Crack in the Sky

Then he crooked the left arm at the elbow, swaying it crazily.

“Why?” Elbridge asked, cocking his head slightly. “He a bull in these parts what you got your own sights on?”

“No,” Williams said evenly, his eyebrows lowered meaningfully. “One of these days I’ll go under my own self, boys. And spirits awready showed me how I’m coming back.”

In utter disbelief Gray squeaked, “C-coming back?”

“My medeecin showed me in a vision I had this past winter,” Williams declared. “Coming back as a bull elk.”

Gray glanced over at Bass with a wink and a wry twist to his smile. “A bull elk, you say?”

“With his left antler growed crooked, jest like I showed ye,” Williams explained. “What’s wrong with ye two? Don’t tell me ye don’t believe in Injun medeecin?”

“Damn well don’t,” Bass declared. “But that don’t mean you can’t, William Shirley Williams.”

For a moment the older man regarded Titus before a smile eventually came to that well-tanned, leathery face. “So, tell me, Scratch. How long ye been out here to these mountains?”

“Since summer of twenty-five.”

“I come out west the y’ar afore that and laid in my first winter up near Salish Flouse in Hudson Bay country,” Williams explained as he rocked out of the saddle and landed on the ground. “Ye both been out in these hills for any time at all, boys—a shame ye h’ain’t learned much from the Injuns here ’bouts.”

Gray demanded, “What you mean—we ain’t learned from the Injuns?”

“’Bout life … and dyin’ … and all the magic what lives all round us,” Williams said, his voice quieting, gesturing his right arm in a full half circle. Then he went to rubbing a sore knee as he continued. “There’s more for a man to learn hisself and unnerstand than most folks can ever start to know. But it takes a smart man to own up to not knowing about all the magic what lives around him.”

Titus scratched at his beard a moment. “Don’t reckon I savvy what sort of magic you’re talking ’bout.”

“He’s telling us about the sort what makes a coin disappear from a man’s hand,” Elbridge explained. “Magic what pulls that coin from ahind a man’s ear.”

Stroking his horse’s muzzle, then bending to pick up a front hoof to inspect it, Williams replied, “Ain’t that kind of magic at all, boys. Magic … like the spirits all round us. The ghosts of them what gone afore. Powerful beings—warriors and such. Hoo-doos what we can’t see ’cause we ain’t got our own magic strong enough yet.”

“And when we get our own magic strong enough,” Bass inquired skeptically, “you’re saying we can see them hoo-doos? See them spirits you talk about?”

With a wide smile Williams set the second forehoof on the ground and straightened, stretching his back. “Man makes his own magic strong, Scratch—then that man don’t just hear them spirits talking to him, he can see ’em too.”

“Shit!” Elbridge groused in total disbelief. “You been sipping at the cider jug far too long, Williams!”

The old horseman calmly turned from Elbridge without showing the slightest contempt for the man’s disbelief. “The spirits are around us alla time, Scratch. They show theyselves to me. They palaver at me. And I listen. I h’aint ashamed to tell ye listening to ’em has saved this nigger’s hash a time or two.”

Elbridge snorted, “How them hoo-doos save your hash?”

Without acknowledging Gray in the slightest, Williams continued. “Like it’s no more’n a curtain, Scratch— there’s nothing more’n a breath of air atween us and the world of them hoo-doos.”

“So you hear them spirits all the time, do you?” Titus asked, amazed that he sensed something more than sheer lunacy in the older man.

“No, don’t hear ’em not alla time,” he answered, gazing up at the clear blue of springtime’s fading light. “It’s … it’s like there’s that spirit world, and there’s our world right here. They’re two differ’nt places. But there h’ain’t nothing more’n a curtain up atween us and the other world. Atween us and all what we don’t unnerstand.”

Wagging his head, Titus asked, “So how’s a man ever hear or see these hoo-doos?”

“Only when there’s a rip in that curtain atween our world and the rest of what is.”

“Only then?”

“When there’s a tear in that curtain I tol’t you about. Maybeso think of it like … like a crack,” he declared, waving that arm of his at the horizon, describing a jagged line rising from the earth and ascending toward the darkening dome overhead. “A crack that goes all the way from here, where folks like us walk … clear to heaven.”

“A c-crack in the sky?” Elbridge chortled.

Now at last Williams turned to Gray and nodded emphatically. “That’s right, nigger. A man what opens hisself up to hearing the real world all round him—then that’s the man what can see right on into the world of spirits and hoo-doos by looking through that ol’ ragged crack in the sky.”

For the moment Bass wasn’t sure just how he felt about this ghosty horseman as he and Elbridge went about setting the last two of their traps here along a stretch of a new stream they hadn’t visited during last autumn’s stay in the Bayou Salade. But one thing was for sure—Williams had given him something to think about, something with some real heft to it. Titus figured the talk around the campfire that night wasn’t destined to be the usual fare of senoritas and Taos lightning and how big a carouse they would have come rendezvous on the Popo Agie. If no one else got this William Shirley Williams to talking about his magic and his hoo-doos and that crack in the sky, then Scratch vowed he sure as hell would.

More than three weeks of hard riding out of Taos had brought them into the southern end of the Bayou once more. How different the high, narrow mountain valley appeared this time. Last year they had reached South Park from the north near the tail end of summer, when the grasses were burned and curing beneath a relentless and high summer sun, just before the turning of the leaves.

Here in early spring the snows were only beginning to retreat up the mountainsides. The trees only starting to bud, the willow and alder giving no more than a hint of what would soon be their green glory. The streams were just opening up after a long winter’s rest beneath thick blankets of ice, every tiny freshet beginning to throb with snow-melt as the days lengthened, their narrow threads meandering through every meadow, adding their strength to the creeks that spilled from the snowfields overhead, continuing through the darkened stands of spruce and fir and lodgepole as they descended toward the great, long valley where the beasts gathered and took their nourishment.

Come this the season of prime plew. Early spring when the beaver possessed its finest coat. When the flat- tails were their busiest: warily emerging from the security of their winter lodges to labor through the short daylight hours constructing new slides and dams in every meadow. After three spring seasons stalking this high country, Bass knew down at the very marrow of him just how important was the spring hunt to a trapper.

When beaver were easiest to spook and hardest to bring to bait—spring was the time a man discovered if he had what it took to be a master trapper.

During the fall was another matter entirely: the animals had been out of their lodges and active since the melting of the high snowpacks. They were less guarded and careful in the autumn, when their activities were nudged into an even higher intensity than they had been during the summer. With the cooling of the days and the chilling of the nights, the beaver became more animated, roaming farther, extending their territory with the arrival of fall.

But for now—this season of rebirth—the bucktoothed rodents were extremely wary, watchful, and suspicious of the castor set out to lure them to their deaths.

“I come outta Boone County, on the Ohio River, northern Kentucky,” Bass answered the newcomer’s question. “Where you from back east?”

Brushing the hair back from his shoulder, so long it oft tangled in the beard that fell halfway down his chest, Williams said, “Borned in a cabin on Horse Crik, tucked up under Skyuka Mountain.”

Hatcher asked, “Where’s that, Bill?”

“Rutherford County, in Northern Carolina.”

“How long ago was that?” Isaac inquired.

“I’m forty-two this last Janeeary.”

Scratch commented eagerly, “I’m born in January. When’s your day?”

“The third.”