At last he saw something register there, some understanding, perhaps a recognition that only increased the pain and fury in the eyes.
After tugging on his bandanna, Bass held up two fingers. Then he positioned both hands in front of him at waist level, palms and fingers pointed up, fingers waving gently as he raised them slowly.
Again he signaled two.
And once more he made the grass sign for “summer.”
The Indian’s eyes came away from Scratch’s hands to meet the trapper’s eyes. Sure enough sign the warrior understood.
“That’s right. Two summers ago.”
Then he tapped the end of his finger on the dead Indian’s chest. And when the wounded man’s eyes came back to his, Bass said, “This nigger. That’s right. Two summers ago, this here red nigger.”
As before, he used both hands to sign. Extending only the forefinger on the right hand, Titus held out his left arm, the first two fingers on that hand pointing down, symbolizing the legs of a man. Now he struck that man repeatedly with the right forefinger.
Coup.
“Good. This friend of your’n counted coup on me two summers ago. You savvy that, you bastard?”
He signed all of it over again.
Two.
Summers.
Counted coup.
Then he ripped off the bandanna a second time, pointing to the bare skull bone. And finally to that patch of long, wavy brown hair loosely sewn to the buckskin bag.
When those black, luminous eyes locked back on his, Bass resumed signing. He tapped his own breast with his right hand, then placed the back of that hand against his forehead, the first two fingers extended and held apart, slightly curved. He raised the hand slowly, moving it round and round in a simulated rise of smoke from a fire.
“My medicine” he spoke softly as the breeze nuzzled the leaves overhead.
Making a fist of that right hand, Titus slapped it against his chest, right over his heart, then brought the fist down to almost waist level with a bold, confident gesture.
“It is strong. My medicine’s strong.”
Now Scratch opened his hand and placed it near the right side of his forehead, fingers open, separated, and slightly curved into a cup as he twirled the hand back and forth, back and forth in a tight spin to resemble mental instability.
“That’s right: I’m crazy,” he explained, the volume of his voice rising. “A damn fool, crazy. You go tell your people they best not mess with me. I’m a crazy nigger!”
The eyes glared back at him, unflinching.
“Now I’m gonna prove to you just how crazy I am, you son of a bitch,” Titus growled. “When you get back to your people—you be sure to tell ’em all what you see’d here today.”
Leaning to the side, Bass quickly laid the belt bag and the dead man’s knife where they would be safe, more than an arm’s length away, then took out his own skinning knife. It made a faint crackling noise as he drove the narrow blade deep into the base of the dead man’s throat, blood seeping out as he dragged the blade along the flesh and muscle stretched over the breastbone. At the bottom of the sternum he plunged the knife into the abdomen, all the way to the handle. Sawing through the thick rawhide belt that held up the leggings, Titus flung aside the front of the leather breechclout and continued down, down in a ragged line, drawing the full length of the blade through the gush of blood and spill of purple intestines until the knife struck hard bone just above the warrior’s penis.
After wiping the blood from the blade on the dead Indian’s legging, Scratch drove the weapon into the ground beside the body. He rocked forward, rising onto his knees over the warrior. Giving the wounded Arapaho one last, long look of devilish insanity—the trapper stuffed both hands into that wide, grisly incision.
Again and again he ripped apart the gaping slash, pulling out long lengths of that purplish-white intestinal coil, heaving it to the far side of the body until no more remained. Then he retrieved the knife from the ground and went to work on the rest. Bladder and both kidneys he hacked loose, flinging them onto the growing gut-pile. The stomach, and liver, then the gallbladder—chopping it all free with savage slashes of the knife, splattering himself with the Indian’s blood, painting himself in crimson, reveling in the warmth of his victim’s body like some wild, feral beast gorging itself up to the snout in its prey.
He growled, grunted, whooped, and shrieked in shrill exultation every time he pulled some new organ free and hurled it onto the expanding gut-pile there in the grass near the body. Chopping and jabbing, hacking and sawing with the knife, Scratch repeatedly stuffed his arms past the elbows into the chest cavity, tearing free the lobes of lung from the connective tissue on the interior of the chest wall, ripping them from their last grip on the windpipe’s branching forks.
With all those warm, quivering organs lying beside the sundered carcass, empty from downstream anus to upstream voice box, there remained but one last organ for him to cut free from that bloody hollow.
Seizing the soft, sticky, warm globe in his left hand, Scratch slipped his knife under the rib cage and hacked it free. Bringing it out from beneath those last, lower ribs, he gazed at the heart, turned it over and over, thick blood continuing to ooze from those butchered vessels. So small and weak and defenseless, he thought as he studied it.
Then for the first time during his mad, crazed orgy over the body, Bass turned to look at the wounded man. And when he saw how transfixed the warrior’s eyes had been on him throughout it all, Bass knew what he must now do.
Cradling the quivering heart in his left hand, he scrambled over to where he could squat right beside the wounded Arapaho. Rolling the organ over in his hands, Bass suddenly shoved it forward, until he held it suspended no more than two inches from the warrior’s face, blood still dripping onto the brown skin stretched taut across the Indian’s frozen, grim countenance.
“You tell your people what you see’d here today,” Bass grunted, realizing his anger fired his every vein with hot surges of adrenaline, his voice little more than the sound an animal would make after making its kill.
His eyes never leaving the wounded man’s, Scratch slowly turned the heart over and over in his hands, slowly bringing the slimy organ closer and closer to his opening mouth. Then he shoved the heart between his teeth, clamped down, and savagely tore off a symbolic hunk of his enemy’s power.
How warm the soft, elastic tissue felt between his teeth, against his tongue—yet no different from the elk liver or buffalo heart he had been eating for years. So strong was the muscle, he knew as soon as he began to grind it between his back teeth that he wasn’t about to chew it up fine enough. Instead, he swallowed hard, gagging at first, then tried again—this time sensing the hunk of raw flesh glide past the back of his tongue. He swallowed once more to make sure it would stay down.
And stood, grinning madly, staring wild-eyed at the wounded man—then suddenly cocked back his arm and flung the heart across the creek. It landed with a bounce on the open and grassy bank the horsemen had come down to make their crossing.
Quickly pointing at the dead Indian, Bass made the sign for “medicine” in front of his forehead: bloody, slimy fingers rising slowly in that symbolic spiral of smoke. He concluded by slapping his own chest with that crimson hand—painting himself with that red handprint.
“His medicine,” he uttered the words now as he repeated the signs. “It’s now my medicine!”
Swiping the back of his red hand over his mouth, Bass made the signs one last time, not taking his eyes off the enemy who lay there in pain, breathing in short gusts, watching the crazed trapper.