abeyance, Bass vowed he would use this day to narrow the distance, getting close enough to the Blackfoot to come up with some scheme to free their prisoners.
For some time during that ride he brooded on that first fight he had taken Waits-by-the-Water into, slipping in on the Arapaho who had come to avenge the deaths of some fellow warriors. He and Josiah had chosen to risk it all by striking first, not waiting to be hit by the Indians. But to do that required that their own wives had to take part in the killing alongside them. From slipping in to take down the horse guard, to shooting the enemy as they slept around their fire …
Bass asked that the woman be every bit as strong in the coming hours as she had been that long-ago autumn in the Bayou Salade.
Near midday, with the sun behind their shoulders no more than a pewter glob behind the immobile clouds, it became even more plain that the Blackfoot were intent on penetrating the high country rather than taking the long way around the foot of the mountains. While it would be a much easier journey for the horsemen, to take that circuitous trail to the east would place the whittled-down war party in the heart of territory claimed by the Mountain Crow. The enemy was taking the quicker, more direct and dangerous, route home.
By late afternoon they were well into the foothills, each gust of wind stirring the fragrance of cedar, the perfumes of the sage that dotted the open slopes crossed by the Blackfoot trail. Hour after hour Scratch squinted up the hillside, studying those mountainsides carpeted with thick timber, the snow-crusted granite escarpments that poked their heads from the last reaches of alpine tundra where trees no longer grew.
Once again he kicked his heels into the pony’s ribs, anxious for a bit more speed from the weary animal.
There was little choice but to narrow the gap before they reached that timberline. If the Blackfoot got to those rugged slopes of scree before sundown, they would cross on over. Which meant that he and the Crow could not follow them into the waning hour of twilight. The animals would simply find the footing too tough in the deepening of dusk. And moving across the shifting talus and loose shale would create the sort of noise that would alert the Blackfoot they had company.
Up till now the sight of two lone pursuers would not have caused the war party any concern. But here as the timber thinned, where the cedar and juniper were battered, twisted, and stunted by constant winds, forced to grow closer to the ground, the Blackfoot might well decide to turn around and smack the two strangers the way a man might finally slap at a troublesome deerfly.
So they kept their eyes constantly moving along that portion of the trail cut in the crusty snow, hoofprints threading through the waist-high boulders and knee-high scrub brush—wary of unexpected sounds emerging from the frozen silence as much as they were watchful of any see some new country. Brown’s Hole might be the place for us to winter.”
“You don’t mind me riding along?”
With a smile Scratch declared, “I been ’thout a partner for many a winter now—back to thirty-four. I’d like to hook up for a spell and catch us some beaver to boot.”
Sweete stuck out his hand. “When you fixing to pull out?”
“Two days set with you?”
“All right by me.”
“Dawn.”
“First light it is.”
As events turned out, others were setting out that same morning—men who had taken themselves off the company’s books. But Doc Newell, Kit Carson, and a few others weren’t riding south for the Uintah. They were instead heading northwest for Fort Hall. Carson had his young Arapaho wife along, while Newell was escorting his own family as well as Virginia, Joe Meek’s Indian wife, to the British post while Meek set off to the southwest intending to work the Salt River. If the American traders were withdrawing from the mountains, Meek, Newell, and Carson declared, then it made sense for a man to polish his relationship with those English booshways of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
“Maybe we’ll see you two down to Brown’s Hole late of the fall,” Carson declared as he swung into the saddle after shaking hands with Bass and Sweete.
“We’re gonna see what the English offer us for peltries,” Newell explained as he climbed atop his horse. “If’n they give a man a fair swap, we’ll trap the Snake country.”
“But if the Britishers don’t treat us right,” Carson stated, “figure to see us at Fort Davy Crockett a’fore it snows hard.”
“That’s still good beaver country, Scratch,” Newell said as he nudged his horse away, giving a farewell wave. “Bunch of us laid in over to Brown’s Hole last winter.”
In twos and threes small groups of men peeled themselves away from the once-great monolith of the Rocky Mountain fur trade, like ripping back an onion, layer by layer.
Only a year before on the Popo Agie, the Pierre Chouteau Company had employed some one hundred twenty trappers in the field. But by the time this rendezvous on the Green was over, no more than one week after the caravan had arrived, company partisan Andrew Drips discovered he would be leading fewer than eighty men north to the Three Forks country for the fall hunt. And no more than two thousand pelts would be leaving rendezvous for St. Louis.
Never again would skin trappers be able to turn in their furs for credit, then go in debt for whiskey and trifles for the coming year. This summer on the Green no one could be sure there would be another summer, another rendezvous, or if there would be a mountain fur trade. Little surprise, then, that more than two dozen men simply slipped away from rendezvous with what they could lay their hands on. No longer was there such a thing as company credit.
And damn soon there simply would be no way for most of these men to make a living.
Trying to compete with the British had begun to drive Pierre Chouteau, Jr., out of the business. With the high cost of trade goods back east, the Americans had to offer top dollar for beaver—or lose those pelts to the Hudson’s Bay Company securely ensconced at Fort Hall. And to continue offering five dollars per pound when those plews weren’t bringing enough of a profit in the eastern markets was nothing less than financial suicide. If American trappers could not only wrangle a better price for their fur from the British, but pay less for their possibles in the bargain, then Scratch figured only an idiot would continue to do business with the St. Louis monopoly.
All around him the Rocky Mountain beaver trade had become no more than a pale reflection of those glory days of old.
Following the course of the Green River, Bass and Sweete had slowly marked the miles that took them through that familiar country. Behind the two of them rode Waits-by-the-Water and Magpie on their painted ponies. Little Flea sat in front of his father, tiny hands gripping the reins the way his sister once had done, assured he was master of all that he surveyed each day.
Over the last two weeks a relentless August sun had tortured this high desert country. With every step the hooves scraped the parched earth, sending up clouds of fine yellow dust that hung suspended in the breathless heat. But every night they camped in the shade of cottonwoods lining the riverbank, cooling not only their aching throats but soaking up to their necks in the revitalizing current as twilight overtook the land.
Eventually they neared the mouth of Vermillion Creek,* where the Green made one of its two great bends in passing through Brown’s Hole. In the middistance they discovered a small herd of horses grazing beneath the tall old cottonwoods. Just beyond, through the massive trunks of that stately grove, Bass spotted the stockade of upright logs. As they moved closer, a white man pushed open one side of the narrow gate and stopped just outside the walls, watching the party’s approach.
“Shady spot you picked for yourselves,” Bass commented as he brought his horse to a halt and the stranger dropped the butt of his rifle to the ground.
“This here place is better’n most to winter,” the man said as he came up to Bass’s horse, holding up his hand. “Name’s Sinclair. Prewett Sinclair.”
Shad introduced himself, then asked, “You the only feller here?”
“My partners is gone for ’nother few weeks,” the man with the dark, angular face explained.
“Partners? How many of you there be?” Scratch inquired.
“Three. Thompson headed east to the Missoura settlements for supplies last spring, just as soon as he could get north around the mountains. Three weeks back, my other partner named Craig headed over to meet Thompson—planning to meet up at Vaskiss’s fort.”
