Daniel Potts.”
“I met a couple other fellas that same ronnyvoo,” Bass explained, suddenly remembering faces. “I ain’t seen either of ’em here. One was named Bridger.”
“Jim Bridger?” the first trapper asked. “Bridger did go back east with Sublette last year—see his ol’ home and family some … but he ain’t give up on the mountains.”
“He’s got him some family he wanted to see back to Missoura,” the other man explained.
And the coffee maker said, “Likely Jim’ll be back out with Sublette’s pack train when it shows up in the next few days.”
For a while Titus watched the flames in the fire pit as more men began to stir in their blankets, some rising to move out to the bushes, where they relieved themselves. A few came over to join the three at the fire, while most simply returned to their bedrolls and drifted back to sleep as the chilly air brightened with the sun’s first appearance in the east.
“Knowed me ’Nother fella—his mama was a slave and his daddy was a Virginia tobacco grower,” Bass began to explain. “They come out to Missouri when he was a tad. That feller had him his mama’s dark skin and curly hair —”
“And he wore it long and fancy,” interrupted one of the new arrivals to the fire as he came to a halt. “Fact be, all his clothes was damned fancy, wasn’t they?”
He turned to the stranger. “You know him?”
“Sure sounds like Beckwith. He was half-Negra, if’n that’s what you’re trying to get at with the talk of his mama being a slave.”
“Jim Beckwith, that’s him,” Titus replied, remembering all the more now. “So what become of him? He off north with Davy Jackson’s outfit?”
The meat carver shrugged. “No. Beckwith signed off the books with Campbell middle of the winter last. Decided to go out on his own and live with the Crow.”
Scratch asked, “Why’d a man like him wanna go off and live with them Crow ’stead of staying with his own kind?”
The new arrival looked at Bass. “Beckwith said he figgered them Crow was closer to his own kind than we white folk was.”
“Seems that last fall some of us boys played a joke on him, figgering to have us a hoot making them Crow think Beckwith was one of their own what was stole from ’em when he was just a child,” said the coffee maker.
The meat carver chimed up, “Don’t you know Beckwith even had him a mole on his eyelid, just like a li’l child what was stole from them Crow years back! So when we told them Crow that Beckwith was their own kin, why— one of them ol’ squaws spotted that mole!”
“And she was dead sartin Beckwith was her long, lost boy come back home to roost once more!” roared the coffee maker, slapping his knee.
“Beckwith figgers to be something big on a stick with them Crow now,” explained the new arrival at the fire.
The round-faced meat carver said, “Could be you ’member some others, eh?”
Staring into the smoky fire, Titus wagged his head and grumbled, “’Cept for them friends of mine what ride with Jack Hatcher, ain’t a man around I know anymore.”
15
Near everyone he knew was gone. Hatcher had said that’s what become of most of them what ventured out to the far mountains.
Some time ago Jack declared theirs was the sort of man who discovered they wasn’t cut out for what it took to make a life for themselves out here … so they skeedaddled back east. If they were lucky enough to keep their hair until they fled, like Daniel Potts. Bass figured there was a lot of men who had no business being out here, men who hadn’t been fortunate enough to get back east before their luck ran out.
Even Jim Beckwith—giving up on the mountain trade and throwing in with them Crow. Much as he liked Bird in Ground’s people, Titus couldn’t imagine himself staying on as a full-time member of the tribe. It was getting to be all he could do to stay on as a member of Jack Hatcher’s little brigade of free trappers.
Maybeso he just wasn’t the joiner sort. Perhaps by the time winter arrived, he might decide to go his own way, see how his stick would float all on his lonesome. Maybe he’d be able to rendezvous with Mad Jack’s men every summer. Leastwise, it sure didn’t seem none of them were the kind to give up and skedaddle back east like Potts, not the sort to turn over and go to the blanket like Beckwith done. Hatcher’s bunch was cast-iron, double- riveted beaver trapper, all the way to the muzzle, by damned.
But he suddenly remembered Kinkead and Rowland. Both of them Hatcher’s men, both of them the hardy, hang-on sort who wouldn’t turn around for the backtrail. Yet they had given up the mountains in exchange for a life among the inhabitants of a foreign people in a faraway Mexican village.
For every man who ventured west beyond the Missouri, perhaps there did indeed come a time when that man had filled his life with all the mountain peaks and ribbons of valleys, with all the sparkling beaver streams and snowy, untrammeled meadows that his soul could contain. Perhaps he realized his kind needed something more that only the settlements could offer: something that only women and crowds, buildings, clutter, and closed-in skies could give him.
But damn the settlements while there was still beaver in the mountains!
Damn them white women and their whiny ways, getting a man all bumfoozled the way they could so a man didn’t know fat cow from poor bull and damn well didn’t even care a cuss!
And damn them all them tight places where folks back east chose to live, crawling all over themselves with a racket of wagons and carriages and surreys too, shoving down narrow streets, squeezed in by buildings so tall a man was hard-pressed to see all the sky a man was made to see.
Not to mention the smell of such places where folks lingered far too long!
Not that he wasn’t glad most folks were content to live that way, satisfied to stay back east in their settlements and towns and big, sprawling cities. Better for them that they kept themselves back there beyond the rolling prairies where the buffalo ruled. And damn well better for men like Titus Bass that the crowds were so content to huddle together back east rather than come swarming out here.
Bringing along their white women with those harsh stares they shot a man just about every time he got set to have himself some fun. On their coattails came the constables and preachers with their Bibles too. Raising jails and schools and churches right alongside one another … till the crush of them drove near all the joy right on out of life.
Always seemed that in the wake of wagons came white women. Where a wheel could roll, some high- necked, glary-eyed white gal was bound to show up before a man really had himself a chance to snort and prance. Wagons and white women—why, they’d be the ruin of the West!
This wasn’t no land fit for the likes of them, he thought. This was a man’s country, a man’s country fit only for a certain type of man, at that. Now that land back east, all closed in with little bumps of hills and all the crush of trees … now, that was a woman’s country if ever there was one.
But out here where the hills had grown on up into huge, hoary chains of impenetrable granite and ice and mazelike passes … this was a man’s country, by the everlasting! Back there the country was all closed in, and a person damn well couldn’t see very far: just the way things ought to be in a land where little minds reigned.
Not here! Where only a man with a heart big enough, with a soul mighty enough, could expect to take it all in. From horizon, to horizon, to horizon and back again under an endless blue dome.
He could only hope that Bridger would be back. Likely Jim was the sort to stay on out here, no matter what. Maybe a man like him had to return east just once in his life after he had eventually discovered where his heart was truly at peace. To return east so he could put things to rest with his family, to settle with all that was so he could get on with living all that was to be. Perhaps Bridger had him just that sort of healing and burying the past to accomplish … and then he’d be back.
