Buffalo Palace (25 page)

Standing, she stepped over to the liner rope and retrieved Bass’s belt before returning to stop right in front of him.

“You,” she repeated.

Glancing quickly at the boy child, Titus stood obediently. The woman tugged the blanket off one of his shoulders, then waited for him to complete the disrobing. Impatiently she tugged it off his other shoulder and started to pull the blanket from him.

Embarrassed, he stammered, “W-wait—I don’t know what y-you’re ’bout to—”

Tugging one last time, she managed to wrench the blanket out of his hands and rip it away from him. Now he stood before her totally naked, dropping his hands down to cover his manhood. Suspicious that this strange, frightening creature of a woman wanted him to poke her right there in front of the child.

But instead Fawn slipped her hands in behind his forearms and flung the leather belt around his waist, slipped the end through the buckle and latched it loosely over his bony hips. Then she retrieved the long strip of foot-wide canvas at her feet and stuffed one end up through the front of his belt, taking hold of the other end to jab it between his knees. Stunned into stone silence, Bass remained motionless as the widow went deftly about her work.

Looking over his shoulders, he watched as Fawn pulled the canvas up between his thighs, stuffed it up through the belt at the small of his back, then tugged it down until the end almost reached the back of his knees. Quickly she stepped in front of him and tugged on that end of the cloth until it too hung just at his knees. Only then did she step back and swiftly admire her work.

Fawn was soon back in motion. She took the buckskin shirt from where it hung over his arm and spread it over her hands so that she exposed the wide neck hole trimmed with red wool. Quietly she said, “You.”

He nodded and quietly murmured, “Yeah, me.”

Bass dipped his head forward for her to slip the shirt over his hair, then brought his two arms up to poke them into the long fringed sleeves. Pulling down on the long bottom of the garment, the widow smoothed the shirt out, stood back a moment, then went to his right arm. There she rolled up the long sleeve into a cuff to shorten it.

As she began to work the same alteration on the left arm, Titus said, “I s’pose your husband is a …
was
a bigger man than me.”

That was plain to see from the way Bass swam in the sheer size of the shirt: the width of it draped across his bony shoulders, the length of the sleeves she had to cuff to shorten for him, and the immense girth of the shirt festooned
with ermine skins and finished off with wide strips of colorful decoration.

As she bent to retrieve one of the leggings from the floor of the lodge, Titus tapped a finger against one of the strips of decoration.

“What’s this?” he asked.

Instead of answering, the widow knelt before him, tugging at his foot until he grabbed hold of a lodgepole to steady himself and raised the cold foot. She shoved the legging up his leg, pulled his foot down, then pushed up the bottom of the shirt so that she could tie the two straps at the top of the legging in a loop over his belt. With the second legging knotted, the widow brought forth a few pair of moccasins. Again she knelt and pulled up one of is bare feet.

But as quickly she sat back on her haunches and shook her head. It was plain to see that the white man’s feet were much too small for the moccasins. She flung them back onto the rawhide container, then appraised her work thoughtfully. With his old pair of moccasins and that canvas breechclout, the dead warrior’s clothing would do him for now.

Then she turned from Titus, sat, and pulled the boy from his blankets as she tugged at the open side of her hide dress to expose a full breast.

Bass swallowed uncomfortably and sat, trying not to look at the breast. His heart hammered again in his chest as it had last night as he’d tossed and turned—thinking of the woman lying just a matter of feet away in the lodge, yet not knowing the ways of these people, how to approach an Indian woman with any suggestion of their coupling. So here she was, again exposing that soft round breast to him as she began softly humming to the child cradled across her lap in the rumpled blankets as she rocked him while he had his warm breakfast.

“Titus,” he said finally, quietly—standing there above them.

She did not look up immediately when he spoke to her from the other side of the small lodge that he feared she hadn’t heard.

“Titus.”

When he repeated it, she raised her head and smiled.

Bass tapped his chest. “Titus.”

“Ti-tuzz.”

He nodded. “Me.”

“Ti-tuzz you.”

“Yepper. Titus. Me.”

It grew quiet in the lodge once more as his cold, frozen feet warmed by the fire. Then he asked, “You?” and pointed at her.

“You. Ti-tuzz.”

“No,” he replied, and shook his head, then scooted a little closer to them, just near enough to lean forward and touch the top of her arm where the boy’s head was cradled. “You.”

Her eyes grew all the wider, round and black as berries thick on the hopvines back in Boone County, hard by the Ohio. With them she softly peered at the white man, looking into him; then the tip of her pink tongue licked at her lips before she spoke.

“Tui-rua-ci.”

“Titus, me. You, Tui-rua-ci.”

She nodded, smiling at him with more genuine happiness than he had seen on her face since coming to her lodge the day before yesterday. It was a smile that made him forgive her for burning his clothes, made him forgive the three trappers for bringing him here to such a foreign and frightening place, made him forgive himself for wanting another man’s widow so badly.

“Tui-rua-ci,” Fawn repeated, then her eyes dropped behind those lashes as she said his name softer than he could ever remember hearing it spoken: “Ti-tuzz.”

Every few days during the heart of that winter when the weather tempered, the four of them left the village with some of the Ute warriors for a few days of hunting. Not only did they seek game to take back to the hungry mouths awaiting them in the winter camp, but the brownskins also surveyed the countryside for pony tracks, for firesmoke, for any sign of their enemies.

“’Rapaho?” Titus repeated Turtle’s admonition as the white men came to a halt at the tree line bordering a clearing where the advance warriors had just come across some hoofprints.

“That’s what these niggers say they was,” Billy Hooks responded instead. “’Rapaho. Good-sized war party of ’em too.”

As the last of the group halted, most of the warriors dropped to the ground to inspect the tracks.

Silas Cooper agreed. “More red-bellies—out looking for ponies, h’ar, and coup!”

“How they so sure what band it were?” Titus asked, intrigued.

With a shrug Cooper explained, “Maybeso they figger to tell us they know the difference atween ’Rapaho and Shian—but I’ll be damned if I can. C’mon over here with me, fellers—an’ let’s have us a look-see.”

The three dismounted to join Cooper, dispersing among the Ute, who were carefully moving up and down within the many foot-and hoofprints, each blanket-coated warrior bent over, closely studying the enemy’s spoor. The winter breeze tousled the feathers tied to loose, flowing hair or to those animal skins the warriors had pulled over their heads in the fashion of caps, each one tied with a rawhide string beneath a bare brown chin.

“That one,” Cooper announced, pointing to one of the warriors, “he says that spot be where one of ’em got off his pony to look at a bad hoof.” Silas bent over and studied the snowy, crusted ground himself. “Yep—I can see it plain my own self too. There be that nigger’s pony prints … and there be where the nigger clumb down afoot.”

Tuttle commented, “Then you’re telling us these Yutas know what sort of red nigger made them tracks just from the mokerson prints?”

“That be the how of it,” Cooper replied.

“Nawww—them could’a been Shian, Silas,” Billy Hooks protested. “Them niggers are in this country alla time too. Kissin’ cousins to them ’Rapaho, yessirreebob!”

“Maybeso you’re center, Billy boy,” Cooper agreed, then looked over at Bass. “Them Shians do keep close company with the ’Rapaho anyways.”

“Likely they’d all lift a Yuta scalp if’n any of ’em had their chance, Silas,” Tuttle observed.

“Not this day,” Cooper vowed with unmasked bravado as he straightened and patted one of the two pistols he carried at his belt. “Them stupid ’Rapaho out hunting ponies and skelps in our part o’ the country … maybeso we ought’n get these here Yutas go with us to hunt down them ’Rapahos.”

“Skelps and ponies!” Hooks repeated joyfully, clapping his blanket mittens together. “Yessirreebob! Skelps and ponies for us all!”

But as it turned out, the leader of the hunting party would not be dissuaded from his goal: securing meat for those left behind in the winter camp. He steadfastly told Cooper and the other white men that their first rule was to provide for the village, and only when there was enough meat back in camp would a Ute warrior go traipsing off to
follow an enemy trail in hopes of bringing home ponies, scalps, enemy weapons, and war honors.

Cooper and Hooks grumbled, threatening to pull out and turn back to the village on their own. But in the end they hung in with the meat hunters as the afternoon waned and the day began to grow old. As the horse rocked beneath him and the sun fell below the furry wrinkle of his old coyote-skin cap, Titus found his eyelids growing heavy. His mind drifted back to his first hunting trip out with the Ute warriors—the first time he had left Fawn and her son, White Horse, behind.

The new year itself had come and gone on that hunting trip—the first Titus could recollect not boisterously celebrating among white men. The fact that it might well be the first day of 1826 hadn’t even made no never mind to the other three trappers. No man among them had a calendar anyway—so it didn’t seem vital in the least to celebrate one day’s importance over another. Not a Christmas neither.

“For balls’ sakes, such doin’s as that be the whatnot and befugglin’ a man’s gotta leave behin’t when you come out here to these mountains,” Tuttle had declared, explaining how the three of them felt about holidays.

“Only one time a year do a man got him any reason to celebrate, Scratch,” Cooper went on to explain. “That be the summer: time when a man cain’t trap, seein’ how the plew h’ain’t prime no more … an’ seein’ how that’s when the trader says he’ll be back to buy our furs and maybeso have some likker to sell us this time out.”

“Trader?” Bass inquired, his mind fired. “Likker? You said a trader’d have some likker? Like rum or whiskey? Where in blue hell—”

“Right here in the mountains—yessirreebob!” Billy exclaimed, his eyes dancing as he licked his lips with the tip of a pink tongue.

Titus wagged his head in disbelief. “Traders come out here to the mountains? Had me no idea.”

“First time we heerd about it our own selves was just last winter,” Tuttle declared. “Fellas said a trader named Ashley been out to the mountains with his own company of trappers. Word was Ashley wanted the news spread all over that he was coming back the next summer with trade
goods and likker—not just for them fellers what come west with him in the seasons afore, but for all niggers like us what could allays use more powder and G’lena lead, coffee and sugar, all such.”

“I heard of Ashley, I have,” Titus declared. “He was the high-pockets behind a feller named Henry years back when that Henry feller pushed upriver … the year Hugh Glass got hisself chawed on by a grizzly bear.”

Tuttle asked, “Washburn tol’t you ’bout Glass?”

“Yepper.”

Cooper said, “We heard of this here Glass.”

“Last summer was some doin’s, weren’t it, fellers?” Hooks said with that ready, contagious smile.

“We was up to those hills where we run onto you,” Cooper explained. “Run onto a band of Ashley’s boys what tol’t us ’bout the plans to rendezvous come that summer.”

Billy’s face grew most expressive as he recalled, “Just like they told us to, we moseyed on over to a place called Horse Creek on the Green, where we pitched camp with more trappers’n I see’d in all my days.”

“More’n a hunnert!” Tuttle claimed. “And some three dozen more added in.”

Cooper jumped into the recollection. “Few days later some Hudson’s Bay come rollin’ in. There was a bunch of Injuns tagging along with ’em—women and young’uns too. But, damn, if Ashley wasn’t one to keep his trade packs closed till all
his
men was in.”

“ ‘Ceptin’ tobaccy,” Hooks complained. “That was all he traded for till the last of his own moseyed on in.”

Silas nodded. “Still had us a merry time of it—didn’t we, Billy?”

Hooks dragged the back of a blanket mitten across his dry lips, eyes dancing. “Eatin’, spinnin’ tales … and, oh—them womens!”

“Long as it lasted,” Tuttle grumbled. “Ashley had the beaver out of our packs and into his inside of two days afore he was turning back for St. Louie! Two goddamned days!”

“After all that waiting,” Billy chimed in, “we wasn’t about to sleep through none of it, Scratch! A man stayed awake through it all!”

Titus asked, “So you got yourselves good and drunk?”