ever’ man one chance to show he can be a dead fool.”
“Billy’s right, Scratch,” Cooper reminded. “And y’ done had your chance back up there near Buffalo Pass when y’ laid your hand on me.”
Bass flinched with another look into Cooper’s cold black eyes. Almost a good head taller than Bass, and with some eleven or twelve years on him too. “I understood you, then, Silas. An’ I don’t fix on ever giving you cause to raise a hand to me. Not among friends.”
“That’s right, ’Rapaho-killer!” Cooper roared, flinging his long arm over Titus’s shoulder so suddenly that it surprised Bass as they came to a halt at the center of camp with the others. “We’re friends, ain’t we? Friends allays take good, good care of each other!”
The tight ring about the trappers loosened as women and men alike began to throw down blankets and robes, seating themselves around the huge fire ring as women came forward bearing rawhide platters heaped with boiled meat and roasted marrow bones, sections of stuffed elk gut and minced slices of raw liver one could dip into tiny bladders filled with tangy yellow gall. Everywhere folks began to talk at once, laugh together, sing out in merriment and exultation.
“Well?” Cooper demanded, turning on Bass, seizing Titus’s shoulders in his big hands and squeezing hard. “I asked y’. H’ain’t we friends?”
“Yes, Silas,” he said, trying not to wince with the pain the big man created in that left shoulder, a hot, deep pain where it had not yet fully healed. At the same time he was determined not to show Cooper, nor the others, just how much he hurt. “We’re friends.”
“Allays will be?”
Bass nodded. “Yes, always will be friends, Silas.”
“Good man!” and Silas pounded Titus on the top of the shoulders. “What say we stuff our gullets full this night, fellas … then each dog-man of us rut ary a squaw dry till mornin’ light when Silas Cooper’s outfit pulls out for the high country!”
“Womens tonight!” Hooks cheered. “Aye—an’ the high country tomorry!”
Full as a tick about to burst he was as he waddled back to Fawn’s lodge that night long after moonrise. He cradled the boy in his arms on that walk, then laid the sleeping youngster among the blankets where the widow made a warm nest for the child. Titus stood looking down on them both as she tugged up the buffalo robe, then turned and stood before him.
There in the red-hued glow of the dying fire, Fawn freed the sash from her worn blanket coat and flung them both to the far side of the lodge, her eyes never leaving his. Then with her left hand she pulled at the ties on her right shoulder, doing the same at her left shoulder, loosening the top of her dress enough to slowly slide the skins down over her arms, tugging the garment on down over her breasts, then down her rounded belly and hips, finally to let it spill off her thighs to lay in a heap around her ankles like that last, old snow withdrawing in a ragged ring around the trunk of every aspen, lodgepole, and patch of sage in the surrounding hills.
He found his mouth bone dry as he watched what the dim flicker of the last limbs and glowing coals did to the dark hue of her brown flesh. His eyes savored the roundness to her, the full sway of her breasts as she stepped on out of her dress, the soft, full curve of her hips as they molded back to her full bottom.
Just before she moved into him, Bass gazed down at the dark triangle of hair there where her thighs blended into her rounded belly. Then she pressed herself against him, arms encircling his waist, cheek buried against his chest.
Pushing her away slightly, Titus hurried out of his coat with a shudder of excitement—then yanked his shirt over his head as she hastened to pull at the buckle, loosening his belt so that breechclout and leggings fell together. She knelt immediately, tugging at his moccasins, eagerly yanking at the leggings in a rush of motion, her eyes crawling up his legs to where his flesh began to throb and grow in anticipation of her.
Then she stretched up over him like a big cat, pushing him back upon their bed, finally arching herself out to full length atop him, her mouth finding his. The taste of her, wild with red meat simmered until tender with those dried leaves she harvested last summer—again his heart sang with happiness that he had taught her to kiss him back. Their mouths sucking, drawing, savoring one another’s as his hands stroked down that concave valley at the small of her back, then rising onto the rounded knoll of her bottom. Fingertips played over the fleshy fullness of her hips only briefly before his hunger drove him to push her off to the side where he could lick and suck on her breasts, running a hand down to that warm delta where she already grew moist.
Ready for him on this, their one last night.
Titus rose above her slowly, then suddenly descended as an animal would pounce while Fawn, the woman, pulled him into her feverishly, fingernails digging like puma’s claws, laying claim to the muscles of his back.
There in the red glow of the fire’s dying, he wordlessly spoke his good-bye in the one language he was sure she understood—for it was, after all, the same language they had spoken all winter long and into the coming of spring to these high places.
That language of need. Unspoken words that acknowledged you were taking what you needed from another and in return giving back what you thought the other needed most from you. A ferocious hunger there in the dark as the fire slowly went out.
Having dozed fitfully beside her that last night, morning came slowly—in some ways not soon enough; in others too long in the coming. When he turned to lift the buffalo robe gently, he found her already awake. She pulled at his wrist, turning Bass toward her so one hand could reach up to touch his face, the other slipping down to encircle the flesh that hardened with the barest of her touch.
She deserves this, he told himself as he mounted her. She deserves so much, much more than I can give her. So it was that he took his pleasure as she took hers from him, one last time.
And even before his heartbeat had slowed, he rolled from her and slipped from beneath the buffalo robes. Reaching first for his tradewool breechclout, Titus next pulled on the leggings, then yanked the shirt down over his head. He was aware of how she watched his every move as he bent to tie on his moccasins.
“I will miss your shadow in my lodge, Me-Ti-tuzz.”
“Come outside to say good-bye to me,” he said, his back to her still, not brave enough to look at her yet, afraid he would too easily respond to the plaintive sound in her voice.
“I will dress and bring the boy.”
After buckling the wide belt around his coat, Titus pushed back the antelope hide Fawn used for a door cover and blinked with the first light of the coming sunrise. From their rope corral he retrieved Hannah, along with his saddle horse and one more pack animal, taking them all to the lodge, where he tied the three to a nearby aspen beginning to show the first signs of budding. Back and forth between the lodge and the mule Bass hefted what he had left in the way of pack goods, then finally his season’s catch: those stiffened round beaver hides lashed together in hundredweight bales.
It was plain as sun that his animals were anxious, restive, eager to go at last. Somehow they knew this was not to be just another hunting trip—no, not with all three of them going. No, the loads Bass secured to their backs, were too heavy to these trail-wise animals. This departure would mean they would not be returning to this place.
“Howdy, Titus!”
Bass turned to find Tuttle walking up in his well-greased dark-brown buckskins.
Bud pointed behind him at his animals picketed at a nearby lodge. “All loaded, I am.” Some of his sandy- brown hair hung down over his eyes, poking from beneath the wolverine-hide cap he had fashioned for himself. “You ready to pull out?”
“Just ’bout,” he replied. “Where the others?”
“They’s loading up,” Tuttle answered. “Light enough to ride, so Silas sent me to fetch you up.”
Just then Bass heard the movement of the lodge door against the taut, frozen lodge skins and turned. Fawn emerged into the cold morning, holding the young boy on her hip. She set him down on the cold ground, where he stood unmoving, clutching her leg and watching the two white men, little puffs of frost at his lips.
“I’ll catch up with you in just a bit,” he said, his eyes coming back to look at Tuttle. “Gonna say my farewells.”
Bud nodded. “Don’t be long, Scratch. Less’n you’re fixin’ to pack that squaw along for your wife—best you just kiss her, pat her on her sweet ass, and tell her thankee for warming your robes last winter … then turn around,
