Buffalo Palace

9

Imperceptibly at first, the days began ta lengthen.

It happened that Bass realized it was a little brighter in the lodge those mornings when he awoke. Instead of the gray wash to everything just beginning to announce the coming of the sun, the light was already there to greet him each time he opened his eyes beside her.

As well, night was held at abeyance for just a little longer. Twilight seemed to swell about them in that high mountain park, the end of each succeeding day celebrating itself with just a few more heartbeats of gentle glow as the sun eased out of sight. Why, a man would have to be nothing short of blind not to notice that spring was on its way.

It was clear to Titus that the other three realized it too as the snow grew mushy beneath his own thick, fur-lined winter moccasins of buffalo hide. From time to time, yes—snow would fall from those clouds gathered up there near Buffalo Pass, then only from those clouds collared around the peaks to the far north. Eventually, there were no more storms.

As the snow retreated into the shadowed places, so the game retreated farther up the mountainsides. The men traveled higher, stayed out longer, to supply the camp with meat. And the nearby streams were nearly trapped out. Over the last few days Silas Cooper had been forced to take his trappers farther and farther still to run onto a creek where they stood a chance of finding beaver what would come to bait.

Plain as paint, the time was coming to move on.

“Where you set us to go?” Tuttle asked Cooper of an evening just days ago as they had sat in the last rays of the sun, smoking the bark of the red willow mixed with the pale dogwood. Some time back they had finished off the last of Bass’s tobacco.

Silas sighed. “Yonder to the west.”

“Them mountains we come through to get here?” Hooks inquired, digging a fingernail around inside the bowl of his clay pipe. Just then he struck a hot coal, sure enough, and jerked the finger out to suck on it like a child with a precious sliver or some such injury worth nursing.

Cooper quickly glanced round at the other three, then stared off to the high peaks bordering the sundown side of Park Kyack. “That be the direction a man takes him to mosey off to ronnyvoo, ain’t it?”

“Surely it is,” Bud agreed.

Cooper’s gaze landed on Bass. “What say y’ then, Scratch?”

“Say me to what?”

“Where away would y’ lead this bunch, if’n it was you callin’ the tune?”

Pulling the cane pipestem from his mouth slowly, Titus wiped the back of his hand across his lips thoughtfully. “Near as I recollect, there was many a stream in that country where a man would be smart to lay down his traps. Yessir, Silas. No two ways to it—that’s good country yonder for a beaver man.”

Cooper smiled as big as he had ever smiled, here with his plans given such credence. “Damn straight, Scratch. By bloody damn, boys! This here greenhorn pilgrim we come across’t last fall h’ain’t so wet ahin’t his ears no more now.”

“But afore we go and tramp off to this here Ashley’s ronnyvoo,” Scratch replied, “it’s plain to me we best be taking our time through that high country.”

“Take … taking our time?” Cooper asked, all but incredulous.

“Damn, but there’s a ronnyvoo ain’t a one of us wanna miss!” Hooks whined, worry in his eyes.

Titus looked at Billy, then at Tuttle. “You’re cutting a trail through beaver country to reach ronnyvoo, ain’cha?”

Bud nodded, but Billy glanced at the dark-faced Cooper.

Silas said, “So, Scratch—what fur y’ got to rub with me?”

“We’re up there anyways,” Titus began, “so let’s set us some traps. Catch us some beaver on the tramp.”

Hooks grinned, then scratched at the side of his face when he asked, “What you think of that, Silas?”

Warily, the way an animal might react as it kept itself from being backed into a corner, Cooper said, “If’n there’s time, ary a man’d be struck with the stupids what he didn’t try to trap what beaver he could.”

Tuttle picked at a scab on his nose while the light sank out of the sky. “For balls’ sake—ronnyvoo’s still a far piece off. Take our time getting.”

Hooks nodded amiably, saying, “Maybeso we ought’n head there straight off.”

“No,” Tuttle corrected, “plenty of time till ronnyvoo, more weeks’n I care to count.”

Billy’s shoulders sagged in disappointment. “I was hankering for that trader’s whiskey—just to talk of ronnyvoo!”

“Soon enough, Billy,” Silas replied, then turned to Bass. “Just how full was y’ fixin’ to get your beaver packs?”

“Full as I can,” Bass answered. “I go through a piece of country what looks to be crawlin’ with them flat-tails … I say let’s drag what critters we can outta the streams on our way.”

“Boys”—Cooper brightened of a sudden as he called out in his booming voice—“looks to be we took us on a greenhorn last autumn, and now we got us a master trapper as our partner, don’t it?”

“Har! Har!” Tuttle exclaimed. “Scratch is a damn sight better trapper’n me—”

“Wouldn’t take much for that!” Hooks gushed, belly-laughing.

Bud frowned. “An’ I’d care to lay a set that he’s some better’n you, Billy Hooks!”

The wide smile was whisked from Billy’s face as Hooks looked over at Cooper.

Silas said, “I daresay Bud might well be dead center, Billy. Scratch awready got better’n you.”

“Awright,” Hooks replied with a single nod of his head, “then you the only one he ain’t a’bettering—right, Silas?”

Cooper regarded Bass a moment. “For now, Billy. For now I’m still the best in this here trappin’ outfit.”

Hooks inquired, “What haps when Scratch gets better’n you, Silas?”

His eyes narrowing, Cooper chewed over that a moment, then replied, “It don’t mean a thing’s gonna change, Billy, This here still be my outfit—no two ways about it. No man take it from me. Y’ understand that, Bud?”

Turtle’s eyes hugged the ground. “I figger I know how your stick floats, Silas.”

Cooper continued. “Good. Might’n be some man pull more beaver’n me outta the water … but that don’t mean he’s man ’nough to lead my outfit.”

Hooks grinned all over again, like he had come up with it in the first place. “You ain’t got balls enough to lead this outfit, Scratch! Not man enough to take it ’way from Silas!”

“Never said I was,” Bass defended. “Silas asked me a question, and I tolt him I was fixin’ to trap me a bunch more beaver on the way to ronnyvoo.”

“Your packs is damn near the heaviest there is right now!” Tuttle exclaimed.

“Hush up, now!” Cooper ordered, slapping a hand down on Turtle’s forearm. “If’n we find we got more packs’n we can carry—then we just get us more animals to carry ’em.”

“More animals from where?” Billy asked.

“These here Yutas,” Cooper said with a grin. “Afore we pull out come morning, what say we buy us some more ponies?”

“Good idea, Silas,” Tuttle said. “You always was the thinkin’ man in this outfit.”

“An’ I allays will be, Bud. Don’t you ever forget that.” Cooper’s eyes left their faces as he peered over their shoulders. “Now, what y’ suppose these ol’ fellers got on their minds?”

The three turned, finding more than a dozen of the tribal elders and revered warriors headed their way, each of the Ute wrapped in a painted buffalo robe or in a blanket to which wide strips and rosettes of porcupine quills had been added.

By the time the old men came to a stop before the trappers, more of the village was gathering behind them. A lone man’s voice began to sing out, startling Bass. Other men quickly joined in the song, and women trilled their tongues.

“What’s goin’ on, Bud?” Scratch whispered to Tuttle.

“Dunno,” he answered with a shrug.

“I’d lay we’re big men to this here village,” Silas boasted as the song was coming to an end. “Something big up a stick to them.”

“Yessirreebob! Gonna have to come back one day soon to visit that li’l squaw again,” Hooks added, rubbing his groin with a grubby hand. “Been a fine thing, dipping into that honey-pot!”

When the last note of the song had drifted off toward the aspen and lodgepole pine surrounding their camp, the leader of the hunting party stepped forward. He gestured, wanting the four white men to stand.

As all four got to their feet, the crowd inched in even more tightly. Looking about him curiously, Titus studied the faces until he found Fawn, her young son, White Horse, clinging to her back, his little arms clamped around her neck. She smiled. And that went a long way to easing his apprehension.

One man after another began to speak in excited tones, some waving their weapons, others rattling a shield; then the hunting-party leader waved forward the old man Titus remembered from his delirium.

“That one says he knows y’,” Cooper said, translating some of what was being said as the wrinkled one began to speak haltingly.

“I recollect he does,” Bass said. “Name is Crane. Him and Fawn got me through the fever of my wounds.”

Cooper turned an ear toward the talk. “Y’ recollect any of what he said to y’ when you was took with fever?”

“Nary a thing,” Titus admitted.

“Seems to me this bunch figgers you was the big bull in that scrap,” Cooper explained.

“I heard some talk of it my own self,” Bass said. “Understood part of it—but it don’t make no sense to me.”

The old man pointed at Titus, waving him forward.

“G’won, now, Scratch.” Tuttle prodded him with a shove of his hand.

As the old one started to speak again, he carefully removed two scalps from the pouch he wore slung over his shoulder. With one held aloft in each hand, the pair tied together with one long whang of leather, he began to tell the story of the hunt for food to fill the hungry bellies in their village, a hunt where they discovered sign of enemy Arapaho once again come trespassing on Ute land.

“There was no time to prepare for battle,” the old man known as Crane explained, telling the crowd what must surely have been a well-known story by then. “No time for paint. No time to smoke one’s pipe, only enough time to sing a prayer—before the Arapaho came down upon us.”

Wild shouts erupted from the full ring of onlookers. Men yelped and women keened until the old man shook the scalps again, ordering quiet.

“In the battle that took four of our friends, uncles and nephews to us all—one man among our hunting party displayed great bravery!”

Again they raised their voices in shouts of joy.

“Now at last the time has passed for mourning,” the wrinkled one declared. “We can celebrate the courage of our friends who helped save our people. Their guns helped win the day for our people!”

As more cheers rolled over the trappers, men and women alike leaned forward to pound the four white men on the backs and shoulders in congratulation.

“Yet there is one among them who showed more bravery than all the rest in the face of those enemy when they attacked us from behind!”

Now the crowd grew strangely quiet as the old man turned slowly, slowly about, the scalps still held at the end of his outstretched arms.

“He is the only warrior that day to take two enemy scalps! Two!”

Suddenly Bass found the pair of scalps held before his face as the old man shook them violently.

“This is the hair of our enemy!” Crane cried out to the crowd in his quavery voice—answered by great shouts leaping from more than a hundred throats. “Two enemy warriors are naked of hair in the beyond land now!”

Wheeling, the old man dropped the leather thong over Bass’s head so the two scalps hung around his neck, high on either side of his chest.

“The courage of this white man saw his feet through on his terrible journey into the dark country, so deep were his wounds. He returned to us, granted life by the life-giver of us all. We give our thanks that he was spared for us: a true friend of the Ute, and sworn enemy of the Arapaho!”

Now again the leader of that hunting party stepped forward and put his arms around a stunned Titus Bass, hugging him once before he turned to address the crowd.

“As we planned, this is to be a night of celebration. Women! Bring out the meat! Children! Open a path for the men of this camp! Come, everyone! Celebrate tonight, for our white friends depart in the morning!”

As some in the crowd surged close and began to nudge the trappers along toward the center of the village, Cooper leaned close to Titus. “Y’ get all of that, Scratch?”

“Maybeso enough.”

“You’re some big coon to these here red niggers,” Silas grumbled.

“A big, big shit!” Hooks echoed with that ready grin of his.

“Ain’t done nothing special,” Bass replied, trying to make less of this spontaneous celebration in his honor.

“Y’ something big up a stick to them,” Cooper argued. “But mind y’—don’t ever go figgering you be as savvy as me, hear? Don’t ever y’ figger y’ can outtrap, outfight, outsquaw Silas Cooper! Y’ got that, ‘Rapaho-killer? Y’ got that?”

“I … I don’t aim to take nothing away from you—”

“Tell me, Bass! Right here an’ now,” Cooper interrupted. “Don’t y’ ever try to stand head to head with me like y’ done once.”

“Silas always give a man one chance to show his stupids,” Hooks proclaimed. “What Silas always says: give ever’ man one chance to show he can be a dead fool.”

“Billy’s right, Scratch,” Cooper reminded. “And y’ done had your chance back up there near Buffalo Pass when y’ laid your hand on me.”

Bass flinched with another look into Cooper’s cold black eyes. Almost a good head taller than Bass, and with some eleven or twelve years on him too. “I understood you, then, Silas. An’ I don’t fix on ever giving you cause to raise a hand to me. Not among friends.”

“That’s right, ’Rapaho-killer!” Cooper roared, flinging his long arm over Titus’s shoulder so suddenly that it surprised Bass as they came to a halt at the center of camp with the others. “We’re friends, ain’t we? Friends allays take good, good care of each other!”

The tight ring about the trappers loosened as women and men alike began to throw down blankets and robes, seating themselves around the huge fire ring as women came forward bearing rawhide platters heaped with boiled meat and roasted marrow bones, sections of stuffed elk gut and minced slices of raw liver one could dip into tiny bladders filled with tangy yellow gall. Everywhere folks began to talk at once, laugh together, sing out in merriment and exultation.

“Well?” Cooper demanded, turning on Bass, seizing Titus’s shoulders in his big hands and squeezing hard. “I asked y’. H’ain’t we friends?”

“Yes, Silas,” he said, trying not to wince with the pain the big man created in that left shoulder, a hot, deep pain where it had not yet fully healed. At the same time he was determined not to show Cooper, nor the others, just how much he hurt. “We’re friends.”

“Allays will be?”

Bass nodded. “Yes, always will be friends, Silas.”

“Good man!” and Silas pounded Titus on the top of the shoulders. “What say we stuff our gullets full this night, fellas … then each dog-man of us rut ary a squaw dry till mornin’ light when Silas Cooper’s outfit pulls out for the high country!”

“Womens tonight!” Hooks cheered. “Aye—an’ the high country tomorry!”

Full as a tick about to burst he was as he waddled back to Fawn’s lodge that night long after moonrise. He cradled the boy in his arms on that walk, then laid the sleeping youngster among the blankets where the widow made a warm nest for the child. Titus stood looking down on them both as she tugged up the buffalo robe, then turned and stood before him.

There in the red-hued glow of the dying fire, Fawn freed the sash from her worn blanket coat and flung them both to the far side of the lodge, her eyes never leaving his. Then with her left hand she pulled at the ties on her right shoulder, doing the same at her left shoulder, loosening the top of her dress enough to slowly slide the skins down over her arms, tugging the garment on down over her breasts, then down her rounded belly and hips, finally to let it spill off her thighs to lay in a heap around her ankles like that last, old snow withdrawing in a ragged ring around the trunk of every aspen, lodgepole, and patch of sage in the surrounding hills.

He found his mouth bone dry as he watched what the dim flicker of the last limbs and glowing coals did to the dark hue of her brown flesh. His eyes savored the roundness to her, the full sway of her breasts as she stepped on out of her dress, the soft, full curve of her hips as they molded back to her full bottom.

Just before she moved into him, Bass gazed down at the dark triangle of hair there where her thighs blended into her rounded belly. Then she pressed herself against him, arms encircling his waist, cheek buried against his chest.

Pushing her away slightly, Titus hurried out of his coat with a shudder of excitement—then yanked his shirt over his head as she hastened to pull at the buckle, loosening his belt so that breechclout and leggings fell together. She knelt immediately, tugging at his moccasins, eagerly yanking at the leggings in a rush of motion, her eyes crawling up his legs to where his flesh began to throb and grow in anticipation of her.

Then she stretched up over him like a big cat, pushing him back upon their bed, finally arching herself out to full length atop him, her mouth finding his. The taste of her, wild with red meat simmered until tender with those dried leaves she harvested last summer—again his heart sang with happiness that he had taught her to kiss him back. Their mouths sucking, drawing, savoring one another’s as his hands stroked down that concave valley at the small of her back, then rising onto the rounded knoll of her bottom. Fingertips played over the fleshy fullness of her hips only briefly before his hunger drove him to push her off to the side where he could lick and suck on her breasts, running a hand down to that warm delta where she already grew moist.

Ready for him on this, their one last night.

Titus rose above her slowly, then suddenly descended as an animal would pounce while Fawn, the woman, pulled him into her feverishly, fingernails digging like puma’s claws, laying claim to the muscles of his back.

There in the red glow of the fire’s dying, he wordlessly spoke his good-bye in the one language he was sure she understood—for it was, after all, the same language they had spoken all winter long and into the coming of spring to these high places.

That language of need. Unspoken words that acknowledged you were taking what you needed from another and in return giving back what you thought the other needed most from you. A ferocious hunger there in the dark as the fire slowly went out.

Having dozed fitfully beside her that last night, morning came slowly—in some ways not soon enough; in others too long in the coming. When he turned to lift the buffalo robe gently, he found her already awake. She pulled at his wrist, turning Bass toward her so one hand could reach up to touch his face, the other slipping down to encircle the flesh that hardened with the barest of her touch.

She deserves this, he told himself as he mounted her. She deserves so much, much more than I can give her. So it was that he took his pleasure as she took hers from him, one last time.

And even before his heartbeat had slowed, he rolled from her and slipped from beneath the buffalo robes. Reaching first for his tradewool breechclout, Titus next pulled on the leggings, then yanked the shirt down over his head. He was aware of how she watched his every move as he bent to tie on his moccasins.

“I will miss your shadow in my lodge, Me-Ti-tuzz.”

“Come outside to say good-bye to me,” he said, his back to her still, not brave enough to look at her yet, afraid he would too easily respond to the plaintive sound in her voice.

“I will dress and bring the boy.”

After buckling the wide belt around his coat, Titus pushed back the antelope hide Fawn used for a door cover and blinked with the first light of the coming sunrise. From their rope corral he retrieved Hannah, along with his saddle horse and one more pack animal, taking them all to the lodge, where he tied the three to a nearby aspen beginning to show the first signs of budding. Back and forth between the lodge and the mule Bass hefted what he had left in the way of pack goods, then finally his season’s catch: those stiffened round beaver hides lashed together in hundredweight bales.

It was plain as sun that his animals were anxious, restive, eager to go at last. Somehow they knew this was not to be just another hunting trip—no, not with all three of them going. No, the loads Bass secured to their backs, were too heavy to these trail-wise animals. This departure would mean they would not be returning to this place.

“Howdy, Titus!”

Bass turned to find Tuttle walking up in his well-greased dark-brown buckskins.

Bud pointed behind him at his animals picketed at a nearby lodge. “All loaded, I am.” Some of his sandy-brown hair hung down over his eyes, poking from beneath the wolverine-hide cap he had fashioned for himself. “You ready to pull out?”

“Just ’bout,” he replied. “Where the others?”

“They’s loading up,” Tuttle answered. “Light enough to ride, so Silas sent me to fetch you up.”

Just then Bass heard the movement of the lodge door against the taut, frozen lodge skins and turned. Fawn emerged into the cold morning, holding the young boy on her hip. She set him down on the cold ground, where he stood unmoving, clutching her leg and watching the two white men, little puffs of frost at his lips.

“I’ll catch up with you in just a bit,” he said, his eyes coming back to look at Tuttle. “Gonna say my farewells.”

Bud nodded. “Don’t be long, Scratch. Less’n you’re fixin’ to pack that squaw along for your wife—best you just kiss her, pat her on her sweet ass, and tell her thankee for warming your robes last winter … then turn around, never look back, an’ be done with it.”

Bass grimaced with the sudden, cold feel those words gave his belly. Not that he hadn’t been the sort to just run off and leave the first gal he’d ever poked. Not that he wouldn’t have run away from the Ohio River whore neither—but Abigail had beat him to the door. And then there’d been Marissa … the hardest one to leave, because he had come to realize that if he didn’t run when he did, he’d be there still.

No, by Jehoshaphat—Titus Bass was no innocent, white-winged angel when it came to running off and hurting folks’ feelings bad. But—just to hear Tuttle put it all to words the way he had, why … it gave a man pause to look back at the thoughtless things he’d done in the past, the sort of things a real man wouldn’t have done.

Bristling at Tuttle, angry with himself for more than he cared to admit right about then, Titus snapped, “Said I’d be along, Bud. I won’t be no time a’tall.”

“S’awright by me,” Bud replied with a slight shrug. “Just bear it to mind Silas ain’t one to be waiting on no man.”

“If’n he’s set on leaving ’thout me, he can go right ahead,” Bass said. “I’ll be on your backtrail shortly.”

Bass watched Tuttle turn away without another word, heading back to midcamp, where more and more people gathered in a growing congregation around Cooper and Hooks as the sun’s light continued to creep on down the side of the mountain toward the shadowy valley where the village sat.

Bass sighed, as if steeling himself before he turned round to look at her for the last time. When he did, Bass found Fawn staring at the ground. Only the boy gazed up at him. So much like Amy’s younger brothers and sisters—they reminded him—the wee ones who watched older folk with wide, questioning eyes that bored right through to the core of a person.

As he came to her, Fawn raised her face to him, cheeks wet. For a moment he started to stammer; then, in frustration, Bass quickly looped his arms about her shoulders and clutched her tight. The feel of her tremble within his grasp was almost more than he could bear.

Why the hell hadn’t he just saddled up and gone before she ever awoke? he asked himself. Like he’d done before? Damned sight easier that way.

She quivered against him as she said, “My husband rode away one morning. He never came back.”

That made him angry—then immediately sorry that his back hairs had bristled. She had every right to speak her heart.

“Fawn, I am not your husband.”

Finally she admitted, “You are right. You come here for the winter. Now spring winds blow you on down the trail.”

“You knew when I came—”

“Yes, I knew,” she interrupted, squeezing her arms about his waist. “I … I did not count on letting my heart grow so fond of you.”

“It is because you are so lonely,” Bass explained, gazing down at the child. White Horse looked up at the two of them in wonder.

Fawn pulled her head back to gaze at him herself. “You were not lonely?” When he did not answer right away, she said, “Tell me that you could spend the winter by yourself—those long nights.”

“If a man had to, I could do—”

“How alone would you be with your terrible wounds? Tell me that.”

With pursed lips he finally nodded. “Yes, Fawn. You are right. I would have been lonely without you for the winter.”

She pressed into him again. “But you go now. Because you go, it hurts to remember back when my husband went away—and he never came back either.”

He could feel her quake as she said it, and that almost made his eyes spill. How rotten it made him feel to tell her, “But I never promised you I would return. I came to your lodge for the winter.”

“Will you ever … will I ever see you again?”

It was hard to speak the truth. “I don’t know. Chances are, I won’t ever see you or your people again … not for a long time.”

“You will always be welcome in my lodge, Me-Ti-tuzz,” she said, pulling back from him to arm’s length. “And my robes will always be warm for you.”

“No, Fawn—you will find a husband to warm you in those robes.” Titus put a hand out on the boy’s head, rubbing it gently. “Someone to help this one grow.”

“He needs an uncle, one who can name him when he is ready to be a warrior.”

“Yes, Fawn—this boy will deserve a man’s name.” He turned slightly to look over his shoulder as the noise grew.

The three others had mounted up and had begun to pull out of the village with their pack animals in tow. Men, women, and especially children reached out to touch the horses, the moccasins and legs of the white men taking their leave. Cooper, Hooks, and Tuttle vigorously waved one arm, then another, shouting back at the clamoring crowd surging along with the trappers’ horses and mules.

Suddenly Bass turned back to Fawn, gripping her shoulders tightly in his hands. “You will give him a strong name, Fawn.”

“Yes.”

“Promise me.”

“Yes, I promise.”

“Be sure he remembers my name.”

“Yes. He will remember you.”

“One day we may meet again, him and me.”

“And what of us?”

“Do not watch the horizon for me, Fawn. No one among all of us can say what tomorrow or that horizon will bring. So don’t watch the horizon and wait on me.”

Rising on her toes and lifting her chin, Fawn pulled on the collar to Bass’s coat, pressing her mouth against his. She was long and lingering in that kiss.

“I am glad I taught you how to do that,” Titus told her.

“I like to touch your mouth,” she said as she stepped back from him a ways, parted the fold of the blanket she clutched about her, and pulled a thong over her neck. Quickly she raised herself on her toes again and dropped it over his head.

Looking down, he took the small pouch, some four inches long, in his hand. It was nearly empty. “What is this?”

“A gift.

“Among my people every young man must find his own special medicine that allows him to become a warrior. A woman of his clan usually makes him a pouch in which that young man can put those special things that give him his power.”

“This … this is my medicine pouch?”

Fawn nodded. “Yes.”

As his fingers rubbed it together gently, Bass could tell the pouch was all but empty. “What have you put in it for me?”

“Some ashes from our last fire together,” she said, her eyes misting now. “A few petals from the flowers just beginning to bloom in the meadow. You … you will have to fill it the rest of the way, Me-Ti-tuzz.”

Clutching the pouch in one hand, Bass looped the other arm around her and brought her into a fierce embrace. He kissed her one last time, then kissed the tears streaking her cheeks.

She backed from him another two steps, putting an arm around the boy to hold him tightly to her side. “I will remember the touch of your mouth always.”

“I’ll never forget how you and Crane saved my life this winter.”

“The old man’s medicine helped,” Fawn admitted. “But he said it was your power that kept your spirit from flying off to the Star Road.”

Nearly choking, Bass sobbed, “I will remember you, Fawn. Always.”

Turning on his heel before he tarried any longer, Bass hurried over to untie the lead rope to Hannah and the packhorse, released the lash to the saddle horse, and leaped into the saddle without using the stirrup. In one swift motion he brought the horse around in a half circle, not daring to look at her again, then immediately gave the animal his heels.

Into the middle of that camp he plunged as quickly as he could—the bodies of men, women, and children surging past him and his pony, past the two pack animals like water rending itself around a boulder in midstream. Their wishes, and prayers, and their strong-heart songs rocked against his ears as he parted them, slowed to an agonizing walk as the farewell noise grew in volume.

At last he reached the outer ring of lodges, pushed on to the willow flats, where he could yank on Hannah’s lead rope and jab his heels into the ribs of that saddle horse. Far up ahead on the sunny slope Bass sighted the others climbing off to the left at an easy angle, beginning their switchback climb out of this great inner-mountain valley, reaching ever toward the Buffalo Pass.

He would follow without hesitation, for he needed those three far, far more than they would ever need him.

And tonight, without her warmth beside him—Titus would need something, anything, even the company of those hard-edged, iron-forged three to hold back the aching loneliness until days, perhaps even weeks, from now he would no longer hurt so keenly as he did at this terrible moment.

Into the first patch of sunlight creeping down the western slopes he hurried that morning, wondering if saying farewell ever got any easier.

The wild iris, as deep a purple as the Rocky Mountain twilight itself, stood waving in clusters, bobbing beneath the spring breeze that followed Titus across the meadow. Over his shoulder he lugged the weight of that oiled-leather trap sack he himself had sewn up back in Troost’s Livery.

Bass stopped, turned, and squinted behind him in the afternoon light. The three had chosen again to move downstream. At camp after camp on their journey a little west of north, Silas and the others always set their traps downstream while Titus deemed to take a different path. Up this creek, like the other streams before it, he pushed on through the saw grass and skirted the leafy willow, past wild blue hyacinth and the brilliant lavender of flowering horsemint, making sure not to step upon the delicate brick-red petals of prairie smoke or those tiny white whorls of redwool saxifrage.

Except for the distant, mocking shriek of the Steller’s jay or the cheep of the bluethroats singing from the branches of the trees over his head, Scratch marveled at the long stretches of silence when the breeze died. Then it would finger its way back down this narrow valley as the day cooled, soughing through the heavy, tossing branches of blue spruce and hearty fir. Back among the shady places, where a soft bed of rotting pine needles covered the forest floor beneath every evergreen and aspen, poked the sun-yellow centers of the pale-blue pasqueflower crocus, straining their saffron faces toward the falling of the sun.

It was for these few minutes he had alone, both morning and afternoon, that Titus had come to live. The quiet so deep, he could almost hear his own blood surging through his veins. Then the robber jay flashed its gray wings in a low swoop overhead, crying out with its squawk of alarm at the two-legged creature below it. Other birds rustled into flight, called out the general fright, and all grew quiet once more.

Nearby, the stream murmured in its gravel bed, talking on and on day and night without stop as it started last winter’s snowpack on a rushing tumble toward the distant sea. For a long moment he gazed downstream, studying the tiny riffles and widening vees formed behind every small boulder midstream, wondering if that water passing by him right then would eventually boil into the North Platte, joining all the rest of spring’s melting runoff to swell the prairie rivers, finally to spill into the muddy Missouri before merging itself with the mighty Mississippi as it lolled its way past St. Louis … down, down to N’Orleans, where the quadroon and many-hued whores plied their trade, where ebony-skinned slaves stood shack-led on auction blocks, and the great sheets of canvas strained against the wind on those mighty, three-masted, oceangoing vessels come there from far off beyond the very curve of the earth.

Hell, right here where he stood Titus figured he was damn well far beyond the curve of the earth from everything he had ever known before. Even as high as he stood in these mountains, last winter’s snowpack barely yards above him, the timberline not all that far beyond that, Bass could not look back and see the mouth of the Platte, not that widow’s cabin at Boone’s Lick nor trader’s store at Franklin, much less the barn he had helped raise on the Guthrie farm south of St. Lou. As high into the sky as he stood at that moment—why, Titus couldn’t even see beyond the jagged tumble of gray granite and emerald-green that marked cleft upon cleft as the mountain ranges stood hulking one against the other without apparent end.

But he knew these high peaks had to end the farther west he pushed … there they would allow a man to gently ride back down their sunset-side slopes onto the prairie among the burnt orange of the paintbrush and the sego lilies and the upwind sage that always filled a man’s nostrils. He had never been there yet, not in all his searching to the west last autumn. Nor had Isaac Washburn.

But Silas, Bud, and Billy had, by damned. And that’s where they were headed in this easy tramp toward rendezvous. They’d seen the end of the mountains and the beginning of the great dry basin that most said was where rivers eventually sank into oblivion and the desert stretched toward the sunset until it finally ran smack up against even more mountains.

Beyond that was rumored to be the great salt ocean where Lewis and his friend Clark had dared take their men some twenty years before. And now here he stood, squarely in that land of fable and myth that had no end until it dropped off suddenly into that salt ocean. At N’Orleans, Titus had looked out with sixteen-year-old eyes and tried to imagine where all that water could carry those tall-masted ships.

No more did he wonder on all that white canvas thrown up against the wind, for here, among the gigantic heave of granite escarpment thrust against the very same sky … here he could cast his gaze upon tumbling boulder fields of talus and scree stretching wider than the Ohio River itself, why—Titus stood beneath the white umbrella of clouds he could almost reach up and touch. There, just inches beyond the reach of his fingers.

He looked back to the east again, perhaps to will his vision to penetrate through the haze and all that distance just whence he had come. The Ohio River borderlands of Boone County. Then Louisville and Owensboro. Natchez-Under-the-Hill and the dense forest road that took a man north through the Chickasaws’ and Choctaws’ wilderness and on back to home.

But he saw none of that from here. Home now lay beneath the soles of his moccasins. And there was no wilderness back there anywhere near as mighty as was this where he dropped his trap sack and suddenly went to his knees to rock forward and lean out over that murmuring stream—just to sip at what must surely be God’s own holy water, so cold it set his back teeth on edge.

Beard dripping, Scratch rocked back on his haunches and looked up at those cold snowfields mantled around the high peaks just beyond their camp. And there and then he closed his eyes—praying as best he could remember having learned to pray at his mam’s knee: her old, yellow-eared Bible flung open and draped over her lap like two great wings of some bird that she was certain one day would lift her up and carry her away to everlasting paradise.

Rising once again, he brought the trap sack up with him and set off, sweeping around a bend in the creek another two hundred yards until he reached the edge of the flooded meadow where the flat-tailed rodents had long been at work. Perhaps since the day after the beginning of time. How his heart beat that much faster, just to let his eyes rush over all the signs of their industry: tender saplings and young trees hawed off by those busy front teeth less than a foot from the ground, more than two dozen muddy slides marked the beavers’ descent from grassy banks into that watery world of their own making, and at least a double handful of those crude, dome-topped lodges rising from the middle of their pond—lodges where the animals were safe from all but one predator.

Last fall as he began his new life as a beaver-man, Titus had taken a sharpened sapling and waded out to the closest lodge. There he had curiously jabbed and levered, chipping away at the chewed limbs and mud chinking until he had broken through, then peered inside at the dark inner world abandoned by the frightened animals who kept right on slapping their tails on the surface of that pond nearby. He saw the inner shelf where the beaver crawled up and out of the water to sleep, there to feed on the tender green shoots and new limbs they dragged down the banks, into the water, then under the surface and into their lodges.

They would have that hole repaired inside of three days, maybe only two, he had estimated from how hard he saw the animals work. And when he had found the hole covered with new limbs and fresh mud the very next day, Bass felt a newfound respect for this creature he stalked, trapped, skinned, and sometimes ate.

“You gone an’ hit dead center this time, ol’ coon,” he breathed all but to himself as he stared now at the immensity of the beaver pond.

Then quickly glanced downstream where he feared the others might have followed him there.

For a moment more he listened. Only the racket of a chirking squirrel complaining overhead and the shadow-flash of a swooping flock of black rosy finches broke the stillness. Then came the rustle of branches and a handful of leaves spilling to the surface of the pond. In and out of the shadows on the far side he made out the familiar waddle of the fat rodents all about their business of chewing back the forest’s edge a tree at a time.

Cautiously he set down the sack, then freed the knot at the top, stuffed the strand of half-inch rope beneath his belt and plunged a hand into the sack to pull forth the first trap. With it set beside him in the grass, hidden there behind the clumps of low, leafy brush, Scratch used his belt knife to saw free a narrow branch, then sharpened the widest end to a point.

Standing again, he quietly slipped off downstream to a place where he could enter the water far from the beavers’ slides. The first step wasn’t the hardest. It was the third or fourth as he inched deeper into the stream—his body past the first, startling shock of the cold, this water just descended from glacial melt. Now his calves began to ache and his toes disappeared from all feeling. Still he plodded on, each leaden foot feeling its way forward across the rocky bottom, pressing his way upstream, back toward the flooded meadow.

Slowly he moved, keeping to the afternoon shadows as best he could, his eyes and ears alert to those beaver that might discover him as they went about their business on the far side of the pond, and he went about his. At the ninth slide he figured he had come far enough, nearly halfway around the meadow. It wouldn’t do to press his luck beyond here, Titus figured.

There he jabbed the bait-stick into the side of the bank so that it hung low over the slide. Titus kept it down to make it all the easier for an unsuspecting animal to get himself a real good sniff of the end of that bait stick where he smeared some castor—that pale, milky substance taken from a pair of glands in the beaver’s groin. The animal used it to sleek and waterproof its thick hide. But to smell strange castor come to their pond—why, that would pique the curiosity of any of these flat-tails hereabouts.

Quietly reseating the stopper in the bait bottle that hung from his belt, Scratch crouched forward, bending at the knee, and with one hand began to dig away at the bank there a half foot below the pond’s surface. With a proper shelf excavated, he next worked at squeezing closed both of the tough iron springs on the trap so that the jaws fell open. Only then could he slip the trigger into the notch on the round pan that lay in the center of the open jaws.

Carefully he moved the trap under the water, settling it upon the shelf, then adjusted the end of the bait-stick so that it hovered right above the hidden trap. It wouldn’t be long before one of the flat-tails came down that slide, winded the scent of a strange beaver, and waddled over to investigate. When it did, chances were almost certain it would end up stepping right on the pan in trying to get itself a good sniff of the bait—when the trigger would release, snapping the smooth iron jaws shut on the beaver’s leg.

And what the frightened animal did then would be crucial to Scratch having a pelt to scrape and stretch and eventually barter off to a trader … or it would mean losing a trap somewhere at the muddy, grassy bottom of this forest pond.

From the back of his belt he took a long branch he had selected from a nearby stand of lodgepole. Then he stretched out the trap chain to its full length, one end of which was looped around a trap spring. Slipping the branch through the large eye-ring at the other end, Bass drove a sharp end into the bottom of the pond.

Once the jaws had slapped shut around the unwary beaver’s leg, the animal would instinctively dive for the safety of deep water, paddling frantically for the middle of the pond and its lodge. But on the way it would be caught at the end of the trap chain that it had unknowingly dragged down the length of the branch, where the trap-ring would be snagged beneath a large knot. Reaching deep water near the middle of the pond, the beaver would find it impossible to swim back again to the surface, and drown without any damage to its glossy pelt, which would one day be fashioned into a fine top hat for some eastern gentleman, mayhap even a winter muffler for some gussied-up city gal all aswirl in yards upon yards of starched crinoline, taffeta, and satin.

Slowly Scratch turned, careful to make as little noise in the water as he could, keeping to the shadows as the sun continued its descent, here where a man grew his coldest in this water just recently given birth by ice fields. But it was here, just below the dripping shelves of snowy cataracts, just beneath the overhang of melting glaciers, that beaver grew their thickest pelts and maintained those winter coats long into the spring.

Trap after trap he set that afternoon, returning to his trap sack each time on the same circuitous route through the water so that his scent would not become entangled with the brush or the ground near any one of his sets. Ten bait-sticks he cut late that afternoon, and ten shelves he carved away beneath the water’s surface there at the bottom of ten slides.

Ten beaver would he collect come morning light.

Those last two traps at the bottom of the sack felt as heavy as a small anvil to his weary arms as Scratch finally slogged downstream, taking his leave of the flooded meadow only after the sun had disappeared behind the high peaks looming far overhead.

Those ten beaver would again put him ahead of Cooper’s catch. Even farther ahead or Billy’s. And poor Turtle wasn’t even in the running. Yet Bud made himself useful around camp, scraping hides, whipping together the willow hoops on which the others would stretch their beaver plews into the distinctively round “beaver dollars.” As poor a trapper as Bud Tuttle was, to Scratch’s way of thinking he was a damned good man to have along as a camp keeper and fire tender.

His feet heavy, and shuddering with the chill of evening coming, Titus plodded back toward that distant flicker of their camphre signaling like a beacon through the quaking aspens. Coffee and some elk loin would set well on his stomach this night.

He vowed to keep the meadow secret until he had pulled his beaver come morning.

By damn! This would be the last night Silas Cooper would have to gloat.

Now they’d all see just who in tarnation was the master trapper in these parts!