Turning back to the trader, grinning, he said, “Looks like we’ll go see for ourselves if ol’ Broken Hand gonna make a good peace with all them bad cases. Now, pour me some more of that there booshway’s brandy—I got me a wedding to celebrate!”
He didn’t awaken until the early afternoon of the following day, his head pounding like a hammer on an anvil as the sun finally slipped in beneath the bottom of the upturned lodge cover, making his flesh hot and causing his head to swim. When he eventually sat up and opened his eyes, Titus realized there wasn’t much left in the lodge. Someone had come and stolen most everything that belonged to his wife. His wife—
“Waits?”
She bent to her knees and stuck her head under the rolled-up lodge cover. “You are awake? How is your head?”
“Pounding like a drum,” he moaned, cradling his temples in both hands.
“Little wonder,” she scolded him in Crow. “You stayed up most of the night dancing and singing and pounding on any drum someone would loan you.”
“Don’t talk so loud,” he growled. “I can hear you just fine if you’d talk softer.”
“Go back to sleep until you feel better,” she said with a giggle. “I have too much work to get done before we leave for me to sit and argue with a drinker man—”
“Leave?”
“With Round Iron and the chiefs,” Waits reminded.
“Oh … right,” and he remembered foggily. “When?”
“Tomorrow at sunrise. Before then, I have to finish packing what we will take along for the children, and leave the rest with Magpie.”
“M-Magpie, yes.” He remembered her wedding too. And for some reason, that really saddened him. “She … doesn’t live with us anymore.”
“She has a husband, and they have their own lodge now.”
“Are they going with us?”
“No,” she answered. “Turns Back and those war chiefs staying behind are leading the people into the mountains—the Baby Place, Baah-puuo I-sa-wa-xaa-wuua, where there are the children’s footprints. They will find it cooler there, until autumn.”
“Right … the mountains,” he said as his head sank back onto the horsehair pillow. “The children’s footprint mountains, where the Little People live?”
“Yes. They might run into some of our holy friends, the Little People.”
Closing his eyes, Titus heard her shuffle off and felt himself drifting back into a blessed sleep. The idea of cool, shady mountains sounded damned good to him; at that moment he wasn’t so sure the air was moving at all. Heavy and hot. Maybe if he prayed right now the sacred Little People would answer by blowing with their breath, causing a breeze to drift down from their mountains that lay off to the southwest. He’d never seen one for himself, but the Crow steadfastly believed in these beings who were half human, half furry creature. Ever since the Apsaluuke people had come to this land from the Missouri River, they had been visited by the Little People. The beings came to heal the sick and wounded when the Crow healers could not. They came to protect the faithful who believed in them. And, they sometimes portrayed their sense of humor too—often making off with some small object or another that they took a liking to. From time to time a Crow man or woman might realize they were missing something shiny and explain that the Little People had taken it. Then, years later, they would find the missing object lying on a prominent rock, or hanging from a tree branch beside a well-used trail somewhere in those mystical “children’s footprint mountains,”* always in plain sight where a shiny trinket would sparkle, catching the rays of the sun.
He tried to imagine what shape the creatures took, how they looked—because while every one of the Crow believed in the Little People, few, if any, had ever had themselves a good look at one of the mysterious and sacred creatures. Most times, the elders and prophets, seers and healers caught no more than a glimpse of the Little People out of the corner of their eyes. The hint of a shadow, the mere suggestion of fleeting movement … because the legends always told of the Little People doing their good in secret, away from the eyes of man.
Titus felt himself dreaming at last. Floating up the mountainside toward the cool and inviting darkness lit by a bright full moon and innumerable stars that seemed so close he felt he could reach out and tap each one, even set his big-brimmed hat right down on top of that gauzy, gibbous moon. He heard a rustling on either side of him and stopped, looking down to realize the horse that had been between his legs was somehow gone … and he was standing barefoot in the cool grass, the breeze nuzzling his long, graying hair. He turned to the side at the sounds of tiny feet scampering, but glimpsed only a half dozen shadows as they disappeared behind the trees.
From his right he heard more faint rustling and turned that way to look. All he saw was the tail end of some flickering movement as the creatures vanished before he ever saw them.
When he held his breath and concentrated, Titus heard the whispers. Straining into the black of that night, he listened intently, straining to make out the sounds. Voices, but not quite human. And the language they spoke … not anything he had ever heard spoken before in his fifty-seven winters on earth. For sure not American, but not Ute or Snake, Comanche or Crow either, not even what little Blackfoot or Mojave had fallen about his ears, and not a thing like Mexican talk.
Scratch took a deep breath and let half of it out, the same way he held a breath in his lungs when he was aiming his rifle … then listened some more, doing his best to recognize a word, some fragment of the foreign sounds.
These had to be Little People, he decided. For some reason, he knew he was the only human around these parts. Titus wasn’t sure why he felt so certain about that … but, after all, this was his dream. While the Crow could accept that they would never really see one of the creatures, Titus Bass wasn’t a Crow. He wanted to see one of them, talk to it—have the being talk with him, perhaps even show him some of their magic that so amazed generation after generation of the Apsaluuke people. Waits-by-the-Water and their children could believe in these holy beings out of hand, but Titus wanted to see for himself some of their notorious tricks and sleight of hand. The Crow had many long-held legends about Old Man Coyote—the well-known spiritual trickster … so maybe these sacred Little People had some tricks they could teach him.
“Come out here an’ lemme take a look at you.”
He heard a rustling to his left, then felt a brushing against the back of his leg. But as soon as he looked, it was gone.
“Stand still, so I can have me a good look afore you run away again.”
Scratch suddenly turned at more rustling, trying his best to catch a glimpse, for he was sure they were all around him at that very moment—and as soon as he had turned his head he felt as if something had trundled across his toes, the way a badger or porcupine might, had they not been such slow and lumbering creatures.
“Titus Bass.”
He understood that.
He grinned and said to the night, “You do speak American after all.”
“We talk so you understand us, yes,” the voice answered. “In the tongue of the listener.”
“Why won’t you show yourself to me?”
There was a pause while more leaves and branches rustled on all sides of him. Then the voice said, “We never show ourselves to you until you need us.”
Scratch smiled at that. “I need to see you, know you’re real an’ not just some dream of mine.”
“Dream? Why, you’re dreaming right now, aren’t you, Titus Bass?”
“Yep, s’pose I am.”
“Then—if this is your dream, you should realize this is very real,” the voice said as the rustling quieted.
He struggled to wrap his mind around that. Not since that night at Fort Bridger so many years ago had he given any thought to the two opposing worlds of unreality and dream, any thought to that unknown country where the two worlds converged, where they could ensnare a man into belief.