Buffalo Palace (69 page)

Whenever a harsh winter took its toll on the northern herds and times grew lean on the far northern prairie, that great confederation of Gros Ventre, Piegan, and Blood tribes were more likely to roam farther to the south in
search of game and hides come spring. Never had they hesitated if their roamings took them into the land of an enemy.

So it was that for many generations the Shoshone had come to regard these as their buffalo. Each year they followed the herds migrating north in the spring, then south again before winter, a people moving before the wind. And with the first snow they would turn away from the buffalo and seek shelter in the lee of the Wind River Mountains, where they would pass the winter beneath the hides they had harvested for shelter, wrapped warm in the robes they had tanned and smoked, their bellies filled with the meat they had dried in anticipation of those lean days to come with the cold, cold time.

“They got ’em more hunting to do,” Jack explained.

“Not just buffler,” Caleb added. “Goats too.”

Antelope skins—some of the softest of hides used in making the finest of garments. In this country below South Pass, the Shoshone could always count on encountering numerous herds of the pronghorn goats.

Scratch asked, “That why they ain’t yet heading north?”

Hatcher nodded. “They got hides for to hunt. And we got beaver waiting for us up yonder.”

Bass tugged one last time on the single horsehair cinch, then flipped down the big cottonwood stirrup. “Where away you figger us to go?”

“We can find flat-tails just about anywhere north,” Jack replied. “Where ye take a notion to go?”

Bass shrugged and grinned. “To the high country.”

“Best we go there afore winter sets in hard,” Caleb Wood declared.

Elbridge Gray’s head bobbed. “Easy ’nough from them foothills up north to work our way down to the Popo Agie.”

“Been on that river afore my own self,” Bass replied as they all turned to watch the approach of a sizable crowd on foot.

Hatcher winked and leaned close to whisper, “Be different this time, Scratch—ain’t gonna be none of this here outfit getting the damn fool notion of floating your furs down to some burned-out post in Injun country.”

“That was a heap of plew,” Bass recalled in a hush as the procession of older men came to a stop before the trappers and the small herd of their animals, loaded and preparing to depart.

Behind the chiefs and headmen stood the ranks of young warriors. On either side of them the women formed the horns of a great crescent. And among their legs jostled the small children scooting this way and that to get themselves a good view.

Goat Horn stepped forward slowly, leading the ancient blind one whose eyes were covered with a milky covering. Over his shoulders he wore that sacred calf skin taken in the White Buffalo Valley, its forelegs tied at his neck with a thong.

“Many summers ago,” Hatcher quietly translated, “our brave warrior uncle could see no more. Something cut the magic cord between his eyes and his heart.”

Titus watched the old man nod, blinking his blind eyes as Goat Horn spoke.

“Ever since,” Jack continued his translation, “Porcupine Brush has see’d things none of the rest of us can see with our eyes. This morning he come to me … come to my lodge, saying we was to go to the white men together.” Then for a few moments Hatcher listened, squinting and wrinkling up his nose as if he were struggling to make out something being said in the foreign tongue.

“What’s that ol’ hickory stump saying?” Wood grumbled impatiently.

“Shush!” Jack hushed Caleb with an elbow. “This here ol’ hickory stump of a medicine man come to say prayers to us … prayers
for
us.”

When Goat Horn signaled, several young men stepped forward to join the wrinkled old men who stationed themselves directly behind Porcupine Brush. In their hands they clutched rattles or small handheld drums strung with feathers. At the moment the old shaman lifted his sightless eyes to the sky, they all began to play. The ancient one soon joined them, singing high and slightly off-key.

In fascination Scratch watched the old man’s Adam’s apple slide up and down his wrinkled, thready neck as the notes climbed, then fell. With their song over, Bass and
the others believed the ceremony was over and were ready to leave—but instead Goat Horn led Porcupine Brush forward until they stopped right in front of Bass.

As the old one put out his left hand to lightly touch the white trapper’s chest, he used his right hand to untie the two thongs holding the sacred calf skin around his shoulders. With the chief’s assistance, the shaman got to his knees, and there at Titus’s feet he spread the hide.

Rising with Goat Horn’s help, the shaman called out. This time only the old men came forward, bursting into a multitude of prayers and chants, each one as discordant as the next, no two of them the same—a dozen or more different songs being sung and played on drums, rattles, and wing-bone whistles all at once. A deafening noise that had begun only when the old man had reached out, blindly seizing Scratch’s two hands in his, holding them over the calf skin.

First Porcupine Brush moved one of the trapper’s arms in a circular motion over the hide; then he waved the other back and forth, but always in a circle from right to left, the same direction as the sun.

When the songs ended suddenly, the singers stepped back a few feet, and everyone fell silent as Porcupine Brush once again dropped slowly to his knees. Mumbling something to Goat Horn, he held up his veiny hand.

Whispering to Bass, Hatcher said, “Says he wants the chief’s knife.”

“He ain’t … ain’t gonna cut me, is he?” Titus asked as the knife went into the old one’s hand and Porcupine Brush bent over his work.

Locating the neck portion of the hide, the old shaman went down that edge of the hide by feel until he reached the bottom of where the skin had been pulled from the left foreleg. Although sightless, he carefully worked off a small sliver of the white calf skin.

Upon rising he immediately held out the knife, and it was taken from him by Goat Horn. Then Porcupine Brush laid the quarter-inch-wide strip of pale furry hide in one of Bass’s palms and rolled up the fingers of the white man’s hand to enclose it. He spoke for a moment before Hatcher translated.

“That there piece of the medicine calf is this ol’ man’s
prayer ye can allays carry with you,” Jack whispered at Scratch’s ear. “Ye brung the medicine calf to the Snake people with you—and ye’ve helped keep ’em a strong people. The power of … how strong the Snakes are can go with ye now as ye leave their camp.”

Titus began to ask, “H-how’s that power go with me?”

But he never heard an answer as Porcupine Brush knelt to pick up the hide. As soon as he had the sacred skin in hand and was standing to return it to his shoulders, the crowd erupted into joyous singing, trilling their tongues, laughter bubbling and washing over all of them.

Suddenly Bass felt himself turned, his right arm seized. He found a grinning Slays in the Night there at his shoulder, pumping his hand as if it were a forge bellows, up and down to beat the band. Goat Horn slid in next, taking the trapper’s hand from his son’s and shaking Bass’s arm while Slays in the Night stood there pounding Titus on the back.

“Time to saddle up, Scratch!” Hatcher called out as he and the others whirled about to take up their reins and climbed on the backs of their horses.

Hannah and some of the pack animals brayed and snorted with excitement as children shrieked, dogs howled and barked, and it seemed a thousand different hands reached out to touch Scratch from the crowd—merely to touch this white-man shaman before he left them.

“T-thank God!” Bass replied, yelling over all the noisy throats as one chief and old warrior after another shook hands with him. “I’m ’bout to get my arm yanked off here!”

“Dammit, Scratch—ye ugly dog you! Get up! Get yer arse up
now!”
Hatcher hollered inches from his ear, his thick beard brushing the side of Bass’s head.

“Get away from me!”

“Eeegod—it ain’t ever’ day a man has his birthday!” Jack roared.

The long-maned, hairy-faced others were chattering and laughing, jigging and gaping, like a passel of slack-jawed town idiots.

“Leave me be!” Bass growled, attempting a second time to pull the buffalo robe back over his head.

“Whassamatta?” Jack jabbed a hand at Bass’s nose, then pushed his own face right down close to Scratch’s, plainly showing that one upper tooth that had clearly rotted, black against the tobbaco-stained others. “You better come hurraw with us—it’s
your
damned birthday!”

Holding the edge of the robe right under his eyes, Titus peered at each of them in turn. The snow fell lightly on their shoulders as they stood arm in arm with one another there around their roaring fire just beyond the crescent of their half-dozen canvas shelters. Every last one of them was bleary-and red-eyed, but none so much as Hatcher, whose wild expression once more convinced Titus why some time back his friends had come to call him “Mad Jack.”

“I had enough hurrawin’ last night,” Scratch said, his red-rimmed eyes feeling gritty. “Where’d you get that damned tonsil varnish anyhow?”

“Allays we save us some!” Caleb Wood cried out, hoisting his tin cup there beside Elbridge Gray.

“Good likker, h’ain’t it?” Matthew Kinkead sang.

Bass’s head felt about as heavy as an anvil as he tried to pick it up off the robes where he had collapsed sometime in the predawn darkness, not having the fortitude these other men seemed to exhibit as they kept right on drinking, singing, carousing, and merrily bringing in what they calculated to be a brand spanking-new year.

“C’mon, now! Come doe-see-doe a jig with the hull of us!” Isaac Simms begged, hopping around so energetically that his pale, whitish-blond hair shook like a lively burst of sunlight beneath his battered and greasy felt hat. “It’s your birthday, Scratch!”

As he rubbed grit from his eyes, Titus knew his head would not take any more swaying and swinging the way they had done all last night, dancing round and round, in and out among the others, thumping feet and slapping knees, singing out as loud as they could while beating on kettles with sticks to accompany Hatcher as he scratched his bow across the strings of that worn fiddle of his. Beginning as soon as the sun had set and the quarter moon was on the rise—hour after hour they kept right at it.

“We allays hurraw for the new year, y’ lop-eared sumbitch,” Hatcher slurred before he emptied the last dregs of his cup, then flung the cup aside. While he bent over to again retrieve his fiddle from that worn, much battered oak-colored violin case, he said, “Ye having yerself a birthday sure as hell makes a good reason for me and the boys here to keep on hurrawing right on into New Year’s Day!”

“Gimme some water,” Bass grumped, clutching his pounding, aching head between his hands. It seemed they all were talking too loud, stomping their feet, pounding those kettles no matter how poorly his head hurt—why, even these damned snowflakes were landing on him too hard, too cold, too damned loud.

“Get that back-strapped sumbitch a drink of water,” Hatcher ordered—then suddenly caught himself. “Water, Scratch? What the hell you wanna go an’ drink water for?”

Bass admitted, “’Fraid if I drink any more of that trader’s whiskey—I’m gonna puke in the fire.”

Jack bent there in front of Scratch’s face, the fiddle and bow swinging loose from one hand, the other hand plopped on the top of Bass’s shoulder to steady himself as he rocked slowly back and forth. “Damn, nigger—ye got more grit’n most ever’ man I ever knowed, Titus Bass. But ye sure as hell cain’t hol’t your likker wuth a Sunday preacher man!”

They all roared with that, which only made Scratch’s head thump and hammer all the more.

Stumbling a little as he straightened, Jack swung his arms out as he announced to the group, “This here’s the birthday of Titus S. Bass. Shhh—don’t ye ever let no nigger know the
S
stands for Scratch.”

“Here’s to Scratch!” John Rowland cried, shoving some of his bushy, unkempt hair out of his eyes.

And then Hatcher was sputtering again. “Scratch be a man ever’ last one of us can depend on, that’s for sartin—sartin sure. A man made of pure fighting tallow.”

“How the hell old are you?” Solomon Fish wondered, stuffing a hand beneath the gray wolf-hide cap of his, scratching at his blond ringlets.

“Hell if I can figger it out for you right now!” Titus snapped angrily.

“Hush your face, Solomon!” Jack ordered. “Dammit, here I am speechifying on this nigger’s birthday—so ye just keep respectful of this here serious occasion and keep yer ugly yap shut!”

Beneath his sharp hatchet of a nose dotted with huge pores forever blackened with fire soot and dirt, Fish growled, “Your yap uglier’n mine, Hatcher!”

“Bet you don’t know near the purty words Mad Jack here knows!” Elbridge Gray defended.

“Thank ye, child!” Hatcher roared. “Now, all of ye raise your cups to this here ugliest nigger you’re bound to see out to the Shining Mountains! It’s his birthday, by damned! And ain’t none of us likely to see a more flea-bit, skin-chewin’, squar-screwin’, likker-lovin’ coon in near all of God’s natural creations!”

With that Jack swung the fiddle up and jabbed it beneath his chin. Striking a pose, he dragged that old bow across those strings—succeeding in raising every last one of the hairs on the back of Scratch’s neck and grating on Bass like a coarse file dragged across some crude cast iron. If it weren’t for the sharp hammer strikes the whining notes caused in his head, he was sure Mad Jack’s fiddle playing would have made him throw up what he had left in his belly from last night.

Barely cracking his eyes into slits as Mad Jack’s music picked up its pace and the other liquor-crazed trappers set to stomping with one another, Titus spotted the kettle of water nearby. At the moment, he couldn’t remember being thirstier. Grunting with that self-inflicted pain, he lumbered onto his knees shakily, trying desperately to shut out what noise he could from piercing his head with slivers of icy agony, just as if someone were shoving his mam’s knitting needles into both his ears, jabbing them right in behind his eyeballs.