Death Rattle

2

But there wasn’t a man among them willing to attempt slipping off before moonrise lit up this high desert.

Good men these were, but … Scratch realized most of them were followers. Not that they lacked in courage, just that they weren’t eager to strike out on their own in the dark without Henry Fraeb leading them back to the Green River.

“He’s for sure dead?” Bass asked some of the first to crawl up to meet him near the tree stumps.

“Enfant de garce!” Basil Clement swore. “I see lot of dead, and that Frapp ees ver’ dead!”

Jim Baker sat staring at how Fraeb’s corpse leaned back against one of the stumps, his jaw hanging open in a horrifying grin, rivulets of blood dried over most of his face as it spilled from the bullet wound that had nearly blown off the top of his head. Baker shuddered and turned back to the council. “He sure does make a damn ugly dead man.”

“Remind me to say some kind words over your worthless, fly-blowed carcass when you go under,” Bass chided, jabbing an elbow into Baker’s ribs.

“Didn’t mean no disrespect by it,” the redhead grumbled apologetically.

Scratch turned from Baker and asked the group, “So how many of you gonna come with me?”

Not a one spoke up. The silence of that twilight council was almost suffocating to him. Bass slowly eyed most of the twenty others who huddled nearby in an arch around the dead booshway.

“Ain’t none of you got the eggs to make a break for it with me?”

“They’ll have scouts prowling,” Jake Corn finally put an argument to it.

“But they’re like to come at us again in the morning,” Bass grumbled to those men who first started to cluster near the center of their corral back when twilight began to erase the last of the day’s shadows. “How long any of you figger our powder to hold out?”

No one had an answer to that.

“I’m gonna stay,” Jake Corn volunteered bravely.

At least give the man credit for speaking up and spitting out his mind.

A lot of the half-breeds and Frenchmen nodded without saying a thing. Good, spineless followers they were. Almost made Scratch want to puke.

But he knew when he was beat. Knew how fruitless it would be to try to convert noisy cowards into quiet heroes. “Maybeso you’re right,” Bass relented, his shoulders sagging.

“I’ll go with you, Scratch,” Baker offered immediately.

He weighed it a moment, then decided. “Thankee, Jim. But, maybeso we all ought’n go … or we all ought’n stay. Best we’ll hang together or we’ll fall separate.”

“Leastways, we got us some cover here,” Elias Kersey offered.

Then Rube Purcell added, “And we know they ain’t likely to run us over tomorrow if’n they couldn’t today.”

Several of the faceless men grunted their assent.

“It gets dark enough,” Bass suggested, “some of us oughtta belly down to the river and bring back some water.”

Five men volunteered. He could tell that handful really were brave men. They just needed to be told what to do.

When the cloaking darkness finally came and the first faint stars were just beginning to twinkle in full radiance, the five crawled from the far side of the corral with what oaken and gourd canteens the whole bunch could find among the scattered baggage or tied to those saddles still strapped on the bloating horses.

Bass watched them go, then turned to catch one of Fraeb’s half-breed, no-brained Frenchmen loading his pipe bowl with shreds of tobacco.

“That spark you’ll strike gonna make for a good target of your poor self,” he growled as he closed a bony claw on the man’s shoulder, another hand around the pipe itself. “No telling how close them brownskins could try crawling up on us to put a big hole in one of you.”

“The man’s right,” Jake Corn agreed. “No pipes.”

Then Titus went on to remind them all they must stay close to the ground when they felt the need to move about the corral so the evening sky would not backlight them. No sense in learning the hard way if those Sioux and Cheyenne had any true marksmen lying out there in the night.

Later, after the water carriers returned and the men scrounged through possibles sacks for some dried meat or a little pemmican, feeding their wounded first, Scratch could no longer put off the chore. Crabbing over toward the far corner, he rocked up onto his knees and toes to quickly yank aside the front of his breechclout. Here and there in the corral, others were doing the same—every last one of them finding it all but impossible to make water crouching on his knees. Not a one of them dared to stand in doing their business. Too risky, what with the warriors who might well be slipping up in the night.

When finished, Titus shuddered, sensing how quickly this high prairie cooled off once the sun had been sucked from the sky. Dragging his rifle beside him, he did his best to hold his breath while he crabbed back over to the mule’s carcass where he struggled to free one of the thick, wool blankets. It would have to do: his other blanket and the buffalo robe were hopelessly pinned beneath the mule, its hide, the blanket, and the robe all bristling with more than half a hundred arrows. Draping the lone horse blanket across his shoulders, he left the stinking gut pile and the mule’s riven belly behind. Reaching his saddle horse, he sank back against its backbone and let out a sigh.

He pulled off his wide-brimmed, low-crowned hat and flopped it on his belly as he allowed his head to collapse back among a few of the arrow shafts prickling the carcass. He was weary but doubted he could really sleep. Instead he lay watching the stars crawl overhead, inch by inch, listening to the muted sounds of the others, listening for any suspicion of the enemy.

He wondered if she would be watching this same sky too, way up there in Crow country. As she stared up through the smoke hole at that triangle of sky near the top of her mother’s lodge. While Waits-by-the-Water rocked their children to sleep in her arms … singing softly to them, making up those hero stories about their father.

Scratch didn’t realize he had fallen asleep until the quiet whispers of those nearby stabbed through his dreamy reverie. It really had turned cold. He shuddered and ground the heels of both hands into his eyes. Blinking them open, he found that false dawn would arrive momentarily. But for now the skyline behind them was no more than a sliver of gray suspended between a blackened sky and an even darker horizon.

“ ’Bout time you woke up.”

Bass rolled to find Baker sliding up on his haunches, dragging half a buffalo robe with him.

“You been up all night?”

“When I woke up a bit ago, I seen you was asleep,” the redhead explained. “So I decided to stay awake till you got done.”

Looking around at the dim forms taking shape in the first filtered gray of predawn, Bass said, “I figger nothing much happened.”

“One of the wounded fellas died,” Baker declared. “But he went quiet.”

An icy drop of cold snaked its way down his spine. He shuddered in the half-light. “Goddamn, but I hate when a man dies noisy.”

Better that they go like Jack Hatcher. Now, there was a man what knew how to die. Go out singing his favorite song. Mad—Jack—Hatcher. For as noisy a life as the coon lived … he sure went quiet.

Titus asked in a whisper, “No one heard nothing from out there?”

Baker admitted,. “Not that I know of.”

“I better see the others is ready when first light comes,” Scratch said, dragging the blanket off and reaching for his brown, weathered hat. He tugged it down over the black bandanna. “Maybeso you try for some shut-eye while you can, Jim Baker.”

“Uhn-uhn. I’ll come with you,” the redhead volunteered. “Make sure every man’s up and fixed for powder.”

He knelt there, staring at the youngster a moment more, feeling the grin starting to crease his leathery, oak-brown face. “Just like a pup, ain’cha?”

“What you mean by that?”

Wagging his head, Titus set off with Baker at his elbow. “I ’member when I was young and fool-headed like you—back when I could go days ’thout any sleep.”

“I’ll be fine,” the tall one protested.

Finally Bass stopped, grinning as he slapped a hand on Baker’s shoulder. “I’ll bet you will at that.”

One by one the others who had been dozing amid the carcasses were coming awake. The two who were badly wounded soon began to ask for more water. Bass and Baker looked over what remained in the canteens, then asked for volunteers to crawl down to the creek with them before the sky got any brighter. No small wonder the men in that corral had already drained nearly every drop they had brought back from the stream at twilight, what with the way the sun had leached so damn much moisture from them throughout that long, long day beneath the cruel, late-summer sun. Come nightfall and their first chance to slip down to the creek, the men were nigh as parched as a green hide dusted with canning salt and a dose of alum.

As the light slowly ballooned around them, Scratch could see that someone had laid a greasy leather shirt over Fraeb’s head. The old German’s mortifying remains still sat on the ground, leaning back against that hundred-year-old fire-charred stump. But it was clear one of the men simply couldn’t stand looking at that ugly, gap-toothed, death grin of Henry Fraeb’s any longer. Maybe one of the half-superstitious Frenchies, he figured. They were Papists, to be sure.

This bunch would have to decide what to do about their dead when it came time to skeedaddle out of there.

“Them’s the only ones I see,” a man whispered huskily.

“Where? Where?”

There was a lot of muffled shuffling when most of the sixteen who could still move on their own crawled over to the near side of the corral. Every last one of them staring quiet as deer mice at the slope while the coming light continued to give a changing texture to the hillside where the warriors had gathered throughout the previous day. At first, Scratch was not sure what he was seeing—not until enough gray seeped sidelong through the mouth of the valley to their right, exposing more of the slope.

Nothing there but some sage and stunted cedar, along with a scattering of jack pine. No horsemen, as far as he could tell.

“I see ’em!” one of the others called out a little too loud.

“There—on top of the hill!”

“That all there is?”

Plain as the coming sun that six or seven of them, no, at least eight, had stood watch atop that crest through the short summer night.

“I don’t see no more of ’em.”

Hopeful, Titus strained his eyes to be as sure as the rest. If the breast of the hill was no longer blanketed by the horsemen, if those chanting women and old men no longer bristled against the skyline, perhaps this coming sunrise would not be their last.

“Could be they’re only guards,” Baker offered as he stopped at Bass’s hip.

Scratch nodded while many of the others murmured in wonder of just what this meant. “Maybeso they hung back to see if these white men would slip off during the night. To wait up there till first light to be sure we was still here.”

He wanted to laugh a little, perhaps cry too—quickly glancing around their prison, that corral of stinking, putrefying horses and mules.

“Their magic is broken,” Bass explained barely above a whisper.

“What was that?” one of the men asked, edging closer on a knee.

“I said their medicine’s broke.”

“Let’s get,” came the first suggestion.

“On what?” another shrieked in indignation. “We ain’t got a horse one!”

“I’ll walk, goddammit.”

“That’s for sure,” Baker growled, then turned to Bass. “But where we going?”

Scratch sighed, staring down at his mule and the saddle horse, the animals he had sacrificed to save his life. “Anywhere but here.”

“Maybe north—”

“Yeah,” Bass agreed. “Back to the Green.”

“I say we light out west for Davy Crockett.”

Titus considered that a moment, then told those men all younger than he, “You fellas take off where you want to go. I can’t stop you from heading out. Only thing I’m sure of here and now … we split up, it’s just gonna make us easy pickin’s for them brownskins.”

The one with deep-set, anxious eyes stepped up to ask, “So what’s your all-fired mighty idea? Ain’t Davy Crockett just ’bout as close as the Green?”

“May well be,” he answered. “But that fort lays yonder where I had me my first scrap with them Sioux. So I figger this country’s thick with ’em.”

Another man stepped up close. “We can get us horses at the fort.”

“How you figure they’ll have enough horses for all of us?” Baker bellowed.

“Maybe the Snakes have some ponies for us—”

Titus wagged his head dolefully. “If the Sioux are chasing through this country,” he argued, “it’s for certain the Snake aren’t anywhere this far south.”

“That means we gotta go north for horses,” Baker explained.

“Makes the most sense to me,” Bass replied, turning to look back at the hilltop where the eight horsemen waited out the coming dawn.

“How long afore we go?” one of the younger ones asked.

“Soon as we’re ready—we’ll move out,” Titus assured them.

“What about my outfit?” grumbled one.

“I’m fixing to take my truck with me,” Bass explained. “I figger you can bury what you don’t want to carry. Or you can just leave it behind for them bastards up on that hill when they come down to dig through what’s left. Red niggers left me poor more’n I care to count … so, for me, I’m walking away with my hide, hair, an’ everything I can carry—”

“Man can’t carry much!” one of them scoffed with a gust of mirthless laughter.

Pointing at a copse of cottonwood saplings at the water’s edge, Scratch said, “I figger to make me a travois.”

“You ain’t got no horse to carry your goddamned travois!” another snorted.

“I’ll drag it my own self,” Titus growled as he turned away for the carcass of his pack mule. Over his shoulder he said, “Maybeso, the rest of you figger on doing the same.”

Behind him some of the voices continued to argue among themselves. He didn’t care. Digging one of the small axes from his packs, Titus went directly for the cottonwoods. By the time he felled the first sapling, others were joining him. Three young trees was all he needed, Bass figured. Two with large, sturdy bases—and a third he could use to lash the two together in a narrow vee. After hacking the branches off the three saplings, he dragged them back up the rise to the corral.

He had done this before, he told himself.^* Sure, he had been younger, stronger too. But that had been winter, by damned. And he had been forced to cross the Yellowstone—wading through the icy floes on foot. He could do this. It was a matter of have to.

Don’t give no mind to the sage and cactus, the sharp stones and numerous dead-end canyons they’d bump into between here and the valley of the Green. If only he could get there, he knew in the pit of him that he’d find some Ute or Snake, trade some horses from them, and get back to Waits-by-the-Water. He’d done this before … way back when he didn’t have near this much to lose.

Man gets older, maybeso he finds he needs certain things, certain people, a little more than he ever had before. Man gets older, he’s damn lucky he’s learned what’s most important.

Dropping the three saplings, he collapsed to the ground and dragged one foot around so he could inspect the bottom of his moccasin. Then the other. They wouldn’t last long, thin as they were rubbed.

Good thing Waits had stuffed a dozen pair in his possibles before he kissed her good-bye. Already he had used at least half of them through the rest of the spring and into the summer. Moccasins wore out. Some men made repairs if they could. Bass stuffed the old ones away in his plunder. Now he’d pull them out to wear double if he could. Maybe even cut them up into strips he could tie around his moccasins, protecting those places that suffered the most wear.

He wondered if these other men would make it across all the sage and cactus and rocks on foot. He wondered, because he knew none of them had near as much spurring them on. Because none of them had near as much to lose.

After notching the two large saplings where the cross-piece would lay atop them, he used short lengths of the half-inch rope he unknotted and yanked off the mule’s pack. The sun was emerging over the horizon by the time he started dragging everything off the elkhorn pack saddle that he had strapped onto the backs of two mules over a lot of years. Both of them dead now. Scratch vowed he would drag it along too—if he could pull it off the carcass.

Already the air was warming. It would be another scorcher of a day. And the animals would smell even worse. Beginning to rot, their juices bubbling and boiling inside, meat turned to soup in time.

“Baker,” he called out to the redhead, “cut you some meat from your horse. Back there on the rump where the muscle’s deep.”

“Meat?”

“Rest of you do the same,” he instructed the circle. “Make sure you got some meat to carry off with you. We’re gonna need something to eat ’long the way,” he explained as he dragged his knife from its scabbard.

“Shit—I aim to shoot what I need,” one of the men protested.

Another man roared with laughter, “Eat this goddamned putrefied horse when I can bag me some fresh meat?”

With a shake of his head, Titus stood and said, “What if we don’t run onto no game slow enough for a man on foot?”

A long-faced young man wagged his head. “I can allays find something to eat what’s better’n ol’ rotten horse!”

“You fellas do what you wanna,” he replied with a shrug, turning back to the cold haunch. “I ain’t your booshway.”

Baker watched the old trapper wag his head in disgust. “Don’t pay ’em any mind, Bass.”

Scratch stopped to look at the redhead. “I ain’t got the time to fret myself over such stupid idjits.” Then leaned atop the horse carcass. “Don’t know how Frapp ever did cotton to taking along such a bunch as this to nurse.”

“Maybe Fraeb wasn’t the smartest fella himself,” Baker said as he came up to Bass’s side.

“The German had savvy,” Titus snapped angrily. “And more grit in him than you and this hull bunch all together.”

Baker was cowed. He waited several minutes, then to the old man’s back he asked, “What about them wounded?”

“If’n they can walk, they’ll walk,” Titus explained. “If they can’t, we’ll have to drag ’em on travois.” He got up slowly, working kinks out of his back. “I’ll go see how many can get along on their own.”

“You want me to help you?”

“No—start on the animals,” Scratch declared, sensing the young man was apologizing for his ill-considered remark about the dead. “We’ll wrap up the meat best we can, bury it deep in our plunder. Be sure you cut deep to take out your steaks—down where it ain’t started to go bad and turn to soup in the sun yesterday.”

Three of the five wounded told him they’d try to walk. Another with a bad shoulder wound didn’t figure he was strong enough to pull his own plunder. And the last one was so bad off he would have to lay in a travois, a strip of folded rawhide between his teeth to clench down on every time he was moved. He wouldn’t be long; but a gut wound was a nasty, slow way for a man to go. Bass divided that handful’s meager goods among the rest.

By late morning Fraeb’s ragtag bunch was ready to pull out. He had gotten the German’s men to agree that they would all take a turn at pulling the wounded man as they plodded north. His would be the heaviest travois.

“If you was bad off like him, I know you’d want the others to drag you outta here.”

There had been no dissent.

Kneeling within the narrow end of the vee he had constructed of the saplings, Bass stood, raising his travois to start forward. He took the head of the march, turning to look over his shoulder at the skyline where the warriors had dismounted now, watching the white men. Where the creek valley took a bend, Bass looked back at the hilltop one last time. The Sioux were gone.

Now this bunch could really start to worry.

Likely, those scouts had gone off to tell the rest of the village that the white men had abandoned their fort. From here on out, when the Sioux attacked, the horsemen would have an easier time of it riding over the trappers. With every step Bass worked to convince himself that they’d corral up quickly within what baggage and packs they had strung out on the many travois, doing their best to hold the warriors off any way they could. For as long as they could.

The sun seemed to hang in the sky that long afternoon, unmoving like a stubborn mule. That comparison made him remember. Step by painful step, damn—if it didn’t make him remember. Try as he might to squeeze out the hurt that first part of the day, Bass finally gave in and let the tortured remembrance of Hannah course through him like the burning sting of a poison coursing through his veins.

Even when he called for a halt and the bunch dropped their travois, every man collapsing into the dust and the sage, huffing and pulling at their canteens of tepid, alkali-laced water. The first few times he reminded them only to wet their lips, to wash their tongues and the insides of their mouths with one swish of water rather than guzzling at their dwindling supply of moisture. Especially since they had no idea where they would end up come sundown. Near a creek or not. Soon enough he gave up trying to convince them to conserve their water.

A mountain man wasn’t supposed to worry about water. But … a man didn’t have to if he had a horse to cover ground. However, the going was slow on foot.

No telling how far they had come by the time the sun had sunk and the long shadows were no more. That’s when they started searching in earnest for a place to wait out the night.

Scouring every crease lying between the hills, the trappers still came up dry—every creekbed nothing more than a sandy strip of dust. Then as twilight was sucking the last of the light from the sky, they spotted a dark hollow in the rolling tableland ahead. Dotting the hollow was a sprinkling of brush,-vegetation barely bigger than the sparse sagebrush that struggled to survive in this high desert. Spread out in a wide vee behind him, the trappers lunged step-by-step toward the dark, beckoning green.

Reaching the coarse grass and stunted willow, Bass dropped the travois from his weary hands turned to numb, stonelike claws. Then he went to his knees in weary exhaustion as the first of the others stumbled to a halt around him.

Crawling out of the vee, he stayed on hands and knees, searching for the source of the seep by sound, feeling along for the growing moisture beneath his fingertips. There it was, at last. No more than an oozy seep, and a little warm at that, but it was water.

Rocking forward, Bass put his face down into the shallow pan-sized spring and lapped at the wetness. It was bitter with salts, but it was water. And damn if it weren’t cool.

“Gimme your canteen,” he demanded of a half-breed Frenchman, the first to come up at his shoulder.

Once it was filled, he scrambled out of the way and let the others at the seep while he lurched over to the travois where the dying man lay groaning. His parched lips were swollen and cracked. His leathery face sunburnt and coated with a fine layer of alkali dust.

“I brung you some water.”

But the man didn’t open his eyes. Didn’t respond. Nothing more than the quiver of those lips as he mumbled unintelligible sounds. Kneeling over him, Bass pressed the narrow end of the gourd against the swollen lips and slowly poured the springwater into the man’s slack mouth. More than half of it dribbled down his bearded cheek, and he sputtered so badly on the rest that Bass gave up.

Poor fella wouldn’t be long now. Gut shot the worst way to go under. Man took a long, long time to die. Could be this one wouldn’t make it through another day of the bouncing, jarring ride as they pressed north by west for the Green River come morning.

He died quiet and merciful, sometime late on the afternoon of the second day’s march. That night at their waterless camp, the men took turns scraping out a shallow trough from the hard, flinty soil. The moon had risen by the time they rolled the body into its resting place, then covered the dusting of earth with what rocks they managed to find across the side of a barren hill.

Over low fires they broiled thin strips of the stringy horsemeat that was beginning to take on a sharp tang. What they had left wouldn’t spoil if they jerked it. Titus figured they’d be down to chewing on parfleche and eating their spare moccasins in another three or four days if they didn’t ration what little meat they had left among them.

In the cool air that third morning, they had themselves a bad scare.

“Shit,” one of the men grumbled as the whole bunch jolted awake in their blankets, “only see three of ’em.”

“Where there’s three watching—might well be three hundred waiting,” Bass declared.

Baker inquired, “What you figger ’em to be?”

For a moment longer he studied the gray hillside, then wagged his head. “Ain’t got no idea. But I don’t make ’em for Sioux still keeping an eye on us. They’d follered us, caught us in the open, and been done with us quick.”

“So who they be?” Elias Kersey asked.

They all watched as the trio slipped out of sight behind the far hilltop. “Don’t matter now,” Titus sighed. “They for certain ain’t the friendly kind.”

“Maybe Snake?”

“Maybeso,” Bass answered. “Or Yuta. Either way, what they see’d of us down here ’thout no horses, I reckon they figger us to be slim pickin’s. Ain’t worth stealing from, or worth killing.”

One of the younger trappers crawled over to ask, “That mean there’s a village close?”

“Likely it does.”

“Maybe we can find it today,” Rube Purcell said, enthused.

“Don’t set your sights that high,” he warned the angular man. “Best we can hope for is to find a trail and see if it might do to follow those tracks toward the Green.”

A pair of the Americans immediately set off for the distant hill in the predawn light. The rest waited in that waterless camp for them to return with their disappointing news that the riders had circled out of the southeast, and their trail led off to the southwest, a jumble of rolling hills.

Some of the men instantly began to grumble that they should have started for Fort Davy Crockett in Brown’s Hole, since that was likely the trio’s destination.

“Could be they were the last of the Sioux scouts keeping watch on us too,” Bass declared. “I’m making for the Green. There’s a lot I don’t mind gambling over—but walking right into that Sioux village again sure seems like short odds to me.”

When it came time to start out again a few minutes later, about half of the others didn’t immediately follow. He wasn’t going to let it matter to him if they had decided to take off on their own. Bass vowed to focus his efforts on cutting a fresh trail that might well mean finding a friendly village of Shoshone or Ute. At least Baker, Kersey, Corn, and Purcell were behind him—they were a steady lot.

A little later when he glanced over his shoulder, Titus discovered the rest of the bunch strung out behind him in a ragged procession, their moccasins and travois poles scuffing up small puffs of the yellowish dust. If the Sioux decided to hit the white men now, they’d be easy to roll on over.

It didn’t matter, he told himself. Just keep walking—every bone-jarring step was one more step closer to Waits-by-the-Water and the youngsters.

What the hell was he doing down here anyway? Had he come out of Crow country to trap beaver in the Wind River Range and the valley of the Green? Or, had he really moseyed south in hopes of holding on to a past that was dead and all but buried?

Maybeso, he had ventured down this way hoping to run into some of the old faces, to talk over the shinin’ times, share something of a bygone life. But Bridger had stayed behind to oversee the construction of his small post, and now even Fraeb was dead. As dead as the partnership between those two old hands.

Dead as the beaver trade.

Truth was, there weren’t enough trappers left in the mountains to make it worthwhile for Bridger to hunker down in one spot and become a trader. So who was it Gabe hoped to turn a profit on at the new post he was raising? The Yuta and Snake in that country?

The way of things now dictated a squaw got more for a buffalo robe than a man did for trapping beaver. No matter which way Titus looked at it, seemed his whole world had gone belly-up.

What was a man to do?

^* Crack in the Sky