Ride the Moon Down (30 page)

“Women who open their legs for men?” she asked in her language, still somewhat bewildered. “Indian women
who take the beads and ribbon to open their legs for you white men?”

“Maybeso,” he admitted as he turned back to gaze down at her face. “I laid with my share of white whores back east in my day. But as long as I been out here in these mountains, as many Injun gals what I laid with, never have I thought Injun women was whores the same as white women—”

“Why not?” she interrupted, scratching the top of the dog’s head. “If I opened my legs for you men so I could get a new knife or some hawksbells, wouldn’t I be a whore like your white women?”

After some thought he eventually wagged his head. “Somehow, it don’t seem the same to me. Them whores all the time stay where the men come to lay with ’em. It’s what they do to make their living—like I trap beaver to make mine.”

“In that land where you came from, are there more whores, or more wives?”

He grinned a little, saying, “I s’pose there’s many more wives.”

She sighed, grinning herself as she snuggled against him. “A long time ago when I was a young girl and the first white men were coming to visit my people, many of us came to believe that among your people there must not be very many women.”

“Not many, eh?”

With a nod Waits explained. “We decided you must not have many women where you come from because you white men had such an appetite for our women.”

Squeezing her shoulder, he replied, “There are more’n enough white women back there. I sure as hell knew enough of the worst for me to decide I like Injun gals best.”

Gazing up at his greenish eyes, Waits felt consoled enough to say, “I am glad to hear you tell me this. When I heard the riders shouting that white women were coming, I grew afraid.”

“Afraid? Of what?”

“Afraid that you white men were growing tired of
Indian women so your traders were bringing white women here to lay with you men in trade for your beaver.”

He snorted with laughter, throwing his head back a moment, then clutched her securely in both arms as the first of the riders started peeling away from the trappers’ camps, in a mad dash for the mesa that lay on the eastern rim of this valley of the Green River where the trappers and Indians always found an abundance of wood, water, and grass for their animals. Here at the mouth of Horse Creek, the Green flowed roughly west to east. South along the banks of the creek stood the lodges of two of those four visiting tribes, while west along every twist and bend in the river itself the company trappers had crowded their camps.

“I’ll lay a year’s wages that the women coming to ronnyvoo ain’t whores, woman,” he reassured her.

If not the sort to lay with men who gave them presents, she decided, then the newcomers had to be wives.

At the first noisy announcement from those riders galloping into rendezvous, Waits-by-the-Water had been very scared, believing that with the arrival of these white creatures, the trappers would have their pick, forsaking the Indian women, abandoning their Indian wives.

In her people’s oral history, it was told the white man first sent horses among the Crow, then sent firearms to the Absaroka, followed by bright, shiny, wonderful trade goods. It wasn’t long before the white man himself came among them. Each of these arrivals caused volcanic changes for her tribe. So it was natural now that she should convince herself the white man was bringing as many of his women as he had brought horses, or guns, or tin cups and hanks of beads.

Understandable that if the white man didn’t bring the women there to lie with the trappers at their summer gatherings, then the women would have to be wives. She had imagined a trader caravan chock-full of pale-skinned women, enough to provide one partner for every trapper. And some of those white women would likely have hair on their faces, just as the majority of white men she had seen in her life grew hair on their faces.

Among the Crow, neither gender grew facial hair. In coming to view beards and mustaches as a characteristic of the white race, it seemed very natural to assume that many of the white man’s women would grow the same beards and mustaches on their faces.

Still, her greatest concern about that long trader caravan bringing an untold crowd of white women the way it brought a dazzling and innumerable array of trade goods lay in her fear that the white men would abandon their Indian wives, forsake their Indian children, and return to their own kind. Waits-by-the-Water did not want to think of life without Ti-tuzz.

“The women are here to marry white men?”

He answered, “Naw, I figure they come with their husbands.”

“Among your people, can one man steal the wife of another?”

“Yes,” he answered, then suddenly looked down at her with some alarm. His eyes quickly softened as he must have read the hurt that had to show on her face. “But don’t you worry ’bout me and them white women. I had near all I could stand of their kind back east.” He embraced her fiercely. “No white woman ever gonna take me away from you.”

She gripped him tight, pressing her cheek against his chest, feeling safe there, safe enough to tell him of an old fear.

“When you left me behind with Rosa two winters ago, I was so afraid I would never see you again,” she confided as more shouts reverberated in the distance. “I feared you would be killed and I would be left to live among strangers in a land I did not know. But even more frightening, I was afraid you would stay in that country from where you came—you would find a white woman and forget about your Crow woman.”

She felt him rub his chin on the top of her head.

“You are the one I love,” he said to her in his halting Crow. “Maybe it’s only my poor luck, but every white woman I’ve knowed has been faithless to me, one way or another. For more winters than I can count, I’ve looked
for one woman who would remain loyal to me, a woman who could show me that I was the most important person in her heart.”

“You are all my life,” she told him.

“You won’t be scared of no white women?”

Gazing up at him, Waits replied, “No. You have given me your promise.”

“How ’bout me taking you and Magpie to have yourselves a long look at them women?”

A slow smile crossed her face, and Waits nodded. “Yes, let’s go now and see these women creatures with their pale skin and their hairy faces.”

By the time they were saddled up, with Magpie riding behind her father, loping up to that flat mesa across the Green, more than half-a-hundred mounted trappers were racing for the head of the caravan in the middistance. Hundreds of mules and horses, along with many small two-wheeled objects her husband explained were called carts. As the trappers kicked their horses into a furious charge on the front of the pack train, Waits spotted a new sort of two-wheeled cart that appeared to be a small box sitting on its wheels, the front of the box laid open so two people could control the pair of horses attached to it.

All those trapper guns erupted with smoke, and a heartbeat later she heard the distant weapons boom from the caravan in a ragged order. Then her husband was laughing, harder than he had laughed for some time.

“Damn if them pilgrims don’t figger those boys are Injuns on the attack!” he roared, his eyes moist with tears. “Lookit ’em! Stopping that pack train and circling them carts right there to make a fight of it!”

A handful of figures at the head of the march stopped, turned, and were yelling at the pack train.

“I’ll wager the pilot for that outfit is telling ’em just what a bunch of softheaded idjits they are—being skairt of them white fellers come riding out, whooping and hawing!”

That broad front of bare-chested trappers was continuing to race for the caravan, unslowed, shouting and shrieking just like warriors as half of their number swept
down one side of the incoming train, the other half tearing like demons down the opposite side. Both ends of their charge circled the other and continued their gallop back up the line of march until they reached the head of the procession where they slowed to match the pilot’s pace.

Then the ceremony began. The white man sure put a lot of importance in this matter of shaking hands and pounding one another on the back, she thought.

“C’mon, woman,” Bass said with excitement. “Let’s go show Magpie how a white gal looks.”

His pony was already bolting away, with Magpie clinging to her father’s back the way a small, chubby tick would grip the hide of an old bull as Waits nudged her horse into a gallop.

In nearing the head of the march, she expected him to slow down to the crawl the caravan was taking, but instead her husband kept galloping right on past the leaders. At times he waved that hat he had torn from his head, but he did not ease the pace.

In front of them some strange creatures bolted, starting to peel off to the right and scatter, lumbering with an ungainly gait as two young Indian boys started after the animals, yelling and whipping the air with long sticks. Then they were close enough that she recognized the scattering, bawling animals, those strange creatures the white man brought out to rendezvous every summer to pull his wagons or to give him warm milk. Strange that a race of people so prepared to fight and defend themselves like the whites would have so docile and tranquil an animal while her people grew up among the wild buffalo.

Her husband was slowing as he neared that strange small box set on its four small wheels, his horse jogging sideways to a halt with Magpie laughing merrily at the exhilarating ride. Bass waved to her with his hat. As she came racing up to yank back on the reins, she thought the white man who rode a horse beside the box wagon looked familiar. The rider pushed his hat back from his face. She smiled, recognizing the holy man who had cut the arrowhead from Bridger’s back last summer.

The holy man was smiling, waving her over, at the
same time saying something to those in the shadow of the box wagon.

As Waits slowed her pony to a walk beside her husband’s horse, she felt her eyes grow big, and her chin drop. On one side of the box wagon sat a thin, sour-faced, bony creature who peered out at her with suspicion and alarm from beneath the brim of a black hat that nearly wrapped itself around the woman’s face. Dark circles hung like ugly pendants below her glaring, accusing eyes. Waits wondered if this person had ever smiled in her life, much less laughed.

Was this a white woman? No wonder the white man had such an incurable hunger for Indian women!

But the creature seated next to the hard-eyed one caused Waits to gasp. The holy man and her husband were talking at once, shaking hands while Bass dipped his head and introduced their daughter … but Waits could not take her eyes off the radiance of the fair-skinned beauty who sat alongside the mousy-haired, mean-eyed, dried-up pucker of a creature.

To her surprise this second white woman pulled her hat from her head, revealing hair the color of which Waits had seen on some white men—but never in such tight curls and ringlets. She reached up and touched one of her own black braids wrapped with strands of blue and red ribbon, bewildered to discover she almost coveted hair like this white woman’s—

“Waits-by-the-Water …”

Upon hearing her name, she turned to her husband.

“You remember Dr. Whitman?” he asked.

“Yes,” she answered in English, and dropped her eyes, adding in Crow, “he is the holy man.”

Bass translated her comment to Whitman in English, then continued in Crow for her. “This woman closest to us is the holy man’s wife. Both of them are wives of holy men.”

“Not whores?”

“No,” and Titus shook his head with a wry grin that put Waits at ease with her questioning. “This is Whitman’s wife. Her name is Narcissa. Nar-Sis-Sa.”

“Nar-Sis-Sa.”

The moment the Crow woman repeated it, Narcissa Whitman smiled at her and wiped her brow with a large red bandanna, cheerfully saying, “Hello. What is your name?”

Slowly Waits repeated what her husband had taught her of the white man sounds to her name, “Waits-by-the-Water.”

Twisting halfway around on the back of his horse, Bass had managed to loop an arm about his daughter, and she was crawling over his hip to sit in front of him on the pony’s bare back.

“This here’s my daughter, Magpie,” he announced. “Tell these good folks you’re pleased to meet ’em, Magpie.”

“Pleased mee’cha.”

At the child’s tinkling reply both Marcus and Narcissa laughed, but neither the sour-faced woman nor her dull-eyed husband showed anything more than indifference bordering on contempt. Ahead of them the column was already resuming its march.

“This year we push on for the Nez Perce country,” Whitman explained to Titus as they all set off once more, continuing their descent to the river bottom. “Has Reverend Parker come in to meet us?”

With a shrug Scratch replied, “I ain’t see’d him. But I can’t say for sure, Doctor. Likely wouldn’t know him less’n someone said that’s who he was.”

“I pray he has returned,” the physician added. “He vowed he would—so to lead us back to where we are to establish our mission.”

“We will make our way through the wilderness without him if we must,” said the woman with the happy eyes.

Waits-by-the-Water found she liked the light-haired one more and more as they pressed on to the rendezvous. But the other woman’s glare made her feel self-conscious, as if that dour woman did her best to hold herself above all others by the way she peered down her nose with such haughty disdain.

When they reached the campground chosen for the
supply train, the two women were helped down from their wagon while trappers scurried to provide a place to sit in the shade where the women were brought water to drink. Nearby others began to erect a large conical tent. It struck Waits as more and more white men came to gawk at the new arrivals, how those trappers fell over one another to keep the white women from having to lift a hand to help themselves.

Perhaps it was best that these two white women were hurrying on through this mountain west, she decided, best they were bound for the land of the Nez Perce far, far away. Waits-by-the-Water believed it had to be a good omen that the women did not belong to trappers, better instead that they belonged to those who were only passing through. It was plain enough that neither of the white women belonged out there—even Nar-sis-sa, despite her open friendliness. Both of them looked … soft. Not hardy enough to withstand much trial or hardship. And that was pretty much all life held in store in this brutal land.