Side to side he switchbacked the horse up the side of the bluff they had descended to take shelter, then brought the mare to a halt at the top to survey the heavens overhead. A blue expanse dotted with white, fluffy clouds—as beautiful as a man would want his sky to be. To the south, and north, and even to the west as far as he could see, the sky remained unthreatening—except that jagged line of purple-blue thunderhead still clinging to the tar western horizon.
“Ain’t like nothing I ever seen: just sitting out there ’thout coming this way a’tall,” he muttered in confusion to the horse, more in disgust that he had been ready this time when no storm came crashing over them.
Yet as he continued to stare at the distant smoked-glass horizon—it slowly dawned on him. Perhaps … yes, there might be a reason this truly wasn’t like any storm he had ever seen—especially now that he had himself a good, long gander at it … because maybe, just maybe, that wasn’t a jagged, roiling, rumbling thunderstorm gathering on the far horizon after all.
“Do you think?” he asked himself aloud, leaning forward to speak into the mare’s ear. “Could it be … them far, far mountains?”
To see them at long, long last for the first time, sitting atop that steady old horse there on that rocky bluff of pale ocher, the gentle summer breeze strong in his face, perhaps a wind bringing him the scent of those far-off and terrible places. No, not clouds at all hulking way off yonder at the end of his mortal sight … but the … the god- blamed Rocky Mountains!
“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!” he shrieked in a sudden gust of realization at the same moment he began to hammer the mare’s ribs with his heels.
She gamely shot away, obediently rolling into a trot.
“Whaaaa-hooooo!”
Into a lope she finally took herself, then eased up into a gallop as he hugged close to her neck, one hand double-wrapped with that lead rope, the other hand tangled in her mane as they raced west toward that thin purple-blue border of jagged landscape. Down the far end of the bluff they tore together, right onto the rolling, rugged valley—ever westward!
“By damn—we gonna make it to them Rocky Mountains, ol’ girl!” he whooped in ecstasy, then bellowed again at the top of his lungs as the mare surged ahead with all the speed she could muster for her rider. “Whaaaa- hooooo!”
It had taken so many weeks, and months too, just to leave that hardwood country behind, then suddenly to find himself pitched into a monotonously bare and rolling tableland when through all his waiting Titus had figured the country would become increasingly more hilly the closer he got to those distant, shining mountains. But instead the world around him had only become flatter, ideal for the numberless buffalo that grazed on the land’s rich bounty of grass.
“Glory! Glory! Glory!” he repeated in a wild screech as the hot breeze whipped tears from his eyes.
So long had he waited to see them with his own eyes, each night along the way remembering just how he had let his imagination paint such vivid pictures in his mind while Isaac Washburn had told him this and told him that about the far places of the west the old man had himself seen. Night after night of imagining and dreaming on them, it seemed those mountains had grown all the larger, loomed all the bigger until here he was at last—suddenly struck with disappointment that what lay before him was not as tall, nowhere near as grand, nor jagged, nor threatening, nor ultimately challenging as Washburn had made them out to be.
Nowhere near the majestic mountain ranges his very own rich and fertile and ready imagination had been making them out to be all these months.
So in no small measure of disappointment he began to pull back on the rope, slowing the mare out of her surging run to the west.
For well over a year Titus had been preparing for this moment—yet here he was, of a sudden trying to make sense of it, to reconcile Gut’s description of the Rocky Mountains with what undramatic and uneven outline lay there against the far horizon.
At last he brought the horse to a halt. Bass slid to the ground but continued to stare until he kicked a toe at a clump of bunchgrass.
“Damn—if I ain’t got a head filled with stupids!” he roared, feeling the fool of a sudden. “It ain’t that them mountains is puny, girl … just that they be too damned far away for us to see ’em proper!”
He sat there some more soaking in that distant vista before slowly turning the mare about to retrace their path. And from time to time he glanced back over his shoulder at the far jagged line.
“Gonna take us a few days afore we get there,” he consoled himself. “Leastways, now we see where it is we been heading all this time. Out there—why, that be the end of our journey, girl!”
Like everything else in his life, he decided, this was to be only a matter of keeping one foot landing in front of the other—hard times or slick. He’d come this far by putting his head down and not giving up no matter if the water was bad or the game was scarce, no matter that there’d been cold camps for lack of firewood or the possibility of scalp hunters out and afoot. But no matter any of that, Titus Bass was here at the brink of the Rocky Mountains— where he could look out there and see them for the first time in all his born days.
And so it was that after he had repacked the mule and set forth once again, Bass vowed that he would never stray too far from those distant mountains ever again. Once he arrived, he promised never to leave them. Never to wander so far away that he could no longer see them at the edge of his sight, just as they were right then. They were to be his compass, his lodestone, the very anchor for his life from there on out. The way some men back east dared never to wander too far from the rivers where they plied their trade and lived out their lives … Titus swore these mountains would from that day forth be the marrow of his world, swore that on a mighty oath for what would be the rest of his natural days.
Late that afternoon after pushing farther west, Titus brought down one of those prong-horned goat creatures he found were almost too curious for their own good. He skinned back the tan-and-white hide, butchered off the steaks and two hams he wanted from the rear flanks, then moved on west to scare up a good camp for the night. Not until the sun had disappeared behind the jagged wall of peaks far beyond did Titus discover just what he wanted.
It was a shady nook at the side of a hill that offered good water from a stream coming in from the south, plenty of firewood, and enough trees that his smoke would be dispersed among the branches—in the event any brownskins were lurking about. But most of all, the campsite sat just so: positioned in a way where he could gaze into the west as the meat broiled on sticks hung over the fire and the coffee began to boil.
After stuffing himself, with great care he loaded his old briar pipe with tobacco as twilight sank around him. How he enjoyed the utter silence of the night as it came stealing over the land, broken only by an occasional call from the wild dogs populating the nearby hills.
Like a gentle nudge, something caused him to turn and look back to the east where it had already grown dark as pitch—the sky flecked with the first stars. Back yonder, to what he had left behind, to what he had chosen to abandon. Funny, he thought—but he could not see anything back there that reminded him of what was left behind. Nothing there to show him what he had abandoned … yet right here in this spot he could look upon his goal.
So Titus turned back to gaze into the west once more. The mountains were there—limned in indigo light by the long-ago falling of the sun. They were reachable and real. No longer something of legend and myth. Indeed, he told himself, after all these days and the many, many miles, he had come so far that he no longer could see what had been, could no longer see
Yet on this evening, with the light rapidly draining from the summer sky, it was possible for him to catch a glimpse of what he was now to be … to fathom at long, long last the man he was to become.
The mountains were there, finally within reach. He had only to stay his course for the next few days, with that jagged line looming larger against the sky with every step he took.
After nigh onto a lifetime of waiting, Titus Bass had come to the Rocky Mountains. And in the deepening embrace of that twilight, he joyously welcomed the man he was to become.
6
Dry and wispy as old ash, the snowflakes struck his cheeks as he stepped out from the copse of aspen trees
