Buffalo Palace

16

In taking their leave of Big Hair’s River Crow, the four of them pointed their noses to the northwest, intending to strike the Yellowstone itself inside a week’s time. Leaving the upper Bighorn River country, they first had to push due north past a small range of low mountains, then cross the several forks of a creek system* before they could finally begin to angle off to the west.

The chill, early-spring wind had grown strong and blustery by the time Silas Cooper’s ragtag band struck the valley of the upper Yellowstone—a wind that knifed itself right into their faces and sank all the way to a man’s marrow as the horses and mules plodded west, step by step, day after day. Beside the gently meandering river they made their camp each night, then marched on come morning. The four of them made quite an impressive outfit, what with all the animals they had loosely lashed together traipsing along behind the trappers—in and out and around the groves of stately old cottonwood and those mazelike copses of willow, chokecherry, and alder where the deer burst from cover, spooking the antelope into turning and bounding off across the open bottoms. Farther up on the slopes of the nearby hills the elk grazed and watched, seemingly unperturbed by the passing of so many four-leggeds.

Some of those packhorses plodded a little less lively than the others: Scratch already had them loaded with the bulging packs of thick-haired beaver he had toiled through the long winter to trap, flesh, and keep vermin free as both spring and their departure approached. Indeed, as winter had aged and the weather hinted at warming, there had already been so many packs of beaver that come the first sign of thaw, Silas needed to trade for another ten Crow ponies from Pretty Weasel and Other Medicine, both brothers of clan leader Big Hair. Now there were easily two dozen saddle mounts, packhorses, and mules among the four trappers—an enviable remuda for any outfit and, as always, a juicy, tasty temptation dangled before any horse-hungry band of thieving warriors.

Those early-spring days spent leisurely trapping from creek to creek along the Yellowstone were mild and sunny, the nights still cold and frosty. But as the season matured, the skies stayed cloudy for days at a time, raining now and again, whipping up tremendous gales often accompanied by icy hailstorms that drove the trappers to seek out the shelter of protective cottonwood groves or the overhang of riverbluff rimrock. Many were the times those sudden and capricious storms passed on by, leaving a layer of icy white piled in drifts across the ground. As the gusty torrents rumbled on to the east down the Yellowstone Valley, the four would cautiously study the receding clouds, peer hopefully at the clearing sky overhead, then urge their nervous animals out of the timber and press on upriver, all those hooves crunching every bit as loud as if they were walking on parched corn spilled across a hardwood floor.

Every day, the farther west they marched, it became clearer to Titus just how hardy and courageous the Crow people were. A huge country itself to protect, Absaraka sat squarely in the middle of enemy territory. As Bird in Ground had taken pains to instruct, to the east ruled the seven fires of the Lakota and their allies, the Cheyenne. On the south roamed the hostile Arapaho, the sometimes friendly Shoshone, as well as the Ute and the Bannock, while to the west lived the strong and amiable Flathead along with the Nez Perce. East of the great north star lived the Cree and Assiniboine. Yet a little west of north roamed the greatest threat of all—the fiercest raiders of the high plains: the Itshipite, known to white trappers as the Blackfeet.

Three powerful clans—the Blood, the Piegan, and the Gros Ventre of the prairie—who banded together to form a mighty confederation that stretched all the way east to the English holdings of the Hudson’s Bay Company, then swept clear down along the northern Rockies until Blackfeet territory butted sharply against the home of the Crow.

Although outnumbered nearly four or five to one by any of its great enemies on the south, east, or north, the Apsaalooke held steadfast winter after winter, raid after raid, generation after generation, as few warrior clans could boast. Ever since a time beyond the count of any man then alive, the Crow had given birth to their babes, raised their children, and buried their old ones in that land. Winter after winter they had defended their home.

Although few, this proud and fearsome people, Bird in Ground had explained, was all that held back the tide of their many enemies.

“Wherever you go from Absaraka,” the young man instructed gravely, “you take your life in your hands. I know of no others who would be satisfied to take only your horses.”

Bass clawed at his itchy scalp as he replied in his halting Crow tongue, “These Blackfoot, they want my hair?”

Bird in Ground nodded. “You will be careful when you ride west with the others?”

“Yes,” Titus had assured his friend, who helped him trap and flesh many of those prime, blanket-grade beaver that winter, “we will all be very careful when we leave the safety of Absaraka. I aim to stay as far away as possible from the Blackfoot.”

For a long time the young man did not reply, as he seemed to be weighing what he wanted to say to the trapper. Finally he said gravely, “Perhaps it isn’t only the Blackfoot you should be wary of.”

Titus asked his new friend if he said that only because the other three made it more than plain they didn’t like Bird in Ground.

“No,” was the Crow’s surprising answer. “I tell you this because I do not like them. And my medicine warns me that you must not trust being with them.”

Trying to smile as if it were a joke, to make light of what caused him to sense a chill at the base of his spine, Bass replied, “The three—they took me in. They made me one of them. They taught me. They protected me. Why would they ever harm me?”

“I only ask that you will be careful.”

Titus scoffed, “I think you are seeing ghosts.”

“Seeing ghosts?” the Crow asked, his brow furrowed in confusion.

“You see something that isn’t there,” Titus responded. “There is no reason for my three friends to harm me.”

In the end Bird in Ground gave Titus his solemn blessing, “May Akbaatatdia, the Grandfather Above and Maker of All Things, watch over you, my new friend.”

“May the Grandfather hold you in his hand too,” Bass repeated as he sensed that same sudden and overwhelming sentiment he had first experienced years before on the Ohio when he’d parted from Kingsbury’s boatmen, “until we talk again, in a season yet to come.”

Now as the four of them-moved ever closer to the great bend of the Yellowstone, Titus had many things to think upon throughout each day as the sun tarried in the sky a little longer, a little brighter. So much had he begun to learn in his winter with Bird in Ground, all of what they talked about and struggled over during those long, cold days spent trapping, hunting, learning one another’s tongue. From him Bass had learned of the tribal structure of many Apsaalooke clans; learned too of their am-maakalatche, or strong personal beliefs in their Maker of All Things. Bird in Ground taught Scratch that the akbaalia, or shamans, had the power not only to heal but to see into the future too. As the days of winter waned, Titus learned how family members related one to another within the clan through birth or marriage. And always, Bird in Ground told many, many little stories of his people’s history, tales dating all the way back to the creation of the earth.

They were stories that Scratch listened to, then practiced retelling to assure Bird in Ground that every detail and facet of the tale was recited correctly. Some were stories that caused him to remember those parables taught him from the old, leather-bound family Bible laid across his mother’s knees by the fire in Boone County. Tales of faraway places and people with faraway names. And now he himself had gone as far, far away from that cabin at Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, as he figured those faraway people ever were.

“I been told the beaver be as big as painter cats in the valley what’s other side of that pass,” Cooper stated as the last of the packhorses clattered to a halt behind them.

Billy Hooks nodded, grinning wondrously as he said, “An’ a painter’s a big ol’ cat too, Scratch.”

“I ain’t never had cause to see one myself,” Bass replied.

“They h’ain’t a likely animal for a man to spot,” Cooper assured. “Keep back out of a man’s way.”

“Not like a b’ar,” Tuttle added. “Why, a b’ar’ll just as soon mosey on down into your camp as much as a man’ll come to call!”

“Best we find us a crossing,” Silas instructed, bringing the others back to the task at hand, his eyes raking the gravel bed on the far bank. “I figger this here Yallerstone gonna run high an’ wild with snow-melt one day real soon.”

Bass pointed south up the narrow valley where the river originated before it took that big bend to the east. “What’s off yonder?”

When Tuttle wagged his head, Billy confided, “I ain’t ever knowed of a man been in that country what could rightly tell us.”

“Devil smokes,” Cooper declared as he turned his horse away toward the bank of the river. “Been told the ground shakes and spits water high as a church belfry in the air!”

Turning to wink at Bass, Hooks guffawed loudly. “I heard me such talk afore, Scratch—and ever’ time I do, I figger ’em to be teched … right up here!” He tapped a dirty finger against one temple.

“H’ain’t no flat-tails in the land of them devil smokes,” Cooper flung his voice over his shoulder as he urged his horse and some of the pack animals down to the Yellowstone.*

“So I’ll be going where I hear there’s beaver the likes you ain’t never seen!”

What water flowed in the river that early spring ran nearly as cold as winter ice when they splashed their way across. As wide as were the gravelly banks, the Yellowstone was still no match for the capricious Platte. Here the riverbed was rocky, far different from the sandy, shifting bottom that had robbed Titus of half his supplies, and the Indian pony. One leg at a time, the horse beneath him carefully set each hoof down, planting it securely among the rocks before raising another leg from the strong, clear current that slowly climbed to bubble halfway up Bass’s calf by the time they reached midstream.

When he turned in the saddle, Titus found Hannah picking her way across with the other pack animals, the two bundles lashed to her back swaying one way, then the other, as she shifted her weight, each hoof seeking solid ground.

Reaching the north bank, Cooper spurred his horse out with a lunge, pulling up and around on a high piece of ground where he waited for the other men and the last of their animals to leave the water before he set off to the west without a word. From that crossing the land rose abruptly into timbered hills. The four of them began to string the horses and mules out in single file as the sun continued to midsky and the trappers climbed toward the cleft* that would take them west.

That night they camped on the far side of the pass, turning the horses out for a roll and a good dusting before picketing the animals as the sky grew dark. With the cold spring sky serving as a pallet for a million stars, Bass looked east from those heights at the land of the Apsaalooke they were leaving. Then he gazed to the west, where the sun had set beyond even taller mountains.

Finally Titus asked the others at the fire busy sharpening knives or smoking their pipes, “You figger that to be Blackfoot country off yonder there?”

“Blackfoot don’t come down this far south so early in the year,” Silas stated with certainty.

“Where you hear that?” Billy asked.

When Cooper’s eyes flared with instant anger, Hooks turned away to pick at the dirt caked under his fingernails with his skinning knife. “I s’pose you’d be the one oughtta know ’bout such things, Silas.”

“Don’t want none of y’ forgetting that,” Cooper said as he arose, beginning to work at the wooden buttons on the fly of his buckskin britches as he turned toward the shadows in the trees.

When Silas stepped out of earshot, Tuttle whispered, “You figger he knows if that’s Blackfoot country or not, Scratch?”

“How the hell you ’spect me to savvy if he knows or not?” Bass grumbled. Immediately he felt sorry: if he should be angry with anyone, he should be angry with Cooper. Not with those who just followed merrily behind Silas come spring, summer, fall, and winter.

Titus wagged his head. “Maybe we’ll find out for ourselves, fellas,” he said in a low voice filled with resignation. “But no matter how I figger it—Silas ain’t ever done nothing stupid enough to lose his hair.”

“Scratch is right, Bud,” Billy agreed with a bob of his head and a grin that showed off that big gap between his top two teeth.

“Yeah. S’pose you’re right,” Tuttle added in a whisper. “Silas ought’n know if there’s Blackfeet down there.”

The following day they began their descent into one of those beautiful interior valleys the northern Rockies could boast. And for the next few weeks they worked the streams that fed the Gallatin River, then eased over to trap among the streams along the Spanish Breaks that fed the Madison. As the snowline slowly retreated farther and farther up the slopes of the mountains, the four of them ranged higher and higher, finding the hunting good, and the trapping even better than they could have hoped.

“Ain’t no wonder there’s them what’ll claim right to your face that the Blackfoot spell trouble in this here country,” Cooper said at their fire one evening late that spring.

“Their kind just wanna keep it all to themselves,” Tuttle replied.

Billy chimed in, “That’s the gospel, it is, yessirreebob!”

“Them with Fitzpatrick was fixing to head up this Way last fall,” Bass said. “So maybe that country ain’t all that much a secret, Silas.”

With those dark, chertlike eyes betraying the falsehood of that big grin on his face, Cooper growled, “Or maybe them company trappers are the sort to figger on scaring away us what are out here on our own hook.”

“If the trapping’s good,” Tuttle said, “I figger they’ll say what it takes to scare us off.”

“Fitzpatrick’s brigade ain’t the only ones,” Titus said, wagging his head. “S’pose you fellers tell me why them Crow warned us ’bout going west, torst Blackfoot country at the Three Forks?”

“The Crow try to skeer you away, did they?” Billy asked.

Snorting with a gust of sharp laughter like iron colliding with an anvil, Cooper cried, “You damn idjit, Billy! The Crow didn’t tell him no such a thing. That Crow feller what’s soft in the head—the one trying hard to be a gal—I’ll wager he’s the one what warned Scratch. Ain’t none of them warriors worth their salt gonna be so skeered to warn us away from here. Just some soft-brained man-whore what likes to wear squaw’s clothes!”

Turning to Bass there beside their fire, grinning hugely with that gap-toothed smile, Hooks rolled onto his hands and knees as he asked, “What else he like to do like a squaw? Been figgerin’ to ask you all along, Scratch. He let you hump him like this here?”

Tuttle and Cooper roared along with Billy as Hooks wagged his rear end provocatively, grunting and wheezing.

Vowing not to flare with anger, Titus got to his feet and started away, wagging his head, not sure where he’d go at that moment. Just anywhere but there.

“Eh, Scratch?” Silas called after him as Billy’s high, mocking laughter followed Bass toward the ring of trees where they had corralled their horses. “Y’ ass-humped that soft-brained feller’s bones, didn’t y’?”

“I can tell he did, Silas!” Hooks cried out, “Bet Ol’ Scratch liked ass-humpin’ too, boys!”

“Maybeso if’n that man-whore was soft in the ass as he was in the brain!” Cooper shouted, flinging his voice after the retreating Bass.

The three of them continued to laugh and make their catcalls as Bass swept by his bedroll, took up his pouch and rifle, and kept on moving toward the animals. Their cruelty followed him to the rope corral where Hannah was the first to smell him coming. The mule nudged a pair of horses aside and inched up to the rope as Titus came to a stop to nuzzle her.

“Care to go for a ride, girl?”

Her eyes closed halfway as he rubbed up her muzzle, then scratched his way up to her forelock.

“C’mon,” he whispered to her. “I figger it’s time you got used to having me sit on your back.”

Bobbing her head eagerly, the mule came close to prancing smartly as he led her out of the corral and took up the extra length of her lead rope.

“Critter like you ought’n be good for more’n just packing my plews from place to place.”

As he flung himself up on her broad, bare back, Hannah twisted her head around to give him as quizzical a look as he had seen an animal ever give him. Patting her on the neck, Bass gently tapped his moccasins into her ribs.

“G’won, now,” he prodded, shaking the halter looped around her neck. “Let’s get.”

Standing like a statue for a moment more while she seemed to decide on just what to do, the mule finally set off slowly. He rode her all the way out of the timber toward the clearing at the end of the ridge where he could look both north and west at the deepening hues of twilight as the spring sun sank and the air cooled quickly. Over time the cold of the coming night helped: he came to lose the heat of his anger at the three. After a while Bass told himself they laughed for no better reason than they were plain ignorant about such things. If not outright ignorant, well—then the three were plainly cruel to call Bird in Ground a soft-brained person.

Titus had met soft-brained folk throughout his life. The first he ever saw was a flat-faced girl about his age back to Rabbit Hash. She didn’t talk much, and what she said he never could understand. Her folks talked to her like folks would talk to a baby—all nonsense words and such. And while Bird in Ground didn’t do any of the things men of his tribe did, the Crow man made a lot of sense when he talked. There was times, Titus had to admit, Bird in Ground made more sense than all three of them fool-headed, yabbering yahoos put together!

Hell, Scratch thought, a man’s ways was just his ways … and if a fella turned out to do different from other men’s ways—then just who could say what was right, or what was better, or just who the hell was soft-brained?

Damn, if it weren’t hard at times to figger out just who had his best interests in heart. Bird in Ground, who had never said a cross word about another soul? Or them three, who didn’t miss a lick when it come to whacking others down a notch or two? Hard it was to weigh them out against the other, especially because the young Crow had sure appeared to care genuinely when he’d warned Titus … while Silas, Billy, and Bud actually had saved his life more than once.

So confusing to think on, that it almost hurt his head to try now to sort out what he figured was likely one of the most difficult puzzles life had ever presented him. Maybe some things were just supposed to be rocks a man wasn’t meant to crack—no matter how hard you hammered away at them. Some things in life just were and could defy a man’s most intricate cogitation.

Like women. Nawww, not all women. Maybeso just white women. Women like Amy and Marissa, and even Abigail. No matter that she was a whore—she was still a white gal. There was just something he’d experienced with white women that made them naturally hard for a man like him to fathom, while on the other hand the Indian gals he’d rubbed up against were a lot more reasonable sort.

Seemed fair to say that most every white woman he’d had much cause to know anything about made a real tough study of herself. Rather than taking life on its own terms, white gals seemed to take such delicious relish in complicating things, enjoying how hard they made a man work at getting along with them.

Looking back now at that first woman creature he had tried to figure out in Boone County, Amy Whistler was clearly just that sort. And Marissa Guthrie too. Even the gal wrhat had come into his life between the two of them—Abigail Thresher. Times were that riverboat bang-tail had shown signs of being a stock-and-trade woman creature with all her confusing ways and all her confusing wiles, despite the fact that she was a whore in the end … a woman who, for all intents and purpose, set out a’purpose to satisfy a man’s baser hungers.

No two ways of Sunday about it: a white gal was just a white gal. A creature put on earth for no other purpose but to devil a man.

“Why the hell you getting yourself all bumfoozled over such a thing anyhow?” he chided himself as he stared off into the growing darkness and scratched Hannah’s ears. “You’re done with white gals. Done for all time.”

As the sky’s distant rose became purple, and in the end that purple turned a deep indigo-blue, the first stars of evening stood out ail the more distinctly. Ready at last to turn back for camp, he drank deep of the chill air … then blinked and looked again. To be sure.

There against the darkness that was the featureless valley far beyond flickered a point of light.

Squinting his best to bring its starry point into focus, Bass wasn’t sure at first what the sighting might be. Perhaps some dry timber set ablaze by a passing thunderstorm. But—that was pure balderdash: there hadn’t been any lightning in many days.

Maybeso it would be Fitzpatrick’s brigade of trappers, who had pushed north this spring out of the Willow Valley where they had plans to winter up all together. Then again—that was just as crazy a thought … because a trapping brigade of any size would have them more than one fire.

The more Titus stared down at that faraway, solitary point of light, the more it fed his imagination, and his misgivings. Perhaps a wandering war party. After all, it was late spring, wasn’t it? Likely that the Blackfoot were moving about by now—no matter what Silas Cooper and any of those more experienced in such things might have to say on the matter.

“C’mon, girl,” he said in a hush to the mule as he clambered onto her broad back. “We got us news to tell.”

That night he led the others back to the meadow and rocky outcrop, where they all four gazed down at the faraway valley floor and that distant flicker of light.

“This far off—a man cain’t tell just what made that fire,” Cooper warned. “Could be a white man or a red nigger.”

“Hell, we can’t tell, Silas,” Hooks added.

Frustrated, Bass said, “If you fellas can tell me you know of a Injun what rides off by hisself alone—I’m ready to listen.”

Turning on Scratch, Cooper demanded, “Spit out what you’re trying to say.”

“I spent me a winter with them Utas, and ’nother winter with the Crow,” Titus explained. “Not once did I see a solitary Injun from neither band of ’em go out all on his own. Did any of you?”

“Nope, I didn’t,” Tuttle agreed.

Silas had turned to look back at the far flicker, but Billy reluctantly said, “Not me neither, Scratch. You’re right, dammit. Injuns don’t travel alone—like a white man does.”

“No great shakes, fellas. If’n its more’n one, cain’t be all that many if they got ’em just one fire,” Cooper tried to reassure them as he studied the darkness.

“But, Silas: it don’t take much of a fire to keep warm twice as many as we are,” Tuttle declared, his eyes filling with the first hint of dread.

“Maybe three times as many,” Scratch admitted. “Them Injuns don’t make big fires. And there ain’t no telling how big that fire is anyway, Silas.”

“How’s that?” Cooper demanded.

Pointing, Bass said, “Hell—we don’t even know how far off that fire is … so how’s any of us to say just how big a fire it is?”

“We best be clearing out,” Tuttle warned.

“Come morning’s soon enough,” Cooper stated flatly.

Billy nodded, his ready grin gone beneath the silver-pale moonshine. “Morning’s soon enough, Bud.”

Upon returning to their camp they nonetheless snuffed out their fire and decided upon a rotation of guards that would keep one man awake until it was light enough to pack up, load the animals, and start on their backtrail east.

“A damn shame too,” Hooks grumbled as the other three settled into their blankets there in the cold darkness. “The trapping in this country was some punkins too.”

“Ain’t that the way it’s bound to be for a man?” Tuttle moaned, rising on an elbow.

“We done ourselves good anyway,” Cooper said, lying still in his blankets. “I’d care to bet there ain’t four other trappers in all these here mountains what have near the plews we got in our packs already.”

“Ain’t that so!” Hooks exclaimed, pounding a knee and nearly toppling his cup of lukewarm coffee drained from the pot before the fire went out. “Just imagine the look gonna be on that trader’s face when we come rolling into ronnyvoo come summer, boys!”

“Yeah,” Tuttle cheered in the hush of their quiet voices. “We four gonna be kings of ronnyvoo!”

“Cocks of the walk, I’d wager!” Hooks continued. “Ain’t nothing we cain’t buy. Ain’t a squaw we cain’t hang with foofaraw and girlews. Why, we’ll stay drunk all the time!”

“Right from the first day till the last,” Bass said, joining in their imagined revelry. It felt good to shake off the fear and misgivings the way old Tink would shake water off herself after crossing a stream. “We gonna drink ourselves sick on trader’s rum every day, ain’t we, Silas?”

For some time Cooper didn’t answer. Long enough that Billy finally prodded, “Silas? You ’sleep?”

“No. Just been thinking more on ronnyvoo … and what the four of us ought’n do about all these plews.”

“What you mean—what we ought’n do?” Tuttle asked there in the dark as the satin-colored moon settled down on the tops of the pines to the west of their camp.

“We ain’t never had near this many beaver, have we?”

Billy replied, “We ain’t never had four of us afore, Silas. And Scratch here been working his ever-livin’ ass off since winter.”

“That’s the natural truth,” Tuttle added.

“So what you got on your mind?” Bass asked the question that for months now had gone unanswered as he slowly sat up and crossed his legs under the buffalo robe.

“H’ain’t so sure no more we should be making for ronnyvoo with these’r furs come summer,” Cooper admitted as he kicked the blankets off his legs, sat up himself, and brought a robe around his shoulders. “Not so sure we should wait till summer to sell ’em neither.”

“Why not?” Hooks inquired. “Summer ain’t no time for trapping beaver.”

From the darkness Cooper explained, “But by then every swinging dick in these here mountains is selling his plews to the trader coming out from St. Louie.”

“So if we don’t sell to the trader come high summer,” Scratch began with keen curiosity, “just what you got in mind for us to do?”

“Sell before the summer,” Cooper stated flatly.

“Hell, Silas—Ashley and his bunch ain’t gonna be back till high summer!” Tuttle argued.

“I don’t figger to have nothing to do with any of ’em,” Cooper admitted.

Growing more intrigued, Titus asked, “If I follow your thinking—we figger to sell our plews early, and we don’t figger on waiting for no trader tromping west from St. Louie … then where we gonna take all this beaver we got in these here packs?”

“Down the river, boys.”

“What?” Hooks asked, his voice rising. “You cain’t tell me we’re gonna cross that prerra?”

“No, Billy—I said down the river, you softheaded idjit.”

“That’s gonna be a bit of a ride for us,” Bass declared as he thought on it. “But I s’pose it can be done.”

Then Cooper admitted, “That’s something else I been working over in my head too.”

“Sounds to me you been doing more thinking since winter than I do in a hull year!” Hooks told Cooper.

“Ain’t no doubt of that, Billy!” Tuttle cried with a snort.

Titus prodded, “So tell us what you been cogitating on about this long ride, Silas.”

“No ride a’tall. Simple as that.”

Billy asked, “Then how the hell you ’spect us get downriver?”

“We float.”

“F-float?” Hooks said with his head bobbing. “What’s a man to float in, Silas? You don’t ’spect us to just ride our plews on down, do you?”

“Way I figger it, this time of year,” Cooper explained, “fast as the water’s rising—a man can float downriver least twice as fast as he can ride a horse following beside that same river.”

The three others sat quiet for some time, clearly in their own thoughts, weighing the merits of that comparison on their own, until Scratch spoke first.

“Makes a lot of sense, it do, Silas,” he admitted. “You cover twice as much ground in the same time it’d take us to tramp across it on horse.”

“Maybe faster,” Cooper injected.

“Maybe faster,” Titus agreed with the appraisal. “You thinking of going down the Yallerstone?”

“Yup.”

“But—where’s that gonna put you to trade on the river?”

“Maybe nowhere,” Silas answered, “… until we reach the mouth of the Bighorn.”

Scratch asked, “What’s there?”

Cooper explained, “Some winters back Missouri Fur boys built ’em a fort there, right on the Yallerstone.”

Immediately Bass grew enthused, saying, “Just down the river a ways?”

“Like I said: near the mouth of the Bighorn,” Cooper said. “Bud—you recollect what they called that place … Bentley … Bentling—”

Tuttle said, “Fort Benton what they named it, Silas.”

“But wait a minute: we was in that Bighorn River country,” Titus said, his suspicions tingling. “Crow country—last winter. Whyn’t we ever go on down to that post for a visit?”

“Hell, Scratch,” Cooper replied with a big grin, “mouth of the Bighorn was too far a piece from where we was with them Crow. Way off yonder to the northeast.”

“All right,” Bass conceded, working over the direction of rivers and mountain ranges in his mind, “if’n them Missouri Fur Company fellers still got a post there—”

“They call it Fort Benton,” Tuttle reminded.

Bass nodded at the interruption, then continued, “Benton … then I s’pose it do make damned good sense to trade to them early—afore they start trading with the tribes in the area.”

“A right handy post,” Cooper stated. “Close at hand, it be.”

“You been there, ain’cha?” Titus asked.

“We been there awright,” Hooks declared.

“But we ain’t been over to that country in some time, Silas,” Tuttle reminded.

Cooper quickly replied, “Just what the hell are y’ trying to say, Bud?”

“What if they gone and closed up shop?” Tuttle asked. “What if there ain’t no one there to trade our furs to?”

“I thought on that too,” Cooper related. “That be the case, then I figger we gotta float on down the Yallerstone a piece.”

Bass inquired, “H-how much farther you gotta float?”

“Means we gotta go all the way to the Missouri,” Cooper explained. “On down to the Mandan country.”

“How far you figger that is?” Titus wondered.

“A ways above the mouth of the Knife.”

“That anywhere near Ree country?” Scratch asked. “I heard tell them Rees don’t take to fur men passing through their land.”

“Don’t y’ worry none—Fort Vanderburgh’s north of Ree country,” Silas said consolingly. “Not nowhere near them black-hearted Rees.”

Billy agreed, “Ain’t a one of us like going nowhere them red niggers be, Scratch.”

Scratch turned back to Cooper in the dark. “Awright—so you’re telling me we don’t find no one there at the Bighorn, we got no other choice ’cept to float on down to Mandan country.”

“That’s right,” Cooper said.

“Ain’t that a longer trip after all, ’stead of us just heading south to ronnyvoo on horseback?”

“Longer to ronnyvoo from here,” Silas declared matter-of-factly.

“And you ’member we ain’t moving near as fast on horseback neither,” Tuttle sized things up. “We can make more miles in a day on the river.”

“Saying we do decide to make that float,” Titus began after he heard the familiar snort of the mule and it prodded him into thinking, “just saying we up and decide to … what we gonna do with all them critters we’re riding, all them packhorses?”

“That’s a problem,” Cooper admitted. “But I thought me on that too.”

“So what you figger we gonna do with all the horses, Silas?” Billy wondered.

“We leave one of us behind.”

“One … one of us behind.” Tuttle sounded concerned. “In country like this?”

“Gonna be Crow land,” Cooper reminded them.

“Sounds to me like you got this all sorted through, right down to the gnat’s ass,” Bass stated.

“You can lay your sights to that, Scratch,” Cooper replied. “I even figgered out the best man to trust with the animals.”

Tuttle was frightened when he asked, “Who—who that be, Silas?”

Cooper said, “Scratch.”

Billy asked, “Leave Scratch behind on his lonesome when we take the furs downriver?”

“He’s got a better head on his shoulders’n Tuttle over there—and Scratch ain’t near as skeered of things as Bud,” Silas explained. “And he’s ever’ bit as good with the critters as you, Billy. Makes sense to me that Scratch be the one to leave behind, don’t you see? ’Sides, he’s got him a lot more sense’n you’ll ever have.”

“Yep, you’re right at all corners of it, Silas.” Hooks applauded softly. “Bass got lots more sense’n I’ll ever have. He’s the man to trust with the horses, for certain on that! What you say about it, Scratch?”

“Figger a man’s gotta think on something so ’portant as this be,” Titus confided as he stretched his legs out and leaned back, the better to help his mind to settle on thinking.

For a long time Titus lay there in the quiet, listening to the nearby animals crop at the grass, hearing the breathing of the others become as quiet as the spring night that settled around them. Finally Bass came to the end of his consideration, sorting through it the best way he knew how.

“So you’re telling me it might be a short trip of it—”

“Other side of the pass where we run onto the Yallerstone,” Cooper interrupted, “the four of us’ll make two rafts. I figger that’s all we’ll need.”

“Won’t take us no time to float down to the Bighorn,” Billy assured. “Trader might even have him some whiskey!”

Bass said, “But if you don’t find no one there, then it’ll be a longer trip to the Missouri country.”

“I figger we can meet up with y’ afore ronnyvoo time,” Cooper testified. “We’ll set us a place to join back up, somewhere on down the east front of the mountains.”

“Closer on to ronnyvoo?” Billy asked.

Silas said, “Where we can spend all the money we’ll make on whiskey and geegaws for the squaws!”

Titus waited for their quiet, good-natured laughter to drift off. “You really do got this sorted clear out to the end, don’t you, Cooper?”

“You damn well all know I been thinking on it since last winter. Long enough to know for damn certain what the hell I’m doing.”

Rubbing an itch at his nose, Scratch said, “An’ you figger I’m the one to stay with the critters.”

“Always have figgered you to be the only one ’sides me I could trust withall them critters and the truck the rest of us cain’t take with on downriver.”

Gazing a moment at Hooks and Tuttle in the dark, Scratch sighed. “I s’pose if’n you boys trust me to see our horses through—”

“I trust you, Titus Bass,” Cooper interrupted, smiling with deep satisfaction. “Don’t you worry a bit about that, now. These here other two niggers know I’d damn well trust you with ever’thing I own, Scratch … even trust you with my own life.”

Damn—but that was a lot of plew.

Titus Bass knelt there on the bank of the spring-swollen Yellowstone as he and Cooper tied off the last of the hundredweight packs in the center of their second of the two crude rafts.

“Now, don’t you dawdle none,” Bud reminded Scratch as Bass stood, straightened, and stretched a kink in his back.

Silas stood too, dusting his hands like a man would who’d just finished the difficult task at hand. “He’s right, Scratch. Soon as you get us pushed off here, get those horses strung out in a proper train and come on downriver.”

“I don’t ’spect I’ll run across you from here on down, will I?”

Cooper shook his head. “Likely be that we’ll cover at least twice as much ground as you will, riding herd on that cavvyyard.”

For a moment the four of them stared at the river in silence. How the Yellowstone had filled so that now it ran from bank to bank, flowing all the swifter, deeper too.

“She’s running good, Silas,” Billy declared.

The leader said, “Fast enough—and still coming up too. We’ll likely make better time’n we figgered a wready.”

“I can almost taste some sweet rum,” Billy said, rubbing a hand across his belly like a hungry child.

Bass stepped up to that grinning, fun-loving, childlike man. “You best pack some back for me, Billy Hooks.”

“I will. I will most certain!”

“And we ain’t gonna be paying no stiff-necked trader’s prices for nothing too,” Tuttle reminded. “Not no plew for a plug of burley tobacco—that’s for certain sure.”

“This here’s gonna work out best all around,” Bass assured as he stepped off the raft and onto the sloping bank where the water lapped at his moccasins. “Silas here come up with the way for us to get top dollar for them skins.”

One last time he studied those packs of dark, glossy beaver pelts lashed onto the unpeeled cottonwood saplings. At each end of the craft was tied a partially dug-out cottonwood log. While the two rafts represented close to a week’s work for the four men, this second of the two craft had aboard it more beaver than any of the other men had trapped since last summer … more beaver than Billy and Bud put together. Tied down to that second raft were the fruits of his labors for the better part of a year.

“Grab your rifles, fellas,” Cooper ordered, anxious to set off.

The other two turned away as Silas flung aboard the two rafts the long poles they had cut and trimmed. While Hooks and Tuttle would man that first, Silas himself would be alone with Scratch’s many bales of beaver on the second. That way Cooper had promised to personally watch over that small fortune in plew.

“You come on down and have a drink with us at the Bighorn, you hear?” Billy said, holding out his big hand to Titus. Dirt, smoke, grease, and blood were caked in the folds of every knuckle, in a pair of dark crescents beneath the nails, and at the cuticles of every finger.

Tuttle stepped up next, giving his hand to Bass. “If’n we ain’t there, we had to push on.”

Nodding, Scratch replied, “Means I’ll have to turn south my own self, don’t it?”

“If’n the Missouri Fur boys don’t still have their post at the Bighorn, we’ll hurry on to Mandan country,” Cooper repeated as he stepped up, then dropped to the damp ground below them, took out his knife, and redrew the map he’d drawn for Titus a dozen times since crossing back over the mountains to strike the Yellowstone.

“That there’s the Missoura,” Billy said as Cooper scratched a long, meandering line in the damp soil where they had packed the ground underfoot for days now.

“An’ here’s the Yallerstone,” Cooper said as he drew with the tip of his knife blade. “The Bighorn comes in here.”

Titus squatted on the other side of the crude map. “From the south, yeah—I remember.”

With the knife’s tip at that juncture, Cooper said, “We ain’t there, and there ain’t no fort or traders still there—we gone on down to the Missoura.”

Head bobbing, Billy added, “And Mandan country.”

“That’s ’bout over here,” Silas said, jabbing at the ground on that Missouri River line.

Scratch nodded. “When you boys get there and trade off them plews of ours—show me again how you fix on coming back.”

“Ain’t along the river like we floated down,” Tuttle reiterated.

“No,” Cooper explained, then started dragging the knife blade from the Upper Missouri on a southwesterly beeline. “What I figger to do is buy us some horses—come cross the country, Scratch. Maybeso take us a few weeks, but you can figger on joining up down here.”

“Where for sure?”

Holding the knife upright and twisting the tip into the ground, Silas explained, “I figger the best place for us to meet up is here.”

“You figger that’s on over that low pass, off torst the west of Turtle Rock?”*

“On over from the Sweetwater,” Cooper agreed, tapping his knife even farther to the southwest. “On past that Popo Agia stream the Crow talk of.”

Tapping his own index finger into that dirt map, Scratch said, “If ronnyvoo gonna be here—you figger me to meet you up here … somewhere east of the Uintees?”

Cooper smiled. “That’s the place where we’ll see y’—on down in that Green River country.”

“Where General Ashley had him his first ronnyvoo back to twenty-five?” Tuttle inquired.

Glancing at Bud, Cooper answered, “On down from Henry’s Fork. There’s a good park down there. A high valley, Scratch. Good grazing for all them animals. We’ll meet y’ there with our trade goods and our drinking money.”

Billy slapped his hands together loudly. “Ready for a spree at Sweet Lake ronnyvoo!”

As Cooper stood, he said, “We won’t be far from ronnyvoo there, Scratch.”

“Women and whiskey—right, Titus?” Tuttle said, enthused.

“Damn shame you boys’ll have a head start on me,” Scratch replied, making the most of what he felt at their leave-taking.

“You just remember: ain’t but one man I trust to stay behind with my critters,” Cooper said, gazing steadily into Bass’s eyes. “Only one man I figger won’t let ’em get run off by red niggers ’tween now and the time we join back up.”

Titus nodded solemnly. “I won’t let you down.”

Silas presented his big paw as he looked down at the shorter man. “I never thought you would, Titus Bass. Not from the first days I laid eyes on you. Allays figgered you was a man to count on doin’ ever’thing you could to live up to my trust in you, saving your hide the way I done more’n once.”

Bass took a step back as he let go of Cooper’s hand. “Time’s come for me to watch out for my own hide, ain’t it?”

Smiling, Cooper said, “That’s for certain sure, Scratch. Keep your eye on the skyline.”

Titus watched Billy and Bud wade over to the first raft with a splash, untie it, and step on board. “Yep—and you boys watch your hair!”

“Best you keep your nose in the wind, Titus Bass,” Billy called out as he squatted down among the bales of beaver and took up the long rudder pole he planted down in the fork of a stout branch lashed to the back of the raft.

“I’ll do that, Billy Hooks!” he called out.

Tuttle took up the long pole and pushed the first big raft away from the shore, poling toward the faster water in midchannel. “We’ll have us a good, long drink together real soon, Scratch!”

“I’ll count on that, Bud,” he called back, raising his hand to the pair as their craft was nudged by faster water.

Cooper slipped his big hat off his head and plopped it down on top of those beaver packs Bass had worked so hard to pull out of the icy mountain streams. Taking up his long pole with one hand, Silas gathered some of his stringy, unkempt hair in the other, tugging on it as he sang out.

“Keep your hair locked on tight, Titus Bass!”

“Don’t you worry none about me!” Scratch sang back in reply as he started to trot downstream along the grassy bank, watching Cooper’s raft ease into the fast water now, beginning to pull away all the faster. “I’ll watch my topknot!”

Then Cooper had his back turned and had his long pole reversed, putting the flat paddle end down into the water and the pole itself to rest in the Y-shaped branch they had lashed at the back of the raft. With it he would keep the craft at midriver where the spring runoff ran deepest.

Glancing downstream, Bass saw the first raft, made out the dim shape of those big bales of fur, and the pair of tiny figures on board—one of them working the crude rudder as the Yellowstone hurried them east toward that Missouri Fur Company post near the mouth of the Bighorn. Then they were swept around a gentle bend in the river and gone from sight.

He turned back to watch Cooper glide by at a fast clip, watching, watching, watching until the tall, thick-shouldered man was gone around that curve in the Yellowstone too. Then Titus stared at that spot in the river, those tall cottonwoods sixty, seventy feet or taller … as things grew quiet save for the nearby animals cropping at the spring grass, the cry of meadowlarks and the bothersome chatter of a nagging magpie too, the gentle breeze sneaking through the new leaves above him with a faint, reassuring rustle.

Then for a moment it got so quiet, he could almost hear his heart beat … except for the voice of the river running over its rocky bed, pushing itself against a boulder here and there with a foaming rush.

So quiet was it, so alone was he again, that Scratch succumbed to the temptation to fill that empty void as he watched that distant spot on the river, there between the wide banks of the Yellowstone where the three had disappeared.

“Yepper,” he sighed, every bit as quietly as the breeze itself. “I’ll watch my topknot.”

*Pryor Mountains and Pryor Creek, named for Sergeant Nathaniel Pryor, part of the command who accompanied Lewis and Clark west to the Pacific Ocean

*Near present-day Livingston, Montana

** Bozeman Pass

*Independence Rock, in present-day Wyoming