Crack in the Sky

26

More and more with every turn of the seasons, Titus Bass came to know that no matter how long or hard the winters of his life, spring was always sure to come.

Sure enough, a little earlier than normal last autumn, Hannah and his horses had furred up just like the creatures of the wild. And they kept their heavy coats longer into the spring too. Although the skies domed a brilliant blue overhead as the air began to warm, large fields of snow lasted long on the north-facing slopes. The thaw came late to the Yellowstone country that eighth spring of his come out of St. Louis.

By the time he made ready to leave Arapooesh’s band, Titus Bass was packing two more large bundles of beaver hung from the elk-horn packsaddle on Hannah’s back. He had kept himself busy through the long months of short days.

When she brayed at him in protest at the load, he said, “Don’t know if that means you’re ready for the trail, or you’re squawking at me for packing you after you ain’t had much of nothing on your back all winter.”

He stepped up to her muzzle and grasped it between both hands and cocked her head so she could gaze at him with one eye. “Now, you know I ain’t no damned Ned. Ain’t never been one what plants his nose under a robe all winter—no matter how warm the womens might be. Never has Titus Bass been a child to lay around camp all through a robe season.”

She rolled that near eye and brayed at him again. “I s’pose that means you and me both ’bout ready for the trail, ol’ girl. But first we best pay our respects.”

As Scratch slowly approached Rotten Belly leading his three animals, the chief emerged from his door, stretched lazily, then stepped around to the side of the lodge where the morning sun would warm him with its full glory. He sat, leaned back in his warmest buffalo robe, and closed his eyes. And didn’t even open them as the trapper came to a stop at his elbow.

“I hear the sound of heavy horses,” the chief said without looking up.

“We are ready to go, my friend.”

“You were happy this winter?”

Scratch thought a moment, glancing over at the lodge where he had spent many a night with the widow. “I had all I needed—yes, Arapooesh.”

“So you’ll come back our way soon?”

“I want to hunt the waters north of the Yellowstone next fall,” Bass replied. “Yes, I think it will be a good thing to come find your camp when the winter winds begin to blow.”

With a long sigh the chief finally looked up into the bright morning light and shaded his eyes with a flat hand. “You will stay safe, won’t you, Pote Ani?”

“I will.”

“Because I cannot talk you out of riding west from Absaroka, you must promise me that you will stay safe so that my eyes can look upon my old friend again come next winter.”

Kneeling beside the chief, Bass pulled off his mitten and laid the hand on Rotten Belly’s arm under that buffalo robe. The chief looked up at him, and Titus said, “I’ll be back soon. You know how short the seasons are up this far north, when winter lasts so long.”

Arapooesh knifed his hand through the flap in his robe and laid it on Bass’s arm, saying, “My prayers go west with you. When you leave Absaroka in that direction, there is so much danger that can find a man alone.”

Standing, Scratch said with a smile, “I’m not looking to die just yet. I’ll watch behind me.”

Closing his eyes again, Rotten Belly said, “See you in the winter.”

“See you then, my friend.”

It took better than four days to ride down the Yellowstone to his cache, what with all the drifted snow and the boggy bottom ground, having to double back here and there. But eventually he dug at the icy, frozen snow that lay crusted over the earthen circle that plugged the neck of his small underground vault. For the next two days he busied himself with pulling out each bundle of beaver in turn, dusting every individual plew with Hannah’s currycomb, then closely inspecting each hide for sign of vermin that might burrow into the beaver felt and destroy the value of a hide. Once the plews were ready for their long spring journey toward rendezvous, Bass tied them back into bundles, then pushed the buffalo-hide shelter down into the cache. Positioning it high upon some freshly cut willow saplings, Bass left it at the center of the floor and backed out of the hole. Reweaving a network of narrow limbs, he finished his labors by muscling the round earthen lid back over the hole.

That night he built a fire atop his cache and the next morning scattered the ashes before he took up Hannah’s lead rope and rose into the saddle. Turning toward the Yellowstone, Bass headed west until he reached the crossing used for years without count by the massive herds blanketing these northern plains.

“Man knows what to look for, he can always find a buffalo crossing,” he said to Hannah, having taken to talking to her more and more with every day of his enforced separation from other humankind. “Don’t you know a man can’t hardly go wrong if he lays his nose along a buffalo trail.”

On the opposite bank of the river he pointed their noses west. Creek by creek, beaver stream by beaver stream, he trapped as he went those days of early spring, shivering through the wintry cold of each night, savoring the brief hours of sunny warmth as the earth’s rising heat formed puffy clouds across the deep spring blue like the snowflash feathers of ducks upended and fishing in a spring pond.

At times he came across sign of hunters out from one band or another of the River or Mountain Crow, but Scratch never saw another person in those first few weeks as he took his time marching for that cleft through the mountains west of the big bend of the Yellowstone, a crossing he had made years before with Silas Cooper. Bass turned in the saddle and gazed back at the large packs of beaver both Hannah and the packhorse carried. Hard to believe what he had done in the past year: he hadn’t trapped this many pelts since the seasons he had traveled with those three who had taken him under their wings his first seasons in the mountains. But that learning had cost him—first in what share Silas split off for himself, and then to lose all the rest of his plews when the trio floated off downriver with his fur.

“Likely gone to the bottom of the goddamned Yellowstone,” he grumbled.

Likely where their three carcasses are right now, he brooded. All them plews and all that work—

Then he scolded himself. “No sense in thinking on what was and can’t do nothing about now.”

Titus turned around, putting his face into the cold slash of wind and tucked the long flaps of the capote back around his legs. As Scratch rocked gently in the Spanish saddle, his horse steadily carried him higher up the winding switchbacks that took him in and out of patches of timber and across broad, open, grassy meadows where he flushed up small herds of elk, spooking the creatures back into the shadows where they warily watched the three strange animals slowly climb out of sight as the sun sank lower against the far curve of the earth.

Across that last saddle before he reached the pass, Scratch discovered so much snow still crusted in the open places that it stretched all the way to the far line of mountain and sky. He reined up, cautious. For a few moments he calculated how much light he still had himself in the day, then turned and looked behind at the beckoning timber where he could get out of the constant, cutting wind.

Better to try sloughing his way across that deep snowfield come morning when the animals were fresh and they had more hours of daylight to work the ground. Besides, the cold temperatures would refreeze the top layer of the snow and make it far better going right after dawn than it would be now after the high sun had mushed the icy crust.

“C’mon, girl,” he crooned to Hannah as he reined the horse around sharply and clucked to the mule to follow.

That night he lay awake by the dying fire listening to the wind moaning above him in the pines, remembering how the wind called to him at times as if in warning. Stirred by something he couldn’t reach out and touch, Bass kicked free of his robes and went over to Hannah. He led her closer to the saddle horse and tied the mule’s long lead rope in a loose loop around the horse’s neck. Then he played out the long rawhide rope knotted around the horse’s neck and trudged back to his bedding. There he wrapped the end of the rope beneath his capote belt and stuffed himself back between the robes.

Closing his eyes once more, Bass laid the long flintlock between his knees, tucking the pistol against his chest as he made a warm place for his cheek against the dark, curly hump fur.

The robber jays awoke him the next morning, cackling at him and the animals from the branches overhead, their shrill protests making him start with surprise. Blinking into the new light just then warming the eastern plains below him, Titus threw back the robes and blankets, then glanced up the slopes toward the snowy saddle where the first rosy rays of light angled up from beyond the east, striking the snowfields and turning them a pale, blood-tinged pink.

He’d slept longer than he had wanted—angry at himself because he had planned to be at the edge of the frozen pass just as soon as it was light enough to make their crossing.

Promising himself some coffee on the far side, Scratch tied up his bedding, then stepped out into the open, where he dampened the ground. After pulling up some thick branches of the gray sage, he went to the animals. He dragged off the dirty, greasy, trail-sweated chunks of canvas he laid over their backs on those coldest of nights, the better to help those creatures preserve some of their own body heat. One by one, he rubbed them down with those clusters of sage, warming himself in the process with the exertion. Then in turn the three were padded, saddled, cinched, and loaded with his few possessions and the fruits of his labor.

Behind them the sun was just beginning to raise its bleary red eye in the east as he reached the edge of the extensive snowfield.

“We’ll be across afore midday,” he reminded the animals, tapping his heels into the horse’s ribs.

One hoof at a time, one short, slow step—Scratch carefully calculated his crossing of the crusty, frozen snow. He kept his eyes moving from the surface right below him to the rosy appearance of the snow some twenty, maybe as much as thirty, feet ahead of him, studying the way the ice had shrunk around the edges of a boulder, the way the crust lay in frozen, scalloped patterns where the wind constantly chiseled across it day and night. Warming each day beneath the sun, then refreezing beneath the spatter of starlight right overhead.

For a moment he gazed at the shocking blue of the heavens domed above them, and sighed. “Up this high, up here where that sky is so clear … where the sky is so damned close—if a man listens just right, Hannah—why, he might well hear angels sing.”

Closer to heaven was he here, and therefore much closer to that other existence Asa McAfferty spoke of in such hushed tones. Being this high—with nothing between him and the full, aching stretch of sky right beyond his fingertips—if a man himself wasn’t wary and careful, he just might slip right on through that crack to the far side of life and death and all that lay in between.

Was it a land of the unknown crossed only by those who slipped in and out of that crack in the sky … or by those who had themselves come eye to eye with one such spirit from that realm of the unknown? Just as Asa had with that Ree.

Thinking on those hoo-doos gave Titus such a chill that he pulled the capote’s flaps tighter around his chest and turtled his neck down a bit farther.

Step by step, one yard at a time, and he’d be off this wide-open snowfield and on the far side of the pass. Out here under the wide sky where the spirits might look down upon him creeping along, his animals like a trio of beetles burrowing their way across the bottom of a buffalo chip-might those spirits look down upon him and pluck him right up?

Scaring himself, Bass stared up at the blue, his chin quivering with the cold, shivering with the fright.

“You ain’t ever gonna get me ’thout a fight,” he suddenly bellowed at the cloudless sky.

Though it hurt his throat to yell that loud, he went on, “Might be some men what ride off to look for you … like Asa done—coming to stare death and dying in the eye. Like Asa had such a hankering to die hisself.”

Below him at the far western edge of the snowfield four magpies suddenly took flight from the tops of the distant trees as his voice boomed in an echo over their perch.

“But not me! I ain’t going nowhere easy as Asa McAfferty done! You’re gonna have to come for me. You’re gonna have to come ready to fight.”

He shuddered less with the wind by the time he reined up on the western side of the snowfield, turning the horse around and halting to gaze back at that open expanse of saddle he had just crossed there beneath the blue, there where a man had nowhere to hide, nowhere to run.

“Hoo-doos won’t dare come for a man what aims to fight,” Scratch boasted as he nudged his horse into motion once more. “Long as I ain’t so tired I can’t fight …”

Descending the steep western side of the pass, Scratch spent the rest of that day and the next locating a patch of ground he would use as his first camp for what he planned would be an extended stay in this country just east of the Three Forks. Years ago the trapping there had been almost as good as it had been along the Mussellshell and Judith. A dangerous land where only the wary survived, however. But by the time he ran across a site that offered good cover, grass, wood, and water, Bass hadn’t crossed any trails nor come across any sign that would tell him the Blackfoot routinely made this valley part of their travels.

Except for that single fire, that lone point of light he had spotted down in the bottom of this valley years before, when he and the trio had come here to trap. Someone had built themselves a fire big enough to warm a passel of men.

Someone.

That next morning he awoke in the dark to find a cold early-spring fog cloaking the river bottom. Overhead no more than a matter of feet hung a foreboding layer of low clouds threatening to drizzle at any moment—it and the fog were both as cold and gray as ash flake in a long-dead fire. Stirring out of the robes and blankets, Bass stomped feeling back into his feet, then crabbed over to his packs to dig out the buffalo-hide moccasins. He planned to wear them to and from every trap site, taking them off before he entered the water to make his sets, then pulling them on once he was ready to turn back for camp.

Looking again to the priming in both pistol and rifle, he stuffed the camp ax and a tomahawk into the back of his belt, where his skinning knife hung in its rawhide scabbard. Throwing the heavy buffalo-hide sack bearing a dozen American and Mexican traps over his shoulder and clutching his long bait-sticks under his arm, Bass lunged forward through the frosty grass as the dark canopy limned a thin line of sunny blue behind the jagged eastern skyline above his valley camp.

At the water’s edge he dropped the sticks and sack, then leaned the rifle against a clump of willow. Throwing his mittens down beside the traps, he pulled off his capote and yanked up his shooting pouch. Overlapping the wide strap, Titus poked a long leather whang through a series of holes so that he could fasten it with a knot. That done to severely shorten the strap, Bass could count on keeping his pouch and horn tucked high above the surface of the creek, pulled right under his armpit now as he waded into the freezing water.

By the time he had seven traps set at the foot of slides and other likely spots where the lush new grass had been trampled by tiny paws, or saplings had been felled by the toothy rodents, Scratch was finding he wasn’t near so cold. With the sun’s impending arrival, the air had begun to warm slightly. How good a fire would feel against his skin, how good some hot coffee would feel in his empty belly when he made it back to camp—

He looked up, froze. Listening. Something twitching inside him. Like a warning.

Staring at the far bank, Scratch watched the shudder and dance of the fog as it thinned, just then beginning to burn off. Like a gauzy tangle of lace laid against a bride’s dark hair, the mist clung in tatters against the dark, leafy brush. Somewhere on that far bank a bird chattered.

And he finally breathed again.

“Sometimes it gets too damned quiet,” he sighed.

Bending again to work at the shelf he had been scraping away with the camp ax a few inches below the water’s surface, Titus watched the way the light glittered across the slowly moving surface of the water. A magpie suddenly broke into flight overhead, freezing him immediately. The noisy rush of those black wings faded; then all was quiet once more.

“Got yourself spooked,” he whispered. “Only natural—this close to Blackfoot country again.”

As he carefully pulled the trap off the bank and slowly lowered it into the water, pan set and ready for business, Bass thought on McAfferty.

Had Asa ever found what he was looking for? But, then, what was it the white-head wanted most? he wondered. It wasn’t money, really. So was it power? Something many men desired.

Scratch wasn’t sure, but there at the end he had come to believe McAfferty had acted as if he was trying to find himself a sure way to die. Was it death that the white-head wanted most—the death that so far had eluded the man, frustrating him, because Asa believed he wasn’t worthy of living?

No—Titus knew it had to be something else that Asa had gone to do in Blackfoot country. Something besides getting himself killed by a band of Blood or Piegan or Gros Ventre. Just riding into that country to find some warriors to cut him down and hack off his hair wasn’t the neat, tidy end to McAfferty’s story, Bass decided.

He struggled to make sense of why some folks did what they did with their lives. Then decided such metaphysical matters were simply beyond his reach.

Stepping upstream a few yards, Scratch hoisted himself out of the water where he wouldn’t leave his smell near the last trap-set. Standing, he allowed his leggings to drip on the warm ground just now starting to steam, the mists rising into the cold air as the sun peeked over the mountain skyline.

With that first, frightening yip—he whirled on his heel, staring at the far bank. Down into the water leaped three screaming horsemen. A fourth reined up on the opposite bank, his pony shuffling in a sidestep as its rider twisted on its back, brought down his straightened arms in pointing the arrow at the white man.

Bass was moving in a crouch as the arrow hissed behind him.

From the corner of his eye he saw the painted bowman nocking another arrow against his string.

Behind him the horsemen clattered across the creek, their ponies severely slowed by the water that swirled up to their bellies as their powerful legs churned against the current. Wild cock’s-combs of brilliant spray spewed into fans of cascading, iridescent waterfalls around the legs of each warrior. For but an instant a lone beam of early sunlight glinted off that single knife blade embedded in a long wooden staff swung at the end of one of the brown arms.

Their cries boiling upon his heels, Scratch whirled as he heard one of the ponies lunge onto the bank behind him.

Yanking the pistol from his belt, he dragged back the hammer, straightened his left arm, and pulled the trigger.

Damp powder in the pan …

Swooping up on his pony, the Indian drew back with his tomahawk as Titus yanked his weapon from the small of his back where he had it stuffed in his belt. Only time enough to grip the handle in both hands as the pony hurtled past, the warrior swinging down as Bass bent at the knees, springing forward, planting the wide blade in the man’s belly as the Blackfoot’s weapon knocked the fur cap right off the trapper’s head.

Hot blood splattered Scratch’s face as the dying warrior raced on past, pitching off the far side of his pony with a loud grunt.

For no more than a heartbeat he glanced at the bush where he had dropped his coat and mittens, where he had stood his rifle before entering the stream. Then the rising falsetto in that voice yanked him around like a child’s string toy—twisting so quickly in his waterlogged moccasins on that frosted grass that Scratch stumbled to his knees an instant before a tomahawk cartwheeled past him, careening noisily through the thick brush behind him.

Pulling the skinning knife from his belt, he watched the closest one yank up a war club where it had hung by a thong at the saddle’s horn in front of the warrior. Over his head the Indian swung this terrible weapon studded with a half-dozen six-inch-long deer-antler tines embedded in a round knot of carved wood to which a handle was attached with rawhide and brass tacks like a medieval mace, closing in on his prey.

Titus lunged aside as the tines slashed the air beside his cheek. Landing on his elbow, he rolled up onto his knees, cocking his arm back far enough before he flung the knife at that third horseman racing for him with an arrow strung in his bow.

The warrior’s bow pitched forward as he suddenly clutched at the knife that caught him high in the chest below one outstretched arm. His pony hurtled past in a blur.

Just beyond the spot where Bass’s rifle stood, the Blackfoot with the antler-studded club was already yanking back on his rein, nearly bringing his pony to its knees as he savagely wrenched its head to the side. Bass glanced at the rifle, instantly calculating its distance from him, how fast the warrior would reach him, how much time it would take for a tired old trapper to reach the weapon … then set himself in a crouch as the horseman kicked speed back into his mount, racing into the open with that club held high overhead, his mouth o-o-ing with some primal death cry as he lunged toward his pale-skinned enemy.

Starting to leap to the right, Bass feinted and instantly whirled to the left at the last moment instead, causing the warrior to swing his club off balance. It was all the man could do to stay on his pony’s back as he galloped by.

Now he had both time and distance to his advantage.

Rising immediately to burst into a sprint, Scratch raced headlong for the rifle as he heard the cries of not one, but both, of the last two horsemen. He dared not look over his shoulder, afraid to find the bowman from the far bank suddenly within arm’s length.

Onto his soggy knees he skidded, snatching at the rifle as he slid against the brush, yanking back the hammer to full-cock. Setting the rearmost of the two triggers, he started his turn. Wheeling about with the weapon, Bass rose on one knee and rammed the buttstock back into his shoulder, jamming his bare finger into the front of the trigger guard.

Finding that enraged horseman setting his pony in motion again after a knee-grinding turn, kicking the pony savagely as he cried out in rage, swinging his fearsome weapon into the coming light of day … Bass held.

Held.

Held a little longer as he let the front blade rise while the Blackfoot lunged closer. Both warrior and pony wide-eyed, the man’s mouth a large black hole, that horse’s nostrils shooting jets of steam into the cold of the early-spring morning.

Held—

With a roar the rifle erupted.

The ball struck the Blackfoot with such force that it jerked the man back to the rear flanks of the pony, where he sat for a moment as if unfazed; then with the next bounce the body pitched on backward in a graceful somersault to land on its belly. Unmoving, as still as winter grass.

When Titus yanked at the knot on the pouch strap, the shooting bag dropped to his hip as he watched the bowman’s horse leap onto the bank no more than twenty yards away. Digging a hand into the bottom of the bag, he pulled out three balls, stuffing them into his mouth before he jammed the powder-horn stopper between his teeth and pulled it free.

With the horn’s narrow end against the muzzle, he poured some powder down the barrel as the warrior neared, swinging up his bow at the end of his outstretched arm.

Pressing his lips against the rifle’s muzzle, Bass spat a single ball down the barrel at the same moment he yanked the ramrod from its brass thimbles along the underside of the forestock.

No time to prime the son of a bitch.

Without any conscious thought, acting only on animal instinct, Scratch reversed the rifle, gripping both hands around the end of the barrel, starting its swing into the air as the bowman leaned off his pony, smacking that short elk-horn bow against the white man’s temple at the very moment Titus planted the rifle butt in the horseman’s belly.

Stunned into seeing hot, red stars, Scratch pitched to his knees—part of him yelling out to the rest … ordering him to move, to get off his knees, to forget the nausea and the shower of lights and get himself out of danger.

Stumbling up onto one knee, he wobbled to the side and fell over, his head in as much pain as the day he had been scalped by the Arapaho. Feeling as heavy as his trap-sack, Titus feared he wouldn’t get his head off the ground before the warrior got to his feet.

Less than twenty feet away the Blackfoot rolled to a stop against a clump of brush, lunged over onto his knees where he shook his head, then seemed to draw a sudden bead on the white man still stretched upon the frosty ground.

The moment the warrior started forward, the Indian drew a huge double-bladed knife from a long beaver-tailed scabbard at his hip.

Like a puff of winter breathsmoke suddenly gone with a gust of wind, Bass squeezed his eyes shut, then dragged them open reluctantly. Leaning onto his left knee and arm, he struggled to rise, reaching at the back of his belt for the camp ax.

Then remembered it was at water’s edge by his trap sack.

Tomahawk gone. And the knife scabbard empty.

He rose to his full height, wobbled shakily there on the balls of his feet, wondering how much longer his dizzy head would let him focus on the charging warrior, setting himself for the coming impact … his eyes transfixed on that huge, double-edged dagger clutched in the Blackfoot’s hand.

In that last moment Titus glanced at the painted face, the lower half completely black from just below the eyes—that horizontal line disappearing back at both ears, this greasy black smeared over the chin and down the jawline in a ragged semicircle that arced from the bottom of one ear to the bottom of the other…. Then Titus tried hard to fix his wavering, watery eyes on the dagger as his knees buckled, going soft as freshly boiled Kentucky sour mash.

Likely what saved him.

So surprising the warrior that the Blackfoot stumbled, lunging forward with his left arm straightened before him—seizing the white man’s capote in that hand as Bass collapsed backward, yanking the Indian over him in an ungainly somersault.

By the time Titus had rolled onto his hip and rocked up to his feet, the warrior had braced himself on the ground and lashed out with a leg, whipping it against Bass’s ankles—knocking them out from under him. As Titus spilled onto his back, he watched the Blackfoot blotting out a piece of the sky as soon as the Indian leaped for him.

With both hands Scratch locked a grip around the brown wrist that clutched the handle of that huge dagger, its dark wood decorated with the tiny heads of more than a hundred brass nails. Which meant the warrior was free to squeeze down on the white man’s throat with his left hand.

For those next few heartbeats that Bass figured might be his last, he stared up at the contorted face just inches away—the eyes squinted and glaring into his there above that shelf of black war paint. As the warrior grunted, struggling to force the wide double-edged blade into his enemy with one hand, straining to crush the white man’s windpipe with the other—Titus smelled the dried meat on the Indian’s hot, stinking breath.

As much as he tried to breathe, he couldn’t drag any air past that claw closed around his throat. How his lungs began to burn while the black of night slowly seeped down across his eyes. Not much left of the strength needed to hold off that knife.

He had moments left, only heartbeats before he became nothing more than a scalp on some goddamned Blackfoot’s war club or bridle and a coup story told around a fire. Wouldn’t that take the circle? When this red son of a bitch yanked off his fur cap and the bandanna, going to scalp him—finding he’d already lost some hair!

“The last joke’s on you,” he growled, none of those words understandable from that pinched, raspy throat.

But as he said them, he shifted his left hand to dig at the brown fingers—prying. With the other he squeezed down on the wrist, twisting. So painfully slow, the hand that held that dagger began to turn the more Bass twisted and pried. He watched the Blackfoot’s eyes shift suddenly, staring down at his own hand now.

That pain in his throat …

Not knowing how many more breaths he could sacrifice before he had no fight left, Scratch suddenly released the enemy’s fingers and seized a handful of the hair at the back of the Blackfoot’s head in his left hand, pulling with all he had to the side. When the warrior yanked away, Bass was there to drive his forehead up savagely into the warrior’s blackened chin.

With that sharp pain the Indian yanked to the side, away from Bass’s grip, trying to free his hair—just as the dagger twisted up in an agonizingly slow half circle, the tip of the blade now pointed toward that chin where a jagged slash of the black war paint had smeared off on the trapper’s forehead.

He saw the black curtain oozing down over his mind, over his failing strength, over all that he remembered and knew that he ever was … then yanked once more on the enemy’s hair—savagely jerking the head straight back.

At the very instant the warrior resisted, tugging his head forward against the white man’s painful pull, Scratch had the sharp point of the dagger positioned right below the chin … when it dropped violently.

Not only did Bass feel the wide blade pierce the cartilage and soft tissue on its path upward through the back of the throat, on past the hard palate, and into the bottom of the man’s brain—but he heard its noisy journey of death as it cracked through hard tissue. Blood and gore gushed down over that handle decorated with those tiny brass nails.

Above that border of black pain the warrior’s eyes suddenly rolled back to whites as his throat gurgled and his body went limp, pitching to the side, the double-edged blade penetrating the base of the Indian’s brain, severing motor control.

Scratch’s throat whimpered with that first breath of air he dragged in, so painfully did it rush down his windpipe—like shards of shattered mirror glass the moment he rolled onto his side, away from the Blackfoot, coughing so violently he was sure he would expel pieces of his lung. He gasped in agony as he lumbered onto his hands and knees, watching the warrior’s legs thrash spastically for a moment, then go still as the man’s bowels voided in death.

How it hurt to drag in anything larger than a tiny breath as his heart thundered in his ears like the beating of a war drum, the vapor hanging gauzy in front of his face as he looked about that small clearing. Four of them. So much blood beginning to slicken the frosty ground. Dead men come to kill him.

Scratch felt the first heave of his empty stomach, sensed the initial burn of gall at the back of his throat—then his belly revolted as he rocked forward on hands and knees, spilling the putrid yellow bile on the trampled, frozen grass. Again, and again, and again he heaved up what little his stomach held, until there was nothing left but the spastic, wrenching seizures of each dry wretch.

Did the killing ever get easier for a man?

And if it ever did, at what cost?

Wiping his mouth with the back of his right hand, he tasted the Blackfoot’s blood that had splattered over him as that knife plunged up through the throat and into the man’s brain. It made him gag anew.

On the frosty broken shafts of grass he frantically wiped his hands, smearing the frozen moisture across his face—wiping, wiping, wiping at the blood smearing his flesh while hot, stinging tears pooled in his eyes.

Then he finally crouched to the side, and with that half-frozen, bloodstained hand Bass yanked the crimson-coated knife from the enemy’s head … raised it toward the sky … and slashed a jagged line down from heaven above toward this earth below where men walked out their numbered days.

“Bass!” he croaked with searing pain in his throat.

“Bass!”

And when the strident echo flung its answer upon him from the hills, that lone man hurled it back at the spirits of this great wilderness which must never forget his name.

“BASS!”

His left eye had sparkled for the first time later that spring while Scratch sat in a hot pool he chanced across near the Land of Smoking Waters on his slow tramp toward the southern pass, easing toward rendezvous.

And now it lit up a second time as he sat in that hot, tarry pool of thick black goo here in the Bighorn basin.

So many fiery, shooting stars burst in a brilliant fan of shimmering color from that lone left eye that when he shut the right, he found himself all but blinded.

At first Titus believed it was somehow nothing more than those wavering veils of steam rising off the hot pools of thick, stinking, sulphurous ooze that collected in these low places widely known among the beaver hunters who crisscrossed the mountain west. But even when he stood with his naked, sticky body and trudged a few yards away from that steamy vent to the cooling relief of a nearby stream, where he plopped down onto his rump, submerged right up to his chest—the eye still sparkled with the fire only a Rocky Mountain night could rain upon the earth.

So he sat there until his hide grew cold as winter meat.

Rising, Titus lunged back to the tar pool, where he eased his bare flesh down into the hot, thick ooze with a long sigh. Taking one last check on the horizons, Bass closed his eyes and let the heat soak to his marrow. He hadn’t been this warm since … since sometime last fall. Indian summer. Some seven, maybe eight suns since he had run onto those white faces and white voices he ached so to see now.

Here in this aching silence where only the spring breeze or the flap of a bird’s wing or the distant passing of a fluff of cloud brought any sound to his ears, Bass grinned—remembering how last fall up on the Bighorn he had crossed trails with that large brigade of some two dozen Rocky Mountain Fur trappers on their way south for winter encampment and he was making for Absaroka. They made camp together that cold night so old friends could share stories of the land, the price of beaver, word on this tribe or that, and any shred of news that might make the prospect of a lonely winter a bit more bearable.

Seems that Tom Fitzpatrick and his supplies had finally made it north from Taos all the way to the Platte, where Henry Fraeb finally ran onto him in all his desperate searching. Throughout those early days of autumn, Broken Hand and his hired men had their work cut out for them: with winter coming they could accomplish nothing save for traipsing around Blackfoot and Yellowstone country, running down the various brigades so the overdue Fitzpatrick could reoutfit them from those much-needed goods brought up from the Jackson and Sublette train when it reached Taos from the States.

“We was all just starting to settle in over to the mouth of the Powder—just like we done last winter, Scratch,” Jim Bridger had explained beside that one night’s fire they had shared in their trail crossing. “Cutting cottonwood for horse fodder, laying in grass, and building our huts for the time the wind blows mean.”

“That there’s pretty mild country for winter doin’s,” Bass had commented. “Man can make meat, and the snow don’t get all that deep.”

“But we got drove out!” Henry Fraeb bellowed from the far side of the fire.

“Frapp means to say the goddamned American Fur men showed up in our own blessed backyard like ticks sucking blood from a bull!” Milt Sublette exclaimed angrily.

“Am-american Fur?” Bass repeated with worry. “Wasn’t it just a couple year back Hugh Glass was preaching to every nigger at ronnyvoo about a fort American Fur was building at the mouth of the Yellowstone? Saying we all ought’n take our furs there ’stead of trading at ronnyvoo?”

“Mackenzie,” Bridger snarled, nodding. “That’s the bastard building the post.”

Then Sublette added, “He’s took to calling himself ’King of the Missouri’!”

“Now the son of a bitch sent out two fellers named Vanderburgh and Dripps to run down our brigades,” Tom Fitzpatrick spoke up for the first time as he whittled on a green bough. “Them two had ’em a bunch of green hands along—don’t bet any of ’em ever laid a trap under water!”

“Shit! Ain’t a one of ’em knows fat cow from poor bull!” Bridger roared with laughter. “So them two booshways said right to our faces they was gonna camp where we was camped, and go where we was to go—all so they could learn the best of the beaver trade in the mountains afore they snatched it right out from under us!”

“Was they serious?” Scratch had asked.

“We could tell they wasn’t just flapping their jaws!” Sublette grumbled. “They was American Fur—so that means John Jacob Astor … which means all the money in the world throwed up against us poor boys.”

“Sons of a bitch,” Fraeb grumbled in his thick German accent.

Fitzpatrick declared, “Then and there we figgered to hold us a council and see which way our stick would float.”

Bridger nodded. “All five of us decided we wasn’t the sort to hang around and watch Vanderburgh and Dripps camped across the river all winter, then have ’em dog our shadows come spring green-up.”

“So the next night—right at slap-dark—we slipped out and got skedaddling away from them bastards,” Sublette explained.

Bass shook his head sadly. “May come a time when American Fur’s money is the only money in the mountains,” he growled.

“Astor’s always been the sort what runs off all competition wherever he sets hisself down,” Sublette agreed.

“So if you’re running from this here Vanderburg and Dripps now,” Scratch began, “where is it you’re fixing to winter up?”

Bridger answered, “The five of us decided to get over to the west side of the mountains. Cross the southern pass, jump the Green, and on to the Snake afore the last of the passes close.”

“Seems there’d be Nepercy and some Flathead over yonder,” Sublette explained. “Those Injuns a little friendlier than the folks up there in Blackfoot country.”

“Where you bound for this winter?” Fitzpatrick asked.

“Crow land,” he had said. “Rotten Belly’s band. Not till the creeks is froze.”

Early the following morning a few of the young, green hands who had come up from Taos with Fitzpatrick had thought to have themselves a bit of fun ribbing Bass and Fraeb about being too old to muster the mountains.

“Lookit them ol’ gray-heads, will you?” one had roared as Scratch had tightened the last of the ropes on Hannah’s packs.

“Lucky Ol’ Frapp’s got us along to take keer of him when times get lean or we run onto some Injuns!” a second cried, eliciting more wild laughter that Fraeb and Bass did their best to ignore.

But the third made the mistake of saying, “Lookee there! What ’bout that other’n we run onto yestiddy? Looks to be this man’s fixing to ride off on his own like some crazy ol’ coot what wouldn’t know no better.”

Titus had slowly turned on the three young tormentors. “You young pups figger me for old?”

At which the trio of greenhorns had busted out with so much guffawing that he was sure they liked to bust a belly seam.

“Listen to this ol’ bastard!”

“Not so old I can’t pin your ears up a’hint your ass, son,” he growled, slowly pulling his pistol from his belt to stuff it under one of the pack ropes.

“Watch out, now!” one of the trio cried in laughter.

“We better not move too fast for ’im!”

The third shouted, “What the hell’s one ol’ man gonna do against the three of us?”

And that hired hand got to laughing so hard that he fell right over and rolled on the cold ground. Titus figured he had taken about all he was going to take—even if these were Bridger’s men.

Lunging for the one laughing uncontrollably and rolling on the ground beside the fire, Scratch seized the young man at the collar and by the belt, and with that strength most often stoked by the fires of anger, he hurled the greenhorn off the ground and flung him into the other two. With arms and legs flailing, the young man went crashing into the first greenhorn, but the second and larger of the pair managed to sidestep and immediately rushed for Bass, both thick arms swinging with wild, windmill haymakers.

Scratch ducked to the side, tripping the young man as he rushed by, sending him sprawling onto his belly. Whirling about, Bass landed on the man’s back, knocking off his hat and yanking back on the greasy hair with his left hand at the same time he was pulling his knife from its scabbard with his right. He pressed the blade against the taut, outstretched neck just hard enough that a little blood began to bead along the razor-sharp metal.

“Scratch … Scratch,” Bridger cooed the moment he reached the scene.

“Get this crazy ol’ man off me, Bridger!”

A few yards away the other two tormentors were bellowing and bawling like newborn calves until Fraeb told them to shut up.

Calmly, Scratch said, “I figger to show this brassy young’un how a old man whips a ignernt greenhorn, Jim.”

Bridger replied, “Shame of it is, Bass—we need ever’ man we got. Now that American Fur’s come to the mountains—”

“Even this’un what don’t know his own asshole from a badger den?”

“Maybeso we can teach this’un something afore he gets his hair raised,” Sublette said as he came up, doing his best to stifle a laugh.

“Cut ’im, I say,” Fraeb grumped. “The young nigger’s got it coming, boys. He was rawhiding me and Bass here.”

And Scratch added, “Said we was too old for the mountains—”

“You ain’t! You ain’t too old!” the greenhorn whimpered there beneath the veteran mountain man.

“Damn well knocked all three down, did you?” Bridger asked as he stroked his beard.

“I did, Jim. But I was fixing to kill only one of ’em.”

Bridger walked over slowly, thoughtfully cupping his chin in one hand as he stared down at the greenhorn. “Being old back east where you come from is one thing, mister.”

“Y-yes,” the man whined plaintively with wide, frightened eyes as Bass tugged back on his hair again, exposing more of the young man’s white flesh and maintaining the blade’s pressure against the neck.

Then the booshway knelt at the young man’s head. “Don’t look to be you got far to go till you kill ’im quick, Bass,” Bridger said, peering at the knife first this way, then that. “Where you got it now, you’ll cut right through his windpipe slick as crap through a goose if I know how sharp you keep your knives.”

“It’s sharp, Jim. Damned sharp.”

By now the greenhorn sobbed. “P-please, Bridger.”

The booshway gazed down at the newcomer to the mountains. “Are you paying attention to what this here cast-iron mountain nigger’s teaching you?”

“I’m t-trying!”

“Like I said—being a old man back east is one thing, son,” Jim said as he stood slowly and rubbed his knees. “But any old man you run onto out here got him the hair of the bear in him. There’s a damned good reason he’s got old out here in these mountains while a lot of li’l young shits like you gone under and got themselves rubbed out.”

Sublette said, “You ever again run onto a man old as Titus Bass here—you best figger that son of a bitch has managed to live all those years out west cause he’s tough enough to take all what the mountains can throw at him.”

For a moment the greenhorn’s eyes rolled back toward Scratch. “Yes, sir, Mr. Titus Bass, sir.”

Scratch wobbled the knife blade back and forth a little more against the flesh of the neck. “You got something to say to me, son?”

“I-I … I’m sorry I talked bad ’bout you being old—”

With such swiftness that it startled the youth, Bass pulled the knife away, releasing the youngster’s hair so suddenly that his chin smacked the ground. Scratch stood, taking his knee from the middle of the young man’s back.

Slowly rolling onto his hip and rising onto his knees, the greenhorn rubbed his neck with his hand, then held that hand out before him to stare at the blood on his palm.

“You damn well could’ve killed me!”

“I was fixin’ on it—but you pulled your own hash from the fire.”

Looking up at Bridger, the youngster gasped, “Awright. I figger I didn’t have no room to be talking like that to this fella—”

“Like I told you: one thing you’re gonna learn out here,” Bridger explained as he pulled on his woolen mittens, “if you don’t know who you’re talking to, or you don’t know what the devil you’re talking about … you bloody well better keep your goddamned mouth shut and your ears open.”

“Otherwise,” Milt Sublette added, “your scalp might soon be hanging on some red nigger’s lodgepole.”

With a snort Henry Fraeb growled, “Or better yet—your hair be hanging from some ol’ man’s belt!”

Spring had mellowed as Bass wandered south, hankering to have himself another look at Park Kyack. Maybeso to run onto that band of Ute after all these years. See if Fawn had found herself a man.

Lord, but that was a good woman what deserved a decent man to see after her.

But he hadn’t found the Ute, hadn’t run across any bands of Shoshone either when he turned around and headed back north toward that country where the Crow roamed. Horse thieves that they were, in the end they had always done right by him.

Climbing across the foothills of the Wind River range late that spring, he had fashioned a hat out of the fur of a kit beaver caught in one of his traps down on the Popo Agie. Nowhere big enough to warrant a man’s trading it at the coming rendezvous planned for Pierre’s Hole, Scratch dug out the sinew he kept among his possibles and made himself a respectable replacement for the rubbed and worn coyote-skin cap that had seen him through many a winter.

By the time he found himself at the southern end of the Wind Rivers, turning west to make for the far side of the Tetons, Titus had attracted a trio of troublesome coyotes who followed him whenever he left camp to see to his traps. For days now he’d been feeding them with beaver carcasses and the bones of the game he brought down. Then a few days back he awoke to find his packhorse down, eyes open wide, barely breathing. A dark, gummy blood had gushed from its anus. He knelt at the pony’s head, rubbing an ear. As much as he had wanted to mourn what its loss would mean, Titus knew there was nothing he could do to save the animal.

Eventually he stood, pulling the pistol from his belt. “You’re likely et up inside with something terrible.”

The only thing for him to do was finish the job nature herself had begun.

What with all he fed them, the coyotes faithfully stayed with him. In fact, the trio had dogged his backtrail so relentlessly Titus thought it strange that they weren’t loping around his camp this morning, making a nuisance of themselves as he went about packing for the day’s journey.

Maybeso he ought to put another three or four suns behind him before he looked for a likely stream to trap. Seemed like summer was here and he had miles to go before he would reach Pierre’s Hole. Best to put some more country behind him.

Sensing time slipping away from him like riverbottom sands, Scratch hurried to lash a pair of packs behind his saddle so they rested on the horse’s flanks, then turned to hang all the rest from Hannah’s elk-antler packsaddle. From the look she gave him, the mule didn’t much like the idea of carrying most everything on her back.

The early sun was already climbing off that red smear of horizon far to the east. Damn, but he was burning daylight.

No sooner had Bass gathered up Hannah’s lead rope and crawled into the saddle than the mule set up a noisy bawl. She yanked the rope from his hand so swiftly Bass almost lost his rifle. And by the time he had swung out of the saddle and laid the long weapon on the ground, the mule was wildly pitching about in a ragged circle—dipping her nose almost to the ground as she threw her hind legs into the air, hee-rawwwing loud enough to wake the dead, or at least scare away every winged thing for miles around.

When he dodged out of her way, then immediately dived in to grab hold of her bridle, Hannah swung her big head in his direction, batting him out of her way as she passed on over the trapper—one of her small hooves landing squarely on his left foot.

“God-damn!” he screeched as he collapsed in pain, making almost as much noise as the mule while she bucked and jumped about the small meadow.

Sweeping up his rifle to use as a crutch, Bass hobbled out of her way, muttering unearthly curses on all those dim-witted brutes created to trouble man. Collapsing at the side of the clearing, it took only minutes for him to cut the moccasin off the foot, finding it already bruised and swelling while the mule went right on acting as if she were possessed of the devil.

He clambered clumsily to his feet, stumbling and hopping over toward the animal as she flung the loads on her back this way and that. If he didn’t know better, Titus guessed she was trying to get herself out from under all those heavy packs he had just fixed atop her. Seizing a hitch rope, he hung on with one hand as the other frantically grappled at the first knot. Up and down she jolted him along with her loosening burdens until he suddenly freed the last knot and everything exploded off the mule. Including him.

In the midst of the scattered bundles of possibles and plews he sat up, dusting himself off.

“There, now, you cussed animule. Let’s just simmer down some,” he coaxed gently as she slowed her wild jig, eyeing him constantly.

Bass got to his feet, standing on that good leg with the rifle propped under an arm as he hobbled over to the mule.

“You’re ol’ bag of bones, you are, gal. And you could sure put a man in a fine fix up here.”

After stroking her muzzle, he patted his way down her side to find the ugly gash opened up along her spine. As if someone had worked a knife back and forth to get that jagged slash in her hide. And that’s when it struck him.

Wheeling about on that one good foot, he stumbled back to the packs, went to his knees, and dug at that small bundle of his possibles until he found it.

“Damned sure,” he grumbled, angry at himself for not packing any better in his haste to be on their way that morning—too much in a hurry to see that certain possessions were kept from shifting, from working themselves loose.

Like the Blackfoot dagger he had taken off that red nigger weeks ago. Plain enough to see how it had been jostled enough that it spilled from its beaver-tail scabbard, then cut right through the waterproof sheeting, then on through the mountain-goat saddle pad until its point began to jab along Hannah’s backbone. And as soon as she started to buck against the pain, her wild thrashing only made the laceration worse as the blade slashed back and forth to make for an ugly wound.

After pushing some moistened tobacco leaf into the wound and covering it with a patch of beaver fur, Scratch sensed a weary loneliness come over him. The new sun was only then beginning to climb high enough off the hills that its warming rays had just started to descend down the border of thick green timber ringing this tiny meadow.

Maybe there would be time enough to put the miles behind him for the day after he had rested here a bit longer. He could chance to let some of that pain ooze out of Hannah’s wound, to rest his swollen foot … to close his eyes and dream on things that had been, to dream on what was to be.

Before him danced images of those Crow women moving in and out of Bird in Ground’s lodge that cold winter day not long after Bass had arrived. Although the entire village was packed and ready to move on, a large crowd gathered around this solitary lodge still standing. Emerging from the doorway a handful of old women brought out the dead man’s possessions and gave them away, one by one by one until most all of Rotten Belly’s people had received a little something that had once belonged to the warrior who had lived many years with his powerful man-woman medicine.

And once the lodge was stripped of all that could be given away, an old, bent woman took up a burning brand from a nearby fire, and as others keened and wailed, she set the lodge hides aflame. Slowly turning aside, the people went to their horses and travois, setting off to the south for a new winter campsite.

While a black, greasy spiral rose from what had once been his friend’s home.

Friends. And home.

Where he found friends, Titus Bass had always found a home.

White faces swam before him now as those copperskins of the Crow faded from view. Come rendezvous he would reunite with old friends, make him some new ones … and drink that annual toast to the missing few who failed to come in.

Recalling in that early-morning reverie how he had vowed to hoist a drink to Asa McAfferty’s memory—

Through a sudden narrow crack that opened in his reverie, Scratch listened as the magpie took flight over him, cawing noisily in alarm.

He did not move, peering through squinted eyes, listening to every sound, testing every smell the breeze brought to him.

Nearby Hannah lifted her muzzle into the air.

Were it a Injun—she’d be raising a ruckus.

Could it really be a white man she’d winded?

The old man squinted and barely made out the felt hat sitting motionless now behind some low brush across the clearing.

Damn—but he hadn’t seen a white face in longer’n he ever cared to go again.

Sudden hope fluttered in his chest like the rush of a thousand pairs of wings—raising his own spirit as high as that seamless blue belt stretched far above him, higher than his spirit had been in a long … long time.

A white man.

He figured there were answers come to the most private of prayers.

“I heard you, nigger!” Titus hollered. “Might’n come out now!”

Reluctantly, the felt hat rose, with the hairy face of a young man appearing beneath its wide brim, frightened eyes about as big as the quilled rosettes on Scratch’s leather shirt.

Titus looked up and down the intruder’s frame. The bearded stranger already wore his hair hung long over his collar. Maybeso this feller’d been out here some time already.

But he was still wearing store-bought woolen clothes—mussed and dirty to be sure, torn and ripped in places. And it was plain to see that his leather belt was notched up tight around a waist surely much skinnier than it had once been.

And suddenly Titus Bass remembered that he too had been this young of a time long ago, come to these far and terrible mountains when he had been so damned ignorant that he wouldn’t have lasted ’less someone took him under a wing.

His eyes misting with the heartfelt swell of inexplicable joy, Scratch’s voice croaked when now he used it.

“C’mon over here. Lemme take a look at you.”