certain the spirits of those few old wanderers still followed the ancient trails of a bygone time, trails once pounded by the hooves of the long-gone buffalo. Every bit as sure was he that the spirit of his very own grandpap had picked up and moved away from the ground that the man had come and settled upon in his youth, the land where Titus himself had been born and raised, the ground it seemed Thaddeus Bass would farm until the day he was buried beneath its thick, cold, loamy blanket. There at last his father’s soul would be at rest beneath the ground where he had labored his whole life through.
So unlike his grandpap’s own restless spirit cast out to dance on the wind: forever wandering in the wake of the west-seeking buffalo. That spirit never to find its rest until it had journeyed far enough to discover that mystical place where the sun laid its head at night, out there beyond the farthest reach of man’s most westward settlement. That old man’s spirit never to find peace until at long, long last it one day reached the land where the buffalo ruled.
Generations ago new settlers come to the canebrakes and the Cumberland had scared off and driven away what buffalo the Indians hadn’t yet killed. Yet with an unnamed certainty buried there in the core of him, Titus somehow knew the buffalo existed—out there, somewhere still. Undoubtedly it was a realm far enough away from the white settlers and town builders, well beyond all the school benches and church spires and small-town mercantiles, a land far gone, where those great mythical animals could at last wander free, every bit as free as the spirits of those who hunted for that faraway land where the buffalo reigned.
One day, perhaps. One day.
Four more frosty nights and four more grueling days later, as the sky wept a drizzle from low clouds, Bass stood silently staring down at the smooth gray river rock the Grinder family had heaped over an otherwise unmarked grave dug back in the woods no more than a few steps away from their roadside inn. All any of the three boatmen knew was the dead man’s name. Only that—along with how he and another had taken a Corps of Discovery west to the far ocean, crossing the high mountains and fighting raging rivers in the process, returning home in triumph and adulation in 1806. Story was that about a year ago in the fall of 1809 Meriwether Lewis had begun his journey east along the Natchez Trace.
“He come in here on that awful October night,” the elder Grinder loved to regale travelers with the hoary tale, pounding a fist into an open palm, “none of us knowing he ’tended to kill hisself right here and then.”
Here beneath this pile of cold, rain-washed river rock lay the final resting place of that daring young wanderer who had pointed the way west for Thomas Jefferson’s brave young country.
“Ol’ Grinder says the man shot hisself in the head—but didn’t do all that good a job,” Ovatt repeated the story now as they all stood beside the cairn, paying their respects. “So he called out, begging others to finish him ’cause he knew just how hard he was to kill.”
“How’d a man like him ever come to wanna take his own life?” Root asked. “Ever’ time I come up this here road and spend the night at Grinder’s Stand since it happened, it fair gives me the willies. Like I feel the man’s ghost hanging on round here.”
“A troubled soul perhaps,” Beulah replied.
“Maybeso he’d already been across’t them far mountains and out to the great ocean beyond it all,” Kingsbury attempted to explain, “so likely he figured there was nothing left for him to see. Gone and seen it all. I s’pose a man like that figures it’s just as well to snuff out his own candle.”
“Gotta hand him that,” Ovatt replied. “When there ain’t no more to see, maybe you’re right, Hames—no sense in going on, taking up room.”
With the clang of the iron gong suspended from the Grinders’ porch calling them to supper, Titus watched the others turn away from the grave, Kingsbury leading the rest back down the gentle slope to the gathering of squat cabins where they could take refuge from the drizzle and suffer the Grinder woman’s distasteful cooking. In moving off, Hezekiah looked back over his shoulder, stopped, then returned to stand quietly beside Bass at the cairn.
“You g’won now and get yourself something to eat,” he quietly told the slave.
“Folks ain’t gonna feed me with them others,” the slave said, wagging his head. “I’ll stay till you come down. We eat together.”
With a sigh Bass turned slowly. “I’m finished here, done trying to sort out why he done it.”
“Maybeso he was kill’t.”
His face rose as did the realization. Bass stared into Hezekiah’s yellowed eyes.
The slave continued. “Folks like them …”
“The Grinders?”
With a nod Hezekiah went on, “They just might’n figure a feller like this’un be carry him lots of money. ’Portant man like him allays got lots of money.”
While it seemed so far-fetched, Hezekiah’s explanation seemed probable at the same time. Bass replied sullenly, “So they kill’t him for it.”
“Then their kind go an’ bury the man ’fore anyone come round asking questions,” Hezekiah replied.
Wagging his head, Titus slowly shuffled away from that low pile of rock. “I ain’t hungry no more.”
Feeling as if his belly trapped a cold stone, Bass grappled with the greed and avarice of those he had encountered—whether it was pirates on the river or highwaymen haunting the Trace, or even the insatiable greed of stand owners like the Grinders.
Just what was it that made such men hunger after money more than love, more than adventure, more than happiness? Why did most men look for security in a full purse, while but a few searched for contentment beyond themselves in a land yet unseen? He laid his hand across the waistband of his britches as he watched the others take their pewter trenchers from one of the Grinder sons and stand at the stove while the old woman ladled out their supper. Perhaps the meaning of life came down to choosing gold, or the journey.
If need be, he decided, his would be the journey. Like his grandpap before him, he could live without the gold. His spirit must dance on the wind.
The next day they forded the Duck River at Gordon’s Ferry, now come eighty miles from Colbert’s Ford and the ambush by the Tennessee River. Another two nights in the wilderness of the Barrens brought them to the Big Harpeth River, where they slept in crude sheds erected near the house of the last American full-blood white man known to have lived between there and Natchez itself.
“We’re less’n thirty miles from Nashville,” Kingsbury explained as darkness came down like a cold, sodden blanket. “Place folks once called French Lick.”
It was there at Nashville they left the Natchez Trace and pushed on to the northeast, following a trail that left behind the Cumberland River, their feet plying a path long ago blazed by boatmen returning to the Ohio River country. From there they pushed into the highlands of Kentucky, fording the Great Barren River, then the Green. At each crossing they stripped off what they could, tying it up into tight bundles they carried over their heads, thereby allowing themselves something warm to pull on once they reached the far shore, where they built a fire and drove off the chill the winter sky was whipping overhead.
Then on to Nolins Creek and Elizabethtown. Beyond there few miles remained before they crossed the icy Salt River, drawing close to Louisville and the mighty Ohio itself. Come nearly a thousand miles through the wilderness by wagon, foot, and horseback.
“More land getting cleared every trip,” Heman Ovatt grumbled as they passed a growing number of settlers’ cabins the closer they drew to the bustling riverfront town.
“Folks cutting down the forest for corn and wheat,” Kingsbury replied.
“There’s more’n enough forest to go around,” Reuben Root argued. He swung his arm in an arc. “Lookit all this! You really figure they’ll ever cut down all of these?”
“Settlers gone and drove off most of the critters,” Bass said acidly. “I figure the trees just might be next to go.”
“Sounds to be you’re still nursing on sour milk over them buffalo,” Kingsbury said.
Root agreed. “Yeah—an’ you ain’t never see’d a buffalo neither.”
“Don’t need to,” Titus said, “to know they been drove off—gone out yonder someplace.”
“That where you’re fixing to take him?” Kingsbury asked, thumbing a gesture at Hezekiah.
“Ain’t taking him nowhere with me,” Bass replied. “He ain’t mine no more.”
“Then you must figure on setting him free?” Root inquired.
“Like I said I was.”
“Ain’cha got no use for a Negra?” Ovatt asked.
