suck on the wound, swallowing slowly.
For the longest time Titus watched McAfferty draw at his own blood before Asa turned his head and attempted to gaze up at Bass, his eyes slowly swimming, rolling.
“G-get us to … water. Get water.”
With the deadweight of a sack of meal, Asa’s head went limp across Bass’s arm.
Unable to support it any longer, Scratch pulled his arm free, gasping for air as if his lungs were filled with hot coals. Squatting there by the body of his partner, Titus stared down at his own wrists. Then he peered over at the bloodstained knife lying by his knee.
The antler handle had a strange, foreign feel in his hand as he scooped it from the ground. A sensation not quite real as he laid the knife lengthwise along his own wrist and without hesitation pressed it down until his watery eyes finally noticed the blood seeping up on either side of the narrow blade already crusted with sparkling particles of sand.
Surprised that there was no pain, Scratch continued to ease the blade down into his skin, opening himself up even more. As the dark fluid began to bead and tumble off his forearm, Titus yanked the wrist to his mouth, began sucking noisily. His eyes fluttered half-closed in that feral way of an animal savoring the warm, moist nourishment of its prey.
Blood thick as his mam’s Kentucky sugarcane molasses. So warm against his lips, oozing back upon his tongue. He swallowed, sensing himself gag, feeling his stomach lurch in revolt. Desperate, he shoved the bile back down, his throat stinging with the acid’s burn, its fiery aftertaste, and kept on sucking.
At the back of his neck he became aware of the fire against his skin. Revived enough now to raise his head, Bass turned and glanced at the path the sun was taking into the west. They might just stand a chance now … make it through till nightfall. But they damn well needed shade until the sun had limped from the sky.
“H-hannah,” he whispered, able to coax no more out of his throat.
Sucking some more on his wrist, Titus used the tip of his tongue to smear that blood over his lips until they were moistened, then tried to whistle. Nothing more than a faint shrill sound. Beginning to feel hopeful at this small success, Bass watched the half-dead mule roll her big head to the side and peer over at him.
He licked the lips again and whistled. This time she obediently started to turn his way. Then stopped.
“Hannah,” he croaked.
She came on around with his coaxing. The mule worked unsteadily at those next few steps, turning slightly, picking up one hoof at a time beneath her burdens, finally drawing close enough that he could reach out with his bloody arm and grab for the lead rope. On the fourth try he captured the braided rawhide and looped it around the hand. Now he was able to nudge her closer, eventually turning her so that she stood nearly on top of them to block the bright light. So hot had the direct rays become that this sudden shadow seemed like the cooling breath carried by a spring breeze.
It surprised him when his saddle mount came over to join the mule. Nor was it long before one of McAfferty’s packhorses came over to join the others. He let himself collapse to the side in relief. A good thing it was, he thought as he let his head rest atop his elbow on that hot ground—good that horses were a damned sight more sociable than he was.
There in the collective shade made by those near-dead animals, Scratch closed his eyes and sighed, letting his mind drift now that his tongue wasn’t near so swollen with thirst, now that he could feel some saliva beginning to work up at the back of his throat, around that tiny pebble he had stuffed under his tongue back near sunup. In a while he figured he just might have enough strength to get up and cut a horse’s ear for McAfferty.
Not … right now.
In a while.
On that August morning—what seemed like ages ago now—he and McAfferty had hastened back to Hatcher’s camp, eager to announce their plans to set off on their lonesome to the others, who were trudging over groggily to settle by the fire and swill down some steaming coffee.
“Here I thought you was a happy man being part of us!” Caleb Wood sputtered, the first of them to protest.
Elbridge Gray shook his head woefully, pursing his lips until he exploded, “Can’t believe you’d up and leave us now, Scratch—after all we been through together for the last two years!”
Isaac agreed. “And after all we done to take you in with us!”
Their reactions making him feel the first pangs of regret, Scratch nodded and said, “I’ll always be a grateful man, fellas—for all you done by me. But don’t get it wrong just ’cause I aim to make my own tracks now. I’m beholden to you, for always.”
With that sentiment encouraging them, Caleb, Isaac, and Elbridge did their best to caution Scratch against pulling up his stakes and setting off alone with Asa McAfferty.
“Goddammit, Bass,” Simms growled, smearing drops of coffee collected in the broom bristle of his whitish- blond mustache. “You damn well know how many times we had a scrap with the Blackfoot our own selves in the last two years.”
Gray nodded vigorously. “And now you wanna set off with just the two of you niggers!”
“We ain’t going nowhere near Blackfeet country!” McAfferty protested after remaining silent for so long.
But Wood ignored the white-head, jabbing a finger at Bass instead, just as that turkey-wattled schoolmaster back to Kentucky had jabbed once too often. “Pick up and move off from us, Scratch? And here I thought you was our friend!” Caleb glared a moment at McAfferty.
“This don’t mean I ain’t your friend no more—”
Wood fumed, “But I guess you ain’t our friend, are you, Scratch! I s’pose now I can see just how your stick floats—”
“A man does what he thinks best,” Jack Hatcher interrupted the tongue-lashing, immediately shushing them all. “Bass allays been that sort to take the circle. Even though I don’t agree with him one whit … I’ll trust to what Scratch thinks best for hisself.”
“Y-you mean you’re gonna let him go off like this, Jack?” Rufus asked, his voice rising an octave in disbelief.
Hatcher didn’t answer all that quickly. Instead, his unwavering gaze landed on McAfferty. Then he said, “I’ll trust in both of ’em, boys. Ye ’member we rode with both of these men of a time.” Then his eyes came over to fix on Titus. “And now it ’pears that the time for us to ride together’s come to an end.”
“Don’t mean we reached the knot at the end of our days together,” Bass replied, his throat filled with sentiment, suddenly sensing the ghostly presence of so many of those who lived on now only in his memory.
“Ye leaving us … it’s been coming for some time,” Jack explained. “I seen it plain as prairie sun. Some folks need others around ’em all the time—like the rest of these boys. Then … there’s folks like you, Titus Bass. The sort of man what does best left on his own.”
Those words reverberated someplace within him now, like the waves of heat rising off the cast-iron surface of this land.
Scratch didn’t know how long he had been lying there with his eyes closed, his half-cooked mind numb from the dizzying heat, his thoughts running in this direction, then that, just the way Hannah would urinate on this baked and flinty ground, the hot yellow piss streaming off in one little rivulet, then a second, and then another speeding there, finally a fourth narrow dribble fingering across the merciless, endless crust of the flaky sand.
With a cold seizure of his heart, Scratch wondered if he had made a mistake—come so far into this devil’s fry pan to die with McAfferty. Maybeso he came only to prove something to himself.
Could he make it on his own hook?
Or was the real problem that he doubted he would ever be able to trust in another man as fully as he had trusted in those three before they disappeared with near everything he had labored for?
And while he was questioning himself and what he had done: should he have followed McAfferty out of rendezvous back in August? Or had he only been blinded by the prospect of virgin beaver streams where no white man had ever laid a moccasin?
In the end, was he cut out for making it on his own hook?
Hearing Asa groan, Bass reluctantly opened his eyes. It was still shady on him. Peering up, he could see that all of their five animals remained around them. What a sight he and Asa must make, and he tried to chuckle in that taut, sunburned face of his. Out here where nothing green grew tall enough to brush a horse’s belly, their little
