River Range and the valley of the Green? Or, had he really moseyed south in hopes of holding on to a past that was dead and all but buried?
Maybeso, he had ventured down this way hoping to run into some of the old faces, to talk over the shinin’ times, share something of a bygone life. But Bridger had stayed behind to oversee the construction of his small post, and now even Fraeb was dead. As dead as the partnership between those two old hands.
Dead as the beaver trade.
Truth was, there weren’t enough trappers left in the mountains to make it worthwhile for Bridger to hunker down in one spot and become a trader. So who was it Gabe hoped to turn a profit on at the new post he was raising? The Yuta and Snake in that country?
The way of things now dictated a squaw got more for a buffalo robe than a man did for trapping beaver. No matter which way Titus looked at it, seemed his whole world had gone belly-up.
What was a man to do?
*
3
Spring came early, wet and muddy that next year.
Winter had been mild enough up north in Absaroka country, the sort of weather that made his feet itch to be up and on the move rather than lying around camp the way the Crow men would.
A fella could well grow soft and lazy between the last autumn hunt and first of spring trapping. So Bass had done his best to keep himself busy. All through that winter when he could no longer fight off the restlessness, he kissed his family of a morning and rode off alone for a few days at a time, haunting the icy streams and creeks where the beaver waited out the winter in their icy lodges. What beaver were left.
There were stretches of country where a man wouldn’t run onto any fresh sign—no newly felled saplings, no slides, no dammed-up meadows, and certainly none of the huge, domed lodges where the beaver and their kits spent the winter dry and warm. But if he persisted, if he pushed on into the seldom-tracked creek valleys, if he dared climb higher into the icy hills, he did find a few of the flat-tails that had survived that onslaught of the last twenty years.
It was in such remote valleys that Titus Bass was rewarded with something more than a few sleek pelts. Gazing down upon those white slopes crisscrossed with the pale flesh of the skeletal aspen and furred with the verdant emerald of pine and spruce, he found himself renewed again and again. Listening to the sough of the wind in the snow-crusted evergreen as it fled to distant places, many times hearing nothing more than the quiet breathing of his three horses. Sometimes only the beating of his heart.
That deep, abiding cold, and a silence like no other.
On occasions at his solitary fire as winter’s darkness sank in around him early of an afternoon, he would look back upon those nine days of dragging his travois and the followers behind him, marching away from the country of the Little Snake, steadfastly pointing his nose for the country of the Green. Heat and dust, the sting of the alkali making his nose bleed, dust caking his mouth, burning his slitted eyes as they bore into the distance beneath that high, relentless sun. Eyes vigilantly searching the wavering, shimmering skyline for landmarks, for horsemen, for friends or foes.
Each day he found the others strung out behind him a little more. Some were just slow working up the wherewithal to start out in the morning, to kneel, pick up their travois load, and put that first step behind them. So a few were slow in making it in to their pitiful camp each evening as the light came down. They straggled in for hours after dark. And the following morning, they would straggle out—always following the deep tracks his drag scored in the flaky, wind-scoured topsoil.
He would look back over his shoulder at times, watching them coming, strung out like a few uneven beads on a thong grown too long, most of them wavering, lunging ahead a step at a time as the dust stived up from their moccasins, from the ends of every pole … and he would think how strange was the appearance of this dark, staggering creature—like some long, disjointed, many-legged centipede dragging itself through the pale, yellow sand … body parts irrevocably following its head.
Dragged along by the sheer power of his will alone.
Persistent he became, if nothing else. One step at a time. One morning, one midday, and one afternoon at a time. Eat the dried horsemeat and promptly fall into the sleep of a man beyond weary, his mind grown too numb from the heat and the thirst to think on little else but to dread the coming dawn when he would have to scoop down inside himself once more and determine if he could push on this one more morning, this one more midday, and finally this one more afternoon as the sun burned itself a red track across the western sky.
It was afternoon when he thought he recognized the river valley from the low butte he had climbed, hopeful after these nine nights of fitful sleep, awakening at every cough, with every rustle of a man in his blankets— worrying if he should post a night guard … and in the end finding himself so hungry, so parched, so goddamned weary that he only worried in his dreams.
But there it was on that flat above the cutbank where the stream flowed into the Green. On that patch of bottom ground stood the dark shadow of those cottonwood logs piled one atop the other to form a small square … so reminding him of Bonneville’s post squatting far to the north along this same Green River.
“L-lookee there,” he croaked as Jake Corn and Jim Baker stuttered to a halt with their dust-caked travois.
“D-don’t see it too good,” Corn confessed, licking his cracked lips and squinting his red-rimmed, alkali-burned eyes. “Can’t see no roof.”
“That’s ’cause there ain’t no roof, Jake.”
Baker’s face went gray with disappointment. “Where’s Bridger, them others stayed back with him—”
“Way I lay my sights, they give up and pulled out sometime back,” he explained as two more trappers lunged to a halt nearby and took to gazing at the scene below. “But lookee there: that smoke low off again’ the hills —”
“Don’t see no smoke,” a Frenchman interrupted.
“There, miles up the valley.” And Titus pointed. “Look in the trees and you’ll see it.”
“S-so far away … still,” another man grumbled.
“What you take ’em for, Scratch?”
He looked at Baker, then grinned weakly. “Likely Snake. S’pose we keep on till we can pay our respects on their camp.”
It was nearly dark, with the last shreds of the longest shadows of the day clinging to the low places, when he heard the first dog bark. It so reminded him of coming home from a long day of squirreling in the thick woods, hearing ol’ Tink start to bark and bay as the old hound burst ahead, smelling home before he even reached the clearing and spotted the cabin and barn amongst the clutter of elm and oak.
A second dog had taken up the warning, and soon a dozen or more of the half-wild curs were yipping, their cries echoing off the low bluffs framing the valley where the last copper light was disappearing from a ragged string of clouds to the west. He shuddered to a halt between Baker and Corn the moment they heard the hoofbeats. Out of the tall willow and cottonwood more than ten of them streamed, spreading out in a broad front, bristling with weapons as they confronted the strangers staggering up one by one behind Bass.
First whack, those Snake had to see just how bad off these white men were. White men on foot? Glor-eee! That had to be something for them warriors to witness. Bass recalled a smattering of their tongue, inched through enough of his clumsy sign language too, to explain how they’d been jumped by the Sioux, forted up behind the horses and mules they were forced to sacrifice, then how they had dropped the pony being ridden by that warrior princess who surely had to be directing the battle. All of that before the trappers made beasts of themselves and started dragging their burdens back north.
How many days?
In response to the warrior’s question, Titus pulled the short twig from where he had it safely stuffed inside his wide belt, and quickly brushed the pad of his thumb over the notches he had carved each night before he fell
