Wind Walker (2 page)

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.
^*

But right from the beginning it was clear they couldn’t hold out forever with their loved ones, hiding in the foothills, waiting for any roving bands of Mexicans or Pueblos to discover them as they went about hunting for something to eat, collecting wood to fight off the numbing cold one snowstorm after another. So Bass volunteered to push north alone, across the pass, pointing his nose for a trading settlement founded by former trappers, a place called the Pueblo. After
losing his horse and subsequent days of foundering on foot, nearly starving and close to freezing, Titus had stumbled into a cluster of canvas tents—a camp of westbound sojourners who called themselves the chosen Saints of God, a party of religious pioneers wintering near the trading post until the spring thaw would allow them to continue west, on to their promised land reputed to lie somewhere beyond the high mountains.

After those Saints delivered the half-dead old trapper to the gates of the traders’ stockade, Titus hurriedly delivered the terrible news of the Pueblo revolt. Wringing their hands in anger and frustration, the former mountain men argued over what to do. Although there weren’t near enough of the old trappers to beat back the hordes of Mexicans and Pueblos on a rampage, the Americans nonetheless voted to start south immediately—if only to be close enough to keep an eye on the village of Taos and be ready when the army’s dragoons marched up from Santa Fe to put an end to the riot and murder. But before their ragtag band marched out south early the following morning, they sent one of their own to carry word of the uprising and brutal murder of the American governor himself to Bents’ Fort on down the Arkansas River.

Wasn’t a man there in that cold, hushed, dimly lit room at the Pueblo where Titus had told his story could argue that William Bent didn’t deserve to know how his older brother, Charles, had been hacked apart by the Taos mob—just as fast as a runner could get a horse on down the Arkansas to that big adobe fort with the news.

Louy Simmons volunteered to make that ride east while the rest turned their faces south for the valley of the San Fernandez and that tiny village of Taos where the icy streets had run red with the blood of Americans. Although weary and weak from his ordeal in bringing the horrible news, Titus turned right around and started south, leading Mathew Kinkead and the others who were setting off to right a terrible wrong. With his family and old friends hiding out among the hills above Taos, he could do no less. Then somewhere along that trail, in those long, cold days spent racing back to
his family, Bass had decided against joining in the retribution. Not that the Mexicans and Indians didn’t have a judgment day coming—be it a dragoons’ firing squad or a long drop at the end of a short rope noose tied by the hands of those American mountain men.

But this simply was not his fight.

By the time he had watched his half-blood children lunging toward him through the knee-deep snow, Titus Bass knew he would start his family north for the country where life was his fight. The others, like old friend Josiah Paddock—they had a decided stake in this land where the American army had come to conquer the Mexicans, this land where those chosen Saints of God had migrated to wrest their promised land from an unforgiving wilderness. As soon as he finally held his Crow wife tightly in his arms, rejoicing at their reunion, Titus realized if he did little else, he had to get his family far enough north that they would be in country the white man did not want. Only then would they be safe from those dangers he did not begin to understand.

Some dangers he could comprehend: the hatred between the Crow and their ancient adversaries to the north and east. Dangers such as the great white bears that could tear a man apart in heartbeats, or beasts that broke your leg so you could not move and slowly froze to death—those were the challenges and risks a man could fathom. They were a part of the life he had endured for more than two decades already. Such were the dangers that he reveled in, the very risks he had come west to conquer. Titus Bass could understand those challenges that had been an integral, and daily, part of his life for so long. But he did not care to make sense of armies coming to take away an old way of life from the Mexicans and Pueblo Indians, nor did he make sense of those Mexicans and Pueblos who staged a bloody revolt to drive out all those who were different. But what made him seek to hurry his family north even faster was his inability to make sense of those religious zealots who had come to the mountains to make a place only for their chosen few.

Ever since he had arrived here back in ’25, this had always
been a land where a man celebrated his freedom to do and be … but now there were armies and emigrants, murderers and zealots come to change the face of this wilderness, come to change the very nature of what had belonged to only the daring few for so long.

Putting the San Fernandez Valley at their backs, Titus and his family struck out for the snowy pass, then started down, angling off to the northeast for the Picketwire.
^*
Near its mouth, on the north bank of the Arkansas, Titus promised them they would find the mud-walled fort where the Bent brothers traded with the likes of the Kiowa, Arapaho, and Cheyenne. But they hadn’t escaped the foothills when they spotted those distant horsemen—dark figures crossing the crusty snow. Turning his family and their animals into a juniper-cloaked draw, Bass took his eldest son and together they worked their way to the edge of a rocky overhang.

Through the spyglass the figures appeared to move like white men, at least by the way they rode spread out rather than strung back in a long column like a war party would ride on the march. But who could tell for sure, what with those horsemen bundled under layers of winter clothing—wrapped in wool blanket coats or thick fur hides as their hang-down animals plodded for the foothills while the sun continued its fall. He and the boy would watch from here until the horsemen made camp for the coming night … then leaving his loved ones back in the safety of that ravine, Titus alone would slip up on the strangers.

First off to learn the color of their skin, and then to discover the purpose of their journey south toward that land of revolt and bloodshed.

Titus didn’t recognize a one of them.

Not that it was particularly easy for him to pick out a familiar face as the strangers hunkered around their fires, their faces obscured by furry hats or the hoods to their blanket
coats, lit only with the flicker of low flames a dull red on the snow as they murmured to one another. He waited in the darkness, listening to a foreign tongue he knew was not Mexican, but a language he had heard plenty of during those years he languished in old St. Louis before striking out for the mountains. Some of these strangers were Frenchies, the laborers who had long played an important role in the fur trade across this wide, wild continent.

Silently he pushed back, sliding into the dark, and inched over closer to another fire, where he strained to listen to the quiet talk of those men rubbing frozen hands and warming icy feet near the flames. This bunch was Americans. Leastways, what he could hear of their few words.

Slowly rising to his feet, Bass called out, “Ho, the camp! I’m comin’ in! Don’t get no itchy fingers—this here’s a white nigger!”

At his first cry the men around those half-dozen fires leaped to their feet, some snatching up guns and preparing to make a fight of it, others ducking behind what cover there was in their baggage. The huge white dog leaped up, a deep, menacing growl rumbling at the back of its throat. In their midst a man of middling height stepped forth, longrifle in hand, yelling orders at the rest as he seized hold of the wide collar buckled around the big dog’s throat.