the breaking.
It struck Titus there by the rivers’ junction, now that he was here on the yonder side of the wide Missouri: he had been gone from home for almost as long as he had spent growing up in the house of his father. Considering, too, how Thaddeus Bass himself had known little else but the place where his father had set down roots before him. Yet, unlike Titus, never had Thaddeus desired to reach out, to explore, to search beyond what lay there in that small section of Boone County he plowed and planted. And that failure was something Thaddeus’s son could not fathom.
Staring down at the surface of the coffee in his cup, Titus wondered now about his family. How his pap had aged. How the intervening years might have marked his mam with gray and lines. His brothers and sister—they all were grown and would surely have families of their own now. Children carrying on the family cycle on the land.
And all he had to his name were these two hand-me-down horses, his guns, and the clothes on his back, along with what little else was packed on that mare.
A shadow flitted past him across the ground, startling him. He looked up in time to catch the crimson flutter of the cardinal as it disappeared among the timber north of his fire. So he smiled.
He might not own all that much, Titus decided as he stood and gazed into the west. For certain he sure as hell didn’t own much by most men’s standards.
But right now—he sensed he had all of that out yonder to call his very own.
*
4
The sheer size of the abandoned Indian camp was the first thing that struck him as he cautiously ventured in on foot, wary and watchful … having hidden the horses back downriver when he came across the first flurry of tracks.
But he found the village empty, deserted.
Now Bass could swallow down the lump of fear at last. His lungs felt as if he were taking his first breath in more than an hour. Titus forced his heart back down and finally emerged from the brush at the river’s edge to stare across the Platte at what some band of Pawnee had left behind. Then quickly he decided he’d best backtrack and fetch up the animals. No sense swimming the river on his own.
An hour later, dripping naked in the sun after another crossing, he dismounted on the north bank among the small rings of river stone he discovered near the center of each elliptical circle of pounded grass and hardened ground. For the most part the entire camp formed a great horseshoe, the horns of its crescent opening back to the east whence he had come.
Finding a good patch of grass near the trees along the bank, Bass ground-hobbled the horses and turned back to explore this wondrous, frightening place.
More than fifty circles and all that foot-pounded earth plainly showed where this band of Indians had camped for some time this spring. At the western extent of the site Titus came across the wide trail of tracks and pole scrapings that led off to the west. They were wandering upriver.
“Maybeso they move off come the summer,” he said quietly in the silence of that big country as he turned about and stepped back into the camp crescent itself.
Here the land lay painfully silent. As quiet as anything he had ever experienced in those eastern forests growing as thick as quills on a porcupine’s back, as those forests he had come to know flatboating down the great waters of the Ohio and Mississippi, or walking north along the Natchez Trace.
More than two weeks had passed now since he had given wide berth to the dragoons and their Fort Atkinson. The day before he came in sight of the distant stockade, Bass had run across more and more signs of man’s passing: shod hoof prints, the heel stamp of soldiers’ boots, the crude cut of a wagon’s iron tires slashing down into the fragile earth. Trail and scent and sign that warned he was drawing close enough to that cluster of white mankind.
Turning abruptly, Titus had pointed his nose to the west—intending to ride two, maybe three days at the most in a roundabout to give himself plenty of room around the soldier post. But late that second day after cautiously leaving the Missouri behind and striking out overland, he was surprised when his westward path brought him right into a great, wide loop in the Platte River itself before it eventually gentled him back to the north. Surprised was he to discover as well that so shallow a river could enjoy such a formidable reputation among those frontiersmen who returned to St. Louis—men like Isaac Washburn.
Had the old trapper been yanking on his leg with all his bawdy tales of everything being bigger, or faster, or just plain wilder out here in the great beyond? Or dare he consider that he had not yet reached the Platte, that this was some minor river? Yet something innate within him told Titus he could not be mistaken on it—fact was that the big dragoon’s post did lay at the mouth of the Platte.
Shallow indeed, yet every bit as wide here as Washburn had claimed. So for the first time that afternoon, Titus had looked off to the west, gazing toward the river’s far source away yonder among the distant, yet unseen mountains that gave birth to these waters. On the south bank he had knelt in the mud and grass beside the river, cupped his hands, and pulled forth a little of that mountain water. Bass looked down into it with something bordering on reverence, then brought it prayerfully to his lips.
As silt laden as it was, how much sweeter did it taste knowing he was that much closer to those high mountain snows giving birth to these waters! He drank his fill that day before turning west along the south bank of the river he knew would one day deliver him to the buffalo country, the great course of the Platte that allowed a man to pierce the kingdom of black, shaggy beasts Washburn guaranteed him ruled a great, rolling wilderness out there. How good its taste lay upon his tongue, this water from the Platte that was really all the more than a river: a magical road that would lead him to and through the buffalo ground, then ultimately deliver him to the high and terrible places few if any had ever seen.
Following the south bank another few days, Bass found the river led him back in a huge, sweeping curve to the south of west. Damn! but these western rivers could confuse and exasperate a man, he brooded. Every bit as disconcerting as a fickle woman who could turn back on herself just as soon as a man began to think he had her figured out!
First he had followed its bank into the west. Then the Platte led him north. And now it was wandering off to the south. And after all this meandering, just where in hell were those mountains that gave birth to this river, after all? A part of him prayed again that Washburn wasn’t as crazed as Hysham Troost had warned Titus the aging fur trapper would prove himself to be.
Oh, the many times he had yearned to strike out due west, leaving the Platte behind—resenting himself for having to depend on the river, forced to rely on a dead man’s guarantee. Now that he had come to stand beside this fabled Platte himself, he had no reason not to believe he shouldn’t catch his first glimpse of the mountains rising just beyond the next stand of hills. If not them, perhaps those hills just beyond.
Indeed, Titus had left the hardwood forests behind some days back, emerging almost of a sudden onto a plain where he reined up, then slowly dropped from the saddle to stand in utter awe at the rolling immensity of what lay before him. From that point on it was clear the trees no longer grew in great mats of thick, meandering forest blanketing hillside and valley alike. Instead, the green lay in clusters dotting the great tableland, confined to pockets and ravines wrinkling the countryside, the emerald-green vegetation for the most part tracing the path of streams and creeks and what narrow, gurgling rivers fed the flat, shallow expanse of the Platte itself.
At that night’s fire Titus had sensed he had just crossed an even more indelible border than was the barrier of the Missouri River itself. Oh, with his own sixteen-year-old eyes he had marveled as the great eastern forests had given way to rolling delta while the riverboat crew steered their craft past the Walnut Hills and old Fort Mc- Henry, floating down the lower reaches of the Mississippi. Yet, for the most part, the immense trees and timbered forests still predominated those riverbanks and the high bluffs where great-winged birds took flight from wide, stately branches bedecked with long gray beards of Spanish moss.
But out here the trees no longer grew as tall, no more were their trunks as big around. No more did he recognize the familiar leaf of the elm, the maple, the varieties of oak. Almost as if this harsh and difficult land
