Crack in the Sky

Closing his eyes as he dragged bow across strings, the tall, homely trapper began to sing to that hushed, respectful, firelit crowd.

I’m just a poor, wayfaring stranger,

Traveling through this world of woe.

Yet there’s no sickness, no toil, no danger

In that bright land to which I go.

I’m going there to see my father,

Who’s gone before me, no more to roam.

I’m just going over Jordan.

I’m only going over home.

For a moment Titus tore his eyes from Hatcher’s expressive, lean, and melancholy face, glancing quickly about at the others, every last one of them spellbound by the sad, mournful strains of the two instruments, by the plaintive, feral call of Hatcher’s voice as he climbed atop each new note.

I know dark clouds will gather round me,

I know my way is rough and steep.

Yet beautiful fields lie just before me,

Where God’s redeemed their vigils keep.

I’m going there to see my mother,

She said she’d meet me when I come.

I’m just going over Jordan.

I’m only going over home.

One by one the ghostly wisps of people from his past slipped through his mind as Jack and Elbridge weaved their magic spell in that firelit darkness. A father and mother left behind in Kentucky what seemed a lifetime ago. Good men like Ebenezer Zane and Isaac Washburn, dead well before their time. Billy and Silas, and even Bud Tuttle too—those three who had come into Bass’s life, then gone to their downriver deaths.

Death so sudden in this wilderness. A man’s end come so in the blink of an eye on this unspeakable frontier. Every day was to be savored and cherished and fiercely embraced for all it was worth—a fact that every last one of these few gathered at the fire understood, knowing theirs would not be a Christian burial. No, none of these was the sort of man forever to lie at rest beneath some carved stone marker where family and friends could come to visit. Instead, theirs would be anonymous graves, an unheralded passing … their only memorial the glory of their having lived out their roster of days in the utter ecstasy of freedom.

I’ll soon be free of every trial,

My body will sleep in the churchyard.

I’ll drop the cross of self-denial,

And enter on my great reward.

I’m going there to see my brothers,

Who’ve gone before me one by one.

I’m just going over Jordan.

I’m only going over home.

To die Where the winter snows would lie deep in seasons still in the womb of time, their bones gnawed by predators, scattered to bleach below endless suns … to sleep out eternity where only the wind would come to sing in whisper over this place of final rest.

4

By the time Jack Hatcher’s bunch began to straggle back to their bowers and bedrolls across the creek from the grove where the company men had raised their camp, a strip of sky along the eastern horizon had begun to relinquish its lampblack, noticeably graying. Dawn was not far behind.

As he stumbled along, Scratch’s head throbbed, tender as a red welt. Barely able to prop his eyes open any more than snaky slits, his toes groped their way through the grass and brush. Scattered among the outfit’s packs and belongings, he finally located his blankets and lone buffalo robe. Sinking to the ground, Bass rolled onto his side and dragged the old Shoshone rawhide-bound saddle toward him to prop beneath his head. As he lay back upon it, the saddle’s wooden frame momentarily creaked beneath the weight of his shoulders, then suddenly split apart and collapsed—smacking his head against the hard ground and the saddle’s sideboards.

“What in hell are you about over there?” John Rowland demanded as he sat up, a disheveled sight to behold. He had come back to his blankets some time before the others.

Groaning as he gently rubbed the side of his skull with two fingertips, Bass slowly sat up. Struggling to catch his breath against the hammer pounding inside his brain, he carefully adjusted the greasy, sweat-salted blue bandanna he tied over the top of his head not only to keep his long hair out of his eyes but to protect that bare patch of exposed cranium where he had lost his hair to an Arapaho horse thief.

“Shit,” Caleb Wood grumbled as he stretched himself out once more, “Scratch cain’t even lay down quietlike.”

Bass held up the chewed wooden frame pieces. “My goddamned saddle come apart on me!”

“Come apart?” Hatcher repeated in disbelief as he rolled onto his knees and crabbed over to Bass’s blanket.

“Look at it!” Titus shrieked in horror as he ran fingers over the ruin of his old saddle.

“I’ll be go to hell, boys!” Jack cried. “Come see for yer own selves!”

“See what?” Kinkead asked as he loomed over them.

“Right there,” Hatcher instructed. “See where the damned critters been eatin’ at it.”

“C-critters?” Titus squawled. “What critters?”

Hatcher’s eyes narrowed, looking over their encampment. “Go see to yer outfits, boys. Likely Scratch ain’t the only one chewed up.”

“Critters?” Bass repeated.

Hatcher watched the others scurry off to their own belongings before he turned back to Titus. “Wolves, more’n likely.”

“Wolves done this?” he asked, letting the ruined saddle spill from his hands.