Crack in the Sky

25

The six of them had near pounded him to black-and-blue there in that little clearing as the horses snorted around them.

“Lookee here, boys!” Hatcher roared as he grabbed hold of the front of Bass’s shirt—cocking his head this way, then that, looking at Scratch from different angles. “If this nigger ain’t graying up like a ol’ barn owl!”

“Ain’t he now!” Solomon agreed, yanking the wide-brimmed hat off Scratch’s head. He held up that narrow braid of hair hanging there in front of Bass’s left ear.

Titus nabbed it away from Fish, his eyes crossing as he focused on it. “Gray?”

“See what I tol’t you!” Elbridge roared. “Hell, Jack-Titus Bass rode with Asa McAfferty too long awready!”

Caleb asked, “You mean he’s getting white-headed like that ol’ preacher?”

“My hair ain’t white!” he protested.

Jack rocked back on his heels, grinning like a house cat put out to the barn where all the mice are at play. “Sure are getting ol’t, Scratch. Maybeso ye ain’t had nothing scare yer hair to white … but this here’s certain sign ye’re getting ol’t!”

Bass lunged for him suddenly, sweeping low beneath Hatcher’s right arm to hoist the surprised man onto his shoulders as he straightened, raising Jack right off the ground and flipping him right on across his back so that Hatcher flopped into the waist-high grass. The other five roared, holding their bellies as they guffawed at the stunned Hatcher, some pounding their knees, bent over in a laughing fit.

“Tell me now just how ol’t I am, Jack Hatcher!” Scratch bellowed like a wounded bull, standing over the man sprawled on the ground, balling his fists on his hips, just daring Hatcher to get back to his feet again.

“Ol’t enough ye ought’n know better!” and Jack swung out with his leg, catching Bass at the ankles, sweeping Scratch’s feet cleanly off the ground, toppling him right beside Hatcher. “Damn, if it ain’t good to see ye!” Jack bawled, slugging a fist into Scratch’s shoulder.

“We had you figgered for gone under!” Rufus declared as he dropped to his knee nearby.

Isaac lunged up, saying, “You see’d hair or hide of McAfferty?”

“Naw,” Scratch answered as he slowly got to his feet, dusting off his leggings. “Heard of him—from Bridger’s bunch. Said they saw him last fall.”

“Up to Three Forks?” Solomon asked.

“On north of there a good ways Asa run onto ’em.”

Hatcher whistled low. “That’s hair-liftin’ country, ever there was one.”

“Told us he was going there,” Caleb explained.

“I don’t figger him to make it to Willow Valley,” Isaac said.

“Hard for a man to come through a hull winter and spring that far into Blackfoot country,” Hatcher stated. “Damn, but I’m glad to see you again, Scratch.”

He looked round at those six faces. “It’s damned good to lay these ol’ eyes on you boys too.”

“Bet you’ve got some lies to tell, don’cha?” Elbridge asked.

“Me?” he replied with mock indignation. “Ever’thing I’m gonna tell you fellers tonight at the fire gonna be the God’s truth.”

“You hear that, Jack?” Caleb roared.

“Let’s see: I wrassled with ol’ Ephraim … aw, hell—I awready told you boys about that,” Scratch grumped. “And I damn near got killed by some greaser soldiers—”

“You and McAfferty done tol’t us about that too,” Rufus interrupted.

So Hatcher lazily looped an arm over Bass’s shoulder. “Just what the hell you done with yourself since we saw you last summer over on the Wind River?”

After fetching up his animals and turning them out to graze with those of Hatcher’s bunch, Scratch told them about his journey far north to the Judith, where he returned to the site of his bear mauling, regaling them with the story of his long walk to track the Crow horse thieves, finishing with his spring trapping on some tributaries of the Bighorn, his stop to soak aching bones at the tar springs before pushing on to the Wind River, climbing over South Pass to make his way to the Sandy—where he first spotted their dust cloud.

“You ain’t a very cautious bunch,” Bass told them, wagging his head with mock criticism.

“Just what the hell ye mean?” Hatcher growled. “We knowed we didn’t have to be careful when it was only a bone-headed horse’s ass named Titus Bass following us!”

“You owe me a drink for smearing my name in such a way, Jack Hatcher,” he grumbled, and held his cup up for more coffee as Rufus brought the pot around the fire. “And I don’t mean none of your bad coffee neither.”

“Gladly, Titus Bass! We’ll all have us more’n one round of Billy Sublette’s whiskey when we reach Willow Valley!”

But they wouldn’t drink any whiskey that year. And the mountain men sure as hell wouldn’t have their rendezvous hurraw in the Willow Valley either.*

As it turned out, after crossing to the west bank of the Green the next morning and setting out for the day, they ran onto a small group of free trappers heading east.

“Where you bound?” their leader asked as Bass and Hatcher’s bunch hailed the strangers, and both groups came to a noisy halt.

“For ronnyvoo in Willow Valley!” Jack cried exuberantly. “Ain’cha going?”

“Not to be no ronnyvoo in the Willow,” their leader replied. “We was coming south from the lower Snake country where we trapped this past spring.”

“Near Sweet Lake, we was,” interrupted another of the strangers.

The first man continued, “When we come across some of Bridger’s men, he sent out to pass the word.”

“Pass what word?” Caleb demanded.

“Rocky Mountain Fur wants all free men to meet ’em on the Green, up near what they call Horse Creek.”

“Horse Creek, no shit?” Hatcher echoed.

Pointing his arm north, the leader explained, “A ways yonder, up the Green.”

And with that, Scratch shuddered. “Heard that’s damned cold country come winter.”

“Heard that myself,” the leader replied, looking over the rest of Hatcher’s free men. “You care to throw in with us for the trip to ronnyvoo?”

Quickly Jack turned to the rest, seeing them nod. He looked back to the stranger. “Name’s Hatcher,” and he held out his hand as he continued. “I figger we might as well all ride up the Green together.”

As each of the free trapper bands reached the growing encampment nestled down in the fertile, grassy bottoms along the Green near the mouth of Horse Creek, one or another of the company booshways made a point to come over to explain this change of site.

“Fitz didn’t get off for St. Lou early as we’d planned for him to,” Bridger declared to the group who rode in with Hatcher. “What with Willow Valley being a far piece to the west, me and the partners figgered to move ronnyvoo some to the east so Fitz and Billy Sublette could reach us quicker when they come out from St. Lou.”

Titus asked, “What’s ronnyvoo got to do with Fitzpatrick making it back to St. Louie?”

Bridger cleared his throat. “When we bought out Smith, Jackson, and Sublette last year, we promised ’em we’d have a man back to St. Lou arranging for supplies afore March each spring, when a mule train’s got to make its start west. Just like it was when Sublette hisself went back. Trouble was, we didn’t get Fitz away from the mouth of the Powder this spring as soon as we wanted to.”

Bass felt concern taking root within him. “Jim, you don’t figger there won’t be no trader this year, do you?”

The younger booshway shook his head and smiled. “Fitz ain’t the sort to cache hisself, boys. He’ll make it back just fine. ’Sides—Smith, Jackson, and Sublette are savvy fellers: they know we’re all needing supplies to make out the next year.”

“That’s right,” Titus worked to convince himself. “Sublette and the rest gotta know every man out here needs provisions, year in, year out.”

Jack bellowed like a bull with its bangers caught on cat-claw brush, “We’ll damn well go under we don’t get powder and lead—”

“Whiskey and tobacco!” Rufus whimpered.

Bass agreed and echoed, “Whiskey and tobacco, some coffee and sugar too. Why, hell—how’s a man to winter up ’thout the trader’s supplies less’n he’s got a band of friendlies to hunker in with, or he points his nose south for the greaser diggings?”

Bridger nodded, shoving his floppy felt hat back onto his head. “I know how you feel, boys. Just ’member: we all suffer the same in this. Seems we just have to wait together and keep our eyes peeled for Broken Hand.”

They did keep their eyes locked on the eastern horizon for Tom Fitzpatrick, William Sublette, and those vagons every man was sure the trader was bound to bring back for a second trip to the mountains. Day, after day, after day they kept up their vigil … while July grew old and August loomed close.

Even the unflappably gruff Henry Fraeb finally grew concerned enough to seek out the services of an aging shaman traveling with a small band of Crow who had come in to trade with the white men.

“Frapp said he told the ol’ boy he’d give him some tobacco and coffee if he’d do his medicine and figger out what happened to Fitz. He’s figgering Broken Hand went under—never made it back to St. Louie,” Scratch explained to the others late one afternoon when he returned to the spot where he was camped with Hatcher’s men.

“That medicine man come up with a answer for us?” Isaac asked.

Bass nodded as he settled at the fire. “The ol’ goat was at it for more’n a day. Just a while back he come to Frapp and told ’em all that Fitz ain’t dead—”

“That’s some plumb fine news!” Caleb hooted, stomping a foot.

Jack shushed the sudden clatter and noise, “But if he ain’t dead, where’s he? And where’s the whiskey?”

“That old Crow says Fitzpatrick ain’t gone under, but he’s on the wrong trail.”

“On the wrong trail!” Rufus squeaked.

“Hell—we ain’t gonna get no whiskey now!” Elbridge groaned as he slapped his forehead and turned away with utter disgust.

Hatcher flapped his hands again for quiet. “What’s that mean: wrong trail?”

“Ain’t no one knows,” Scratch answered with a shrug. “So Frapp’s going out in the morning to look for Fitz.”

Biting on his lower lip, Solomon advised, “There ain’t a snowball’s chance in hell Frapp gonna find Fitz out there to the east.”

“Not in time for us to have a ronnyvoo!” Graham complained.

“Shuddup, goddammit!” Hatcher demanded again. “To hell with ronnyvoo!”

Caleb leaped to his feet, hulking over Hatcher, bristling like a spit-on hen. “To hell with ronnyvoo?”

Jack glared up at his friend. “Damn right. We got bigger problems, boys.” He waited a minute as Wood turned back to the group and the others settled around the fire to hear what their leader had to say. “For a man to miss ronnyvoo one’s thing … but for a man to figger him out a way to get through the winter in Injun country ’thout supplies—that’s the real fly in this nigger’s ointment.”

“Jack’s right,” Bass replied. “Like I said when we come in and Bridger told us the trader wasn’t here yet—man’s got to make one of two choices.”

As Hatcher looked them over, the rest stared into the fire as afternoon’s shadows grew longer. “So what’s it gonna be, fellers?”

Elbridge drew himself up and jutted out his proud chin. “Taos. There we’ll find Workman’s lightning and Mex gals.”

“What ’bout them soldiers?” Graham worried.

“That is a problem,” Hatcher agreed thoughtfully.

Scratch grumbled, “Damn, but me and Asa really boogered things good down there, didn’t we?”

“Weren’t none of yer fault,” Jack scolded. “Any one of us done the same if we was jumped by a greaser soldier.”

“’Specially when you was jumped same time you was crawling the hump of some Mex whore!” Rufus roared.

“Maybeso we can slip into Workman’s place one night,” Solomon suggested, holding his hands up for quiet. “Ask him about the lay of the land with the governor’s men.”

“If things don’t look good,” Bass continued, “you can skedaddle back north.”

“We?” Jack chimed in. “You mean ye ain’t gonna come to Taos with us for the winter?”

Scratch shook his head and snorted. “Ain’t gonna be healthy for this child down there for a couple winters yet.”

“So if we care to slip on down to Taos for the winter and supply-up,” Hatcher commented as he turned on Bass, “what ye gonna do for yer own self?”

For long moments he stared at the fire, poking a long stick into the flames. When he brought out the fiery end of that dry limb and peered at it, Scratch said, “I got friends back in Crow country. I’ll winter up there.”

“You’ll be awright ’thout no supplies?”

“Hell, yes,” Titus answered. “Might run low on ball and powder afore next summer … but I’ll get by. ’Sides, fellers—just think what Sublette’s gonna have to pay us next summer for beaver!”

“Whoooeee!” Caleb cheered.

Isaac said, “And ain’t there gonna be a heap of it too come next year?”

“When you was over visiting Bridger,” Jack inquired, turning to Bass, “you hear any word from the company booshways on where they’ll join up for next ronnyvoo?”

“Heard talk about Pierre’s Hole,” Bass replied. “But I don’t figger they’ve decided hard on it.”

That ended up being the best any of those few hundred men gathered on the Green could do—company trapper or free man: nothing more than talk about and dream on next summer, next rendezvous, next time they’d see Billy Sublette’s trade caravan coming in. But with the way a man planned for, anticipated, and downright lusted after each annual gathering for a whole year … it was all he could do to calmly accept that there would be another autumn, another winter, and another spring of wading knee-deep in icy mountain streams before he would trade some of his furs in for whiskey, for enough foofaraw to get him laid with a bright-eyed squaw gal.

It was purely painful there in the valley of the upper Green after Henry Fraeb pulled out to look for partner Fitzpatrick as each new day of August came and went.

When Tom Fitzpatrick did not show up in St. Louis by the agreed-upon date, the partners of Smith, Jackson, and Sublette proceeded with their initial plans of entering the Santa Fe trade. By the time the eastbound Fitzpatrick reached the settlement of Independence, he learned that the three partners had already come through with a caravan bound not for the mountains, but for Mexico. There was little other choice but to gallop after the wagon train. Somewhere in that hot, waterless country of what is today southwestern Kansas, he caught up to the three partners. They told Fitzpatrick he would have to join them all the way to Taos, where they would outfit him with supplies for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company.

By then the caravan had entered the most dangerous and deadly water scrape on the Santa Fe Trail. Far out ahead of the wagons, searching for water in any of the few sandy, dry river bottoms, Jedediah Smith was confronted by some Comanche buffalo hunters. Although his life oozed out on the end of a deadly fourteen-foot buffalo lance, his body was never found.

Even with Smith missing, Jackson and Sublette proceeded on to Taos, where they disbanded their partnership after turning over some six thousand dollars in supplies to Fitzpatrick. While Jackson headed west to California and his own fortunes, Sublette turned back for St. Louis to begin gathering finances and goods for his 1832 trading venture to the mountains.

Leaving Tom Fitzpatrick to load up what little he had been given on the backs of the mules he purchased in Taos, he hired some extra hands eager to go north into the Rockies, and made for the mountains—already more than a month late and with little hope of finding the company brigades and the free men still gathered, still awaiting his arrival.

Without any coffee and not so much as a twist of tobacco. And whiskey? Only in a man’s dreams was there any whiskey! It was shaping up to be another long, dry year.

What few bands of friendly Flathead and Shoshone showed up didn’t hang around long. With summer growing old, it would soon be a time for making winter meat.

Bass and the rest watched the lodgeskins come down, seeing the women tie the poles together into travois, watched the dust trails disappear against the horizon. Then the first of the free men began to pack up their plews and set off.

“Bridger offered any of us to throw in and travel with the company brigades to their fall hunt,” Solomon declared late one morning as he returned to Hatcher’s camp.

“What the hell we do that for?” Caleb demanded.

Fish shrugged. “He says Frapp’s gonna find Fitzpatrick. And when he does, Fitz is gonna have supplies for Rocky Mountain Fur. Only way any free man’s gonna get supplies is he’s gonna have to be hanging close to a company brigade.”

“The hell with ’em,” Rufus griped.

Elbridge asked, “We’ll go to Taos, right, Jack?”

“We’re gonna drown that goddamned Sublette in beaver next summer,” Hatcher declared.

“Pierre’s Hole gonna be ass-deep in beaver, that’s certain!” Bass exclaimed.

That evening Jack suggested his bunch pull out come morning. He cupped a hand at his ear and grinned in the fire’s light. “I hear them beaver calling to me from the Bayou.”

Isaac giggled and squeaked in a high voice, “Jack? Jack Hatcher? Why don’t you come catch me in your trap, Jack Hatcher?”

The rest guffawed and went back to tearing hunks off their antelope steaks using only their fingers and knives, wiping grease on their long hair to give it the same sheen a warrior gave his long braids with bear oil.

A sudden gust of wind slashed through their camp that twilight just then, scattering tiny coals like a swarm of fireflies dipping and swirling through camp until they snuffed themselves out.

In that surprising silence Scratch quietly said, “You fellas don’t s’pose … that Asa’s gone under, do you?”

Jack cleared his throat, tonguing the chunk of meat to the side of his mouth. “He ain’t showed up a’tall, has he?”

Bass looked around at the others, eager perhaps to find something in their faces to hang his faint hope upon. “Maybe he went on down to Willow Valley, boys—and didn’t get no word about ronnyvoo getting moved over here on the Green.”

Caleb shook his head, absently replying, “I don’t figger Asa McAfferty for the kind to sit there in Willow Valley all by hisself for long. Most likely he’s gone and got hisself—”

But Wood was suddenly interrupted by a stern glare from Hatcher. Nothing was spoken—only that gaze of disapproval.

Wood coughed, then corrected himself, “What I mean to say is … maybe he’s gone off on his own like he allays does. Somewheres.”

Bass wiped his bloody knife across the front of his right legging, long ago grown black beneath rubbings of old grease. With a thickened voice he said, “S’pose you’re right, Caleb. Asa’s allays been a contrary cuss.”

“Asa’s set to do what’s on his mind and his mind alone,” Jack agreed.

“Man decides to go to Blackfoot country,” Bass continued, attempting to console himself, “them what he leaves behind shouldn’t go counting on seeing that nigger again. ’Less they’re plain, ignernt-headed fools.”

“He knowed what he was doing,” Caleb explained apologetically. “Wasn’t no way you was gonna keep him from where he was bound to go.”

Solomon declared, “When Asa said God was telling him to go to Blackfoot country, I knowed there was no use in me wasting my breath telling him not to.”

“We all know of fellers what don’t come in to ronnyvoo each year,” Jack said sadly. “But I’m damned happy to see your face here with us again, Titus Bass.”

He looked up through his swimming eyes, a knot of sour sentiment clogging his throat, making it hard for him to speak. Eventually, he said, “I figger that’s what Asa’s done: picked him his way to die.”

“About the most important thing a man can do in his life,” Hatcher agreed.

“’Cept for choosing how he’s gonna live his life,” Scratch replied, “I s’pose choosing the way he’s gonna die runs close.”

Elbridge exclaimed, “You said yourself, Scratch—that Asa knowed there was Bridger’s brigade he could hang close to if’n he’d wanted to be sure he was safer.”

Wagging his head, Bass disagreed. “That wasn’t Asa’s way. He damned well wouldn’t have stayed anywhere near no company men. Naw, Asa had him something real serious stuck in his craw what made him go up there all brassy and bold, marching into Blackfoot country all on his lonesome.”

“So if McAfferty chose him this way to die,” Isaac commented, “then it’s for the rest of us to drink us a toast to him, and go on with our own living.”

“But we ain’t got no whiskey to toast him!” Rufus bellowed.

“Then we’ll drain our cups for him come next summer in Pierre’s Hole!” Caleb reminded them.

“Yep,” Bass agreed hauntingly. “We’ll just have to wait another year till we meet again in Pierre’s Hole … till we can drink to Asa’s ghost.”

Looking back on things now as another winter hinted it was about to squeeze its grip down upon this land, Scratch realized how a man could get things wrinkled but good on him. How the perfectly good rope of his life could begin at times to unravel into wild strands. But a man always had a choice to go on, or go back.

And Titus Bass had never been one to go back.

As much as there were some folks who had come into his life, taught him something, then were gone … he most missed those few who had refused to ask more than they gave back to life: folks like Ebenezer Zane and his boatmen, Ol’ Gut Washburn, Mad Jack Hatcher, and even Asa McAfferty in his own way—although Scratch was certain he still had to sort out the why and wherefore of the white-head.

And included with the rest of those who gave back to life in equal measure was the Crow man-woman named Bird in Ground.

But Bird in Ground was dead.

Perhaps even worse to accept was that it had happened early in the fall, when Titus had been trapping over east on the Tongue. No more would he have Bird in Ground to tutor him. No more would Scratch have the man’s smile and his patience and his hearty laugh. No more would he have that good friend.

Bird in Ground had taught him just how important it was to laugh at what scared him most. No fear could ever be near as great after a man laughed at it. How the Indian had taught him that special quality of laughter in the face of a terrible, immobilizing fear.

What sort of man was it who openly set himself apart from other men—declaring that he would be a warrior unlike any other warriors, that he was a man-woman who would do some man things, and some woman things too? How much courage had that taken?

“Bird in Ground was killed in battle,” Arapooesh explained as soon as Scratch had arrived at the tribe’s first winter camp established on the lower Bighorn.

He had choked on the news, unable to speak for minutes as a few of the other tribal elders and some of the young warriors gathered to welcome back Pote Ani to Absaroka with no more than a muted celebration.

Rotten Belly continued. “Two moons ago. He elected to go on a scalp raid against the Blackfoot with some of our strongest warriors. Bird in Ground had gone into battle before. He was not a stranger to fighting. He was not always a woman. On that raid no one feared for him, especially with the strongest of men going on that journey north.”

“North?”

Arapooesh pointed, nodding. “They intended to go far beyond the Three Forks country. Sure to find Blackfoot there. Bird in Ground said it was time for him to ride against the enemy, time to make his man side strong once more.”

“Yes,” Scratch replied. “He told me he always raided against the enemy once a year or so.”

“For this journey he asked a young man to go with him, someone to hold and care for his war pony,” Arapooesh explained. “He asked Pretty On Top to go to war with him.”

Bass’s eyes slowly shifted to the youngster standing nearby, silent as a winter night. “You went on the raid with our friend, Bird in Ground?”

“He made me proud,” Pretty On Top answered, his sad eyes misting over. “No man ever before asked me to go with him on a raid against our most terrible enemy.”

Swallowing hard against the sour ball collecting in the back of his throat, Scratch said, “To ask you to go with him, he must have been very proud of you.”

Titus watched Pretty On Top struggle to keep from spilling his emotions, just the way the Crow elders taught this same detached stoicism to every young man hoping one day to become a warrior. Scratch said, “You became a good friend not only to Bird in Ground,” Titus declared, “but to me.”

The youth bit at his quivering lower lip.

Suddenly something cold in Bass’s gut reminded him … and just as quickly he was sure he knew to the day when Bird in Ground was killed. It made the hair bristle at the back of his neck, made it prickle down his arms—merely to be in the presence of something he did not understand, to be standing right here sensing the undeniable presence of something far, far bigger than any of them.

Earlier that autumn Scratch had been trapping the Tongue, when late of an afternoon he had gone cold. As much as he had tried, he could not shake the trembling. So extreme was it that he finally gave up trying to set his traps in that narrow river valley, and shuffled back to camp. There he had laid more wood on the fire, set the coffee over the coals to reheat, then squatted close to the flames with a blanket clutched around his shoulders. Although the fire grew hotter, it failed to warm him.

Shuddering with an icy emptiness, Scratch had snatched up a buffalo robe and wrapped it around himself head to knee, its furry warmth turned inside. When the coffee began to steam, he poured himself a cup and drank it down despite how it scalded his tongue. But as warm as it was momentarily, even the coffee could not drive away that deep inner chill.

Its icy fingers seemed to penetrate right to the very marrow of him.

Finally, after more than three hours of shaking like an aspen leaf in an autumn gale, Scratch sensed the chill suddenly departing. Instead of the icy fear and the confusion clinging to his very core, he felt a warming sense of tranquillity come over him. No longer was he so frightened of this uncanny cold.

“H-how was he killed?”

Pretty On Top gazed up at the trapper evenly, saying, “One of our men was wounded and fell from his pony during the battle. With some men on horseback, others fighting on the ground, there was so much confusion and noise—no one really noticed the man fall at first, not until the enemy began to withdraw with their wounded and what ponies we hadn’t taken from them.”

Rotten Belly continued, “That’s when our men noticed that one of our warriors had fallen behind the Blackfoot lines.”

“This was Bird in Ground? The one who fell among the Blackfoot?”

“No,” and Pretty On Top shook his head. “It was one of my uncles. But while others stopped a moment to decide what to do, Bird in Ground rushed forward without waiting … without fear. He killed two of the enemy who came back to kill my uncle, then picked the man off the ground and started back to our side with him.”

“That’s when the enemy started shooting at Bird in Ground,” Arapooesh explained. “All of the Blackfoot trained their weapons on him.”

The youngster took up the story. “We watched the arrows fall around Bird in Ground, as if nothing could touch his body while he stumbled forward under the weight of my uncle. But then … one of the enemy reloaded his medicine iron—like the long one you carry—and pointed it at Bird in Ground. As the weapon roared, we saw him start to stumble, but he caught himself and hung on to the wounded man as he kept on coming for our side.”

“Just to see Bird in Ground’s valor—that’s when more of our warriors were rallied again!” Rotten Belly exclaimed proudly. “Many of us rushed forward, racing right past him and the man he was carrying to safety, charging the Blackfoot.”

“They drove the enemy back for good at that moment,” Pretty On Top said. “But Bird in Ground slowly came to a stop on his wobbly legs. I ran to him, reaching him just before he fell, as he laid the wounded man out. I got there when he collapsed, unable to stand—sitting there singing his prayer song. When I looked at his back, I saw the small hole. But there was much more blood on the front of his shirt. ’See to your uncle,’ he told me. ’He can live from his wounds but I … I cannot.’”

When the youngster fell silent, struggling to hold in the strong emotion, Arapooesh filled the void. “As our men returned from driving the Blackfoot off, they were celebrating, happy, bringing the enemy’s ponies with them. But all fell silent when they arrived to see Bird in Ground sitting there, bleeding to death and not calling for anything to dull his pain, wanting no one to take from him this courageous death he had earned.”

Now Pretty On Top nodded, rubbing the back of his hand beneath his nose, and said, “He sat there talking to us for a long time. While the sun traveled from there, to there. Talking most of the while as if there were no pain. Then, after a long time of quiet from him, he told me, ’Remember my death, Pretty On Top. Remember that in the end we all choose how we live. But very few of us get to choose how we die. Remember that I did not choose to be a man-woman of the Crow … that medicine was thrust upon me when I had no choice. But I did bear up my strong medicine with dignity all of my days. And now I choose to die fighting my people’s enemy. Remember my death.’”

When the young man turned away, averting his misty eyes, the chief continued. “That’s when Bird in Ground slowly fell over to the side and closed his eyes. After all that time and pain, he simply laid over and closed his eyes … as if he were going to sleep.”

“I will never forget that look on his face,” Pretty On Top declared. “He was content. He died at peace with his medicine. At peace with the way he chose to die—as a man of honor. As a very, very brave warrior.”

After a long time Scratch was able to speak. He pointed to one of the brown buffalo-hide cones. “Is that his lodge?”

“Yes,” Rotten Belly answered. “Among our people the lodge is something a woman possesses. Not a man. But Bird in Ground’s medicine told him different, because he was a man-woman. We have not let anyone tear it apart or take it down in mourning. I don’t know what I will choose to do when we have to move from this camp—”

“May I sleep in it?” Titus suddenly interrupted.

For a long moment Arapooesh looked into the white man’s face. “Yes,” he finally answered. “I think that would be a good thing, Pote Ani.”

Pretty On Top agreed. Quietly he said, “I know Bird in Ground would say it is a good thing too—this, what you do to stay close to the spirit of your friend.”

She lay warm against him within the scratchy warmth of the wool blankets, both of them nestled under the weight of two buffalo robes. His own skin still smelled of hers and their coupling in the firefly darkness of the lodge where Bird in Ground once lived.

This woman who had been with him for several weeks now was younger than some who had come to be a bed warmer for him on the long winter nights spent among the Crow. This woman who had lost two infants to sickness and told him she could never carry another in her belly because something was torn inside her. No children, and now no husband. He had gone off to hunt one day early last fall, gone to bring in some game for their lodge … and never come back.

She too battled the beast of loneliness.

Here in the deep hours of the long winter night, Bass smelled the firesmoke in her tangled hair and thought back on the faces and hair, the breasts and bellies, hips and legs, of all those who had gone before her. And with those memories Scratch wasn’t at all surprised to find he still sensed the same sort of seeping emptiness he had always felt, something akin to that first flush of contentment that washed over him right after the moment of coupling began to seep out of him like milk oozing from a crack in one of his mam’s earthenware crocks.

Maybe, Titus told himself, he should be at peace with what he had shared with each of them in turn. Maybe that was enough.

Suddenly there in the darkness beneath that patch of dark sky hung above him at the smoke hole, Scratch found himself looking back on Amy as his very first stumble, falling headlong into the world of women. Oh, how he had been swept up with what his own body was experiencing while his hands raced over virginal Amy’s warm flesh, those soft breasts and rounded hips, the downy fur of her down below—all of it arousing him frantically: while his head didn’t have any idea what to do next, it was his body that took command of him that night at the swimming hole.

In the end Titus had to run away from her, from the prison she and those farmer’s fields would make for him.

By the time he found Mincemeat in that Ohio River tippling house as he was closing in on his seventeenth birthday, he came to appreciate all that a woman could do for a man when she herself knew and practiced more of all those mysteries of how a woman and a man pleasured one another.

But unlike that Kentucky farmer’s daughter he had escaped, Mincemeat ran away from him, leaving him a raw and open wound for the longest time.

When he had chanced upon the carnal warmth of Marissa in the loft of her father’s barn, Bass was beguiled at just how one woman could heal all those places left so tender and painful by the woman come before her. So good was what Marissa gave him of her body that Able Guthrie’s daughter almost did make young Titus forget the hurt, forget that he had vowed to make his way to St. Louis, forget that he swore he would never settle down in one place to work the land like his pap.

Lo, that second time he forced himself to flee from the prison he was sure his affection for Marissa would make for him, chaining him down to what he feared most.

In those brawling back ways and along the waterfront shanties of St. Louis, young Bass discovered no settlers’ daughters to threaten his freedom—only a procession of faceless whores who took no more than he was ready to give … until the night he ventured back to a tiny crib with a coffee-skinned quadroon just come up the river from New Orleans. In the candlelight of that tiny hovel, he found her skin to have the same sheen and color of damp mud along the banks where the Mississippi lapped.

Each time he visited the mulatto, Titus reluctantly promised himself that he couldn’t love a whore who lay with other men. But when he wasn’t with her, he was forced to admit that he couldn’t stop thinking about her, nor that pleasure she brought him. How good she made him feel about himself.

Yet in the end she too had deserted him—leaving for a man wealthy enough to buy her pleasures all for himself, just as a person would put something away on a shelf for no one else to enjoy. All Titus had left were the memories of the quadroon, and the blue silk bandanna she had tied around his neck.

During those dark and drunken days that followed, Bass had brooded only long enough to decide that it all proved beyond a doubt that he would never be anything more than a bone-headed idiot when it came to the fair sex. The women who wanted him surely wanted him only for security—something that scared him enough that he fled.

But what of those women he wanted so desperately? Why, they just up and disappeared on him—without so much as a fare-thee-well or an explanation of why they abandoned him. Each time it happened, his not knowing why served only to crust another thin layer of scar over his heart, like the layers of an onion, every new crust protecting the others below it.

That’s probably why the Indian women had come like a breath of mountain breeze on a still, airless day. Fawn had asked so little from him that winter he had spent with the Ute in Park Kyack. And Pretty Water had wanted only to nurse him back to health that long autumn he had healed among the Shoshone at the foot of the Wind River Mountains. Even the procession of robe-warmers who had come to him in turn across each of the three winters he had spent among the Crow in Absaroka had demanded nothing more than to feel his body pressed against theirs in the darkness of their lodges.

Maybe it was better that he think of them as meaning nothing more to him than those whores like Conchita down in Taos: women who walked into his life and stayed for but a moment only to take away a little of that constant agony of his loneliness. They had come for nothing more than stolen moments, flickers of time a person snatched here and there the way he had snatched at fireflies as a boy.

Truth was, as a young man, that’s all he had really cared for: a woman of the moment to soothe an immediate need until he got itchy moccasins and moved on. A woman to stay only until he had rubbed his horns and the fever of the rut was gone.

So why was it not the same this winter? Why was he no longer able to curl up with a warm brown body, take his pleasure and give the woman hers, then sleep the rest of the night away without remorse? Why the hell had he begun to feel as if something was missing?

Hell, he had all he wanted to eat, and a warm shelter out of the wind. He had him a good mule and horses and a darn fine rifle and traps. And when it came to friends, why—Scratch figured no man could go any finer than the men Titus Bass called friend, both white and red. Besides, he didn’t answer to no booshway, and he sure didn’t bow and scrape to no gussied-up, apron-stringed eastern gal with her should-do-this and shouldn’t-do-that!

So why the hell was he lying here in the dark next to this warm, pretty, naked woman … and grappling with something a man of his spare talents had no damned business grappling with?

There had never been any doubt that he was the sort who stumbled through anything dealing with women, stubbing his toe and stumbling, yet somehow managing on in his own bumbling way—somehow just getting by when it came to the fairer sex. After all, right from day one back at that swimming hole in Boone County, Kentucky, when he had crawled atop his first woman, Titus Bass had been in way over his head. And the best he ever figured he could do was tread water till …

Till … maybeso he found himself a full-time night-woman who would keep his lodge warm and his pots boiling when he came back from seeing to his traps every evening. A woman who would listen when he wanted her to listen to what he had to say, a woman who would talk when he wanted to hear that gentle sound of a female’s voice—so appealing after so many seasons of nothing but deep, bass-toned, bullock voices there at his ear. The sort of gal who’d be there knowing when he wanted to scream and when he wanted to cry. The sort of woman what’d know the difference.

Were these feelings troubling him this winter after so many winters gone before it … simply because he had turned thirty-eight?

Did a man start thinking of so weighty a matter as that of finding a full-time night-woman for himself when he had added a certain tally of rings and his hair had started to gray? Could that be the reason he was dwelling on why he hadn’t already found himself one good woman, wondering when he’d stop making the rounds of one roll in the robes after another? Was this brooding late at night on such things just one more sign of his getting on in his years?

In the late winter darkness, his skin slightly moist where it lay right against hers, he strained to remember the faces of those gone before this one. Most names he could recall—but strained to conjure up the eyes and nose and mouth of Amy … Abigail Thresher … Marissa Guthrie … even the quadroon and those women who had taken him into their lodges and allowed him between their legs season after season after season.

If he tried hard enough, staring long enough at that place where the poles were bound one to the other, he figured he just might come up with a composite of their faces—putting them all together in some murky memory puddle the way rain made earth colors run. The best eyes and nose, the warmest lips and the rounded breasts … all of them thrown in and stirred up in his remembrance the way his mam would stir up her stew of so many ingredients.

Unable to remember any one of them alone any longer now, Scratch had to satisfy himself that he could recall just enough to put them together into a watery, filmy, half-focused face, all mouth and breasts, hips and legs.

But because he failed to draw up a clear image of any one of them from the past, lately Scratch had become certain he would never be worthy of having just one for the rest of his days. He had no right to want just one woman to last him all the seasons yet to come in his life. If he could not pay homage to all that the many had given him from the past, then Titus figured he was certain he had no right to hope for finding that one woman who would stand at his side through those seasons yet unborn.

Perhaps, he decided, he had been blessed enough … so maybe it was enough to accept what he did of each new day, thanking that which was larger than all of them, there at the end of each day granted him. With all that he had been given already, to want a full-time night-woman for the last of his years was simply more than he had the right to ask.

And so Titus consoled himself that dark morning as he had been consoling himself for many nights this winter now grown old. Doing his best to push the loneliness back, to push away the emptiness that cried out within him, its voice become louder and louder while spring loomed on the far horizon.

Oh, how he hungered for white faces as he floated adrift in this sea of copperskins. Like a dry man not knowing when he would next have a drink of water—Scratch thirsted for white voices and white laughter and the soul-healing potion of strong, saddle-varnish liquor.

If he did not have a woman come to fill those empty places in his soul, at least he knew there would always be friends and voices, laughter and whiskey, to soothe those raw and oozing places in his life.

Perhaps he would have enough of all the rest … so that one day he would eventually forget this deepest, most secret need of all.

*Near present-day Cove, Utah. Although one of the contemporary sources intimates that Jim Bridger, Milt Sublette, and Henry Fraeb met with their combined brigades in what is today called Cache Valley, what the mountain men of the era called Willow Valley, the majority of fur-trade historians appear to agree that the preponderance of the remaining contemporary sources show conclusively that the Rocky Mountain Fur Company outfits actually united on the Green River that July of 1831.