“They got ’em more hunting to do,” Jack explained.
“Not just buffler,” Caleb added. “Goats too.”
Antelope skins—some of the softest of hides used in making the finest of garments. In this country below South Pass, the Shoshone could always count on encountering numerous herds of the pronghorn goats.
Scratch asked, “That why they ain’t yet heading north?”
Hatcher nodded. “They got hides for to hunt. And we got beaver waiting for us up yonder.”
Bass tugged one last time on the single horsehair cinch, then flipped down the big cottonwood stirrup. “Where away you figger us to go?”
“We can find flat-tails just about anywhere north,” Jack replied. “Where ye take a notion to go?”
Bass shrugged and grinned. “To the high country.”
“Best we go there afore winter sets in hard,” Caleb Wood declared.
Elbridge Gray’s head bobbed. “Easy ’nough from them foothills up north to work our way down to the Popo Agie.”
“Been on that river afore my own self,” Bass replied as they all turned to watch the approach of a sizable crowd on foot.
Hatcher winked and leaned close to whisper, “Be different this time, Scratch—ain’t gonna be none of this here outfit getting the damn fool notion of floating your furs down to some burned-out post in Injun country.”
“That was a heap of plew,” Bass recalled in a hush as the procession of older men came to a stop before the trappers and the small herd of their animals, loaded and preparing to depart.
Behind the chiefs and headmen stood the ranks of young warriors. On either side of them the women formed the horns of a great crescent. And among their legs jostled the small children scooting this way and that to get themselves a good view.
Goat Horn stepped forward slowly, leading the ancient blind one whose eyes were covered with a milky covering. Over his shoulders he wore that sacred calf skin taken in the White Buffalo Valley, its forelegs tied at his neck with a thong.
“Many summers ago,” Hatcher quietly translated, “our brave warrior uncle could see no more. Something cut the magic cord between his eyes and his heart.”
Titus watched the old man nod, blinking his blind eyes as Goat Horn spoke.
“Ever since,” Jack continued his translation, “Porcupine Brush has see’d things none of the rest of us can see with our eyes. This morning he come to me … come to my lodge, saying we was to go to the white men together.” Then for a few moments Hatcher listened, squinting and wrinkling up his nose as if he were struggling to make out something being said in the foreign tongue.
“What’s that ol’ hickory stump saying?” Wood grumbled impatiently.
“Shush!” Jack hushed Caleb with an elbow. “This here ol’ hickory stump of a medicine man come to say prayers to us … prayers for us.”
When Goat Horn signaled, several young men stepped forward to join the wrinkled old men who stationed themselves directly behind Porcupine Brush. In their hands they clutched rattles or small handheld drums strung with feathers. At the moment the old shaman lifted his sightless eyes to the sky, they all began to play. The ancient one soon joined them, singing high and slightly off-key.
In fascination Scratch watched the old man’s Adam’s apple slide up and down his wrinkled, thready neck as the notes climbed, then fell. With their song over, Bass and the others believed the ceremony was over and were ready to leave—but instead Goat Horn led Porcupine Brush forward until they stopped right in front of Bass.
As the old one put out his left hand to lightly touch the white trapper’s chest, he used his right hand to untie the two thongs holding the sacred calf skin around his shoulders. With the chief’s assistance, the shaman got to his knees, and there at Titus’s feet he spread the hide.
Rising with Goat Horn’s help, the shaman called out. This time only the old men came forward, bursting into a multitude of prayers and chants, each one as discordant as the next, no two of them the same—a dozen or more different songs being sung and played on drums, rattles, and wing-bone whistles all at once. A deafening noise that had begun only when the old man had reached out, blindly seizing Scratch’s two hands in his, holding them over the calf skin.
First Porcupine Brush moved one of the trapper’s arms in a circular motion over the hide; then he waved the other back and forth, but always in a circle from right to left, the same direction as the sun.
When the songs ended suddenly, the singers stepped back a few feet, and everyone fell silent as Porcupine Brush once again dropped slowly to his knees. Mumbling something to Goat Horn, he held up his veiny hand.
Whispering to Bass, Hatcher said, “Says he wants the chief’s knife.”
“He ain’t … ain’t gonna cut me, is he?” Titus asked as the knife went into the old one’s hand and Porcupine Brush bent over his work.
Locating the neck portion of the hide, the old shaman went down that edge of the hide by feel until he reached the bottom of where the skin had been pulled from the left foreleg. Although sightless, he carefully worked off a small sliver of the white calf skin.
Upon rising he immediately held out the knife, and it was taken from him by Goat Horn. Then Porcupine Brush laid the quarter-inch-wide strip of pale furry hide in one of Bass’s palms and rolled up the fingers of the white man’s hand to enclose it. He spoke for a moment before Hatcher translated.
“That there piece of the medicine calf is this ol’ man’s prayer ye can allays carry with you,” Jack whispered at Scratch’s ear. “Ye brung the medicine calf to the Snake people with you—and ye’ve helped keep ’em a strong people. The power of … how strong the Snakes are can go with ye now as ye leave their camp.”
Titus began to ask, “H-how’s that power go with me?”
But he never heard an answer as Porcupine Brush knelt to pick up the hide. As soon as he had the sacred skin in hand and was standing to return it to his shoulders, the crowd erupted into joyous singing, trilling their tongues, laughter bubbling and washing over all of them.
Suddenly Bass felt himself turned, his right arm seized. He found a grinning Slays in the Night there at his shoulder, pumping his hand as if it were a forge bellows, up and down to beat the band. Goat Horn slid in next, taking the trapper’s hand from his son’s and shaking Bass’s arm while Slays in the Night stood there pounding Titus on the back.
“Time to saddle up, Scratch!” Hatcher called out as he and the others whirled about to take up their reins and climbed on the backs of their horses.
Hannah and some of the pack animals brayed and snorted with excitement as children shrieked, dogs howled and barked, and it seemed a thousand different hands reached out to touch Scratch from the crowd—merely to touch this white-man shaman before he left them.
“T-thank God!” Bass replied, yelling over all the noisy throats as one chief and old warrior after another shook hands with him. “I’m ’bout to get my arm yanked off here!”
“Dammit, Scratch—ye ugly dog you! Get up! Get yer arse up now!” Hatcher hollered inches from his ear, his thick beard brushing the side of Bass’s head.
“Get away from me!”
“Eeegod—it ain’t ever’ day a man has his birthday!” Jack roared.
The long-maned, hairy-faced others were chattering and laughing, jigging and gaping, like a passel of slack-jawed town idiots.
“Leave me be!” Bass growled, attempting a second time to pull the buffalo robe back over his head.