Or could one man hold out against the rest of the world, at least his world of these western mountains? Sure he could, Bass decided. But he would have to figure out something else to do if beaver plews were never again to make a man and his family a decent living. What else was a man to do, when no one wanted to buy the beaver he trapped?
A trapper was what he had been for more than seventeen winters now. How could he expect himself to pack up and return east when it felt as if these mountains were all he ever knew? Or how could he abandon the Rockies and migrate to Oregon country with Doc Newell and Joe Meek? He didn’t know where to go to find the answers … but he did know someone who might help him sort through the knots that had his thoughts so tangled.
Late that winter after returning to Absaroka, he had taken, the family with him when he tramped east from the Crow camp near the foot of the Bighorns, striking out for the mouth of the Tongue where Samuel Tullock squatted inside Fort Van Buren, waiting on the Indian trade to recommence come spring.
“I wanted to see a white face, listen to some white talk,” Scratch explained as he blew smoke from that first, deep pull at the pipestem. “Maybeso, to hear just what news there lays on the upper rivers, to hear it from the lips of the company its own self.”
The trader snorted as he sipped his hot coffee there at the fireplace with Titus. “I sure as hell ain’t the company, Scratch!”
“You’re the by-god American Fur Company to this here country, to these here Injuns.” He stared into the bowl of his old clay pipe a moment before he finished. “You’re the bone and sinew to the beaver business.”
“Beaver’s down,” Tullock admitted gravely. “Ain’t likely to ever come back, Scratch.”
Titus had looked around the small trading room and asked, “Buffler?”
“Just as many as the Crow and others have to trade.”
After sipping at his scalding coffee, Titus asked, “What happens when you’ve forced the Indians to kill all the buffler for their skins? What then?”
But Tullock had snorted with a wide smile. “Ain’t no way that can happen. Too damned many of the big snaggles—”
“But it happened to beaver, Sam’l. Time was, you ’member we never thought we could trap ourselves out the flat-tails.”
“Damned sad thing it is too,” Tullock commiserated. “There ain’t all that many beaver left nowdays … and what beaver there is don’t bring much of a price no more.”
The American Fur Company set a depressingly low value on his beaver—despite how Tullock might want to help—but Scratch needed supplies.
“Give me the best dollar you can on these here plews, Sam’l,” he pleaded. “I need fixin’s afore I head south to trap this spring.”
“Where you figure to go?”
“Down the Bighorn to the Wind River.”
As Tullock began separating the furs from those two small packs Bass had packed to Van Buren, the trader asked, “You ever think of trying Blackfoot country?”
“Smallpox didn’t kill ’em all, did it?”
“No, not all,” the trader admitted.
“I value what I got left for hair,” Bass declared. “Blackfoot country will have to get a lot more peaceful afore I go gamble my hide up there.”
The easy beaver was a thing of the past. It was clear that a man would have to work all the harder if he was going to trap the prime grade of fur the traders were still wanting. Any plews that didn’t measure up, the company men simply refused to take off a trapper’s hands.
But he ended up with enough credit that he could purchase what he needed for his outfit that spring, as well as have enough left over to spoil Waits, Magpie, and Flea with a few small presents like ribbon, finger rings, tiny mirrors, some brass bracelets, and a pair of small penny whistles for his children. That and a new white blanket for his wife, the one with narrow red stripes across the entire length of it, just the blanket Waits-by-the-Water had been wanting for some winters now.
When they put Fort Van Buren behind them three days later, Scratch had his fixings for a brand-new season in the mountains, along with a few geegaws and some pretty foofaraw for his woman and young’uns, not to mention a good-sized pack of beaver pelts trader Tullock didn’t put much store in. Titus decided that he would take them and the rest he still had back in the Crow camp with him when he headed south. Maybe another trader would put more value on the days in the freezing streams, the nights in those solitary camps, the stretches of lonely country he had traveled to find those beaver.
Maybe some other trader waiting in some other post on some other river somewhere south of here … maybe a man like Jim Bridger at his Black’s Fork post. Only a man who’d trapped his own self would know the proper worth of a pelt.
Taking leave of her and the children early that spring was every bit as miserable as his homecoming last autumn had been a rejoicing with his resurrection from the near-dead. All but eight summers old, his daughter clamped one arm around her father’s waist and another around her mother’s as the parents embraced for that last time. And with only five winters behind him, Scratch’s tiny son clung to one of his father’s legs, his arms and ankles locked for good measure as he gazed up in unbridled bewilderment to watch the tears stream down the grown-ups’ faces.
She began to whisper, “I can go with you—”
But he laid two fingers upon her lips. “We talked of this last night. It’s better you remain here with the children, to live among your people while I go search place to place.”
“We lived those seasons together years ago, never separated.”
He nodded, then pulled her cheek against his chest. “That was before we became parents. Before you … you were almost taken from me. I promise you we will travel together again.”
“You said you would take me back to Ta-house.”
“Yes, and I will keep that promise.”
“We will see our old friends again after all these winters,” she said. “When can we go?”
He had realized she was trying in her own roundabout way to convince him to take her and the children along with all her talk of a far-off trip to see long-ago friends. So he said as gently as he could, “I don’t know.”
“When you return? We go then?”
“No, not then,” he answered quietly, but firmly. “But, we will go there someday. For now, I have to find a trader who will take my beaver. So I will work my way south, trapping as I go, always looking for a trader who will realize how hard I work.”
“You could stay here with us,” she begged. “Hunt and ride off on pony raids like Apsaluuke men do with their days. You don’t need to hunt the flat-tails—”
“I don’t think I can live a life like that.” He explained what she must surely know already. “I cannot give up and become Indian like the men of your tribe. Nor can I give in and become one of the many who go back east to scratch at the ground or own a store … don’t you see that I am a man in between who doesn’t belong in either world?”
“Man in between,” she repeated thoughtfully, as if giving it careful consideration. “No, you are not meant to be a warrior who lives only for the battle or the ponies he might steal. And I agree that you could never go live among the white people again.”
Gently wagging his head as he grasped her face between his hands, raising it so he could stare down into her eyes, Titus said, “I must go in search of a place for myself. Everything is changing around me. I am not of your world, but I am no more a part of the white world. I can only pray that I can find a new place now that everything has gone crazy around me.”
“When will I see your face again?” she asked.
“I hope to return before the coming winter,” he admitted, believing it would be so and that nothing could prevent him from keeping his vow to her.
“When the leaves on the aspen and the cottonwood begin to turn yellow, every day I will look for you on the horizon, every day,” she choked out the words.
He smothered her mouth with his, unable to speak for the hot ball stuck in his throat. Then he knelt there
