there last spring, Scratch went in search of firewood, forced to look for more than a half mile in any direction before he found enough to last him through the coming two nights. It was plain that McAfferty had cleared the nearby ground of every last scrap of deadfall that would burn as he kept his vigil over the mauled and mutilated Titus Bass.
Then beside the fire pit he plopped down a hindquarter of the antelope he had shot that morning. With enough firewood laid in, and his bedding spread out, the time had come to fetch some water from the river bank. Snatching up the bail of his small cast-iron kettle, Scratch took a deep breath and started for the willows that lined the Judith a few yards off through the tall brush blanketing the meadow.
On the far side of the river the beaver had been at work for years without count. Those industrious creatures had backed up part of the river into some low bottomland, where they had constructed at least half a hundred mud-and-branch lodges. He spotted some two dozen of the flat-tails still swimming about in the shallow waters or at work on the trunks of nearby trees. And there, off to his left, was the narrow strip of sandbar lying beneath the sharp cutbank, at least what remained of it after the spring floods had uprooted huge sections of the river bottom and carved away large slabs of the bank, relocating them downstream.
Scratch wasn’t sure at first, but that spot some twenty yards to his left had a familiar feel about it—what with the gentle curve of the river, the overhanging vegetation, that small copse of trees on the far bank.
He and McAfferty had been gone from here about the time the snow-melt was gorging all the streams and creeks and tiny rivulets that fed the Judith, swelling the river in its wide channel—well beyond the level of the sandbar. And with the way this land dried out at the end of each summer, that strip of ground at the bottom of the cutbank was once again exposed here in these chilly days as winter sank ever southward from the arctic.
Halfway there he grew pretty sure. After another half-dozen steps he was certain. Although the Judith had deposited some sand and native silt, along with some limbs and roots and assorted river trash around the remains—that big a carcass could only be but one of two creatures. Either a buffalo, or a grizzly.
And this skull plainly wasn’t huge and wide, nor did it bear a healthy set of horns.
No. That was the skull of a grizzly.
His veins ran cold of a sudden. And his belly crimped the way it did when he had gone the better part of a day without feeding. His mouth went dry and pasty, almost the way it had with his ordeal down in the desert of Apache country.
Predators had come and picked the bones all but clean before, perhaps since, the spring floods. A mountain man would call it high meat. A revolting victual Asa said the Mandans loved to eat on the high Missouri—meat gone bad … so decomposed it had liquefied enough that the Indians could spoon it out of the rotting carcasses of buffalo floating down the flood-swollen Missouri. When there was no end to rich, tender red meat a man could find on the hoof, why would anyone consider that putrid, stinking, worm-infested slime a delicacy?
In revulsion Titus swallowed his gorge back down and took two steps closer to the skeleton. Then a final step that brought him right to its side, awash in memory. Snatches of recall, tattered shreds of recollections: where he had been when he had fired his pistol, when he had rammed the stake into her chest, where he likely landed when she pounced on him and blotted out the sky; and … could he remember anything at all of where he’d been when McAfferty pulled him out from beneath the dead sow?
Just beyond the bones. There.
Bass stepped over, stopped. Trembling slightly.
It was almost like standing there and looking down on … on his own grave.
Had it not been for Asa, he would have died right there.
For a moment he fought the sting of tears and looked up and down the riverbank until he realized he could not stifle the sob.
Bass sank to his knees in the hard, frozen sand beside the grizzly carcass. Put out his hand. And laid it on the huge shoulder blade.
“You and me both, we was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said quietly. “If it been just the two of us—you’d won that day. If it’d been just me …”
Then he suddenly thought of the two cubs, orphaned the moment their mother had lunged out of the willows after them, having scented danger in the smell of a man who had blundered into the midst of their play. Bears had ’em a mighty, mighty strong nose.
And he knew in the marrow of him he could have been a quarter of a mile away, even a half mile or more … and it would have made no difference. He and that bear had been destined to bump up against one another on this very ground.
Scooting around on his knees, he leaned forward, and there beside the bear’s skull Scratch smoothed out a circle of sand some two feet across. At the edge of that crude circle he stuck some small twigs he broke off a chunk of driftwood to mark the four directions of the wind. The he pulled his tomahawk from his belt and used the back of the blade to break loose the sun-bleached skull from the top of the spine, setting it in the middle of his circle.
Squatting at the edge of this crude altar and crossing his legs, Bass dragged up his belt pouch and pulled out a twist of Billy Sublette’s trade tobacco, laying it atop the skull. Using his skinning knife, he cut a little of the dry leaf from the twist and chopped it up fine enough to stuff down a pipe bowl. Setting the pouch, twist, and knife aside, Bass pulled his much-used clay pipe from its pocket in his shooting pouch, and stuffed it with those shreds of tobacco.
He dragged his dirty fingers beneath each eye and smeared away the hot tears, then stuffed his hand back into his shooting pouch to pull out his strike-a-light tin. From it he took a piece of black char cloth, a small chunk of flint, and the large curl of fire steel. Holding the flint and char in his left hand, he hit the stone with sharp downward strikes, sending sparks into the charred cotton where the embers smoldered until he brought them to his lips, blowing on them gently. Over these tiny glowing dots of heat he laid a small shred of dried tinder and blew some more until the tinder caught. Laying the glowing tinder over the top of the bowl, he sucked steadily until the coals licked through the dry tobacco, and his pipe was lit.
First a puff to each of the four directions, then one to the cold, cloudless blue sky overhead, and some final smoke he blew into the sacred circle he had smoothed before him.
That done, he stared off at the nearby bluffs and the distant hills, feeling the sinking track of the sun as he smoked, and thought, and felt what this ground had to tell him. What it yet had to teach him.
When he finally looked back down into that circle, Scratch put out his left hand and laid the fingers atop the bear’s skull.
“Give me the power of this animal,” he asked in a quiet voice, feeling more humble than ever before in his life.
“Because it died here, I could live,” Titus went on in a sob-choked whisper. “Make the rest of my days as strong as they can be because you give me a second chance here.”
Then he puffed some more on the pipe, drawing in each breath deep, like a prayer in itself, feeling the smoke course deep into his lungs where he held it before he exhaled. And when the tobacco had all been consumed, he turned the bowl over and knocked out the ashes on the top of the skull. With his fingers he smeared the black and gray into the stark white bone, forming a large, dark circle.
That circle, and the circle of this sand altar, both were symbolic of the circle he realized was his own story. People, places, events—they were all to be experienced by him for a reason in the constant turn in the seasons of his life. He had been drawn here, compelled to venture this close to Blackfoot country for a good reason he now sensed he could understand.
While he could not fathom what lured Asa McAfferty to go where he had gone, something told Scratch that the white-head’s journey was of a purpose … and Titus felt at peace with that. While McAfferty believed he was directed to go here and there by God, Bass believed people moved in and out of one another’s lives for reasons they might not know at those very moments.
Come a day soon, perhaps, Bass figured he would understand why he and Asa had had their time together, why they had shared those terrible tribulations and bloody battles, why they had both come to know it was time to part from one another. Maybe one day he would understand about McAfferty—but not until he understood more about the workings of the mysterious, the ways of the spirit world.
So here at last, here beside this sand altar and the remains of the huge creature that had almost killed him, Titus Bass discovered an inner serenity despite his not knowing.
One day he might well sort out the mysteries of life. But for now, he was at peace with it.
