Crack in the Sky

23

How good were those last hot days of summer to think back upon now that winter had clamped its jaws tight upon this land. Those days that he rode out the long hours from well before sunrise until twilight squeezed down until nothing but starshine fell from the sky. Even the cool rainy days of autumn when he had turned back from the Mussellshell to dig his cache near the Yellowstone would have felt far better than this marrow-numbing cold.

Up ahead beneath the aching winter blue of the clear sky, he recognized that bulk of those hills as they tumbled down toward the valley of the Judith.

“Looks like we found it, girl!” he flung his voice back to Hannah, eager to share his mounting anxiousness with another. “Maybeso we’ll make camp up yonder for the night.”

For days now it had felt as if it were the thing to do: locate the place where he and Asa had camped late last spring as they’d worked their way north to the Missouri River—the site where for days McAfferty had ministered to his wounds, sewn up the worst of them on his hip and back with those short strips of buffalo sinew and downy tufts of beaver felt, then through day and night nursed Scratch back to health with bone broth and broiled bits of meat.

It hurt to think about his old friend, pained him to wonder just what it was that lured a man into Blackfoot country all on his own—to go where certain death waited, go where few other white men would ever tread. A tangible ache throbbed in his chest each time he tried to figure out what made McAfferty ride off into a sure and certain death carrying nothing more than his Bible and his rock-hard faith that all his steps were guided by his God.

Most times Scratch could put his mind on other things, the way a man would pick up a checker piece and move it to another square. But there were times in the black of night, or the coming gray of morning, or in the day-long swaying rock of the saddle, that he found it wasn’t so damned easy to shift his thoughts away from a mortal fear for McAfferty’s life, if not his very soul.

Not so much afraid that the Blackfoot would butcher Asa as he was afraid of something he could not describe, could not put his hand out and touch. To fear a man of flesh and blood who came at you with his gun or club or knife was one thing. But Bass was coming to fear this journey of McAfferty’s had everything to do with what Scratch himself could not understand.

Titus Bass had never really been afraid of what he could look in the eye—whether it be man or beast. It was what Scratch could not see that scared the bejesus out of him now.

After hollowing out that hole on the north side of the Yellowstone not far from that huge, flat-topped sandstone monolith that stood on the river’s south bank, he went out that third morning and cut some willow branches, a mile downstream where they might not be missed and arouse suspicion. Then he chopped up some five-foot lengths of cottonwood deadfall and dragged them down into the hole, where he laid them out side by side to form a solid floor. On them his supplies would rest up and out of the dirt and mud in the event any water seeped into his cache. After a first layer of willow was stood against the walls and across the cottonwood floor, Bass started down with the plews that he would not need to pack around until he was headed south for rendezvous next summer.

When he had all those autumn pelts and a little extra plunder secured in the cache, Scratch backed out through the neck of the hole and shoved in a last half-dozen leafy willow branches to finish off the lining of that shaft. Up on the ground once more, he jammed a cross-hatch network of willow limbs across the narrow neck of the cavern until it could support the replacement of the sod he had carefully removed in four large pieces when he had begun his excavation two days before.

The final act was then to start his supper fire right on the top of that entrance to the cache, hoping to obliterate as much evidence as he could. As the sun came up the next morning and he prepared to ride north for the Judith to trap on into the early winter, Scratch took note of two nearby landmarks one last time: the position of the two big cottonwoods and that outcropping of red sandstone rock, in addition to how many paces his treasure lay from the downed tree, how many paces up from the bank of the narrow creek.

Early next spring when his winter in Crow country was drawing to a close, he would come back here to dig up his autumn’s take and those few supplies he felt he could do without. But for now he had put the Yellowstone at his back and turned his nose north for the Judith, setting his course for that ground where the sow grizzly had forever changed everything between two men.

He brought the horse, Hannah, and the packhorses to a halt and sighed in the silence of this place.

Collars of old snow clung back in the shady places there in the copse of trees rising on the west bank of the river.

“It was good enough for us back then, girl,” he said quietly as he swung off his horse and rubbed his thighs quickly, “so it ought’n do for us now.”

As much as he wanted to walk down to the riverbank then and there, Bass resisted and instead busied himself with pulling the loads from the backs of the animals, removing saddles and blankets and pads from them all, leading them one by one toward a small clearing where the cool autumn nights were beginning to brown the last of the tall grass. He secured the forelegs of the last of the three with twisted rawhide hobbles, rubbed each animal down with tufts of sage, then turned back to see to his camp. After resetting the firestones he and Asa had used there last spring, Scratch went in search of firewood, forced to look for more than a half mile in any direction before he found enough to last him through the coming two nights. It was plain that McAfferty had cleared the nearby ground of every last scrap of deadfall that would burn as he kept his vigil over the mauled and mutilated Titus Bass.

Then beside the fire pit he plopped down a hindquarter of the antelope he had shot that morning. With enough firewood laid in, and his bedding spread out, the time had come to fetch some water from the river bank. Snatching up the bail of his small cast-iron kettle, Scratch took a deep breath and started for the willows that lined the Judith a few yards off through the tall brush blanketing the meadow.

On the far side of the river the beaver had been at work for years without count. Those industrious creatures had backed up part of the river into some low bottomland, where they had constructed at least half a hundred mud-and-branch lodges. He spotted some two dozen of the flat-tails still swimming about in the shallow waters or at work on the trunks of nearby trees. And there, off to his left, was the narrow strip of sandbar lying beneath the sharp cutbank, at least what remained of it after the spring floods had uprooted huge sections of the river bottom and carved away large slabs of the bank, relocating them downstream.

Scratch wasn’t sure at first, but that spot some twenty yards to his left had a familiar feel about it—what with the gentle curve of the river, the overhanging vegetation, that small copse of trees on the far bank.

He and McAfferty had been gone from here about the time the snow-melt was gorging all the streams and creeks and tiny rivulets that fed the Judith, swelling the river in its wide channel—well beyond the level of the sandbar. And with the way this land dried out at the end of each summer, that strip of ground at the bottom of the cutbank was once again exposed here in these chilly days as winter sank ever southward from the arctic.

Halfway there he grew pretty sure. After another half-dozen steps he was certain. Although the Judith had deposited some sand and native silt, along with some limbs and roots and assorted river trash around the remains—that big a carcass could only be but one of two creatures. Either a buffalo, or a grizzly.

And this skull plainly wasn’t huge and wide, nor did it bear a healthy set of horns.

No. That was the skull of a grizzly.

His veins ran cold of a sudden. And his belly crimped the way it did when he had gone the better part of a day without feeding. His mouth went dry and pasty, almost the way it had with his ordeal down in the desert of Apache country.

Predators had come and picked the bones all but clean before, perhaps since, the spring floods. A mountain man would call it high meat. A revolting victual Asa said the Mandans loved to eat on the high Missouri—meat gone bad … so decomposed it had liquefied enough that the Indians could spoon it out of the rotting carcasses of buffalo floating down the flood-swollen Missouri. When there was no end to rich, tender red meat a man could find on the hoof, why would anyone consider that putrid, stinking, worm-infested slime a delicacy?

In revulsion Titus swallowed his gorge back down and took two steps closer to the skeleton. Then a final step that brought him right to its side, awash in memory. Snatches of recall, tattered shreds of recollections: where he had been when he had fired his pistol, when he had rammed the stake into her chest, where he likely landed when she pounced on him and blotted out the sky; and … could he remember anything at all of where he’d been when McAfferty pulled him out from beneath the dead sow?

Just beyond the bones. There.

Bass stepped over, stopped. Trembling slightly.

It was almost like standing there and looking down on … on his own grave.

Had it not been for Asa, he would have died right there.

For a moment he fought the sting of tears and looked up and down the riverbank until he realized he could not stifle the sob.

Bass sank to his knees in the hard, frozen sand beside the grizzly carcass. Put out his hand. And laid it on the huge shoulder blade.

“You and me both, we was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said quietly. “If it been just the two of us—you’d won that day. If it’d been just me …”

Then he suddenly thought of the two cubs, orphaned the moment their mother had lunged out of the willows after them, having scented danger in the smell of a man who had blundered into the midst of their play. Bears had ’em a mighty, mighty strong nose.

And he knew in the marrow of him he could have been a quarter of a mile away, even a half mile or more … and it would have made no difference. He and that bear had been destined to bump up against one another on this very ground.

Scooting around on his knees, he leaned forward, and there beside the bear’s skull Scratch smoothed out a circle of sand some two feet across. At the edge of that crude circle he stuck some small twigs he broke off a chunk of driftwood to mark the four directions of the wind. The he pulled his tomahawk from his belt and used the back of the blade to break loose the sun-bleached skull from the top of the spine, setting it in the middle of his circle.

Squatting at the edge of this crude altar and crossing his legs, Bass dragged up his belt pouch and pulled out a twist of Billy Sublette’s trade tobacco, laying it atop the skull. Using his skinning knife, he cut a little of the dry leaf from the twist and chopped it up fine enough to stuff down a pipe bowl. Setting the pouch, twist, and knife aside, Bass pulled his much-used clay pipe from its pocket in his shooting pouch, and stuffed it with those shreds of tobacco.

He dragged his dirty fingers beneath each eye and smeared away the hot tears, then stuffed his hand back into his shooting pouch to pull out his strike-a-light tin. From it he took a piece of black char cloth, a small chunk of flint, and the large curl of fire steel. Holding the flint and char in his left hand, he hit the stone with sharp downward strikes, sending sparks into the charred cotton where the embers smoldered until he brought them to his lips, blowing on them gently. Over these tiny glowing dots of heat he laid a small shred of dried tinder and blew some more until the tinder caught. Laying the glowing tinder over the top of the bowl, he sucked steadily until the coals licked through the dry tobacco, and his pipe was lit.

First a puff to each of the four directions, then one to the cold, cloudless blue sky overhead, and some final smoke he blew into the sacred circle he had smoothed before him.

That done, he stared off at the nearby bluffs and the distant hills, feeling the sinking track of the sun as he smoked, and thought, and felt what this ground had to tell him. What it yet had to teach him.

When he finally looked back down into that circle, Scratch put out his left hand and laid the fingers atop the bear’s skull.

“Give me the power of this animal,” he asked in a quiet voice, feeling more humble than ever before in his life.

“Because it died here, I could live,” Titus went on in a sob-choked whisper. “Make the rest of my days as strong as they can be because you give me a second chance here.”

Then he puffed some more on the pipe, drawing in each breath deep, like a prayer in itself, feeling the smoke course deep into his lungs where he held it before he exhaled. And when the tobacco had all been consumed, he turned the bowl over and knocked out the ashes on the top of the skull. With his fingers he smeared the black and gray into the stark white bone, forming a large, dark circle.

That circle, and the circle of this sand altar, both were symbolic of the circle he realized was his own story. People, places, events—they were all to be experienced by him for a reason in the constant turn in the seasons of his life. He had been drawn here, compelled to venture this close to Blackfoot country for a good reason he now sensed he could understand.

While he could not fathom what lured Asa McAfferty to go where he had gone, something told Scratch that the white-head’s journey was of a purpose … and Titus felt at peace with that. While McAfferty believed he was directed to go here and there by God, Bass believed people moved in and out of one another’s lives for reasons they might not know at those very moments.

Come a day soon, perhaps, Bass figured he would understand why he and Asa had had their time together, why they had shared those terrible tribulations and bloody battles, why they had both come to know it was time to part from one another. Maybe one day he would understand about McAfferty—but not until he understood more about the workings of the mysterious, the ways of the spirit world.

So here at last, here beside this sand altar and the remains of the huge creature that had almost killed him, Titus Bass discovered an inner serenity despite his not knowing.

One day he might well sort out the mysteries of life. But for now, he was at peace with it.

He’d follow the sonsabitches all winter if he had to.

One thing was for certain: their village couldn’t be all that far away.

And … they were cocky bastards too. They didn’t even give a red piss that they were leaving a good trail for him to follow.

After all, they were on horseback. And they had left him afoot.

Alone, and on foot here as winter deepened its bone-numbing cold, and the horizon far to the west threatened to snow in another day or so.

Whoever they were, the red niggers had stolen in to make off with Hannah and the horses a few hours back. In those last seconds Bass heard them whooping as they swept down on the animals, as he was thrashing his way out of his blankets and robes, grabbing his weapons, and sprinting toward the patch of grass where he had picketed the critters.

Beneath the silvery light of that half-moon he made out four riders, then a fifth as they loped away, driving his three animals ahead of them—still whooping, all flushed with their success.

“Five of ’em, against one stupid, bonehead nigger!” he had grumbled while he watched the dark shadows bob as they faded across the snow, ultimately swallowed by that black of the distant hills themselves.

“Goddamned Blackfoot!”

His heart pounded. And he damn near felt close to tears, ready to bawl in frustration and rage. That hot adrenaline squirting into his veins was no longer enough to keep him warm as he stood there in the snow up past his ankles, the wind cutting at him as it weaved through the trees where he had made his last camp before he would reach the cache sometime around midday tomorrow.

“Hannah!” he suddenly shouted into the darkness, despairing he would lose her.

Only when he could no longer hear the hoofbeats on the hard, frozen ground did he finally think to breathe again. Staring at the half-moon still hanging about three hands over the western ridge, his eyes slowly descended onto the widening vee of trampled snow as the thieves’ trail emerged from the distance.

Just like some roving bunch of Blackfoot. Cocky bastards that they were.

But he swore he’d have ’em—their scalps and their balls too—if it took all winter. If it took all goddamned winter.

Turning on his heel, Scratch lunged back to camp on cold, wood legs. There he knelt at the coals of last night’s fire and laid a few dry limbs upon the ashes. Bending low, he pulled the coyote-fur cap from his head and blew on the dim spots of crimson among the gray. They soon leaped to life, capturing the limbs, licking hungrily along the dry branches.

He rocked back on his haunches and grabbed the old coffee kettle, shaking it. Still enough left in it to reheat, so he set the kettle right against the rekindled flames. Rubbing his hands over the fire, he realized he had but two choices. He could stay here where he would be guaranteed of warmth and commiserate with himself over the loss of his animals, willing to wait until he figured out how to come up with some more animals—which meant he was willing to let the red niggers get away with what was his.

Or he could start moving now: here in the dark, hiding his plunder and furs from roaming eyes, then set off on that trail the thieves left behind.

The gall of it burned in his belly like a twelve-hour coal. They loped off, knowing they had put him afoot, and thinking that he wasn’t about to follow them since he was at a decided disadvantage—either because he was one against a half dozen, or because he was on foot and they were covering ground much faster on horseback.

Dammit! He may well be one against that handful of red thieves, but it didn’t make no never-mind to him that he was on foot against horsemen.

Bass decided they wouldn’t figure a lone white man to be coming after them … so that arrogance just might work in his favor.

From the looks of the moon hanging above those southwestern ridges, he calculated that he might have as much as two more hours before it was light enough to take off after them.

Not that he couldn’t go now, racing off into the snow-covered night. But he was damned suspicious one of the thieves, maybe even two of them, might turn back in the dark, hiding somewhere along the trail left by the others, watching for any possible pursuit from the lone trapper.

Better was it for him to wait until there was sufficient light to see far enough ahead along the thieves’ backtrail.

Besides, he had him plenty to do until the gray of predawn came sliding over the bluffs to hail its first greeting to the Yellowstone valley.

After warming his hands over the flames a moment more, Titus snatched up his small camp ax and turned toward the tall willow clustered along the riverbank. Wouldn’t be long before he’d have a sweat worked up, cutting enough branches to hide his plunder and plews.

More than two weeks ago he had turned south from the Judith basin as the weather grew unbearably miserable. No longer was winter merely dallying with the northern plains. Deep cold left in the wake of a hellish storm descended so quickly upon this country that it left a man no doubt that autumn was long done with. Bass had pushed his luck about as far as any savvy man might, lingering that far north along the Missouri River country, trapping past the time when lesser men might have turned tail and run.

But, damn—weren’t the plews fine!

Big, fat beaver, the sort what wore pelts so large the mountain man called them blankets. And thick? Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat—but they were seal fat and sleek! It was damn near the finest trapping Titus Bass had ever done in the weeks he tarried past the falling of the leaves, the freezing of the smaller creeks and streams, lingering past the first icy glazing to the surface of the Judith and even the mighty Upper Missouri itself.

Battling his way south, back up the Judith until it reached the foothills, he struggled on through the narrow breach between two mountain ranges, eventually crossing the low divide to drop into the valley of the Mussellshell. Scratch plodded south by east only as long as the animals’ strength held up each day, slowly making for his cache on the north bank of the Yellowstone. When he could tell they were close to being all but done in, Titus would be forced to find them someplace to camp where a small patch of grass had been blown clear. If he wasn’t that lucky, Bass would spend the last hour of light each afternoon chopping cottonwood he would peel before throwing the limbs onto his fire. Though it wasn’t the best of fodder for the animals—it had to be better than some of the withered, wind-dried grasses the stock had been forced to eat as the seasons quickly turned against man and beast in this icy land.

This was to have been his last camp before reaching the cache. One last sleep before he would spend a day or so reopening the hole, laying in his high Missouri pelts with what he had already stashed away of the catch from earlier in the autumn. In addition, he had planned to stow away what he knew he wouldn’t need until late in the winter—like the extra weight of his traps, both American and Mexican made—when the streams and creeks and rivers began to open. And before he resealed the cache, he figured he should pull out a little of this and a little of that from his Taos and rendezvous goods: gifts of foofaraw and geegaws for the Crow.

This one last camp before …

After he had slogged back to his plunder with that first armload of brush, Scratch took a few minutes to pull his hands from his blanket mittens and warm them over the fire before turning to the business of dragging the bundles back into the willow near a small stand of cottonwood saplings. Retying each pack, Titus made sure every square inch was covered by the oiled Russian sheeting. Then he dragged up the first of the brush he had cut, working carefully to stuff the limbs down into the ropes on the top and all four sides.

A second trip added more brush to his cover. A third, fourth, and finally a fifth time he trudged down to the riverbank to chop more limbs. By the time the sky to the east turned as red as that afterbirth expelled by a buffalo cow dropping a calf, he stood back and was satisfied he had concealed what he owned.

Now he had to go after the rest of what little he had in this world.

Stuffing his hands back into the mittens after rubbing his flesh over the fire, Bass laid his two buffalo robes one on top of the other. After folding his two blankets, he placed them inside the robes before turning in the edges of the furry hides. With a bundle more than two feet thick, Scratch took the last long braid of rawhide rope and lashed it all together into a pack some four feet long and nearly as wide.

Rising from the cold, blue snow just beginning to turn a pale pink presaging the sun’s arrival, he hurriedly chopped down three of the strongest cottonwood saplings and trimmed them of branches and knots. Crossing one of the long, thin saplings over another, he tied the two together with some short sections of hemp rope. After cutting the third sapling into two pieces, he tied both sections across the wide vee formed by the others. Then, with his last piece of rope, Titus lashed his bedding and a small packet of dried meat to his improvised travois.

By then it was light enough to plainly see the trail left by the raiders. Time to move out.

Stepping into the vee just ahead of his bundle, Bass shoved the barrel of his rifle through two of the bedding ropes. He jabbed his pistol under another rope, then turned and adjusted the knife and tomahawk at his back, shifted the shooting pouch over his shoulder.

Then he stepped forward, bent down, and pulled the two saplings off the ground.

Surprised to find it wasn’t so heavy after all. And if he had left enough room at the base of the travois below that bottom crosspiece, the drag should ride well enough over the sagebrush and rocky ground, keeping his robes out of the ankle-deep powder.

Squinting into the west as the light began to balloon around him, he thought of Hannah.

Remembered how she had run off that day the Arapaho had jumped them. How she had come back later. How the mule had saved him, saved them both.

“I’m coming for you, girl,” he vowed in a cold, dry whisper.

Ain’t no red niggers gonna get you from me ’less I die trying to get you back.

The intense cold of that early dawn nearly froze the hot mist in his eyes as he set out on the trail, realizing just how warm a man could be when he nursed on revenge.

Stopping only long enough to blow and catch his wind or get a drink of water that first day, Bass didn’t eat until evening. After chewing on some dried strips of venison, he bent over the bank and cracked the thick scum of ice forming along the Yellowstone. He drank long and deep, knowing how vital it was to quench his thirst several times a day in this high, dry, cold land.

Every bit as important, if not more so, as it was to take in water during the heat of late summer—just as crucial as such a thing could be in Apache country. Water might mean the difference between his keeping up with the raiders or never even standing a chance of catching them … the difference between life and death, alone as he was in this winter wilderness.

He stood again, his weary bones protesting, pushing his face on into the brutal slash of that drying west wind.

A while after the sun went down ahead of him, the wind died, no longer tormenting the valley, nor rawhiding his leathery face. Throughout the day’s march he had stopped here and there long enough to swipe one mitten or the other over his face, scouring the frost from his eyebrows and lashes, scrubbing the icicles from his mustache and beard where they collected as his heaving gusts of breath froze in a coating over his face. All day hauling his little travois onward in the path of the falling sun.

Then, as twilight deepened the hues of that snow covering the nearby hills to shades of rose and lavender, he lunged to a stop, weary, exhausted, thirsty so quickly again … his heart rising to his throat in frustration and fear as he peered down the raiders’ trail.

The hoofprints turned sharply to the left, following the gentle slope of the bank toward the river. The trampled snow he had been following disappeared through a wide notch in the brush and cottonwood.

It would make a fine spot for an ambush. The sort of place where one or two of the warriors would lie back after the others had gone on, waiting there in hiding for the white man—if they suspected they were followed.

But the more he stared at that wide breach in the brush along the bank, at that gentle descent the slope made as it fell away to the shallow ford, as he studied the skeletal trees up and down the river, listening … Scratch grew all the more certain these warriors were so cocky they didn’t even give a good goddamn if they were followed by one lone trapper.

So maybe he should let the sonsabitches know he was coming.

“Hannah!”

He listened to the voice echo back at him from the low hills lying south of the river. The deepening cold swallowed that plaintive sound quickly as a mist began to form at the river’s surface.

Then Bass whispered, “I’ll find you yet, Hannah. I swear it, by God.”

At the river’s edge he stared across the Yellowstone. A thickening ice had rimed itself along both banks in a scum more than two feet wide. He bent and chopped himself a wide hole, then leaned out and drank. The drops froze on his face as he stood to swipe off that thin crusting with a mitten.

And, Lord, how that hurt too—merely rubbing his nose and cheeks with the stiffened wool of his mitten!

Hannah was somewhere on the other side now. And the thieves were on the south bank of the Yellowstone with her and the horses. How far ahead, he had no way of knowing. But if he hesitated here, one thing was certain: he never would get the mule back. He never would catch up to the raiders. He never would see the startled looks on their faces as he rained his retribution down upon them.

Just the way Asa McAfferty’s avenging angels would rain fire and brimstone down upon the unholy come their Judgment Day.

If he camped here, he might as well give up.

But if he crossed now, and pushed on into and through this night … he might just stand a chance of catching them somewhere west of the ford, catching them sometime tomorrow. Because red niggers as cocky as this bunch would most assuredly figure on stopping close to dark, making their beds around a warm fire, and sleeping out the night in warmth.

Bass listened to the river lap against the bank beneath that thickening rime of ice near his feet. And realized it was the only way.

He dropped the travois and turned around to the bundle of robes and blankets. Stripping off his mittens, he stuffed them under a top section of rope where he could grab them quickly, without fumbling. A man’s hands would have to be warm enough to grip a thin piece of char, hold a chunk of flint at the right angle, to sweep down with that gentle curve of the fire-steel without trembling if he was going to get himself a fire started on the far bank.

Next came the thick fur-lined buffalo moccasins he stuffed under the ropes, as well as an inner pair of fur-lined elk-hide moccasins. Bass decided to leave on the soft, smoke-tanned elk-hide moccasins he wore right against his flesh: he might well need that thin layer of protection against the river-bottom rocks, the grip they could give him as he raced across this ford of the Yellowstone.

Now came the leggings, one shivering leg at a time. After he had removed his shooting pouch and powder horn and laid them both alongside his rifle, he pulled the thick blanket capote from his arms and laid it atop the bedding bundle. Next he dragged the rifle from the ropes and set the weapon down within the coat, wrapping the leggings around the muzzle, clear back to the lock. By the time he pulled off the breechclout and his belt, his legs were shaking with the bite of intense cold.

Scratch clenched his chattering teeth together and yanked the long buckskin war shirt over his head, off his arms, and slapped it down on the rifle. Rolling it into a long tube that covered the lock and buttstock, he had one last item of clothing to remove.

His frozen fingers trembled as they fought the buttons loose from their holes on his faded red wool longhandles. Yanking it down off his arms, on down off his chest and belly, Bass tugged the dirty, smoke-stained cloth over each moccasin and stood again to drape it across the rifle and his buckskin clothing. He swaddled the sides of the coat over it all, rolled up his bundle, and wedged this long wool-wrapped packet under two sections of rawhide rope.

Pausing only long enough to take a deep breath, Titus whirled and seized the cottonwood saplings of his travois, rising from the snow with them. At the riverbank he hesitated a moment, gazing at the ice and the slow-moving water … his eyes eventually moving across the wide black ribbon to the far bank where the raiders’ trail disappeared into the brush…. Then he finally looked at the sky to the west.

Snow before morning.

If it stormed hard enough … and he hadn’t caught them by sunup, his chances ran somewhere between slim and none that he would have a trail clear enough to follow.

Titus stepped into that wide crack he had hacked through the layer of ice skimming the riverbank.

His breath immediately seized in his chest—so sudden and tight were the frozen bands around his ribs that Scratch doubted he would ever breathe again.

Already his feet and calves ached with the deep cold, just standing there….

“It ain’t nothing you haven’t felt afore,” he convinced himself as he stepped deeper into the water, the cold quickly climbing up his legs, sensing the travois poles begin to float their load on the river’s surface behind him.

Before he plunged any deeper, Titus realized he would have to step out of the vee and float his travois the rest of the way as he plodded across on foot. The slow water swirled sluggishly at midthigh, gushing up against his shrinking scrotum and manhood as he high-stepped out of the travois, pushed it ahead of him, and plunged on into the river—measuring each step carefully as his toes felt their way along the river bottom in the growing darkness, each foot securing a hold before he moved another half-yard.

All too quickly the water rose past his hips, over his waist, to midchest and finally to his armpits as he pushed on—not even a third of the way across yet. So deep already that he grew worried this wasn’t a shallow ford at all. But the raiders had to know.

So he pressed on, struggling with his travois every now and then as the river’s surface tugged at it, shoving it sideways from him. Nearly halfway across, the water rose above his shoulders, lapped at his ragged beard.

Damn, if it really weren’t warmer here under the water!

Then he realized that would mean the air itself was colder than the Yellowstone.

Bass knew his life depended upon how quickly he could move across the second half of the river, onto the bank, and into his clothes.

By the time he was no more than calf-deep in the Yellowstone and no more than a few feet from the river’s edge, Bass felt his muscles beginning to fail his willful heeding. Slow, sluggish, moving no faster than the oozing flow of pine sap.

Reaching that ice scum frozen against the south bank, he flung his wooden arms aside and dropped the cottonwood saplings, his fingers still cramped into frozen, unresponsive claws. Slowly, painfully, he turned in that cold air, his legs half-submerged in the Yellowstone, ordering his body back toward the bundle, toward the clothing protected by that capote.

As much as he cursed his fingers, he still couldn’t get them to respond. So in one last, desperate move, Scratch used his teeth to drag the first mitten free of the rawhide rope, and stuffed the unwilling hand inside its warmth. Then, realizing his strength was quickly failing, he yanked the second mitten free and plunged his right hand inside.

With clawlike fists he started to rub the scratchy wool up and down each bare arm quickly, over the flesh on his chest and belly, down across his thighs, knees, and calves—right to the river’s surface as he lumbered back slowly, almost stumbling and going down twice on his frozen feet. One at a time, it seemed, his fingers began to respond to his commands, moving within their woolen cocoon until he could ball up a fist and release it.

Pulling one hand from its mitten, Scratch seized the top of the travois and dragged it up the frozen bank until the bedding bundle no longer bobbed atop the water’s surface. With both hands back in their mittens, he valiantly struggled to pull the long bundle of his capote from beneath the lashing. Clumsily yanking back on the flaps of the coat, he pulled it out from beneath the rifle and his other clothing. How glorious it felt to stuff his arms into that warmth! Even with his hands trembling terribly, he somehow got the wide finger-woven sash knotted at his waist.

Maybe he would make it after all.

Hannah was counting on him. He knew that. If she couldn’t get freed from her captors, then he knew she was counting on him to come after her. Driven by the same deep bond that had compelled her to come back for him after the Arapaho had driven her off, scalped him, and left the white man for dead.

He owed her for that, and for the other times she had been there to warn him of danger, times when she pulled his hash out of one fix or another.

Shaking like a quaky leaf in a September gale, Bass snatched up his shooting pouch and looped it over his shoulders before he lunged thick-legged up the gentle slope of the bank, his soggy moccasins slipping on the icy crust as the leather began to freeze. Collapsing into the snow beside a large branch of deadfall cottonwood, Titus hurriedly brushed aside what he could of the ice at the base of a low drift, then began snapping off the smaller limbs and twigs. As soon as he had a pile formed at his knees, Scratch dragged his pouch into his lap, fought up the flap.

Stuffing his right mitten between his teeth, he yanked it from his hand and began to dig through the pouch for his tinderbox. From the container made of German silver back in Kentucky, he took a small chunk of blackened char. Against it he laid a piece of flint, then pulled out his fire-steel.

As soon as a tiny spark ignited the char, he pulled a small nest of tinder from the box and laid it upon the cloth and blew until the dried tinder burst into flame. Oh, to feel that welcome warmth on his face!

Placing the fiery tinder atop some of the twigs, he gradually laid more of the tiny branches over the struggling flames—adding one piece at a time as each new twig caught fire.

Finally he laid on some of the branches as thick as his wrist. Feeling confident enough that the flames wouldn’t snuff themselves out, Bass stood shakily, dragging his frozen knees and calves out of the snow. Snugging the flaps of his capote around him, he stood dangerously close to the flames, sensing how quickly the sudden, surprising warmth seeped into the flesh of his lower body. Through the layers of his coat, he vigorously rubbed his thighs again, then moved away only long enough to grab his longhandles and leggings.

How warm and dry the faded underwear felt against his near-frozen flesh!

Pulling each one of the buckskin tubes on over the wet moccasins, Scratch tied each legging to the belt he had buckled around his waist. Reluctantly he pulled the capote from his arms and hurriedly replaced it with his war shirt. And with the coat knotted around him once again, Bass sat back against the small bundle of his bedding, sucked on his bare fingers to warm them a moment, then struggled with the soggy knots of his moccasins. One at a time the stark, white, nearly frozen flesh of his feet was exposed—but only for a moment as he dragged on the pair sewn so the elk hair lay inside against his skin. Over them he tied the heavy, thick moccasins with their curly buffalo hair turned inside.

As soon as he laid on the last of that dried cottonwood, Bass realized he was going to need more wood to build up the fire before he had rewarmed enough to set off into the coming night all but done with sucking the last of the light from the valley.

Looking downriver, then up—he decided to go in search of wood to his right. He took only one step when he stopped suddenly, staring at the footprint before he dropped to one knee to inspect it more closely in the firelight. Now he knew. There could be no doubt. Not with the way the outer seam of the moccasin ran back from the big to the little toe at a sharp angle. This was Crow.

He had seen a winter’s worth of those prints to know a Crow moccasin from a Cheyenne, a Ute from a Blackfoot or Shoshone. Two years back he had learned from Bird in Ground to recognize how Crow squaws cut and sewed up their moccasins.

“Damn them cocky Sparrowhawks,” he grumbled as he rose and plodded away into the snow.

Dragging back more deadfall, Scratch snapped off all the limbs and branches he could break with his hands, the sole of his feet, or hack loose with the small ax. In minutes he had the sort of fire that would warm a half-dozen men.

And as he gazed off to the west and that band of indigo blue shrinking to black, Scratch was sure they were warming themselves around a fire right then too.

“You niggers go right on and sleep real snug,” he said quietly to the night. “Titus Bass is coming.”

The half-moon was just climbing over the tops of the bare cottonwood downriver when he felt he had restoked his own inner flames enough to push on into the darkness. With the snow beginning to brilliantly reflect the feeble starshine and the light of that rising moon, Scratch felt certain he could follow the trail of trampled snow heading west up the Yellowstone.

Stepping into the travois, he secured his rifle back under two ropes, then turned and hoisted the drag. Leaning against the saplings, he plunged into the darkness, into the wilderness, into the unknown.

“What’s one goddamned white nigger gonna do?” he groused under his breath as he struggled along, dragging the travois behind him across the sagebrush and rocky ground.

“Bet that’s what them Sparrowhawk bastards is asking themselves!”

They ain’t worried one whit about me.

And that made Titus smile.

Jehoshaphat, but did they have a surprise coming!

The sky behind him had just begun to faint up the last time he had turned his head and looked over his shoulder to the east. The cold, frozen mist clung beside the river-banks, thick among the brush and bare-bone cottonwood. Damned cold here, but this was where they cut their trail through the snow. A mist so thick and dark all night long that it made him think of cotton bolls dipped in tanner’s black. But finally, far behind him to the east, it appeared the sky was finally relinquishing its first hint of the dawn to come.

He had to keep pushing, Bass reminded himself. Couldn’t slow up now. Come first light—they’d be up and on the move again. Maybe not right at sunup, but soon after. They weren’t worried about hurrying out of their blankets, not cocky as this bunch was.

Turning his nose back upriver, he leaned into the vee and lunged forward, driven to keep moving here past the point of exhaustion, though his feet felt like chunks of ice and every stirring of the breeze tormented his frostbitten face. Time and again he rubbed his nose, the tops of his cheeks, with a mitten, trying his best to somehow keep the flesh warm enough that it would not die, turn black, and sluff off. He had seen enough men who carried such disfiguring scars: ears and noses and cheeks.

Tugging the fur of the coyote-skin cap down lower on his forehead, Bass suddenly stopped and sniffed the breeze again.

How the quickening wind made his raw flesh cry out in agony … but suddenly that breeze also carried on it the smell of something new to his nose.

He’d be boiled for the devil’s tater if that didn’t smell like … like firesmoke.

Damn—if that didn’t take the circle!

Scratch peered through the dim light of dawn coming, straining his eyes into the thick, murky, frozen fog clinging along the riverbank. Now, they might be camped up ahead before the Yellowstone took a gentle sweep to the north, or they might be camped just beyond, where they would likely have taken shelter behind that low rise.

He sniffed again and again until he felt sure of making a savvy guess. The fragrance of firesmoke was so faint that it couldn’t be coming from very close. That fire, and those who were gathered beside it, had to be around that river bend, just on the far side of that low hill jutting toward the north and forcing the river to flow around it.

With a sudden surge of energy he threw himself forward into the cold and the darkness, drinking in that hint of a fire, that faintest shred of hope that he was nearing the end of his pursuit.

Where once he had been bone weary and benumbed at his night-long chase, now Bass congratulated himself on deciding to push on while his quarry slept confident that no man would be following them through the long winter night.

Out of the trees he stepped, staring at the low hill he would have to climb now to follow the trail. There was no room left for man or horse to walk between the vertical bluff and the Yellowstone itself. Left without a choice, he continued in the wake of those hoofprints.

Stopping near the crest of the rise as the scent of his enemy grew stronger in his nostrils, Scratch sensed more of the firesmoke greeting him on that breeze rising from the river valley.

Quietly he let the travois fall to the trampled snow, stepped out of the vee, and cautiously approached the top of the hill. Just shy of the crest he went to his belly and pushed himself up between some stunted cedar.

Smoke struck him in the face, strong as anything he had ever smelled.

And there below him in the rising, dispersing mist were the dancing flames of that fire.

Around it stood four figures more shadow than substance. Then a fifth emerged from the brush readjusting his breechclout. He immediately snatched up a blanket and pulled it over his shoulders.

For a moment more Bass watched them talking around that fire, some of them gesturing; then finally two of the Crow turned away and began rolling up buffalo robes while another pair started kicking snow into their fire pit, snuffing the flames and sending up an eruption of thick smoke. He was watching that column rise into the graying sky when a familiar sound suddenly reached him where he lay on the crest of the hill.

Hannah’s plaintive, brassy bawl.

Off to the side he watched the fifth warrior attempting to approach the mule secured to a tree trunk. As the man inched closer, she began to swing her rump toward him, preparing to kick—but he deftly leaped away. Five times he attempted to maneuver in like that without success; then the warrior lunged to the side and swept up a chunk of deadfall about as long as his arm. With this held overhead he dashed toward the mule.

Leaping onto his knees, Bass let out a pained howl just as Hannah scree-awwwed again. Loud enough that she drowned out her master’s call from the hilltop.

It felt as if he had been smacked between the eyes the moment that piece of wood cracked against her head.

He felt his stomach lurch, empty and cold as he watched the mule stumble sideways. The Indian with the club quickly stepped in and yanked her lead rope loose from where he had tied it against a low-hanging branch.

Strutting in victory, the warrior pulled the stunned mule toward the other ponies and horses as the faint trickle of laughter drifted up the side of the hill and reached his ears with a cruel clarity.

Before he could rise from his knees to get to his feet, the stunned trapper watched the five Indians leap atop their horses, turn about, and head out. Riding off toward the west once more. Into the shadows of predawn.

Far enough out of reach that it made him ache to his core.

He had managed to stumble here too late to save her.