Ride the Moon Down

13

Each time Scratch returned to Waits-by-the-Water throughout the rest of that winter, bringing in more beaver pelts from the streams and creeks ribboning the nearby slopes, he couldn’t help but notice how the ricks of buffalo robes multiplied in the fort’s storage house when he rode over to the post for the sound of male voices, some man’s talk, or just to hear a bit more English than he could wring out of his wife.

And with the mountain man’s every visit to the stockade, young Sublette gently prodded Scratch. “Ain’t you getting a little old to be traipsing off all alone into them snowy hills anymore?”

Bass’s eyes would twinkle, and he’d wink at the older Vasquez when he replied, “I ain’t so old I can’t take care of myself, you pup.”

“Man smart as you,” Sublette chided, “I would’ve thought you’d figured out some easier way to make a living.”

On that Louis Vasquez would agree. “Trapping’s gotta be some of the meanest work any man can do, Scratch.”

“Hard work never kill’t no man I know of,” he grumbled over the lip of his tin cup.

Every visit Sublette would say, “Don’t you figure it’s time you quit scratching out a living with your hands, and start making your living with your wits?”

“I told you, I ain’t fit out to be no trader,” Bass told them, a little stronger this third time, as they sat out a storm.

At the stockade walls a wolfish wind howled as dawn approached. The sudden subfreezing gale had come on so fiercely that Scratch abandoned their camp and hurried his wife and daughter through the moaning trees that loomed out of the darkness to reach the walls of the fort. In the last few hours Waits-by-the-Water and Magpie had slept snugly in a far corner of the trading room behind two bales of buffalo robes while he had dozed fitfully, his back propped against a pack of beaver in another corner.

Once Vasquez had awakened, he shoved open the plank door to start some coffee brewing over the fire Scratch kept going in the mud and river-stone fireplace. Two of the fort employees had abandoned their blankets to sit before the flames, kneading their cold hands and inhaling the luring fragrance of brewing coffee.

It wasn’t long before Sublette himself had appeared at the ill-fitting door where a sudden gust billowed a rooster tail of snow around him as he struggled to shut off the wind, forced to throw his shoulder against the rough planks. Even as he sat and accepted his tin cup from Vasquez, Sublette had begun to prod the old mountain man.

“When you going to admit you’re just the man Louis and me need to trade with the bands hereabouts?”

“There’s traders, and there’s trappers,” Titus snapped. “And one ain’t fit to be the other.”

Then he sat silent while Vasquez moved from man to man with the huge coffeepot, filling each steaming tin before moving on.

“Pretty plain our friend doesn’t want us to beg him anymore, Andrew,” the Spaniard stated with a wry look of amusement on his face. “The matter’s dead. Isn’t a concern to Scratch that the bottom is getting torn out from under the beaver trade. He doesn’t have to worry with none of it.”

“Damn right,” Scratch grumbled. “I’ll stay on trapping what I can, trading for what I need. I ain’t been a hired man in almost eleven years. So I ain’t about to sign on now.”

“You got a family,” Andrew lobbied. “How you figure to provide for them when beaver goes to hell?”

“Just the way any man would!” he shrieked, then realized how loud his voice had grown and sneaked a quick look at the far corner where wife and daughter slept. Whispering, he continued, “We ain’t gonna starve, long as I can hunt.”

Sublette asked, “How do you propose to pay for lead and powder? For your coffee and tobacco, sugar and salt—not to mention those nice things your wife deserves?”

Bass snorted with a grin. “Damn, if you ain’t got a lot of your oily-talkin’ brother Billy in you, young Sublette,” and he hoisted his coffee cup in salute. “Comes to it, a man with a strong back and his wits about him can allays find himself work.”

Vasquez said, “We got work for you right here.”

“Dammit, boys—ain’t neither of you give thought I got me a Crow wife? How you ever ’spect me to take a Crow woman into them ’Rapaho and Shian camps?”

Sublette shrugged, muttering, “I … I—”

“You doing your damndest to make me think you got horse apples for brains, ain’cha?”

“It ain’t so foolish as you’re making it out to be,” Sublette argued as he glanced over at his partner, finding Vasquez grinning in his dark face. “You been riding off from her to trap all winter long. Come back to your wife and her camp when it pleases you. Tell me what’s so different with going off to find some villages and trade for their buffalo robes?”

“Long as there’s beaver in the hills, there’s lots of differ’nce,” he answered firmly. “I’m a man gonna choose how he makes his living, how he works out the rest of his days.”

Vasquez came over and squatted down next to Titus. “Ever you consider trading with the Crow up north? You’re married to one, gotta know plenty of them bucks too. It might work out well for you and us.”

But he wagged his head. “Things ain’t so good ’tween me and them Sparrowhawks right now. Ain’t none of you been paying no notice I spent the winter here, ’stead of up there in Absaroka? Don’t that tell you nothing?”

“Just figured we might help you and you help us,” Vasquez explained. “I traded among ’em myself couple winters ago. Lost two of my men to the Blackfoot, but damn if that spring of thirty-four I didn’t haul better’n thirty packs of buffalo up to Campbell’s post at the mouth of the Yellowstone.”

“Crow trade ain’t wuth the trouble,” Bass declared. “Not long after the company bought out Campbell and your big brother Billy, they found things so tough up there on the Yallerstone in Crow country that they pulled back from the Bighorn—moved their post to the Tongue.”

Andrew whistled low. “Don’t say?”

“’Sides, the company booshways already got ’em someone living with the Crow. He sees they trade their furs off only to him and the company.”

“That Negra Beckwith,” Sublette grumbled, then grinned. “But I’ll bet you’d do fine working for us up there.”

Titus dug a fingernail at his itchy scalp. “Trader at Fort Cass, fella named Tullock, he asked me ’bout taking Beckwith’s job last spring.”

Vasquez leaned close. “Company isn’t happy with him?”

“Tullock says Beckwith spends too much time making war on the Crow’s enemies,” Bass explained. “’Stead of making them Crow warriors trap beaver for the company. Tullock ain’t figgered it out: up there near the Blackfoot country, there ain’t but one choice for them Crow. They can trap flat-tails, or they can protect their families.”

“But down here,” Sublette replied with gusto, “Injuns don’t have the Blackfoot to fret over! You agree to be our trader, you can see that the bands in these parts bring us their furs instead of taking them down to the Arkansas, or up to Fort William on the North Platte. You make ’em see how good they’ll have it trapping beaver for us, making buffalo robes for Vasquez and Sublette.”

“Naw,” Scratch answered with a dull echo as he brought his tin cup to his mouth. Waits-by-the-Water settled beside him. She kissed his cheek and rested her head against his upper arm.

“Magpie asleep?” he asked her in English.

She nodded and spoke in his tongue. “Yes. She hungry soon.”

“Storm’s ’bout played itself out,” Bass said, gazing at that one window in the room where a sheet of thin, translucent rawhide had been tacked over a square hole sawed in the cottonwood logs to serve as a crude windowpane. “Figgered to pack up and move out this morning anyways.”

“But now the snow will be so deep,” she protested in Crow, gripping his arm fiercely, as if she would physically keep him there.

“The two of us, we’ve been through worse,” he answered in her tongue. “So don’t you worry. There’s beaver yet—believe me. And I mean to trap my share of it.”

He set his empty cup down, looking at Sublette and Vasquez. To them he said in English, “I mean to trap my share of what beaver’s left, no matter that traders like you don’t give me much for my plews no more.”

With winter retreating up the slopes more each day, Bass was able to push farther into the recesses of that eastern front of the central Rockies. As the days lengthened and warmed with the arrival of spring, he stayed out longer, visiting their camp on the South Platte for shorter stays.

While the sun warmed the earth late those mornings he spent near the stockade walls, Bass loved to grab his daughter and her soft doe-skin ball Waits-by-the-Water had sewn together, slowly trudging hand in hand over to a patch of open ground where they tossed and kicked and even batted the ball across the ground with limbs he snapped off of some deadfall. Although she couldn’t move all that fast, stumbling and pitching into the new grass more than her share, Magpie nonetheless scrambled back to her feet laughing, chirping, eager to continue their exhausting play. Without fail, their game always ended with Titus chasing after his daughter, arms waving over his head, fingers crooked clawlike as he bellowed the battle roar of a grizzly, eliciting ear-shattering squeals and giggles from the little one as she peered over her shoulder at the terrible man-beast pursuing her.

At the edge of the meadow stood Waits-by-the-Water, always watching, smiling, laughing with them each time either father or daughter spilled, rolling in the cool, wet grass. Day by day Magpie got better at smacking the ball away from him, better at staying on her feet, better able to dodge and sidestep her father until he would collapse on the ground, huffing from exhaustion while she leaped upon his chest to pull at his long hair or his beard.

“Popo play! Popo play!” she would cry in English, unable yet to call him papa, as she tugged at his graying curls as if to drag him to his feet so he could continue their game.

“Popo tired, Magpie,” he would mimic her pet name for him. “Popo sleep now.”

Then Titus would shut his eyes to feign sleep until she bent over his face, gently nudging back an eyelid to inspect his condition. Each time she did, Scratch would immediately roar and leap up, snatching her into his arms, hoisting her overhead, spinning, spinning until he made himself so dizzy he had to collapse again, both of them laughing as Waits-by-the-Water leaped on them both.

These warming days of early spring were good. Though their times together were brief because the beaver were sleek with winter coats, he did his best to make the most of every visit before he rode off again. One day soon, he promised, they would start north for rendezvous in the valley of the Green, not so much to trade furs off for their necessaries as much as he hankered to see familiar faces again—to learn what old friends had gone under, who had abandoned the mountains, and who remained steadfast as this way of life slowly burned itself out like the final ember in a fire that had flared far too hot.

Far back in the hills again, he had encountered sure sign of Indians for something on the order of a week, moving his camp a little each day. At first he saw the smoke of distant fires. Then spotted some far-off riders. And even crossed a fresh trail that came down from the saddle above him two days back. Four of them, perhaps five. At least there were five horses. No telling how many riders. Might only be hunters, their packhorses laden with elk as the game grazed farther and farther up the slopes with each week’s warming.

But for the past two days of making cold camps—chewing on dried meat, going without coffee, and sleeping without a fire—Bass hadn’t run across any new sign of the horsemen.

“Likely ’Rapaho,” he grumbled to himself now as he pulled the trap sack loose from Samantha’s packsaddle, the way he had grumbled countless times in the last week. “Taking furs in to trade with Sublette and Vaskiss. Get ’em more powder and shot.”

More than once Bass had returned from his trapping forays to find Arapaho lodges pitched outside the walls of Fort Vasquez, come there to trade for what they needed, perhaps wheedling for what they coveted, willing to steal what wasn’t nailed down when the white men turned their backs.

Losing some of his hair made his gut burn with an unquenchable hatred for the tribe. Finally Scratch had taken his revenge upon the very man who had scalped him nine years ago.

How cleansing it had been to exact that brutal retribution.^*

And even though the red bastards had put an arrow in his shoulder more than two winters back, somehow Titus always managed to hurt the Arapaho more than they had hurt him.

Over the years he had come to learn there were tribes and bands he could deal with, and tribes who meant trouble straight up. Even among the Crow, he had discovered there were good and there were those whose hearts lay in a dark and shadowy place. He figured it had to be just that way with the Arapaho. A man had to be on the watch for Bannock too, a bunch who always did their damndest to run off with what they could. Then there were the Ute, a peaceable enough people. And those Shoshone who had healed him, perhaps saved his life, though Slays in the Night had inexplicably turned on him later: stolen Bass’s horses, tried to kill his old white friend.

Maybeso there really was good and bad in each bunch, he had begun to believe this long, wet winter. Just as there were good men who were his friends among the company brigades, there would always be men like Silas Cooper or that parley-voo Chouinard. Skin color didn’t make no difference, he allowed.

Except when it came to the Blackfoot.

They were the foulest creatures God ever put on the earth. Why, those red sons of bitches had butchered more good men Scratch knew of. If ever there was a tribe that deserved the iron fist of God’s own wrath rubbing them out in one fell swoop, he believed it was the Blackfoot. Evil incarnate.

Late in the day after lying back in the shadows wrapped in a robe, Titus led Samantha out of hiding, heading downhill for the swampy bottom ground where he set more than a dozen traps that morning. The beaver had been busy there in the shade of the leafless quaky, stirring from their winter lodges to fell the saplings they fed their young. That half of the meadow the sun could not yet reach this time of the year was still slicked with inch-thick ice. The rest of the clearing warmed enough to become a bog by day, but refroze each night.

Now he needed to gather all his traps before returning to camp; tomorrow he’d be on his way even higher. What with the way the tiny freshets were feeding every little stream, how so many of them wove together to form gushing creeks that spilled on down the slopes, Titus figured the high country had to be melting. And if the snow was softening, then there surely had to be a way of punching his way back into that country where the beaver slumbered, yet undisturbed.

When he pulled up that first trap, Bass found it empty. Into one of the two trap sacks it went, clattering softly as the iron jaws and chain settled against Samantha’s side where the deer-hide sack hung suspended from the elk-horn pack-saddle. The second clutched a fat, sleek beaver captured in its jaws. Glancing at the sun, he figured he had enough time to skin the animal out there and then. That done, the trap went into the other sack with the green hide he had rolled tightly. On and on he went, collecting at least two beaver for every three traps he pulled from the water—

Samantha’s ears came up as she froze.

Bass held his breath. Stilled his hands over the carcass he was skinning in the cold, damp grass beginning to slick with ice here as the sun’s light continued to fade from the sky. For the longest time he listened, his eyes searching the brush, the trees, always coming back to look at the mule—watching her eyes, her nostrils, until she finally snorted and dipped her head to tear contentedly at the grass.

He breathed again, relieved, and went back to trimming the hide from the two back legs, then sawed off the huge tail. But instead of pitching this tail out with the gut-pile, Titus decided to save it, perhaps cook it tomorrow after they had climbed high enough, far enough that no skulking redbelly would follow.

Gathering tail, hide, and trap, he stood and heard his knees crackle in protest. The years of cold, wading and working in frozen streams, were exacting their toll on his joints. Tortured more every season with aching, icy stabs of pain, he worried how long his body would be able to endure, how long before he could no longer provide for those who counted upon him.

He glanced over at the big Derringer rifle leaning against the brush, then decided against gathering it up, pushing instead for the pack mule, his arms already burdened. At Samantha’s side he dropped the trap with a clatter, then spread the green, sticky hide across her wide rump, hair side down. On the gummy flesh he laid the beaver tail and quickly rolled it within the hide.

Pulling back the top of the trap sack, Titus dropped the green plew inside—crying out with pain as the iron tip of an arrow slashed a furrow along his right shoulder, pinning his right hand against the wide wooden packsaddle support.

Gritting his teeth with that exquisite trail of fire scorching its way up his arm, Scratch jerked around, hearing the war cry burst from the brush at the edge of the clearing. Just one voice. A lone figure among those leafless trees, nocking a second arrow against the bowstring.

Twisting back to look at his right hand, bloodied and impaled on the arrow shaft that quivered with every pulse of his bright red blood, quivered with every shudder of uncontrollable pain that sent its tremor through the arm. Gently he flexed the fingers a little, finding that every one of them still moved. Just a little, what with the pain it caused—but they moved.

He seized the shaft with his left hand, slid the fist down until it smeared the blood oozing from the wound, and pulled. The arrow did not budge.

When the second arrow struck the mule’s flank, they yelped in pain together as Samantha jerked, kicking a hind leg, slashing his shin with her hoof as she tried to escape the cause of her torment. With each buck she made and tremor that shot through her muscles, he grunted anew with his own pain.

Behind him the warrior suddenly screamed again, shouting this time a rhythmic, off-key war song as he jabbed another arrow against the bowstring and brought the weapon up.

Slapping the mule, driving his knee up against her belly, Scratch got Samantha turned a quarter circle before she threw her weight back against him, angrily twisting her head around to stare at him with wide, cruel eyes—as if she couldn’t understand why he wasn’t doing more to ease her pain.

The third shaft struck the far side of the packsaddle with such force that it quivered as she lunged in a sidestep against him, knocking his feet out from under him, suspending her master from that shaft buried in the wooden packsaddle frame.

Grunting in torment, he scrambled to regain his footing. His wet moccasins slipping on the damp grass, Bass choked down the hot ball his stomach hurled against his tonsils. A wave of icy pain had begun to numb his brain. Scratch’s eyes glazed over with stinging tears as he finally planted his feet and stood, instinctively reaching for the belt pistol with his left hand—yanking the weapon free as the mule twisted, shoving him backward so hard he lost his balance again.

Pushing himself upright, Titus blinked his eyes clear, finding the warrior dropping his quiver off his shoulder to the ground.

At that moment Bass went dry-mouthed, suddenly hearing the approach of another pony, another voice—this second still disembodied somewhere in the trees behind the first attacker.

Narrowing his gaze on that bowman who was straightening after removing the quiver so he could drag a brass-headed tomahawk from the back of his belt, for the first time Titus realized how the cards were stacked against him.

One-handed.

With only one shot.

And now a second warrior had appeared back in that dapple of light and shadow among the skinny lodgepole and bone-bare quaky.

The bowman was already in motion, his arm cocked overhead as he sprinted toward the white man and the mule, screaming with guttural bravado over a sure kill.

No more than fifteen yards between them.

Scratch firmly squeezed his sweaty left hand around the pistol butt.

Ten yards …

But he had to relax that grip to clumsily thumb back the hammer mounted on the right side of the weapon.

Five yards—

With the frizzen flush against the pan, and the hammer back to full cock, he didn’t allow himself the time to hold and aim as he plopped his pistol arm down atop the mule’s rump.

The warrior dodged to his right, starting to careen around the rear of the mule.

Whirling to his left with the target, Scratch pulled the trigger.

Samantha shuddered, jerked sideways at the gunshot, prompting another wave of nausea through him as the icy pain flushed clear up to his shoulder the moment she settled back to all four.

On the far side of the mule the bowman skidded to a stop, backed one step, then a second, when he collapsed backward, a dark stain spreading on the left side of his chest. There he thrashed and gurgled a moment before the second attacker emerged from the tree line.

Free of the tangle of lodgepole and aspen, the horseman brutally kicked his pony. This second attacker did not wear a war shirt—only a buffalo-fur vest that flapped open with the rhythm of the gallop as he brought the forestock of his muzzle loader down to rest on the crook of his bare left arm—racing toward the open ground where the white man and that mule began to dance in a tight circle.

Yelling at Samantha didn’t help settle the mule, but it was nonetheless as loud as that Arapaho war cry.

Flinging the empty pistol aside, the trapper wrapped his left hand around the shaft and gave it another mighty heave. Unable to budge the arrow.

He had no weapon but his knife now. His rifle was propped against the distant brush, his camp ax lay a few yards closer among a small pile of float-sticks. Both weapons might as well have been on the other side of those peaks for all the good they could do him now.

If he couldn’t free the arrow from the packsaddle, he had to free his hand.

Clenching his teeth, Scratch threw a shoulder into the mule’s ribs to turn her, putting Samantha between him and the oncoming horseman for the moment—then snapped the shaft off just above his bleeding hand.

He tasted sour, stinging bile as he dragged his right hand up the short section of arrow, over the frayed splinters, and it was free.

Dragging in a huge breath to push back the warm, liquid unconsciousness he realized was about to overwhelm him, Titus looked at the rifle. Saw it was too far. And realized the camp ax lay too far away too.

Now that the mule had danced them around part of a tight circle, Bass found himself staring down at the dead warrior.

Leaping aside, dodging right, then left, as the horseman approached, Titus gave the warrior nothing more than a moving target as he raced by.

Once the horseman shot past and was wrenching back on his single rein, Scratch lunged for the dead bowman. Skidding onto his knees, he peeled back those fingers locked around that tomahawk handle, one by one, until he ripped the weapon free of the death grip.

Wheeling in a crouch, he found the horseman had turned, kicking his pony savagely, coming back for another try with his short-barreled rifle. Bass dodged, the warrior swerved, swinging the weapon’s muzzle toward the white man as he started his pass—

Scratch was already leaping, that left arm swinging, planting the brass-headed tomahawk under the two bare brown arms crooked to hold the rifle on its target.

Sensing the broad blade crunch through bone, Bass drove the weapon into the naked chest with all that left arm and both shoulders could muster—toppling the horseman as he ripped downward with the tomahawk.

Even as the rider landed on his back, he had both hands locked around Bass’s wrist as he struggled to pull the tomahawk from his rib cage. Spewing bloody, gurgling oaths, the warrior struggled with an unheralded fury in his final moments.

With his strong left arm imprisoned by the enemy, Bass reached at the back of his belt with the injured right hand for his thin-bladed skinning knife, pulled it from the sheath decorated with brass tacks.

In that instant the trapper’s knife hung frozen above him, the warrior relaxed his grip on the white man’s left wrist—staring transfixed at the weapon poised above him.

Driving the blade deep into that notch at the base of the Indian’s throat, Scratch yanked and pulled with all his might, savagely tearing back and forth, slashing the windpipe that wheezed with a last rush of air, severing thumb-thick arteries that gushed free those last tremulous pumps of a heart not yet stilled.

Hot blood splattered him with such force that he was blinded as he tumbled back from the horseman’s body.

Landing on his side, Bass heaved for wind. Resting on his right elbow, he dragged his left forearm across his eyes, clearing them of crimson spray.

A few feet away the warrior lay motionless on his back—totally still but for the quivering flex of the fingers on both hands that once had gripped the white man’s wrist, still but for the tremble of his lips as they fought to speak unuttered words in that deadly silence suspended between killer and killed.

He began to catch his breath, the thunder slowly diminishing in his ears. Staring at the dying man, Scratch grew aware of the breeze quietly nuzzling the branches of the surrounding trees. Aware that the warrior’s pony had come to a stop near Samantha and contentedly tore at the short new grass emerging at the border of the old snow still crusted in a dirty, ragged line at the edge of the tree shadows.

Eventually he realized that in staring at the horseman’s bloody chest, he was noticing something odd, something out of place. There above the abdomen smeared with the splatter of glistening crimson, some of the copper flesh was not near as dark as the rest.

Rocking onto his knees, Titus crabbed over to the warrior and studied that skin. Scarred—perhaps by hanging himself from a sun-dance pole. Then he suddenly realized those scars covered more flesh than sun-dance punctures high on the pectoral muscles.

There was even something of a pattern to them.

With his bloody right hand Scratch swiped at some of the spatter of thick, congealing blood. It took another swipe with his left hand to remove enough of the blood to see what lay beneath it.

That lighter skin did form a pattern across the warrior’s cinnamon-colored chest.

Shoving aside both flaps of the warrior’s buffalo-fur vest, he quickly rubbed away more of the blood.

“Goddamn,” he whispered, stunned.

Scratch raised his face to the sky deepening suddenly with the sun’s last whimper, its crown just disappearing over the distant peaks.

When he opened his eyes again, Bass laid both of his palms flat against the two scars.

“This were a brave man, Grandfather,” he said in no more than a whisper. “He lived them many winters you gave him after I handed the bastard back his life. Tol’t him to go back to his people, so he could tell ’em the story of all I done to the nigger what took my ha’r.”

Removing his hands from the scars, Titus gazed down once more at T and the B he had scraped in this warrior’s chest many summers ago when he had finally taken his revenge on the scalper.

“I hope you saw fit to let him have children, Grandfather,” he whispered. “Brave man what had to drag hisself back to his village. Maybeso he crawled till someone come out looking for him. A brave man ought’n have children.”

Such a warrior had some mighty powerful medicine.

Bass sensed the chill drag its finger down his spine like a drip of ice water. He turned suddenly to look over his shoulder as if he had been warned.

Likely more of them. Where there were two, there would be more. And if they didn’t start looking for these two dead men tonight, they surely would be coming at first light. From the sign he had run across the last few days, these two might even belong to that hunting party working this side of the mountain.

With a shudder he stood, already feeling regret that he would have to endure another night wrapped in his buffalo robe and blanket rather than enjoying the comfort of a small fire. He needed to get back up to the rocks where he had camped, throw everything together, and get as far from there as he could before sunup.

The Arapaho’s pony was skittish as he approached, but with its long loop of rein played out on the ground, Scratch was able to bring the animal close and tie it off to Samantha for companionship. Slowly inching alongside the nervous horse, he stopped. Brushing his hand across the half robe the warrior had draped across the horse’s back, the trapper suddenly realized what he had yet to do.

“Easy, boy,” he whispered as he gently dragged the long section of buffalo hide from the animal’s back, turned, and gazed at the line of trees gone to shadow.

There in the dusk he knew he didn’t stand a chance finding any of those lodgepole or aspen with limbs big enough. And he sure didn’t have time to waste cutting branches and lashing together some lattice to construct a tree scaffold. Besides, he told himself, the others would be coming along tomorrow, and odds were they would undo all that Bass would attempt to do now.

Still, he realized he must do what he could do.

A brave man deserved a proper burial, especially if he was buried by the man who had killed him.

What one warrior did for another.

As an inky twilight deepened, in the distance he spotted a tangle of boulders that had torn themselves away from the mountainside above him aeons ago. The top of those rocks would have to do. As good a place to offer up the body to the elements as any man could ever want, as good as any brave warrior could ask.

As he struggled to lift the body, to hoist it over his shoulder, then onto the back of the pony, Titus found his right hand growing numb, the hot pain diminishing the more he demanded of the hand. After making his first ascent to decide upon the best route to reach the top of the boulders, Bass laid the buffalo hide on the gently arched crown of the highest rock, then returned for the body.

Looping the end of his rawhide rope under the dead man’s arms, he dragged the body to the bottom of the boulders, then began to climb. As he reached a narrow shelf, he would turn and haul back on the rope, bringing the body up behind him. Once it lay at his feet, Scratch climbed a little higher. Then hoisted the warrior too. Higher and higher still, until he finally heaved the body onto the edge of that tallest boulder.

Turning his back on the faint light of that band of sky in the west, he stared to the east and smiled with satisfaction. It was good: here the sun would not be blocked as it rose come morning.

Flipping the buffalo robe fur side up, he stretched it out to its full length, then dragged the body atop the hide so the warrior’s feet would point to the east, greeting the morning sun.

For a few minutes he remained there, catching his breath while the air grew cold, that last bit of early-spring warmth sucked out of the earth with the onrush of night. Finally Titus started to slide back down, knowing what he had to do.

He would gather up the enemies’ weapons, strip the first man of any tradable clothing, then search for the second Arapaho pony before he led the two animals and Samantha back to the rocky outcrop where he had pitched his temporary camp. There he would tie everything onto the mule and ponies, then ride downslope through the night.

Maybe the time had come for him to get moving anyway.

Wasn’t going to be healthy for him to lollygag around this part of the country for some seasons to come.

* Crack in the Sky