He recalled that her people believed very strongly that every man would know when he was about to cross over. That same mighty power was what had prompted, provoked, and inspired Jack Hatcher to warble his favorite song as he lay mortally wounded in battle against the Blackfoot in Pierre’s Hole.* And the very same spirit that compelled Asa McAfferty to pick his own time and his own place to make what Asa realized was coming down to his final stand. To these warrior peoples of the High Plains and the tall mountains, a man knew in his bones when his time had come to cross over that last, high, and lonely divide. Alone … for dying was at best a one-man job.
“You stay with me a long, long time still,” she said, the worry gone from her face.
“Woman—ain’t none of us know what’s in store,” he admitted. “Much as I’d love to die in my blankets with you and our children at my side, a passel of grandpups crawlin’ on the floor of our lodge … in this here country nothin’ lives long but the rocks and the sky.”
Her eyes misted a little, gone cloudy as a stormy day when she turned away from him and nodded once in agreement. “Only the rocks and sky live long, husband.”
“But—just look at you!” he exclaimed with good cheer, leaning over in the saddle and grabbing hold of her elbow. “Why, you ain’t ever gonna grow old, are you, woman?” He gazed deeply into her eyes.
“Many winters have come and gone since you first looked at me,” she said in Crow, gazing at him from beneath those black eyelashes with a profound gratitude for his compliment.
“But you don’t look no differ’nt than the day you come to sit with me aside the Elk River.”*
“But, what of the … sickness that ravaged my face?”
“I don’t see that,” he confessed. “When I look at you I never have seen the sickness scars.”
“How long … you and me … was together?” She struggled some with his American tongue.
“Fourteen. This’ll be fourteen winters since you come to talk with me on that rock beside the river.”
She smiled at him. “You give me four good children.”
“Four?” As suddenly as he spoke the question, Bass realized his mistake and grinned at her, roaring, “Yes! Number four is comin’ this winter near my own birthin’ day!”
How he wanted to be back up in Absaroka long before then. Before the hard winds blew the yellow leaves off the cottonwood standing so stately along the Yellowstone, the Bighorn, on north to the winding valleys of the Judith and the fabled Musselshell. By the time the trembling aspen on the high slopes had begun to shed their leaves of gold and the snowline crept down, down, down toward the rolling prairie where the buffalo had begun to put on winter coats and take shelter in the lee of the mountains. How he hungered to be back among the places where the white man did not come with his women and wagons, with his ways meant to change everything that had been into what those stiff-backed folks demanded it must be.
To be back among a people living generations beyond count in a land that had always been. All a man could do was pray that the soft ones back east would never find a way to change that on him. For, if they did … then life would no longer be worth the living.
If a man could no longer hear the shrill whistle of a red-tailed hawk circling overhead but for the noisy clatter of mankind and his wagons, if he could no longer make out a wolf’s howl drifting down from the nearby hills because the aching stillness of night had been ruined by the nearness of one dirty, stinking settlement after another … then life no longer was sweet. Life was no longer worth the living. Till then, he’d go higher, and higher still, farther and farther back—all to stay away from those who came to take what they could from each new place before they ruined it and moved on. Men like Phineas Hargrove and his kind.
But then, there had always been that kind.
Yet wasn’t he much the same sort? Hadn’t the beaver men come to take until there was little left to take? Perhaps it was so … and it made his heart ache with the weight of that realization.
Still, he brooded, there was a marked difference between the him he was in those early years and the him he had slowly become. When the bottom fell out of beaver and there was no earthly reason to wade ice-cold streams in search of the elusive flat-tails, most all the old trappers had given up and fled: east for what once was, and west in the hope of what might be. But only a handful stayed on, clinging to what could never be again. Maybeso, that proved he was not like the rest, not the sort who came, used, and moved on when they had taken all that could be dug up, cut down, or carried off.
Which got Scratch to wondering just how white a man he was anymore. Gradually, inexorably, more and more with every year, he had come to think of himself as a man in between, someone who could never become a part of his wife’s Crow people, someone who would never again be considered completely white by his own kind. If most of the white trappers had fled back east to old jobs and old ways, and other white folks fled the East in their wagons, desperate to make a new start and new lives for themselves far to the west beyond these mountains … being neither white nor red anymore, just what the hell was he? Merely some mule-stubborn old man refusing to let go of a way of life that was in its death throes?
And all the more important: He worried about what the devil a man would do as he realized he would never fit into that world he saw coming down the trail.
Titus stood at the lower edge of a crusty patch of ground where the sulfur-laden waters had soaked into the earth over the eons, relentlessly leaving behind one thin layer of mineral sediment on top of another.
“That’s boiling water?” asked young Leah.
“Hotter’n your mama has in her kettle,” he explained to his grand-daughter.
As Ghost and Digger traipsed away to sniff at new and intriguing smells off in the sagebrush, both young boys accompanied the old trapper on this excursion to witness a true wonder of nature. Jackrabbit gripped one of his gnarled hands, and Lucas clutched the other. On both sides of him stood the other children, all of them a little in awe at the sight. As soon as the first steamy gush of water spewed from the geyser,* more than a hundred excited, enthralled emigrants came racing out of the camp they were setting up that afternoon near Soda Springs.
Young Lucas asked, “Can I touch it?”
“Don’t you dare,” his mother warned as she stopped behind the child and rested her hands on his narrow shoulders. “That’ll burn you good.”
“Like fire burn me?”
“Wuss’n that,” Titus told his grandson. “Fire just burn you up and kill you quick. That there water burns so you die slow an’ hurtful, Lucas. That ain’t no way for a li’l man like you to go under.”
Leaning forward, Lucas peered around the front of Bass’s legs to get Jackrabbit’s attention. “We can’t go there to play.”
Little Jackrabbit, about the same age as Lucas, shook his head with understanding and confirmed, “No go.”
“No is right,” Amanda said gravely. “You boys play close to the wagon while we’re getting settled for the night. Over there, that side of camp, away from this here hot spring.”
“Where, Popo?” Jackrabbit asked, gazing up at his father.
“You boys play yonder where Lucas’s mama said,” he explained and pointed. “In the sage there, but don’t go far as them rocks.”
The boys started to let go of the old man’s hand as Amanda reminded them, “You two boys stay where I can see you! Hear?”
Lucas was darting off, Jackrabbit at his side in nothing more than a tiny breechclout and moccasins, as the white boy flung his tiny voice over his shoulder. “I heard you, Mama!”
Six and a half days after they had left behind Hargrove’s California-bound party and the headwaters of what the emigrant maps were already calling Bridger Creek on the Bear River Divide, the Bingham-Burwell Oregon Company reached Soda Springs high on the gentle, looping, northward curve of Bear River. From here the train would strike out north-northwest, leaving the river behind, striking overland as they made the last stretch for Fort Hall on the Snake.
Most afternoons all Titus or Shadrach had to do was turn about and look back along the far horizon for a low column of dust rising lazily in the air more than a full day behind, telltale sign of the Hargrove California Company. The ousted wagon master and his faithful supporters had begun to fall farther and father behind every day across the last week, moving at a more leisurely pace now that the Bingham-Burwell party was pushing on ahead without
