Crack in the Sky

4

By the time Jack Hatcher’s bunch began to straggle back to their bowers and bedrolls across the creek from the grove where the company men had raised their camp, a strip of sky along the eastern horizon had begun to relinquish its lampblack, noticeably graying. Dawn was not far behind.

As he stumbled along, Scratch’s head throbbed, tender as a red welt. Barely able to prop his eyes open any more than snaky slits, his toes groped their way through the grass and brush. Scattered among the outfit’s packs and belongings, he finally located his blankets and lone buffalo robe. Sinking to the ground, Bass rolled onto his side and dragged the old Shoshone rawhide-bound saddle toward him to prop beneath his head. As he lay back upon it, the saddle’s wooden frame momentarily creaked beneath the weight of his shoulders, then suddenly split apart and collapsed—smacking his head against the hard ground and the saddle’s sideboards.

“What in hell are you about over there?” John Rowland demanded as he sat up, a disheveled sight to behold. He had come back to his blankets some time before the others.

Groaning as he gently rubbed the side of his skull with two fingertips, Bass slowly sat up. Struggling to catch his breath against the hammer pounding inside his brain, he carefully adjusted the greasy, sweat-salted blue bandanna he tied over the top of his head not only to keep his long hair out of his eyes but to protect that bare patch of exposed cranium where he had lost his hair to an Arapaho horse thief.

“Shit,” Caleb Wood grumbled as he stretched himself out once more, “Scratch cain’t even lay down quietlike.”

Bass held up the chewed wooden frame pieces. “My goddamned saddle come apart on me!”

“Come apart?” Hatcher repeated in disbelief as he rolled onto his knees and crabbed over to Bass’s blanket.

“Look at it!” Titus shrieked in horror as he ran fingers over the ruin of his old saddle.

“I’ll be go to hell, boys!” Jack cried. “Come see for yer own selves!”

“See what?” Kinkead asked as he loomed over them.

“Right there,” Hatcher instructed. “See where the damned critters been eatin’ at it.”

“C-critters?” Titus squawled. “What critters?”

Hatcher’s eyes narrowed, looking over their encampment. “Go see to yer outfits, boys. Likely Scratch ain’t the only one chewed up.”

“Critters?” Bass repeated.

Hatcher watched the others scurry off to their own belongings before he turned back to Titus. “Wolves, more’n likely.”

“Wolves done this?” he asked, letting the ruined saddle spill from his hands.

“That ain’t the least of it, I’d wager,” Jack replied, nodding at the rest of Bass’s gear.

“Damn,” Scratch groaned as he turned to follow Hatcher’s eyes, discovering the mauled tatters of his buffalo-rawhide lariat, the scattered remnants of bridle, hackamore, and cinch, and even the remains of a leather-bound gourd canteen, all of it chewed into hardly recognizable shreds.

“More’n one of ’em done this, Jack!” Isaac Simms called out.

“Likely so,” Hatcher echoed. “They come in here in a pack.”

Titus shook his head as he stared at the firelit debris. “Wolves dare come this close to a man?”

“Hell,” Caleb growled, “likely was a pack don’t know enough to fear a two-legged man yet, Scratch.”

“Cale’s right,” Simms added. “Most wolf packs ain’t had enough run-ins with men to be scar’t off from us.”

“Chances be this pack hasn’t run across any big guns neither,” Hatcher explained.

“So them damned dogs just come waltzin’ in here?” Bass whined. “While’st we was off for supper?”

Rowland roared with laughter, slapping a knee. “And the critters had ’em their supper on your outfit!”

“Lookit all they chewed, Jack,” Simms clucked, wagging his head sympathetically.

“Bass ain’t got him near nothing left what don’t need some fixin’,” Rufus Graham declared.

“In a bad way too,” Titus grumped as he sat there in the midst of what debris remained of his leather tack and gear.

Hatcher knelt beside him. “Where’s yer pouch?”

“Jehoshaphat!” Bass swore as he whirled in a crouch, lunging for the tight roll of his extra blanket where he had secured his rifle and shooting bag before they had strolled over to the supper fires—for no other reason than to guard them from a quick-moving thunderstorm while they were gone from their camp. Yanking at the edges of the blanket, he rolled the weapon free, quickly inspecting the strap and bag, the narrow thongs securing the two powder horns to the strap, finding no damage.

“Ye’re a lucky man,” Hatcher intoned.

“Ain’t that the solemn truth,” Kinkead whimpered. “Look how they got to mine.” He held up what little remained of his bag, spare balls and a ball screw, his bullet mold spilling from the huge, ragged hole gaping in what Matthew had left of his chewed pouch.

“My only pair of spare mocs are gone,” Simms groaned as he picked through his few belongings.

Graham held up his old smoothbore, showing the others those vivid teeth marks deeply scored up and down the shrunken, translucent rawhide wrap where in a time past he had repaired the cracked, weakened wood along the wrist of the stock. “They even tried eatin’ on this here. Just ’cause it’s leather.”

“Shit,” Bass said as he gazed round at the wolf pack’s destruction the others held up for view. “Maybeso this means we ought’n have a man stay in camp all the time, Jack.”

“Hell,” the outfit’s leader snorted, “come ronnyvoo, I don’t know a single man jack of these here yahoos be willing to stay ahin’t while the rest of us go traipsin’ off to have us whiskey, women, and song!”

“Not me!” Wood bellowed. “You ain’t leavin’ me behin’t!”

“Not me neither!” Rowland said. “You each watch over your own outfits!”

Hatcher turned back to Bass. “See. Any other time of the year, a man be willing to stay back to camp for the rest. Be it trapping time, fall or spring—a man don’t mind taking his turn hanging back at a trappin’ camp.”

“Maybeso we ought’n go cross the creek there,” Titus said, pointing. “Go yonder there with them company boys and put our camp with them. That way we ain’t gotta worry ’bout—”

“We don’t have to move camp,” Hatcher interrupted.

Bass couldn’t believe what he had heard. Did these lean and experienced trappers mean to tell him they were willing to take the chances of wild creatures slipping into their abandoned camp, to chew on anything and everything made of leather again in the future?

“S-so you’re telling me we sit and wait for these here wolves to come back and ruin some more?”

As straight-faced as he could say it, Jack stepped up to Scratch and declared, “No … we pee.”

Titus wasn’t sure he’d heard Hatcher clearly. “Did you say … p-pee?”

“Pee. Piss. Spray. Same thing, Scratch.”

“P-pee?” Bass noticed most of the others smiling, some with hands over their mouths, trying to suppress their guffaws.

“Eegod!” Jack roared. “So I gotta show ye how to pee now?”

Hatcher whirled on his heel and stepped away, raising the tail of his long cotton shirt and tugging aside the blanket breechclout as he went purposefully to the bushes at the north end of their camp. Titus stood rooted to the spot, unsure just what he was to do.

“G’won,” Caleb instructed, flinging a hand in Jack’s direction. “Rest of us be right behin’t you.”

Suspicious that he was having his leg pulled but good, Scratch reluctantly followed in Hatcher’s steps, stopping nearby as the outfit’s leader pulled out his penis and began to spray the base of the thick brush with urine as he sidestepped to his left, still spraying a thin stream in the cool dawn air.

“What the hell you peein’ for?”

Hatcher inched away from Bass, doing his best to control the amount of urine he sprayed on the brush, slowly sidling in a wide arc at the far edge of their encampment. “Keeps the wolves away.”

Bass laughed with how ridiculous that sounded. But the moment he began, he noticed that no one else was laughing with him. “How a li’l bit of your piss gonna keep wolves away?”

“Wolf and other dog critters piss here and there to lay out their own ground,” Jack explained as he moved off a bit farther. “They tell others of their own kind what belongs to them, and what don’t.”

“That means when we spray round our camp,” Simms declared, “chances are the wolves won’t come in to bother our gear and truck.”

Wagging his head, Bass said, “But Hatcher ain’t got him enough pee to wet clear round this here camp.”

Jack stood shaking his penis, empty. “Maybe not—but, Caleb, come on up aside me and mark our camp from here.”

Wood stepped up, pulling at the antler buttons on the front of his leather britches to begin peeing right where Hatcher had left off. As Titus watched in amazement, the others began roaring with laughter, hopping drunkenly toward the bushes, where they each took their turn at this duty, circumscribing their camp with the smell of urine, marking off their territory, staking it out as if to declare to the wolves that this was a boundary not to be crossed.

“Ain’t no little bit of your piss gonna make no never mind to no wolf pack,” Scratch snorted cynically as he watched the other eight having themselves far too much fun for him to take this seriously.

“Ye can go piss yer likker away anywhere ye want, Scratch,” Hatcher stated. “Or ye can piss where it just might do all of us some good.”

“Awright—you had your fun with me,” Bass replied lamely. “I’m certain you boys just laughing inside on my count.”

“I’m dead to rights serious,” Jack argued.

“This is one critter to another,” Caleb declared.

“Wolf’ll stay away,” Solomon agreed. “I seen it my own self.”

Kinkead held up the ragged remains of his shooting pouch. “Wish’t we’d done it afore we went off to supper. Where ’m I gonna get me ’Nother bag now?”

“If’n there ain’t one to trade off these company fellers,” Rowland said, “we make you a new one, Matthew.”

Hatcher turned to Bass as the edge of the sun broke over the nearby hills, spreading day’s light into the valley. “Ye gonna pee … or ye gonna stand there gawkin’ at me like a idjit?”

With a gust of easy laughter, Scratch stepped away toward the far bushes, pulling aside his breechclout as he said, “I’ll take my turn at it, Jack Hatcher. Then I’m sleeping out the day.”

A damned good idea that had been: to sleep out the day there in the shade of their grove after last night’s drinking and raucous carousing at the brigade fire.

But near midday another of the company’s brigades hoved into sight along the eastern hills, the noise and excitement electrifying the valley. Among them rode the merry Daniel Potts.

“It’s been two year since last I saw you,” Bass cried with joy as Potts unhorsed himself among the early arrivals.

“That really you, Titus Bass?”

“Damn if it ain’t, Daniel.”

“Thort you might’n gone under, friend.”

“Came close,” Scratch replied, tapping a finger against the taut blue cloth tied over his head. “’Rapahos raised some hair an’ left me for dead.”

“But you’re standing here flapping your ugly mug just to show me you pulled through!”

“Damn right I pulled through, Daniel!” Scratch bellowed. “I been working on me a thirst for two year now … but we come riding in here to hear the traders’s already been out here and gone!”

“We’uns got our supplies back to early spring our own selves,” Potts explained, his merry eyes twinkling. “’Stead of you doing without come time for the fall hunt, I’ll see what I can spare you.”

“No, I don’t want you to go short of nothing—”

Daniel interrupted, “I won’t, Scratch. But likewise I won’t see no friend of mine go short neither. Not when I can help it.”

Craning his neck here and there, Bass glanced over the rest of the new arrivals. “Where’s that dandy goes by the name of Jim Beckwith was with you two year ago?”

“He ain’t with us—”

“Beckwith go under?” Titus asked gravely.

“Nawww,” Potts replied. “He’s riding with ’Nother brigade this spring. Are you here with them three what looked down their noses at Negra Jim?”

Wagging his head, Bass explained, “Them three … they went under.”

“How?”

“Rubbed out somewhere’s on the Yallerstone.”

“Potts’s face went sad as he said dolefully, “Likely Siouxs they were, Scratch. Maybeso Ree got ’em.”

“Let’s pull your truck off your horse and get it over to the shade, Daniel Potts!” Titus suggested, wanting nothing more than to shake off the gray cloud brought him by that remembrance of those three. “You’re the child what’s got two year of stories to catch me up on!”

Late that afternoon the growing encampment of white trappers witnessed the arrival of a large band of Flathead who announced that a sizable party of Americans would likely be reaching them sometime the following morning, as they were traveling not all that far behind the migrating village. By sunset the southwestern sky was dippled with the concentric swirls of rope-bound lodgepoles over which the women had stretched their smoked buffalo hides. Bright fires glowed at twilight outside each lodge as supper was prepared, a time when the young men were the first to venture into the trapper camp.

“They’re a pretty people, don’cha think?” Potts asked as he settled in beside Bass at a large fire.

“Handsome warriors they make, that they do.”

Invited to sit around the fires, the Flathead men joined the Americans for supper, then for many cups of hot coffee and much smoking of the pipes that made the circles time and again. And finally the old men showed up out of the darkness, two of them dragging a large drum between them. Setting it down within the firelight’s glow, the two squatted, quickly joined by others who likewise sat cross-legged and removed sturdy drumsticks from their belts.

One coarsely wrinkled man began to sing at the first thump of the huge drum, the others joining in as the songs and the celebration and the night went on.

It was near dawn that second morning when Bass and some of the others dragged back to their camp across the creek. He stumbled forward to his knees on the bedding, more weary than he could remember being in a long, long time. Then he collapsed onto the blankets and let out a long sigh.

“Wolves come back an’ chew up anything else of yer’n, Titus Bass?” Hatcher called out as his head sank back against his saddle.

“Not that I see, Jack.”

Hatcher chuckled. “Damn right they didn’t.”

Then Caleb said, “And they won’t neither—not with us peein’ a line round our camp the way we done.”

“That what kept the wolves away from our plunder, eh?” Scratch asked.

“One of these days, maybeso ye’ll believe,” Jack advised as he rolled onto a shoulder and let out a contented sigh.

“Right now all I wanna believe in is sleep,” Bass replied. “I got cut out of my sleep yesterday and again last night—so I’m aiming to sleep right on through to sundown today.”

From across their small camp Kinkead asked, “What ’bout the wolves slipping in to chew on your possibles while you’re napping, Scratch?”

“To hell with wolves. Long as the sonsabitches don’t gnaw on me, I’m sleeping right on through ever’thing.”

But undisturbed they were not to remain.

“Blackfoot to the north!”

It was near midmorning on that third day when the distant voice bellowing the terrible news split into Bass’s hazy dreaming there in a patch of shade where the breeze rustled the brush overhead.

“Blackfoot got some of our boys pinned down!”

His mind still numbed with half-baked, interrupted sleep, Bass rolled off his hip and onto his knees, blinking against the glare of bright summer light, trying to focus on the middistance where two horsemen were approaching out of the north, their lathered animals racing along the eastern side of the lake as they bellowed their warning.

Reluctantly, he joined the rest as they quickly splashed across the stream to stand with the company men as the two riders reined up in a shower of dust and grass clods. Both of them had stripped to the waist in the heat, tying black silk bandannas around their heads.

Some man on foot called out, “Damn if we didn’t take you for Injuns at first!”

One of the riders gulped, saying, “We throwed off our clothes to look the Injun when we rode through the Blackfoots what got us surrounded.”

“Who you fellers with?” Porter demanded as he lunged up to seize hold on one of the reins.

Brody answered for the dry-mouthed riders, “He’s with Campbell!”

Someone hollered, “Bob Campbell’s bunch?”

Brody explained to the anxious group, “Campbell’s brigade was up to Flathead country last winter.” Then he squinted into the bright light, staring right up at the breathless rider. “You boys taken any dead or wounded?”

Wagging his head, the second rider answered, “Don’t rightly know. There was some thirty of us to start with, I s’pose. Campbell sent us riding soon as we was jumped.”

“You sartin they’re really Blackfoot?” a man cried out.

“Nary a man in this company don’t know him Blackfoot from Digger!” someone shouted angrily. “Bob Campbell says they’re Blackfoot, then they’re Blackfoot, by God!”

“Where?”

The first rider pointed north. “Fifteen mile, maybe.”

“That’s a long ride,” Porter replied. “A hard one at full-out too.”

Brody nodded. “Best we get started, boys! Let’s leave back a dozen or so to stay with camp and the extra animals.”

“Bring in them horses and mules what we ain’t riding!” Porter ordered.

Brody turned, his eyes scanning the crowd until he found Mad Jack. “Hatcher! Your bunch planning on throwing in for this fight?”

“Don’t see why not,” Jack responded. “We ain’t the kind to let Blackfoot have their way with no American. To hell with Bug’s Boys!”

An instant and spontaneous roar erupted from the seventy-some trappers knotted around those two weary riders and played-out horses.

Bass pushed through the throng to reach the knee of one of the horsemen, saying, “Get yourself down and watered. We’ll bring you up a fresh horse afore we’re ready to ride out.”

“You comin’ with us, Titus Bass?”

Turning, Scratch found Daniel Potts headed his way, followed by a handful of familiar faces. “You boys riding out to the fight?”

“No booshway gonna order me to stay back to camp and nursemaid no cavvyyard when there’s Blackfeets to fight! Damn right I’m going!”

Bass cheered, “I’ll ride with you.”

“Be quick about it,” Daniel ordered. “I don’t want the others to have the jump on us!”

Splashing his way across the creek and sprinting into the meadow, Bass hurriedly freed the long halter rope from the iron picket pin he had driven into the ground near their camp, leaped atop the pony’s bare back, and loped it back to his blanket shelter at an urgent trot. After dropping his shooting pouch and horns over his right shoulder, then gathering up his pistol and the fullstock Derringer rifle, Scratch vaulted onto the warm, bare backbone of his saddle horse. This time he would ride far and hard without that secondhand Shoshone snare saddle. Without stirrups, he kicked his heels into the pony’s ribs.

“Hep! Hep-hawww!”

By the time the first of the trappers were streaming north along the eastern shore of Sweet Lake, Flathead warriors were mounting up at the edge of their village. Women and children darted here and there, bringing their men shields and bows and quivers filled with war arrows. Everywhere dogs were underfoot, barking and howling, somehow aware of the importance of this moment as the Flathead men quickly completed their personal medicine, got themselves painted and dressed for battle, then sprinted off to fight their ancient enemies.

What a sight that determined cavalcade made that summer morning! Beneath a brilliant sun the colors seemed all the brighter in the flash of wind-borne feathers and scalp locks and earth paint, the showy glint of old smoothbore muskets and shiny brass tomahawks and fur-wrapped stone war clubs waved high beside those long coup-sticks held aloft in the mad gallop just as any army would carry its hard-won banners before them as it rode against its foe.

Mile after mile Scratch raced at the head of a growing vee of horsemen as more trappers burst out of camp, mingling with the mounted Flathead warriors, the widening parade streaming behind Bass and Potts leading the rest at the arrow’s tip. Here and there the land rose gently, then fell again until they reached the bottom of a draw, where they had to leap their horses over each narrow creek feeding the long, narrow lake from the hills beyond. After urging all they could out of their horses for more than the hour it took them to cover the fifteen miles, those at the head of the cavalcade heard the first of the gunshots in the distance.

And moments later the rescuers galloping in heard the first war cries of the Blackfoot raiders.

As they reached the top of a gentle rise, the low plain spread out before them: less than a mile away the scene was easy to read. The Blackfoot already had possession of most of the trappers’ horses and mules, having driven them to the northwest, off toward the shore of the lake where the herd was protected by a handful of their warriors. On their broad backs were still lashed the fat packs of beaver—the fruits of two long, lonely seasons of back-breaking labor by Robert Campbell’s brigade.

The rest of the attackers clearly had the white men surrounded in a small cluster of rocks. It was hard for Bass to tell just how many men were hunkered down within that tightening ring he could see was drawing closer and closer.

Suddenly a lone warrior stood up in the grass, waving his arms wildly, pointing at the middistance. He had spotted the first few rescuers: more white men joined by Flathead horsemen.

One by one more than a hundred warriors quickly bristled from the brush and grass, beginning to sprint in an effort to meet boldly the new assault showing itself on that hilltop Bass had just abandoned as he and the first riders raced down the slope toward the raiders, toward that small ring of boulders and stunted brush where Bob Campbell’s men fought for their hides.

“Ride right through ’em?” Potts hollered at Titus.

With tears streaming from his eyes as the dry wind whipped them both in the face, Scratch glanced behind him at the dozen or so others, then nodded. “Don’t you dare pull back on that rein as we shoot through, Daniel!”

“Whooeee!”

“Heya!” Bass hollered himself at the sudden new surge of adrenaline warming his veins, kicking the tired horse in the ribs, leaning forward as they bounded over the tall grass, heading straight for the enemy, who began to clot together to form a phalanx on foot that was inching its way toward these new targets.

Scratch felt his empty stomach knot as more and more of the warriors joined the numbers already headed their way. His head pounded with more than the lack of sleep, more than a hangover from the potent grain alcohol, more than the hammering of the last hour’s race to lift this siege.

As he neared that wall of Blackfoot, Bass spotted the dark carcasses beyond the warriors in the tall grass—the bodies of dead horses lying here and there around those rocks where the trappers had just spotted the approach of their rescuers. Closer and closer he and Potts sprinted for the Blackfoot line … close enough now to hear their shrill war cries, close enough to hear the whooping of the trappers whose mouths O’ed in celebration as the first of them stood within their rocks, waving rifles and broad-brimmed hats.

Less than eighty yards remained between Bass and the Blackfoot.

A ball whined past, splitting the air between him and Potts. Then a flying covey of arrows arched out of the grass, bursting from half a hundred bows, speeding across the stainless blue of the summer sky, quickly reaching their zenith before they began to fall.

Fifty yards from the enemy.

The bowmen were many, but the horsemen were quicker. They were already ahead of those first arrows, which hissed into the grass at their heels.

No more than twenty yards remained as Bass leaned forward, pressing himself against the pony’s withers, laying his sunburned cheek along the damp, lathered neck, his toes digging into the animal’s ribs.

Ten yards … a matter of two swift strides.

And Bass was there before them—close enough to see paint and color and dark eyes beneath the greased hair tied up in a provocative challenge to raise a scalp lock.

Swinging clubs and bows and an old fusee, more than eight surged toward him as he burst into their midst. The frightened pony sidestepped, then lunged forward again as the warriors swung and leaped and cried out to frighten the animal, to scare their enemy. First one bow, then a stone club, smacked his legs, raked along the horse’s ribs, grazed along its bobbing neck as he shot past.

Suddenly Scratch became aware that he had plunged into the most dangerous moments of their dash through the enemy’s lines.

He twisted to look over his shoulder, beyond the pony’s flying tail. More than half of the Blackfoot had turned, stringing arrows to shoot at him and Potts and those first few Flathead warriors, to shoot them in the back at the moment they streamed through the enemy phalanx.

“Watch your backside!” Bass screamed, the words ripped from his mouth as the riders closed on the rocky fortress.

“Damned buggers!” Potts growled. “Gonna shoot us in the ass!”

Behind them streamed more than sixty mounted trappers, both free and company men. At least that many Flathead horsemen were mixed in among them as they galloped toward the Blackfoot, who were quickly realizing that the odds were beginning to tip from their favor. In the rocks ahead, black forms became men, and faces took shape beneath the shadow of hats. Sounds became words: cries of joy and shouts of challenge flung back now at the enemy.

As a handful of arrows clattered around them, Bass and Potts crossed the last few yards as three of the besieged trappers emerged from the rocks, hollering, reaching for the horses, eager to drag the horsemen to the ground and back to the safety of their tiny fortress.

“Potts!” a tall, full-faced man bellowed as he dashed up. His left cheek was bleeding, having been grazed by the stone tip of a war arrow. “Is that really you, Potts?”

“Campbell?”

“Aye—it’s me, lad!” the brigade leader shouted, jumping forward to seize Potts in both arms and pound him soundly about the shoulders.

“Good to see you standing, Booshway!”

“They’d had us all eventually,” Campbell said gravely as he stepped back toward the rocks. “Had all of you not shown up.”

Bass agreed as he stepped up. “If ronnyvoo wasn’t close—you’d all gone under.”

Then Scratch knelt suddenly, peering about him at that scene within the crude oval of rocks. More than a handful of half-breed children, at least that many Indian women, all huddled next to some of the white trappers as they helped their men reload weapons, these stoic mothers preparing to sell their lives dearly come a final assault on that narrow compound. Bass’s eyes stopped here and there, looking over the bodies sprawled on the ground within the fortress. Three of the dead had a blanket, a hat, or their own leather shirt pulled over their faces. At least three more were having their wounds attended to by comrades who washed off blood with water dipped from the trickle of a spring that issued within the rocks. A few others firmly held bloody compresses against their bright, bleeding injuries.

“W-would I know …” Then Daniel took a deep breath before gesturing at the dead and continued quietly, “Do I know any of these?”

With a doleful cloud passing over his face, Campbell replied, “You know every one of them, Potts.”

Immediately sinking to his knees, Daniel dragged back the edge of a greasy blanket, stared a moment at the familiar face, then gently replaced the blanket. His shoulders quaking in grief and rage, he suddenly tore at the bloody grass with both hands as a guttural cry burst from his throat.

“Damn these thievin’ bastards!” he roared.

Bass stepped up to stand beside the man, placing a hand on his trembling shoulder.

“Fools they were!” Daniel’s voice cracked. “Just like me, Scratch! Fools just like me for coming out here where there ain’t no God to watch over a man!”

“Damn right, Potts,” one of the wounded said in a small voice grown weak from loss of blood. He had a bandage wrapped around his head, the bloody cloth covering one eye and all but concealing half his face.

“That … that you, Scott?”

Hiram Scott nodded. “God don’t dare come out this side of the Missouri, Potts.”

Daniel looked up, eyes imploring as his clenched fists slowly opened, allowing the broken blades of bloody grass to spill from them. “I ain’t staying here no more, Cap’n Campbell.”

The brigade leader protested, “We get these Blackfoot run off, we’re moving on to rendezvous—”

“I don’t mean staying to ronnyvoo, dammit!” Potts spat to interrupt. “I ain’t staying out here in this country!”

Campbell started, “It’s natural for a man to be bitter—”

“God don’t look down from heaven on this country!” Potts shrieked. “Not for no white man, He don’t!”

On the ground the wounded Scott agreed, “Not a man gonna convince me God’s looking down on this land … this place fit only for the devil’s kind!”

Raising his face toward the sky, Potts roared in grief, “Man crosses the Missouri an’ leaves the settlements behind—there ain’t no angels watching his back then, and there ain’t no God to drive off Satan’s whelps clear away out here!”

“Look here around you, boys—there, there … and there. Look and you’ll see the proof of it.” Scott winced in pain as he straightened, then continued, “No God in this sky out here! No God a’tall!”

Bass watched the tears stream down the wounded trapper’s bloody face as he went to sobbing, quietly.

Why some were spared, and others heard their number called—Bass figured he would never know. Likely this was something only someone like his mother could answer, if not one of those circuit-riding preachers. No reason and no rhyme could he put to it … yet one thing was for certain: out here he had discovered that the choices were simpler and more sharply drawn than at any time in his life. And out here in this unforgiving wilderness, the consequences became all the more sudden and stark for those who chose to chance fate beneath this seamless dome of endless sky.

“Lookit ’em!” a man shouted nearby. “Bug’s Boys turning tail!”

In the middistance gunfire rattled as the onrushing horsemen fired their rifles at the retreating Blackfoot raiders, white man and Flathead alike, all whooping the moment they shot past the rocky fortress to the cheers of Campbell’s survivors.

“I see you brought us reinforcements, Titus Bass!”

Bass turned at the distantly familiar drawl to the voice, finding the tall, handsome mulatto stepping up through the tall grass, gunpowder smudged across his mud-colored face, that black shoulder-length hair tightly braided and wrapped in trade ribbon.

Titus asked, “Beckwith?”

“None other!” and he held out his hand. “Thought you was dead when we didn’t see you last summer.”

“Some tried!” Bass roared as he pumped the arm of that Virginia-born son of a white planter and a Negress that planter eventually married before moving his family to frontier Missouri. “Where you been in this fight, Jim? Laying low?”

“Right out there in the grass,” Beckwith explained, and pointed. “Didn’t like the feel of these here rocks. Never felt easy about being closed up in a fight. Always figure to have me a way out.”

“Look at ’em!” Campbell declared loudly as he waved both arms at the passing horsemen. “Look at all those lovely white faces.”

Scratch reminded, “Flathead too!”

“See how them devil’s sons scamper!” cried another man, pointing at the retreating warriors.

At that moment the enemy had begun their wholesale retreat from the fight, able to see they were soon to be on the losing side. Easy to realize that now was the time to get away with their stolen plunder and captured horses while they could.

“Sonsabitches got their hands on more than five thousand dollars in beaver!” Campbell fumed as he angrily dragged some fingers across the oozing cheek wound.

A clerk stepped up and added, “And two mules with some of our trade goods too, Cap’n!”

Robert Campbell whirled on him, glowering. “How many horses, they get?”

“They’re running off with more’n forty head.”

“Damn their black hearts!” Campbell cursed.

Then, as if to rally his own flagging spirits, the brigade leader quickly tore the shapeless hat from his head and waved it aloft at the last of the rescuers racing their way, those horsemen shooting past the little fortress like a spring torrent. Campbell joined the rest in clambering atop the low rocks to wave and whoop and whistle as the last of the Blackfoot hurriedly mounted and started to tear away with their booty, driving the brigade’s horses and mules before them.

“When’d they hit you?” asked one of the horsemen who had circled back, bringing his horse to a halt just outside the rocks.

“Not long after we put to the trail this morning,” Campbell explained. “All told, must’ve been more than two hundred of ’em dogging our backtrail for the last day or so.”

“Likely picked up your scent day before yestiddy.”

“Nearby, Hiram Scott added, “We made a run for it to get this far.”

“Lucky these rocks were here when we needed ’em,” Campbell added. “I spotted these willows and made for ’em. Then we found the spring. At least we’d have water. So I prepared the men for a long siege of it.”

The rider glanced over the dead and wounded. “You kill any of ’em your own selves?”

“Maybe a half dozen,” Campbell declared. “Knocked a bunch out of the saddle, but the others come in and rode off with every bastard we knocked off a pony.”

Titus turned back to say, “Wouldn’t have mattered to have you water in here, Booshway. Looks to be they was whittling your side down a mite fast.”

After a long sigh Campbell blinked his eyes as if they smarted and said, “When I sent the riders out, we were running low on powder and ball. Truth be, we were all preparing for the worst. If these Blackfoot had jumped us any farther from your camp—we’d been finished but good.”

“Not a chance you’d hung on again’ that many,” the rider said as he wheeled his horse about, giving it the heels to speed away after the rest of those chasing the retreating raiders.

Beckwith stepped up to Campbell. “There’s another one of our dead out in the grass. I made sure none of them Blackfeet got close enough to scalp him.”

“I know,” the brigade leader replied. “It’s Boldeau—a damned good cook he was too.” He nodded toward one of the women. “His Flathead wife made it in on the run, but Louis was just too old, just too slow. I watched him drop—praying he was playing rabbit.”

“His woman’s gotta grieve proper, in the way of her own people,” Bass said, turning to Beckwith. “Why’n’t you take her to the man’s body, Jim.”

With a nod the mulatto stepped over to the Flathead woman and made sign for her to follow him. Bass watched them scramble over the rocks and hurry out through the tall grass.

“Let’s get what horses we have left and see how best to get our wounded and dead into camp,” Campbell ordered, directing some of the men to bring up the few horses they still possessed. He turned to Bass. “How far to camp?”

At the moment Titus opened his mouth to speak, the Flathead woman raised a mournful wail from the prairie. With the hair prickling on the back of his neck, Scratch turned to see her crumple down to her knees, bending over the body of Louis Boldeau. There she rocked back and forth as Beckwith stood nearby, his hat held in both hands. For the life of him, Bass didn’t know what was a more pitiful sight: Potts mourning over the body of an old friend, or the squaw keening over the body of her man.

“Not far, Booshway,” Bass finally answered, tearing his eyes from the woman yanking her knife from its scabbard, dragging it across the first clump of hair she held out in the other hand as she hacked it from her head. This she held up toward the sky, slowly opening her left hand to let that hair spill into the wind. “You ain’t far from camp now.”

Then, as the other survivors began to pick their way out of the rocks, Scratch turned his face to gaze at the sky so immense overhead, wondering—wondering just how far a man was from God out here now.

“Mind my word, boys: I ain’t gonna pay these scalpin’ prices to no man, no booshway, no goddamned company!”

Scratch stepped up to the outer fringe of that gathering of free trappers who were loosely circled around a bareheaded older man intently haranguing the swelling crowd beneath a hot summer sun that late morning four days after their scrap with the Blackfeet.

“Damn the mountain prices!” someone called from the crowd.

“But that’s just what they are!” Jack Hatcher bellowed as Bass stopped at his elbow. “These here are mountain prices, Glass—and a free man pays or a free man don’t dance!”

“You … you say his name is Glass?” Scratch asked in a whisper.

From the side of his mouth, Hatcher said with an admiring grin, “Yep. Glass be that ol’ wolf-bait’s name.

“Turning and taking a step closer to Mad Jack, Glass-grumbled, “I’ll wager you’re the kind what riggers it’s fair for the traders to charge us twice or three times what things is wuth just for ’em bringing the goods all the way out here to us, eh?”

“Every man’s entitled to have hisself paid for his labor,” Jack argued. “Even a damned double-backed, gobble-necked trader!”

Glass wagged his head, sputtering, “B-but, you’re a free man!”

Bass whispered, pursuing his question, “That really Hugh Glass?”

“And I’ll die a free man! A free man what don’t pay no tariff to no company, and no tariff to you neither!” he hollered back at Glass. Then Hatcher quickly turned his head to look Titus square in the face. “Ye heard tell of that ol’ coon?”

“I do,” Scratch replied in a hush. “First heard of him clear back to St. Louie. Friend of mine told me ’bout that ol’ feller dragging hisself back to the Missouri after a sow grizzly chewed him up an’ he was left for dead by the bunch he was traveling with.”

Hatcher grinned. “That’s the man awright. One and the same. Have him show ye his scars after he steps down from preachin’ hellfire to this short pew of sinners.”

“What’s the rub he’s greasin’?” Scratch asked.

“Like Glass is saying: all these here men ought’n take a stand against being dangled at the mercy of the traders. Him and a few others trailed in here with him yesterday and called all the free men together out of the camps to grouse about the tall prices we’re faced with payin’ to Smith, Jackson, and Sublette.”

“For the life of me, sounded there like you was coming down on the other side of this fight,” Scratch replied.

“Nawww,” Jack explained with a widening grin. “Hell, Glass does have him a good point. An’ he’s right on most every count. I’m just the nigger what likes to argufy with that ol’ buzzard ever’ now and then ’cause it gets him so riled—’bout as steamed as a unwatched tea kettle over the fire.”

“So what’s Glass figger we can do about what toll the traders charge us for their goods?”

“And for what they give us for our plews,” Hatcher added. “Don’t forget they got us two ways of Sunday!”

“Like I told you—them three friends of mine got rubbed out with my furs last summer, they figgered to float downriver to the first post they come onto and trade there, ’stead of packing our plew into ronnyvoo, where a trader can skelp us both top and bottom.”

As the heated discussion continued among the gathering, Jack wagged his head. “Ye saying we should pack our furs all the way to a fort, Scratch? Ye know how far the closest post is nowdays?”

“Why—we ride in all the way to ronnyvoo,” Bass explained. “Ain’t nothing more to ride our plew all the way to a fort.”

“Damn—closest fort’s clear over to the Missouri—taking a man right through Sioux and Ree country, Scratch!”

Glass shushed the crowd and stepped toward Titus and Jack. “Did I just hear you fellers talkin’ ’bout taking your furs to a fort clear over on the Missouri?”

“As crazy a notion as I’ve ever heard!” Hatcher snorted with a wry grin.

“Then again, maybe not,” Glass declared, turning his eyes to gaze at Scratch. “Way you’re talking, friend—must be you heard of the new post they’re building at the mouth of the Yallerstone.”

With a shake of his head Titus answered, “No—I ain’t heard no such a thing.”

“That’s old news, Glass!” cried someone in the crowd.

Another man called out, “No man’s had the balls to open Henry’s old post in many a year!”

Whirling on the naysayers, Glass roared, “You dumb, Digger-brained idjits! I ain’t talkin’ ’bout Henry’s old post!”

“What fort at the mouth of the Yallerstone ye speakin’ of?” Jack demanded, glaring at the old trapper.

“Mackenzie’s post.”

Amid the sudden noisy murmurs in the crowd, Hatcher asked, “The same Mackenzie been on the upper river for some time?”

“That’s the nigger,” Glass declared. “The one what runs the Upper Missouri Outfit for American Fur now.”

His head bobbing, Caleb Wood shouted, “That’s a man knows what he’s doing!”

Titus asked, “Where you hear all this news, Glass?”

Glass turned back to Scratch. “From Mackenzie’s own tongue hisself.”

The mumblings and murmurings grew louder among the free trappers until Glass waved his arms and got the crowd shushed.

“This last spring I run across a bunch of pork eaters raising their stockade walls up there on some high ground just above the mouth of the Yallerstone,” Glass explained after he had those curious men completely quiet. “Mackenzie his own self was there—seeing the place was built proper. Said he was naming it Fort Floyd.”

“That’s still a hell of a trip up to that country,” Solomon Fish complained, scratching contemplatively at his beard of blond ringlets.

“Then come to ronnyvoo year after year,” Glass replied with a shrug, “and pay mountain prices.”

Hatcher demanded, “Mackenzie’s prices gonna be better?”

“Yeah!” Scratch protested. “And is he gonna give us a better dollar on our plew?”

Stepping back toward Titus, Glass explained, “Mackenzie didn’t say much more’n asking me to come down here to ronnyvoo and tell you he was open for business, even while they’re building the post.”

Some of the men looked at one another, almost as if calculating the journey they would have to make then and there that very summer if they chose to pack their beaver all the way north to where the Missouri River issued out of the badlands.

Matthew Kinkead stepped up to ask, “If’n you come as a courier for this Mackenzie and the American Fur Company—what you get out of it, Glass?”

“I got me a new rifle, and a hundred pounds of bar lead, boys,” Glass admitted, then began to tap his chest with a gnarled finger. “But more’n that—I come away from this here meeting knowing I done right by all the free men in these mountains.”

Isaac Simms asked, “So what’s a man left to do who don’t see going all the way to the mouth of the Yallerstone to trade with American Fur?”

“Way I figger it,” Glass replied, “least a man oughtta have him a choice.”

“If’n Mackenzie didn’t tell ye to guarantee he’d beat mountain prices,” Hatcher began, “what’s to come of us when we get all the way there and this here Mackenzie turns out to be just as much a thief as Ashley, Sublette, or any of ’em?”

Bass held up his arms for quiet, and before Glass could reply, he said, “Maybe you ought’n go back to Mackenzie and tell him we’re interested, but … but he should bring his trade goods to ronnyvoo, where we’ll have us two traders to sell to on the same spot.”

“Two traders!”

“That’d keep prices down!”

Then another voice bellowed, “And plew prices up!”

The roar was unanimous. Excitement energized the congregation as they babbled about the possibility of actually having competition among traders: competition in the dollar given for beaver, in those prices charged for a man’s necessaries once a year. No longer would they be at the mercy of one trader who kept the price of beaver low, and the cost of goods sky-high.

“Is that the word what you fellers want me to carry back to Mackenzie at Fort Floyd?” Glass inquired after the crowd fell quiet once more.

The first man yelled, “Tell the Upper Missouri Outfit to come to ronnyvoo!”

“Tell Mackenzie the free men in the mountains will make it worth the trip!”

And a third cheered, “Tell him men like us ain’t at the mercy of traders no more!”

That summer of 1828 none of those double-riveted, iron-mounted free trappers had any idea that the invitation they were extending to Alexander Mackenzie of the American Fur Company’s Upper Missouri Outfit would prove to be akin to the sort of dinner invitation the inhabitants of a henhouse would extend to a hungry fox in a well-known children’s fable.

For now, the only men truly standing between the free trappers and their being at the mercy of American Fur’s total monopoly in the mountains were St. Louis traders William Ashley and Billy Sublette. In less than a decade, however, John Jacob Astor’s company would be trading without competition in the far west, able to dictate what it would pay for fur, to demand what it would for supplies. In less than a decade American Fur would be king of the mountains.

But for now … for the next few glorious seasons of an all-too-brief era in the early west, the free men would rule the Rockies.

As it was, things did not look all that bright for the American Fur Company that hot July. The previous fall Joshua Pilcher and his partner, William Bent, led a party of forty-five men west from Council Bluffs, their supplies and trade goods provided on contract by Astor’s company. Then somewhere on the upper North Platte, the Crow struck and drove off most of their horses. Pilcher was forced to cache most of his trade goods before proceeding over South Pass and on to the Green River, where he planned to winter his brigade.

Having traded for horses from the Shoshone with the arrival of spring, Pilcher sent some of his hands back to raise their cache—only to find most everything destroyed by water seepage. With what little he could salvage, the booshway didn’t have much to offer those coming to rendezvous at Sweet Lake. Showing up late, and hampered by his pitifully small supply of goods, Joshua Pilcher succeeded in trading the free trappers for a paltry seventeen packs of beaver before the fur hunters began drifting off in all directions. As the grasses browned and the land baked late that summer, Pilcher and Bent dissolved their partnership.

While Bent started back to St. Louis with their miserable take for the year, Pilcher and nine of his trappers left rendezvous following David Jackson and Thomas Fitzpatrick on their way north to the land of the Flathead, that brigade bolstered by a good share of the trappers who had deserted Pilcher at Sweet Lake. That next morning the brigade led by Robert Campbell and Jim Bridger departed for Powder River country and the home of the Crow.

Company partner Jedediah Strong Smith hadn’t shown up at Sweet Lake that summer. The carousing men drank toasts to him and his California brigade, hoping that Jed’s boys had not bumped up against disaster. Maybe next year they would all be together once more.

“It’s been a good season!” cheered William Sublette as he started his caravan on its return trip to St. Louis. “We’re out of debt, and in control of the mountain trade.”

“Let Astor have the rivers,” Davy Jackson had proposed.

“Damn right,” Sublette agreed. “The mountain trade is ours.”

“See you on the Popo Agie next summer, Bill!”

“See you on the Popo Agie!”

This business was growing, slow and sure. And rendezvous had proved to be the way to supply the company men, the way the partners could secure the biggest return from the trappers’ dangerous labor in the mountains. That first day of August, Sublette turned east with more than seventy-seven hundred pounds of beaver that they had purchased for three dollars a pound, fur that would bring them over five dollars per in St. Louis. In addition Sublette had forty-nine otter skins, seventy-three muskrat skins, and twenty-seven pounds of castoreum aboard his pack mules.

After paying off General Ashley the twenty thousand dollars they owed him for the year’s supplies, the three partners were left with a profit of more than sixteen thousand dollars.

It had indeed been a good year in the mountains.