Ride the Moon Down (11 page)

Those faces were monuments to the seasons of his life. Men who had remained steadfastly loyal through shining times and walks with death.

And now he had lost another.

Quickly Titus tugged at the bottom of his long buckskin shirt, dragging it over his head and from each arm. Yanking back the sleeves of his faded woolen underwear as the cold wind startled his bare flesh, Scratch gently dragged the knife’s blade across the back of his forearm. Then a second narrow slash close beside that first just beginning
to bead and ooze with blood. Then a third, a fourth, and more he cut, slicing a series of slashes on down that forearm before he repeated the process on the other arm.

“He was the greatest of all Crow chiefs,” Bass whispered with a sigh, feeling the cold wind bite along the oozy wounds as he turned to glance at the dog. “Now he’s gone.”

Bass set the knife aside to stare at the tops of the far hills across the valley.

You are a man who understands that there is no use in lingering in this life when one’s time has gone,
he remembered Arapooesh declaring when Bass and Josiah were about to set out on McAfferty’s trail after Asa had murdered the chief’s wife.
Why should a man linger, like the wildflower in spring holding on to hope of passing the heat of summer and the cold of the coming winter? Only the earth and sky are everlasting.

“So many,” he whispered now. “So many it makes a man feel he ain’t got friends left.”

It is men that must die,
Arapooesh’s voice reverberated in Bass’s head.
Our old age is a curse.

Sensing the burn of tears, Titus said, “Times like this, I feel older’n I really am. And I feel any more years is a goddamned curse … living without them what’s gone is a hard thing. Too hard.”

Again, Rotten Belly’s words whispered in his head,
And death in battle is a blessing for those who have seen our many winters.

In the death of a great chief, Crow tradition dictated that the band mourn across four days. The entire camp would grieve any man killed by an enemy—but especially a beloved chief like Rotten Belly, felled as he was in battle with their most hated enemies.

That first day of public grieving, the chief’s lodge had been painted with wide horizontal red stripes. Inside where no fire would ever burn again, the body was cleaned, dressed in his finest war regalia, then laid on a low four-pole platform. In his hands was placed a fan of eagle feathers, and his chest was bared to the spirits. There
the body rested while his people expressed their utter sorrow at his death, their unrequited anger at the Blackfoot who had killed their leader.

Across those nights and days, Rotten Belly’s warrior society conducted elaborate ceremonies in his honor. The Otter Clan saw to it that the dead man’s treasured war totems lay beside his body, and assured that his face and bare chest were painted red. For hours they beat drums throughout the camp. Wailing, mourners pierced the skin at their knees, others pierced their arms to draw blood. Some jabbed sharp rocks against their foreheads, making themselves bleed. For four days a somber pall fell over the entire camp.

Then on the morning of the fifth day, the Crow had torn down their own lodges, abandoning the site on the Grey Bull River and leaving the chief’s lodge to decay with the elements through the coming seasons. While the dead man’s relations would continue to grieve in their own way, the rest of the band went on with its life and a new leader stepped to the fore.

From time to time as the sun sank from midsky and disappeared in the west this cold day of his own private mourning, Bass left his perch to scour both sides of the bluff for deadfall poking from the crust of snow, wood he could drag back to his fire pit. After each short trip he found he needed to rest longer and longer, sucking on more and more of the icy snow as he heaved for breath. Once he was ready, Scratch clambered to his feet and trudged off again. Exhausted, he returned from what he knew would be his last trip as twilight darkened the sky and threw the land into irretrievable shadow with night’s approach.

“C’mere, boy,” he called, patting the edge of the crude lattice platform beside him.

Zeke eagerly lunged up through the snow, then went to his belly at his master’s knee, laying his jaw on Bass’s thigh where he knew he would receive a good scratching.

“I’m glad you come along, ol’ fella. You’d been a mess for her back there in camp if’n I’d left you behind. Got
yourself in the way but good, staying underfoot. Better the woman didn’t have you whining and moaning after I left.”

He watched the first stars come out before he grew too tired to watch any longer. Bass banked more wood against the fire, then rearranged the robe and blanket on the platform that kept him out of the snow.

“Lay here, Zeke,” he instructed, patting the robe.

The dog came up, turned about, and nested right next to him. Then Scratch pulled the other half of the robe and that heavy wool blanket over them both. Laying his cheek down on his elbow, Bass closed his eyes, listening to the distant sounds of that cold winter night—an utter silence so huge and vast that he felt himself swallowed whole by the open sky above them.

He tried to imagine what she was doing right then, if Waits-by-the-Water had Magpie on her knee as she helped her mother prepare supper. Or if the baby was sleeping. Perhaps even talking more than ever. He wondered if his wife was thinking of him right at that moment. Surely she was, for that had to be the reason his thoughts had turned instantly to her.

And he thought on how warm it was lying next to her skin in the winter, even cold as deep as this. It saddened him to think of all those winter nights Arapooesh had endured after his wife was murdered. Knowing how hard it would be for him to endure two long winters without Waits-by-the-Water.

Perhaps Rotten Belly had sought out his own death. Some men did just that: seeking an honorable death on its own terms. Like Asa McAfferty.

Bass wondered if he would have the courage to seek out his own death when the time came.

Then he thought on his woman, and their child—knowing because of them he now shared the promise of life.

The dog lay warm against him, breathing slowly.

As the Seven Sisters rose in the northeast, low along the horizon that first night of early winter, Bass dreamed of sunlit high-country ponds and the slap of beaver tails on still water, the spring breeze rustling those new leaves budding
on the quakies, and the merry trickle of Magpie’s laughter.

Dreamed with the pleasure of his wife’s lips on his.

And that joy of crossing into a span of country where he knew he was the first man ever to set foot … as if it were the day after God had created it all, made that world just for him.

There was little choice but for Scratch to put out the call—asking warriors to join him in making a raid deep into Blackfoot country.

In those first days following Bass’s return to the village, Whistler not only readily offered to go along on the journey, but volunteered to spread the call.

“I will be your pipe bearer,” declared the man not all that much older than Titus.

“That means you are the one who will take responsibility for asking others to join you?”

“Yes,” Whistler explained. “I will carry the pipe throughout the village and ask all who wish to join us in this blood journey to bring tobacco to our lodge.”

“And you’ll smoke the tobacco of those you decide will go with us?”

“
We
will smoke their tobacco, offering our prayers for a successful venture.”

Bass felt humbled at this honor. “Whistler makes me proud, agreeing to act as pipe bearer on this war trail led by a white man.”

“You are a son-in-law who gives me honor,” the warrior protested. “The loss of my older brother and my own selfish mourning blinded me to what must be done for my brother’s memory. Now you have returned to us after many seasons. And you have mourned as my people grieve: cutting your hair and drawing your own blood. You offer to ride into the land of the enemy to take revenge in the name of the One-Who-Is-No-Longer-Here.”

“He-Who-Has-Died was a good friend,” Bass explained. “For such a friend who treated me like his brother, I am without honor if I do not go in search of Blackfoot scalps in his name.”

After four nights in the hills beside his little fire, with only Samantha and Zeke for company as the sun rose, climbed, and fell each day, as the stars wheeled overhead each night, it was such a sweet homecoming to lie next to Waits-by-the-Water. To tell her how he had yearned for her closeness as he endured those days of isolation, eating snow and the dried meat he had packed along, moving from that rocky point on the brow of the hill only to gather more wood he lashed on the mule’s back twice each day: first with the sun’s rising so he would have enough for his little fire until dusk, and later as the sun began its tumble into the west so he had what he needed to keep his fire going through the long winter night.

Darkness spent dreaming of his wife and Magpie, slumber troubled with frightening memories and terrifying visions that awoke him in the cold and the blackness to lay more wood on the struggling flames. Clutching the old dog against him beneath the buffalo robe, Scratch sorted through the dizzying glimpses of blood and loneliness, those confusing and blurred images of violence, despair, and loss.

Each time the haunts visited him, he somehow managed to drift off again—reminding himself that he would never be frightened for himself, fearing only for those he loved.

Strikes-in-Camp was the first to volunteer. This tall, haughty warrior had reacted with violent jealousy when Arapooesh chose Scratch and Josiah to go in search of McAfferty. Whistler’s firstborn, Waits-by-the-Water’s brother, and now one of Bass’s relations, Strikes-in-Camp nonetheless remained cool and distant to the white man.

“I came to say I will go with you to take Blackfoot scalps,” the young warrior announced the afternoon of that first day Whistler spread the call across that camp of some three thousand souls. But he spoke only to his father, rarely allowing his eyes to touch the trapper.

Whistler glanced at Bass, then asked his son, “Are there any others in your society who will join us?”

“Some,” the warrior answered. “And they will come to join for themselves. I am not here to speak for them.
Only for myself. You must understand that I do this not for my brother-in-law,” he explained, clearly refusing to mention the white man by his Crow name. “I go to take revenge on the enemy because they killed my uncle.”

When Strikes-in-Camp had gone, Whistler settled at the fire again and continued drinking the strong coffee he and Bass shared every afternoon, an anticipated and much-enjoyed treat the trapper brought from the rendezvous where the white men gathered.

After some reflection the aging warrior declared, “My son has been shamed, perhaps.”

“Shamed?”

“Yes, perhaps. Because you were the first to announce you were going to take Blackfoot scalps in the name of He-Who-Has-Died.”

For some time Bass did not answer. How best to walk the straight road with his words without offending Strikes-in-Camp’s father. Eventually he said, “Your son could have raised the call as soon as the four days of mourning were over, as soon as this village moved on and left the chief’s lodge behind. He could have convinced many of his warrior society to join him, and he would have been well regarded.”

Whistler could only nod in agreement. “But I think he was too busy with other things more important than family and honor.”

“We were young once, Whistler,” Bass sympathized. “The two of us, we both grew older, we both came to know there is nothing more important than family … and honor.”

Across the next five days more than ninety others came to Whistler’s lodge on the outskirts of the Crow village to ask that they too could ride along, men old and young. Some were men of such considerable winters that they had long since given up the war trail, content to let younger men do battle in the name of their people. Most of these Whistler turned away with his thanks, acknowledging that they had already given many years serving in defense of the Crow nation. And there were many of the very young, really no more than boys—most tall and lithe,
of ropy, hardened muscle, but every one of them smoothfaced.

“Some mother’s son,” Whistler would say when he had turned them away and promised that he might lead them on the next war trail. “I am a father, and I know what fear I had in my own heart when Strikes was just as young, believing he was ready to take scalps for the first time. I remember how Crane wept, begging me to keep him from going. How she pleaded with me to go in secret and demand the pipe bearer turn our son away, to prevent him from going along.”

“Each man must have his first fight,” Scratch said as he savored that coffee. “My first blooding was against the Choctaw.”

“Ch-choctaw? I have not heard of these people.”

“They live east of a great muddy river, so far away that your people have no name to call that river,” Bass explained. “I was nearing my seventeenth winter.”

“That is a good age for a young man to go on his first pony raid.”

Titus nodded with a smile, saying, “I wasn’t a pony holder, even though I was with older, wiser men. None of us were out to steal horses. I was alone, hunting supper when the Choctaw found me—chased me—and wounded one of the others.”

“Did you kill any of your enemy?”

“Later,” he said, remembering how the canoes slipped up alongside the flatboat in the dark, warriors sneaking onboard to initiate their fierce and sudden attack. “I lost a good friend in that fight.”

“And you killed your first man that night?”

“Yes, I know I killed. There was no doubt.”

“Blood you spilled, to atone for the blood of your friend the enemy spilled,” Whistler observed grimly.

Scratch gazed into the older man’s eyes. “Yes. Sometimes the only thing that will do … is blood for blood.”

“Now we ride this trail together,” Whistler said quietly. “Together and alone, we go to do what old warriors know must be done.”