Eventually a few more joined in, accompanied by the trapper beating his taut, willow-strung beaver hide.
Then Hatcher began to prance and bob right around Gray in a quick, whirling jig of a dance, both of them kicking up dust and bits of flying grass as their feet flew.
Back to back the two weaved and swayed, then began to do-si-do around and around one another.
After two more songs one of the company men hollered, “Meat’s cut. Time for the fire!”
Night had deepened while a handful of trappers had butchered loose, bloody slabs of venison and elk. The trappers surged forward now that the supper call was raised, knives in hand, waiting for their portion. Jabbed on the end of long, sharpened sticks, the rich red meat sizzled over the flames, juices dripping into the crackling fire. Men grunted and groaned with immense, feral satisfaction until their bellies could hold no more; then once again their thoughts turned to liquor. With pepper-laced alcohol warming their gullets, many of the men brought out pipes of clay or cob or briar burl, filling them with fragrant Kentucky burley, lighting them with twigs at the fireside before settling back against saddles and packs and bedrolls.
“I ain’t heard a squeezebox played that good since I floated the Mississap,” Scratch declared with pure appreciation as he eased down beside Elbridge Gray, his tin cup in one hand, a second helping of thick tenderloin impaled on the knife he clutched in the other.
Around a big bite of rare meat, Gray replied, “I’m rusty.”
“If’n that’s rusty,” Nathan Porter snorted, “I’d sure as hang wanna hear you when you’re oiled!”
Without benefit of fork, Bass held the slab of meat up, snatched hold of a bite-sized chunk between his teeth, then, holding the meat out from his lips, cut off that bite with the knife. Hardly the best of proper table manners, it was nonetheless an efficient way for a man to wolf down his fill of lean, juicy meat in less time than it would take most men to fill a pipe bowl and light it. While some ate more, and a few ate less, the standard fare in the mountains was two pounds of meat at a sitting.
Eventually Titus grew stuffed and well satisfied, ready at last for the coffee some of the company trappers had set to boil at the edge of the fires. As he wiped his knife off across the thigh of his buckskin legging, Bass turned to Elbridge. “You’ll play some more for us tonight?”
Gray asked, “You’re up to it, Jack?”
Hatcher replied, “Dog, if I ain’t. When ye’re done coffeeing yerself, Elbridge.”
Minutes later the two were at it again, the potent liquor continuing to flow, both company trappers and the free men frolicking with total abandon: dancing, singing, beating on the bottoms of kettles or banging two sticks together in time to the music They whirled in pairs or stomped about in a wild jig, knees pumping so high, they near grazed a man’s own chin.
The night had ripened and the moon had risen before Jack shushed them all.
“Gonna play ye one last song,” he told them as he stood wavering back and forth, clearly feeling his cups.
“It be a foot stomper?”
“No,” Hatcher growled with a snap.
Someone else yelled, “I wanna foot stomper!”
“Shuddup,” Caleb Wood grumped at the complainer.
“I allays play it,” Hatcher explained as the group fell quiet. “Allays …”
Solomon quickly explained to the others, “It’s his song, boys.”
Quietly, Gray asked, “You want me play with you?”
Jack nodded. “Sure do. Sounds purtier with ye siding for me, Elbridge.”
Hatcher led into the tune with a long, melancholy introduction. After a few bars Elbridge joined in, quietly, echoing Jack’s plaintive notes like the answer a man would hear to a jay’s call, the faint reply returning from the distance in those eastern woodlands where they had all been raised.
