give the two men some time to themselves there in the deteriorating hulk of this fort, unoccupied almost five years now. Before it had been abandoned, Andrew Sublette and Louis Vasquez gave it their all in the Arapaho trade here on a wide, grassy flat along the east bank above the South Platte. It was here, Shad had explained to his wife as they approached the deteriorating mud walls, that he had worked a few seasons for the partners after the summer rendezvous were no more. Here stood a part of his past, a piece of his life before he first came among Gray Thunder’s band and took a shine to a pretty, doe-eyed girl.
Even though the partners had raised their post more than two hundred miles north of Fort William down on the Arkansas River, the influence of the Bent brothers ranged far and wide along the Front Range of these southern Rocky Mountains. Within two trapping seasons, the Bents and Milton Sublette’s own older brother, William, had consolidated the lion’s share of the Indian trade, not to mention what few men still trapped on their own instead of slaving for the overbloated American Fur Company. While Andrew ended up throwing in with his older brother’s economic fortunes, Vasquez had ridden north and eventually formed a partnership with Jim Bridger—the two of them constructing their first small post on Black’s Fork of the Green River by early autumn in ’43.
“Look ’round you, Shadrach,” Titus suggested. “Look at ever’thing around you here.”
“Ain’t nothing left,” Sweete grumped. “Nothing to look at—”
“That’s where you’re wrong, my friend.”
Sweete looked down at him strangely, as one might regard a soft-brained town idiot. “Ain’t nothing to see here but mud walls and them broke-down wood gates, a few corral posts, an’ what’s left of the fur press that ain’t been burned to ash by the Injuns.”
Wagging his head, Bass said, “You ain’t lookin’ close enough.”
“At what?”
“Lookin’ at all the shinin’ times you had here,” he whispered, a mystical enthusiasm rising in his voice. “Take a look over there,” he said as he turned Sweete on his heel. “An’ over there too. You was here for times that was some, Shadrach! Times got tough an’ I won’t argue with you that this place is drying up like a ol’ buffler wallow … but it sure as blazes shined while you was here.”
Titus stood looking up at his tall friend’s face, watching something new come into Sweete’s eyes as the big man studied the mud walls, the charred, half-burned gate barely suspended from its iron hardware at the entrance, at those empty, lifeless windows along the walls of the low-roofed huts appearing very much like the empty eye sockets of a buffalo skull … and realized Shadrach was finally seeing more than the abandoned facade. His eyes were finally looking back across the years to a day when this spot teemed with life. A long-ago day when he stood tall and bold against what the future might throw at him. Back to a day before their breed was abandoned and they were all left to wander evermore.
“You see what Shad Sweete was when he stood here many seasons ago?”
He nodded slowly. Then turned his head to look down at his older friend. “I can see more’n some empty post ever’body turned their backs on.”
“Can you see what you was meant to do, meant to be, when they pulled the fur business out from under us?”
Shad went back to staring at the walls. “No, Scratch. I can’t see that.”
“Good.” He slapped Sweete on the back. “None of us can see ahead into what days’re still to come. We’ll leave that up to them ol’ rattle-shakers and Injun medeecin men. Now, lookee right over there.”
“At them women?”
“Shell Woman. Hell yes, you idjit,” he snorted. “Lookee there at that young pup o’ your’n holding on to his mam’s hand so tight, at that li’l girl Shell Woman’s got in her arms.”
“I see ’em.”
“That’s all the gonna-be you need to worry about, Shadrach. Don’t go frettin’ on what was—”
“But … my goddamned arm!”
“You’re the only one worried ’bout it. Shell Woman sure as hell ain’t.”
“It’s
“You been doin’ fine by ’em ever since that wolf chewed you up and spit you back out!”
Sweete’s eyes narrowed menacingly. “I can’t wait till I’m strong ’nough again to toss you in the river.”
“The Platte over there?”
“Yeah—I’ll throw your ol’ ass in the Platte.”
“Just be gentle with me, child,” Titus pleaded, his hands clasped together prayerfully. “Promise me you won’t do it till summer.”
Looking down at that left arm bound close to his chest in a sling fashioned from a huge black bandanna of silk, Shadrach sounded wistful. “Hope by summer, I can toss us both in the river.”
Overhead a ragged V of Canada geese curled low, making their noisy descent on the nearby river. In silence both men watched those final moments of flight as the birds ceased flapping, raised their wings into double arches all the better to catch the wind, and dropped their legs beneath them as they descended onto the South Platte, squawking with a flourish and a spray of water.
Sweete said, “First of them I’ve see’d this year.”
“Honkers making their way north, Shadrach. Day at a time,” Titus said. “Just like us: a day at a time.”
That snowy, hoary night back south along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, Scratch had convinced himself that no one was going to stop Shad’s relentless bleeding. But old as he was, despite all that he’d seen out here in these wild and mysterious places—Titus Bass was in for an experience he never could have imagined he would witness right before his eyes, especially back in those days when he was young and far too cynical to believe in anything beyond the reach of his own hands. Had that night happened to a younger Titus, why—he likely would have refused to accept what he had seen, and passed it off as nothing more than his mind playing hoo-doo tricks on him with some strange and inexplicable occurrence. As it was, Scratch had witnessed something that rocked him down to the soles of his winter moccasins, then did his damnedest to wrap his mind around what marvel had overtaken all of them. By dawn he had come to accept that there was no other explanation but that they had all been in the presence of Shell Woman’s protector spirits.
Bringing back their horses from the coulee, Titus had somehow managed to clumsily get Shadrach off the ground and into the saddle, weak and groggy as Sweete had become. With that small, lone pouch of buffalo tongue and boss meat lashed between the sawbucks on the packhorse, Bass had clambered aboard his mount and taken a moment longer to wrap a big bandanna over the coyote fur cap, knotting it beneath his bearded chin to hold the cap down against the growing strength of the icy gales. Then he had closed his eyes. Drawing in a deep breath, he dithered on whither direction they should go. With the disappearance of the sun behind the storm clouds, gone were the landmarks that had brought them here to the buffalo. Nowhere to be seen were the guiding stars he had always relied upon at times like these.
“You know where we’re going?” Shadrach had asked him weakly sometime later after they had quartered into the storm’s wintry fury.
Bass had stopped all three horses and pulled the big wool muffler down to his chin. “You got a feelin’ I’m going wrong?”
Sweete shook his head. “I … I dunno. Just take me to Shell Woman, quickest way you can, Titus. Quickest you can.”
“Ain’t much quick about gettin’ anywhere tonight, Shad,” he said, then wished he hadn’t spit out those words. He leaned over, helping his friend get a thick wool scarf adjusted over his face so that it protected everything below the eyes. “There now. Can’t believe you don’t trust a nigger like me after all our years partnered up. You just stay in the saddle an’ you can count on me taking you right to Shell Woman. She’ll have a big, warm fire going for us, and my woman gonna have some hot food waiting for your belly—”
“Shell Woman’s gonna use her power to heal me, Scratch.”
“You ’member that—how she’ll go to work on your arm,” he said as he tugged on the packhorse’s lead rope. “Mend you up just fine.”
“Just listen for her,” Shad said in a raspy voice, muted somewhat by the wool muffler and the growing cry of the wind. “Shell Woman gonna lead us back to camp. All you gotta do is listen.”
The sharp, icy snowflakes slashed at any bare flesh exposed as Titus led them on into the dark, plodding warily across the shifting, icy landscape. But for all that he strained, Bass couldn’t hear anything but the faint keen of the wind as it slinked out of the coulees and whined along the tops of the ridges overhead. That, and the steady,
