Scratch swallowed and tried his best to make his words sound cheerful. “That big son of a bitch ain’t come to ronnyvoo again, and here I was—fixing to get him good and drunk like before!”
“I’m afraid Jarrell’s dying a slow and terrible death,” disclosed the half-breed McKay, John McLoughlin’s stepson.
“I looked for him here last summer,” Bass explained, his voice starting to, quiver. His eyes were already pleading when he asked, “He at Vancouver where the white-headed doctor can care for him?”
McLeod said, “Far as I heard, Thornbrugh’s still at one of our trading houses south of the Columbia where he was taken ill. We all fear it was the arrow that found him in a fight with some renegade Umpqua.”
“Took an arrow?” Bass said.
“A year ago spring,” McLeod continued. “Heard he didn’t feel so poorly until it came time to set out from the Siskyou country to meet us inland for our last journey to rendezvous.”
“He never reached us in time to come along,” McKay declared. “But we really didn’t know he was in such a bad way until after we returned last fall.”
“None of you see’d him for two summers?”
Both McKay and McLeod shook their heads. The half-breed said, “Doctor McLoughlin fears it can only be a matter of time.”
In his mind he was plotting the grueling distance and the exhausting months of travel that journey would consume if he chose to stab his way across the Snake River wilderness, down to the Columbia, pushing west to Vancouver where he might learn just where Jarrell was dying, somewhere far to the south of that British fort. The man might be dead by the time he reached his side. If he wasn’t already.
And what of Waits-by-the-Water and Magpie? Now that his wife carried another child, he couldn’t fathom taking her along on such an exhausting quest. So if he were to go alone, what was he to do with his family? Take them all the way north to Crow country before he hurried west.
As much as he felt compelled to ride to Jarrell’s side, Titus was pulled in the opposite direction at the same time, realizing he now had stronger loyalties to consider. Unlike that solitary winter’s journey to Fort Vancouver in hopes of putting McAfferty’s ghost to rest, now Bass was no longer alone in life. He had family—a wife, his daughter, and another child on the way. Weighty responsibilities to the ones he loved.
“If’n I’d wanna write Jarrell some thoughts, could one of you see my letter’d get to him?”
McLeod nodded. “We’ll see it’s carried back with our annual express.”
“Are you learned?” Wyeth quietly asked the American trapper. “Can you write your friend that letter?”
Scratch pursed his lips, reluctant to admit that shortcoming. Eventually he shook his head. “Used to write a bit. I can read a mite, but it ain’t much. I figger to find someone what can help me—”
“I’ll write your letter for you,” the Yankee interrupted enthusiastically.
“I’d be in your debt, Nathaniel. Much ’bliged.” He felt an instant and overwhelming gratitude for this man who had been so wronged by William Sublette.
“When you’re ready, all you have to do is tell me what you want to say to the man, and I’ll transcribe it, word for word,” Wyeth stated. “When would you like to start?”
He wagged his head, unsure, then asked, “How long you gonna be here afore you turn back for Fort Hall?”
Wyeth smiled with a hint of wistful regret. “The fort is no longer mine. I’ve sold it to the British. That’s how I came to ride in with McLeod and McKay. I plan to head east from here—make Boston by autumn. Which means I’ll be around until the fur train starts back for St. Louis.”
“So John Bull drove you out too,” Titus said sadly.
“Perhaps. But if I am put out of business, then the blame must be squarely laid at the feet of the two men who have already fled the mountains for gentler climes and far easier money.”
“Sublette and Campbell?” McLeod asked.
“Yes,” Wyeth answered bitterly. “But I feel some small measure of pride knowing that those cowardly thieves fled the mountain trade long before business reversals now force me to leave this country. Years ago when they defrauded me, I vowed I would roll a stone into their garden …”
When Wyeth paused, Bass said, “And there ain’t never been a stone bigger’n the Hudson’s Bay Company.”
The Yankee smiled, gratitude written in his eyes now. “It will be an intriguing and most exciting contest to watch, won’t it, Bass? These two long-surviving fur giants, one American and the other British—locked in this final, mortal combat for mountain peltries. A fight to the death.”
Scratch shuddered. “I’m a’feared it’ll be a fight to the death of us all.”
Time was when men like General Ashley could reap immense harvests of beaver without establishing permanent posts. But the easy beaver was taken, and Ashley retired.
Now those men who came west hoping to grow rich so they could retire back east had to climb higher, penetrate farther into the fastness of the mountains, or dare to slip around the edges of that forbidden Blackfoot country. Smith, Jackson & Sublette had failed: the first dead on a Comanche lance, the second off to have a try at Spanish California, and the last escaped back to St. Louis, having pillaged the fur business of every last dollar he could squeeze, finagle, or steal from it.
Their successors, the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, had gone under as well—two of its partners eventually giving up on the mountains. And now Bridger, Fitzpatrick, and Drips had shown the white feather, becoming nothing more than hired trappers for the rich moguls in St. Louis.
Where once there had been a handful of big companies along with those small outfits working on a moccasin string, now there remained only one.
The tragic scenario was playing itself out just as he and Bridger had figured it would. With fewer beaver reaching rendezvous every year, and the market for those pelts diminishing with each rendezvous season, what with the price of supplies and trade goods continuing to escalate at the same time, only the biggest company of them all had pockets deep enough to stay in this fight for the Rocky Mountains.
First the traders brought milk cows, then two-wheeled carts, and freight wagons, and even a Dearborn carriage! And now, not only were the preachers come to the mountains to deliver their hellfire and sulfurous brimstone sermons … but they’d brought white women along too!
What would these mountains come to?
Looking back now, Scratch could see how in the last few winters the trade had undergone such dramatic changes that he and Gabe hardly recognized it anymore. Now there were posts and forts sprouting up at the mouth of this river or that, stockades where the company’s traders successfully lobbied the surrounding tribes to harvest beaver so they no longer had to rely solely on the labors of white trappers—indentured employee or free man, neither one.
Maybeso these rendezvous were on their way to playing out as the fur was playing out itself.
“Boys, I’m ’minded of that time I first come to the mountains—how I made a tumble mistake,” Bridger said the next afternoon at his fire, looking up at Bass and Shad Sweete with such sad eyes. “I ’member looking down at that ol’ wolf, Hugh Glass, his breathin’ like a death call in his chest, chewed up so bad there weren’t a ghost of a chance of him survivin’, just a’layin’ there beside his own shallow grave in the sand—sure to die.”
Jim drew in a long sigh and poked among the ashes at the edge of the fire pit. “Maybeso this here business is just like ol’ Glass. It’s fixin’ to die, run outta time there beside its grave, just hanging on somehow, one breath at a time.”
“But Glass didn’t die that way, Gabe,” Shadrach argued.
“That’s right,” Bass agreed. “He went down years later, fighting on the Yallerstone.”
“Mayhaps you’re right, boys,” Bridger admitted. “But even ol’ Glass went under … eventual’.”
“You figger the end’s coming, Jim?” Sweete asked.
Bridger nodded his head. “Take a good look around us, boys. See what Sublette and Campbell and them St. Louie parley-voos are doing to choke the life out of us. Don’t figger it’s a question of
That had set Scratch to brooding, down in his mind and dwelling on matters he hadn’t given much thought to over the last few years. He just couldn’t bring himself to accept that his way of life was changing and would never be the same again, that the way he had lived might actually be dying, never to resurrect itself again.
