Crack in the Sky

by Terry C. Johnston

  Mile after mile Scratch raced at the head of a growing vee of horsemen as more trappers burst out of camp, mingling with the mounted Flathead warriors, the widening parade streaming behind Bass and Potts leading the rest at the arrow’s tip. Here and there the land rose gently, then fell again until they reached the bottom of a draw, where they had to leap their horses over each narrow creek feeding the long, narrow lake from the hills beyond. After urging all they could out of their horses for more than the hour it took them to cover the fifteen miles, those at the head of the cavalcade heard the first of the gunshots in the distance.

  And moments later the rescuers galloping in heard the first war cries of the Blackfoot raiders.

  As they reached the top of a gentle rise, the low plain spread out before them: less than a mile away the scene was easy to read. The Blackfoot already had possession of most of the trappers’ horses and mules, having driven them to the northwest, off toward the shore of the lake where the herd was protected by a handful of their warriors. On their broad backs were still lashed the fat packs of beaver—the fruits of two long, lonely seasons of back-breaking labor by Robert Campbell’s brigade.

  The rest of the attackers clearly had the white men surrounded in a small cluster of rocks. It was hard for Bass to tell just how many men were hunkered down within that tightening ring he could see was drawing closer and closer.

  Suddenly a lone warrior stood up in the grass, waving his arms wildly, pointing at the middistance. He had spotted the first few rescuers: more white men joined by Flathead horsemen.

  One by one more than a hundred warriors quickly bristled from the brush and grass, beginning to sprint in an effort to meet boldly the new assault showing itself on that hilltop Bass had just abandoned as he and the first riders raced down the slope toward the raiders, toward that small ring of boulders and stunted brush where Bob Campbell’s men fought for their hides.

  “Ride right through ’em?” Potts hollered at Titus.

  With tears streaming from his eyes as the dry wind whipped them both in the face, Scratch glanced behind him at the dozen or so others, then nodded. “Don’t you dare pull back on that rein as we shoot through, Daniel!”

  “Whooeee!”

  “Heya!” Bass hollered himself at the sudden new surge of adrenaline warming his veins, kicking the tired horse in the ribs, leaning forward as they bounded over the tall grass, heading straight for the enemy, who began to clot together to form a phalanx on foot that was inching its way toward these new targets.

  Scratch felt his empty stomach knot as more and more of the warriors joined the numbers already headed their way. His head pounded with more than the lack of sleep, more than a hangover from the potent grain alcohol, more than the hammering of the last hour’s race to lift this siege.

  As he neared that wall of Blackfoot, Bass spotted the dark carcasses beyond the warriors in the tall grass—the bodies of dead horses lying here and there around those rocks where the trappers had just spotted the approach of their rescuers. Closer and closer he and Potts sprinted for the Blackfoot line … close enough now to hear their shrill war cries, close enough to hear the whooping of the trappers whose mouths O’ed in celebration as the first of them stood within their rocks, waving rifles and broad-brimmed hats.

  Less than eighty yards remained between Bass and the Blackfoot.

  A ball whined past, splitting the air between him and Potts. Then a flying covey of arrows arched out of the grass, bursting from half a hundred bows, speeding across the stainless blue of the summer sky, quickly reaching their zenith before they began to fall.

  Fifty yards from the enemy.

  The bowmen were many, but the horsemen were quicker. They were already ahead of those first arrows, which hissed into the grass at their heels.

  No more than twenty yards remained as Bass leaned forward, pressing himself against the pony’s withers, laying his sunburned cheek along the damp, lathered neck, his toes digging into the animal’s ribs.

  Ten yards … a matter of two swift strides.

  And Bass was there before them—close enough to see paint and color and dark eyes beneath the greased hair tied up in a provocative challenge to raise a scalp lock.

  Swinging clubs and bows and an old fusee, more than eight surged toward him as he burst into their midst. The frightened pony sidestepped, then lunged forward again as the warriors swung and leaped and cried out to frighten the animal, to scare their enemy. First one bow, then a stone club, smacked his legs, raked along the horse’s ribs, grazed along its bobbing neck as he shot past.

  Suddenly Scratch became aware that he had plunged into the most dangerous moments of their dash through the enemy’s lines.

  He twisted to look over his shoulder, beyond the pony’s flying tail. More than half of the Blackfoot had turned, stringing arrows to shoot at him and Potts and those first few Flathead warriors, to shoot them in the back at the moment they streamed through the enemy phalanx.

  “Watch your backside!” Bass screamed, the words ripped from his mouth as the riders closed on the rocky fortress.

  “Damned buggers!” Potts growled. “Gonna shoot us in the ass!”

  Behind them streamed more than sixty mounted trappers, both free and company men. At least that many Flathead horsemen were mixed in among them as they galloped toward the Blackfoot, who were quickly realizing that the odds were beginning to tip from their favor. In the rocks ahead, black forms became men, and faces took shape beneath the shadow of hats. Sounds became words: cries of joy and shouts of challenge flung back now at the enemy.

  As a handful of arrows clattered around them, Bass and Potts crossed the last few yards as three of the besieged trappers emerged from the rocks, hollering, reaching for the horses, eager to drag the horsemen to the ground and back to the safety of their tiny fortress.

  “Potts!” a tall, full-faced man bellowed as he dashed up. His left cheek was bleeding, having been grazed by the stone tip of a war arrow. “Is that really you, Potts?”

  “Campbell?”

  “Aye—it’s me, lad!” the brigade leader shouted, jumping forward to seize Potts in both arms and pound him soundly about the shoulders.

  “Good to see you standing, Booshway!”

  “They’d had us all eventually,” Campbell said gravely as he stepped back toward the rocks. “Had all of you not shown up.”

  Bass agreed as he stepped up. “If ronnyvoo wasn’t close—you’d all gone under.”

  Then Scratch knelt suddenly, peering about him at that scene within the crude oval of rocks. More than a handful of half-breed children, at least that many Indian women, all huddled next to some of the white trappers as they helped their men reload weapons, these stoic mothers preparing to sell their lives dearly come a final assault on that narrow compound. Bass’s eyes stopped here and there, looking over the bodies sprawled on the ground within the fortress. Three of the dead had a blanket, a hat, or their own leather shirt pulled over their faces. At least three more were having their wounds attended to by comrades who washed off blood with water dipped from the trickle of a spring that issued within the rocks. A few others firmly held bloody compresses against their bright, bleeding injuries.

  “W-would I know …” Then Daniel took a deep breath before gesturing at the dead and continued quietly, “Do I know any of these?”

  With a doleful cloud passing over his face, Campbell replied, “You know every one of them, Potts.”

  Immediately sinking to his knees, Daniel dragged back the edge of a greasy blanket, stared a moment at the familiar face, then gently replaced the blanket. His shoulders quaking in grief and rage, he suddenly tore at the bloody grass with both hands as a guttural cry burst from his throat.

  “Damn these thievin’ bastards!” he roared.

  Bass stepped up to stand beside the man, placing a hand on his trembling shoulder.

  “Fools they were!” Daniel’s voice cracked. “Just like me, Scratch! Fools just like me for coming out here whe
re there ain’t no God to watch over a man!”

  “Damn right, Potts,” one of the wounded said in a small voice grown weak from loss of blood. He had a bandage wrapped around his head, the bloody cloth covering one eye and all but concealing half his face.

  “That … that you, Scott?”

  Hiram Scott nodded. “God don’t dare come out this side of the Missouri, Potts.”

  Daniel looked up, eyes imploring as his clenched fists slowly opened, allowing the broken blades of bloody grass to spill from them. “I ain’t staying here no more, Cap’n Campbell.”

  The brigade leader protested, “We get these Blackfoot run off, we’re moving on to rendezvous—”

  “I don’t mean staying to ronnyvoo, dammit!” Potts spat to interrupt. “I ain’t staying out here in this country!”

  Campbell started, “It’s natural for a man to be bitter—”

  “God don’t look down from heaven on this country!” Potts shrieked. “Not for no white man, He don’t!”

  On the ground the wounded Scott agreed, “Not a man gonna convince me God’s looking down on this land … this place fit only for the devil’s kind!”

  Raising his face toward the sky, Potts roared in grief, “Man crosses the Missouri an’ leaves the settlements behind—there ain’t no angels watching his back then, and there ain’t no God to drive off Satan’s whelps clear away out here!”

  “Look here around you, boys—there, there … and there. Look and you’ll see the proof of it.” Scott winced in pain as he straightened, then continued, “No God in this sky out here! No God a’tall!”

  Bass watched the tears stream down the wounded trapper’s bloody face as he went to sobbing, quietly.

  Why some were spared, and others heard their number called—Bass figured he would never know. Likely this was something only someone like his mother could answer, if not one of those circuit-riding preachers. No reason and no rhyme could he put to it … yet one thing was for certain: out here he had discovered that the choices were simpler and more sharply drawn than at any time in his life. And out here in this unforgiving wilderness, the consequences became all the more sudden and stark for those who chose to chance fate beneath this seamless dome of endless sky.

  “Lookit ’em!” a man shouted nearby. “Bug’s Boys turning tail!”

  In the middistance gunfire rattled as the onrushing horsemen fired their rifles at the retreating Blackfoot raiders, white man and Flathead alike, all whooping the moment they shot past the rocky fortress to the cheers of Campbell’s survivors.

  “I see you brought us reinforcements, Titus Bass!”

  Bass turned at the distantly familiar drawl to the voice, finding the tall, handsome mulatto stepping up through the tall grass, gunpowder smudged across his mud-colored face, that black shoulder-length hair tightly braided and wrapped in trade ribbon.

  Titus asked, “Beckwith?”

  “None other!” and he held out his hand. “Thought you was dead when we didn’t see you last summer.”

  “Some tried!” Bass roared as he pumped the arm of that Virginia-born son of a white planter and a Negress that planter eventually married before moving his family to frontier Missouri. “Where you been in this fight, Jim? Laying low?”

  “Right out there in the grass,” Beckwith explained, and pointed. “Didn’t like the feel of these here rocks. Never felt easy about being closed up in a fight. Always figure to have me a way out.”

  “Look at ’em!” Campbell declared loudly as he waved both arms at the passing horsemen. “Look at all those lovely white faces.”

  Scratch reminded, “Flathead too!”

  “See how them devil’s sons scamper!” cried another man, pointing at the retreating warriors.

  At that moment the enemy had begun their wholesale retreat from the fight, able to see they were soon to be on the losing side. Easy to realize that now was the time to get away with their stolen plunder and captured horses while they could.

  “Sonsabitches got their hands on more than five thousand dollars in beaver!” Campbell fumed as he angrily dragged some fingers across the oozing cheek wound.

  A clerk stepped up and added, “And two mules with some of our trade goods too, Cap’n!”

  Robert Campbell whirled on him, glowering. “How many horses, they get?”

  “They’re running off with more’n forty head.”

  “Damn their black hearts!” Campbell cursed.

  Then, as if to rally his own flagging spirits, the brigade leader quickly tore the shapeless hat from his head and waved it aloft at the last of the rescuers racing their way, those horsemen shooting past the little fortress like a spring torrent. Campbell joined the rest in clambering atop the low rocks to wave and whoop and whistle as the last of the Blackfoot hurriedly mounted and started to tear away with their booty, driving the brigade’s horses and mules before them.

  “When’d they hit you?” asked one of the horsemen who had circled back, bringing his horse to a halt just outside the rocks.

  “Not long after we put to the trail this morning,” Campbell explained. “All told, must’ve been more than two hundred of ’em dogging our backtrail for the last day or so.”

  “Likely picked up your scent day before yestiddy.”

  “Nearby, Hiram Scott added, “We made a run for it to get this far.”

  “Lucky these rocks were here when we needed ’em,” Campbell added. “I spotted these willows and made for ’em. Then we found the spring. At least we’d have water. So I prepared the men for a long siege of it.”

  The rider glanced over the dead and wounded. “You kill any of ’em your own selves?”

  “Maybe a half dozen,” Campbell declared. “Knocked a bunch out of the saddle, but the others come in and rode off with every bastard we knocked off a pony.”

  Titus turned back to say, “Wouldn’t have mattered to have you water in here, Booshway. Looks to be they was whittling your side down a mite fast.”

  After a long sigh Campbell blinked his eyes as if they smarted and said, “When I sent the riders out, we were running low on powder and ball. Truth be, we were all preparing for the worst. If these Blackfoot had jumped us any farther from your camp—we’d been finished but good.”

  “Not a chance you’d hung on again’ that many,” the rider said as he wheeled his horse about, giving it the heels to speed away after the rest of those chasing the retreating raiders.

  Beckwith stepped up to Campbell. “There’s another one of our dead out in the grass. I made sure none of them Blackfeet got close enough to scalp him.”

  “I know,” the brigade leader replied. “It’s Boldeau—a damned good cook he was too.” He nodded toward one of the women. “His Flathead wife made it in on the run, but Louis was just too old, just too slow. I watched him drop—praying he was playing rabbit.”

  “His woman’s gotta grieve proper, in the way of her own people,” Bass said, turning to Beckwith. “Why’n’t you take her to the man’s body, Jim.”

  With a nod the mulatto stepped over to the Flathead woman and made sign for her to follow him. Bass watched them scramble over the rocks and hurry out through the tall grass.

  “Let’s get what horses we have left and see how best to get our wounded and dead into camp,” Campbell ordered, directing some of the men to bring up the few horses they still possessed. He turned to Bass. “How far to camp?”

  At the moment Titus opened his mouth to speak, the Flathead woman raised a mournful wail from the prairie. With the hair prickling on the back of his neck, Scratch turned to see her crumple down to her knees, bending over the body of Louis Boldeau. There she rocked back and forth as Beckwith stood nearby, his hat held in both hands. For the life of him, Bass didn’t know what was a more pitiful sight: Potts mourning over the body of an old friend, or the squaw keening over the body of her man.

  “Not far, Booshway,” Bass finally answered, tearing his eyes from the woman yanking her knife from its scabbard, dragging it acr
oss the first clump of hair she held out in the other hand as she hacked it from her head. This she held up toward the sky, slowly opening her left hand to let that hair spill into the wind. “You ain’t far from camp now.”

  Then, as the other survivors began to pick their way out of the rocks, Scratch turned his face to gaze at the sky so immense overhead, wondering—wondering just how far a man was from God out here now.

  “Mind my word, boys: I ain’t gonna pay these scalpin’ prices to no man, no booshway, no goddamned company!”

  Scratch stepped up to the outer fringe of that gathering of free trappers who were loosely circled around a bareheaded older man intently haranguing the swelling crowd beneath a hot summer sun that late morning four days after their scrap with the Blackfeet.

  “Damn the mountain prices!” someone called from the crowd.

  “But that’s just what they are!” Jack Hatcher bellowed as Bass stopped at his elbow. “These here are mountain prices, Glass—and a free man pays or a free man don’t dance!”

  “You … you say his name is Glass?” Scratch asked in a whisper.

  From the side of his mouth, Hatcher said with an admiring grin, “Yep. Glass be that ol’ wolf-bait’s name.

  “Turning and taking a step closer to Mad Jack, Glass-grumbled, “I’ll wager you’re the kind what riggers it’s fair for the traders to charge us twice or three times what things is wuth just for ’em bringing the goods all the way out here to us, eh?”

  “Every man’s entitled to have hisself paid for his labor,” Jack argued. “Even a damned double-backed, gobble-necked trader!”

  Glass wagged his head, sputtering, “B-but, you’re a free man!”

  Bass whispered, pursuing his question, “That really Hugh Glass?”

  “And I’ll die a free man! A free man what don’t pay no tariff to no company, and no tariff to you neither!” he hollered back at Glass. Then Hatcher quickly turned his head to look Titus square in the face. “Ye heard tell of that ol’ coon?”