Ride the Moon Down

16

Six days after they reached rendezvous, McLeod and McKay turned their brigade around and departed for the northwest. This time the Hudson’s Bay men would be guiding five missionaries and their two young Indian boys on to the land of the Nez Perce.

Scratch and Waits-by-the-Water, like hundreds of whites and Indians, watched the short procession of pack mules, horses, sixteen milk cows, and that oddly misplaced Dearborn carriage wind its way out of the valley of the Green River, followed by the Nez Perce village dragging their travois, a hugh pony herd bringing up the rear. It made for a noisy, heartfelt farewell from the trappers who turned out for one last look upon those church women, a departure that left behind such an awful silence when the dust clouds eventually disappeared beyond the northern hills.

So quiet, Bass could hear the quiet gurgle of Horse Creek along its bed, or Zeke’s fitful panting in the oppressive heat, or the buzz of the deerflies that tormented and bit, leaving behind hot, painful welts. So unlike those last few frantic days after Wyeth had introduced McLeod and McKay to the American party.

“This must surely be God’s answer to our prayers!” Marcus Whitman exclaimed. “Praise the Almighty for His blessings!”

Henry Spalding concurred. “We’ve been praying that He would provide us a way to reach the Walla Walla country.”

“That’s where Sir Stewart suggests we settle our mission,” Whitman explained. “Up the Walla Walla some twenty-five miles north of your post, at a place he says the Nez Perce call Waiilatpu.”

“A good spot: plenty of ground for your crops and graze for your cattle,” John McLeod replied enthusiastically. “It’s agreed—you can join our brigade when we leave on the eighteenth. From here we’ll march for the Walla Walla by way of Fort Hall.”

“Thank God, thank God!” Narcissa cried, and clapped for joy.

“There is one thing I must require, however,” McLeod declared more sedately, quickly glancing over the few Americans who happened to be visiting the missionary camp at that moment.

“If it’s about money,” Whitman began, “I’m afraid we don’t have much of any to—”

“This isn’t about your money,” McLeod interrupted. “Only that I must have your guarantee on something before I commit to lead you into Oregon, into Hudson’s Bay Company territory.”

Spalding’s brow knit. “A guarantee?”

“We cannot have you encouraging any of these American hunters and trappers to come to the Columbia River to settle,” McLeod drew a fine point on it. “We do our best to have nothing at all to do with the American fur men, nothing in any fashion.”

“B-but you’ve come here to their rendezvous,” Whitman observed.

“The better to see to the nature of the American business on this side of the mountains,” McLeod declared.

Whitman shook his head. “Why shouldn’t we have the right to encourage any man who might want to make a home for himself among our mission—”

“Reverend,” McLeod said, “we know from past experience that any of these American hunters who would come to the Columbia country only cause trouble and difficulties among our Indians. They always have before.”

“But I have been thinking that we might need some help in building ourselves the church and meeting hall, putting up our simple homes too,” Whitman stated.

McLeod was waving his hand, ready to speak. “Should you need any manual labor, be it workers for your fields or men to assist in putting up your buildings, the Hudson’s Bay Company would rather furnish you with what you need than to have you encourage and invite any of the Americans to migrate into the Columbia country.”

It was clear, from the set of McLeod’s jaw and the determined cast in his eyes, that should the missionaries desire the assistance of his brigade in delivering them to the land of the Nez Perce, those missionaries would have to toe the company line.

Whitman cleared his throat to announce, “Then I have committed something of an error I will have to correct.”

“What error, Doctor?” asked half-breed McKay.

“I’ve asked some men to accompany us to Oregon country,” Whitman explained, “enlisting them as employees to help us raise shelter before winter arrives. Now … I’ll have to tell them I won’t need their services.”

“We believe that’s for the best,” McLeod responded. “For all concerned. Our enterprise, and yours.”

So the Whitmans marched out of the Rockies, across the interior basin, and on to Oregon, passing into the lore and legend of a fading era.

How quietly did two great upheavals glide by that summer, all but unnoticed on the turbulent river of history.

Having crushed all remaining American competition in that year of our Lord 1836, Astor’s St. Louis successors in this western trade would themselves end up closing the door on a glorious era. The end of an age had come.

Yet at this same July rendezvous another door had been cracked open, one never to be shut again: white women, wheels, and cows had crossed the Southern Pass.

From here on out, the West would never be the same.

Within days of the missionaries’ departure, Thomas Fitzpatrick and Milton Sublette packed up their furs and started for the post on La Ramee’s Fork, now no longer called Fort William but renamed Fort Lucien when Fontenelle and his partners purchased it from Sublette and Campbell back in thirty-five. While the one-legged Sublette would remain as mayordomo at the post, Fitz would pilot the pack train to St. Louis. With this fur caravan went Nathaniel Wyeth, who carried a pouch of letters written to loved ones back east, most transcribed for those who could neither read nor write. The intrepid Yankee promised to have them in St. Louis by October, as he was heading south to Taos by way of Bents’ Fort. Bound too for St. Louis and the States were Stewart, the Scottish nobleman, and his guide, Antoine Clement.

The most significant transaction there on the banks of the Green River was not the trading of furs for sugar and coffee, powder and lead, but that sale of Fontenelle, Fitzpatrick & Company to Joshua Pilcher, agent for Pratte, Chouteau &c Company. With no more than a whimper the grand and raucous rivalry that had raged between competing outfits was now a thing of the past.

A new American Fur Company had won the pot. But while those wealthy St. Louis Frenchmen might have defeated their less-well-heeled American competitors, Pratte, Chouteau &c Company still did not have the fur country to themselves. With Hudson’s Bay continuing to skulk around the edges, this business of beaver pelts was bound to be not only a competition between two companies, but a sharpening of the rivalry between two countries.

While Andrew Drips once again led a small brigade south by west past the Snake River country for the Wasatch and Uintah ranges, Lucien Fontenelle departed with Kit Carson and some thirty men for a fall hunt on the Musselshell, intending to winter on the lower Powder, a favorite with trappers because of its protection from the winter winds and the numbers of buffalo that grazed there throughout the cold months.

“Due north, where we’ll stab our way into the gut of Blackfoot country again.” Thus Sweete explained where Bridger’s brigade was heading as he held out his hand, preparing to move out at first light that late July morning.

“Got us plenty of time to trap a’fore we winter somewheres over on the Yellowstone,” Jim Bridger added as Bass shook their hands in farewell.

Scratch embraced his old friend. “You boys gonna watch your ha’r up there in the land of Bug’s Boys, ain’t you, Gabe? Maybe we’ll run on you come winter. Spring at the latest.”

“You’ll be up north too?” Sweete asked.

With a nod Bass said, “Fixing to winter on the Yallerstone with my wife’s people. Crow, they are. We lost her pap to the Blackfoot two year ago. Time we got back up there to see to her mam.”

Bridger glanced at Cora who sat atop her pony nearby. “Reckon I know how your stick floats when it comes to your wife’s family. Many don’t just marry a woman.”

“He ends up hitching hisself to all her kin,” Titus concluded. “It’s a good thing too, Jim—what with that doctor’s wife gone to Oregon now. Shiny-eyed gal like that being around just naturally made my woman jealous. Yours too.”

“What? My Cora?”

“Yep. Reason I know is, my wife had a good talk with me—worried all sorts of white gals was coming west and I wouldn’t want her no more,” he explained, watching Bridger turn to stare at Cora.

“I had me no idee I done anything to make her worry.”

“She’s carrying your child now, Gabe.”

Jim nodded and said, “So I made her worry I was gonna leave her high and dry with a young’un?”

“Take it from a feller what has one pup and ’nother on the way—carrying a child makes a woman act like she was bit by the full moon for no reason at all. Best for you just to figger she’s gonna bawl at nothing, scream at you for nothing too.”

Grinning, Jim commented, “I know my way round the mountains, know a Blackfoot mokerson from a Crow, know when to fight the niggers and when to run … and damn if I ain’t a fool to think I knowed women too!”

“At times, Gabe—there be no sign writ on a woman’s heart, so it’s for us to find out for our own selves.”

“Thankee, Scratch,” Bridger added, shaking Bass’s hand again before he turned, swung into the saddle, and waved his arm as he hollered for his brigade to mount up.

“Time for the trail,” Sweete said as he crawled atop the strong, jug-headed Indian pony, the man’s legs so long they all but brushed the tops of the meadow grass as he reined away for the column starting out of the valley.

Titus waved, crying out, “See you boys on the Yallerstone!”

Some of the finest moments in his life were spent sitting on a hillside such as this, listening to autumn pass with such a hush that most folks simply weren’t aware of its journey across the face of time until winter had them in its grip.

Now that summer was done, every few days Titus dawdled among the shimmering quakies, leaning back against a tree trunk there in the midst of their spun-gold magnificence to gaze out upon the valley below where he ran his trapline. Since leaving rendezvous, he had keenly anticipated this season of the year, this season of his life.

The quiet murmur of the land as it prepared for a winter’s rest. The frantic coupling of the wild creatures big and small before the coming of cold and hunger. That soul-stirring squeal of the bull elk on the hillside above him. Those heart-wrenching honks of the long-necks as they flapped overhead, making for the south once again to complete a grand circuit of the ages.

As he sat there today, gazing down at how the wind stirred tiny riffles across the surface of the stream, Scratch remembered the ancient Flathead medicine man who had died early that July morning his village was preparing to depart the white man’s rendezvous. Only the day before the old man’s death had Bass gone to the Flathead camp with Bridger, Sweete, and Meek, who had come along with Cora to visit some of her kinfolk to have a divination, a portent of their autumn hunt.

The ancient one unexpectedly called the trappers to his shady bower where he lay suspended on his travois of soft blankets and robes beneath a buffalo-hide awning. His daughter, old herself, remained at his side.

“My father wants to talk to you,” the widow had explained, looking up at Bridger, then the others, with tired eyes.

“Who is your father?” Sweete asked in sign.

And Bridger inquired with his hands, “Why does he want to talk to me?”

“Come,” she gestured. “He will tell you everything.”

The old man reached out a frail, bony hand, looking more like a bird’s claw, the moment he heard his daughter return, heard the trappers shuffle up and position themselves self-consciously around the travois.

“Touch his hand,” she signed, rubbing the back of hers with her fingers. “So he knows you are here.”

Bridger knelt and rubbed the back of the ancient one’s veiny hand. Then Scratch touched it, amazed at how the dark cords stood out like tiny ropes against the sheen of the malleable brown skin.

“Does he hear?” Bass said, then remembered to make the sign.

The woman nodded and laid a hand on her father’s cheek, spoke to him softly in Flathead.

When he began speaking, it was only a few words at a time, almost as if he was having to fight for breath between each phrase. And when he sighed, resting, the old woman translated with her hands.

“He says to you: it is good that you come to listen—you leaders of the white men who are strangers to this land,” she signed.

“Many long winters ago when I was a boy, I remember the seasons as good. Then the first white men arrived.

“Your kind came to our country as no wild creature ever came to our villages before. And we did not understand.

“The white man did not stay at the edges of our camps like other creatures, but he came straight into our village. He ate the beaver and all the animals in our mountains with his iron teeth.

“Because the white man has such a great appetite for everything in our country, now my grandchildren and great-grandchildren are hungry.”

While the old woman signed these last words, her ancient father wiped his watery eyes and clutched a tiny tortoiseshell rattle against his chest as if he had finished. Sweete, Bridger, Bass, and Meek began to rise—but the daughter motioned them to remain.

“Do not think my father is done. So tired is he with his years, he only needs a little rest now.”

For a long time the soft, wrinkled eyelids remained closed in that gray-skinned, skeletal face. Then, just when Scratch was growing restless, the medicine man finally spoke again, in even more of a whisper this time, his voice grown all the weaker. Eventually the daughter turned her attention from him to the white men and made sign.

“If the mountain lion or the great silver bear ever came to our villages the way the white men have … the lion or bear goes down under our arrows and lances.

“But the eye spirits in my dreams tell me we do not have enough arrows and lances for the many white creatures who have come boldly into our country, you who do not stay on the edges of our camps. My dreams tell me we can never kill all of those wild white creatures who have come to change things forever.

“We do not understand,” she translated into sign. “Once we were masters in our land. Now we are hungry, and afraid. Above us in our skies, the sun has set on our faces. Night has forever fallen across our land … never again will we ride the moon down.”

As if she knew he must be thirsty from all the talk, weary from all the effort, the old woman gave her father some water from a horn ladle, then settled at his elbow where she made sign.

“He is done. All done, what he wants to say to you. Farewell.”

The next morning the ancient seer was dead. Chances were good that his last words were spoken to some white men he believed were chiefs among their people. While Meek, Newell, and Sweete had joked with Bridger on their way back to camp about Gabe’s being a chief among the trappers, Bass wondered instead why the old man hadn’t sent for the rich or the noble, the holy or the powerful, among the white booshways and traders, sportsmen, and missionaries camped along the Green River.

Perhaps the old man had no desire to talk to the loftier sort who had never truly penetrated to the heart of the mountains. Maybe he wanted more so to speak to those who had trapped and crossed his land, those who had invaded and thereby changed life as his people had known it.

Funny—until this moment Scratch hadn’t remembered the old rattle shaker. But now, here among the glittering but dying yellow leaves, watching the rhythms of death slowly overcome the seasons of life, he suddenly imagined that the old man and his people were very much like the beaver. Unlike those tiny worms said to spin their threads of silk for hats, the beaver had to be sacrificed for others to reap their harvest. A man took the hide and discarded the rest.

The rattle shaker must have figured the trappers had come to his country to take what they wanted in the way of furs and women, discarding everything else when they moved on. Perhaps his people were like the beaver.

So the old man’s dream began to disturb him in that season of dying before the onset of winter—a terrifying vision of perpetual night that held no hope of a moonset, no prayer that any of them could ride the moon down and bring about the coming of day.

This autumn, more than any before, Scratch sensed the cold stab him to the marrow.

“What the hell’s a man call this godforsaken place of yours, trader?” Bass roared as he ushered his wife through the narrow doorway cut into the clay-chinked cottonwood logs and threw his shoulder back against the crude door planks to batten it against the wind.

Samuel Tullock looked up from the floor where he was sorting through some buffalo robes a handful of Crow warriors had brought in. All six of them stood to peer at the new arrivals.

“That you, Bass?”

Tearing the bulky coyote hat from his head, Scratch slapped the fur against the tail of his elk-hide coat, knocking loose a cloud of snowflakes. Despite the best efforts of the stone fireplace at the corner of the small trading room erected there on the north bank of the Yellowstone opposite the mouth of the Tongue River, their every breath was a greasy vapor in the winter air.

Tullock stepped around the warriors and that scatter of robes as Waits-by-the-Water set Magpie on the floor of pounded earth. As soon as she pulled back the deep hood of her blanket capote, three of the warriors instantly recognized her. She settled onto a small wooden crate, tearing at the knot in the sash around her waist. Bass held out his hand to the trader.

Tullock shook with him, affectionately laying his frozen club of a left hand on Titus’s forearm. “I ain’t seen a white face in weeks.”

“Down to ronnyvoo, one of them brigades made plans to spend the winter over on the Powder,” Titus explained as he tore open his heavy coat and dragged it from his arms. “Figgered they’d been through here a’fore now on their way to winter camp.”

Tullock shook his head and took a step back. With a sigh the former trapper said, “Good to see a white man every now and then. Likely them company boys come through eventual’, if’n they’re in this country. Coffee?”

“Some for both of us, thankee.” Scratch watched the trader turn and step around the pile of robes, moving behind the group of warriors who had stepped over to chatter with Waits. He caught every third word or so, fast as they were talking—happy and animated. It made his heart glad to see such a smile on her face, hear that cheer in her voice. Back among her own kind.

“Trading been good?” he asked as Tullock handed a cup down to Waits, passed a second to Titus.

“Spring was a mite slow,” he admitted. “But it’s been picking up here of late now that the cold has come for certain.”

“So you ain’t been hurt none closing down your old place and moving over here?”

“Near as I can tell, these fellas say their people gonna bring in their furs no matter what.”

The steam of his coffee warmed his face as Scratch held it beneath his chin. “These Absorkees ain’t got nowhere else to go, Sam’l. They ain’t about to ride north through Blackfoot country to trade at the Marias post, so if you wasn’t here—they’d be banging on the gates of Fort Union for powder and coffee.”

“It ain’t powder and coffee these bucks come for,” Tullock growled. “They don’t believe I ain’t got no whiskey.”

Titus snorted with laughter and glanced over at Magpie standing at her mother’s knee, gazing up at the warriors. He sensed that the girl must realize how those men looked more like her than did her father.

“Whiskey, is it? Ain’t that just what we taught ’em? We done our best to make these poor niggers want what’s the wust for ’em.”

“You was down on the Green?”

“Yup, a hot, dry one too, that was.”

“What’s news from ronnyvoo?” Tullock asked. “Last boat of the year, word down from Union said St. Louis has gone and bought up ever’thing.”

After sipping at the scalding coffee, Titus declared, “Your outfit owns the hull mountains now. It be a’tween you and Hudson’s Bay.”

The trader patted, then settled back against a stack of folded buffalo robes. “Beaver’s ’bout done.”

“I ain’t give up, Sam’l. Gonna ride this horse till it drops dead a’tween my legs.”

“What brings you here to the Tongue?” Tullock asked. “You been trapping nearby?”

“Been up the Rosebud, hung round the big bend for a few weeks till I trapped it out and weren’t wuth the trouble putting my steel in water. We moseyed north for the Yallerstone. Aiming to make it downriver to Fort Union. Look up an old friend.”

“Who that be?”

“Levi Gamble. You hear of him?”

“Never thought you’d know Levi,” the trader responded, stepping over to the ill-fitting door to brush away some of the snow sifting in around the jamb. “A fair man, good of heart too. Gamble’s been out here longer’n most.”

Nodding, Bass replied, “Met him back in Caintuck when he was on his way to St. Lou. Gonna meet up with Lisa and ride up the river for to be a beaver hunter.”

“That man’s got him some rings, all right,” Tullock declared with his back turned.

“Didn’t ever figger to run onto him,” Scratch admitted. “It’s been over twenty-five year now.”

The trader turned from the door as the wind keened all the more loudly, rattling the crude planks, whining as it shinnied through the chinking, moaning as it sulled around the sharp corners on this low-roofed log hut. “Figure it’s better for you and your family to stay here the night.”

“Thankee, Sam’l,” Scratch replied. “Gonna be dark soon.”

“You speak better Crow’n me—why don’t you tell them others they can bed down right here with us if they choose.”

After translating for the warriors, Scratch removed his buffalo-hide vest from his shoulders. Settling near the fireplace, he held out his arms to Magpie. A smile instantly blossomed on her face, her black-cherry eyes glowing as she trundled across the uneven floor, tripping once and catching herself before she reached her father’s arms, giggling as he smothered her face and neck in kisses.

Two of the Crow followed Waits over to the fire and squatted cross-legged on the ground as the woman leaned against Bass’s shoulder.

“You will have another child soon,” one of the Crow said, nodding toward Waits’s belly. “Perhaps it will be a boy.”

Smiling, Titus patted the rounding belly. “Yes. A boy, perhaps.”

“A good thing, this—your wife birthing a boy,” the second man commented. “He will become a Crow warrior.”

Scratch took his eyes from the young man and stared at the flames. “Better that the boy become a beaver trapper like his father.”

“Just who in hell’s asking for Levi Gamble?”

Gazing up at the man yelling down at him, Scratch craned his neck there beside the wall of that massive wooden stockade rising some twenty feet beside the hulking stone bastion erected at the southwestern corner of the fort. A second and third man now joined the first to stare over the top of those pickets near the bastion’s stone wall. All three studied the visitors in that cold swirl of a ground blizzard.

For much of the day he and Waits-by-the-Water had struggled through the storm, making no more than a half-dozen miles, fighting to reach the walls as the afternoon light waned.

“An old friend,” he shouted at the trio above.

“You speak good English, friend,” a voice called down, the words all but hurtled away before they reached Bass at the foot of the giant timbers. “Better’n any Injun I know can speak English.”

“Well, now—I figger you for a white nigger too,” Titus growled. “My wife an’ young’un near froze out here, so what say you crawl on down here and let us in a’fore we can’t move no more.”

“Said you was a friend of Levi Gamble’s?”

“From a long time ago,” he replied. Bass was relieved when he saw the speaker’s head disappear. The other two-faces peered at him for a few seconds more before they were gone as well.

The snow stung his eyes as it flung itself against the wall, ricocheted off with a glancing blow and a howl of fury, then hurled sharp, icy shards at him from several directions at once.

He heard Magpie whimper again inside his coat where he clutched her against his warmth. Patting her back with one hand, Scratch pulled the buffalo robe more tightly around her. The moment the storm had descended upon them that morning, he had stopped, turned the girl around so that she faced him, her little legs straddling him in the saddle. Untying the flaps of his elk-hide coat so he could admit her, he had Magpie loop her arms around him, burying her face and head into the furry warmth of the buffalo-hide vest. When he had retied the coat around her, Bass dragged a buffalo robe across the neck of the pony, positioning it over Magpie’s back, wrapping it securely around their legs as the wind began to shriek through the cottonwoods that lined the northern bank of the Yellowstone.

Able to see no farther than their ponies’ noses, they had taken the better part of the afternoon to locate a place where they could ford to the north side of the Missouri, upriver from the post. Now they stood waiting on the tall, barren bluff overlooking the muddy river, at the mercy of the cruel wind, their animals caked with a brutal mix of ice from the Missouri and frozen snow.

“Over here!” a voice called gruffly as the wind died momentarily. “Hurry, goddammit!”

Through the swirling, wispy gauze of the dancing ground blizzard, Bass spotted a dark rectangle appear in the solid bank of wall timbers. He blinked and the rectangle disappeared. But as that gust of wind died, the dark rectangle reappeared, beside it now a figure swathed in a furry coat, his head like a huge, disproportionate grizzly’s resting atop his shoulders.

“C’mon!” Scratch snapped at Waits, reaching for her reins.

Their head-bent, tail-tucked ponies and Samantha required some extra nudging, heels and yanking both, to encourage the animals to move.

Near the fur-wrapped figure at the gate Scratch dropped to the ground with the girl in his arms. “You got a place in there for these here animals?”

“How many you got?” the voice grumbled beneath the hood of fur.

“Six. Less’n I take ’em somewhere back down the bank outta the wind, they ain’t gonna make it.”

“Bring ’em in,” the man relented. “We’ll make room for the night. Soon as the storm lets up—”

“I’ll pay for their k-keep,” Bass stuttered, shifting the little girl in his arms when she whimpered with the cold.

“That your young’un you got in there, mister?”

“My daughter.”

Beneath the frost-glazed brow of his bear-fur cap the man peered up at the Crow woman now. “You better get them both in here outta this wind.”

Scratch watched the man reach out and seize the reins to Waits-by-the-Water’s pony, removing them from Bass’s thick glove. The stranger turned and led the woman’s horse into that narrow rectangle, pushing aside the huge gate only wide enough to admit the animal and its rider who sat hunched over in the howling fury of the storm.

Hoisting the small child into his arms, Titus struggled to clutch the buffalo robe around them both as he started forward, tripping on the robe and dropping it.

“Magpie?”

“Yes, popo?” she said in English, her voice faint, muffled against his chest.

“I’ll get you warm soon,” he told her as he turned to discover the mule and the other ponies slowly drifting away before the wind, angling from the wall toward the tall fur press, its top completely obscured in the foggy swirl of snow.

“Get in here, mister!” the stranger bellowed as he reappeared at the gate, waving violently.

As a gust of wind died, Bass cried out, “Samantha!”

He tried to whistle, but his swollen, bleeding lips would not cooperate. Instead he called her name a second time, then started for the dark slash in the wall where the man stood holding open the gate.

Magpie shivered against him. “Popo?”

“Said I’ll get you warm soon.”

“Cold. Cold,” she whimpered, shaking against him.

Of a sudden that word reminded him how Josiah had whispered in his ear in the bloody aftermath of chasing after an old friend, moments after killing Asa McAfferty.

“M-my wife?” he stammered as he inched through the gate the stranger held open.

“She’s safe. I put her in the trade room round the corner,” the man said, bracing his arm against the wall to his left, propping open the heavy gate. “Take your young’un round there too.”

His weary arms barely able to hold on to Magpie, his legs stubborn and leaden, Scratch shuffled through the door with Zeke at his heels. As the sudden warmth brushed his bare cheeks, Titus noticed how the shriek of the wind disappeared behind him. This place smelled of coffee and beeswax, gunpowder and new wood slats on the crates of every trade good imaginable.

“Leave the child with its mother,” the stranger ordered.

Waits sat side-legged on the floor, wiping the melting snow from her damp face as she pulled back her hood. When he stumbled toward his wife, she looked up, held out her arms. Waits pulled aside the flaps of his coat and vest, reaching inside to grab the child, murmuring at Magpie in Crow.

He eased the girl into her mother’s lap with a whimper, then turned slowly.

“C’mon, mister,” the stranger said. “Let’s get them animals put up or they’re lost.”

It took long minutes of struggle to account for the five horses and Samantha, cajoling them toward the walls, through the gate, then into the crude pen to the right of the gate where they joined some other stock. Together Bass and the stranger tore at the knots lashing their meager possessions and packs of beaver to their backs until everything had been dropped.

“Now,” the man gasped, brushing some of the frost from his gray beard and mustache, “s’pose you tell me who the hell this friend is what’s looking after Levi Gamble.”

“My name’s Bass. Titus Bass,” he gasped, winded, weary, and more than half frozen.

“Bass. Say you know Gamble?”

“Knowed him a long, long time ago.”

“How long?”

“Back to eighteen and ten it were—”

“Jesus and Mother Mary!” the stranger exclaimed. “How the hell you ’spect a ol’ man to remember that far back? So how you know him?”

“We shot at a mark together, once,” Bass explained, dragging a coat sleeve across the lower half of his face. It wasn’t near so cold there, out of the wind the way they were. “No more’n sixteen was I, but still I nearly whupped Levi that summer—”

“The Longhunters Fair?” the stranger suddenly blurted.

Bass licked his lips, surprised at the interruption. “Y-yup. Levi come through Boone County. We shot at the Longhunters Fair they hold every summer—”

“You that skinny whiffet of a green-broke young’un nearly outshot me that summer day?”

Scratch blinked again, closely studying the stranger’s face in the dim, fading light of that stormy afternoon. Those tired eyes, their deeply etched crows’-feet and liver-colored bags of fatigue, along with that massive, unkempt gray beard and tangle of iron-colored hair beneath the crown of black-bear fur.

“Levi?” he croaked. “Levi Gamble?”

“Goddamn, it’s been so long and you changed so much,” Gamble apologized. “I’d never knowed it was you even if you’d come up and punched me in the nose!”

Bass opened his arms and flung them around this man who was a stranger no more. “Damn if it ain’t good to see a old friend!”

Gamble flung his arms around Bass, squeezed, then pounded Scratch on the back with both thick mittens. “I’ll declare, Titus Bass! What the hell took you so goddamned long to look me up?”