“Yes.”
“Injuns have dogs near big as that critter?”
The boy shook his head.
“That’s right, son,” Titus whispered. “Dog like that lopin’ along them horses—it’s a sign them are likely white men comin’ our way.”
Over the last few agonizing weeks Titus Bass had grown all the more certain that he would see that every one of his children knew everything he could teach them about the white man. Not just his language, but his ways. The good and the bad of the pale-skinned ones who were trickling out of the East. Titus would have to teach them everything he inherently knew about his own kind so that his half-blood children would not get eaten alive when the mountains grew crowded with strangers.
They knew of enemies.
A few more of their kind had already come at earlier rendezvous—but only a string of preachers and their wives, missionaries come to the wilderness to take the wildness out of this primal place and its Indians. Come to bring the word of the Lord to the red man—to civilize these warriors and their squaws, turn them into God-fearing, land-tilling white folk just like everyone back east.
Damn them, anyway! To make over this land into their own image instead of leaving it just the way it had been when Titus Bass himself arrived back in eighteen and twenty-five. This coming spring would make it twenty- two years since he’d come to the mountains. He could count each and every season—every summer and every winter—marked inside his soul the way a fella could peer down and count each year of a tree’s life.
“And those horses under their heavy packs—like a white man. Indians pull travois. These are white men, Popo,” Flea whispered now, in Crow, taking the spyglass from his eye again. “Just like you.”
“No,” his father corrected patiently. “Don’t you ever believe that just because a man has pale skin like me, that he is just like me, son. That thinking is downright dangerous. Most white men aren’t at all like me.”
“Not the … the,” and Flea sought for the word. “Greasers? They’re not like you?”
With a wag of his head, Titus explained. “No. Them greasers come to kill all the white folks from America what come down to Mexico. Kill any women married to them fellas. Greasers come to butcher their children—just because them young’uns was like you and had some white blood in ’em.”
“That why we ran away, Popo?”
Laying his hand on his boy’s shoulder, Titus vowed, “I’ll run anywhere I have to, Flea—to save my family.”
“We run away from these strangers?”
“Not just yet,” Bass answered, considering the steel-gray, overcast sky. “We’ll have us a close look come sundown when they make camp.”
As they slid backward on their bellies through the snow-dusted cedar and juniper, Titus did his best to pray that those horsemen weren’t renegade Mexicans or the Pueblo Indians who had thrown in together and let the wolf out to howl in Taos. They had prowled the streets for any American, even anyone who consorted with Americans, then hacked them apart with their machetes and farm implements. Titus Bass got his family out of the village and into the hills with no more than moments to spare. By the time they were approaching Turley’s mill just north of town, the murderous mob was launching its attack on the mill’s inhabitants. Titus struck out for the foothills with his family, and that of his long-ago partner, Josiah Paddock.*
But right from the beginning it was clear they couldn’t hold out forever with their loved ones, hiding in the foothills, waiting for any roving bands of Mexicans or Pueblos to discover them as they went about hunting for something to eat, collecting wood to fight off the numbing cold one snowstorm after another. So Bass volunteered to push north alone, across the pass, pointing his nose for a trading settlement founded by former trappers, a place called the Pueblo. After losing his horse and subsequent days of foundering on foot, nearly starving and close to freezing, Titus had stumbled into a cluster of canvas tents—a camp of westbound sojourners who called themselves the chosen Saints of God, a party of religious pioneers wintering near the trading post until the spring thaw would allow them to continue west, on to their promised land reputed to lie somewhere beyond the high mountains.
After those Saints delivered the half-dead old trapper to the gates of the traders’ stockade, Titus hurriedly delivered the terrible news of the Pueblo revolt. Wringing their hands in anger and frustration, the former mountain men argued over what to do. Although there weren’t near enough of the old trappers to beat back the hordes of Mexicans and Pueblos on a rampage, the Americans nonetheless voted to start south immediately—if only to be close enough to keep an eye on the village of Taos and be ready when the army’s dragoons marched up from Santa Fe to put an end to the riot and murder. But before their ragtag band marched out south early the following morning, they sent one of their own to carry word of the uprising and brutal murder of the American governor himself to Bents’ Fort on down the Arkansas River.
Wasn’t a man there in that cold, hushed, dimly lit room at the Pueblo where Titus had told his story could argue that William Bent didn’t deserve to know how his older brother, Charles, had been hacked apart by the Taos mob—just as fast as a runner could get a horse on down the Arkansas to that big adobe fort with the news.
Louy Simmons volunteered to make that ride east while the rest turned their faces south for the valley of the San Fernandez and that tiny village of Taos where the icy streets had run red with the blood of Americans. Although weary and weak from his ordeal in bringing the horrible news, Titus turned right around and started south, leading Mathew Kinkead and the others who were setting off to right a terrible wrong. With his family and old friends hiding out among the hills above Taos, he could do no less. Then somewhere along that trail, in those long, cold days spent racing back to his family, Bass had decided against joining in the retribution. Not that the Mexicans and Indians didn’t have a judgment day coming—be it a dragoons’ firing squad or a long drop at the end of a short rope noose tied by the hands of those American mountain men.
But this simply was not his fight.
By the time he had watched his half-blood children lunging toward him through the knee-deep snow, Titus Bass knew he would start his family north for the country where life was his fight. The others, like old friend Josiah Paddock—they had a decided stake in this land where the American army had come to conquer the Mexicans, this land where those chosen Saints of God had migrated to wrest their promised land from an unforgiving wilderness. As soon as he finally held his Crow wife tightly in his arms, rejoicing at their reunion, Titus realized if he did little else, he had to get his family far enough north that they would be in country the white man did not want. Only then would they be safe from those dangers he did not begin to understand.
Some dangers he could comprehend: the hatred between the Crow and their ancient adversaries to the north and east. Dangers such as the great white bears that could tear a man apart in heartbeats, or beasts that broke your leg so you could not move and slowly froze to death—those were the challenges and risks a man could fathom. They were a part of the life he had endured for more than two decades already. Such were the dangers that he reveled in, the very risks he had come west to conquer. Titus Bass could understand those challenges that had been an integral, and daily, part of his life for so long. But he did not care to make sense of armies coming to take away an old way of life from the Mexicans and Pueblo Indians, nor did he make sense of those Mexicans and Pueblos who staged a bloody revolt to drive out all those who were different. But what made him seek to hurry his family north even faster was his inability to make sense of those religious zealots who had come to the mountains to make a place only for their chosen few.
Ever since he had arrived here back in ’25, this had always been a land where a man celebrated his freedom to do and be … but now there were armies and emigrants, murderers and zealots come to change the face of this wilderness, come to change the very nature of what had belonged to only the daring few for so long.
Putting the San Fernandez Valley at their backs, Titus and his family struck out for the snowy pass, then started down, angling off to the northeast for the Picketwire.* Near its mouth, on the north bank of
