Bass had the fire punched now, so laid in the long piece of strap iron he was going to start forming into a spring for the first of those beaver traps he would fashion for Isaac Washburn, once more using the old square- jawed one of Hysham Troost’s he kept hanging from a nearby peg as his pattern. Not that he really needed to take it down and study it, measure it, see how things fit. In the last few years Titus had hammered together the springs and jaws, pans and triggers, to make some two hundred such traps. So despite how ragged his head treated him, this morning Bass eagerly went at the sooty work over the forge with a renewed relish, well before Hysham Troost strode through the door.
Titus asked the old trapper, “Tell me how come that partner of your’n didn’t come here to St. Louie to have a spree with you?”
Washburn straddled an anvil atop a huge stump that squatted on the far side of the forge and settled his rump, his eyes watching the red glow begin to bleed up long strips of iron Bass would soon begin hammering into the tempered trap springs. “Had him t’other affairs to see to.”
“And miss out on a spree with his partner?”
“Like I said—other ’fairs.”
“I s’pose he’s got him a gal stuck away someplace, likely,” Bass said, slipping on a pair of blackened leather gloves with short gauntlets.
“Ain’t got a thing to do with a woman,” Isaac said sourly.
“What sort of man miss out on good whiskey and white women when he finds himself this close to St. Louie?”
“Never did claim he got close to St. Louie at all.”
“Did I prick you in a sore spot, Isaac?” Titus asked, shoving the iron farther down into the glowing coals, then heaving on the bellows all the more. “Sounds to me like you don’t wanna talk ’bout him.”
“Ain’t him, rightly,” Washburn finally admitted. “It’s all that hurt an’ p’isen he’s been carrying round inside him for too long—gonna get hisself kill’t from it one day soon. Shit, he yest may well gone under by now.”
“Your partner?”
Isaac nodded. “I ain’t been partnered up with him long, just last few months, really. But ever since’t I knowed him, Glass been laughin’ danger square in the face for nigh onto a y’ar now.”
“Glass?”
“That’s his name. Claims he’s pertected by God, so he can do God’s work in taking him some revenge on them what left him for dead.”
“He was left for dead?”
“That’s him. The one I tromped through the last winter with, gettin’ to Fort Atkinson, floatin’ back down the Missouri to get here with what little I got left to my outfit.”
“How long you been in the mountains, in that upcountry, Isaac?”
Washburn visibly relaxed as his eyes stared out the half-open livery door where a cold, spring rain drizzled in gray sheets.
“Been over fifteen winters, Titus. Damn but that do feel like a long, long time. I fust come out of Albermarle County, Virginia, in 1805. Moseyed west into the Cumberland country. Didn’t come to St. Louie till the next y’ar, and by oh-seven I was hired on as engagee to Man-well Leeza. Was a big fur trader in these parts.”
“I heard tell of him a lot here’bouts.”
“He died not long back,” Washburn continued. “Fella named Pilcher took over the company now. Howsoever, I ain’t had a thing to do with it for some time.”
“You went upriver to trap beaver in oh-seven?”
With a bob of his head Washburn answered, reaching beneath his long beard to take out his pipe and some tobacco. “That black-ha’red Spanyard led us north that y’ar—the winter Antoine Bisonette deserted an’ Leeza sent George Drouillard to bring him back in, dead or alive.”
“Did he?”
“Did he what?”
“Bring him in?”
He looked at Titus as if he were talking to a stump. “Dammit to hell—he sure did. Bisonette was wounded so bad, he weren’t bound to live all that long. Leeza put him in a pirogue with two other fellers, sent ’em south back to St. Louie while’st we pushed on. Later we heerd Bisonette died. Didn’t matter—wasn’t many of us liked him or Drouillard neither one.”
“How far you make it up the Missouri?”
“Me and others—like that friend I come to know named Henry—we went and built Leeza’s post on the Yallerstone, mouth of the Bighorn. He called it Fort Raymond. Then some of us tramped on over to the Three Forks kentry.”
“Three Forks?”
“Three rivers what all tangle up and make the Missouri River, see? That’s Blackfeet kentry—mess of them devil’s whelps.”
With his tongs Titus pointed at Washburn’s greasy, blackened buckskins. “That where you come onto them there? Your outfit?”
He rubbed a hand down a thigh, fingers brushing the strip of porcupine quillwork in colors dulled over time by many dunkings in high-country streams and bleached beneath a merciless sun. “Got this off’n a Mandan woman, truth of it, Titus. She kept me warm one winter, while’st I kept her an’ her young’uns fed. These’r leggin’s lasted me some seasons, they have. Only had to patch ’em up from time to time, down at the bottom mostly, where I soak ’em in the criks and eventual’ the skin dries up an’ cracks.”
“Got them from that Mandan gal when you was up at the Three Forks?”
“Hell, no, I didn’t, ye consarned idjit!” he roared, rocking forward off his anvil and pulling his skinning knife out of the scabbard behind his hip. “Hyar, now—lemme show ye yest how stupid a nigger yer making yerself out to be.”
As Washburn went to his knees and began smoothing out sortie of the pounded clay floor, Titus stuffed the strip of iron back into the coals and gave the bellows another half-dozen hard heaves before he too went to his knees to hunker as close as he could while Washburn began drawing landmarks with the tip of his knife.
“These’r all along hyar—they the Rocky Moun-tanes. Hyar’s whar’ them three rivers tangle up to make the Missouri. All the way over hyar on the Missouri, them Mandans live in great wigwams made of earth. But back hyar is whar’ the Yallerstone comes in. Sometime later on my friend Henry was to put him a post right thar’. An’ on down hyar off the Yallerstone comes in the Bighorn. That’s whar’ Leeza had Henry build him a post to trade with them Crow.”
“The Injuns you told me ’bout last night.”
Washburn grinned. “Maybeso yer head weren’t all so comboobled up as I thort she was!” Using his knife, he pointed back down at his crude map. “Cain’t ye see how far Mandan kentry is from Blackfeet kentry?”
“Where’s Blackfeet land?”
He dragged the knife tip in a great, long oval that encompassed a good portion of the land he had just described.
Bass swallowed, shifting slightly onto another knee. “All that?”
“Don’t ye ever go an’ doubt it, Titus. Blackfeet hold them northern moun-tanes like they was their own. An’ them goddamned Rees hold the river like they owned it an’ ever’thing upriver from ’em too!”
“So you been up there, in all that country, since you went up with this Manuel Lisa back to 1807?”
“No, I ain’t been up there ever since, ye mule-headed id jit! Didn’t take long for them Blackfeet an’ Assiniboin to start whittling away at the first of us into that kentry. Some durn good men left their bones to bleach in the sun up that way. Rest of us turned tail an’ come easin’ back downriver in 1811. Already them British bastards was making it mighty hard for Americans to work the beaver kentry up north. They was a sneaky lot—still are, for my money. Come down from Canaydee—sellin’ them blood-suckin’ Injuns guns an’ powder, siccin’ ’em on Americans. That war we fought agin ’em didn’t help, didn’t help a tinker’s damn up thar’ in that north kentry.”
Washburn spoke the truth of it. By the time the War of 1812 had worn itself out and America had negotiated a border, along with some agreements regarding exploration and control of the fur trade in the far Northwest—the Hudson’s Bay Company already had consolidated everything west of the Rocky Mountains while the Northwest Company Nor’Westers had a firm hold on the entire upper Missouri country east of the continental divide. With the
