pounding him on the back. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to return to Green River, or go wherever the old free men might hunt in the seasons to come.
It was simply that he knew down in the marrow of him that it was never to be. Titus Bass was never coming back again. This was the last time he would look at these wrinkled, wind-scoured, sunburned faces. The last time he would gaze across this piece of country. He was going home for the last time. Every bit as well as he knew the aches in his bones and the scars on his body, Titus Bass accepted that he would never be back.
So he swallowed deep, working up the courage to explain it, and finally said, “Very ol’t man, name of Real Bird, some years ago, he said if’n I go back to Crow country this time, I can’t never leave again.”
“C-can’t leave?” Sweete echoed, worry graying his expression.
He patted his tall friend on the shoulder and said, “My heart’s telling me that’s awright, Shadrach. Because my spirit wants to get back north to the Yallerstone.”
As the others moved in close, forming a tight semicircle about the old man, Sweete cleared his throat and asked, “Th-that mean none of us ever see you again?”
Sensing the sting of tears, Scratch explained quietly, “Maybeso you niggers won’t ever see Titus Bass like this again, not like you see me standin’ here now. Gray, an’ ol’t, an’ awful tired. But … ever’ night when you boys close your eyes to sleep, close your eyes to dream—you’ll see them days that used to be.” He looked directly at Bridger then, smiling. “Gabe, you ’member back to that night at your post, round a fire, when I come back after takin’ them emigrants to Fort Hall?”
“I ’member the night.”
“You recollect I was in the cups, an’ how we talked of what was dream … an’ what was real?”
Bridger swallowed. “I ’member that too.”
“Them dreams you fellas will have of the used-to-be days are gonna be real … an’ all the rest of these seasons without beaver, these seasons when the unhonorable men come crushin’ in on us—why, that won’t be real a’t’all,” he told his friends. “Way I see it, the dreams is just about all we got to hang our hands on to now. So them dreams of what was our glory time are gonna be all the sweeter for it.”
Few of them could hold their eyes on him now, most of the old friends dragging hands beneath their cold, dribbling noses or smearing an eye here or there.
“I ain’t got no doubt you’re gonna see me again an’ again, over an’ over, in your dreams,” he explained with difficulty at putting the feelings into words. “But I don’t figger you’ll ever see me like this again. In your dreams I won’t be feelin’ all my war wounds an’ all these here battle scars.”
Quietly, Sweete said, “We lived through a high time when other’ns went under, Scratch.”
“That’s right,” he responded. “An’ in them dreams each of us gonna have in the seasons to come, we’ll all be fresh an’ brand-new again, boys. Can’t you see them dreams now? Why, we’ll be settin’ foot out here again for the first time—just like this land was brand-new. The day after God made this country for our kind, when we was the onliest white niggers to put down a mokerson track out here.”
Scratch could tell by the way tears were trickling from their eyes that most of these old friends were remembering those glory days already. Veterans of more than two decades of survival, countless seasons and battles, victories and losses. Friends moved on and friends gone under. These last holdouts were remembering those bright and shining times when this country was brand-spanking-new … and they had been the first.
The goddamned very first to walk this high and mighty land.
“I’m going back north to live out what I got left of days, fellas,” he confessed in a voice cracking with emotion. “Spend it with my family, up there with my wife’s relations. Now that it’s come my time to cross the river an’ go, I don’t want none of you to stare at this here ol’ nigger too good. Don’t want you to ’member his gray head or the tired way he moves in his ol’ bones.”
“Don’t look at you?” Sweete asked.
“I want you ol’ friends to do me honor,” he started to explain, “to remember me when we was all like young bulls come spring green-up: strong, an’ wild, an’ with the sap runnin’ through us so heady that no man dared stand agin’ any of us, red or white.”
Dragging his coat sleeve beneath his nose, Scratch quietly said, “That’s the Titus Bass I want you to ’member. When you boys close your eyes, I want you to dream on them glory days we had. An’ I’ll be there. No matter what happens to me from here on out, I swear to you under this great sky that them dreams are gonna be more real than us standin’ here right now.”
Shadrach impulsively threw his arms around the shorter man, hugging him fiercely. As Sweete took a step back, the others came up and embraced their old friend in turn. Until it was time for Bridger.
With a deepening melancholy, Scratch looked into Jim’s face and said, “Nothing lives long but the earth an’ sky, Gabe. Only the earth an’ sky.”
They hugged and pounded each other on the back, then stepped apart.
Smearing the back of his powder-grimed hand beneath both eyes, Scratch cleared his throat and told them with a strong voice, “That dream I tol’t you about … that’s where Titus Bass is gonna live for all time to come. That’s how Titus Bass is gonna stay with you.”
Quickly he turned on his heel and went to his gray pony before any of them could say or do something that would stay him any longer. Settling in the saddle, he gestured for his son to start the others down to the crossing. When his family were on their way toward the bank, Scratch turned for one last look at these old faces he would only see in dream from here on out.
“I’ll see you again—soon enough, my friends!” he cried out, his voice cracking with painful emotion. “Just dream of them glory days, by damn, you dream it in your hearts … for that’s where I’ll allays stay!”
They didn’t have all that much when they put Fort Bridger behind them and started for the Green River, not after the Mormons had stolen all the extra weapons, blankets, buffalo robes, even unto what extra clothing an old mountain man, his wife, and their children possessed.
But by the time Mary Bridger finished explaining to her people what had happened to all of them at the hands of Brigham Young’s Avenging Angels, Washakie’s Shoshone opened up their hearts and their hands to the family of Titus Bass. A blanket from this person, a buffalo robe from another, an old saddle someone wasn’t using, a worn kettle or dented coffeepot—nearly everyone gave something to the old mountain man, this good friend of Jim Bridger who had married the chief’s daughter.
Once again Titus was stunned by the generosity of these people who lived with far less than any Mormon family ever would own, yet were a people more than willing to share what little extra they had with this stranger and his Crow wife. On top of that, it had struck Scratch, the Shoshone and Crow held no undying love for one another. So it was with deep gratitude that he had watched as Little Fawn brought the first gift to place upon the ground in front of the brush shelter where Titus and his family were preparing to spend that cold night after running onto Washakie’s people near the banks of the Green River.
“While we menfolk was in council with Washakie’s headmen,” Jim had explained in a whisper as one person after another came forward with a gift for the Bass family, “that wife of mine went round the camp, tellin’ ever’one just what you an’ your’n been through to help us, Scratch. What you give up, what you lost just to be there to help a old friend like me.”
Scratch’s eyes brimmed as he looked over the goods given by people who did not have great wealth but were rich in spirit.
He said, “Don’t know how I’ll ever come to thank ’em all—”
“You awready have, Titus Bass,” Jim interrupted in a whisper. “These folks know you chose to stand by a friend against a whole damn army of thieves and murderers—an’ your family lost near ever’thing for it. These folks is honoring me by honoring my friend, Titus Bass.”
For a long time he could not speak, the lump so tight and raw in his throat. Instead, the old trapper stood on his tired legs, one arm wrapped around his wife’s shoulders, as they watched the procession of Washakie’s people bringing gifts to the family of that man they honored as a faithful friend.
Many times in the following days he squinted his eyes against the low winter light glinting off the icy skim of snow … and remembered back to that afternoon as the sun sank and the weather turned bitter. His wife and children had been doubly warmed with those gifts of clothing, blankets, and robes. From there on out, they had no fear of freezing before seeing Crow country. Enough robes to throw over a small shelter made of willow limbs he and Flea could tie together, forming a low dome. Two old kettles to boil the meat he and his son had somehow
