But, like the Apache and Navajo to the south, like those Comanche raiding out of the southeast, now the Arapaho and the Cheyenne were threatening along the borders of Ute land from their traditional haunts on the eastern plains.
Within days it would be time for the Ute chiefs to deliberate and argue where best to move their winter camp to another site with better grazing for their ponies, more wood for their fires, a place where the winds did not carry so much of the stench of human offal and rotting carcasses of game brought in to feed the many hungry mouths.
But Bass knew none of this.
Titus slept fitfully that first night he was dragged through the doorway and deposited upon the widow’s blankets. Here at last, he told himself, he could try sleeping through the sharp pain as the edges of his wounds rubbed one another with the manhandling, the crude travois jouncing over uneven ground. To lay in one spot and just sleep. But the male voices were no sooner gone than the woman herself was busy above him.
Unable to get his coat off, Fawn did only what she could do. For a few minutes there he was somewhat conscious of hearing the heavy blanket wool being cut, sliced, hacked away with her cooking knife. Then it felt as if she were slowly, delicately, slashing along the seam of the left arm, down the left side of the shirt she had made for him weeks earlier. Finally he felt her tugging where the smoked leather of the shirt crossed over his left shoulder.
By cutting the shirt half off the left side of his body, Fawn was able to pull it off the right side, for the first time fully exposing the three deep gashes, blue and purple and a deep brown against his startling white flesh. So swollen, so oozy, were the wounds that she gasped and began to sob.
It might have been only the cold still air or the sudden silence there within the lodge, or it might have been her stifled sobs—but something made Titus open his eyes at that moment, finding it hard to focus in the dim light, the fire’s reflection flickering on the lodge skin behind her. Then his eyes found her crumpled over beside him, her head pressed down in her hands, her tiny shoulders shuddering as she did her best to stifle the sobs that racked her.
She nearly jumped when his right hand reached out and gently touched her arm.
“I … I ain’t gonna die,” he said in English—forgetting himself—his mouth as dry as it had ever been.
Bass watched her eyes pool as she brushed fingers down his hairy cheek. The moment he licked his dry, cracked lips, she understood. Quickly she dragged over a small kettle of cool water and from it pulled a buffalo horn fashioned into a large spoon, which she used to slowly pour rivulets of life past his parched lips, blessed drops washing across his dry tongue, spilling into his throat.
In the end he had strength enough to nudge the horn spoon aside and turn his face away, closing his eyes once more. How he wanted to do nothing but sleep that night, for a few moments thinking just how sweet it would be to wake up in the dim light of early dawn, finding her naked beside him in the quiet stillness before first light … to awaken and find that all of this was nothing more than a dream. So sweet was it to imagine the feel of that freedom from the pain of his body, so real was it to feel her steamy flesh against his—
Scratch nearly came off the buffalo-robe bed, his back arching in sudden, unexpected, excruciating pain.
“I’m sorry!” she cried out to him in Ute.
He looked at her in surprise, perhaps some disgust, then peered over at his shoulder. The deepest wound had begun to bleed freely again. When he looked back at her, Bass, found in her hands the rough ball of moss-green lichen dripping water and some of his crusted blood in the narrow strip of pounded dirt there between the robe bed and the fire pit.
“Damn you, Fawn,” he growled in English. “That hurt like hell!”
“I’m sorry,” she repeated again in her tongue.
Then it suddenly hurt him that he had lashed out and hurt her. His foggy, pain-crazed mind cleared, like a wind blowing away wisps of thick mist. “You were cleaning me?” Bass inquired in Ute.
“Yes. I need to open the wound, to clean it well before I can put my plants in it.”
“P-plants,” he stammered. Just the thought of any more scrubbing on the deep, jagged gashes … the prospect of anyone probing down into that torn, ugly, purple muscle was enough to make his head ache and spin as it was.
“Plants,” she repeated, dragging up a large soft-skinned bag to lay across her lap as she sat there beside him, her legs tucked to the side in that way of a woman. Holding back the large flap, Fawn pulled several smaller pouches tied at their tops with thongs, then retrieved two wooden vials, at the top of which were stuffed wooden stoppers.
“You put your plants in my wounds?”
She nodded, biting her lip between her crooked teeth as if she knew for certain herself what pain that announcement must cause him.
“Your husband—you used your plants for him?”
Her eyes immediately dropped to her hands in her lap, shuffling absently some of the pouches and wooden vials. “No. I did not have a chance to try healing my husband. He was dead when they returned his body to our village.”
How he wished he could trade places with one of the others right now, even simpleminded Billy Hooks. Staring up at the spiral of poles laced within one another at the top of the lodge, Titus hurt of the flesh from his wounds, hurt of the heart for what pain this woman endured.
“As I told you before, I won’t die,” he repeated, this time in Ute.
“Your wounds, they are terrible.”
As much as he did not want to look, Titus turned his head slightly and peered down at them. And quickly looked away. They were ghastly. Long ribbons of flesh torn asunder by the sharp, tumbling knives on that Arapaho war club. If nothing else was done for them, he was sure someone would have to attempt pulling the edges of the flesh together once more.
At least that is what his grandpap, even his own pap, had done for animals who suffered tragic accidents or falls. Stuffing some moist, chawed tobacco down into the edges of the wound before using a woman’s sewing needle and thread to draw things shut. Perhaps even some spider’s web at the edges of the laceration, if one could find such a thing back in the corners of the cabin or barn. His mam claimed it helped in drying out the edges of the wound, helped the flesh knit back together as it dried. Healing the most natural way possible. Something folks on the frontier took in stride and Bass had always taken for granted.
The way a Chickasaw arrow was cut from the meat of Ebenezer Zane’s leg. Or the way Beulah had bound up Hames Kingsbury’s ribs, then prayed over him till he was healed. Or the many times the blackened but steady hands of Hysham Troost had laid poultices on wounds Titus brought home from the Wharf Street watering holes, drawing out the poisons until it was time to pull the flaps of skin together with some of Mother Troost’s sewing thread.
But never had he laid eyes on anything near as terrible as this.
“Leave it be, Fawn,” he told her softly as his eyes closed. “Just cover me now and let me sleep.”
He felt her drag a wool blanket over him, gently laying the corner over that bloody shoulder and upper arm. Then she pulled a buffalo robe over that. The weight of it felt reassuring there as he began to drift off again into that netherworld somewhere between healthy sleep and what fitful unconsciousness the mind conjures up in its attempt to escape the brutal trespass of pain.
The last he remembered was the coolness of her hand and the roughened touch of the damp lichen she held in her fingers, brushing back the long, unkempt hair from his forehead and the sides of his face. Cool water, as she continued attempting to put out the fire of that fever she was certain was already on its way.