Ride the Moon Down (49 page)

Nonetheless, if God saw his family through, Bass vowed he would do his best to be attentive to what God might ask in return, where- or whenever.

As strong as the fragrant tang of wood smoke grew in his sore, drippy nostrils, Scratch believed they had to be getting close. Step by step, stronger and stronger.

At times it became difficult to keep the bank of the Tongue close by on their right, what with the way the trees and willow forced them to ride several yards from the riverbank, sweeping slowly this way and that as they needled their way through the underbrush. The pack ponies began to protest now, pulling back on Samantha—making her
bray in distress or anger at the way they were attempting to turn about and flee in the face of the brutal wind. For a moment he stopped, just long enough to loop the mule’s rope twice around his left wrist, clutching Magpie against him with his right arm, the pony’s reins held short and tight in that right hand as he struggled to get the horse started again into the teeth of the storm.

Out of the swirling gray gloom leaped the flickering glow of the fire, a corona of yellow glittering in the midst of the wavering, white-diamond air as snowflakes darted about in wispy, wind-driven trails. As they approached, Titus could tell that the fire had been huge not so long ago, nearly a bonfire fed by huge trunks and limbs of downfall someone had dragged to this small riverbank clearing. But now the man-high inferno had whipped itself so furiously that the firewood was nearly exhausted and on the verge of dying.

No one here to attend it. Like a beacon lit, then abandoned.

For barely a moment as he halted the exhausted pony again, Titus spotted two meat-drying racks erected back against the cottonwoods … then the blackened crowns of those small rocks arranged in a crude fire-ring where a lodge might once have stood. Injuns.

Should he stop here—get the three of them down by that fire—then push on by himself into the teeth of the storm?

There on the far side of the fire, that wall of ten-foot willow offered the only windbreak he could see in the fury of wind and snow. Right where those who had abandoned this place had raised their lodge. Perhaps Waits could huddle with the children beneath the three robes he could drape over them, waiting there for his return as the snow continued to build.

When he kicked the pony in the flanks, the animal failed to move. It shuddered the next time he kicked it with the heels of his ice-crusted buffalo-fur moccasins. A third hammer to its ribs finally got the animal lunging away a hoof at a time, slowly stepping around the perimeter of that dying fire, flames wildly licking up the huge logs,
sparks spewing from the rotted wood like muzzle blasts, quickly swallowed by the wind, extinguished by the cold like galaxies of dying fireflies—given life in one breath, gone with the next.

On the far side of the fire, upwind, he tugged back on the reins and twisted stiffly in the saddle, his left arm wooden as he raised Samantha’s rope, clumsily trying to find the pony’s lead rope he had looped beneath his belt.

As the wind battered the side of his face, Scratch searched and dug at the side of his elk-hide coat. His cold mind slowly grasped the horror: the pony’s rope was gone! It had somehow disappeared, dragged from his belt without his realizing it—

“W-waits!” he cried hoarsely in English. Even as the word escaped his lips, it was swept away by the gale, swallowed by the keening wind.

“Popo?”

Swallowing hard, he whispered to his daughter, “I’m calling your mother.”

“Is mother there?”

“Y-yes,” he lied again, feeling his eyes pool.

“And little brother?”

“Yes, Magpie.”

God, I told you I would do anything you asked. Spare them. And if you must take any of us, then see they live and you can take me.

Her voice drenched in anguish, the girl whimpered, “I want my mother.”

“Hush, now, Magpie,” he scolded her sharply, angry and bitter at himself as much as he was angry and bitter with the All-Maker. “There’s a fire here where I can get you warm.”

“And my mother too.”

“Yes, daughter—”

“Ti-tuzz!”

Her raspy voice slipped through a lull in the wind a frozen heartbeat before her shadowy, ghostly form loomed out of the blizzard.

“Woman!”

“Ti-tuzz!”

Bending his head down, Bass reassured his daughter, “Your m-mother is here.”

She was sobbing against his breast. “Now you can get all of us warm.”

“Yes,” he gasped as he turned the pony around, watching the black form inch closer. “Now I promise to warm all of you.”

He dropped the mule’s lead rope and held out his left arm, so crusted it felt as if he had been lifting a thick stump of cottonwood. She brought her pony to a halt at his left side, leaning against him beneath that arm, sobbing.

“I thought I’d lost you in the storm,” he said, rubbing that flap of the buffalo robe where her head was buried in the crusted fur. Then he heard the faint whimper of the baby.

“The boy, he is cold. I know he is scared too,” she pleaded as she drew back the fur and tried to gaze up at his face in the storm.

“There is a fire where you and the children can stay while I go in search of shelter. You will be safe here till I can come back for—”

“We will be safe with you.”

“The animals are tired,” he begged her. “Better that I go on alone. I don’t want to lose any of you to the cold and wind.”

She interrupted, “Bu’a, out there minutes ago, I knew we would not die. My heart knew to believe in you. We will go with you.”

Instantly his heart rose to his throat. “No. You must do as I say. Trust me and stay here. I will be back—”

That’s when he dimly realized he was still smelling the wood smoke.

Bass immediately twisted in the saddle, away from his wife, turning his face into the wind once more—sniffing the terrible, metallic teeth of the fury heavy with moisture. Water. Nothing but a dry winter storm that had just crossed a wide river on these high, desertlike plains could smell quite like that.

Yet how was it that the beckoning fragrance of that
wood smoke remained strong in his nostrils now that he stood upwind of this abandoned fire?

There had to be another fire to the north. Close to the Yellowstone that relinquished its wind-whipped froth to the storm.

“Come!” he cried. “Stay beside me. And talk to Flea! Keep talking to him so I can hear your voice and know your pony is staying near mine.”

Harder than ever now, he struggled to get the animals moving, horses that acted as if they were no longer ready to bolt from the teeth of the storm, but had decided they were giving up the fight and would die there. Yelling, lashing out with his icy moccasin, he goaded Waits’s pony and his own into lunging, uncertain steps as the white veil grew thicker around them, the wind no longer keening like a bitter, disembodied widow.

Now it howled in anger, sang out in a shrill fury.

At times over the next half hour, which seemed to be an eternity, the wood smoke grew stronger for a few moments, then disappeared altogether—only to return on the back of the wind just when Bass became convinced he had wandered off the path, or had passed the fire by. All through those next anxious minutes his mind tugged at it the way the current of the powerful Platte had tugged at his two horses, eventually claiming one—moving blind into the whiteout.

Suddenly he realized they had stepped off the shallow riverbank, their horses lunging into the Yellowstone. Icy water surged against their legs, washing against their bellies and ribs, swirling around his own left leg, spray and drops freezing instantly as the animals snorted in fear, whinnied in fear—plunging headlong for the north bank without a shred of hesitation. Only blind terror.

Waits cried out, a shrill yelp she stifled as her pony sidestepped there in the middle of the river where it found a deep pocket and swam back out, continuing to battle the current from the west and that blizzard born out of the north.

Stronger and stronger still the odor grew, then disappeared as the blizzard twisted this way and that—

Just as his horse’s front legs floundered and he sensed it was going down, Bass heaved back on Magpie with that left arm as she started to slip away from him, onto the animal’s withers. But with the next step the horse rocked back and shuddered, its front legs clawing—seizing ground, lunging onto the north bank with the last of its strength!

Out of the ghostly curtain emerged the dark shadow of the low, hulking block of neatly stacked timbers. He was almost upon the wall when it appeared right before them.

A few more steps and he stopped. Reached out and touched the chinked timbers with his crusted mitten.

“Halloo!” he croaked, barely audible as his cracked lips split even more painfully.

There against the wall, for the moment, they were out of the worst of the wind. He cried again, louder now, “Hal-halloo!”

It had to be Tullock’s post.

Bass reached over and tugged on the other pony’s rope now, getting their horses started again there in the lee of the log wall.

Fort Van Buren. Mouth of the Tongue. North bank of the Yellowstone.

“Halloo! Tullock!”

They reached the end of the wall, where the dark shadow of the timbers disappeared in the blizzard as the wind screeched itself around the low log structure.

“Tullock!” and the wind carried his cry away again—

“Who? Who goes there?”

Titus swallowed, ready to cry as he glanced over at his wife, squeezed his daughter tighter.

“B-bass!” he whimpered into the might of the storm. “Titus Bass!”

“Titus Bass?” the disembodied voice came to him around the corner of those timbers.

The ghost figure suddenly took shape. “I ain’t see’d your hide for longer’n I can count!”

“Tullock?”

“No!” and the tall, rail-thin figure stepped right
around the corner of the post, stopping at Scratch’s knee to peer up at the frozen man from the hood of his capote. “It’s Levi, Scratch! Levi Gamble!”

The two tiny rooms that made up Fort Van Buren were gloomy with the blizzard’s blotting out the sun. Little light but for the four smoky oil lamps, a pair of flickering candle lanterns, along with that stone fireplace where two Indian women and a half-dozen children sat basking in the warmth.

Gamble shooed them back, clucking in Assiniboine, clearing a path through them as he ushered Waits-by-the-Water from the creaky door and had her settle right in the middle of the hearth where she dragged the crusted buffalo robe from her shoulders as the ice adhering to it began to sweat and dribble to the hardpacked floor. She bent her head, kissing the boy’s face, wiping her tears from his cheeks.

“I’ll see to this’un, Titus Bass,” Samuel Tullock offered with a kindly growl, kneeling and putting his arms out to accept the young girl as she emerged stiff and frightened from the buffalo robe and elk-hide coat Scratch had clutched around them both.

“I … I thankee,” Bass whispered, his throat clogged with appreciation—to Gamble, to Tullock. To God. “I truly do.”

Then he turned back to the door with Levi.

Outside the two of them stumbled after the animals already drifting before the wind that hurtled the men around like wood chips on a mountain stream. Lunging after the mule’s lead rope, Scratch managed to yank Samantha back toward the cabin.

The other ponies reluctantly turned when she did, following her as they would a bell-mare, while Gamble hollered and slapped and cajoled them from the rear as they busted through the snowdrifts already accumulating waist high at the corner of the fort. It was there the wind whipped and eddied. There along the south wall they tied the ropes off to iron swivel rings pounded waist high into the unpeeled logs.

For a long moment Bass stood there, shading his eyes from the wind and frozen snow with a mittened hand, staring at the ice caked on their legs, around their bellies. Howling snow and crossing that damned river—

“Ain’t nothing more you can do now!” Levi yelled above the deafening wail of the wind as it careened around the corner of the wall with a constant white slash.

For a moment Bass stood there, looking at all of them, the way the ice crusted their eyes, forelocks, and manes, how wind-scoured ridges of it lay gathered against the packs and even across the broad flanks all the way down to the tail roots.

Then he said, “If they’re meant to make it—they’ll be here when the storm’s passed.”

“C’mon,” Gamble urged. “Get on inside with your family.”

Some of the drifts were already tall enough that the deep snow billowed out the long tails of his coat, his legs busting through until he stood crotch-deep in the shocking cold, snow seeping down inside his breechclout and leggings. They had to kick with their toes, dig with their heels, at the thick, icy crust forming at the foot of the doorway. Eventually the two of them together were able to pry the door back toward them far enough to allow them to slip through sideways, then drag it closed against the square-hewn jamb.

Both Gamble and Bass sank to the floor, gasping, pummeled by the wind, worn down with the subzero cold, suddenly back inside where a man could hear his own heartbeat again, could hear the crackle of burning wood in that fireplace. Where a man felt relief at finding himself still alive.

Scratch’s face started to hurt as his breathing began to slow. He dragged off the coyote cap and that long strip of blanket he had tied around his head and over his ears, working at the frozen, crusted knot under his chin. Across the room at the fire, Waits-by-the-Water nursed little Flea in the flickering glow of that fireplace as she talked in low tones with the women. A young half-breed girl sat with Magpie, a pair of dolls between them.

Titus gazed into his wife’s face—her eyes saying that her faith in him had not been misplaced. As he worried the big antler buttons from their holes and pulled the flaps of his coat aside, his daughter looked over, stood, and started his way.

“Popo,” she said as clear as she ever had, coming into his arms.

As Magpie laid her cheek against her father’s chest, Titus sighed. “That’s a second time you’ve took my family in from a winter storm, Levi. How’s a man s’pose to repay you for kindness like that?”