The Shirt On His Back - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,8

Mexican authorities if you happened to find yourself a little farther south than you'd counted on, discourses on how to locate water in the arid stretches that lay between the western mountains, or where the beaver could still be found as thick and populous as they'd been ten years ago. ('Say, Prideaux, is it true that Cree squaw of Clem Groot's showed Groot where there's a secret valley where the beaver's the size of baby bears? You should see the pelts Groot brought in . . .')

Indians came as well. As a child, January had played with the children of the local Houmas and Natchez bands, who occasionally camped on his master's land, but even then he'd known that they were only the broken remnant of the people they once had been. Since crossing the frontier, he had found himself in the world of the Indians, where the tribes and nations were still strong. Shaw's little party had travelled from Independence along the Platte with a trading caravan bound for Santa Fe, for protection against the Pawnee, who still held sway on those endless grasslands, and here at the rendezvous a dozen tribes and peoples were represented: Crows and Snakes keeping company mostly with the trappers who worked for the AFC, Flatheads and Nez Perce camped around the Hudson's Bay tents, alliances mirroring the ancestral enmities of the plains. There were Shoshone and Mandan, Sioux and Omaha. There was even a bunch of Delaware Indians, who had fled the ruin of their people on the east coast two generations ago, to take up a sort of vassalage with the Company as scouts - 'I'll take you down there tomorrow, hoss, they got a squaw does nuthin' but sew moccasins, an' she can fix you up a new pair for fifty cents in twenty minutes . . .'

January had filled pages of Rose's notebook with jottings of their characteristic designs of war shirts or tipis, and with unsifted gossip about this tribe or that. Despite the fact that it was, as January well knew, completely illegal for white men to sell liquor to any Indian, when the tall Crow in their beaded deerskin shirts came with their packs of close-folded beaver skins, Gil Wallach shared several tin cups of watered-down forty-rod with them before negotiations began as to price. When they came into the store tent later - with the variously- colored 'plew' sticks that represented credit for pelts - January was given to understand that a water bottle filled with liquor was to be quietly set out behind the tent for them as part of the deal.

Other traders weren't so discreet. As the afternoon progressed, tribesmen in all degrees of serious inebriation came and went along the path or across the green open meadow to the west: shouting-drunk, singing-drunk, howling-drunk, weeping-drunk, men who had little experience with the raw alcohol doled out by the traders, and none whatsoever in how and when to stop.

One man staggered out of the trees, naked except for his moccasins, and began a reeling dance with his arms spread to the sky; Hannibal emerged from the tent beside January, asked, 'I never got like that, did IT

'Every night. Rose didn't want to hurt your feelings by telling you so.'

'Tell me that again if you ever see me head for the liquor tent.' The fiddler had gotten over the sweating jitters, but still looked like many miles of bad road.

'I promise.'

The squaws came, too, to admire the beads and, even more loudly, to admire the trappers who had skins to purchase them with. Beautiful, many of them, with their long black braids and doe eyes. Though he had not the slightest intention of being unfaithful to Rose, the sound of female voices after months of hearing nothing but masculine basses made January's loins ache.

It didn't help matters that every man at Fort Ivy, and every engage on the trail across the mountains to the rendezvous, had at one time or another informed him that most of the women of the tribes hadn't the slightest objection to a friendly roll on a blanket with a trapper who'd provide the vermillion, beads, mirrors, or knives that constituted wealth among the peoples of the plains and the mountains. It was a way of adding to her own and the family's wealth, and in addition, a way of obtaining the white men's luck and magic to pass along to their husbands. A number of the mountaineers who came by did