But a hardy few had determined they would hang on, clinging to the last vestige of what had been their finest days. What had been their glory.
Never again would the big companies dispatch their trapping brigades into the high country. There was no money to be made in trading supplies for beaver pelts at a summer rendezvous on the Wind, the Popo Agie, or some fork of the legendary Green. Bridger and Fraeb formed a new partnership and brought out that last, undersized pack train from St. Louis in ’40. Afterward, while Bridger led a small band of trappers north, Fraeb and Joe Walker started for California with a few men of their own.
Bass marched his family north with Gabe’s undermanned bunch. And when Bridger turned off for Black-foot country, Titus had steered east for Absaroka and the home of the Crow, his wife’s people. There would always be beaver in that country—even if he had to climb higher, plunge deeper into the shadowy recesses than he had ever gone before. And, besides—traders like Tullock were handy enough with his post over at the mouth of the Tongue. He’d continue to trap close to the home of his wife’s folk; trade when he needed resupply; and wait for beaver to rise.
The way beaver had before. The way it would again.
They had a fair enough winter that year—cold as the maw of hell for sure, but that only meant what beaver he brought to bait were furred up, seal-fat, and sleek. When the hardest of the weather broke, he took a small pack of his furs down to Fort Van Buren on the Yellowstone, only to find that Tullock couldn’t offer him much at all in trade. So Titus bought what powder and lead he needed, an array of new hair ribbons for his woman, a pewter turtle for Magpie to suspend around her neck, and a tiny penny whistle for Flea.
How Bass marveled at the way that boy of his grew every time he returned to the village from his trapline or a trading venture. At least an inch or more every week Titus rode off to the hills. Even more so when he returned from a long journey to the Tongue. Flea was four winters old now, his beautiful sister to turn seven next spring, looking more and more like her mother with every season.
Where it used to break his heart at how Waits-by-the-Water first hid her pox-ravaged face,* it now gave him comfort that she had made peace with what the terrible disease had cost her: not only the marred and pocked flesh but the loss of her brother. Every time Bass returned from the hills, come back from the wilderness to the bosom of his family, he quietly thanked the Grandfather for sparing this woman, the mother of his children, from the cursed disease that had decimated the northern mountains. And, he never neglected to thank the All-Maker for the days the two of them had yet to share.
With the arrival of spring following that last rendezvous, he decided to mosey south, taking a little time to trap if the country looked good—but intending above all else to be in the country of the upper Green come midsummer when Bridger planned to reunite with Fraeb. On the Green last year before going their separate ways, there had been serious talk of erecting a post of their own.
Damn, if that news didn’t stir up a nest of hornets among the old holdouts! Hivernants the likes of Gabe and Frapp ready to give up on trapping beaver? The two of ’em turning trader?
Such black notions he had done his best to push out of his thoughts over that winter. No sense in his tying his mind in knots around something that was nothing more than talk. Why, Frapp and Gabe had been out in these here mountains pretty near from the beginning. If anyone else but himself knew beaver was bound to rise again—it was them two! But … when Gabe or Frapp gave up trapping and settled down to trade fixin’s for furs, why—it meant nothing less than the old days was over for certain.
By the time Bass reached Black’s Fork of the Green, he was nonetheless startled to discover that Bridger and his men had started laying down cottonwood logs, chinking them with clay from the riverbank. They had the walls and some of the roof done six weeks later when Fraeb and his outfit rode in from their exploratory expedition to California, not one of their pack animals swaybacked under furs. Not much of anything to show for all those months and miles. Out west to the land of the Mexicans Fraeb’s outfit sold off all their beaver for some beans, soap, tobacco, coffee, and sugar, along with seventeen mules and a hundred mares. Not to mention trading for the head-hammering
After a little celebrating at their reunion, wetted down with some whiskey Bridger traded off a small train of emigrants bound for Oregon who had tarried at Gabe’s half-completed post long enough to recuperate their stock, Fraeb proposed a short journey south by east where the men might trap and make meat. Bridger stayed behind with a handful to continue work on their post before winter slammed its fist down on the valley of the Green.
Bass chose trapping and hunting over the mindless chores of a cabin-raising sodbuster. He figured he’d pounded enough nails and shingled enough roofs back east to last him the rest of his days.* So when Henry Fraeb’s twenty-two rode out for the Little Snake, Titus went along. He reckoned on sniffing around some country he hadn’t seen much of since he lost hair to the Arapaho. Might just be a man could find a few beaver curious enough to come to bait.
Besides … among the old German’s outfit were some of the finest veterans still clinging to the old life in the mountains. Yessirree! This hunt that would take them into the coming fall might well be the last great hurraw for them all.
Those long days of late summer seeped slowly past. None of them ran across much beaver sign to speak of, and where the men did tarry long enough to lay their traps, they didn’t have much success. Not like the old days when a man could damn well club the flat-tails, they were thick as porky quills! The hunting wasn’t all that fair either. Game was pushed high into the hills. Bass and others figured the critters had been chivvied by the migrations of the Ute and Shoshone.
Turned out the game was driven off by the hunting forays of this huge village of wandering Sioux and Cheyenne, not to mention that band of tagalong Arapaho.
The sun had been up a good three hours that morning when one of Fraeb’s outriders spotted a half dozen horsemen on the crest of the hill across the Little Snake.
“If’n they was Yuta, them riders be running down here first whack,” Jake Corn snorted. His black beard extended right on down his neck and into his chest hair in one continuous mat. “Begging for tobaccy or red paint.”
“Snakes too,” Rube Purcell added. His greasy, matted, deerhide-brown hair was already flecked with snows of age. “Poor diggers them Snakes be.”
“Those ain’t either of ’em,” Elias Kersey growled. “An’ that’s a yank on the devil’s short-hairs!”
“Lookit ’em,” Bass remarked. “Just watching us, easy as you please. Ain’t friendly-like to stare so—is it, Frapp?”
The old German hawked up the last of the night-gather in his throat and spat. “Trouble is vhat dem niggurs lookin’ at.”
Fraeb picked four men to cross the river ahead of the rest, making for the far slope and those unfriendly horsemen. Stop a ways off and make some sign. See how the winds blew and the stick floats. Then the rest started their animals into the shallow river just up the Little Snake from the mouth of a narrow creek. The trappers had the last of the pack animals and spare horses across right about the time the first muffled gunshot reached them.
Every man jack jerked up in surprise, finding their four companions wheeling round and returning lickety-split, like Ol’ Beelzebub himself was right on their tails, one of their number clinging the best he could to his horse’s withers as they lumbered down the long slope. Behind them came the six strangers. And just behind that half dozen … it seemed the whole damned hillside suddenly sprouted redskins.
“Fort up! Fort up!” came the cry from nearly every throat as the four trappers sprinted their way.
Fraeb’s twenty spun about, studying things this way, then that—when most decided they would have to make a stand of it right there with the river at their back.
“Pull off them packs for cover!” one of them bellowed.
But Bass knew right off there weren’t enough packs to make barricades for them all. Not near enough supplies lashed to those pack saddles to hide behind, and sure as hell not any beaver bundles to speak of. One last-ditch thing to do.
“Put the horses down!” One of the bold ones gave voice to their predicament.
“Shoot the goddamned horses!” another voice trumpeted as the four scouts reined up in a swirl of dust and hit the ground running, reins in their hands.
That’s when Titus could make out the yips and yells, the taunts and the cries—all those hundreds of voices rising above the dull booming thunder of thousands of hooves.
