Likely to feed the boy, he thought as he laid his cheek against a damp, cool spot on the buffalo robe beneath him where some of his sweat had collected. How long had it been since he’d had to pee? Titus wondered. He couldn’t remember peeing since before they were jumped by the Arapaho. And he wondered if he had done the unthinkable—to go and wet himself. Still, he felt wet everywhere on his body, everywhere his fingers touched. Maybe Fawn and this old man would not notice he had wet himself, since he was damp all over.
Then he realized it might just be all right. He hadn’t done the unthinkable. The fever—it had taken every drop of moisture in his body, soaked it up, and poured it out through his skin. There’d been nothing left for him to pee.
Funny how a man thought on such things like that when walking up the threshold to death’s door.
The strong, leathery arm raised his head. Bass felt the hard, smooth texture of the horn spoon pressed against his lips.
Yes, he thought. Water. The more I drink, maybe I can live. More, his mind echoed, convincing himself. This was sweet and clear. Not the bitter water she gave him. More.
Bass drank his fill until he could drink no more, and slept.
“You have been gone a long, long time,” the voice said out of the darkness as Bass’s eyes fluttered open.
His mouth was dry again, his lips so parched, he could feel the oozy cracks in them … but his skin no longer felt as tight and drawn as it had when he had been burning up with the fire of that fever.
For a moment he struggled to focus, then gazed at the old man’s face, watching it withdraw and the widow’s replace it right above him. Staring down at him with a wide, crooked-tooth smile.
“You are back from wandering the dark paths,” she said, her fingertips lightly touching his brow. “For some time now you have not been hot. It is good.”
“Yes,” he said in English, recognizing only the Ute word for “good.” Too hard to try remembering the Ute words now, to say them or understand them. If he ever could remember them again. So sure was he that the fever had burned away a good portion of what little he had in the way of his mind, just as a farmer set his fires to burn away the stalks from last year’s crop so that the next spring’s planting had that much better a chance.
“Yes,” she repeated in English. “Are you hungry?”
He thought a few moments—then understood—assessing the way he felt there on the robes, and finally answered, “No. Not right now. Maybe later.” He had said it in English, but when he shook his head slightly, she seemed to show some understanding.
“The old one came to guide you through the land of darkness, Me-Ti-tuzz.” He remembered that was what she called him as Fawn signaled to the man. The old one came close enough for Bass to see once more.
“You …,” and then Scratch struggled to remember the Ute words, how to put a few of them together. “Two … help … me … no more fire?”
“No more fire,” the old man repeated in his native tongue. “No more walk on the dark path.”
“No more fire,” Bass echoed confidently, remembering only tattered fragments of the fevered convulsions, how hot and wet he had been, how he had thrashed about.
Slowly, painfully, he raised his head to look down at himself. Surprised, he found upon his bare chest the smeared and many colors of patches and stripes of earth paint. Mystical symbols. Potent signs. And farther south on his belly were smeared what appeared to be dry, flaky powders, crude lines raked across his flesh by fingertips in some simplistic pictograph.
“This?” he asked weakly.
“You are better now,” the old man said, then turned to Fawn. “Wash off the paint, woman.”
Using that same clump of moss, she dipped cool water onto his flesh and gently scrubbed off the dried earth paint.
As she finished, the old man asked, “Should we tell the others with him?”
“They are gone,” Fawn replied.
“Gone where?” Titus asked as soon as the words registered, afraid the trio had abandoned him, leaving him behind when they rode off for parts unknown.
“To the streams,” she explained. Then, setting the moss scrubber aside, Fawn slapped her two open palms together with a smacking sound to imitate the animal’s own method of signaling a warning. “To catch the flat-tails.”
“Beaver!” he said in English with relief. And let his head sink back onto the buffalo robe beneath him.
“They come back soon,” she continued. “This is good?”
“Yes,” he said in Ute. “This is very good that they come back. I go with them when we leave for the spring.”
“Spring,” she repeated the word, her eyes drifting away. “It comes soon. And you go.”
“Yes.” He cheered himself with the thought. Then because he could not think of the words in Ute, Bass tried hard to explain in English, “To catch beaver in its prime! To mosey easy-like on down to ronnyvoo where the trader will have him whiskey! An’ there’ll be women too!”
In that next moment he suddenly realized what he had said. “Women for all the men what ain’t had a good woman to wrap up in the robes with ’em all winter, Fawn,” he tried to apologize in English.
Clumsily he reached out and took hold of one of the woman’s hands. Again he spoke in Ute, “You know I leave soon. Come spring.”
“Leave Fawn. Yes. Me-Ti-tuzz only a winter guest. Come again maybe next winter.”
“Yes,” he said sadly. “Maybe next winter.”
She pulled her hands from his and turned aside as the old man continued to stuff things away in his shoulder pouch. Bass glanced again at his wounds, finding each of them covered with moistened leaves held down with thin strips of cloth.
“You both help me,” Bass declared to them, watching their faces turn so they could look at him. “I will not forget. I may leave come spring … but I won’t ever forget you both.”
*Cache Valley, on the present-day Utah-Idaho border
9
Imperceptibly at first, the days began ta lengthen.
It happened that Bass realized it was a little brighter in the lodge those mornings when he awoke. Instead of the gray wash to everything just beginning to announce the coming of the sun, the light was already there to greet him each time he opened his eyes beside her.
As well, night was held at abeyance for just a little longer. Twilight seemed to swell about them in that high mountain park, the end of each succeeding day celebrating itself with just a few more heartbeats of gentle glow as the sun eased out of sight. Why, a man would have to be nothing short of blind not to notice that spring was on its way.
It was clear to Titus that the other three realized it too as the snow grew mushy beneath his own thick, fur-lined winter moccasins of buffalo hide. From time to time, yes—snow would fall from those clouds gathered up there near Buffalo Pass, then only from those clouds collared around the peaks to the far north. Eventually, there were no more storms.
As the snow retreated into the shadowed places, so the game retreated farther up the mountainsides. The men traveled higher, stayed out longer, to supply the camp with meat. And the nearby streams were nearly trapped out. Over the last few days Silas Cooper had been forced to take his trappers farther and farther still to run onto a creek where they stood a chance of finding beaver what would come to bait.
Plain as paint, the time was coming to move on.
“Where you set us to go?” Tuttle asked Cooper of an evening just days ago as they had sat in the last rays of the sun, smoking the bark of the red willow mixed with the pale dogwood. Some time back they had finished off the last of Bass’s tobacco.
Silas sighed. “Yonder to the west.”