of trappers to work the mountains, and of course the sinking number and quality of furs harvested, more than half of those men gathered in the valley of the Green River were genuinely surprised that their patience had been rewarded.
For days now the white men had reminded one another that they really wouldn’t be disappointed if Drips didn’t show. After all, summer was not the time to be chasing beaver anyway. The fur wasn’t worth much, so a man might as well follow the Flathead, Nez Perce, and Shoshone on down to Bonneville’s old fort on Horse Creek to look up some old friends, share some stories of the glory days, and keep one eye on the horizon.
Maybe Drips would show with a few carts and trade goods and a little whiskey. Maybe the mountain trade wasn’t dead yet. Just maybe …
Bass turned to his tall friend, tears glistening in their eyes. His voice cracked as he said, “Damn the settlements while there’s still beaver in the mountains, Shadrach.”
Sweete’s moist eyes grew big, his mouth moving with no sound coming forth as he started to point. “L-lookee there, Scratch!” he finally gasped. “It’s Jim! By God, it’s Jim Bridger!”
“Gabe?” and he squinted into the bright distance. “Damn if it ain’t Gabe hisself!”
Patting little Flea on his back, Shad roared, “And ol’ Frapp too!”
Sure enough, out in front of the short caravan Andrew Drips was leading into the creek bottom was none other than Jim Bridger and his old partner, German-born Henry Fraeb, whose family had emigrated to America, on to St. Louis when Henry was but a child.
Racing out on horseback to meet the train was Joseph Walker. He tore the hat from his head, waving it wildly as another man on foot suddenly angled away from the wagons and sprinted his way, kicking up dust with his ill- fitting boots. Walker reined up in a spray of yellow dirt, vaulting to his feet where he embraced the stranger who threw down his rifle to wrap his arms around the trapper.
“Who you figger that is with Joe?” Titus asked.
“Maybe its Joe’s brother,” Shad said with a smile. “You recollect Joe said he’d be on the lookout for his brother, ever since Joe got a letter from him saying he was gonna be coming west to settle in Oregon this summer.”
“Settlers?” He nearly choked. “Now there’s settlers going to Oregon?”
Shadrach nodded, his smile disappearing. “Maybeso they’ll just keep on going, Scratch. And you won’t have nothing to fret about. I imagine them folks’ll just pass on through and won’t ever stop to fill up these here mountains.”
“Oregon can have ’em,” Bass snarled. “That wet, rainy country is fit for the likes of farmers … such as my pap. Fit for the likes of them Bible-spouting preachers too. With their angry eyes, and sad mouths, and their bitter tongues spouting against ever’thing natural a man gonna do. You damn bet their kind better just pass on through. Let Oregon have ’em, I say!”
The next day after their reunion with Bridger, when Drips opened his packs and set up shop, instead of hurrying for the trading canopy, Bass and Sweete turned in a few furs for that first kettle of whiskey, then sat in the shade of a cottonwood calmly watching the bartering begin.
Wiping droplets from his shaggy, unkempt mustache, Titus asked, “You was with Ashley, wasn’t you?”
“Just a sprout then.”
“I come west in the spring of twenty-five, year Ashley had his first ronnyvoo,” Titus explained. “But I didn’t see my first ronnyvoo till twenty-six.”
“That first’un wasn’t nothing more’n the Gen’ral taking in furs and passing out supplies. Not a drop of whiskey. And there sure weren’t no such thing as a free man anywhere in sight since we was all Ashley men in twenty-five,” Shad reflected.
They fell quiet, listening to the drone of big green-bottle deerflies and the noisy murmur of trappers and clerks, the clatter of beads and tacks, the clink of tin cups inside whiskey kegs.
“Summers, they were good back then,” Bass sighed. “For a time there, every new ronnyvoo was better’n all the ones that’d come a’fore it.”
“I’ll say. Ever’ one got bigger. Wilder. More men and mules, more whiskey and women too. If’n a man only got one chance to celebrate all year long in a year of hard, dangerous living … then them was the celebratingest times a child could ever hope to have.”
And now those days were gone. Bass told himself he had better admit that beaver would never shine again, not the way that beaver had shined back then.
It almost made a growed man wanna cry, it did. Sitting here sipping cheap puke-up liquor, watching a handful of sad, old hivernants try to wrangle themselves a square deal from a bunch of Pierre Chouteau’s slick city types out from St. Louis. Men like him and Shad who had seen the sun set on better than five thousand days of glory in these high and terrible mountains … men who had withstood freezing winters and blazing-hot summers … men who had stared right back into the eye of sudden, certain death and withstood the grittiest test of wills … the sort who had always treated every other man fairly and given more than a day’s work for what wages the company offered him when it came time for an accounting beneath the trading canopy.
Men who now were all but begging Andrew Drips’s weasel-eyed hired hands to realize that for seasons beyond count they had risked their health, their hair, their very lives to trap that beaver the company was buying less than cheap. These last few members of a dying breed, who for a short time in history had stood head and shoulders above any man anywhere in the world, were being told that their labors weren’t worth much at all, that the risks they had taken were worth even less than that … that their lives had little meaning in a world that was already passing them by.
So rather than openly bawl, Bass sat there and drank. Sip by sip, cup by cup, hoping to numb the goddamned pain of watching those proud men come to the counter to beg for another year’s supplies, men willing to turn over their hard-won beaver dirt cheap, willing to pay prices that would choke a big-boned Missouri mule for what possibles might get them through till next summer.
Then Drips came out to stand before less than a hundred trappers gathered there. Bridger and Fraeb stood off to the side, their long faces showing they already knew what the partisan was about to tell the crowd.
“I s’pose it don’t come as no surprise to most of you,” Drips began before that hushed assembly. “For the past two summers, there’s been rumors Pratte and Chouteau weren’t going to send out no supply caravan to ronnyvoo.”
He waited a moment while some of the crowd muttered in disgust and disillusionment.
“But they was just rumors, men. Rumors. Last summer we come, even when the beaver take wasn’t worth the trip. And this spring the company decided to give it one last try.”
For a long time Drips looked over the crowd formed in a huge crescent around his trade canopy. It seemed that his eyes touched almost every man there—most he knew, some better than others. Perhaps he was struggling to find the words. Perhaps—Scratch thought—Drips was trying to decide whether or not to use those words Bass was certain the partisan had practiced all the way out to rendezvous.
“Men … this here’s the last supply train to the mountains.”
It was as if they already knew. There was no sudden gasp of surprise or alarm. These men already knew. While Drips himself might have expected anger, a torrent of unrequited rage … Bass realized these men likely felt they had been owed more than rumors. They were damn well due the truth. And now they knew for sure. Rather than be hung out on a strand of spider’s silk for another year, not knowing. Not knowing.
Now they could get on with what it was they were going to do with the rest of their lives.
“What about the brigade?” a voice cried out in that hot, breathless, midsummer stillness.
“Yeah!” hollered another of those deep voices. “Ain’t the company gonna put a outfit in the field this year?”
But Drips stood there, unspeaking.
“Ain’t you gonna take us north for the fall hunt?”
Still the company partisan remained mute, staring at the ground.
“Sure they will!” another voice cried, strong with hope. “Bridger’s back to pilot!”
“No,” Drips finally declared, his face a bland and emotionless mask. “I’m turning back for St. Louis when the trading is done and I can get on my way.”
A stunned, quiet pall had overtaken them as every last man of them stood there in numbed silence.
Then Joe Meek took a step forward. “How ’bout you, Gabe?” he asked. “You gonna lead a brigade this fall,
