Free Ride the Moon Down by Terry C. Johnston Page B

began to squirm again, her legs kicking, arms pumping, fists flailing in discontent, a little brown-skinned ball of anger at the end of his arms, held here against the black sky in the fire’s light, her flesh lit red as Mexican copper.
    “We honor this gift you have given the two of us, First Maker!” he said now.
    “This little one who you knew would make a place for herself in our hearts.”
    Slowly, the baby slowed her leg’s gyrations, quieted her fussing.
    “You gave this little one her name at the very beginning—evenfrom the start of time … and you have waited for us to discover her name for ourselves.”
    The child cooed, reaching for those sparks that spiraled upward from the flames leaping inches from Bass’s knees. Then he realized his daughter was no longer trying to catch the daring, dancing sparks. Instead she reached for those twinkling bits of light just beyond her reach, those stars flung against the blackened backdrop.
    “Help us protect her, to raise her right, strong, and straight. Help us to teach her to know you,” he said, feeling the first tear spill from his brimming eyes.
    The infant was talking again, not chattering at her father, but babbling at those flecks of light in the sky above her. Just beyond her reach.
    “We know she is our child for only a short time, Grandfather. We know you have been so kind to part with her while she comes to us for a short time. Help us both to see that she walks the right trail. And help us to make her happy.”
    At the end of his arms the babe stretched out her arms again and again, flexing her tiny, pudgy fingers, trying to scoop up the glittering specks of brilliant light as her happy, constant chatter grew all the bolder.
    “So you have told me her name,” Bass said, both eyes streaming now as he gazed upon his daughter. “We ask your blessings on this child who will be called … Magpie.”
    Quickly he looked over at his wife. Tears suddenly spilled from her eyes too as she brought the fingertips of both hands to her lips, smiling and sobbing at the same time. Waits nodded to him, then looked at their daughter there above them both in the copper firelight.
    Past the happy sob clogging her throat, Waits-by-the-Water pushed the word, “M-magpie.”
    “Magpie,” Bass repeated as he lowered the babe into his wife’s arms, “this little talking one called Magpie has come to be with us for a while.”
    As they followed Ham’s Fork down to its mouth to depart the valley, Bass had kept his pony close to Waits’shorse. The rendezvous site was crowded with coyotes, a few lanky-legged wolves, and flocks of big-winged, wrinkled-necked buzzards flapping and cawing out of the sky all around them.
    Zeke strained at the length of rope tied round his neck, yanking on the strong hand that restrained him as Titus led them east. “Easy, boy. Easy.”
    From far and wide, what had called in those predators was the stench.
    Those streamside camps once filled with over six hundred white men along with some three-times-that-many Indians was making for quite a feast of carrion. Several snarling wolves or angry, flapping, snapping vultures clustered around every butchered carcass or gut-pile left behind. So bold had these predators become with their feasting that the sound of the horses’ approach did not drive off the four-legged and birds, much less the sight of those horses and humans as Scratch took his family past the refuse of each of Rocky Mountain Fur’s progressive camps, Wyeth’s camp, and finally what had been American Fur’s camp where Ham’s Fork poured into Black’s Fork.
    It was good, he thought, so good to leave that place where so many had crowded together with all their noise. That place of grass trampled beneath so many moccasins and hooves, what grass hadn’t been cropped and chewed by the thousands of horses. But given a winter to lie fallow beneath the snows of this high, arid country, those meadows along the creek would cloak