That is, hidden from any but the eyes of Two Sleep.
From the man’s still-warm fire, the Shoshone warrior knew the white man had eaten antelope. From the bones left, the way they had been stripped clean and gnawed. Two Sleep guessed it might be the last meat the white man had along.
“He will be hungry before the day is out,” said the aging warrior as he had climbed from his blankets in the gray light of early dawn that next morning. There came more and more tight complaints along his muscles with the waning of every moon. They felt much like the knots he would crimp in a new buffalo-hair lariat or green rawhide to make hobbles for his war pony.
“There isn’t much game from here for the next day’s ride.”
And for that moment Two Sleep sensed some sorrow for the lone rider. But instead of going down the slope to share his dried meat with the white man, the Shoshone had instead quickly lashed his blanket over his saddle pad and made ready to leave—but only when the other one left his cold camp among the willow below.
“He sleeps long,” the Shoshone had murmured to himself at dawn.
To the east the red sun came up beneath purple rain clouds, to be swallowed in the time it took the sun to travel from one lodgepole to the next. Far to the west above the uplifted land, the worrisome clouds were already unloading their long streamers of rain upon the parched, high land.
Small wonder the white man had decided to sleep late. There was little sunlight to awaken him, and all that he had to look forward to was a day of rain. The late days of summer in this country could be like that, Two Sleep had mused as he watched some stirrings of movement in the camp below, the plains grown hot as the bottom of a cast-iron skillet, the air cooling in the high, snow-covered places rising all around this land. Clouds created above those high places were ultimately sent scrambling over the hot valleys to spill open their rain-swollen bellies accompanied by noise and torment.
It had come and gone—that storm battering the distant rider for more than two hours along the westward trail before he gave up and sought some shelter among the cottonwoods beside the narrow river. At those first drops Two Sleep had slid from the back of his pony and stripped himself naked—everything but his moccasins—then rolled his dry clothing up within the blanket covered by a small piece of oiled hide.
Soon he grew used to the cold of the rain, the hammer of the cold drops pelting his unprotected body. Soon it began to feel good, cleansing.
He wondered if the lone white man knew about bathing. So many didn’t. Two Sleep thought on all the white men he had known, most of them encountered along the Holy Road that took the whites to the western sun, or those men met at Big Throat’s fort near the Shaded River. It was the one called the Green by the white men. Among them Big Throat was known as Bridger. He was called Big Throat among most of the tribes because of the swollen flesh of the goiter at the old scout’s neck.
It had not been all that long since Two Sleep had heard rumor that Big Throat had abandoned the mountain West, had gone to Fort Laramie and beyond, even beyond the string of forts along the Platte River Road. East, it was said, to a home Bridger had not visited for many, many winters.
“I call you Two Sleep,” Jim Bridger had said many winters before to the young Shoshone warrior distantly related to the mountain fur trapper through marriage. Big Throat was the husband to Two Sleep’s cousin, cementing a bond with the Snake Indians many, many summers back in time, when both Bridger and Two Sleep had been younger and full of the rising sap of youth.
“Why you give me this new name?” the Shoshone had asked as he passed the pipe on around the circle of warriors come to visit Bridger where the white man had erected his log fort.
Bridger had smiled, his eyes merry. “Because I have never known you to sleep, my friend. On our hunts, when I go to sleep, you are still awake. When I wake up, you are already awake. So I think when you finally go to sleep, you will sleep for two men, eh?”
The old men had liked Big Throat’s reasoning, giving their approval to the name. So it was sanctioned, this new name: Two Sleep.
From that wedding day Chief Washakie had added his blessing not only to Bridger’s marriage, but to Two Sleep’s new name as well. The two men became even closer friends. Hunting together, making war on the enemies of the Shoshone together, loving their women and the Snake people and this land the tribe fiercely called its own.
“I will fight alongside you, Big Throat,” Two Sleep had told the trapper when word came that white men were riding out of the south against Brid-ger.
The old trapper had gathered a double handful of his old friends, all men who had spent years among the mountain snows and valley streams with Brid-ger, men who moved a little slower these days but still aimed true and shot center. Those few punished the other white men come cocky and bold on their big American horses, giving the attackers a solid drubbing, these old warrior friends of Brid-ger’s did. It was these that Two Sleep came to know as friends when the Shoshone warrior came to live among the whites, instead of living among his own.
But in the end some of those old friends abandoned the country. Some went west, some back to the east, where it was rumored the white man numbered like the stars above Shoshone country. Still, Big Throat and Sweete had stayed on, guiding for the pony soldiers who marched against the Lakota and Shahiyena warrior bands. It was good work for the friends of the Shoshone to do—this tracking and guiding, leading the soldiers against the camps of the Snake’s most hated enemies.
Only Big Throat and Sweete had stayed on in this country spread high and wide beneath the setting sun that now dipped out of the clouds like a raindrop slowly loosening itself from a cottonwood leaf. For a moment the land flared red-orange as the sun appeared, then lost itself almost as quickly behind the far foothills and vaulted peaks.
Gone was the day.
Like the rumor said of Big Throat. He was gone east, back among his original people, the ones he belonged to before he had been adopted by the Shoshone.
It could not be true: that Brid-ger would give up on this land and go back to the places where the white man clustered together in great groupings that reeked of his offal and the air hung gray in the sky. Out here the wind blew free enough that the land cleansed itself when a Shoshone village packed up and moved on.
But stories had Brid-ger gone from the high plains and snowy mountains for good. A grand era had come to an end.
This, Two Sleep had decided, he must see for himself.
So he took this journey to Brid-ger’s fort where the soldiers came to roost from time to time. That way Two Sleep would find out if the rumor was true.
For many days Two Sleep traveled without seeing another human being. Only the sweep of the red-tailed hawks circumscribing lazy loops against the sky. Only white-rumped antelope bounding off from the path Two Sleep had chosen, then stopping to look back at the solitary rider. No others ventured into this shimmering heat rising off the parched land—until the Shoshone spotted the two horses weaving like black water striders a’dance among the rising waves of heat along the far horizon.
It had proved to be this white man traveling alone along this road. A brave thing, Two Sleep decided. If he met the wrong Indians …
But at this time of the year, this far west—why, the Lakota and the Shahiyena were far to the north, hunting. Still, the Arapaho were a different matter. They were a fickle, funny people.