Fawn pulled her head back to gaze at him herself. “You were not lonely?” When he did not answer right away, she said, “Tell me that you could spend the winter by yourself—those long nights.”
“If a man had to, I could do—”
“How alone would you be with your terrible wounds? Tell me that.”
With pursed lips he finally nodded. “Yes, Fawn. You are right. I would have been lonely without you for the winter.”
She pressed into him again. “But you go now. Because you go, it hurts to remember back when my husband went away—and he never came back either.”
He could feel her quake as she said it, and that almost made his eyes spill. How rotten it made him feel to tell her, “But I never promised you I would return. I came to your lodge for the winter.”
“Will you ever … will I ever see you again?”
It was hard to speak the truth. “I don’t know. Chances are, I won’t ever see you or your people again … not for a long time.”
“You will always be welcome in my lodge, Me-Ti-tuzz,” she said, pulling back from him to arm’s length. “And my robes will always be warm for you.”
“No, Fawn—you will find a husband to warm you in those robes.” Titus put a hand out on the boy’s head, rubbing it gently. “Someone to help this one grow.”
“He needs an uncle, one who can name him when he is ready to be a warrior.”
“Yes, Fawn—this boy will deserve a man’s name.” He turned slightly to look over his shoulder as the noise grew.
The three others had mounted up and had begun to pull out of the village with their pack animals in tow. Men, women, and especially children reached out to touch the horses, the moccasins and legs of the white men taking their leave. Cooper, Hooks, and Tuttle vigorously waved one arm, then another, shouting back at the clamoring crowd surging along with the trappers’ horses and mules.
Suddenly Bass turned back to Fawn, gripping her shoulders tightly in his hands. “You will give him a strong name, Fawn.”
“Yes.”
“Promise me.”
“Yes, I promise.”
“Be sure he remembers my name.”
“Yes. He will remember you.”
“One day we may meet again, him and me.”
“And what of us?”
“Do not watch the horizon for me, Fawn. No one among all of us can say what tomorrow or that horizon will bring. So don’t watch the horizon and wait on me.”
Rising on her toes and lifting her chin, Fawn pulled on the collar to Bass’s coat, pressing her mouth against his. She was long and lingering in that kiss.
“I am glad I taught you how to do that,” Titus told her.
“I like to touch your mouth,” she said as she stepped back from him a ways, parted the fold of the blanket she clutched about her, and pulled a thong over her neck. Quickly she raised herself on her toes again and dropped it over his head.
Looking down, he took the small pouch, some four inches long, in his hand. It was nearly empty. “What is this?”
“A gift.
“Among my people every young man must find his own special medicine that allows him to become a warrior. A woman of his clan usually makes him a pouch in which that young man can put those special things that give him his power.”
“This … this is my medicine pouch?”
Fawn nodded. “Yes.”
As his fingers rubbed it together gently, Bass could tell the pouch was all but empty. “What have you put in it for me?”
“Some ashes from our last fire together,” she said, her eyes misting now. “A few petals from the flowers just beginning to bloom in the meadow. You … you will have to fill it the rest of the way, Me-Ti-tuzz.”
Clutching the pouch in one hand, Bass looped the other arm around her and brought her into a fierce embrace. He kissed her one last time, then kissed the tears streaking her cheeks.
She backed from him another two steps, putting an arm around the boy to hold him tightly to her side. “I will remember the touch of your mouth always.”
“I’ll never forget how you and Crane saved my life this winter.”
“The old man’s medicine helped,” Fawn admitted. “But he said it was your power that kept your spirit from flying off to the Star Road.”
Nearly choking, Bass sobbed, “I will remember you, Fawn. Always.”
Turning on his heel before he tarried any longer, Bass hurried over to untie the lead rope to Hannah and the packhorse, released the lash to the saddle horse, and leaped into the saddle without using the stirrup. In one swift motion he brought the horse around in a half circle, not daring to look at her again, then immediately gave the animal his heels.
Into the middle of that camp he plunged as quickly as he could—the bodies of men, women, and children surging past him and his pony, past the two pack animals like water rending itself around a boulder in midstream. Their wishes, and prayers, and their strong-heart songs rocked against his ears as he parted them, slowed to an agonizing walk as the farewell noise grew in volume.
At last he reached the outer ring of lodges, pushed on to the willow flats, where he could yank on Hannah’s lead rope and jab his heels into the ribs of that saddle horse. Far up ahead on the sunny slope Bass sighted the others climbing off to the left at an easy angle, beginning their switchback climb out of this great inner-mountain valley, reaching ever toward the Buffalo Pass.
He would follow without hesitation, for he needed those three far, far more than they would ever need him.
And tonight, without her warmth beside him—Titus would need something, anything, even the company of those hard-edged, iron-forged three to hold back the aching loneliness until days, perhaps even weeks, from now he would no longer hurt so keenly as he did at this terrible moment.
Into the first patch of sunlight creeping down the western slopes he hurried that morning, wondering if saying farewell ever got any easier.
The wild iris, as deep a purple as the Rocky Mountain twilight itself, stood waving in clusters, bobbing beneath the spring breeze that followed Titus across the meadow. Over his shoulder he lugged the weight of that oiled-leather trap sack he himself had sewn up back in Troost’s Livery.
Bass stopped, turned, and squinted behind him in the afternoon light. The three had chosen again to move downstream. At camp after camp on their journey a little west of north, Silas and the others always set their traps downstream while Titus deemed to take a different path. Up this creek, like the other streams before it, he pushed on through the saw grass and skirted the leafy willow, past wild blue hyacinth and the brilliant lavender of flowering horsemint, making sure not to step upon the delicate brick-red petals of prairie smoke or those tiny white whorls of redwool saxifrage.
Except for the distant, mocking shriek of the Steller’s jay or the cheep of the bluethroats singing from the branches of the trees over his head, Scratch marveled at the long stretches of silence when the breeze died. Then it would finger its way back down this narrow valley as the day cooled, soughing through the heavy, tossing branches of blue spruce and hearty fir. Back among the shady places, where a soft bed of rotting pine needles covered the forest floor beneath every evergreen and aspen, poked the sun-yellow centers of the pale-blue pasqueflower crocus, straining their saffron faces toward the falling of the sun.
It was for these few minutes he had alone, both morning and afternoon, that Titus had come to live. The quiet so deep, he could almost hear his own blood surging through his veins. Then the robber jay flashed its gray wings in a low swoop overhead, crying out with its squawk of alarm at the two-legged creature below it. Other birds rustled into flight, called out the general fright, and all grew quiet once more.
Nearby, the stream murmured in its gravel bed, talking on and on day and night without stop as it started last winter’s snowpack on a rushing tumble toward the distant sea. For a long moment he gazed downstream, studying the tiny riffles and widening vees formed behind every small boulder midstream, wondering if that water passing by him right then would eventually boil into the North Platte, joining all the rest of spring’s melting runoff to swell the prairie rivers, finally to spill into the muddy Missouri before merging itself with the mighty Mississippi as it lolled its way past St. Louis … down, down to N’Orleans, where the quadroon and many-hued whores plied their trade, where ebony-skinned slaves stood shack-led on auction blocks, and the great sheets of canvas strained against the wind on those mighty, three-masted, oceangoing vessels come there from far off beyond the very curve of the earth.