“You done right with that she-bitch of a grizzly.”
He kept his eyes closed. “Right?”
“Leave’d your knife in ’er.”
“Damn! You’re hurtin’ me—”
“Gotta keep some of these here wounds open,” McAfferty interrupted unapologetically, “or they’ll grow shut with the p’isen inside.”
“What p’isen?”
“’Nough evil already around us for a man to worry over that you don’t wanna have evil shut up inside ever’ one of your wounds, Mr. Bass.”
“Asa.”
“Yeah?”
“I … I took the knife out.”
“Knife was in ’er when I pulled you free,” Asa grumbled as he continued his ministrations with that water he heated at the edge of the fire. “That’s all that counts. Leave the knife in the bear: it’ll bleed ’em out inside.”
“Leave the knife in,” Scratch repeated, his puffy lips so swollen and dry from fever that they had cracked. “Leave knife in.”
Bass remembered how day after day it seemed the man talked of nothing much more than the same topic. Instructing his wounded partner on the two places where you could place a lead ball certain to kill a grizzly.
“There be jest two places where a nigger can put his ball into a devil beast such as that to know his lead’ll do the trick certain. One be just under the ear. T’other—why that be just back and down of the front leg, Mr. Bass. Where the evil heart beats in that beast. Hide so damned thick, can’t allays count on the ball going in nowhere else to any account. I killed that she-bitch with two balls to the head, just under her ears. And I finished her off with your tomahawk. Nearly got her head cut clean off afore she fell over with you still wrapped in her arm.”
In addition, the white-head muttered in and out and roundabout, speaking of that Ree medicine man who wore a grizzly’s head for his own powerful headdress, wore a cluster of grizzly claws around his neck, even performed his incantations with his two hands stuffed inside a pair of dried and shriveled grizzly paws, which he swiped at the air to invoke the bear’s spirit when he came to demand McAfferty’s Bible. Came to steal Asa’s personal medicine.
“Leastways—that’s how I knowed that son of a bitch was a hand servant of the devil his own self,” McAfferty growled. “He come to me to make his grizzly medicine on me—and when I didn’t just hand over me Bible to him … he made more evil medicine on me, called the grizzly spirit to come fetch me.”
From time to time Bass awoke to find McAfferty talking still, talking to no one at all—Scratch supposed—for Asa was standing, slowly moving this way around the fire, then turning to walk in the other direction. The way the white-head hunched himself over at times, arms held out from his body, fingers clawed before him, growling like a bear, then muttering or shouting in fury. Moving again, sputtering his fireside sermons on and on through the dark of night or the light of those late-spring days as Bass slept, gathering strength.
“A evil omen, this,” McAfferty mumbled one of those starless nights as the rain smacked the broad leaves overhead.
So thick was the cottonwood canopy that little of the mist reached them here in this copse of trees. Like hailstones striking rawhide, Bass believed he could hear each and every drop hit the leaves.
“We been trouble for each other, Mr. Bass,” he explained another time as he helped Scratch eat, pulling the broiled meat apart with his fingers and laying small fibers of the elk tenderloin on Titus’s tongue.
“Trouble?”
“The bear—it’s only the latest sign, don’t you see?”
Scratch chewed on the meat, sensing his strength slowly returning after enduring days of nothing but broth and bone soup. “I figger ary a man gonna run onto Injuns, Asa.”
“Them Apache stalked us like demons. They wasn’t human.”
“Then it was demons I killed aside the Heely, McAfferty,” he argued. “And I kill’t me a lot of ’em to save your hide. To save us.”
McAfferty measured him with an appraising look, then stared back down at the meat he was tearing apart with his fingers. “Those greaser soldiers too—”
“They was looking to get some gal forked around ’em,” Bass snorted. “Weren’t no demons there.”
“Taos used to be a good place,” he reminded. “I went there times afore and it was a good place, Mr. Bass.”
“You ever have you a spree and look for a woman, there in Taos?”
“No. I never laid with no whore.
For a moment he felt stung by Asa’s condemnation. But then—every man here in the mountains was entitled to live in his own way. Long as no man passed judgment on him, Titus Bass would abide by that man.
Then Scratch said, “I’m a man what wants to lay with a woman, Asa. I need that. And it’s all right that you don’t—”
“Don’t you see I love the feel, the smell … I love the taste of a woman.”
“Maybe we’re come of two different worlds, Mr. Bass,” he finally declared.
There. It was said. No sense in asking the white-head what he meant by that. Pretty plain to see Asa’s thinking, to grasp just what he had come to across the last few days as Bass lay-in and out of this world. Hell, it was easy enough for a man all on his own to talk himself into most anything. All the easier for that preacher to see the bear as something more than a bear.
Finally he took the small piece of meat from McAfferty and began to slowly pull slivers off for himself. “Mayhaps you’re right. So you figger to lay all our troubles at my door?”
“Never in my life have I suffered such tribulations as I have with you, Mr. Bass,” he admitted quietly, almost apologetic for speaking it. “But don’t get me wrong: the trapping’s been good with you. I admire any man what’ll go where you gone with me to trap beaver.”
“We made us a pair,” Bass agreed, knowing the tear in this fabric would never be rewoven. “But you’re of a mind to go your own way.”
“Ain’t you ready your own self? Ready to go your own way ’thout me?”
He couldn’t admit that he wasn’t ready.
Yet Titus knew he wasn’t the sort who could go days and weeks and much less months without some human contact. Be it a partner, or an outfit of free trappers, even a wandering band of Indians who spoke a language he hardly understood. How precious was just the sight of a human face, the sound of a human voice, the possibility of some human touch.
But instead Scratch said, “I reckoned on it a time or two in the last year.”
“Been paired up almost that long, ain’t we?”
“Almost a year. Ronnyvoo’s coming.”
McAfferty nodded. “Soon as you’re able to travel, we’ll mosey south. Trap along the way if we find a likely place. Soon as you’re strong enough, Mr. Bass.”
He didn’t figure there was a lick of sense in beating a dead mule. How’d you figure to change a man’s mind when it was his heart already made up? Why waste his breath when Asa McAfferty believed Titus Bass was the cause of all his tribulations? When Asa refused to even consider that it was his belief in evil and spirits and the Ree medicine man that brought him to tear apart the best partnership in these mountains?
Was there any sense in trying to talk to McAfferty about it come a month from now? Perhaps when he had more strength to argue with the white-head. Maybeso days and weeks from now, someplace on down the trail. Somewhere closer to rendezvous. Someplace away from this river valley where he had made the mistake of bumping into the sow grizzly and her cubs.
Somewhere much, much farther away from this low-hanging, evil patch of torn and sundered sky.
