Ride the Moon Down (14 page)

Enemy horsemen were mounting up, charging toward the onrushing Crow to throw a buffer between them and the women as those figures on foot hurtled themselves around and lunged away with their horses dragging half-laden travois of meat and heavy green hides. Calf-deep snow clawed at their legs, slowing their retreat as the Blackfoot horsemen closed ranks behind the women, then rushed the charging Crow in a full front.

As Scratch and his warriors swept over the brow of the hill, he watched the Blackfoot line collide against Whistler’s Crow with a great crash—men yelling and grunting, horses crying out, guns blaring and handheld weapons clattering.

Then the Blackfoot were behind the Crow lines, several of them yelling to the rest, ordering their comrades to halt and circle around on the rear of the Crow.

Just then the women fleeing from Whistler’s men spotted Bass’s Crow horsemen fanning out across the northern hillside, realizing they were being attacked from two directions. With a howl they dragged to a halt, screaming, turning round and round in fear and confusion.

Down, down the slope Bass’s line flowed as it raced toward the women who wailed and cursed the Crow warriors as those horsemen peeled past them in a blur, tearing on down to the valley floor where the buffalo were suddenly turning blindly, lumbering toward the southwest, making for the narrow saddle that allowed them their only escape from the snowy bowl.

Behind them the women shook their knives in their bloody hands, shouting their oaths at the Crow backs.

“Perhaps you’ll find a wife today!” Scratch hollered at Pretty On Top. “These Blackfoot love to copulate with brave Crow men!”

The young warrior laughed.

On the far side of him Windy Boy said, “I saw a pretty
one! Maybe I will take her back to my lodge and we can make many Crow babies!”

Having raced halfway across the trampled snow on the valley floor, Titus realized several of the Crow and Blackfoot riders had been unhorsed in the brutal collision of their lines. In the midst of the butchered buffalo carcasses and the milling, riderless horses, the warriors were crawling out of the snow, whirling about in search of an enemy. Voices rang from the slopes, overwhelmed by the roar of smoothbore English fusils and American-made trade muskets. Once the weapons were empty, most of the combatants did not stop to reload. Instead, they pitched their empty firearms aside and pulled out a bow, a long-handled war club, a tomahawk, or a knife before they rushed on one of the enemy.

Even in the swirling maze of confusion, it was easy for Scratch to pick Crow from Blackfoot, even with both sides bundled in heavy blankets or capotes. The enemy was dressed for winter hunting, while the Crow were painted for war.

In shock, the Blackfoot warriors were realizing they were caught between the pincers of a trap rapidly sealing off their chance for escape. Those still on horseback were forming up, yelling boldly to one another, kicking into a gallop as they started across the snowy ground toward Bass’s mounted warriors.

If they collided with the Crow line and lunged on past it, they would rejoin the women and the chase would be on. The battle would then be a running fight instead of a decisive victory.

“Halt!” Scratch cried, his throat immediately sore in the superdry air. “Halt!”

He was waving as a handful of the warriors took up his cry, the Crow waving at the rest to return up the slope, to re-form in a ragged line somewhere between the fleeing women behind them and those oncoming horsemen sweeping across the valley floor.

“Hold the line—do not charge!” the white man ordered.

Bear Ground shook his head in confusion. “You want us to stand here while they ride down on us?”

“Yes!” he demanded. “If they get past any of you, if they break by our line, then they have escaped.”

“
Tote Ani
is right!” Pretty On Top yelled. “None of us wants to chase after the enemy! We must stand and fight them here!”

He saw the fear in their eyes as the Blackfoot raced toward his line.

But on their faces was written a stoic anger.

Time and again Bass had seen that loathing the Blackfoot held for the white man. No, their hatred for Americans.

The tribe put up with the British to the north, endured the Hudson’s Bay traders and fur brigades because those white men brought all sorts of useful goods, most especially the guns, powder, and lead. But the Americans traded with every enemy of the Blackfoot. With the arrival of the Americans, the Crow, Shoshone, and Flathead found a supplier of those firearms necessary to even the balance after decades of mountain warfare while a mighty, well-armed confederation of Blood, Piegan, and Gros Ventre sought to crush its poorer neighbors.

In the fading of that afternoon’s light, the Blackfoot were discovering that their firearms gave them no advantage if they could not reload them on the run. Caught unaware in the surprise attack, these hunters found they
had no choice but to use weapons that would bring them face-to-face with the Crow.

Those Blackfoot closest to Bass suddenly realized there was a white man among their enemy. Just before the lines clashed, some of the warriors yelled to the others, pointing at the lone trapper—singling him out for certain attention.

“They don’t like you!” Pretty On Top shouted beside Bass as his pony pranced, barely under control.

Titus growled, “Never worried about what dead men think of me!”

A half dozen were converging on the trapper as he poked the trigger finger of his right hand out through a slot cut in the palm of his blanket mitten.

As Scratch struggled to calm his own frightened horse, an arrow slapped his leg, painfully pinning the meat of his calf against the animal. The horse sidestepped away from its pain, trying to rear back. Each time it jolted back onto all four hooves, a shock wave of nausea bolted through his stomach. Then the wounded leg popped free and he was able to swing it up, clutching the long shaft in his left hand. Snapping it off, he quickly bent down to try pushing the damned thing on out the inside of his calf when a second arrow raked along his rib cage.

Staring at the shaft fluttering there in his thick elk-hide coat, he wondered if he’d been punctured. Seizing the arrow in his left mitten, he steeled himself, ready to snap it off against his belly, when he discovered that it had pierced only his coat and buckskin shirt.

From behind him unearthly shrieks rolled toward him like a landslide.

Twisting partway in the saddle, he raised the full-stock rifle, pulled back on the rear set trigger, and clumsily waved the Derringer’s muzzle at the closest Blackfoot screaming down on him. Yanking back on that front hair trigger, Scratch watched the heavy
.54
-caliber ball slam the warrior back onto the rear haunches of his pony for a heartbeat before the man tumbled backward off the animal into the trampled snow.

Now as the others closed on him, in that long flintlock
rifle Titus found himself holding no more than a long and very heavy club. Leaning to the right, he dropped out of the saddle and landed with most of his weight on the uninjured leg. But when he slapped the pony on the rump and sent it away, then started to step backward as he clawed at his side for the powder horn, the wounded calf gave way as soon as his weight was momentarily shifted onto it.

Pitching into the snow, Scratch realized he had no time to reload the long-range weapon. He dropped the rifle to the ground beside him, rolled onto his knees, and futilely tore at the flaps of his coat with both mittens, scrambling clumsily to seize the weapons tucked in that wide leather belt secured around the outside of his coat. Stuffing each of the mittens under an armpit, he tore them from his hands just before dragging the two big pistols from his belt, raking back the hammer on the right one.

At that moment the Blackfoot collided with the two ends of the Crow line, smashing into those two horns of the crescent.

Scratch took aim at a target closing on him, a round-faced warrior wearing a blanket cap and swinging a stone war club with a long elk-horn handle. That first pistol ball struck the warrior under the armpit, spinning him so violently he struggled vainly to clutch at the pony’s mane as the animal clattered past and the man bounced loose. Ten yards behind Bass the warrior spun to the ground, tumbling across the snow.

More shrieking yanked Scratch about to find another warrior with his bow strung, its arrow drawn back against its string to form a sharp, two-sided vee. Swapping the pistols, Bass ripped the hammer back and pulled the trigger—an instant after the string snapped forward.

Flinging himself backward, Bass fell into the snow as the arrow slammed into the icy crust between his knees.

For a heartbeat he stared at the quiver of the shaft and its fletching, then jerked up to find the bowman on top of him, slashing out with the bow. Twisting to the side out of its way, Titus watched the warrior coming off the pony, flying spreadeagled through the air, that bow at the end of one outstretched arm.

He slammed into the white man, driving the air from their lungs as Scratch rolled them over, throwing his arm behind him to find his knife. Instead, his fingers struck the frosty head of the belt ax.

The muscular Blackfoot grabbed the white man’s throat with one hand, his fingers closing around the windpipe as the warrior began to flail at the white man’s head with the bow in blinding flashes.

Dragging the ax into his hand, Titus swung wildly, eventually slamming the side of the blade against the warrior’s head. In bringing his arm back for another blow, he twisted the tomahawk in his hand. This time the blade sank deep, splattering hot blood and brain matter into Bass’s face.

He had to unlock the dead man’s legs from his before he could struggle to his knees and wrench up the first of the pistols. With some of the Blackfoot retreating back down the hill into the flat where more of their number were fighting furiously against the trap that had closed around them, some of those who were dismounted were taking cover behind the huge buffalo carcasses rising like dark, hairy boulders against the bloody snow.

With that first pistol reloaded and stuffed into his belt, Bass lunged across the Indian’s body to scoop up the second pistol. After blowing snow from the pan, he reloaded it, snapped the frizzen down over the pan again, and jammed it into his belt. Back up the hill a few yards lay the rifle, its barrel buried in the snow right up to the lock’s hammer.

“White man!”

He looked up to find Strikes-in-Camp gleefully reining his pony to a halt nearby.

The young warrior asked, “Where is your horse, white man?”

“I fight better on foot,” Bass growled.

“Forget your firearms,” Strikes snarled. “Come with me and fight the enemy close today! Come fight like a real man!”

With a wild laugh the warrior spun his horse around
savagely, kicking it in the ribs as he shot back down the slope toward the hottest of the fighting.

By then Pretty On Top and the others had driven the Blackfoot back, throwing them against the warriors Whistler and Turns Plenty led. They had the Blackfoot surrounded. On the hillside above him the women were screaming, keening, crying out to their men.

Surrounded by the enemy, goaded by their women, the Blackfoot could only be made bold by their desperate straits—or stupid, willing to grasp at any chance before they died.

One of them was about to do just that.

Near the center of that buffalo killing field the Blackfoot warrior stood, waving his smoothbore fusil at the end of his arm, his mouth a wide O as he hollered at the rest who were beginning to withdraw from the shelter of their buffalo carcasses and stream toward their leader. It reminded Scratch of a black cloud of sparrows as they dipped this way, then that, low in the sky overhead. Suddenly the leader took off, his warriors strung out on either side of him, racing for the hills.

In an instant Bass could see that they really weren’t making for the distant slope. Instead, they were sprinting for the weakest part of the Crow line where Strikes-in-Camp and a handful of others were all that stood between the Blackfoot and escape. On the far side of the valley, Scratch could tell that Whistler saw things taking shape at the same moment. The old warrior was yelling and waving even as he started his pony loping to head off the enemy.

Bass was already on his way down the hillside, whistling in the cold air, licking his lips to whistle again for the pony which raised its head and started his way.

Instead of waiting for the others, instead of slowly backing up the slope to delay the clash, Strikes-in-Camp taunted his fellow warriors into joining him in a headlong dash toward the Blackfoot spearhead coming their way. Near the bottom ground the enemy swept around the half-dozen Crow, swallowing them whole the way a mountain lion swallowed a deer mouse in one bite.

The Crow warriors disappeared beneath a roiling
mass of arms and weapons, dragged one by one from their horses.

Whistler and the others were closing in on the slaughter as some of the Blackfoot broke from the six unhorsed Crow and lunged up the slope to make their escape. The older warrior waved at the enemy seeking to flee—sending more than ten of his fighters to seal off any chance of escape. Then Whistler continued into the fray to save his son and the others.