That delicious anticipation was enough to slowly arouse him.
Once she had set the cradleboard aside to let the child sleep with her full tummy, Waits quickly yanked off her moccasins. Taking a moment to glance both ways along the creek, she hurriedly pulled her dress over her head and stepped off the bank, sucking in a gush of air as the sudden cold shocked her.
“You’ll get used to it. Come on over here,” he begged.
She settled beside him, then turned so that he could pull her back against his chest. There they sat in the middle of the creek as the valley gradually came alive on all sides of them. In the quiet of this early morning, it took little effort to hear sounds drifting from far-off trapper camps and Indian villages too: grumbling, hungover men, mothers scolding children in foreign tongues, the whinnying of horses and braying of mules, the crack of axes and the occasional boom of a rifle against the far bluffs where someone had gone in search of game.
Time was he had never seen a rendezvous sunrise unless he was stumbling back to his robes after a long, long night of liquoring and devilment. Many were the summers he drank himself into oblivion, hardly rousing from his stupor to vomit right where he lay, then passing right out again—repeatedly convincing himself he was having a fine time of it. After all, weren’t the rest of his friends doing the very same thing, day after day until the rendezvous was over and the traders headed east, or at least until he and his friends ran out of money and pelts and it was time to face down their hangovers, time to haul their aching heads back to the high country where they would work up enough plews to pay for another summer spree?
The last real drunk he’d given himself was no more than two summers before, back to Pierre’s Hole in thirty-two. By then the hangovers had begun to hurt him something terrible. And last year both he and Josiah took it easy on the whiskey, choosing not to punish the barleycorn that much, what with their both having new wives with them.
Wives. Most white folks just wouldn’t ever understand, he figured. There’d been no ceremony between him and Waits-by-the-Water. Hell, when he’d ridden off for the western sea more than a year and a half ago, Titus had gone to sulking and licking his wounds, figuring her vows of love weren’t worth much at all. But come the next spring—there she had been, tagging along with Josiah his own self, clearly intending to find Titus, to show him just how devoted she truly was.
No, there had been no civil-folks preacher to say the proper words over the two of them as they stood before their families and friends as they did back among the settlements. Such folks in the States would likely mule up their eyes and scrunch their lips in a sneer at the very thought that a man like him and a creature such as Waits could be so much in love that they would privately vow to one another every bit as strong as any white folks’ ceremony, promising they would be there until death ultimately parted them.
One more reason why he figured he’d made his last trip back east. St. Louis was in the past, and all those white folks too. Titus figured he wouldn’t live long enough to ever want to see settlements again, their sprawl stretching farther and farther west the way they always had.
Maybe he wouldn’t live long enough to see settlers and wagons, white women and preachers, reach the high plains, much less make it to the Shining Mountains. Why—a mountain man sure as hell ought’n die a’fore he had to witness such a goddamned confabulation as that! Damn if it wouldn’t likely pull the heart right out of a feller to see all this get ruin’t with settlers and civilizing.
By bloody damn, he prayed there’d still be plenty of wild in the wilderness, enough to last him all the rest of his days.
“You are going to see your tall friend this morning?” Waits asked him in a whisper as she gently scrubbed his grimy fingers one by one, scratching at the layers of grease and blood, grit and camp-black that had encrusted itself down deep into every knuckle, hardened into dark crescents at the base of every fingernail.
“Yes. Jarrell,” he said in English.
“Jer-rel,” she repeated.
“Jarrell Thornbrugh,” he completed the friend’s name with just the proper burr to the last name. “A John Bull Englishman.”
“That is more of his name?”
He chuckled and explained in Crow, “Just Jarrel Thornbrugh. Englishman is where he’s from, what he is. Like I’m American from the States, and you’re a Crow from Absaroka.”
“It was good to have a friend near when death loomed close last summer,”* she reflected.
“He saved our lives,” Bass agreed. “Saved Josiah’s life. Mine too.”
“This man, he comes to trade his furs like you?”
“No. Last summer Jarrell told me that his boss, a man I met out to the western sea, sent him to rendezvous all alone only to look things over. That boss, a white-headed eagle named McLoughlin, had plans to send a brigade of men here this summer.”
“More of the English white men?”
“Yes, woman—all sent by a man who wants to carve off a piece of this rendezvous trade for himself.”
Worry tinged her voice. “Will the English push the Americans out of these mountains?”
Bass snorted, shaking his long, damp hair. “Not a chance of that. If the English know what’s good for them, they’ll stay to their own country and leave this to the rest of us.”
“You will go this morning to throw the tall white man out of this country?”
After some hesitation Bass said, “I don’t figure I got the right to throw any man out of what country isn’t mine.”
“But many times you’ve told me this land is your home.”
“True, woman. But it still isn’t mine, the way folks put down claims on the ground back east. No, I’m content to live out here where none of this is really mine, to pass on through a lot of country where I’m only visiting.”
“There is Crow country farther north,” she tried to explain as she wrapped his arms over the tops of her heavy breasts. “And this country is the land of the Shoshone and Bannock. All fight to keep the powerful Blackfoot from taking away their lands. So why aren’t you going to fight the English now that they have come to take this country from you?”
“I don’t think they have come here to take any land from me,” he declared.
“But they came for the beaver,” she maintained. “And some of that beaver is yours.”
He leaned to the side so he could gaze closely at her face. “You trying to stir up some trouble between me and that big Englishman?”
With a smile she replied in Crow, “No. I am only trying to make sense of why you do what you do sometimes. Make sense of what you don’t do at times. You Americans and the Englishmen are confusing to me: you say you don’t want this country out here, but you both want to be free to take what you want from the land.”
Beginning to fuss, the child began a muted squawl from the bank.
“You’re right, woman,” Bass admitted. “This land ain’t mine, but the beaver I take with my own sweat, with my hands—they’re mine. I don’t allow I have any right to fight for this country because it’s not mine. But I will fight for what is mine: my beaver, my animals and traps, my family. No man will ever take them from me.”
She turned slightly and kissed him, then pulled away, wading to the bank. He stood too, allowing the water to sluice off his cold white flesh, marveling at just how pale he was now that the sun had climbed fully above the ridge to the east.
As she pulled her dress over her head and tugged it down over her hips, Waits-by-the-Water laughed again. “I am happy a strange fish like you is the father of my child.”