Unless he went, and now. Yes, perhaps some of the brigades might still be in that country close by the Sweet Lake. Wouldn’t be no trick at all to find where the hundred or more had camped and traded, drank and reveled together. Wouldn’t be no hard task to seeing how they had split up and moved out, what direction the brigades were headed. He might catch up, spend a few days among the company of one brigade or another. Just to have the sound of voices and laughter in his ears.
After all … it was plain to see that Silas and Billy and Bud had been rubbed out. Somehow he had to accept that he was on his own hook once more.
Perhaps they hadn’t made it all the way down the Yellowstone and then the Missouri to that trader’s post called Vanderburgh’s. Then again—they might well have made it there and traded all the furs, only to be rubbed out coming across all that country where the Arikara and Pawnee and Arapaho could jump a few white men hurrying back to the mountains. Leastways, that’s something Isaac Washburn had known of firsthand. The country where Scratch’s three friends were to cross was the same stretch of high plains where Ol’ Gut and Hugh Glass had barely escaped with their hide and their hair.
As much as he stared into the small fire he built himself for company every night, as much as he watched the water flow by in the Green every day—the feeling inside him had grown no more comfortable, no more easy to accept until he was ready to let it go. To hell with the furs. There’d always be beaver in the mountains and high valleys. Besides, he still had his traps and other truck. By God, Titus thought, he was still in the business of trapping.
So to hell with all that prime beaver he had dragged out of countless frozen streams, beaver stretched and scraped, beaver packed in hundredweight bales and finally lashed down on that crude raft that disappeared down the Yellowstone with Silas Cooper.
Only thing that mattered was that he’d lost three friends. Lost the three men who had damn well saved his life.
Down in his belly that eventual acceptance of it brought up the gorge that nearly choked him after all these years: remembering how he had lost Ebenezer Zane. A trusted friend, a mentor Titus had looked up to, a man who had taught Bass not just about the great rivers, but about life on the river—women and rum, song and friends.
Then he remembered Isaac himself. How the graying trapper had done all that he could to keep Bass from liking him there at first, but come to love him Titus had. To trust Washburn enough to plan on following him west into the unknown. Then Gut was taken from him too. Gone as suddenly.
After all these winters and summers healing over those two painful scars of loss, now he had to face the loss of three more. Silas, Billy, and Bud ripped from him.
“The Big Muddy’s fair boiling with red niggers,” he told himself out loud more than once as he wrestled with his inner agony. “Likely it be that the three of ’em just bought into more’n they could barter for on that river’s track. Injuns got ’em up there—or Injuns got ’em coming back.”
As much as a man might refuse to grapple with it, he had to accept that the three of them were gone. Dead. Rubbed out.
And the only way there was to get on with life was to get on … with people. Bass had to find one of those brigades. He had to be among others until this pain eased. It might take a few days. More likely it would take weeks, and Bass might just decide to throw in with Fitzpatrick’s bunch for the fall hunt, joining up for as long as the winter. He could trade off what he didn’t need in the way of all these horses to the company men for some coffee and sugar, anything he didn’t already have enough of back there among the packs. The brigade’s booshway might even have some liquor left. And rum or whiskey might just go a long way to helping numb a bit more of the pain.
Titus was sure the only way that hurting would stop and he could venture back out on his own was to do one thing. If he was to survive inside, he knew he had to scare up some faces and voices and eyes crinkling in laughter.
Knowing that the best chances for finding any of that healing lay over in that Sweet Lake country, Scratch eagerly set off before sunrise the next morning, unable to sleep after coming to his decision. All night he had brooded on it, concluding that his best chances of running onto a brigade moving out with the breakup of rendezvous lay in his striking out to the north. At least he knew there would always be one brigade moving northeast into the high mountain country to trap through the autumn. There might even be two brigades he could run across—since another was likely to march east a ways from the Sweet Lake country before pointing their noses directly north.
Chances were better than good that he would run onto one such brigade somewhere to the north—or at least come across sign of their passing, and he could hurry along their backtrail until he caught up with them. That morning he put the Green at his back and struck out east, following the meandering path of a narrow river* that he knew would eventually lead him back toward the mountains and Park Kyack. Scratch felt a new chapter opening on the book of his life. Instead of plunging back into that high country to search for the Ute, this time he would strike out to the north upon reaching the foothills.
All the better to avoid the Arapaho who came to raid the Ute for ponies and plunder. Titus knew firsthand just how that warrior tribe craved ambushing their ancient enemies.
It simply made a lot more horse sense to stay as far out of the way of those thieving Arapaho as he could.
*
*
*
18
“Whereaway you bound, my son?”
In his dreamlike reverie Titus peered up at the old man leading a fine horse up to his evening fire. Nighttime had come early that autumn so long, long ago now … and with it the cold as he rode closer to the city of his dreams.
Lulled now into daydreaming once more by the late-summer heat on his back and the rocking-chair gait of the saddle horse beneath him, Scratch’s wandering mind remembered that fine fall evening.
“St. Louie,” he had answered the stranger.
Bass had been a sull young’un back then, with no more than nineteen summers under his belt.
“Ah,” the old fellow replied as he halted, his expressionless face staring down in study at the small, cheery fire a moment, then finally regarded the youth and the rifle across the youngster’s lap. “I am but a poor wayfarer. Do you mind if I share your fire and a bit of conversation this night?”
Bass tossed another limb onto the flames and shrugged. “I was just getting used to the lonesome.”
At the sudden beating of several pairs of wings, his eyes fluttered open—blinking—to find himself on horseback … realizing he had been dreaming, remembering. How that younger man had, perhaps for the first time in his life, been truly getting used to the lonesome.
When at the age of sixteen Titus took off from home, he hadn’t gone that many days before he yearned for the sound of another’s voice, just the look and smell and nearness of other humans. So what with the riverboatmen and the Ohio River whore called Mincemeat, along with the others who saw him across the wide Mississippi to Able Guthrie’s farm, and then with Guthrie’s most desirable daughter herself … why, he hadn’t ever been truly alone ever since the day he’d run off—just himself and the forest.
Back then he realized this aloneness would take some getting used to. Some men took to it natural. Others never would—so it was best their kind stayed back east of the river. The third sort were like himself, Bass figured: they could do with bouts of aloneness as long as there were times when a man set his sights on being with folk. Those occasions between the long stretches of aloneness before the loneliness began to creep in—the bawdy summer celebrations of rendezvous or settling into a friendly village for the winter—he had come to believe would be enough to hold the lonelies at bay.
