Buffalo Palace

7

“There h’ain’t no use to pushing on,” Silas Cooper announced to the other three that late afternoon as the wind and snow battered them with such force that it nearly wore a man out. “We’ll hunker down to camp here.”

“Don’t figger we can make it?” Bud Tuttle asked before he swung out of the saddle right behind Cooper in the deep, swirling snow they had been slogging their way through.

“Sun’s falling,” Silas explained, looking off to the west, then looked up ahead of them. “Clouds dropped on that pass up yonder. H’ain’t no way we’re gonna make it over an’ back down to timber afore dark no way.”

Titus watched them both anxiously. In the last few weeks he had come to trust their judgment on just about everything. And now the four of them had just passed timberline into the open, where the wind battered and bruised them without respite. The animals were beginning to bog down in ever-deeper snow. All around them the soft white flakes kept on falling, gusting, swirling in what was close to becoming a whiteout.

“We gonna get ourselves snowed in here, Silas!” Billy Hooks whined.

“What about game?” Titus asked, anxious, his belly growling.

“Game?”

Bass continued, “How we gonna eat?”

“There’ll be game, Scratch. Don’t y’ fret yourself ’bout that.”

“And if there ain’t, for balls’ sake?” Tuttle demanded, slogging up through the snow that reached to their knees.

“Then we’ll eat our damned horses,” Cooper replied, glaring at Bud. “Beginning with yours!”

For a moment the two men stared at one another, shoulders loose, hands encased in those crude blanket mittens ready to snatch up a belt pistol or knife if the other jumped.

“C’mon, boys,” Hooks finally cooed. “Let’s g’won back down there some to that last big patch of trees where we can fort up.”

Without taking his eyes off Tuttle, Cooper said, “Plumb center idee you got, Billy. Let’s camp, boys.”

Until Silas and Billy yanked their horses and mules around and started back down the slope on foot, followed a moment later by Bud Tuttle, Bass didn’t realize he had been gripping the butt of the big pistol he carried stuffed in the wide belt at his waist.

There was something deadly about Silas Cooper—something always there right under the surface, something that he figured could strike with the quickness of a cotton-mouth while the man was still smiling at you, talking to you … giving you no warning of the danger. In his thirty-one years Titus had learned that some men were easy to steer clear of because you had a clear sense of who they were and the danger they posed. And then there were a few like Cooper. They were the scariest of all.

The sort who could turn on you in the blink of an eye. When you had no idea it was coming.

Down the gentle slope the four men slid and skidded, plunging between the sparse, wind-tortured scrub cedar until they reached the copse of stunted pine Hooks had suggested. Here at least, Titus thought as they crowded into the cluster of trees, they would be out of most of that wind driving the snow into thick, wavering banners of ground blizzard, a wind that this high could cut through a man like a hot pewter knife would slide right through Marissa Guthrie’s freshly churned butter.

“I-I …,” and Bass worked hard to keep his teeth from chattering in the cold. “I ain’t n-never been this g-goddamned high afore.”

Tuttle turned his head to regard the leaden sky, the clouds no more than fifty, maybe as much as a hundred, feet at the most over their heads. “You best watch your swearing, Scratch. We’re up high enough on these mountains a man might just run hisself into a angel or two!”

Hooks laughed easily with that. “Long as them angels is womens—I don’t mind running onto ’em at all! Yessirreebob! Been dreaming more an’ more about soft breasties and a woman humping up and down on my stinger. I’d take me a angel right about now—right here in the snow!”

Tuttle wagged his head, looking at Bass to say, “Billy and his womens. Always got a passel of ’em on the brain.”

“Been thinking on women my own self,” Titus admitted.

Tuttle smiled. “Ain’t hard to figger, Scratch. Not when a man’s been doing so long without.”

“Sounds like you think on the womens too, Bud.”

Tuttle stopped his horse, turned toward it to throw up the stirrup and grab the cinch. “I’m a man—like any else, I s’pose.”

“You think back on a special girl?” Titus inquired.

“Just remember women. First one of ’em to come into my head. I ain’t never been particular when it comes to poking a woman center … so why should I be particular when it comes to thinking about ’em?”

“I remember this one gal back along the Ohio,” Titus began to explain. “She weren’t my first, but she was a whore—so she was the first what showed me how much fun poking could be with a woman.”

“You ’member her name?” Bud asked as he dragged the saddle and blanket from his horse.

“Abigail—uh, Mincemeat was her given name.”

“There been others, ain’t there?”

“A few. Sweet farmer’s daughter and a mess of dark-skinned backwater whores.”

“And don’t forget that widow woman what give you them passel of gray back nits.”

“Even thought on her a time or two, I have,” Bass admitted. “All them lonely nights I camped along the Platte, even after I got out here to these mountains.”

“Sometimes all the quiet out here can make a man’s mind turn to such things as womenfolk, the women a man left him back there,” Tuttle suggested as he turned away to gaze at the rest of their pack stock Cooper and Hooks were driving into the trees.

“Only natural, ain’t it—”

The loud shriek of the mule interrupted the two of them. In the copse of stunted pine, there amid the jostling mass of pack animals and horses, Bass could see Cooper lunging about, swinging a long tree limb—and each time he connected with a sound audible over the crying wind, one of the mules bawled in a painful bray.

Titus began to step in Silas’s direction. “What the devil do you think—”

But Tuttle leaped out, grabbing Bass’s sleeve, snagging it and stopping Titus in his tracks. “For balls’ sake—don’t! It ain’t none of your business, Scratch.”

“Any man beating his animals, that is my business,” he said as he whipped his arm free of Tuttle’s grip.

As Titus moved this way, then that, to cut a path through the milling stock, which Cooper and Hooks were corralling within a roped-off area strung between that stand of trees, Titus watched Silas work himself into a fury, lashing out, lunging, swinging that long tree limb at the back of the mule mare that reared and scree-hawed in pain and fear, clumsy because only half her packs had been taken from her back. As Bass got closer, he saw the limb snap in half at the back of the mule’s head. Dazed, the animal stumbled sideways, wild-eyed with fear, nostrils throbbing as it tried to swing its haunches around and kick out.

Cooper swung once more with the short half of the limb he clutched like a war club in both hands—but didn’t make contact as the mule lunged aside. His rage boiling over, Silas hurled the limb down into the skiff of snow, where he fought a moment for footing, then dragged his big smoothbore horse pistol from the wide sash that held his blanket coat closed. As the weapon came up, Cooper was cursing above the bawl of the mule and the cry of the wind, dragging the hammer back two clicks to full-cock … then pointed the muzzle directly at the mule’s head, little more than an arm’s length from the frightened eyes that stared at the human, the beast not knowing its next breath would be its last.

Leaping and shoving his way through the anxious, milling, frightened animals, Titus landed next to Cooper, grabbing Silas’s left wrist—and clamped down with all the strength he could muster. All he could remember was how the packmare’s eye stared up at him as he pulled the trigger.

“You weasel-stoned son of a bitch!” Cooper growled as he jerked around to stare right into Bass’s face. “Let go a’me!”.

“Put it away!” Titus snapped, feeling the big man’s arm tremble in fury.

“Gonna shoot you first!”

Struggling to keep the oak-thick arm down and the pistol pointed at the ground, Bass pleaded, “Don’t shoot that mule—damn, please don’t shoot it.”

Cooper’s eyes narrowed, and he immediately quit trying to thrash his arm loose of Bass’s two-handed grip. “The mule? The mule, is it?”

“Don’t kill ’er.”

“That mare ain’t been nothing but trouble since we took ’er on,” Cooper said, his eyes still seething. “Time I got rid of what makes trouble for me. Now, y’ just let go a’me and stand back. I got work to finish—”

“I ain’t letting go,” Bass said resolutely, watching how his words startled the bigger man. “You cain’t go an kill her for no good reason.”

“No good reason?” Cooper shrieked. “I got good reason, Titus Bass … and for nothing more’n the hell of it if’n I wanna.”

Desperate not to watch another animal die with a lead ball in its brain, Titus blurted, “L-lemme have ’er.”

Something came across Silas’s face in that next moment as he stared down at Titus Bass, standing there toe to toe, only inches between them. “Y’ … y’ say y’ want this cantankerous pile of mule shit for yourself?”

“Just lemme have ’er and you won’t have to waste your time no more on the mule.”

Silas wagged his head. “But I awready give y’ a mule to use for packin’ your truck and plews.”

Titus nodded, sensing his arms growing weary as he continued to grip Cooper’s wrist. “I’ll trade you. That’s what we’ll do.”

“A trade.” Finally Silas nodded, then gazed at where Bass held his wrist. “Awright. We’ll work us a fair trade. Now, y’ best let go a’me, Titus.”

He immediately released Cooper’s arm. “You gimme that mule and I’ll give you back the one you gimme that first day you run onto me.”

Cooper rubbed the wrist Bass had held imprisoned for those long, terrifying moments. “Hold on there: it ain’t so easy to trade pack stock. You’re just a dumb pilgrim when it comes to tradin’, ain’cha, Scratch? Y’ see, y’ made the mistake of letting the other man find out just how willing y’ was to be trading—showed me plain just how much y’ wanted what I got to trade.”

“We’re just swapping the mules, one for t’other,” Bass said.

“That’s only fair, Silas,” Tuttle agreed, licking his cracked lips nervously.

“One for t’other. One for t’other,” Billy Hooks repeated with that ready smile of his as he shifted back and forth from foot to foot.

“No,” Cooper snapped. “If’n y’ want this mule so bad, then we’ll trade. But it’s gonna cost y’ more’n just that fly-bait mule I give y’ when I first took you on. That’uns the wust in our hull bunch.”

Bass swallowed. “What’s it gonna cost me?”

Silas appeared to regard that for a long moment as he peered over at the mule carrying all that Bass owned in the world. “Y’ been doing good at trappin’, Scratch.”

“I been catching on what you learned me, yeah.”

“Got better’n Tuttle, y’ have—right off.”

Bud snorted. “That ain’t hard for ary a man to do!”

“And you’re damn near good as Billy Hooks right now.”

Titus said, “I’d wager I am as good as Billy right now.”

“Maybeso you’re better’n me,” Hooks injected, “but you’ll never be good as Silas Cooper!”

“Maybe I will,” Bass replied, watching those coal-black eyes come back to rest on him. “One day real soon.”

Cooper asked quietly, “Y’ want this here mule, Scratch?”

“You know I do, goddammit,” he snapped, knowing full well it was going to cost him dearly.

“Then I’ll trade y’,” Cooper offered. “For your ol’ fly-bait animal, and half what plews y’ll catch this winter.”

Tuttle gasped. “T-that mean from here on out, Silas?”

“No, that means half of everything Scratch trapped up till now, and half till we reach ronnyvoo come summer.”

Titus seethed inside. “W-what’s ronnyvoo?”

Silas explained, “Where I tol’t you we was gonna barter in our beaver come next summer. Drink some whiskey and poke a squar or two … barter us plunder for next year. Ronnyvoo.”

Bass swallowed hard, knowing he had nowhere to wiggle in the negotiations. “H-half of my hides this winter … till ronnyvoo—”

“You want the mule … or don’cha?”

“I want it,” Bass said squarely.

“Then it’s a deal,” Cooper said, sticking out his bare right hand in that bitterly cold wind.

Bass yanked off his mitten, took the hand, and shook as he gazed up into those marblelike eyes of Cooper’s. “It’s a deal.”

Then he felt Silas slowly start squeezing, bearing down harder, slowly harder as the muscles and bones of his hand cried out in sudden, hot pain. When he looked back up at Cooper’s eyes, they were lit with cold, cold fire.

Behind that big grin of his, Silas said, “And … one more thing, Titus Bass.”

That hand hurt like hell, so much it was hard to speak. “What’s … what’s that, Silas?”

“Don’t y’ ever, ever again lay a hand on me …”

He interrupted, “I don’t figger I’ll have cause to lay a hand on—”

But Cooper snarled, interrupting, “Or the next time y’ll pull back a bloody stump.”

* * *

That mule-for-beaver bargain had been nothing short of mountain thievery.

And for certain there had been times since that very first day when Titus Bass wished he’d let Silas Cooper go right on ahead and put a lead ball in that mule’s head.

But for all the trouble she’d give him in those days and weeks that would come to pass—besides the pain of having to trade off that half of his beaver plews to boot—Scratch remained steadfastly hopeful that the sorrel mule would one day come around and behave like a decent, docile, and obedient animal … the sort that would prove herself to be a true partner to a man, just like those mules that had faithfully plowed the ground for his pap back in Boone County.

Why, Titus had even named the stubborn, stiff-backed mule—something new for him: Bass had never before named a horse or mule, ever—but feeling this time that to give her a name might not only make it seem she was just that much more special to him, but she might well come to know the sound of her own name, learn to recognize it, and might thereby figure she was pretty damned special to him.

“Hannah,” he had told her aloud the third morning of that storm, after sitting and studying her for the longest time, watching the sorrel’s big eyes study him in turn as she worked on a patch of ground he had cleared of snow. “I’ve always favored that name—for a wife of my own, thought maybeso for my daughter. So I’d like you to have it … Hannah.”

As hard as he was to work in the Weeks to come, hoping that the mule might just one day come around to his way of thinking and try a little to be his friend … well—trouble was, the two of them were still a long, long way off from that glorious day.

The early-winter storm on the pass had indeed continued another three days and nights, dumping an icy snow without stop. In their sheltering ring of trees the four men chopped what firewood they needed from the limbs and branches of that copse of stunted pine. A part of each morning they used their time to scrape and chisel down through the new snow to reach some bare ground for the horses and mules grown weary of digging for themselves with bloody hooves. Most afternoons two of the men ventured out to hunt in relay, going as far off as they would dare—every one of them aware how a man could easily get himself turned around in the endless white blur of a blizzard.

What they managed to bring in for all their effort was hardly enough to keep one man well fed, much less four hearty appetites in that subzero cold: a few snowshoe hares, a handful of blue grouse, and a fat marmot—one more than Titus ever wanted to see again in his life. Nevertheless, that poor fare along with the one bony Indian pony they sacrificed kept those men alive enough so that after five more days, when the weather cleared, they were strong enough to urge their animals on up past timberline, across the loose, shifting talus and shale of that treacherous saddle, then down the far side of the eastern slopes into the trees, where they would surely have more luck hunting what game had been driven down, ever down, to lower elevations by the winter storms.

“That back there be Buffalo Pass,” Cooper announced near twilight of that ninth day as they reached a meadow where the snow had blown clear on the lee side.

“You been up there afore?” Titus asked.

“We have,” Tuttle answered, flicking a glance at Cooper. “But we ain’t ever come this way.”

Turning to Cooper, Titus inquired, “How’d you know what the pass is called?”

“Only know cause I just named it,” Silas admitted. “Look for yourself.”

The three others turned to look up behind them as the gray clouds were beginning to drop, hurrying in to obscure the high granite formations that marked the very trail they had made across the saddle. Stark against the darkening clouds lowering on the pass was one formation in particular that from this side appeared to closely resemble a buffalo bull’s head—horns, chin whiskers and all.

“Buffalo Pass, it be, Silas,” Tuttle agreed as he clambered to the ground, stood a moment rubbing life back into his cold knees and thighs, then started to trudge back to the pack animals. “Scratch, you and Billy get some rope strung out in them trees for a corral, an’ I’ll bring in the cavvyyard.”

“Cawy … cawyyard?” Bass repeated.

“The remuda,” Billy said with that impish grin of his. “The horses … our herd, you idjit!”

“Cawyyard,” Titus repeated again, liking the feel of it on his tongue. “I ain’t never heard it called such—and you called it something else?”

“A remuda.”

“Yeah,” he said. “A remuda.”

“Billy’s picked up all he could of that greaser talk,” Cooper explained.

Hooks defended himself. “Some of them greaser words I really took a shine to, Silas.”

Cooper sneered. “That’s all them greasers good for, Billy—an’ don’t y’ forget it.”

Billy leaned close to Titus, saying, “Silas don’t like him them greasers down south in the Mexican Territory. We run onto a few of ’em trapping with American boys outta the greaser settlements a time or two—so Silas come to hate them people more ever’ time we bump into ’em.”

As he walked past with a horse at the end of each arm trailing behind him, Tuttle said, “Maybeso that’s why this is about as far south as we ever go nowadays, don’t you figger, Billy?”

“Silas’s medicine tells him we best stay in the country somewheres atween the Blackfoots and the greasers,” Hooks continued as Titus tied off one end of a long rope to one of the trees, then began to play out the rope to another tree.

As he wrapped the weathered hemp rope around the tree once, then moved off for the next, Bass inquired, “What’s up there in that north country make a man wanna get troubled by them Blackfoots anyway, Billy?”

“Beaver,” Hooks replied.

“For balls’ sake—big beaver!” Tuttle added as he finished tying off the second horse to the first section of their rope corral.

Cooper moved past with two horses and said, “The biggest beaver a man ever lay his eyes on.”

“That’s it?” Titus asked.

Stopping, Silas regarded Bass a moment, then added, “Beaver big enough—ever’ last one of ’em seal fat an’ sleek, so fine that a man might damn well risk his own hair just to lay down his traps in that country.”

“Three Forks: my, my,” Hooks commented with a cluck of his tongue.

“Fine country,” Tuttle agreed.

“Country just crawling with Blackfoot niggers—yessirreebob,” Hooks replied.

On his way past Titus to fetch another pair of the animals, Cooper slapped Bass on the back of the shoulders. “Maybeso that’s where we’ll take Scratch here come next winter.”

“Blackfoot country?” Titus repeated. How the name of that land ignited images of a forbidden land.

“Beaver pelts nigh big as blankets,” Tuttle said. “Just big enough to bury a man in when those red niggers lift his hair!”

“Bud’s a might squampshus, you understand,” Cooper declared. “He h’ain’t much a trapper, so it don’t seem worthwhile to go up to that country and stick his neck out for the prime beaver.”

“Prime beaver,” Billy repeated in a shrill voice. “Beaver just calling out, ‘Yoohoo! Come an’ get me Bud Tuttle!’ Then ’nother beaver cross the stream hollers out, ‘No, Bud Tuttle—come an’ get me!’ Pretty soon all them beavers is scrapping and fighting so hard to be the one what gets catched in Bud’s trap that the poor nigger never does catch him very many!”

“Sometimes, Billy Hooks,” Tuttle growled, his face flushing with anger, “you’re nothing more’n lucky. A lucky son of a bitch for what little brains you got left, what little ain’t already poured out your bunghole.”

“I may not be smart as you, Bud—but I’m sure as hell a better trapper’n you’re ever gonna be!”

“Right now all I want out o’ the two of you is for all you boys go drag in some timber—since you finished stringing up our corral, Billy.” Silas jumped into the argument as he brought up the last two horses. “Hush up your yammerin’ and get us plenty of wood. It’s fixin’ to get dark on us real quick.”

Tuttle strode up with the last of the mules in tow, asking, “How long you figger afore we’ll make it down to Park Kyack, Silas?”

“The north park? Why, lookee down there, Bud—an’ the rest of you. There it lay. Park Kyack.”

Hook wheeled about on his heel, his smile broadening. “Kyack? Down yonder’s where we’ll winter up with the Yutas?”

Cooper nodded. “That’s right, Billy. Y’ know what that means, don’cha?”

Leaping into the air with a wild, whirling, primal dance, Hooks shook and trembled like an old dog whose master had just returned home from a long, long journey. “Means womens! Womens! And more womens!”

That night Titus tossed in his blankets, unable to warm himself enough to escape the deliciously tempting dreams that flitted about the broken pieces of what shattered sleep he could capture.

Everywhere he looked, it was black. Up, down, and in all directions—then he realized he was floating in the water as black as the sky, stretching far, far to the horizon, where it touched the black sky and they became one. Only when Titus moved his arms to keep himself afloat did the starshine ripple across the surface of the water … then she was there.

Amy slowly pushed her way toward him across the black starlit water rippling in front of her as she slowly flung her arms out to stroke. As she drew ever closer, he could even see her bare feet break the surface now and again as her long legs kicked and paddled. Her shoulders bare and glistening with the water. Her white neck so long, and her dark hair strung out behind her. Then he saw a hint of the flesh at the tops of her breasts as they broke the surface, side to side with each stroke as she came closer, closer.

Waiting for her, Titus could feel his flesh harden, stiffen, lengthen—knowing that she was coming to him here in their secret pond. Here where they met to satisfy their great hunger.

Anxious, he reached out his arms to Amy—ready to draw her to him, to lift her up, then urge her down on the throbbing flesh between his legs … but as he strained to reach for her, she took a breath and disappeared beneath the surface.

“Titus,” a gentle voice called out to him over his shoulder, so close he could almost feel the woman’s breath on his skin. “Titus Bass.”

He turned from the ripples where Amy had disappeared to watch Marissa Guthrie drawing close, stopping there on the edge of the bank, stalks and flecks of hay cluttering her hair the way it always had when they had savagely coupled in the loft of her father’s barn there south of St. Louis.

“Oh, Marissa—it is you!” he heard himself exclaim, heart hammering, beginning to paddle for her.

“Come to me, Titus! I’ll give you children, and this land—give you everything a man could ever want—just come to me!”

How quickly she threw off her dress, naked beneath—then dived into the water. He felt almost ready to agree with anything Marissa asked as he reached her … her head coming out of the water right in front of him. Titus grabbed her naked shoulders in his two hands and lifted her hungrily out of the water to catch a glimpse of her breasts. How he had loved kissing them, sucking them, fondling them as it drove her wild with desire for him.

Bending, Titus nuzzled and sucked on them, lost in the pure heaven of the smell, the taste, the feel of her flesh. Then he brought his face up, planting his mouth over hers and opening her lips as he drew her breath into his lungs.

She tasted of cornmeal and hard cider, the tang of old smoke and that morning’s hog sausage gone stale on her breath. Marissa had never smelled quite like that before.

Titus drew his head back in wonder to ask her why, now, did she smell so … when he found he was holding the widow. She smiled, her eyes filled as they tearfully uttered their thanks; then she pulled his head down between her breasts once more, pressing him close, close, so close he could not breathe anything but the scent of her ravenous sex as she reached out and took hold of his hardened flesh, beginning to stroke it rapidly, urgently, savagely.

How he wanted in her before he exploded. And oh, how he begged the woman to place him there, but just as he began to murmur to her, the first great waves of relief washed over him. How miraculous it felt to have her hand sliding up and down the length of him as he rocked against her, his face buried between her breasts as he groaned in sheer happiness.

Moments later, as he finished, Titus suddenly realized the water had disappeared, and with it the black sky overhead. Yet worst of all was the startling cold where his cheek lay. Instead of the widow woman’s breasts, his face lay against the old, scarred, unforgiving leather of his saddle. And instead of her hand wrapped around his hardened flesh, Bass realized it was his own.

Just as it was his loneliness for a woman—any woman—that troubled him with these dreams most every night now. How he prayed each time he awoke that it was not Amy nor Marissa, not even the widow woman the dreams were telling him he should join himself to. Praying it was nothing more than the woman hunger Tuttle spoke of, the sort of appetite every man in the mountains must endure for long periods of drought before he can dance and revel in the land of plenty with brown-skinned squaws who are every bit as hungry to have a man between their legs as a man is ravenous in his appetites to have himself planted in their moist heat.

Lying there, Titus found the night so quiet that he could hear the flames lick along the length of some of the limbs in their fire. Raising his head, Titus looked round at the other three, all four of them radiating out from the fire like spokes of a wheel. He dragged his cracked, thin-soled moccasins back under the layer of thick blankets and covered his head once more. Warmer was it to breathe here in the dark, he thought.

And closing his eyes again, brooding on how his own stark white flesh might well look pressed against the dark thigh or gently rounded belly of an Injun woman, Bass put himself back to sleep. Behind his eyes the white and brown flesh rubbed together so fast and with such savage fury that he wasn’t sure any longer if he really was master to his fate in coming here to this far, foreign, and frightening place … or in the end had he only discovered that he was nothing more than a slave to his hungers.

She smelled of smoke and grease.

Her clothing, which lay discarded at the far side of this tiny lodge, smelled strongly of her woman scent mixed in with the firesmoke and the spatter of cooking grease. Even her skin and hair—spread there beneath his nose and across his chest like black, glossy tendrils as she lay sleeping—all of it smelled of smoke and grease and the shocking cold of winter forest.

Tui-rua-ci.

Fawn, she was called.

Coals still glowed in the fire pit, and it was warm with her under the buffalo robes and heavy wool blankets. Morning would be a long time getting here in the heart of winter. Here, nestled in the marrow of the mountains. At long last now he could luxuriate in not having to rise before sunup to check a trapline.

Weary, Titus closed his eyes again, letting the blackness ooze over him once more. No longer did he worry about where the others were or what became of them. Silas, Bud, and Billy were all three likely out cold right about then—noisily sawing lumber the way they snored—having danced themselves silly in the ballet of that beast with two backs. Hooks was a hungry, voracious man with a sexual appetite that drove him to couple repeatedly with any woman, wife or daughter, young or middling, who either had her the slightest inclination to bed him or was graciously turned over to the white man as a gift from a good host.

And Bass figured Tuttle and Cooper weren’t the sort to lag far behind Hooks in the hunger department.

Most days in winter camp the four white men gathered to do nothing more than did the Ute men in winter camp: sit, eat, smoke, and swap their stories of past battles or their exploits in killing a bear or capturing an eagle for its feathers. Over the past weeks Titus came to understand the rudiments of that talk Silas, Bud, and Billy had with the Ute, slowly learning that universal language of the fingers, hand, and arm moving in a graceful dance of silent expression.

Then each night, from the Ute widow who had taken Titus into her lodge, he learned a little more of the tribe’s spoken tongue.

Not that she was all that much to feast your eyes on, but he could tell right off that second day after they reached the Ute’s winter camp that she was good of heart. Besides, she knew just how to pleasure him in the blankets, and what she cooked over her lodge fires he could eat with relish. Although it had taken him some to get used to her boiling all them organs.

In fact, their first night together she had fed him elk heart—turned slimy and gelatinous simmering there in the kettle for what must surely have been the better part of the past three days.

“The ol’ man here,” Cooper had explained that first afternoon, telling Titus the results of a long exchange of sign language, some dutiful handshaking, and loud elocutions in both Ute and white tongues, “he’s the gal’s uncle.”

“Whose uncle?” Bass had inquired, his eyes searching the crowd of women and children who had gathered behind their men in welcoming the white men into their midst when the four had burst out of the timber into the bottomland, whooping and hollering to beat the band, firing their rifles into the air to greet the young warriors who had hurried out to meet them—their dark, brazen frowns turned quickly to happy smiles all round. Indeed, Titus could readily see why Tuttle had repeatedly emphasized that the Ute were a good people to hunker down with for the winter.

“Why,” Silas replied, “the woman who said she’d take y’ in, Scratch.”

“T-take me in?” he echoed, then immediately grew particular. “She be young or old?”

“Y’ grown particular?” and Cooper flashed him a disapproving look. “It don’t matter, do it?”

With a shrug Bass glanced over the female faces and said, “Long as it’s a place to sleep, I s’pose it don’t.”

Cooper slapped a hand on Bass’s shoulder. “Leastways, she’s old enough to be a widder woman.”

“A widder woman!” Billy shrieked. “Ah-hah! Scratch’s gonna fork him a widder woman for winter!”

“Just like the widder woman what give him the nits!” Tuttle had gushed with laughter too.

Enough laughter that it made Bass’s cheeks burn in embarrassment, and his stomach churn with a sudden angry seizure. Maybe he had no business expecting anything better, what with his being the greenest among them, but to be made the butt of their jokes once again—after all this time and after so many jokes played on him … now, that galled him ail the more.

“A widow woman,” Titus repeated, the words tasting sour. He swallowed hard, forcing down the bitter tang of them as he was of a sudden reminded of the Widow Grigsby. Then he jutted out his chin. “By damn, you niggers—at least that squaw’ll be no stranger to gathering firewood!” He whirled on black-haired Billy to say right to the man’s face, “And I’ll wager she knows her wav around a kettle pot too, Billy Hooks! Better’n I can say for you!”

Cooper banged Tuttle on the back, roaring with good-natured laughter, throwing his head back and letting his voice rise to the winter sky. “Why, if the greenhorn here ain’t got him a bit of ha’r after all!”

Bass continued, “So if’n it’s here we’re to plop down for the winter, by Jehoshaphat, I figure to stay warm and keep my belly full at that widder woman’s fire!”

Tuttle slapped a hand on Hooks’s shoulder, the both of them sniggering uncontrollably. Bud said, “I’ll … I’ll bet that widder woman knows her way round under a buffler robe too, Titus Bass!”

Silas Cooper roared again at that, his Adam’s apple bouncing up and down between the thick, muscular cords in his neck, then told his three companions, “Good for us it be that all this high-larity come at just the time when these here Ute bucks is all smiling and acting good-natured themselves.”

“Wouldn’t be for us to be laughing at that ol’ chief’s gift of his niece, would it, now?” Tuttle observed, winking at Bass.

“Boys, looks to be we got us as prime a place to hunker down for the next few weeks as there be in the mountains,” Silas repeated later as the crowd began to disperse and the four chosen women remained behind in the bright afternoon light to take home their white lodge guests. “Empty your packs and keep your plunder at your side this first night. Be sartin y’ picket your animals outside your door come sundown—so it be close at hand for the first few nights. Jest in case.”

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.

Standing, she stepped over to the liner rope and retrieved Bass’s belt before returning to stop right in front of him.

“You,” she repeated.

Glancing quickly at the boy child, Titus stood obediently. The woman tugged the blanket off one of his shoulders, then waited for him to complete the disrobing. Impatiently she tugged it off his other shoulder and started to pull the blanket from him.

Embarrassed, he stammered, “W-wait—I don’t know what y-you’re ’bout to—”

Tugging one last time, she managed to wrench the blanket out of his hands and rip it away from him. Now he stood before her totally naked, dropping his hands down to cover his manhood. Suspicious that this strange, frightening creature of a woman wanted him to poke her right there in front of the child.

But instead Fawn slipped her hands in behind his forearms and flung the leather belt around his waist, slipped the end through the buckle and latched it loosely over his bony hips. Then she retrieved the long strip of foot-wide canvas at her feet and stuffed one end up through the front of his belt, taking hold of the other end to jab it between his knees. Stunned into stone silence, Bass remained motionless as the widow went deftly about her work.

Looking over his shoulders, he watched as Fawn pulled the canvas up between his thighs, stuffed it up through the belt at the small of his back, then tugged it down until the end almost reached the back of his knees. Quickly she stepped in front of him and tugged on that end of the cloth until it too hung just at his knees. Only then did she step back and swiftly admire her work.

Fawn was soon back in motion. She took the buckskin shirt from where it hung over his arm and spread it over her hands so that she exposed the wide neck hole trimmed with red wool. Quietly she said, “You.”

He nodded and quietly murmured, “Yeah, me.”

Bass dipped his head forward for her to slip the shirt over his hair, then brought his two arms up to poke them into the long fringed sleeves. Pulling down on the long bottom of the garment, the widow smoothed the shirt out, stood back a moment, then went to his right arm. There she rolled up the long sleeve into a cuff to shorten it.

As she began to work the same alteration on the left arm, Titus said, “I s’pose your husband is a … was a bigger man than me.”

That was plain to see from the way Bass swam in the sheer size of the shirt: the width of it draped across his bony shoulders, the length of the sleeves she had to cuff to shorten for him, and the immense girth of the shirt festooned with ermine skins and finished off with wide strips of colorful decoration.

As she bent to retrieve one of the leggings from the floor of the lodge, Titus tapped a finger against one of the strips of decoration.

“What’s this?” he asked.

Instead of answering, the widow knelt before him, tugging at his foot until he grabbed hold of a lodgepole to steady himself and raised the cold foot. She shoved the legging up his leg, pulled his foot down, then pushed up the bottom of the shirt so that she could tie the two straps at the top of the legging in a loop over his belt. With the second legging knotted, the widow brought forth a few pair of moccasins. Again she knelt and pulled up one of is bare feet.

But as quickly she sat back on her haunches and shook her head. It was plain to see that the white man’s feet were much too small for the moccasins. She flung them back onto the rawhide container, then appraised her work thoughtfully. With his old pair of moccasins and that canvas breechclout, the dead warrior’s clothing would do him for now.

Then she turned from Titus, sat, and pulled the boy from his blankets as she tugged at the open side of her hide dress to expose a full breast.

Bass swallowed uncomfortably and sat, trying not to look at the breast. His heart hammered again in his chest as it had last night as he’d tossed and turned—thinking of the woman lying just a matter of feet away in the lodge, yet not knowing the ways of these people, how to approach an Indian woman with any suggestion of their coupling. So here she was, again exposing that soft round breast to him as she began softly humming to the child cradled across her lap in the rumpled blankets as she rocked him while he had his warm breakfast.

“Titus,” he said finally, quietly—standing there above them.

She did not look up immediately when he spoke to her from the other side of the small lodge that he feared she hadn’t heard.

“Titus.”

When he repeated it, she raised her head and smiled.

Bass tapped his chest. “Titus.”

“Ti-tuzz.”

He nodded. “Me.”

“Ti-tuzz you.”

“Yepper. Titus. Me.”

It grew quiet in the lodge once more as his cold, frozen feet warmed by the fire. Then he asked, “You?” and pointed at her.

“You. Ti-tuzz.”

“No,” he replied, and shook his head, then scooted a little closer to them, just near enough to lean forward and touch the top of her arm where the boy’s head was cradled. “You.”

Her eyes grew all the wider, round and black as berries thick on the hopvines back in Boone County, hard by the Ohio. With them she softly peered at the white man, looking into him; then the tip of her pink tongue licked at her lips before she spoke.

“Tui-rua-ci.”

“Titus, me. You, Tui-rua-ci.”

She nodded, smiling at him with more genuine happiness than he had seen on her face since coming to her lodge the day before yesterday. It was a smile that made him forgive her for burning his clothes, made him forgive the three trappers for bringing him here to such a foreign and frightening place, made him forgive himself for wanting another man’s widow so badly.

“Tui-rua-ci,” Fawn repeated, then her eyes dropped behind those lashes as she said his name softer than he could ever remember hearing it spoken: “Ti-tuzz.”