as the head of an Indian war drum, fashioned into that crude shape the mountain man called his “beaver dollar.”
The coffee had begun to hiss and spew, so he grabbed a short limb and used it to pull on the bail to ease the pot back off the flames. There on the bed of glowing coals it would remain warm for some time to come. Then …
Oh, how Titus hated what grueling work came next: fleshing.
Yet he figured he should make a start of it before Tuttle came back to finish up the hides—at least flesh this first one. So far this spring they had them an easy bargain worked out. Titus was far better at lashing the plews within their willow hoops, so he did that for Bud. And Tuttle didn’t much mind the fleshing, a chore most beaver men considered “squaw’s work.” Funny thing was that here, as in most camps of fur trappers, there simply weren’t any squaws to complete the back-bending, shoulder-sore labor of removing every last bit of flesh, fat, and connective tissue from the backside of the beaver plew once it had been stretched on its frame.
Near a stack of empty willow hoops, Scratch found one of the fleshing tools, its half-round wooden handle well darkened with oil from the hands of those who had labored with it. Screwed between the two long halves of the wooden handle was a rounded piece of thin iron, sharpened on its convex side, enough room left in the iron blade so that a man’s fingers could slip through the slot and firmly grip the flesher.
Flipping the hoop so it laid fur side down, Titus squatted, sighed, then knelt over the plew to begin dragging the sharp edge of the flesher against the grain of the beaver’s skin—gradually lifting that excess flesh, thick straps of fatty tissue, and thin strips of connective fascia. Time and again he peeled the sticky residue from his crude flesher and went back to work, until he eventually had the hide scraped to within a thumb’s width of the edge of the plew where the rawhide loops secured it to the willow hoop.
Slowly volving his shoulders as he rocked back on his haunches, Scratch felt the pull and tightness in his back with the hunched-up work he truly felt was fit only for a squaw. Weary as the work made him, the rest could wait until Tuttle returned, he figured. Then together they could begin to work on the other thirteen, plus what others Bud would manage to bring back from his own traps that morning.
Titus crabbed forward and poured himself half a tin cup of the steaming coffee as more of the sun shot down through the trees in narrow shafts of misting light. He scooted his rump over to lean back against a large trunk of some deadfall, his feet to the fire, and sipped his coffee.
Here in the sun, its warm rays creeping up his legs, the heated coffee tin cradled between his hands, Scratch slowly closed his eyes. No doubt was there that the best beaver men moved out of camp before first light. But just as sure was it that a man might reward himself with the luxury of a little nap once he was back in camp with the prior day’s catch. Titus sat the coffee tin beside him on the trampled ground, folded his arms, and let his chin whiskers fall to his chest.
Startled by the chirk of a squirrel in the branches high overhead, he awoke sometime later, aware he had indeed been dozing with no recollection of just how much time had passed. But picking up the cup and taking a sip of the cold coffee gave him some idea of just how long. He flung out the dregs and poured himself another half cup. That was the way he had learned not to waste valuable coffee: drinking only a half cup at a time so that it wouldn’t cool prematurely.
After a few sips on the hot brew that invigorated him, Scratch got to his feet and moved off toward his side of the small camp to roll up his bedding he had abandoned before first light. There among his pack goods he stopped of a sudden—staring down at the four packs of beaver hides he had trapped in valley and high-country streams since first reaching the mountains last autumn. Three … damn if three of the packs didn’t look smaller than he remembered.
Bass rubbed his smoke-reddened eyes, thinking perhaps it was only because he was still groggy from napping that the packs somehow appeared smaller. Then he tilted his head to one side, appraising them. And tilted his head to the other. None of it made things appear any better.
Dropping quickly to his knees on the thick turf of fallen pine needles, Scratch worked to loosen the knots at the first of those three short packs. As his fingers clawed feverishly, he realized his heart was hammering a little faster with apprehension. Confusion. Pure bewilderment. And a sickening lump was starting to rise in the back of his throat, making it hard to swallow.
As he flung back the four long strands of thick rawhide, Titus became all the more despairing—thinking back to that very morning at the meadow pond where he had labored to skin those fourteen beaver: when he had realized those fourteen plews would be enough to finish out his fourth pack and provide a good start on a fifth. But now as his hands quickly parted the hides, counting them silently as his lips moved, trembling and fearful—Bass knew with growing certainty that he no longer had four full packs.
He quickly tore at the rawhide lashes on a second stack and began counting.
Suddenly Bass was confronting the fact that what he had now was far from enough to make even three full packs, much less the four. And as quickly he was afraid of just what that meant.
His hands froze at the knots securing the rawhide lash on the third short pack. Instead of releasing the knot, he turned slowly, staring across camp to where the others cached their plunder, possibles, and plews.
Titus was choking on the sour taste of it as he rose shakily, his knees wobbly as the realization sank in … slowly stumbling around the fire pit toward the far side where the trio’s packs sat beneath drapes of dirty canvas.
There he stopped and stared down, seeking to weigh things before committing the unpardonable transgression of prowling through another man’s belongings. From the way things appeared, Bud Tuttle didn’t have near enough packs among his things for Bass to be concerned.
Maybe Billy. By damn, maybeso it was him. That handy smile and happy-go-lucky naybobbin’ way of his might well be just the proper cover-up that would allow a jealous Hooks to get away with the theft of another man’s furs.
Thievery.
There it was. A word yet unspoken, but big and bold all the same.
Kneeling beside Billy’s possessions, Bass hurled back the end of the canvas, pulled the first stack toward him, and tore at the knots. But as he was beginning to count that first stack of furs, his eyes eventually, reluctantly, crawled to Cooper’s hides bundled nearby.
Lord, how he didn’t want it to be so.
Rising from Billy’s uncounted furs, Bass trudged over to Silas’s belongings with the air of a man forced to walk those last thirteen steps up to a hangman’s noose. Sinking to his knees, he drew back the canvas drape. There sat better than five whole packs.
Titus looked once more at Turtle’s piddling catch. At Billy’s best efforts. Then back again to regard how Silas’s catch outstripped the other two. It was plain to see that Cooper had a sizable lead on Titus.
His hands were shaking as he began to pull at the knots on that first pack, trembling so bad that Scratch finally pulled his knife and slashed at the rawhide ties. Setting the skinning knife aside, Titus pulled the first hide off the top. He swallowed hard as he turned it over, eyes skipping quickly over the flesh side.
It bore Cooper’s mark.
As did the second, and the third. And even the fourth.
He swept the knife up and cut free the rawhide bands on the second pack, beginning to inspect the hides in that pack. The first half dozen or so were clearly branded with Cooper’s mark. Likewise he slashed at the rawhide thongs on the third pack. Growing more desperate as he went along, Titus tore into the fourth stack of beaver pelts, wondering what was worse: thinking Cooper was the thief, or finding out that Cooper was not … which meant Titus still had a great, unsettling mystery to solve.
Then eight plews down in that fourth pack he saw it.
His mark on the backside of a large, shiny, glossy beaver pelt. His mark, sure enough—except that Cooper had attempted to scratch his own mark right over Bass’s.
Bass yanked it out of the stack, then pulled the seventh and studied it. Damn but the job was good, the way Cooper had carefully scratched a knife tip over the T B on the rough, stiffened, fleshy side of the pelt, turning the T into a careless
Lunging for one of the stacks he had just inspected, Titus found the same to be true farther down in each pack. He hadn’t looked deep enough, nor well enough. The top six or eight hides were Cooper’s in each pack, to be
