In English he said, “For weeks now I been wondering what we was gonna name you, little one.”
The moment he finished she gurgled happily again, which made him laugh once more, causing her in turn to stare at him in wonder.
“You and me can have us a talk, cain’t we?” he asked, bouncing her on a thigh. “I talk and laugh, just like you, pretty one. So you understand me. And you’re gonna grow up talking your pap’s tongue, ’long with your mama’s tongue too. Gonna talk happy in both!”
As soon as his voice drifted off, the infant set right in with her cheery babble. “So when your mama gets mad at me and don’t wanna talk, or when she don’t wanna have nothing to do with speaking the white man’s tongue I’m trying to teach her—why, you and me can have us all the talk we want!”
“Talk?” Waits repeated the word in English as she stepped up, then knelt beside him on the blankets.
“Yes,” he replied in English, and slowly continued in his own language, “we’re gonna see which one of you learns my tongue first. Mama, or daughter.”
“You will teach her to talk the white man’s words the way you are teaching me?”
He nodded, feeling the fuzziness creep across his forehead there by the warmth of the fire. “I’m hoping she’ll want to talk to me when you’re angry at something I’ve done or said.”
“Do I hurt your feelings when I won’t talk to you?”
The girl reached out for her mother, so he settled the baby in Waits-by-the-Water’s lap. “I don’t like letting things go,” he confessed. “I want to get things settled quick. Get shed of those bad feelings soon as we can. Only way to do that is to talk.”
She brushed the babe’s short hair with a palm as she considered that. “Yes,” Waits agreed. “When you make me angry with you, I don’t want to hurt your feelings because I am so mad I don’t know what to say. Now I know that you want me to talk.”
“That’s the only way to … to …” But he lost track of what he had wanted to say.
“The white man’s real bad water made you forget, husband,” she said, then leaned in to kiss his hairy cheek.
“No, the whiskey just makes me stupid,” he admitted in English. “Better I sleep now.”
“Sleep,” she echoed the English word, and reached down to stuff a blanket under his head as he settled back onto the robes.
“Like I said, you’re a good woman,” Bass whispered in English as he closed his eyes.
“You … good man,” she said the words quietly, haltingly, in her husband’s tongue.
He smiled and sighed, and listened to the baby softly chatter as he sank into sweet oblivion.
It was late of the next morning when he awoke, his head tender as a raw wound, his temples thumping louder and louder still as he fought to sit up without his brain sloshing around inside his skull.
But at the fire where she was carefully cutting pieces of winter moccasins from a section of smoked buffalo hide, she heard him moving, groaning. In her cradleboard their daughter was asleep, propped against a bale of beaver hides. Without a word Waits laid her work aside and kneed up to the fire, pouring coffee into a dented tin cup.
“Drink this,” she said to him in Crow, holding the cup out between them. Then, as he peered up at her with grateful eyes, Waits spoke in English. “Coffee … for husband’s s-sick head.”
He tapped his puckered lips with a fingertip. After she leaned over to kiss him, Bass whispered, “What’d this ol’ bonehead ever do to deserve such a good woman like you?”
After swilling down several pint cups of coffee and gnawing on some flank steak from the antelope carcass they had hanging in a nearby tree, Titus started to feel halfway human again. By early afternoon the roll of thunder had eased at his temples, and that greasy pitch and heave to his belly had departed.
“Do you want my help?” she asked when he brought the mule into camp and dragged over the two small bales of beaver he had to trade.
“You’re a pure delight,” he said in English.
“Dee-light?” she repeated.
Grinning, “Do you know the word smile?”
“Smile, yes,” and her whole face lit up.
“You make me smile in here,” he said using her tongue, tapping his chest. “A big, big smile in here.”
“Too, me,” she attempted in English as she pulled up the thick, woolly packsaddle pad made from a mountain sheep and lapped it over the mule’s back.
Minutes later beneath the painful glare of a summer sun he encountered a pack train on the move that afternoon, migrating toward him, moving up Ham’s Fork.
“This here Wyeth’s outfit?” he asked as he brought his pony alongside three of the horsemen who were wrangling less than a dozen horned cows at the far side of the march.
“It is,” one answered.
“Where’s Wyeth?”
“At the head, yonder,” and that second man gestured toward the front of the cavalcade stirring dust from every hoof into the still, hot air.
“Thankee,” Bass replied as he kicked heels into the pony and they bolted into a lope, crossing the narrow bottomland that meandered between bare bluffs and the twisting stream.
In no time he was standing in the wide cottonwood stirrups, hollering, “Wyeth! Wyeth!”
One of the figures ahead turned in the saddle, bringing a hand to his brow as he peered from beneath the brim of his hat. “I’m Wyeth.”
Slowing his pony to match the pack train’s pace, Bass found himself suddenly grown anxious that his afternoon of reunion and celebration had put him one day late in trading for what the three of them would need through the coming year. The Yank’s brigade was clearly on its way.
“You pulling out?” he asked of the leader. “Leaving ronnyvoo?”
“Not yet,” the man answered. His small eyes in that overly narrow face squinted in the shade beneath his hat brim. “That time will come soon,” and he sighed with resignation. “But for now, we’re only migrating upstream to find more grass for our stock.”
“Them cows I see’d over there?”
Wyeth grinned. “That’s what’s left of the herd we started with.”
“You gonna open for trading?”
That question plainly startled Wyeth. His eyes blinked in surprise as he appeared to consider his response. “W-why, there hasn’t been anyone wanting to … not a soul’s come to me, our tents to trade. Suppose I would be willing to trade. Uh, yes—well, we do have near everything we brought west with us from Missouri to supply Rocky Mountain Fur.” Wyeth grinned. “Yes, mister—I’ll be open for business tomorrow morning after breakfast.”
With great relief Bass inquired, “You eat early or late of a morning, Wyeth?”
The trader smiled even bigger, the sharply chiseled edges to his lean face easing somewhat with mirth. “I’m one to eat early.”
Bass held out his hand and shook with the Yankee before he loped away. “I’ll see you after breakfast.”
“I said it last year, and I’ve said it more than once this summer already,” Wyeth declared to Bass that following morning, “but most of these men out here in the mountains are nothing less than a low breed of scoundrel.”
“You countin’ me in that bunch?”
Wyeth slung his head back and laughed heartily. “Not by a long shot, Mr. Bass.”
Titus thumbed through some more of the lighter amber-colored flints. “If’n you had yourself whiskey to trade, I’d be one to give you all my business.”
“Looking to give yourself a celebration, are you?” Wyeth asked. “And a good-sized headache when you’re done too?”
“Maybe a good carouse, but the days are past when Titus Bass gets so far down in his cups he can’t crawl back out till a morning or two later. Gimme a dozen of them wiping sticks,” and he shoved a double handful of flints across the top of a wooden box at Wyeth’s clerk.