As much as he cursed his fingers, he still couldn’t get them to respond. So in one last, desperate move, Scratch used his teeth to drag the first mitten free of the rawhide rope, and stuffed the unwilling hand inside its warmth. Then, realizing his strength was quickly failing, he yanked the second mitten free and plunged his right hand inside.
With clawlike fists he started to rub the scratchy wool up and down each bare arm quickly, over the flesh on his chest and belly, down across his thighs, knees, and calves—right to the river’s surface as he lumbered back slowly, almost stumbling and going down twice on his frozen feet. One at a time, it seemed, his fingers began to respond to his commands, moving within their woolen cocoon until he could ball up a fist and release it.
Pulling one hand from its mitten, Scratch seized the top of the travois and dragged it up the frozen bank until the bedding bundle no longer bobbed atop the water’s surface. With both hands back in their mittens, he valiantly struggled to pull the long bundle of his capote from beneath the lashing. Clumsily yanking back on the flaps of the coat, he pulled it out from beneath the rifle and his other clothing. How glorious it felt to stuff his arms into that warmth! Even with his hands trembling terribly, he somehow got the wide finger-woven sash knotted at his waist.
Maybe he would make it after all.
Hannah was counting on him. He knew that. If she couldn’t get freed from her captors, then he knew she was counting on him to come after her. Driven by the same deep bond that had compelled her to come back for him after the Arapaho had driven her off, scalped him, and left the white man for dead.
He owed her for that, and for the other times she had been there to warn him of danger, times when she pulled his hash out of one fix or another.
Shaking like a quaky leaf in a September gale, Bass snatched up his shooting pouch and looped it over his shoulders before he lunged thick-legged up the gentle slope of the bank, his soggy moccasins slipping on the icy crust as the leather began to freeze. Collapsing into the snow beside a large branch of deadfall cottonwood, Titus hurriedly brushed aside what he could of the ice at the base of a low drift, then began snapping off the smaller limbs and twigs. As soon as he had a pile formed at his knees, Scratch dragged his pouch into his lap, fought up the flap.
Stuffing his right mitten between his teeth, he yanked it from his hand and began to dig through the pouch for his tinderbox. From the container made of German silver back in Kentucky, he took a small chunk of blackened char. Against it he laid a piece of flint, then pulled out his fire-steel.
As soon as a tiny spark ignited the char, he pulled a small nest of tinder from the box and laid it upon the cloth and blew until the dried tinder burst into flame. Oh, to feel that welcome warmth on his face!
Placing the fiery tinder atop some of the twigs, he gradually laid more of the tiny branches over the struggling flames—adding one piece at a time as each new twig caught fire.
Finally he laid on some of the branches as thick as his wrist. Feeling confident enough that the flames wouldn’t snuff themselves out, Bass stood shakily, dragging his frozen knees and calves out of the snow. Snugging the flaps of his capote around him, he stood dangerously close to the flames, sensing how quickly the sudden, surprising warmth seeped into the flesh of his lower body. Through the layers of his coat, he vigorously rubbed his thighs again, then moved away only long enough to grab his longhandles and leggings.
How warm and dry the faded underwear felt against his near-frozen flesh!
Pulling each one of the buckskin tubes on over the wet moccasins, Scratch tied each legging to the belt he had buckled around his waist. Reluctantly he pulled the capote from his arms and hurriedly replaced it with his war shirt. And with the coat knotted around him once again, Bass sat back against the small bundle of his bedding, sucked on his bare fingers to warm them a moment, then struggled with the soggy knots of his moccasins. One at a time the stark, white, nearly frozen flesh of his feet was exposed—but only for a moment as he dragged on the pair sewn so the elk hair lay inside against his skin. Over them he tied the heavy, thick moccasins with their curly buffalo hair turned inside.
As soon as he laid on the last of that dried cottonwood, Bass realized he was going to need more wood to build up the fire before he had rewarmed enough to set off into the coming night all but done with sucking the last of the light from the valley.
Looking downriver, then up—he decided to go in search of wood to his right. He took only one step when he stopped suddenly, staring at the footprint before he dropped to one knee to inspect it more closely in the firelight. Now he knew. There could be no doubt. Not with the way the outer seam of the moccasin ran back from the big to the little toe at a sharp angle. This was Crow.
He had seen a winter’s worth of those prints to know a Crow moccasin from a Cheyenne, a Ute from a Blackfoot or Shoshone. Two years back he had learned from Bird in Ground to recognize how Crow squaws cut and sewed up their moccasins.
“Damn them cocky Sparrowhawks,” he grumbled as he rose and plodded away into the snow.
Dragging back more deadfall, Scratch snapped off all the limbs and branches he could break with his hands, the sole of his feet, or hack loose with the small ax. In minutes he had the sort of fire that would warm a half-dozen men.
And as he gazed off to the west and that band of indigo blue shrinking to black, Scratch was sure they were warming themselves around a fire right then too.
“You niggers go right on and sleep real snug,” he said quietly to the night. “Titus Bass is coming.”
The half-moon was just climbing over the tops of the bare cottonwood downriver when he felt he had restoked his own inner flames enough to push on into the darkness. With the snow beginning to brilliantly reflect the feeble starshine and the light of that rising moon, Scratch felt certain he could follow the trail of trampled snow heading west up the Yellowstone.
Stepping into the travois, he secured his rifle back under two ropes, then turned and hoisted the drag. Leaning against the saplings, he plunged into the darkness, into the wilderness, into the unknown.
“What’s one goddamned white nigger gonna do?” he groused under his breath as he struggled along, dragging the travois behind him across the sagebrush and rocky ground.
“Bet that’s what them Sparrowhawk bastards is asking themselves!”
They ain’t worried one whit about me.
And that made Titus smile.
Jehoshaphat, but did they have a surprise coming!
The sky behind him had just begun to faint up the last time he had turned his head and looked over his shoulder to the east. The cold, frozen mist clung beside the river-banks, thick among the brush and bare-bone cottonwood. Damned cold here, but this was where they cut their trail through the snow. A mist so thick and dark all night long that it made him think of cotton bolls dipped in tanner’s black. But finally, far behind him to the east, it appeared the sky was finally relinquishing its first hint of the dawn to come.
He had to keep pushing, Bass reminded himself. Couldn’t slow up now. Come first light—they’d be up and on the move again. Maybe not right at sunup, but soon after. They weren’t worried about hurrying out of their blankets, not cocky as this bunch was.
Turning his nose back upriver, he leaned into the vee and lunged forward, driven to keep moving here past the point of exhaustion, though his feet felt like chunks of ice and every stirring of the breeze tormented his frostbitten face. Time and again he rubbed his nose, the tops of his cheeks, with a mitten, trying his best to somehow keep the flesh warm enough that it would not die, turn black, and sluff off. He had seen enough men who carried such disfiguring scars: ears and noses and cheeks.