Ride the Moon Down by Terry C. Johnston Page A

porcupine, that awakened him, most times the trapper would come to, suddenly aware of some seminal change in the nightsounds drifting around their camp—even if it were nothing more than the rustle of an owl’s wings as it prowled on the hunt through the branches overhead or a change in the wind’s pitch as it soughed on down the valley below them. Season after season, the senses of those who hadn’t gone under became honed more finely, polished to clarity, become virtually instinctual.
    Too many times in these last nine years he had simply reacted, not given the luxury of a moment to plan, to consider and reflect on what course to take. Here he was alive after so many had tried to kill him simply because Bass had absorbed the virtual wildness of this wilderness. Theway of those beasts around him, that survival of the quickest, the most wary, those most cunning.
    He had survived in this wilderness where lesser men were swallowed up simply because he had become wild enough to reach across that gulf between man and beast.
    They had autumn beaver, a damned good start on what prime pelts he’d trap come spring. Maybe even do this winter what he hadn’t done in recent years—slip off for days at a time and search out those high country meadows and dammed streams where the beaver were laying out their winter safely burrowed in their lodges. A man could bust open the tops of those lodges, then shoot or spear the big flat-tails he caught inside. But those efforts always left a trapper with furs something less than prime—punctured by a gaping hole or two. Something that would pare down the price of his plews come rendezvous next summer.
    And with what he had seen of the high cost of necessaries coupled with the slide in the dollar that a man’s beaver could bring, Titus Bass didn’t figure he could chance anything else robbing him of what prime he had left among his plews.
    South of the Yellowstone River where the Crow would winter, down toward the Stinking Water around that region the trappers called Colter’s Hell, he was sure he could run onto some creeks and streams fed by warming springs, even those wider rivers where the banks bore plenty of beaver sign plain as paint and the water remained open throughout the cold months. A week of hard work here, and a week there, returning to the Crow camp to turn his hides over to his woman, nestle himself down in the robes with her naked, full-breasted warmth for a few days before he would set out again in search of another stretch of winter trapping.
    Sure sounded like it had the makings of some fine winter doings. He’d revisit his old friends among the Crow, stay off and on with Waits-by-the-Water and his in-laws … but when he got that old itch to be on the tramp again, why—he could pack up a mess of dried meatand pemmican before heading south with Samantha in search of brown gold.
    “Husband,” she called out, the word catching in her throat.
    She had seen the smoke a heartbeat before he spotted it. Down the slope to their left, rising among the last few leaves still clinging to those cottonwood branches—faint spirals of wood smoke. Bass imagined he could already smell its fragrance like a wispy perfume on the cold autumn wind gusting along the ground, kicking up icy streamers across the top of the most recent dusting of snow.
    “They are camped right where we believed we would find them,” he said with a smile. “Let’s ride on down there and show your family this little girl of ours.”

5

    Arapooesh was dead.
    It slapped him with the same brutality he had experienced in losing Ebenezer Zane, Mad Jack Hatcher, even the canny old preacher Asa McAfferty.
    Rotten Belly simply wasn’t the sort who rode off half-cocked, spoiling for a fight, taking stupid chances. No, he had always been a warrior’s warrior, a prudent fighter who persisted in considering the odds and planning every detail of the battles he led against the enemy.
    But the Crow had many enemies,