of the coins. “Meaning it’s only a thing. Nothing magic about it. Don’t make this money I won more than it is, young people. You’ll be doing yourselves a great shame if you ever make money more than it really is.”
The big farmer asked, “What is it, then, if not a wondrous thing to have?”
“Ah, money can be a wondrous thing only when it lets you reach for what you want most. Money ain’t nothing in and of itself, you see. Only importance comes from how it keeps you going after your dream.”
“So money’s important, after all,” Titus concluded with a nod of his head.
“No,” Levi said quickly. “The only thing important is your dream.”
“So what’s yours, Levi Gamble?” asked one of those at the fire.
He looked up at the canopy of stars. “Those faraway rivers where the beaver pelts are so big they say a man can sleep under one of a winter’s night.”
“A blanket beaver?”
Gamble nodded to the farmer. “Aye. To lay eyes for myself on that land Manuel Lisa spoke of in the quiet tones a man uses when he’s speaking of something religious.”
“This Lisa claim he found him God out there?” snorted one of the older men at the fire, who spoke up for the first time.
With a grin Levi replied, “Perhaps he has, the way he talked. The way he told me come west to St. Louie and he’d put me to work that next season when his boats pushed upriver.”
Titus leaned forward anxiously. “You’ll go?”
“Aye—I will at that.”
“What’s those places you’re going?” Titus asked dreamily.
Gamble turned sideways on his stump to look at the youth. “Magic names, young Mr. Bass. Rivers called the Yallerstone. Another one Lisa built a post on called the Bighorn. Said there’s wild sheep out there in the hills, and the males get horns so long, they wrap right back around on themselves in a curl.”
“Pure poppycock!” someone spouted, and others guffawed.
Levi held up a hand. “Lisa and them as was with him swore by it when I told ’em I doubted all they told me, the size of animals and such. Claim everything’s much, much bigger out there in that big, big country.”
“Like what?” Titus asked.
“Take any critter. The deer, sure. But they got one Lisa called a elk. Big as a milk cow, with a rack o’ horns on his head would cover a dining table at a country inn.”
“The man’s daft, and he pumped you up with his wild stories!”
“No,” Levi told the doubters. “There’s bear out there the likes of nothing we seen here in these eastern forests. Said there’s some called silvertips. What some call grizzlies. Stand half again as tall as a man on their hindquarters. Claws a good six inches long tear the heart out of a elk or rip a man’s arm off in one swipe!”
Amy leaped back as Gamble’s arm suddenly swung in a great arc toward Titus, his fingers stiffened into the curve of imaginary claws.
Bass did not flinch at Levi’s frightful pantomime. Steady and sure, he asked, “What other critters out there what’s big?”
Gamble stared into the youth’s eyes for a moment, then answered, “Lisa told me ’bout buffalo, bigger’n a cow an’ a elk an’ a grizzly too.”
Titus whispered huskily, “My grandpap tol’t me ’bout buffalo.”
The tall woodsman held out his arms wide. “A great and shaggy animal.” Then put his crooked fingers on either side of his head. “Big black horns they scrape and keep shiny for to do battle when it comes time for the rut each year. Thick fur from the top of their head back across a big hump on their shoulders. Seems they crowd together in herds a man likely couldn’t walk through in a hull day.”
“This Lisa and his boys ever try that?”
Gamble looked across the fire at the farmer. “No, they didn’t say they ever did.”
“Poppycock stories!”
“No, listen,” Gamble said. “They saw ’em, great herds of ’em. Saw ’em with their own eyes as they was pushing north on the Missouri River.”
One man wagged his head and commented dryly, “Just hard for me to believe there’d really be such a critter, and so damned many of ’em.”
“We ain’t none of us never see’d any back here,” claimed another.
“I heard talk once, long back,” an old man spoke up for the first time, “used to be a woods buffler in this country.”
“Must’ve been long back,” the man’s grandson replied.
“Surely was,” the old one continued. “But there was always talk that a critter even bigger lived on west. Talk was we killed off all them woods buffler in this country, but folks said we’d likely never kill off all them big critters out yonder.”
“If Manuel Lisa and his men are right,” Levi added, “folks’ll never make a dent in their numbers.”
“Buffalo.”
Gamble turned back to young Bass. “That’s right, Titus. Buffalo. Biggest thing on four legs God ever made for this country.”
“A man walk all day and not get through a herd of ’em.”
Levi nodded. “For six days running, Lisa told me, they was pushing upriver, poling and warping their keelboats past just one herd. Six hull days it took ’em.”
“So that’s where you’re headed, Levi? To see them buffalo?”
He wagged his head. “I’m going for the beaver, Titus. To see for myself those mountains and them rivers a’foam with melting snow. Rivers so muddied up they’re gobblin’ away at their banks, chewing trees right outta the ground in one bite and drowning buffalo by the thousands every spring. It’s them rivers I gotta see me afore I die. And trust me, fellas—Levi Gamble being tied down to one place is a fate wuss’n dying.”
Titus asked, “What your father do in Emsworth?”
“He’s a blacksmith. Like his papa before him, an’ before him too.”
“So you learned the family trade?” asked one of the older men.
With an affirmative nod Gamble said, “A good thing too: I don’t recommend nary a man going west what can’t do some simple blacksmithing work.”
“True, true,” was the assent of most.
“Not just to repair his traps, but to care for his guns as well.”
The moon-faced farmer commented, “Out across the Missouri a man is going to be too durned far from the settlements, from the help of those he’s used to counting on to help.”
Turning then to Titus, Gamble said gravely, “From all what them upriver men told me when they come through Pittsburgh, it takes much more’n just good shooting to make your mark out yonder to the far west.”
“I imagine so,” the big farmer echoed the general sentiment. “Out there a man’s bound to be all on his own.”
“Most times he’s got no other to call on but his own self,” Levi replied.
“Not a lot of folks, neither—I wouldn’t imagine,” an old gray-head commented. “Not a lot of
The big farmer guffawed at that and slapped his hand down on his knee. “Farther west a man goes, I’ve heard—less an’ less civilization there be to count on.”
“For some of us,” Gamble replied, “maybe we’re just looking to get someplace where there’s a little less of that civilization to close in around us.”
“Hell, son,” declared the oldest man there at the fire, “all a feller has to do is get a mile away from any of these here farms, back into the woods, up into the hills … and he’s as far away from civilization as any man needs.”
“When’d you come here, mister?” Gamble asked the gray-head.
“Come here myself back when I was a tad. Seventeen and fifty-three. We took this ground from the Injuns. Held on to it against the French, and agin them Englishmen too when we was through with the crown saying we had to do this, a king saying we had to do that.”
Levi Gamble leaned forward, the fire’s light leaping across his face in a moving dance. Bass leaned forward too as the tall woodsman began to speak in soft tones, something wistful, almost a whisper that emerged from
