Death Rattle

20

“Where the hell you fixin’ to go with them dogs, woman?”

That pinned those cracked and scuffed brown boots of hers right to the pounded clay floor. Up and down she gave him a scathing appraisal, then glared straight into his eye.

“Who be askin’?”

“You answer my question first,” he demanded with the beginnings of a grin. From the corner of his eye, Titus noticed a thick-armed Negro appear at the open doorway behind the big Negro woman. His shirt was open to the waist, sweat glistening in diamonds at the chest hair. He wore a faded yellow bandanna tied round his head, splotched with damp sweat stains. No matter the man’s imposing size, Scratch turned back to argue with the woman the moment she protested.

“Ain’t a-gonna answer you, no how,” she huffed, and her face grew even harder.

“You work for Savery?”

“I do,” and she drew herself up. “So who is you? You work here now?”

“No, I don’t,” he answered impatiently. “Tell me what you’re doing with them dogs—”

“Ain’t no business of yours these dogs.” Then she progressed another step forward with that armful of squirming puppies.

Feeling emboldened, Bass leaped directly in front of her. Now they stood less than an arm’s length apart. “You ain’t the cook, are you?”

“Leave me be!” she growled, lunging to the side to start around the trapper.

But he was far lighter, and all the quicker, dodging left to appear in front of her again, blocking her way.

“Who the hell you be, actin’ with such bad manners way you are!” she snarled.

Now a new, booming voice announced, “You better tell her just who the hell you are, mister. And what the high most you care where she’s headed with them pups.”

He glanced as the muscular man eased into the room, slowly volving the edge of a big butcher knife round and round on a flat whetstone he cupped in the other palm. He took his eyes off Bass only momentarily to spit onto the stone, then continued his sharpening.

“Titus Bass,” he said in a hurried gush. “I asked if you was the cook, woman?”

“I is,” she answered, shifting those wriggling puppies in her arms.

“Wh-what’s your name, woman?”

She turned her head nearly around to speak over her shoulder at the man standing in the doorway. “Mr. Dick—you g’won and tell Mr. Titus who I is.”

“Charlotte, she’s my wife, mister,” the man explained. “An’ Charlotte be the Bents’ cook hereabouts.”

Scratch asked, “Charlotte, you wasn’t planning on cooking these here dogs, was you?”

A snort of raw laughter broke from her big-toothed mouth while her eyes grew wide and expressive. “Why—I ain’t no Shian Injun woman now, Mr. Titus! I ain’t never et puppy and I ain’t ever gonna eat puppy neither. Don’t you know I’m the onliest lady in the whole damn Injun country?”

“So them pups is yours, right?”

“These here dogs?” she asked.

“Yes. They yours?”

“They mine ’cause no one else took care of the bitch they come out of,” the cook replied.

The man leaned a shoulder against the adobe door-jamb but kept on circling the edge of his knife round and round on that stone. “You want a pup, mister? That why you’re asking with such curiosity?”

Pinning his eyes again on the woman’s, Scratch continued, “You got more pups, woman?”

“The bitch had her seven of ’em,” the cook answered. “Weeks ago now. They been coming off the tit last few days.”

“Jehoshaphat!” he exclaimed, his heart leaping. “If that ain’t prime doin’s!”

“What you got in your head?” she asked, more than a little suspiciously.

“I want them two pups,” Bass exploded in a gush.

“There’s four others too. I awready give one away,” the woman declared. “But, you wanna see them other four too?”

Charlotte didn’t have to ask him a second time. Eager, Bass held out his arms and she immediately obliged, passing him one of the thick-furred pups. With the other dog still wrapped in her arm, she turned and led him back through the doorway as her muscular husband stepped aside. Back through the kitchen they wound their way, past small kegs and crates, on through the cool shadows in the pantry, eventually emerging through a low, narrow portal to find himself out in the autumn sun. Nonetheless, he discovered they were still standing inside the fort walls. She paused at one end of an oblong corral, where the black cook immediately stooped over a low, crudely erected pile of brush and firewood meant to serve as a small pen. She set her pup on the ground right in front of the low entrance to a small canvas shelter, where the four other pups burst into view, scrambling into the light around their weary but suspicious mother.

“There they be, Mr. Titus,” she said with the most cheerful tone. “Take your pick which one.”

When the pup he held suddenly became animated in his arms, all legs and eager yelps, Bass leaned over the firewood fence and returned the pup to his mother and siblings. Some of the other pups hopped right up to give him a good going-over with their noses, sniffing all that was new on his fur.

“I want two,” he confessed.

“Two?” And then Charlotte Green chuckled, her fleshy face becoming even rounder in mirth, her big bosom and shoulders quivering with laughter. “That be a double handful of trouble, that’s what!”

“So you lemme have two?”

“You can have ’em all if’n you want ’em.”

He considered that a moment, then thought of that long ride north. One pup, maybe two at the most—he could handle them. But not a half dozen wild, animated creatures as he marched his laden pack string north to Absaroka.

“Nawww, just two.”

“Which’uns you want, mister?”

Pausing a moment more to study them all as they boiled back and forth across their small enclosure—some scratching an ear, others tugging a sibling’s long tail as they wrestled, and the rest plopping down in the dirt near the security of their mother’s shadow—he quickly decided.

Bending over the fence, he scooped one into his hands, hoisting it aloft to glance between its hind legs. Then he gazed into the little male’s face. He approved of the look in the pup’s eyes as the dog’s tiny pink tongue repeatedly lapped in its attempt to lick Scratch’s face.

“This’un likes ye, mister,” Charlotte observed.

“Hold ’im for me, would ye?”

Titus moved past her to step round to another side of the enclosure where he held his hand down close to the ground. Three of the remaining five pups immediately came over to sniff his callused, rough hand. But one of the three immediately nuzzled its tiny, cold nose into his palm, rubbing his fingers.

“You too,” he said as he scooped up the second pup and inspected its genitals.

“What you got there?” the cook asked. “A li’l girl? You wanna a li’l girl too?”

“Nope. Better for me to take two males, Charlotte.”

Again she chuckled with that merry laughter. “I knows! This way, the li’l boy won’t be crawlin’ on his li’l sister to make more pups, eh?”

“How much I owe you?”

“Nothin’,” she answered with a grin.

“I owe you somethin’ for these two pups,” he pleaded. Then Titus was hit with an inspiration as she shook her head emphatically. “Surely now, you’ve had your eye on something over to the trade room, woman! Some new beads, or a Mexican scarf. Maybe a bolt of cloth for a new dress—”

“I did see something!” Charlotte exclaimed as her eyes widened like white orbs swelling in a dark firmament.

He gulped, suspicious he might have offered too much. “What can I get for you?”

“I seen some …” And she squeezed an earlobe between her finger and thumb as she squinted, leaning close to peer at one of his wire hoops and those tiny small brass beads suspended from it. “Some real purty earbobs.”

Relieved, he shifted the dog into one arm and pulled her toward the door. “C’mon with me, Miss Charlotte! We’re gonna make us a trade!”

With the two pups in their arms, Titus and Charlotte threaded their way past hunters, trappers, and fort employees lounging in the last of the autumn sun cast against the east side of the inner courtyard, scurrying hip to hip into the trade room where they shuffled around a cluster of Mexicans and half-breeds arguing with one of the traders.

Charlotte began waving her free arm in the air to the clerks at the far end of the counter. “Mr. Goddamn! Ovah heah, Mr. Goddamn!”

Busy over a ledger at the far end of the long counter, Lucas Murray turned to peer over his shoulder as they approached. His face lit up when he realized who had called him out. “Charlotte!”

“You he’p me please, Mr. Goddamn?”

“Help you do what?”

“This here nice man gonna get me some earbobs I took a shine to.”

The fort’s head trader’s eyes trained on the old trapper. “You’re Bass—the one took all those blankets off our hands.”

He nodded, scratching the pup’s neck. “Like she said: I wanna trade for some purty earrings Charlotte’s put her eyes on.”

Murray leaned across the counter so he could put his lips near Scratch’s ear, whispering in delicious confidentiality, “You ain’t getting her something in trade for her bedding you. She gonna throttle your wiping stick, that the way of it?”

Titus roared as the trader straightened, stiffening in surprise. “Great Jehoshaphat! She’s got that husband of hers—the blacksmith! By the stars, I’m getting her them earrings she took a shine to in trade for these here two puppies!”

Nervously licking his lips in embarrassment, Murray sidestepped over to stand directly in front of the cook, only the narrow counter separating them now. “S’pose you tell me which ones you got in mind, Charlotte.”

Bass had to admit they did look good hanging from her ears, what with the way she wore her hair all pulled back and covered with that bright red, blue, and yellow Mexican scarf. As Charlotte was inserting the second earring through the hole in a lobe, Bass turned slightly, noticing the stack of pack baskets woven from oaken slats.

“How much you want for them baskets, Mr. Murray?”

The trader stepped down to the corner and picked one of them up by its single handle. “What you need one’a these for?”

“Two of ’em,” he declared. “One for each pup. Here, pass it over and lemme try it.”

He handed one of the dogs back to Charlotte, then clutched the remaining pup under one arm before he took the basket and set it on the floor. Then lowered the dog into the basket’s wide, oval mouth. Immediately the pup stood up inside, barely able to get its little nose over the top.

“These’ll work just fine,” Titus commented, taking his hand off the basket where he had been steadying it and the pup both. “How much you trade for two of ’em—and them earrings too?”

Charlotte’s infectious, uninhibited laughter split the trading room. Bass turned, watching the pack basket topple over and the puppy come tumbling out. It scrambled onto all fours and was just starting for the door when Titus leaped to grab it. He stood, scratching the pup’s ears as it went to licking his neck beneath the graying whiskers.

“ ’Bout got away from you, Mr. Titus!” she giggled as the dog in her arms squirmed.

Murray cleared his throat, “You got another two horses, I let you have both of these here baskets and Charlotte’s earbobs too.”

“Sounds steep to me,” Scratch reflected, allowing the pup to gently gnaw on his thumb with its tiny, sharp teeth.

“It ain’t steep,” Murray replied. “Could cost you more—but the Frenchmen was what used these baskets. So we don’t get much call for ’em anymore.”

“Two horses?”

The head trader nodded. “Two horses.”

“I’ll have your horses back here afore you bolt the gate at sundown tonight.”

Murray grinned as he turned to step back down the counter to his ledger. “You’re one I trust, Bass. Just put them two horses with the others you already brung up to the fort.”

“Well, now,” Charlotte sighed as she turned toward Bass, lowering the framed looking glass she had been regarding herself in. “How I look?”

“Handsome as could be,” Titus said with a grin. “I declare, if you ain’t the most handsome woman this side of the Wind River Mountains!”

They were Injun dogs. Plain and simple.

Their long, wolfish snouts and short, peaked ears marked these mongrels as belonging to a breed much, much closer to their wild cousins than any civilized house or hunting breed preferred by white folks back east.

He could easily believe there might well be some prairie wolf in the pups, what with him getting that brief look at their mother. She was nothing more than a Cheyenne cur … that tribe being an extremely nomadic people who had long ago grown attached to those wild canines roaming the fringes of their villages in the prehorse days. From her narrow head and shallow rib cage, the bitch was nothing more than a typical Cheyenne camp dog, homely mongrel that she was.

But the male that had mounted her at the fragrant peak of her last season damn well had some buffalo wolf in him—if not an outright wolf himself. That wild, feral cast to the pups’ eyes, the forehead and lean haunches of the two—characteristics that all bespoke an ancient ancestry dating long, long before man and dog ever crossed paths to advance their mutual fortunes.

That first morning marching north, Scratch had them ensconced in their baskets, slung on either side of a gentle, hard-boned mare he figured had to be some eight to ten years old from the condition of her teeth. With a short lead rope he had loosely looped around her neck, he kept the mare close by his knee. Only once did one of the black-eyed pups ever grow fractious enough to clamber his way out of his basket.

Titus watched it out of the corner of his eye: that offhand pup scratching and clawing desperately, pulling himself up with all fours until the dog purchased a hold on the top of the basket with his powerful jaws—pulling the rest of his roly-poly body behind him … then phoosh—he spilled all the way to the ground. Somehow the gentle mare knew and stopped, jerking back on her lasso Scratch had looped round his left hand.

Suspending his flintlock from the saddle horn using the braided loop he had knotted to the trigger guard, Titus dropped to the ground and stepped around the mare. Now the second pup, the one with those pale, ghost-colored eyes, was yelping—wanting out to play too.

Its darker-haired brother rocked onto its feet, shimmied to dust himself off, then immediately dove under the mare’s legs to flee the man just settling to his knees.

“C’mon, you li’l Digger,” he said as he stood, slowly moving to the other side of the mare.

Which caused the obstinate pup to scamper in the opposite direction.

Titus stopped, put his hands on his hips, and said in a quiet, clear voice, “So, you don’t wanna go north to Absaroka with me—that it?”

He watched how the pup settled to its rear haunches and cocked its head at him—as if trying to understand those sounds the man was making. Behind Titus the other pup kept up a pitiful yowl for its brother.

“It’s up to you. If’n you’re going, you get over here now so we can be on the tramp. I ain’t gonna take you up there to them two young’uns of mine less’n you wanna go with me on your own.”

He bent forward slowly, inching toward the pup—which suddenly darted to the other side of the mare again.

“Awright—there’ll only be one of you dogs get up there with us for the winter. Damn your li’l black eyes anyway. By mornin’ you’ll be breakfast for a b’ar!”

Scratch stood, dusting off the knees of his leggings and settling the elkhide coat around him once more as he strode around the mare’s head and took up the reins to his saddle horse. When he was settled, Bass loosed his rifle off the round saddle horn and clucked at the mare. “Giddap.”

It took no more than three of his heartbeats for the ghost-eyed pup to set up a mournful howl the moment it saw they were leaving its black-eyed brother behind. Scratch turned to gaze over his shoulder at the dog sitting on the prairie, dispassionately watching the string of packhorses pass him by, one by one by one. Eventually he was alone, and the big rumps of those cayuses were passing out of sight in the far trees lining a creekbank.

Yip-yipping, the black-eyed pup suddenly set up its own call—a plaintive cry far different than the mournful howl of its basket-bound brother.

“If’n he don’t come—we’ll both get over him,” Bass assured the grief-stricken, pale-eyed dog.

Then he glanced over his shoulder a third time, spotting the little pup scurrying along the line of packhorses, its short legs churning so furiously that it shot past the string of tall horses, making for the front of the line where the old trapper reined to a halt. After suspending the rifle from the horn again, Scratch eased himself slowly to the ground, turned, and descended to both knees, patting the tops of his thighs.

“C’mon, you li’l Digger! Get on up here!”

The puppy tumbled into his arms, every leg still wind-milling as Titus swept it off the ground—whimpering, burying its muzzle beneath Scratch’s elbow. He stood with the pup, scratching behind its ears. The way its brother was howling and leaping in its basket, Bass carried the black-eyed one over and let them both lick each other’s faces for a long moment before returning the darker one to his basket.

“You gonna stay there now,” he chided. “Leastways, till your legs are long enough for you to foller on your own.”

He scratched them both atop their bony skulls before remounting. “I sure hope you fellas gonna be as good a dog as ol’ Zeke was.”

Of a sudden it made his heart small and cold with mourning to remember that gray-haired hound. Loyal to its dying breath … killed by the goddamned Blackfoot it was following to protect its family—^*

He squeezed his eyes shut against the sting of tears and clucked for the saddle horse, gave the mare’s lead rope a tug. Damn, if he wasn’t getting more and more human all the time, he reflected as the sun emerged at the far edge of the prairie behind his right shoulder. Older he got, the easier it was for him to hurt, easier for his eyes to seep a little too. Ol’ Zeke. Damnation, if he hadn’t been about the best dog a man could ever deserve to have as a friend. He blinked and looked up at the rosy-orange clouds strung out in strips across the autumn-blue sky with the sun’s rising.

If there was a heaven, and if there was a God … then Titus Bass knew the Lord had ol’ Zeke at his knee right about then. Up where Zeke was sure to spend all eternity, that faithful dog had to know how Titus Bass’s heart still pined for a scarred ol’ riverfront mongrel.

Maybeso, one of these two, even both, could one day make as good a dog as Zeke. Him and Zeke—they’d been a pair. Both of them weathered and scarred more than their share. But he’d never heard complaint one out of the dog over their few seasons together. Hell, Zeke had even come along to help him mourn when it came time to grieve alone for Rotten Belly.

He looked over at those two pups, rocking gently side to side as the mare carried them north into the unknown with their new master. Neither one of them made a peep, appearing content as could be in their baskets padded with parts of an old blanket Titus had cut up for them to share. Its thick wool had his smell buried deep within its fibers.

By the time he managed to track down Yellow Belly’s village, Scratch was certain the two of them would be imprinted with his smell, the various tones of his voice, the stern reproach when he corrected their behavior, or that gentle feel of his hands as he ruffled their soft fur. They would no longer be pups just weaned from their mamma. They’d be his dogs.

The day’s new sun felt warm on the side of his face. He and the fellas had themselves quite a hurroo last night—all of it wetted down with lots of Mexican whiskey. For some time now Elias Kersey, Jake Corn, and the others had determined they would push on for the Missouri settlements with their share of the horses, no more than another day or two—once they could cure their hangovers. But Scratch wasn’t about to wait another day. No matter that his head throbbed more than it had in years, he was starting north.

Like Bass and Williams, about half of the raiders had decided to turn their share of the California horses into mountain currency, getting from St. Vrain and Murray what they could per head, then taking out that credit in trade goods. Oh, there’d been a little good-natured grumbling to be sure, but Solitaire and the rest understood as well as any that the complaining wouldn’t do a lick of good.

Out here in this land, on the rolling flats or up into the broken and forbidding high country, freedom meant nothing less than horses to a man. No two ways about it.

But to Titus Bass, his share of those thousands of stolen horses he’d risked his neck to drive out of California were no better than a shackle and thousandweight iron chain hammer welded around his neck. All those animals could make him a veritable rich man for the first time in his life … but he wasn’t about to push on across the plains to reach the Missouri settlements where he could turn them into a small fortune. With no regret at all, he would once again abandon the notion of growing rich and living out his days in comfort.

Beyond what he could give his family and friends in the way of material goods, this temporal matter of things had never been very important to him. Better that a man have family in his arms and friends at his side than live in the finest St. Louis mansion crowded with all the servants, liquor, and rich appointments his money could buy.

Scratch breathed deep of the air still chilly here at sunrise … and realized again that he already was one of the richest men in the whole of all this country west of the wide Missouri.

It wasn’t long before he was thinking back to their last big hurraw last night—when Williams staggered over, his stooped shoulders wagging side to side as he lurched to a drunken halt by Titus there beside their roaring fire.

“I should’a let ’em kill you, Titus Bass,” he grumbled, his face set hard as mountain talus.

“Who?”

“Thompson. Them yellow-livered sonsabitches with ’im. They wanted to gut you so bad … I should’a let ’em, goddamn ye!”

Surprised, and made wary with all the alcohol washing around in his belly, Titus backed a step away from the man and did his best to set himself for what might come: a fist, or even the flash of a knife in the fire’s light.

His curiosity pricked, Scratch asked, “Why you figger them low-down bastards should’a kill’t me, Bill?”

The old trapper was a while in answering, taking his stern, half-lidded eyes off Bass to drain his pint cup before glaring again into Scratch’s face as he licked at the droplets suspended like glittering diamonds from the ends of his shaggy mustache.

“If’n I’d let Thompson an’ his bunch do with you how they wanted … then you’d ain’t been around a few nights back when I was fixin’ to guttin’ that goddamned Beckwith.”

Bass shook his head a minute, his mind confused, dulled somewhat by the potent liquor. “You want me dead ’cause I stopped you from getting yourself hurt, even kill’t by Beckwith?”

“That be the sartin truth of it,” he slurred. “Damn your eyes! I’d a-took him for sure, Scratch.”

“You was drunk then as you’re drunk now,” Titus argued. “Jim’d a hurt you bad, if’n he didn’t kill you outright. I damn sure didn’t want that to happen, Bill … for then I’d had to cut Beckwith up my own self.”

Williams attempted to straighten himself and keep from weaving unevenly, blinking his eyes at Bass. Finally he said, “Y-you’d done that for me?”

“Hell, I stood at your back all the way into California, and all the way back out again,” Scratch reminded. “And when they was fixing to slit my throat, you didn’t look away. Been easy ’nough to do it. But you stood up to ’em, an’ Peg-Leg later on too.”

“I ’member Peg-Leg.” Williams shook his head dolefully. “Dunno where he went bad.”

“I figger a man goes bad, like him and Thompson—they’re the sort allays was bad. Bad just waiting for a place to happen.”

“Damn your soul, Titus Bass.” And Williams licked his lips again. “You gone an’ ’minded me of why I favor taking to the high lonesome on my lonesome. Being with other coons just too hard sometimes. Finding them what you can count on, that’s too damn much work. Better off not havin’ to count on no one else but my own self.”

“Buy you ’nother drink, Bill?”

Williams gazed down into his cup a long moment, then his watery eyes climbed up to stare into Bass’s. “Drinking myself silly—that there’s one thing Ol’ Solitaire don’t cotton to doin’ alone.”

Other raiders were thumping on brass kettles, clanging iron skillets, or pounding on an old hollowed stump as the rest wheeled and cavorted round the fire. The noise and blur and numbness just like the old times, just like rendezvous. Gone forever now. Like cold mountain water run through a man’s fingers …

As the night aged, Williams had grown misty-eyed and asked, “We had us our hurraw, Scratch, didn’t we?”

“This here?”

“Nawww!” Bill shook his head emphatically. “Riding bold as brass into California and sneering at all them goose-necked greasers. We had us our hurraw showin’ them bean-bellies what for and slipping away with all them horse right under their idjit noses. Making it all the way back here ’cross that desert and them Rocky Mountings with what horses could still run with us. That’s the hurraw, Titus Bass. By damn … if that wasn’t a real man’s hurraw!”

Scratch’s eyes grew misty again too. Suddenly, he was struck with the reality that he would likely never see any of these men again in his life. No telling if Elias and the others would ever come back to the mountains once they reached the settlements with those horses. They’d likely sell every one for a ransom and become rich men overnight. If not rich, at least wealthy enough to damn well do anything rather than come west again in an attempt to scratch out a meager living trapping flat-tails in half-frozen streams, looking over their shoulders for grizzly or Blackfoot either one.

And men like Bill. Likely Williams would be good at his word about running alone and not poke his head in most places where Titus Bass might chance onto him again. So Scratch looked around the fire, at those dancing shadows whirling and spinning and stomping with gusto as they kicked up dust and watered down a long-grown thirst. He was not likely to lay eyes on these fellas ever again.

If for no better reason than Titus Bass couldn’t conceive of much that would lure him out of the north country. No matter what an uncertain future might bring his way.

So he had turned to look at old Bill, reading the war map that was Williams’s face, knowing his own face read like a war map of scrapes and scraps and battles too—all those times he had managed to slip right through death’s fingers … not to mention all the suns and the winds, and every last one of the winters that had carved their way onto his face and right on into his soul.

Damn, if the two of them didn’t have their epic California adventure to tell their grandchildren! If, that is, any of them lived long enough to bounce grandpups on their knees. They’d always have what they’d shared together.

“Ain’t no one gonna ever take our hurraw from us, Bill,” he had said to the man seated at his elbow. “No matter neither one of us become the rich men we figgered we was gonna be once we started out for California. No matter we had to fight off Mex soldiers and greasers too, slash our way through them goddamned Diggers and Yutas both just to jab most of these here horses all the way over every one of them mountain passes and down the canyons and valleys so we could reach that Picketwire Creek sitting right over yonder. No matter we hung our asses over the fire an’ roasted ’em good, Bill Williams. It still don’t make me no never mind we ain’t the rich men we thought we was gonna be.”

Bill had snorted some mirthless laughter. “Neither one of us ever likely to make ourselves rich by wading up to our balls in icy water to catch them goddamned big flattailed rats, Titus Bass.”

“Your words are true,” he ruminated. “I s’pose after enough seasons out here, them what learns they’re allays gonna be poor are the first to skeedaddle back east to what they was … while the rest just give up an’ head west for Oregon country to try farming.”

“What’s to become of the rest of us, Scratch?”

“The rest of us?” And Titus paused for some thought before continuing. “Why—niggers like you an’ me damn well made peace with being poor a long, long time ago, Bill!”

“What you figger to do with all them horses of your’n so you can stay on bein’ a poor nigger like you allays was?” Williams asked.

“Traded most of ’em off—give a few away. Keeping only what I need to get some plunder back to my family,” he admitted. “A passel of horses like them’d only slow me down getting north, going back where I belong. An’ … I don’t wanna linger too long striking out for the country I never should’ve left in the first place.”

^* Ride the Moon Down