Brushing one flat palm across the other quickly, Bridger said morosely, “That’s a nigger what’s good as dead awready, Scratch.”
Aw, Asa, he thought now as he dropped down into the bottom below the narrow saddle, feeling the grass brush the bottoms of his moccasins. Why, Asa? Why?
He halted at midday just on the other side of that low saddle, loosened cinches, and let the three critters graze in the lush spring growth as he chewed at some of the meat he had cooked over last night’s fire before moving on to sleep a few miles from where he had supped. Just out of caution, in new country, a man ate one place, made a cold camp, and slept out the night in another. As he ate, he watched that distant line of dust rise against the glorious summer blue painted across the canvas above the western hills.
Close enough now to calculate there couldn’t be more than twenty riders, maybe two dozen at most.
Not likely to be a small band of Snake traipsing south for the white man’s rendezvous in Willow Valley. Might so be some damned Bannock. He knew they was the sort to skedaddle if the odds wasn’t real long in their favor, the sort what laid into any white men if the red niggers could raise some horses and plunder, maybe even some scalps if their medicine was right that day. Goddamn them Bannocks.
Not good Injuns like them Crow.
They was the sort to take a man in, make him welcome, put him up in one lodge or the other till the chief’s two sisters sewed together a buffalo-hide shelter something on the order of a white man’s lean-to. A half-domed affair with a big flap that covered the wide entrance, which he could tie up during the day or lash down for protection from the cold at night, or when a new snowstorm came slashing through the valley. He’d barely gotten used to the dwelling last winter when it came time for the village to move a few miles upstream away from the Yellowstone. The camp had begun to stink something awful from all the gut-piles, rotting meat, and human offal piling up back in the trees. Maybe as much as a half-dozen times Arapooesh’s band would move each winter, finding themselves another place that offered open water, plenty of firewood and grass for their pony herds, along with some protection against the possibility of attack.
As winter deepened, it seemed the Crow grew more relaxed—less concerned about their most fearsome enemy. Too damned cold now, the snow drifted too deep for the Blackfoot to try anything as foolish as a major assault on a village in the heart of Absaroka—home of the Crow.
It hadn’t been long before Scratch had felt a part of them too. Much more a part of them than he had years back when he had come to the Bighorn country with Silas, Billy, and Bud. Perhaps he had felt set apart from the tribe because the three of them had not tried in the least to fit in with their winter hosts. Just as they had refused to do with the Ute. Instead, the trio of white men had stayed apart, taking all that they needed from the Crow and doing little to repay in kind all that had been given them with such generous hospitality. Whether it was food, or a woman offered to warm their robes, or some shelter from the raging winter blizzards—Silas and the others had considered themselves above their hosts, remaining as aloof as those company brigades traveling through one tribe’s territory or another.
But for a lone man eager to learn all the more about these attractive pale-brown people, the past winter in Absaroka with Bird in Ground and Pretty On Top was all that he had hoped it would be. And from that first night’s feasting and celebration, it seemed that old Arapooesh took to the white man, right off.
“Rotten … Belly?” he had repeated the words spoken to him by Bird in Ground.
The man-woman rubbed his stomach with a flat hand, bending over slightly and groaning as if he were sick. “Rotten Belly, yes.”
“That’s Arapooesh’s name?”
Indeed, it was how the venerable chief was known among the two divisions who roamed Absaroka. Recently he had brought his wife and family back to live with her band of the Apsaalooke after spending many years among his River Band. And with the regrettable death of Big Hair, his wife’s people turned to the respected warrior and tribal counselor to lead them into the coming winters.
After recouping his strength in the Crow village for several days, Bass had journeyed east to retrieve the trade goods and supplies he had abandoned when he’d set out on the trail of the horse thieves—just one day shy of reaching his cache. After taking two days to bury the last of his pelts in that black hole, he loaded up the rest of what he needed for the winter on Hannah’s back and turned about for Rotten Belly’s camp. He made it back just as a howling blizzard raked the land. That first night back he slept in Bird in Ground’s lodge, inviting the chief and some of the old warriors, along with Pretty On Top and other youngsters, to a giveaway dinner.
Oh, the way those Crow eyes sparkled as he passed around small gifts of coffee and sugar, some powder and brass tacks, fingerings and bracelets, hanks of ribbon and beads! The men clucked and laughed—for it had been a long, long time since any of them had seen such riches as these!
“Do you see, Pretty On Top?” Bird in Ground playfully chided the young man. “See what a man receives in return when he gives away his friendship to a stranger?”
Later on as that winter grew old, as the wind keened and twisted through the Yellowstone Valley, the chief gathered his friends and advisers in his lodge for a red-stick feast. From the pot for this traditional Crow celebration, the invited guests all plucked tender pieces of elk. Afterward they scraped the greasy marrow from bones they pulled from the coals and cracked upon the rocks ringing the fire pit. Then they smoked and related their coups.
When it came time for Bass to count his own exploits sitting there at Rotten Belly’s left hand, he enthralled them into the deep hours with his tales, stripping off his shirt and showing them those scars earned at the hands of the Blackfoot, being hunted down by the Apache far to the southwest of Absaroka, fighting the Mexican soldiers and fierce Comanche raiders in that land of warm waters, as well as his two struggles with the grizzly—letting them see the scars of his few seasons among the mountains, how the wilderness had marked his whipcord-lean white body.
After the sixteen men nodded and murmured in approbation that he still lived, Arapooesh had refilled his pipe and sent it around the circle another time. And when it reached the chief at the end of its circuit, Rotten Belly solemnly proposed to give a name to the man who had come to his people earlier that winter—on foot and wearing the fur of a coyote wrapped around his head so that only the white man’s eyes and cheeks showed above his beard and mustache, those frosted whiskers similar in color to the gray pelt of that coyote Scratch had worn for winters beyond count already.
“So I give my white friend a name I will call him from this night onward,” Arapooesh declared. “Pote Ani. Because when he came to us, this man seemed to have the head of a coyote on his shoulders. But more than that, my new friend has the cunning of the coyote that allows him to survive both the wolf and the winter. Because the coyote is an animal faithful to its own, steadfast to its friends … because this white man is loyal to my people—I pledge I will always remain loyal to him.”
The rest of those gathered in the lodge had cheered with approval, slapping their thighs, banging their tin cups on the rocks ringing the fire.
Then Arapooesh had continued. “So, my friends—it is with a full and happy heart that I take this white man as my brother. From this night he will be known among our people as Pote Ani. And he will be my brother.”
It never failed to bring a smile to his heart, warming him, every time he thought about his dear friend, Rotten Belly. Remembering how the chief and Bird in Ground and even young Pretty On Top had come to mean so much to him through those winter moons. The sort of men who formed a bulwark against the storms in a man’s life.