Anxious, he reached out his arms to Amy—ready to draw her to him, to lift her up, then urge her down on the throbbing flesh between his legs … but as he strained to reach for her, she took a breath and disappeared beneath the surface.
“Titus,” a gentle voice called out to him over his shoulder, so close he could almost feel the woman’s breath on his skin. “Titus Bass.”
He turned from the ripples where Amy had disappeared to watch Marissa Guthrie drawing close, stopping there on the edge of the bank, stalks and flecks of hay cluttering her hair the way it always had when they had savagely coupled in the loft of her father’s barn there south of St. Louis.
“Oh, Marissa—it is you!” he heard himself exclaim, heart hammering, beginning to paddle for her.
“Come to me, Titus! I’ll give you children, and this land—give you everything a man could ever want—just come to me!”
How quickly she threw off her dress, naked beneath—then dived into the water. He felt almost ready to agree with anything Marissa asked as he reached her … her head coming out of the water right in front of him. Titus grabbed her naked shoulders in his two hands and lifted her hungrily out of the water to catch a glimpse of her breasts. How he had loved kissing them, sucking them, fondling them as it drove her wild with desire for him.
Bending, Titus nuzzled and sucked on them, lost in the pure heaven of the smell, the taste, the feel of her flesh. Then he brought his face up, planting his mouth over hers and opening her lips as he drew her breath into his lungs.
She tasted of cornmeal and hard cider, the tang of old smoke and that morning’s hog sausage gone stale on her breath. Marissa had never smelled quite like that before.
Titus drew his head back in wonder to ask her why, now, did she smell so … when he found he was holding the widow. She smiled, her eyes filled as they tearfully uttered their thanks; then she pulled his head down between her breasts once more, pressing him close, close, so close he could not breathe anything but the scent of her ravenous sex as she reached out and took hold of his hardened flesh, beginning to stroke it rapidly, urgently, savagely.
How he wanted in her before he exploded. And oh, how he begged the woman to place him there, but just as he began to murmur to her, the first great waves of relief washed over him. How miraculous it felt to have her hand sliding up and down the length of him as he rocked against her, his face buried between her breasts as he groaned in sheer happiness.
Moments later, as he finished, Titus suddenly realized the water had disappeared, and with it the black sky overhead. Yet worst of all was the startling cold where his cheek lay. Instead of the widow woman’s breasts, his face lay against the old, scarred, unforgiving leather of his saddle. And instead of her hand wrapped around his hardened flesh, Bass realized it was his own.
Just as it was his loneliness for a woman—any woman—that troubled him with these dreams most every night now. How he prayed each time he awoke that it was not Amy nor Marissa, not even the widow woman the dreams were telling him he should join himself to. Praying it was nothing more than the woman hunger Tuttle spoke of, the sort of appetite every man in the mountains must endure for long periods of drought before he can dance and revel in the land of plenty with brown-skinned squaws who are every bit as hungry to have a man between their legs as a man is ravenous in his appetites to have himself planted in their moist heat.
Lying there, Titus found the night so quiet that he could hear the flames lick along the length of some of the limbs in their fire. Raising his head, Titus looked round at the other three, all four of them radiating out from the fire like spokes of a wheel. He dragged his cracked, thin-soled moccasins back under the layer of thick blankets and covered his head once more. Warmer was it to breathe here in the dark, he thought.
And closing his eyes again, brooding on how his own stark white flesh might well look pressed against the dark thigh or gently rounded belly of an Injun woman, Bass put himself back to sleep. Behind his eyes the white and brown flesh rubbed together so fast and with such savage fury that he wasn’t sure any longer if he really was master to his fate in coming here to this far, foreign, and frightening place … or in the end had he only discovered that he was nothing more than a slave to his hungers.
She smelled of smoke and grease.
Her clothing, which lay discarded at the far side of this tiny lodge, smelled strongly of her woman scent mixed in with the firesmoke and the spatter of cooking grease. Even her skin and hair—spread there beneath his nose and across his chest like black, glossy tendrils as she lay sleeping—all of it smelled of smoke and grease and the shocking cold of winter forest.
Tui-rua-ci.
Fawn, she was called.
Coals still glowed in the fire pit, and it was warm with her under the buffalo robes and heavy wool blankets. Morning would be a long time getting here in the heart of winter. Here, nestled in the marrow of the mountains. At long last now he could luxuriate in not having to rise before sunup to check a trapline.
Weary, Titus closed his eyes again, letting the blackness ooze over him once more. No longer did he worry about where the others were or what became of them. Silas, Bud, and Billy were all three likely out cold right about then—noisily sawing lumber the way they snored—having danced themselves silly in the ballet of that beast with two backs. Hooks was a hungry, voracious man with a sexual appetite that drove him to couple repeatedly with any woman, wife or daughter, young or middling, who either had her the slightest inclination to bed him or was graciously turned over to the white man as a gift from a good host.
And Bass figured Tuttle and Cooper weren’t the sort to lag far behind Hooks in the hunger department.
Most days in winter camp the four white men gathered to do nothing more than did the Ute men in winter camp: sit, eat, smoke, and swap their stories of past battles or their exploits in killing a bear or capturing an eagle for its feathers. Over the past weeks Titus came to understand the rudiments of that talk Silas, Bud, and Billy had with the Ute, slowly learning that universal language of the fingers, hand, and arm moving in a graceful dance of silent expression.
Then each night, from the Ute widow who had taken Titus into her lodge, he learned a little more of the tribe’s spoken tongue.
Not that she was all that much to feast your eyes on, but he could tell right off that second day after they reached the Ute’s winter camp that she was good of heart. Besides, she knew just how to pleasure him in the blankets, and what she cooked over her lodge fires he could eat with relish. Although it had taken him some to get used to her boiling all them organs.
In fact, their first night together she had fed him elk heart—turned slimy and gelatinous simmering there in the kettle for what must surely have been the better part of the past three days.
“The ol’ man here,” Cooper had explained that first afternoon, telling Titus the results of a long exchange of sign language, some dutiful handshaking, and loud elocutions in both Ute and white tongues, “he’s the gal’s uncle.”
“Whose uncle?” Bass had inquired, his eyes searching the crowd of women and children who had gathered behind their men in welcoming the white men into their midst when the four had burst out of the timber into the bottomland, whooping and hollering to beat the band, firing their rifles into the air to greet the young warriors who had hurried out to meet them—their dark, brazen frowns turned quickly to happy smiles all round. Indeed, Titus could readily see why Tuttle had repeatedly emphasized that the Ute were a good people to hunker down with for the winter.
“Why,” Silas replied, “the woman who said she’d take y’ in, Scratch.”
“T-take me in?” he echoed, then immediately grew particular. “She be young or old?”
“Y’ grown particular?” and Cooper flashed him a disapproving look. “It don’t matter, do it?”
With a shrug Bass glanced over the female faces and said, “Long as it’s a place to sleep, I s’pose it don’t.”
Cooper slap
ped a hand on Bass’s shoulder. “Leastways, she’s old enough to be a widder woman.”
“A widder woman!” Billy shrieked. “Ah-hah! Scratch’s gonna fork him a widder woman for winter!”
“Just like the widder woman what give him the nits!” Tuttle had gushed with laughter too.
Enough laughter that it made Bass’s cheeks burn in embarrassment, and his stomach churn with a sudden angry seizure. Maybe he had no business expecting anything better, what with his being the greenest among them, but to be made the butt of their jokes once again—after all this time and after so many jokes played on him … now, that galled him ail the more.
“A widow woman,” Titus repeated, the words tasting sour. He swallowed hard, forcing down the bitter tang of them as he was of a sudden reminded of the Widow Grigsby. Then he jutted out his chin. “By damn, you niggers—at least that squaw’ll be no stranger to gathering firewood!” He whirled on black-haired Billy to say right to the man’s face, “And I’ll wager she knows her wav around a kettle pot too, Billy Hooks! Better’n I can say for you!”
Cooper banged Tuttle on the back, roaring with good-natured laughter, throwing his head back and letting his voice rise to the winter sky. “Why, if the greenhorn here ain’t got him a bit of ha’r after all!”
Bass continued, “So if’n it’s here we’re to plop down for the winter, by Jehoshaphat, I figure to stay warm and keep my belly full at that widder woman’s fire!”
Tuttle slapped a hand on Hooks’s shoulder, the both of them sniggering uncontrollably. Bud said, “I’ll … I’ll bet that widder woman knows her way round under a buffler robe too, Titus Bass!”
Silas Cooper roared again at that, his Adam’s apple bouncing up and down between the thick, muscular cords in his neck, then told his three companions, “Good for us it be that all this high-larity come at just the time when these here Ute bucks is all smiling and acting good-natured themselves.”
“Wouldn’t be for us to be laughing at that ol’ chief’s gift of his niece, would it, now?” Tuttle observed, winking at Bass.
“Boys, looks to be we got us as prime a place to hunker down for the next few weeks as there be in the mountains,” Silas repeated later as the crowd began to disperse and the four chosen women remained behind in the bright afternoon light to take home their white lodge guests. “Empty your packs and keep your plunder at your side this first night. Be sartin y’ picket your animals outside your door come sundown—so it be close at hand for the first few nights. Jest in case.”
Tuttle asked, “You skeery of these here Yutas, Silas?”
“They seem to be a good sort and welcomed us all and one,” Cooper replied. “But it don’t ever pay to let down your guard witn red niggers—now, do it?”
“When we get together again, Silas?” Tuttle inquired, some consternation crossing his face as the four women began to inch away to their own lodges, each one signaling for her guest to follow.
Cooper smiled within his dark beard, his eyes dancing like a bull elk about to rut. “I don’t see me any reason to gather back up till morning, boys—when we’re damn good and ready to roll out of the she-wimmens’ warm blankets,” he said, looping his long arm over the shoulder of the sharp-nosed woman who was taking Cooper in.
Titus gave the three other women a quick study and decided his must surely be the oldest among them. Yet she had the kindest face. In his book such an attribute went a long, long way to making him feel content enough to leave the company of the others and follow her home.
That first day he had looked back once, watching the others splitting up, leading their horses and pack animals away in four different directions. Then she had pulled on his elbow, motioning wordlessly, and pointed to a small smoke-blackened lodge off at the edge of the village circle near a copse of bare-limbed aspens.
For sure, he had decided right then and there: it was one thing to saddle up and push west all on one’s own—totally alone. Such solitude was something Titus had no problem enduring; indeed, he had welcomed that longed-for aloneness. But that evening for those first few hours there in the Ute camp, he found himself feeling something altogether different. Sensing most a bit of despair and frustration at being brought here and handed off to stay among a foreign people, not knowing their language nor their customs … all that mingled with his own excitable male anxiety at again being set adrift with a woman—almost exactly the same feeling he had experienced when the riverboat pilot Ebenezer Zane had arranged it so that for an entire night a very young Titus Bass was to be alone and undisturbed with an Ohio River whore named Mincemeat.
Many things that first awkward night with the Ute widow made him fondly recall his nervousness and selfdoubt with the skinny, chicken-winged whore. But, like Mincemeat, this squaw with the young child slung in a blanket at her back certainly did her best to make the white stranger feel welcome, at home, and very much wanted.
It came as no surprise when she openly nursed the child in front of him after she had rekindled the fire, brought in some water from the frozen creek nearby, then put on a kettle to continue boiling that elk heart. Once the child had fallen asleep at her breast, the woman had nested the young boy back among the buffalo robes at the side of the lodge, pulled back on her own hide coat, and ducked out the lodge door. In minutes she was back—but only to fetch up her crude, rusted camp ax. Again she left the lodge, but as soon as he heard her chopping at wood with the ax, Titus pulled on his blanket coat and went out to help her.
Inside once again with the woodpile replenished to the left of the door, they shed their coats and the woman took some dried greens from a round rawhide container, dropping them into the boiling water where the elk heart rolled and tumbled in its gelatinous juices, slowly cooking. She poured him a tin cup of water from a small skin she had hung from a rope that went from pole to pole, wrapped about each one, inside that small lodge. As he sipped slowly, Titus silently inspected how there was a separate section of hides suspended from that rope so that they formed an inner liner tied some five feet high from ground to rope. A portion of that liner was even lashed across the doorway so that it now formed a double inner barrier against winter’s cold, holding within even more of the small fire’s warmth.
That proved to be no problem: keeping enough of the fire’s radiant heat. He soon discovered a small fire was quite enough to warm such an insulated lodge. Many were the early mornings when he routinely awoke in the gray, predawn cold, or those evenings as he drifted off to sleep with her already snoring softly beside him, or on each of those dark nights when he slowly came awake for no good reason he could fathom, listening to the nightsounds in the camp around him, staring up at the black scrap of sky between the two large flaps of buffalo hide that surrounded the smoke hole, helping direct and pull the fire’s smoke from the lodge. It was up there where the poles came together in their unique spiral—the collection of poles rising slowly, gently, even beautifully, rising in a swirl as smoke itself would spiral slowly on its way to the heavens.
So warm had it been some of the past winter days that the woman would pull back the liner flap and push aside the door, leaving the entrance open, allowing a breeze to slip into the lodge and rise up through the smoke hole, creating a cool current of air that pleased him. If the day was a sunny one, and the others were not dragging him off to check on their traplines, the four white men would join the warriors old and young sitting in the sun. There the trappers each had a chance to practice more of their spoken Ute and the Indians practiced their English. Still, because most of their conversations could not be expressed aloud, there were many hours that winter for Titus to practice his sign language. For the longest time he continued to speak aloud the words his moving hands formed—and soon discovered that some of the warriors, like the widow, did their best to mimic his English for certain objects, actions, or feelings.
Like the routine he had learned on his father’s farm, or that daily ritual he grew accustomed to on Ebenezer Zane’s Kentucky flatboat as it
floated downriver to New Orleans in the autumn of 1810, this easy rhythm of a trapper’s winter life as a man went about the predawn setting of the traps and the twilight harvest of his beaver—this too was a satisfying existence of routine and regularity.
Somewhere in the darkness out beyond the nearby fringe of lodgepole pine, Bass heard a dog bark now. Easy enough to tell it was a camp dog, not one of those wild dogs Billy explained were called coyotes. No, this one barked in the gray light of dawn-coming, reminding him a bit of how old Tink had bayed back in Boone County … not with the yip-yipping howl of the coyotes that stayed back among the hills or warily crossed the prairie-lands.
The sun would still be some time before making an appearance this morning, yet there was enough gray light seeping down from the smoke hole above him for Titus to begin to make out the shapes of things in the lodge, where his rifle stood close at hand, the small mound of blankets and buffalo robes where the woman’s child slept, the boy breathing softly. And he could even make out where he hung his buckskin shirt and the two tube leggings the woman had sewn for him.
That first night in the Ute camp she had wasted no time in attempting to explain that he needed to throw out the worn, grease-slickened wool clothing he was then wearing. By pinching her nose and pointing at his britches, jabbing a finger inside the folds of his blanket coat at his linsey-woolsey shirt, it became abundantly clear what she thought of his smelly, frayed, and worn apparel.
And the widow hadn’t put up with her guest’s poor hygiene for long at all either. It was only the second morning when he awoke to find her beating on his shirt spread out atop a large, flat stone, a small stone gripped in her hand as she repeatedly pounded his smoke-and sweat-blackened clothing.
“What the devil are you doing!” he shrieked at her, lunging out to wrench his shirt from her as he sat up, completely naked in the buffalo robe and blanket bed.
Just as promptly Fawn had grabbed the shirt back, holding it up before him to show the collar, pointing out the mashed bodies of the lice he had hosted for some time.
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