Potts explained, “Louis here don’t cotton much to you free trappers joining in on our ronnyvoos.”
Around a mouthful of the meat, Louis Vasquez spoke up for himself, his dark Spanish eyes glaring at Daniel Potts. “This here’s the general’s doin’s—ronnyvoo is. Them don’t work for the general has no business barterin’ plews for Ashley’s trade goods.”
“’Sides powder and lead, coffee and sugar,” Fitzpatrick said, “the rest of it’s all foofaraw anyway, Vaskiss.”
“Their kind wanna work for Ashley, eh?” Vasquez growled. “Let ’em sign on wit’ Ashley.”
Silas snorted. “An’ fight Blackfeet up there in the devil’s own country like you boys done? No thankee. Pll trap where I wanna trap an’ stay aways from making trouble for myself.”
Then Hooks chimed in, “That means us keeping our noses far from Blackfoot country!”
“Weren’t all that far north of here,” Bridger declared. “Was a good li’l scrap of it. Show ’em what I mean, fellas.”
Five of the others brandished scalps they had hanging from their belts.
“That’s five Blackfoot what ain’t ever gonna raise my hair!” Bridger exclaimed.
“’Nother’n was shot up bad—but the rest rode off with his carcass,” Fitzpatrick said. “Couldn’t raise his scalp.”
“Makes six Blackfeet what won’t devil none of us no more,” Fraeb emphasized.
“Much trouble as them niggers are, the trapping’s some up in them parts,” Fitzpatrick said.
Titus asked, “Some?”
Potts turned to look at Bass. “Means it’s just ’bout the best there is, child.”
“Blanket beaver,” Bridger added with an approving cluck. “And the rivers is so thick with ’em, all a man has to do is walk down to the water and club ’em over the head.”
“Sounds like some crock of bald-faced to me!” Cooper spouted, a disbelieving grin creasing his dark beard.
The dour Fraeb scratched at his nose with the black crescent of a dirty fingernail. “Haps you free trappers ought just go on up there to that Blackfoot country and see for yourselves.”
“No thankee,” Cooper replied, eyes dancing with mirth as he winked at Hooks. “I favor my skelp to stay locked right where it is!”
Billy tore the fur cap from his head and grabbed a handful of his own long, greasy hair. “Ain’t the red nigger born what can take this from me, Silas!”
Then Tuttle observed, “For balls’ sake—only way you Ashley boys can poke your noses up there in that Blackfoot country at all is to travel in a hull bunch like you done.”
“Yessirreebob!” Hooks added, spreading his arms wide. “And there ain’t but four of us!”
Potts leaned close to Bass and asked under his breath, “You still so sartin sure you don’t wanna throw in with us come ronnyvoos?”
For a few moments Titus looked over Fitzpatrick’s bunch, then eyed what the ten had themselves in the way of fur. As much as there was, man for man, the Ashley trappers didn’t have a thing on Cooper’s bunch—despite having trapped that spring in the beaver-rich country haunted by the bloodthirsty Blackfoot.
Then Bass glanced at Tuttle, Hooks, and even the bruising hulk of Silas Cooper himself before he turned aside to Potts and said, “Thankee anyway, Daniel. You offer a handsome prospect, mind you. But the way I see it—I’d rather work for my friends than be working for some trader what brings his goods out to the mountains come once a year.”
“Fitzpatrick’s a good man to foller,” Potts explained, “an’ Bridger’s gonna make him a fine booshway one day his own self.”
“Booshway?”
“Man what leads a brigade hisself.”
“Yeah,” Scratch replied. “Plain as sun to see Bridger’s older’n his years.”
The jovial Potts tugged on Bass’s elbow, whispering low. “Come join us, Scratch. You’re a good man to have around for a smile or two.”
As much as he might take pleasure in the honor of those words, Titus weighed matters a mite different from most, perhaps. Here he was offered the chance to cut the losses in beaver he’d already suffered and get out from under the ominous shadow of Silas Cooper … or he could stay on with the men who had come along to give him the companionship of an open hand—no matter that the same hand had closed itself into a brutal fist of a time. No, Titus saw himself as a loyal, steadfast man, the sort of man another could easily put his faith and trust in without question.
He wasn’t the sort to let down those who had very likely saved his hide.
Bass slapped a hand on Daniel’s shoulder, saying, “Thanks anyway, Potts—you’re a good man, and this appears to be a likely bunch but … I got my own place where I already been took in.”
*
**
12
“Ever you see anything like this before?” Tuttle asked.
All Bass could do was shake his head.
In his youth he had floated down two of America’s greatest rivers, shoulder to shoulder with a crew of hard- bitten, double-dyed Kentucky boatmen. He had even reveled in the rum-sodden fleshpots of Natchez-Under-the-Hill and “The Swamp” farther down in the port of New Orleans. But none of that had prepared him for the sheer joy of camaraderie expressed by those men gathered on the grassy, willow-veined floor of what would one day very soon come to be known among the mountain trappers as Cache Valley.*
True enough, he had seen the hustle and bustle of those Ohio River port cities: Cincinnati and Louisville. And he had soaked in the heady, noisy air of raucous New Orleans, where more than a dozen languages were spoken around him. But never had Titus expected he would find anything quite like this out here in the middle of all this wilderness.
They had rolled in that afternoon with Fitzpatrick’s brigade, Cooper’s outfit joining all the rest whooping and bellering back at those who were screeching and shouting to welcome every group of new arrivals.
More than a hundred of them had already gathered in Willow Valley, at least half the faces pretty near scraped clean of whiskers. Out they came from beneath blanket and brush bowers to fire their rifles into the air, whoop like wild, red-eyed warriors, and greet these last to pull in. Lunging through the dottings of the large creamy flowers that towered along the tall stalks of the Spanish bayonet, they jumped and cavorted—slapping and jabbing at the horsemen they knew, offering their hands to those they did not. Horse hooves and moccasins trampled the bold sunflower-yellow of the arrowleaf balsamroot as every last one of these men celebrated this midsummer homecoming of old friends and new, drawn here from distant parts.
In addition to all those trappers Ashley was responsible for bringing to the mountains in the past few seasons, Etienne Provost led his own band of partisans, who had worked their way north out of Mexican territory far to the southeast, down below the international boundary of the Arkansas River. This redoubtable figure had first grown concerned, eventually desperate, in recent weeks when his own partner, Francois Leclerc, had failed to show up with supplies from Santa Fe at the appointed place and time for their own rendezvous. No telling what ad happened—but the unspoken belief was there among Provost’s men that Leclerc’s outfit could well have been wiped out on its way north toward the Wasatch and Uintah country.
Along the banks of a stream stood more than a dozen small wickiups belonging to the wives of some twenty- five Iroquois trappers who, until a year ago, had been employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company working out of English posts far to the north and west on the Columbia River. But in the summer of 1825 the Iroquois had encountered the shrewd William Ashley, who sweet-talked them into turning their backs on the English and trading their furs to him instead. That Ashley-instigated betrayal would be the beginning of some bad blood between the HBC’s Snake-country outfits operating under the hard-bitten Scotsman John Work and those upstart and most
