horse around and halting to gaze back at that open expanse of saddle he had just crossed there beneath the blue, there where a man had nowhere to hide, nowhere to run.
“Hoo-doos won’t dare come for a man what aims to fight,” Scratch boasted as he nudged his horse into motion once more. “Long as I ain’t so tired I can’t fight …”
Descending the steep western side of the pass, Scratch spent the rest of that day and the next locating a patch of ground he would use as his first camp for what he planned would be an extended stay in this country just east of the Three Forks. Years ago the trapping there had been almost as good as it had been along the Mussellshell and Judith. A dangerous land where only the wary survived, however. But by the time he ran across a site that offered good cover, grass, wood, and water, Bass hadn’t crossed any trails nor come across any sign that would tell him the Blackfoot routinely made this valley part of their travels.
Except for that single fire, that lone point of light he had spotted down in the bottom of this valley years before, when he and the trio had come here to trap. Someone had built themselves a fire big enough to warm a passel of men.
Someone.
That next morning he awoke in the dark to find a cold early-spring fog cloaking the river bottom. Overhead no more than a matter of feet hung a foreboding layer of low clouds threatening to drizzle at any moment—it and the fog were both as cold and gray as ash flake in a long-dead fire. Stirring out of the robes and blankets, Bass stomped feeling back into his feet, then crabbed over to his packs to dig out the buffalo-hide moccasins. He planned to wear them to and from every trap site, taking them off before he entered the water to make his sets, then pulling them on once he was ready to turn back for camp.
Looking again to the priming in both pistol and rifle, he stuffed the camp ax and a tomahawk into the back of his belt, where his skinning knife hung in its rawhide scabbard. Throwing the heavy buffalo-hide sack bearing a dozen American and Mexican traps over his shoulder and clutching his long bait-sticks under his arm, Bass lunged forward through the frosty grass as the dark canopy limned a thin line of sunny blue behind the jagged eastern skyline above his valley camp.
At the water’s edge he dropped the sticks and sack, then leaned the rifle against a clump of willow. Throwing his mittens down beside the traps, he pulled off his capote and yanked up his shooting pouch. Overlapping the wide strap, Titus poked a long leather whang through a series of holes so that he could fasten it with a knot. That done to severely shorten the strap, Bass could count on keeping his pouch and horn tucked high above the surface of the creek, pulled right under his armpit now as he waded into the freezing water.
By the time he had seven traps set at the foot of slides and other likely spots where the lush new grass had been trampled by tiny paws, or saplings had been felled by the toothy rodents, Scratch was finding he wasn’t near so cold. With the sun’s impending arrival, the air had begun to warm slightly. How good a fire would feel against his skin, how good some hot coffee would feel in his empty belly when he made it back to camp—
He looked up, froze. Listening. Something twitching inside him. Like a warning.
Staring at the far bank, Scratch watched the shudder and dance of the fog as it thinned, just then beginning to burn off. Like a gauzy tangle of lace laid against a bride’s dark hair, the mist clung in tatters against the dark, leafy brush. Somewhere on that far bank a bird chattered.
And he finally breathed again.
“Sometimes it gets too damned quiet,” he sighed.
Bending again to work at the shelf he had been scraping away with the camp ax a few inches below the water’s surface, Titus watched the way the light glittered across the slowly moving surface of the water. A magpie suddenly broke into flight overhead, freezing him immediately. The noisy rush of those black wings faded; then all was quiet once more.
“Got yourself spooked,” he whispered. “Only natural—this close to Blackfoot country again.”
As he carefully pulled the trap off the bank and slowly lowered it into the water, pan set and ready for business, Bass thought on McAfferty.
Had Asa ever found what he was looking for? But, then, what was it the white-head wanted most? he wondered. It wasn’t money, really. So was it power? Something many men desired.
Scratch wasn’t sure, but there at the end he had come to believe McAfferty had acted as if he was trying to find himself a sure way to die. Was it death that the white-head wanted most—the death that so far had eluded the man, frustrating him, because Asa believed he wasn’t worthy of living?
No—Titus knew it had to be something else that Asa had gone to do in Blackfoot country. Something besides getting himself killed by a band of Blood or Piegan or Gros Ventre. Just riding into that country to find some warriors to cut him down and hack off his hair wasn’t the neat, tidy end to McAfferty’s story, Bass decided.
He struggled to make sense of why some folks did what they did with their lives. Then decided such metaphysical matters were simply beyond his reach.
Stepping upstream a few yards, Scratch hoisted himself out of the water where he wouldn’t leave his smell near the last trap-set. Standing, he allowed his leggings to drip on the warm ground just now starting to steam, the mists rising into the cold air as the sun peeked over the mountain skyline.
With that first, frightening yip—he whirled on his heel, staring at the far bank. Down into the water leaped three screaming horsemen. A fourth reined up on the opposite bank, his pony shuffling in a sidestep as its rider twisted on its back, brought down his straightened arms in pointing the arrow at the white man.
Bass was moving in a crouch as the arrow hissed behind him.
From the corner of his eye he saw the painted bowman nocking another arrow against his string.
Behind him the horsemen clattered across the creek, their ponies severely slowed by the water that swirled up to their bellies as their powerful legs churned against the current. Wild cock’s-combs of brilliant spray spewed into fans of cascading, iridescent waterfalls around the legs of each warrior. For but an instant a lone beam of early sunlight glinted off that single knife blade embedded in a long wooden staff swung at the end of one of the brown arms.
Their cries boiling upon his heels, Scratch whirled as he heard one of the ponies lunge onto the bank behind him.
Yanking the pistol from his belt, he dragged back the hammer, straightened his left arm, and pulled the trigger.
Damp powder in the pan …
Swooping up on his pony, the Indian drew back with his tomahawk as Titus yanked his weapon from the small of his back where he had it stuffed in his belt. Only time enough to grip the handle in both hands as the pony hurtled past, the warrior swinging down as Bass bent at the knees, springing forward, planting the wide blade in the man’s belly as the Blackfoot’s weapon knocked the fur cap right off the trapper’s head.
Hot blood splattered Scratch’s face as the dying warrior raced on past, pitching off the far side of his pony with a loud grunt.
For no more than a heartbeat he glanced at the bush where he had dropped his coat and mittens, where he had stood his rifle before entering the stream. Then the rising falsetto in that voice yanked him around like a child’s string toy—twisting so quickly in his waterlogged moccasins on that frosted grass that Scratch stumbled to his knees an instant before a tomahawk cartwheeled past him, careening noisily through the thick brush behind him.
Pulling the skinning knife from his belt, he watched the closest one yank up a war club where it had hung by a thong at the saddle’s horn in front of the warrior. Over his head the Indian swung this terrible weapon studded with a half-dozen six-inch-long deer-antler tines embedded in a round knot of carved wood to which a handle was attached with rawhide and brass tacks like a medieval mace, closing in on his prey.
Titus lunged aside as the tines slashed the air beside his cheek. Landing on his elbow, he rolled up onto his knees, cocking his arm back far enough before he flung the knife at that third horseman racing for him with an arrow strung in his bow.
The warrior’s bow pitched forward as he suddenly clutched at the knife that caught him high in the chest below one outstretched arm. His pony hurtled past in a blur.
Just beyond the spot where Bass’s rifle stood, the Blackfoot with the antler-studded club was already yanking back on his rein, nearly bringing his pony to its knees as he savagely wrenched its head to the side. Bass glanced at the rifle, instantly calculating its distance from him, how fast the warrior would reach him, how much time it would take for a tired old trapper to reach the weapon … then set himself in a crouch as the horseman kicked speed back
