Crack in the Sky tb-3

by Terry C. Johnston

  Bass immediately laid his right fist over his heart and held out his left arm. They gripped fiercely and looked one another in the eye.

  “You are my friend, Pretty On Top?”

  “I am your friend,” the youth replied. “Until I die, your friends are my friends.”

  Bass nodded, feeling the mist in his eyes. “And your enemies … they are my enemies.”

  As the throng burst into cheers, Arapooesh stepped up and slapped them both on the back. “We will celebrate tonight! A feast! A feast! For a true friend has returned to visit!”

  Turning to Bass, the chief leaned close to say in the white man’s ear, “It makes my heart happy to hear that you will spend your winter among us … the better for me to come to know this stranger who has proved to be a man of dignity and honor himself … a man who is strong enough, brave enough, that he dares to be both merciful and generous too.”

  He squinted into the light of that early-summer sun.

  Dragging the wide-brimmed hat off his head, Scratch tugged on a wide corner of the black silk bandanna he had tied around his neck, swiping his face with it. Suddenly recalling how so simple a touch had caused his flesh so much agony last winter.

  Up ahead at the far side of the valley, he studied that thin line of dust rising against the distant hills. And wondered if they might be Indians. A war party of Bannock. Maybeso a small band of Snake on their way to rendezvous too.

  Turning to glance over his shoulder in worry, Bass found he hadn’t limned himself against the pale sky, placing him and the animals right along the horizon so that he stuck out in plain view. No, he always did his best to ride somewhere on down the slope some so that he would not be spotted by any distant pair of roving eyes. He always crossed a ridge or divide through some saddle or swale low enough so that he couldn’t be spied right against the sky.

  He was thirsty. His mouth gone pasty. Through the long morning the animals had dampened the leather harness, soaking it with their sweat.

  Instead of slapping the hat back down on his head, he laid it atop the large saucer-shaped horn at the front of the Spanish saddle and grabbed for the bottom of the buckskin war shirt. He tugged it up, over his head, and off both arms, then turned and lashed it to the back of the saddle there with his capote. At this season it was still cold enough early in the morning on this high desert west of the southern pass that a man started out his day shivering, later went to sweating as the sun climbed high, then ended his day shivering all over again as he started his fire, ready to climb into his sleeping robes.

  The cloth shirt he had bought from Bill Williams more than a year ago had faded with so many washings along the banks of streams, vigorously rubbing the material with sand scooped from the creekbed, beating it against the rocks. No more damned nits, he had vowed. Never again.

  Which made him remember how he and McAfferty had stripped off all their clothing at one campsite south along the Heely in Apache country, plopping their cloth and leather garments down upon a series of huge anthills, where they sat out the day completely naked but for their hats and moccasins, content to watch the huge red creatures swarm over the tiny lice that had burrowed into every seam of their clothing.

  He had vowed he’d never again travel with any man who was infested with graybacks. After all, it was only a matter of time before the lice from one host migrated on over to Titus Bass. No more damned nits.

  Those distant horsemen beneath the thin cloud of dust on the horizon were traveling from north to south. As he sat there studying their ragged line of movement, Scratch could see that they were riding for the same spot off to the southwest where he himself was headed. He squinted into the high, bright light. Just across that low range of hills to the west of him, down there the Big Sandy dumped itself into the Green, and those emerald-tinged waters continued their tumble south to the Colorado.

  Glancing back up at the sun as if to curse its blinding glare, he pulled his hat back over the faded blue bandanna of silk, then rocked his horse into motion, tugging on the long lead rope that played back to Hannah’s neck. In turn she tugged on the lead rope running back to the packhorse. What with those unexpected travelers, it was better for him to cross this upper dogleg of the valley and scoot west a bit more before he plunged on south. Keep as much distance as he could between him and those riders. Maybe he would try catching up come later in the afternoon, drawing close enough to them by the time the strangers went into camp that he could slip up on them and from a safe distance see if they might be foe or friend.

  For a child out here on his lonesome, the chances were far greater that he would run onto a foe than he would bump into a friend.

  Friend.

  How good the word sounded. And how it made his already heavy heart ache with more longing.

  Friends to rendezvous with, tell tall stories to, companions to regale with his windies and whoppers and outright bald-face balderdash. Friends who didn’t mind when he grew thick-tongued and stumble-lipped as he drank deep to the bottom of his cups and finally threw up or passed out. One good, gut-busting revel a year—every man was due at least that. Jehoshaphat, but to lay eyes on friends he hadn’t seen for a full year?

  That was cause enough to celebrate, to drink until he got sick and blacked out then and there in the dirt, among the sage and the saddles and the sand thorns.

  Titus hadn’t seen Jack and Caleb and all the others since last summer after Sublette headed east and those two big company brigades set off for their fall hunt.

  Why, he hadn’t seen a white face since late last autumn when he had bumped into that big outfit run by Bridger and Fitzpatrick up in Crow country. They had already punched their way into and back through Blackfoot territory, and were headed east to winter up over toward the Powder River, when Scratch spotted the smokes of all their fires and cautiously rode off the hills to investigate. It was good to see Bridger again, along with some of the others too, and they had themselves a good evening of it, sharing stories and swapping lies the way they did.

  The young booshway had explained how his bunch had even run across Asa up there north of the Three Forks country.

  “We was partners.”

  “Didn’t know you ever rode with him,” Bridger had admitted.

  “For a time we did. He say what he was doing up there all by hisself? How he was getting along?”

  Fitzpatrick had wagged his head. “Had him a few pelts on them packhorses of his—but it didn’t seem to me he was up there to trap, that for certain. Man like him gotta be crazed to figger he can last out the Blackfeet much longer up that way all on his lonesome.”

  “Maybe he’s eager to get his hair raised,” Bridger added.

  Bass had stared at the fire, thinking back on things gone wrong between two men, and said, “I don’t figger I’ll ever see that white-head nigger again.”

  Brushing one flat palm across the other quickly, Bridger said morosely, “That’s a nigger what’s good as dead awready, Scratch.”

  Aw, Asa, he thought now as he dropped down into the bottom below the narrow saddle, feeling the grass brush the bottoms of his moccasins. Why, Asa? Why?

  He halted at midday just on the other side of that low saddle, loosened cinches, and let the three critters graze in the lush spring growth as he chewed at some of the meat he had cooked over last night’s fire before moving on to sleep a few miles from where he had supped. Just out of caution, in new country, a man ate one place, made a cold camp, and slept out the night in another. As he ate, he watched that distant line of dust rise against the glorious summer blue painted across the canvas above the western hills.

  Close enough now to calculate there couldn’t be more than twenty riders, maybe two dozen at most.

  Not likely to be a small band of Snake traipsing south for the white man’s rendezvous in Willow Valley. Might so be some damned Bannock. He knew they was the sort to skedaddle if the odds wasn’t real long in their favor, the sort what laid into any white men if the red niggers could
raise some horses and plunder, maybe even some scalps if their medicine was right that day. Goddamn them Bannocks.

  Not good Injuns like them Crow.

  They was the sort to take a man in, make him welcome, put him up in one lodge or the other till the chief’s two sisters sewed together a buffalo-hide shelter something on the order of a white man’s lean-to. A half-domed affair with a big flap that covered the wide entrance, which he could tie up during the day or lash down for protection from the cold at night, or when a new snowstorm came slashing through the valley. He’d barely gotten used to the dwelling last winter when it came time for the village to move a few miles upstream away from the Yellowstone. The camp had begun to stink something awful from all the gut-piles, rotting meat, and human offal piling up back in the trees. Maybe as much as a half-dozen times Arapooesh’s band would move each winter, finding themselves another place that offered open water, plenty of firewood and grass for their pony herds, along with some protection against the possibility of attack.

  As winter deepened, it seemed the Crow grew more relaxed—less concerned about their most fearsome enemy. Too damned cold now, the snow drifted too deep for the Blackfoot to try anything as foolish as a major assault on a village in the heart of Absaroka—home of the Crow.

  It hadn’t been long before Scratch had felt a part of them too. Much more a part of them than he had years back when he had come to the Bighorn country with Silas, Billy, and Bud. Perhaps he had felt set apart from the tribe because the three of them had not tried in the least to fit in with their winter hosts. Just as they had refused to do with the Ute. Instead, the trio of white men had stayed apart, taking all that they needed from the Crow and doing little to repay in kind all that had been given them with such generous hospitality. Whether it was food, or a woman offered to warm their robes, or some shelter from the raging winter blizzards—Silas and the others had considered themselves above their hosts, remaining as aloof as those company brigades traveling through one tribe’s territory or another.

  But for a lone man eager to learn all the more about these attractive pale-brown people, the past winter in Absaroka with Bird in Ground and Pretty On Top was all that he had hoped it would be. And from that first night’s feasting and celebration, it seemed that old Arapooesh took to the white man, right off.

  “Rotten … Belly?” he had repeated the words spoken to him by Bird in Ground.

  The man-woman rubbed his stomach with a flat hand, bending over slightly and groaning as if he were sick. “Rotten Belly, yes.”

  “That’s Arapooesh’s name?”

  Indeed, it was how the venerable chief was known among the two divisions who roamed Absaroka. Recently he had brought his wife and family back to live with her band of the Apsaalooke after spending many years among his River Band. And with the regrettable death of Big Hair, his wife’s people turned to the respected warrior and tribal counselor to lead them into the coming winters.

  After recouping his strength in the Crow village for several days, Bass had journeyed east to retrieve the trade goods and supplies he had abandoned when he’d set out on the trail of the horse thieves—just one day shy of reaching his cache. After taking two days to bury the last of his pelts in that black hole, he loaded up the rest of what he needed for the winter on Hannah’s back and turned about for Rotten Belly’s camp. He made it back just as a howling blizzard raked the land. That first night back he slept in Bird in Ground’s lodge, inviting the chief and some of the old warriors, along with Pretty On Top and other youngsters, to a giveaway dinner.

  Oh, the way those Crow eyes sparkled as he passed around small gifts of coffee and sugar, some powder and brass tacks, fingerings and bracelets, hanks of ribbon and beads! The men clucked and laughed—for it had been a long, long time since any of them had seen such riches as these!

  “Do you see, Pretty On Top?” Bird in Ground playfully chided the young man. “See what a man receives in return when he gives away his friendship to a stranger?”

  Later on as that winter grew old, as the wind keened and twisted through the Yellowstone Valley, the chief gathered his friends and advisers in his lodge for a red-stick feast. From the pot for this traditional Crow celebration, the invited guests all plucked tender pieces of elk. Afterward they scraped the greasy marrow from bones they pulled from the coals and cracked upon the rocks ringing the fire pit. Then they smoked and related their coups.

  When it came time for Bass to count his own exploits sitting there at Rotten Belly’s left hand, he enthralled them into the deep hours with his tales, stripping off his shirt and showing them those scars earned at the hands of the Blackfoot, being hunted down by the Apache far to the southwest of Absaroka, fighting the Mexican soldiers and fierce Comanche raiders in that land of warm waters, as well as his two struggles with the grizzly—letting them see the scars of his few seasons among the mountains, how the wilderness had marked his whipcord-lean white body.

  After the sixteen men nodded and murmured in approbation that he still lived, Arapooesh had refilled his pipe and sent it around the circle another time. And when it reached the chief at the end of its circuit, Rotten Belly solemnly proposed to give a name to the man who had come to his people earlier that winter—on foot and wearing the fur of a coyote wrapped around his head so that only the white man’s eyes and cheeks showed above his beard and mustache, those frosted whiskers similar in color to the gray pelt of that coyote Scratch had worn for winters beyond count already.

  “So I give my white friend a name I will call him from this night onward,” Arapooesh declared. “Pote Ani. Because when he came to us, this man seemed to have the head of a coyote on his shoulders. But more than that, my new friend has the cunning of the coyote that allows him to survive both the wolf and the winter. Because the coyote is an animal faithful to its own, steadfast to its friends … because this white man is loyal to my people—I pledge I will always remain loyal to him.”

  The rest of those gathered in the lodge had cheered with approval, slapping their thighs, banging their tin cups on the rocks ringing the fire.

  Then Arapooesh had continued. “So, my friends—it is with a full and happy heart that I take this white man as my brother. From this night he will be known among our people as Pote Ani. And he will be my brother.”

  It never failed to bring a smile to his heart, warming him, every time he thought about his dear friend, Rotten Belly. Remembering how the chief and Bird in Ground and even young Pretty On Top had come to mean so much to him through those winter moons. The sort of men who formed a bulwark against the storms in a man’s life.

  Like Jack Hatcher, Caleb Wood, and the others.

  Men red and white, men for all the seasons of his life.

  As the ice on the Yellowstone had begun to crack and shatter, opening the river early that spring, he had taken his leave as Rotten Belly’s band started upriver to the south, while he pointed his nose down the valley to the east. Just past the big rock, he had crossed to the north bank of the Yellowstone and located the patch of ground where he had dug his cache last autumn, the frozen earth lying beneath a snowdrift he had to shovel aside.

  As he pried back the thick sod lid to the cache’s neck, Scratch had suddenly remembered what he hadn’t during that winter in Absaroka—he had turned thirty-seven!

  Although there had been times during his winter with the Crow that he had wondered on Christmas and remembered Taos during the Nativity festival, thinking too how his own birthday came only a week after that celebration … Bass hadn’t given all that much thought to adding another ring to his years.

  It had simply been too wonderful a winter in the land of the Crow: new friends, plenty of protection from the wind and the cold among a people who from time to time provided their guest with one woman or another to relieve the trapper’s pent-up hungers.

  “Who’s been sending me these women who come to my lodge?” he had asked Bird in Ground one cold day as they were out gathering deadfall for their fires.<
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  The strange man of the Apsaalooke stood and looked squarely at Bass. “Since you do not want me for your wife, I decided that you must satisfy your appetites with the women of our tribe.”

  “Believe me when I say, if I ever wanted to settle down with a man-woman among your people for the rest of my winters, I would choose you, Bird in Ground.”

  “I am afraid I will never have a husband,” the Crow sighed. “Look around. There aren’t any others now who are like me—touched by this same spirit medicine. Perhaps I can find some way to show the power of my medicine, to prove to other young men of our tribe that I would make them a good wife.”

  “It is not hard for any man to see that you would make a good wife.”

  The man-woman smiled in that gentle way of his. “I realize you will never be my husband. But you will always stay one of those strong in my heart.”

  “And you will always stay one of those strong in my heart too.”

  Had to be Bannock under that distant dust cloud. Damn. They sure weren’t good folks like the Crow.

  Bannock.

  Certain that’s what they were, Bass tarried a while longer after finishing his cold meat before retightening cinches and pushing on into the afternoon. He’d do all he could to give the Bannock war party a wide berth.

  Not long after the saffron orb had slinked from the summer sky, Scratch noticed how that smudge of dust to the south had faded. The riders must have put in for camp up there a ways in the valley of Black’s Fork. And from there he calculated it wasn’t more than nine, ten days at the most before he’d finally reach the inner-mountain valley where Sublette promised to meet the company brigades for July.

  Before long he grew wary, figuring he had dogged the war party’s backtrail close enough and found himself a place where he tied off the animals, letting them graze while he set off on foot along the east side of the valley. Watching to the southwest as the shadows lengthened, sticking his nose in the wind for firesmoke, keeping his eyes moving from horizon to horizon. That bunch might have hunters out, after all. Making meat for supper. It wouldn’t pay to have a run-in with one or two of the bastards, then find himself tracked by the rest as they tried to run him down.