Crack in the Sky

Gasping with his exertion, Bass turned around and went to the narrow neck. There he reached back to seize the edge of the elk hide and started dragging it out through the neck behind him—bringing with it a load of dirt he had just scratched from the walls. Once he sensed the cool air on his sweaty back, Titus rose, easing his shoulders through the narrow hole until he stood halfway in the ground, and halfway out.

Heaving himself from the hole, he lay down on the ground beside it and leaned in to grab the corner of the elk hide again, folding it over the small pile of dirt. Side by side by side he laid the skin over the dirt until he could drag it from the hole without spilling the earth. After swilling down the last drink at the bottom of the iron kettle, Bass grabbed the kettle’s bail in one hand, and the edge of the elk hide in the other, and carried them off toward the nearby creek.

At the bank he knelt to dip the kettle into the cool water. With that set aside, he stood and moved downstream a few yards with the elk hide bundle clutched in both arms, then stepped right off the grassy bank into the middle of the stream. Once there, he let the hide fall open—spilling another load of dirt from his digging into the creek, hiding every last clump of that damp earth from any roving, suspicious eyes who might happen upon this spot in the days to come.

It had been this way for two days now: digging, eating, digging some more, sleeping, digging again, always the digging.

Having come south from making his fall hunt on the Mussellshell, Bass found a likely spot for his cache back against a thickly wooded hillside that jutted out into some bottomland deposited aeons before by the junction of two small creeks that flowed toward the north bank of the Yellowstone. That following morning Titus had begun what turned out to be some of the hardest work he had ever done. At sundown the first day he had completed the narrow neck of the cache and pitched into the grueling labor of widening the hole as he inched deeper into the ground, until he reached some four feet below the surface. As soon as the light had begun to sink in the west, he went to his packs and pulled out one of the tall candles he had purchased back in Taos from Bill Williams.

While the feeble light hadn’t been much, it nonetheless allowed him to keep scratching at the walls of his ever-widening cache until it was slap-dark outside and his belly was no longer just whimpering in hunger—it had begun to holler for fodder.

He was up in the gray of predawn that morning and had been at it with only one stop at midday for a meal of some dried meat and a short nap. Awaking to a gentle, cold mist of a rain, Bass went back to work despite the chill on his bare skin each time he emerged from the hole. By midafternoon the rain passed on over and the sky cleared for a time. Then another cluster of gray-black clouds appeared on the western horizon, tossing their heads angrily as they rumbled his way down the Yellowstone Valley.

He pressed on despite the threat of more rain. Just as he persevered now as the breeze came up, its heaving breath rank with the promise of another storm.

This was, after all, why he had come here now to dig his cache. The earth was much softer in these damp days of early autumn than it would be when winter froze the ground and made digging in it all but impossible. If a man was going to have himself a winter cache, he damn well better get that hole dug well before the first snow fell on this north country.

Back in camp he dropped the elk hide beside the hole, then set the sloshing kettle nearby. With a deep sigh he knelt, slid into the dark tunnel where the candle’s light flickered. And remembered back to that final day of rendezvous, to that first day he would finally set off on his own.

Had he ever been ready to make tracks for this land north of the Yellowstone!

Half-froze for the trail by the time he packed what he owned on the backs of the two horses and his dear Hannah. Their camp was but one of many bustling with activity in that valley of the Wind River last August as the two large Rocky Mountain Fur Company brigades made ready to put out on the trail. In addition, Hatcher and his men were striking camp, preparing to head west toward the Snake River country.

“Davy Jackson ain’t gonna be there to call Jackson’s Hole his own this year!” Caleb Wood had declared enthusiastically.

Solomon added, “We thought we’d see how that country looks for beaver afore we point south for to winter down in the Bayou.”

Then Bass remembered how he went alone in the first faint light of that last morning to find McAfferty at work loading the horses.

“Looks to be you’re not waiting for Bridger’s bunch afore you ride north,” Bass exclaimed with no real surprise as Asa threw on a packsaddle pad made from the hide of a mountain goat. Nearby sat the canvas-wrapped bundles the white-head would lash atop his pack animals.

“What’s sense in waiting for that gaggle?” and he tried to smile before turning back to his work. “’Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee.’”

“Should’ve knowed better’n trying to talk you into hanging close to Bridger’s men. Just like me, you’re of a mind to go off on your own.”

“I am of that mind, but we are different in many ways,” McAfferty replied. “’Again, when the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive.’”

For a few minutes he helped Asa tie up a pair of bundles onto a packsaddle without either saying a word. Finally Titus asked, “No matter that you’re riding for Blackfoot country?”

His blue eyes touched Bass’s, and he said, “Where I’m bound in Blackfoot country, Bridger’s men won’t be showing their faces, Mr. Bass.”

“It don’t make no sense to me, no sense at all.”

“‘For he remembered that they were but flesh; a wind that passeth away, and cometh not again,’ thus sayeth the Lord that I should not be scared.” McAfferty stopped tying a knot to attempt explaining something so clearly confusing. “Mr. Bass, ’Man that is born of a woman is of a few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down.’”

Scratch felt the hair prickle at his neck. It sounded to him as if Asa were saying he wanted to die in a bad way. “So you ain’t afraid, are you?”

“No, 7 go the way of all the earth,’” McAfferty answered.

“I’m gonna miss the good times we had, Asa,” he admitted quietly. “And I’ll likely think back on all them scrapes we had us too. I thank you for saving my hide, more’n once you saved me.”

“There comes a time for all of us to go our own way,” the white-head said. “There comes a time when we see our end and no longer are afraid, Mr. Bass.”

“You’re not afraid of dying neither?”

“‘And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.’ I’m not afraid of the Blackfoot. They become my people, here in my latter days,” McAfferty replied. “’And thou shalt come from thy place out of the north parts, thou, and many people with thee, all of them riding upon horses, a great company, and a mighty army.’”

Wagging his head in exasperation, Bass stammered, “I’m t-trying to understand what it is pulling you up there, Asa. Up north to Blackfoot country. All this talk about your final days, and not being afraid to dSie—”

“The ways of the Lord are mysterious ways. We are not meant to question, or understand. A man is only meant to follow the hand of the Lord.”

“Will I see you come ronnyvoo in Willow Valley?” Scratch asked as Hatcher and his men came up to stand near McAfferty’s horses.

“If it’s God’s will and I got my hair—I’ll be in Willow Valley next summer,” Asa said, taking up the long rawhide rein to his horse. “If it’s God’s will, Mr. Bass.”

The white-head swung up into the saddle, then held down his hand to each of those who stepped up in turn to shake with him. In the end he put his hand out to Scratch.

Bass shook, saying, “I truly hope you find what you’re looking for up there in Blackfoot country, Asa.”

With a smile he replied, “I don’t think there’s a way I could fail to find what I’m going up there for. If God allows, I’ll see you next summer so I trust you’ll fare well till then.”

Letting go his grip on Scratch’s hand, McAfferty took up the long lead to the first packhorse, clucked his tongue, and gave heels to his saddle mount, reining away from the cottonwood grove, the other animals clattering behind him. Stepping out into dawn’s dim light themselves, they watched the white-head lope away for a few