Crack in the Sky Read online

  “An’ put him on our left,” Jack repeated. “If what ye got in mind don’t work—that nigger likely to take off the top of yer head with that club on his next go-by.”

  “You just keep us both on this here horse—I’ll do the rest, Hatcher.”

  Whooping and wagging his head in astonishment, Jack kept looking over his right shoulder as the Blackfoot urged his pony closer and closer to their horse, and when he figured the warrior was close enough, Hatcher yanked hard to the right.

  But the Blackfoot figured this was another feint and didn’t go for the bait. Instead, he spurred forward, the nose of his animal nearly crashing into the rear flank of the trappers’ horse as it shifted sides. As the startled enemy straightened himself on his war pony, Bass found that Hatcher had done it. The warrior was now inching up on them from their left.

  Closer.

  He struggled to bring the pistol out of his sash in a sweating palm.

  Closer still.

  They were lashed so tightly together that he grew scared the weapon might go off wedged there between them. Kill one of them, if not the horse under them both.

  Close enough now that he could see the ribbons of sweat coursing down the enemy’s face.

  Freed at last—he felt the muzzle move between them, tight against his belly as he pushed his hand forward.

  Swinging the club back, the Indian grinned, his teeth glittering as he closed on what had to be a sure kill. Two white men at once. What a prize—

  Shoved across his body, the pistol suddenly popped out between the two men as Titus raked back the hammer with a thumb.

  The club had already begun its arc downward as the Blackfoot’s eyes suddenly locked on the pistol just then popping into view between his enemies.

  In his sweat-slickened hand the pistol nearly bucked itself loose as Bass pulled the trigger. The ball slammed into its target midchest, right under the warrior’s arm that held the war club aloft. As if disbelieving, the Blackfoot kept the arm and club frozen there, reluctantly tearing his eyes off the white men as he looked down at his side … weaved—then pitched off the back of his straining pony.

  “Sumbitch!” Hatcher cried exuberantly.

  Drops of salty sweat stung Bass’s eyes as he blinked, trying hard to clear them, straining to see if there were any other pursuers who might pose a threat now that he had emptied his only weapon of the only bullet it had held. Behind them two other warriors slowed and brought their ponies to a halt in the sagebrush, circling back for the body of their fallen comrade.

  “Maybeso the niggers are giving up,” Titus said, more hopeful than certain.

  “Not Blackfoot,” Hatcher snorted. “Bug’s Boys don’t give up.”

  “How long they gonna keep after us?”

  It was a moment before Hatcher answered. “Till they take all the horses they can from us, and they got our scalps hanging from their belts, Scratch.”

  “Ain’t healthy for a man up here—this hard by Blackfoot country—is it?”

  “No, I don’t reckon it is.”

  Weakness was like a thick cloud overtaking him now that the hot adrenaline was no longer surging through his veins. “Tell me, Jack: is the beaver so good up here that you’re willing to put your hide on the line ever’ day you got left in your number?”

  “What say when we get back to Isaac and Rufus—we all talk about working our way south to more friendly country?”

  “South … south is good.”

  “Rest of them niggers been after our hair won’t be follering all that quick—seeing how we put ’em afoot the way we done,” Hatcher said. “So we can see to Kinkead and you proper and get this outfit ready to tramp south back to the Windy Mountains after we g’won to ronnyvoo at Sweet Lake. How’s ronnyvoo sound to Titus Bass?”

  Jack waited a minute for an answer from Bass, and when he didn’t get one, he turned slightly to peer at the man roped behind him. “Scratch? Hyar ye—Scratch?”

  Up ahead of them the others were driving the horses across the wide creek, threading the animals through the young cottonwood saplings and between stands of willow. How beautiful were the drops of water spraying up from each hoof, countless glittering gems iridescent in the bright spring sun as the four other horsemen shouted and urged the horses across.

  “Ronnyvoo … just the sound of it shines,” Bass finally said as he closed his eyes again, so heavy had they become that he could no longer keep them open.

  “There’ll be whiskey, Scratch!” Hatcher cheered as he slowed the horse in nearing the ford. “And womens!”

  His side burned with a terrible, prickling pain. And for a moment Titus wondered on just how much blood he had lost. Would he make it to rendezvous? Or would he be one of those who went under? Then Scratch couldn’t fight it any longer.

  “Just lem’ … lemme sleep now, Jack.”

  Not all that far overhead the calliope hummingbird’s wings blurred in frenetic flight—hovering, darting, then hovering once more as it sought out its nectar.

  Bass froze, motionless there in the icy water, the five-pound steel trap and float-stick in hand. Enthralled with the bird’s dance on the gentle spring breeze, he watched the hummingbird bob and bounce from flower to flower until it was long gone down the streambank. He sighed in contentment. And arched his back, feeling the tug of tight new flesh slowly knitting along the bullet’s path through his left side. Especially taut across those two small puckers of wrinkled skin. It was good to be back working the banks of these streams. Good for a man to know where he belonged.

  For days following that scrap with the Blackfoot horse thieves, the others had joshed about keeping him around for no other reason than that Titus Bass was a good omen, perhaps even the old Shoshone soothsayer’s most powerful charm.

  “I had me a uncle once said to me that a few folks is like cats,” Solomon Fish had said beside a campfire one twilight as Hatcher’s brigade made their way south toward the Owl Mountains, working to put more and more country between them and the Blackfeet who seemed determined in their chase.

  “Merciful heavens,” Caleb Wood grumbled as he swayed up with another armload of wood. “How people like cats?”

  “Never had me a cat was wuth a red piss,” John Rowland observed. “Only good for mousin’.”

  “Go ahead on with yer story, Solomon,” Jack prodded.

  With an indifferent shrug Fish nudged some of his blond ringlets out of his eyes and said, “Ain’t much of a story, really. Just my uncle said some folks got ’em nine lives, just like cats s’pose to have.”

  Hatcher turned to Kinkead. “What ye think of that, Matthew?”

  “Sounds like Solomon’s uncle kept hisself filled with bilge water to me.”

  “Maybe not a fella like you,” Fish snorted testily. “But just think about Titus Bass here.”

  Hatcher grinned across the fire, asking, “Say, Scratch—figger ye used up any of yer nine lives?”

  “Damn right I have,” he answered, feeling the certainty of it down to his marrow. “Figger I had a few whittled off me back in St. ’Louie, back to the time when I was doing my best to spit in death’s eye.”

  “How ’bout with them Arapaho down near the Little Bear?” Elbridge Gray asked.

  “Them,” Scratch replied, painfully shifting his position, “and a few times since.”

  Jack turned back to Kinkead, asking, “So don’t it sound like Bass got him a cat’s nine lives?”

  “Solemn,” Matthew used his favorite expression, then spit a brown stream of tobacco into the fire, where it hissed. “But if Scratch truly be a man with nine lives, I reckon he’s just ’bout used ’em all up, Jack.”

  “Long as he don’t use that last one afore ronnyvoo at Sweet Lake!” Hatcher roared.

  Time was drawing nigh when the company brigades and bands of free trappers would begin to gather, marching farther to the west every few days, stopping now and again when the sign along the streams convinced Hatcher’s men the trapping might be worth t
heir efforts. Wandering slowly as the days lengthened and warmed, they neared the southern end of the Wind River Mountains—where a man jumped west by southwest over that easy, sloping divide to find himself in a country where all the waters now flowed toward the Big Salt far, far beyond the horizon.

  When the hummingbird finally flickered out of sight, Titus waded another half-dozen steps and stopped there at the base of the long strip of creekside grass growing along the bank, reaching for the knife at his back. With it he plunged his arm under the water, clear up to the elbow, and began hacking away at the side of the bank until he had carved away a shelf big enough on which to set his trap. From beneath his arm he grabbed the bait stick: a section of peeled willow, one end sharpened for driving into the bank just above the surface of the stream where he had hidden his trap at the end of the beaver slide.

  Here the animals repeatedly entered the water, usually dragging their limbs and saplings they were using to slowly construct a rugged dam across the stream, or swim underwater with their provender, taking it to their beaver lodge to feed mate and kits. The slides ’were a good place to count on beaver coming close enough to that stick where the rodents would catch a whiff of the bait Scratch smeared on that portion of the limb suspended over the readied trap.

  After driving the stick into the bank at the proper angle with the small head of the belt ax he carried, Scratch pulled the stopper from the wooden vial suspended from his belt. The sudden strong, pungent odor of the castoreum rose to his nostrils, making his eyes water as he smeared a little of the thick, creamy liquid on the exposed end of the bait stick, stuffed the vial away, then washed his fingertips there at the foot of the slide.

  Two more traps still to set before sundown.

  Looking over his shoulder at the falling sun, Bass reckoned it would be twilight before he made it back to camp, unsaddled, and picketed the horse on some good grass until it was time to curl up in the blankets for the night.

  Despite the hightailing they had done to stay as far ahead of the Blackfeet as they could, they had nonetheless made a good spring of it for themselves—both before that first attack when they were burying Joseph Little, and after as Hatcher led them farther and farther north toward the southern reaches of that country the Blackfoot jealously guarded and protected as their own hallowed ground.

  “Man’s a fool what’ll go where he’s bound to lose his hair over a little beaver fur,” Caleb Wood had grumbled the farther north they had gone.

  “Man’s a fool if he don’t go to see for his own self if the plew is as prime as some say it is,” Jack retorted. “But don’t ye worry none. We’ll turn around and hightail it out if’n them pelts ain’t as big as blankets … or if Bug’s Boys turn out to be thicker’n summer wasps.”

  Soon enough they found Hatcher right on both counts. No wonder the Blackfoot got so fractious with white American trappers slipping around the fringes of their country—the beaver up there grew bigger, their pelts more sleek, than anywhere else a man trapped in these mountains.

  Moving on upstream, Titus kept his eyes moving, searching for another slide, perhaps the stumps of some young saplings the beaver had felled, any sign that an area was frequented by the big, flat-tailed rodents hunted by the Rocky Mountain fur trapper.

  Decades before, the big companies had first enlisted men to come far up the Missouri River for the purpose of trading with the tribes to obtain their fine and coarse furs: not only the seal-sleek beaver and river otter, but mink and lynx, some buffalo and wolf at times too. The British pushed down from the north, and the Americans prodded farther west each year until men like Ashley and Henry decided they would do better hiring a hundred enterprising young men to catch the pelts themselves. The American fur trade was never the same after the Ashley men began to spread out across the far west—from the Milk and the Marias, the Judith and the Mussellshell on the north, to the Gila, the Rio Grande, and the Cimarron down south in Mexican Territory.

  But beaver had already been feeding the economy of the New World for more than two hundred years by the time the Rocky Mountain fur trapper appeared on the scene. And beaver continued to turn the wheels of commerce as the big companies and the small bands of free trappers moved farther and farther into the wilderness, searching deeper and deeper for virgin country yet untrapped.

  Scratch stopped there in the cold stream fed by last winter’s snows, far, far overhead among the high peaks, surveying the banks on both sides while he pushed some of the long brown curls out of his eyes. As a trapper grew in experience, he came to recognize just what the possibilities of finding beaver would be from the type and amount of vegetation sprouting along a certain stretch of a creek or river. Down at lower elevations some of the animals would feed on young cottonwood and alder, while up here above the foothills beaver worked on aspen, willow, and birch.

  Crossing the stream to the far bank, Scratch bent and scooped up a handful of the wood shavings thickly scattered at the base of a stump within reach from the water. Rolling the chips in his fingertips to check for moistness, then bringing them to his nose to smell—the more fragrant, the fresher they were—Bass calculated it was a recent cutting. No man had ever taught him this: not Bud, nor Billy, nor even the savvy Silas Cooper—none of the three who had gathered him under their wings and taught him not only what it would take to make a living as a trapper, but how to keep hold of his hair in Indian country.

  No, seasons ago Scratch had learned this trick on his own hook. The fresher the shavings, the more recent the activity in that section of a stream, and consequently the greater the possibility of a concentration of flat-tails consumed with building dams, flooding meadows, and constructing lodges for their families.

  A trapper counted on the probability that any beaver curious enough to be lured to the bait stick would put a foot in the steel trap waiting for it at the bottom of a slide or near the entrance to its domed lodge. Unable to free itself from the weight of the trap, the beaver would drown quickly, leaving its pelt unmarred, ready for a careful skinning.

  After being stretched, fleshed, and dried on round hoops of willow, the hides were bundled in packs for eventual transport to the summer rendezvous. This annual gathering, another invention of General William H. Ashley, was conceived as a means of resupplying his brigades who spread out through the mountains from late summer until the following spring when they would begin their trek down from the high country to a prearranged valley, there to meet with the caravan come all the way out from St. Louis laden with powder and lead, sugar and coffee, beads and trinkets, calico and wool stroud—everything a man would need to live for another year in the mountains, even what that man might employ to entice an Indian squaw back among the brush for an all-too-brief and heated coupling.

  No money ever changed hands between trader and trapper, white man or Indian. None was needed. Beaver was the only currency in the mountains. With it a man would eventually buy himself a head-splitting drunk, a raucous series of couplings with a string of agreeable Indian maidens, and he might possibly have enough left over to outfit himself for another year in the high lonesome without going into debt to the company.

  No matter that most men had little to show for their years and their miles and their wrinkles. To search out the wily Rocky Mountain beaver, a man might willingly risk his hair, his hide, and perhaps his very soul.

  After braving months upon months of bone-numbing streams both fall and spring, after enduring a long, spirit-sapping winter in some isolated, snowbound camp, the trapper would eagerly look forward to summer when he could trade off his packs of beaver for another year’s gamble in the wilderness. When the last man had turned in the last of his beaver, when the whiskey kegs had run dry, the traders threw their bundles onto the backs of the very same mules that had hauled the trade goods out from St. Louis, that caravan now to spend the next ten weeks making its return trip to the Missouri settlements. There, or farther east in Philadelphia or even New York, the pelts would be sorted further. While
those of average grade would eventually be used for the tall-crowned gentleman’s hats so fashionable not only back east but especially in Europe, the finest furs would be sold to brokers who exported them to frigid countries the likes of Imperial Russia and feudal China.

  A single pelt of Rocky Mountain beaver might weigh between a pound and a half to two pounds when dried and fleshed of excess fat. The skin of a kit might weigh only half that. Over that brief, meteoric period of the American fur trade, the going rate for plew went anywhere from three to six dollars a pound back in the St. Louis market. So what eventually made Ashley his fortune was not his initially organizing fur brigades to operate in the mountains, but his newest venture: supplying those fur trappers with goods brought out to rendezvous planned for a prearranged site. There the reveling, raucous trappers overly eager to celebrate would be content to receive half the value of their beaver in St. Louis prices, while they wouldn’t mind paying many times the “settlement” price of those staples and supplies transported from Missouri.

  After holding his first rendezvous three years earlier in 1825, General Ashley continued to refine his rendezvous system until the price of beaver would eventually become standardized at somewhere around three dollars a pound—a figure that earned a trapper some five to six dollars a plew. It was hard, cold, lonely, and ultimately dangerous work for the few hundred men who chose to make their livelihood here in the wilderness, and perhaps on the edge of eternity.

  From the northern rivers bordering the Canadian provinces all the way south into territory claimed by Mexico, at any one time less than four hundred Americans scattered their moccasin prints across a trackless wilderness, migrating seasonally across a mapless terrain, confronting a bewildering array of climatic conditions, geography, and native inhabitants. Here in these early years of the nineteenth century, in these opening days of the far west, for a special class of man there simply was no other life imaginable.

  To take your life into your own hands, not beholden to any other man, to test your own resolve and mettle against all the elements God or the devil himself could hurl at a puny, insignificantly few bold men … ah, but that was the heady stuff of living!