6
With Bill Williams and Thomas Smith at the head of the column, the twenty-four men put Fort Uintah behind them. Titus Bass rode with those who brought up the rear with those eight broodmares, hanging off to the left where he and his own animals wouldn’t have to eat so much of the dust kicked up by all those hooves.
The stars twinkled faintly in the sky, and the moon would still be some time in setting as they took off down the west bank of the Green River. At their backs rose the Uinta Mountains, their peaks mantled with white as summer had yet to begin. Ahead stood a broad plateau* that took on wondrous colors with the coming of the sun—smeared yellow, red-orange, and vibrant crimson too. The Green twisted and screwed its way through that barren escarpment, a land of stunted cedar and pinon joining the ever present sage. Until they began to ascend the heights into that plateau’s canyonland, the raiders would run across small herds of buffalo. But once on the other side and dropping to the Colorado River, the shaggy beasts would be no more. This would be their last chance to make meat.
Williams had them put into camp early that first afternoon. Their animals had yet to be hardened to the sort of trail that would become commonplace in the weeks ahead. And they needed to kill, butcher, and dry some meat for the lean times that were sure to come.
Three of the others who had been recruited by Peg-Leg were more than willing to mess in with Scratch. After making camp, they remounted with Bass to ride west into that short-grass country slashed by a maze of shallow washes and flash-flood erosion scars. Far ahead of them to the west lay the snowy heights of the Wasatch Range. All three of these companions had served the last years of the beaver trade with American Fur brigades, ofttimes with Jim Bridger leading the way. But this trio shared something much more indelibly in common with Titus that convinced him the three were good men to stand at his back no matter what might rear its ugly head on the coming adventure in California: They were counted among those who had managed to walk away from Henry Fraeb’s fight against the Sioux and Cheyenne on the Little Snake the year before.
They hadn’t covered many miles under a graying sky before running across a small herd of less than a hundred beasts nestled down in the cleft at the foot of the plateau. The bulls hung together in three bunches, grazing at the outskirts of the scattered herd. The cows and yearlings dotted the center of the lopsided bowl where the first of the red calves were dropping to new, lush, emerald grass watered every afternoon with the arrival of a brief, harsh thunderstorm.
Since trading his roan off the Shoshone late last summer, Scratch had discovered his saddle horse was not trained as a buffalo pony. No matter, he had reflected several times since. Here in his forty-eighth summer, he damn well didn’t relish running meat anyway. Besides, the wind was favorable. Coming out of the west. In their faces. They could do with a stand.
“Better we hobble the horses yonder in that brush and make our creep up that draw,” Bass suggested.
Elias Kersey nodded, his now faded top hat wagging, and all three dismounted with Titus, leading their saddle horses and pack animals into the shadows of the coulee. Quickly tying them off nose-to-nose, two-by-two, the four trappers emerged from the mouth of the draw in a crouch.
Scratch stopped them with a signal, then whispered, “Maybeso, we’ll only get one shot apiece when the guns go off—if’n they set to a run. Best you boys make your one shot count.”
“Just like shooting them Sioux,” Jake Corn whispered with a grin that warmed his whole face. His cheekbones were so high they gave his eyes such an Oriental slant that upon meeting last summer Scratch had first believed Corn was a half-breed, Canadian-born Frenchman. He was instead a river-bred Cajun with a dusky drop of Creole blood in his veins.
Without another word the four fanned out, waddling away in a crouch from one clump of brush to the next, slowly working their way into killing range on the cows and yearlings. If nothing else was handy, a bull would do. But the cows made far better eating, especially when they would be drying wide strips of their tender meat for the trail ahead.
Crouching right beside a clump of cedar, Scratch withdrew the wiping stick from the thimbles pinned at the bottom of his fullstock, .54-caliber flintlock that he had carried west that spring of 1825. For a moment as he settled on his rump, Bass let his eyes run over the scratches, nicks, and gouges, every one of those wounds to the reddish-hued curly-maple stock a story of survival against all that these mountains had thrown against him, survival against all that the warrior tribes had failed attempting to rub him out. “Make ’Em Come,” he had named this beloved rifle many winters ago. Through all the terrors and the joys of his seasons in the Rockies, this weapon had remained at his side like a steadfast friend, whether Bass was making meat or saving his hair.
Like him, the fullstock rifle carried its own scars—a silent testament to the many seasons the two of them had endured when lesser men had given up, or gone under. Come a day he figured he would run onto a good gunsmith at one of the trading posts and have the weapon rebored, the worn rifling freshened after so many years of hard use. Just running his hand down the forestock as he brought it to his shoulder now, allowing his fingers to brush over the buttstock as he nestled his cheek into place … it was as if he were caressing the hard-written story of his life, even to touching the scars and wrinkles that had turned his own leathery, lined face into a veritable war map of his years spent crossing and recrossing the high lonesome.
That long and angular man, Reuben Purcell, was the first to get off a shot, not far away to Bass’s left. One of the big females shuddered, took no more than a half dozen faltering steps, then eased onto her knees and keeled over.
Titus took a few breaths to survey the nearby cows, quickly deciding on one as the buffalo grew nervous. Another rifle thundered, and he didn’t even glance over to see which man it was or what animal he had hit. Some of the cows were starting to inch toward the first buffalo Purcell had dropped. A few others were moseying over to sniff at the second cow dropped.
Bracing one end of the ramrod on the ground as the wind picked up, Bass made a fist at the top of the wiping stick, laying the bottom of the forestock atop the fist as he eased back the hammer to full cock. Nesting the frizzen down upon the pan where the priming powder lay waiting next to the touchhole, he pressed against the back trigger, thereby setting the front hair trigger to trip the sear and spring in the lock with his slightest touch. With his cheek pressed against the stock, he laid the front blade down between the curved antlers of the buckhorn rear sight, with a tilt just so that put the blade into the tiny notch at the bottom of the buckhorn.
Only then did he let out half a breath as his finger slipped over the front trigger, barely inching the rifle to the side so the front blade held on that wide girth just behind the beast’s front flank. The rest of the breath seeped out as he held, waiting for his squeeze on the trigger to—
The rifle bellowed, a whisper of smoke spewing from pan and a spray erupting from the muzzle. The breeze had picked up enough that the gunsmoke disappeared quickly enough for Titus to watch the low-velocity round ball strike the cow’s hide where a puff of dust exploded. She sidestepped once, then again, and with the third time shook her great head, slinging blood from her nostrils and lolling her red tongue from her open mouth where more blood dripped into the dirt and grass.
Across the bowl, a streak of lightning tore the darkening sky asunder as he started to reload. Beyond the hunters, the buffalo grew all the more restless with a sudden, sharp crack of thunder. Although they milled around, no longer content to graze, the buffalo hadn’t stampeded away. Within seconds the sky started to pelt him with tiny drops of rain. He quickly dropped a second cow. No doubt about it now: They’d be skinning and butchering at the height of the coming storm.
He hunched over his rifle, carefully sprinkling more priming powder into the pan, then dropped the frizzen protectively before standing to start back for the animals. In the cold, blowing rain the four managed to butcher out the boss, tongue, humpribs, and rear flanks from every one of their kills, besides some length of intestine they planned to prepare that night around the fire. In the distance, both north and south they overheard faint gunfire as others made meat and the thunderstorm passed on by. Each stiff gust of breeze made the blood-smeared men shudder in their rain-soaked clothing, then the sun sank low enough that it popped from the bottom of the clouds, painting the plateau country with vivid shades of yellow, red, and a dark, bruised purple.
With their pack animals unable to carry any more of a burden, the four bloodied trappers mounted up, ready to turn their noses back for camp when Jake Corn pointed.
