Buffalo Palace

5

Titus hadn’t moved for the longest time the rest of that afternoon—watching the knotted herd of buffalo below him as the packmare contentedly cropped at the grassy hillside nearby.

For what must have been hours he did nothing more than sit and watch how the great beasts moseyed this way, then that, before ambling off in a different direction just as slow as you’d please, flowing together like coagulate, then gradually splitting apart as individuals and small bunches went their own way in grazing the hillsides and prairie floor. He was content to do nothing more than watch the great, hump-backed creatures … all the while trying to control the hammering of his heart, trying desperately to remember to breathe in his excitement.

As the sun began to fall into the western hills, Bass got to his feet and gathered up the long lead rope, taking the packmare from the crest of the knoll where he had remained mesmerized for so long. Angling to the south, he kept to the far fringes of the herd until he found a suitable ravine deep enough for him to make camp for the night. By the time he had pulled the mare into the upper reaches of the ravine, the sky had begun to dim and shadows had grown as long as they would ever be.

After freeing the two smaller packs and dropping them into the tall grass one at a time, Bass slapped the mare on the rump and sent her off to have herself a roll. Next came the task of spreading the still-damp blankets over the nearby brush to finish drying while he gathered up what dead limbs he could find. Making tufts of some dead grass after he had scraped out a small hole at the bottom of the ravine, Titus struck his evening fire, then took up the bail to his coffeepot and headed over to the nearby creek. At the top of the ravine, which put him level with the rest of the prairie, he turned round to gaze back at the campsite—anxious that no wandering eye should spot the smoke from that small fire.

After a trip that led him back toward the Platte, Titus found a clear-running stream, where he dipped both the blackened pot and his wooden canteen. Quickly yanking off his clothes, Bass swabbed as much of the mud as he could wash off—then, shivering, jumped back into the wool shirt and britches. After tying his moccasins, he sat there at the creek a few minutes, drinking his fill once more, realizing just how this arid country dried him out, made him more thirsty than he thought possible. How good the water tasted to his parched tongue.

As he neared the landmark brow of the hill he used to locate his ravine, Bass overheard muted snorts that grew in volume the closer he neared his camp. Instantly concerned for the mare, Titus set off at an ungainly trot with the canteen swinging at the end of one arm, the pot sloshing from the other. Reaching the top of the ravine, he skidded to a halt, staring down to find the mare grazing contentedly at the mouth of the ravine … no more than fifteen yards away from where one of the dark-skinned beasts rooted about in a circle, slowly hobbling round and round, clearly in some sort of distress.

From time to time the animal jerked its head around toward its hindquarters, tongue flicking out in vain as if to lap at the source of its discomfort. From his vantage point Bass glanced at the other buffalo grazing nearby, none of which paid any attention to the commotion—instead, some went on grazing, while at this time of the day most had already found themselves a suitable patch of ground, where they collapsed to their bellies and began to chew their cud with great self-satisfaction.

“Just like Pap’s damned cows,” he muttered, then remembered how he never got all that good at coaxing milk from an udder. “N-never was my cows anyhow,” he said as he settled to the grass to watch the scene at the mouth of the ravine.

The short-horned beast continued to paw at the ground, nostrils snorting in short bursts, then lolled its tongue in a pant, interspersed with rapid-fire bellows as it nosed round and round on all fours … then without any ceremony or warning the creature stopped dead in its tracks and let out a long, guttural cry as it shuddered the entire length of its body. And as Bass watched in dumbfounded amazement, the animal humped up its back just as a bluish membrane began to emerge from its rear quarters, the glistening mass expanding longer and thicker as the beast snorted, bellowing in pain.

“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat! That there’s a buffler cow,” he exclaimed, licking his lips in anticipation of watching the event. “And she’s ’bout to shed herself of a calf.”

Pretty durn close to watching one of the family’s cows drop a calf, he thought.

The newborn buffalo had dropped close to halfway out when the cow’s quivering hindquarters weakened and she collapsed, sprawling on the ground there at the mouth of Bass’s ravine, fully in the seizure of labor.

It was characteristic of the buffalo cow to seek out a site all her own when she was due to give birth—forsaking all companionship with other cows, much less the bulls. The entire birth process usually took close to two hours after the onset of the first contraction.

Here at this late stage Bass watched the cow squirming on her side, at times raising her uppermost hind leg in an attempt to ease the birth process as she jerked her neck backward in spasms of pain. From time to time she thrashed that hind leg as more of the grayish-blue sack continued to slither onto the grassy prairie.

From the end of that fetal sack Titus watched a tiny hoof thrash, suddenly poking its way free, tearing the membrane near its own hindquarters. Then the leg lay completely still. Fearing that the calf was stillborn, Bass rocked up on his knees, expectant. After the cow huffed through those final moments of her exertion, she began to roll onto her legs, pulling herself away from the fetal sack that lay still upon the grass, slowly clambering to her feet before she turned about to sniff at what had just issued from her.

After inspecting the sack from top to bottom, the cow began to chew at the several holes torn in the membrane, appearing to rip at the sack, enlarging the holes through which Bass caught glimpses of the shiny, dark hide of the newborn calf tucked inside. Slowly, mouthful by mouthful—and beginning not at the head but at that hind hoof that protruded from the glistening membrane—the cow went about steadily devouring that slimy sack crusted with grass and dirt at the mouth of the ravine.

Cautiously the packmare began to advance, her nose on the wind as she picked up more of the birthing scent. But she did not approach all that close before the cow caught sight of the horse and whirled on the mare—snorting, bellowing her warning with a long-tongued bawl. It was evident the mare understood that most primitive of warnings, turning away with a whinny of her own. Likely she had given birth to colts her own self, Titus brooded. In her own primal way she would understand just how protective the cow would choose to be at just such a moment.

Returning to her calf, the cow continued tearing at the membrane, devouring every shred of it from the newborn’s shiny, slick body, eventually eating the last of it plastered around the calf’s head. Barely breathing himself, Titus waited, anxious as the cow licked up and down the length of the calf’s muzzle, its nostrils—stimulating her baby. Finally the young animal squirmed at long last, moving on its own.

Strange behavior, this—especially for an animal not in the least considered a carnivore. Yet something innate and intrinsic compelled the cow to continue to lovingly lick at the newborn calf’s coat until she had expelled the afterbirth, then devoured it as well.

The sun had fallen fully beyond the hills by the time some other cows moseyed over to the mouth of the ravine to give this newcomer a cursory sniff, perhaps to help the mother lick its coat—all of them tolerated by the cow with the exception of one yearling bull she swiped at with a horn and drove off with a warning bawl.

As the cow stood protectively over it in the coming twilight, the calf now made its first attempt to stand—here something on the order of half an hour following birth. It caused Titus to remember how the family’s newborn calves and even colts attempted to pull themselves up on their spindly legs, wobbling ungainly before spilling to the ground once more. But here the buffalo calf was, tottering about on its quaking legs sooner than either of those domestic animals Bass had come to know. Again and again the calf heaved this way, then that, before it collapsed in a heap, but was quick to rise again.

Each time the calf managed to stay up longer, long enough to careen about in a crazy circle and finally locate its mother nearby—tottering over to jab its wet nose beneath the cow’s front legs, where it probed with its pink tongue and very little luck. When the cow shifted herself, so did the calf, this time nuzzling along its mother’s belly until it found a teat and latched on. As the calf greedily pulled at the nipple, it was plain to see it had been rewarded with warm milk.

“From now on, li’l one,” Titus said quietly from the side of the ravine, “you’ll know where to go first off, you wanna get fed.”

His own stomach growled of a sudden, reminding him he hadn’t fed it either. Glancing into the west, he got to his feet, sweeping up the bail to the pot and the leather strap nailed to the canteen, saying, “Be dark soon, won’t it, Titus? Ain’t got your supper started. Hell, you ain’t even got yourself a fire to hunker over come full dark.”

Of a sudden he remembered he would be bedding down tonight one horse shy of how he had taken his leave of St. Louis. It might be enough to take the starch out of any man—to cause lesser men to turn back. But Bass vowed he would press on.

Reaching the end of the ravine, he squatted next to the burned-out remnants of his fire and dragged his pouch over, pulling flint and steel from it once more.

“Leastwise that pack animal swum out like I done,” he muttered, trying hard to cheer himself as he blew on the red coal until he could set it beneath another knotted twist of dried grass. “Leastwise I got some of what fixin’s I come out with,” he convinced himself.

But, damn, did he ever hate to walk. Never took too much to that in his life, Titus decided. Even when Kingsbury and the rest of the boatmen were faced with walking back north to Kentucky’s Ohio River country along the Natchez Trace, they had bartered themselves a ride on wagons from New Orleans to the river port of Natchez itself, then walked only until they reached the Muscle Shoals, where the slavers jumped them.

For the rest of that journey north there had been the slavers’ horses for them to ride, keeping a constant and wary eye over their shoulders, ever watchful for that pair of white cutthroats who had escaped the fate of the other slavers there near the Tennessee River when those land pirates had come for Hezekiah Christmas.

A tall, shiny-skinned, bald-headed beauty of a Negro. Not no more’n ten years older than Titus himself. A man Bass soon give his freedom to, set free to go west from Owensboro on his own—a freedman with the whole of a wide-open wilderness to explore.

“Where you now, Hezekiah?” he asked quietly as the limbs caught hold of the flames and Titus finally set the coffeepot to boil.

Tonight he would eat the last strips of his dried venison and go off to shoot his first buffalo come morning.

“You et your first buffalo yet, Hezekiah?” he asked the hills about him. “How ’bout you, Eli Gamble? You find them beaver big as blankets in that upcountry you was yearning to see?”

He shuddered with the coming darkness, feeling smaller as the night came down than he had ever felt before—come here to a monstrous land ruled by these huge beasts. Never had he felt so small. Nor so alone.

Gazing at the stars just peeking into view overhead, Titus asked, “Are you alone, Eli? Like me?”

Then Titus stared at the fire as the nightsounds of the nearby herd drifted in to him. “Naw, I don’t suppose a man like you would ever be alone, Eli Gamble. Not nowhere near as lonely as men like Hezekiah Christmas. Sure as hell not nowhere like Titus Bass his own self right now.”

Plopped down here in the middle of everything he had ever wanted … but without another single living soul to share in the glory of it.

Although he had been awake long before the sun rose, Titus wasn’t ready to go in search of a buffalo to kill until sometime after first light.

For most of the night he had tossed in his blankets. From time to time he either went out to gather more kindling for his tiny fire, or he walked off toward the north bank of the Platte, where he sat for a long time, brooding at the murky river, its rolling surface a glimmering ribbon beneath the dim moonshine. He had remained there until at last he saw the sky had grayed enough to venture out—first to the west, then he walked a wide swing to the north across the night prairie. He had searched for Indian sign. A village of rings, fire pits, and meat racks as he had discovered before. Perhaps to find a herd of their ponies.

Instead, all he found was the bedding grounds of the far-ranging buffalo herd he had run across yesterday afternoon, stretching from horizon to horizon. Assured that the roar of his rifle would pose no danger, perhaps now he could take the chance of hunting his first buffalo. How his heart pounded against his ribs as he dwelt on that one thought all that walk back to his camp, where the packmare awaited him just before sunrise.

The little red-skinned calves were up already by the time he walked along the side of the hills bordering the great, grassy plain near the Platte itself. While the youngest of them still hugged their mothers’ sides, the others, perhaps days and weeks old, scampered about. Some of the oldest calves even butted heads in mock battle.

The sun had fully torn itself from the horizon when Bass sank to the ground, gone weak in the knees again just to stare at all of the countless thousands as the grassland slowly warmed that new day. With gold light the orb painted all the far surrounding hillsides in patches of sandy ocher where the tall green stems refused to grow. A breeze came up as the air warmed, carrying on it the muted sounds of the thousands as they arose from their bellies and ambled off in all directions to graze.

For a long while he studied the biggest ones: monstrous shaggy heads from which protruded a pair of resplendent black horns; those dark chin whiskers that gave the bulls their unique mark; and finally that great hump rising from their shoulders nearly as huge as their massive heads.

Easiest for him to pick out were the smaller cows—not near so large a head and horns, with nowhere near the great hump. Besides, most of the cows either were already mothers that late spring morning, or would be in a matter of hours or days, destined to drop more of the small, playful, impish red calves.

So that left only the fourth group of buffalo he watched in growing excitement to drop one himself at long, long last. They, the yearling bulls. Perhaps nearly as big as some of the older cows, yet distinguished by shortened horns and that straggly beard, not to mention the growing hump. Maybeso a yearling bull or an older cow, he mused, deciding it should be one or the other he would shoot this morning.

Not the calves nor their suckling cows—let the young ones frolic or their mothers breed for seasons to come. Nor should it be one of those old rangy bulls, he brooded. If nothing else, a bull would simply be too big. Far too much meat for him to take with him, he decided, realizing he would feel ashamed to leave so much behind for what predators were sure to feast on such a kill. His grandpap had given Titus that much a legacy: even in times of plenty a man must not be wasteful, for there will surely come times of want.

Was this ever a time of plenty!

It would have been an easy thing for him to seethe in anger at the river once again—to grow saddened as well that Washburn’s Indian pony was gone, for she and the packmare could have carried far more of the buffalo meat he would butcher this morning than the mare could all on her own. But face the truth he did—realizing he sat here in the middle of this foreign land inhabited by strange peoples and stranger animals … knowing he had only the mare to carry everything he called his own, and what meat he would pack along taking his leave of this place.

Then he figured a yearling it would be!

His heart beat all the more fiercely, his mouth gone dry as sand, as he carefully ran his eyes over those buffalo grazing nearby. Praying he would not be disappointed with the meat of so big a creature, Titus swallowed hard, his tongue parched, as he chose the one. Yes—that one would be his first buffalo.

Slowly he rose from his knees and stood, testing the breeze there on the long, lazy slope of the sandy hill. It was good, for the wind came from that portion of the herd dotting the endless valley all the way to the far horizon. He had the breeze in his face, out of the northwest here at sunrise.

Growing all the more cautious when he was some one hundred yards out from the fringe of the herd where the yearling stood cropping the grass with other youngsters, Bass dragged the hammer back to half-cock and flipped the frizzen off the pan. His right hand shook nervously as he sprinkled a few more of the fine grains of black powder into the concave surface of the pan. With the priming horn once more suspended from his pouch strap, Titus gently tapped the lock of the rifle to assure that a portion of the pan’s grains slipped through the touchhole where they would ignite the coarser powder packed behind the .54-caliber lead ball.

Should he stand or sit or lie for this first shot he would make at the bull grazing contentedly down the slope? And as quickly he decided he would sit, knees bent, elbows locked within his legs to steady the long-barreled, heavy, iron-mounted rifle.

Now he pulled the graceful curve of the hammer all the way back to full-cock. Bass quickly licked the pad of his right thumb before running the thumb across the sharp, knapped edge of the huge gray flint that lay imprisoned within the screw jaws of the hammer. He brought the thumb away and inspected it, finding a thin, telltale black line of powder flash he had just wiped off the flint. Better that this be no misfire because of powder residue built up on the knapped surface.

Then, as he nestled the full curvature of the butt plate into the crook of his shoulder, Bass let out a sigh.

“Easy now, Titus,” he whispered barely under his breath, aware that he was growing all the more anxious with every pounding beat of his heart.

He hadn’t felt this way but few times before—and they all came with being close to a warm and scented woman. Even his first back in Boone County. Amy Whistler had been a woman in all respects, he recalled fondly. Not taking herself a husband as early as most girls did on the frontier, she had instead waited for young Titus Bass, pressing him to complete his schooling before he took up the plow to work that portion of the family lands that Titus’s father would turn over to his firstborn son. But she was like Marissa Guthrie, who came to trouble his life a few years later, quickly becoming the one woman he felt he could truly love with all his heart—in the end both women had sought to tie him to the soil when what he wanted most was to wander.

If either had shown any interest in his way of life rather than their fathers’, he likely would have asked one or the other to join him in venturing west. But with both Titus knew better. Neither young woman would have taken to this dangerous, challenging existence the way he had. Truth was, neither woman was daring enough, nor was either of them the sort to take that grave risk this frontier required of all who ventured beyond the pale. Simply put, he had long ago realized that both Amy and Marissa were not the sort to leap into the unknown as he had.

Taking on a woman was pure foolishness, he had determined some time back. To do so was to lash oneself to a single place, to imprison oneself with the land and young’uns and all the shoulds it would take to near suffocate a man. Better that he was alone, he reminded himself now, angrily. Far, far better was it to be here without some woman’s whining cant constantly at his ear.

Slowly he brought the brass front blade down onto the back of the yearling’s front shoulder—suddenly realizing he had no idea where to aim on such an animal. Then quickly Titus convinced himself he would aim as he would at any four-legged: the heart and lights were in there, close behind the leg, after all.

With the front blade held near the midline of the young bull, Bass brought that brass blade down into the crescent of the buckhorn rear sight. Then raised his sight picture even higher on the animal since he was shooting downslope. With the pad of his index finger he gently pulled on the rear trigger, setting the front trigger to something less than a hair’s response. Then he began squeezing while he held his breath—

The rifle shoved itself back into his shoulder, surprising him as the muzzle spat fire. In that fraction of a moment before the pan and muzzle smoke obscured his view, Bass saw the small puff of dust erupt from the blackish hide—meaning the lead ball had struck the yearling high on the rib cage, above midline.

Quickly he rolled onto his knees, yanking the rifle’s muzzle to his lips to blow down the long barrel as he watched the animal sidestep and thrash its head a few times … then it went back to eating after it had attempted to lick at its side, that long pink tongue darting out against the backdrop of that dark, shaggy coat. It lazily cropped a few more mouthfuls of the tall grass while Titus poured down a measured charge of powder, then sank the ball home within its nest of a greased patch with the long hickory ramrod. Quickly he flipped back the graceful goosenecked hammer, popping forward the frizzen before he sprinkled in more of the priming powder.

Down came the frizzen over the pan, his thumb continuing on back to pull the hammer to full-cock as he brought the rifle up to his shoulder, settling back on his rump.

“By damn, I’ll hold this lady lower on you this time,” he muttered, laying the brass blade down into the notch filed in the bottom of the buckhorn rear sight.

Just at the bull’s midline the second bullet struck the young buffalo—causing him to sidestep again with a grunt, twisting his massive, furry head to the side to inspect his hide where that second ball had made another dusty eruption.

“Shit,” he grumbled as he rocked to his knees and began the reloading process once more, angry with himself for muffing that second shot. It had been too long for him to remember the last time he had needed two shots to drop some game, much less three.

Maybe it was the angle of his shot, he decided as he held once more on the dark creature still standing below him at the base of the slope, grazing as if those half-inch lead balls had been no more than tormenting mosquitoes slapping him.

This time Titus determined he would hold low, down on the brisket behind the front leg, and squeezed the trigger.

With a shudder the yearling sidled a bit, then collapsed of a sudden, his legs gone out from under him as if all four of them had been cut at the same moment.

“Damn you anyway,” Titus mumbled as he rocked back onto his knees, reloading quickly, keeping his eyes on the fallen beast while he did so.

Other buffalo grazing nearby now meandered up to give their fallen comrade a sniff or two, and a few even licked at the bloody hide before they moseyed on off to resume their feeding. While some raised their shiny black noses into the air to measure the wind for some scent of danger, most took little notice of the two-legged creature inching his way down the grassy slope until he was within fifty yards. The first beast to notice the hunter turned his body so that he appeared ready to confront the intruder, raising his muzzle into the air to determine just what sort of creature this was approaching the edge of the herd.

With a snort and a bellow, the old bull wheeled about and set off at an ungainly lope, his warning cry enough to drive a hundred or more before him. In moments the nearby prairie lay empty except for the fallen yearling. Then, as suddenly as they had bolted into action, the rest of the thousands rolled to a halt half a mile away and resumed their grazing, their numbers darkening the rounded hills in places, blanketing the prairie with solid black in others.

The air was growing hotter when Bass reached the carcass, cautiously approaching it, his rifle leveled at the yearling, expecting it just might leap up any moment. Then he caught a glimpse of his own shadow cast upon the grass as he crept stealthily around the carcass and stopped, laughing out loud at just how silly that shadow appeared.

When he quit laughing at himself, Titus inched forward carefully and jabbed at the buffalo with the muzzle of the rifle.

“Sure ’nough dead, ain’cha.”

On its dark, curly coat, Bass recognized the shiny patches of blood where the first two shots had struck.

“Can’t aim high,” he muttered as he measured where that first shot had connected. “And that’un in the middle didn’t bring you down neither, did it?”

Only the one low on the brisket, there behind the front leg. Bass rubbed the spot with the muzzle of the flintlock as if to embed its location within his mind. Lucky, he thought now, that the creatures didn’t tear off once they heard the boom of the big gun. Maybe buffalo didn’t hear all that good. And the way that huge bull momentarily stood in challenge to him, long, shaggy fur dangling over its eyes—perhaps these creatures were half-blind as well as being near deaf.

Easy enough for a man to creep up near them, Titus thought. They ain’t a wary, watchful critter when it comes to danger. No wonder they got themselves killed off back east.

Stepping around to venture inside the sprawl of the four legs, he knelt on one knee.

“Now, how you s’pose a body’s to go about dressing such a big critter?”

Laying his rifle in the crook of the bull’s neck, Titus removed the big skinning knife from the scabbard hanging at the back of his belt. Checking one last time at the horizon to the west and north, Bass hefted the left front leg, locked it over his shoulder, and plunged the knife into the furry throat. Using a sawing motion, he dragged the sharp blade back a few inches at a time through the thick hide, down the breastbone and across the belly, until he was confronted with the huge ham of that hind leg, all but impossible to move by himself. Nothing else to do but try his hand at some skinning.

“So be it,” Bass decided, now putting his knife to work slowly inching the curly hide back from the long incision.

Jerking his bloody hands back suddenly, he stared at the tiny insects swarming over his flesh all the way up to the elbows where he had rolled his shirtsleeves. Smearing more blood on himself, Titus brushed from each arm the tiny, hopping fleas along with several fat ticks so swollen they were about to burst. He caught one between his thumb and forefinger, squeezing it until it popped with a bloody ooze, then tossed it aside. Titus went back to work, gradually working the hide back from that first long cut.

It took some doing, but he had almost half of the furry coat laid on the far side of the animal by the time the sun was well into the second quarter of the sky. Standing back to catch his breath and wipe the sweat from his face with the back of a bloody hand, Bass regarded his work to that point, figuring he would have to decide on what portions to pack with him as he continued his journey west to the far mountains.

Laying a knee against the massive rib cage, Titus next butchered a few long steaks from between the hump ribs, tossing each portion onto the green flap of hide draped across the grass on the far side of the carcass. Then he peeled back more of the hide from the rear leg until he could cut himself out two large hams.

At last he stood, using the knife to scrape off the blood, gore, and tiny vermin from each forearm before stuffing the blade back into its scabbard. Taking up his rifle once more, Titus turned away from the carcass, hurrying back toward his camp.

Once there he quickly rearranged each of the two packs so that he could lay his meat in between them along the packmare’s spine, then cover it with the saddle and finally the canvas shroud he would fling over it all. Leading the mare down the ravine and onto the prairie floor, he skirted along the side of the hill to reach the carcass.

“Damn you!” he growled when he got close enough to see the creatures clustered around the young bull.

Scurvy, thieving dogs they were.

“Get!” he bellowed.

Most raised their heads. A few growled at him menacingly. “G’won! Get, I told you!” he hollered louder still, dropping the mare’s lead rope and darting toward the carcass, swinging his rifle from side to side.

Most slinked off a ways, but three dropped to a crouch, snarling, their bloody muzzles showing now they had worked up a blood hunger dining at the bull’s innards. As Bass drew close enough, one of them sprang at him, snapping its jaws.

In a blur he brought the rifle butt up, connecting right beneath the creature’s lower jaw with a resounding crack. Immediately the second of the predators lunged for him as Bass continued swinging, wading into their midst. By the time two of the creatures lay wounded nearby, the rest decided retreat would offer the best path.

Yet they did not retreat far. Some thirty yards off the dozen or so turned as if on cue and sat down among the prairie grass to stare back at him and their feast.

“This is mine, goddammit!” he howled at them, his voice loud in the stillness of those far hills. “Mine, you hear?” he said a bit more quietly, mustering all the bravado he could, and pounded his chest one time with his left fist to emphasize his claim.

Quickly he bent over each one of the mangy creatures in turn, then brought the rifle butt down to crush their skulls for good measure.

“See?” he turned and asked of the pack sitting a safe distance away. “If’n you ain’t seen enough, I’ll show you what’s done to thieving sonsabitches like you!”

Suddenly he jerked up the rifle, dropped the blade on the center dog, set the back trigger, then pulled the front. As the roar and muzzle smoke disappeared, he watched the other dogs suddenly leap away in retreat—leaving one more of their dead among the tall grass.

“Don’t you ever dare come slipping in on my kill no more, I. tell you!” he grumbled as he began reloading.

Out on the prairie one of the predators slunk back in to sniff at its dead companion Bass had just shot. Then another, and a third. Pretty soon they were tearing at the dead one in a fury of hunger.

“Black-hearted sonsabitches. Damned dog-critters—just you go get!”

With the rifle reloaded and laid again in the curve of the yearling’s neck, Titus dragged the canvas cover and saddle off the mare’s back so he could lay in what meat he would take with him. At last he straightened the canvas over the two packs and began lashing it down in a diamond-hitch to protect everything from any rain they might encounter. He had lost all his cornmeal flour in that drenching they had suffered crossing the capricious Platte River—but the coffee beans and tobacco had dried out nicely, spread out on the canvas overnight. He would miss his johnny bread: the smell, the taste, the texture of corn dodgers in his mouth. Adding pinches of clean ash from the fire as he had stirred up a batch of corn biscuits, his mouth watered with the thought. But there would be no such bread from here on out.

Then he realized: oftentimes if a man really wanted to grab hold of something, he had to let go his grip of something else. Maybeso his bidding farewell to those pasty sacks of cornmeal back there by the muddy river just left a hand empty and open to grab on to something new that might well present itself on down the trail. Best just to forget all that he had left behind in the settlements, and that included those sacks of Franklin cornmeal.

Besides, Titus reminded himself again as he took up the lead rope, tonight for the first time in his life he would sup on buffalo.

Yes, he sighed as he stared at the horizon and charted his course toward the western hills for the rest of that morning—his fortunes just might be about to change out here in this wild land. True enough—he was about due for things to go his way … for the very first time in his life.

For the next few days he had found massive clumps of coarse buffalo fur clinging to the brush and bark of nearly every small tree near the riverbank. Each time he shot one of the shaggy creatures in the weeks to follow, he was constantly reminded how summer must surely be on its way to this land—if not there already—for the buffalo were shedding their heavy winter coats.

Every few days as he encountered another herd, Titus would shoot another yearling—far tastier and more flavorful than the beef and pork he had grown accustomed to back east, even better than the game meat he had grown up on in the forests of Kentucky. The savory fragrance of each loin steak or batch of hump ribs he set to sizzle over his fire each evening caused his mouth to water in anticipation. Bass had never eaten anything better than buffalo and doubted he would ever find any meat that could surpass it.

So he taught himself to cut free a large section of each green hide in which he would wrap those choice selections he had butchered from each kill, that satchel to be carried by his most obedient packmare. Each of those pieces of hide he found to be all but rubbed free of the last tufts of last winter’s hair still clinging to the animal’s midsection and hindquarters. Protected inside that green hide satchel, the meat would last the better part of three days or so before he would be forced to leave behind what had gone sour on him and compelled to hunt fresh game.

Those longest of days tumbled past in slow succession as high summer arrived and he reached the forks of the Platte.

“Damn if Isaac Washburn didn’t tell me none of this,” he grumbled in confusion bordering on exasperation the afternoon he reached that union of the north and south forks.

But as frustrated as he was, in the end Titus decided to stay with the northernmost. The way he saw things, it only made sense because that was where he should be headed after all: to the central if not the northern reaches of the Rocky Mountains. Washburn had mentioned nothing of those southern mountains, failing to say if there even were mountains down in that country. So if ol’ Gut hadn’t said nothing about it—why, then, Bass figured there wasn’t much worth concerning himself about down south anyways.

Sure enough, the old trapper had been right on target with most everything he had told Titus before he got himself killed back there in St. Louis. Right about everything except that warning about the Pawnee who lived along the Platte. There had been plenty enough chance to bump right into them all along. Yet except for running across sign of that village migrating along the great river before its trail started moseying its way off to the north away from the Platte, Titus hadn’t seen a feather or war pony either one.

“Nothing more’n pure, dumb luck,” he had muttered to himself more than once in all those weeks since, thinking back how consumed with caution and cold camps he had been.

Dumb luck—which meant he walked straight on through Pawnee country without a single run-in. Far better luck than ol’ Gut and Hugh Glass had themselves when they had headed east to St. Louis, deviled by the Pawnee near the whole way.

Days past those forks, the country started to evolve once more as he pushed ever westward, leading that packmare day after day, wearing down the soles of his first pair of Washburn’s moccasins and starting on the second. As the ground beneath his feet was crusting into a flaky hardpan, Titus worried so much about walking himself out of his last two pairs of moccasins that he took to cutting pieces of green buffalo hide he could lash around the soles of his thinning footwear.

Now the hills became more sharply defined, and all the creeks and streams slashed their way down through the land to form sharp-sided bluffs and buttes, each one striated over centuries of constant erosion by water and wind. Here he found more timber, willow, and brush flourishing along each water course he came across. It was clear he had passed out of the rolling tableland, where the buffalo ruled as undisputed monarchs, entering a country where he no longer had the herds of those shaggy beasts constantly in sight as he plodded west on foot.

He found this to be a country populated by varieties of deer—some surprisingly larger than others. He hunted them down in the brushy bottoms where they spent their days, or waited for them near the creeks and streams where the creatures came to water early of every morning or late of the evenings before scampering off to their beds. Most of the males were already coming into velvet, their antlers covered with that thin, mosslike covering that at times hung in tatters all about their faces.

And there were other creatures he spotted from a distance: the sharp-snouted badger and wolverine, and those wild turkey, which roosted in the low branches of the trees very much the same as their cousins did back east, not to mention what he took to be tiny prairie gophers he encountered, animals that barked at him just like dogs in those huge colonies where they lived together for mutual protection against the great-winged birds who hunted with claw and beak, sweeping over the towns pocked with burrows. Most every day he had to pass through one such community, he and the mare assaulted by the yip-yipping of so many tiny, angry voices.

At times he even caught sight of a brown-or a reddish-coated bear—animals that whirled and loped away at the first sight of him and the horse. Not a day passed that Titus did not spot what he figured to be a variety of pong-horned deer on the nearby slopes—almost a sort of long-legged goat-shaped creature, he surmised—a bit smaller but even more fleet than its mule-eared or white-tailed cousins. And most every night he went to sleep serenaded with the distant crooning of those song-dogs crying out from the surrounding hillsides as if to announce his presence to others of their kind.

Lo, the birds! As big as he had known them to be back east along the Ohio and Mississippi, they proved to be all the bigger the farther west he progressed. Although he had seen many a hawk before, the immense wingspans on these western species came as no small wonder to Bass. Not to mention how big those eagles grew hunting the skies along his line of march. As well, he grew astounded at the size of the wrinkle-necked turkey and black vultures, which congregated at the remains of what carrion the wild dogs and rangy wolves had not consumed.

So it was that time and again he was struck that this was a harsh land devoid of all mankind—although he occasionally did come across some old Indian trail of pocked pony prints and the scraping of poles as those people went about their seasonal migrations. Not a day passed when he did not fear he would run onto a village, or that he would be discovered by a wandering hunting party.

Not to see the enemy proved to be far more frightening than knowing right where the brownskins were, or just how many he might have to confront.

Fact was, none of Bass’s contacts with Indians had ever fostered in him a favorable view of brownskins. Especially that run for his life from the Chickasaw there along the Mississippi River when he was but sixteen years old and fleeing the constraints of his family. And what few Indians had wandered into or traveled through old St. Louis hadn’t impressed him to feel much in the way of human charity as well: they either presented themselves as a haughty, distant, and foreign race characterized by arrogance, or they appeared to be nothing more than a race of flea-bitten beggars trampled over in a rush of settlers and slowly being whittled away by the white man’s dominant culture.

One or the other, Titus had long ago decided, there wasn’t much to admire in or desire to emulate any brown-skin. They looked different, talked different, in fact—everything about them was entirely foreign as another life could be from how he himself had grown up and come to be a man. Struggle as he might, there was little he could think of that he would possibly want to talk over with one of those haughty, better-than-thou warrior chiefs or grease-stained, hand-held-out beggars.

No sense in a man trying his damndest to run onto any Injuns, he decided. Best to just stay as far from any brownskins as he possibly could … for at the worst such two-legged creatures might well spell danger for him, at the least an ignorant Indian was nothing but a pure-dee waste of effort for any white man venturing into an unknown wilderness.

Better that his own dumb luck hold so he could continue on his way for the mountains, untroubled and alone.

Alone was just how he was feeling that midafternoon as he plodded on beneath the baking sun, leading the packmare through the easy footing he found a quarter mile or so out from the Platte. He discovered he could almost doze as he trudged along, laying one foot in front of the other, his eyes barely open as he picked his way through the waist-high buffalo grass. Almost like sleeping: with the warmth on his back and the rhythmic sway to his gait, accompanied by that hypnotic clop of the packmare following behind.

For the last few hours his thinking had been consumed with wondering on how many more days and weeks it would take for him to reach those high and shining mountains described so eloquently by an unlettered Isaac Washburn in terms of undisguised awe that bordered on nothing short of reverence.

Arousing himself from his dull stupor, Titus licked his dry lips … then, squinting to be sure, he studied the distant horizon as it seemed to waver and strangely take shape far, far out there before him—heat shimmers all dark and purple and jumbled there at the edge of the earth. For a moment he glanced up at the sun, hung ahead him nearly at the three-quarters mark of its path across the sky … then quickly back to stare at that shifting, shimmering horizon.

“Damnation. Likely we got another of them windy storms boiling up out yonder,” he muttered, turning to direct his comment to the mare as he lurched to a weary halt. “Mayhap we should find us a place to make camp afore that rain rolls over us like some of ’em have.”

Quickly he scanned the southwest, then took himself a measure of the land off to the northwest, seeking something that might hold promise in the way of forting up against the bluster of a bullying storm replete with horrific wind, rain, and ofttimes hail. Already he had come to expect a brief thunderstorm most every afternoon out here along the upper reaches of the Platte—but, damn, did he hate the hail. Those icy shards hurt each time they came hurtling out of a particularly angry patch of blue-black clouds overhead. Hurt the mare so bad, she cried out in something close to humanlike pain as he scampered to take shelter under her belly and those packs she carried atop her ribby sides, the only cover there often was for miles around.

“We ain’t gonna be caught this day, no, we’re not, girl,” he promised the mare. “There, yonder—I see some big trees not too far off. We’ll skedaddle down there now till that storm blows on over.”

Off to the side of the bluffs he hurried the horse, down from the ridgetop where he first spotted the dim outline of the storm’s approach. Among an extensive grove of cottonwood Titus prepared for the bad weather by dropping the packs from the mare’s back, tying her rope to one of the trees, where she should have adequate shelter against the pelting hail. Then he went over to settle down between the two small packs himself, dragging the canvas over the packs and his head too. Breathing a sigh of satisfaction that he was at last prepared for the impending onslaught, Titus listened expectantly for telltale sounds of the storm’s approach.

Squatting there, he waited and listened. At times Bass caught himself dozing off. And waited some more. But through it all he did not hear the wind whipping itself into a fury, driving the rain and hail before it.

The longer he listened, the more he grew suspicious—thinking the storm had taken a different track to the north or south around them.

“Let’s go have ourselves a look-see,” he told the mare as he threw back his canvas shelter, stood, and untied her long rope.

He vaulted onto her bare back, saying, “Maybe that storm moved on by us—what say we go find out for my own self?”

Side to side he switchbacked the horse up the side of the bluff they had descended to take shelter, then brought the mare to a halt at the top to survey the heavens overhead. A blue expanse dotted with white, fluffy clouds—as beautiful as a man would want his sky to be. To the south, and north, and even to the west as far as he could see, the sky remained unthreatening—except that jagged line of purple-blue thunderhead still clinging to the tar western horizon.

“Ain’t like nothing I ever seen: just sitting out there ’thout coming this way a’tall,” he muttered in confusion to the horse, more in disgust that he had been ready this time when no storm came crashing over them.

Yet as he continued to stare at the distant smoked-glass horizon—it slowly dawned on him. Perhaps … yes, there might be a reason this truly wasn’t like any storm he had ever seen—especially now that he had himself a good, long gander at it … because maybe, just maybe, that wasn’t a jagged, roiling, rumbling thunderstorm gathering on the far horizon after all.

“Do you think?” he asked himself aloud, leaning forward to speak into the mare’s ear. “Could it be … them far, far mountains?”

To see them at long, long last for the first time, sitting atop that steady old horse there on that rocky bluff of pale ocher, the gentle summer breeze strong in his face, perhaps a wind bringing him the scent of those far-off and terrible places. No, not clouds at all hulking way off yonder at the end of his mortal sight … but the … the god-blamed Rocky Mountains!

“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!” he shrieked in a sudden gust of realization at the same moment he began to hammer the mare’s ribs with his heels.

She gamely shot away, obediently rolling into a trot.

“Whaaaa-hooooo!”

Into a lope she finally took herself, then eased up into a gallop as he hugged close to her neck, one hand double-wrapped with that lead rope, the other hand tangled in her mane as they raced west toward that thin purple-blue border of jagged landscape. Down the far end of the bluff they tore together, right onto the rolling, rugged valley—ever westward!

“By damn—we gonna make it to them Rocky Mountains, ol’ girl!” he whooped in ecstasy, then bellowed again at the top of his lungs as the mare surged ahead with all the speed she could muster for her rider. “Whaaaa-hooooo!”

It had taken so many weeks, and months too, just to leave that hardwood country behind, then suddenly to find himself pitched into a monotonously bare and rolling tableland when through all his waiting Titus had figured the country would become increasingly more hilly the closer he got to those distant, shining mountains. But instead the world around him had only become flatter, ideal for the numberless buffalo that grazed on the land’s rich bounty of grass.

“Glory! Glory! Glory!” he repeated in a wild screech as the hot breeze whipped tears from his eyes.

So long had he waited to see them with his own eyes, each night along the way remembering just how he had let his imagination paint such vivid pictures in his mind while Isaac Washburn had told him this and told him that about the far places of the west the old man had himself seen. Night after night of imagining and dreaming on them, it seemed those mountains had grown all the larger, loomed all the bigger until here he was at last—suddenly struck with disappointment that what lay before him was not as tall, nowhere near as grand, nor jagged, nor threatening, nor ultimately challenging as Washburn had made them out to be.

Nowhere near the majestic mountain ranges his very own rich and fertile and ready imagination had been making them out to be all these months.

So in no small measure of disappointment he began to pull back on the rope, slowing the mare out of her surging run to the west.

For well over a year Titus had been preparing for this moment—yet here he was, of a sudden trying to make sense of it, to reconcile Gut’s description of the Rocky Mountains with what undramatic and uneven outline lay there against the far horizon.

At last he brought the horse to a halt. Bass slid to the ground but continued to stare until he kicked a toe at a clump of bunchgrass.

“Damn—if I ain’t got a head filled with stupids!” he roared, feeling the fool of a sudden. “It ain’t that them mountains is puny, girl … just that they be too damned far away for us to see ’em proper!”

He sat there some more soaking in that distant vista before slowly turning the mare about to retrace their path. And from time to time he glanced back over his shoulder at the far jagged line.

“Gonna take us a few days afore we get there,” he consoled himself. “Leastways, now we see where it is we been heading all this time. Out there—why, that be the end of our journey, girl!”

Like everything else in his life, he decided, this was to be only a matter of keeping one foot landing in front of the other—hard times or slick. He’d come this far by putting his head down and not giving up no matter if the water was bad or the game was scarce, no matter that there’d been cold camps for lack of firewood or the possibility of scalp hunters out and afoot. But no matter any of that, Titus Bass was here at the brink of the Rocky Mountains—where he could look out there and see them for the first time in all his born days.

And so it was that after he had repacked the mule and set forth once again, Bass vowed that he would never stray too far from those distant mountains ever again. Once he arrived, he promised never to leave them. Never to wander so far away that he could no longer see them at the edge of his sight, just as they were right then. They were to be his compass, his lodestone, the very anchor for his life from there on out. The way some men back east dared never to wander too far from the rivers where they plied their trade and lived out their lives … Titus swore these mountains would from that day forth be the marrow of his world, swore that on a mighty oath for what would be the rest of his natural days.

Late that afternoon after pushing farther west, Titus brought down one of those prong-horned goat creatures he found were almost too curious for their own good. He skinned back the tan-and-white hide, butchered off the steaks and two hams he wanted from the rear flanks, then moved on west to scare up a good camp for the night. Not until the sun had disappeared behind the jagged wall of peaks far beyond did Titus discover just what he wanted.

It was a shady nook at the side of a hill that offered good water from a stream coming in from the south, plenty of firewood, and enough trees that his smoke would be dispersed among the branches—in the event any brownskins were lurking about. But most of all, the campsite sat just so: positioned in a way where he could gaze into the west as the meat broiled on sticks hung over the fire and the coffee began to boil.

After stuffing himself, with great care he loaded his old briar pipe with tobacco as twilight sank around him. How he enjoyed the utter silence of the night as it came stealing over the land, broken only by an occasional call from the wild dogs populating the nearby hills.

Like a gentle nudge, something caused him to turn and look back to the east where it had already grown dark as pitch—the sky flecked with the first stars. Back yonder, to what he had left behind, to what he had chosen to abandon. Funny, he thought—but he could not see anything back there that reminded him of what was left behind. Nothing there to show him what he had abandoned … yet right here in this spot he could look upon his goal.

So Titus turned back to gaze into the west once more. The mountains were there—limned in indigo light by the long-ago falling of the sun. They were reachable and real. No longer something of legend and myth. Indeed, he told himself, after all these days and the many, many miles, he had come so far that he no longer could see what had been, could no longer see who he had been.

Yet on this evening, with the light rapidly draining from the summer sky, it was possible for him to catch a glimpse of what he was now to be … to fathom at long, long last the man he was to become.

The mountains were there, finally within reach. He had only to stay his course for the next few days, with that jagged line looming larger against the sky with every step he took.

After nigh onto a lifetime of waiting, Titus Bass had come to the Rocky Mountains. And in the deepening embrace of that twilight, he joyously welcomed the man he was to become.