* Dance on the Wind
* Today’s Laramie Range, not the mountains in present-day South Dakota, which after the era of the mountain man would come to be known as the Black Hills during the great Indian wars.
12
Perhaps it was all for the best that his brother-in-law hated him for his white skin, loathed him because he was not Crow.
Bass looked over the party slowly passing by the fort on their way to one of those small clusters of buffalo-hide lodges that dotted the south bank of the North Platte. In the lead rode a white trapper resplendent in his leggings and war shirt, the unfurled wings of a black-and-white magpie adorning his bear-hide cap. Behind him on her own prized pony rode his first wife. To her right sat a child so young the boy’s legs barely reached over the wide back of his small pony. And behind them came a woman who had to be another wife followed by her own three children on their horses. Perhaps a widowed sister of the trapper’s first wife. At least ten or more riders brought up the rear of that slow procession. Old ones and young, male and female both, some goading travois horses with their peeled switches, poles kicking up hot streamers of dust that hung in the still morning air.
When a man took an Indian woman for his wife, he married her whole damned family. That meant promising to provide for his new kin. Clearly, that poor trapper had wanted a wife and had ended up with the responsibility of close to twenty of her relatives.
Scratch turned to Waits-by-the-Water with a grin. “I just decided it’s a good thing your brother hates me.”
“But Strikes-in-Camp gives my mother a home,” she said. “If he is killed, there will be no one but me to care for her now with my father and uncle gone.”
“When that time comes, you and I will see that she is warm, that she has food for her belly,” he vowed.
“My mother will not be a burden on you?”
He bent and kissed her cheek, then said, “I have no others, so your family is my family. We will take care of our own.”
“But you do have family, husband,” she reminded him. “The daughter who stays among the white men, to the east.”
“Yes,” he fondly remembered Amanda. “I have a grown daughter. A woman by now, she probably has given me a grandchild or two.”
“But this child,” Waits said, handing Magpie to her father, “she is your daughter too.”
“How about that!” he said to the little one with a grin as they continued toward the fort gate. “A man old enough to have grandchildren of his own has been blessed by the First Maker with you, my beautiful child. Let’s take your mother inside to find something so pretty she can’t live without it.”
Fort William’s trading room was a long, narrow affair, with a plank counter running down the entire length of it. The company employees reached the area behind that counter through a door that passed into a storeroom. Directly behind the three clerks rose a solid wall of shelves and cubbyholes stuffed with goods and spanning the entire length of the room, a display that extended all the way from the ceiling overhead to the bottom shelf, which served as a second narrow counter about as high as a man’s waist. From there down, the wide openings were stuffed with bales of folded blankets, small kegs of powder, along with bolts of coarse and fine cloth.
For a moment the two of them stopped there in the cool shade of that September afternoon while the clerks attended to other visitors. Bass watched his wife’s face as her eyes slowly climbed up the extent of the shelves, in utter awe of the grand display. She had seen a few of the white man’s trade goods laid out in display at the last three annual rendezvous they had attended, but most of the items were always kept back in crates and bundles and bales, covered with sheets of canvas to protect them from dust or a fickle summer thunderstorm. Here everything could be taken in at once—all of it on display, right out in the open. Each item lay little more than an arm’s length away, just beyond a person’s fingertips. Taunting, luring, entirely seductive.
Where to begin, he wondered.
“Lemme see your finger rings and bracelets,” Bass replied when a clerk moved over to ask what he could do for the trapper.
With a noisy clunk the young employee dropped a large, three-foot-square, wooden tray atop the counter. Narrow dividers partitioned the huge tray into sections where lay a glittering array of brass and copper rings, bracelets and necklaces, silver gorgets and dangly earrings, ivory brooches and other large decorative pins fashioned in the shape of sea serpents, winged dragons, snakes, and peacocks displaying their finest plumage.
Slightly breathless, Waits turned to ask her husband, “M-may I touch them?”
“Touch them all you want.”
“You trading pelts?” inquired the clerk as the woman picked up some earrings to examine.
“They’re back to our camp,” Scratch explained. “When she figgers what geegaws she’s took a shine to, I’ll have you put ’em back for me so I can go fetch my plews.”
One by one Waits chose those items that most caught her fancy. Eventually she took a step back from the counter and the tray, raising her eyes to her husband with a smile. “These are the prettiest.”
“You want these?”
“For me, and for Magpie—yes.”
Turning to the clerk, Scratch asked, “How much?”
Computing the cost, the man announced his total.
“Forty dollar?” Bass shrieked. “So what’s plew by pound?”
“Dollar a pound for prime.”
He gulped. “And you dress it down from there?”
“It ain’t prime, it don’t bring a dollar,” the clerk explained.
“Damn,” he sighed. “Prices ain’t no better here’n they are to ronnyvoo.”
A second clerk stepped up to ask, “You figgered to cut yourself a better deal here?”
“I did,” Bass admitted. “Ain’t never see’d prices so high, never see’d beaver drop so low.”
“Dollar worth the same here as it is on the upper Missouri,” the second man declared. “The company sets what we charge for goods at ever’ post. And they say what we give for furs.”
“Beaver’s on a slide,” the first clerk said, starting to scoop up the brass, copper, and silver jewelry into one hand.
Scratch snagged the man’s wrist in his hand. “Hol’t on. Don’ put those away just yet. Forty dollar, you said.”
“Yep.”
“And a dollar a pound for beaver.”
The first man repeated, “Be it prime.”
“Damn if that don’t cut deep,” Scratch grumbled, staring down at the jewelry spread across a square of black calico dotted with tiny yellow, red, and blue flowers.
“You got any buffler robes?” asked the second clerk.
“Trade for them too, eh?” Scratch commented.
“They’re bringing better money than most anything right now,” the man explained. “Just figgered you might have some robes, what with the woman here.”
“We got robes for damn sure,” he told them. “But them robes keep us warm through the winter. Can’t sell ’em off.”
As he started to amble away down the counter toward a man just come through the door, the second clerk advised, “You decide to sell those Injun robes, we’ll give you good dollar on ’em.”
Pursing his lips with resentment, Bass nudged the jewelry toward the first clerk. There was no way he could bear to see her face, that disappointment in her eyes if they walked away without that foofaraw.
“Keep all them shinies for me,” he ordered. “I’ll be back with ’nough plews to pay you your forty dollar a’fore you can finish your coffee.”
Returning Waits and Magpie to their camp beside the Laramie River, Bass untied the rawhide ropes looped around one of the last two packs of furs. Whacking the dust from them the way his mam used to smack the dirt from their cabin rugs, he quickly sorted the pelts, selecting twenty of his best. They should easily bring more than the forty dollars it would take to trade for those geegaws.