Crack in the Sky

15

Near everyone he knew was gone. Hatcher had said that’s what become of most of them what ventured out to the far mountains.

Some time ago Jack declared theirs was the sort of man who discovered they wasn’t cut out for what it took to make a life for themselves out here … so they skeedaddled back east. If they were lucky enough to keep their hair until they fled, like Daniel Potts. Bass figured there was a lot of men who had no business being out here, men who hadn’t been fortunate enough to get back east before their luck ran out.

Even Jim Beckwith—giving up on the mountain trade and throwing in with them Crow. Much as he liked Bird in Ground’s people, Titus couldn’t imagine himself staying on as a full-time member of the tribe. It was getting to be all he could do to stay on as a member of Jack Hatcher’s little brigade of free trappers.

Maybeso he just wasn’t the joiner sort. Perhaps by the time winter arrived, he might decide to go his own way, see how his stick would float all on his lonesome. Maybe he’d be able to rendezvous with Mad Jack’s men every summer. Leastwise, it sure didn’t seem none of them were the kind to give up and skedaddle back east like Potts, not the sort to turn over and go to the blanket like Beckwith done. Hatcher’s bunch was cast-iron, double-riveted beaver trapper, all the way to the muzzle, by damned.

But he suddenly remembered Kinkead and Rowland. Both of them Hatcher’s men, both of them the hardy, hang-on sort who wouldn’t turn around for the backtrail. Yet they had given up the mountains in exchange for a life among the inhabitants of a foreign people in a faraway Mexican village.

For every man who ventured west beyond the Missouri, perhaps there did indeed come a time when that man had filled his life with all the mountain peaks and ribbons of valleys, with all the sparkling beaver streams and snowy, untrammeled meadows that his soul could contain. Perhaps he realized his kind needed something more that only the settlements could offer: something that only women and crowds, buildings, clutter, and closed-in skies could give him.

But damn the settlements while there was still beaver in the mountains!

Damn them white women and their whiny ways, getting a man all bumfoozled the way they could so a man didn’t know fat cow from poor bull and damn well didn’t even care a cuss!

And damn them all them tight places where folks back east chose to live, crawling all over themselves with a racket of wagons and carriages and surreys too, shoving down narrow streets, squeezed in by buildings so tall a man was hard-pressed to see all the sky a man was made to see.

Not to mention the smell of such places where folks lingered far too long!

Not that he wasn’t glad most folks were content to live that way, satisfied to stay back east in their settlements and towns and big, sprawling cities. Better for them that they kept themselves back there beyond the rolling prairies where the buffalo ruled. And damn well better for men like Titus Bass that the crowds were so content to huddle together back east rather than come swarming out here.

Bringing along their white women with those harsh stares they shot a man just about every time he got set to have himself some fun. On their coattails came the constables and preachers with their Bibles too. Raising jails and schools and churches right alongside one another … till the crush of them drove near all the joy right on out of life.

Always seemed that in the wake of wagons came white women. Where a wheel could roll, some high-necked, glary-eyed white gal was bound to show up before a man really had himself a chance to snort and prance. Wagons and white women—why, they’d be the ruin of the West!

This wasn’t no land fit for the likes of them, he thought. This was a man’s country, a man’s country fit only for a certain type of man, at that. Now that land back east, all closed in with little bumps of hills and all the crush of trees … now, that was a woman’s country if ever there was one.

But out here where the hills had grown on up into huge, hoary chains of impenetrable granite and ice and mazelike passes … this was a man’s country, by the everlasting! Back there the country was all closed in, and a person damn well couldn’t see very far: just the way things ought to be in a land where little minds reigned.

Not here! Where only a man with a heart big enough, with a soul mighty enough, could expect to take it all in. From horizon, to horizon, to horizon and back again under an endless blue dome.

He could only hope that Bridger would be back. Likely Jim was the sort to stay on out here, no matter what. Maybe a man like him had to return east just once in his life after he had eventually discovered where his heart was truly at peace. To return east so he could put things to rest with his family, to settle with all that was so he could get on with living all that was to be. Perhaps Bridger had him just that sort of healing and burying the past to accomplish … and then he’d be back.

Titus hoped, figuring that the young fella was the sort who could no longer live back in the States. After all, it seemed Bridger was the sort to take life on its own terms, the sort to take each day by the horns, the kind who could build himself a bullboat, wave fare-thee-wells to his friends, and take off floating downstream into an adventure and a salty lake of such great proportions that few believed him when he finally returned with his tall tales of a land never before touched by the eyes of a white man.

Bridger would be back, he told himself. While others ran from the danger and the risk and the challenge, men like Jim Bridger and Titus Bass would run to embrace the danger and the risk and the challenge each new day brought them with the rising of the sun.

Of a sudden in his reverie there intruded a clamor of activity as company men burst into the groves where they had tied up their blanket and willow-branch bowers, scooping up their saddles and bridles with an excited chatter.

“What’s going on?” Titus asked as he got to his feet at the shady base of the cottonwood where he had been watching the lazy passing of the Popo Agie.

All around him more and more of the company men were hurrying to saddle up their mounts, the first beginning to sweep up their loaded rifles and pistols.

Should he seize his weapons?

Someone had to answer him—“Injuns?”

But before it appeared any of them had heard him, Campbell’s men were whooping at the top of their lungs, gushing in unbounded joy.

Finally one of the brigade stopped long enough to blurt out to the free trapper, “God-bless-it—the trader’s come in!”

“Trader?”

Trembling with excitement, the skinny whiffet of a man whirled and shot out his arm toward the red-rimmed southeastern hills that framed this verdant, emerald valley. “Sublette’s train comin’ in!”

Squinting into the resplendent midsummer’s light, Bass stepped to the edge of the shade and stared expectantly at the upvault of those crimson bluffs where a long file of horsemen and burdened mules were fanning out across the skyline, backlit by the late-morning sun. More than fifty riders were up there now, all gawking down at the valley below them. And there had to be at least three times that many pack animals, every last one of them reluctant to hurry before their eager masters. Despite the distance, Scratch could almost hear the newcomers barking and bawling at their contrary charges.

A gray mushroom puffed from the end of a distant rifle, a tiny blot against the summer’s blue—a heart’s throb later came the low boom of that rifle held aloft by the pack train’s leader.

Good thing, too, that was. Out here in this country a man never rode up silently on a camp. Prudence dictated that you always announce your arrival, and even discharge your weapon to show peaceful intentions. That gunshot only confirmed Bass’s fervent hope.

“Trader!” he screeched wildly as his feet lurched into motion beneath him, almost as if they were in that much more of a hurry to be off announcing the news to Hatcher’s outfit.

But Jack and the rest were already caught up in a flurry of saddling and mounting by the time he reached them.

“Comin’ to find you!” Elbridge Gray shouted as Bass sprinted up through the trees. Red-faced, the big-nosed trapper tugged on the reins to his own horse with one hand, which also held his rifle, while in the other he gripped the reins to Scratch’s saddle mount.

“Thankee, Elbridge!”

Gray turned and vaulted into the saddle, kicked his toes into the huge cottonwood stirrups. “Get high behind, Scratch! That’s Billy Sublette and he’s bringing likker to ronnyvoo!”

“Likker, Titus Bass!” echoed Hatcher himself as he goaded his horse past them at a trot, then kicked it in the ribs the instant he reached the edge of the meadow. The pony was off like a shot.

By the time Bass swept the rifle from his blanket and stuffed a foot into a stirrup, swinging his horse around, the rest were already on their way across the grassy flat, a wide fan of company trappers and free men gradually streaming together toward that grassy point where the first of those arriving riders were making their way down a gentle slope slanting off those far red hills.

Those dark horses and indistinguishable riders were no more than five hundred yards away now as the last of the pack animals lumbered off the top of the ridge, spilling toward the valley.

“Likker!” Scratch cried as he kicked the horse into a gallop.

“Likker!” he bellowed when he caught up with the rest of Hatcher’s bunch.

“Likker!” was the cry echoed by another two dozen free trappers and nearly the whole of the Campbell brigade.

At four hundred yards Titus could recognize how the nervous greenhorns were bringing up their weapons, waving rifles in the air, shouting at one another.

“Goddamn pilgrims!” Bass growled as he kicked the horse in the flanks again, urging even more speed from it so he wouldn’t be among the last to greet the supply train.

Past three hundred yards the dry-throated riders raced at a full gallop, that wide fan narrowing as the frantic horsemen galloped full tilt, their wide hat brims whipped back by the run, some hats whipped right off their heads, careening back into the belly-high grass.

At Bass’s left a trapper was shouting, “Get ready to give ’em a salute!”

Most already had their rifles in the air by the time those in the lead sprinted past 250 yards.

“Give them pork eaters a mountain how-do!” a voice called out somewhere in that cluster where Bass found himself as the trappers funneled closer and closer together with every yard.

Horses’ nostrils flared as big as their frightened eyes, straining at the bits and hackamores, lunging forward across the uneven ground at a maddening gallop.

At two hundred yards the rider at Bass’s elbow shouted, “Whiskey for my whistle!”

That journey to the last hundred yards took no more than a matter of heartbeats…. Then he could see their faces.

The pilgrims’ eyes and mouths grew as wide and gaping as were the eyes and nostrils of the trappers’ horses. And those leaders of that pack train were already standing in the stirrups, shouting something to the first horsemen racing their way. They raised their long rifles into the air and fired: mushroom puffs of smoke immediately followed by the dull echo of a half-dozen scattered booms carried off on the summer breeze.

Immediately echoed by a gunfire greeting from a handful of the charging riders … then another ten … and now two dozen more. Gray smoke hung in tattered shreds just above Scratch’s head as he raced on.

The headman coming down off the slope toward them was warwhooping and waving his rifle like a fiend. Suddenly he reined up in a flurry of dust and leaped to the ground, his horse wheeling away in the excitement. Snatching the broad-brimmed felt hat from his head, he started sprinting on foot toward the oncoming riders.

One of those horsemen just ahead of Bass yanked back on his reins, his horse’s head twisted to the side as it stiff-legged to a halt and the rider lunged to the ground, nearly spilled, then was up and finding his gait, running those last few steps until he and the leader of the pack train met one another with a violent collision, banging into one another, then dancing round and round as they pounded on each other. As Scratch shot on by, beginning to rein back his own horse, he recognized Robert Campbell as one of the two. Then, as the pair continued their spin, he recognized Bill Sublette—the trapper chief called Cut Face by Washakie’s Shoshone, whom Sublette had helped fight against the Blackfoot back to the summer of 1826.

All around him now the free trappers were popping their hands against their open mouths, whoo-whooing and hoo-hooing like attacking savages, not slowing in the slightest as they exploded through the ranks of the pack train—bawling mules, rearing horses, and frightened men fresh from the settlements, all of them gone white-faced and gulping at the long-haired, buckskinned, half-naked mountain men wheeling round and round the long train as if they were attacking their quarry.

On all sides more guns went off. Puffs of gray clouds hovered in the hot air, barely dissipating on the gentle breeze as old hands shrieked their war cries and Sublette’s greenhorns grumbled and cursed, fighting their frightened, balky mules. More and more of the company men breathlessly slowed their attack, reining up and leaning off their horses to shake hands, calling out their greetings, some even managing to hug a newcomer here or there in the ragged procession.

As he reined about, Bass saw that Campbell and the pack-train leader were remounted and loping on toward the brigade encampment, where a few well-browned lodges bordered a small glade.

By then more than three dozen Indians had splashed across the Popo Agie—warriors, women, and naked brown children, along with half a hundred barking, baying half-wild dogs who weaved between the legs of man and horse alike, adding their voices to the excitement as Campbell and Sublette slid to the ground, the reins to their horses taken by one of the company men who led the animals away.

“By damn, it’s Billy Sublette his own self!” Hatcher roared as he reined his horse from a gallop to a walk beside Titus.

“Any man know if he brung likker this year?”

Jack’s head bobbed like a young child’s on Christmas morning. “Some of them greenhorns say Sublette brung him some likker all the way from the States!”

“Damn if I could ever feel this dry again!” Scratch bellowed.

Hatcher himself dragged a forearm across his lower face. “Let’s get these here horses tied off, then get back afore that trader opens up his packs!”

But tapping those whiskey kegs wasn’t the first item of business.

As Hatcher’s men sprinted back through the trees toward Campbell’s lodge and that scattering of bowers tied here and there among the saplings, those shelters made from oiled Russian sheeting or thick Indian trade blankets, the last of the pack train reached the company camp. As the newcomers dismounted, Sublette ordered them off in one direction or another. Back in the trees the unloading of the first mules began, while at three other points to the north, east, and south more divisions were made, particular bundles dropped at each location according to the trader’s instructions.

Only then did William Sublette have one of his clerks unlash the two leather trunks from the packsaddle atop a weathered old mule the booshway kept close at hand. With both of those three-strap trunks resting at his feet, the trader knelt to unbuckle the straps across the first chest.

Quickly flinging back the top and reaching inside, Sublette said, “Bob—get that other’n open and we’ll give out the mail.”

The moment Campbell crouched over the second trunk, the anxious crowd of boisterous men began to shove close.

“Get back! Get back, there!” Sublette growled at his eager employees. “You’ll all get mail if’n you got mail comin’!”

“You heard the man!” hollered a young, clean-shaven trapper as he shouldered his way toward the center of the mass. “You damn well waited more’n a year for mail—you niggers can wait a li’l more!”

Damn, if that wasn’t Bridger himself!

“Jim!” Bass hollered, lunging toward the younger man known among his brigades as the “little booshway.”

He hadn’t given up on the mountains!

Bridger turned, his eyes squinting in the bright light, giving measure to the onrushing trapper.

“Titus Bass!” hollered Scratch as he held out his hand and came to a stop. “You ’member me from twenty-six?”

Bridger held out his hand, saying, “Titus Bass. I do recollect meeting you. Twenty-six—was it that long ago?”

“You tol’t me all ’bout your float down to the big salt, Jim!”

“Damn, if that wasn’t a time to make my bung pucker!” Bridger roared. “Good to see ol’ faces here, Titus Bass! Three y’ar now, and you still got your ha’r too!”

“Not all of it,” Bass replied, patting the back of his head, sweeping off the blue bandanna and the tanned Arapaho scalp lock without ceremonial preliminaries.

A sudden hush fell over those men in that immediate area, followed quickly by an excited murmur as even more pushed in to have themselves a look at Bass.

For his part, Bridger stood on his toes as Titus bowed and turned his head so his friend could inspect the bare skull. “Man’s gotta keep that bone covered, don’t he?”

“I do for certain, Jim!”

Sublette began calling out names, his left arm cradling a mass of folded, sealed, and posted letters as well as small wrapped packages, while Campbell unbuckled the last strap securing the top of the second trunk. He threw back the lid and stuffed both hands down into the masses of old newspapers and correspondence from loved ones and family far, far away.

Bridger’s fingers brushed the long scalp Bass held. “Injun hair?”

“Arapaho,” Scratch answered. “Last spring it happed I run onto the same nigger scalped me two year ago.”

Bridger rocked back on his heels, grinning widely. “Damn, but that’s got the makin’s of a windy tale!”

“Ain’t no bald-face to it!” Jack Hatcher cheered as he came up to slap his arm around Bass’s shoulder. “Ever’ word’s the truth!”

“The hell you say,” Jim declared. He pointed at Bass’s head. “Get that topknot of your’n covered, or you’re like to burn your brains.”

Holding the scalp on with one hand, Scratch slid the bandanna onto his head, smoothing it back from the forehead. “Out here a man’s gotta pertect what little he’s got left for brains.”

“I better see camp’s set up for the train like Billy asked me to do,” Bridger said as he began to turn away. “I figger you’ll be round for a few days afore pulling out?”

“There’s whiskey to guzzle down my gullet, Jim,” Bass exclaimed. “I ain’t pulling out till Sublette’s kegs is empty or I’m gone bust and don’t have no more beaver to trade!”

Jim asked, “Where you camped?”

“Yonder,” he answered, pointing upstream. “You’ll find us there a ways—two, maybe three rifle shots.”

“Camped just close enough to get in trouble with Billy Sublette’s whiskey!” Hatcher bellowed. “Far ’nough away for us to sleep it off when we do!”

Although Sublette announced he would not be hammering in the bungs to those whiskey kegs until the following morning, there was no dearth of gaiety that evening as twilight broke across the valley of the Popo Agie. Whiskey would be pouring soon enough, they knew, but for now the booshways stored the potent grain alcohol in Campbell’s lodge, where a rotation of trusted guards would be stationed throughout the night.

Meanwhile more of the newcomers were assigned the task of picketing the pack animals, some to erect the five large awnings under which Sublette would conduct his business from the shade. A pair of greenhorns assembled a large balance scale beneath the oiled sheeting that was to be Sublette’s headquarters, while a few trusted clerks began to unpack the trade goods, checking off every item as it emerged from those canvas and paper and blanket bundles wrapped up back in early spring, back in St. Louis, back in the far, far States of America.

Fires roared and meat roasted, coffee boiled and men laughed, pulling uproarious pranks or puffing unbelievable windies for the newcomers fresh off the prairie who suddenly found themselves here now among these half-wild veterans of the wilderness, those hivernants who had wintered in the fastness of these terrible mountains inhabited by never-before-seen savages and unimaginable beasts. This first night always served as an initiation of sorts—a tradition none too kind but always applied in good humor to those greenhorns struck dumb to suddenly discover themselves in the company of these hard cases who had survived Blackfeet and blizzards, scorching deserts and dry scrapes, men who had outlasted loneliness and deprivation … yet were willing still to risk it all again for another roll with Lady Fate’s dice.

Here and there in the bright, flickering flames, the few among them who could read each sat with a cluster of those who could not, reciting those undecipherable words written by mothers and fathers, sisters or brothers, or even more moving—soul-wrenching prose and promises written by sweethearts left behind when men abandoned hearth and homes, daring to challenge these mountains. Letters of yearning and words of caring scribbled on small sheets of foolscap, stories from home counties read from yellowed newsprint. Lockets of hair sent west many, many months before, sent beyond the wide Missouri with faith and a prayer that it would reach a beloved son, would make it to a beloved brother, by the hope of some aching heart that it might just find its way to a beau known to be somewhere out west beneath a wide and faraway sky.

Stories and news of the east were dragged from the newcomers, tales of places and rivers and towns left far behind, a long time ago. Some men laughed at themselves and traded jokes on others, while more sat on downed logs and listened with red-rimmed eyes to what was read them of home another world away. Men who sat in abject silence, listening, men who sat remembering those dim-lit faces once more, remembering the black-earthed closeness of those gently rounded hills and hardwood forests, men who thought back to how long it had been, how far they had come since choosing to leave all that had been, since choosing to cast their lot with the few, with these bravest of the brave.

Like men become so crazed, they dared not consider the odds against them. Men torn by not knowing if they ever would return to what was left behind … men not able to understand why they didn’t really care if they ever did go back.

Night came down on that far valley, the sun hiding its face beyond the Wind River Mountains. Although he had no letters, although he had no loved ones who knew where to write him—Scratch felt that here he was among his chosen brotherhood. Families were no more than a matter of chance. Here he felt himself embraced in the bosom of those who were his family of choice. Men who expected no more from him than they were willing themselves to give in return.

Songs of old leaped from those strings that Jack Hatcher pressed beneath his dancing fingers, tunes came wheezing and wailing from that squeezebox of a concertina that a weaving and bobbing Elbridge Gray clutched at the end of his outstretched arms.

Into that wide circle of fires’ light, pairs of hardened men came. Turning to bow to one another, they readily clasped hands and danced with festive abandon: whirling recklessly—ofttimes spinning one another so robustly they landed in a heap at the very edge of the merry flames, where they guffawed at one another until bounding to their feet, stomping and shimmying some more. While some preferred to imitate the fancy steps learned long ago in polite white company back east, others stomped toe and heel round and round, swooping low and howling in their own earsplitting rendition of the scalp or buffalo or war dance.

And at the border of that open-air dance floor stood those copper-skinned spectators who looked on in unabashed amazement at this unfettered celebration by men who had survived another year in the mountain trade, witnessing this raucous revelry of those who had journeyed west to join that small fraternity of white men come to challenge an unforgiving land. Shoshone males brought their women and children across the creek, here to watch impassively this annual gathering of the white man’s own noisy, strutting warrior bands.

A few like Bass turned their gaze upon this young woman or that, wondering just what it would take in the way of foofaraw to talk one of those dark-skinned beauties into the willows, to convince her to join him back into the shadows where a few minutes of fevered coupling might ease this aching woman-hunger he suffered, might quench his parched thirst for a moistened coupling with a woman soft, a woman smooth, a woman as eager as he.

Which of them might he convince that she simply could not live without a clutter of shiny beads in his palm, without a strand of red ribbon, without a tin cup filled with trader’s sugar?

Which one of those cherry-eyed squaws would eagerly hike up her short leather dress and let him spend himself inside her before he grew one day older?

The next morning Campbell’s trappers had first crack at the treasures excavated from Sublette’s packs.

Company men were first when it came to trade goods brought west by the firm of Smith, Jackson, & Sublette.

“The rest of you gonna have to wait till tomorrow,” Sublette warned the small knots of free men who had gathered by the trader’s awnings. “Might so have to wait long as the day after till we get our company business taken care of.”

There weren’t all that many free trappers in yet, nowhere near as many men as the combined brigades—considering the number Campbell brought down from the Powder River country when coupled with the fifty-four hands Sublette brought out from St. Louis. Close to a hundred men already.

And no more than two dozen free trappers on the Popo Agie.

So all Bass could do was grumble. Sit in the shade and watch the company men come and go about their company business, come and go with their company kettles filled with Sublette’s whiskey.

It was enough to make a saint cuss a blue streak, had there been a saint in that valley of the Popo Agie.

“By damned, they better leave enough wet for our whistles and a good drunk or two outta this ronnyvoo!” Hatcher snarled.

Caleb added, “That trader better leave us enough plunder to see this outfit through ’Nother winter.”

“Likker!” Jack snapped at Wood. “The rest’ll take care of itself. Long as we get some likker.”

Most of the other free trappers hung close by the trader’s awnings too—watching as Sublette’s greenhorn clerks sorted through each company man’s hides, graded them into three stacks, then lashed each stack into a bundle they hung from that huge wooden balance arm where another clerk carefully added weights until both sides swung evenly. That tally was entered in a tall leather-bound ledger—then Sublette informed that mountain employee what he had earned for the year. After the trapper had paid off what he owed from the last rendezvous, after he had settled up for any broken traps, lost tack, or busted saddles, after he had paid for a horse run off by the Crow … he would find out just how much, or how little, celebration he had in store for himself.

Lowest of the three stations of company men were the camp keepers.

“Mangeurs de lard,” Hatcher instructed Bass in the mountain man’s hierarchy.

“Parley-voos?”

“Damn right,” Jack growled with disdain. “Frenchy pork eaters. Most of ’em, leastwise.”

Hatcher went on to explain that this bottom rung had received its name because those camp keepers who had accompanied the earliest expeditions forging up the Missouri River had been French laborers who ate salted sowbelly while the Americans dined on the lean red meat of game hunted on either shore. No better than slavery, Bass figured—forced to perform every dirty, menial task the booshway ordered.

“Company trappers are up from there a big notch,” Jack continued. “It’s where a man with any pluck at all got him a chance to show he’s up to Green River,” referring to that company’s name engraved right at the guard of their knife blades, clearly meaning a trapper who made the supreme effort to plunge into any effort clear up to the hilt. “That man’s got him a chance to prove he’s got the makings of a mountain man.”

While company trappers still had to do whatever task the booshway assigned, their reward nonetheless remained the coming season to show their brigade leaders that they could make a profit for the company as well as hanging on to their hair.

And if a man survived, then someone like Campbell or Sublette or Jackson could promote that man to the top rung of “skin trapper.” Such a man signed on with the company but with no guarantee of wages. When he moved up from company to skin trapper, a man indebted himself for company equipment at the same time he swore to sell his furs only to the company at what price the company quoted. And if there was anything left over when his accounts were settled, then the skin trapper could more than satisfy his thirst for whiskey, or have enough in trade to buy himself a squaw for a night or two, perhaps enough to purchase himself a wife, who would accompany the brigade wherever it wandered in the coming seasons.

But above all three ranks of company men stood the most coveted class of all: the free trappers.

While they might be forced to wait until the trader dispensed with his hirelings, those free men had what Sublette desired most: the finest of plews brought to rendezvous by the “master trappers,” men who traversed the high country on their own hook, beholden to no booshway, in debt to no company.

While the Smith, Jackson, & Sublette men still wore a frontiersman’s wool or leather breeches and some sort of linen or calico shirt, most free trappers gaily sported Indian leggings and war shirt, the twisted fringes of which were caparisoned with tiny brass hawk’s bells, steel sewing thimbles, or strewn with Indian scalplocks, leather garments decorated with wide bands of brightly colored porcupine quillwork. Beneath that outer layer of warrior’s clothing they wore a greasy, soiled, and sooted cloth shirt and woolen longhandles when the seasons turned cold.

Many plaited their hair in two long braids, tied up in bright ribbons of red trade wool or wrapped with otter skin. They daubed purple vermilion down the center part in their hair, often smeared earth paint on their severely tanned faces, and trailed long fringes or small animal skins from the heels of their moccasins. Some ambled about camp wearing a colorfully striped blanket belted around their waist in the fashion of a tribal chief, while others brandished a wide wool sash finger-woven back in eastern woodlands, where they stuffed a brace of pistols, a tomahawk, and perhaps the long stem to their personal smoking pipe.

How plain it was that this breed prided themselves on just how much like an Indian they appeared—but for the long, shaggy, ofttimes braided beards. Oh, how they seized this chance to swagger and strut before Sublette’s gaping greenhorns and mule-eyed pilgrims come fresh-as-dew to the far west.

It was just as clear that such men would never again feel comfortable setting their feet down among civilized company. Doubtful was it that any of their breed would ever return east. Little, if anything, remained for them back there in what had been.

As the long morning dragged on, Titus returned to wait out the hours in camp with Rufus, Elbridge, and the others. To kill some of the time, he brought both Hannah and his saddle horse into camp, securing them to a tree branch while he went to work fancying them up in the fashion of an Indian warrior. First he tied up their tails just as a man would do when about to ride off on the warpath. Then he braided their forelocks with narrow strips of varicolored Mexican ribbon he swapped from Caleb Wood for a single plew of beaver. Next Scratch braided the manes of both with more of that ribbon and looped in a half-dozen feathers from a golden eagle that Bird in Ground had killed during his first winter with the Crow. And finally he made a thick paste from the white clay he discovered in an alkali bed along the creek, using it to paint crude lightning bolts and hailstones, even pressing his own handprints along the neck and flank of both horse and Hannah.

That task complete, Bass collapsed against a huge Cottonwood, where he dozed as the air warmed and the flies droned.

Later that afternoon he meticulously honed his knife and camp ax on a stone and steel, then cleaned his weapons before he finally decided to run some balls for both pistol and rifle: melting bars of soft Galena lead in a small pot from which he dipped tiny ladles of the molten silver and poured the liquid into the round cavity of his bullet molds. Hot work this was at the edge of a fire in this midsummer heat, but that sweaty job was one task more that helped him pass the hours while the free trappers waited for their crack at Sublette’s treasures.

After supper of elk tenderloin, buffalo tongue, and prairie oysters, he joined Hatcher, Fish, and Wood as they moseyed off for the company camp at twilight.

“I would’ve figgered a bunch the size of Campbell’s outfit would’ve had ’em more beaver took in,” Jack appraised as they came to a halt near Sublette’s awnings, where a handful of men still clustered around the stacks of blankets and crates of goods, arguing this point or that with the trader’s clerks.

“Maybeso that Powder ain’t so prime a country as it be back toward the mountains,” Bass observed.

“Not for beaver, it ain’t,” Solomon added.

“If’n a man wants to hunt him prime plew,” Caleb declared, “that nigger’s gotta stick his neck out some.”

“I ain’t never been afraid to stick my neck out some,” Jack said. “Way I see it—to get us the best fur, we gotta trap the edge of Blackfoot country … but I don’t aim to lay a trap where I’ll get my hull damned head cut off!”

Bass spread his fingers and ran them through the skins at the very top of three tall stacks of pelts under the wary eye of a Sublette clerk. “Our fur looks a damned sight better’n this here, fellas.”

“It ought’n be better,” Solomon grumbled. “We damned near lost our hair to Bug’s Boys trapping that beaver!”

“Bug’s Boys?” the greenhorn behind the beaver pelts repeated.

Hatcher gazed at the man fresh out of the settlements. “Ye ever hear tell of Blackfoot, mister?”

“Blackfoot? I heard tell of ’em, yeah. Sublette says the Englishers set them Blackfoot out to kill off Americans like his men.”

“Damn them black-hearted bastards,” Solomon growled. “Too many good men gone under at their hands.”

“Sublette says the Blackfoot is why Davy Jackson ain’t come in to Popo Agie yet.”

Titus asked, “Trader figgers Jackson’s gone under?”

The man’s head bobbed, his fleshy jowls quivering like the wattle at the neck of a tom turkey. “Maybe his whole outfit too. Just like Jed Smith—the other’n who’s a company partner. Word is he’s dead somewhere far west of here with all his men. Been two years now, and Smith ain’t showed up at rendezvous.”

“So Sublette figgers Jackson’s been rubbed out too?” Solomon repeated.

Leaning an elbow on a stack of pelts, the clerk said, “Jackson was up in Flathead country. And Sublette says that’s right near Blackfoot country. I suppose it ain’t hard to figure Jackson’s run into trouble and got himself killed too.”

Caleb clucked, “Damn well might be a real stroke of luck, for that leaves Sublette the whole company, don’t it?”

“Maybe, but Mr. Sublette figures to wait on here for a week or little more, then if Mr. Jackson doesn’t show, Mr. Sublette said he’s going to head on west to the Snake River with what he’s got in supplies to search for some sign of Jackson’s brigade before he turns back for the fall hunt.”

“That Smith feller’s gone,” Hatcher observed flatly. “This long and ain’t none of his bunch showed … why, it’s for sartin he’s been rubbed out. But Jackson, now, that’s a savvy booshway. I reckon he could pull his fat out of just about any fire.”

Caleb asked, “Sublette say if he figgered this was a good year for beaver?”

“I saw him just twice today, when he come around my tent with Campbell.” The clerk wagged his head and rolled his eyes heavenward. “Mr. Sublette just shook his head each time he looked through them furs his men brought in over the last season.”

“Don’t sound like he’s a happy man to me,” Bass observed.

“Not when he don’t have near all the beaver he was counting on taking in,” the clerk stated.

“And now he figgers he lost him his two partners,” Solomon added.

“So tell me if Sublette’s gonna trade for our furs come tomorrow?” Titus asked.

“He ain’t said nothing ’bout it, neither way,” the clerk admitted. “But from what I see, he’ll likely open up trade with all you fellers come morning. There ain’t any more company fur to take in. Leastways, not till he finds. Jackson’s brigade.”

“If he finds ’em at all,” Hatcher declared.

“What’s your tobaccy?” Scratch inquired of the hawk-nosed clerk who stood impassively writing down the value of the pelts another of Sublette’s employees was reciting from his weighing of Titus Bass’s plews.

“You buy your supplies down there.” The man jabbed a finger at another awning. “I just record your take.”

Bass felt as if Sublette and the company had everything arranged just so they could skin a cat every which way of Sunday. No matter if a man worked hard trapping, skinning, fleshing, and packing them beaver plews all the way through from last autumn, the St. Louis trader always held the high cards. But for those suspicious Mexicans down in Taos, there wasn’t another trader for better than eighteen hundred miles of the Popo Agie.

“This all you’re trading in?”

Bass looked up at the second of the clerks, a moon-faced man without distinguishable characteristics: he looked like every other settlement sort, town hanger, and citified nabob.

“That’s all I’m trading with you.”

The man went back to peering down at his ledger, dipped his quill, and went back to writing. “Not a good year for you, was it?”

“That ain’t all the fur I got.”

The clerk stopped his hand and glared at Scratch with the crimson creeping up from his neck. “I just asked you … if this was all you was trading.”

“It is,” Scratch repeated, flashing the man his teeth. “But it ain’t all I caught. Only what I trapped this last spring.”

Now the clerk was clearly angry at the confusion caused him. He sputtered for a moment, his face growing as red as the Indian paintbrush that dotted this high valley in early summer. “Do you want to do business with us or—”

“I ain’t got no more furs to trade to you,” Titus explained, eager to settle the dust. “The rest I sold in Taos last winter.”

With a great rush of air the clerk sighed as if he had been asked to coax milk from a stone. “Very well.”

Back to his ledger he went, wagging his head slightly as he added and carried numbers from column to column. While the clerk finished his computations, Bass gazed over at the rest who had finished this grueling part of the process. Hatcher and the others already stood among the stacks and kegs, crates and boxes of trade goods—fingering this and that, chattering excitedly about most everything they picked up and held to the light. There remained no more than a handful of other free men waiting patiently behind Scratch for their turn at the trader’s scales.

The clerk carefully tore a strip from the bottom of his ledger page and handed it to another man, who stuffed the strip of paper beneath the rope holding together Bass’s beaver skins. Then the hawk-nosed man wrote a little more and tore another strip of paper from the bottom of the page.

He held it out to Bass.

“Here’s your credit.”

“My credit—for over at the store?”

The clerk looked past Scratch at the trapper pushing up behind him. “Next! You’re next, now—come along lively!”

Pressed from behind, Bass stepped aside, trying to hold the rustling strip of paper still enough to read it in the breeze. It was hard for him to make out that writing scratched on the white foolscap beneath the glare from the summer sun. Stepping into the shade beneath the edge of an awning, Titus studied the marks again. Several words were scrawled there, that much he was sure of. And beneath each of them a number. In addition, at the far end of the strip was a fourth number, written bigger than the rest, and circled as well.

“Scratch—how much you got to spend?”

He looked up, finding Rufus Graham before him. “You read this?”

Rufus shook his head. “Can’t read a’t’all.”

“Near as I make it, I got me a few hundred dollars for supplies.”

“How much hundreds?”

“That looks like a nine,” he answered, squinting his eyes as his dirty fingernail pointed out a number. “Damn, but I never was a good one at ciphering numbers. Could do it once, but it’s been too long since I done any of that.”

“None of the others can help you neither,” Graham admitted. “None of us read.”

“S’all right,” he sighed, looking up. “Only place I can spend it is here anyways.”

“’Cept you go back to Taos.”

“Ain’t a chance of that,” Titus said, starting toward the rest, who were dickering with a pair of clerks beneath a far awning.

“This here tobaccy ain’t half-bad!” Caleb declared as he turned toward Bass when the two walked up to the others.

“Better’n Mexican,” Hatcher agreed.

Scratch asked, “How much?”

The clerk perched behind the wooden crates holding several hundredweight of twisted brown carrots of tobacco declared, “Two dollar the pound.”

“Same as it’s been for the last two year,” Isaac stated.

“Damn good thing too,” Bass grumbled. “Missed out on American tobaccy last year.”

Asked the clerk, “You’re ready to buy?”

“I damn well waited the better part of a day and a goddamned half to buy,” Titus snapped. “If’n that don’t take the circle! You better believe I’m ready—”

“Where’s your paper?” the clerk interrupted.

Handing the man his slip, Bass watched the clerk glance quickly at the numbers, then look over at the first of Sublette’s men. “This here right?”

“What’s right?” the other civilian asked.

“This says five hundred fifty-nine?”

The man glanced at Bass a moment before he remembered. “Five hundred fifty-nine is the right amount.”

As the first clerk went back to grading and weighing pelts, the store clerk said, “Take your pick,” and began to write in his own ledger. “You got enough to near buy what all you want.”

“Damn,” Titus said as it began to hit him. “I ain’t really had no chance to buy nothing but what it took to live on for so long now—I … I don’t know how to act, boys.”

“What you need?” Solomon said as he came up and laid a hand on Bass’s shoulder.

Hatcher chuckled, bursting out with, “The nigger needs just ’bout ever’thing!”

“I got me a gun,” Bass said.

“You need a pistol?” asked the clerk.

“I got the one Hatcher loaned me,” he replied. “How much are those you’re selling?”

“They’re smoothbore, sixty caliber—sell for fifty dollars.”

“Oooo!” exclaimed Caleb. “That hurts.”

Hatcher came up to stand beside Titus, saying, “You go ahead on and keep that’n I loaned ye long as ye want.”

“If I can buy me my own, I’ll do that. Much ’bliged, Jack,” he said, then turned back to the clerk. “Gimme one of them pistols to look at.”

After he started inspecting the weapon, slowly dragging back the big hammer to check the crispness of the lock, holding it against his ear to listen to the action, Bass had the clerk hold up this or that, quoting one price after another.

Closing his eyes in sensual pleasure, Scratch sniffed at the bag of green coffee beans below his nose.

“Two dollar a pound.”

“Better weigh out twenty-five pounds. How’s your powder?”

“Best grade is two-fifty the pound.”

Titus turned to Hatcher and Gray. “You figger it’s better’n that Mex powder we got along?”

“Gotta be,” Jack replied.

“It’s American,” the clerk asserted. “Du Pont.”

“All right,” and Scratch nodded. “I’ll take fifty pounds. What’s Galena?”

“Lead’s only a dollar and a half.”

“We got us some of that Taos lead from down in the Mexican mines,” Rufus said.

Bass cogitated a few moments, staring up at the underside of the awning over his head as the sun baked down on them. “I’ll take me a guess and go with seventy-five pounds. And I need me some good awls.”

The clerk spun around and swept up a sample from the boxes behind him. “These are three for fifty cents.”

They appeared sturdy with their fire-hardened steel points and hardwood handle. “Gimme six.”

Solomon asked, “You want ’Nother blanket?”

So Bass looked at the clerk, “How much?”

“White blankets for twenty dollars.”

“That’s a lot just to keep a man warm,” Bass grumbled.

The easterner said, “You want it sewed into a capote, them are only twenty-five each.”

“How much your striped blankets?”

“They ain’t near as much,” Hatcher explained. “He’s charging just fifteen dollar for striped ones.”

“Because they ain’t as big as the white ones,” the clerk declared.

“Better gimme a white blanket.”

As the clerk returned with the neatly folded blanket, he asked, “Need any pepper or salt?”

Scratch shook his head. “Got plenty of that down to Taos last winter.”

“Beads-or ribbon?”

“What do them hanks of beads cost a man?”

Shoving forward that heavy tray containing thick hanks of the big colored variety commonly called pony beads, the clerk answered, “Five dollars a pound.”

“Show me how much a pound is,” Bass requested.

In a moment the man had weighed out several hanks of the various colors. “That’s five pounds. So it’ll be twenty-five dollars.”

“All right,” Titus said with a smile. “I’ll take them five pounds, but put back them white and black’uns—gimme only them real purty colors: like that green and blue, the yellow and that blood color too. See that brown, gimme that too.”

“You need nails?” the clerk asked after he had laid out the long hanks of beads atop the white blanket.

“Lemme see what you have.”

After inspecting the various sizes of short brass nails a man used for both repair and decoration, he asked, “How much?”

“Fifty cents a dozen.”

“Let’s see—five dozen of ’em oughtta do.”

“You want any ribbons?”

“Show me what you got to trade.”

The clerk brought out a box containing a rainbow of cotton ribbon. “It’s six bits the yard.”

“Better let me have my pick of ten yards.”

“I figure you’ll want some bolt cloth too, won’t you, mister?” and he patted a stack of different patterns and colors.

“Tell me how much that’ll cost me.”

As he started down the stack of bolts, the clerk called out the prices, “This here scarlet is the best grade. Mr. Sublette likes it best too. It’s a wool. Goes for ten dollars.”

“Ten dollars a yard?”

“A yard. The coarse blue is eight dollars. But the calico here is only two-fifty.”

“What’s that on the bottom?” he asked, pointing.

“Striped cotton. It’s a soft material like the calico.”

“Sounds like I can get me a lot more of that ’stead of the coarse cloth,” Bass declared. “Let’s say … ten yards of each of them two. Show me how much cloth that’ll be.”

After Scratch had seen just how much twenty yards of material would be, he felt himself growing more excited about the possibilities—staring again at the various colors of the beads, figuring gifts like these would be able to communicate where his rudimentary talents with the Shoshone tongue left off.

“You got some vermilion, don’t you?”

“Chinee, I do,” the clerk replied. Returning to the rough-hewn plank, he held up a wooden tray that contained a profusion of small waxed packets the size of a man’s fist, one of which he opened to show the deep-purple pigment. “It ain’t cheap.”

“How much?” Hatcher asked.

“Six dollars a pound.”

Bass scratched the end of his nose, sensing the eyes of the others riveted on him. “Better make it five pounds.”

“All that red paint for you, Scratch?” Rufus asked.

“Shit!” Caleb snorted. “It ain’t all for him, you idjit! Scratch’s gonna get his stinger wet with that Chinee vermilion!”

Graham wagged his head in doleful confusion. “How’s Scratch gonna get his stinger wet with …” Then it struck him like a bolt of summer thunder. “Say! You’re gonna get yourself one of them Sho’nie gals, ain’cha?”

Bass winked and turned back to the clerk. “Show me what you got in wiping sticks and flints.”

“Good hickory, these be,” the clerk replied, turning back to his crates. “And for flints: we got English and French.”

“Get them French ambers,” Hatcher suggested. “Likely we’ll pay more for ’em, but they’ll last longer’n the English.”

By the time he had picked out a bundle of two dozen straight-grained hickory wiping sticks, as well as three pounds of the pale amber flints imported from France, along with several handfuls of assorted screws and worms for gun repair and cleaning, he finally asked the clerk to total it all up. He looked again over at his stack of pelts beneath that first awning, remembering just how many plews he had sent downriver with Silas Cooper. Then he suddenly squeezed his eyes closed in that way he hoped would shut off the terrible memory.

Letting out a long sigh, the trader’s employee came back to the free men and announced, “That all comes to four hundred seventy-three.”

Several of the others whistled low, but Bass remained undismayed. “What’s that leave me?”

“Eighty-six.”

Scratch licked his lips and asked, “So how much is your whiskey?”

“He don’t just wanna get his stinger wet!” Caleb hooted behind him. “Bass wants to get his gullet scrubbed too!”

“Damn right I do!”

The clerk cleared his throat. “Whiskey sells two dollar the pint.”

He squinted again, trying to imagine how much a pint was. “How much is that a gallon?”

“Eight dollars.”

For a moment more Scratch looked around at the other six trappers. “I got enough for three gallons start off with?”

“That’s twenty-four dollars. And you’ll have a little money left over for some more.”

“That’s the way I want it,” Bass said with satisfaction. “Go get a kettle, one of you.”

“I ain’t gotta go anywhere to get a goddanged kettle,” Caleb yelled with glee, leaning over to retrieve the kettle he had purchased from the ground. “Here, mister—put a gallon of that likker right in here.”

The clerk looked at Bass.

At which Scratch roared, “You heard the man. This here’s a free man, master trapper in the Rocky—by God—Mountains. So you better pour us some whiskey in that kettle and give me my trade goods … then step back outta our way, ’cause these here cocks o’ the walk are struttin’ bold and brassy tonight!”