Ride the Moon Down (61 page)

“Your chirrun?” asked Isaac Simms, brushing back some of his gleaming platinum-blond hair that continued to successfully hide the fact that he was graying.

“They was fine,” Scratch declared. “Cain’t callate how Magpie come out so good—’thout the sickness getting hold of her the way it done to her mam, what with them both being took together by the Blackfoot.”

He glanced in wonder at the woman again, noticing once more how the curvatures of her hips and backside had begun to round out her dress as she worked over the hide on her hands and knees. She had been slow to put
back on most of the weight she’d lost to those weeks fighting the pox. No longer was she a raw-boned skeleton with her skin sagging over her joints like proper folks’ bedsheets draped over a split-rail bedstead. For a long time there he hadn’t believed someone so frail and thin, so downright cadaverous, could ever have the strength to fight off the scourge.

“She’s a lucky woman,” Solomon Fish observed. “Had you to care for her, pull her back from death’s door.”

Scratch nodded, taking his eyes from the woman to look at Solomon’s long beard of blond ringlets. “I’m a lucky man. She’d done the same to save my life.”

And that’s what had kept him going through those first hours, then those first long, seemingly endless, days and nights as she grew hotter, weaker, sicker. He kept reminding himself that she would never give up on him, that she would be the sort to chide him and scold him and yell at him to fight back even as he grew weaker.

So he had done just as he knew she would do for him. Always reminding her of the children, of all the four of them had to live for. Over and over doing his level best to convince her of the years left them both.

“I kept that fire going day and night,” he said quietly in the shade of those cottonwoods as the flies droned about them. “Didn’t sleep much them days—couldn’t.”

He had been scared, too afraid to rest more than a few minutes at a time even when he grew so weary he could no longer keep his eyes open, no longer able to cradle her head in his lap and wash her face with the scalding hot water that sometimes made her whimper and moan, sometimes made her wail and thrash against the grip he had on her.

“I don’t have me no idea how it helped, but chopping the wood, boiling the snow, washing her over and over every day and every night … it kept me busy—so busy I didn’t have much time to worry. I had to keep doing what I could do to keep her alive one more day. Then another come after that, and I knowed I had to keep her alive that day.”

The sun had warmed the earth that first morning after Stiff Arm’s rescue party left as Titus gathered wood close to their camp, brought the horses close, and started scooping snow into her new brass kettle to heat over the flames. That night, like all the nights that followed for them on the side of that mountain, the temperatures sank well below zero. With it too cold for a man ever to sleep for long at all, he repeatedly awoke throughout each long stretch of darkness to prop more wood on the fire, dragging the kettle near the heat again, repeatedly dipping the coarse linen scrap into the scalding water where he boiled slivers of snakeroot, then scrubbed the woman’s face and neck as she grumbled, sometimes screamed—but soon grew too weak to push his hands away.

He had convinced himself the ugly, ofttimes oozing, pustules were filled with a loathsome poison as surely as a gangrenous wound would fill with the poison capable of killing. Over and over he cleaned the sores with the snakeroot broth, gently scrubbing each sore open so he could get at the foul ooze, cleanse it from her body in the hope he could prevent the poison from killing her.

They had begun as red spots, then became hard, angry welts lying just beneath the surface of the skin until the first one erupted as he scoured the coarse linen across it. There were many more by the next morning. And by that night it seemed her whole face had been taken over by the noxious pustules.

Yet he persisted, doing what he could to clean each one with the scalding water that soothed the bones in his bare hands aching so with the intense cold. Slowly too, doing his best to remember that he must wash each pustule separately so that he did not rub poison from one into the next. Each time he finished bathing her, he trudged out of the firelight with that kettle of water and dumped it in the same spot, downwind of camp. When he returned, he draped the coarse linen scrap over the end of a tree branch and held it over the coals of their fire, turning it the way he would a thick slab of elk loin so that the heat killed the poison, cauterized every inch of the cloth.

Rituals so intricate and consuming that they kept him
this side of that fine line of insanity, rituals practiced with such fidelity that they prevented him from going mad with the terror that he was going to lose her.

At times Bass hunted when she slept, never venturing far. Twice each day he made soup in their old cast-iron kettle, boiling snakeroot with the meat of a bighorn goat he’d shot, later a small cinnamon bear—even the goat and bear bones—making a hearty broth he forced her to sip day after day after day as her cheeks began to sag: that ravaged, pitted, bloodied skin of her face … her almond-shaped, oriental eyes growing more sunken, red-rimmed, bags like liver-colored fire smudge wrinkled beneath them both.

Every few hours the fever made her delirious. At times Waits even mumbled with a swollen tongue—so bloated it cruelly reminded him of that deadly desert crossing back when he and McAfferty fled the Apache on the Gila. Plain to see the damned fever was boiling all the juices out of her. She had to drink. He never let her refuse, pouring the cool water over her tongue until she coughed and sputtered, or holding a horn ladle of warm broth against her chapped, cracked lips as she struggled to turn away. But he didn’t let her—couldn’t let her.

Even now he would not tell these old friends how he cried, or how he cried out at her too every time he had to lock her head beneath an arm, doing his best to scold or cajole some liquid past her lips.

Sixteen long days they remained there. He whittled a notch for each one in the handle of a camp ax. Sixteen days and nights, awaking fearfully from his troubled half sleep, afraid she had died. Anxious to see if she still breathed, resting his fingers over her nose and mouth each time he returned from his hunt through the surrounding timber, or among the boulders and tundra, often times with no more than a marmot or two.

With each morning’s arrival he watched the sun climb off the far edge of the earth, thankful that she still breathed in her fitful sleep, that she had survived another day, somehow endured another bitterly cold night. As weak as she became, to find her alive there against him,
still breathing shallow and raspy wrapped in his arms, it became no small celebration for his heart.

He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t noticed it before, but there came one night at the fire while he was scrubbing her face with that coarse rag and scalding water, suddenly aware that he could find no new pustules erupting on her face. And what angry red pockmarks there were no longer oozed and bled near as much as they had in recent days each time he repeatedly washed them.

Two days later she awoke him from his own fitful sleep, whispering with her raw throat and swollen tongue that she wanted some water. As he poured sips past her cracked, puffy lips, later fed her spoons of hot soup and washed her wounds, Waits-by-the-Water gazed at him for the first time in more than two weeks. The love in those eyes dared him to hope.

For sixteen days those eyes had remained shut, never looking back at him, not once opening to dispel his doubts, drive away any of his fears. But after all those nights, she finally opened her eyes and looked up at him, soft and thankful. So weary, she did not try speaking any more that day in her exhaustion, even as he clumsily removed her dress and leggings, replaced them with some of his clothing. All she could do was look at him with those eyes.

Not until the next day did she speak again. “Love Ti-tuzz.”

And that evening she asked for help walking to the brush so she could relieve herself. She squatted, then pulled herself up against him, and he supported her as they returned to the fire, where she curled up within a new robe and he dragged off the one she had lain in for all those days.

“What will you sleep in tonight?”

“I’ll sleep with you again,” he explained.

“We’ll need the old robe to keep us warm—”

“Going to burn it before we leave,” he said in English. “And them clothes of your’n too. The sickness is all over em.”

Better to leave as much of the disease as they could
right there on the mountainside, among the ashes of their fire. Bass realized he could replace things, like his missing traps he figured the Blackfoot had thrown away, like the plunder they had shattered and destroyed. Just leave the pox and its evil there on the mountain. Trouble was, they would never leave it all behind. Waits-by-the-Water was going to carry a telling reminder of the pox with her till the end of her days.

But they still had one another. And they had their children. So Bass remained confident he could rebuild the pieces of their life together. As long as there was beaver in the mountains and as long as the traders hauled their goods out to rendezvous—he’d carve out a life for them … just as long as he and his kind could continue to race across the seasons, as long as they could continue to ride the moon down.

Many times since that late winter of thirty-eight it had haunted him just how many there were who had given up and abandoned the Rockies. Daniel Potts, and even Jim Beckwith. It troubled him to think back on how fewer and fewer showed up come rendezvous with the arrival of each summer. Sad to watch how many didn’t choose to reoutfit themselves, deciding instead to ride east with the fur caravan, electing to take their wages in hard money once they reached St. Louis. Every summer at least a couple dozen more admitted they were throwing in and giving up.

“Plunder costs too much,” some groused.

Others complained, “Beaver’s too low.”

Still more confessed that a few seasons spent crotch-deep in icy streams, exposed to that unwarmable cold of the mountains for three seasons a year, had aged them well before their years. Titus felt sorry for those who decided to flee back east to what was, back to who they had been. Yet he realized he didn’t have any of that to return to himself.

For the last few summers he saw how those who were giving up simply freed their Flathead, Shoshone, or Yuta wives to return to their villages, to their parents, taking the half-breed youngsters with them when the winters of marriage were done and the white trapper no longer needed the benefits of his dusky-skinned bedmate.

But a time or two Titus had heard tell of a man who did take his wife and their children east with him, perhaps to settle somewhere on the frontier that others claimed was inching right to the edge of the rolling prairie itself. There among the pacified Sauk and Fox, among the Osage or those other bands Andy Jackson had driven west, such an old trapper and his family might better mix in with the life of hardworking folks scratching out an existence along that border of the wilderness. Once they were on that backtrail to the settlements, nothing else was ever heard of those men who had returned east in hopes of recapturing some of what life they had left behind, nonetheless unable to let go of a woman and children who were part of another life they had now abandoned.

Again this summer on Horse Creek, some three dozen company men had turned in their furs, preparing to flee the mountains.

Sitting there talking with these scarred, old friends, Scratch realized he could never return to the settlements. There wasn’t anything left back there. No family to speak of—no one to make for a sentimental reunion. There had been no real success in the blacksmith trade with Hysham Troost that would lure him back as this beaver trade slowly sank from its lofty heights. And he ruminated that he could never take Waits-by-the-Water onto that rolling land of the buffalo prairie or beyond to those hardwood forests where corncrackers scratched at the ground and raised their fixed communities.

They were no place to raise children—not back there where the trees grew so tall and thick a man couldn’t see any distance at all, back east where a man looked up only to see a portion of the sky. No place for a child to grow tall and strong as they would here in these mountains, breathing this clean, dry air. Back east, he remembered, the men on that old frontier of hardwood forests had a far different look in their eye than these hivernants of the high Stonies. Back there, closed in with the thick timber and small patches of sky that too often turned gray and drenched them with rain—such men did not possess the
far-seeing squint of those iron-forged few who made a home beyond the western prairies.

Out here a man quickly took on a decidedly distant gaze. He grew accustomed to gazing across great stretches, searching far ridges, studying the skyline for dust or smoke, game or foe, reading those green threads that beckoned him to water as if they were parchment maps, ciphering each swaybacked, snow-covered saddle that allowed him a pass between the mountain peaks—scratching every mile of the journey into the fastness of his memory. This unimaginably huge land required a man to stretch his eyes far beyond what had been required of him in those closed-in, narrow-bounded forests back east.

Come from what he had been, a man either became much more than what he was back east—or he left his bones to bleach on the banks of some uncharted mountain stream. So again this summer those who realized they had teased and taunted Dame Fate long enough chose to rake in what chips they had left and scurry east. Leaving behind a life. Leaving behind loved ones.

“I vowed that if the woman died,” Titus quietly explained to the circle of friends that hot summer afternoon, “I wasn’t returning to the Crow.”

“What of your young’uns?” Elbridge asked.

He grew thoughtful. “Told myself they’d grow up just fine, took in and raised by them what would come to love li’l Flea and my darling Magpie like their own.”

“Couldn’t bear to face ’em,” Isaac said.