his top two teeth.
“Yeah. S’pose you’re right,” Tuttle added in a whisper. “Silas ought’n know if there’s Blackfeet down there.”
The following day they began their descent into one of those beautiful interior valleys the northern Rockies could boast. And for the next few weeks they worked the streams that fed the Gallatin River, then eased over to trap among the streams along the Spanish Breaks that fed the Madison. As the snowline slowly retreated farther and farther up the slopes of the mountains, the four of them ranged higher and higher, finding the hunting good, and the trapping even better than they could have hoped.
“Ain’t no wonder there’s them what’ll claim right to your face that the Blackfoot spell trouble in this here country,” Cooper said at their fire one evening late that spring.
“Their kind just wanna keep it all to themselves,” Tuttle replied.
Billy chimed in, “That’s the gospel, it is, yessirreebob!”
“Them with Fitzpatrick was fixing to head up this Way last fall,” Bass said. “So maybe that country ain’t all that much a secret, Silas.”
With those dark, chertlike eyes betraying the falsehood of that big grin on his face, Cooper growled, “Or maybe them company trappers are the sort to figger on scaring away us what are out here on our own hook.”
“If the trapping’s good,” Tuttle said, “I figger they’ll say what it takes to scare us off.”
“Fitzpatrick’s brigade ain’t the only ones,” Titus said, wagging his head. “S’pose you fellers tell me why them Crow warned us ’bout going west, torst Blackfoot country at the Three Forks?”
“The Crow try to skeer you away, did they?” Billy asked.
Snorting with a gust of sharp laughter like iron colliding with an anvil, Cooper cried, “You damn idjit, Billy! The
Turning to Bass there beside their fire, grinning hugely with that gap-toothed smile, Hooks rolled onto his hands and knees as he asked, “What else he like to do like a squaw? Been figgerin’ to ask you all along, Scratch. He let you hump him like this here?”
Tuttle and Cooper roared along with Billy as Hooks wagged his rear end provocatively, grunting and wheezing.
Vowing not to flare with anger, Titus got to his feet and started away, wagging his head, not sure where he’d go at that moment. Just anywhere but there.
“Eh, Scratch?” Silas called after him as Billy’s high, mocking laughter followed Bass toward the ring of trees where they had corralled their horses. “Y’ ass-humped that soft-brained feller’s bones, didn’t y’?”
“I can tell he did, Silas!” Hooks cried out, “Bet Ol’ Scratch liked ass-humpin’ too, boys!”
“Maybeso if’n that man-whore was soft in the ass as he was in the brain!” Cooper shouted, flinging his voice after the retreating Bass.
The three of them continued to laugh and make their catcalls as Bass swept by his bedroll, took up his pouch and rifle, and kept on moving toward the animals. Their cruelty followed him to the rope corral where Hannah was the first to smell him coming. The mule nudged a pair of horses aside and inched up to the rope as Titus came to a stop to nuzzle her.
“Care to go for a ride, girl?”
Her eyes closed halfway as he rubbed up her muzzle, then scratched his way up to her forelock.
“C’mon,” he whispered to her. “I figger it’s time you got used to having me sit on your back.”
Bobbing her head eagerly, the mule came close to prancing smartly as he led her out of the corral and took up the extra length of her lead rope.
“Critter like you ought’n be good for more’n just packing my plews from place to place.”
As he flung himself up on her broad, bare back, Hannah twisted her head around to give him as quizzical a look as he had seen an animal ever give him. Patting her on the neck, Bass gently tapped his moccasins into her ribs.
“G’won, now,” he prodded, shaking the halter looped around her neck. “Let’s get.”
Standing like a statue for a moment more while she seemed to decide on just what to do, the mule finally set off slowly. He rode her all the way out of the timber toward the clearing at the end of the ridge where he could look both north and west at the deepening hues of twilight as the spring sun sank and the air cooled quickly. Over time the cold of the coming night helped: he came to lose the heat of his anger at the three. After a while Bass told himself they laughed for no better reason than they were plain ignorant about such things. If not outright ignorant, well—then the three were plainly cruel to call Bird in Ground a soft-brained person.
Titus had met soft-brained folk throughout his life. The first he ever saw was a flat-faced girl about his age back to Rabbit Hash. She didn’t talk much, and what she said he never could understand. Her folks talked to her like folks would talk to a baby—all nonsense words and such. And while Bird in Ground didn’t do any of the things men of his tribe did, the Crow man made a lot of sense when he talked. There was times, Titus had to admit, Bird in Ground made more sense than all three of them fool-headed, yabbering yahoos put together!
Hell, Scratch thought, a man’s ways was just his ways … and if a fella turned out to do different from other men’s ways—then just who could say what was right, or what was better, or just who the hell was soft-brained?
Damn, if it weren’t hard at times to figger out just who had his best interests in heart. Bird in Ground, who had never said a cross word about another soul? Or them three, who didn’t miss a lick when it come to whacking others down a notch or two? Hard it was to weigh them out against the other, especially because the young Crow had sure appeared to care genuinely when he’d warned Titus … while Silas, Billy, and Bud actually had saved his life more than once.
So confusing to think on, that it almost hurt his head to try now to sort out what he figured was likely one of the most difficult puzzles life had ever presented him. Maybe some things were just supposed to be rocks a man wasn’t meant to crack—no matter how hard you hammered away at them. Some things in life just were and could defy a man’s most intricate cogitation.
Like women. Nawww, not all women. Maybeso just white women. Women like Amy and Marissa, and even Abigail. No matter that she was a whore—she was still a white gal. There was just something he’d experienced with white women that made them naturally hard for a man like him to fathom, while on the other hand the Indian gals he’d rubbed up against were a lot more reasonable sort.
Seemed fair to say that most every white woman he’d had much cause to know anything about made a real tough study of herself. Rather than taking life on its own terms, white gals seemed to take such delicious relish in complicating things, enjoying how hard they made a man work at getting along with them.
Looking back now at that first woman creature he had tried to figure out in Boone County, Amy Whistler was clearly just that sort. And Marissa Guthrie too. Even the gal wrhat had come into his life between the two of them —Abigail Thresher. Times were that riverboat bang-tail had shown signs of being a stock-and-trade woman creature with all her confusing ways and all her confusing wiles, despite the fact that she was a whore in the end … a woman who, for all intents and purpose, set out a’purpose to satisfy a man’s baser hungers.
No two ways of Sunday about it: a white gal was just a white gal. A creature put on earth for no other purpose but to devil a man.
“Why the hell you getting yourself all bumfoozled over such a thing anyhow?” he chided himself as he stared off into the growing darkness and scratched Hannah’s ears. “You’re done with white gals. Done for all time.”
As the sky’s distant rose became purple, and in the end that purple turned a deep indigo-blue, the first stars of evening stood out ail the more distinctly. Ready at last to turn back for camp, he drank deep of the chill air … then blinked and looked again. To be sure.
There against the darkness that was the featureless valley far beyond flickered a point of light.
Squinting his best to bring its starry point into focus, Bass wasn’t sure at first what the sighting might be. Perhaps some dry timber set ablaze by a passing thunderstorm. But—that was pure balderdash: there hadn’t been any lightning in many days.
Maybeso it would be Fitzpatrick’s brigade of trappers, who had pushed north this spring out of the Willow Valley where they had plans to winter up all together. Then again—that was just as crazy a thought … because a
