Buffalo Palace

22

“It true what they say ’bout that Three Forks country up yonder?” Titus asked the others at the fire one cold spring evening.

“True that it’s crawling with more ways for a man t’ die than most ever thought of?” Jack Hatcher asked in reply.

“Them three I was with,” Bass began to explain, “they didn’t want to go nowhere near Blackfeets.”

“Damn them red-bellies!” Isaac Simms shouted.

“No-account worthless niggers,” echoed Elbridge Gray.

Scratch asked, “I take it you fellas rubbed up again’ them Blackfeets, eh?”

Jabbing his sharp knife in the air, pointing at the others in the circle at that fire, Hatcher made his point. “Every damn last one of these here coons rubbed up again’ Blackfoot at least once.”

“An’ for most—once be more’n enough!” Caleb Wood exclaimed. “Just ask Jack hisself there.”

“Ask him what?” Bass inquired.

Wood continued, “Ask him about Blackfoots—how they took his own brother.”

Turning to look at Hatcher, Bass repeated, “They kill’t your own brother, Jack?”

For a moment longer Hatcher sat swabbing the oiled rag on the end of his wiping stick up and down the bore of his rifle. “It be the church’s truth. Jeb were with Lisa … long, long ago.”

“The Spaniard? Manuel Lisa?”

“That’s him,” Jack answered Titus. “Took him one of the first outfits to the upper river.”

With a knowing nod Matthew Kinkead added, “The Up-Missouri country.”

Then Hatcher continued. “My brother Jeb weren’t ’sactly with Lisa, howsoever. Stayed on with Henry’s bunch what tramped over to the Three Forks.”

“Long time back I knowed a man what was bound away to join up with Lisa out to St. Louie,” Scratch announced. “It were the summer just afore I left home for good. Long ago. Gamble, I remember his name to be. Damn if he weren’t a shot too: beat me good at the Longhunter Fair shoot.”

“Jeb was the best there was in our country,” Hatcher explained, smiling with brotherly admiration. “Damn—but there’s times I do miss him sorely.”

“Wait just a shake there,” Bass exclaimed. “You can’t be near old enough to have you a brother what went upriver with Lisa!”

“Shit!” cried Rufus Graham. “Jack Hatcher’s lot older’n you think!”

“Not near so old I cain’t whip your ass, Rufus!” Hatcher growled, then turned back to Titus. “Jeb was firstborn in our family. I was the babe. Ain’t really all that far apart in years, I s’pose. I was old enough to carry a rifle into the woods with him the fall and winter afore he left home for to join Lisa. It purely broke my ma’s heart when he left. And it broke my pa’s heart when Jeb never come back.”

For long minutes none of them spoke at the fire, perhaps deep in thought on what had been left behind, those who had been left behind—the price paid to seize hold of this life.

Night held back this season of the year, waiting just a bit longer each evening before it stole in to take possession of the day. Not like autumn, that other season of change: when night rushed in like a bold, brazen brigand. But for now night held off, and so did they, likely every man thinking of loved ones left behind among the settlements and places where people gathered shoulder to shoulder.

A wet, cold spring it had become—almost from the first retreat of the snow up the mountainsides. Streams swelled to overflowing with the melting runoff tumbling down to the valleys below while icy rains hammered the land until the ground could hold no more. Nearly every ravine, coulee, and dry wash frothed in its headlong rush for the sea. The beaver hunting turned poor there in the country that drained the eastern slope of the Wind River Mountains. During such spring floods the flat-tails simply did not live by the same habits. And if they did emerge from their flooded lodges at all, the beaver were much more wary, harder to bring to bait, more cautious than a long-tailed house cat trapped in a room filled with bent-wood rockers.

One evening after it had been raining solid for the better part of a night and the following day, they sat by their smoky fire, broiling pieces of meat the size of their fists on sharpened sticks called appolaz. To his utter surprise, Bass heard that first yip-yip-yipping cry of a nearby coyote.

“Didn’t think they come out in the rain,” Scratch said, sniffling as he dragged his wet wool coat under his red, raw nose.

“That’s medicine,” Hatcher explained matter-of-factly as he poked a finger in his half-raw meat, then returned it to the flames.

“What’s medicine?” Bass repeated.

“That song-dog,” Graham said.

Titus scoffed, “What’s the medicine in some lonely ol’ coyote singing to the sun as it falls outta the sky?”

Clearing his throat, Hatcher said, “Scratch, ye damn well know I’d rather spit face-on into a strong wind than tell ye a bald-faced lie.”

“You ain’t ever told me no bald-face what I know of,” Bass admitted.

“Then ye damn well pin ye ears back and give Mad Jack Hatcher a good listen here. Some winters back I heard tell a coyote what comes out to howl in the rain—why, that coyote really be a Injun.”

“You mean a Injun coming round to scout our camp?”

“No—a coyote” Hatcher repeated. “A coyote what used to be a Injun.”

Starting to grin, Bass was sure now he was getting his leg pulled, and good. “No matter you swore you’d tell me no bald-face … I can tell when a man’s poking fun at me—”

“You believe what ye-wanna believe, Titus Bass,” Hatcher interrupted. “And ye ain’t gotta believe what ye ain’t ready to believe.”

Solomon Fish declared, “He’s telling you the straight of it, Scratch.”

“You mean you ain’t rousting me?” Titus asked.

Wagging his head, Hatcher replied, “No. Just telling ye the truth of it, as I knows the truth to be.”

For a moment he listened to that coyote wailing off-key out there in the soggy hills. “You mean to tell me that there ain’t no coyote singing out there?”

“Oh, there’s a coyote all right,” Caleb Wood testified. “A buffler coyote.”

“What’s a buffler coyote?”

Hatcher said, “Scratch, surely ye see’d how coyotes toiler the herds.”

Bass nodded. “Yep, them and the wolves. So that’s what you call a buffler coyote, eh?”

“Yep.”

Still grinning, Bass said, “So—what is it? A buffler coyote … or a Injun?”

Wood wagged his head like a schoolmaster who had grown frustrated explaining some fine point to one of his thickheaded young charges. “Tell ’im, Jack.”

“One what sings in the rain be a coyote what was once’t a Injun,” Hatcher said patiently. “Kill’t by a enemy while’st his medicine was still strong.”

“You’re trying to tell me all that howling’s from a dead warrior?”

Wood nodded eagerly. “I do believe he’s getting it, Jack!”

“Wait a shake here,” Bass protested. “If’n his medicine’s so strong, how come he gets hisself kill’t?”

“’Cause the spirits want that warrior and his powers,” Hatcher replied.

“Why them spirits want the Injun for if he’s been killed by a enemy?”

“Them spirits change the Injun to a coyote critter,” Hatcher continued, “so’s it can take some revenge for some wrong done those spirits.”

Titus swallowed unconsciously, sensing a heaviness to the air about him as the coyote took up its cry once more. The rain continued to hammer the branches of the trees and the half-dozen nearby sections of canvas and Russian sheeting they had stretched over their bedding. Drops hissed into their fire pit that struggled to maintain its warmth.

“So maybe there’s buffler near-abouts,” Scratch finally broke the long silence. “If’n that’s a buffler coyote.”

“Don’t mean there’s buffler about at all,” Jack said. He pointed with the appolaz in the general direction of the coyote’s howl, then poked his finger at his browning meat. “All it means is that spirit critter got something the spirits want told to one of us niggers here.”

“Now for sure I don’t believe you.”

“It be the truth,” John Rowland testified.

Bass wagged his head. “That coyote wants to tell something to one of us?”

Jack tried biting into his meat, finding it still too raw, returning it to the flames. “Way I got it figgered—you was the only man here what didn’t know ’bout such spirit doin’s, Titus Bass.”

“So I’m the one that coyote wants to talk to, eh?”

Scratch waited a moment while the others fell silent, figuring that if he was patient enough, there was sure to come some gust of laughter that would prove to him the others were having their fun at his expense. But, instead, as he looked from face to face to face, the others stared into the fire, or regarded their supper, faces grave and intent.

Finally Scratch said, “All right, you all heard that spirit critter afore. And if … if I’m the only one what didn’t know nothing ’bout such a thing till now—what you figger such a spirit critter’s got to tell me?”

Hatcher shrugged slightly and said, “I ’spect we’re going to find out soon enough what all his song means.”

With the first days of spring they had abandoned that country and slogged north by west, following the Wind River itself, then slowly worked their way through those mountains* they followed north as the days lengthened and the land began to bloom. Across carpets of alpine wildflowers they slipped over the passes—feasting mostly on the elk fattening themselves up as the herds migrated to higher elevations, following the season’s new grasses ever higher. Overhead flew the undulating black vees of the white-breasted honking longnecks and their smaller canvas-backed, ring-necked, or green-crowned cousins, heading back to the north. Late each afternoon it seemed the sky would reverberate with the racket of beating wings as the flocks passed low, circled, then swooped in—beginning to congregate near every pocket of water, there to feed by the thousands and rest those hours until morning when again they would take to the sky in a deafening rush of wings.

As he watched the monstrous vees disappear to the north, slowly spearing their way across the springtime blue, the carrot-topped Caleb Wood always grumbled. “Headed to Blackfoot country—just over them peaks.”

Wood’s sourness always made Jack Hatcher laugh, which invariably caused the legs of that badger cap he wore to shake on either side of his face. “Damned birds make fools out of us, don’t they, Caleb? Travel free an’ easy while’st we watch the skyline, made to keep our eyes on our backtrail—scared for losing our hair! All while them goddamned birds go flying off to see what haps with them Britishers up north come ever’ spring … then on the wing back here to spy on us come the autumn!”

Running his dirty hand through hair so auburn it had a copper glow to it, Rufus Graham sighed. “Up there in that Three Forks land I hear tell beaver’s so thick, you just walk up and club ’em over the head, Jack.”

“I got close enough to know that’s the certain truth,” Bass replied with a nod. “Beaver big and glossy—more of ’em on every stream than I’d ever see’d.”

“A damned cursed country, that be!” Hatcher snapped. “A country I’ve vowed I’ll never set foot in for all the grief it’s caused my poor grievin’ ma.”

All winter Solomon Fisn had been working on cultivating a beard with blond ringlets in it to match his flowing mane that reached the middle of his back. Turning to Bass, he agreed with Jack. “There be a reason why that Three Forks country crawls with beaver.”

“An’ their name be Blackfoots!” Hatcher snarled.

Elbridge Gray was the first out of the saddle that afternoon at the edge of a meadow where they planned to camp. With the beginnings of a potbelly starting to slip over his belt, he was constantly tugging up his leather britches. “By God, I’m a man what values his hair more’n all the beaver what’s in Chouteau’s warehouse!”

Proud of his considerable mane, Solomon roared, “And my hair more’n all the beaver in the hull of St. Louie!”

As the men slipped to the ground, the horses and mules began switching their tails and flicking their ears all the more. One by one the trappers began to slap at the back of a hand, swatted their neck or cheek—some tender and exposed domain of juicy flesh.

Graham quit removing his saddle, his hands on the cinch. “Dammit, Hatcher—I say we find us a better camp!”

“Skeeters bound to eat us up alive!” Gray agreed.

“Ye two just get the fire started,” Jack commanded. “Smear some goober on—then haul out our sack of buffler wood.”

“Why us?” Graham grumped, swatting at the insects buzzing right at the end of his nose.

“It’s your night to tend fire, ain’t it?” Caleb asked.

As he watched Rufus and Elbridge turn back to their packs, Bass stepped up to Hatcher, swatting at those tormentors that hovered around his face. “What’s this goober?”

“Some calls it milk,” Fish replied.

“Same thing,” Hatcher stated. He reached for the cherrywood vial hanging on his belt, untied it, and removed the antler stopper before he brought it beneath Scratch’s nose.

“That’s beaver bait!” Titus exclaimed, making a face and scrunching up his nose with the awful tang.

“Damn right it is,” Hatcher said, pouring a little of the thick milky-white substance into the palm of one hand. “That’s the goober a man puts on where he don’t want no skeeters biting at him.”

In surprise Bass watched Jack, then Solomon and the others in the group, all busy themselves with smearing the potent, rancid, smelly discharge on their exposed flesh: face, neck, backs of hands—everywhere the mosquitoes might be tempted to land and begin their biting torment.

“Best ye try some skeeter medicine,” Hatcher suggested. “Where’s yer bait?”

“In my plunder. Hell if I’d figger to need it till we was setting traps.”

Caleb asked, “Don’t skeeters trouble you none?”

“Damn right they do!” Bass replied. “I just allays done my best to kill as many of ’em as I could.”

“Here,” Jack said, handing his bait bottle over to Titus. “Get that there smeared on ye, and quick, afore them critters ea’cha alive! We’ll have us a buffler-wood fire going soon enough to take care of most o’ them pesky varmits. G’won—do it, ye stupid idjit—or yer bound to be pure misery by morning.”

Reluctantly Titus took the cherrywood vial from Jack, its antler stopper hanging by a narrow thong from the neck of the bottle. Trying to hold his breath, Bass poured a little of the thick goo into a palm and brought it to his cheek. Wrinkling his nose and breathing through his mouth so he would not have to smell the stench, Scratch smeared the substance over his forehead, cheeks, down his throat and the back of his neck.

“Gonna need more’n that, ain’t he, Jack?” Wood suggested.

“Lather that goober on, Scratch,” Hatcher declared. “Gots to be enough to drive them skeeters off!”

The nauseating repellent came from two glands that lay just beneath the skin near the hindquarters of the beaver. That castoreum was valued almost as highly as the animal’s pelt itself. Milking each of the glands from trapped beaver into his bait bottle, the trapper used the thick whitish castoreum to draw even more beaver to future trap-sets. It was that scent of an unknown rival that brought the curious, jealous, or territorial-guarding beaver to its iron-jawed fate.

“Do like Jack told-you,” Caleb instructed as the rest of the band went about unsaddling the animals and making camp. “Smear that beaver milk on good.” He started away on camp chores himself. Long in torso and short in leg, Wood was a man who swayed so much when he walked that from behind, it looked as if he hobbled.

By the time Bass finished smearing his skin good, he found he could better tolerate the stink, almost enough to stand being around himself. Jamming the antler stopper back into the bait bottle, he took it over to Hatcher. Jack squatted next to Joseph Little, who sat propped against a tree, not looking good at all.

“Thankee, Scratch.” Hatcher took the bottle from Titus, opened it, and began to smear some on Little’s face. “Joe here says he ain’t feeling too pert. Mebbeso yer belly’s all bound up.”

“Ain’t … ain’t my belly,” Little said, his glassy, fevered eyes half-open as Hatcher smeared goober on his mottled, grayish face.

“Gotta be what it is, Joe,” Jack said. “Yer hide feels to be burning up. And yer wet as hell with fever.”

“I been sweating like this near all day, Jack,” Little replied with a hoarse rasp. It was clear he was scared. “What you think it be?”

“Don’t have me no idee,” Hatcher answered, flicking Bass a questioning look. “But I’m sure it ain’t nothing to fret yerself over.”

Titus shrugged slightly as he knelt beside the two. The moment he touched Little’s mottled cheek, he pulled his fingers back, alarmed at the heat of the man’s fever. Little’s skin looked pale, almost translucent, save for the reddish splotches dotting his face and neck.

“He ever get sick like this afore?” Bass inquired.

“N-never,” Little answered for himself. “You g-get me some water? One of y’?”

Scratch got to his feet and hurried off to fetch a kettle. By the time he returned from the nearby stream, having walked through clouds of buzzing tormentors, Hatcher had Little dragged over near the fire pit where Gray and Graham had their kindling going-well enough to begin work with what the mountain trapper called “buffalo wood.” Each took a dried buffalo chip from the rawhide sack where the band of free trappers stored this precious commodity, breaking the chips into small pieces, which they patiently fed to the flames.

“Here, ye feed him some water, Scratch,” Hatcher stated as he stood. “I’ll haul over his blankets and we’ll get ’im covered up.”

Little protested, pulling at his own damp shirt, struggling to get the sticky buckskin off his arms, over his head, as if he were suffocating in it. He muttered feverishly, “Goddammit! Cain’t y’ idjits see I’m burning up! Don’t want no damned blankets!”

“Brung you some water—like you asked me,” Bass said, holding out a cup to Little.

With his sweat-soaked shirt still crumpled over one shoulder and at his neck, Joe snatched the cup away like a man gone four days in the desert without a drink. His shaking hands brought it to his lips, where he managed to spill more than he drank before handing it back to Bass for more. He drank and drank, cup by cup from the kettle, and while he did, Scratch noticed the tiny red mounds there beneath Little’s arms every time the man raised them to gulp from the tin cup. Far more of the same small, angry welts dotted the pale flesh near his belt line.

“Jack?” Scratch tried to say without alarm.

When Hatcher had resettled beside Scratch at Little’s side, Titus said, “You got any idee what them be?”

“These here red spots?” Joe asked instead, looking down at his own belly. “I got more.” He tugged back his belt where the breechclout hung and the buckskin leggings were tied.

“Damn,” Hatcher said under his breath. “Ye know what them is, don’cha, Joe?”

“They was t-ticks,” Little replied, his eyes half-closed as he keeled over to the side wearily, propping his head on an elbow.

As Scratch dragged over another blanket and put it beneath Little’s head, Jack inquired, “Ye telling us ye knowed they was ticks?”

“Yup.”

“What happen’t to them ticks, Joe?” Jack asked.

Slowly wagging his head, Little answered, “I got rid of ’em. All over me. But I got rid of ’em.”

“How?” Hatcher demanded, his voice growing in volume and alarm. “How’d ye get rid of ’em?”

“P-pulled ’em out,” Little said, quaking with a sudden tremor. He drew his legs up fetally, groaning. “Now, g’won and lemme sleep some. I’m tired and cold.”

Jack pulled the blanket over Little’s shoulders, then motioned Bass to follow as he got to his feet. When the two of them stopped some yards away, the others came up to join them in a hushed circle.

“Something he et?” John Rowland asked.

“Ticks.”

Several of them turned and looked at the quaking figure lying huddled in the blankets beside the fire.

“He’ll go under, won’t he, Jack?” Caleb asked.

It took a moment before he answered; then Hatcher said, “I ’spect he will.”

“Damn,” Isaac replied, his eyes frightened as he pulled at his whitish beard stained with dark yellow-rown streaks.

Wood added, “With the ticks, fellers—it only be a matter of time.”

“Didn’t he know no better?” Gray asked, pulling off that cap he had made himself from a scrap of old wool blanket, sewn complete with two peaks on either side of it to resemble wolf ears.

“Said he pulled ’em all out,” Hatcher replied.

“S’pose one of you tell me what you’re talking about,” Scratch finally demanded. “What you mean, he’s got ticks?”

Kinkead scratched at his big red nose. “Like Hatcher said, Joe’s got ticks.”

Bass shook his head, then scoffed, “You can’t all be so full of shit to think he’s gonna die from ticks!”

Solemn Isaac Simms took off that battered felt hat of his, the brim singed in places where he had not been all that careful in using it to stir up many a dying fire. “Listen, Scratch. Joe ain’t listened to all that much Hatcher tried to teach him ’bout nothing—so it’s plain as paint Joe didn’t learn hisself ’bout ticks.”

“W-wait, dammit,” Bass said. “Just how the hell does a man die from ticks?”

“He gets the fever from ’em,” Hatcher explained, sadly shaking his head and the two legs on that badger cap too. “I only see’d one other like this.”

“That feller go under too, Jack?” Fish asked.

“Sartin as sun.”

Scratch simply could not believe his ears. “J-just from ticks?”

“From ticks,” Hatcher affirmed.

“We could bleed ’im, Jack,” Wood suggested.

“If’n Joe lets us, we’ll bleed him,” Hatcher agreed. “But Isaac the one’s gonna do it. He’s done it on us afore.”

“Awright,” Simms agreed, turning momentarily to look at the figure lying by the fire. “I’ll bleed ’im if he’ll let me.”

Bass watched Isaac turn aside quietly with Solomon Fish and go over to where Little shivered uncontrollably in his blankets. They both knelt and began talking so low, Titus could not make out what they said. Only then did he notice the sun was easing down on the far peaks rising to the west of them.

“I’ll go over see if them two need my help,” Scratch declared, then turned from the group.

He stood behind Fish and Simms for a few minutes as they tried desperately to hold Little’s arms still enough for Isaac to delicately prick open a vein in the sick man’s wrists. But because of the growing violence of his quaking, they succeeded only in scratching Little with the tip of the knife blade.

When Hatcher came up to watch those last attempts, Bass quietly said, “You don’t need me for nothing, I’ll slip off for a while.”

“Go right on ahead,” Jack declared. “Ain’t nothing more any of us can do here, I’m afeared.”

Picking his way west from camp, Scratch came upon Elbridge Gray rooting among the brush along the streambank. They signaled one another with a wave, but neither one spoke a word. Already it felt as if a somber air were settling upon the valley.

Gray hunched back over his work, crawling about on his knees, working his knife into the damp soil, digging, prodding things out of the ground. At every camp Elbridge was the one to go in search of wild onions or Jerusalem artichokes among the thick undergrowth along the river bottoms, the one among them all to dig up the tip-sina, a rooted tuber that grew out on the prairie.

Bass wasn’t all that sure how long he walked, but when he stopped and circled back, Scratch could not see anything of their camp but the rising vale of a single wispy column of smoke emerging from the canopy of trees. That’s where he decided to go no farther. Nearby ran a game trail, on the far side of which stood a nest of large boulders. Bass climbed to the top and settled, drawing his legs against him, his arms knitted around them as he stared at the last lip of the sun slipping over the far, jagged horizon.

Ticks.

A critter so small a man might think nothing more of one than to yank it out of his hide and scratch where the damned thing had burrowed its head to suck at the man’s blood.

It weren’t like ticks was anything new to him, neither. Hell, all his pap’s animals had suffered ticks from time to time—cows, and even Tink herself. Never had he given a second thought to yanking ticks right out of the old hound’s hide. Now the rest were telling him Joe Little was going to die from the ticks.

A man don’t die. from ticks!

Up here where a man could get froze to death or get hisself chawed up by a sow grizzly? Where a fella’s pony might slip a hoof on an icy ledge or he might get hisself killed by thieving red niggers? A hundred and one things might kill a man out here for sure and certain … but not no ticks!

As the light began to drain from the sky, Titus brooded on it in that peculiar way he had come to dwell on all weighty matters. Scratch would cautiously reach out and barely touch a thing first before really grabbing hold of it—maybe even rub a finger or two across a subject before diving in to stir it up good. It was as if Titus Bass tested things a time or two, exactly like a man would stick his toe into the water, testing its temperature before jumping on in.

Sure enough of a time not all that long ago he had been a man with a wild feather tickling his ass, a young pup what had come to the mountains as brave and stupid as a buffler in the spring with his nose stuck high in the air. But he’d been lucky. That, or Dame Fortune had merely smiled on one more of those rare men who went out and made his own luck happen.

Luck or fate, or medicine. There was more than enough mystery to give a man pause out here.

“Mind if’n ye have some company?”

He looked down, finding Hatcher there at the foot of the boulders.

“C’mon up.”

Jack scrambled up and over the nest of rocks, settling near Bass. “They’re warm, ain’t they?”

Scratch put his hand out to feel the boulder beneath him. For the first time he realized how the rock had absorbed the afternoon’s sunlight and heat. “Damn sight warmer’n the air up here.”

After a few minutes Jack turned to look over his shoulder, then asked, “Ye don’t figger our fire’s too big, do ye?”

Again Scratch glanced at the smoke. “You fearing Injuns, Jack Hatcher?”

“Only them what come out’n the north.”

They fell quiet again, both lost in thought until Titus asked, “Joe really gonna die?”

“He might’n pull through,” Hatcher replied solemnly. “But I cain’t lay much stake on that. But there ain’t much else we can do ’cept keep ’im at his ease. I dug out the last of the likker for ’im. With that fever—Joe was plumb going out of his head.”

“You done right, Jack,” Titus agreed. “Maybe help him sleep now.”

“It don’t feel like I done nothing right, though.”

Turning slightly on the boulder, Scratch said, “This is pure crazy, Hatcher. How’s a man die of ticks?”

“I ain’t got me a answer for ye,” he finally admitted. “Me and Caleb see’d it only once’t afore.”

“Seen what?”

“Man die of tick fever.”

“Tick fever? A mari really died of a tick bite?”

After nodding, Hatcher said, “He bums up with a fever—just like Joe’s doing right now. Tweren’t nothing no man could do for ’im.”

“Gotta be something, Jack—like you help a body through the croup-sick or the ague.”

“Joe ain’t got none of that. Been bit by the ticks what kill’t him. What give him the fever and kill’t him.”

“I know ticks. Ever since’t I was a boy—”

“These out here ain’t the same, Scratch,” Hatcher interrupted. “Ain’t the same like them back east where we both come from. Not down there on the prerra neither. These up here in the mountains … they can kill a man.”

“Sure as Blackfoot?”

“Sure as Blackfeets … and that’s for sartin.”

Almost in a whimper Scratch asked, “W-what’d Joe do wrong that he’s gotta die for it?”

“Like he tol’t us his own self: he pulled them ticks outta his own hide.”

“Shit, Hatcher. Man can’t leave the damned things stuck in there, can he?”

Wagging his head, Jack sought to explain. “Listen, Scratch: there’s a right way to set a trap, and a wrong way too. So there’s a way to get them ticks off your hide ’thout things turning out the way they did for Little.”

“How so?”

“Man’s gotta get hisself something hot and touch them sumbitcnes on the ass.”

“Something hot?”

“Like yer knifeblade ye heat up over the fire,” Jack continued. “Just touch them ticks on the ass, and they’ll come backing right on out.”

“Come out’n a man’s hide—just like that?”

“Ye gotta do it that way, Scratch,” Hatcher explained. “Wait till they pulled themselves out, then ye grab ’em and toss ’em in the fire.”

“Can’t just pick ’em off.”

“Joe did that,” Jack said gravely.

Bass nodded. “And now he’s gonna die.”

“’Cause when he pulled them ticks off him, the heads rip off then and there, and them heads stay buried there in a man’s hide.”

“What of it—them heads?”

“That’s the wust of it, Scratch,” Hatcher declared. “Them heads is what got the poison in ’em.”

“So it’s that poison gonna kill Joe?”

“He can’t last more’n two, three days now.”

“We staying here?”

Jack nodded, staring off into the distance. “We’ll trap. And in the by and by let the man die in peace. Give him a decent folk’s buryin’.”

“Least we can do for a friend,” Scratch said.

“The least I’d do for any man what rode with me,” Hatcher replied as he started to rise. “C’mon. Sun’s down. Time we got back and done ourselves up some supper. First light comes early—and we got traps to set.”

Titus clambered down the boulders behind Jack, thinking on just how rare was this breed of man he had cast his lot with—these men with Hatcher, even Joe Little as he lay his final hours beside a fire tucked far back into the wilderness. Theirs was a special breed cut for a special place where few survived. Fire hardened on the anvil of blistering heat and soul-numbing cold. Beaten and pounded under relentless watchfulness, forged by adversity and quenched in that joy of truly relying on no man but their own kind. Theirs was truly a breed of its own.

As he settled at the fire near the blankets where Little trembled, Bass felt those first stirrings of a sense of belonging to something bigger than himself. It had taken him three seasons, but now he felt as if he was a part of the lives these men shared one with another. Among them, out here in this wilderness, there existed few rules if any—and what rules there were existed for the sake of the living. Those rules were learned, and practiced, solely for saving a man’s hair and hide.

And there was a code of honor too—one that dictated that a man’s friends do what was decent when it came time to bury him, to speak their last farewell and leave ’hat old friend behind. As simple as that code was, Bass realized he had already sworn to it before taking his leave of St. Louis. He had done what was right by Isaac Wash-bum—then come west to live out the life the old trapper would never live again for himself.

How temporal and truly fragile life had turned out to be, Bass brooded. No matter that these were a hardy breed of men, the toughest he had ever known—tougher than any plowman, tougher still than any riverboatman—the men of this breed lived for what time was granted them, then accepted death as surely as they had come to accept life on its own terms. Each man in his own way wanting no more out of life than was due him.

They were quiet around their fire that night as the nine ate, for the most part deep in their own thoughts as they chewed on half-raw pieces of a cow elk shot that morning. While the coffee brewed, they filled themselves on lean red meat and gulped down the boiled onions Gray had scrounged from the creekbanks.

For eating, a man used his knife only, no matter how big the cut of meat. Holding one end of a reddish piece of steak between his teeth, Bass pulled the other end, then sawed his skinning knife neatly through the outstretched portion, feeding himself chunk after mouth-filling chunk. Before he poured himself some coffee, Titus chopped up a well-done piece of elk into small pieces that Little just might swallow without the trouble of chewing. These he dropped into a second tin cup set before the dying trapper, next to his cup of water.

When he had plunged his knife blade into the hot coals and left it there to set a moment, Scratch poured a cup of steaming coffee, its aroma wild and heady. Not wanting the knife to become too hot, he pulled it from the fire, wiping it quickly across the thigh of his leggings, back and forth over the buckskin until its sheen had returned, cleansed of blood and gristle so he could nest it back in its scabbard.

He was struck with a sudden thought. “Where’s ronnyvoo to be this year?”

“That’s right—you wasn’t one to make it last summer,” Caleb Wood replied.

“Got hisself jumped by the Araps,” Simms reminded them.

“Then ye’ll have yerself a second go-round for Sweet Lake,” Hatcher announced.

Titus inquired, “Where you met up with the traders last summer?”

“The same,” Fish replied.

“Ah—ronnyvoo,” Mad Jack sighed as he leaned back on his saddle and blankets, one hand laid lovingly on his battered fiddle case. “Damn near what a man works for all year long, don’cha figger, Titus Bass?”

“I callate ronnyvoo is the prize what any of us gambles his hide for.”

“Likker and lovin’,” Caleb added. “By damn, for every man what comes to ronnyvoo, give ’im the wust of the likker and the best of the lovin’!”

Near moonrise Little began muttering and mumbling. As he lay shivering in his blankets, sweating from his rising fever, Joe rapidly slipped into a delirium. No longer did he experience any lucid moments, nor did he respond to the men who went to his side with water.

It was hard for any of them to turn away and sleep that night.

Sometime in that last hour before sunrise, the noisy muttering and thrashing quieted and Little finally fell silent. Taking his rotation at guard, Solomon Fish was the man up to hear when everything went quiet with Joe.

“Hatcher,” Fish whispered loudly, and he clambered to his feet. “C’mere!”

As the others slowly sat up in their blankets, watching in silence, Jack joined Solomon at Little’s side. Hatcher first held his hand just above Joe’s face. Then laid his ear over the man’s mouth. And finally Jack touched Little’s cheek, his forehead, then the front of Joe’s throat as he pulled back the blankets.

“He … he dead?” Caleb asked.

Instead of answering immediately, Hatcher laid his ear against Little’s chest and listened for what seemed like a good piece of eternity to Bass.

When he raised his head, Jack pulled the top blanket over Joe Little’s face. “Rufus, want you and Scratch start digging a hole.”

“He dead awready?” Simms asked.

“Fever took him quick,” Hatcher replied.

“Merciful heavens,” Wood whispered, grabbing that beaver-skin cap off his head. “Damn good thing it was quick.”

“No man deserves to die slow,” Graham muttered as he kicked off his blankets and stretched as he got to his feet. “C’mon, Scratch. We got us a burying hole for to dig.”

The two of them found a patch of ground at the distant edge of the tree line where they didn’t figure they would run across too many rocks as they worked their way down into the soil with the crude, stubby-handled shovels. As they were approaching four feet, Jack showed up. The sun was just easing off the ridge to the east.

“Deep enough,” Hatcher declared as he bent quickly to glance into the hole. Turning, he waved an arm in the air and brought the others—four of them carrying the body on a shoulder.

When Graham and Bass scrambled out of the hole, Hatcher ordered, “Put ’im in.”

Titus could see that they had lashed Joe inside one of the huge blankets wrapped round and round with hemp rope for a secure funeral shroud.

“Any of you know some proper burying words?” Caleb asked as Hatcher stared down at the body.

These men, that blanket-wrapped body, the quiet stillness about them as the birds ceased their songs and calls—and especially the utter senselessness of Joe Little’s death … it all brought a flood of memories back for Titus. Remembering Ebenezer Zane. Recalling how he had lived, and how the man died. How the pilot’s loyal crew of boatmen buried him off the side of their Kentucky flatboat, the shroud slowly slipping beneath the muddy surface of the Mississippi River.

“Any of ye have something to say to Joe, now be the time to speak yer piece,” Hatcher said quietly.

“He was a good man and a fair ’nough trapper,” Caleb said after he took a step right up to the edge of the long hole.

Moving up beside Wood, Elbridge Gray added, “The sort you could allays trust to watch your backside.”

“He weren’t the best in the world at nothing,” Simms said, “but he knew just how to be a man’s friend.”

“Not a better man to count on when things got tough,” Fish said self-consciously. The rest nodded.

Jack said, “Won’t none of us soon forget ye, Joe Little.” Then he turned to the rest of them. “Any ye niggers know any proper church words?”

For a few moments all of them stood there embarrassed and shuffle-footed in their moccasins and greasy buckskins, hands clasped in front of them, their eyes darting this way and that, or staring at the dark hole near their feet … none of them knowing what to say.

“Stupid for this here nigger to ask that,” Hatcher admitted after a long moment. “Should’ve knowed better’n to ’spect any of us ever been inside a church to recollect any Sunday-meeting words to say over one of our own.”

Then Caleb blurted, “Weren’t no good reason for him to go the way he did.”

Kinkead nodded his big head, saying, “Man figgers to be took in a Injun fight, maybeso a grizz—but to go under this a’way …”

“Dead is dead,” Scratch muttered just as suddenly. The words surprised him as much as they surprised the others, who turned to look at him. “Don’t matter how a man dies—that ain’t what counts nohow. What matters most is how Joe Little lived.”

Hatcher and a couple others grunted their approval. Jack studied Bass carefully there as he picked at an itchy scab on his cheek where a mosquito had landed at the edge of his beard. Then Jack said, “That’s the true of it, fellas. Joe ain’t here no more. He’s gone.”

“Ain’t here no more,” Wood repeated.

Jack continued. “Like Titus said, it don’t matter how he died. It were how Joe lived … how any of us lives what makes a good goddamn.”

“He were a free man,” Rowland said. “Lived free and didn’t cotton to working for no man.”

“I don’t know no better words’n that, Johnny,” Hatcher declared. “Joe Little was a free man. He gone where he wanted to go. He done what he wanted to do. And he damn well lived the way he wanted to live. That’s what matters most.” Jack looked at Bass.

With a nod Bass added, “A man don’t always get a chance to choose the way he dies, fellas … but a man sure as hell can choose the way he lives. I figger Joe had all he ever wanted to have, and lived the way he wanted to live.”

“Let’s us remember that,” Hatcher reminded them. “Not how the man died. Let’s remember the good days we had with our friend.”

Jack knelt quickly, scooping up a double handful of loose soil and shoving it into the hole, where it landed with a muffled splatter on the thick wool blanket. “S’long, Joe.”

Caleb knelt at the side of the grave and tossed in a single handful of dirt. “Keep your eye on the skyline.”

One by one they came to the edge of the hole and threw in some dirt to begin this burial of their friend, each man speaking his own farewell as if it might be no more than a parting among those at the end of rendezvous. Neither one knowing when next they would see one another.

Eventually all had spoken save for Bass.

“We vow to remember,” he said, repeating the grieving woman’s words more than seventeen winters old, words spoken while another canvas-wrapped shroud was slipped into the waters of the Mississippi. “Those of us left behind, we vow to remember the ones what been took from us.”

“Damn,” Jack muttered. He dragged his forearm beneath his nose and blinked rapidly. “Promised myself I wasn’t gonna do this.”

Titus began, “Ain’t no shame in having strong feelings for a friend—”

But he fell silent the instant Hatcher turned on his heel and stomped away.

“Goddamn—I knowed this was gonna happen,” Caleb explained, wagging his head.

The others didn’t even look up to watch Hatcher hurrying back to camp. Their eyes stole a glance at Titus, then went back to gazing down at the body in the hole.

“Wh-where’s he going?” Bass inquired.

“To get hisself away,” Simms said.

“Get away from what?”

“From you,” Wood answered.

“From me?”

Caleb explained, “From what you said.”

“I … I said something wrong?”

“No, not rightly wrong,” Wood confided. “I s’pose it was bound to happen. You see, Jack ain’t never took … he ain’t never got used to losing folks. We’uns—all of us—we know Jack ain’t never had him a friend what died that he wasn’t all broke up about it for a long time.”

“Ain’t nothing wrong with that,” Titus said, looking after the tall, thin man hurrying across the small meadow as the sun began to creep down the hillside toward them.

Simms declared, “Maybeso Titus here hadn’t oughtta gone and said nothing ’bout having feelings for a friend. Hatcher being so techy the way he is.”

“How ’bout me going to tell Jack I didn’t know,” Bass suggested, sensing remorse that he had offended a friend and hurt feelings. “Tell him I’m sorry for—”

They all heard the pony snort. And the forest around them go silent in the space of a heartbeat. Then came the snap of a branch somewhere behind them in the timber. Turning as one without a word, the trappers bolted off in the opposite direction as if a bolt of lightning had struck beneath their feet.

In that instant they were racing back for camp on instinct—not yet aware just what danger was riding down on them with the hammer of all those hooves.

A danger wearing death’s own hideous, earth-paint masks.

*Absaroka Range