Death Rattle

^* Ride the Moon Down

^* The Ute tribe; Buffalo Palace.

^* Dance on the Wind

^† One-Eyed Dream

^†† Carry the Wind

^* BorderLords

27

The family traveled as light as they dared when they set off on their march south out of Absaroka. Down the Bighorn at the Wind River, they entered the land of the Shoshone. From the Wind they continued up a tributary until it elbowed its way directly toward the saddle of the Southern Pass, lying to the west. In less than a morning’s march from there, they struck the Sweetwater, following that river east.

For the first time in all his years in the mountain West, Scratch spotted long grooves cut upon the land, a corduroy of iron-tired tracks—more of them than all the carts in a trader’s caravan would carve while plodding their way to a rendezvous encampment.

“What is this?” Waits asked him as he stood afoot, gazing first to the eastern horizon, then turned to stare as those scars followed the landscape rising toward the Southern Pass. “These are not the marks made by travois?”

“The white man’s boxes you have seen teams of horses pull into summer rendezvous many years ago.”

She gently wagged her head. “There must be many of them going across the mountains.”

Bass laid his arm around her shoulder and snugged her against his side. “I hope that’s where they all keep right on going. Hope they don’t ever stop. I don’t really care how many of them want to cross the mountains … just as long as they push on through.”

“These people, the ones who made these tracks,” Waits-by-the-Water said with a small, unsure voice, “they aren’t like you and the other fur hunters?”

“No, they are no way like us,” he answered grimly.

Titus remembered all that he had run away from back there in Boone County, on that farm outside the tiny crossroads of Rabbit Hash. “The folks who leave marks like this on the land are the sort of folks who will cut through the ground with huge knives, to plant their crops and make them grow. Folks who come in their wagon trains aren’t like me at all because when they stop somewhere … they mean to stay put.”

“Then they are not like my people either.”

He grinned at her. “They sure as hell ain’t.”

“Are you, Ti-tuzz?” she asked, surprising him. “Are you like my people?”

Scratch realized he must answer her truthfully. “No, I’m not like your people either. Not like white folks, and I’m not like Indians. Figured out I wasn’t much good at being white—but, trouble is … I’ll never be an Indian in my heart.”

“You are a man in between,” she put it succinctly.

For a long moment he stared deeply into her eyes. “Perhaps I am just that, Waits. A man in between. Not a white man, and not an Indian either. So it pains me even more deeply to think of what’s coming.”

“Tell me, Ti-tuzz. What do you see coming out there, on the far horizon?”

He gazed into her eyes with such sadness, such despair in realizing his time had come and was all but gone. The evidence of it lay in those scars beneath his feet. “The white people, there are too many of them. They keep growing like the blades of grass in the spring—spreading everywhere. And where they go, they push out who was there before. It will not be good when they reach Absaroka.”

“Perhaps we will be old or long dead by then,” she said with hope in her voice.

Scratch looked at his three youngsters a moment as they tossed rocks at a fleeing jackrabbit. “I pray the children will be very old, perhaps long dead too, by the time this land is swallowed up by whites.”

“Perhaps wiser men could prove me wrong,” Waits said as she stepped against him, resting her cheek against his chest, “but I don’t think the future can be changed now.”

A deep pain stabbed through him. “You’re right. What’s to come, will come … and one man like me can never stop it.”

She explained, “Surely the buffalo will be wise enough to stay far, far away from these travelers. So let the white people go on to where the sun sets, and we’ll stay away from this sunset road, like the buffalo.”

Sunset road. Titus thought it was a heart-wrenching and accurate description of this trail stretching from the eastern edge of the frontier all the way to Oregon country. A fitting name for the trail if for no other reason than he realized the sun was already setting on this raw and wild land. A way of life was ending as the sun set on an era, eons of living and dying in utter freedom. The glory days were over for men like him. All that life had been out here in these mountains was preparing to take its one last breath. Standing here now, gazing at the corduroy of tracks extending off to both horizons like the mourning scars on a woman’s arms and legs after she lost her man, Scratch knew he could hear the death rattle warning as it rumbled deep in the hollow breast of these mountains.

“Yes, maybe we can avoid them—but only for a time,” he consented. “I’m afraid that where their kind goes, they bring the sunset with them. For now they may just pass on through, but they have still poisoned every inch of ground they touch.”

She stepped around in front of him again, staring up at his face to say, “We’ll go higher than these white people will ever dare to venture. We can take our children and the life we still have farther and farther back into the mountains—where these white settlers will be afraid to live.”

He pulled her against him. “It doesn’t matter how many miles I get away from them—because it’s the simple fact that they are in our country. Look at these marks on the ground. It means their kind has already come to my mountains. Think of how you would feel if another tribe came and squatted down right beside a Crow camp. It won’t work, ever. Those who are coming will ruin what I came out here for.”

“I can’t ever remember seeing you so sad, Ti-tuzz.”

“Maybe … because … I’m sorely afraid that what I came to get for myself, I went and ruined just by opening the door for these others to waltz right on through,” he tried to explain his disappointment, that bitter despair at what he believed he had done to bring about the downfall of his own kind. “I fear that what I came for is no more —and will never be again—because I pointed the way for the kind of folks who should never have come out here to destroy what once was.”

Two days later, after they made their late-afternoon camp in the shade of some rocky cliffs, Scratch led his wife and their children on a short walk into that narrow maw the Sweetwater had carved out of solid stone, a place where the river’s flow was so restricted that it boiled and foamed in angry fury every spring—a landmark the mountain man had given the most appropriate name: Devil’s Gate.

“I do not understand this expression,” Waits declared.

Bass did his best to translate, “When a person does nothing but wrong—the sort of wrong that constantly hurts other people—we call what that person does evil. And the creature who does the most evil in our world is called the devil.”

“Is this devil here in this place?” Magpie asked.

“No,” Titus answered, feeling as if he should never have attempted an explanation. “But the water rushes so fast it can cause a lot of trouble for men in bullboats.”

Waits lifted young Jackrabbit onto her hip. “So this is the doorway you spoke of, where the white fur traders must pass to take their pelts to the land of the east?”

“Yes.”

Flea stepped over, surprising his father with a perceptive question, “Why don’t the white men beach their bullboats back there behind us where the stream is quiet, then carry their furs around the canyon so they won’t spill into the water?”

“What you say makes a lot of sense,” Titus declared. “But there are times when men will do something that does not make as much sense, when they attempt something for the challenge or the danger of doing it.”