There must be some way to learn—there had to be … before a man was forced to learn his lessons all too late. The way he had learned about Chickasaw warriors all too well back in his sixteenth summer. Learning all he had ever wanted to know.
But he was nearly twice as old now. And that angered him: what had he learned in those intervening years that was of any good to him now? How to get a Kentucky flatboat and its crew of randy, hardy men down the great Mississippi with its cargo, which could be sold for a rich man’s ransom in the bustling, multihued seaport of New Orleans? How to love a woman who warned him not to—a woman who one day left without warning, without a word of explanation? How to build a barn, from cutting down the trees for lumber to seating the pegs a man used instead of iron nails on the frontier? All that and a little something of the black art of fire and iron, of sweat and muscle? Perhaps that most of all: from Able Guthrie and Hysham Troost, he had come to know how to bend metal to his will, fashion it to the task at hand.
Yet in the end Titus had learned best just how deeply satisfied a man could become in a job done well. For its own sake. Not for the faint, fleeting praise of others. But the true value of his toil, his effort, his devotion to the task.
Out here, he realized, there were no others to judge him. As well, there were no others to depend upon. Very simply, if he was to make it, it was up to him alone to feed, clothe, and protect himself from the elements … from the savage men who roamed this savage wilderness.
With his realization Bass sensed his own personal power grow as he put mile after mile behind him, as the east and everything of it fell farther and farther at his back. But in this great test of solitude and oneness with himself, he knew he had to come to terms with and control the loneliness. There were, after all, times in his life when he could recall wanting company so badly that … that it hurt more than he cared to remember.
Just as he was fleeing all the hold the east had on him, so was Titus attempting to escape that need in him to depend upon others, that loneliness so keen it often caused him great pain. So it was he realized he needed to keep his mind out of those dark places that made him long for any of what had been abandoned back there, to yearn for any of those left behind.
Those days seeped one into the next like the spring storms that he watched approaching out of the west, clouds tumbling one over the other as they drew nigh—clouds gone white to gray and gray to black. Yet despite the storms, each new day the air warmed that much more, and the land gently rose beneath him.
One morning birthed so clear, so quiet, the entire prairie seemed a bell jar of silence—no other living thing in sight but him and the two horses, no birds above nor four-legged critters bounding off through the tall, waving grass, no stir of life down among the water courses that lay in the land-wrinkles lying against the sides of every hill.
For the life of him, it appeared the country was changing, evolving again. Not near as abruptly as the land had converted itself from thick forest to open plain where the trees clustered here and there only … but as he turned to gaze back, he was all the more sure the land now became something unto itself. Land only now, denied of forests and thick stands of timber. Forgotten by all but the hardiest of narrow streams and shallow rivers. Cast here essentially alone beneath the great pale-blue dome of sky, the land came to exist of and for itself. Beyond him the hills rolled up in the distance to abruptly become striated bluffs topped with the waving feathers of the tall grass. He felt himself shrinking in all that vastness—this sudden compression suffered here beneath the endlessness of the sky as it and the land stretched on and on, and on.
Like nothing he had ever seen before back there. Like nothing he could have prepared himself for.
The infinite quality of it permeated him all the more because his pace seemed so agonizingly slow when measured against the vastness of the landscape. There were days when it felt as if he had barely moved from morning get-up, coffee and breakfast, until he chose a campsite that night where he curled up in blankets as the stars winked into view overhead. For more than two weeks now he put at least twenty-five, sometimes more than thirty, miles behind him in a day. Yet in country such as this, that sort of travel often left a man to turn around and look back upon reaching his evening’s camp—able to see some feature of the land that showed where he had crawled from his bed that very morning.
So open and without borders was this kingdom. So utterly vast that few landmarks really existed. Little was there beyond the Platte and the endless river bluffs to excite his attention, to prick his interest. Then the land became monotonous enough to lull him to sleep in the saddle as the pony gentled him west, always keeping the south bank of the muddy, meandering Platte in sight. From time to time he would open his eyes into slits, staring off this way and that to assure that he was the only thing moving in all that vastness, then let his eyelids droop once more as he continued to rock in that old saddle he had repaired for Isaac Washburn.
The afternoon was aging a handful of days later—the sun fallen enough that it had just slipped beneath the brim of his hat to where it scoured his face as it continued its descent into the west. He had been dozing lightly, off and on mostly, as the pony’s gait kept him nestled in sleep.
Yet now he awoke, aware of the dryness in his mouth, and tried to swallow. And found his tongue so parched, he could barely force any spit down his throat.
Water was all that consumed his thoughts.
Titus kicked his right leg over the saddle horn, landing on the left side of the pony even before it stopped—both of them having reached the banks of the Platte at the same time. As he collapsed to his knees and dunked his head under the murky water, Bass could not remember ever being any thirstier. When he brought his head out, gasping for air, the packmare stood up to her fetlocks in the river on his left, lapping at the water. The pony drank at his right shoulder.
Stuffing his face back into the Platte, Titus drank until his belly ached, then plopped back on his rump there in the water, surveying what lay around him. A horse on either side, the animals lapped their fill, stirring the murky bottom. As he squinted into the late-afternoon sun, he spotted it.
For a moment Titus just stared at the bleached skeleton lying akimbo on the nearby riverbank, upstream. Stared at the way the sun slanted through the huge prison bars of its rib cage, the sheer bulk of its massive backbone. What had to have been a monstrous creature of immense weight.
Finally he convinced himself to move from that spot, almost afraid the skeleton would prove to be nothing more than some heat mirage that would disappear should he attempt to move in its direction. Slowly rising from the cool water of the Platte, Bass stood and slogged upstream more than ten yards—his eyes locked hypnotically on the skeleton. The closer he got, the more he could see of the length of it. Surely, the creature had fallen here a long, long time ago—so white, so sun bleached were its bones. Its final resting place lay far enough up the sharp bank of the river that the Platte had not been able to claim that fallen creature, nor its skeleton, even with the capricious spring floods.
So here it had lain just inches above the river’s surface, now only an arm’s length away as he came to a stop. As the Platte continued to lap around his knees, Bass reached out a hand, his breathing became shallow, his heart hammering as he took in the sheer size of the skull, the immense span between the horn tips. Oh, he had seen oxen before that might well have a wider spread of horn from tip to tip—but never had Titus laid eyes on a skull so large. Great, gaping eye sockets, one of which stared blankly back at him from its riverbank grave.
From the back of that skull his eyes marveled at the vast sweep of the backbone, then slowly traced the immense amalgamation of vertebrae that began to diminish in size over the rear flanks and finally into the tail root. It was then he discovered his mouth had gone dry again, and he found himself trembling.
At the bank he squatted beside the bones—touching, running his fingers over the huge plates of skull, tracing t
he horn core, down the snout, then back over the rise and fall of its massive backbone. Could this … could this be?
And he looked up at the far bank, finally staring off in the direction both he and the sun were headed that afternoon. Were they out there, somewhere close at hand?
Titus looked back at the skeleton, positioned so that its head pointed down toward the water, lying on its right side. The massive legs stilled in death. How he wanted to believe. Enough to reach out and hold the one horn core, gripping it in fear of his hope’s disappearing like a desert mirage.
Nothing else could it be. What other monstrous, four-legged creature was there? Even this bare skeleton was more impressive than his dreams of it had ever been.
Buffalo.
At one time they had been right here, Titus told himself. Right where he sat, stilled to utter wonder.
Perhaps he would find they had been driven farther west now by the creeping advance of white settlement. Oh, how he cursed those in places like Franklin—it was just as he had always feared: to lay eyes on the buffalo would mean a man had to travel far toward the setting sun.
But at least they had been here of a time past.
He sat there in the grass and mud long enough that the Indian pony and mare slogged up to stand near him as the Platte continued its relentless march past them all. Past the skeleton of a creature and time long gone by. Eventually he stood—reluctantly. And touched the bleaching skeleton one last time before sweeping up the rein, stuffing his soaked boot into the stirrup, and mounting.
It was a long time before he grew aware of his leather britches, how they began to chafe as they dried. So long had he been riding, thinking—dwelling on that skeleton and nothing else as the pony carried him west while the sun disappeared and the air grew cool, the mosquitoes rising like vapors along the riverbank where he eventually decided to stop for the night.
That evening, when he finally closed his eyes beside his small fire and pulled the blankets up over his shoulders, Titus could not remember for sure if he had eaten an evening meal, or what had consumed his time that night—only that his thoughts were on the unshakable beyond that lay just past the next hill, on the far side of the next bend in the great Platte River, on yonder through that country he had to endure until he ultimately discovered where the buffalo would be found.
More than myth. More than mere skeleton. Where they were flesh and bone, hide and horn.
How many more days, how many more weeks of riding would it take until he had put the last vestiges of white man’s forts and settlements and civilization far enough behind him … all the distance it would take before he discovered his first living, breathing buffalo? How well had he come to understand that the forts and outlying settlements, the white man himself, all were the greatest enemies to the wild creature he sought.
But it had been so long now, he ruminated as he eventually drifted off to sleep that night—so many weeks and countless miles since he had left the Missouri and the last bastions of white civilization all behind.
When would he ever possess the answers to those questions he had carried inside him for more than half his lifetime?
When would his mortal prayers finally be answered?
Late of the morning two days later he sensed the breeze come up, relishing its cooling touch across his cheek as it swept beneath the wide brim of the low-crowned hat that for the most part protected his face from the unforgiving sun in this open country. Hell, it was about all the shade to be found out here: for the past two days there hadn’t been trees big enough for a man to squat under and get out of the sun. What shade there was, the three of them were making for themselves: right below the horses’ bellies, and right below his hat’s floppy brim.
The pony snorted, jostling him awake with a start. Jehoshaphat—hadn’t it been a good dream too! His nose nestled down between the quadroon’s breasts where the sweat pooled and he could taste the salty earthiness of her coffee-skinned body as he crawled atop the woman in that ramshackle Wharf Street house of pleasure built crib upon tiny crib.
Immediately his hand tightened reflexively around the rifle laid upon his thighs, his eyes blinking as they came open in the late-morning light. Turning his head to the south, he quickly scanned the distant horizon, then turned to the right, studying the abrupt, low bluffs that bordered the river near at hand.
“What the hell you wake me for?” he demanded of the Indian pony as he loosened his white-knuckle grip on the rifle’s stock, slipped the reins into his right hand along with the weapon, then patted the horse along the neck. “I s’pose you caught yourself falling asleep too—that it, girl?”
She seemed to roll her eyes back at him.
“Yeah, I know. Hot as hell, ain’t it? And the way I figger it—this country gonna get hotter afore we get higher and cooler.”
As he said it, Titus cocked his head, peering up from beneath the wide brim of his dark-brown hat to find the offending yellow orb warming him to sleep at the same time it made him more thirsty than he had ever been in his life. Licking his dry, cracked lips, he mentally cursed the sun and its incessant heat, then blinked again and turned away from it, praying for more of that cooling wisp of breeze.
It was then that he saw them. Far off in the distance. Black specks swirling across the blue sky, off to the north and west of him. As the ponies plodded on, he watched, becoming almost hypnotized by the way the flock swooped and dived, then wheeled about and rose in the sky once more. Black specks diverging for but a moment, scattering like water striders on the surface of a Kentucky pond—then suddenly congealing in an ever-darker mass as they came down in a loud fluttering of wings, all of them disappearing from view.
His throat went even drier. That was the first great flock of birds he had seen like that. They must be tiny, for they had no real form at this distance. One of them would have been all but invisible, he decided as he reined the pony gently to the north, toward the river. Maybe even a few of them would still have trouble making themselves visible. But the innumerable masses of them flocking together in that one black cloud across the spring blue was enough to capture any man’s attention.
As he reached the water’s edge and halted the animals, Bass saw the faint puffing of dust rise beyond the bluff, a dirty smudging of the blue horizon far beyond his line of sight.
“Shit,” he grumbled.
Angry at himself, Titus sat there a moment in the saddle, watching those birds rise again, swoop to the north, climb ever higher to the cloudless sky, then sweep back to the south before settling once more behind the bluff.
What stirred that dust? What caused those birds to take to flight like they did—spooked perhaps, then descending to roost once again?
Heart thumping, afraid he had made the last mistake of his life … yes, Bass was angry with himself for all but bumping into the rear of the Indian village after so many days, weeks now, of taking such pains to avoid the Pawnee. So damned many miles during which he had been so very careful that if he had a fire, he built it beneath one of the rare leafy trees where the branches would disperse the smoke, or beneath an overhanging shelf of a ravine where he could again hide himself, the glow of his fire, and his camp for another night. Just enough fire dug down in a hole to boil some coffee.
Still, there had been those nights when something in his gut told him he’d best make it a cold camp: lying up with the horses close enough that he could swing atop the pony and make a run for it if fate dictated that he would be discovered there in the dark beneath the prairie stars. Suspicious enough, even afraid enough too there at times, that he only traveled at night for more than eight days—back there along the Platte after first running across the village site.
Those tepee rings and meat racks and the size of that trail had been enough to scare him. Hell, just such a sight was enough to pucker any thinking man’s bunghole.
He’d seen for himself how the Chickasaw stole in to work over their enemies—night creatures that they were, sneaking on board
that flatboat as Ebenezer Zane’s men lay tied up on the far side of the Mississippi. Yes, Titus had seen with his own eyes just how bloody ruthless Indians could be … and from Isaac Washburn’s accounts of his own cross-country trek with Hugh Glass last year, these river Pawnee might well be all the worse than those Mississippi Chickasaw.
There was simply no taking chances. A younger man might, and lose his hair in the bargain. Hell, who was he kidding anyway? If he was dumb enough to pull a stunt like heading out to the far mountains on his own, then he just might be stupid enough to get himself in some big trouble.
“Damn,” he muttered in exasperation, slamming a palm down on the saddle horn as he stared at that rising, swirling dust cloud.
That’s what had happened, he decided. No doubt about it, he had run right up on the rear of that village moseying upriver on the north bank as the season warmed, likely searching for new hunting grounds. And here he was, traipsing right along behind that village until he’d run right smack into them.
Was it run, or turn back?
Turning to look left, then right, he decided this south bank of the shallow river was not the place to hide out the rest of the day. Over there, across the Platte, the bluffs rose, cut by sharp-sided ravines where he might find a place for himself and the animals until nightfall. Only then would he chance recrossing to the south bank and hurrying wide around them. Get in front of those Pawnee where he would not have to worry about bumping into them again.
It sounded as good as any idea he’d ever had as he got down from the saddle, threw up the stirrup fender, and slipped his fingers beneath the cinch. Tugging, he figured it was tight enough still. Likewise he checked the cinch and straps on the mare’s packsaddle. When he had stripped off his clothes and stuffed them under the packsaddle’s ropes, Titus figured he had them all ready for another crossing and remounted.
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