Ride the Moon Down

28

Bass swatted at the mosquito, then rubbed a fingertip across the tiny red bump raised on the back of his walnut-brown hand. “I don’t figger them Blackfeets gonna bother nary Americans no more.”

Unfolding his big kerchief of black silk, old friend Elbridge Gray wiped sweat from his forehead and the ridge of his round bulb of a nose more pocked with tiny blue veins every year. “Come spring, we run across more’n one camp of them bastards. Lodges filled with dead’uns getting picked over by the jays, bones getting dragged off by the wolves. Bridger figgers what Blackfoot ain’t been kill’t off by the pox gonna be cowed but good. Won’t dare make trouble for us now.”

With a sigh Scratch nodded. “Ain’t like it was afore, Elbridge. Bug’s Boys ain’t the fearsome bunch no more.”

“For sartin the Blackfoot country’s open to Americans now,” Rufus Graham added, hissing his s’s between those four missing front teeth, two top and two bottom. Then he glanced self-consciously at the woman who sat nearby cutting moccasin soles from the thick neck hide of a buffalo robe. “After you and your wife rubbed up ag’in’ them Blackfoot what had the smallpox … how you two ever come out by the skin of your teeth?”

Titus didn’t answer for a hot, still moment, watching the woman at work over her hide. She must have felt his gaze, for she turned to glance at him for but an instant before she smiled and resumed her work.

For the longest time now she had refused to let others look at her, hiding her face beneath the hood of her capote, even as spring warmed the land and dispelled all evidence of winter. It wasn’t until early in that second summer after healing from the pox that she had relented and no longer kept her face in the shadow—about the time they started south from Absaroka for this rendezvous on the Green.

For more than a year and a half Waits-by-the-Water had lived her life all but hiding out each day. Ashamed of how the disease had ravaged her face, the woman rarely emerged from her sister-in-law’s lodge until twilight. If she did venture out to scrape hides or gather wood and water, Waits tied one of Bass’s large black silk kerchiefs just below her eyes, covering most of her disfigurement. It wasn’t until Crane died late in the spring of 1839 that Waits heeded the praise of others, finally coming to believe that somehow she really was, in a most tangible way, a heroine to her people.

She had survived—not only the brutal capture and abuse of an ancient enemy—but Waits-by-the-Water had endured the slow, cruel torture, and what should have been the sure death demanded by the pox.

“The men of your tribe, they are proud of their sacrifice scars, yes?” Bass asked her, tapping a finger against his own breast to indicate the sun-dance torture.

Waits had nodded her head in the firelight of the lodge where she and the children stayed with Strikes-in-Camp’s family while Titus was gone trapping in the hills for days at a time.

“And the Crow men,” he had continued, “they proudly mark their war wounds with vermilion paint—showing everyone just how brave they were, how great their courage to bear up in the face of death?” Titus waited for her to nod again.

“Yes.”

“To your people you are just as brave as a warrior. You faced death but did not die. Wife, you do not have to paint a red war circle around a bullet pucker, a knife scar, or a hole made by an arrow shaft. The great battle you waged against the terrible sickness is a battle none of your people ever win. In your victory that battle has marked you with its scars that show you were every bit as brave as a Crow warrior.”

Even though she began venturing out in the day without her black silk kerchief, Titus knew how frightened she had to be—afraid of what other Crow would say or ask when they saw her, afraid more of those who wouldn’t say a thing about her face but would instead look upon her with disgust or revulsion—worse yet, pity. The deep scars had marked her cheeks, pitted her forehead and nose.

Yet Waits-by-the-Water’s battle with the disease had left her scarred far deeper than the surface of her skin. She had healed from the scourge. Eventually she had begun to live again without hiding her face. But this woman would be a long time in healing the inner wounds.

“I never come down with the pox,” Bass explained to that dwindling circle of old friends gathered with him at that rendezvous near the mouth of Horse Creek on the Green River. “Only way I figger the woman come through it … maybeso God Hisself knowed how much we needed her.”

“Your chirrun?” asked Isaac Simms, brushing back some of his gleaming platinum-blond hair that continued to successfully hide the fact that he was graying.

“They was fine,” Scratch declared. “Cain’t callate how Magpie come out so good—’thout the sickness getting hold of her the way it done to her mam, what with them both being took together by the Blackfoot.”

He glanced in wonder at the woman again, noticing once more how the curvatures of her hips and backside had begun to round out her dress as she worked over the hide on her hands and knees. She had been slow to put back on most of the weight she’d lost to those weeks fighting the pox. No longer was she a raw-boned skeleton with her skin sagging over her joints like proper folks’ bedsheets draped over a split-rail bedstead. For a long time there he hadn’t believed someone so frail and thin, so downright cadaverous, could ever have the strength to fight off the scourge.

“She’s a lucky woman,” Solomon Fish observed. “Had you to care for her, pull her back from death’s door.”

Scratch nodded, taking his eyes from the woman to look at Solomon’s long beard of blond ringlets. “I’m a lucky man. She’d done the same to save my life.”

And that’s what had kept him going through those first hours, then those first long, seemingly endless, days and nights as she grew hotter, weaker, sicker. He kept reminding himself that she would never give up on him, that she would be the sort to chide him and scold him and yell at him to fight back even as he grew weaker.

So he had done just as he knew she would do for him. Always reminding her of the children, of all the four of them had to live for. Over and over doing his level best to convince her of the years left them both.

“I kept that fire going day and night,” he said quietly in the shade of those cottonwoods as the flies droned about them. “Didn’t sleep much them days—couldn’t.”

He had been scared, too afraid to rest more than a few minutes at a time even when he grew so weary he could no longer keep his eyes open, no longer able to cradle her head in his lap and wash her face with the scalding hot water that sometimes made her whimper and moan, sometimes made her wail and thrash against the grip he had on her.

“I don’t have me no idea how it helped, but chopping the wood, boiling the snow, washing her over and over every day and every night … it kept me busy—so busy I didn’t have much time to worry. I had to keep doing what I could do to keep her alive one more day. Then another come after that, and I knowed I had to keep her alive that day.”

The sun had warmed the earth that first morning after Stiff Arm’s rescue party left as Titus gathered wood close to their camp, brought the horses close, and started scooping snow into her new brass kettle to heat over the flames. That night, like all the nights that followed for them on the side of that mountain, the temperatures sank well below zero. With it too cold for a man ever to sleep for long at all, he repeatedly awoke throughout each long stretch of darkness to prop more wood on the fire, dragging the kettle near the heat again, repeatedly dipping the coarse linen scrap into the scalding water where he boiled slivers of snakeroot, then scrubbed the woman’s face and neck as she grumbled, sometimes screamed—but soon grew too weak to push his hands away.

He had convinced himself the ugly, ofttimes oozing, pustules were filled with a loathsome poison as surely as a gangrenous wound would fill with the poison capable of killing. Over and over he cleaned the sores with the snakeroot broth, gently scrubbing each sore open so he could get at the foul ooze, cleanse it from her body in the hope he could prevent the poison from killing her.

They had begun as red spots, then became hard, angry welts lying just beneath the surface of the skin until the first one erupted as he scoured the coarse linen across it. There were many more by the next morning. And by that night it seemed her whole face had been taken over by the noxious pustules.

Yet he persisted, doing what he could to clean each one with the scalding water that soothed the bones in his bare hands aching so with the intense cold. Slowly too, doing his best to remember that he must wash each pustule separately so that he did not rub poison from one into the next. Each time he finished bathing her, he trudged out of the firelight with that kettle of water and dumped it in the same spot, downwind of camp. When he returned, he draped the coarse linen scrap over the end of a tree branch and held it over the coals of their fire, turning it the way he would a thick slab of elk loin so that the heat killed the poison, cauterized every inch of the cloth.

Rituals so intricate and consuming that they kept him this side of that fine line of insanity, rituals practiced with such fidelity that they prevented him from going mad with the terror that he was going to lose her.

At times Bass hunted when she slept, never venturing far. Twice each day he made soup in their old cast-iron kettle, boiling snakeroot with the meat of a bighorn goat he’d shot, later a small cinnamon bear—even the goat and bear bones—making a hearty broth he forced her to sip day after day after day as her cheeks began to sag: that ravaged, pitted, bloodied skin of her face … her almond-shaped, oriental eyes growing more sunken, red-rimmed, bags like liver-colored fire smudge wrinkled beneath them both.

Every few hours the fever made her delirious. At times Waits even mumbled with a swollen tongue—so bloated it cruelly reminded him of that deadly desert crossing back when he and McAfferty fled the Apache on the Gila. Plain to see the damned fever was boiling all the juices out of her. She had to drink. He never let her refuse, pouring the cool water over her tongue until she coughed and sputtered, or holding a horn ladle of warm broth against her chapped, cracked lips as she struggled to turn away. But he didn’t let her—couldn’t let her.

Even now he would not tell these old friends how he cried, or how he cried out at her too every time he had to lock her head beneath an arm, doing his best to scold or cajole some liquid past her lips.

Sixteen long days they remained there. He whittled a notch for each one in the handle of a camp ax. Sixteen days and nights, awaking fearfully from his troubled half sleep, afraid she had died. Anxious to see if she still breathed, resting his fingers over her nose and mouth each time he returned from his hunt through the surrounding timber, or among the boulders and tundra, often times with no more than a marmot or two.

With each morning’s arrival he watched the sun climb off the far edge of the earth, thankful that she still breathed in her fitful sleep, that she had survived another day, somehow endured another bitterly cold night. As weak as she became, to find her alive there against him, still breathing shallow and raspy wrapped in his arms, it became no small celebration for his heart.

He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t noticed it before, but there came one night at the fire while he was scrubbing her face with that coarse rag and scalding water, suddenly aware that he could find no new pustules erupting on her face. And what angry red pockmarks there were no longer oozed and bled near as much as they had in recent days each time he repeatedly washed them.

Two days later she awoke him from his own fitful sleep, whispering with her raw throat and swollen tongue that she wanted some water. As he poured sips past her cracked, puffy lips, later fed her spoons of hot soup and washed her wounds, Waits-by-the-Water gazed at him for the first time in more than two weeks. The love in those eyes dared him to hope.

For sixteen days those eyes had remained shut, never looking back at him, not once opening to dispel his doubts, drive away any of his fears. But after all those nights, she finally opened her eyes and looked up at him, soft and thankful. So weary, she did not try speaking any more that day in her exhaustion, even as he clumsily removed her dress and leggings, replaced them with some of his clothing. All she could do was look at him with those eyes.

Not until the next day did she speak again. “Love Ti-tuzz.”

And that evening she asked for help walking to the brush so she could relieve herself. She squatted, then pulled herself up against him, and he supported her as they returned to the fire, where she curled up within a new robe and he dragged off the one she had lain in for all those days.

“What will you sleep in tonight?”

“I’ll sleep with you again,” he explained.

“We’ll need the old robe to keep us warm—”

“Going to burn it before we leave,” he said in English. “And them clothes of your’n too. The sickness is all over em.”

Better to leave as much of the disease as they could right there on the mountainside, among the ashes of their fire. Bass realized he could replace things, like his missing traps he figured the Blackfoot had thrown away, like the plunder they had shattered and destroyed. Just leave the pox and its evil there on the mountain. Trouble was, they would never leave it all behind. Waits-by-the-Water was going to carry a telling reminder of the pox with her till the end of her days.

But they still had one another. And they had their children. So Bass remained confident he could rebuild the pieces of their life together. As long as there was beaver in the mountains and as long as the traders hauled their goods out to rendezvous—he’d carve out a life for them … just as long as he and his kind could continue to race across the seasons, as long as they could continue to ride the moon down.

Many times since that late winter of thirty-eight it had haunted him just how many there were who had given up and abandoned the Rockies. Daniel Potts, and even Jim Beckwith. It troubled him to think back on how fewer and fewer showed up come rendezvous with the arrival of each summer. Sad to watch how many didn’t choose to reoutfit themselves, deciding instead to ride east with the fur caravan, electing to take their wages in hard money once they reached St. Louis. Every summer at least a couple dozen more admitted they were throwing in and giving up.

“Plunder costs too much,” some groused.

Others complained, “Beaver’s too low.”

Still more confessed that a few seasons spent crotch-deep in icy streams, exposed to that unwarmable cold of the mountains for three seasons a year, had aged them well before their years. Titus felt sorry for those who decided to flee back east to what was, back to who they had been. Yet he realized he didn’t have any of that to return to himself.

For the last few summers he saw how those who were giving up simply freed their Flathead, Shoshone, or Yuta wives to return to their villages, to their parents, taking the half-breed youngsters with them when the winters of marriage were done and the white trapper no longer needed the benefits of his dusky-skinned bedmate.

But a time or two Titus had heard tell of a man who did take his wife and their children east with him, perhaps to settle somewhere on the frontier that others claimed was inching right to the edge of the rolling prairie itself. There among the pacified Sauk and Fox, among the Osage or those other bands Andy Jackson had driven west, such an old trapper and his family might better mix in with the life of hardworking folks scratching out an existence along that border of the wilderness. Once they were on that backtrail to the settlements, nothing else was ever heard of those men who had returned east in hopes of recapturing some of what life they had left behind, nonetheless unable to let go of a woman and children who were part of another life they had now abandoned.

Again this summer on Horse Creek, some three dozen company men had turned in their furs, preparing to flee the mountains.

Sitting there talking with these scarred, old friends, Scratch realized he could never return to the settlements. There wasn’t anything left back there. No family to speak of—no one to make for a sentimental reunion. There had been no real success in the blacksmith trade with Hysham Troost that would lure him back as this beaver trade slowly sank from its lofty heights. And he ruminated that he could never take Waits-by-the-Water onto that rolling land of the buffalo prairie or beyond to those hardwood forests where corncrackers scratched at the ground and raised their fixed communities.

They were no place to raise children—not back there where the trees grew so tall and thick a man couldn’t see any distance at all, back east where a man looked up only to see a portion of the sky. No place for a child to grow tall and strong as they would here in these mountains, breathing this clean, dry air. Back east, he remembered, the men on that old frontier of hardwood forests had a far different look in their eye than these hivernants of the high Stonies. Back there, closed in with the thick timber and small patches of sky that too often turned gray and drenched them with rain—such men did not possess the far-seeing squint of those iron-forged few who made a home beyond the western prairies.

Out here a man quickly took on a decidedly distant gaze. He grew accustomed to gazing across great stretches, searching far ridges, studying the skyline for dust or smoke, game or foe, reading those green threads that beckoned him to water as if they were parchment maps, ciphering each swaybacked, snow-covered saddle that allowed him a pass between the mountain peaks—scratching every mile of the journey into the fastness of his memory. This unimaginably huge land required a man to stretch his eyes far beyond what had been required of him in those closed-in, narrow-bounded forests back east.

Come from what he had been, a man either became much more than what he was back east—or he left his bones to bleach on the banks of some uncharted mountain stream. So again this summer those who realized they had teased and taunted Dame Fate long enough chose to rake in what chips they had left and scurry east. Leaving behind a life. Leaving behind loved ones.

“I vowed that if the woman died,” Titus quietly explained to the circle of friends that hot summer afternoon, “I wasn’t returning to the Crow.”

“What of your young’uns?” Elbridge asked.

He grew thoughtful. “Told myself they’d grow up just fine, took in and raised by them what would come to love li’l Flea and my darling Magpie like their own.”

“Couldn’t bear to face ’em,” Isaac said.

“No, wasn’t that a’tall,” Bass replied with a shake of his head. “If’n I’d buried the woman in a tree, proper that way for the wind to take her … I knowed I would ride on down that north side of them mountains, making straight for Blackfoot country.”

Rufus nodded. “Take you some goddamned hair.”

“One by one,” Scratch continued. “I’d kill ever’ last one of them bastards I chanced across. Times were at nights while I kept myself awake caring for the woman, I figured how I’d mark the bodies: cutting on ’em, scraping my letters in each one so they’d come to know who I was and what I was about.”

Solomon glanced at the youngsters nearby and asked, “You never figgered to see your young’uns again?”

“No,” he confessed. “I was gonna ride and kill till ever’ one of the Blackfoot was dead … or them sonsabitches kill’t me.”

Gray sighed. “Lookit your young’uns now, Scratch. Ain’t it turned out for the best you didn’t leave ’em for the Crow to raise? And you ain’t dead and skulped up there in Blackfoot country!”

“And the woman pulled through,” Graham cheered.

“Were a bunch more days afore she was strong enough to sit a horse, howsoever,” Bass continued his tale. “I got us back over the pass just a’fore another storm blowed down on us. We made it to some good timber and sat it out whilst she got a bit more of her strength back. Don’t know how many days that was, for I’d stopped a’counting and carving on that ax handle.”

Day by day they had backtracked for the Crow village, become anxious when they didn’t find it where the lodges had been standing weeks before when the ordeal had begun. As they were pushing out of the abandoned campsite along the snowy ground churned with travois scars, Titus had spotted the scaffold propped across the branches of a distant cottonwood that stood at the base of the rimrock. And from the way the gnarled tree trunk below that robe bundle was marked, they knew it had to be the body of Strikes-in-Camp.

“Them Crow gave him a decent funeral,” he declared, “even if they never did bring his body into camp—feared as they was of the pox.”

Beneath the spreading branches of the cottonwood they camped that afternoon, and as Bass built a fire and gathered wood for the night, Waits-by-the-Water knelt and began her mourning. She chopped off more of her hair and tossed it into the wind, those shorn locks grotesquely framing that wounded, pitted face. Tears flowed as she wailed, tearing her coat from her arms so she could slash her flesh until her strength was gone and Bass raised her from the frozen ground, carrying his wife back to the warmth of the fire where he fed her, wrapped her, then rocked her to sleep.

“After the second day I told the woman it was time for her mourning to be done,” Titus said, looking over to see his young son toddling his way now. “It was time to be finding our young’uns.”

Some two and a half years old by then, young Flea lumbered the last few yards as his father spread his arms to welcome him. The boy vaulted into the air, sailing into Bass’s arms where he settled into his father’s lap, looking round at the hairy faces gathered there in the afternoon shade as the deerflies droned and Horse Creek gurgled along its sandy bed.

“How long it take you to find them Crow?” Solomon inquired.

“Weren’t long, not really,” he said, rubbing Flea’s bushy head affectionately. “They took off right after the four days of mourning for Strikes-in-Camp and them others the Blackfoot killed in the ambush. But we found ’em eventual’.”

It had made for quite a scene when Bass and Waits-by-the-Water showed up near the camp one day late that winter of 1838. As soon as he had seen the camp guards loping their way, Scratch halted, waiting. Among the sentries had been Pretty On Top.

The young warrior’s eyes filled with a mist as he whooped, his cry sailing to the cold blue sky of Absaroka as he brought his pony skidding to a stop with the seven others right in front of the white man and his wife who clutched the flaps of her hood over her face, not daring to let these people who had known her from childhood see her wounds.

“My heart sings!” Pretty On Top cheered, slapping his breast. “You are returned with your wife! How is this that she did not die?”

“My husband would not let me,” Waits announced from the muffle of her hood, surprising even Titus. “He said I could not die.”

“Then the medicine of Ti-tuzz is mighty!” cried Three Iron. “In the stories of our great-grandfathers, when the pox visited itself upon us, very few were spared death before the scattering of the bands. So the First Maker has truly smiled on you, Waits-by-the-Water.”

She had looked over at her husband and said, “Yes, I know how the First Maker has smiled on me.”

The eight guards yipped and whistled with approval, causing their horses to jostle with the sudden loud exuberance.

Bass found her eyes smiling at him from the shadows of her hood and said, “Yes, woman—the First Maker has smiled on us both.”

Little Flea had been at their horses’ legs before the two of them even dismounted beside Bright Wings’s lodge. And Magpie was already reaching her arms to her father as Bass brought his pony to a halt. He had leaned over, caught her by the wrist, and swung her up behind him, marveling at how much it seemed she had grown. As he kissed and hugged her right there on horseback, Waits dropped to the ground to gather little Flea into her arms, smothering him with her kisses. Not knowing what he was doing, the babbling child pushed back the hood—his own eyes suddenly wide with surprise, even fear.

Around the woman others gasped, fell back a step, as Waits-by-the-Water snatched the hood over her head, beginning to sob because the boy continued to stare at her in shock and fright. But in that next moment Crane emerged from the lodge doorway, her stooped body hurrying to her daughter’s side where she flung her arms around Waits—crying, wailing, sobbing, keening, blubbering all at once.

Then Bright Wings was there too, the three of them hugging, their arms wrapped around Flea as he rested on his mother’s hip. The moment Magpie and Bass hit the ground, the young girl sprinted to her mother’s side, ducked between some legs, and ended up in the middle of all those women happily reunited.

Hugging Flea now before the boy toddled off again, Scratch looked at Magpie as she helped her mother cutting moccasin soles. Back then, upon their return to the Crow after chasing down the Blackfoot, Magpie had been no older than Flea was at this moment. But to look at the girl now, tall and long-legged as she was, Titus found it hard to believe so much time had flowed past since that winter of the Blackfoot … realizing again that his daughter was more than four years old.

At times that late winter and on into the spring, Pretty On Top and his companions—Red Leggings, Comes Inside the Door, Sees the Star, and Crow Shouting—would ask to join the white man when he packed up and rode away from the village for two weeks or more at a time. By day the bored young warriors might follow Titus to the icy banks of the flooding streams, amused and intrigued by the trapper’s rituals. Most mornings one of the Crow would ride out to spend the day circling the surrounding territory, searching for any sign of enemy encroachment while he hunted for fresh meat.

Days later, with a load of beaver for Waits-by-the-Water to flesh and his own heart yearning to hold her, eager to embrace his children, Bass would turn around and return to Yellow Belly’s village. For two, sometimes three nights he would remain at the woman’s side, each day spent hunting elk and deer or mountain sheep for his wife’s big family, coupling with her, wrestling with his children and those cousins who now had no father of their own. Once he was assured the group had enough meat to last them many days, Titus packed up again and headed into the high country—sometimes alone, often joined by the young warriors.

With each subsequent journey as those weeks passed, Scratch was able to push higher into the hills, farther upstream, always there when the beaver emerged from their winter lodges to make repairs on their dams.

“We figgered you’d gone under for sartin,” Rufus confessed now. “When you didn’t come in for ronnyvoo on the Popo Agie last summer.”

“Why’d the booshways move ronnyvoo there ’stead of here on the Green where they said they’d meet the brigades?” Titus asked.

Elbridge explained, “Goddamned company booshways changed it on us when they growed tired of allays having Hudson’s Bay show up ever’ summer over here in this country.”

“Englishers got to be a bit of a problem with the free men, so it seemed,” Solomon said. “They was offering a good price on fur over at Fort Hallee, and wasn’t asking so much for their trade goods neither.”

“Wonder why we ain’t see’d hide nor ha’r of John Bull yet this summer?” Bass reflected.

Isaac said, “Maybeso they don’t know we’re here this year for ronnyvoo.”

“Chances are better them English don’t give a damn ’bout coming to ronnyvoo no more,” Solomon observed, “what with the trade ain’t being what it used to be.”

“Damned good to see you’re still standing on your pins, Titus Bass,” Gray said. “We was a’feared you’d gone under.”

“Way things was,” Bass began, hoisting the restless boy out of his lap, kissing Flea on the cheek, then sending the naked child on his way, “I didn’t figger the woman was much ready to be around white folks. So I had me a choice of coming to ronnyvoo all on my lonesome … or sticking close to her and the young’uns.”

“You said them Blackfoot gone and ruin’t some of your plunder,” Isaac said. “How in blazes’d you fare ’thout them supplies what you’d get at ronnyvoo?”

He gazed at the two children playing in the grass beneath a great clump of willow. “We made out fine,” Bass said quietly. “High summer—when the beaver ain’t fit for a red piss—I packed up all I had and rode ’em over to the mouth of the Tongue.”

“Tullock’s fort?” asked Gray.

Titus nodded. “Van Buren. Me and Sam’l dickered and drank, then dickered some more. All in all, he’s a good man. That coon spent plenty of time trapping beaver his own self. Knows how it be to freeze your balls to catch poor plew. Tullock done the best by me his company would let him.”

Graham inquired, “He get all your fur last year?”

“Most. Even this summer I could trade it to the company here, or I could trade it to the company at Tullock’s Crow post. Don’t make me no differ’nce,” Scratch confided. “Only differ’nce is, this nigger sure missed his companyeros when he don’t come in for that ronnyvoo on the Popo Agie.”

“Weren’t much of a hurraw last summer,” Solomon grumbled.

Rufus agreed. “Lookee round you right here, goddammit. Ain’t much to ronnyvoo at all no more.”

“Drips come out from St. Louie with a small pack train last year,” Elbridge explained. “Had him no more’n two dozen carts an’ some seventy-five men.”

“Getting smaller and smaller ever’ year now,” Isaac grumped.

Titus stretched out his legs, his knees aching from those countless seasons spent submerged in freezing water. “That Scotsman feller, Stewart—he come out again last summer?”

Gray’s head bobbed. “Sartin sure did. Brung him out some others too. Had ’nother furrin-borned fella with him this time. Name of Sutter.^*That’un said he was setting his sights on making it all the way to the land of them Spanyards in California.”

Rufus Graham snorted with laughter. “It were funny to hear that li’l rip of a runt grumble and cuss with his funny talk! Why, don’t you know he went from camp to camp at ronnyvoo, trying to hire him an outfit of fellers to guide him on to California.”

“He have him any takers?” Scratch asked.

Rufus nodded. “A few hooked up with Sutter and give up on beaver.”

“You ’member how that li’l pecker called ’em all a bunch of robbers!” Solomon hooted. “He howled that all it seemed most fur men really wanted to do in California was rob churches, stealing cattle and horses!”

“More’n a handful signed on with Sutter leastways,” Elbridge said. “And Stewart brung out a pair of young fellers, just to make a trip west.”

“Either of them two hap to be a artist—maybeso that Miller fella he had with him couple years back?” Titus asked.

“Just peach-faced boys,” and Isaac shook his head solemnly. “Their papa sent ’em out to see the West.”

Itching the side of his cheek, Scratch asked, “Who’s their papa?”

“William Clark, of St. Louis,” Rufus answered. “Same one took that bunch all the way to the far ocean with Lewis back … oh, more’n thirty year ago now.”

“His two boys come out to see this country for themselves, I reckon,” Elbridge observed with a wry smile.

“I’ll bet ol’ man Clark sent his young’uns out here to see this here country the way it was when he come through here years ago,” Bass grumbled sourly. “See this country a’fore it ain’t no more.”

“Ain’t no more?” Rufus squealed.

“Lookit, boys—nigh onto ever’ summer we see’d missionaries coming to ronnyvoo, on their way west with their carts and wagons and milk cows,” Scratch declared grimly. “We see’d white women and Englishmen, Bible-thumpers and furriners … and for ever’ one of ’em come out here—there’s just a li’l less wild country left for the likes of you and me.”

The others fell silent for a few moments, thoughtful. Then Solomon said, “I recollect Scratch is right on that. Even more of them goddamned missionaries come through last summer too.”

“More?” Bass groaned.

Gray said, “Had four white women with ’em too.”

“Don’t s’prise me none,” Bass admitted.

“Even had us a li’l fun when one of them preachers married one of the company fellers to his Nez Perce woman.”

“Married her?” Bass said. “You mean like stand-up white folks, read-the-Bible married?”

Elbridge nodded enthusiastically. “Them Nepercy stood around stone-faced and quiet as church mice whilst that missionary said the proper words over ’em both.”

“Most off, I recollect how last year them clerks from St. Louis didn’t have a good word to say ’bout things back east,” Isaac explained. “They was grumping over how bad they was having it with furs.”

Simms went on to explain how the eastern hands who accompanied the caravan for that summer trip to the mountains and back were eager to describe just how gloomy the financial picture had become in the East. The Panic of Thirty-seven had the States in its grip. Money was tight, times were hard, trade goods were never more expensive, and beaver was falling fast.

“That ronnyvoo last summer no better’n this’un,” Bass said.

“Most fellers pretty down, that’s for sure, what with all them company clerks was telling ever’one,” Rufus explained. “Then we heard tell the company was so disgusted, they wasn’t gonna bring out no more trade goods. No more ronnyvoo.”

“Disgusted?” Titus repeated.

“Rumor was the company bosses tol’t Drips they wasn’t much happy with the mountain trade no more,” Elbridge took up the story. “They figgered maybeso to do it all from the fur posts.”

“Fur posts!” Titus squeaked in disbelief. “Won’t be no more ronnyvoo?”

Solomon said, “Ever’ year now more and more niggers give up trapping and ride off back east. That means there ain’t much beaver for them booshways no more.”

“What do Drips and Fontenelle fix to do if’n there ain’t no more mountain rendezvous?” Bass inquired.

“Fontenelle’s dead,” Elbridge disclosed. “I heard he died last year. Drips is the only one still running things in the mountains now.”

“He put Bridger out in the field with a strong brigade,” Rufus explained. “Joe Walker got ’nother outfit working for Drips. Damn if Walker didn’t come in to the Popo Agie last summer with a shit-load of Mexican horses. That was ’bout the best news the company got last summer. Needed them horses in a bad way.”

This was all so hard to comprehend. Right from Bass’s first year in the mountains, there had always been a summer rendezvous: a place to trade in his furs and barter for what he needed in possibles.

Titus wagged his head, unable to fathom it. “No more ronnyvoo?”

“But don’t you see?” Gray asked. “Drips ended up calling ever’one together and telling ’em the rumors was all wrong. Promised he’d be out here to Horse Crik this summer.”

Then Isaac said, “But the damage been done by the time Drips stomped on them rumors.”

“Damage?” Scratch asked.

“We heard tell of … maybeso a dozen fellers what listened to all them stories ’bout the company not having no more ronnyvoo,” Isaac continued. “Well, a few of them niggers slipped off from the Popo Agie ever’ night or so, taking their company traps and their company guns and their company possibles with ’em.”

“Ever’ last one of ’em running off with a good number of company horses too!” Rufus cried. “Ain’t never been so many deserters as there was last summer.”

Isaac said, “I s’pose it’s cuz no one was much for sure there’d be ’nother ronnyvoo.”

“Fact be, Drips says if we meet up next summer, he’ll show up here,” Elbridge explained. “Just this morning Drips got all the boys together and said Pierre Chouteau the younger back in St. Louis don’t know if he’ll send out another supply train next year—but if he does, it ought’n ronnyvoo with us right here where we been many times a’fore.”

“Damn if this all don’t take the circle!” Bass exclaimed in amazement. “Hard to reckon on them fellas stealing traps and possibles and horses from their brigades.”

Rufus shrugged in that easy way of his. “Man hears the company ain’t gonna be no more, I guess he reckons it’s time to take what he figgers is due him.”

“We … we even talked ’bout deserting our own selves last summer,” Solomon confessed.

“But we didn’t,” Elbridge stated firmly. “We signed on with the company to the end … and that’s damn well giving a man our solemn word. We ain’t none of us gonna steal from no man—not when we got our pride.”

“Makes a fella wonder,” Isaac ruminated, “what the hell we’re gonna do when the company tells us it don’t need us to trap its beaver no more.”

“Shit,” Bass growled as the others fell silent in the drone and buzz of busy insects. “From the looks of things—this here beaver business gone and sunk so low that white men even took to stealing from white men!”

* Swiss immigrant August Johann Sutter.