Through his reverie Titus could hear the faint tumble of the water’s first turn to a boil. And likewise felt the tingle of his own flesh stir with the memory of Amy Whistler.
How fully had she bloomed in those weeks and months before they had consummated their young passion there on a summer night beside the moonlit swimming pond. So full and soft were the curves of her, the roundness to the feel of her gliding up to him in the water … there beneath him where he laid her back on the grass beside the great boulders. But with that aching physical memory of the exquisite pleasure Amy brought him came also a flash point of anger at the coquette in her that had attempted to possess and corral him before he was ready to have his wings clipped, ready to be put in the wire cage the way a woman had done to his grandpap … the way his very own mother had imprisoned his pap.
Amy. Or Marissa. Oh, the wiles women used to snare men from the beginning of time. Roping them down with pleasures of the flesh, then later with the coming of children, and finally snaring them to stay on the land—plowed land. Land where a man walked behind an ox or mule, lashed and laboring as surely as did his beasts.
The boiling water hissed and tumbled, calling him from his reverie.
From the small pouch of pounded coffee beans Titus took a handful and flung the grounds into the pot, then carefully hooked a finger within the wire bail and dragged the pot from the edge of his fire. As the water continued to turn, Bass stood and moved off to test his wet clothing.
Dry enough they were. Into the still-damp britches he stuffed his legs, then slipped his arms into the warmth of his shirt. Around his waist he finally drew the wide belt and tightened it before kneeling at the fire, pouring himself a cup, then rocking back on his haunches to first draw in the savory fragrance of the coffee. Only then did he sip at the steaming brew.
Because the wool shirt itched when it became damp, he thought he might change back to the linen shirt. He smiled, recalling how riyerboatmen like Hames Kingsbury and the rest were really no different from other men on the razor’s edge of the frontier: they would wear one set of clothes until it fairly rotted off, then they promptly rooted around for something new to wear out completely in its time.
Not so very different was that from his own childhood, he mused as he sipped on the coffee there in the sun’s spring light. Most young’uns had no more than one change of clothing: their everyday wear, along with those clothes saved for Sunday-morning meeting as well as those rare special celebrations of life. The marryings, birthings, and the funerals of friends and family … those cords of remembrance he felt still binding him to that past and that place had begun to grow thin and weak—very much like spider’s silk stretched to the breaking.
It struck Titus there by the rivers’ junction, now that he was here on the yonder side of the wide Missouri: he had been gone from home for almost as long as he had spent growing up in the house of his father. Considering, too, how Thaddeus Bass himself had known little else but the place where his father had set down roots before him. Yet, unlike Titus, never had Thaddeus desired to reach out, to explore, to search beyond what lay there in that small section of Boone County he plowed and planted. And that failure was something Thaddeus’s son could not fathom.
Staring down at the surface of the coffee in his cup, Titus wondered now about his family. How his pap had aged. How the intervening years might have marked his mam with gray and lines. His brothers and sister—they all were grown and would surely have families of their own now. Children carrying on the family cycle on the land.
And all he had to his name were these two hand-me-down horses, his guns, and the clothes on his back, along with what little else was packed on that mare.
A shadow flitted past him across the ground, startling him. He looked up in time to catch the crimson flutter of the cardinal as it disappeared among the timber north of his fire. So he smiled.
He might not own all that much, Titus decided as he stood and gazed into the west. For certain he sure as hell didn’t own much by most men’s standards.
But right now—he sensed he had all of that out yonder to call his very own.
* Reconstructed near present-day Sibley, in Jackson County, Missouri
4
The sheer size of the abandoned Indian camp was the first thing that struck him as he cautiously ventured in on foot, wary and watchful … having hidden the horses back downriver when he came across the first flurry of tracks.
But he found the village empty, deserted.
Now Bass could swallow down the lump of fear at last. His lungs felt as if he were taking his first breath in more than an hour. Titus forced his heart back down and finally emerged from the brush at the river’s edge to stare across the Platte at what some band of Pawnee had left behind. Then quickly he decided he’d best backtrack and fetch up the animals. No sense swimming the river on his own.
An hour later, dripping naked in the sun after another crossing, he dismounted on the north bank among the small rings of river stone he discovered near the center of each elliptical circle of pounded grass and hardened ground. For the most part the entire camp formed a great horseshoe, the horns of its crescent opening back to the east whence he had come.
Finding a good patch of grass near the trees along the bank, Bass ground-hobbled the horses and turned back to explore this wondrous, frightening place.
More than fifty circles and all that foot-pounded earth plainly showed where this band of Indians had camped for some time this spring. At the western extent of the site Titus came across the wide trail of tracks and pole scrapings that led off to the west. They were wandering upriver.
“Maybeso they move off come the summer,” he said quietly in the silence of that big country as he turned about and stepped back into the camp crescent itself.
Here the land lay painfully silent. As quiet as anything he had ever experienced in those eastern forests growing as thick as quills on a porcupine’s back, as those forests he had come to know flatboating down the great waters of the Ohio and Mississippi, or walking north along the Natchez Trace.
More than two weeks had passed now since he had given wide berth to the dragoons and their Fort Atkinson. The day before he came in sight of the distant stockade, Bass had run across more and more signs of man’s passing: shod hoof prints, the heel stamp of soldiers’ boots, the crude cut of a wagon’s iron tires slashing down into the fragile earth. Trail and scent and sign that warned he was drawing close enough to that cluster of white mankind.
Turning abruptly, Titus had pointed his nose to the west—intending to ride two, maybe three days at the most in a roundabout to give himself plenty of room around the soldier post. But late that second day after cautiously leaving the Missouri behind and striking out overland, he was surprised when his westward path brought him right into a great, wide loop in the Platte River itself before it eventually gentled him back to the north. Surprised was he to discover as well that so shallow a river could enjoy such a formidable reputation among those frontiersmen who returned to St. Louis—men like Isaac Washburn.
Had the old trapper been yanking on his leg with all his bawdy tales of everything being bigger, or faster, or just plain wilder out here in the great beyond? Or dare he consider that he had not yet reached the Platte, that this was some minor river? Yet something innate within him told Titus he could not be mistaken on it—fact was that the big dragoon’s post did lay at the mouth of the Platte.
Shallow indeed, yet every bit as wide here as Washburn had claimed. So for the first time that afternoon, Titus had looked off to the west, gazing toward the river’s far source away yonder among the distant, yet unseen mountains that gave birth to these waters. On the south bank he had knelt in the mud and grass beside the river, cupped his hands, and pulled forth a little of that mountain water. Bass looked down into it with something bordering on reverence, then brought it prayerfully to his lips.
As silt laden as it was, how much sweeter did it taste knowing he was that much cl
oser to those high mountain snows giving birth to these waters! He drank his fill that day before turning west along the south bank of the river he knew would one day deliver him to the buffalo country, the great course of the Platte that allowed a man to pierce the kingdom of black, shaggy beasts Washburn guaranteed him ruled a great, rolling wilderness out there. How good its taste lay upon his tongue, this water from the Platte that was really all the more than a river: a magical road that would lead him to and through the buffalo ground, then ultimately deliver him to the high and terrible places few if any had ever seen.
Following the south bank another few days, Bass found the river led him back in a huge, sweeping curve to the south of west. Damn! but these western rivers could confuse and exasperate a man, he brooded. Every bit as disconcerting as a fickle woman who could turn back on herself just as soon as a man began to think he had her figured out!
First he had followed its bank into the west. Then the Platte led him north. And now it was wandering off to the south. And after all this meandering, just where in hell were those mountains that gave birth to this river, after all? A part of him prayed again that Washburn wasn’t as crazed as Hysham Troost had warned Titus the aging fur trapper would prove himself to be.
Oh, the many times he had yearned to strike out due west, leaving the Platte behind—resenting himself for having to depend on the river, forced to rely on a dead man’s guarantee. Now that he had come to stand beside this fabled Platte himself, he had no reason not to believe he shouldn’t catch his first glimpse of the mountains rising just beyond the next stand of hills. If not them, perhaps those hills just beyond.
Indeed, Titus had left the hardwood forests behind some days back, emerging almost of a sudden onto a plain where he reined up, then slowly dropped from the saddle to stand in utter awe at the rolling immensity of what lay before him. From that point on it was clear the trees no longer grew in great mats of thick, meandering forest blanketing hillside and valley alike. Instead, the green lay in clusters dotting the great tableland, confined to pockets and ravines wrinkling the countryside, the emerald-green vegetation for the most part tracing the path of streams and creeks and what narrow, gurgling rivers fed the flat, shallow expanse of the Platte itself.
At that night’s fire Titus had sensed he had just crossed an even more indelible border than was the barrier of the Missouri River itself. Oh, with his own sixteen-year-old eyes he had marveled as the great eastern forests had given way to rolling delta while the riverboat crew steered their craft past the Walnut Hills and old Fort Mc-Henry, floating down the lower reaches of the Mississippi. Yet, for the most part, the immense trees and timbered forests still predominated those riverbanks and the high bluffs where great-winged birds took flight from wide, stately branches bedecked with long gray beards of Spanish moss.
But out here the trees no longer grew as tall, no more were their trunks as big around. No more did he recognize the familiar leaf of the elm, the maple, the varieties of oak. Almost as if this harsh and difficult land stunted what was allowed to grow upon its own breast.
“Water,” he had decided.
It was all because of water. Or more so the want of it. Back east vegetation grew in abundance—a green, leafy, shady profusion. But out here the brush and trees struggled for want of water, sending roots deep to penetrate the sands for what moisture the land had captured during the passing of spring thunderstorms.
So as he had stood there at that margin of immense hardwood forest thinning itself to become the borderland that would take him on west into his yondering quest, Titus found himself liking this land best. Far better than that to the east and south was it. Back there he found it hard to see long distances, so thick did the vegetation grow. But here—yes, from here on out—a man could gaze so far that he just might see halfway into tomorrow itself.
Beneath the floppy brim of his old beaver-felt hat, Titus had stared across the distance, determining that to survive in such a land he would have to train his eyes to take in more. A man back east, why—he didn’t have to concern himself with more than a few rods of open ground … the distance across a glen or meadow, before he plunged back into the tangle of thick and verdant forest.
But out here a man had to accustom his eyes to measuring the heft of great distance. He must teach himself to read all manner of things from far off. The course of rivers and streams recognized only by their dim green outline disappearing at the distant horizon. Too, a man had to better read the game he would pursue across great distances—startling the whitetail out of the brush and across the open ground, the turkey and quail that roosted where they found shade and protection along the water courses. And he reminded himself he must make certain his eyes always moved from one point of the compass to the next. Constantly—for there were other men who traveled this wild, open country too, seeking game, horses, plunder, and scalps.
Readily did he see that in a land such as this, a man must be vigilant in assuring that he did not stand out against the horizon, against the country itself.
Then it had struck him. How did he ever come to know such a startling fact of life and death?
That core of him that had been honed, ground to a fine edge in the eastern forests of his youth—then all but ignored, lying fallow and forgotten there in St. Louis beside the Mississippi all those years—he sensed that core of him had been pricked, aroused, enlivened anew in his arrival at the edge of such a vast wilderness. Again, something within him gave thanks to that same force that traced out the course of rivers, the comings and goings of the wild animals with each season, the force that strummed some nerve with a responsive chord, awakening something buried within him after so long a time of mute deafness.
In looking about him then, as if to weigh the presence of that force far greater than mere man would ever be, Titus squinted—studying distance. Hefting the sheer meaninglessness of time out here in all that abundance of space. Realizing that he feared. Knowing that his fear was the selfsame as that of the wild things.
Indeed, his instincts told him this was a far more dangerous place than that eastern land of the Shawnee, Mingo, and Chickasaw. For here there might be no place for a man to hide.
At the root of him, a tiny part of Titus had yearned for the protection of those thick forests, those great bulking shoulders of gray limestone jutting from the red earth where one might take cover, there to lie in wait for game or man. And he remembered the smell of that country. Damp enough that a woodsman could come to know the scent of saltpeter caves—homing in on them with nothing more than his nose, there to gather some of that mineral for making his own gunpowder.
Bass had trembled slightly, staring out at this vastness he did not know, a space and wilderness that he did not understand. Back there, in those eastern forests, he had grown up learning what it took to live well. He knew which was the chestnut oak a man gathered for its tan-bark: that wood containing the yellowish tannin he could use in curing the hides of the creatures he shot and skinned. A man likewise knew to look for white oak, harvested for barrel staves.
A child spent his youth back there among the hemlocks dotting the ripple-walled sandstone quarries lying among the canebrakes. On the high ridges of the pine forests, cedar jutted from the pale limestone walls. A world of many colors that was made for a child: yellowing poplars reaching for the sky among the opalescent yellow of hickory and chestnut and beech, the red and gold of maple and sweet gum, the deep bloody crimson of black gum and dogwood. Even the leafy oaks, his favorite, often lingered until spring, their color gradually changing from autumnal red, to bronze, and then to the brown of decay as they clung to their branches.
But out here an endless plain of green lay stretched beneath that forever blue of the sky. Across it—the scar that marked the Pawnees’ route west.
All around him in this abandoned camp stood the remnants of their meat-drying racks and the litter of slender shreds of hides crusted with hair. He knew what they had been doing here: scraping the skins
of animals to remove all the excess fat and flesh as close as they could to the edge of each hide, that narrow border left raw, then trimmed away and discarded. Small animals—deer and antelope. Now that winter had released this land, the people living upon it would no longer have to survive on the small creatures.
Now they would hunt the shaggy beasts.
For some distance around the camp Bass could see how the ground was trampled, the grassy swales cropped by a herd of ponies he figured were filling their own bellies on the new green shoots after a long, long winter. Then he turned to look at the two animals delivering him there. While the mare ate and ate every bit as much as did the Indian pony, she did not appear to flourish on her diet of spring grass. Not that she had noticeably weakened, but beneath the packsaddle his fingertips had begun to discern the emerging ridge of backbone, the faint corduroy of the old girl’s ribs.
And in staring out at the wide scar of trampled ground that disappeared over the rolling hills to the west, Titus wondered how smart he would be in following that Indian trail carved beside the Platte. What with the grass eaten down, perhaps not so wise a choice for feeding his hungry animals.
Yet something primal told him to follow their trail … for these Pawnee most surely were gone in search of the same shaggy beasts they had hunted ever since a time long forgotten.
That afternoon, not long after leaving the abandoned village, good sense convinced Bass to recross to the south side of the river, where he pushed on ever more cautiously, his eyes searching the ground that lay before him, hoping to find a knoll tall enough that would allow him to locate the Indian village on the march somewhere out before him. How far ahead of him were they? How long had it really been since they had passed through this piece of country?
Growing frustrated, he admitted he did not know. Then cursed himself for not knowing how to know. Surely there must be some means by which a man would tell from the age of the hoofprints on that wide trail, from the dryness of the limbs used to build their meat-drying racks, from the depth and age and texture of the ashes in those half-a-hundred fire pits lying at the center of those rings of trampled ground.
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