He smiled as Flea held out the long, brass spyglass to him. “You are a good lad,” he said, this time in American, slowly too, pulling out the three sections to the spyglass’s full length.
“Lad.” Flea tried the word out, then paused slightly as he strung more words together, “I—am—a—good—lad.”
“You’re about the best lad ever could be,” Titus confirmed, again in American, then patted his son on the shoulder.
Poking his trigger finger through the small slot cut in his thick buffalo-hair mittens so he could fire his rifle with those mittens on, Bass swiveled the tiny brass protective plate away from the eyepiece and brought the spyglass to his one good eye. Blinked several times. Then peered through the long instrument as he slowly scanned the far ground below them until the image of the riders flashed across his view. Back he brought the spyglass, then slowly, slowly twisted the last of the three sections to bring the figures into better focus.
“Here, Flea—have a look for your own self,” he said as he handed the boy the spyglass. When his son had it against one eye, Bass spoke in Crow. “Turn it slow, like this, to see the riders come up close in your eye.”
The man rubbed the long, pale scar that angled downward from the outside corner of his left eye while he waited for the boy to scan the ground ahead with that strange, foreign instrument. He had worn that scar for some fifteen winters now, cut there in a last, desperate fight he had with an old friend whose right hand had been replaced with a crude iron hook.
As the youth panned across the landscape, Flea jerked to a halt and held the spyglass steady, breathless too.
Titus asked, “How many you count?”
Flea’s lips moved slightly as he continued to concentrate his attention on the distant objects. “Two-times-ten, perhaps a little more.”
“No, in American.”
The boy took the spyglass from his eye and concentrated now on this new problem. Then he said in his father’s tongue, “Ten.”
“No,” Titus prodded in a whisper, speaking his own native language. “That’s the wrong American word. Two-times-ten. So in American, you say twenty.”
“Why is this number more important than those riders down there?” Flea asked with a youth’s irritation.
Bass sighed and said, “You are right. We must think on the riders. All those horsemen—do you think they are enemies?”
With a nod, the boy answered in Crow, “Just as you said, in this country there are many strangers … and strangers could be enemies.”
For a moment he glanced at Wah-to-Yah, the Spanish Peaks, rising against the blue winter sky off to the west. Then he asked the boy, “Tell me what you think about those riders. Do you see the horses that don’t carry any riders? The animals loaded down with packs? What of this bunch coming our way—should we hurry back to your mother and the rest of our family? Should we get them into hiding fast?”
For a long moment Flea regarded his father as if it might just be a trick question. Then he whispered, “They don’t ride like Indians.”
“Why do you say they don’t ride like Indians, son?”
“Because, Popo,” Flea said, using that affectionate name for his father, “the Indians I know—they ride in single file.”
“So these horsemen, what are they?”
“White men?”
“Say it in American for me.”
“White men,” Flea said assuredly. He knew those words. His father was one. Half his blood and bone and muscle was white.
“You see the dog?” he asked his son.
“Dog?”
“Look carefully—and you’ll spot him.”
After some moments, Flea finally declared, “That dog is white—I did not see him for a long time because of the snow.”
“Big dog, ain’t it?” he asked in American.
“Yes.”
“Injuns have dogs near big as that critter?”
The boy shook his head.
“That’s right, son,” Titus whispered. “Dog like that lopin’ along them horses—it’s a sign them are likely white men comin’ our way.”
Over the last few agonizing weeks Titus Bass had grown all the more certain that he would see that every one of his children knew everything he could teach them about the white man. Not just his language, but his ways. The good and the bad of the pale-skinned ones who were trickling out of the East. Titus would have to teach them everything he inherently knew about his own kind so that his half-blood children would not get eaten alive when the mountains grew crowded with strangers.
They knew of enemies. Iskoochiia. The Crow had always suffered the mighty enemies who surrounded their Absaroka homeland. But those forces still to come would be even mightier than the Sioux or Cheyenne, stronger still than the powerful Blackfoot too. Titus Bass had seen a glimpse of what was on its way to these mountains. That one meant more were sure to come—wagons—every last one of them filled with corncrackers, sodbusters, settlers … farmers with their women and their young’uns along, bringing their plows to dig up the ground and their Bibles to pacify the wildness out of this land. Almost seven years ago he had watched that first wagon with its dingy-gray canvas top wheel into their final rendezvous on the Green River, the fabled Seedskeedee Agie, or Prairie Hen, River. It hadn’t been a trader’s wagon. No, that wheeled contraption did not turn back for St. Louis when the annual trading fair was over. Instead, the sodbuster took his wagon and family on west … making for Oregon country.*
A few more of their kind had already come at earlier rendezvous—but only a string of preachers and their wives, missionaries come to the wilderness to take the wildness out of this primal place and its Indians. Come to bring the word of the Lord to the red man—to civilize these warriors and their squaws, turn them into God-fearing, land-tilling white folk just like everyone back east.
Damn them, anyway! To make over this land into their own image instead of leaving it just the way it had been when Titus Bass himself arrived back in eighteen and twenty-five. This coming spring would make it twenty-two years since he’d come to the mountains. He could count each and every season—every summer and every winter—marked inside his soul the way a fella could peer down and count each year of a tree’s life.
“And those horses under their heavy packs—like a white man. Indians pull travois. These are white men, Popo,” Flea whispered now, in Crow, taking the spyglass from his eye again. “Just like you.”
“No,” his father corrected patiently. “Don’t you ever believe that just because a man has pale skin like me, that he is just like me, son. That thinking is downright dangerous. Most white men aren’t at all like me.”
“Not the … the,” and Flea sought for the word. “Greasers? They’re not like you?”
With a wag of his head, Titus explained. “No. Them greasers come to kill all the white folks from America what come down to Mexico. Kill any women married to them fellas. Greasers come to butcher their children—just because them young’uns was like you and had some white blood in ’em.”
“That why we ran away, Popo?”
Laying his hand on his boy’s shoulder, Titus vowed, “I’ll run anywhere I have to, Flea—to save my family.”
“We run away from these strangers?”
“Not just yet,” Bass answered, considering the steel-gray, overcast sky. “We’ll have us a close look come sundown when they make camp.”
As they slid backward on their bellies through the snow-dusted cedar and juniper, Titus did his best to pray that those horsemen weren’t renegade Mexicans or the Pueblo Indians who had thrown in together and let the wolf out to howl in Taos. They had prowled the streets for any American, even anyone who consorted with Americans, then hacked them apart with their machetes and farm implements. Titus Bass got his family out of the village and into the hills with no more than moments to spare. By the time they were approaching Turley’s mill just north of town, the murderous mob was launching its attack on the mill’s inhabitants. Titus struck out for the foothills with his family, and that of his long-ago partner, Josiah Paddock.*