traps. For days now he’d been feeding them with beaver carcasses and the bones of the game he brought down. Then a few days back he awoke to find his packhorse down, eyes open wide, barely breathing. A dark, gummy blood had gushed from its anus. He knelt at the pony’s head, rubbing an ear. As much as he had wanted to mourn what its loss would mean, Titus knew there was nothing he could do to save the animal.
Eventually he stood, pulling the pistol from his belt. “You’re likely et up inside with something terrible.”
The only thing for him to do was finish the job nature herself had begun.
What with all he fed them, the coyotes faithfully stayed with him. In fact, the trio had dogged his backtrail so relentlessly Titus thought it strange that they weren’t loping around his camp this morning, making a nuisance of themselves as he went about packing for the day’s journey.
Maybeso he ought to put another three or four suns behind him before he looked for a likely stream to trap. Seemed like summer was here and he had miles to go before he would reach Pierre’s Hole. Best to put some more country behind him.
Sensing time slipping away from him like riverbottom sands, Scratch hurried to lash a pair of packs behind his saddle so they rested on the horse’s flanks, then turned to hang all the rest from Hannah’s elk-antler packsaddle. From the look she gave him, the mule didn’t much like the idea of carrying most everything on her back.
The early sun was already climbing off that red smear of horizon far to the east. Damn, but he was burning daylight.
No sooner had Bass gathered up Hannah’s lead rope and crawled into the saddle than the mule set up a noisy bawl. She yanked the rope from his hand so swiftly Bass almost lost his rifle. And by the time he had swung out of the saddle and laid the long weapon on the ground, the mule was wildly pitching about in a ragged circle—dipping her nose almost to the ground as she threw her hind legs into the air,
When he dodged out of her way, then immediately dived in to grab hold of her bridle, Hannah swung her big head in his direction, batting him out of her way as she passed on over the trapper—one of her small hooves landing squarely on his left foot.
Sweeping up his rifle to use as a crutch, Bass hobbled out of her way, muttering unearthly curses on all those dim-witted brutes created to trouble man. Collapsing at the side of the clearing, it took only minutes for him to cut the moccasin off the foot, finding it already bruised and swelling while the mule went right on acting as if she were possessed of the devil.
He clambered clumsily to his feet, stumbling and hopping over toward the animal as she flung the loads on her back this way and that. If he didn’t know better, Titus guessed she was trying to get herself out from under all those heavy packs he had just fixed atop her. Seizing a hitch rope, he hung on with one hand as the other frantically grappled at the first knot. Up and down she jolted him along with her loosening burdens until he suddenly freed the last knot and everything exploded off the mule. Including him.
In the midst of the scattered bundles of possibles and plews he sat up, dusting himself off.
“There, now, you cussed animule. Let’s just simmer down some,” he coaxed gently as she slowed her wild jig, eyeing him constantly.
Bass got to his feet, standing on that good leg with the rifle propped under an arm as he hobbled over to the mule.
“You’re ol’ bag of bones, you are, gal. And you could sure put a man in a fine fix up here.”
After stroking her muzzle, he patted his way down her side to find the ugly gash opened up along her spine. As if someone had worked a knife back and forth to get that jagged slash in her hide. And that’s when it struck him.
Wheeling about on that one good foot, he stumbled back to the packs, went to his knees, and dug at that small bundle of his possibles until he found it.
“Damned sure,” he grumbled, angry at himself for not packing any better in his haste to be on their way that morning—too much in a hurry to see that certain possessions were kept from shifting, from working themselves loose.
Like the Blackfoot dagger he had taken off that red nigger weeks ago. Plain enough to see how it had been jostled enough that it spilled from its beaver-tail scabbard, then cut right through the waterproof sheeting, then on through the mountain-goat saddle pad until its point began to jab along Hannah’s backbone. And as soon as she started to buck against the pain, her wild thrashing only made the laceration worse as the blade slashed back and forth to make for an ugly wound.
After pushing some moistened tobacco leaf into the wound and covering it with a patch of beaver fur, Scratch sensed a weary loneliness come over him. The new sun was only then beginning to climb high enough off the hills that its warming rays had just started to descend down the border of thick green timber ringing this tiny meadow.
Maybe there would be time enough to put the miles behind him for the day after he had rested here a bit longer. He could chance to let some of that pain ooze out of Hannah’s wound, to rest his swollen foot … to close his eyes and dream on things that had been, to dream on what was to be.
Before him danced images of those Crow women moving in and out of Bird in Ground’s lodge that cold winter day not long after Bass had arrived. Although the entire village was packed and ready to move on, a large crowd gathered around this solitary lodge still standing. Emerging from the doorway a handful of old women brought out the dead man’s possessions and gave them away, one by one by one until most all of Rotten Belly’s people had received a little something that had once belonged to the warrior who had lived many years with his powerful man-woman medicine.
And once the lodge was stripped of all that could be given away, an old, bent woman took up a burning brand from a nearby fire, and as others keened and wailed, she set the lodge hides aflame. Slowly turning aside, the people went to their horses and travois, setting off to the south for a new winter campsite.
While a black, greasy spiral rose from what had once been his friend’s home.
Friends. And home.
Where he found friends, Titus Bass had always found a home.
White faces swam before him now as those copperskins of the Crow faded from view. Come rendezvous he would reunite with old friends, make him some new ones … and drink that annual toast to the missing few who failed to come in.
Recalling in that early-morning reverie how he had vowed to hoist a drink to Asa McAfferty’s memory—
Through a sudden narrow crack that opened in his reverie, Scratch listened as the magpie took flight over him, cawing noisily in alarm.
He did not move, peering through squinted eyes, listening to every sound, testing every smell the breeze brought to him.
Nearby Hannah lifted her muzzle into the air.
Were it a Injun—she’d be raising a ruckus.
Could it really be a white man she’d winded?
The old man squinted and barely made out the felt hat sitting motionless now behind some low brush across the clearing.
Damn—but he hadn’t seen a white face in longer’n he ever cared to go again.
Sudden hope fluttered in his chest like the rush of a thousand pairs of wings—raising his own spirit as high as that seamless blue belt stretched far above him, higher than his spirit had been in a long … long time.
A white man.
He figured there were answers come to the most private of prayers.
“I heard you, nigger!” Titus hollered. “Might’n come out now!”
Reluctantly, the felt hat rose, with the hairy face of a young man appearing beneath its wide brim, frightened eyes about as big as the quilled rosettes on Scratch’s leather shirt.
Titus looked up and down the intruder’s frame. The bearded stranger already wore his hair hung long over his collar. Maybeso this feller’d been out here some time already.
But he was still wearing store-bought woolen clothes—mussed and dirty to be sure, torn and ripped in places. And it was plain to see that his leather belt was notched up tight around a waist surely much skinnier than it had
