that autumn. Every few days they would move on to camp by a new stream—there to find more dams or lodges, to discover where the beaver felled tracts of the forest, gnawing the timbered meadows into nothing more than flooded ponds dotted with hundreds of aspen stumps.
That first morning at each camp found the ten of them fanning out in three directions to spend the day searching for any sign of man in that country—hoping not to discover sign of an enemy. Eyes along the skyline, and eyes on the backtrail. Close enough here to the Arapaho, who might raid out of the south, and close enough to the Blackfoot, who were known to come riding out of the north.
Once assured that the nearby countryside was untraveled, the ten fell into their routine of eating, sleeping, trapping, stretching, and scraping. Morning and night an autumn fire felt especially good to these men who haunted this high land as winter threatened on the horizon—a fire to hunker close to on those coldest of days, for there was always work to be done in fall camp.
If not repicketing the pack animals out to graze or riding the saddle horses to keep them exercised, there was always the nonstop scraping and stretching of the hides. If it weren’t a matter of repairing a saddle or bridle or some other piece of tack, then a man might find he needed to mend a sore hoof or perhaps even the bloody wound caused when one pony nipped at another in the cavvyyard. Now was the season when the men closely inspected the back and ribs of every one of their work animals—treating the saddle sores and cinch ulcers from summer’s long travels with what herbs and roots they had come to know would draw out the poisons, applying poultices that healed the flesh not only of beast but of man as well.
Yet as autumn turned inward on its shortening days and slid headlong into winter, it could become a sad time for a mountain trapper finding himself with less and less work to do now that camp was rarely moved through the deep snow, now that most of the beaver in the nearby country were already caught. In that leisure a man surely had himself more time to reflect and remember, to fondly recollect last summer’s rendezvous here at a time when he must also ready himself for the long, ofttimes lonely, and idle winter … until spring temperatures finally freed the frozen streams, prodding the trapper back to his hard labors that would take him from valley floor on up to the high and terrible places: once more to spend his days wading up past his knees in icy water, searching out those sleek- furred rodents that were the commerce and currency of this far country.
“Who was it learn’t ye to trap, Titus Bass?” Hatcher had asked him one of those glorious late-fall afternoons before Scratch wandered away from camp, just as the others had come to expect of him: off to watch the sun settling south of west.
“Ain’t nobody learn’t me,” he had replied, then gazed down at his own hands he turned palms and backs. “Just these—seems my hands damn well learn’t all on their own.”
“Not them three fellas you wintered up with?” asked Caleb Wood.
For a moment he had gazed into the mesmerizing dance of the flames—thinking back on all that the three
“They learn’t me, sure enough,” Bass finally answered, the reflection of the flames dancing across his bearded face. “But not ’bout trapping. Truth be, I was better’n all of ’em—damn near good as all of ’em put together too.”
“Shit, if that ain’t a bald-face!” Isaac Simms snorted in disagreement. “How you gonna be better’n three trappers?”
“Whoa, hoss!” Hatcher declared. “Just look at what this nigger’s brung in already.” He was pointing for the rest to regard Bass’s growing packs of fur. “If’n it weren’t that every last one of ye was pure punkins at laying a set—Ol’ Scratch here just might have any three of ye beat at that!”
“Man does bring in the beaver, he does,” Rufus Graham grudgingly admitted.
“So what’s yer secret, Scratch?” inquired the rail-thin John Rowland.
With a slight shrug Titus replied, “Don’t know my own self, Johnny-boy. All I know is that I hadn’t been out here all that long when I come to callate that what I learn’t back there across the Big Muddy wouldn’t do me no good out here in this land. None of what I knowed back there was gonna hold me in good stead on the far prerra, not up in them high places. Not a damn bit of what folks learn on the other side of the river gonna do any of us a good goddamn anymore.”
That autumn sunset as he had leaned his back against the trunk of a lodgepole pine and tracked the pale globe’s slow descent from the sky, he brooded some more on all that he had come to know, on what he had learned across those seasons he had managed to survive since leaving St. Louis all by his lonesome, on his own hook. And in all that time Bass had come to clearly understand that if anything could come natural to a man, then he had come natural to this nomadic trapper’s life. Just as the rivers came natural to Ebenezer Zane and Hames Kingsbury, how plowing at the ground came natural to his own pap and others of his kind.
When a man’s clearly not cut of the right cloth for something—he best find what he is cut out for.
As the saffron orb settled its fiery ring on the tops of the distant trees, Scratch thanked whatever force was listening right then … thanked that power in his own way for holding Titus Bass up in the palm of its hand and thereby bringing him out of that land of the east, keeping him safe as he crossed the open danger of the plains and prairie—eventually to deliver him up before this great snowcapped altar that that same powerful force had long ago erected here, right at the foot of an endless dome of sky. Here where the temple spires scratched at the underbellies of the clouds.
Here—where there were no monuments to man, no puny steeples and church belfries—only what monuments the unseen hands and powers and forces at work all around him had created.
So once more Bass felt small … so very, very small in watching the sun disappear behind the trees, there beyond those granite towers of the Wind River Mountains—so far overhead no trees dared grow. In this most private, spiritual moment at the end of each day Bass had learned to expect the coming of that crushing silence at the instant twilight determined the first stars would peek through from heaven. It was the very same silence that each evening caused him to rewonder when he would come to know just what force it was that was so much greater than himself.
When would he know it with the certainty of Fawn, the Ute widow with those eyes of ageless sadness? When was he to sense in his own heart all that the old, blind Shoshone shaman sensed in his? How long, Titus wondered, would he have to go on not knowing? How long until he, like that ancient one, could touch the pale hide of a white buffalo calf and finally hear the answer reverberate within his heart?
How long would it take until he understood what the wrinkled old men had accepted—what had truly given them real peace?
Here Scratch stood in that winter forest, the boisterous singing and Hatcher’s scratchy fiddle only faint wisps on the Tight breeze that bitter morning … the first of a shiny new year by Caleb Wood’s careful count made on notched sticks he carried in a bundle tucked away in a saddlebag—a brand-new year for them all here in the heart of the winter, ten free men living out their days deep in the marrow of the Rocky Mountains.
Maybeso, he decided, autumn wasn’t the season he could expect to discover what he wanted most to know. After all, in autumn a man was still too damned busy to allow himself enough quiet to really hear. There were beaver to be caught, distance to be covered, cold to prepare one’s self for.
More likely, Scratch thought, he would come to know his answers come a winter. Perhaps … even this winter. A time when life itself slowed, when the spin of days wound down and like thick black-strap molasses everything barely moved ahead at such a leisurely pace that a man was allowed time to rightfully consider and plan and to give thanks for what he has been given.
From what Scratch had come to know, for most trappers winter was a time to hunker by the fire, swapping lies, carefully embellishing and embroidering their stories of coups and conquests. A time when a man did just what the Injuns did: gathered close to the fires in their lodges, doing their best to stay warm and keep their bellies filled till spring. During that long period of endless cold, there simply wasn’t much reason for a man to ride his horses the way he did during the hunt for beaver or his annual trek to rendezvous—a fact that meant that come spring, a man’s animals would most likely be rangy, feisty, all but back to wild mustangs again. There’d come a time just before spring trapping began when a man would have to break his pony to saddle all over. But Scratch had never been one to allow that to happen.
Here in his third winter, just as he had done for both of those before, from time to time Bass would ride his
