22
Spring was all but done anyway. And with it the good trapping too.
Time for a man to be making tracks for rendezvous.
Time for him to be sorting through just what he would do when company trappers and free men gathered in the valley of the Wind River. Soon he’d have to decide if he would throw in with Mad Jack Hatcher’s boys … or if he would set off on his own hook now. Alone against the mountains.
Maybeso this was the season to set his own direction. Just as he had six years before: leaving behind St. Louis and the east and all that he had been. Proving to himself that he could reach the high mountains on his own.
But even then Bass remembered—just as he was beginning to believe he had beaten the odds stacked against him, he was suddenly forced to stare failure in the eye … about the time the three of them had shown up. To his reckoning, events never had allowed him the chance to succeed, or let him fail all on his own. Back then Silas, Billy, and Bud had come along to save his hash.
And ever since then it seemed that every time he had chosen to steer his own course—why, his fat had tumbled right back into the fire. Damn the fates if it hadn’t.
Only God knew how Titus Bass had tried to make it alone after his first three partners had disappeared down the river, getting themselves rubbed out in the bargain.
For all his trouble trying to set his own course, he went and got himself scalped.
It took Jack Hatcher’s bunch to yank his fat from the fire that time.
Then shortly after deciding to pull off from those fellas, he and McAfferty had come a gnat’s hair from going under down in Apache country, close as he ever wanted to come again in his living life. Only bright spot in that whole dank memory had been the fact that he had saved McAfferty’s life along with his own in reaching that river in time to end their thirst, in time to prepare for the Apache.
But no sooner did they make it back to the Mexican villages than Asa had to rescue him in that knocking shop. Later to save his life a second time with that she-grizz.
Scratch wondered if his wanting to stay together with McAfferty might only come from his longing to right the scales. To square himself with the man who had not just evened things by rescuing him at the whorehouse … but had gone on to pull him back from death’s door on that sandbar beside the Mussellshell River. Maybe, just maybe, Scratch thought, he might be resisting McAfferty’s notion of splitting up only because that would make it near impossible for him ever to clear his accounts with the white-head.
If he was anything, Titus Bass realized he wasn’t the sort of man who could stand going through the rest of his days knowing that he owed someone for saving his life a second time.
It was something that nettled him as they began their journey south from the Judith, up near the Missouri itself, then continued to eat at him as they made their way on down the valley of the Mussellshell, picking their way between mountain ranges. After crossing the Yellowstone, Bass and McAfferty reined to the southeast, skirting the foot of some tall snow-covered peaks then steered a course that took them through a wide cleft in two lower ranges.
Near there they struck the Bighorn, following it south until the Bighorn became the Wind River.
At the hot springs they tarried for two nights among the remnants of countless Shoshone and Crow campsites. Here where warrior bands had visited far back into the time of any old man’s memory, the two had the chance to sit and soak in the scalding waters so comforting that they made Scratch limp as a newborn babe before he would crawl out, crabbing over to a cold trickle of glacial snow-melt that had tumbled all the way down to the valley from the Owl Creek Mountains. There he splashed cold handfuls of the frigid water against his superheated flesh, then scampered back, shivering every step, to settle once again into the steaming pools. Back and forth he dragged his slowly healing carcass, sensing the stinking, sulphur-laden water draw at those poisons that could near eat up a man’s soul. Like one of his mam’s drawing poultices she would plaster upon an ugly, gaping wound, Bass felt those hours he lay in the springs renew not only his flesh, but his spirit as well.
By late in the afternoon of that second day, Titus called for McAfferty to bring his knife along to the pools. Once more the heated water had softened the tough sinew Asa had used to sew up his ragged wounds—and now he was ready.
“Come cut your stitches out,” he asked of the white-head.
“Lemme have a good look at ’em first.” “They’re heal’t.”
McAfferty finally pulled his knife from its scabbard and plunged it beneath the scalding water after he had inspected the thick ropes of swollen welt. “You heal fast, Mr. Bass.
Titus bent over and turned his bare back and hip toward his partner. “I’m ready. Cut ’em out of me.”
“My sewing wasn’t purty,” Asa muttered as he pricked the end of the first short length of animal tendon and began to tug it from the tight new skin become a rosy pink with the heat.
“But your sewing likely saved my life.”
Between the long edges of every jagged laceration, McAfferty had stitched tiny fluffs of downy-soft beaver felt as he’d crudely closed the wounds by the fire’s light. But now nothing was left of that beaver felt—all of it absorbed by Scratch’s body until all that remained were those thick purplish-red welts roping their way across his shoulder, down his back, over his hip.
Titus Bass would carry that mark of the bear for the rest of his natural life.
As tight as it was, in time that new skin would stretch and loosen, and he would move that shoulder, move that hip without so much as a protest from it. But Scratch knew he would never … could never … forget coming face-to-face with a force so powerful it could rip the sky asunder, reach through, and devour his very soul.
No more than two days later they reached the valley where the Popo Agie drained into the Wind River. Those wide and verdant meadows were dotted with several camps of Indian lodges, small herds of grazing horses, and a scattering of blanket-and-canvas shelters lying stark against the green banks of both rivers.
“Har, boys!” Scratch cried, feeling an immediate and very tangible joy rise in him like sap in autumn maples.
A handful of white men came out of the shady trees to squint up at the two newcomers. One of them asked, “Where you in from?”
Bass replied, “The Mussellshell and the Judith.”
Another stranger inquired, “You must be free men?”
“We are that,” McAfferty answered this time.
So Titus asked, “You know of Jack Hatcher?”
A third man nodded and moved forward a step as he pointed on up the valley. “Seen him and his outfit, come in already. Don’t know if they’re still here. But they was camped on past Bridger’s bunch.”
“D-don’t know if they’re still here?” Bass repeated, disappointment welling in him like a boil. “They pull out early?”
“Naw,” replied the first man. “Just that ronnyvoo’s ’bout done for this year. Ain’t no more beaver for Sublette to wrassle from us. You boys are the last to wander in from the hills.”
Bass gulped and straightened in the saddle, licking his lips. “Trader still got him any whiskey?”
“Might’n have him a little left,” the second trapper explained as two of his group turned away and headed back to the shade where swarms of flies droned. “He brought the hull durn shiterree out from St. Lou in wagons this year. Can you cotton to that?”
The first man cackled. “Ain’t never been a wagon roll all the way out here! And if that don’t beat all—Sublette brung him two Dearborns along too!”
“Carriages?” Bass squeaked in a high voice, disbelieving. “Dearborns and wagons—here in this wilderness? Shit,” Scratch grumbled as he turned to flick a raised eyebrow at McAfferty. “What’s all this big open coming to? Next thing there’ll be white women and town halls out here!”
“So you say Sublette still got his tents open?” Asa inquired, clearly anxious. “Need me some trade goods.”
“Seemed he had some of near ever’thing left yestiddy,” the trapper answered. “You looking for supplies— lead, powder, coffee?”
With a shrug Asa explained, “Want me some goods for the Injun trade: Chinee vermilion, ribbon and calico,
