Louie!”
As the men slipped to the ground, the horses and mules began switching their tails and flicking their ears all the more. One by one the trappers began to slap at the back of a hand, swatted their neck or cheek—some tender and exposed domain of juicy flesh.
Graham quit removing his saddle, his hands on the cinch. “Dammit, Hatcher—I say we find us a better camp!”
“Skeeters bound to eat us up alive!” Gray agreed.
“Ye two just get the fire started,” Jack commanded. “Smear some goober on—then haul out our sack of buffler wood.”
“Why us?” Graham grumped, swatting at the insects buzzing right at the end of his nose.
“It’s your night to tend fire, ain’t it?” Caleb asked.
As he watched Rufus and Elbridge turn back to their packs, Bass stepped up to Hatcher, swatting at those tormentors that hovered around his face. “What’s this goober?”
“Some calls it milk,” Fish replied.
“Same thing,” Hatcher stated. He reached for the cherrywood vial hanging on his belt, untied it, and removed the antler stopper before he brought it beneath Scratch’s nose.
“That’s beaver bait!” Titus exclaimed, making a face and scrunching up his nose with the awful tang.
“Damn right it is,” Hatcher said, pouring a little of the thick milky-white substance into the palm of one hand. “That’s the goober a man puts on where he don’t want no skeeters biting at him.”
In surprise Bass watched Jack, then Solomon and the others in the group, all busy themselves with smearing the potent, rancid, smelly discharge on their exposed flesh: face, neck, backs of hands—everywhere the mosquitoes might be tempted to land and begin their biting torment.
“Best ye try some skeeter medicine,” Hatcher suggested. “Where’s yer bait?”
“In my plunder. Hell if I’d figger to need it till we was setting traps.”
Caleb asked, “Don’t skeeters trouble you none?”
“Damn right they do!” Bass replied. “I just allays done my best to kill as many of ’em as I could.”
“Here,” Jack said, handing his bait bottle over to Titus. “Get that there smeared on ye, and quick, afore them critters ea’cha alive! We’ll have us a buffler-wood fire going soon enough to take care of most o’ them pesky varmits. G’won—do it, ye stupid idjit—or yer bound to be pure misery by morning.”
Reluctantly Titus took the cherrywood vial from Jack, its antler stopper hanging by a narrow thong from the neck of the bottle. Trying to hold his breath, Bass poured a little of the thick goo into a palm and brought it to his cheek. Wrinkling his nose and breathing through his mouth so he would not have to smell the stench, Scratch smeared the substance over his forehead, cheeks, down his throat and the back of his neck.
“Gonna need more’n that, ain’t he, Jack?” Wood suggested.
“Lather that goober on, Scratch,” Hatcher declared. “Gots to be enough to drive them skeeters off!”
The nauseating repellent came from two glands that lay just beneath the skin near the hindquarters of the beaver. That castoreum was valued almost as highly as the animal’s pelt itself. Milking each of the glands from trapped beaver into his bait bottle, the trapper used the thick whitish castoreum to draw even more beaver to future trap-sets. It was that scent of an unknown rival that brought the curious, jealous, or territorial-guarding beaver to its iron-jawed fate.
“Do like Jack told-you,” Caleb instructed as the rest of the band went about unsaddling the animals and making camp. “Smear that beaver milk on good.” He started away on camp chores himself. Long in torso and short in leg, Wood was a man who swayed so much when he walked that from behind, it looked as if he hobbled.
By the time Bass finished smearing his skin good, he found he could better tolerate the stink, almost enough to stand being around himself. Jamming the antler stopper back into the bait bottle, he took it over to Hatcher. Jack squatted next to Joseph Little, who sat propped against a tree, not looking good at all.
“Thankee, Scratch.” Hatcher took the bottle from Titus, opened it, and began to smear some on Little’s face. “Joe here says he ain’t feeling too pert. Mebbeso yer belly’s all bound up.”
“Ain’t … ain’t my belly,” Little said, his glassy, fevered eyes half-open as Hatcher smeared goober on his mottled, grayish face.
“Gotta be what it is, Joe,” Jack said. “Yer hide feels to be burning up. And yer wet as hell with fever.”
“I been sweating like this near all day, Jack,” Little replied with a hoarse rasp. It was clear he was scared. “What you think it be?”
“Don’t have me no idee,” Hatcher answered, flicking Bass a questioning look. “But I’m sure it ain’t nothing to fret yerself over.”
Titus shrugged slightly as he knelt beside the two. The moment he touched Little’s mottled cheek, he pulled his fingers back, alarmed at the heat of the man’s fever. Little’s skin looked pale, almost translucent, save for the reddish splotches dotting his face and neck.
“He ever get sick like this afore?” Bass inquired.
“N-never,” Little answered for himself. “You g-get me some water? One of y’?”
Scratch got to his feet and hurried off to fetch a kettle. By the time he returned from the nearby stream, having walked through clouds of buzzing tormentors, Hatcher had Little dragged over near the fire pit where Gray and Graham had their kindling going-well enough to begin work with what the mountain trapper called “buffalo wood.” Each took a dried buffalo chip from the rawhide sack where the band of free trappers stored this precious commodity, breaking the chips into small pieces, which they patiently fed to the flames.
“Here, ye feed him some water, Scratch,” Hatcher stated as he stood. “I’ll haul over his blankets and we’ll get ’im covered up.”
Little protested, pulling at his own damp shirt, struggling to get the sticky buckskin off his arms, over his head, as if he were suffocating in it. He muttered feverishly, “Goddammit! Cain’t y’ idjits see I’m burning up! Don’t want no damned blankets!”
“Brung you some water—like you asked me,” Bass said, holding out a cup to Little.
With his sweat-soaked shirt still crumpled over one shoulder and at his neck, Joe snatched the cup away like a man gone four days in the desert without a drink. His shaking hands brought it to his lips, where he managed to spill more than he drank before handing it back to Bass for more. He drank and drank, cup by cup from the kettle, and while he did, Scratch noticed the tiny red mounds there beneath Little’s arms every time the man raised them to gulp from the tin cup. Far more of the same small, angry welts dotted the pale flesh near his belt line.
“Jack?” Scratch tried to say without alarm.
When Hatcher had resettled beside Scratch at Little’s side, Titus said, “You got any idee what them be?”
“These here red spots?” Joe asked instead, looking down at his own belly. “I got more.” He tugged back his belt where the breechclout hung and the buckskin leggings were tied.
“Damn,” Hatcher said under his breath. “Ye know what them is, don’cha, Joe?”
“They was t-ticks,” Little replied, his eyes half-closed as he keeled over to the side wearily, propping his head on an elbow.
As Scratch dragged over another blanket and put it beneath Little’s head, Jack inquired, “Ye telling us ye knowed they was ticks?”
“Yup.”
“What happen’t to them ticks, Joe?” Jack asked.
Slowly wagging his head, Little answered, “I got rid of ’em. All over me. But I got rid of ’em.”
“How?” Hatcher demanded, his voice growing in volume and alarm. “How’d ye get rid of ’em?”
“P-pulled ’em out,” Little said, quaking with a sudden tremor. He drew his legs up fetally, groaning. “Now, g’won and lemme sleep some. I’m tired and cold.”
Jack pulled the blanket over Little’s shoulders, then motioned Bass to follow as he got to his feet. When the two of them stopped some yards away, the others came up to join them in a hushed circle.
“Something he et?” John Rowland asked.
“Ticks.”
Several of them turned and looked at the quaking figure lying huddled in the blankets beside the fire.
“He’ll go under, won’t he, Jack?” Caleb asked.
It took a moment before he answered; then Hatcher said, “I ’spect he will.”
