Crack in the Sky

21

Ol’ Vaca was dead.

Killed the day before Christmas.

Only a matter of hours before Bass and McAfferty showed up at his hacienda, Luis Maria Cabeza de Vaca had been shot resisting a detail of Governor Manuel Armijo’s soldiers sent from Santa Fe to confiscate the beaver pelts and other property of Americans suspected of being hidden at Vaca’s rancho.

Near noon on that sacred holiday as the two gringos rode down from the low hills toward the mouth of the Peñablanca, instead of looking down from the heights on the splendor of the Vaca-family empire, they gazed at the deserted, still-smoldering ruin of half the buildings. As soon as they reined into the smoky yard, more than a dozen armed men appeared from all sides, every one of them smeared with cinders, their faces and clothing streaked with ebony and dried blood.

Among them were Vaca’s three sons, as well as a nephew who knew a little English—enough to explain that the governor’s soldados had come on the evening of the sacred holiday with a writ to search the grounds and buildings, orders to seize all Americans’ property and confiscate any goods being trafficked with the gringos.

“My family has been on this land for generations,” the nephew explained. “This is no way to treat my family!”

True to his personal code of honor, the old man had stood before the overwhelming array of soldiers without a weapon and refused the captain permission to search the grounds. Which prompted the officer to rein up to the old man and brutally slash him across the face with his quirt, splitting Vaca’s cheek open and knocking him down. Yet he struggled back to his feet and immediately attempted to yank the impudent soldier out of the saddle.

“The captain—he pull his pistol and shoot my uncle,” the nephew disclosed.

Before the smoke from that single pistol shot could clear, a general melee broke out as family members and ranch hands turned and raced for their weapons while the soldiers began their rampage. In the end it was Vaca’s old wife who ventured out of the hacienda waving a large white handkerchief in the stiff, cold wind, surrendering so that no more of her family would die, so that she could go to the body of her husband where he lay mortally wounded in the trampled yard, bleeding to death near the foot of their porch. A patch of dirty crimson still stained the crusty snow where Vaca fell.

After rounding up all the family and their employees, placing them all under guard in the middle of the yard, the soldiers rummaged through the house and outbuildings before they moved on to the barn and the barracks where the ranch workers slept. Only then did a young Paiute house servant turn back to look at the hacienda and emit a horrified scream. The house was on fire.

At first the captain had refused to allow the ranch hands to fight the flames, claiming that such a catastrophe was no work of his men. But after nearly half of the graceful old building had been consumed, he relented and allowed Vaca’s men to put up a valiant but hopeless effort against the flames.

Instead of ordering his men to help the family, the captain had his soldiers continue their search: eventually managing to find over two hundred pounds of beaver pelts hidden beneath a trapdoor in the barn floor. Beyond that there was nothing conclusive to indicate that Vaca had been dealing with the Americans. Besides, the angry captain had been informed there would be gringos to arrest.

His men found no Americans.

“The governor and his soldados,” explained the nephew, “they hate the Americanos. They want us to hate them too. My uncle, he not hate. What he had he give to all who come to his door, to all guests. And now he lay in his grave.”

Three dark mounds stood out against the sunlit snow in the family cemetery on a low knoll behind the hacienda. Three new wooden crosses marked the last resting place of Cabeza de Vaca, along with two of his workers. This last resting place of the old man’s hospitality to American trappers.

Bass waited with the horses as McAfferty walked through the crude iron fence and knelt at the foot of that freshly turned sod so stark against the gleaming snow beneath a cloudless sky.

“‘Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance,’” Asa grumbled as he returned and took up his reins. “There ain’t nothing for us here now, Mr. Bass.”

As McAfferty kicked his horse in the ribs and turned away, Bass reached down and shook hands with the old man’s sons, then told the nephew, “Your uncle died a brave man. Near every one of them soldiers I run onto—they been cowards. But a brave man like your uncle, he’s gone now to a place where there ain’t a single yellow-backed polecat coward … a place beyond the sky where other men of honor have welcomed him.”

The two of them swept around to the south before turning north by northeast for the foothills of the mountains. This would be far harder going than the road offered a wayfarer traveling north to Taos along the Rio Grande road. But they were wanted men, and it was clear there were soldiers out, prowling.

Just as clear that this was not a good season for an American in northern Mexico.

Four days later, after traveling during the cold of night and hiding out each day, Bass and McAfferty found a well-concealed rito, one of those narrow canyons through which a stream flowed out of the mountains toward the Rio Grande itself. After leaving their horses concealed from roving eyes, they moved out at moonrise on foot, reaching Workman’s place close to midnight.

“Bill Williams been out to see me,” the whiskey trader announced after he had hurried them into the back room of his stone house and they had explained why they weren’t hiding out at Ol’ Vaca’s place.

“Bill already heard what happen’t to us?” McAfferty asked.

Nodding, Workman continued, “He brought me a dozen traps for you boys. Soon as he heard the story of what you done over at the Barcelos place, he come right on out here to see what he could do to help. I told him we just shooed you off to Santa Fe—but that I had some of your furs here. That’s when he said you told him you was needing some traps to replace them what you had to leave behind on the Heely.”

“Damn straight—I told him we was pretty short on traps,” Bass replied.

Workman hauled a huge sack out of a dark corner. As he swung it across the earth floor, it clattered, coming to a rest. “Juniata steel, boys. Best traps a feller can buy him in Mexico.”

Titus asked, “We square with Bill?”

“He took what he needed in trade from your plews,” Workman answered. Then his eyes got anxious. “You ain’t fixing on staying here, are you?”

Scratch could see the apprehension glazing the man’s eyes. He said, “Naw, we just come for what was left here when we lit out afore.”

Workman’s shoulders sagged, limp with relief. “Ain’t safe around here for you.”

“Ain’t safe down in Santy Fee neither,” McAfferty added.

“Tomorrow night we’ll be back to gather up what’s ours and be gone,” Bass said. “Afore we do, you take what’s fair for all you done by us.”

The whiskey maker waved a hand in the dark room. “You boys don’t owe me a thing.”

“It’s only right,” Scratch protested. “For all you done—”

“Mr. Bass is right,” Asa added. “Likely them soldados will be back to see you.”

They were out of there before the eastern sky grayed. And back at dark the next night to load up what they had left behind more than a week before. With every hour Bass himself grew all the more anxious, all the more certain in McAfferty’s belief that the soldiers would be back. After seeing Vaca’s place, and those three fresh scars on the earth—it was almost enough to make him a praying man: begging God to spare William Workman and all the rest who had put their necks in a gallows noose simply to help out a few Americans come to Mexico.

But every bit as much as a man might pray, Scratch realized a man also had to keep his powder dry and his weapons close at hand. And never be caught praying down on his knees with his eyes closed. Suicide, sure and certain.

“Maybeso one day I’ll come back this way,” Asa told Workman as they swung into their saddles.

“Give it some time, like Kinkead said,” the whiskey trader reminded them. Then he turned of a sudden and held up his hand to Titus Bass.

“Near forgot to tell you, Scratch. Wanted to wish you a happy birthday.”

“H-happy birthday?”

Workman nodded. “Figger it’s well past midnight already. That makes it New Year’s Day, eighteen and thirty. How many rings that give you now?”

“Thirty-six,” he replied, astonished. “Already a new year.”

“You boys watch your hair,” Workman said as he took a step back and slapped Bass’s horse on the rump.

“You watch your’n, Billy Workman!” Scratch cried as they reined away.

At the top of the prairie McAfferty came alongside him as they loped beneath the North Star.

“That’s twice now since we threw in together what I didn’t think we’d make the new year, Mr. Bass.”

“Maybeso you’re a hard-user on your partners, Asa.”

“Me?”

“You was the one what rode us off down to Apache country.”

McAfferty snorted. “And you was the one took us off down to whore country! ’For true and righteous are His judgments: for He hath judged the great whore, which did corrupt the earth with her fornication!’”

When Titus turned to gaze at Asa, he found the white-head’s eyes glimmering with mirth. “Awright, you slick-tongued son of a bitch. I s’pose we are even. You got us in that fix down on the Heely, and I got us out.”

“Then I pulled us out of the next mess you plopped us down in,” McAfferty concluded.

“Way I see it,” Scratch declared, “we’re square, Asa McAfferty. No matter what happens atween us partners now, we’re square.”

Scratch figured they couldn’t have anywhere near as much trouble from there on out as the two of them had their first few months after throwing in together. Leastways, that’s what he told himself as they loped out of the valley of the Rio Grande, slogged their way over the pass, and finally plunged down to the foot of the Front Range, where they struggled on north.

At times they happened across a likely-looking stream flowing down from those emerald foothills and set up camp for a few days to work the banks hard, doing their best to strip the place clean of what beaver they could bring to bait. More times than he would care to count that winter and on into the early spring, they were forced to hole up and hunker down as a storm blustered over them, delaying their journey north. Nonetheless, those days imprisoned in camp gave them a chance to make needed repairs to traps, tune the locks in their rifles and pistols, sharpen knives, and reinforce saddles and tack.

Those hours also gave Asa an opportunity to discourse on a variety of celestial and theological subjects, his long, meandering monologues taking him from the rightful place of the devil and evil among mankind, all the way to his assertions that the end of the world had already been foretold and its date was therefore cast in stone. No matter how good mankind might believe it would ever become, man was by nature still an evil creature and one day would be brought to task for his errant ways.

“Even you, Asa McAfferty?” Bass asked skeptically.

The white-head had looked up from the oiled strop where he was dragging a knife blade back and forth. The sharp edge lay still as he studied Scratch. After a long moment of reflection, he answered gravely, “Especially me.”

As his partner went back to sliding the honed blade up and down the strop, Bass echoed, “You?”

“The harshest penalty come that day of judgment for this wicked world will be meted out to those of us who have sought how best to serve the Lord our God … and failed Him in the end,” McAfferty explained. “’And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.’”

Scratch stared into the fire for a long time and eventually asked, “Ever thort to just turn away from all your Bible-spouting ways?”

“There ain’t but a handful of men I’ve met in me life what’d understand what I’m about to say, Mr. Bass—but I figger you’re one of the few,” Asa began with measured confidence. “See, comes a time in his life a man does what he knows to be right … even when he knows no one else thinks he’s right. That might be my saving grace. My only prayer of spending eternity in the sky.”

Oh, how Scratch had wanted McAfferty to explain all that, cursing himself for not being near smart enough to figure out the riddles and parables the man used to explain things. But in the end Titus was reluctant to admit his ignorance of spiritual matters. In the end he let it lay, and did not ask.

As winter grew old, they crossed the South Platte, then struck its northern branch. Along it the pair traveled west toward the interior basin, then struck out for the Wind River. North to the Bighorn, eventually reaching the south bank of the Yellowstone itself.

By and large the ice was growing spongy that day late in March, so they were forced to push downstream until they found a patch of more open water. There they stripped out of all their clothing but moccasins, tied all of it right onto the top of their packs, and led the reluctant animals into the icy river. Yelling their encouragement to one another and to the animals, their teeth chattering like bone dice in horn cups, the trappers swam across the mighty Roche Jaune, gripping bridles or saddle horns with trembling hands.

On the far side Bass and McAfferty emerged from the water shivering so hard they could hardly stand, their half-frozen fingers fighting to loosen wet knots, finally freeing the oiled hides where they had safely wrapped their clothing. Back inside their warm buckskins, an outer pair of buffalo-hide moccasins, and their thick blanket capotes pulled over buffalo-fur vests, they made camp for the night on the spot—then pressed on the next morning.

North by northwest they pointed their noses now, their faces battered by a wild mix of brutal spring rains, freezing sleet, and some soggy, late-season snows until more than a dozen days after putting the Yellowstone at their backs they struck a narrow, winding river where the redbud and willow were just beginning to bloom beneath a clearing sky.

“By my reckoning, this here gotta be the Mussellshell,” McAfferty asserted as they dropped to the ground in that lush bottomland.

Bass studied the stream up, then down, making note of the surrounding landforms. “You heard tell this was good beaver country, eh?”

“Said to be prime beaver,” Asa replied; then he raised his rifle and gestured at the jagged line of peaks lying along the western horizon. “That yonder’s the edge of Blackfoot country.”

They slept off and on throughout the lengthening days, grabbing a short nap here and there in the morning and afternoons, catching a few hours at night. This was a dangerous land where one of them had to arise in the dark hours after the moon had set and take half their animals out to graze in plain sight of camp. The other horses they kept tied close at hand just to be ready, in the event they had to run to save their scalps.

While a trapper’s normal routine would have him going out early in the morning and again late in the afternoon, neither of these wary veterans ventured from their secluded camps during the daylight hours. Instead, Bass and McAfferty went to their traps only in the darkness before dawn, and in the blackness after twilight had faded from the sky.

As they slowly worked their way up the Mussellshell toward the mountains, then crossed over the low divide and began to trap down the Judith River, the pair cautiously chose their camps: finding a spot with enough tall willow to hide their horses and their plunder, enough of the blooming cottonwood branches overhead to disperse the smoke rising from their tiny fires. A cold and horrid winter had given way to a wet and miserable spring, fraught with daily thunderstorms that soaked man and animal alike and made a man hanker for the coming warmth of summer days and the prospect of rendezvous.

As the weeks tumbled behind them, their animals labored under the growing weight of heavier and heavier packs of beaver. And though they occasionally came across sign of war parties moving this way and that up the Mussellshell or down through the Judith Basin, neither Bass nor McAfferty saw a single warrior. By late spring it was almost enough to make a man grow complacent, if not downright lazy.

With as warm and sunny as it had become that afternoon, Titus determined to move out of their new camp before slap-dark had descended upon the valley. At sunset he took up the big Mexican butcher knife they used in camp and stuffed it into the back of his belt. His rifle in one hand, his trap sack in the other, he nudged Asa with a toe.

“Goin’ out—set me some traps.”

McAfferty squinted into the afternoon light, then rubbed both eyes with his knuckles. “Ain’cha waiting till dark?”

He snorted. “We ain’t see’d a feather.”

“But we seen lots of sign up here this close’t the Missouri.”

“You’re like a mother hen,” Titus replied as he turned away. “It’s only bait sticks I’m cutting. Ain’t no Bug’s Boys gonna catch me out.”

Still wet from that afternoon’s thundershower, the tall grass and leafy brush soon soaked through his leggings and moccasins, beading on the long flaps of his thick wool capote. Constantly moving his eyes across the surrounding hills, looking for anything that shouldn’t be there, Scratch searched for a likely spot to cut his bait-and float-sticks. Plenty of green willow up and down the Judith—but where would he find a place concealed enough to work?

At the edge of the river he spotted the narrow sandbar that ran in a jagged strip from the bank toward the edge of the water, a damp piece of ground some thirty yards long. Up to his left the sandbar jutted against a sharp cutbank better than eight, maybe ten, feet high. And off to his right the cutbank fell away to nothing but a gentle slope as the grassy bank descended to the river’s edge.

Damn good place to cut his willow, peel it, and prepare his traps—all of it out of sight from the surrounding hills and meadows. A pretty spot, too, here as the light was beginning to fade and turn the rustling leaves to a deeper hue.

After clambering through the thick copse of willow and buckbrush, Titus dropped his heavy trap sack onto the edge of the sandbar and propped his rifle against it. Directly behind him hung a wide canopy of willow suspended over the edge of the cutbank. It was there he pulled the tomahawk from his belt and began to hack at the base of some of the thicker branches, tossing them into a pile near the trap sack. After he had nearly two dozen cut, Scratch turned back and squatted on the sandbar to begin peeling the first limb, slowly fashioning it into a bait-stick, sharpening its thicker end so that he could drive it into the bank just above a set he would make come morning. At the other end of the stick he used his knife and fingers to peel back layers until he had the limb fanned out for some three or four inches down the wand. The better to hold more of the “beaver milk” that would lure a curious flat-tail to drop one of its feet within the jaws of his trap.

Downstream … there among the willow along that gently sloping, grassy bank … maybe it was only the wind sighing.

But he waited. Glanced over at his rifle, and waited a moment more. Yeah, probably only the breeze rustling those branches up there.

He tossed the finished stick aside and picked up another, starting to hack off the small limbs and nubs with that big butcher knife. Peeling, stripping, peeling some more.

Of a sudden the hair stood on the back of his neck as the breeze shifted into his face and he frantically sorted out the meaning of that rank smell. Whatever it was, he scratched up a memory strong enough to trigger revulsion, then some growing fear. He kept clawing for the answer as he turned slightly, his right hand beginning to tremble—and that scared the hell out of him. Just to look down at the butcher knife and see it quaking.

Perhaps it was an Indian pony—this rank odor of dampness. Maybeso it might even be a damned Blackfoot he smelled on that hint of wind coming into his face, bristling the guard hairs on the back of his neck, stirring him to remember. Something like the fetid, putrid stench of bear oil smeared on a warrior’s skin, or the bear grease rubbed into his braids … a smell so suddenly recognizable as the red nigger rushed close enough to grapple with you—

With their snorts of surprise and curiosity, he watched them both lumber his way out of the willow. But the moment he fell back to his haunches and struggled to drag his legs back under him, the two grizzly cubs skidded to a halt, whirled ungainly, and bumped into one another, their eyes frightened of this big creature they had just discovered. And then they began to whimper.

A sure call for their mother.

So fast did the next few heartbeats thump within his chest—enough time for the sow to burst through the thick willow brush behind her cubs. Time enough for her to stick her nose into the breeze and size up the threat posed to her offspring. Time only for him to start scooting backward.

She shakily rose on her back legs, opening her massive jaws and rolling back her muzzle to expose those yellowed fangs dripping with foamy slobber.

Glancing at the rifle that lay between them, Bass got only to his knees in that instant the sow dropped to all four and heaved his way with a lurch. Shoving the butcher knife into his left hand with that half-peeled willow branch he was already holding, he yanked out his pistol and raked back the goosenecked hammer, getting it up in front of him just in time to blot out her snout as she opened that gaping maw and began to roar.

Wau-augh!

He felt the pistol buck in his hand as she was yanked up short—immediately swiping the arm and that tiny weapon aside as smartly as she would swat a troublesome mosquito, the pistol’s smoky bark buried beneath the terrible battle cry of a mother wronged and duty bound to protect her young. She brought that paw up to rub at the side of her jaw where the ball smashed through her face. Then gazed down at her enemy and grumbled something great and fearful at the back of her throat the moment she rocked back down onto all four and lumbered into motion.

In that final moment before she swatted him, and the pistol went wheeling into the willow, he remembered how the thick tufts of green grass exploded into the air as she sank each paw into the ground, how the glittering sand spurted from each foot in a golden cascading spray as she exploded toward him.

One powerful paw crashed over the rifle and the heavy trap sack as she scrambled past the cubs and closed on her prey—the open sack clattering across the wet earth, the rifle cartwheeling end over end toward the water lapping against the rain-dampened sandbar.

Wau-au-au-au-gh-gh-gh!

With her huge maw open and dripping with that terrifying roar, the sow bellowed the grizzly’s battle cry as she pounced upon Bass with such a powerful rage that she bowled both of them over, spilling them across the wet sand and into the tall grass like the large rawhide balls small Indian boys batted back and forth across the ground in their exuberant, youthful games.

He felt the sudden, hot tenderness at his back, rolling groggily onto an elbow, knowing she had caught him with a paw, raking him with one or more of her four-inch claws as she burst past him—

Wau-au-au … gh-gh-gh!

Already she was catapulting onto her hind legs, digging in with her forepaws, wrenching up sand and grass as she righted herself and twisted about in her turn. Angrier perhaps that she had not crushed the puny creature in that first grand charge. Just the way she had had to deal with any male she encountered ever since that day in early spring when she had emerged from her den with those two young cubs given birth and suckled during the last of winter’s rage suffered on this north country.

Waughgh!

Leaping across those last ten feet, the sow cut off the light, cut off all air as she dropped out of the sky onto the trapper scrambling like a crab to get out of her path. He landed on his back as everything went black, went suffocating.

Scratch cried out as she reared back suddenly and smacked him with a monstrous paw, as if he were no more than a bothersome badger she was trying to dig out from beneath a rotted log. The fire around his lungs was so great, it felt as if his ribs had been torn loose from his chest as he was hurtled to the side on the sandbar.

Waugh!

Again she bellowed as he blinked grains of sand from his eyes, dragging his cheek off the ground, finding her resting on all fours a few yards away, turned to look at her cubs. Calling to them noisily with those jaws, that curving muzzle drawn back to expose the rows of monstrous yellowed teeth.

The moment the two cubs started his way, Bass shoved onto a hip, his chest refusing him a deep breath, his back burning, hot one instant, icy cold the next as the wind slashed across it. If he could run now, he might stand a chance of getting to the rifle a heartbeat before she got to him. Just spin around as he cocked the hammer, fire as she settled upon him again—

Then he knew it was too late already. That flicker of time’s candle to consider what to do and how to do it had already cost him his chance.

Just take her with his own bare hands.

When she spotted him rising to his knees, coming shakily to his feet, she wheeled fully on him. Then twisted her head to locate her cubs the moment before they bounced against her.

Enraged, her hump hair stiffened. The sow batted the first aside, backhanded the second, sending them both sprawling away toward the cutbank, yelping and whimpering as they tumbled to a stop, licking at their bruises. Then she slowly turned on the trapper, wobbly on his two legs.

He tried to blink the sandy grit from his eyes, clear the dry shreds of cobweb from his head as she flexed her back, shifted her feet, planting them squarely as she rose on those huge, haunches. Then she too stood on hind legs. And windmilled at the air with those long, deadly instruments, her claws bared, glinting in the last rays of the sun.

Just take her with his own bare hands.

And for the first time he realized his hands were not empty.

In the terror of her first strike, he must have gripped on to what he had been holding with the might of a trap’s jaws. In his left hand remained that chunk of willow limb a little thicker than his own thumb, already sharpened at the end.

And in his gritty right hand was the bone handle attached to that curved, ten-inch blade of Mexican steel.

Tottering on her hind legs, the sow lumbered forward, closing those last few yards, towering over the puny human by more than a foot in shaggy, silver-tipped height. Sawing her arms back and forth, she pounced the last two steps and blacked out the sky once more as her awful roar deafened all sound from his ears.

His back burned anew as she clutched him into her with one great paw, burying his face in her chest. Lunging with all he had in that weakened left shoulder, Titus sank the sharpened end of the branch into her thick hide, sensing the point pierce that heavy layer to plunge on into the muscle, shoved on past bone. He felt her jerk as the willow spear went home, driven deep within her lights.

Knowing in that next instant it was not enough to kill the she-brute.

Again she raked at him, and again. Her shaggy forearms only brushing, bruising, battering his shoulder blades and the small of his back as she struggled to rake him with her claws—but she held him too close to get at him. Too close, right there against her: smothered, trapped against the beast that was about to finish him off.

Gagging, Bass could smell nothing but the rank odor of her damp hide, the milk going sour at her two shriveled dugs.

Knowing by this time of the season she was likely giving up nursing the two cubs, teaching them instead to feast on plants and small animals, ants and that meat of whatever big game presented itself to them.

Meat. Four-legged or two. Including a hapless trapper.

As he felt her crush his chest with a fiery pressure, the sow straightened to full height, dragging his feet off the ground, shaking him helplessly against her great stinking mass. He dangled in her grip, his legs flopping like one of his sister’s sock dolls.

How he needed a breath of air. Just one breath more. Sensing his supper rise against his tonsils, Bass gasped, sickened by the dank sour-milk odor of her as he drew back the butcher knife and plunged it into her chest.

Too low!

But instead of drawing it out, with both hands clamped around the wet, sticky, warm handle, he sawed the blade to the side savagely. Hearing her grunt with each new plunge of the blade within her gut.

Feeling the rumble of each of her battle cries, feeling each of her painful groans as they reverberated within her chest and rattled against his cheek, he even sensed her cries shake the handle of that weapon he gripped with white knuckles. Then he himself echoed the sow’s dull roar that shuddered beneath his eye pressed deeply against her stinking fur.

The bear hooked a claw around his hip and raked back. He felt the sudden cold as the legging gave way and the breechclout with it—his hide laid bare to the bone across the top of his hip.

He heard a shrill cry coming to him in the midst of that muffled, dark hole of her massive being where she had herself wrapped around him—just as surely as if she had swallowed him whole. And he realized that inhuman cry was his.

Then, as the cry faded, Scratch heard a new, strange sound.

One thunderous thump echoed through her body, and he listened to her whimper like her cubs when she had batted them aside in fury. Pulling back one mighty arm from the grip she had on him, Bass could suddenly see shafts of rosy alpenglow, slivers of trees and brush suspended against the sky overhead. And smell glorious air.

He shoved back against the other paw for leverage and yanked the knife free of her. Swinging it up in a short arc, Bass buried the long blade right below her jawline. She nearly shook him free, nearly tore his grip from that bloody handle as she shivered and whipped her head from side to side to rid herself of the torment.

Scratch attempted to saw the knife to the side but encountered bone. Instead he yanked the weapon free once more, rocked back, and plunged it in. Back out and in again. Out once more, just enough to give himself some leverage against that grizzly foreleg that gripped and raked and pummeled him—then back in with all the strength he could muster. Sensing his will seep out of him with each new thrust. Turning, twisting, screwing the blade brutally an instant before he jerked it back out.

Waugh-gh-gh-gh!

With her roar garbled by her own blood, Bass felt the beast falling, pitching forward with him beneath her. Helpless, he twisted and screwed at the knife’s handle as his face was buried again. Sealing out all light, suffocating him. Shutting off the rest of the world.

She had swallowed him whole.

The grizzly had won, and now she was devouring his soul. Not just what wreck was left of his body. But feasting on his very spirit. Like an evil specter come lunging out of a ragged tear between his world and its own—lunging through to devour him and drag his soul back to its world of eternal despair.

Better to be dead than seized and hauled back through that crack in the sky by this evil spirit.

Suddenly he felt his leg being pulled, yanked. The wounded, bloody hip yelped in pain as his ankle was twisted brutally.

Certain it must be the cubs, feasting on his flesh now that their mama had killed him. Believing these last few seconds of his life would be even more torture than those last painful moments of their battle—for now he realized he had lost to this demonic creature. Now he knew the cubs were going to gnaw on his bones, and the sow would ultimately drag his soul back to where her evil seed was whelped.

Of a sudden he felt the cold air slap his face, sneak in to tickle his bare flesh where the long, curved claws had raked the buckskin shirt to ribbons at his back. How cruel the breeze was to brush over the riven muscle across his hip. So cruel to tease him with its cool, fresh breath here the moment before he would breathe his last, the moment before his heart would stop and he would be no more than wounded soul.

Knowing he had lost and was now a captive of that evil beast come through the sky to his world seeking new prey.

She was picking him up, seizing his head, peeling his upper body out of the sand, ready to hurtle with him back across the grass and the sandbar and through the willow, back to where she had emerged right out of the twilight, right out of the air itself…. He blinked at the sand tormenting his eyes—how he wanted to stare this beast in the face, look it in the eye as she seized dominion over his soul.

One last look—

“Mr. Bass!”

Swimming right above him, the great creature’s face spewed its fetid breath down across his cheeks. Hot breath—unlike the cool touch of the evening breeze.

“Mr. Bass!”

A dream this was. Feeling himself shaken by the creature, believing it was all part of the great evil to see McAfferty’s face swimming above his.

“Arrrghgh!” Scratch groaned, flailing his arms helplessly at the beast.

His arms were quickly pinned and the face came right over his once more. Shaking his shoulders. “Mr. Bass—it’s Asa! Asa!”

Again he tried to fight the evil of its lie.

“For the love of God, Mr. Bass … the bear is dead! We killed it. I killed it. God knows you killed it too.”

Somehow he managed to sputter the word, “A-asa?”

“Yes. It’s Asa, Mr. Bass. Praises be to heaven for your deliverance!”

Whether it truly had been heaven’s intervention as Asa believed, or it had been the two rifle balls McAfferty deftly fired into the base of the sow’s head at close range, along with those savage blows the white-hair delivered with Bass’s own tomahawk found beside that pile of unpeeled willow limbs … there were times in those next few days when Scratch wasn’t all that sure he was grateful for that divine deliverance.

As much pain as the simple act of living on brought him, it might well have been better to go under then and there to that sow grizzly.

Had it not been for his fear of losing his mortal soul to something monstrously evil, something he knew he could never fathom—simple man that he was. Were it not for his fear of a life everlasting wherein a man whimpered helplessly before the great unknown … he might well have given up and crossed over that last divide in those next few hours.

“Damn, but this ain’t good,” McAfferty muttered again and again as he hovered over him on that sandbar, down on his knees inspecting Scratch’s wounds up and down. “This … this ain’t good. A bear … chewed up like this … it ain’t no good, Mr. Bass.”

He had passed out with the pain when Asa had attempted to free his other leg from under the grizzly’s carcass. Then he came to again, groaning in pain to find McAfferty pulling off his capote to lay over him.

“Damn them evil abominations gathered round us!” Asa growled.

Titus closed his eyes and listened for a moment as McAfferty trotted away up the sandbar, moving off from the cutbank in a hurry; then all was quiet.

It was full dark by the time the white-head nudged him awake as gently as he could, snagging Bass under the armpits and raising him off the sand, painfully dragging Scratch a matter of yards to the crude travois he had hurriedly constructed back at camp from some strips of rope and rawhide and a buffalo robe. Despite the curly softness of the thick hair, Bass felt the hard pinch of the hemp rope beneath his ripped and torn flesh at his back, across his hip, behind one ear as Asa laid him out on the Crosshatch web and pulled a blanket over him.

Without a word Asa went thin-lipped with determination, then turned aside as Bass’s eyes fluttered closed and he passed out again. How merciful unconsciousness can be at times, giving a man relief when he has reached a point where he can no longer bear up under the pain. How blessedly merciful.

In those next few days he tolerated the brutal bathing of his crusty, grit-coated wounds, as well as surviving the constant chatter from the partner who had saved his life this second time. Now he was beholden to McAfferty. No longer were they square. Bass listened to what he could of the man’s preaching, to his praying over him, to his rambling fire-and-brimstone cant.

“‘And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath into you, and ye shall LIVE!’”

And in the midst of those terrible days Scratch heard Asa try to explain to them both what that run-in with the sow meant in terms far too theological for a simple man like him to understand, much more metaphysical than anything he had ever heard Asa McAfferty preach before.

“You done right with that she-bitch of a grizzly.”

He kept his eyes closed. “Right?”

“Leave’d your knife in ’er.”

“Damn! You’re hurtin’ me—”

“Gotta keep some of these here wounds open,” McAfferty interrupted unapologetically, “or they’ll grow shut with the p’isen inside.”

“What p’isen?”

“’Nough evil already around us for a man to worry over that you don’t wanna have evil shut up inside ever’ one of your wounds, Mr. Bass.”

“Asa.”

“Yeah?”

“I … I took the knife out.”

“Knife was in ’er when I pulled you free,” Asa grumbled as he continued his ministrations with that water he heated at the edge of the fire. “That’s all that counts. Leave the knife in the bear: it’ll bleed ’em out inside.”

“Leave the knife in,” Scratch repeated, his puffy lips so swollen and dry from fever that they had cracked. “Leave knife in.”

Bass remembered how day after day it seemed the man talked of nothing much more than the same topic. Instructing his wounded partner on the two places where you could place a lead ball certain to kill a grizzly.

“There be jest two places where a nigger can put his ball into a devil beast such as that to know his lead’ll do the trick certain. One be just under the ear. T’other—why that be just back and down of the front leg, Mr. Bass. Where the evil heart beats in that beast. Hide so damned thick, can’t allays count on the ball going in nowhere else to any account. I killed that she-bitch with two balls to the head, just under her ears. And I finished her off with your tomahawk. Nearly got her head cut clean off afore she fell over with you still wrapped in her arm.”

In addition, the white-head muttered in and out and roundabout, speaking of that Ree medicine man who wore a grizzly’s head for his own powerful headdress, wore a cluster of grizzly claws around his neck, even performed his incantations with his two hands stuffed inside a pair of dried and shriveled grizzly paws, which he swiped at the air to invoke the bear’s spirit when he came to demand McAfferty’s Bible. Came to steal Asa’s personal medicine.

“Leastways—that’s how I knowed that son of a bitch was a hand servant of the devil his own self,” McAfferty growled. “He come to me to make his grizzly medicine on me—and when I didn’t just hand over me Bible to him … he made more evil medicine on me, called the grizzly spirit to come fetch me.”

From time to time Bass awoke to find McAfferty talking still, talking to no one at all—Scratch supposed—for Asa was standing, slowly moving this way around the fire, then turning to walk in the other direction. The way the white-head hunched himself over at times, arms held out from his body, fingers clawed before him, growling like a bear, then muttering or shouting in fury. Moving again, sputtering his fireside sermons on and on through the dark of night or the light of those late-spring days as Bass slept, gathering strength.

“A evil omen, this,” McAfferty mumbled one of those starless nights as the rain smacked the broad leaves overhead.

So thick was the cottonwood canopy that little of the mist reached them here in this copse of trees. Like hailstones striking rawhide, Bass believed he could hear each and every drop hit the leaves.

“We been trouble for each other, Mr. Bass,” he explained another time as he helped Scratch eat, pulling the broiled meat apart with his fingers and laying small fibers of the elk tenderloin on Titus’s tongue.

“Trouble?”

“The bear—it’s only the latest sign, don’t you see?”

Scratch chewed on the meat, sensing his strength slowly returning after enduring days of nothing but broth and bone soup. “I figger ary a man gonna run onto Injuns, Asa.”

“Them Apache stalked us like demons. They wasn’t human.”

“Then it was demons I killed aside the Heely, McAfferty,” he argued. “And I kill’t me a lot of ’em to save your hide. To save us.”

McAfferty measured him with an appraising look, then stared back down at the meat he was tearing apart with his fingers. “Those greaser soldiers too—”

“They was looking to get some gal forked around ’em,” Bass snorted. “Weren’t no demons there.”

“Taos used to be a good place,” he reminded. “I went there times afore and it was a good place, Mr. Bass.”

“You ever have you a spree and look for a woman, there in Taos?”

“No. I never laid with no whore. ’Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.’”

For a moment he felt stung by Asa’s condemnation. But then—every man here in the mountains was entitled to live in his own way. Long as no man passed judgment on him, Titus Bass would abide by that man.

Then Scratch said, “I’m a man what wants to lay with a woman, Asa. I need that. And it’s all right that you don’t—”

“‘But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.’”

“Don’t you see I love the feel, the smell … I love the taste of a woman.”

“Maybe we’re come of two different worlds, Mr. Bass,” he finally declared.

There. It was said. No sense in asking the white-head what he meant by that. Pretty plain to see Asa’s thinking, to grasp just what he had come to across the last few days as Bass lay-in and out of this world. Hell, it was easy enough for a man all on his own to talk himself into most anything. All the easier for that preacher to see the bear as something more than a bear.

Finally he took the small piece of meat from McAfferty and began to slowly pull slivers off for himself. “Mayhaps you’re right. So you figger to lay all our troubles at my door?”

“Never in my life have I suffered such tribulations as I have with you, Mr. Bass,” he admitted quietly, almost apologetic for speaking it. “But don’t get me wrong: the trapping’s been good with you. I admire any man what’ll go where you gone with me to trap beaver.”

“We made us a pair,” Bass agreed, knowing the tear in this fabric would never be rewoven. “But you’re of a mind to go your own way.”

“Ain’t you ready your own self? Ready to go your own way ’thout me?”

He couldn’t admit that he wasn’t ready.

Yet Titus knew he wasn’t the sort who could go days and weeks and much less months without some human contact. Be it a partner, or an outfit of free trappers, even a wandering band of Indians who spoke a language he hardly understood. How precious was just the sight of a human face, the sound of a human voice, the possibility of some human touch.

But instead Scratch said, “I reckoned on it a time or two in the last year.”

“Been paired up almost that long, ain’t we?”

“Almost a year. Ronnyvoo’s coming.”

McAfferty nodded. “Soon as you’re able to travel, we’ll mosey south. Trap along the way if we find a likely place. Soon as you’re strong enough, Mr. Bass.”

He didn’t figure there was a lick of sense in beating a dead mule. How’d you figure to change a man’s mind when it was his heart already made up? Why waste his breath when Asa McAfferty believed Titus Bass was the cause of all his tribulations? When Asa refused to even consider that it was his belief in evil and spirits and the Ree medicine man that brought him to tear apart the best partnership in these mountains?

Was there any sense in trying to talk to McAfferty about it come a month from now? Perhaps when he had more strength to argue with the white-head. Maybeso days and weeks from now, someplace on down the trail. Somewhere closer to rendezvous. Someplace away from this river valley where he had made the mistake of bumping into the sow grizzly and her cubs.

Somewhere much, much farther away from this low-hanging, evil patch of torn and sundered sky.