Buffalo Palace

21

“Damn good thing it is too—ye starting to feel pert enough to try forking yer legs over a saddle, Scratch!” Jack Hatcher said cheerfully a few mornings later as he dragged his blanket over his back so he could hunker down near the flames he fed a few pieces of wood, then held both palms over. “Be getting time to head for the high country soon, that for sartin.”

With each morning that the air became a little colder, Bass did feel a growing anxiety to be away and once more at that endeavor in the mountain valleys. Lying here so weary, beaten, and pummeled in body—still mightily hungering in spirit for those high and lonely places. “I … I’m looking forward to making that tramp, Jack.”

“So ye figger to trap this fall, do ye?” Jack asked with a grin on his face where the stubbly beard was beginning to fill out.

“I do.”

But then again Scratch realized just how little he had to his name … which caused a little of the starch to seep right out of him. Embarrassed, he looked away from Jack, and instead stared at the fire. “Don’t have me much. What I do got, I know I’m no way near being fixed for high-country doings. After them ’Rapahos got off with nigh onto everything—ever since, I ain’t had me a chance to look at what I was left in Hannah’s packs.”

“Stands to reason ye ain’t yet looked,” Hatcher commented. “Why, the way ye was hanging on to that mule for yer life. Eeegod, child—ye was just hanging on to life itself!”

With a slight wag of his head, Bass sensed the sudden sting of loss and remorse pierce him. The loss not just of place and people left back east—but the great and weighty loss of friends, the loss of furs, and now the loss of most everything he’d worked so hard to call his own. “Shit, I don’t even know if I got traps, not what other truck I got in them packs—”

“Ye ain’t poor, nigger!” Hatcher interrupted with a snort. “Why, ye got yerself half-a-dozen prime traps! Square-jawed they be: strong of spring and some handsome pan triggers, I might add. Some of the finest handiwork this nigger’s seen. Any man got hisself traps an’ truck like that gonna make it just fine. Where’d ye come on them traps?”

“Made ’em my own self.”

“Don’t say?” Jack commented with a little astonishment, then went back to stirring the fire with a limb. “Blacksmith?”

Bass nodded. “Was for some winters. Livery, in St. Louie.”

“When we gone through your truck—I see’d ye had you a little of this and a little of that too,” Jack added, turning again to eye Bass carefully. “Like I said, Scratch: a man ’thout much more in the way of mountain fixin’s might have him trouble making do on his own hook—”

“I ain’t no brigade trapper, Jack,” Titus replied a bit testily.

“Didn’t claim ye was,” Hatcher explained. “But I want ye to know that with a good horse—a man what has him the fixin’s you got, and that ornery mule of yer’n … why—he could make a damn fine go of it if’n he’s planning to throw in with some others.”

Bass instantly bristled. “Just tried to tell you: I ain’t no brigade trapper.” He locked his arms across his chest and hrrumphed as if he’d been insulted in the worst way.

Hatcher immediately roared at that, standing to turn his back to the flames and lifting his long-tailed war shirt to rub the breechclout that draped over his cold rump. “Ain’t a one of us neither, Scratch! Not no bunch o’ pork-eaters. No, sir—not my boys!”

Flushed with embarrassment, Scratch said, “D-didn’t mean you and the rest, Jack.”

“Ever’ last one of ’em is cut from the same cloth you be, Titus Bass,” Hatcher explained.

“I—I don’t doubt it.”

“So when I go saying ye might make do just fine with what fixin’s ye got if ye was to go and throw in with others—I wasn’t talking about ye throwing in with booshways like Sublette, or Fitzpatrick, or even li’l Davy Jackson. Why, they all good fellers, but a booshway is a booshway, and their kind is still the sort to honey-fuggle a man right outta his hard-earned plews!”

“Long as I got traps, powder, and lead,” Bass explained, slowly sitting up on his travois bed there by the trappers’ fire at the edge of the camp circle, “I figger to make back what I lost over the next two seasons.”

When Jack stopped rubbing his rump and straightened, he. peered long and hard at Bass. “There ain’t really no two ways to say this to ye, Scratch. Ye figger to hunt flat-tails this fall up in that high country … I’m thinking ye should join up with me and the boys.”

For a few moments Titus was stunned, purely astounded at the offer. When he finally found words, he said, “Jack—I ain’t g-got much to put up.”

“Ye got a few traps, and a damn good gun, nigger,” Hatcher said with a grin, coming over to pick up the bail to the coffee kettle in one hand. “But even more important than that is what ye got in here.” Jack tapped his heart. “Any man what can ride out of ’Rapaho country with a bullet hole showing daylight right through him, why—more dead’n alive and hanging on the back of a ornery mule like he was a tick stuck fast and sure to some ol’ bull … then I figger that man can ride to the high country with me any season of the year.”

How full his heart felt at that moment! “You … you certain about this?”

“Sartin as it’s gonna snow on-the high places, Scratch.”

“Maybeso you should talk it over with the others.”

The voice came from behind Titus. “We awready talked it over all we need to.”

Twisting his head around, Scratch found Caleb Wood there. Behind him stood the others: Elbridge Gray, Solomon Fish and Joseph Little, Issac Simms and Rufus Graham, John Rowland and Matthew Kinkead.

Hatcher repeated, “We all want you to join up.”

“But,” Rufus grumped, “you gotta vow you stop this laying around, goddammit. Man fixin’ to light out for the high country—he ought’n be up an’ around, don’t you think, fellers?”

“By God—Rufus is right!” Fish roared. “Let’s us get Titus forked over a horse this very morning.”

The rest started toward him as Elbridge Gray turned back for a pair of saddle horses tied nearby. Lord, was Scratch ever ready when they helped steady him as he pushed himself up and off that travois. Then, slowly, the others stepped back to let Titus stand alone.

“Lookee there, Mad Jack!” Kinkead cried as Hatcher stepped up, flinging the blanket off his shoulders.

“Yer ready?” Jack asked.

Bass nodded, watching Gray lead one of the horses up to the group. “This your’n, Elbridge?”

Gray glanced at Hatcher a moment.

Jack nodded once. “Go ’head.”

Then Elbridge said, “No. It ain’t mine, Scratch. We’uns—well … we all pitched in some and traded for to get a saddle pony from these here Snakes for you.”

He had trouble swallowing as the others stepped close to circle him and the horse. “I … I … I don’t—”

“Ain’cha gonna climb up?” Jack proposed.

“Steady him now, boys,” Rowland instructed when Bass went to stuff a left foot in the stirrup. “Help him on up there.”

Fish and Simms, stocky men both, helped Titus boost himself onto that big, carved cottonwood stirrup—getting the other leg kicked over the high cantle and eased down as Rufus guided Titus’s right foot into the other hand-carved stirrup.

Scratch asked, “Who’s saddle this be?”

“Yer’n,” Hatcher replied. “It’s Injun. All we had us— but … from the looks of how ye sit it, gonna work out just fine for ye till we can get to ronnyvoo next summer and fix ye up with one of the trader’s American saddles.”

Titus shifted this way and that on the rawhide-covered wooden tree with the high pommel in front and its high, wide cantle in the back.

“Damn if it won’t do, fellas,” he said quietly, having a little trouble getting the words out.

“See? Told ye he’d like it,” Hatcher proclaimed.

“Man got himself a rifle, a good horse, saddle, and a mule to pack along a few traps,” Bass said, his eyes stinging as he looked down on the six of them gathered around his new pony, “why—that man got hisself just about all he’ll ever need.”

Hatcher grabbed Bass’s wrist and said, “That, and a few friends along too when he points his nose for the highlands.”

“Yes,” Titus choked. “Man can make do anywhere, no matter what—if’n he’s got him a few friends … f-friends like you fellas.”

He could cotton to a little more riding each day—so before another eleven days had passed, Scratch felt ready to sit the saddle long enough for them to take up the trail north.

Three times in more than two weeks while he was with them, the Shoshone moved camp, following the herds south as the remains of summer faded and autumn first kissed the cottonwood along the creeks, spinning gold of the trembling aspen that dotted the timbered slopes above the valleys where the buffalo grazed. The village had been shooting and butchering and fleshing hides for many days now, every member of the tribe involved with these preparations for winter before they would turn north and make their way into a valley sheltered from the harsh winds and the deep snows. There they would find respite from the raiding Arapaho to the south, the wide-ranging Blackfoot slipping down from the north.

Whenever a harsh winter took its toll on the northern herds and times grew lean on the far northern prairie, that great confederation of Gros Ventre, Piegan, and Blood tribes were more likely to roam farther to the south in search of game and hides come spring. Never had they hesitated if their roamings took them into the land of an enemy.

So it was that for many generations the Shoshone had come to regard these as their buffalo. Each year they followed the herds migrating north in the spring, then south again before winter, a people moving before the wind. And with the first snow they would turn away from the buffalo and seek shelter in the lee of the Wind River Mountains, where they would pass the winter beneath the hides they had harvested for shelter, wrapped warm in the robes they had tanned and smoked, their bellies filled with the meat they had dried in anticipation of those lean days to come with the cold, cold time.

“They got ’em more hunting to do,” Jack explained.

“Not just buffler,” Caleb added. “Goats too.”

Antelope skins—some of the softest of hides used in making the finest of garments. In this country below South Pass, the Shoshone could always count on encountering numerous herds of the pronghorn goats.

Scratch asked, “That why they ain’t yet heading north?”

Hatcher nodded. “They got hides for to hunt. And we got beaver waiting for us up yonder.”

Bass tugged one last time on the single horsehair cinch, then flipped down the big cottonwood stirrup. “Where away you figger us to go?”

“We can find flat-tails just about anywhere north,” Jack replied. “Where ye take a notion to go?”

Bass shrugged and grinned. “To the high country.”

“Best we go there afore winter sets in hard,” Caleb Wood declared.

Elbridge Gray’s head bobbed. “Easy ’nough from them foothills up north to work our way down to the Popo Agie.”

“Been on that river afore my own self,” Bass replied as they all turned to watch the approach of a sizable crowd on foot.

Hatcher winked and leaned close to whisper, “Be different this time, Scratch—ain’t gonna be none of this here outfit getting the damn fool notion of floating your furs down to some burned-out post in Injun country.”

“That was a heap of plew,” Bass recalled in a hush as the procession of older men came to a stop before the trappers and the small herd of their animals, loaded and preparing to depart.

Behind the chiefs and headmen stood the ranks of young warriors. On either side of them the women formed the horns of a great crescent. And among their legs jostled the small children scooting this way and that to get themselves a good view.

Goat Horn stepped forward slowly, leading the ancient blind one whose eyes were covered with a milky covering. Over his shoulders he wore that sacred calf skin taken in the White Buffalo Valley, its forelegs tied at his neck with a thong.

“Many summers ago,” Hatcher quietly translated, “our brave warrior uncle could see no more. Something cut the magic cord between his eyes and his heart.”

Titus watched the old man nod, blinking his blind eyes as Goat Horn spoke.

“Ever since,” Jack continued his translation, “Porcupine Brush has see’d things none of the rest of us can see with our eyes. This morning he come to me … come to my lodge, saying we was to go to the white men together.” Then for a few moments Hatcher listened, squinting and wrinkling up his nose as if he were struggling to make out something being said in the foreign tongue.

“What’s that ol’ hickory stump saying?” Wood grumbled impatiently.

“Shush!” Jack hushed Caleb with an elbow. “This here ol’ hickory stump of a medicine man come to say prayers to us … prayers for us.”

When Goat Horn signaled, several young men stepped forward to join the wrinkled old men who stationed themselves directly behind Porcupine Brush. In their hands they clutched rattles or small handheld drums strung with feathers. At the moment the old shaman lifted his sightless eyes to the sky, they all began to play. The ancient one soon joined them, singing high and slightly off-key.

In fascination Scratch watched the old man’s Adam’s apple slide up and down his wrinkled, thready neck as the notes climbed, then fell. With their song over, Bass and the others believed the ceremony was over and were ready to leave—but instead Goat Horn led Porcupine Brush forward until they stopped right in front of Bass.

As the old one put out his left hand to lightly touch the white trapper’s chest, he used his right hand to untie the two thongs holding the sacred calf skin around his shoulders. With the chief’s assistance, the shaman got to his knees, and there at Titus’s feet he spread the hide.

Rising with Goat Horn’s help, the shaman called out. This time only the old men came forward, bursting into a multitude of prayers and chants, each one as discordant as the next, no two of them the same—a dozen or more different songs being sung and played on drums, rattles, and wing-bone whistles all at once. A deafening noise that had begun only when the old man had reached out, blindly seizing Scratch’s two hands in his, holding them over the calf skin.

First Porcupine Brush moved one of the trapper’s arms in a circular motion over the hide; then he waved the other back and forth, but always in a circle from right to left, the same direction as the sun.

When the songs ended suddenly, the singers stepped back a few feet, and everyone fell silent as Porcupine Brush once again dropped slowly to his knees. Mumbling something to Goat Horn, he held up his veiny hand.

Whispering to Bass, Hatcher said, “Says he wants the chief’s knife.”

“He ain’t … ain’t gonna cut me, is he?” Titus asked as the knife went into the old one’s hand and Porcupine Brush bent over his work.

Locating the neck portion of the hide, the old shaman went down that edge of the hide by feel until he reached the bottom of where the skin had been pulled from the left foreleg. Although sightless, he carefully worked off a small sliver of the white calf skin.

Upon rising he immediately held out the knife, and it was taken from him by Goat Horn. Then Porcupine Brush laid the quarter-inch-wide strip of pale furry hide in one of Bass’s palms and rolled up the fingers of the white man’s hand to enclose it. He spoke for a moment before Hatcher translated.

“That there piece of the medicine calf is this ol’ man’s prayer ye can allays carry with you,” Jack whispered at Scratch’s ear. “Ye brung the medicine calf to the Snake people with you—and ye’ve helped keep ’em a strong people. The power of … how strong the Snakes are can go with ye now as ye leave their camp.”

Titus began to ask, “H-how’s that power go with me?”

But he never heard an answer as Porcupine Brush knelt to pick up the hide. As soon as he had the sacred skin in hand and was standing to return it to his shoulders, the crowd erupted into joyous singing, trilling their tongues, laughter bubbling and washing over all of them.

Suddenly Bass felt himself turned, his right arm seized. He found a grinning Slays in the Night there at his shoulder, pumping his hand as if it were a forge bellows, up and down to beat the band. Goat Horn slid in next, taking the trapper’s hand from his son’s and shaking Bass’s arm while Slays in the Night stood there pounding Titus on the back.

“Time to saddle up, Scratch!” Hatcher called out as he and the others whirled about to take up their reins and climbed on the backs of their horses.

Hannah and some of the pack animals brayed and snorted with excitement as children shrieked, dogs howled and barked, and it seemed a thousand different hands reached out to touch Scratch from the crowd—merely to touch this white-man shaman before he left them.

“T-thank God!” Bass replied, yelling over all the noisy throats as one chief and old warrior after another shook hands with him. “I’m ’bout to get my arm yanked off here!”

“Dammit, Scratch—ye ugly dog you! Get up! Get yer arse up now!” Hatcher hollered inches from his ear, his thick beard brushing the side of Bass’s head.

“Get away from me!”

“Eeegod—it ain’t ever’ day a man has his birthday!” Jack roared.

The long-maned, hairy-faced others were chattering and laughing, jigging and gaping, like a passel of slack-jawed town idiots.

“Leave me be!” Bass growled, attempting a second time to pull the buffalo robe back over his head.

“Whassamatta?” Jack jabbed a hand at Bass’s nose, then pushed his own face right down close to Scratch’s, plainly showing that one upper tooth that had clearly rotted, black against the tobbaco-stained others. “You better come hurraw with us—it’s your damned birthday!”

Holding the edge of the robe right under his eyes, Titus peered at each of them in turn. The snow fell lightly on their shoulders as they stood arm in arm with one another there around their roaring fire just beyond the crescent of their half-dozen canvas shelters. Every last one of them was bleary-and red-eyed, but none so much as Hatcher, whose wild expression once more convinced Titus why some time back his friends had come to call him “Mad Jack.”

“I had enough hurrawin’ last night,” Scratch said, his red-rimmed eyes feeling gritty. “Where’d you get that damned tonsil varnish anyhow?”

“Allays we save us some!” Caleb Wood cried out, hoisting his tin cup there beside Elbridge Gray.

“Good likker, h’ain’t it?” Matthew Kinkead sang.

Bass’s head felt about as heavy as an anvil as he tried to pick it up off the robes where he had collapsed sometime in the predawn darkness, not having the fortitude these other men seemed to exhibit as they kept right on drinking, singing, carousing, and merrily bringing in what they calculated to be a brand spanking-new year.

“C’mon, now! Come doe-see-doe a jig with the hull of us!” Isaac Simms begged, hopping around so energetically that his pale, whitish-blond hair shook like a lively burst of sunlight beneath his battered and greasy felt hat. “It’s your birthday, Scratch!”

As he rubbed grit from his eyes, Titus knew his head would not take any more swaying and swinging the way they had done all last night, dancing round and round, in and out among the others, thumping feet and slapping knees, singing out as loud as they could while beating on kettles with sticks to accompany Hatcher as he scratched his bow across the strings of that worn fiddle of his. Beginning as soon as the sun had set and the quarter moon was on the rise—hour after hour they kept right at it.

“We allays hurraw for the new year, y’ lop-eared sumbitch,” Hatcher slurred before he emptied the last dregs of his cup, then flung the cup aside. While he bent over to again retrieve his fiddle from that worn, much battered oak-colored violin case, he said, “Ye having yerself a birthday sure as hell makes a good reason for me and the boys here to keep on hurrawing right on into New Year’s Day!”

“Gimme some water,” Bass grumped, clutching his pounding, aching head between his hands. It seemed they all were talking too loud, stomping their feet, pounding those kettles no matter how poorly his head hurt—why, even these damned snowflakes were landing on him too hard, too cold, too damned loud.

“Get that back-strapped sumbitch a drink of water,” Hatcher ordered—then suddenly caught himself. “Water, Scratch? What the hell you wanna go an’ drink water for?”

Bass admitted, “’Fraid if I drink any more of that trader’s whiskey—I’m gonna puke in the fire.”

Jack bent there in front of Scratch’s face, the fiddle and bow swinging loose from one hand, the other hand plopped on the top of Bass’s shoulder to steady himself as he rocked slowly back and forth. “Damn, nigger—ye got more grit’n most ever’ man I ever knowed, Titus Bass. But ye sure as hell cain’t hol’t your likker wuth a Sunday preacher man!”

They all roared with that, which only made Scratch’s head thump and hammer all the more.

Stumbling a little as he straightened, Jack swung his arms out as he announced to the group, “This here’s the birthday of Titus S. Bass. Shhh—don’t ye ever let no nigger know the S stands for Scratch.”

“Here’s to Scratch!” John Rowland cried, shoving some of his bushy, unkempt hair out of his eyes.

And then Hatcher was sputtering again. “Scratch be a man ever’ last one of us can depend on, that’s for sartin—sartin sure. A man made of pure fighting tallow.”

“How the hell old are you?” Solomon Fish wondered, stuffing a hand beneath the gray wolf-hide cap of his, scratching at his blond ringlets.

“Hell if I can figger it out for you right now!” Titus snapped angrily.

“Hush your face, Solomon!” Jack ordered. “Dammit, here I am speechifying on this nigger’s birthday—so ye just keep respectful of this here serious occasion and keep yer ugly yap shut!”

Beneath his sharp hatchet of a nose dotted with huge pores forever blackened with fire soot and dirt, Fish growled, “Your yap uglier’n mine, Hatcher!”

“Bet you don’t know near the purty words Mad Jack here knows!” Elbridge Gray defended.

“Thank ye, child!” Hatcher roared. “Now, all of ye raise your cups to this here ugliest nigger you’re bound to see out to the Shining Mountains! It’s his birthday, by damned! And ain’t none of us likely to see a more flea-bit, skin-chewin’, squar-screwin’, likker-lovin’ coon in near all of God’s natural creations!”

With that Jack swung the fiddle up and jabbed it beneath his chin. Striking a pose, he dragged that old bow across those strings—succeeding in raising every last one of the hairs on the back of Scratch’s neck and grating on Bass like a coarse file dragged across some crude cast iron. If it weren’t for the sharp hammer strikes the whining notes caused in his head, he was sure Mad Jack’s fiddle playing would have made him throw up what he had left in his belly from last night.

Barely cracking his eyes into slits as Mad Jack’s music picked up its pace and the other liquor-crazed trappers set to stomping with one another, Titus spotted the kettle of water nearby. At the moment, he couldn’t remember being thirstier. Grunting with that self-inflicted pain, he lumbered onto his knees shakily, trying desperately to shut out what noise he could from piercing his head with slivers of icy agony, just as if someone were shoving his mam’s knitting needles into both his ears, jabbing them right in behind his eyeballs.

Fighting that cold, stabbing torture, Scratch peered down into the kettle, finding its surface crusted with ice. Angrily breaking the crust with his bare fist, Bass plopped over to squat in a heap, raising the kettle to his lips, where he ended up drinking less than he managed to splash in his lap—shaking so bad from a terrible concoction of numbing winter cold mixed with a brutal hangover and sprinkled generously with more of Mad Jack’s wild caterwauling and fiddle playing. He drank and drank until he suddenly needed to pee.

As heavy as his head felt, as slow as his leaden legs and arms were to respond to even the little he ordered them to do—this getting himself up and moving off from the fire, to head anywhere away from the raucous merrymaking—it came as a great rush of relief to suck in a chestful of the frightfully cold air. He tramped through the snow, farther, farther still, as the sounds behind him slowly faded and his head no longer throbbed nearly as loud, nor as fitfully as it had. When he was finally able to hear the critch and crunch of his own thick winter moccasins breaking through the icy crust of the old snow, he figured he had come far enough to have himself a peaceful pee.

Yanking open the flaps to his blanket capote, tugging aside the long tradewool breechclout, he let out a sigh and for the moment found himself no longer caring about much of anything else. How very quiet the forest became out here, away from the celebration—a grating, noisome celebration he was nonetheless happy the others were there to share with him. But here it was so utterly quiet, he could hear the faint hiss of his stream as it melted the icy crust. So, so quiet he was sure he could hear the snow falling, hear when each flake tumbled against his wind-burned, hairy face, when each flake spun itself into his long, curly, unkempt hair or landed on the sleeves of his thick wool coat.

Through a narrow crack in the evergreen corduroy of tall trees Scratch found he could stand there in the quiet and look up at the foothills, beyond them at the east face of the Wind River Mountains extending north until their slopes totally disappeared beneath the lowering clouds bringing in this new snow. Those high mountains giving birth to the freshets that trickled down from the alpine snowfields to become the creeks and streams and eventually the rivers, all of which had been good to Hatcher’s bunch that fall. Between the Popo Agie on the southeast and all those little streams that flowed off the slopes of the mountains to feed the Wind River itself, the ten of them had found a virtually untrapped haven. By the time winter began closing in for good and the high creeks were freezing over, they had moved their way northwest across a great stretch of country, just by following the base of the mountains.

Come spring and the first freeing of that icy jam holding back those winter-clogged creeks, the ten promised themselves they would again work back up the Wind’s course, cross on over far upriver, then attack the streams that striped the slopes on the north side of that great horseshoe of a valley. There they were sure they would find a virgin territory in those foothills of the mountains that bordered Crow country on the east and Blackfoot territory on the west. A crossroads of war trails that land was sure to be.

Since taking their leave of the Shoshone and their grand buffalo hunt, the trappers’ cooking pots had never gone empty. As the days shortened and the temperatures dropped, the game slowly moseyed down to lower elevations, called to gather with that seasonal imperative, male and female to satisfy their species’ itch. Pronghorn antelope were the first to busy themselves with this annual ritual of courtship. In short order behind them the mule deer and whitetail began their dance of the seasons as bucks sparred and sought out fertile does. The renewal of life went on.

And then one cold, breathless morning Bass and the others heard that first shrill whistle gradually descending into a snorting grunt. Somewhere higher on the slopes above the stream where they were working, the dropping temperatures had once again stirred the ancient juices in the lordly elk. Just as it was in a time before any man had laid his foot down in these valleys, the young bulls sensed the same urges, were drawn by the same lure, were seduced by the same fragrance on the wind … yet it would not be these males most young and eager who would claim the cows. Instead it was. only the deeper-throated, heavier-antlered bulls who had any chance at all to drive off all pretenders until each harem was secure from all challenge.

It was an exhausting time for these old royals. Their necks swelled up, they were in constant discomfort, and they barely had time to eat. Instead, the herd bulls worked ceaselessly night and day keeping their cows rounded up and under their watchful scrutiny. Yet—that many fertile, fragrant females were sure to cast a scent on the wind guaranteed to draw some young bulls eager enough to take themselves a shot at the reigning monarch.

Lowering their heads to dig up tufts of alpine meadow with their wide-flung antlers, each male shaking and trembling with the hormone flush of impending battle, taunting their challenger by flinging urine and semen across their own hide and that piece of ground they claimed, the bulls began their deadly dance: snorting, whistling, and Anally bugling their intention not to back away from battle.

There had been days this past autumn when Scratch had finished his trap setting, done with skinning out the beaver he caught without fail, and set aside his chores of stretching and fleshing those skins in camp, days when he crept to the edge of a meadow, or sneaked off to overlook a streamside arena from above in an outcropping of granite boulders—there to watch in wonder and listen in silence to this singular song dedicated to the cycle of the seasons—the bugling challenge of a bull elk. Nowhere else on earth did he believe there could be a sound quite like this ages-old call to battle.

Overhead those late-autumn days the great longnecks strained south in wavering vees that pocked the deepening blue of the sky. Loud, raucous honking as the birds flapped on past high mountains and river valleys in their own seasonal quest.

Up these verdant slopes in the darkened timber and down among the rocky bluffs, the bears were consumed with eating their last, stuffing themselves with every bite of plant or animal, anything they could find to last them through the long, cold, deep sleep of their kind.

The leaves dried, some turned golden and others the crimson of bloody, iron arrow points—then hung there waiting until strong winds rushed down from the high glaciers, stripping tree and brush alike as the land finished off these last few pirouettes before it fell into a hush, ready to sleep on through the winter.

While their horses cropped at the last of the dried grasses and grew heavy, shaggy coats for the season on its way, the industrious beaver went about making repairs to their dams and lodges. Those ever-curious beaver who came to investigate when they encountered a strange scent on the wind as the ten made their sets and laid their traps. One by one, Bass, Hatcher, and the rest gathered in the fat, seal-sleek flat-tails, trap-set by trap-set through that autumn. Every few days they would move on to camp by a new stream—there to find more dams or lodges, to discover where the beaver felled tracts of the forest, gnawing the timbered meadows into nothing more than flooded ponds dotted with hundreds of aspen stumps.

That first morning at each camp found the ten of them fanning out in three directions to spend the day searching for any sign of man in that country—hoping not to discover sign of an enemy. Eyes along the skyline, and eyes on the backtrail. Close enough here to the Arapaho, who might raid out of the south, and close enough to the Blackfoot, who were known to come riding out of the north.

Once assured that the nearby countryside was untraveled, the ten fell into their routine of eating, sleeping, trapping, stretching, and scraping. Morning and night an autumn fire felt especially good to these men who haunted this high land as winter threatened on the horizon—a fire to hunker close to on those coldest of days, for there was always work to be done in fall camp.

If not repicketing the pack animals out to graze or riding the saddle horses to keep them exercised, there was always the nonstop scraping and stretching of the hides. If it weren’t a matter of repairing a saddle or bridle or some other piece of tack, then a man might find he needed to mend a sore hoof or perhaps even the bloody wound caused when one pony nipped at another in the cavvyyard. Now was the season when the men closely inspected the back and ribs of every one of their work animals—treating the saddle sores and cinch ulcers from summer’s long travels with what herbs and roots they had come to know would draw out the poisons, applying poultices that healed the flesh not only of beast but of man as well.

Yet as autumn turned inward on its shortening days and slid headlong into winter, it could become a sad time for a mountain trapper finding himself with less and less work to do now that camp was rarely moved through the deep snow, now that most of the beaver in the nearby country were already caught. In that leisure a man surely had himself more time to reflect and remember, to fondly recollect last summer’s rendezvous here at a time when he must also ready himself for the long, ofttimes lonely, and idle winter … until spring temperatures finally freed the frozen streams, prodding the trapper back to his hard labors that would take him from valley floor on up to the high and terrible places: once more to spend his days wading up past his knees in icy water, searching out those sleek-furred rodents that were the commerce and currency of this far country.

“Who was it learn’t ye to trap, Titus Bass?” Hatcher had asked him one of those glorious late-fall afternoons before Scratch wandered away from camp, just as the others had come to expect of him: off to watch the sun settling south of west.

“Ain’t nobody learn’t me,” he had replied, then gazed down at his own hands he turned palms and backs. “Just these—seems my hands damn well learn’t all on their own.”

“Not them three fellas you wintered up with?” asked Caleb Wood.

For a moment he had gazed into the mesmerizing dance of the flames—thinking back on all that the three had taught him about survival and trust, about balancing the ledger for one’s own life time and again, the way season after season Bud, Billy, and Silas had taught him just how fragile life could be out here—how important it was to have someone to trust … perhaps even after you realized you could not trust them completely. Especially then.

“They learn’t me, sure enough,” Bass finally answered, the reflection of the flames dancing across his bearded face. “But not ’bout trapping. Truth be, I was better’n all of ’em—damn near good as all of ’em put together too.”

“Shit, if that ain’t a bald-face!” Isaac Simms snorted in disagreement. “How you gonna be better’n three trappers?”

“Whoa, hoss!” Hatcher declared. “Just look at what this nigger’s brung in already.” He was pointing for the rest to regard Bass’s growing packs of fur. “If’n it weren’t that every last one of ye was pure punkins at laying a set—Ol’ Scratch here just might have any three of ye beat at that!”

“Man does bring in the beaver, he does,” Rufus Graham grudgingly admitted.

“So what’s yer secret, Scratch?” inquired the rail-thin John Rowland.

With a slight shrug Titus replied, “Don’t know my own self, Johnny-boy. All I know is that I hadn’t been out here all that long when I come to callate that what I learn’t back there across the Big Muddy wouldn’t do me no good out here in this land. None of what I knowed back there was gonna hold me in good stead on the far prerra, not up in them high places. Not a damn bit of what folks learn on the other side of the river gonna do any of us a good goddamn anymore.”

That autumn sunset as he had leaned his back against the trunk of a lodgepole pine and tracked the pale globe’s slow descent from the sky, he brooded some more on all that he had come to know, on what he had learned across those seasons he had managed to survive since leaving St. Louis all by his lonesome, on his own hook. And in all that time Bass had come to clearly understand that if anything could come natural to a man, then he had come natural to this nomadic trapper’s life. Just as the rivers came natural to Ebenezer Zane and Hames Kingsbury, how plowing at the ground came natural to his own pap and others of his kind.

When a man’s clearly not cut of the right cloth for something—he best find what he is cut out for.

As the saffron orb settled its fiery ring on the tops of the distant trees, Scratch thanked whatever force was listening right then … thanked that power in his own way for holding Titus Bass up in the palm of its hand and thereby bringing him out of that land of the east, keeping him safe as he crossed the open danger of the plains and prairie—eventually to deliver him up before this great snowcapped altar that that same powerful force had long ago erected here, right at the foot of an endless dome of sky. Here where the temple spires scratched at the underbellies of the clouds.

Here—where there were no monuments to man, no puny steeples and church belfries—only what monuments the unseen hands and powers and forces at work all around him had created.

So once more Bass felt small … so very, very small in watching the sun disappear behind the trees, there beyond those granite towers of the Wind River Mountains—so far overhead no trees dared grow. In this most private, spiritual moment at the end of each day Bass had learned to expect the coming of that crushing silence at the instant twilight determined the first stars would peek through from heaven. It was the very same silence that each evening caused him to rewonder when he would come to know just what force it was that was so much greater than himself.

When would he know it with the certainty of Fawn, the Ute widow with those eyes of ageless sadness? When was he to sense in his own heart all that the old, blind Shoshone shaman sensed in his? How long, Titus wondered, would he have to go on not knowing? How long until he, like that ancient one, could touch the pale hide of a white buffalo calf and finally hear the answer reverberate within his heart?

How long would it take until he understood what the wrinkled old men had accepted—what had truly given them real peace?

Here Scratch stood in that winter forest, the boisterous singing and Hatcher’s scratchy fiddle only faint wisps on the Tight breeze that bitter morning … the first of a shiny new year by Caleb Wood’s careful count made on notched sticks he carried in a bundle tucked away in a saddlebag—a brand-new year for them all here in the heart of the winter, ten free men living out their days deep in the marrow of the Rocky Mountains.

Maybeso, he decided, autumn wasn’t the season he could expect to discover what he wanted most to know. After all, in autumn a man was still too damned busy to allow himself enough quiet to really hear. There were beaver to be caught, distance to be covered, cold to prepare one’s self for.

More likely, Scratch thought, he would come to know his answers come a winter. Perhaps … even this winter. A time when life itself slowed, when the spin of days wound down and like thick black-strap molasses everything barely moved ahead at such a leisurely pace that a man was allowed time to rightfully consider and plan and to give thanks for what he has been given.

From what Scratch had come to know, for most trappers winter was a time to hunker by the fire, swapping lies, carefully embellishing and embroidering their stories of coups and conquests. A time when a man did just what the Injuns did: gathered close to the fires in their lodges, doing their best to stay warm and keep their bellies filled till spring. During that long period of endless cold, there simply wasn’t much reason for a man to ride his horses the way he did during the hunt for beaver or his annual trek to rendezvous—a fact that meant that come spring, a man’s animals would most likely be rangy, feisty, all but back to wild mustangs again. There’d come a time just before spring trapping began when a man would have to break his pony to saddle all over. But Scratch had never been one to allow that to happen.

Here in his third winter, just as he had done for both of those before, from time to time Bass would ride his saddle pony or strap the packs on Hannah’s back—to keep the animals broken in. Enough contact every few days to remind these creatures of his touch, of his smell—enough so these half-wild creatures would be reassured in the presence of a white man here in the land of so many red men.

Although … Scratch had to admit Hannah had been different almost from the start, right from that very first winter. Markedly different from those other mules he had known working at Troost’s Livery back in St. Louis, as well as those mules brought out of the Missouri country by traders to this far country.

Thinking about Hannah and her affection always caused a spot inside him to glow not unlike his mam’s bed-warming iron, no matter how cold the land became around him with winter’s icy grip. Many were the times when the winds blew ferociously and the snow fell so deep that the animals had it tough pawing down to anything they could find to eat. From Silas, Billy, and Bud Scratch first learned he could feed his horse and pack animals a subsistence of cottonwood bark until the Chinook winds arrived to clear the land of snow … at least until the coming of the next winter storm.

Astounded at first—and convinced the three trappers were having themselves a great laugh at his expense—Bass was genuinely amazed when they showed him just how a hungry animal would take to the bark they peeled from cottonwood limbs and logs. After chopping short, firewood-sized pieces, the men would set about drawing their large skinning knives down the length of each limb to peel away the tender, soft underbark. Most times it was a cold, tedious, and laborious process, where a man was forced to kneel in the snow to accomplish his task: Scratch would lock a short length of wood between his knees as he crouched over it, then pull his knife toward him in a shaving motion, with each stroke producing a thin curl of palatable bark. Once he had enough to fill his arms, he would lay that big pile before the mule and other animals the way a man might lay out armloads of alfalfa or bluegrass.

One morning early their first winter together in the mountains Bass hadn’t been peeling near fast enough to keep up with just how rapidly Hannah could make the bark disappear. Without hesitation she eased over to where he was working, snatching up the curls of bark as quickly as he produced them. When he had stood momentarily to bend and flex the kinks out of his cold, cramped muscles, to his surprise Hannah moved right up to help herself. Putting one front hoof down on the middle of a branch to hold it in place, the mule bent low and began to rake her teeth across it, peeling the bark away each time. As he watched in utter amazement, she consistently managed to pull off short lengths of bark on her own.

“You just remember that now, ol’ gal,” he had instructed her that first winter. “Hap’ the time I don’t peel fast enough for that damned hungry belly of your’n—don’t you dare be shy ’bout digging in for your own self.”

As he stood there this cold morning, his head pounding with hangover and finding himself a full year older, Scratch came naturally to think that Hannah was truly meant to come to him, just the way certain folks had shown up somewhere along the path his life had taken. Women. And friends. And even a mule. Times were a hand had gently touched his life, nudging it this way, or easing it there.

Mayhap it had been better in those younger days when he did not know enough to realize there was something greater than himself … better then than now with the nagging of this not knowing, with this wondering. Far better those days of reckless youth when nothing seemed of much import but the moment. Now, with each ring he put on every winter, Bass realized he knew less and less, so grew to sense just how precious was each day—for now he realized how those days grew less and less in number. Now he knew how each one might well be his last.

He had to know: just the way he had come to learn the alchemy of fire and iron and muscle in Troost’s Livery; the way he had learned to set and bait and blind a beaver trap in those high-country streams and ponds. This was something that must not elude him: knowing what force had brought him here, then continued to watch over him, and ultimately plucked him from danger more than once already.

Likely it had to be the very same force that had guided him north as he lay all but dead across Hannah’s withers. No, not just the North Star shining like some distant beacon, not only it—for he was certain something far greater than those tiny pricks of light in the night sky had steered him north to Goat Horn’s band of the Shoshone, north to Jack Hatcher’s bunch … and—dare he think it?—had guided him north right to that white buffalo calf … the animal that had saved his life.