Crack in the Sky

2

Scratch Thought he heard the horse guard well before he ever saw him.

He stopped, listening intently to the dark. Listening not only with his ears, but with every inch of exposed flesh, his skin alive and prickling at the nearness of danger. He tried to remember to breathe, and when he did, Bass found the air shockingly cold. Sniffing deeply of the gloom, he thought he could smell the dried sweat, the days-old grease that told him the warrior was near. Or was it only his imagination, galloping wildly now that he was inching ever closer to this moment of reckoning?

Not that he hadn’t killed before. But this was something entirely different.

When violence confronted a man, it usually did so suddenly, without warning and forethought. One moment a man stood square with the world around him. And with his next breath, things went awry, everything off-kilter and askew in that instant. A man found himself swept up in the immediacy of the moment and responded to protect either himself or those dear to him. Just as he had done when the Chickasaw had slipped on board Ebenezer Zane’s Kentucky flatboat.

One moment he’s fighting off sleep with heavy eyes and the gentle bobbing of that flat-bottomed broadhorn laden with marketable goods bound for the port at New Orleans … and the next moment he’s shooting and stabbing, clubbing and slashing at the heathens who have stolen out of the night.

So this was the first time in his life that Bass ever had time to plan, to think, and to fret on it. Killing had always been what he had done when presented with no other choice. Now it became something altogether different, when he was no longer the one confronted by the violence created for him—now that he was the one slipping out of the dark. Not that these Blackfoot didn’t deserve to die, he reminded himself as he took another two steps forward … and suddenly saw the shape of the man.

Stopping almost in midstep, Bass held his breath a long moment. Waiting, he watched the warrior, studying to be sure there was no chance he might have been heard. Waiting to be certain the breeze was still in his face. He took another step, paused, then moved to within two short yards of the raider. The horses were just beyond him.

He leaned the rifle against a tree, wondering where Hatcher was. Wondering how long he should wait there before … how much time he would have before the warrior moved farther away, or the animals scented him, or all hell broke loose because one of the others were discovered.

Swallowing down the sharp-edged ball of thorny fear lodged in his throat, Bass brought both arms up, his left ready to snare the Blackfoot, the right hand filled with his old knife.

The horses brought their heads up suddenly as Titus was starting the knife back in its arc. An instant later a cry shattered the night. The Blackfoot in front of him visibly jerked, then started to wheel to his right, about to sprint off for camp. He spotted Bass at the same moment Scratch was lunging forward, his arm already swinging down in a frenzy, snatching hold of the Blackfoot’s war shirt, yanking the Indian close as the knife became a blur.

In that moment of the white man’s hesitation, the enemy managed to bring his forearm up. Bass’s wrist collided with it as the tip of the knife grazed the side of the warrior’s neck. But the Blackfoot’s right arm was free, grabbing for his own scabbard as they danced in a tight circle. The moment the man’s knife came up in that free hand, Titus shoved his enemy backward, slamming his knee into the warrior’s groin.

Stumbling a step, the warrior sought to protect himself as Scratch pursued him back, back—still holding on to the war shirt—yanking the warrior to the side as he raked his knife across the Blackfoot’s gut. He felt the sudden warm splash across his own cold hand.

Until now the enemy hadn’t made a sound; but this was something that reminded him of a grunt from the old plow mule, a little of the squeal. Sinking to his knees, the Blackfoot stared down at his hands, found them filling with the first purplish-white ribbons of gut spilling from the deep, savage wound. Dull-eyed, he looked up at the white man just as Bass heard the rumble burst free of his own throat: stepping forward to savagely slash the old knife from left to right across the enemy’s throat.

Deep enough that the man’s head snapped back, eyes wide, lips moving bereft of sound this time.

There was enough other noise now.

Scratch could hear the shouts of the trappers somewhere behind him. And off toward the creek came the shrill cries of the rest of the Blackfoot.

Their fat was in the fire now.

Damn if they hadn’t managed to stir up the hornets’ nest without getting off with the horses.

Of a sudden it sounded as if he were surrounded by the rain-patter of running steps. Out of the gray gloom emerged huge black shadows. Snorting, wide-eyed, with frosty vapor jetting from their mouths, more than two dozen ponies shot past as Scratch dodged this way, then that, to keep from getting trampled. He thought he recognized some of the voices cracking the darkness, yelling to one another as they raced to get ahead of the stampeding herd.

All bets were off now.

He damn well knew he couldn’t count on his own horse being back there where he had left it with the others.

As the last of the ponies blew past him in the dark, thundering through the tall willows, Bass knew he was alone, and on foot.

Realizing what that meant for no more than a heartbeat before he heard the Blackfoot cries coming closer and closer. Footsteps, the rustle of underbrush, the strident call of anguish, rage, blood lust.

He looked down at the dead warrior, hoping to find some sort of firearm. Nothing more than that knife and a quiver strapped over his shoulder, filled with arrows and a short bow.

Jerking around at the nearing clamor, Scratch decided the time would never be better to make a run for it—just as more than a half-dozen warriors burst from the far brush on foot.

“Bass!”

The voice yanked him around as he was turning to plunge into the willow thicket for his rifle.

Trying to get any sound free past the clog in his throat was an impossible feat as he stammered Hatcher’s name.

Jack burst out of the brush on horseback between Titus and the onrushing warriors. “Up, coon! Heave up now!”

“My gun!”

“Get it, sumbitch!”

By the time he whirled back with it, Jack held out a hand from the back of the Blackfoot pony he controlled with no more than the single buffalo-hair rein. In a frightened circle it pranced around Bass one time, then a second, as Jack struggled for control and Scratch stuffed the knife into its sheath. The two men locked one another’s forearms while Titus hopped round and round at the center of the circle.

The cries grew louder, renewed now that the prey was in sight.

“Dammit—get up here or we’re both wolf bait!”

“G’won … I can’t—”

With a mighty grunt Hatcher reared back, dragging Bass off the ground enough that he was able to swing one leg over the hind flanks of the pony, his free hand reaching out to seize Jack’s buckskin shirt. Both of them jabbing heels into the horse’s ribs, they lunged into the willow thicket.

Arrows smacked the branches around them. Gunfire boomed behind them, the air on either side of their heads alive with the tormented whine of lead balls.

“Far as hitting anything with a gun, never met me a Injun wuth a red piss!” Hatcher roared as the willow whipped their arms and legs and cheeks unmercifully.

Bass’s left side burned in the cold—like a sudden, raw opening of tender flesh. Gazing down at the wound while he laid his hand over it, Bass waited a moment, then brought the hand away, feeling the pain already, even before he saw the dark stain on his palm.

“Should’ve left me behind,” he grumbled as he secured a better hold on Hatcher just as they broke free of the willow onto the sagebrush plain.

“Hell with you, nigger!” Hatcher grumbled. “I ain’t never left no man ahin’t … and I ain’t about to start now. Mangy as yer carcass is—wuthless, no-good—”

“There they are!” Scratch exclaimed through gritted teeth, fighting the pain in his side where the bullet’s path made him want to cry.

“Damn if it ain’t!”

Far ahead of them galloped more than forty horses, their hooves hammering the flaky hardpan ground as they were driven by the whooping cries of the other four trappers struggling to keep the Blackfoot ponies from scattering this way or that at either side of their path.

For a moment Bass turned slightly to peer over his shoulder behind them. He was beginning to feel faint, wanting nothing better than to have Hatcher stop so he could climb off, lie down, and sleep. Instead Titus bit down hard on his lower lip—startling himself with the pain that for a moment made him forget the terrible fire in his side.

“W-we gonna make it, Jack?”

Hatcher turned his head quickly to look behind them. “I do believe, Titus Bass!”

“You mean we pulled that off?”

“Less’n them sumbitches got more ponies—and I do believe we got ’em all—they ain’t coming after us but on foot!”

Suddenly Titus was growing light-headed and the ground was starting to spin beneath the pony’s hooves as it struggled beneath the weight of two men. “I ain’t … ain’t …”

“Hang on!”

“Can’t hang much more—”

“Ye hit?”

“’Fraid so, Jack.”

“Eegod, Scratch!” he screeched, yanking back on the single buffalo-hair rein.

His eyelids grown so heavy. “K-keep goin’!”

“I wanna see how bad ye’re—”

“We’re gonna have company soon if’n you pull up.”

Hatcher jerked his head around, gazing down their backtrail, spotting the distant figures Bass had sighted only moments before. Horsemen. There weren’t many—but enough to make for trouble.

Jack sighed, “Ye gonna hold on?”

“Like a goddamned tick.”

“Hep-ha!” Hatcher cried, jabbing his moccasins into the horse’s belly, jolting a sudden burst of speed from it.

Burying his face in Hatcher’s bony back, Titus drank in deep drafts of air, realizing that it was no longer night. Sometime in the last few minutes, the sky had begun to brighten in prelude to sunrise. Now they’d be all the easier to track for that handful of riders. Ponies the trappers hadn’t driven off. And where there was a handful, a man could always figure there might likely be more.

He wondered how Kinkead was doing, remembering the sight of that arrow shaft quivering every time Matthew drew in a ragged breath, shuddering every time he exhaled. How they had struggled to hold the big man down to pull it out. All the blood as Hatcher dug the stone head out of the thick muscle. Arrow or bullet—who was to say what was better … what a man could survive …

“Help me get him down!”

Some of the black curtain was pulled back, and Bass came awake as the hands grabbed him, feeling himself pulled, allowing himself to fall against them clumsily. The others laid him out as Hatcher slid from the heaving pony’s bare back. It was plain the creature didn’t take to being so close to these strange-smelling white men. It nearly pulled Jack off the ground with its first lunge, snorting and rearing back.

Hatcher balled up his hard-boned fist and smacked the animal with a powerful haymaker of a blow, landing it right behind the nostrils.

Staggering to the side, the pony righted itself, more wary now of the man who still gripped its buffalo-hair rein.

“Take this, Caleb.” Jack handed that rein to Wood. “Solomon, turn Scratch on his side.” He knelt beside Bass. “Lemme have a look-see while the rest of ye get ready to welcome Bug’s Boys to our li’l hidee-hole.”

“That makes only three guns, Jack,” Rowland complained.

“Four,” Hatcher corrected. “Caleb, tie that jughead off and get yerself a spot to watch the backtrail.”

Somewhere beyond them back down the trail, the sun was breaking over the edge of the earth. But here past the mouth of this narrow canyon, it was still shadow. Breath vapor steamed in frosty halos surrounding every head. Bass grunted as he was turned, his eyes struggling to focus as he looked up, around at the faces dancing in a watery haze over him.

“It come clean through, boys,” Jack declared, finding the exit wound on Bass’s belly.

“Damn lucky, ain’t he?” Solomon Fish exclaimed, supporting the wounded man’s shoulders.

“Titus Bass lucky?” Hatcher snorted as he leaned close to examine the entrance wound, pushing this way and that with his fingertips. “Any other man I’d call lucky if’n he was hit by a Blackfoot ball that went right on through his side the way this’un did. But from what we know about this son of a bitch, the way he lived to tell of a ’Rapaho scalpin’, hung like a tick on the back of that damned bitch of a mule long enough to be in the right place and the right time when the Snakes shot that white medicine calf … and then got his fat pulled from the fire with the rest of us last spring when that white medicine calf’s hide told them grateful Snakes when we was all about to go under … hell, Solomon! I never knowed any man more lucky than Titus Bass!”

Elbridge Gray turned to say, “Born under a good star, that child was.”

“Damn if he wasn’t,” Jack sighed, leaning back. “’Pears to me that ball went right on through ’thout striking anything but skin and muscle.”

Caleb whistled low in amazement. “Almost makes a man wanna keep him around for our own good luck.”

Hatcher nodded, pushing some of Bass’s long, stringy hair out of his eyes as Titus struggled to focus on the brigade leader. “Damn right, boys—this here’s a good man to have along.”

“J-jack—”

Hatcher leaned close. “I got bad news for ye, Scratch.”

“Bad?”

“Ye’re gonna live, ye mangy, flea-bit no-count.”

“Gonna make it, am I? By damn that’s good news—”

“That is less’n the Blackfoots catch up to us and pin us down till they can finish ye off.”

Bass squinted his eyes against the rise of pain. “We ain’t gonna let ’em, are we?”

Jack grinned, his overly large teeth the color of pin acorns. “Not by a long chalk, we ain’t.” He turned. “Caleb—crawl on up there and see what them riders are up to at the mouth of the canyon.”

Scratch heard Caleb Wood move off. “I got my pistol, rifle too, if’n any of you can use ’em.”

“Hell, Bass,” Gray spouted. “You ain’t hurt so bad you can’t hold on to ’em your own self.”

Fish added, “Might be you’ll get a chance to use ’em yet.”

A few long minutes later Titus fluttered open his eyes slightly, fighting to focus on Hatcher’s face hovering over his. “You get your horse guard?”

“Didn’t get the chance,” Jack replied. “I spooked a horse, so that red son of a bitch jumped out into the meadow on me. Right about the time a second one showed up.”

“Second one?” Rowland asked.

“I figger it was another guard coming out to take him his turn at watch,” Jack explained. “Boys, there ain’t two ways about it: plain as paint I’m ’bout as unlucky as Titus Bass born under a good star!”

“Let’s hope his star gonna shine down on all of us,” Caleb huffed as he crabbed back into that ring the trappers formed around Bass.

Solomon asked, “More coming?”

Wood nodded, licking his dry lips. “See’d ’em. Coming a ways off.”

“How many?” Rowland demanded in a rising voice.

“It don’t matter how many,” Hatcher declared as he rose from his knees. “We can’t none of us stay here to let ’em finish us off.”

“What about Bass?” Fish asked.

Jack looked down at Titus. “What about it, Scratch?”

He struggled to rise on an elbow and tried out a weak grin on all of them. “Boys, if Mad Jack here says we best be making tracks—then we best be on our way.”

“Get the horses!” Elbridge hollered as he wheeled about, sweeping up a rein.

“Put them Blackfoot ponies out in front of us and keep ’em going,” Jack ordered. “No matter what, keep them ponies going.”

Hatcher was the next up after throwing his saddle onto a fresh mount. He had Fish and Wood heft Bass up behind him.

“Now, get me one of them picket ropes,” Jack said. “Wrap it round us both so ye can tie him to me.”

“D-do me up tight, fellas,” Bass demanded of them, knowing the chances were good that he would grow too weak to hold on to Hatcher by himself. “I don’t wanna fall off so them Blackfoot niggers get me.”

They made a half-dozen loops around the two men, then knotted the ends in front of Hatcher so he could free himself or Bass if the need arose.

“Get a leg up, boys!” Jack cried. “Move them ponies out!”

Wide-eyed, Solomon said, “Only one way out of this here canyon, Jack.”

“We’ll run right into them niggers waiting for the rest to come up!” Caleb shrieked.

“That’s just what I figger Jack wants to do,” Solomon shouted.

Hatcher nudged his heels into the horse. “Right, the first whack! Do our best to run right on over ’em on our way out! Hep! Hep-ha!”

As the horse’s powerful flanks surged beneath him, Bass locked his fingers around the loops of rope imprisoning Hatcher’s chest. Ahead of them the others were yelling and screaming, driving the horses before them, sure to scare the billy-be-hell out of the half-dozen or so Blackfoot waiting at the mouth of the canyon.

“You really gonna ride right into ’em?” Scratch asked against the back of Hatcher’s neck.

“Damn right we are!” he said, turning his head slightly. “A goddamned sit-up, straight-on ride-through!”

Cautiously, Bass loosened the hold he had with his right hand and slid it between himself and Hatcher until he filled his hand with the butt of the flintlock pistol.

“Hold tight, son!” Jack warned. “We’re about to do-si-do!”

What few war cries the Blackfoot raised were swiftly drowned out by the hammer of hooves on the flaky hardpan of the earth’s crust as the horses and trappers galloped into the open, heading right for their enemy who waited among the sage and buckbrush in the day’s new light. Hatcher’s men shouted back with their own bravado, hurtling through the few who had dared to follow them.

A lone gunshot. Bass figured it had to be one of the boys. The Blackfoot simply didn’t have that many weapons, and chances were good they wouldn’t dare try to shoot their weapons from horseback anyway. What Jack had said was true: Indians simply weren’t much in the way of marksmanship.

“Take a lookee there, Scratch!” Hatcher called.

He turned his head, immediately catching sight of the warrior racing toward them at an angle—putting himself on a collision course not that far ahead. In one hand the Blackfoot held the elk-antler quirt he used to whip the pony’s rear flank. And in the hand that clutched the pony’s rein, the warrior also held a long wooden club from, the end of which protruded a long, wide knife blade. Two feathers streamed back from his long, unfettered hair while the pony raced around and over the stunted sagebrush.

“Maybe I should ride right into him?” Jack mused.

“You do, you’ll knock me off,” Scratch replied.

“I’ll wager that’s what he’s fixin’ to do.”

All the jarring, jolting, side-to-side hammering inflicted on his wound was about to overwhelm Bass. For a moment he bit down on his lower lip again, then said, “You pull up—I’ll shoot the son of a bitch.”

“I ain’t stoppin’ for nothing! Not when I got a head of steam behind me!”

It was like a nausea that threatened to surge up his gullet, a blackness doing its best to put an end to the torment in his side. And out of the shrill ringing in his ears, Bass heard the other pony. Opening his eyes, he struggled to focus: discovering the warrior racing just behind them, just over his right shoulder.

“Hatcher!”

“I know, goddammit!”

Bass watched the Blackfoot switch the reins into his free hand, beginning to swing his left arm back. “Can you shoot him, Jack!”

“It’s all I can do to keep us on top of this damned horse!”

With a sudden swerving lurch, the warrior brought his pony sharply to the left as he swung the long club forward. Both Hatcher and Bass ducked out of the way as the knife blade hissed past their heads—that sudden shift of weight causing the horse below them to stumble and sidestep at full stride. Both trappers barely held on as the animal dodged through the sagebrush: Hatcher locked on to the saddle, Titus locked on to him.

Bass cried, “Son of a bitch’s coming back for another go!”

“He’ll keep it up till he gets one of us,” Hatcher growled, “or he drops us both!”

“Can you ram your horse into him?”

“S’pose I can,” Jack admitted grittily. “But it might spill us!”

“He comes close enough—just give ’im the idea you’re gonna.”

For the next few moments Bass was able to watch the look of grim determination on the warrior’s face as the Blackfoot inched his animal closer and closer to the white man’s horse. He saw how the man’s hair was cut with long bangs that tossed in the wind, the hair on the top of his head tied up with a few feathers, like a bold challenge to try taking that topknot. And he saw how those black-cherry eyes glittered with hate.

Titus wondered how anyone could ever possess such hate like that for someone he didn’t know. Besides the horses—why would these warriors carry such rage for the white men? After all this time, were they still licking their wounds after being driven off by the Shoshone last spring? To Scratch’s way of thinking, even that could not account for the unadulterated hatred and contempt he read in the Blackfoot’s eyes as the warrior drew closer and closer.

“Now!” Bass screamed.

Hatcher was right on the money, yanking hard on the rein. Their horse twisted suddenly, just as Jack yanked back to the left to correct it. That sudden lunge did the trick: enough to make the warrior pull off.

And when the Indian realized what the white men had done, even more rage clouded his face.

“I gotta get rid of the son of a bitch,” Jack grumbled.

“This horse ain’t gonna last long under us both,” Bass said into the back of Hatcher’s neck, feeling himself breaking into a fevered sweat. “Maybe we get a chance, you get us stopped, tie me on another horse. This’un can’t carry us much—”

“Shuddup! I ain’t about to trust ye to make it on yer own.”

Off to the right, the warrior was coming at them again as they reached more open ground, the land falling away gently toward the distant river valley, that beckoning vale rushing at them with its wide border of green disclosing its meandering course to these battle-weary travelers.

“Then gimme a chance to shoot him,” Bass demanded.

“How in the devil’s eggs are ye gonna shoot ’im?” Hatcher snorted, getting a new grip on the horse’s rein. “Ye can barely hang on to me as it is, child!”

“J-just … g-get him on the other side of us.”

“Don’t let go of me, Bass!”

“I ain’t, Jack,” he vowed weakly. “Just get him on our left. Cross over, hard and sharp.”

“An’ put him on our left,” Jack repeated. “If what ye got in mind don’t work—that nigger likely to take off the top of yer head with that club on his next go-by.”

“You just keep us both on this here horse—I’ll do the rest, Hatcher.”

Whooping and wagging his head in astonishment, Jack kept looking over his right shoulder as the Blackfoot urged his pony closer and closer to their horse, and when he figured the warrior was close enough, Hatcher yanked hard to the right.

But the Blackfoot figured this was another feint and didn’t go for the bait. Instead, he spurred forward, the nose of his animal nearly crashing into the rear flank of the trappers’ horse as it shifted sides. As the startled enemy straightened himself on his war pony, Bass found that Hatcher had done it. The warrior was now inching up on them from their left.

Closer.

He struggled to bring the pistol out of his sash in a sweating palm.

Closer still.

They were lashed so tightly together that he grew scared the weapon might go off wedged there between them. Kill one of them, if not the horse under them both.

Close enough now that he could see the ribbons of sweat coursing down the enemy’s face.

Freed at last—he felt the muzzle move between them, tight against his belly as he pushed his hand forward.

Swinging the club back, the Indian grinned, his teeth glittering as he closed on what had to be a sure kill. Two white men at once. What a prize—

Shoved across his body, the pistol suddenly popped out between the two men as Titus raked back the hammer with a thumb.

The club had already begun its arc downward as the Blackfoot’s eyes suddenly locked on the pistol just then popping into view between his enemies.

In his sweat-slickened hand the pistol nearly bucked itself loose as Bass pulled the trigger. The ball slammed into its target midchest, right under the warrior’s arm that held the war club aloft. As if disbelieving, the Blackfoot kept the arm and club frozen there, reluctantly tearing his eyes off the white men as he looked down at his side … weaved—then pitched off the back of his straining pony.

“Sumbitch!” Hatcher cried exuberantly.

Drops of salty sweat stung Bass’s eyes as he blinked, trying hard to clear them, straining to see if there were any other pursuers who might pose a threat now that he had emptied his only weapon of the only bullet it had held. Behind them two other warriors slowed and brought their ponies to a halt in the sagebrush, circling back for the body of their fallen comrade.

“Maybeso the niggers are giving up,” Titus said, more hopeful than certain.

“Not Blackfoot,” Hatcher snorted. “Bug’s Boys don’t give up.”

“How long they gonna keep after us?”

It was a moment before Hatcher answered. “Till they take all the horses they can from us, and they got our scalps hanging from their belts, Scratch.”

“Ain’t healthy for a man up here—this hard by Blackfoot country—is it?”

“No, I don’t reckon it is.”

Weakness was like a thick cloud overtaking him now that the hot adrenaline was no longer surging through his veins. “Tell me, Jack: is the beaver so good up here that you’re willing to put your hide on the line ever’ day you got left in your number?”

“What say when we get back to Isaac and Rufus—we all talk about working our way south to more friendly country?”

“South … south is good.”

“Rest of them niggers been after our hair won’t be follering all that quick—seeing how we put ’em afoot the way we done,” Hatcher said. “So we can see to Kinkead and you proper and get this outfit ready to tramp south back to the Windy Mountains after we g’won to ronnyvoo at Sweet Lake. How’s ronnyvoo sound to Titus Bass?”

Jack waited a minute for an answer from Bass, and when he didn’t get one, he turned slightly to peer at the man roped behind him. “Scratch? Hyar ye—Scratch?”

Up ahead of them the others were driving the horses across the wide creek, threading the animals through the young cottonwood saplings and between stands of willow. How beautiful were the drops of water spraying up from each hoof, countless glittering gems iridescent in the bright spring sun as the four other horsemen shouted and urged the horses across.

“Ronnyvoo … just the sound of it shines,” Bass finally said as he closed his eyes again, so heavy had they become that he could no longer keep them open.

“There’ll be whiskey, Scratch!” Hatcher cheered as he slowed the horse in nearing the ford. “And womens!”

His side burned with a terrible, prickling pain. And for a moment Titus wondered on just how much blood he had lost. Would he make it to rendezvous? Or would he be one of those who went under? Then Scratch couldn’t fight it any longer.

“Just lem’ … lemme sleep now, Jack.”

Not all that far overhead the calliope hummingbird’s wings blurred in frenetic flight—hovering, darting, then hovering once more as it sought out its nectar.

Bass froze, motionless there in the icy water, the five-pound steel trap and float-stick in hand. Enthralled with the bird’s dance on the gentle spring breeze, he watched the hummingbird bob and bounce from flower to flower until it was long gone down the streambank. He sighed in contentment. And arched his back, feeling the tug of tight new flesh slowly knitting along the bullet’s path through his left side. Especially taut across those two small puckers of wrinkled skin. It was good to be back working the banks of these streams. Good for a man to know where he belonged.

For days following that scrap with the Blackfoot horse thieves, the others had joshed about keeping him around for no other reason than that Titus Bass was a good omen, perhaps even the old Shoshone soothsayer’s most powerful charm.

“I had me a uncle once said to me that a few folks is like cats,” Solomon Fish had said beside a campfire one twilight as Hatcher’s brigade made their way south toward the Owl Mountains, working to put more and more country between them and the Blackfeet who seemed determined in their chase.

“Merciful heavens,” Caleb Wood grumbled as he swayed up with another armload of wood. “How people like cats?”

“Never had me a cat was wuth a red piss,” John Rowland observed. “Only good for mousin’.”

“Go ahead on with yer story, Solomon,” Jack prodded.

With an indifferent shrug Fish nudged some of his blond ringlets out of his eyes and said, “Ain’t much of a story, really. Just my uncle said some folks got ’em nine lives, just like cats s’pose to have.”

Hatcher turned to Kinkead. “What ye think of that, Matthew?”

“Sounds like Solomon’s uncle kept hisself filled with bilge water to me.”

“Maybe not a fella like you,” Fish snorted testily. “But just think about Titus Bass here.”

Hatcher grinned across the fire, asking, “Say, Scratch—figger ye used up any of yer nine lives?”

“Damn right I have,” he answered, feeling the certainty of it down to his marrow. “Figger I had a few whittled off me back in St. ’Louie, back to the time when I was doing my best to spit in death’s eye.”

“How ’bout with them Arapaho down near the Little Bear?” Elbridge Gray asked.

“Them,” Scratch replied, painfully shifting his position, “and a few times since.”

Jack turned back to Kinkead, asking, “So don’t it sound like Bass got him a cat’s nine lives?”

“Solemn,” Matthew used his favorite expression, then spit a brown stream of tobacco into the fire, where it hissed. “But if Scratch truly be a man with nine lives, I reckon he’s just ’bout used ’em all up, Jack.”

“Long as he don’t use that last one afore ronnyvoo at Sweet Lake!” Hatcher roared.

Time was drawing nigh when the company brigades and bands of free trappers would begin to gather, marching farther to the west every few days, stopping now and again when the sign along the streams convinced Hatcher’s men the trapping might be worth their efforts. Wandering slowly as the days lengthened and warmed, they neared the southern end of the Wind River Mountains—where a man jumped west by southwest over that easy, sloping divide to find himself in a country where all the waters now flowed toward the Big Salt far, far beyond the horizon.

When the hummingbird finally flickered out of sight, Titus waded another half-dozen steps and stopped there at the base of the long strip of creekside grass growing along the bank, reaching for the knife at his back. With it he plunged his arm under the water, clear up to the elbow, and began hacking away at the side of the bank until he had carved away a shelf big enough on which to set his trap. From beneath his arm he grabbed the bait stick: a section of peeled willow, one end sharpened for driving into the bank just above the surface of the stream where he had hidden his trap at the end of the beaver slide.

Here the animals repeatedly entered the water, usually dragging their limbs and saplings they were using to slowly construct a rugged dam across the stream, or swim underwater with their provender, taking it to their beaver lodge to feed mate and kits. The slides ’were a good place to count on beaver coming close enough to that stick where the rodents would catch a whiff of the bait Scratch smeared on that portion of the limb suspended over the readied trap.

After driving the stick into the bank at the proper angle with the small head of the belt ax he carried, Scratch pulled the stopper from the wooden vial suspended from his belt. The sudden strong, pungent odor of the castoreum rose to his nostrils, making his eyes water as he smeared a little of the thick, creamy liquid on the exposed end of the bait stick, stuffed the vial away, then washed his fingertips there at the foot of the slide.

Two more traps still to set before sundown.

Looking over his shoulder at the falling sun, Bass reckoned it would be twilight before he made it back to camp, unsaddled, and picketed the horse on some good grass until it was time to curl up in the blankets for the night.

Despite the hightailing they had done to stay as far ahead of the Blackfeet as they could, they had nonetheless made a good spring of it for themselves—both before that first attack when they were burying Joseph Little, and after as Hatcher led them farther and farther north toward the southern reaches of that country the Blackfoot jealously guarded and protected as their own hallowed ground.

“Man’s a fool what’ll go where he’s bound to lose his hair over a little beaver fur,” Caleb Wood had grumbled the farther north they had gone.

“Man’s a fool if he don’t go to see for his own self if the plew is as prime as some say it is,” Jack retorted. “But don’t ye worry none. We’ll turn around and hightail it out if’n them pelts ain’t as big as blankets … or if Bug’s Boys turn out to be thicker’n summer wasps.”

Soon enough they found Hatcher right on both counts. No wonder the Blackfoot got so fractious with white American trappers slipping around the fringes of their country—the beaver up there grew bigger, their pelts more sleek, than anywhere else a man trapped in these mountains.

Moving on upstream, Titus kept his eyes moving, searching for another slide, perhaps the stumps of some young saplings the beaver had felled, any sign that an area was frequented by the big, flat-tailed rodents hunted by the Rocky Mountain fur trapper.

Decades before, the big companies had first enlisted men to come far up the Missouri River for the purpose of trading with the tribes to obtain their fine and coarse furs: not only the seal-sleek beaver and river otter, but mink and lynx, some buffalo and wolf at times too. The British pushed down from the north, and the Americans prodded farther west each year until men like Ashley and Henry decided they would do better hiring a hundred enterprising young men to catch the pelts themselves. The American fur trade was never the same after the Ashley men began to spread out across the far west—from the Milk and the Marias, the Judith and the Mussellshell on the north, to the Gila, the Rio Grande, and the Cimarron down south in Mexican Territory.

But beaver had already been feeding the economy of the New World for more than two hundred years by the time the Rocky Mountain fur trapper appeared on the scene. And beaver continued to turn the wheels of commerce as the big companies and the small bands of free trappers moved farther and farther into the wilderness, searching deeper and deeper for virgin country yet untrapped.

Scratch stopped there in the cold stream fed by last winter’s snows, far, far overhead among the high peaks, surveying the banks on both sides while he pushed some of the long brown curls out of his eyes. As a trapper grew in experience, he came to recognize just what the possibilities of finding beaver would be from the type and amount of vegetation sprouting along a certain stretch of a creek or river. Down at lower elevations some of the animals would feed on young cottonwood and alder, while up here above the foothills beaver worked on aspen, willow, and birch.

Crossing the stream to the far bank, Scratch bent and scooped up a handful of the wood shavings thickly scattered at the base of a stump within reach from the water. Rolling the chips in his fingertips to check for moistness, then bringing them to his nose to smell—the more fragrant, the fresher they were—Bass calculated it was a recent cutting. No man had ever taught him this: not Bud, nor Billy, nor even the savvy Silas Cooper—none of the three who had gathered him under their wings and taught him not only what it would take to make a living as a trapper, but how to keep hold of his hair in Indian country.

No, seasons ago Scratch had learned this trick on his own hook. The fresher the shavings, the more recent the activity in that section of a stream, and consequently the greater the possibility of a concentration of flat-tails consumed with building dams, flooding meadows, and constructing lodges for their families.

A trapper counted on the probability that any beaver curious enough to be lured to the bait stick would put a foot in the steel trap waiting for it at the bottom of a slide or near the entrance to its domed lodge. Unable to free itself from the weight of the trap, the beaver would drown quickly, leaving its pelt unmarred, ready for a careful skinning.

After being stretched, fleshed, and dried on round hoops of willow, the hides were bundled in packs for eventual transport to the summer rendezvous. This annual gathering, another invention of General William H. Ashley, was conceived as a means of resupplying his brigades who spread out through the mountains from late summer until the following spring when they would begin their trek down from the high country to a prearranged valley, there to meet with the caravan come all the way out from St. Louis laden with powder and lead, sugar and coffee, beads and trinkets, calico and wool stroud—everything a man would need to live for another year in the mountains, even what that man might employ to entice an Indian squaw back among the brush for an all-too-brief and heated coupling.

No money ever changed hands between trader and trapper, white man or Indian. None was needed. Beaver was the only currency in the mountains. With it a man would eventually buy himself a head-splitting drunk, a raucous series of couplings with a string of agreeable Indian maidens, and he might possibly have enough left over to outfit himself for another year in the high lonesome without going into debt to the company.

No matter that most men had little to show for their years and their miles and their wrinkles. To search out the wily Rocky Mountain beaver, a man might willingly risk his hair, his hide, and perhaps his very soul.

After braving months upon months of bone-numbing streams both fall and spring, after enduring a long, spirit-sapping winter in some isolated, snowbound camp, the trapper would eagerly look forward to summer when he could trade off his packs of beaver for another year’s gamble in the wilderness. When the last man had turned in the last of his beaver, when the whiskey kegs had run dry, the traders threw their bundles onto the backs of the very same mules that had hauled the trade goods out from St. Louis, that caravan now to spend the next ten weeks making its return trip to the Missouri settlements. There, or farther east in Philadelphia or even New York, the pelts would be sorted further. While those of average grade would eventually be used for the tall-crowned gentleman’s hats so fashionable not only back east but especially in Europe, the finest furs would be sold to brokers who exported them to frigid countries the likes of Imperial Russia and feudal China.

A single pelt of Rocky Mountain beaver might weigh between a pound and a half to two pounds when dried and fleshed of excess fat. The skin of a kit might weigh only half that. Over that brief, meteoric period of the American fur trade, the going rate for plew went anywhere from three to six dollars a pound back in the St. Louis market. So what eventually made Ashley his fortune was not his initially organizing fur brigades to operate in the mountains, but his newest venture: supplying those fur trappers with goods brought out to rendezvous planned for a prearranged site. There the reveling, raucous trappers overly eager to celebrate would be content to receive half the value of their beaver in St. Louis prices, while they wouldn’t mind paying many times the “settlement” price of those staples and supplies transported from Missouri.

After holding his first rendezvous three years earlier in 1825, General Ashley continued to refine his rendezvous system until the price of beaver would eventually become standardized at somewhere around three dollars a pound—a figure that earned a trapper some five to six dollars a plew. It was hard, cold, lonely, and ultimately dangerous work for the few hundred men who chose to make their livelihood here in the wilderness, and perhaps on the edge of eternity.

From the northern rivers bordering the Canadian provinces all the way south into territory claimed by Mexico, at any one time less than four hundred Americans scattered their moccasin prints across a trackless wilderness, migrating seasonally across a mapless terrain, confronting a bewildering array of climatic conditions, geography, and native inhabitants. Here in these early years of the nineteenth century, in these opening days of the far west, for a special class of man there simply was no other life imaginable.

To take your life into your own hands, not beholden to any other man, to test your own resolve and mettle against all the elements God or the devil himself could hurl at a puny, insignificantly few bold men … ah, but that was the heady stuff of living!

True freedom: to live or die by one’s own savvy and pluck.

Such was the nectar that lured these bees to the hive. Freedom was the sirens’ song that enticed this reckless breed of men to hurl their fates against the high and terrible places.

Despite the cold and the Blackfoot—despite the odds of sudden death.

After constructing two travois for Kinkead and Bass, the other seven trappers had reloaded their pack animals and pointed their noses south for the Owl Creek Mountains, driving the extra Blackfoot ponies along behind them. Scratch was the first to knit up after their ordeal.

Twice a day one of Hatcher’s men would make a poultice of beaver castoreum mixed with the pulverized roots or pulp of one plant or another, smearing the smelly concoction into the wounds troubling both men. It wasn’t long before Bass could move about camp without tiring out too quickly. But for the better part of two weeks he contented himself by remaining in camp with Kinkead when the others went out to trap—staying busy by fleshing the beaver hides, then stretching them on willow hoops, or untying the packs to dust the plews and check for infestation before rebundling them in their rawhide cords. Eventually the raw, red flesh around his wounds became new, pink skin that he could gently stretch more each day. Inside, however, he was knitting together much slower.

Nowhere near as slow as Kinkead.

For the longest time Matthew continued to cough up bright-red blood, later on bringing up dark, half-congealed phlegm. With as little as the man ate, over the following weeks the others began to notice the gradual change in their friend as his huge face thinned, accentuating the dark, liver-colored bags beneath his eyes.

“I wanna see Rosa,” Kinkead declared quietly one night as the rest joked and laughed around their nighttime fire, that simple plea coming right out of the blue.

The others fell silent immediately, some choosing to stare at their feet or the ground or the fire. Only Hatcher and Bass could look at the man still imprisoned on his travois.

“Natural for a man to wanna see his wife,” Jack consoled as he knelt beside Kinkead.

“W-wife?” Titus asked, surprised. “You married?”

Hatcher explained, “She’s a good woman.”

“She back east?”

Kinkead shook his head. “Taos. She’s a Mexican gal.”

“I’ll be go to hell,” Bass exclaimed. “What the devil you doing trapping beaver up here in the mountains when you got a wife waiting for you down in the Mexico settlements?”

“Don’t make sense no more, does it?” Matthew declared. “One time it did. Now—it don’t make sense to me no more. God, I ache in my bones I wanna see Rosa so bad.”

Scratch did not know what to say—struck dumb just watching the way Kinkead’s eyes filled with tears. “Man has him someone who loves him, someone he loves … I’d sure as hell feel same as you, Matthew—wanting my woman with me if I was healing up.”

Dragging a hand under his nose, Matthew’s voice cracked as he said, “I decided today …”

Hatcher asked, “Decided what?”

Kinkead couldn’t look at any of them. “Figger to quit the mountains.”

“Qu-quit the mountains?” bawled John Rowland.

Hatcher asked, “What ye gonna do if ye plan on staying back in Taos?”

“Rosa and me, we’ll be fine,” Kinkead protested. “I figger I’ll find something.”

“Where you gonna live?” Solomon inquired. “Where the two of you set up home?”

With a shrug Kinkead responded, “I stay with her at her papa’s house when I’m back in Taos. S’pose that’s what we’ll do till we find us some li’l place of our own.”

“Damn,” Caleb Wood sighed. “If that don’t take the circle! I can’t believe you’re quitting the mountains.”

“I’d do it this minute if I could get back down there,” Kinkead complained.

Hatcher explained, “We ain’t tramping that far south till fall hunt’s over.”

“All the way to Taos?” Bass inquired.

Suddenly Matthew’s tired face grew more animated as he turned toward Titus. “That’s prime doings! You’re gonna see Taos shines, Scratch! Purely shines!”

“We got us some more trapping to do afore spring is done,” Jack confided. “And then we’ll be making for ronnyvoo over at Sweet Lake. After that we was planning on moseying down to the Bayou Salade for the fall hunt afore climbing on over to Taos.”

“Where’s this Bayou Sa … Sa—”

“Salade,” Elbridge Gray recited. “Way south of here, Scratch. Not far from the Mexican country itself. Up on the headwaters of the Arkansas it be. Pretty place—and full of beaver too.”

Now Bass turned to Kinkead. “So, nigger … you’re married to this Mexican gal named Rosa.”

He watched how it made Matthew smile.

“Yep, a purty lady she is too.”

“But near as I can callate, you ain’t been back there in more’n a year already.”

Just that saying of it appeared to take some more starch “out of Kinkead. He stared down at himself, lying helpless in that travois. “Makes me hurt more, Scratch—thinking just how long it’ll be till I see her again. That’ll make it near two years by the time I hold her. We left Taos end of winter a year ago.”

“But you knowed we wasn’t going back till this winter,” Caleb said.

“I knowed …” And Matthew’s voice trailed off.

“It don’t matter if he knowed it was gonna be a long time when he left Taos,” Bass said firmly. “Things is different now. The man come close to going under to Blackfoots. Ain’t onreasonable to me for Matthew to be getting so homesick.”

Caleb turned back to the fire, grumbling, “Homesick ain’t no sick for a free man to have.”

“Can I get you anything, Matthew?” Bass asked. “You had enough to eat?”

“Ain’t got me much of a appetite no more,” he replied. “You’re coming with us to ronnyvoo, ain’cha, Scratch?”

“Planned on it.”

Hatcher turned around at the fire to ask, “Ye got plans for the fall hunt, Scratch?”

“Like to see me this Bayou Salade you boys talk of. Yeah, I figger I’d throw in with your bunch.”

“How ’bout Taos?” Kinkead asked, almost breathless with excitement. “You coming there with us when I get back home? Get to meet my Rosa!”

Bass dug his fingernails at his beard. “Taos for the winter, is it?”

Rufus hurrawed, “A man can’t do him no better for winter!”

“Senoreetas and lightnin’,” Hatcher chimed in. “A man can keep hisself real warm down in Taos come winter!”

Titus asked, “Lightnin’?”

“Mexican drink they make down there to the Taos valley,” Caleb Wood explained. “Take the top of your head off like a tomahawk.”

“That ain’t no bald-face lie neither,” Hatcher declared. “So, ye figger to stay on with our bunch till next spring?”

“Winter in Taos?” Bass repeated. “From the sounds of it—a man’d be plumb filled with stupids if’n he passed up the chance to ride into Mexico with this outfit!”