All those trapper guns erupted with smoke, and a heartbeat later she heard the distant weapons boom from the caravan in a ragged order. Then her husband was laughing, harder than he had laughed for some time.
“Damn if them pilgrims don’t figger those boys are Injuns on the attack!” he roared, his eyes moist with tears. “Lookit ’em! Stopping that pack train and circling them carts right there to make a fight of it!”
A handful of figures at the head of the march stopped, turned, and were yelling at the pack train.
“I’ll wager the pilot for that outfit is telling ’em just what a bunch of softheaded idjits they are—being skairt of them white fellers come riding out, whooping and hawing!”
That broad front of bare-chested trappers was continuing to race for the caravan, unslowed, shouting and shrieking just like warriors as half of their number swept down one side of the incoming train, the other half tearing like demons down the opposite side. Both ends of their charge circled the other and continued their gallop back up the line of march until they reached the head of the procession where they slowed to match the pilot’s pace.
Then the ceremony began. The white man sure put a lot of importance in this matter of shaking hands and pounding one another on the back, she thought.
“C’mon, woman,” Bass said with excitement. “Let’s go show Magpie how a white gal looks.”
His pony was already bolting away, with Magpie clinging to her father’s back the way a small, chubby tick would grip the hide of an old bull as Waits nudged her horse into a gallop.
In nearing the head of the march, she expected him to slow down to the crawl the caravan was taking, but instead her husband kept galloping right on past the leaders. At times he waved that hat he had torn from his head, but he did not ease the pace.
In front of them some strange creatures bolted, starting to peel off to the right and scatter, lumbering with an ungainly gait as two young Indian boys started after the animals, yelling and whipping the air with long sticks. Then they were close enough that she recognized the scattering, bawling animals, those strange creatures the white man brought out to rendezvous every summer to pull his wagons or to give him warm milk. Strange that a race of people so prepared to fight and defend themselves like the whites would have so docile and tranquil an animal while her people grew up among the wild buffalo.
Her husband was slowing as he neared that strange small box set on its four small wheels, his horse jogging sideways to a halt with Magpie laughing merrily at the exhilarating ride. Bass waved to her with his hat. As she came racing up to yank back on the reins, she thought the white man who rode a horse beside the box wagon looked familiar. The rider pushed his hat back from his face. She smiled, recognizing the holy man who had cut the arrowhead from Bridger’s back last summer.
The holy man was smiling, waving her over, at the same time saying something to those in the shadow of the box wagon.
As Waits slowed her pony to a walk beside her husband’s horse, she felt her eyes grow big, and her chin drop. On one side of the box wagon sat a thin, sour-faced, bony creature who peered out at her with suspicion and alarm from beneath the brim of a black hat that nearly wrapped itself around the woman’s face. Dark circles hung like ugly pendants below her glaring, accusing eyes. Waits wondered if this person had ever smiled in her life, much less laughed.
Was this a white woman? No wonder the white man had such an incurable hunger for Indian women!
But the creature seated next to the hard-eyed one caused Waits to gasp. The holy man and her husband were talking at once, shaking hands while Bass dipped his head and introduced their daughter … but Waits could not take her eyes off the radiance of the fair-skinned beauty who sat alongside the mousy-haired, mean-eyed, dried-up pucker of a creature.
To her surprise this second white woman pulled her hat from her head, revealing hair the color of which Waits had seen on some white men—but never in such tight curls and ringlets. She reached up and touched one of her own black braids wrapped with strands of blue and red ribbon, bewildered to discover she almost coveted hair like this white woman’s—
“Waits-by-the-Water …”
Upon hearing her name, she turned to her husband.
“You remember Dr. Whitman?” he asked.
“Yes,” she answered in English, and dropped her eyes, adding in Crow, “he is the holy man.”
Bass translated her comment to Whitman in English, then continued in Crow for her. “This woman closest to us is the holy man’s wife. Both of them are wives of holy men.”
“Not whores?”
“No,” and Titus shook his head with a wry grin that put Waits at ease with her questioning. “This is Whitman’s wife. Her name is Narcissa. Nar-Sis-Sa.”
“Nar-Sis-Sa.”
The moment the Crow woman repeated it, Narcissa Whitman smiled at her and wiped her brow with a large red bandanna, cheerfully saying, “Hello. What is your name?”
Slowly Waits repeated what her husband had taught her of the white man sounds to her name, “Waits-by-the-Water.”
Twisting halfway around on the back of his horse, Bass had managed to loop an arm about his daughter, and she was crawling over his hip to sit in front of him on the pony’s bare back.
“This here’s my daughter, Magpie,” he announced. “Tell these good folks you’re pleased to meet ’em, Magpie.”
“Pleased mee’cha.”
At the child’s tinkling reply both Marcus and Narcissa laughed, but neither the sour-faced woman nor her dull-eyed husband showed anything more than indifference bordering on contempt. Ahead of them the column was already resuming its march.
“This year we push on for the Nez Perce country,” Whitman explained to Titus as they all set off once more, continuing their descent to the river bottom. “Has Reverend Parker come in to meet us?”
With a shrug Scratch replied, “I ain’t see’d him. But I can’t say for sure, Doctor. Likely wouldn’t know him less’n someone said that’s who he was.”
“I pray he has returned,” the physician added. “He vowed he would—so to lead us back to where we are to establish our mission.”
“We will make our way through the wilderness without him if we must,” said the woman with the happy eyes.
Waits-by-the-Water found she liked the light-haired one more and more as they pressed on to the rendezvous. But the other woman’s glare made her feel self-conscious, as if that dour woman did her best to hold herself above all others by the way she peered down her nose with such haughty disdain.
When they reached the campground chosen for the supply train, the two women were helped down from their wagon while trappers scurried to provide a place to sit in the shade where the women were brought water to drink. Nearby others began to erect a large conical tent. It struck Waits as more and more white men came to gawk at the new arrivals, how those trappers fell over one another to keep the white women from having to lift a hand to help themselves.
Perhaps it was best that these two white women were hurrying on through this mountain west, she decided, best they were bound for the land of the Nez Perce far, far away. Waits-by-the-Water believed it had to be a good omen that the women did not belong to trappers, better instead that they belonged to those who were only passing through. It was plain enough that neither of the white women belonged out there—even Nar-sis-sa, despite her open friendliness. Both of them looked … soft. Not hardy enough to withstand much trial or hardship. And that was pretty much all life held in store in this brutal land.