Crack in the Sky (79 page)

Close enough now to calculate there couldn’t be more than twenty riders, maybe two dozen at most.

Not likely to be a small band of Snake traipsing south for the white man’s rendezvous in Willow Valley. Might so be some damned Bannock. He knew they was the sort to skedaddle if the odds wasn’t real long in their favor, the sort what laid into any white men if the red niggers could raise some horses and plunder, maybe even some scalps if their medicine was right that day. Goddamn them Bannocks.

Not good Injuns like them Crow.

They was the sort to take a man in, make him welcome, put him up in one lodge or the other till the chief’s two sisters sewed together a buffalo-hide shelter something on the order of a white man’s lean-to. A half-domed affair with a big flap that covered the wide entrance, which he could tie up during the day or lash down for protection from the cold at night, or when a new snowstorm came slashing through the valley. He’d barely gotten used to the dwelling last winter when it came time for the village to move a few miles upstream away from the Yellowstone. The camp had begun to stink something awful from all the gut-piles, rotting meat, and human offal piling up back in the trees. Maybe as much as a half-dozen times Arapooesh’s band would move each winter, finding themselves another place that offered open water, plenty of firewood and grass for their pony herds, along with some protection against the possibility of attack.

As winter deepened, it seemed the Crow grew more relaxed—less concerned about their most fearsome enemy. Too damned cold now, the snow drifted too deep for the Blackfoot to try anything as foolish as a major assault on a village in the heart of Absaroka—home of the Crow.

It hadn’t been long before Scratch had felt a part of them too. Much more a part of them than he had years back when he had come to the Bighorn country with Silas, Billy, and Bud. Perhaps he had felt set apart from the tribe because the three of them had not tried in the least to fit in with their winter hosts. Just as they had refused to do with the Ute. Instead, the trio of white men had stayed apart,
taking all that they needed from the Crow and doing little to repay in kind all that had been given them with such generous hospitality. Whether it was food, or a woman offered to warm their robes, or some shelter from the raging winter blizzards—Silas and the others had considered themselves above their hosts, remaining as aloof as those company brigades traveling through one tribe’s territory or another.

But for a lone man eager to learn all the more about these attractive pale-brown people, the past winter in Absaroka with Bird in Ground and Pretty On Top was all that he had hoped it would be. And from that first night’s feasting and celebration, it seemed that old Arapooesh took to the white man, right off.

“Rotten … Belly?” he had repeated the words spoken to him by Bird in Ground.

The man-woman rubbed his stomach with a flat hand, bending over slightly and groaning as if he were sick. “Rotten Belly, yes.”

“That’s Arapooesh’s name?”

Indeed, it was how the venerable chief was known among the two divisions who roamed Absaroka. Recently he had brought his wife and family back to live with her band of the Apsaalooke after spending many years among his River Band. And with the regrettable death of Big Hair, his wife’s people turned to the respected warrior and tribal counselor to lead them into the coming winters.

After recouping his strength in the Crow village for several days, Bass had journeyed east to retrieve the trade goods and supplies he had abandoned when he’d set out on the trail of the horse thieves—just one day shy of reaching his cache. After taking two days to bury the last of his pelts in that black hole, he loaded up the rest of what he needed for the winter on Hannah’s back and turned about for Rotten Belly’s camp. He made it back just as a howling blizzard raked the land. That first night back he slept in Bird in Ground’s lodge, inviting the chief and some of the old warriors, along with Pretty On Top and other youngsters, to a giveaway dinner.

Oh, the way those Crow eyes sparkled as he passed
around small gifts of coffee and sugar, some powder and brass tacks, fingerings and bracelets, hanks of ribbon and beads! The men clucked and laughed—for it had been a long, long time since any of them had seen such riches as these!

“Do you see, Pretty On Top?” Bird in Ground playfully chided the young man. “See what a man receives in return when he gives away his friendship to a stranger?”

Later on as that winter grew old, as the wind keened and twisted through the Yellowstone Valley, the chief gathered his friends and advisers in his lodge for a red-stick feast. From the pot for this traditional Crow celebration, the invited guests all plucked tender pieces of elk. Afterward they scraped the greasy marrow from bones they pulled from the coals and cracked upon the rocks ringing the fire pit. Then they smoked and related their coups.

When it came time for Bass to count his own exploits sitting there at Rotten Belly’s left hand, he enthralled them into the deep hours with his tales, stripping off his shirt and showing them those scars earned at the hands of the Blackfoot, being hunted down by the Apache far to the southwest of Absaroka, fighting the Mexican soldiers and fierce Comanche raiders in that land of warm waters, as well as his two struggles with the grizzly—letting them see the scars of his few seasons among the mountains, how the wilderness had marked his whipcord-lean white body.

After the sixteen men nodded and murmured in approbation that he still lived, Arapooesh had refilled his pipe and sent it around the circle another time. And when it reached the chief at the end of its circuit, Rotten Belly solemnly proposed to give a name to the man who had come to his people earlier that winter—on foot and wearing the fur of a coyote wrapped around his head so that only the white man’s eyes and cheeks showed above his beard and mustache, those frosted whiskers similar in color to the gray pelt of that coyote Scratch had worn for winters beyond count already.

“So I give my white friend a name I will call him from this night onward,” Arapooesh declared.
“Pote Ani
. Because
when he came to us, this man seemed to have the head of a coyote on his shoulders. But more than that, my new friend has the cunning of the coyote that allows him to survive both the wolf and the winter. Because the coyote is an animal faithful to its own, steadfast to its friends … because this white man is loyal to my people—I pledge I will always remain loyal to him.”

The rest of those gathered in the lodge had cheered with approval, slapping their thighs, banging their tin cups on the rocks ringing the fire.

Then Arapooesh had continued. “So, my friends—it is with a full and happy heart that I take this white man as my brother. From this night he will be known among our people as
Pote Ani
. And he will be my brother.”

It never failed to bring a smile to his heart, warming him, every time he thought about his dear friend, Rotten Belly. Remembering how the chief and Bird in Ground and even young Pretty On Top had come to mean so much to him through those winter moons. The sort of men who formed a bulwark against the storms in a man’s life.

Like Jack Hatcher, Caleb Wood, and the others.

Men red and white, men for all the seasons of his life.

As the ice on the Yellowstone had begun to crack and shatter, opening the river early that spring, he had taken his leave as Rotten Belly’s band started upriver to the south, while he pointed his nose down the valley to the east. Just past the big rock, he had crossed to the north bank of the Yellowstone and located the patch of ground where he had dug his cache last autumn, the frozen earth lying beneath a snowdrift he had to shovel aside.

As he pried back the thick sod lid to the cache’s neck, Scratch had suddenly remembered what he hadn’t during that winter in Absaroka—he had turned thirty-seven!

Although there had been times during his winter with the Crow that he had wondered on Christmas and remembered Taos during the Nativity festival, thinking too how his own birthday came only a week after that celebration … Bass hadn’t given all that much thought to adding another ring to his years.

It had simply been too wonderful a winter in the land
of the Crow: new friends, plenty of protection from the wind and the cold among a people who from time to time provided their guest with one woman or another to relieve the trapper’s pent-up hungers.

“Who’s been sending me these women who come to my lodge?” he had asked Bird in Ground one cold day as they were out gathering deadfall for their fires.

The strange man of the Apsaalooke stood and looked squarely at Bass. “Since you do not want me for your wife, I decided that you must satisfy your appetites with the women of our tribe.”

“Believe me when I say, if I ever wanted to settle down with a man-woman among your people for the rest of my winters, I would choose you, Bird in Ground.”

“I am afraid I will never have a husband,” the Crow sighed. “Look around. There aren’t any others now who are like me—touched by this same spirit medicine. Perhaps I can find some way to show the power of my medicine, to prove to other young men of our tribe that I would make them a good wife.”

“It is not hard for any man to see that you would make a good wife.”

The man-woman smiled in that gentle way of his. “I realize you will never be my husband. But you will always stay one of those strong in my heart.”

“And you will always stay one of those strong in my heart too.”

Had to be Bannock under that distant dust cloud. Damn. They sure weren’t good folks like the Crow.

Bannock.

Certain that’s what they were, Bass tarried a while longer after finishing his cold meat before retightening cinches and pushing on into the afternoon. He’d do all he could to give the Bannock war party a wide berth.

Not long after the saffron orb had slinked from the summer sky, Scratch noticed how that smudge of dust to the south had faded. The riders must have put in for camp up there a ways in the valley of Black’s Fork. And from there he calculated it wasn’t more than nine, ten days at the most before he’d finally reach the inner-mountain valley
where Sublette promised to meet the company brigades for July.

Before long he grew wary, figuring he had dogged the war party’s backtrail close enough and found himself a place where he tied off the animals, letting them graze while he set off on foot along the east side of the valley. Watching to the southwest as the shadows lengthened, sticking his nose in the wind for firesmoke, keeping his eyes moving from horizon to horizon. That bunch might have hunters out, after all. Making meat for supper. It wouldn’t pay to have a run-in with one or two of the bastards, then find himself tracked by the rest as they tried to run him down.

Goddamned Bannocks. Who the hell did they think they was, anyway? He’d been run down by the best of ’em—riding day and night with the Apache breathing down on his ass. No way these here Bannocks ever come close to measuring up to Apache.

He stopped there in the shadows of the man-sized willow that bordered the coulee and sniffed again. Woodsmoke.

His mouth went dry.

That weren’t no summer thunderstorm grass fire. No, that was a smell altogether different. This was wood-smoke. Even had the smell of broiling meat braided around the edges of that stronger scent.

And that made his dry mouth water.

Then Bass remembered that he was slipping up on some thieving red bastards, scolding himself that he’d better forget his feed bag for now.

After checking the priming in both the rifle and pistol for the fifth or sixth time, Titus angled down the side of the coulee toward the river valley, hanging with the cover offered him by the thick, leafy brush.

Less than a half hour later, he stopped suddenly—his nose greeted by horse sweat wafted on that cooling breeze nuzzling its way down the riverbank. Another twenty yards and … he heard them.

Parting the willow with the rifle’s muzzle, Titus spotted the horses. Son of a bitch if that wasn’t a white man’s
tack on that piebald! Not no braided buffalo-hair hackamore.

And that roan! Hell if he hadn’t seen it before!

One of the horses on the far side of the bunch whinnied low as a figure stepped out of the tree shadows and headed for the piebald. Scratch’s heart stopped then and there in his chest—

“Rufus Graham!”

The figure wheeled at the call of his name, yanking on the pistol he had stuffed into the wide, colorful sash at his waist.

“Don’t shoot me, Rufus!”

As Bass rose to his feet there in the thick willow, he watched the horses part, listened to the ground reverberate with running feet. At the far side of the clearing where a wary Rufus Graham stood frozen, there suddenly appeared the other five.

Titus didn’t know when their ugly, hairy faces had ever looked prettier!

“Eegod, boys!” Jack Hatcher yelped as he stepped closer, a wide slash of a grin splitting the lower half of his bearded face. “If it ain’t Titus Bass his own self … riz right up from the dead!”

The six of them had near pounded him to black-and-blue there in that little clearing as the horses snorted around them.