Buffalo Palace

19

Just when he was feeling sorry for himself, about the sorriest he’d ever been, Hannah showed up.

That mule had a head about her, Scratch would tell himself over and over across the next few days.

As he sat there staring at her for the longest time, not able to believe at first that she was real, no one could have convinced Titus that she wouldn’t eventually come back for him. Deep in his marrow, Bass knew that she had run as far as she had to until the warriors gave up their chase. Then it had merely been a case of her lying low long enough for the countryside thereabouts to clear of brownskins.

“Likely you moseyed back to stay close enough so’s you could watch me,” Bass murmured late that afternoon as sundown approached. “Waiting to learn if’n I was live, or dead.”

His affection for her burned all the more warmly in his heart as Bass reflected on what she’d done to take care of not just her own hide, but his as well.

“And when you saw me moving there by the river,” he told the mule, “you come out of hiding and made your way back to me. Just like a friend. A good … good friend.”

Slowly it struck him just how little he had left in the world right about then. A year’s worth of prime, seal-sleek beaver plews gone the way of dust on the wind. Now the horses and mules, saddles and camp plunder, along with the lion’s share of what supplies of coffee, sugar, flour, and such he had been toting around since bidding the three farewell far up on the Yellowstone.

But at least he had Hannah, he thought as he looked up at her there on the riverbank where the mule came to a halt beside him, lowering her head so that he could reach up and rub between her ears—right there at the forelock the way she liked him to do. He had Hannah, the only friend he could imagine he had left in the world to count on.

There were others—men among Fitzpatrick’s and Sublette’s brigades. But they were so far away in days and distance that he told himself they could be of little help to him now—not in the shape he was in. Whereas before the attack he had planned on heading north to cut one of their trails so that he might end up with a few supplies and a whole heaping of companionship … now Scratch realized he just needed to get himself to anyone who could help him mend, help him heal, then reoutfit him.

Why, he might be lucky enough to find an old knife among the packs Hannah carried—besides it, he didn’t have a weapon to call upon. The two pistols were gone and his belt scabbards were empty when he had finally come to beside the Little Bear River.

Again he stared at the mule in amazement. She had returned for him, steadfastly loyal. Yet he and Hannah were nonetheless alone—here in enemy country, with nothing more than one another to rely upon.

It was enough to make a good man cry … then he remembered the tale the old frontiersman Isaac Washburn had told him. How in his first ordeal Hugh Glass had been mauled good by that sow grizzly, then left beside his own shallow grave with nary a weapon nor a horse. But the second time Glass found himself set afoot in enemy territory along the Platte, Washburn was along to discover just how good Ol’ Hugh felt despite their dire circumstances. Having his rifle, pistol, pouch, and powder—why, all that made a man feel right pert, so Hugh told Isaac.

“Damn,” Bass muttered, “just look at you feeling so danged sorry for yourself. You ain’t got no gun, that’s for certain. But, by God—you got some fixin’s there in that mule’s packs … and I got you too, girl,” he cooed to her.

The moss trickled down the back of his neck as he inched forward, reached out, and snagged her long lead rope—thankful it hadn’t become tangled in rocks or brush in her getaway flight, or in her faithful return to him.

“S-steady, steady girl,” he whispered.

Gradually he coaxed himself to stand beside her: dragging himself up with that rope, raising his weight with that one strong arm as he got his legs under him, rocking there on the weak, wobbly legs. Then he slowly worked at the knotted rope securing one corner of the dirty canvas covering her packs. He flipped the heavy cover back, seeing what he had been hoping for—then lay against the pack a moment. Closing his eyes, he felt as if he offered a prayer.

When he had gathered his strength again, Bass worked one-handed at the knot on the rawhide parfleche painted with earth colors in Ute designs and patterns. Pushing back the stiff flap, he reached inside, digging around carefully until his fingers found it.

Dragging out the old, much-worn rawhide belt scabbard, Titus sighed with relief. Such was his joy that his hands almost trembled as he clutched it, a mist welling in his eyes. Scratch slid the knife out. As worn and well used as it was, he had nonetheless always kept it sharp. A man could never have enough knives around camp. Now Gut’s old knife would likely make a big difference.

From that parfleche he pulled a bundle of scrap buckskin, pieces of hide Fawn had tanned and smoked and used for garments sewn for him or the boy that winter in Park Kyack. As she had taught him, nothing was thrown away—least of all those odd-shaped pieces left over after making moccasins or clothing. There beside Hannah he sank to the grass and sand. Working the knot loose, he spread the scraps apart as the soggy moss continued to drip down his neck, across his chest, and onto his lap.

Then he found a rectangular scrap that, with a little cutting, might work. He left a patch in the middle about the size of three fists. On either end of that middle section he sliced two long straps. As he bent his head forward, Titus carefully centered the buckskin over the moss—squaring it so that the makeshift bandage overlapped the missing scalp lock. Now came the painful ordeal of lifting the right arm, rotating the shoulder high enough for him to accomplish the rest of this task. He bent over more … raised his arm a little higher, biting down fiercely, clenching his teeth against the burning agony in the bullet wound as he finally lifted the right arm far enough for his fingers to latch on to one of the straps dangling on that side of his head.

Barely able to breathe for the pain coursing through him, Titus quickly seized a strap on the left side of his cheek and knotted it crudely at his forehead.

Exhausted with enduring the torture, Scratch let the right arm drop, numbed, filled with painful arrows that radiated from the sharp torment in the shoulder. His breath came sharp and ragged … but at least he did not have to worry about the moss sliding off any longer while he waited for the pain to pass.

When he was prepared to endure it all over again, Bass again hunched over at the waist, making himself light-headed as he grabbed hold of those last two straps on his buckskin scrap and secured them beneath his chin—just tight enough that he could feel the knot when he swallowed, tight enough that he was sure the makeshift bandage would not slip off his head.

The wind suddenly came up, blustering down the snaking path of the riverbed—spooking him enough to jump. Startled, he lunged to his knees for the lead rope, ready to escape at any cost.

Then that gust of wind died, and he was left with Hannah, his heart hammering in his tortured head, his breath coming shallow and labored in the chest, where it tormented him to take a deep breath.

“You … you damned fool,” he chided himself in a whisper, and sank back to the ground from his knees.

Pulling the remaining scraps of buckskin together, he retied the bundle, then shuffled on hands and knees down the bank. There beside the river he tugged on Hannah’s lead rope.

“C’mon, girl,” he coaxed. “Get yourself a drink while’st you can. No telling when next we’ll have us a chance at water.”

She stood beside him on the grassy bank as he lay forward, held himself out over the water, and dipped his face. Drinking his fill as if it were a sweet potion, Titus drew back on the grass and sand, gulping down that last cold mouthful. Only then did the mule dip her head and lap at the river. He waited and twice told her to drink more. As if she somehow understood his prodding, Hannah returned to nuzzle more water down.

As the sun continued to fall, the wind came sinking down the ridge behind them, then blustered off toward a bend in the river—spooking him enough again to hurriedly wrap the lead rope around his left hand. When it had gone down the valley, Hannah stood over him as he crouched in her shadow.

Gazing up at the mule, he realized what they must do. “We can’t stay here no longer. Gotta make ourselves tracks.”

The warriors might return for no good reason at all—thinking they may well have left something on the dead man, figuring they might still find the mule carrying more of their ill-gotten plunder.

Steadying himself against her left foreleg with his good shoulder, Bass again forced his legs under him to prop himself up beside her. Pushing back that waterproofed Russian sheeting again, he dug around until he secured one of the thick wool blankets he used to roll himself within. Tugging to free it, Titus stopped suddenly—staring. Blinking his eyes. Not sure he wasn’t imagining what his eyes told him he saw.

Sinking to his knees and one hand of a sudden, he sobbed as he crabbed forward around the mule, dragging the right arm. He lost sight of the object as soon as he collapsed into a crouch—afraid now that his eyes had been playing tricks on him.

Desperate, he pushed against the thick tangle of leafy brush, prodding his way in farther and farther a few inches at a time—desperate to know for sure if it was real, or a trick his head was playing on him.

With a wordless gasp he closed his eyes and raised his face to the sky for a moment. Then opened them again and reached out with that left hand, his fingertips brushing the scuffed wood of the curly maple forestock, the rawhide band. It was real. He hadn’t imagined it.

Grabbing hold before the rifle could disappear with a poof of his imagination, Scratch dragged the weapon out of the brush where it had gone tumbling, pitching and cartwheeling, during his fall from the saddle horse. There it had lain, hidden in the brush while the victorious warrior stole the rest of his weapons. Hidden, just as surely as Hannah had remained out of sight until it was safe.

Collapsing back with growing relief, Titus sat, cradling the rifle in his lap, stroking that rawhide repair, treating the weapon as if it were a living creature. Suddenly fearing the lock might well be broken, he dragged the hammer back. It clicked at half-cock. Then moved on back with a crisp snap to full-cock. With a thumb he flicked the frizzen open and gazed down at the priming powder still cupped in the pan. The derringer was loaded and ready.

Bringing it off his lap in that left hand, standing it up, Bass propped himself against the rifle and rose. Now he could hobble about, using it as a crutch. Shuffling over to the mule, he pointed the muzzle down at an angle and worked the barrel beneath those ropes securing the right side of her packs. There, he figured, he could pull it out quickly if need be. With no pistols, nothing but the old skinning knife he had stuffed into the back of his belt—Titus lovingly stroked the heavy-barreled rifle. It, like the mule, were gifts granted him this day, which might well have been his last.

Steadying himself with an arm around the mule’s neck, Bass hobbled beneath her head. It took a little doing, but with the sheeting finally draped back over that off side of the load, and the thick red blanket folded just so and laid over the top of the packs, Bass took up Hannah’s long rawhide lead again. Looping it over her neck halfway between ears and withers, he hobbled a single step so that he could grip his left arm around her jaw.

It was an embrace she struggled against at first—perhaps not sure what he intended to do—then, as he continued to coo and pat and stroke, she settled—allowing him to hug her fiercely.

“You’re all I got now, girl,” he croaked, his voice breaking and his eyes filling with tears, spilling out on the blood dried and caked on his cheeks. “You gotta do for me … w-what I can’t do for myself.”

Laying the side of his face along her jaw for a moment, Bass eventually pulled himself away and hobbled back to her foreleg again. This was it—the test to see if they would be able to get themselves out of there.

Hell, he told himself—she could. That wasn’t the question at all. What he was about to endure was the test of his own grit. Perhaps one of the most supreme trials he had ever confronted. And here he was alone. No one to help. No one to know. Just him, and the mule. The friend who had come back for him.

Damn near the only friend he now had in life.

“Help … help me,” he whispered there at her ear as he reached over her withers as far as he could with his good left arm. “S-steady,” he coaxed, already wincing with the pain, tears clouding his eyes.

Bass said no more. He could not. His teeth were clenched too damned tight to utter a word. But sounds came out nonetheless as he raised himself off the ground a matter of no more than inches at first, struggling to pull his weight up against the side of the shifting mule with that one lone arm.

When he tried kicking his leg for additional boost, Bass cried out suddenly … and hearing himself, he clamped down on his lower lip, vowing he would not make that mistake again. Instead, he could only groan, gasping for breath with every sharp jab of pain as he pulled. Pulled.

Steady … dear God—steady, girl, he thought as the mule sidestepped again, shifting herself with his additional weight throwing her off balance.

Then he realized he had dragged himself more than two feet off the ground, and not knowing how long he could go on hanging there with the one arm bearing it all … but knowing at the core of him that he would never endure another attempt. This had to be it, or they would be staying right there for the night, perhaps forever if the Arapaho returned.

Grunting, he forced that tingling right hand to seize a loop of knotted rope securing the sheeting over the packs. By rocking to his side Bass let go with his left hand and before his weak right arm failed him—he thrust out with the strong one, securing a new hold and hung there, stunned by the pain and ready to bawl.

Sure that he would weaken and cry out with the torment in that shoulder wound the next time he inhaled, instead Titus bit down on his lip, grunting as he pulled again, dragging his weight a little farther up the side of the mule. She volved her head back to look at him, see what he was doing … then suddenly lowered her neck.

Not waiting for Hannah to change her mind, for her to move—Bass lunged down her far side with the good hand and snatched a third hold, pulling, dragging, hauling himself on over her foreflanks until his waist lay across her withers.

As Hannah’s head and neck came up, he finally gasped for breath, spitting blood from the lower lip he had just bitten hard enough that a warm ooze trickled across his tongue.

“G-good … g-girl,” he stammered in a hoarse croak, the punctured lip already beginning to swell.

As he fought the dizziness and thumping of each heartbeat now clanging in his head with the power of a blacksmith’s hammer, Titus rolled onto his left side and with the numbed right arm yanked on the thick blanket, stuffing it down beneath him. There he knew it would pad him from the mule’s bony withers, here where he lay cradled between her neck and the front of Hannah’s packs.

With each of those violent movements, all that stretching of the shoulder, rotating it—Bass now rested there a moment, sensing the wound on the front of his shoulder seeping. For the first time since he had regained consciousness on the riverbank, the bullet hole had torn away from the inside of his buckskin shirt where the animal hide had crusted itself against the exit wound.

And as he hung there crimped at the waist over the back of the faithful mule, Scratch began to feel a warm trickle at the back of his neck—not sure if it was the river moss still dripping …. or more of his own blood seeping now from the entrance wound in his back.

That, or the scalping.

If he didn’t bleed to death in the next few hours, he damn well might fall off because he couldn’t hold on anymore. No telling how long his strength would last. And when it failed, he would just tumble off the mule’s back. If that happened, Bass knew with rock-hard certainty that he would never get back on her. This was his chance. He’d been given this much by the power that watched over all things. A man had no right to expect any more than that.

This was his one chance. His to do with … or die. It was up to him now. Up to him and the mule.

After a moment more he tugged on the rifle one more time to be sure he could free it from the ropes; then Bass took up the long loop of rawhide rope.

“Awright, Hannah,” he whispered hoarsely. “Get … get us outta here.”

With a slight tug on the rope she started away from the riverbank with him slung over her like so much deadweight baggage. Turning slightly and taking those small steps, Hannah was careful where she placed each hoof, perhaps sensing the heavy burden placed on her. Not just the man’s weight—but his call to her spirit. It was up to her now.

As Hannah turned a step at a time, firmly planting each hoof before she moved another on the uneven, sandy grass of the bank, she turned Scratch’s face toward the west. Slowly, slowly she came around, turning so that he saw downriver. Through the mist of tears he got himself a long look at the sun settling beyond those tall cottonwoods.

How good this was—he suddenly thought, suddenly felt its certainty through his whole body. How damned good it was to watch this sundown.

So simple a thing to him before this day, this matter of the sun’s going down.

As she brought him on around, Bass gradually turned his head and rested it against her powerful, muscular foreflank flexing with each measured step. Resting his cheek against her power when he was now weak. Gazing back at that sunset.

As she plodded forward across the uneven ground, a hoof at a time … he gave thanks for the loyalty of that friend carrying him away from the riverbank there at the end of that day.

Watching the sun ease down past the bushy tops of the far cottonwoods, Scratch vowed his life would not be the same hereafter. This simple matter of a sunset was the powerful radiance of what surrounded his heart with all the more warmth. Not only did he have the mule and his rifle … but he had been given this sunset.

The gift of another day now brought to a close.

Had things been different—had the power that watched over all things not been wanting him to see things through new and different eyes—then, Bass realized, he would not be alive to watch this sun going down behind those cottonwoods … splashing the river’s surface with glittering light.

At the center of him he made a vow to watch each and every sunset, each and every one of those days given him from here on out. Promising to be thankful for each one he had been granted by whatever great force had spared him this day.

Surely it had to be the same, unnamed power that created the beauty of every sunset, painting each day’s with a different hue as the earth slowly turned beneath that radiant, blazing horizon.

As the sun sank lower, out of sight behind the cottonwoods and Hannah carried him up the long slope from the river, Bass vowed with all his heart that he would not fail to watch them all. Given that gift of each day.

Realizing he was not just given his life this day, but given new eyes to see all those sunsets yet to come.

By the time he pushed himself over and off the mule’s back late that first night, it felt like every inch of him had been scalded raw.

Scratch wasn’t sure how much ground they had covered after fleeing the riverbank at sundown: he had passed out. But when he finally became aware that the mule had stopped, the moon itself was resting on the far western edge of that black dome overhead. Slowly coming awake, he realized he had been asleep, maybe more so he had passed out with fatigue, his mind and body giving up the fight against such terrible pain. And he shivered with cold. As warm as the days had been, the nights had been gradually growing colder.

Evidently, she had been standing there patiently waiting for him to awaken, unable or unwilling to take him any farther that night. The only sounds he heard as he came to were the mule’s weary breathing, and the faint trickle of water seeping along its bed, somewhere out there.

As the seconds passed and his heartbeat began to hammer at his ears once more, Bass became all too painfully aware of his body. From head to toe, it felt as if he had been brutalized—not a part of him that did not cry out. While not as horrifying an ordeal as had been climbing on, this pushing himself off the mule’s bare back was nothing short of excruciating torment.

Even the muscles in his good arm and the two strong legs cried out with complaint. Every part of him in agony, Bass heaved himself off his perch, dropping to his legs only to have them give out beneath him so he landed in a heap.

Groaning, Scratch rolled over onto his left shoulder and drew his legs up fetally—fixing to let himself cry as the pain washed over him in a diminishing flood. Sometime later, when he was prepared for what it would take, Bass told himself he had the strength to get back on his feet. Better that than lying on the cold, bare ground at the edge of this stand of trees.

First he struggled to his knees, then rose there beside Hannah, resting against her as his breath slowed until he again heard the faint trickle. With his legs stiff and unused, he gripped on to the mule and stumbled around to the far side of her to drag his rifle free. With that crutch Titus started away, following the faint sound.

The tiny freshet proved to be less than five yards away: a narrow creek fed by a high-country snowfield as yet unmelted by summer’s harsh glare and heat. There he went to his knees again, and with the rifle close at hand, Bass dipped his face into the icy flow. Colder than he had imagined it would be—much colder than the river had been—he pulled back, gasping with surprise, his face and beard dripping with black pearls in the darkness.

“Come, girl,” he coaxed the mule behind him. “Get you some.”

When she didn’t move, he tried convincing her again, but instead she only hung her head in exhaustion.

“I know,” Scratch said quietly. “Me too.”

Then, after he slowly dragged his tongue over his parched lips, Bass whistled the best he could.

Her ears perked and her head came up. Wide-eyed, she came over close enough for him to stroke her as he sat up beside the freshet to rub a hand down a foreleg, sensing the powerful muscle that had rescued him from destruction, carried him far from the riverbank attack.

“Drink, girl. You’re gonna need it.”

Gently tugging down on her lead, Titus finally got her to understand. She lapped at the water briefly, then raised her head and backed away.

“C’mere,” he demanded … then whistled.

When she returned to his side, Scratch reached up and snatched hold of the end of the big, thick wool blanket. He wasn’t about to move any farther tonight. Right here would do.

Gazing into the sky for a moment to figure where the sun would come up in the morning, he shuffled over a few yards on his knees to a soft patch of grass within a brushy crescent of tall willow. She followed him, stopped, and hung her head as he painfully, slowly, laid his body down on the double fold of blanket, slid the long rifle between his knees and arms, then brought the other half of the blanket over himself.

It took a few minutes, but much of the pain of moving eventually dissipated, and he was left with nothing but the constant, nagging throb of his wounds, and the deepening of the cold that night.

Sometime later when the sky to the east was graying, Bass awoke, his bladder full and aching. The best he could do was throw off the blanket, push himself onto his knees, then pull his breechclout aside as he made water there and then. With that exquisite relief washing over him, Titus collapsed within his thick red cocoon and quickly fell back to sleep.

There were times during that first day when he grew aware of things around him. Not coming fully awake, not really opening his eyes at all—only occasions when he was slowly brought to realizing the sun was up at one position or another in the sky. Instead of opening his eyes here in the cool of his copse of willow, Bass would smell, his nose telling him that Hannah remained close by. One time he awoke to smell the earthy scent of her dung, another time when she made a puddle of strong, pungent urine nearby.

Late that afternoon he awoke again—and for the longest time he kept his eyes closed, listening to the mule crop at the grass, tearing it off between her teeth, listened to the breeze and the birds and the winged insects droning somewhere close. With no sun on the willow grove now, he figured it to be evening and eventually opened his eyes. Rubbing the grit from them once more, Scratch sat up a little at a time, his belly as hungry as he could remember it had ever been.

For a long time his belly rumbled while he stared down at the front of his right shoulder, slowly volving it to see how much he could move it now, more than a day after the bullet wound. Sore and tender—but he could urge it this way and that more widely than before. Soon, maybe, he would have to see about patching it up, putting some sort of bandage over one or both of the holes. Carefully he tugged at the buckskin shirt with his fingers and was surprised to find that the shirt wasn’t crusted to the front wound again. The hole was coagulating all on its own.

After whistling softly to Hannah, Bass pulled himself up against her, propping himself there to loosen knots on rope and rawhide. After retrieving that tight bundle of buckskin scraps, he blindly dug around in a second rawhide parfleche until his fingers felt the beaver fur. Knowing the glossy hides would do nicely, Scratch pulled out the small wrap of fur. What he saw was not just the dark sheen of the thick scraps of beaver, but tangled in it across his hand lay the blue bandanna.

Slowly sinking again with the buckskin and beaver scraps in his lap, he stared a long time at the blue silk scarf before finally bringing it to his nose. He inhaled deep and long, his eyes barely closing—conjuring up that remembrance of her through the potent power or scent.

As he rubbed the cloth gently across his bare cheek, down the bridge of his nose, over his eyelids—just to feel the caress of the fabric was enough to make him want desperately to remember the feel of her … that silky flesh with its tiny hairs, flesh that goose-pimpled each time it became cold in her tiny room and he flung back the blankets to look at all of her at once, to gaze upon her coffee-colored body. That big blue scarf took him back many, many miles and what seemed like a good man’s lifetime—took him back to those last months in St. Louis.

To that time when he lost Isaac Washburn, and along with the old trapper—Bass lost his long-held dream. Across those seasons of despair he had nothing more to look forward to than the earthy necessities of a man’s life. Spending most of his money to buy himself a drink now and then, along with the feral pleasure of a good meal upon special occasions, as well as the company of a succession of women who each one helped Titus hold at bay the numbness slowly eking in to penetrate to his very marrow.

It had been a time when, unlike before, there were no more of those raucous days ruled by whiskey-fever and whoring until he passed out. But for a time there—he no longer dreamed on the buffalo.

Across that last autumn and winter he’d imprisoned himself in St. Louis, Bass routinely had pleasured himself one evening a week with the coffee-skinned quadroon he’d grown fond of. At times they’d shared a bottle of West Indian sweet rum brought upriver on a paddle-wheel steamboat, both of them drinking and laughing until she was ready to hike up her nettlebark petticoat and climb astride him.

He smelted of the blue scarf again as he sat there in the willow. Only in his imagination did it still smell of her. So very long now had he carried it among skins and hides—on that packmare, then among Hannah’s baggage.

Oh, how he believed he smelled her still on this corner or that. Remembering how he visited once a week, every payday when he could afford a bottle of that brown-sugar rum and the sweet sin of that cross-breed whore. There every week … at least until that Saturday night he came to call, fresh from the bathhouse and a warm meal taken in the tippling house just down the narrow avenue, ready to have that cream-colored beauty work her magic on his flesh so he could swallow down what troubled him so.

As Scratch brought the scarf from his nose and laid it across his lap, spreading it out fully, he recalled how the old woman who watched over the knocking girls informed him that his favorite no longer boarded there—having left suddenly to take up residence in a private place farther up the hill, close to where the rich and very French families dwelled in old St. Lou. Bass remembered how, as the woman had told him the news, in disappointment he had touched that blue scarf he’d always tied around his neck every one of those special Saturday nights.

No, Isaac Washburn hadn’t been alone in finding a favorite trollop there in St. Louis. For Titus, his favorite became the gal with skin the color of a pale milk chocolate. A recent arrival, the quadroon had been imported upriver from New Orleans by a successful madam. Ah, how her brown skin was almost the color of that silky mud sheen to the Lower Mississippi itself.

As he hacked off two pieces of the beaver hide big enough to lay over his wounds and tied together long strips of buckskin, Titus recalled the first time he saw her sipping at her Lisbon wine. She was wearing those tall and gracefully carved ivory combs in her hair every bit as dark as a moonless midnight. At the base of her neck was wrapped a velvet choker pinned with a whalebone brooch, the ribbon clasped so tight at her throat that the brooch trembled with every one of her rising pulses. Her lips full enough to more than hint at her African ancestry, Bass found it little wonder that he came away from her so many nights bearing the tiny blue bruises and curves of teeth marks she left behind as she worked him over with her mouth, starting at the shoulder and working on down to the flat of his belly.

While he clumsily secured the scraps of beaver over the wounds with two long strands of buckskin thong, he stared at the blue scarf—squeezing hard to remember her every gliding movement, to remember the silky feel of her, to recall her potent smell.

It had been early one wintry morning after swearing she was his favorite that they heard Washburn hammering a fist on her door, announcing that he was ready to head back to the livery. Without saying a word at first, she reached up to pull down one of her scarves from a peg hammered into the wall beside her narrow, short-posted muley-bed.

“You take this,” she instructed in a hoarse whisper as she settled her naked body back on the thin mattress beside him.

At that moment he didn’t know what she laid across his hands in the flickering candlelight. “What’s this?”

“My scarf,” she said in that thick Mississippi-bottom dialect of hers, taking the fabric from him to unknot it. “Blue as the sea that rolls away from New Orleans to the home of my people.”

“W-where are your people?” he had asked her over the noise of Washburn’s insistent thumping on the doorway, his bellowing that he was about to come crashing in.

“I don’t have no people no more,” she explained, sadness filling her eyes. “But I want you always to be somebody special to me.”

“I will be, always,” he vowed, and let her tie the scarf around his neck before they parted in the gray of that dawn.

How he recalled wearing the scarf knotted there at his neck every time he returned to see her of those Saturday nights when he could afford the price of both a bottle of rum and to sleep till morning with someone warm beside him. Hell, even when he could not afford her and had to content himself with gazing at the whore from across the smoky room in the tippling house where she went about her business, talking and laughing with other customers, glancing at him once in a while—those eyes of hers asking why it was not he who was pushing his hand up her skirts and hungrily rubbing her legs then and there, panting to drag her back to her little room.

After struggling to get the buckskin shirt down over his head and arms once more, Bass concluded he would wear the scarf as she had intended him to. Working at the two resistant knots, he eventually freed the head bandage as the sky became greasy with twilight. Tucking the scarf under his belt, Bass slowly crabbed over to the trickling freshet, then slipped the buckskin and moss from his head.

As he set the moss scrapings aside atop a small rock, Bass grew curious—just how would the bare bone feel to his touch, how would his touch feel to the bare bone? Before he could talk himself out of it, Scratch reached up to lay his fingertips on the wound. One by one his fingers tiptoed across the exposed bone, gingerly feeling their way around the circumference of the lacerated flesh. There at the bottom of the wound he felt the thin, stiffened strip of flesh. Tugging on it gently, Scratch figured he could not pull it—that shriveled curl of skin must still be attached to some living flesh.

Drawing the worn skinning knife from its old scabbard at the back of his belt, Scratch bent forward so that he could use his right arm—the right hand grasping the long flap of skin so he could lay the blade against his skull and saw the knife through it.

Bringing the curled flesh down to stare at it, at the same time Bass also rubbed a finger along the wound where he had cut the scrap free, reassured that he hadn’t stirred up any more bleeding.

A curious object it was—this long, narrow strip of his own flesh, no more than three inches in length now that it had shriveled. Attached to its entire length was some of his very own hair. As careful as the Arapaho had been in scraping the scalp itself clean before stuffing it into his belt, it appeared the warrior had made himself two cuts to free the cherished topknot, both of those cuts ending at the bottom, where they overlapped. That narrow thong of overlap had been left to dangle when the warrior had yanked off the topknot, the flesh drying, dying, shrinking into a long, twisted curl.

He knew immediately what should be done with it. After untying the narrow thong that closed the top of the small medicine pouch, Scratch stuffed the small scrap of his own scalp in among the few other objects of special significance he had been gathering since that spring parting from Fawn. Here he would keep the strip, dangling around his neck in the medicine pouch, worn beneath his shirt, next to his heart.

With the moss dampened in the trickle of water and replaced over the bare bone of his exposed skull, Titus smelled deeply of the scarf one last time. From now on the fabric would no longer even remotely carry the fragrance of the quadroon—lo, after all these many miles and bygone seasons. Remembering painfully how the whore had abandoned him and what little they had shared together.

“I’ll go see her there,” he recalled declaring to the madam that night she had told him the quadroon would not be back. “See her where she’s working now. What’s the place so I’ll know it?”

“You can’t see her up there,” the woman tried to explain, the wounded look in her eyes showing how she tried to understand this poor man’s desire for just one woman.

“She ain’t coming back?”

Wagging her head, the woman explained, “Rich man bought her, took her off to the place where he’s gonna keep her for himself, for now on and always. Buy her all the soft clothes she’d ever wanna wear. She told me when she left, there’s a tree outside her window—where she’ll sit and watch the birds sing come the end of this goddamned winter.”

“H-he married her?”

The woman had laughed at that. “Sakes no! He’s already got him a wife—but one likely cold as ice. Land o’ Goshen, but he don’t ever intend to marry the girl. Just keep her in that fancy place he bought her—just so she’ll be there whenever he shows up so she can pleasure only him.”

“Maybeso I can see her still. Sneak up there when he ain’t around.”

Again the woman wagged her head sadly. “Don’t you see? She went there on her own. That means she wasn’t thinking ’bout being with no one else here on out. The girl, she left everything behind. And that means she left you too. Best you forget her now.”

Now, as he folded the large square of heavy silk into a triangle, Bass recalled how he had stared at the crude puncheon planks beneath his muddy boots, realizing how the quadroon’s leaving was merely another piece of him chipped away, like a flake of plaster from one of those painted saints down at the cathedral on Rue d’Eglise. Then Titus had looked into the woman’s eyes, vowing he would not let her leaving hurt him. Then of a sudden he had remembered Isaac’s favorite.

“What about that one with the brown hair down to the middle of her back? Think she was called Jenny.”

“You’re two days late, son,” the woman declared morosely. “A mean bastard cut her up good just last night. Up to the pauper’s cemetery they buried Jenny in a shallow hole only this morning.”

Swallowing, perhaps feeling a bit desperate that so much of what he took solace in was crumbling around him, Bass said, “Any other’n. Any one a’tall.”

Squinting her eyes up at him, the woman rested her hands on her fleshy hips and asked, “You ain’t so choosy no more?”

His eyes flicked to the left down the corridor, then right. Back to the woman. “Not choosy at all.”

Here in the willow as the light quickly oozed out of the sky, Titus remembered that from that painful night on he had rutted with the fleshy ones, the pocked ones, the ones who hadn’t cared to bathe in a month or more—it made little matter to him that the quality and color of whores in that city always depended upon the size of a man’s purse. No, it wasn’t the money that was determining his choice of solace for Bass. No good reason at all could he come up with to be particular just where he took his pleasure. And for the longest time it seemed to be that he was seeking only that particular salve of a warm and willing woman to rub into all those hidden wounds he kept covered so well.

No, he hadn’t been choosy at all—until he chose to seize his dream.

When he brought the blue triangle to his head and began to knot it at the base of his skull to hold down the damp moss, Bass remembered those days when he figured it was simply too cruel to fool himself any more into believing in hope. How he had vowed never again would he cling to any dream.

Those dreary seasons passed slowly by while he choked down his despair at never hoping again, daring never again to dream—pounding out his rage on that anvil in Troost’s Livery. Of every Saturday night he found himself a new whore to stab with his anger as he rutted above her. Until he had worked his way through them all and by the time a cold winter was waning, Titus started pleasuring his way back through what poor women he could still afford. As he did, Bass had grown more frightened that with each visit to their wharfside cribs, it was taking just a little more of that balm to soothe his deepest wounds. Scared they might never heal.

And when he found himself weakest, Titus had always brooded on this then faraway land—still mythical as it was to him back then. He had been weakest in those moments when the whiskey could no longer stiffen his backbone, when he found himself drained and done with the sweating torment of driving his rage into a woman and he lay beside her, gone limp and soft deep within himself as well as out.

Now with the moss protecting his skull, with the bandanna secured around his head, he knew with certainty that it hadn’t been a cruel hoax his grandpap and Isaac Washburn had played on him: there was indeed a magical, mystical place where the horizon ran black with buffalo. Just as they had promised, those huge, shaggy, powerful beasts indisputably ruled their domain and were servient to none.

Like that rare breed of man who had come to test himself against these mountains. The few who indisputably ruled this wild, untamed domain.

That twilight Bass used some of the last of his strength to draw back the Russian sheeting, and desperately scrounged through what baggage was left on Hannah’s back in search of something to eat. All that he found besides some green coffee beans he could suck on was a small linen sack of flour. With his blanket clutched around his shoulders, Scratch collapsed wearily to the grass, watching the sun settle far away beyond the Uintah Mountains.

He moistened the fingers on his left hand, then stuffed them into the flour. Pulling his hand out of the sack, he sucked on the fingers, repeating the movement over and over until his stomach no longer rumbled, until he could no longer tolerate the pasty, bland taste of the flour.

Bass realized he needed meat. It was the only thing that would replenish his strength—keep him from steadily becoming weaker and weaker, until he could only curl up and wait to die. He dreamed on buffalo—big, shaggy, hump-backed buffalo. All that red meat and blood up to his elbows … but he’d take elk or deer now, a prairie goat if he had to.

Hell, Scratch thought mournfully as he looked down at the flour sack in his lap, he’d even take a rabbit or a ground squirrel right now if he had to—close his eyes and make believe it was buffalo as he was eating it.

When he had retied the top of the sack with its strand of hemp twine, Titus keeled over onto his side, dragged the rifle between his legs, and tugged the blanket back over himself.

Twilight had faded and night had arrived the next time he awoke. After putting the flour, buckskin, and beaver scraps away among the few belongings still left him, Scratch stuffed the rifle under the loops of rope. Now he was ready for the ordeal of getting himself aboard the mule.

Again he folded the blanket over her withers in front of her packs, but this time he had something different in mind for the night’s ride. Back over to the freshet, then across its narrow path he led the patient Hannah a hobbling step at a time. It was there on the far side he had seen the deadfall where he now headed.

Positioning the mule beside the big pine’s trunk, Titus slowly clambered up the rotting deadfall until he stood nearly opposite her tail root. Seizing hold of the ropes at the top of her packs, he leaned against her, pulling himself onto Hannah’s rear flanks. Securing a second hold farther up, Titus pulled himself a little farther onto her back. Nestled there between the two bundles that were lashed to her pack frame, he settled himself. Down between them he wouldn’t be near so likely to fall off as she picked her way across uneven ground while he fell asleep.

Which was just what he wanted to do more than anything right then. With his good left arm, Bass dragged the red blanket over his head, nudging it on down over his back so that it covered his legs, flaps draping off either side of the mule’s packs. Now he would be warm, here under the blanket and next to her hide, warm no matter how cold this late summer night would become as Hannah carried him into the coming darkness.

At least he would be warm here, no matter how empty his belly. Warm, though he realized how fast his strength was flagging. Were it not for that nest within the packsaddle, Bass knew he simply didn’t have the strength to stay on her back. Without meat he might not be able to hold on much longer. Without meat he might never be strong enough to climb back on. Hunger was a cruel torturer.

Taking the long lead rope into hand, Scratch raised his chin to search the heavens a moment until he found what he looked for.

Gently reining Hannah around to the right, he told her, “Let’s go, girl. Time to carry me some.”

As he clucked to her with his tongue, Bass guided her toward that great patch of black sky there beneath the North Star. The big handle on that water dipper pointed the way he would go. In only a matter of minutes his eyes grew too heavy for him to hold them open any longer.

“Keep going, girl,” he whispered to her, stroking her withers, patting her neck and mane. “Take us north.”

Hannah moved out faster this evening than she had carried him that first night, perhaps sensing that now he was secured among her baggage. The ofttimes gentle, sometimes jarring rock-a-bye motion of her gait lulled him deeper and deeper as he repeated wearily, “Take us north. Find us … something to eat.”

At times during the night he awoke, lifting his sore, pounding head, and gazing into the starry black blanket overhead. Then he might tug a little this way or that to nudge a correction to their course before he let his head collapse once more and he was asleep again in his warm nest down between those bundles lashed to the crossed arms of the worn sawbuck saddle.

The North Star beckoned the way … suspended far, far ahead of them in the night.

He slept again, knowing that the only way he’d ever follow that star was on the back of this mule.