motion he brought the horse around in a half circle, not daring to look at her again, then immediately gave the animal his heels.
Into the middle of that camp he plunged as quickly as he could—the bodies of men, women, and children surging past him and his pony, past the two pack animals like water rending itself around a boulder in midstream. Their wishes, and prayers, and their strong-heart songs rocked against his ears as he parted them, slowed to an agonizing walk as the farewell noise grew in volume.
At last he reached the outer ring of lodges, pushed on to the willow flats, where he could yank on Hannah’s lead rope and jab his heels into the ribs of that saddle horse. Far up ahead on the sunny slope Bass sighted the others climbing off to the left at an easy angle, beginning their switchback climb out of this great inner-mountain valley, reaching ever toward the Buffalo Pass.
He would follow without hesitation, for he needed those three far, far more than they would ever need him.
And tonight, without her warmth beside him—Titus would need something, anything, even the company of those hard-edged, iron-forged three to hold back the aching loneliness until days, perhaps even weeks, from now he would no longer hurt so keenly as he did at this terrible moment.
Into the first patch of sunlight creeping down the western slopes he hurried that morning, wondering if saying farewell ever got any easier.
The wild iris, as deep a purple as the Rocky Mountain twilight itself, stood waving in clusters, bobbing beneath the spring breeze that followed Titus across the meadow. Over his shoulder he lugged the weight of that oiled-leather trap sack he himself had sewn up back in Troost’s Livery.
Bass stopped, turned, and squinted behind him in the afternoon light. The three had chosen again to move downstream. At camp after camp on their journey a little west of north, Silas and the others always set their traps downstream while Titus deemed to take a different path. Up this creek, like the other streams before it, he pushed on through the saw grass and skirted the leafy willow, past wild blue hyacinth and the brilliant lavender of flowering horsemint, making sure not to step upon the delicate brick-red petals of prairie smoke or those tiny white whorls of redwool saxifrage.
Except for the distant, mocking shriek of the Steller’s jay or the cheep of the bluethroats singing from the branches of the trees over his head, Scratch marveled at the long stretches of silence when the breeze died. Then it would finger its way back down this narrow valley as the day cooled, soughing through the heavy, tossing branches of blue spruce and hearty fir. Back among the shady places, where a soft bed of rotting pine needles covered the forest floor beneath every evergreen and aspen, poked the sun-yellow centers of the pale-blue pasqueflower crocus, straining their saffron faces toward the falling of the sun.
It was for these few minutes he had alone, both morning and afternoon, that Titus had come to live. The quiet so deep, he could almost hear his own blood surging through his veins. Then the robber jay flashed its gray wings in a low swoop overhead, crying out with its squawk of alarm at the two-legged creature below it. Other birds rustled into flight, called out the general fright, and all grew quiet once more.
Nearby, the stream murmured in its gravel bed, talking on and on day and night without stop as it started last winter’s snowpack on a rushing tumble toward the distant sea. For a long moment he gazed downstream, studying the tiny riffles and widening vees formed behind every small boulder midstream, wondering if that water passing by him right then would eventually boil into the North Platte, joining all the rest of spring’s melting runoff to swell the prairie rivers, finally to spill into the muddy Missouri before merging itself with the mighty Mississippi as it lolled its way past St. Louis … down, down to N’Orleans, where the quadroon and many-hued whores plied their trade, where ebony-skinned slaves stood shack-led on auction blocks, and the great sheets of canvas strained against the wind on those mighty, three-masted, oceangoing vessels come there from far off beyond the very curve of the earth.
Hell, right here where he stood Titus figured he was damn well far beyond the curve of the earth from everything he had ever known before. Even as high as he stood in these mountains, last winter’s snowpack barely yards above him, the timberline not all that far beyond that, Bass could not look back and see the mouth of the Platte, not that widow’s cabin at Boone’s Lick nor trader’s store at Franklin, much less the barn he had helped raise on the Guthrie farm south of St. Lou. As high into the sky as he stood at that moment—why, Titus couldn’t even see beyond the jagged tumble of gray granite and emerald-green that marked cleft upon cleft as the mountain ranges stood hulking one against the other without apparent end.
But he knew these high peaks had to end the farther west he pushed … there they would allow a man to gently ride back down their sunset-side slopes onto the prairie among the burnt orange of the paintbrush and the sego lilies and the upwind sage that always filled a man’s nostrils. He had never been there yet, not in all his searching to the west last autumn. Nor had Isaac Washburn.
But Silas, Bud, and Billy had, by damned. And that’s where they were headed in this easy tramp toward rendezvous. They’d seen the end of the mountains and the beginning of the great dry basin that most said was where rivers eventually sank into oblivion and the desert stretched toward the sunset until it finally ran smack up against even more mountains.
Beyond that was rumored to be the great salt ocean where Lewis and his friend Clark had dared take their men some twenty years before. And now here he stood, squarely in that land of fable and myth that had no end until it dropped off suddenly into that salt ocean. At N’Orleans, Titus had looked out with sixteen-year-old eyes and tried to imagine where all that water could carry those tall-masted ships.
No more did he wonder on all that white canvas thrown up against the wind, for here, among the gigantic heave of granite escarpment thrust against the very same sky … here he could cast his gaze upon tumbling boulder fields of talus and scree stretching wider than the Ohio River itself, why—Titus stood beneath the white umbrella of clouds he could almost reach up and touch. There, just inches beyond the reach of his fingers.
He looked back to the east again, perhaps to will his vision to penetrate through the haze and all that distance just whence he had come. The Ohio River borderlands of Boone County. Then Louisville and Owensboro. Natchez-Under-the-Hill and the dense forest road that took a man north through the Chickasaws’ and Choctaws’ wilderness and on back to home.
But he saw none of that from here. Home now lay beneath the soles of his moccasins. And there was no wilderness back there anywhere near as mighty as was this where he dropped his trap sack and suddenly went to his knees to rock forward and lean out over that murmuring stream—just to sip at what must surely be God’s own holy water, so cold it set his back teeth on edge.
Beard dripping, Scratch rocked back on his haunches and looked up at those cold snowfields mantled around the high peaks just beyond their camp. And there and then he closed his eyes—praying as best he could remember having learned to pray at his mam’s knee: her old, yellow-eared Bible flung open and draped over her lap like two great wings of some bird that she was certain one day would lift her up and carry her away to everlasting paradise.
Rising once again, he brought the trap sack up with him and set off, sweeping around a bend in the creek another two hundred yards until he reached the edge of the flooded meadow where the flat-tailed rodents had long been at work. Perhaps since the day after the beginning of time. How his heart beat that much faster, just to let his eyes rush over all the signs of their industry: tender saplings and young trees hawed off by those busy front teeth less than a foot from the ground, more than two dozen muddy slides marked the beavers’ descent from grassy banks into that watery world of their own making, and at least a double handful of those crude, dome-topped lodges rising from the middle of their pond—lodges where the animals were safe from all but one predator.
Last fall as he began his new life as a beaver-man, Titus had taken a sharpened sapling and waded out to the closest lodge. There he had curiously jabbed and levered, chipping away at the chewed limbs and mud chinking until he had broken through, then peered inside at the dark inner world abandoned by the frightened animals who kept right on slapping their tails on the surface of that pond nearby. He saw the inner shelf where the beaver crawled up and out of the water to sleep, there to feed on the tender green shoots and new limbs they dragged down the banks, into the water, then under the surface and into their lodges.
They would have that hole repaired inside of three days, maybe only two, he had estimated from how hard he saw the animals work. And when he had found the hole covered with new limbs and fresh mud the very next day, Bass felt a newfound respect for this creature he stalked, trapped, skinned, and sometimes ate.
“You gone an’ hit dead center this time, ol’ coon,” he breathed all but to himself as he stared now at the
