Her husband and the others instantly hooted and hollered, screeched and whistled, as Bridger shuddered, huffing deeply after he spit out the thick slab of rawhide. He grumbled at the medicine man who stepped to the trapper’s knee and handed the bloody object to the bleeding man.
“Goddamn, if that ain’t some!” Bridger commented quietly, as if much of his strength had just been tested.
“Damn right!” the one named Meek roared as he lunged over to slap the medicine man on the back, then held up the shaman’s bloody arm while the trappers went wild again with their whooping and shrill Indian calls.
“That was ’bout as slick as warm buff tallow!” her husband bellowed at those old friends of his who stood nearby, these trappers he had traveled the high places with in years gone by before he had chosen to journey the mountains and plains with her.
Now he turned to her quickly, chuckling, his eyes filled with wonder, his face lit with exuberance as he said, “A friend just told me that medicine man is named Whitman. He’s one who reads the book of God.”
“A holy man, yes,” she said, finding it made perfect sense for a true holy man to possess such remarkable healing powers. Among her people the spiritual men healed the physical body.
Bass whispered to her, “The knife cutter just told Bridger he is amazed the arrowhead didn’t cause more trouble in the last three winters … but Bridger claimed his back only hurt when the winter cold was deep and long.”
“Just as your wounds hurt you a little more with every winter?”
“As long as I have your fire to warm me, woman—I’ll never mind the coming winters,” he told her, gathering Waits beneath his arm.
As she gazed up to smile at Magpie, four of her husband’s old friends pierced the crowd that was breaking up and stopped around them. She recognized a few of those words they spoke back and forth as the white men looked upon Magpie with smiles of admiration, touching the girl’s dusty feet or rubbing her bare arm as they cooed at her and jabbered with her husband.
Bass slipped the child from his shoulders and saddled her on his hip. Cupping her chin in his hand, he asked Magpie in Crow, “You want to come with me to visit my friends?”
Then it sounded as if he asked the same thing in the white man’s tongue.
“I don’t think she understands me,” Bass sighed.
“One day soon she will understand what we say,” Waits explained, taking the child into her arms. She watched her husband turn away and dig among his things in search of something. “And when she gets older, I hope she will know just how special she is to learn two languages while she is still a child.”
From a rawhide pouch Titus pulled a greasy deck of cards tied with a narrow whang cut from his legging fringe, and said, “With these, sweet woman—I just might win something extra from my old friends in a game of chance.”
“Chance? Like the game of hand my people play?”
“Just like it,” and he bent to kiss her. “Wish me your luck so I can bring back a present for you and one for little Magpie too.”
“Just bring yourself back, husband,” she said with laughter lighting her eyes. “And I will give you a present beneath the blankets tonight.”
He kissed her again. “Do you realize how special you are? To let your husband go off to gamble with his friends?”
“A man needs to be with his friends,” she replied. “You are with us the rest of the seasons—I think it is good we come here each summer so you visit your old friends. A man like you—to live alone in the mountains and on the banks of the far rivers away from the village—such a man needs a few good friends.”
For a moment her husband sighed, his eyes looking over the four white men who stood around them. Then Titus gazed at her with a sad smile and said in Crow, “As I grow older, I greet fewer friends here every summer. So it is right that with the passing of the seasons, what friends I have left grow more special to me, grow more dear in my heart.”
“If’n that hoss don’t take the circle!” Elbridge Gray roared as he and the others joined Titus in recounting the missionary doctor’s operation on Jim Bridger four days before.
Half bent over with laughter, his copper beard dusted with cornmeal, Rufus Graham demanded, “Say it again, Scratch—what-Gabe told that sawbones preacher.”
“When Whitman asked Bridger why that arrowhead didn’t give him more fits in the last three years”—Scratch could barely sputter between side-aching guffaws—“Bridger tol’t him—meat don’t s-spoil in the m-mountains!”
All five of them pounded their feet on the ground or drummed their thighs, clutching their bellies as they laughed.
“Caleb would’ve loved seeing that!” Isaac Simms said with a great chuckle, then realized the sad import of what he had uttered.
“Damn them red buggers anyways!” Bass swore as they all went serious with the flicker of a jay’s wing. “Cutting down a good man like Caleb Wood—right in his prime.”
For a few moments the five grew thoughtful, staring at the ground, or out at the sky, perhaps up at the leaves dancing in the warm breeze that wound its way through the American Fur Company camp.
Finally Solomon Fish said, “Jack would’ve bust his gut to stand there and hear that story too.”
“Shit,” Titus bawled with a huge smile. “Mad Jack was the sort stepped right up there and offered to cut that goddamned arrow right outta Gabe’s back for him his own self!”
The others looked up to find Bass grinning, and in an instant all of them were chuckling again. It was a good feeling, being there among old friends who had stood at his back when together they had faced down Comanche and Blackfoot. Now these friends sprawled around the fire, drinking their potent whiskey, smoking harsh trade tobacco, and stuffing themselves with the beans, cornmeal, and pumpkins Lucien Fontenelle’s mules had packed all the way from the settlements.
“That’s purely some, fellers,” Scratch declared, fighting the sob in his throat as the group fell silent once more. “Chirk up, boys! It shines to laugh when you’re thinking ’bout an old friend. What would Mad Jack and Caleb think of us if we was to get all mopey and down in the tooth whenever we was to ’member on them?”
“Bass is right,” Elbridge reminded them as he turned those slabs of aromatic pumpkin frying in his skillet with a fragrance that reminded them all of a home long ago left behind. “’Specially Jack.”
Scratch bobbed his head. “Hatcher was the life-lovin’ fool now. And Caleb loved playing the sourpuss for Hatcher too.”
“Ain’t that the saint’s truth?” Isaac agreed, wiping more of the dark yellow-brown streaks of tobacco juice into his pale, whitish beard. “When Jack was gone and Caleb took over this bunch, why—that’s when Caleb started getting a funny bone hisself.”
“Damn them Blackfoot,” Bass growled, brooding again on how the four had described Caleb Wood’s horrible death at the hands of the Blackfoot early this past winter.
Ever since Scratch had thrown in with Jack Hatcher’s bunch back in the summer of twenty-seven, one by one they had been whittled away: first by Rocky Mountain tick fever, then two had decided they would fare better hanging back to Taos with their Mexican wives, and finally their last two leaders had fallen to the enemy—Hatcher in the Pierre’s Hole fight*and now Wood had gone under as Bridger’s brigade hacked its way back out of Blackfoot country. Where they had once been ten—now there were but four. And as much as they had hoped their lot would improve by throwing in with Bridger’s men seasons ago, things hadn’t gotten any better at all.
“Damn good thing Jack ain’t around to see what’s become of the mountains,” Solomon grumbled. He swiped at his hatchet of a nose dotted with huge pores forever blackened with fire soot and dirt.