Titus glanced a moment at how Looks Far and Waits hugged and sobbed, reluctant to let go now that they had again been through so much together. Then he explained, “If there’s anything I can count on, it’s you, Josiah Paddock. Still, if you’re ever to lay eyes on me again, it won’t be in no settlement or village or town—be it Mexican or American.” He began to choke with emotion, “Goddamn the settlements: they’ll likely be the death of me.”
Paddock tried futilely to laugh a little as he said, “I remember how the last time you left Taos, you told me, ‘Damn the settlements while there’s still buffler in the mountains.’ ”
“I’d sooner die, Josiah—than have anything to do with where folks gather up elbow to elbow, side by side by side. There’ll be no Saint Louis, no Oregon, no Pueblo, an’ no Taos for this here child. Not for what days I still got left me. Where folks plop down right next to one another … there’s bound to be trouble raise its head, just sure as that sun’s coming to light this day.”
Paddock confessed, “Last night I laid there thinking—how in so many ways, I wished it were years ago now, Scratch. An’ we was back in the mountains. Living and laughing—”
“Much as I wish it could be so, Josiah.… that was a time just ain’t ever gonna be again. There’s forts on the Arkansas an’ the South Platte. I’ve see’d where emigrants been cutting wagon ruts all the way from Westport landing clear out to Oregon country. An’ I’m afraid when they got that territory all crowded up out there, them settlers gonna come washing back here to fill in what country they passed through on their way to Oregon.”
“With all that’s changing around you,” Paddock admitted, “Titus Bass isn’t a man much ready to change.”
Scratch shook his head. “A man either figures he can live all crowded up with folks—with trouble a constant shadow lurking just outside his door … or he sets his sights on taking those he loves off away from the shove and clutter of so many others.”
“Listen, Scratch,” Josiah said with a sudden breathlessness, “I haven’t talked about this with Looks Far, but maybe you should take her and our children north with you.”
“No, Josiah,” he interrupted, clamping both hands on the taller man’s shoulder. “What’s your family gonna do ’thout you—their husband and father?”
Bass watched the worry darken Paddock’s eyes, recognized the pain there, and sensed the stab of guilt anew for that time years ago when he had abandoned his own loved ones to steal some California horses.
“You’re all the family they have, Josiah. There is no other kin for any of ’em to turn to down here. If they come with me, and you never find us in Crow country, they’ll never know for the rest of their days what really become of you. I learned firsthand that’s no way to leave things be with the ones you love.”
“Every now and then”—and Paddock wagged his head—“it gets real hard for me to know what to do.”
“Right or wrong, Josiah—live or die, you keep your family by your side. Now that you’re gonna make Taos safe for families again, you keep Looks Far and all your young’uns close … that way they can hug you if you drive back all them Mex and Pueblo murderers. Or, they can hold you in their arms if you’re terrible wounded. They can even bury you proper if your time’s been called. But one way or the other, Josiah—your family deserves to know.”
“You’d never be happy anywhere but that north country,” Paddock said after he embraced Bass again. “Back in your mountains.”
“That’s why I’m takin’ my family home.”
“Sometime last night,” Josiah said, “I thought on just what you should name the land where it is you belong.”
“What you figger I should call it?”
Paddock blinked, and said, “The used-to-be-country.”
Scratch repeated the words in a soft whisper. “Used-to-be-country.”
Then he sighed and signaled his children to mount up. Titus cupped his two hands together and hoisted young Jackrabbit onto the buffalo-hide pad draped over the wide back of a gentle horse.
“Flea,” Bass instructed in Crow, turning to his older boy, “you take your little brother and start these three packhorses down to the valley. Rest of us should catch up to you by the time you turn north. Follow the tracks. They’re plain enough. You’ll do just fine with your horse medicine.”
The ten-year-old beamed with pride, sitting up all the straighter on his claybank gelding as he slapped the rump of his little brother’s horse and jerked on the lead rope strung back to the pack animals. Flea called over his shoulder, “See you down the trail, Popo.”
Magpie and Waits-by-the-Water sat atop their ponies as the clatter of hooves faded and things grew very still, all but for the crackle of the morning fires, and that cold winter breeze sighing through the sage and cedar.
Dragging his sleeve beneath his runny nose, Scratch climbed slowly into the saddle. Sensing how his bones were getting old. This cold hurt more and more every winter. And damn, if he couldn’t point out to you every last one of the bullet, knife, and arrow wounds he had suffered since setting his heart on a home in those high and terrible places among the Rocky Mountains. This journey north in the middle of winter had all the makings of a tough one for the old man and his family.
But at least he had his nose pointed for home.
“My used-to-be-country,” he quietly repeated what Josiah had called those northern mountains while he put the Cheyenne horse into motion down the slope. “Sounds to me like it’s just the sort of place for a used-to-be- man.”
*
TERRY
C. JOHNSTON
1947–2001
Terry C. Johnston was born on the first day of 1947 on the plains of Kansas and lived all his life in the American West. His first novel,
