Buffalo Palace (24 page)

Tuttle asked, “You skeery of these here Yutas, Silas?”

“They seem to be a good sort and welcomed us all and one,” Cooper replied. “But it don’t ever pay to let down your guard witn red niggers—now, do it?”

“When we get together again, Silas?” Tuttle inquired, some consternation crossing his face as the four women began to inch away to their own lodges, each one signaling for her guest to follow.

Cooper smiled within his dark beard, his eyes dancing like a bull elk about to rut. “I don’t see me any reason to gather back up till morning, boys—when we’re damn good and ready to roll out of the she-wimmens’ warm blankets,” he said, looping his long arm over the shoulder of the sharp-nosed woman who was taking Cooper in.

Titus gave the three other women a quick study and decided his must surely be the oldest among them. Yet she had the kindest face. In his book such an attribute went a long, long way to making him feel content enough to leave the company of the others and follow her home.

That first day he had looked back once, watching the others splitting up, leading their horses and pack animals away in four different directions. Then she had pulled on his elbow, motioning wordlessly, and pointed to a small smoke-blackened lodge off at the edge of the village circle near a copse of bare-limbed aspens.

For sure, he had decided right then and there: it was one thing to saddle up and push west all on one’s own—totally alone. Such solitude was something Titus had no problem enduring; indeed, he had welcomed that longed-for aloneness. But that evening for those first few hours there in the Ute camp, he found himself feeling something altogether different. Sensing most a bit of despair and frustration at being brought here and handed off to stay among a foreign people, not knowing their language nor their customs … all that mingled with his own excitable male anxiety at again being set adrift with a woman—almost exactly the same feeling he had experienced when the riverboat pilot Ebenezer Zane had arranged it so that for an entire night a very young Titus Bass was to be alone and undisturbed with an Ohio River whore named Mincemeat.

Many things that first awkward night with the Ute widow made him fondly recall his nervousness and selfdoubt
with the skinny, chicken-winged whore. But, like Mincemeat, this squaw with the young child slung in a blanket at her back certainly did her best to make the white stranger feel welcome, at home, and very much wanted.

It came as no surprise when she openly nursed the child in front of him after she had rekindled the fire, brought in some water from the frozen creek nearby, then put on a kettle to continue boiling that elk heart. Once the child had fallen asleep at her breast, the woman had nested the young boy back among the buffalo robes at the side of the lodge, pulled back on her own hide coat, and ducked out the lodge door. In minutes she was back—but only to fetch up her crude, rusted camp ax. Again she left the lodge, but as soon as he heard her chopping at wood with the ax, Titus pulled on his blanket coat and went out to help her.

Inside once again with the woodpile replenished to the left of the door, they shed their coats and the woman took some dried greens from a round rawhide container, dropping them into the boiling water where the elk heart rolled and tumbled in its gelatinous juices, slowly cooking. She poured him a tin cup of water from a small skin she had hung from a rope that went from pole to pole, wrapped about each one, inside that small lodge. As he sipped slowly, Titus silently inspected how there was a separate section of hides suspended from that rope so that they formed an inner liner tied some five feet high from ground to rope. A portion of that liner was even lashed across the doorway so that it now formed a double inner barrier against winter’s cold, holding within even more of the small fire’s warmth.

That proved to be no problem: keeping enough of the fire’s radiant heat. He soon discovered a small fire was quite enough to warm such an insulated lodge. Many were the early mornings when he routinely awoke in the gray, predawn cold, or those evenings as he drifted off to sleep with her already snoring softly beside him, or on each of those dark nights when he slowly came awake for no good reason he could fathom, listening to the nightsounds in the camp around him, staring up at the black scrap of sky between the two large flaps of buffalo hide
that surrounded the smoke hole, helping direct and pull the fire’s smoke from the lodge. It was up there where the poles came together in their unique spiral—the collection of poles rising slowly, gently, even beautifully, rising in a swirl as smoke itself would spiral slowly on its way to the heavens.

So warm had it been some of the past winter days that the woman would pull back the liner flap and push aside the door, leaving the entrance open, allowing a breeze to slip into the lodge and rise up through the smoke hole, creating a cool current of air that pleased him. If the day was a sunny one, and the others were not dragging him off to check on their traplines, the four white men would join the warriors old and young sitting in the sun. There the trappers each had a chance to practice more of their spoken Ute and the Indians practiced their English. Still, because most of their conversations could not be expressed aloud, there were many hours that winter for Titus to practice his sign language. For the longest time he continued to speak aloud the words his moving hands formed—and soon discovered that some of the warriors, like the widow, did their best to mimic his English for certain objects, actions, or feelings.

Like the routine he had learned on his father’s farm, or that daily ritual he grew accustomed to on Ebenezer Zane’s Kentucky flatboat as it floated downriver to New Orleans in the autumn of 1810, this easy rhythm of a trapper’s winter life as a man went about the predawn setting of the traps and the twilight harvest of his beaver—this too was a satisfying existence of routine and regularity.

Somewhere in the darkness out beyond the nearby fringe of lodgepole pine, Bass heard a dog bark now. Easy enough to tell it was a camp dog, not one of those wild dogs Billy explained were called coyotes. No, this one barked in the gray light of dawn-coming, reminding him a bit of how old Tink had bayed back in Boone County … not with the yip-yipping howl of the coyotes that stayed back among the hills or warily crossed the prairie-lands.

The sun would still be some time before making an appearance this morning, yet there was enough gray light
seeping down from the smoke hole above him for Titus to begin to make out the shapes of things in the lodge, where his rifle stood close at hand, the small mound of blankets and buffalo robes where the woman’s child slept, the boy breathing softly. And he could even make out where he hung his buckskin shirt and the two tube leggings the woman had sewn for him.

That first night in the Ute camp she had wasted no time in attempting to explain that he needed to throw out the worn, grease-slickened wool clothing he was then wearing. By pinching her nose and pointing at his britches, jabbing a finger inside the folds of his blanket coat at his linsey-woolsey shirt, it became abundantly clear what she thought of his smelly, frayed, and worn apparel.

And the widow hadn’t put up with her guest’s poor hygiene for long at all either. It was only the second morning when he awoke to find her beating on his shirt spread out atop a large, flat stone, a small stone gripped in her hand as she repeatedly pounded his smoke-and sweat-blackened clothing.

“What the devil are you doing!” he shrieked at her, lunging out to wrench his shirt from her as he sat up, completely naked in the buffalo robe and blanket bed.

Just as promptly Fawn had grabbed the shirt back, holding it up before him to show the collar, pointing out the mashed bodies of the lice he had hosted for some time.

“I … I see,” Titus had told her sheepishly, pantomiming for her to continue her killing of the varmints, hammering his fist down on the big rock. “Go ’head on, woman. Kill every last one of ’em for all I care!”

Again and again she pounded, until she leaned back in exasperation and gazed at him. No matter that he could not understand what words she chattered in disgust at the moment. But clearly there was resolve on her lined face as Fawn wrenched up his shirt and canvas breeches and quickly ducked from the lodge with them in hand.

“Where you going?” he demanded as the door flap slid back in place, a chilling gust of winter breeze tickling across his bare flesh.

With a shiver Titus pulled a smoke-scented blanket around his shoulders and scurried out the doorway in a
crouch. Squinting in the new day’s light reflected off the snow, he followed her as she stomped off toward a fire several other women were tending that early morning. Holding the shirt out as far as she could at the end of one arm, along with the breeches and his wool longhandles in the other hand, the widow instructed the others to stand back from their work at smoking a large elk hide draped over a tripod of saplings.

His bare feet began to complain with the cold of the trampled snow as he shrieked in frustration, “Said to you—where in hell you going with my clothes?”

Turning to look over her shoulder at him, Fawn muttered something in Ute to the others, then without further ceremony hurled the breeches beneath the kettle.

“Wait!” he hollered, lunging forward, not sure how he was going to rescue the pants from the flames that smoldered, sputtered, then suddenly began to catch hold of the greasy wool fabric.

“Damn you!” Titus said as he neared the woman.

But Fawn paid him no mind as she proceeded to fling the shirt atop the breeches—waited a few heartbeats until they began to smoke in kind—then hurled the filthy, faded red longhandles over the flames. Sighing with finality she stepped back, crossing her arms across her breasts, no small degree of self-satisfaction apparent on her face.

Skidding to a stop at the fire’s side in a flurry of powdery snow, he grabbed a long stirring stick away from one of the other women. She immediately jerked it back from him so he had no choice but to whirl on the widow.

“What in … what’m I gonna do now?” he roared. “Woman—them’s the only clothes I got me in the whole world! Damn if you women aren’t the most consarned, exasperating creatures! Jehoshaphat—I s’pose you didn’t figger I had to wear nothing more’n this goddamned blanket for the rest of the winter, did you?”

Behind their hands the women young and old sniggered at him. One of the oldest crones even pointed at his skinny white prairie-chicken legs protruding from the bottom of the pale-blue blanket and giggled, her wrinkled, old crow eyes merry. Titus looked down at his calves and ankles and feet, toes gone numb and turning blue as he stood there on the trammeled snow. Shivering, he realized
he must look a sight. Maybe they laughed at just how silly a white man looked in nothing but a blanket, he decided—instead of how embarrassing it was for him that Fawn had thrown his old worn shucks in their morning fire.

He stood there blue-lipped and trembling inside his blanket with that bunch of women, all of them watching together as the flames consumed the last of his earthly clothing—until the widow turned, shot him a glance as she passed by, headed back to her lodge.

“Wait up!” he growled, wheeling barefoot in the snow, feeling club-footed with his unresponsive legs struggling to set themselves into motion.

From the corner of his eye he spotted Billy Hooks poking his head from a distant lodge, and nearby Tuttle came out to stand in the first shafts of winter sunlight, likely drawn by the early-morning commotion.

“Morning, Scratch!” Bud hollered out merrily, waving in genuine greeting. “How was your weddin’ night?”

“Simply fine, goddammit!” he grumbled as he stumbled along stiff-legged. “Thanks for asking!”

Hooks laughed as he waved. “Better you put on some clothes, Scratch—afore you leave out to go calling on your neighbors!”

“Damn you too, Billy Hooks!” he spat, just about the time Fawn ducked her head and disappeared into the lodge.

Titus was right behind her.

Standing there inside the warmth of the lodge, he no longer shivered near as much, realizing just how cold he had been outside. And he tried to figure out what the hell to say to the widow—to tell her how angry he was—dismayed, really—that she had destroyed his clothing. But the more he watched her back as she knelt and started pulling at the laces on a rawhide container, the less he could think of what to say, and how to make Fawn understand just how she had poked a stick into his hornet’s nest.

With the noise of their return, the child awoke and sat up, calling for its mother. She said something to the boy softly, and he lay back down, his wide, round, black eyes
shirting from his mother to stare at the white man still standing near the door.

After a moment of rustling among the robes, Fawn turned to Bass and stood.

From her hands hung a large fringed buckskin shirt. She spoke to him, then shrugged, pantomiming that he was to take it. Bass held out one hand, still clutching the pale-blue blanket about him with the other.

“This for me?” he asked, then tapped his chest with a finger. “For me?”

With a nod the woman bent again and scooped up some more of the leather he now saw folded within a large, flat rawhide case. In each hand she held a legging as she stood. These too she held out for him to take.

“You,” she said in poor imitation of his English. “You.”

“Me?” and he allowed her to lay the two long tubes of buckskin over that arm of his clutching the shirt.

For a moment she stared at his crotch, then mimed a hand motion from waist to knee, up and down. And finally shrugged. Dropping to her knees again, she yanked her knife from her belt and pulled at a flap of the canvas he had draped over the piles of his possessions. The moment she jabbed the knife’s point into the dirty cloth and began to cut a foot-wide strip from its edge, he howled in dismay.

“Wait!” and he went to his knees beside her, reaching to stop the knife.

Fawn pushed him back and frowned at him as he shrank back from her threat when she brought the knife up in front of his face. Bass whimpered as the woman went back to work over the canvas until she had a strip a good seven to eight feet long.