Crack in the Sky

17

Pushed up against the late-summer sky stood over a hundred hide lodges, brown as a Snake woman’s breast. While both the Shoshone and the Flathead bands chose to spread the horns of their camp circles across the valley floor itself, the white trappers had spread their blankets and raised their canvas shelters back against the trees that bordered this stream flowing right out of the snowfields still mantling the Tetons like a creamy shawl.

Here tarried the morning shadows, and cool mists clung to the surface of every narrow thread of water draining both the Teton and Big Hole ranges that defined this long, narrow valley. There was wood and water and graze enough for those hundreds of Indians and something on the order of 175 white men. With those who had followed Milt Sublette into the Bighorn country, all told, Bass reckoned that there was no more than 220 Americans working the mountains of the far west. A damned rare breed what wandered about in all that lonesome country.

The face of a white man wasn’t so common a sight—not yet, he figured that August morning. And he thought back to all those days and weeks and more he had spent on his own—alone by choice, or made lonely by chance. How many times in the past two years had he just wished he could go without hearing another human voice? If only for a whole day. If only to go for enough days with nothing but the soothing quiet of the wilderness itself until that quiet became so overpowering that he could then seek out his own kind.

As long as he had yearned for that rendezvous on the Popo Agie, as much as he had reveled in this even bigger, bawdier Pierre’s Hole rendezvous, Bass awoke before sunup this morning, unable to go back to sleep. Restless, unsettled, not knowing what it was plaguing him with a nagging itch he’d have to find some way to scratch.

On the Popo Agie and again here, there had been enough copper flesh pressed against his to sate the woman-hunger until another winter had arrived. Enough too of the numbing alcohol to remind Titus of just how much a fool it could make him and the others as they rolled and wrestled and romped like the young pups none of them were any longer.

Two years now, he thought again—awakened and restless in that predawn darkness. And peered at the six long mounds that were Hatcher and his men cocooned in their blankets. Good men. Men who had saved his life, taken him in, made Bass one of their own. Men who had shown him the very best of the beaver ground in the Bayou Salade, then introduced him proper to Mexican territory, Taos lightning, and those gringo-loving senoritas.

Two years now …

Was there such a thing as too much companionship?

He grappled with that dilemma as he stared into the dark and impatiently waited for morning to come. Was this an itch to strike out on his own, or only that annual itch to be done with this summer fair and on to the autumn hunt, planning his winter ground, cogitating on where spring would find him breaking ice to set his traps?

So Scratch watched the light come creeping across the horizon, nothing more than a graying of the sky behind the jagged spires of those Pilot Knobs that rose so stately there could be no denying that a man must surely feel himself anointed to be here in this high kingdom, must surely consider himself one of the chosen to step foot in this virgin land … in some way embraced as one of the few who would ever get a glimpse of what lay beyond this world and into the next. So high, so high did they travel that such men as he should surely see right on through the sky.

For too long he had lived in one place. Was it only that his moccasins grew itchy, and he grew anxious to be on the tramp again? Trapped back east among so many people for most of his life, to discover so late what a balm the aloneness could be for his soul. To discover just what the silence in all that was outside of him could do to create serenity for all that rested inside at the marrow of him.

Gone to the banks of the stream as the sun brushed the sky to blue and the Indian camps came alive, Bass splashed cold water on his face, then pushed himself out over the water on locked elbows, dipping his chin right into the bracing liquid so shocking it made him gasp. On the far side sat some women bathing their tiny naked ones in the grass, the children stoic and mute as the sparkling droplets tumbled from their shivering bodies onto the lush green blanket of trampled grass. As he stood, and finally turned to move away, the giggle of children drew him past some tall, concealing willow to find a trio of girls busily chasing a huge bullsnake with their sticks through the grass and brush.

They reminded him of little ones in those camps of the Ute, Crow, and Shoshone where he had passed winters at peace. During those long cold moons the warrior bands were content not to move until the village decided to pick up and find another valley when the wood ran low, or the game disappeared, or the ponies required more of the autumn-cured grass.

Perhaps the warrior had it right, after all, Scratch brooded as he headed downstream toward the Flathead camp.

Indian males celebrated their togetherness in many ways: in the buffalo hunt, at pipe ceremonies, making war, and with those informal talks on all manner of things as they sat in the warm sun while their women went about the camp chores. But, too, many were the warriors he had known who would set off on their own for the hunt, or eager to earn themselves a battle honor, perhaps to steal horses, or only to find an answer to their seeking somewhere on high.

Suddenly stopping dead in his tracks, Scratch nodded emphatically. Although he was alone, he spoke out loud.

“Yes.”

Having decided answers came only to those who took their own path.

All a man found among others was the noisy answers that fit only those other men: a garbled babble of talk that was hard to divine.

To find his way back to that serenity he had first discovered in this huge land, Bass realized he had to make his way back toward solitude.

Barefoot and dressed in nothing more than tiny strips of cloth that served as breechclouts held around their waists by narrow rawhide strings, a half-dozen little boys came chasing after another handful as he neared the outer lodges of the village. Yelling taunts and shouting encouragement to one another, flinging their sapling lances or shooting their boyhood bows, they played at these deadly lessons of warfare, this study of dying and death learned so young.

At the edge of a morning fire sat a young woman who glanced up at the white man walking past. In her lap she cradled the head of her free-trapper husband, his eyes closed in exquisite relaxation. Carefully the Flathead squaw parted her husband’s coal-black hair, inspecting the scalp painstakingly—until she found another louse, which she seized and cracked between her teeth before tossing it into the fire, then continued her search for the next.

Men and women came and went on foot, or on horseback. Warriors rode past bareback, the expressive eyes in their impassive faces locked on some nether point and never touching his. Girls of marrying age watched him pass as they whispered to one another, their sparkling eyes gleeful above the hands they held over their mouths as they shared secrets about him, giggling coyly, playful at the arts of catching themselves a mate.

“Mr. Bass!”

He stopped, turning toward the sound of the voice, searching for the caller. Ahead in the shadows stood a small group of Flathead warriors, busy with some concern near a lodge door. One of the men waved, called out.

“Ho, Mr. Bass!”

Only then did he see how that warrior differed from the others. While the rest wore their hair plaited, braided, adorned, and unmistakably black, the one who called wore white.

“McAfferty? That you?”

Asa stepped away from the Flathead men. “You was up early—gone afore I rolled out this morning.”

“Didn’t sleep in.”

“I see’d such is the way about you,” McAfferty said as he came to a halt before Bass. “That what makes you so damned good a trapper?”

He grinned. “Maybeso, Asa. Get them flat-tails afore the day gets old.” Then, with a gesture, he asked, “What brings you to the Flatheads so early of the day?”

Shrugging, McAfferty replied, “I happed to spend me some of last winter with this very bunch. Stayed on in their country for spring trapping.”

“Spring gotta come late that far north.”

Shuddering slightly, Asa declared, “No truer words was ever spoke. I was hunting on my own hook and about to mosey south for ronnyvoo when I run onto some of Davy Jackson’s boys. Said they was soon to start back to join up with their booshway so to make their way to ronnyvoo their own selves. Sounded like a fine notion to me.”

Bass felt the sensation grow strong deep within him: something snagging his curiosity, pulling at it like the hooked claw of a golden eagle tearing at the body of its prey, peeling it back and making him suddenly aware of what lay beneath.

“You said you was … was on your own hook?”

McAfferty looked at him strangely a moment before answering, “Didn’t none of Jack’s boys tell you how I come to part company with ’em?”

“S’pose they did, yes.”

Asa stared off toward that far border of trees where the white men had their camp. “I ain’t one to stay with a gaggle of fellers, not for long I ain’t.”

“They said you up and had to take your own way.”

“Now, don’t go getting me wrong, Mr. Bass. Ain’t but a few men near as good as Jack Hatcher to lead a bunch of niggers what want to go their own road and do things their own way. And the rest … why, I likes some better’n others, but that’s a bunch what’ll be there when it comes time for the nut-cuttin’.”

Scratch nodded. “They’ve been at my back ever’ time I’ve needed some backing up. Never let me down, not once.”

“And they won’t. That just ain’t their way,” Asa argued. Then he seemed to regard the man before him carefully until he said, “You ain’t really the sort what cottons to a lot of folks around either, are you, Mr. Bass?”

“S’pose I’m not,” he admitted.

“How long you say you been with Jack’s outfit?”

“Almost two years now since I got my hair stole and Jack’s bunch run onto me up by the Wind River hills.”

With a cluck McAfferty replied, “That’s a long time for a man such as yourself to stay hooked up with others.”

“Maybeso. Then again, maybe not.”

“For some men, like the rest of them what been together for years and years now, it ain’t nothing to run in a pack with others winter after winter.”

Scratch looked deep into McAfferty’s icy blue eyes. “But for you?”

“For me?” he asked, then sighed. “I ain’t like most. Had my fill of faithless folks long time back. East it was. For winters now I ain’t been the sort to stay on with this bunch or that very long at all. Sets better by me to have my friends, spend time, trap, and winter up with ’em … then move on afore we find we ain’t friends no more. Maybeso that makes me a hard one to live with, eh, Mr. Bass?”

“None of ’em claimed you was a hard keeper, McAfferty.”

“I ’spect they wouldn’t—that’s why I moved on after a couple seasons with them boys. Took off afore we wasn’t friends no more. Do you figger it’s wrong to ride off before being round others starts to stick in my craw? Is it wrong that I pack up plunder and plews and get high behind down my own trail?”

“Don’t sound unreasonable to me, if’n a man’s made of such,” Bass declared.

“You the sort what likes to mosey on his own, Mr. Bass?”

“I …” And Scratch paused a moment, reflecting, “I s’pose I am. Truly.”

“Never was much a joiner, was you?”

“Can’t say I was.”

Then McAfferty’s eyes narrowed as he gazed at Titus. “The trapping’s better when there ain’t so many to split the take.”

With a shrug Bass said, “We allays worked our own places on the stream. Never was a problem for me.”

“Just give yourself a shake or two and think on it. How good you’d do ’thout all them others working that same stream.”

“It ain’t all about the beaver—”

But McAfferty grabbed hold of Bass’s elbow and turned him so they directly faced the west slope of the Tetons. With an arm, he waved slowly across their granite ruggedness, saying, “Now, look up there and tell me how good you’d do in beaver country, if you was the only one working a stream. Maybeso it’s only you and ’Nother trapper.”

He turned to appraise Asa. “I had me a good spring what got me a fine hurraw on the Popo Agie. Had me ’nough plews last fall to get me a fine winter down to Taos too.”

“Fine place, ain’t that Taos?” McAfferty said in a low voice, letting go of Bass’s elbow and licking his lips almost as if remembering the taste of aguardiente and Mexican tobacco.

“Catched all the beaver I needed to outfit for me ’Nother year, ’long with a little likker—”

“But think of what you’d have if all them beaver been your own.”

Wagging his head, Scratch said, “A man don’t need all the beaver to hisself.”

McAfferty stepped right around in front of Titus again, toe to toe. “But there’s some men what need one hell of a lot of country for their own. Now, you just try to tell me I got you wrong, Mr. Bass. You tell me you ain’t one to wanna drink up all that big space out there for your own self.”

“I … I ain’t never thought about—”

“You tell me you ain’t the sort what wouldn’t jump at the chance to see new country, country where you chose to go—not where you foller along behind the rest.”

He shook his head, as if it didn’t make sense. “Much as I fought me Blackfoot, I ain’t so damned certain a man on his lonesome ain’t a crazy nigger just waiting to die.”

Asa rocked back on his heels a moment. “So you’re the sort figgers you wanna die in a tick bed back east somewheres, white folk’ sheets pulled up around as you go off to sleep, eh?”

“Damn well don’t.”

McAfferty’s booming voice beginning to rise dramatically, Asa stated, “Then set off on your own hook—and say to hell with Blackfoot country when there’s more land to see than you and I both’ll ever lay eyes on in our natural lives.”

If it wasn’t downright contagious, just the way this ex-circuit-riding preacher man stirred up the juices within him.

“You understand that, don’t you, Mr. Bass?” McAfferty said. “You don’t have to trap Blackfoot country, less’n you cotton to the idee of losing more of your scalp.”

“Lost all I wanna lose—”

“There’s country far south of here what ain’t had a trap set in it. Ever.”

“There’s country like that down to Taos?”

McAfferty wagged his white mane vigorously. “I ain’t talking about Taos, or that Santa Fe country. I’ve heard tell of other rivers what take a man off torst the Californios.”

“There’s beaver there?”

“There’s beaver on the Heely!”

Scratch swallowed hard, considering, weighing, hefting it the way he would hoist his trap sack first thing of an evening as he went out to make his sets.

Eventually Titus asked, “Ain’t a white man been there afore?”

“Not one I hear tell of ever set a mokerson down out in that country.”

Bass finally tore his eyes from McAfferty’s convincing gaze to stare again at the deep-purple-hued peaks. “Sounds to me like you’re talking about a couple fellers throwing in together, Asa. Them two fellers what Jack and the rest of his bunch says’re the best trappers in these here mountains.”

Asa stepped up so close that Scratch could feel the warmth in the man’s breath as he spoke, their noses all but touching as they locked eyes. “I’m saying you throw in with me, Mr. Bass—and you ain’t ever gonna wish you hadn’t. There’s streams out there so thick with beaver, a man don’t have to … but you said it ain’t the beaver you’re here for, is it, Mr. Bass?”

“The plews keep me in coffee and powder,” Titus declared. “The fur buys the geegaws for a squaw or two—”

“But the beaver ain’t what brought you,” McAfferty interrupted, a single finger tapping against Bass’s breastbone. “And that beaver ain’t what keeps you here either.”

Right there, staring into the depths of that man’s blue eyes, he was certain McAfferty was peering right on down into his very soul. Finding the truth there that he himself had rarely considered, if ever admitted to. Perhaps this was the same powerful pull that he had seen drag grown-up folks out of those crowds gathered on the banks of rivers back east in Kentucky where he had grown up, the lure that pulled men and women right out of the crowd to join a preacher man standing waist-deep down in the stream, the same seductive call that caused those people to turn themselves over to that preacher and have themselves laid back in the water within the cradle of his arms….

“I ain’t so sure—”

“You’re certain enough that you don’t belong in no outfit no more, Mr. Bass,” Asa interrupted, his voice softer now.

“Don’t mean I can just ride off from Jack and the others—”

“And I ain’t expecting you to,” McAfferty whispered. “You wanna hook up with me?”

“Hadn’t thought ’bout it afore.”

“But you’re thinking ’bout it now.”

He finally nodded.

“Telling ’em’s a simple thing,” Asa explained. “Jack Hatcher’s the sort what understands. Time came for me to go, I set it by him and he didn’t stand in my way.”

Bass nodded again, then said, “So did Matthew Kinkead, and Johnny Rowland too.”

“Them too, yes,” McAfferty echoed. “Comes a time when a man must make his own way and don’t follow the shadow of others.”

“I’m a better trapper’n any of ’em,” Scratch declared, surprising himself.

“You ought’n be showed for just how good you are!”

Scratch turned and gazed at the distant trees across the creek, off in the direction where he had pitched camp with Jack Hatcher’s bunch. Where Asa McAfferty camped too. Then he peered back at the white-head. At last he spoke.

“Where’s that country you said ain’t never had a trap laid down in it that you know of?”

“On the Heely.”

“I s’pose you’re right that if nary a white man ever set a foot down in that country,” Titus confirmed, “then it bears out that there ain’t never been no traps set along those rivers.”

McAfferty’s eyes widened, a smile crinkling that stark white beard. “No one there, Mr. Bass. No one … but Injuns.”

It felt as if the very air around him were sucking him dry.

Not anything like the steamy country back where Bass had grown up along the Ohio and the Mississippi: where a man slowly simmered in his own juices.

Out here far beyond the western slopes of the southern Rockies they had confronted an unimaginable heat, the air around them so hot, Scratch figured it could boil fat off a flea. The sunlight grew so intense that several times a day Scratch swore his skin was shriveling, becoming just as crisp as those cracklins his mam used to fry up for him back in Kentucky … so stark and white was the radiance all around him that it felt as if his eyes were melting while he struggled to focus them on the dancing horizon, everything shimmering in the distance through the midst of that incomprehensible heat.

And the farther south they pushed, the hotter it became.

They desperately needed to find water for their animals, for themselves, before there was nothing left of him but a cracklin like those pan-fried pork rinds his grandpap had so loved to eat. Just to find a pool in some stream deep enough for him to sit—even to lie right down in—submerged right up to his chin so every square inch of his body could soak up that blessed moisture.

Titus didn’t know what was worse: sizzling beneath his thick buckskin war shirt as they plodded on hour after hour, or how the sun’s powerful rays penetrated right on through that old linsey-woolsey shirt he wore under the buckskin, soaking up the sweat. This morning both he and McAfferty had decided to strip to the waist about the same time, lashing their garments behind their saddles as they kept on moving. It didn’t take long for Scratch to realize just how big a mistake that was.

By midafternoon, with the sun still hanging high and seemingly reluctant to begin its slide into the west, Bass realized he was growing light-headed. Strangely … dreamlike. Everything he peered at around him had an unreal quality to it, shimmering, all the edges ill defined and watery, every object pale, all but translucent as they were swallowed up in the endless waves of heat rising from sand and rock and brush alike.

Up ahead of him a few yards McAfferty slowly keeled to the side in his saddle, tipping so far this time that he spilled off in a heap, sprawled on the hot-baked hardpan.

Of a sudden it became an insurmountable struggle for Bass to get the reins pulled back and halt his horse. He sat there a moment, huffing with exhaustion, wavering in the saddle himself, staring at McAfferty’s body lying just as twisted as one of his sister’s sock dolls on the sand-flecked, sunburned grass while he sorted out just what he would do to get himself off his horse.

His head swimming, Scratch leaned until he felt all his weight shifted to his right leg, pain crying out in that foot stuffed in its wide cottonwood stirrup. As he brought his free leg up, he lost control, spinning out of the saddle, losing his balance, careening onto the ground, landing on his back to stare at the pale, fiery sky and that unblinking yellow eye, with that one foot still tangled in its stirrup.

It took only a moment for him to realize that the ground beneath him was on fire, so hot he wasn’t sure he might not just burst into flame himself. In a dizzying surge of effort, Bass kicked his foot free, rolling to the side so he could rock back onto his knees. That accomplished, he brought one leg under him, reached up for the stirrup, and pulled himself onto his feet—gasping for air. Lunging forward on legs that weren’t quite heeding his commands, Scratch stumbled across the last few yards to McAfferty’s side, where he gratefully sank back to the burning ground.

After a painful struggle he managed to get Asa rolled onto his back. Sand and flecks of the gold, withered grass clung to the man’s oak-brown cheek and forehead, plastered there above the stark white whiskers. As Bass bent over McAfferty’s face, hovering above it to peer closely at his partner, he put Asa in a shadow. Almost immediately the eyes fluttered open into no more than crusted slits, grains of sand embedded in his damp eyelids.

Asa’s cracked lips quivered for a moment, his parched, bloated tongue trying to form the words until he spat them out. “C-cut me.”

“Cut you?”

“Knife,” the bleeding lips instructed. “Cut my wr-wrist.”

“Use my knife?”

Slowly McAfferty nodded as if his head weighed more than their trap sacks. “Here.” But it was some time before Asa urged some movement out of one of his red, burned arms and pointed at the other wrist. “You cut. I’ll suck.”

It still didn’t make sense. “Cut you so you’ll bleed?”

“Suck … bl-blood.”

“I can’t cut you—”

With what had to be the last vestige of the man’s strength, McAfferty grabbed a handful of Bass’s long brown hair and tugged on it hard enough to pull Titus right down toward his face.

“Only ch-chance,” Asa croaked with a voice so dry it sounded like a dry rasp being dragged across coarse cast iron. “Blood … save me … till we … get to the river.”

Then with an exhausted gasp Asa released his hair, and Scratch slowly raised his head, squinting below that wide brim of his hat to peer off at first one horizon, then another, and finally in a third, endless direction. Nothing of any promise in sight.

“Yeah, Asa. You just hol’ on. The river ain’t far now.”

But he knew McAfferty wouldn’t make it … unless he cut the man. With a trembling hand Scratch reached around to the small of his back to drag the skinning knife from its rawhide sheath. His vision was blurring, his eyes stinging more and more from the sweat and the blowing sand: red, raw, bloodshot. Scratch didn’t know for sure if it was the salty drops seeping into them, or perhaps that his eyes were simply starting to melt, oozing out of their sockets and right on down his cheeks into the thick beard.

After he had blinked, and blinked some more, to clear them for a moment, Bass peered down to find McAfferty’s head slumped to the side, the man’s eyes half-closed, only the whites showing in that glare of brutal light.

Painfully, Scratch dragged his knees across the hardpan earth, scooting right up to Asa’s shoulder, where he jabbed his left arm under his partner’s neck. With his fingers locked under McAfferty’s armpit, he heaved against the dead weight. That effort made his stomach threaten to hurl itself against his tonsils. He bent over the body, gasping as he squinted his eyes shut, then groaned, gritting his teeth the moment he heaved against the weight once more.

Succeeding in getting McAfferty’s shoulders propped against his thigh, Bass shuddered from that last terrible exertion. With a raspy sigh that felt as if he had swallowed cactus needles, Scratch dragged Asa’s far arm across his lap. Clamping the wrist in his left hand to steady it, he laid the sharp edge of the blade against the inside of the wrist … then suddenly found himself staring at that line where the dark saddle-leather-brown hide of the hand ended and the sunburned crimson began as it climbed up the man’s white skin.

He gritted his teeth, resolute.

Across that tan line he compressed the blade into the reddened flesh, struggling to focus his eyes again, to whip his mind back to the task before him … until he suddenly realized he was watching the man’s blood oozing from the laceration.

“Asa,” he gasped in hope. “Here, Asa.”

Letting the knife spill from his right hand, Titus grasped hold of McAfferty’s chin at the same time he raised the bleeding wrist toward Asa’s mouth.

Rubbing the wound against the cracked lips, Scratch murmured, “Here. Suck, Asa. Suck, dammit!”

But his partner did not move.

In despair Bass rubbed the wrist back and forth over the dry, cracked lips, still without response from McAfferty. Titus dropped the wrist and slapped a flat hand across Asa’s cheek.

The eyes fluttered, clenched, then slowly opened as McAfferty’s thick, blackened tongue came out to lick at the lips.

“That’s your blood, dammit!” Scratch whimpered down at his partner. “Suck … suck it now or you’re … you’re done.”

It took all he had left in him to grab the wrist again and drag it to Asa’s mouth, holding it there against the lips as McAfferty’s eyes closed and his lips parted, tongue flicking out to taste the blood. Then Asa finally began to suck on the wound, swallowing slowly.

For the longest time Titus watched McAfferty draw at his own blood before Asa turned his head and attempted to gaze up at Bass, his eyes slowly swimming, rolling.

“G-get us to … water. Get water.”

With the deadweight of a sack of meal, Asa’s head went limp across Bass’s arm.

Unable to support it any longer, Scratch pulled his arm free, gasping for air as if his lungs were filled with hot coals. Squatting there by the body of his partner, Titus stared down at his own wrists. Then he peered over at the bloodstained knife lying by his knee.

The antler handle had a strange, foreign feel in his hand as he scooped it from the ground. A sensation not quite real as he laid the knife lengthwise along his own wrist and without hesitation pressed it down until his watery eyes finally noticed the blood seeping up on either side of the narrow blade already crusted with sparkling particles of sand.

Surprised that there was no pain, Scratch continued to ease the blade down into his skin, opening himself up even more. As the dark fluid began to bead and tumble off his forearm, Titus yanked the wrist to his mouth, began sucking noisily. His eyes fluttered half-closed in that feral way of an animal savoring the warm, moist nourishment of its prey.

Blood thick as his mam’s Kentucky sugarcane molasses. So warm against his lips, oozing back upon his tongue. He swallowed, sensing himself gag, feeling his stomach lurch in revolt. Desperate, he shoved the bile back down, his throat stinging with the acid’s burn, its fiery aftertaste, and kept on sucking.

At the back of his neck he became aware of the fire against his skin. Revived enough now to raise his head, Bass turned and glanced at the path the sun was taking into the west. They might just stand a chance now … make it through till nightfall. But they damn well needed shade until the sun had limped from the sky.

“H-hannah,” he whispered, able to coax no more out of his throat.

Sucking some more on his wrist, Titus used the tip of his tongue to smear that blood over his lips until they were moistened, then tried to whistle. Nothing more than a faint shrill sound. Beginning to feel hopeful at this small success, Bass watched the half-dead mule roll her big head to the side and peer over at him.

He licked the lips again and whistled. This time she obediently started to turn his way. Then stopped.

“Hannah,” he croaked.

She came on around with his coaxing. The mule worked unsteadily at those next few steps, turning slightly, picking up one hoof at a time beneath her burdens, finally drawing close enough that he could reach out with his bloody arm and grab for the lead rope. On the fourth try he captured the braided rawhide and looped it around the hand. Now he was able to nudge her closer, eventually turning her so that she stood nearly on top of them to block the bright light. So hot had the direct rays become that this sudden shadow seemed like the cooling breath carried by a spring breeze.

It surprised him when his saddle mount came over to join the mule. Nor was it long before one of McAfferty’s packhorses came over to join the others. He let himself collapse to the side in relief. A good thing it was, he thought as he let his head rest atop his elbow on that hot ground—good that horses were a damned sight more sociable than he was.

There in the collective shade made by those near-dead animals, Scratch closed his eyes and sighed, letting his mind drift now that his tongue wasn’t near so swollen with thirst, now that he could feel some saliva beginning to work up at the back of his throat, around that tiny pebble he had stuffed under his tongue back near sunup. In a while he figured he just might have enough strength to get up and cut a horse’s ear for McAfferty.

Not … right now.

In a while.

On that August morning—what seemed like ages ago now—he and McAfferty had hastened back to Hatcher’s camp, eager to announce their plans to set off on their lonesome to the others, who were trudging over groggily to settle by the fire and swill down some steaming coffee.

“Here I thought you was a happy man being part of us!” Caleb Wood sputtered, the first of them to protest.

Elbridge Gray shook his head woefully, pursing his lips until he exploded, “Can’t believe you’d up and leave us now, Scratch—after all we been through together for the last two years!”

Isaac agreed. “And after all we done to take you in with us!”

Their reactions making him feel the first pangs of regret, Scratch nodded and said, “I’ll always be a grateful man, fellas—for all you done by me. But don’t get it wrong just ’cause I aim to make my own tracks now. I’m beholden to you, for always.”

With that sentiment encouraging them, Caleb, Isaac, and Elbridge did their best to caution Scratch against pulling up his stakes and setting off alone with Asa McAfferty.

“Goddammit, Bass,” Simms growled, smearing drops of coffee collected in the broom bristle of his whitish-blond mustache. “You damn well know how many times we had a scrap with the Blackfoot our own selves in the last two years.”

Gray nodded vigorously. “And now you wanna set off with just the two of you niggers!”

“We ain’t going nowhere near Blackfeet country!” McAfferty protested after remaining silent for so long.

But Wood ignored the white-head, jabbing a finger at Bass instead, just as that turkey-wattled schoolmaster back to Kentucky had jabbed once too often. “Pick up and move off from us, Scratch? And here I thought you was our friend!” Caleb glared a moment at McAfferty.

“This don’t mean I ain’t your friend no more—”

Wood fumed, “But I guess you ain’t our friend, are you, Scratch! I s’pose now I can see just how your stick floats—”

“A man does what he thinks best,” Jack Hatcher interrupted the tongue-lashing, immediately shushing them all. “Bass allays been that sort to take the circle. Even though I don’t agree with him one whit … I’ll trust to what Scratch thinks best for hisself.”

“Y-you mean you’re gonna let him go off like this, Jack?” Rufus asked, his voice rising an octave in disbelief.

Hatcher didn’t answer all that quickly. Instead, his unwavering gaze landed on McAfferty. Then he said, “I’ll trust in both of ’em, boys. Ye ’member we rode with both of these men of a time.” Then his eyes came over to fix on Titus. “And now it ’pears that the time for us to ride together’s come to an end.”

“Don’t mean we reached the knot at the end of our days together,” Bass replied, his throat filled with sentiment, suddenly sensing the ghostly presence of so many of those who lived on now only in his memory.

“Ye leaving us … it’s been coming for some time,” Jack explained. “I seen it plain as prairie sun. Some folks need others around ’em all the time—like the rest of these boys. Then … there’s folks like you, Titus Bass. The sort of man what does best left on his own.”

Those words reverberated someplace within him now, like the waves of heat rising off the cast-iron surface of this land.

Scratch didn’t know how long he had been lying there with his eyes closed, his half-cooked mind numb from the dizzying heat, his thoughts running in this direction, then that, just the way Hannah would urinate on this baked and flinty ground, the hot yellow piss streaming off in one little rivulet, then a second, and then another speeding there, finally a fourth narrow dribble fingering across the merciless, endless crust of the flaky sand.

With a cold seizure of his heart, Scratch wondered if he had made a mistake—come so far into this devil’s fry pan to die with McAfferty. Maybeso he came only to prove something to himself.

Could he make it on his own hook?

Or was the real problem that he doubted he would ever be able to trust in another man as fully as he had trusted in those three before they disappeared with near everything he had labored for?

And while he was questioning himself and what he had done: should he have followed McAfferty out of rendezvous back in August? Or had he only been blinded by the prospect of virgin beaver streams where no white man had ever laid a moccasin?

In the end, was he cut out for making it on his own hook?

Hearing Asa groan, Bass reluctantly opened his eyes. It was still shady on him. Peering up, he could see that all of their five animals remained around them. What a sight he and Asa must make, and he tried to chuckle in that taut, sunburned face of his. Out here where nothing green grew tall enough to brush a horse’s belly, their little tableau would stand right out on the flat, baked desert for many miles around. Those horses and that mule ringing two near-dead, completely stupid niggers … a pair of men waiting for the buzzards to come circling above them in the clear, pale, steamy sky. Waiting for those naked brown Apache to pick up their trail again.

“B-bass.”

It took some doing, but Titus slid his head off his arm, raised himself on an elbow, and made his face hover somewhere over McAfferty’s.

“Night c-coming?” Asa asked as the shadow crossed his eyes.

“Not near soon ’nough.”

McAfferty’s brow sagged with despair. “God d-deliver us …”

Bass waited a while, then admitted how likely it was that McAfferty was sleeping again. As much as he wished he could, something down inside his gut nagged at him the way a tiny cockleburr got itself hitched under a saddle blanket and chafed the animal, irritating the horse’s hide until that animal fought to throw off its torment.

Licking his lips, Scratch again tasted the blood. Blinking, he found that this time his eyes did not sting with sweat, nor swim with blurry images. Grunting, Titus straightened, sitting right up beside McAfferty in that shady ring of horseflesh. Alongside his head hung the wide wooden stirrup on Asa’s Mexican saddle. It would do about as good as anything.

Seizing it first in one hand, then with the other, Bass took a deep, hot breath and began to pull himself onto his knees. The weakened horse whinnied, protesting at the sudden shift of weight on its saddle as the animal peered back at him.

“There … there, there,” he tried to coo.

Astonished to discover he was already up on one knee, Titus pulled with his arms, pushed with his legs, lunging up with an arm to snag that wide dish of the saddlehorn. Pulling still more as his knees began to straighten, his head suddenly fuzzy again, light as cottonwood down.

He gasped in surprise, relieved to find that he was standing.

Forced to squint into narrow slits now that he was no longer protected in the horses’ shade, Scratch peered across the distance—struggling to focus through the shimmering, dancing heat waves streaming up from the monotonous ground and that ocean of low brush struggling just to survive beneath a fiery sun. Then he turned slightly, clinging desperately to the saddlehorn with that one hand, the other arm draped around the cantle. Slowly he turned a little more, gazing far, far out into the distance. Checking for a smudge of dust, looking for any betrayal of black, beetlelike forms swimming watery along the shimmying horizon. He did not allow himself another deep breath of the superheated air until he had peered in all directions.

Nothing. Almost as if he and Asa and their animals were the only living things for hundreds of miles around. But, then, he knew better. The Apache were somewhere out there. Following on foot through the broken country. Likely the red bastards had already reached this flat, endless stretch of valley at the base of the rocky mountainside and were coming on. Tracking the white men and their half-dead animals.

Should they drop the animals now and fort up, preparing for the inevitable?

There wasn’t any question that the Apache would follow them, relentlessly. Both he and Asa knew it. The warriors had been dogging their trail for the better part of five days already. Pursuing the trappers right on through the cleft in the mountains, across the plateau, driving them right on down into this sea bottom of a desert.

There wasn’t a reason in all of God’s creation why the Apache would give up now. Especially when the trappers’ horses were slowing, when the white men hadn’t come across water in three days … when the sonsabitches could waltz right in on him and Asa come nightfall.

More than ever, Bass realized he had to get them to some shelter. Trees … not a prayer of finding that much cover out here. Maybeso some rocks to hunker behind. By a miracle perhaps they would happen upon some animal’s den out of the sun and out of sight near a narrow stream. Water and shelter, both.

Which did a man need more right now? he brooded hopelessly, his mind unable to cling to one thing for too long.

Plain enough to see they needed water and shelter, both.

But to get the strength to push on as long as it would take to find that water and shelter, Scratch realized he needed more blood. He needed to open up one of the horse’s ears. Maybe even open up a leg back of the pastern.

Daringly, he hobbled away from Asa’s saddle, inching his way toward his own horse’s neck and up to its head, struggling to focus on the ear. But of a sudden he stopped, stumbled to the side and made for McAfferty’s packhorse. Its ears were bigger. He ran his hands over one of them, finding it all the thicker, jug-headed cayuse that it was. Best to cut Asa’s animal. Besides, he rationalized, if it meant that he might have to coax some additional bottom from his own horse in the hours to come, then the smart thing for him was to bleed McAfferty’s mount.

Wobbly there beside the big head, Scratch pulled out the skinning knife while he positioned the ear in the flat of his hand. As he brought the knife close, one of the big eyes rolled back as if to inspect what the human was about to do.

“Easy, boy,” he murmured at the gelding.

It was all he could do to keep his balance on those watery knees, to hold the horse’s twitching ear steady as he drew the knife down one of the fat veins.

The blood burst readily from the wound as he yanked the knife away, immediately poking his head beneath the ear, his dry mouth flung open, its blackened, bloated tongue protruding like a huge strip of half-dried buffalo liver, doing his utmost to catch every precious drop of that hot stream of life. Milking the ear from the wide base, he continued to steadily stroke toward the cut he had made, squeezing gently below the wound as the horse began a slow, circling sidestep. For every one of its moves, Bass moved—always staying right with that drooling wound as he licked and swallowed until the animal finally relented and stopped so Scratch could pull gently down on the base of the ear, urging the big head closer to his own face. Now he pressed his lips right against the open vein, lapping every bit as greedily as any man would suck at fresh marrow bones pulled warm and toasted from the fire.

The hot, thick liquid dribbled from his lower lip, down his chin into his gray-brown whiskers.

Suddenly he drew back for a moment, gasping for breath—as his lungs felt the shock of the heated air. He clenched his eyes shut and sucked some more of the warm blood.

Finally sensing his stomach lurch in revolt of the warm fluid, Bass pulled away, gasping again.

It was a few moments before he realized he was standing there on his own. No longer was he barely holding himself up, braced against the horse. As he tugged down the floppy brim on his felt hat, Scratch felt his stomach slowly settle. Perhaps it had made peace with the blood.

To straighten his shoulders now, draw himself up, and flex his arms and knees—all made him feel one hell of a lot better than he had for days.

He blinked his eyes and stared off into the distance: first here, then there as he licked his lips, conscious of the blood’s sharp metallic tang coating his mouth. They had maybe as much as three hours till dark. Less until sunset … but something more than that until it would be dark enough for them to venture forth without being spotted by the Apache out there, somewhere in the distance.

No sign of a dust cloud, but then—the Apache wouldn’t be the sort to raise a cloud of dust, would they?

Squatting beside his partner in Hannah’s shadow, he slowly raised McAfferty across his leg again. “We gotta push on, Asa.”

“G-go on ’thout m-me.” The voice sounded hollow, thick with despair.

“Help me get you up,” Scratch demanded.

“Leave m-me. Lo, I travel through the deserts—”

“I ain’t leaving you,” he argued, shifting himself beside McAfferty.

“Just y-you go on ’thout—”

“Shuddup, you stupid idjit.”

Pulling Asa’s arm straight out from the shoulder, Scratch ducked his head under it. Looping his right arm around McAfferty’s thigh, he rolled his partner and struggled to get both his legs under the man’s deadweight as he rocked back—settling as much of the load right over his shoulders, then his legs, that strongest part of his body.

Weaving, wobbly at first, he quivered as he steadily rose with Asa slumped across his shoulders. Steadying himself, Bass lurched those few steps to the side of McAfferty’s mount, braced a shoulder against the animal, then heaved with all he had to shove the man’s upper body across the saddle.

Asa grunted, half-delirious, as he slid across the hot leather.

“That’s right, nigger,” Titus grumbled. “Hope it hurt you bad as it hurt me to get your flea-bit, crow-bait carcass throwed up there.”

Tossing McAfferty’s reins back over the flat, saucer-shaped horn, Scratch turned, exhausted, then caught his breath in the blazing heat of that unforgiving southwestern desert. Weaving forward, he patted the mule’s neck, murmuring assurance to her.

“I ain’t ’bout to die here. Not now.”

Then stumbled on by to take up the reins to his mount.

Stuffing his left foot into the stirrup, he gripped both hands around the horn—about the size and shape of a large Spanish orange—and managed to drag himself into the saddle. After he had shifted his weight back against the cantle, he brought the horse around, then leaned across to catch up the reins to McAfferty’s mount.

Urging his horse away, Bass clucked at Hannah to follow, his lips too dry again to whistle anymore.

He raised his eyes to the blazing bone-yellow sky overhead, praying his thanks that the mule and McAfferty’s horses chose to follow.

Where they were going, he didn’t have a goddamned idea.

But they had less than three hours to find water, or they wouldn’t last through the following day.

As much as he tried, Scratch couldn’t squeeze away the realization of what that came down to: they had less than three hours to keep their lead on the Apache who were following.

The Apache who wouldn’t be stopping for anything as long as they had a white man’s trail to follow.