Crack in the Sky (16 page)

“For the life of me, I don’t think I can bear to watch this country get ruin’t, Jack. I’ll go on to Californy, where there ain’t too many greasers, where I can steal some horses and trap me some beaver too.”

“Can’t make me believe it,” Titus said solemnly. “Look around you. There’s too damn much room out here for all this ever to get ruin’t on us.”

Smith wagged his head, a great sadness come into his eyes. “The folks are comin’, boys. They always have … an’ I guess they damn well always will.”

How long did they have? Scratch wondered.

He raised his eyes to gaze at the late summer blue and wondered, How long would it be before numberless columns of smoke would smudge the skyline the way it had in St. Louis? How long before the dust of wagon wheels and plowshares and thousands of feet and hooves would clog up a man’s nose and make it hard for him to breathe normal?

How long before what he had found out here was no more, and he had to climb higher and higher, up from these rolling prairies and plains, to escape those who always came in the wake of the first to open a land. Smith was right about that. They always came.

They always would.

The longhunters had pushed over the Cumberland, down into the canebrakes when the stalks stood twice as
tall as a man, when the game was plentiful and the buffalo still haunted the eastern timber. But in the wake of those lonely individuals came men with their families following the same narrow footpaths and game trails into the virgin forests until they came to a meadow, a grove of trees by a stream—a place where those men and their women decided to set down their roots then and there. They built cabins and turned the soil, planted their seeds and fought off the Indians there beyond the edge of the frontier.

And eventually they watched others come, leapfrogging over them to inch back the dangerous edge of that frontier a few miles, a few more days farther to the west. Season by season, year by year, farm by farm. They had always come.

And there was no reason for Titus to believe that they wouldn’t always continue to come.

On his way west Scratch had seen them with their toes dug in, clinging fast to the country along the Missouri River. Settlers and widows, families and farms. Merchants and towns. How far would they push before they ran up against the buffalo country? And what then?

That land wasn’t fit for farming, he convinced himself, hopeful. That soil wasn’t rich and black like the ground he had turned over with a plow back in Kentucky. The domain of the buffalo was nothing more than poor grassland, not at all fit for raising corn or tobacco, hemp or squash or potatoes. The settlers who came to raise crops would eventually discover that they couldn’t grow anything in that ground and would therein refuse to venture farther.

So men like Tom Smith were wrong, Bass told himself.

Farmers would not dare probe very far beyond the hardwood forests. Surely the buffalo ground would serve as a buffer, as a no-man’s-land where the great plains blanketed by those shaggy beasts would forever protect these high prairies and tall mountains from the masses of humanity he had seen streaming across the Mississippi on their ferries, rumbling right on through the byways of St. Louis, hurrying their wagons west.

It just wouldn’t happen here.

This simply wasn’t a quiet, closed-in country like that back east of the river. This land was too damned wild, too open and unruly ever to be tamed the way that country had been. Like a horse broke to saddle or a mule to plow, like a man broke to marriage … that was the kind of country folks could tame.

Not this. Not here and surely not now.

This was a land no man could tame, and these were men every bit as tough to break to harness.

“We got visitors,” Fish announced just loud enough that the others could hear.

He didn’t point, but the others just naturally looked left to Solomon’s side of their march. Up the far side of a gentle slope Bass caught sight of them. He had been so wrapped up in lazily musing in the hot afternoon sun that he might well have been asleep on horseback.

“How many ye make it?” Hatcher asked.

“Maybe a dozen,” Fish replied. “But you can bet there’s more we don’t see.”

“That’s for sartin,” Caleb warned.

“Maybeso they’re just watching,” Kinkead said, faint hope in his voice.

“For now anyway,” Jack stated. “They’ll keep their eye on us and figger a place to make their play. If not today, then tomorrow.”

“What are they?” Titus asked.

For a moment they all looked at the horsemen sitting passively at the skyline atop their ponies, just far enough away that a rifle shot would not reach them, close enough to see the long, unbound hair lifting in the hot wind, some feathers and scalp locks fluttering beneath the chins of the horses.

“Bannawks,” Jack declared.

“Likely so,” Elbridge Gray agreed.

“This here’s Bannawk country,” Rufus Graham put in his vote.

“They good to Americans, like the Flathead?” Scratch asked. “Or they devilsome, like Blackfoot?”

“Man can’t allays callate that,” Hatcher explained. “But more times’n not, Bannawks don’t mind running off
yer horses, taking yer plunder, and raising yer hair if ye give ’em a chance.”

Wood said, “You ask me, they ain’t to be trusted.”

“Bannawks ain’t as brave as Blackfoot,” Hatcher explained, “and they ain’t as sneaky as Crow. But this bunch is likely to make a run at us sooner’n later.”

“Two of ’em just turned off back of the hill,” Graham declared.

The rest of the horsemen continued to watch as the party of white trappers and their remuda of pack animals pushed on by, plodding slowly up and down the low swales in the rumpled bedsheet of this land baking under a late-summer sun. It raised the tiny hairs on the back of Scratch’s neck just to look up at those motionless statues … until as one the warriors reined their ponies to the right and disappeared from the skyline.

Dusk would arrive all too soon.

“We better be looking for a place to make camp and fort up,” Kinkead declared.

“We’ll find something ahead,” Hatcher said. “Keep yer eyes peeled for water.”

That was most important in something like this. No one had to explain that fact of life and death to these men. In seeking out a place to camp most nights on their journey south from Sweet Lake, they looked for a spot that promised wood and water and some open ground all round, not only for grazing their animals until dark when they would be brought in close, but open ground any enemy would be forced to cross in pressing their attack, making themselves good targets in the bargain.

A couple hours later as the sun was sinking toward the low range of western hills, they discovered a narrow stream issuing from a ravine where a small spring bubbled up from a green and grassy haven of thick brush and saplings.

“Likely this is the best we’re gonna find,” Hatcher stated after he had halted them and dismounted alone to explore the ground nearby. “Let the animals drink, then graze ’em close in. Hobble every one, and tie ’em up two by two.”

“You ’spectin’ trouble tonight?” Rowland asked.

“I figger they’ll make a run at our horses, first whack,” Hatcher replied. “With Injuns, the horses always come first. Whether they try for us and our plunder tonight, or wait till tomorrow morning, I’ll wager they try to run off the animals right after dark.”

Without a word the other eight swung down off their ponies and went about their business. Some stepped off a ways to relieve themselves, others squatted up and down on sore, trail-worn knees, loosening up kinks and cramps. No man had to ask what needed doing. Each of them had been through this sort of preparation before. And they all knew their mutual safety depended upon the weakest link in their chain being ready to protect the rest of the group with his life.

As it had turned out, Hatcher’s band was the last to abandon the Sweet Lake rendezvous site. They watched one company brigade head north, the other turn east, while small outfits of free trappers drifted off to the four winds. Every group had its own particular medicine to try for the fall hunt. A few of the bands had even paid for a private session with a Flathead shaman camped near rendezvous, in hopes of ascertaining a likely spot to find a rich lode of the flat-tailed rodents that were the currency of these mountains.

While the white men waited patiently, the dark-skinned diviner burned his smudge of sweetgrass, smoked his pipe, consulted his special buffalo bones tossed onto a piece of rawhide, or even peered into the gutted carcass of a badger or porcupine or rock gopher the trappers had brought in for just that purpose. There in the blood pooled at the bottom of the creature’s cavity the old man could fathom the best course for the white men to take, just as folks back east might pay to have their futures foretold by an all-wise soothsayer reading the pattern of damp tea leaves whorled at the bottom of a china cup.

So off the many groups had journeyed in just as many directions, by and large keeping their destinations to themselves, disclosing no more in their leave-taking than that fearless call, “Meet you on the Popo Agie!”

A fall, a winter, and then a spring but to come before then.

Another year of travel, trapping, and hanging on to one’s scalp before another rendezvous would bring them all together.

Hatcher’s outfit had tramped almost due south for several days before they struck the Bear River and from there headed east on a climb around the southern end of a range of low mountains, finally dropping over the hogback into an arid bottomland where they began to angle to the southeast. Striking the Green, and crossing to its east bank, they plodded south along the river’s path, stopping only to rest through the short summer nights, again to eat and graze the animals briefly at midday.

With the high green country beckoning to them, pulling them onward, Hatcher’s men kept their noses pointed toward the west slope of the Central Rockies. South of the Uinta Mountains they finally left the Green behind, and upon striking the ancient Strawberry-Duchesne Indian trail, the trappers turned directly east as the ground began to rise below them.

In that great basin lying at the western foot of the White River Plateau, the Bannock had found them.

Scratch sat in the tall grass, some drying clumps of brush right against his back—all but hidden from any intruders until that enemy would be on top of him. He had volunteered to wait here, some distance out from their camp as the sun disappeared and the light began to fade. When the raiders came for the horses, they would have to pass right by him. Then he would be at the enemy’s back—alone when the shooting started.

The worst that could happen, Titus figured, was that he would have to grab up a horse and race back to camp if things got tight.

As the air began to cool, the deerflies began to rise, buzzing and droning through the tall grass—seeking some fleshy creature to bite and bleed. As much of the springwater as he had swallowed upon reaching the spring, he found himself thirsty now, still parched from their long, dusty day. From his pouch he pulled a twist of dark tobacco
leaf, cutting from it a small knot about the size of the end of his thumb. Just enough to stimulate his salivation. Stuffing it inside his mouth, Titus returned the twist to the pouch, then suddenly slapped his right cheek.

The sting, the burn, the heat of the deerfly’s bite spreading through that tiny knot of flesh—Scratch seized the painful site between a finger and thumb, pinching as hard as he could. It was about all a man could do when the devil creatures bit: squeeze for all he was worth to flush the poison back out. If he didn’t, the bite would go on stinging for days. Pinching the skin until it grew numb, Bass finally swiped a finger over the site, smearing what blood he had oozed out of the tiny wound into his brown beard.

He licked the blood from his fingers. And as he did, Bass remembered he hadn’t eaten since early that morning, just before light when they had prepared for another long day on the trail. Back among the two skimpy packs he had pulled off Hannah was his share of some meat they had dried yesterday after dropping two antelope. He chided himself for not bringing some along to chew on, if only to remind his stomach that he wasn’t forgetting to feed it.

There hadn’t been all that much in the way of supplies the company brigade leaders or Pilcher could lay out on blankets before those free trappers assembled there at the southern end of Sweet Lake. Only natural that they would hold back the lion’s share of most everything for their own. So he and Hatcher and the rest had looked over what was offered: the powder and bar lead, spare flints and hickory ramrods, some flour and a little coffee. No Indian trade goods here. Everything Sublette and Jackson brought out early last winter they intended their trappers to use firsthand.

As it turned out, Hatcher’s bunch ended up bartering with men who knew directly the value of a trapper’s labor. Jack and the rest traded for a little more of everything, enough perhaps to hold them over for several more months until they put the fall hunt behind them and reached the Mexican settlements far to the south beyond the Arkansas River.

“We still got furs we ain’t traded, Jack,” Rowland had complained.

“So we’ll keep ’em,” Hatcher declared. “These company men don’t have anything more what we can use to trade us, so it looks like we’ve got us a start on next fall’s hunt awready.”

Back at their camp that last evening before they would head out, the nine of them took serious stock of what would have to last them on this long trek to the Bayou Salade, and into a longer autumn trapping season.

“I can’t tell a man not to smoke or chew,” Hatcher began as he stood from looking over the packs with the rest of his men, “but as for me, I’m saving my ’baccy for fall. Most of my coffee too. Saving ’em both for a time when the air turns cool and I hear the first whistle of them elk in the high country.”

It was a damn good idea, Bass remembered thinking. A man didn’t really need tobacco and coffee until then. What a treat they both would be when the quakies began to turn gold on the hillsides of those high places, when a man finally saw his breath halo before his face, when the water began to ice up along the banks of the streams where they were laying their traps—