“Hold the line—do not charge!” the white man ordered.
Bear Ground shook his head in confusion. “You want us to stand here while they ride down on us?”
“Yes!” he demanded. “If they get past any of you, if they break by our line, then they have escaped.”
“Tote Ani is right!” Pretty On Top yelled. “None of us wants to chase after the enemy! We must stand and fight them here!”
7
He saw the fear in their eyes as the Blackfoot raced toward his line.
But on their faces was written a stoic anger.
Time and again Bass had seen that loathing the Blackfoot held for the white man. No, their hatred for Americans.
The tribe put up with the British to the north, endured the Hudson’s Bay traders and fur brigades because those white men brought all sorts of useful goods, most especially the guns, powder, and lead. But the Americans traded with every enemy of the Blackfoot. With the arrival of the Americans, the Crow, Shoshone, and Flathead found a supplier of those firearms necessary to even the balance after decades of mountain warfare while a mighty, well-armed confederation of Blood, Piegan, and Gros Ventre sought to crush its poorer neighbors.
In the fading of that afternoon’s light, the Blackfoot were discovering that their firearms gave them no advantage if they could not reload them on the run. Caught unaware in the surprise attack, these hunters found they had no choice but to use weapons that would bring them face-to-face with the Crow.
Those Blackfoot closest to Bass suddenly realized there was a white man among their enemy. Just before the lines clashed, some of the warriors yelled to the others, pointing at the lone trapper—singling him out for certain attention.
“They don’t like you!” Pretty On Top shouted beside Bass as his pony pranced, barely under control.
Titus growled, “Never worried about what dead men think of me!”
A half dozen were converging on the trapper as he poked the trigger finger of his right hand out through a slot cut in the palm of his blanket mitten.
As Scratch struggled to calm his own frightened horse, an arrow slapped his leg, painfully pinning the meat of his calf against the animal. The horse sidestepped away from its pain, trying to rear back. Each time it jolted back onto all four hooves, a shock wave of nausea bolted through his stomach. Then the wounded leg popped free and he was able to swing it up, clutching the long shaft in his left hand. Snapping it off, he quickly bent down to try pushing the damned thing on out the inside of his calf when a second arrow raked along his rib cage.
Staring at the shaft fluttering there in his thick elk-hide coat, he wondered if he’d been punctured. Seizing the arrow in his left mitten, he steeled himself, ready to snap it off against his belly, when he discovered that it had pierced only his coat and buckskin shirt.
From behind him unearthly shrieks rolled toward him like a landslide.
Twisting partway in the saddle, he raised the full-stock rifle, pulled back on the rear set trigger, and clumsily waved the Derringer’s muzzle at the closest Blackfoot screaming down on him. Yanking back on that front hair trigger, Scratch watched the heavy .54-caliber ball slam the warrior back onto the rear haunches of his pony for a heartbeat before the man tumbled backward off the animal into the trampled snow.
Now as the others closed on him, in that long flintlock rifle Titus found himself holding no more than a long and very heavy club. Leaning to the right, he dropped out of the saddle and landed with most of his weight on the uninjured leg. But when he slapped the pony on the rump and sent it away, then started to step backward as he clawed at his side for the powder horn, the wounded calf gave way as soon as his weight was momentarily shifted onto it.
Pitching into the snow, Scratch realized he had no time to reload the long-range weapon. He dropped the rifle to the ground beside him, rolled onto his knees, and futilely tore at the flaps of his coat with both mittens, scrambling clumsily to seize the weapons tucked in that wide leather belt secured around the outside of his coat. Stuffing each of the mittens under an armpit, he tore them from his hands just before dragging the two big pistols from his belt, raking back the hammer on the right one.
At that moment the Blackfoot collided with the two ends of the Crow line, smashing into those two horns of the crescent.
Scratch took aim at a target closing on him, a round-faced warrior wearing a blanket cap and swinging a stone war club with a long elk-horn handle. That first pistol ball struck the warrior under the armpit, spinning him so violently he struggled vainly to clutch at the pony’s mane as the animal clattered past and the man bounced loose. Ten yards behind Bass the warrior spun to the ground, tumbling across the snow.
More shrieking yanked Scratch about to find another warrior with his bow strung, its arrow drawn back against its string to form a sharp, two-sided vee. Swapping the pistols, Bass ripped the hammer back and pulled the trigger—an instant after the string snapped forward.
Flinging himself backward, Bass fell into the snow as the arrow slammed into the icy crust between his knees.
For a heartbeat he stared at the quiver of the shaft and its fletching, then jerked up to find the bowman on top of him, slashing out with the bow. Twisting to the side out of its way, Titus watched the warrior coming off the pony, flying spreadeagled through the air, that bow at the end of one outstretched arm.
He slammed into the white man, driving the air from their lungs as Scratch rolled them over, throwing his arm behind him to find his knife. Instead, his fingers struck the frosty head of the belt ax.
The muscular Blackfoot grabbed the white man’s throat with one hand, his fingers closing around the windpipe as the warrior began to flail at the white man’s head with the bow in blinding flashes.
Dragging the ax into his hand, Titus swung wildly, eventually slamming the side of the blade against the warrior’s head. In bringing his arm back for another blow, he twisted the tomahawk in his hand. This time the blade sank deep, splattering hot blood and brain matter into Bass’s face.
He had to unlock the dead man’s legs from his before he could struggle to his knees and wrench up the first of the pistols. With some of the Blackfoot retreating back down the hill into the flat where more of their number were fighting furiously against the trap that had closed around them, some of those who were dismounted were taking cover behind the huge buffalo carcasses rising like dark, hairy boulders against the bloody snow.
With that first pistol reloaded and stuffed into his belt, Bass lunged across the Indian’s body to scoop up the second pistol. After blowing snow from the pan, he reloaded it, snapped the frizzen down over the pan again, and jammed it into his belt. Back up the hill a few yards lay the rifle, its barrel buried in the snow right up to the lock’s hammer.
“White man!”
He looked up to find Strikes-in-Camp gleefully reining his pony to a halt nearby.
The young warrior asked, “Where is your horse, white man?”
“I fight better on foot,” Bass growled.
“Forget your firearms,” Strikes snarled. “Come with me and fight the enemy close today! Come fight like a real man!”
With a wild laugh the warrior spun his horse around savagely, kicking it in the ribs as he shot back down the slope toward the hottest of the fighting.
By then Pretty On Top and the others had driven the Blackfoot back, throwing them against the warriors Whistler and Turns Plenty led. They had the Blackfoot surrounded. On the hillside above him the women were screaming, keening, crying out to their men.