Crack in the Sky

22

Spring was all but done anyway. And with it the good trapping too.

Time for a man to be making tracks for rendezvous.

Time for him to be sorting through just what he would do when company trappers and free men gathered in the valley of the Wind River. Soon he’d have to decide if he would throw in with Mad Jack Hatcher’s boys … or if he would set off on his own hook now. Alone against the mountains.

Maybeso this was the season to set his own direction. Just as he had six years before: leaving behind St. Louis and the east and all that he had been. Proving to himself that he could reach the high mountains on his own.

But even then Bass remembered—just as he was beginning to believe he had beaten the odds stacked against him, he was suddenly forced to stare failure in the eye … about the time the three of them had shown up. To his reckoning, events never had allowed him the chance to succeed, or let him fail all on his own. Back then Silas, Billy, and Bud had come along to save his hash.

And ever since then it seemed that every time he had chosen to steer his own course—why, his fat had tumbled right back into the fire. Damn the fates if it hadn’t.

Only God knew how Titus Bass had tried to make it alone after his first three partners had disappeared down the river, getting themselves rubbed out in the bargain.

For all his trouble trying to set his own course, he went and got himself scalped.

It took Jack Hatcher’s bunch to yank his fat from the fire that time.

Then shortly after deciding to pull off from those fellas, he and McAfferty had come a gnat’s hair from going under down in Apache country, close as he ever wanted to come again in his living life. Only bright spot in that whole dank memory had been the fact that he had saved McAfferty’s life along with his own in reaching that river in time to end their thirst, in time to prepare for the Apache.

But no sooner did they make it back to the Mexican villages than Asa had to rescue him in that knocking shop. Later to save his life a second time with that she-grizz.

Scratch wondered if his wanting to stay together with McAfferty might only come from his longing to right the scales. To square himself with the man who had not just evened things by rescuing him at the whorehouse … but had gone on to pull him back from death’s door on that sandbar beside the Mussellshell River. Maybe, just maybe, Scratch thought, he might be resisting McAfferty’s notion of splitting up only because that would make it near impossible for him ever to clear his accounts with the white-head.

If he was anything, Titus Bass realized he wasn’t the sort of man who could stand going through the rest of his days knowing that he owed someone for saving his life a second time.

It was something that nettled him as they began their journey south from the Judith, up near the Missouri itself, then continued to eat at him as they made their way on down the valley of the Mussellshell, picking their way between mountain ranges. After crossing the Yellowstone, Bass and McAfferty reined to the southeast, skirting the foot of some tall snow-covered peaks then steered a course that took them through a wide cleft in two lower ranges.

Near there they struck the Bighorn, following it south until the Bighorn became the Wind River.

At the hot springs they tarried for two nights among the remnants of countless Shoshone and Crow campsites. Here where warrior bands had visited far back into the time of any old man’s memory, the two had the chance to sit and soak in the scalding waters so comforting that they made Scratch limp as a newborn babe before he would crawl out, crabbing over to a cold trickle of glacial snow-melt that had tumbled all the way down to the valley from the Owl Creek Mountains. There he splashed cold handfuls of the frigid water against his superheated flesh, then scampered back, shivering every step, to settle once again into the steaming pools. Back and forth he dragged his slowly healing carcass, sensing the stinking, sulphur-laden water draw at those poisons that could near eat up a man’s soul. Like one of his mam’s drawing poultices she would plaster upon an ugly, gaping wound, Bass felt those hours he lay in the springs renew not only his flesh, but his spirit as well.

By late in the afternoon of that second day, Titus called for McAfferty to bring his knife along to the pools. Once more the heated water had softened the tough sinew Asa had used to sew up his ragged wounds—and now he was ready.

“Come cut your stitches out,” he asked of the white-head.

“Lemme have a good look at ’em first.” “They’re heal’t.”

McAfferty finally pulled his knife from its scabbard and plunged it beneath the scalding water after he had inspected the thick ropes of swollen welt. “You heal fast, Mr. Bass. ’This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles.’”

Titus bent over and turned his bare back and hip toward his partner. “I’m ready. Cut ’em out of me.”

“My sewing wasn’t purty,” Asa muttered as he pricked the end of the first short length of animal tendon and began to tug it from the tight new skin become a rosy pink with the heat.

“But your sewing likely saved my life.”

Between the long edges of every jagged laceration, McAfferty had stitched tiny fluffs of downy-soft beaver felt as he’d crudely closed the wounds by the fire’s light. But now nothing was left of that beaver felt—all of it absorbed by Scratch’s body until all that remained were those thick purplish-red welts roping their way across his shoulder, down his back, over his hip.

Titus Bass would carry that mark of the bear for the rest of his natural life.

As tight as it was, in time that new skin would stretch and loosen, and he would move that shoulder, move that hip without so much as a protest from it. But Scratch knew he would never … could never … forget coming face-to-face with a force so powerful it could rip the sky asunder, reach through, and devour his very soul.

No more than two days later they reached the valley where the Popo Agie drained into the Wind River. Those wide and verdant meadows were dotted with several camps of Indian lodges, small herds of grazing horses, and a scattering of blanket-and-canvas shelters lying stark against the green banks of both rivers.

“Har, boys!” Scratch cried, feeling an immediate and very tangible joy rise in him like sap in autumn maples.

A handful of white men came out of the shady trees to squint up at the two newcomers. One of them asked, “Where you in from?”

Bass replied, “The Mussellshell and the Judith.”

Another stranger inquired, “You must be free men?”

“We are that,” McAfferty answered this time.

So Titus asked, “You know of Jack Hatcher?”

A third man nodded and moved forward a step as he pointed on up the valley. “Seen him and his outfit, come in already. Don’t know if they’re still here. But they was camped on past Bridger’s bunch.”

“D-don’t know if they’re still here?” Bass repeated, disappointment welling in him like a boil. “They pull out early?”

“Naw,” replied the first man. “Just that ronnyvoo’s ’bout done for this year. Ain’t no more beaver for Sublette to wrassle from us. You boys are the last to wander in from the hills.”

Bass gulped and straightened in the saddle, licking his lips. “Trader still got him any whiskey?”

“Might’n have him a little left,” the second trapper explained as two of his group turned away and headed back to the shade where swarms of flies droned. “He brought the hull durn shiterree out from St. Lou in wagons this year. Can you cotton to that?”

The first man cackled. “Ain’t never been a wagon roll all the way out here! And if that don’t beat all—Sublette brung him two Dearborns along too!”

“Carriages?” Bass squeaked in a high voice, disbelieving. “Dearborns and wagons—here in this wilderness? Shit,” Scratch grumbled as he turned to flick a raised eyebrow at McAfferty. “What’s all this big open coming to? Next thing there’ll be white women and town halls out here!”

“So you say Sublette still got his tents open?” Asa inquired, clearly anxious. “Need me some trade goods.”

“Seemed he had some of near ever’thing left yestiddy,” the trapper answered. “You looking for supplies—lead, powder, coffee?”

With a shrug Asa explained, “Want me some goods for the Injun trade: Chinee vermilion, ribbon and calico, maybeso a passel of beads and tacks and hawk’s bells—the likes of that.”

Bass gazed at the white-head in consternation. “Now, where you figger to use all that?”

“Injun country, Mr. Bass,” he answered cryptically, then turned his head to look again at the stranger below them. “You said Sublette’s got his tents on up the valley?”

The man pointed. “Just other side of the bend in the river. That Hatcher feller’s camped not far past the trader hisself.”

“Much ’bliged,” Asa said, tapping heels against his horse.

They hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards when Scratch caught up with McAfferty at a lope. “Damn if you don’t seem in the hurry. Who lit the fire under you?”

“I can’t go ’thout them trade goods, Mr. Bass,” Asa explained, anxiety already graying his face.

He could see how something was chewing away at McAfferty. “Why are them trade goods so all-fired important?”

“I know now the Lord’s given me a sign. Showed me the road to go. ’For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever. ’”

“What land?” he asked. “And what sign was give you?”

“Up north there, that’s the country give me by the hand of God,” McAfferty explained. “The sign come to me on the Judith—after you was near kill’t by the bear.”

“That can’t be the land been given you!” Bass replied in disbelief. “There’s Injuns there.”

Asa nodded. “’And he that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations.’”

“I don’t understand,” Scratch admitted. “That surely can’t be where you been told to go, Asa.”

“North. I been told north.”

“B-but that’s Blackfoot country.”

McAfferty nodded solemnly, his eyes never touching Bass. “I will trust in the Lord that there will be many Blackfoot where I aim to go.”

Titus swallowed on that hard lump stuck in his throat, beginning to sense that this friend of his had found himself a sure and quick way to snuff out his own candle. “With your trade goods—you’re fixing to head north to trade with them Blackfoot?”

At last Asa turned to look at Scratch. “I’m no trader, Mr. Bass. But the geegaws and the foofaraw give me something to set before the heathen chiefs when I get there to talk.”

“You … you really figger you’re gonna ride right in to have yourself a palaver with them Blackfoot? Them red killers?”

“‘And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out

of the north, and a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it,’” McAfferty declared, his blue eyes relit with that ice-cold fire.

“What whirlwind gonna come out of the north?”

“The Blackfoot, Mr. Bass,” Asa said, then turned away to search the riverbank ahead. “The heathen Blackfoot.”

For a moment longer Scratch studied the man’s face, how it was illuminated by a most unholy light. Then he figured he was only spooking himself. Why, if he came to believe half of what Asa McAfferty spouted in his Bible talk, then he figured he was soft-brained his own self.

When he turned to look at the small herd immediately ahead of them, Titus suddenly squinted in the bright afternoon sun, not certain he could trust his eyes. “I ain’t believing what I’m seeing, Asa!”

“Believe it!” he whooped with laughter.

“Cows!”

“Five of ’em, Mr. Bass!” And McAfferty wagged his head. “One even looks to be a milker too!”

Sure enough, this summer William Sublette brought four head of beef cattle and a milch cow to accompany his ten big freight wagons each topped with huge canvas-covered bows and that pair of fancy Dearborn carriages.

“jumping Jehoshaphat,” Scratch mumbled sourly. “Man can’t hardly get away from settlement doings, can he?”

“It’s only ronnyvoo!” McAfferty cheered with a smile. “Them cows and wagons and such gonna be turning right back for St. Louie soon enough.”

“S’pose you’re right,” Bass replied eventually as they approached the grazing cows. “Ain’t none of them settlement doings gonna last out here longer’n ronnyvoo.”

The Sublette camp was mammoth this year, and bustling like a hive. There was no mistaking the many newcomers to the mountains from those hivernants who had endured at least one winter in the wilderness. Men moved about like ants on a prairie hill at midday. Trappers both free and company came and went on horseback and foot. Others clustered beneath the shade of the trade canopies or sprawled out near the last of the nearby whiskey kegs. Why, Bass had never seen so many humans gathered in one place since he’d put St. Louis behind.

Wagging his head, Scratch declared, “It purely bumfuggles my mind to try to figger how all these here fellers gonna find enough beaver in these mountains to make their trappin’ worth their while.”

“I don’t reckon all these niggers gonna make a living at all,” McAfferty replied as they reached the fringe of a small herd of horses and moved on past. “A goodly number of ’em likely to go under, that’s a fact. Other’ns gonna skedaddle back east with Sublette come next summer’s ronnyvoo.”

“After they see’d the elephant, eh?”

“Damn right,” Asa agreed. “Not every man gonna keep his hide or hair out in this country. ’For the Lord my God has set my foot down in the wilderness and abideth with me.’”

“Jack! Lookee here!”

Scratch jerked about to stare at the trees up ahead where the voice had called out. If that didn’t look like Elbridge Gray!

Hatcher peeled himself away from the base of a cottonwood tree where he had been leaning. Clambering to his feet, Jack roared, “Titus Bass? And Asa McAfferty too! Ye lily-livered polecats! We figgered ye both for wolf-bait by now!”

“Just ’cause we’re a li’l late for whiskey?” he bellowed, standing in the stirrups as he drew closer to Hatcher and those five men who gathered about him. “Jack Hatcher—don’t you dare take on airs now!”

“Take on airs?” Hatcher cried, thumping his chest. “Why, I ought’n kick yer bony arse—”

“Kick my arse, will you?” Scratch cried in glee. “Don’t you know I’m here to give you the thumping you been needing ever since’t last ronnyvoo!”

“Thump me now, Titus Bass? Why, I’ll have ye know I can outride, outshoot, and outthump ary a man in this hull valley! Mad Jack Hatcher be the nigger what can out-lie, outdrink, and outpuke all the rest of ye poor sons put together! We’ll wrassle if’n ye think ye’re man enough, Titus goddamned Bass!”

Reining up sharply, Scratch immediately flung his leg across the saddle and dropped to the ground, bursting into motion as his feet hit the grass—sprinting low and headlong for Hatcher. They collided with a mighty gust of air from them both as the two spilled onto the ground, a writhing, snaky mass of arms and legs, flying fists and buckskin fringe, spewing and grunting as they rolled over and over atop one another.

“Leave the poor man be, Scratch!” Caleb Wood lunged up to their side laughing as the pair tussled and romped in the grass, thumping one another with their fists and giggling like two schoolboys let out to recess.

“L-leave off me yer own self, Caleb!” Hatcher grumbled as he shoved Bass back, rocked onto his knees, and started brushing dirt and flecks of grass from his bare, sweaty flesh. “I gotta give a old friend a proper greeting!”

“Proper greeting?” McAfferty called. “Why, you ain’t never made me wrassle with you, Jack.”

Hatcher brushed some of his long, dark hair back out of his eyes and swiped at a bead of sweat sliding down the bridge of his nose when he peered up at the white-head as if measuring his words before he set them free.

“Asa McAfferty,” Jack said evenly in that way a man might when he had derided it best to leave certain feelings unspoken. “Didn’t figger either of ye for coming in alive this summer.” Then he turned back to Bass, looping an arm over Scratch’s shoulder. “Damn, but it’s good to lay eyes on ye both again.”

“I’ll be et for the devil’s tater if it ain’t good to see you boys again too!” Titus cried, thumping a fist into Hatcher’s taut belly.

“You’ll camp with us?” Solomon Fish pleaded as the rest came up in turn to give Bass a hearty embrace.

“Ain’t no other place I’d rather spread my robes,” Scratch declared, basking in the glow of these friends.

Rufus Graham looked up at McAfferty. “You getting down off that horse, Asa? Or maybeso you don’t figger to camp with your partner here.”

For a fleeting moment Titus glanced at McAfferty. He explained, “Asa and me—well, we reckon to go our own ways for the fall hunt.”

“I’ll be go to hell!” Caleb exclaimed.

Hatcher himself said, “That news s’prises me.”

“Don’t s’prise me none,” Elbridge grumped. “Asa allays been one to go off on his own. Ain’cha, McAfferty?”

Instead of answering, Asa rocked out of the saddle and came to the ground, busying himself with throwing up a stirrup and loosening the cinch.

Hatcher studied Scratch’s face a moment, as if he might divine some clue thereupon. Eventually Jack said, “Asa ain’t never reckoned on pulling away on his own this quick, boys.” He grinned disarmingly as he turned to McAfferty. “Something really must trouble ye ’bout riding with Titus Bass.”

Only then did Asa slowly step around the horse. “Any man be proud to ride with Mr. Bass.”

“Awright,” Hatcher said with a little disgust at not learning what he wanted to know. “Which one of ye niggers is gonna dust off the truth and spit it right out—”

“The two of us,” Titus interrupted, “we had us a couple bad scrapes, Jack.” He glanced over at McAfferty, seeing the appreciation shine in the white-head’s eyes. “Nothing more’n some Injuns tracking us down on the Heely. Then a few Mex soldiers jumped us in a whorehouse when we rode back in to Taos.”

“Any soldiers we know?” Graham inquired with a grin.

“That sergeant what they made a lieutenant.”

Hatcher asked, “Ye get in yer licks afore ye was run out of town, fellas?”

“I kill’t him,” McAfferty admitted flatly.

Caleb whistled low, and Rufus asked, “Ramirez?”

“That’s the truth,” Scratch added. “Him and a bunch of ’em … well, I don’t figger I can head back down to Taos for a few winters.”

“Lordee!” Caleb hooted gustily. “That Mex nigger had it coming!”

“Sounds to me like ye boys got tales to weave and stories to tell round our campfire tonight!” Jack howled. Then he whirled on McAfferty. “So ye gonna throw yer bed robes down with this bunch of bad mothers’ sons?”

Asa looked over at Bass for a heartbeat, then gazed at Hatcher. “Yep, Jack. I’ll camp with my partner, Mr. Bass—right on through till it’s time for us to go our own trails for the fall hunt.”

“He says the Lord’s steering him for the north country,” Bass explained to Hatcher, Wood, and Graham a few days later. “Keeps talking ’bout the Three Forks.”

“Shit,” Jack said, wagging his head. “It ain’t like McAfferty don’t know that’s smack-dab in Blackfoot country.”

“Why would a man up and decide to go there on his own?” Graham asked.

“Sounds to me like a sure way to lose his hair,” Caleb grumbled. “So purty, long, and white—the nigger won’t have it for long he goes up there.”

“There’s a hunnert ways for a man to die in Blackfoot country,” Rufus added grimly.

“I don’t figger he’s worried a nit ’bout Blackfoots,” Bass declared. “Fact is, he wants to run onto ’em.”

Hatcher shook his head, bewildered. “Man’s crazy what goes riding off to the Three Forks and he ain’t worried ’bout Blackfoot raising his hair.”

Nodding slightly, Scratch stated, “Could be you’re not far off the mark there, Jack.”

“Trapping’s real good up there,” Rufus admitted. “But a man’d have to be soft-brained to want that beaver so bad that he’ll risk his hide to get it when there’s plenty ’nough beaver other places.”

“With what I can make out from all he’s said to me—it ain’t for trapping that he’s headed to Blackfoot country, fellas,” Bass said, watching how his declaration brought the others up short with a morbid curiosity.

Jack demanded, “What the hell for, then, if it ain’t for the beaver?”

“I can’t say right now,” he admitted. “I don’t know. But I’m sure it’s got something to do with that Ree medicine man and the bear what jumped me and them evil hoo-doos been following McAfferty last few years.”

With a snort Hatcher said, “I thort Asa had him his Bible to keep off all them evil spirits!”

Dragging the coffeepot toward him to refill his cup that morning, Scratch replied, “You may damn well just put your finger on it, Jack. Asa McAfferty might be coming to think the power of his Bible ain’t near as strong as the evil spirits in these here mountains. Maybeso—not near as strong as that ol’ medicine man’s evil powers.”

Hatcher asked, “Evil for evil, is it?”

“When good ain’t strong enough to protect him,” Bass sighed, “I figure a man will just twist the evil around any way he can.”

On his way west with those wagons, carriages, and cattle, William Sublette’s eighty-one new hands had to kill and eat no more than eight of his small beef herd before they reached buffalo country, supplying them with the meat that would see them on through to the Wind River Rendezvous. Those fourscore greenhorns were immediately set upon by the hordes of veterans hungry for news from the States as the trader opened his mail pouches and cut through the twine tying up bundles of old newspapers. Then Sublette got down to cracking open his kegs of grain alcohol, sugared Monongahela rum, along with heavy bales of blankets, boxes of beads, tacks, and ribbon, as well as hundredweight barrels of sugar and coffee.

It had been enough to make a man’s eyes bug right out of his head, Hatcher told Scratch. Why, with each of those ten high-walled, canvas-topped wagons weighed down with more than eighteen hundred pounds of supplies apiece, all of it valued at some thirty thousand dollars—trader Billy had reached that sixth annual rendezvous with more staples and geegaws to hanker after than any man had ever seen in the mountains!

And there had even been enough left among the “necessaries” for Titus Bass to outfit himself for what was to be the first winter on his own.

A pair of black-striped Indian trade blankets—one red and the other green—went for twenty-five dollars in fur. Coffee and sugar, some salt and a little flour, along with a carefully calculated amount of St. Louis shot-tower bar lead and more of the black coarse-grained English powder.

“Most everything’s been picked over,” apologized a bulb-nosed, weasel-eyed clerk with a warm smile as he placed the items Bass was selecting in a large square wicker basket. “You been waiting to come trade off them furs of yours?”

“Nawww. I happed to come in late for ronnyvoo this year.”

“Sounds like you rode in from far off.”

“North,” he explained as he brought up a handful of the long-spiked brass-headed tacks he could use for repairs, or for decoration on knife scabbard or riflestock. “Been up near the Englishers’ land.”

“That’s a ways for a man to travel for supplies,” the clerk marveled, flashing that genuine smile.

“Ain’t so far,” Scratch explained. “Not when there ain’t but one place for a man to outfit hisself for the coming year. And that be right here.”

The clerk pulled back on his leather braces self-importantly. “This here’s my second trip west with Mr. Sublette.”

Bass looked up from the trays before him, laying a half-dozen hanks of large Crow beads in the clerk’s basket. “Sublette gonna be back next ronnyvoo?”

“Most certainly,” the man replied. “Just because the old company sold out to a new one, Mr. Sublette still has the contract to supply their summer fair. He says as long as he can make a profit for himself and his investors, he’ll be buying up goods each winter and starting out west from St. Louis each spring—just as soon as the prairie’s dry enough for the wagons.”

“Wagons,” Scratch repeated with a snarl, glancing up at those two nearby carriages that came and went almost steadily with company men and free trappers taking themselves rides in the fancy conveyances, roaring with laughter and giddy with the silliness of such vehicles making it all the way to the Rocky—by God—Mountains! “Prefer a good mule my own self.”

“Mr. Sublette says he can get more in a wagon for his money,” the clerk admitted.

“I’ll bet he can,” Scratch replied, and fingered some soft sateen ribbon. “And he’s gotta make him his profit, or the new company will have to go off and find it ’Nother trader.”

Despite the fact that this summer’s trade fair was undeniably the largest held to date—taking in more than 170 packs of beaver, the most ever—it was plain to see that Jedediah Smith, David Jackson, and William Sublette were beginning to question the future profits they might wrench from the mountain trade. Or maybe it was nothing more than the toll taken by all those seasons in the Rockies, those years gone from kin left behind in the East, every winter-count giving a man far too much time to dwell on old friends rubbed out and no longer around.

When Sublette handed mail to his two partners, Davy learned that he had lost another member of his family to pneumonia. And ’Diah opened a letter from his brother, reading that their mother had died.

Maybe the partners’ decision to sell out was nothing more than those two of them believing they had had enough of the uncompromising wilderness and the unforgiving winters. Perhaps the time had come to invest their fortunes in more civilized ventures. Besides, Sublette had arrived at rendezvous with news that John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company no longer appeared to be content to stay on the Missouri. And not only were Astor’s men eager to entice small bands of free trappers to the new fort they were raising at the mouth of the Yellowstone—but word was that American Fur had even dispatched a full-fledged brigade into the Central Rockies so they could give the upstarts a run for their money.

Maybe the time had come for the three of them to find a smarter way to make their fortunes than this annual gamble that was the Rocky Mountain fur trade. So while Billy reaffirmed his desire to continue supplying the summer rendezvous during that first week of August in the valley of the Wind River, ’Diah and Davy decided that they just might invest their hard-won earnings in the lucrative Santa Fe trade down in the southwest.

Over the past two days with most of the bartering done for the year and the old company accounts being settled, the firm of Smith, Jackson, & Sublette formally dissolved their partnership, and for a promissory note in the amount of more than fifteen thousand dollars they sold out to five new partners. Now Billy Sublette would be supplying his brother, Milton, along with Tom Fitzpatrick, Henry Fraeb, Jean Baptiste Gervais, and Jim Bridger himself—all long-time veterans of the mountain trade.

And with their new partnership, the five gave birth to the Rocky Mountain Fur Company.

Gabe, Milt, and Broken Hand would take more than two hundred men north along the Bighorn, cross the Yellowstone and plunge into the heart of Blackfoot country—performing a grand and daring sweep that would take them all the way to the Great Falls of the Missouri before circling south toward the Three Forks, then trapping their way to the east along the Yellowstone with plans to winter at the mouth of the Powder. Just let Bug’s Boys dare try tackling a brigade that size.

Those Blackfoot be damned!

At the same time, OP Frapp and Jervy laid plans to lead their brigade west from rendezvous for the continental divide, striking the Snake, which they would follow west to its forks before the great cold began to close in and they made for their winter camp in Willow Valley.

And come the spring that enterprising brigade would venture even farther to the west now that Jedediah Smith was no longer a booshway, no longer able to object to his partners and force his employees to refrain from trapping in that land beyond the spine of the continent, a region jointly held by treaty with the English of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Come spring more than a hundred Americans of the newly born Rocky Mountain Fur Company intended once again to lay claim to that beaver-rich region.

The English be damned.

Let there be no mistake! The Rocky Mountain Fur Company had come to the mountains!

Every one of those hot summer days at rendezvous hundreds upon hundreds of dollars had been spent upon supplies, foofaraw, and the trader’s grain alcohol—a lot of it bartered for women, bet on games of chance with cards or dice, and wagered on horse races, wrestling matches, shooting contests, and footraces for those hearty or daring enough to venture out into the late-July heat.

“They had a feller get so drunk he kill’t one of his friends,” Caleb exclaimed one afternoon, coming back with Bass from watering their horses.

“Funniest damned thing,” Scratch added, wagging his head and smiling with those teeth the color of pin acorns, “they had the feller what did the killing tied up to a tree till he sobered.”

“And was he ever bellering!” Wood declared.

Snorting with a gust of laughter, Titus continued, “But they had the dead feller he killed laid out on the ground right where he was shot, flat on his belly. And the four of ’em what tied the killer up … why—they was using that dead nigger for a card table while they was all playing eucher!”

Caleb slapped Bass on the shoulder, laughing. “With that poor, dead nigger going stiff on ’em!”

His eyes narrowing in disgust, Asa McAfferty grumbled, “Don’t s’prise me one whit. So much alcohol. This many niggers. Why, a man gets tight enough on all that demon rum in Sublette’s kegs … purely amazing to me more men don’t get theirselves killed.”

Hatcher watched the white-head shuffle off. “Asa—maybe ye ought’n go get ye a drink of Sublette’s milk!”

“Milk?” he roared in disbelief the instant he wheeled about on his heel.

“That damn milch cow!” Elbridge Gray explained. “I had me a pint cup of it this afternoon—warm it was, fresh from the udder like I ’membered it back to Ohio.”

Scratch couldn’t fathom it himself. “Milk? You gone and drunk yourself milk here in the Rocky Mountains?”

“I done it too,” Solomon boasted. “Sublette’s been selling it ever’ morning and evening: two dollar a pint cup.”

“Jumping Jehoshaphat!” Bass grumbled, and shook his head. “First off he brings wagons and fine folks’ carriages and beef cows out to ronnyvoo in these here tall hills … and now Sublette sells milk to trappers? What is the Rocky Mountains coming to?”

“Sublette and his other two partners are turning back for St. Louie in the morning,” Rufus explained. “You want you a drink of milk, Titus Bass—you better make it tonight!”

“Shit! I’d ruther let you fellers suck down all of Sublette’s milk so I can go tell Bug’s Boys that Jack Hatcher’s bunch is coming north: a bunch more likely to nurse on their mamas’ breasts as they are to hanker after a fight with them Blackfoot!”

Late on the morning of August 4, Smith, Jackson, and Sublette did indeed set off at the head of that column of ten wagons, a pair of carriages, and some fifty men, heading south by east for the North Platte and the settlements, hauling a small fortune in beaver pelts. Both brigades of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company rolled out to bid them farewell, as well as most of the free men of the mountains—all of them eager to see the booshways off in proper style.

Unlike General Ashley, these three were men who had first come to the mountains as nothing more than hire-ons. They had worked hard, played their cards smart, and stepped forward when called upon to do the difficult. All three had seen more than their share of friends cut down by enemy warriors. All three had suffered the cold, endured the heat and thirst, put up with the hunger and the fatigue like any man.

So it was that three grand and rousing huzzahs were raised for the three booshways at the moment they set off for the States. Cheers and whistles, accompanied by a final shaking of hands and backslapping all around. Here was a trio who would do to ride the river with. Here were three men who had come from humble beginnings to rise all the way to the top of the mountain trade itself.

Here were men who would be missed in those seasons yet to come.

At least Sublette would return come summer, Bass mulled as he turned back to camp with the others. And those five partners of the newly formed Rocky Mountain Fur Company weren’t the sort to quake with fear at the prospect of Blackfoot or tremble at the threat of John Jacob Astor. Sure, there were places in the Rockies where the beaver had been thinned out. But down in the marrow of him, Scratch knew there still had to be a passel of holes back in the mountains where a man could find virgin streams overrun by the flat-tails.

All a man had to do was ride a little farther, work a little harder, climb a little higher, and he would discover those untouched valleys.

Especially if he rode alone.

“Yestiddy—over in the company camp—I come upon a feller named Green reading to some other niggers,” Rufus declared that night as the Wind River Valley quieted just past dark.

“Reading?” Hatcher repeated.

“I gone over and sat for a while myself,” Graham continued. “Listened to a story he was reading for them others.”

“He had a book he was reading from?” Bass inquired, his interest suddenly pricked.

Rufus nodded, spreading out his hands across his lap to show the tome’s size. “A big damn book.”

“What sort of story was it?” Titus asked, his interest piqued.

“That feller Green said it was Shakes … Shakes … ah, shit! I can’t remember—”

McAfferty interrupted, “Shakespeare?”

“That’s it!” Rufus cheered with a snap of his fingers. “Shakespeare. Some story of a king.”

“Richard?” Asa inquired.

“Naw,” Graham replied.

McAfferty brushed the long white hair off his shoulder. “Must’ve been Macbeth.”

Rufus shook his head in amazement. “That’s it! Macbeth!

Green was reading that story to a bunch of ’em. Why, he even had him a Bible laying by his side. Told me he read to any fellers what would listen ever’ day—winter or summer, on the trail or not. Said that big ol’ Shakespeare book of his had more’n one story in it, and his Bible was crammed full of tales to read round a camphre.”

“The Lord’s truth that is,” McAfferty agreed. “‘Fraise ye the Lord. Fraise God in His sanctuary: praise Him in the firmament of His power!’”

“So, McAfferty?” Hatcher asked. “Ye ever read any of that Shakespeare?”

Asa said, “Some I have. Not much. But enough to know that when I set off time to read, I’ll read the stories in my Bible. God’s own word.”

“You ever read that Macbeth story?” Titus inquired.

“Not much of it,” McAfferty admitted. “Only far enough to know that one man hankered to be king enough to think he just might murder the real king. Now, the Bible has a story about the first Asa.”

“The first Asa?” Solomon echoed.

“He was a king back in Bible day,” McAfferty said. “‘Abijah slept with his fathers, and they buried him in the city of David: and Asa his son reigned in his stead. In his days the land was quiet ten years. And Asa did that which was good and right in the eyes of the Lord his God: for he took away the altars of the strange gods, and the high places, and brake down the images, and cut down the groves.’”

Jack asked, “So if you was named after an old king, why didn’t ye finish yer reading that Macbeth story Rufus told us about?”

“I give up on that tale when Shakespeare kept on writing about witches and their evil spells,” Asa confessed.

Scratch shifted, anxious to hear more. “Witches? Real witches in that Shakespeare story?”

“Evil creatures,” Asa confirmed with a shudder as he looked up at the night sky. “Abominations and she-bitches what call forth familiar spirits and demons from the other side, Mr. Bass. ’A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.’”

“She-bitches,” Titus repeated the word, thinking of the bear. “Like that sow what tore through my hide?”

McAfferty looked him in the eye long, his brow futrowing. “Perhaps. A man never knows what form evil will take when it tempts him. Maybeso a grizzly. Or a Injun warrior. Mayhaps a whore what gets a man hot to poke her. The fornicating slut—”

“Whooeee!” Solomon hooted from the far side of the fire.

“Hurraw for she-bitches, witches, and whores!” Hatcher whooped, slapping the tops of both thighs exuberantly.

Visibly perturbed at their lighthearted response to his dire warning, McAfferty turned back to Titus. “The devil puts all sorts of temptations down before a man. If he turns away from one, the devil will come up with another. Sooner or later the devil will find a temptation every man will fall to, Mr. Bass.”

“Now, tell me what all temptations you gone and fall to, Asa.” Hatcher demanded.

He thought a moment, then answered, “Damn near all of them. Whiskey, pride, avarice … and the lure of a false woman. ? God, thou knowest my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from Thee!’ I committed near all of them, Mr. Hatcher. Oh—and I’ve been one to stub my toe and stumble on the temptation of following the lead of other men … instead of letting the Lord guide my steps.”

Damn, if Asa McAfferty didn’t have a surefire way of putting an end to conversation around the dancing flames of their campfire, dashing cold water the way he did on their last night together.

“Sure ye don’t wanna throw in with us come morning, Scratch?” Hatcher asked later in the inky darkness as he crouched to slide beneath his blankets. “We’re fixing on riding south to the Bayou for fall hunt.”

“Like I told you the first time—you make me proud when you ask me to throw in with you fellas again,” Bass explained in a whisper as the others shifted and settled in their robes to drift off to sleep all around them. “But I’ve come to rigger this is my calling, Jack. I ain’t never truly been on my own hook afore.”

“Ye learn’t yourself just how dangerous it was too.”

“Hell if I ain’t learned what danger is,” he echoed. Then a moment later he said, “But there comes a time when I figger a man should grab for what he dreams. And if he goes under for it—then I don’t reckon he’s really failed, Jack.”

“How ye figger that?”

“Way I see it,” Titus explained, “only feller what truly fails is a man what has him a dream … but don’t have the guts to go make a grab for it.”

For a long time after that Hatcher remained quiet, so long that Bass figured Jack had fallen asleep. So it surprised him when the brigade leader finally spoke in a hushed whisper again, just as Titus was drifting off.

“I figger you and McAfferty got that same sort of itch in ye both.”

“What sort of itch is that?” he asked sleepily.

“Ye’re riding off to look for something I figger you’ll come upon soon enough,” Jack explained in the dark. “And Asa—he’s chasing after something he ain’t never gonna find.”

“But that don’t sound like we really got the same kind of itch to scratch.”

For a moment Hatcher was quiet; then he explained, “S’pose you’re right, Scratch. One sort of itch just drives a man on. Like yers. And Asa’s … why, his be the sort of itch what just drives a man crazy.”

At its best, this was squaws’ work. The sort of work fit only for a farmer, for a man who loved grubbing in the soil, caking the moist, rain-softened earth under his nails. The sort of man back east who didn’t mind at all sweating even though this autumn air was cold and those clouds gathering overhead presaged another storm.

A trapper wasn’t cut out for grubbing in the ground the way his father had forced him to back in Kentucky— pulling out stumps and laying aside row after row of deep, damp furrows where Thaddeus Bass came along to drop his seed each spring. A trapper come to the mountains was simply above this sweaty, dirty groundhog and badger clawing sort of demeaning chore.

But for the life of him Titus Bass hadn’t figured out any other way for a man to dig himself a cache.

Gulping another long drink from the kettle he kept nearby, Scratch dragged a dirty hand across his mouth, then spit, finding he had turned the dirt on the back of his hand to a nasty mud, rubbing it onto his lips. Grabbing the tail of his long blanket capote, he swiped his face clear of sweat and dirt and that muddy paste. Then he sighed and leaped down into the narrow hole, dragging the short-handled, iron-toothed shovel behind him as he squatted, went to his knees, and crawled forward into the short neck of his cache.

Emerging on the other side after some three feet of tunnel, Titus crabbed a few feet to the far wall and flung the shovel against the earth. Down here where the autumn breeze couldn’t reach his flesh, he was sweating again in minutes. Out there the air chilled his skin. Down here it was the sort of work he detested more than just about anything. Why, he was the sort of man made for sitting high atop lofty places, able to look out upon hundreds of miles of untouched country. Down here in this hole he found his breathing growing short, his heart thumping anxiously, his very soul yearning to burst free of this earth-bound grave he had dug himself.

Even the fluttering light thrown off by that big wax candle he had set into a notch he’d scraped in the wall of the cache wasn’t enough to ease the dank otherworldly feel of this hole. As if by wriggling through the narrow neck, he had instead pushed himself through to another existence.

Gasping with his exertion, Bass turned around and went to the narrow neck. There he reached back to seize the edge of the elk hide and started dragging it out through the neck behind him—bringing with it a load of dirt he had just scratched from the walls. Once he sensed the cool air on his sweaty back, Titus rose, easing his shoulders through the narrow hole until he stood halfway in the ground, and halfway out.

Heaving himself from the hole, he lay down on the ground beside it and leaned in to grab the corner of the elk hide again, folding it over the small pile of dirt. Side by side by side he laid the skin over the dirt until he could drag it from the hole without spilling the earth. After swilling down the last drink at the bottom of the iron kettle, Bass grabbed the kettle’s bail in one hand, and the edge of the elk hide in the other, and carried them off toward the nearby creek.

At the bank he knelt to dip the kettle into the cool water. With that set aside, he stood and moved downstream a few yards with the elk hide bundle clutched in both arms, then stepped right off the grassy bank into the middle of the stream. Once there, he let the hide fall open—spilling another load of dirt from his digging into the creek, hiding every last clump of that damp earth from any roving, suspicious eyes who might happen upon this spot in the days to come.

It had been this way for two days now: digging, eating, digging some more, sleeping, digging again, always the digging.

Having come south from making his fall hunt on the Mussellshell, Bass found a likely spot for his cache back against a thickly wooded hillside that jutted out into some bottomland deposited aeons before by the junction of two small creeks that flowed toward the north bank of the Yellowstone. That following morning Titus had begun what turned out to be some of the hardest work he had ever done. At sundown the first day he had completed the narrow neck of the cache and pitched into the grueling labor of widening the hole as he inched deeper into the ground, until he reached some four feet below the surface. As soon as the light had begun to sink in the west, he went to his packs and pulled out one of the tall candles he had purchased back in Taos from Bill Williams.

While the feeble light hadn’t been much, it nonetheless allowed him to keep scratching at the walls of his ever-widening cache until it was slap-dark outside and his belly was no longer just whimpering in hunger—it had begun to holler for fodder.

He was up in the gray of predawn that morning and had been at it with only one stop at midday for a meal of some dried meat and a short nap. Awaking to a gentle, cold mist of a rain, Bass went back to work despite the chill on his bare skin each time he emerged from the hole. By midafternoon the rain passed on over and the sky cleared for a time. Then another cluster of gray-black clouds appeared on the western horizon, tossing their heads angrily as they rumbled his way down the Yellowstone Valley.

He pressed on despite the threat of more rain. Just as he persevered now as the breeze came up, its heaving breath rank with the promise of another storm.

This was, after all, why he had come here now to dig his cache. The earth was much softer in these damp days of early autumn than it would be when winter froze the ground and made digging in it all but impossible. If a man was going to have himself a winter cache, he damn well better get that hole dug well before the first snow fell on this north country.

Back in camp he dropped the elk hide beside the hole, then set the sloshing kettle nearby. With a deep sigh he knelt, slid into the dark tunnel where the candle’s light flickered. And remembered back to that final day of rendezvous, to that first day he would finally set off on his own.

Had he ever been ready to make tracks for this land north of the Yellowstone!

Half-froze for the trail by the time he packed what he owned on the backs of the two horses and his dear Hannah. Their camp was but one of many bustling with activity in that valley of the Wind River last August as the two large Rocky Mountain Fur Company brigades made ready to put out on the trail. In addition, Hatcher and his men were striking camp, preparing to head west toward the Snake River country.

“Davy Jackson ain’t gonna be there to call Jackson’s Hole his own this year!” Caleb Wood had declared enthusiastically.

Solomon added, “We thought we’d see how that country looks for beaver afore we point south for to winter down in the Bayou.”

Then Bass remembered how he went alone in the first faint light of that last morning to find McAfferty at work loading the horses.

“Looks to be you’re not waiting for Bridger’s bunch afore you ride north,” Bass exclaimed with no real surprise as Asa threw on a packsaddle pad made from the hide of a mountain goat. Nearby sat the canvas-wrapped bundles the white-head would lash atop his pack animals.

“What’s sense in waiting for that gaggle?” and he tried to smile before turning back to his work. “’Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee.’”

“Should’ve knowed better’n trying to talk you into hanging close to Bridger’s men. Just like me, you’re of a mind to go off on your own.”

“I am of that mind, but we are different in many ways,” McAfferty replied. “’Again, when the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive.’”

For a few minutes he helped Asa tie up a pair of bundles onto a packsaddle without either saying a word. Finally Titus asked, “No matter that you’re riding for Blackfoot country?”

His blue eyes touched Bass’s, and he said, “Where I’m bound in Blackfoot country, Bridger’s men won’t be showing their faces, Mr. Bass.”

“It don’t make no sense to me, no sense at all.”

“‘For he remembered that they were but flesh; a wind that passeth away, and cometh not again,’ thus sayeth the Lord that I should not be scared.” McAfferty stopped tying a knot to attempt explaining something so clearly confusing. “Mr. Bass, ’Man that is born of a woman is of a few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down.’”

Scratch felt the hair prickle at his neck. It sounded to him as if Asa were saying he wanted to die in a bad way. “So you ain’t afraid, are you?”

“No, 7 go the way of all the earth,’” McAfferty answered.

“I’m gonna miss the good times we had, Asa,” he admitted quietly. “And I’ll likely think back on all them scrapes we had us too. I thank you for saving my hide, more’n once you saved me.”

“There comes a time for all of us to go our own way,” the white-head said. “There comes a time when we see our end and no longer are afraid, Mr. Bass.”

“You’re not afraid of dying neither?”

“‘And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.’ I’m not afraid of the Blackfoot. They become my people, here in my latter days,” McAfferty replied. “’And thou shalt come from thy place out of the north parts, thou, and many people with thee, all of them riding upon horses, a great company, and a mighty army.’”

Wagging his head in exasperation, Bass stammered, “I’m t-trying to understand what it is pulling you up there, Asa. Up north to Blackfoot country. All this talk about your final days, and not being afraid to dSie—”

“The ways of the Lord are mysterious ways. We are not meant to question, or understand. A man is only meant to follow the hand of the Lord.”

“Will I see you come ronnyvoo in Willow Valley?” Scratch asked as Hatcher and his men came up to stand near McAfferty’s horses.

“If it’s God’s will and I got my hair—I’ll be in Willow Valley next summer,” Asa said, taking up the long rawhide rein to his horse. “If it’s God’s will, Mr. Bass.”

The white-head swung up into the saddle, then held down his hand to each of those who stepped up in turn to shake with him. In the end he put his hand out to Scratch.

Bass shook, saying, “I truly hope you find what you’re looking for up there in Blackfoot country, Asa.”

With a smile he replied, “I don’t think there’s a way I could fail to find what I’m going up there for. If God allows, I’ll see you next summer so I trust you’ll fare well till then.”

Letting go his grip on Scratch’s hand, McAfferty took up the long lead to the first packhorse, clucked his tongue, and gave heels to his saddle mount, reining away from the cottonwood grove, the other animals clattering behind him. Stepping out into dawn’s dim light themselves, they watched the white-head lope away for a few minutes until he slowly faded out of sight, gone downriver, riding for the far hills.

“Man’s in a hurry to be gone from here, ’pears to me,” Rufus exclaimed.

As they all turned back to their campsite, Hatcher said, “He’s damn well got him somewhere to be, fellas. That’s for certain.”

“Wish I was the sort what could figger folks out,” Bass admitted, still staring after McAfferty even though he could no longer see the distant figures. “Sometimes what I know a man is keeping from me gets in my craw and eats at me for not knowing.”

Later that morning Jack came to a halt where Bass was finishing his work lashing the last bundle atop his pack animals. “Ye’re still bound for the Judith?” he asked.

“Good trapping, that country,” Scratch had answered as he tied off the last knot, knowing the saddest of moments had arrived. “If I keep my head and don’t let no roaming Blackfoots know I’m about—I’ll hang on to my hair.”

Hatcher had stepped up, opening his arms wide, seizing Titus within his bony embrace. “You’ll damn well watch over what ye got left for hair, won’cha?”

He heard a sob thicken the sound of Jack’s words. It made his own heart rise in his throat as he squeezed Hatcher fiercely, fiercely. “I’m prideful of my purty hair, Mad Jack. It’s gonna be long and gray afore you’ll ever think of seeing it hanging from any warrior’s lodgepole.”

One by one he had hugged the others, slapped them each on the back and promised to buy them a drink come whiskey time in Willow Valley, come the summer of thirty-one. But for now the rest were headed west, and he felt the Judith pulling him north once more. As if that country might become as much his as he had come to love the Bayou Salade.

Jack stepped close and held up his hand after Bass was in the saddle. For a long moment Hatcher was silent before he finally spoke. “Yers is a damned ugly scalp anyway, Titus Bass. Not a warrior wuth anything a’tall gonna wanna take yer poor scalp.”

“You flea-bit, broke-down, crow-bait of a buzzard.” Bass shook heartily one last time, then flung Hatcher’s hand down with a wide smile and waved to them all. “You ain’t got no room to talk about just who’s got the worst case of the uglies! You boys watch your backtrail now! I’ll see you come summer!”

A painful memory, recalling how he rode off for the north, how he had turned in the saddle that one last time to look behind him, finding the six of them still standing. How they had all raised their arms and some had waved hats … it again brought that dry clutch high in his chest here beside the Yellowstone, two moons later.

But he had a cache to finish before he could push on for the Judith. To find a certain sandbar. And there to make medicine.

The sort of medicine a man could make only when he was truly alone. Truly on his own at long, long last.