“I feel it. So you gone and made a flat place for the trap under the water.”
Cooper said, “Tell him what it’s for, Tuttle.”
“Put your trap down there, under the water, so the goddamned beaver don’t see it, you idjit.”
As he pulled his hand out of the freezing water, Bass turned to ask of Cooper, “What good does it do to hide your trap?”
“Beaver ain’t too stupid a animal, Titus,” Silas explained. “They smell your scent—where y’ve walked, where y’ go and spit—they won’t come anywhere near. Y’ been a stupid pilgrim to leave your traps on top of the bank afore now?”
“Yeah, I done that.”
Silas wagged his head. “Don’t y’ see that trap got your scent, maybeso that dead horse’s smell on it from packing it out here from St. Louis,” Cooper declared. “But under water—the beaver can’t pick up no man- scent.”
“And ’sides—you gotta have bait!” Billy added.
Tuttle asked, “Maybeso you didn’t have no bait to set out, did you?”
“B-bait? Hell—I ain’t fishin’ … I’m trapping beaver!”
Hooks and the other two snorted laughter behind their hands to muffle as much of the shrill sound of it as they could—a sound that grated Titus like a coarse file drawn across rusted iron.
“You was a lucky nigger,” Tuttle reminded him. “To catch a few old beaver ’thout no bait, and your traps sitting right on the bare ground, bold as can be.”
“I found me a place where there was tracks,” Titus protested. “And I caught me some beaver.”
Billy cheered, “You gotta l’arn to be sneaky!”
“How’d y’ like to learn yourself how to catch least
“That’s how good Silas here does—yessirreebob,” Billy declared.
“T-two beaver for every three sets?”
“And sometimes Silas fills ’em all,” Tuttle added. “Damn but he’s so good, it puts me to shame.”
“Maybe you an’ me just ain’t got the knack of it the way Silas do,” Hooks cautioned.
Standing, Titus measured the tall, black-haired man before him. “You really mean sometimes you fill all your god-blamed traps?”
“These here partners of mine speak the truth. I tried to teach ’em the best I could,” Cooper said. Then he leaned forward and said in a whisper, “Y’ wanna learn how to be as good as me—y’ll have to learn from me, Titus.”
And learn he did.
From that morning on Bass hung on every one of Silas Cooper’s words, soaking in all he could, asking questions of all three, and being sure he was the first to rise in the morning, the last to return to camp in the evenings after checking his sets. And right from that very first morning Titus got better and better at selecting where he should set the traps, deciding which side of the stream he would use for his set, and figuring how to leave his bait behind on the long willow limbs he jabbed into the frozen ground, the other end daubed in the “beaver milk” given him by the other three until he had caught enough animals to acquire some of the smelly bait for himself.
It did not take him long before he was able to surpass Bud Turtle’s catch at each camping site. Then for weeks he worked hard to equal the tally of Billy Hooks’s beaver. And in the end, as winter set in hard and drove the group down out of the Wind River Mountains, south for the southern Rockies, Titus Bass knew he would never be content until he beat Silas Cooper.
Just the way he had come, oh, so close to beating Eli Gamble in that shooting match back to Boone County fifteen summers before.
“So how old a man are y’ now, Titus Bass?” Cooper asked one blustery evening as the clouds parted enough to let the moon and some stars shine through not long after twilight.
He shivered, knowing it would be a cold one this night. “I turn thirty-two this coming Janee-ary.”
“Won’t none of us rightly know when that is!” Tuttle advised.
“Maybe we go and have us a li’l celebration anyways,” Cooper said, shivering himself. “Time we get down to Park Kyack, we’ll likely have to fort up for the winter—as far out of the wind as a man can get hisself.”
Titus dug up behind an ear, his fingertip feeling for the tiny hard vermin about the size of a small grain of rice. “Park Kyack?”
“Where we plan on winterin’,” Bud Tuttle said.
Hooks pointed at Bass, squealing, “Just throw that grayback in the damn fire!”
“Your goddamned nits better not come jumpin’ over here on me,” Tuttle grumbled.
“Titus Bass,” Silas started, “’bout time y’ owned up that you’re fixed with the nits.”
“Rode on him alla way from the settlements, I’d imagine,” Tuttle said.
“Whores got ’em. Ever’ last whore I knowed,” Billy said. “That and the pox too. Man takes his poison from a whore in small doses, but, damn, I hate the Irish itch the way you got it!”
Bass’s scalp crawled all the more just for the speaking of it. Sheepishly he dug his fingers along the top of his scalp, searching, feeling more and more of the tiny varmints infesting him.
Cooper asked, “Whores, was it?”
Wagging his head, Bass replied, “Ain’t been with a whore since early last spring.”
“You itch right after?” Tuttle inquired.
“Not till I was out long the Platte.”
Silas roared, “Say, boys—any Pawnee what had raised that varmit’s skelp—they’d get the grayback nits for all their trouble!”
The three of them laughed heartily, generously, at Bass’s incessant torment. It had gotten worse since meeting up with the trio—if only because one or the other would always comment about his all-but-nonstop itching. When Titus was alone, at least there hadn’t been anyone around to remind him he played host to a troublesome infestation. But looking back at this moment, he decided it had to be that he took on those vermin from the damned soldiers at Fort Osage … that, or from the widow woman up north of Franklin.
“Chances were good it were soldiers,” he declared, not wanting to mention Edna Grigsby as he dug at the back of his neck, pulling a louse free and pitching it into the coals, where it popped and hissed as it was quickly consumed.
“Soldiers?” Cooper demanded.
“Where abouts you run onto ’em out on the Platte?” Hooks asked.
“Wasn’t there,” Titus replied. “Back to Fort Osage.”
“Oh,” Tuttle said with relief crossing his face. “Good thing they didn’t just make you a soldier with ’em. They do that, you know? They can press you into service if’n they take a mind to.”
Bass defended, “These were good fellas—”
“Damn ’em all!” Hooks interrupted. “Soldiers is just like them graybacks. Serve for no good.”
Cooper leaned over and slapped a big hand on Bass’s knee to ask, “Y’ been anywhere else’t but that soldier post where you’d take on a herd of nits?”
A bit embarrassed at telling of his encounter with the widow, Bass looked down, away from the prying eyes, to stare at the fire. It was as good as admitting to it.
“Where, Titus?” Tuttle demanded.
“A woman.”
“Tell us! Tell us now!” Billy roared, clapping his hands twice.
“Billy loves him stories of the womens, he surely does,” Cooper declared. “So tell us your woman story, Bass. And make it a good’un. We all been without for too long, and likely be some weeks afore we winter up with some friendly Injun gals.”
“Injun gals!” Hooks repeated with enthusiasm, rubbing his crotch and humping his hand. “Good poontang, them Injun gals for Billy Hooks.”
“Best part of living in the mountains for the man,” Silas said. “So, y’ gonna tell us ’bout your woman?”
“A widow woman,” Bass finally admitted. “Just a lonely … widow woman. Been ’thout a man for a long time.”
