“Damn, I reckon I know just how you boys feel—no way to hear word they brung out our necessaries early. We wasn’t in winter camp yet ourselves.”
Two summers, come and gone, and still no rendezvous for him. Bass heaved a mighty sigh of disappointment, “’Thout no trader, not gonna be no ronnyvoo now.”
“Just what you boys come here to do if not for ronnyvoo?” Kinkead demanded.
“Not all the brigades got ’em provisions back to winter,” Porter stated. Then he threw a thumb back in the direction of their camp. “Our bunch didn’t get us a chance to take on supplies with the rest in the spring.”
Now Hatcher’s face was growing crimson. Gritting his teeth, he growled, “Winter and spring … and now it’s the goddamned summer! So ye’re telling us there ain’t gonna be no trade goods come to ronnyvoo?”
“Ashley ain’t figgering to be out his own self,” Porter explained as more of his bunch came up to stand nearby in the bright midsummer sun among Hatcher’s men.
“Each one of the big brigades we still ’spect to come in all got ’em supplies they can trade off to you fellers for your skins, I s’pose,” a new and taller man declared, coming to a halt at Porter’s shoulder. “What outfit you men with?”
“Like we just told him—we ain’t with no outfit,” Scratch declared, surprised to discover just how proud that made him to state it so unequivocally. “We are an outfit.”
“This bunch is on its own hook,” Caleb Wood emphasized.
“Thort you might be some of American Fur coming in,” the second man said. “They been dogging near every one of our brigades since last summer.”
“This here’s Mad Jack Hatcher,” Scratch exclaimed proudly, sweeping an extended arm toward their leader. “He’s the one what heads this outfit of free mountaineers.”
“Hatcher, is it?” Nathan Porter asked, extending his hand to Jack. “From the sounds of it, you got a passel of furs to trade.”
“We got plenty of plew,” Hatcher agreed as they shook. “But where’s my men to find something to trade them furs for?”
The taller of the company men said, “Just as soon’s the rest of the brigades ride in, we’ll start the trading.”
“At mountain prices, I’ll lay!” Scratch snarled.
Porter nodded. “After all, this here’s the mountains—”
“Wagh!” Hatcher snorted with the guttural roar of the grizzly boar. “Mountain prices, he said, boys!”
“Get ready to get yourselves honey-fuggled by them company booshways!” Caleb Wood cried as he pounded a hand on Porter’s back, both of them laughing easily.
But the second man was clearly uncomfortable as Hatcher’s men guffawed along with many of the company men. “Mountain prices is what we all take in exchange. Ain’t no man better’n any other.”
“No, I savvy you’re right there,” Scratch said as he stepped up before the tall trapper. “But just as long as we get what’s fair for our plew here in the mountains, a man don’t mind paying mountain prices for his necessaries.”
“Hold on!” Rowland jumped forward, his face drawn and gray with concern. “Y-you mean … if’n there ain’t gonna be no trader come out—there ain’t gonna be no whiskey?”
“No whiskey!” shrieked Rufus Graham.
Now it was Porter’s turn to roar with laughter. “Ain’t got enough to float a bullboat back to St. Louie, boys … but we have us enough to wash the dust out’n your gullet!”
“Whooo-haw!” Bass shouted with glee, sidling up to fling an arm over Porter’s shoulder. “How smooth it be? Like a Natchez whore’s baby-haired bum?”
Nathan Porter turned and looked at Bass in alarm. “Smooth? Hell, it ain’t smooth!”
A new trapper stepped forward. “Ain’t no such a thing as smooth likker in these here mountains, friend. Ever’ drink’ll cut’cha going down and land like a bar of Galena lead when it hits bottom.”
“I wanna know if it can take the shine off my traps,” Hatcher said.
“An’ can it peel the varnish off my saddle tree?” Bass inquired.
“Hell if it can’t!” the man replied with a near toothless grin.
Bass looked over at Hatcher, and they both smiled so broadly, it nearly cracked their faces in half.
Scratch screamed, “Then bring on that there likker, fellers—’cause I got me a two-year thirst to rid myself of!”
Although there was indeed a small supply of crude grain alcohol at the south shore of Sweet Lake, that summer of 1828 there would be no great and boisterous revelry because Sublette and Jackson had already reached the mountains with some twenty thousand dollars in supplies the winter before. Despite the shortage of trade goods and liquor, the air of excitement, camaraderie, and fellowship swelled as the sun began to drop and twilight approached each evening.
Rendezvous was rendezvous. Make no mistake of that. A man worked a whole year to journey off to some prearranged valley for this reunion with faces and friends he had not seen in all those months of grueling labor in freezing streams, fighting off the numbing cold of the past winter, defending himself against horse-raiders and scalping parties. This July a double handful of the new company’s men would be missing.
Survivors of one more year in the wilderness, Hatcher’s men joined other free trappers and brigade men at their fires for swapping stories, generously lathered with exaggeration bordering on lies, catching up on any fragment of the stale news brought out from the settlements by the traders last winter—news seemingly as fresh as these men in the wilderness wished to make every report and flat-out rumor.
As night eased down, black-necked stilts called out softly from the rushes in the nearby marsh bordering the lake.
“Listen to that, won’t you?” a stranger said to Bass at that cluster of fires in the brigade camp where all of them had gathered.
“A purty sound,” Titus replied, hearing the birds’ calls fade across the water.
“If’n you think that’s purty,” Rowland said to the stranger as he strode up, “then you ain’t never heard Jack play his fiddle.”
The man whirled on Rowland. “One of your men has him a fiddle?”
“We do,” Bass declared proudly.
A new stranger with a big red nose leaped up from the ground where he had been lying. “He can play it?”
“Damn if he can’t,” Rowland declared.
Bass nodded. “Plays so damned bad, it hurts more’n your ears when you’re nursing a hangover!”
“Hey, Squeeg!” the man with the big red nose roared across the fire. “One of these here free men plays the fiddle!”
“Who’s the one with the fiddle?” demanded a tall, barrel-chested man.
“I am,” Hatcher volunteered, standing from his stump. “Jack Hatcher’s the name.”
“Mine’s Brody.”
Then Jack warned, “But I don’t play for free.”
“That’s right,” Solomon Fish agreed. “None of us play for free.”
Brody wheeled around on Fish. “What’s it you play?”
“Gimme a kettle an’ a stick,” Solomon said with a straight face.
“The hell with you,” and Brody turned back to Hatcher. “You play for a drink, won’cha?”
“The devil hisself got a tail, don’t he?”
The tall man took a wide, playful swing at Hatcher. “Go get your fiddle, coon! This bunch is half-froze for sweet music!”
That twilight as the sky grew dark and meat broiled on the end of sharpened sticks, spitted and sizzling over the leaping flames, Jack Hatcher returned with the scuffed and scratched, journey-weary oak-brown violin case.
“I’ll be dogged!” some man quietly exclaimed. “He do have him a fiddle!”
Another voice asked across the fire, “Can he really play it?”
“Your toes’ll be tapping in less time’n takes to lift a Blackfoot’s hair!” Caleb Wood explained.
