Crack in the Sky

6

Two of them brought all their stock right into camp and began to load the pack animals in the bright glare of that roaring fire Bass was certain would mean the death of them all, backlighting the white men as some went about preparing for the trail, others busy with heating a little water in a kettle to use in Jack’s surgery.

“Hold ’im down, boys,” Hatcher ordered when he finally dragged his thin-bladed skinner from the edge of the coals.

Bass struggled for a moment as five of them seized him, shoved him back onto the grass there beside the fire pit. He knew what was coming.

“Sorry we gotta do it this way, friend,” Hatcher explained, his merry green eyes gone dark with concern. “We ain’t got time to soften yer brain on whiskey.”

“Hell, you ain’t got no whiskey left anyway,” Scratch said between gritted teeth, struggling slightly against the others as his eyes narrowed on the blade headed for his leg. Then he quickly glanced at the other faces hovering near his—knowing there wasn’t a lick of sense in fighting them all.

Hell, he realized he’d do the same for any of them—whatever it took to save a friend’s life.

“Get that legging off’n his belt,” Hatcher commanded, his lean face gone taut and gray in the firelight, eyes narrowing on the job at hand.

It all went so slowly after that. Brutally, brutally slow. With the legging straps unknotted and the tube of deerskin tugged down around his knee, it was clear to see the ends of the splintered arrow poking from the two blackened, bloody holes.

Hatcher dragged the back of his hand across his dry lips and murmured, “Gimme yer ramrod puller, Caleb.”

In a moment Wood returned with the small pair of anvil-forged pliers a trapper used to give himself leverage on his hickory ramrod in pulling a ball back out of the long-barreled flintlocks that were the constant companions to these men far beyond the frontier.

With the fingers of his left hand, Jack pressed down on the bloodied skin around the hole on the front of the thigh, spreading the edges of the wound a little, and began digging into the torn flesh with the narrow, open jaws of the puller. Each time he squeezed down on the handles, thinking he had a bite on the shaft, all he dragged out was reddened splinters.

“Dammit,” he grumbled quietly. “Roll ’im over for me.”

Bass gritted his teeth as they twisted him onto his belly and sat back down on his shoulders and legs.

Jack tapped Rowland on the arm. “Get outta my light, Johnny.”

Rowland shifted his weight on the wounded leg.

“That’s better,” Hatcher said. “Ye’re a lucky nigger, Titus Bass.”

“T-this don’t feel like lucky.” Then he twitched with the sudden flare of pain.

“Didn’t hit that big bone,” Hatcher explained as he leaned over the wound, pressed down on the flesh around the hole with his weight, and dug in with the puller.

Scratch ground his teeth together as the pain continued to swell, rising to a feverish red heat, glowing in overlapping waves that rose right up through his buttock and into the pit of him, spreading deep through his belly. Again and again Hatcher dug—yanking and swearing with each attempt, only to dig again. Each time coming up empty-handed.

“Sumbitch!” Jack grumbled, the bags under his eyes going liver-colored with frustration. “Caleb Wood! Get me my pouch yonder.”

When the shooting bag was laid on the ground next to Scratch, Hatcher began digging through it all the way to the bottom as Bass raggedly caught his breath while the sharp pain slowly subsided. He watched Hatcher drag a short ball starter out of the pouch.

“Roll him on his right side, fellas,” Hatcher said, of a sudden his voice much calmer than it had been since this operation had begun.

While they gently rolled him onto his right hip, Titus stared at that ball starter: a short six-inch length of hickory ramrod embedded in a small hardwood ball that fit comfortably in a man’s palm.

“Wha—what you gonna do now with that?”

“I can’t pull that arrow outta ye,” Jack explained, holding the starter in the light, “so I figger to hammer it out.”

“H-h-hammer?” Titus squeaked.

“Hold him down,” Hatcher said, refusing to answer the question. “This is gonna hurt him, bad.”

As much as he tried to keep his muscles relaxed, Scratch felt them tense as Hatcher set the brass-tipped end of that short ramrod into the hole on the front of his leg. He didn’t like the idea of what he knew was about to happen, watching Hatcher take his knife from its sheath, grip the blade, and prepare to swing the weapon’s handle at the round ball. He figured Hatcher was right about this, if nothing else: it was gonna hurt.

The last thing Bass remembered was hearing the antler knife handle whack hollow against the hickory ball … then sensed his stomach rise, twisting itself into a fiery knot that hurled against his tonsils before he lost all sensation, the searing red flames of pain mercifully dissipating in a cool blue rush of blessed unconsciousness.

Slipping down, down—scolding himself for ever having thought the pain was going to be unbearable, that it was going to be so bad he’d wet himself there in front of his friends … because right where he was at that moment, Scratch didn’t feel a goddamned thing.

It wasn’t until the following morning that he learned how the others had hoisted him up on the back of a horse behind the muscular Matthew Kinkead, then tied the two of them together before setting off in the dark, riding south and east at a good clip toward the foothills lying tangled at the base of the western slope of the Rockies.

The sun had felt good that morning, despite the fever he was running. Its touch was warm and reassuring there on the back of his neck as he awoke slowly, bouncing gently against Kinkead’s broad shoulders, gradually sensing the rub of the thick hemp rope wound across his ribs and back, slowly realizing what they had done because he didn’t have the strength to cling to the back of a horse by himself, much less hang on to consciousness during their perilous starlit ride.

“Seen any sign of ’em?” he whispered in a hoarse croak that sunup, his words mumbled against Matthew’s back.

“Nothin’,” Kinkead replied wearily.

That one word was spoken loud enough to alert the others that Bass had come to.

Hatcher eased his horse up on the off-hand side, the direction Bass faced with his cheek rubbing Matthew’s shoulder blade. “Mornin’ to ye, ol’ coon!”

“Wh-where we …” Then realized his mouth was terribly dry.

“Where we headed?” Jack finished. “To Bayou Salade, Scratch. Right where we been heading since we pulled away from Sweet Lake ronnyvoo.”

“Mornin’, glory!” Caleb came up on Jack’s off side, smiling hugely as he leaned forward so Bass could see him. “How’s he doin’, Jack?”

“Don’t look to be bleedin’ no more,” Hatcher said. “’Bout all I know is the nigger’s awake and thirsty as the burning pits of hell itself. Let’s see if’n we can find us a cool drink for him up ahead at that line of green, yonder.”

“Likely a crik there,” Wood said, urging his horse into a lope so he could take the lead.

“This time of year,” Kinkead declared, “I hope it ain’t a crik what’s dried up already.”

“Nawww,” Jack said, his eyes smiling at Bass’s pasty face, “there’s bound to be water for this here arrow catcher. Even if we have to scratch for it.”

What there was had been a trickle. Still, enough for the men to water the animals downstream after they untied Bass and eased him down into a patch of shade among the trees where the buzz and drone of summer’s insects accompanied the rustle of the leaves brushed by an intermittent breeze. They brought him the cool water a cup at a time. No matter that it was a little gritty, what with flowing so close over the sandy bottom of the creekbed—it tasted better than he could remember water tasting on his tongue in a long time. They bathed his face and neck, washed off some of the dried blood around the crusty strip of cloth binding up his wounds, and some of the men dozed as the sun rose.

After a couple hours of fitful sleep, Scratch awoke to hear Hatcher rustling the men into motion. They had been off the trail long enough, he told them. They’d get a chance to sleep more that night if they put a few more miles, a few more hours, behind them.

Back onto the horse went Kinkead. Up they hoisted Scratch again, two of them, a third cradling the leg as gently as he could, raising him to his rocking chair behind the saddle, where they retied him to Matthew; then all went to their horses and drove the pack animals away from that narrow little stream.

Not until sundown did Hatcher select a secure place for a cold camp. No fire that night—but not one of them grumbled. They were either too tired to complain, or they damn well understood the stupidity of lighting a beacon that might well call down a reinforced Bannock raiding party on them again. That night Bass grew cold not long after moonrise.

“We’re climbing a bit,” Solomon Fish explained as he knelt and laid another blanket over Titus. “Natural for you to get yourself a chill.”

They kept on climbing the next morning, and for every day across the next two weeks as they tramped through the long hours of sunlight, winding into the high country. From time to time one of the group would point out a recognized landmark to the others. By the fourth day after the scrap with the Bannock, Scratch was staying awake longer as he rocked against Kinkead’s back. And by the end of that first week, he was finally able to move about on the leg, finding he could stuff his left foot into a stirrup and hoist himself onto the back of his horse without the muscles in that leg crumpling, collapsing, spilling him onto the ground.

This matter of getting himself forked astride a horse was something a mountain trapper quickly learned was an affair of life or death. To ride was not a luxury, not some mere convenience. Having an animal and the ability to ride meant survival. To be without a horse, or to find that one could not stay in the saddle, might well be a death sentence.

So again, from somewhere deep inside this determined man, came the strength and dogged resolve to mend himself. Mule-headed stubbornness even more than pride drove Titus to test the leg, to swallow down the pain and push beyond what he had known before as his limits of endurance. At each night’s camp Bass found himself almost too weary to eat as the fire was kindled and meat set to broil at the end of long green sticks driven into the earth around the fire. The ride, that work it took pushing up into the high country, picking a trail along the mountainsides, up and down, then up and down again—it all took its toll day after day. At night he slept so soundly, he rarely rolled over, slept until someone nudged him with a toe, announcing it was time to water the stock, pack, and move out again.

“How far now to this Salade of your’n?” he asked Hatcher of a morning when they were both throwing bundles onto the sawbucks strapped onto the backs of their pack animals.

“Ain’t far now.”

“Take a guess for me.”

“Don’t know for sure,” Jack replied, his eyes back to being merry sparkles of green light. “Can’t say. Soon, though.”

By that time they had climbed east into the heart of the southern Rockies, following the tortuous path of a winding river ever higher as the late summer days continued to shorten by a matter of heartbeats every evening, the air cooling more quickly at twilight, the streams and freshets colder than they had been since spring, fed by those snowfields suspended just overhead above timberline where the marmots squeaked and the golden eagles drifted upon the warm updrafts, searching for another meal.

Up, up as the hooves of their animals crushed the dried, golden grasses having cured beneath the late-summer sun, on across the slopes as they picked their way through stands of rustling aspen, past the wide, bristling boughs of blue spruce, mile after shadow-striped mile of lodgepole forests. Finally near timberline, they turned almost due south, climbing from the headwaters of that westbound river, crossing over to the slopes where a new river system was given birth.

“This here where the Arkansas has its start,” Jack explained late of an afternoon as they topped out on the brow beneath a jagged series of hoary granite peaks scratching at the clouds on both left and right.

Here they let the horses have a blow.

“The Arkansas what flows into the Mississap way down south?”

“The same, friend.”

Bass wagged his head, unable to comprehend it. “Why—I’ll be go to hell and et for the devil’s own tater, Jack.”

“Ye been on the Arkansas, I take it?”

“Never. Just by it, once,” Bass explained. “Never did I figger that water come all the way from these here mountains.”

“Snow from the Shining Mountains, Scratch—’cause they allays got snow on ’em. Every li’l flake, every damned drop of rain, falls up here makes its own long, long trip till it reaches the sea.”

“We must be getting close to that valley now, ain’t we?”

Pointing east with his left arm, Hatcher replied, “Right over them high peaks.”

“You figger we’ll climb over them?”

“Nawww,” Caleb finally spoke. “Too much work on the animals.”

Hatcher pointed south, down the long, narrow valley crimped between the two ranges. “We follow the Arkansas down till we reach the foot of the hills on our left. Ride right around ’em and we’re in the south end of the Bayou Salade.”

“Some of the best trapping a man can do him,” Isaac Simms said as he patted the neck of his horse.

“Best trapping anywhere in all the Rockies,” Rufus Graham added.

Scratch asked, “Even good as the Three Forks country?”

Nodding, Hatcher said, “I’ll put this country up agin’ that’un any day, Titus Bass. Ye ain’t been where we’re going—so I’ll ’How ye’re just plain ignernt about the Bayou. But the beaver ye’ll pull out of the streams yonder, right over them peaks … those beaver some of the best a man can trap hisself anywhere south of English country, or north of Mexico.”

“They shine, that’s the bald-faced truth,” gushed Elbridge Gray.

“Worth the trip, are they?”

“The trip?” Hatcher echoed Bass. “This bunch gonna winter down to Rancho Taos—so South Park is right on our way.”

Caleb declared, “And South Park gonna be right on our way north come spring green-up.”

“When the flat-tails be some, so seal fat and sleek!” John Rowland crowed.

Hatcher said, “Come spring, them big water rats gonna have ’em a winter plew knock yer eyes out, Titus Bass!”

“Swear on my own heart! Way you niggers are talking,” Scratch observed, “makes a fella want to lift his tail up and get high behind to ride on over there right now!”

“Titus is right, boys,” Hatcher said. “Let’s cover ground while we still got light.”

Perhaps it was only the air’s tingle hinting at the arrival of autumn, but his skin goose-bumped as they all whooped, hollered, and cheered, urging the animals south downslope along those headwaters of the Arkansas, no more than a matter of days now from their goal. Up here so close to the sun, Bass found himself in awe once more how warm were the rays caressing his bare skin, how cool was every breeze that whispered out of the thick timber.

His anticipation grew over the next week, what with the way the others talked every night of the Park, glorying on the promise of its beaver, on the herds of buffalo, elk, and deer said to blanket the valley floor. Just to sense the rising excitement within the other men as they crossed to the east bank of the Arkansas, each day hoping to reach the end of the mountain range where they could finally sweep around the foot of the hills and drop into the Bayou Salade.

Of one golden afternoon, with the high sunlight gently kissing each early-autumn breeze, Bass slipped away into that place a man goes with his thoughts when he really isn’t thinking of a thing. They had been pushing hard since the first gray light of predawn, squeezing every mile they could out of the day. While all of them had been quiet for the most part, each man off in his own thoughts that afternoon like so many gone before, Scratch suddenly became aware of a change coming over the others. Gradually the men appeared to grow restless, shifting in the saddle, unsettled and anxious. Eventually some of them began to murmur to one another, tugging at their sweaty clothing, resettling their shapeless old hats atop their heads. It reminded him of a bunch of Kentucky schoolboys in those last few moments before the schoolmaster called for midday recess, or in those last breathless heartbeats every afternoon before the entire schoolhouse was freed at the end of the day—

“Lookee yonder, Scratch. This be the end of the hills!” Hatcher exclaimed, pointing as they eased up the side of the slope toward a low saddle fringed with dark emerald timber. “Other side lays the Bayou Salade.”

Feathers suddenly took swirling flight within his belly, like the flapping beat of huge wings. Sudden whoops startled him as John Rowland and Matthew Kinkead burst past him, hooves hammering by on either side as they drove their horses the last few yards to the top of the saddle there between stands of blue spruce, shot over the rise, then were gone from sight. Only their exultant voices reverberated off the hills.

Then Isaac Simms shot by. And Rufus Graham careened past Hatcher and Bass, until Jack had time only to remind Solomon and Gray that some of them needed to stay back momentarily and see to the cavvyyard of horses and mules. At that reminder Scratch tightened his grip on Hannah’s lead rope, pulling the mare closer to his saddle mount. They were about to enter a special place by all accounts. Such magic was to be shared with all of a man’s friends.

“That it?” he asked Hatcher almost breathlessly as they crowned the saddle, pulling Hannah’s rope so the mule came up right alongside him.

Below the crest, down the smooth, treeless hillside, he watched the others race, zigging and zagging, waving hats and standing tall in the stirrups, passing one another in curving swoops, signaling back at those yet to come down the slope. Beyond them on the valley floor lay the slowly undulating clots of buffalo milling, grazing, lowing among the belly-high, mineral-rich grasses.

“This is it,” Jack said quietly, his eyes twinkling with a peaceful contentment.

“The Bayou Salade.” Spoken almost like a prayer of thanksgiving.

Hatcher reached over and touched Scratch’s arm. “Way ye said it, I can tell ye feel the place awready.”

Tugging at the back of the blue silk bandanna he had knotted over his skull, Titus replied, “I can’t remember seeing a valley near so purty, Jack. Not in all my days out here. Strange as it may sound to folks what ain’t never come to this here place, looking up to see such sculpturin’s as these all around ’em—I doubt their kind would ever understand if I tried to explain just how I feel right here an’ now.”

“How’s that, Scratch?” Hatcher asked with a smile as wide as South Park itself.

“You told me yourself the other night, Jack.”

“Told ye what?”

He rubbed the back of the bandanna over his missing scalp and hair, saying with a quiet, but keen, anticipation, “You told me I’d feel like this here’s one of them few places where a man can know just why it was he ever come out here to the Rocky Mountains.”

It was the marrow of the world.

Scratch realized at last that this was the bone and sinew to which everything else in his known universe had always been attached.

From these tall peaks where the snow never fully melted flowed the lifeblood of a whole continent. This truly was a place where a man found confirmation in the reason he ever dared to venture on past those folks back east not willing to risk all they ever had, continuing on by those not willing to dare enough in placing their very lives on the line … here suddenly to sense the close kinship a man could feel with a patch of ground, with a stretch of open country, with an entire virgin land that had embraced him.

Welcoming him home.

Into a small protected bowl the rest had taken their pack animals, stopping only when they had reached a secluded meadow ringed by thick timber and outcroppings of granite dotting the hillsides. A place big enough to afford enough pasturage for their remuda over the next two months or more, yet a place small enough to afford them ample security from chance discovery of their fires and shelters by roaming bands of raiders. More than enough wood—a litter of deadfall back in the thick groves … and water too: a narrow stream gurgling along its mossy bed right through the middle of the bowl. The stock would want for nothing as the last days of summer waned and the seasons turned.

Here they would be sheltered by the timber on the surrounding hills and the rock outcroppings. The stone faces of the granite would reflect the heat of their small fires on the nippy mornings to come, again each cold evening that autumn was bound to bring anyone venturing this high. As well, these rocky faces would serve to better hide the entrance to their small bowl from any who might pass through the valley itself.

“We used this here same place a couple seasons back,” Isaac Simms explained. “Oughtta be real safe here.”

“Off the beaten road,” Hatcher added. “Not on any trails the tribes use when they crisscross the Park, coming and going as they please.”

“Fella should keep his eye peeled for brownskins?” Scratch inquired.

“Just look down there,” Jack advised. “See all the buffler. Then ye tell me if ye figger this be a place where the Injuns’ll come to hunt.”

Titus nodded.

And with every day that followed it made him marvel all the more just how alive was this valley. The variety of wildlife were drawn here for the natural salt licks. They came for the abundance of grass, itself rich with natural minerals. And, too, the creatures came for the cold, crystalline waters tumbling down from the high, treeless places like streamers of sunlit glitter itself.

From time immemorial man had followed the four-legged creatures into this valley. Where the game went, so followed the hunters after meat and hides, after tongues and survival. From one end of the valley floor to the other ran the boggy salt marsh that had led the French trappers and voyageurs to first give their name to this place, a sparkling series of ponds where beaver had dammed the creeks and streams into a necklace of quiet water. With the arrival of autumn an untold variety of ducks appeared overhead every day, sweeping in from the north across the autumnal blue skies to join the great long-necked geese in a brief migrational layover in this magical place.

Their first morning in South Park, they had moved away from their breakfast fire into the stands of lodgepole to select and fell a number of long, thin trees they dragged back to camp, where they trimmed off branch and stub, then cut each pole to length. One by one the shelters took shape, most no more than lean-tos made from bowers laid across their lodgepole frames, finally covered with pack canvas and old blankets. More than a dozen were there: some men pairing up, a few of them preferring to sleep on their own, along with four large shelters built to protect the outfit’s supplies.

That night, well after dark when they completed their camp-making chores, Hatcher joined the weary men at the fire to run over the well-worn sequence of trapping in hostile country.

“Caleb, I want you and Rufus to hang back the first day.” Jack waited until the pair nodded. “Next day gonna be Scratch and Matthew.”

He went on and on, pairing the men, then waiting while each pair nodded to one another in recognition.

“That just leaves you again,” Elbridge stated.

“Ain’t no different’n it was after Little went under to the ticks last spring,” Jack explained. “With him gone after that bad scrape with the Blackfoot, we had us one odd man out.”

“I remember that,” Fish replied.

“So, boys—I’ll be the one what will hang back on my lonesome when it’s my day to stay in camp.”

It was not the practice of all Mad Jack Hatcher’s brigade to depart every morning to set traps along the streams and slides, down at the valley ponds.

With the exception of their solitary leader, in rotation two men took their turns lying back to camp for one day out of every five: using their time to repair tack and saddles, doctor the sores and saddle ulcers on riding and pack animals, trim hooves and mend bite wounds that a man had to expect among half-wild horses. From hides traded off the Flathead back at Sweet Lake, some spent their camp day, even nights, around the fire, cutting and sewing additional pairs of moccasins. On occasion a man would tinker with a trap he found not working properly, or he might fashion himself a rawhide sheath for a knife, perhaps add some brass tacks to a belt or the stock of his rifle.

Never was there any end to the lot of a camp keeper. When more interesting work was finished, there was always more than enough to do tending the plews: fleshing the freshest beaver hides scratched with each man’s distinctive mark … cutting, trimming, and tying willow limbs into a wide hoop … finally lashing the day’s pelts onto the willow hoops—stretching, tightening, then stretching some more. With each new day these huge, round red dollars of Rocky Mountain currency dotted the campsite, stacked against every tree trunk, sapling, and clump of brush. More were brought in every afternoon by the seven who took their turn at the streams and slides and pools.

As the weeks passed, even Scratch grew astounded by their take. Rich as some previous seasons had been for him, he had never seen anything quite as bountiful as this. Large beaver, thick fur, not one empty trap any day. And nary a sign of brownskins about.

Most mornings he had thrown the much-worn, oft-repaired Shoshone saddle onto Hannah’s back, tied his two greasy trap sacks on either side of the horn, where they would hang at his knees, and move out with the other six who would be trapping that day with him. On those mornings when it was Bass’s turn to hang back to tend to camp duties, the mule had proved just as restless and out of sorts as he was when not allowed to venture into the pristine beauty of the valley.

If she wasn’t picketed on those days, Hannah came right into camp even before the rest pulled out—seeming to know that the other animals were being saddled and prepared for departure while she was not. Until he eventually trained her better, having to swat at the mule with a switch and scold her, driving her out of camp, Hannah would turn over kettles and coffeepots with her nose, braying loudly to show her deep displeasure.

Many were the times on those chilly mornings when he’d grab the mule by her ears, yanking her head down so he could glare into one of her defiant eyes and growl an endless rash of words strung together to convince her just how angry he was with her impish antics. Later that day she’d slip up behind Titus as he was concentrating on one chore or another, suddenly shoving her muzzle right against his shoulder blades to knock him off balance, sprawling on the ground.

“You’re a she-devil all right,” he growled. “Times are I’ve thought to strangle you. But I can’t bring myself to it—not when I recall how you saved my life … twice already.”

Seemed as if she somehow knew what he was saying at those times, for Hannah would eventually come up to stand over him, lowering her nose right against him softly, her big eyes half-closed, twitching those peaked ears of hers as if in apology for her childish stunts. Lord, if she didn’t know just how to get herself back on his good side again.

As if he could ever be angry enough with Hannah to kill her. Maybe a man like Silas Cooper could have shot her easy as spitting … but not Titus Bass.

The days continued their march into autumn, each one imperceptibly shorter than the one before it. The mornings grew colder, a film of ice forming in the kettles and at the edges of the creeks until enough of the high, glorious light warmed them each day. Even a blind man would know that summer was over, that the seasons had turned, that they were beginning their headlong tumble toward winter.

A man with a good nose would surely know. Autumn mornings had their own unmistakable fragrance—that sharp, crisp tang to the air. The smell of this high country dying, or its life already dead for another cycle of the year. Grasses and brush had grown dry and brittle beneath the increasing bite to every breeze that knifed its way down from the high and hoary places. It smelled of winter on its way.

Autumn advanced with an amazing swiftness above their camp on every mountain slope. Each morning he found the descending line of gold-smitten aspens had inched a little farther down the hillsides toward the valley floor … as if autumn were creeping down upon them from above, a few yards more every night.

No more were there any of the hardy wildflowers tucked back in the protected meadows—swept away by the falling temperatures and the harshness of the winds, joining the summer-browned grasses in parched oblivion. Each day brought the deer and elk farther down the forested slopes toward the safety of their winter pasture in the valley. And these days of waning light brought the constant accompaniment of whistling elk calling other bulls to combat, or the slapping crack of bucks’ antlers locking, twisting, slashing in an ages-old combat. Males battling for the right to the harem, that struggle played out on the nearby slopes of dark pine-green and sun-splotched gold quakie.

Farther below in the valley itself, the cottonwood and willow would be the last to give way before the mysterious forces of nature and time and season. But ultimately their leaves began to shrivel with age, dried with the passage of time and the invisible hands of nature’s clock. Trees stood bare, stark, and skeletal against the golden, browning backdrop of the hills. Autumn’s breath was seizing hold of this land.

And so much of the rhythm of life appeared to grind slowly to a halt like a miller’s wheel brought rumbling to a stop by an unseen hand.

Yet as suddenly as life seemed to breathe its last, the Bayou Salade burst into frenetic activity across a week or more. Swarms of migratory birds blackened the skies now. Over the lower peaks and passes, formation after formation of the spear-headed migrations paraded across the crystal-clear autumnal blue. Each formation transformed itself from black specks spotted far off in the sky to become a low-swooping V of geese and ducks, angling in to settle across the ponds and still water of the valley with a thunderous concert of honking and splashes. First the longnecks circled, their heads craning, searching for a landing spot before making their long, graceful figure-eight loop across an open spot of marsh water. Then the huge geese slanted down in formation, banking sharply before they hit the skylit water, kicking up rooster tails of spray, squawking to one another, to the ones they were joining, or to those still descending from the sky above.

On those mornings that Bass found himself out in the autumn chill to set his traps, he would stand and stare for long periods of time at the pageant of sky and water and wing—there were so many of the ducks and geese that there could not possibly be room for any more out on the huge marshes and icy bogs. Yet still they came as if spewed out of the sky.

From this direction and that, the smoothbores echoed from the far hills, his fellow trappers out hunting, their guns loaded with shot instead of a huge round ball. And every night the men roasted the rich, fat meat over their fires, this a welcome change from a diet of elk and venison and buffalo.

Other, smaller songbirds feasted before the coming onslaught of winter on those insects, locusts, and beetles clinging cooled and torpid on those grasses dried by the slash of autumn winds. Time hung in the balance here, and fall was clearly a time when it was decided just what creatures survived, what creatures would not. Each species was making ready for the coming change in its own ages-old dance of the seasons, each life-form readying itself for the time of cold and death that was winter in this high country.

True, the coming winter would decide just what would live, and what would not. This intricate rhythm that hummed around him each new and glorious day was a rhythm begun so long ago that aeons had still rested in the womb of time.

The first storm came and went, not yet cold enough for the snow to stay longer than a couple of days. Then the second and third storms rolled through the valley, each snowfall lasting a little longer before it finally melted, soaking into the soggy ground, dripping off the thick spruce boughs, feeding every creek, stream, and freshet a sudden, final burst of life before winter would squeeze down hard.

“When you figger for us to pull out?” Elbridge Gray asked one evening around their fire as the wind came up, beginning to blow off the high slopes with a wolfish howl.

Standing to stretch, Hatcher said, “Trapping’s been so damned good—I’d like to stay right to the last day afore the passes close up.”

Caleb Wood declared, “Trouble is, a man can’t never tell when he’s gonna stay a day too long … till he tries and finds the passes are all snowed in.”

“Ye saying it’s time to go south?” Jack asked.

With a shrug Caleb replied, “I dunno. Last week or so I been thinking real hard on Taos—”

“Ain’t a one of us ain’t been thinking real hard on Taos,” Matthew Kinkead interrupted.

Hatcher stepped over and laid a hand on Kinkead’s shoulder. “Ye’ll be there afore the hard cold sets in.”

Matthew’s eyes softened, and with a hound-dog expression crossing his jowly face, he sobbed, “Wanna see my Rosa.”

John Rowland looked up and asked, “You ever get the feeling she might one day figger you for dead, Matthew? That you been gone so long from her … she goes out and gets herself ’Nother husband?”

Slowly wagging his big shaggy-bear head, Kinkead gave that considerable thought, then answered, “I don’t figger her the kind to do anything of the sort … not till one of you boys rode into Taos and tol’t her your own self I gone under.”

“And even then Rosa’s the sort of woman what just might expect one of us to bring her something special of yer’n, Matthew,” Hatcher explained as he knelt by the coffeepot. “Something what would show her ye was really gone.”

Isaac Simms asked, “What would that be, Kinkead?”

“Yeah,” echoed Solomon Fish, “what would be the one thing we’d have to show your Rosa to prove to her you been rubbed out?”

He scratched his big onion bulb of a nose with a dirty, charcoal-crusted finger, deep in thought. Then he said, “I s’pose it’d be this here kerchief I wear round my neck.” Using a couple of fingers, Kinkead lifted the soiled black cloth, emblazoned with a multitude of painted red roses in full bloom.

“Rosa give you that, didn’t she?” Titus asked.

He nodded, looking down at it a moment. “Winter afore last, when this bunch was all in Taos—afore we come north last two year. She and me, we bought this here kerchief down to a poor woman’s blanket she had spread out in a warm spot there in the sun, over to the Taos square.”

“I remember that ol’ brown Injun gal!” Rowland crowed with excitement. “I see’d that same kerchief my own self that morning and was coming back to buy it.”

Kinkead nodded, grinning. “Yep: that were the first time I met this here skinny son of a bitch.” And he pointed at the rail-thin Rowland.

“We got to talking,” John began.

Then Kinkead continued, “And you said you was done with that bunch you’d been trapping with for more’n a year.”

“Some folks just ain’t meant to run together,” Rowland agreed.

Matthew said, “You told me your outfit was breaking up that winter, picking sides then and there in Taos.”

“Yep, some fellers following Ewing Young, and some others saying they was gonna tag along behind Antoine Robidoux. Only me and McAfferty didn’t take no side when the outfit tore apart.”

“McAfferty?” Hatcher inquired. “That when you two come and hooked up with us?”

With a nod Rowland looked up at their brigade leader and answered, “Damn—but that nigger never was the same since’t he killed that Ree medicine man. He started to get … strange after that. Strange and … downright spooky.”

“Damn if he didn’t after he killed that medicine man,” Fish replied.

“Just the fall afore we run all the way south to Taos—two year ago now.”

“All the way from Ree country. That was a far piece to travel just to winter up,” Graham observed.

“McAfferty, he was a nigger what wasn’t gonna stay in that country where he’d just killed the ol’ rattle shaker,” Rowland recalled. “Hell, he told us it wasn’t healthy for a man’s hide to be caught in country anywhere close to where the Ree stomped around.”

Scratch found that long trek hard to believe. “Just for him killing a Ree medicine man you tramped all the way down to Taos?”

“Don’t you see?” Rowland tried to explain in a quiet voice that hushed the others. “This here McAfferty had him dark hair—shiny like a new-oiled trap and near black as the gut of hell itself—afore the night he had to kill that Ree medicine man.”

Bass asked, “What you mean, had to kill the Ree?”

For a moment Rowland pursed his lips as if he were trying to pull out the particulars of that memory. “Something to do with what feller had the strongest medicine … to do with that medicine man fixing to steal McAfferty’s Bible.”

“He carry a Bible hisself?” Scratch inquired.

“Yup,” John answered. “The man left us with hair black as charred hickory. An’ he come back with it turned.”

“No shit?” Titus asked. “So that’s when his hair become white?”

Turning to Bass, Rowland explained, “McAfferty’s hair is as white as new snow.”

“What turned his hair?” Titus inquired.

John stared into the fire for long moments before answering. “Maybeso the hoo-doos.”

“Hoo-doos!” shrieked Rufus Graham with a gust of sudden laughter.

“That’s right,” John said, nonplussed. “Like I said, McAfferty left our bunch with black hair … and come back with it and his beard turned white.”

Rufus declared, “Like the man see’d a ghost!”

With a shrug Rowland continued, “The man never told any of the rest of us what scared him so. Said he wouldn’t talk about it—claimed that he’d always counted on God to watch his backside agin’ the devil.”

“Not a word of what hoo-doo spooked him, eh?” Caleb asked.

“Nary a peep did we pull outta him,” John explained dolefully. “All the way down to Taos that fall, I don’t recall the nigger sleeping much at all.”

“How’s a man get by ’thout any sleep?” Scratch asked with a yawn.

“All I can tell you is on our trip south that white-headed nigger was awake when I closed my eyes ever’ night, and he was awake when I opened my eyes again come morning.”

Skeptically, Scratch asked, “Awake, doing what?”

“Just looking up at the sky near all the time, moving his lips like he was talking to somebody, keepin’ a tight hold on his Bible.”

“That’s spooky right there,” Hatcher declared.

“He packed that Ol’ Bible along in his possibles ever since I knowed him. Never saw him pull it out much,” Rowland explained. “But after that night when he come back with his head turned white, McAfferty was one to keep that saddle-worn Bible right in his hand or laying by his side … ever since.”

“McAfferty sounds to me like a man what got hisself spooked but good!” Bass observed.

Hatcher agreed, “Right from the very first time I laid eyes on him down to Taos, I knowed in my bones there was something a mite odd about that child.”

“Yep,” echoed Solomon. “Young as he was—to have his hair turn like it did.”

“Don’t matter how young a feller is when hoo-doos reach out an’ grab hold,” Rowland protested, stretching out his arm, making a claw of his fingers. “Hoo-doos gonna leave their mark on you.”

Bass snorted. “Sounds to me like you believe in ghosts your own self, Johnny.”

“How ’bout it, boys? Any of ye see’d any of McAfferty’s hoo-doos yer own selves when ye was with him?” Hatcher added.

Shaking his head, Wood said, “I ain’t never seen none for myself … but I rode many a mile, and many a moon, with Asa McAfferty. I saw what become of a man who did see a hoo-doo. A man what see’d a Ree Injun rattle shaker’s hoo-doo!”

“Damn! If that don’t give me goose bumps the way Johnny’s talking!” exclaimed Isaac Simms, rubbing both of his forearms as if he had just suffered a sudden chill.

“Shit!” roared Elbridge Gray. “Johnny’s got you jumping at shadows now too!”

Hatcher turned to Rowland, asking, “Whatever come of McAfferty that winter we rode back to Taos, John?”

At that moment in the timber above their protected valley, a wolf raised its voice to the clear, starlit autumn sky.

All nine of them turned and listened as the morose howl drifted away slowly, the sound swallowed by the utter, black immensity of that night.

After a bit of reflection Rowland answered, “Like I said, he didn’t figger to join up with Young or with Robidoux’s outfit. Hell, truth was both of ’em made it real plain that they didn’t want him along come spring.”

“So he go north with another outfit?” Scratch inquired.

“No,” Rowland answered. “Near as I know, he never looked for a bunch to trap with after that. Like he knowed others down that way was talking about his hoo-doos that winter, like he knowed there wouldn’t be a man wanted to trap with him.”

Rufus asked, “What happened to him?”

“Dunno,” John stated. “I heard tell he up and pulled out of Taos late two winters ago. There in Mexico one day. Gone the next.”

Wood asked, “By hisself?”

“Yup. I heard he was all on his lonesome.”

“Damn,” Hatcher grumbled. “Here I was first thinking he become a strange goat … an’ now I’m feeling a mite sorry for this McAfferty. Feel sorry for a man what no one wants around.”

“How ’bout you, Johnny?” Elbridge asked. “Would you want to trap with McAfferty now?”

Shaking his head emphatically, Rowland answered, “Not a whore’s chance in Sunday meeting I’d ever travel the same trail with that one. Something ’bout him killing that rattle shaker, something ’bout that ol’ rattle shaker’s hoo-doo medicine made McAfferty go … go real soft in the head.” Then with a sudden, uncontrollable shudder of his body, John added, “This coon’ll stay as far away from that crazy bastard as I can.”

“He’s trouble,” Rufus added.

“Nawww, not like he’s a bad sort,” Rowland explained. “Just that … well, let’s say trouble follers on his bachtrail ever since the rattle shaker’s hoo-doos come after him. Way I see it: McAfferty’s gonna have trouble dogging him the rest of his days, for here on out.”

“Man’s got enough to worry about in Injun country,” Solomon declared. “He don’t have to take on a partner what’s been turned soft in the head.”

“So how ’bout you, Hatcher?” Bass inquired with a grin. “You ain’t gonna get soft in the head an’ keep us here till all the passes outta this valley are closed in, are you?”

“Nawww,” Jack replied. “I figger we each have us one more turn at camp keeper—five days more—and we’ll get on outta here.”

“To Taos!” Kinkead roared with renewed enthusiasm.

“Damn right,” Hatcher answered. “We push on over the high side and make for the mud-house Mexican settlements.”

“Ah! Women got skin the color of smoked leather,” Isaac Simms growled, a hunger glistening in his eyes.

Rufus Graham agreed, “And Workman’s likker, clear as a summer sky and as strong as the kick of a mule.”

“I’m half-froze for corn an’ beans,” Caleb Wood said wistfully, then licked his lips. “Don’t make me no never-mind that their bread is flat as it can be—it’s still bread to this here starvin’ nigger!”

“I ain’t had me no greaser bread since we put Taos at our rumps!” Rowland grumbled.

“This here nigger can’t wait to get me some of that greaser tobaccy,” explained Elbridge Gray. “How ’bout you, Jack? What you wanna get when we shine in Taos?”

“Music … music I don’t have to make for everyone else,” Hatcher explained, looking up at the cold sky dreamily. “I wanna listen and dance to such music them greasers play … while’st holding my arm round the waist of a thin gal or a plump one—hell, it don’t make no matter to me! My, my, my: how I look forward just to spin a woman to some music and look down at her purty face, seein’ right there and then in those eyes that she wants this here child to plant his wiping stick atween her legs.”

“Stand back, you damned greasers!” Rowland shouted to the heavens. “Bow your brown heads to American free men come riding in from the mountains! Get back you damned pelados an’ make way for free mountaineers come to shine in Taos!”