when he could recall wanting company so badly that … that it hurt more than he cared to remember.
Just as he was fleeing all the hold the east had on him, so was Titus attempting to escape that need in him to depend upon others, that loneliness so keen it often caused him great pain. So it was he realized he needed to keep his mind out of those dark places that made him long for any of what had been abandoned back there, to yearn for any of those left behind.
Those days seeped one into the next like the spring storms that he watched approaching out of the west, clouds tumbling one over the other as they drew nigh—clouds gone white to gray and gray to black. Yet despite the storms, each new day the air warmed that much more, and the land gently rose beneath him.
One morning birthed so clear, so quiet, the entire prairie seemed a bell jar of silence—no other living thing in sight but him and the two horses, no birds above nor four-legged critters bounding off through the tall, waving grass, no stir of life down among the water courses that lay in the land-wrinkles lying against the sides of every hill.
For the life of him, it appeared the country was changing, evolving again. Not near as abruptly as the land had converted itself from thick forest to open plain where the trees clustered here and there only … but as he turned to gaze back, he was all the more sure the land now became something unto itself. Land only now, denied of forests and thick stands of timber. Forgotten by all but the hardiest of narrow streams and shallow rivers. Cast here essentially alone beneath the great pale-blue dome of sky, the land came to exist of and for itself. Beyond him the hills rolled up in the distance to abruptly become striated bluffs topped with the waving feathers of the tall grass. He felt himself shrinking in all that vastness—this sudden compression suffered here beneath the endlessness of the sky as it and the land stretched on and on, and on.
Like nothing he had ever seen before back there. Like nothing he could have prepared himself for.
The infinite quality of it permeated him all the more because his pace seemed so agonizingly slow when measured against the vastness of the landscape. There were days when it felt as if he had barely moved from morning get-up, coffee and breakfast, until he chose a campsite that night where he curled up in blankets as the stars winked into view overhead. For more than two weeks now he put at least twenty-five, sometimes more than thirty, miles behind him in a day. Yet in country such as this, that sort of travel often left a man to turn around and look back upon reaching his evening’s camp—able to see some feature of the land that showed where he had crawled from his bed that very morning.
So open and without borders was this kingdom. So utterly vast that few landmarks really existed. Little was there beyond the Platte and the endless river bluffs to excite his attention, to prick his interest. Then the land became monotonous enough to lull him to sleep in the saddle as the pony gentled him west, always keeping the south bank of the muddy, meandering Platte in sight. From time to time he would open his eyes into slits, staring off this way and that to assure that he was the only thing moving in all that vastness, then let his eyelids droop once more as he continued to rock in that old saddle he had repaired for Isaac Washburn.
The afternoon was aging a handful of days later—the sun fallen enough that it had just slipped beneath the brim of his hat to where it scoured his face as it continued its descent into the west. He had been dozing lightly, off and on mostly, as the pony’s gait kept him nestled in sleep.
Yet now he awoke, aware of the dryness in his mouth, and tried to swallow. And found his tongue so parched, he could barely force any spit down his throat.
Water was all that consumed his thoughts.
Titus kicked his right leg over the saddle horn, landing on the left side of the pony even before it stopped— both of them having reached the banks of the Platte at the same time. As he collapsed to his knees and dunked his head under the murky water, Bass could not remember ever being any thirstier. When he brought his head out, gasping for air, the packmare stood up to her fetlocks in the river on his left, lapping at the water. The pony drank at his right shoulder.
Stuffing his face back into the Platte, Titus drank until his belly ached, then plopped back on his rump there in the water, surveying what lay around him. A horse on either side, the animals lapped their fill, stirring the murky bottom. As he squinted into the late-afternoon sun, he spotted it.
For a moment Titus just stared at the bleached skeleton lying akimbo on the nearby riverbank, upstream. Stared at the way the sun slanted through the huge prison bars of its rib cage, the sheer bulk of its massive backbone. What had to have been a monstrous creature of immense weight.
Finally he convinced himself to move from that spot, almost afraid the skeleton would prove to be nothing more than some heat mirage that would disappear should he attempt to move in its direction. Slowly rising from the cool water of the Platte, Bass stood and slogged upstream more than ten yards—his eyes locked hypnotically on the skeleton. The closer he got, the more he could see of the length of it. Surely, the creature had fallen here a long, long time ago—so white, so sun bleached were its bones. Its final resting place lay far enough up the sharp bank of the river that the Platte had not been able to claim that fallen creature, nor its skeleton, even with the capricious spring floods.
So here it had lain just inches above the river’s surface, now only an arm’s length away as he came to a stop. As the Platte continued to lap around his knees, Bass reached out a hand, his breathing became shallow, his heart hammering as he took in the sheer size of the skull, the immense span between the horn tips. Oh, he had seen oxen before that might well have a wider spread of horn from tip to tip—but never had Titus laid eyes on a skull so large. Great, gaping eye sockets, one of which stared blankly back at him from its riverbank grave.
From the back of that skull his eyes marveled at the vast sweep of the backbone, then slowly traced the immense amalgamation of vertebrae that began to diminish in size over the rear flanks and finally into the tail root. It was then he discovered his mouth had gone dry again, and he found himself trembling.
At the bank he squatted beside the bones—touching, running his fingers over the huge plates of skull, tracing the horn core, down the snout, then back over the rise and fall of its massive backbone. Could this … could this be?
And he looked up at the far bank, finally staring off in the direction both he and the sun were headed that afternoon. Were they out there, somewhere close at hand?
Titus looked back at the skeleton, positioned so that its head pointed down toward the water, lying on its right side. The massive legs stilled in death. How he wanted to believe. Enough to reach out and hold the one horn core, gripping it in fear of his hope’s disappearing like a desert mirage.
Nothing else could it be. What other monstrous, four-legged creature was there? Even this bare skeleton was more impressive than his dreams of it had ever been.
Buffalo.
At one time they had been right here, Titus told himself. Right where he sat, stilled to utter wonder.
Perhaps he would find they had been driven farther west now by the creeping advance of white settlement. Oh, how he cursed those in places like Franklin—it was just as he had always feared: to lay eyes on the buffalo would mean a man had to travel far toward the setting sun.
But at least they had been here of a time past.
He sat there in the grass and mud long enough that the Indian pony and mare slogged up to stand near him as the Platte continued its relentless march past them all. Past the skeleton of a creature and time long gone by. Eventually he stood—reluctantly. And touched the bleaching skeleton one last time before sweeping up the rein, stuffing his soaked boot into the stirrup, and mounting.
It was a long time before he grew aware of his leather britches, how they began to chafe as they dried. So long had he been riding, thinking—dwelling on that skeleton and nothing else as the pony carried him west while the sun disappeared and the air grew cool, the mosquitoes rising like vapors along the riverbank where he eventually decided to stop for the night.
That evening, when he finally closed his eyes beside his small fire and pulled the blankets up over his shoulders, Titus could not remember for sure if he had eaten an evening meal, or what had consumed his time that night—only that his thoughts were on the unshakable beyond that lay just past the next hill, on the far side of the next bend in the great Platte River, on yonder through that country he had to endure until he ultimately discovered where the buffalo would be found.
More than myth. More than mere skeleton. Where they were flesh and bone, hide and horn.
How many more days, how many more weeks of riding would it take until he had put the last vestiges of white man’s forts and settlements and civilization far enough behind him … all the distance it would take before he
