cached it. A whole damned suit of old armor wasn’t the sort of plunder a man figured on coming back for any day soon.
Back when that rendezvous of 1837 broke up, company partisans Andrew Drips and Lucien Fontenelle elected to swap places. That summer while Drips accompanied the fur caravan back to St. Louis, the volatile Fontenelle commanded a brigade in the field. With Bridger as his pilot, they set out for the Blackfoot country of the upper Missouri with one hundred ten trappers and camp keepers. Osborne Russell and Doc Newell joined a smaller outfit that headed northeast for the valleys of the Powder and the Tongue—some of their favorite country.
Every summer when the pack train arrived, those men who had fled from a life back east nonetheless clamored around the caravan pilot, eager to learn if they were to receive any mail from family or friends so far away in the States. If the booshway didn’t have any mail for a fella, then he could usually get his hands on one of the public papers of the day, packed in thick bundles and transported halfway across the continent to men who could barely read but were nonetheless ravenous for any news of home. At rendezvous a man who could read was damn near reading all the time: ciphering letters written to those who could not understand the strange marks on the paper, or relating stories from those newspapers that recorded long-ago events in faraway places.
But the heady days of these raucous midsummer fairs were breathing their last.
In those last few days before Bridger steered his brigade north, Scratch purchased a dozen of the small iron fishhooks the traders offered, then went onto the prairie with Shad Sweete in search of grasshoppers. The two of them ended up having almost as much fun catching the hoppers as they had using those insects for bait on the hooks they dipped in the Green River and Horse Creek. On lazy afternoons they fished and sipped some Monongahela rum, a rare treat in the mountains, sweetened with a heaping spoon of brown sugar stirred into each cup.
“I can’t recollect ever fishing since I was a young’un,” Scratch admitted.
“Where was that?”
“Caintuck, right on the Ohio.”
Sweete said, “I figger it’s just like riding a horse. You fall off, but you don’t ever forget how to crawl back on.”
At times the two of them gathered a small crowd of curious Indians and trappers who collected on the shady banks to watch their amusing efforts. More often than not the small native trout and grayling weren’t shy about taking the wriggling bait that floated on the surface of the water. It never failed to surprise Titus when a sharp tug pulled on that twine he had knotted at the end of a peeled willow branch.
Eating the tiny fish was a different matter altogether. What with all the little bones, he soon decided it was far more work than was worth the effort. Antelope or elk or buffalo it would be from here on out. Just as long as the fish didn’t ever get greedy and start eating beaver, Scratch figured he would leave those fish in peace.
By late fall, after trapping his way through the Wind River Mountains and up the Bighorn, he had his family back on the Yellowstone and in the heart of Crow country. The weather had grown cold early that autumn, then moderated as the days sailed past. Instead of turning west, where he believed he might run onto Yellow Belly’s village, he started east for the Rosebud and the Tongue. Since winter appeared slow in arriving, Titus decided he could steal a final few weeks of trapping out of the season, working their way toward Fort Van Buren before they had to turn west, searching for the Crow in their winter camp.
Even though the water in the kettles lay covered by a thin ice slick every morning, the sun always rose, warming the earth blanketed by autumn-dried grasses, lacy collars of old, dirty snow strangling every bush or tree trunk. Along the Tongue the beaver were starting to put on a heavier coat, that protective felt nestled below the long guard hairs growing all the thicker. As the days passed, Scratch read the sign plain for any man who took a notion to pay heed.
A hard winter was due.
So when the faraway horizon threatened many days later, Scratch quickly hurried back to camp where he loaded their plews and possessions on Samantha and their horses, then lit out for Tullock’s post. They might well have as much as a day. From the looks of that gray-blue skyline rearing its ugly head out of the north, they should have enough time for the journey before the storm clobbered them. Down, down the Tongue they hurried, their noses pointed for the Yellowstone, riding straight into the teeth of the coming fury as the wind began to quarter around, carrying with it that distinct metallic tang of a high plains blizzard.
Reluctantly he agreed to stop that night short of their goal. Lighting a fire, Bass figured to give his family and the animals a few hours’ rest before sunup. But Scratch had them moving again before night had been completely sucked out of the dawn sky.
By the middle of that second morning the storm’s first sullen tantrum was taunting them. Snowflakes sharp as iron arrowheads slashed this way and that at their bare cheeks as they rode hunched over, head-tucked into the softly keening wind.
“How far, popo?” Magpie asked, her tiny voice muffled against his chest where he had the girl wrapped beneath the buffalo robe covering them both as the horses plodded forward one slow step at a time, icy heads bent against the mighty gale.
Each time he blinked, his eyes cried out in pain—the wind-driven shards slashing across them. By now his eyelashes were little more than heavy crusts of ice he struggled to keep open. Scratch figured there was no sense in telling Magpie the truth. Better to tell his daughter what she needed to hear then and there.
“I think I see some familiar hills ahead,” he lied in Crow. Truth was, he couldn’t see much past the end of his pony’s nose.
Worried suddenly about Waits-by-the-Water, Bass twisted in the saddle. The gusty wind almost tore the coyote-hide cap from his head.
Back there a matter of yards from his pony’s tail root, Titus thought he saw the movement of her shadow, barely making out Samantha’s dark outline plodding flank to flank beside his wife’s pony. The moment the wind had first come up that morning, he had knotted a rope to both of those saddles, looping the other ends beneath his left leg before he knotted them around the large pommel the size and shape of a Spanish orange at the front of his Santa Fe saddle. He had strung the rest of the pack animals out behind the mule, connecting each one to another animal in front and another in back with more rope. Since starting in that frozen predawn darkness, Bass had brooded that the storm might well cut the strong animals from the weak.
Because one or more of the ponies might break free and turn about with the force of the wind, he had packed what they needed to survive on Samantha. The rest he could go in search of after the storm’s fury had played itself out. But the mule carried what might well save their lives even if all else were taken from them.
“My mother, she is near?” Magpie asked.
He figured she became frightened when he turned to look behind him.
“She’s with us, daughter,” he reassured her, his teeth chattering like bone dominoes in that horn cup Hames Kingsbury loved to rattle while floating down the river.
He wondered if Kingsbury was an old man now. If not—where he was buried. Perhaps even put to rest in the Mississippi the way they had consigned Ebenezer Zane’s body to the river back in 1810. Or maybe on that thieves’ road known as the Natchez Trace. Would any of the others still be alive …
Dragging the ice-crusted wool blanket mitten across his eyes, then under his red, swollen nose, his raw, chapped, ice-battered skin shrieked in torment. Suddenly Titus held his breath, put his nose back into the wind, and breathed deep.
Wood smoke.
By damn, it was wood smoke.
That meant a fire. And where he would find a fire, there must be humankind. Somewhere he could get out of the storm and warm up his nearly frozen wife and children. A lodge, even a windbreak …
“You smell that?”
After a moment his daughter asked, “Smell only you in here against your heart.”
“Magpie,” his voice cracked, “I smell wood smoke.”
“A f-fire, popo?”
“Yes—a fire.” He spoke it like a promise. “You’ll be warm soon.”
His mind racing, Scratch sorted through the possibilities the way he would sort through his pelts: thinking of the worst that could happen, pushing that aside to cling to the best. At the very least he knew that with this wind blowing into his face, that fire had to be due north of them. A blind man could stumble across it now. Even if it were
