Buffalo Palace (50 page)

Nearly at the end of their worn-out rawhide whangs, the four hobbled into a grove of cottonwood near the lee side of some low hills and tied off the weary animals. While two of the trappers kicked around in the snow to gather up deadfall, another brought in water from the nearby stream, and the last of them brushed snow back from the ground where they built their night fire.

“I’ll take first watch,” Scratch volunteered as they chewed on their dried meat and drank their scalding coffee.

“Best by a long chalk,” Tuttle said, “than for a man to get hisself woke up when he’s dead asleep, smack in the middle of the dark an’ the cold.”

Better was it to stay awake, he thought as the night deepened, and stand to first watch. But when he had turned Billy Hooks out and crawled off to his robes and blankets, Titus found he could not sleep. Instead he lay shivering beside the crackle of their small fire for the longest time—unable to escape his fear of just what might become of them out here without the rest of their animals, in the middle of a wilderness where the brownskins came and went as they pleased, taking what they wanted from a white man.

Damn well didn’t seem near fair, it didn’t—when he hadn’t come to stay among these hills, beside this stream, after all. Only to take a few beaver and move on to new country. No more than passing through. So them Injuns had no right to have call on taking what wasn’t theirs. No right at all.

Nothing like Silas Cooper, no it wasn’t. The man took what Scratch grudgingly admitted was his share—but Cooper hadn’t taken it for naught. No, it was his rightful share in exchange for saving Bass’s life, for keeping Bass alive, for teaching Bass day in and day out. By damn, to Titus that was a fair exchange between two men.

But this stealing of a man’s horses and mules. Putting that man afoot as a blue norther bore down on these high plains and uplands. And the worst part of it was that the new snow had eventually blotted out the trail the farther north they walked. Still, the four of them had a good notion the thieves were leading them north, right into the teeth of the coming weather.

That day the trappers had even agreed that they would find the thieves up yonder, in that. Yellowstone country. No matter that they didn’t have a trail to follow. All they would have to do was keep watch from the high ground, a ridgetop or the crest of a hill, straining their eyes against all that bright and snowy landscape—searching for some sign of a pony herd, a cluster of brown lodges nippling against the cold skyline … and if nothing else, maybe they’d spot some ghostly smudge of firesmoke trickling up into the autumn sky.

That’s how they found the Indian camp, far, far off the next afternoon.

From a distant ridge they could make out the lighter brown of the buffalo-hide lodgeskins scalded black at the smoke flaps, each cone raising its gray offering of heat, and food, and shelter from the cold. Ponies grazed beyond the lodges on what grass they pawed free or snow. People came and went on foot among the lodges, down to the thick groves of tall cottonwoods, or to the narrow stream meandering in its crooked, rocky, springtime-wide creekbed.

“Who they look to be?” Tuttle asked anxiously as they huddled there on the ridgetop as the wind came up.

Hooks prodded, “They ain’t Blackfoots, is they?”

“Blackfoot would’ve rubbed us out first—then took the horses,” Bass reminded them, feeling exposed and vulnerable against the skyline. “Maybeso we ought’n get ourselves down off this ridge, Silas.”

Cooper didn’t say a thing for the longest time, studying
not so much the village as he looked here and there across the valley for horsemen. Then he watched the way the men acted in camp, for it ought to be plain if they were a hostile bunch or not.

Scratch agreed when Silas explained to them as much.

“Maybeso this bunch showed us they didn’t mean us no harm but for takin’ our animals.” Titus looked this way and that, growing more nervous what with the way they were backlit by the afternoon’s light.

Cooper glared at Bass, saying, “But we come here to get them horses back. Then—maybeso I’ll mean them some harm.”

“Only us again’ all of them?” Tuttle squeaked.

Shaking his head, Silas admitted, “Nawww—it don’t have to be a fight, boys. We just wait till dark—sometime after moonset. Then we’ll slip in and get what’s rightfully ours.”

“J-just like that?” Hooks asked. “We ain’t never … not ever gone an’ stole horses from Injuns, Silas.”

“A first time for ever’thing, Billy.” Having snarled the rest into the silence of their own private thoughts, Cooper gazed off into the valley for a few minutes. “Looks to be a likely place off down yonder where we can lay up and wait till it’s good and dark—”

“God-damn!”
Scratch bawled, yanking his longrifle out of the crook of his left arm.

With the sudden appearance of the horsemen, the others were doing the same—but in the span of three heartbeats they realized their four guns were little match for the two dozen or more who burst from the trees on one side, breaking over a nearby hilltop on the other.

“We gonna take what we can of ’em with us afore they cut us down, Silas?” Billy asked in a harsh whisper.

“Just hold your water,” Cooper cautioned, suspicion in his voice. “Don’t unnerstan’t why they coming in so slow—”

“Cooper’s right, Billy,” Scratch confided, the short hairs at the back of his neck bristling. “Just don’t let ’em get in here too close.”

At times like these a man remembered the lessons in life learned the hard way—clear as rinsed crystal. And right at this moment Titus recalled the way the Chickasaws
glided up silently on the black-and-silver Mississippi, then rushed Ebenezer Zane’s boatmen out of the night … recalled how the Arapaho laid waiting in their ambush for the Ute hunting party last winter—then sprang like a cat coiled for the attack.

Bass continued, “But it do seem a mite contrary, don’t it, fellas? If’n this bunch wanted our hair here and now—likely they’d come at us on the run.”

As it turned out, the horsemen brought their wide-eyed ponies to a halt at a respectful distance, completely circling the trappers. Turning slowly, Bass looked each one over quickly. A handsome outfit they were, fine of form and every one decked out in their feathers and teeth, hair tied up atop their heads with stuffed birds and scalp locks fluttering from coats, robes, and shields. A few of them talked among themselves quietly, but for the most part, the ponies made the only noise, restless and restive as they snorted in the cold, pawing at the hard ground beneath the thin skiff of new snow.

“By doggee!” Hooks exclaimed only so loud. “Them ponies of their’n don’t like our smell.”

“Come to think of it,” Tuttle agreed, “I don’t think any white person with a good nose would like
your
smell, Billy.”

“Hush your yaps!” Cooper snarled as one of the horsemen inched out from the others in the circle. He began to make sign with his hands. “By damn, I think we might be able to talk to these here boys after all.”

Without reservation he suddenly handed his rifle back to Tuttle and quickly began to make sign.

The warrior smiled, then replied in kind, his hands fluttering before him as he nodded in the closest thing to friendliness Bass had seen since the hospitable Shoshone at last summer’s rendezvous.

“’Pears to be an agreeable sort,” Bud commented.

“Don’t seem so bad a bunch, after all, do they?” Hooks added.

Cocking his head around to tell them over his shoulder, Cooper said, “This here’s a bunch of Crow.”

“By damn, we run onto the Crow ’stead of Blackfoot!” Tuttle cheered with genuine relief.

Hooks slapped Titus on the back. “Crow got ’em
some purty squaws, so the downriver talk says. Mighty purty squaws.” Then he bent his head close, his lips almost touching Bass’s ear. “Maybeso we can talk Cooper into winterin’ up with these here Crow and their womens. Word on river says these bang-tails make the best robe-warmers!”

Bass grumbled, “Maybeso you’d better wait to see what these here bucks have in mind for us afore you up and decide you’re gonna spread some Crow squaw’s legs for the winter here.”

With a snort Billy rocked back on his heels and said, “You grown particular of a sudden, Scratch? Gone and got picky about where you poke your wiping stick?”

“Hush, Billy!” Tuttle warned while Cooper went on talking in sign.

With some word from their leader, half of the warriors slowly turned their ponies and formed up loosely to move off down the slope toward the valley and that village nestled among the cottonwoods along the river.

“All I know is that running onto Injuns means we found us some brownskin sluts,” Billy hissed with a grin on his thick lips. “An’ I ain’t never met me a brownskin slut what didn’t kick her legs wide for Billy-boy here when I showed her a handful of my purty red beads or a little strip of ribbon!”

“Maybeso ol’ Silas got lucky for y’ boys again!” Cooper crowed as he turned and joyously slapped Hooks on the shoulder. “Leave it to me to find a warm lodge, and a warm honey-pot for our stingers, ever’ time!”

As the remainder of the horsemen urged their ponies closer to the white men, Tuttle whispered, “What they figger to do with us, Silas?”

Cooper smiled in that long black beard of his that tossed in the rising wind, slapping both hands down on the tops of Bud’s shoulders. “Ease your hammer down, son. These here Crow bucks just gave us the invite to come on down for dinner with their big chiefs.”

Billy echoed, “Big chiefs?”

Taking his rifle back from Tuttle, Cooper said, “From the sign talk I just got, looks like they knowed we was coming after our horses for the last two days.”

Bud asked, “An’ if we didn’t come after the damned horses?”

Grabbing Turtle’s elbow to urge them all down the snowy slope, Silas said, “Then they’d knowed we had us yaller stripes painted down our backs an’ was no better’n women.”

As the afternoon light deepened the hues of everything from clouds, to cedar, to the surface of the creek itself in that hour before the sunset, the Crow warriors escorted the white men into their noisy village. Not all that different from making their ride into the Ute village last winter, to Scratch’s way of thinking. Except one thing—these Crow sure were a tall people. Men and women both seemed taller than the Shoshone, and the Ute he had come to know in Park Kyack. Too, the more he looked at not just the menfolk, but the children and the Crows’ slant-eyed womankind, the more Titus felt these were as fair-skinned and handsome a people as rumors and campfire palaver had boasted they were.

Cooper turned over the two animals to a pair of young, smiling boys who appeared to take their grown-up responsibilities most seriously as they barked at the children to stay back from a wary Hannah and the restless saddle horse. And with that the trappers were shown into a warm lodge where waited at least ten men as old as Cooper himself.

That first evening of ceremonial smoking and eating boiled meat dragged on and on as speeches were made and exploits recounted by every warrior in attendance before he began his turn at haranguing the rest. And sometime after the first winter moon had fallen in the west, the white men were told that they would have to wait until morning for an answer to what would be done about their stolen horses.

When the next morning finally became afternoon, the trappers were told they would have an answer the following day. But it wasn’t until four days later that Cooper and the others were called before the Crow council, after impatiently cooling their heels where they were allowed to camp in a grove of cottonwood at the edge of the village circle.

“Seems they figger they got the right to ask us to pay
for the beaver we’re taking from their criks,” Cooper explained what he had been told in the stillness of that council lodge. “They took our stock to pay for that beaver they say we’re stealing.”

“I don’t figger they’re asking for all that much,” Bass said.

For a moment Silas glowered at Titus, then finally asked, “What y’ think, Billy?”

“You tell me, Silas. Think we ought’n give ’em any of our beaver?”

Cooper looked at Tuttle. “If’n we don’t—these thievin’ bastards said they’d stretch us out over a fire an’ let their womens do their worst to us.”

“That … that ain’t ’sactly what they said, Silas,” Bass corrected.

“Oh?” Cooper demanded, smiling the best he could for the sake of the Crow men, his marblelike eyes nonetheless glaring holes in Bass.

“From what I saw ’em sign to you,” Titus explained, “they give us a choice.”

Pursing his lips in seething anger, Silas crossed his arms and said, “So now y’ figger y’ read sign language good enough to know what the hell these ol’ bucks said to me? S’pose y’ tell us all ’bout it, y’ boneheaded nigger.”

Not only were the eyes of the trappers on him now, but the black-cherry eyes of every one of the Crow elders and counselors were as well, clearly sensing the tension among the white men.

“From what I make of it,” Scratch started tentatively, then swallowed hard, “looks to be we got us one of two ways to go at this. We can give ’em something in trade for the beaver we been taking out’n the streams in their country, or …”

“Or?” Tuttle squeaked.

“Or they throw us right on out the way they found us—maybe lucky to get our mule and horse back.”

Hooks twisted to look at Cooper. “That true what Scratch said? We give ’em something to trade or they turn us out?”

Cooper nodded, his brow furrowed, anger smoldering at Bass, every bit as plain as sun on his face.

“But they’ll let us go?” Tuttle said. “Just let us ride on out—if’n we give ’em some plunder?”

“That’s the way I read the sign, boys,” Silas replied.

Then Bass declared, “Looks to me like we gotta figger out just how good it might turn out to be—us trapping here in Crow country.”

“What you think of us hanging back in this country, Silas?” Billy asked.

For a moment Cooper was silent; then with a smile he turned to Bass. “Let’s ask Scratch what he thinks we ought’n do.”

“I say we give ’em presents,” Titus was quick to answer. “Never know when it might turn out good to have us friends like these up here close to Blackfoot country, don’t you think?”