Damn, if Asa McAfferty didn’t have a surefire way of putting an end to conversation around the dancing flames of their campfire, dashing cold water the way he did on their last night together.
“Sure ye don’t wanna throw in with us come morning, Scratch?” Hatcher asked later in the inky darkness as he crouched to slide beneath his blankets. “We’re fixing on riding south to the Bayou for fall hunt.”
“Like I told you the first time—you make me proud when you ask me to throw in with you fellas again,” Bass explained in a whisper as the others shifted and settled in their robes to drift off to sleep all around them. “But I’ve come to rigger this is my calling, Jack. I ain’t never truly been on my own hook afore.”
“Ye learn’t yourself just how dangerous it was too.”
“Hell if I ain’t learned what danger is,” he echoed. Then a moment later he said, “But there comes a time when I figger a man should grab for what he dreams. And if he goes under for it—then I don’t reckon he’s really failed, Jack.”
“How ye figger that?”
“Way I see it,” Titus explained, “only feller what truly fails is a man what has him a dream … but don’t have the guts to go make a grab for it.”
For a long time after that Hatcher remained quiet, so long that Bass figured Jack had fallen asleep. So it surprised him when the brigade leader finally spoke in a hushed whisper again, just as Titus was drifting off.
“I figger you and McAfferty got that same sort of itch in ye both.”
“What sort of itch is that?” he asked sleepily.
“Ye’re riding off to look for something I figger you’ll come upon soon enough,” Jack explained in the dark. “And Asa—he’s chasing after something he ain’t never gonna find.”
“But that don’t sound like we really got the same kind of itch to scratch.”
For a moment Hatcher was quiet; then he explained, “S’pose you’re right, Scratch. One sort of itch just drives a man on. Like yers. And Asa’s … why, his be the sort of itch what just drives a man crazy.”
At its best, this was squaws’ work. The sort of work fit only for a farmer, for a man who loved grubbing in the soil, caking the moist, rain-softened earth under his nails. The sort of man back east who didn’t mind at all sweating even though this autumn air was cold and those clouds gathering overhead presaged another storm.
A trapper wasn’t cut out for grubbing in the ground the way his father had forced him to back in Kentucky— pulling out stumps and laying aside row after row of deep, damp furrows where Thaddeus Bass came along to drop his seed each spring. A trapper come to the mountains was simply above this sweaty, dirty groundhog and badger clawing sort of demeaning chore.
But for the life of him Titus Bass hadn’t figured out any other way for a man to dig himself a cache.
Gulping another long drink from the kettle he kept nearby, Scratch dragged a dirty hand across his mouth, then spit, finding he had turned the dirt on the back of his hand to a nasty mud, rubbing it onto his lips. Grabbing the tail of his long blanket capote, he swiped his face clear of sweat and dirt and that muddy paste. Then he sighed and leaped down into the narrow hole, dragging the short-handled, iron-toothed shovel behind him as he squatted, went to his knees, and crawled forward into the short neck of his cache.
Emerging on the other side after some three feet of tunnel, Titus crabbed a few feet to the far wall and flung the shovel against the earth. Down here where the autumn breeze couldn’t reach his flesh, he was sweating again in minutes. Out there the air chilled his skin. Down here it was the sort of work he detested more than just about anything. Why, he was the sort of man made for sitting high atop lofty places, able to look out upon hundreds of miles of untouched country. Down here in this hole he found his breathing growing short, his heart thumping anxiously, his very soul yearning to burst free of this earth-bound grave he had dug himself.
Even the fluttering light thrown off by that big wax candle he had set into a notch he’d scraped in the wall of the cache wasn’t enough to ease the dank otherworldly feel of this hole. As if by wriggling through the narrow neck, he had instead pushed himself through to another existence.
Gasping with his exertion, Bass turned around and went to the narrow neck. There he reached back to seize the edge of the elk hide and started dragging it out through the neck behind him—bringing with it a load of dirt he had just scratched from the walls. Once he sensed the cool air on his sweaty back, Titus rose, easing his shoulders through the narrow hole until he stood halfway in the ground, and halfway out.
Heaving himself from the hole, he lay down on the ground beside it and leaned in to grab the corner of the elk hide again, folding it over the small pile of dirt. Side by side by side he laid the skin over the dirt until he could drag it from the hole without spilling the earth. After swilling down the last drink at the bottom of the iron kettle, Bass grabbed the kettle’s bail in one hand, and the edge of the elk hide in the other, and carried them off toward the nearby creek.
At the bank he knelt to dip the kettle into the cool water. With that set aside, he stood and moved downstream a few yards with the elk hide bundle clutched in both arms, then stepped right off the grassy bank into the middle of the stream. Once there, he let the hide fall open—spilling another load of dirt from his digging into the creek, hiding every last clump of that damp earth from any roving, suspicious eyes who might happen upon this spot in the days to come.
It had been this way for two days now: digging, eating, digging some more, sleeping, digging again, always the digging.
Having come south from making his fall hunt on the Mussellshell, Bass found a likely spot for his cache back against a thickly wooded hillside that jutted out into some bottomland deposited aeons before by the junction of two small creeks that flowed toward the north bank of the Yellowstone. That following morning Titus had begun what turned out to be some of the hardest work he had ever done. At sundown the first day he had completed the narrow neck of the cache and pitched into the grueling labor of widening the hole as he inched deeper into the ground, until he reached some four feet below the surface. As soon as the light had begun to sink in the west, he went to his packs and pulled out one of the tall candles he had purchased back in Taos from Bill Williams.
While the feeble light hadn’t been much, it nonetheless allowed him to keep scratching at the walls of his ever-widening cache until it was slap-dark outside and his belly was no longer just whimpering in hunger—it had begun to holler for fodder.
He was up in the gray of predawn that morning and had been at it with only one stop at midday for a meal of some dried meat and a short nap. Awaking to a gentle, cold mist of a rain, Bass went back to work despite the chill on his bare skin each time he emerged from the hole. By midafternoon the rain passed on over and the sky cleared for a time. Then another cluster of gray-black clouds appeared on the western horizon, tossing their heads angrily as they rumbled his way down the Yellowstone Valley.
He pressed on despite the threat of more rain. Just as he persevered now as the breeze came up, its heaving breath rank with the promise of another storm.
This was, after all, why he had come here now to dig his cache. The earth was much softer in these damp days of early autumn than it would be when winter froze the ground and made digging in it all but impossible. If a man was going to have himself a winter cache, he damn well better get that hole dug well before the first snow fell on this north country.
Back in camp he dropped the elk hide beside the hole, then set the sloshing kettle nearby. With a deep sigh he knelt, slid into the dark tunnel where the candle’s light flickered. And remembered back to that final day of rendezvous, to that first day he would finally set off on his own.
Had he ever been ready to make tracks for this land north of the Yellowstone!
Half-froze for the trail by the time he packed what he owned on the backs of the two horses and his dear Hannah. Their camp was but one of many bustling wit
h activity in that valley of the Wind River last August as the two large Rocky Mountain Fur Company brigades made ready to put out on the trail. In addition, Hatcher and his men were striking camp, preparing to head west toward the Snake River country.
“Davy Jackson ain’t gonna be there to call Jackson’s Hole his own this year!” Caleb Wood had declared enthusiastically.
Solomon added, “We thought we’d see how that country looks for beaver afore we point south for to winter down in the Bayou.”
Then Bass remembered how he went alone in the first faint light of that last morning to find McAfferty at work loading the horses.
“Looks to be you’re not waiting for Bridger’s bunch afore you ride north,” Bass exclaimed with no real surprise as Asa threw on a packsaddle pad made from the hide of a mountain goat. Nearby sat the canvas-wrapped bundles the white-head would lash atop his pack animals.
“What’s sense in waiting for that gaggle?” and he tried to smile before turning back to his work. “’Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee.’”
“Should’ve knowed better’n trying to talk you into hanging close to Bridger’s men. Just like me, you’re of a mind to go off on your own.”
“I am of that mind, but we are different in many ways,” McAfferty replied. “’Again, when the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive.’”
For a few minutes he helped Asa tie up a pair of bundles onto a packsaddle without either saying a word. Finally Titus asked, “No matter that you’re riding for Blackfoot country?”
His blue eyes touched Bass’s, and he said, “Where I’m bound in Blackfoot country, Bridger’s men won’t be showing their faces, Mr. Bass.”
“It don’t make no sense to me, no sense at all.”
“‘For he remembered that they were but flesh; a wind that passeth away, and cometh not again,’ thus sayeth the Lord that I should not be scared.” McAfferty stopped tying a knot to attempt explaining something so clearly confusing. “Mr. Bass, ’Man that is born of a woman is of a few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down.’”
Scratch felt the hair prickle at his neck. It sounded to him as if Asa were saying he wanted to die in a bad way. “So you ain’t afraid, are you?”
“No, 7 go the way of all the earth,’” McAfferty answered.
“I’m gonna miss the good times we had, Asa,” he admitted quietly. “And I’ll likely think back on all them scrapes we had us too. I thank you for saving my hide, more’n once you saved me.”
“There comes a time for all of us to go our own way,” the white-head said. “There comes a time when we see our end and no longer are afraid, Mr. Bass.”
“You’re not afraid of dying neither?”
“‘And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.’ I’m not afraid of the Blackfoot. They become my people, here in my latter days,” McAfferty replied. “’And thou shalt come from thy place out of the north parts, thou, and many people with thee, all of them riding upon horses, a great company, and a mighty army.’”
Wagging his head in exasperation, Bass stammered, “I’m t-trying to understand what it is pulling you up there, Asa. Up north to Blackfoot country. All this talk about your final days, and not being afraid to dSie—”
“The ways of the Lord are mysterious ways. We are not meant to question, or understand. A man is only meant to follow the hand of the Lord.”
“Will I see you come ronnyvoo in Willow Valley?” Scratch asked as Hatcher and his men came up to stand near McAfferty’s horses.
“If it’s God’s will and I got my hair—I’ll be in Willow Valley next summer,” Asa said, taking up the long rawhide rein to his horse. “If it’s God’s will, Mr. Bass.”
The white-head swung up into the saddle, then held down his hand to each of those who stepped up in turn to shake with him. In the end he put his hand out to Scratch.
Bass shook, saying, “I truly hope you find what you’re looking for up there in Blackfoot country, Asa.”
With a smile he replied, “I don’t think there’s a way I could fail to find what I’m going up there for. If God allows, I’ll see you next summer so I trust you’ll fare well till then.”
Letting go his grip on Scratch’s hand, McAfferty took up the long lead to the first packhorse, clucked his tongue, and gave heels to his saddle mount, reining away from the cottonwood grove, the other animals clattering behind him. Stepping out into dawn’s dim light themselves, they watched the white-head lope away for a few minutes until he slowly faded out of sight, gone downriver, riding for the far hills.
“Man’s in a hurry to be gone from here, ’pears to me,” Rufus exclaimed.
As they all turned back to their campsite, Hatcher said, “He’s damn well got him somewhere to be, fellas. That’s for certain.”
“Wish I was the sort what could figger folks out,” Bass admitted, still staring after McAfferty even though he could no longer see the distant figures. “Sometimes what I know a man is keeping from me gets in my craw and eats at me for not knowing.”
Later that morning Jack came to a halt where Bass was finishing his work lashing the last bundle atop his pack animals. “Ye’re still bound for the Judith?” he asked.
“Good trapping, that country,” Scratch had answered as he tied off the last knot, knowing the saddest of moments had arrived. “If I keep my head and don’t let no roaming Blackfoots know I’m about—I’ll hang on to my hair.”
Hatcher had stepped up, opening his arms wide, seizing Titus within his bony embrace. “You’ll damn well watch over what ye got left for hair, won’cha?”
He heard a sob thicken the sound of Jack’s words. It made his own heart rise in his throat as he squeezed Hatcher fiercely, fiercely. “I’m prideful of my purty hair, Mad Jack. It’s gonna be long and gray afore you’ll ever think of seeing it hanging from any warrior’s lodgepole.”
One by one he had hugged the others, slapped them each on the back and promised to buy them a drink come whiskey time in Willow Valley, come the summer of thirty-one. But for now the rest were headed west, and he felt the Judith pulling him north once more. As if that country might become as much his as he had come to love the Bayou Salade.
Jack stepped close and held up his hand after Bass was in the saddle. For a long moment Hatcher was silent before he finally spoke. “Yers is a damned ugly scalp anyway, Titus Bass. Not a warrior wuth anything a’tall gonna wanna take yer poor scalp.”
“You flea-bit, broke-down, crow-bait of a buzzard.” Bass shook heartily one last time, then flung Hatcher’s hand down with a wide smile and waved to them all. “You ain’t got no room to talk about just who’s got the worst case of the uglies! You boys watch your backtrail now! I’ll see you come summer!”
A painful memory, recalling how he rode off for the north, how he had turned in the saddle that one last time to look behind him, finding the six of them still standing. How they had all raised their arms and some had waved hats … it again brought that dry clutch high in his chest here beside the Yellowstone, two moons later.
But he had a cache to finish before he could push on for the Judith. To find a certain sandbar. And there to make medicine.
The sort of medicine a man could make only when he was truly alone. Truly on his own at long, long last.
23
How good were those last hot days of summer to think back upon now that winter had clamped its jaws tight upon this land. Those days that he rode out the long hours from well before sunrise until twilight squeezed down until nothing but starshine fell from the sky. Even the cool rainy days of autumn when he had turned back from the Mussellshell to dig his cache near the Yellowstone would have felt far better than this marrow-numbing cold.
Up ahead beneath the aching winter blue of the cle
ar sky, he recognized that bulk of those hills as they tumbled down toward the valley of the Judith.
“Looks like we found it, girl!” he flung his voice back to Hannah, eager to share his mounting anxiousness with another. “Maybeso we’ll make camp up yonder for the night.”
For days now it had felt as if it were the thing to do: locate the place where he and Asa had camped late last spring as they’d worked their way north to the Missouri River—the site where for days McAfferty had ministered to his wounds, sewn up the worst of them on his hip and back with those short strips of buffalo sinew and downy tufts of beaver felt, then through day and night nursed Scratch back to health with bone broth and broiled bits of meat.
It hurt to think about his old friend, pained him to wonder just what it was that lured a man into Blackfoot country all on his own—to go where certain death waited, go where few other white men would ever tread. A tangible ache throbbed in his chest each time he tried to figure out what made McAfferty ride off into a sure and certain death carrying nothing more than his Bible and his rock-hard faith that all his steps were guided by his God.
Most times Scratch could put his mind on other things, the way a man would pick up a checker piece and move it to another square. But there were times in the black of night, or the coming gray of morning, or in the day-long swaying rock of the saddle, that he found it wasn’t so damned easy to shift his thoughts away from a mortal fear for McAfferty’s life, if not his very soul.
Not so much afraid that the Blackfoot would butcher Asa as he was afraid of something he could not describe, could not put his hand out and touch. To fear a man of flesh and blood who came at you with his gun or club or knife was one thing. But Bass was coming to fear this journey of McAfferty’s had everything to do with what Scratch himself could not understand.
Titus Bass had never really been afraid of what he could look in the eye—whether it be man or beast. It was what Scratch could not see that scared the bejesus out of him now.
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