For long moments he stared at the fire, poking a long stick into the flames. When he brought out the fiery end of that dry limb and peered at it, Scratch said, “I got friends back in Crow country. I’ll winter up there.”
“You’ll be awright ’thout no supplies?”
“Hell, yes,” Titus answered. “Might run low on ball and powder afore next summer … but I’ll get by. ’Sides, fellers—just think what Sublette’s gonna have to pay us next summer for beaver!”
“Whoooeee!” Caleb cheered.
Isaac said, “And ain’t there gonna be a heap of it too come next year?”
“When you was over visiting Bridger,” Jack inquired, turning to Bass, “you hear any word from the company booshways on where they’ll join up for next ronnyvoo?”
“Heard talk about Pierre’s Hole,” Bass replied. “But I don’t figger they’ve decided hard on it.”
That ended up being the best any of those few hundred men gathered on the Green could do—company trapper or free man: nothing more than talk about and dream on next summer, next rendezvous, next time they’d see Billy Sublette’s trade caravan coming in. But with the way a man planned for, anticipated, and downright lusted after each annual gathering for a whole year … it was all he could do to calmly accept that there would be another autumn, another winter, and another spring of wading knee-deep in icy mountain streams before he would trade some of his furs in for whiskey, for enough foofaraw to get him laid with a bright-eyed squaw gal.
It was purely painful there in the valley of the upper Green after Henry Fraeb pulled out to look for partner Fitzpatrick as each new day of August came and went.
When Tom Fitzpatrick did not show up in St. Louis by the agreed-upon date, the partners of Smith, Jackson, and Sublette proceeded with their initial plans of entering the Santa Fe trade. By the time the eastbound Fitzpatrick reached the settlement of Independence, he learned that the three partners had already come through with a caravan bound not for the mountains, but for Mexico. There was little other choice but to gallop after the wagon train. Somewhere in that hot, waterless country of what is today southwestern Kansas, he caught up to the three partners. They told Fitzpatrick he would have to join them all the way to Taos, where they would outfit him with supplies for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company.
By then the caravan had entered the most dangerous and deadly water scrape on the Santa Fe Trail. Far out ahead of the wagons, searching for water in any of the few sandy, dry river bottoms, Jedediah Smith was confronted by some Comanche buffalo hunters. Although his life oozed out on the end of a deadly fourteen-foot buffalo lance, his body was never found.
Even with Smith missing, Jackson and Sublette proceeded on to Taos, where they disbanded their partnership after turning over some six thousand dollars in supplies to Fitzpatrick. While Jackson headed west to California and his own fortunes, Sublette turned back for St. Louis to begin gathering finances and goods for his 1832 trading venture to the mountains.
Leaving Tom Fitzpatrick to load up what little he had been given on the backs of the mules he purchased in Taos, he hired some extra hands eager to go north into the Rockies, and made for the mountains—already more than a month late and with little hope of finding the company brigades and the free men still gathered, still awaiting his arrival.
Without any coffee and not so much as a twist of tobacco. And whiskey? Only in a man’s dreams was there any whiskey! It was shaping up to be another long, dry year.
What few bands of friendly Flathead and Shoshone showed up didn’t hang around long. With summer growing old, it would soon be a time for making winter meat.
Bass and the rest watched the lodgeskins come down, seeing the women tie the poles together into travois, watched the dust trails disappear against the horizon. Then the first of the free men began to pack up their plews and set off.
“Bridger offered any of us to throw in and travel with the company brigades to their fall hunt,” Solomon declared late one morning as he returned to Hatcher’s camp.
“What the hell we do that for?” Caleb demanded.
Fish shrugged. “He says Frapp’s gonna find Fitzpatrick. And when he does, Fitz is gonna have supplies for Rocky Mountain Fur. Only way any free man’s gonna get supplies is he’s gonna have to be hanging close to a company brigade.”
“The hell with ’em,” Rufus griped.
Elbridge asked, “We’ll go to Taos, right, Jack?”
“We’re gonna drown that goddamned Sublette in beaver next summer,” Hatcher declared.
“Pierre’s Hole gonna be ass-deep in beaver, that’s certain!” Bass exclaimed.
That evening Jack suggested his bunch pull out come morning. He cupped a hand at his ear and grinned in the fire’s light. “I hear them beaver calling to me from the Bayou.”
Isaac giggled and squeaked in a high voice, “Jack? Jack Hatcher? Why don’t you come catch me in your trap, Jack Hatcher?”
The rest guffawed and went back to tearing hunks off their antelope steaks using only their fingers and knives, wiping grease on their long hair to give it the same sheen a warrior gave his long braids with bear oil.
A sudden gust of wind slashed through their camp that twilight just then, scattering tiny coals like a swarm of fireflies dipping and swirling through camp until they snuffed themselves out.
In that surprising silence Scratch quietly said, “You fellas don’t s’pose … that Asa’s gone under, do you?”
Jack cleared his throat, tonguing the chunk of meat to the side of his mouth. “He ain’t showed up a’tall, has he?”
Bass looked around at the others, eager perhaps to find something in their faces to hang his faint hope upon. “Maybe he went on down to Willow Valley, boys—and didn’t get no word about ronnyvoo getting moved over here on the Green.”
Caleb shook his head, absently replying, “I don’t figger Asa McAfferty for the kind to sit there in Willow Valley all by hisself for long. Most likely he’s gone and got hisself—”
But Wood was suddenly interrupted by a stern glare from Hatcher. Nothing was spoken—only that gaze of disapproval.
Wood coughed, then corrected himself, “What I mean to say is … maybe he’s gone off on his own like he allays does. Somewheres.”
Bass wiped his bloody knife across the front of his right legging, long ago grown black beneath rubbings of old grease. With a thickened voice he said, “S’pose you’re right, Caleb. Asa’s allays been a contrary cuss.”
“Asa’s set to do what’s on his mind and his mind alone,” Jack agreed.
“Man decides to go to Blackfoot country,” Bass continued, attempting to console himself, “them what he leaves behind shouldn’t go counting on seeing that nigger again. ’Less they’re plain, ignernt-headed fools.”
“He knowed what he was doing,” Caleb explained apologetically. “Wasn’t no way you was gonna keep him from where he was bound to go.”
Solomon declared, “When Asa said God was telling him to go to Blackfoot country, I knowed there was no use in me wasting my breath telling him not to.”
“We all know of fellers what don’t come in to ronnyvoo each year,” Jack said sadly. “But I’m damned happy to see your face here with us again, Titus Bass.”
He looked up through his swimming eyes, a knot of sour sentiment clogging his throat, making it hard for him to speak. Eventually, he said, “I figger that’s what Asa’s done: picked him his way to die.”
“About the most important thing a man can do in his life,” Hatcher agreed.
“’Cept for choosing how he’s gonna
Elbridge exclaimed, “You said yourself, Scratch—that Asa knowed there was Bridger’s brigade he could hang close to if’n he’d wanted to be sure he was safer.”
Wagging his head, Bass disagreed. “That wasn’t Asa’s way. He damned well wouldn’t have stayed anywhere near no company men. Naw, Asa had him something real serious stuck in his craw what made him go up there all brassy and bold, marching into Blackfoot country all on his lonesome.”
“So if McAfferty chose him this way to die,” Isaac commented, “then it’s for the rest of us to drink us a toast to him, and go on with our own living.”
“But we ain’t got no whiskey to toast him!” Rufus bellowed.
