COLTER DIDN’T HAVE THE shits. They probably didn’t even have giardia back then, let alone the little yellow 400 mg metronidazole tablets they gave you to cure it. What they did have was hostiles, thousands of them, maybe hundreds of thousands, though the white race had done their best to bring those numbers down, what with smallpox and gonorrhea and rum, whiskey, vodka and gin. But here they were, the Blackfeet, terminally furious and flinging Potts’ bloody genitalia at him, and the only issue was not if but how they were going to put him to death. Braves kept lurching up to him, right in his face, tomahawks drawn, then jerking back again, as if to rattle him, but he kept calm because he saw that some of the higher-ranking ones, the chiefs, had withdrawn a ways to sit around in a circle and think things through. Why be hasty? They had all day, all night, and if he lasted that long, the day after that. He felt his heart sink, though he wouldn’t let his face show it. After a while the ululations dropped off and the young braves, the hotheads, held back in deference to their elders, but you could see they were aching for the moment they’d be set free—and gloating too over the prospect of what mold of sport the elders were devising for them.
Naked, with Potts’ blood drying on his chest and shoulders, Colter stood rigid, trying to focus his mind. He could make out something of what the elders were saying—some were for the death of a thousand slits, others for making a target out of him so they could improve their aim the way they had with Potts, maybe even take wagers as to which of them could drill him the closest without killing him outright. He had enough of their language to get a sense of all this, but not enough to plead his case—if he was doing anything at that moment it was trying to form the Blackfoot words in his head, when only the language of their enemies, the Crows, or Kee-kat-sa, as they called themselves, would rise up out of the depths of his brain, which was, understandably, under a whole lot of stress at the moment.
Finally, one of the chiefs—tall, bleak-faced, with reddened mucousy eyes and skin jerked by the wind and sun—pushed himself up and ambled over to stand face-to-face with him, practically nose-to-nose. Colter could smell him, the tobacco he sucked through his pipe, the sweat of his horse, the dried buffalo meat and pounded meal he’d had for breakfast. They stood like that for a long moment, Colter naked and vulnerable and wanting only to sprout wings and fly on out of there, the hardest thing to keep your back straight and not give in to the impulse to protect your gut—a reflex, really—and guard against a sneak blow that would double you up and leave you gasping in the dirt. “Are you a fast runner?” the chief asked, but Colter didn’t understand him, so after a long moment, the chief repeated himself and he got the gist of it. This was hope. A particle of it, anyway. He’d heard of similar situations, in which a tribe would let their captive run for his life so they could have the sport of the chase, like fox and hounds, except that the ground was festooned with prickly pear and the fox had no moccasins to protect his feet and even if he did there was nowhere to escape to or even hide in all that flat deserted plain.
And what did Colter say, in his accent that must have been a kind of insult in itself? “Not really.”