Dumb luck—which meant he walked straight on through Pawnee country without a single run-in. Far better luck than ol’ Gut and Hugh Glass had themselves when they had headed east to St. Louis, deviled by the Pawnee near the whole way.
Days past those forks, the country started to evolve once more as he pushed ever westward, leading that packmare day after day, wearing down the soles of his first pair of Washburn’s moccasins and starting on the second. As the ground beneath his feet was crusting into a flaky hardpan, Titus worried so much about walking himself out of his last two pairs of moccasins that he took to cutting pieces of green buffalo hide he could lash around the soles of his thinning footwear.
Now the hills became more sharply defined, and all the creeks and streams slashed their way down through the land to form sharp-sided bluffs and buttes, each one striated over centuries of constant erosion by water and wind. Here he found more timber, willow, and brush flourishing along each water course he came across. It was clear he had passed out of the rolling tableland, where the buffalo ruled as undisputed monarchs, entering a country where he no longer had the herds of those shaggy beasts constantly in sight as he plodded west on foot.
He found this to be a country populated by varieties of deer—some surprisingly larger than others. He hunted them down in the brushy bottoms where they spent their days, or waited for them near the creeks and streams where the creatures came to water early of every morning or late of the evenings before scampering off to their beds. Most of the males were already coming into velvet, their antlers covered with that thin, mosslike covering that at times hung in tatters all about their faces.
And there were other creatures he spotted from a distance: the sharp-snouted badger and wolverine, and those wild turkey, which roosted in the low branches of the trees very much the same as their cousins did back east, not to mention what he took to be tiny prairie gophers he encountered, animals that barked at him just like dogs in those huge colonies where they lived together for mutual protection against the great-winged birds who hunted with claw and beak, sweeping over the towns pocked with burrows. Most every day he had to pass through one such community, he and the mare assaulted by the yip-yipping of so many tiny, angry voices.
At times he even caught sight of a brown-or a reddish-coated bear—animals that whirled and loped away at the first sight of him and the horse. Not a day passed that Titus did not spot what he figured to be a variety of pong-horned deer on the nearby slopes—almost a sort of long-legged goat-shaped creature, he surmised—a bit smaller but even more fleet than its mule-eared or white-tailed cousins. And most every night he went to sleep serenaded with the distant crooning of those song-dogs crying out from the surrounding hillsides as if to announce his presence to others of their kind.
Lo, the birds! As big as he had known them to be back east along the Ohio and Mississippi, they proved to be all the bigger the farther west he progressed. Although he had seen many a hawk before, the immense wingspans on these western species came as no small wonder to Bass. Not to mention how big those eagles grew hunting the skies along his line of march. As well, he grew astounded at the size of the wrinkle-necked turkey and black vultures, which congregated at the remains of what carrion the wild dogs and rangy wolves had not consumed.
So it was that time and again he was struck that this was a harsh land devoid of all mankind—although he occasionally did come across some old Indian trail of pocked pony prints and the scraping of poles as those people went about their seasonal migrations. Not a day passed when he did not fear he would run onto a village, or that he would be discovered by a wandering hunting party.
Not to see the enemy proved to be far more frightening than knowing right where the brownskins were, or just how many he might have to confront.
Fact was, none of Bass’s contacts with Indians had ever fostered in him a favorable view of brownskins. Especially that run for his life from the Chickasaw there along the Mississippi River when he was but sixteen years old and fleeing the constraints of his family. And what few Indians had wandered into or traveled through old St. Louis hadn’t impressed him to feel much in the way of human charity as well: they either presented themselves as a haughty, distant, and foreign race characterized by arrogance, or they appeared to be nothing more than a race of flea-bitten beggars trampled over in a rush of settlers and slowly being whittled away by the white man’s dominant culture.
One or the other, Titus had long ago decided, there wasn’t much to admire in or desire to emulate any brown-skin. They looked different, talked different, in fact—everything about them was entirely foreign as another life could be from how he himself had grown up and come to be a man. Struggle as he might, there was little he could think of that he would possibly want to talk over with one of those haughty, better-than-thou warrior chiefs or grease-stained, hand-held-out beggars.
No sense in a man trying his damndest to run onto any Injuns, he decided. Best to just stay as far from any brownskins as he possibly could … for at the worst such two-legged creatures might well spell danger for him, at the least an ignorant Indian was nothing but a pure-dee waste of effort for any white man venturing into an unknown wilderness.
Better that his own dumb luck hold so he could continue on his way for the mountains, untroubled and alone.
Alone was just how he was feeling that midafternoon as he plodded on beneath the baking sun, leading the packmare through the easy footing he found a quarter mile or so out from the Platte. He discovered he could almost doze as he trudged along, laying one foot in front of the other, his eyes barely open as he picked his way through the waist-high buffalo grass. Almost like sleeping: with the warmth on his back and the rhythmic sway to his gait, accompanied by that hypnotic clop of the packmare following behind.
For the last few hours his thinking had been consumed with wondering on how many more days and weeks it would take for him to reach those high and shining mountains described so eloquently by an unlettered Isaac Washburn in terms of undisguised awe that bordered on nothing short of reverence.
Arousing himself from his dull stupor, Titus licked his dry lips … then, squinting to be sure, he studied the distant horizon as it seemed to waver and strangely take shape far, far out there before him—heat shimmers all dark and purple and jumbled there at the edge of the earth. For a moment he glanced up at the sun, hung ahead him nearly at the three-quarters mark of its path across the sky … then quickly back to stare at that shifting, shimmering horizon.
“Damnation. Likely we got another of them windy storms boiling up out yonder,” he muttered, turning to direct his comment to the mare as he lurched to a weary halt. “Mayhap we should find us a place to make camp afore that rain rolls over us like some of ’em have.”
Quickly he scanned the southwest, then took himself a measure of the land off to the northwest, seeking something that might hold promise in the way of forting up against the bluster of a bullying storm replete with horrific wind, rain, and ofttimes hail. Already he had come to expect a brief thunderstorm most every afternoon out here along the upper reaches of the Platte—but, damn, did he hate the hail. Those icy shards hurt each time they came hurtling out of a particularly angry patch of blue-black clouds overhead. Hurt the mare so bad, she cried out in something close to humanlike pain as he scampered to take shelter under her belly and those packs she carried atop her ribby sides, the only cover there often was for miles around.
“We ain’t gonna be caught this day, no, we’re not, girl,” he promised the mare. “There, yonder—I see some big trees not too far off. We’ll skedaddle down there now till that storm blows on over.”
Off to the side of the bluffs he hurried the horse, down from the ridgetop where he first spotted the dim outline of the storm’s approach. Among an extensive grove of cottonwood Titus prepared for the bad weather by dropping the packs from the mare’s back, tying her rope to one of the trees, where she should have adequate shelter against the pelting hail. Then he went over to settle down between the two small packs himself, dragging the canvas over the packs and his head too. Breathing a sigh of satisfaction that he was at last prepared for the impending onslaught, Titus listened expectantly for telltale sounds of the storm’s approach.
Squatting there, he waited and listened. At times Bass caught himself dozing off. And waited some more. But through it all he did not hear the wind whipping itself into a fury, driving the rain and hail before it.
The longer he listened, the more he grew suspicious—thinking the storm had taken a different track to the north or south around them.
“Let’s go have ourselves a look-see,” he told the mare as he threw back his canvas shelter, stood, and untied her long rope.
He vaulted onto her bare back, saying, “Maybe that storm moved on by us—what say we go find out for my own self?”
