Crack in the Sky (19 page)

“Lookee yonder, Scratch. This be the end of the hills!” Hatcher exclaimed, pointing as they eased up the side of the slope toward a low saddle fringed with dark emerald timber. “Other side lays the Bayou Salade.”

Feathers suddenly took swirling flight within his belly, like the flapping beat of huge wings. Sudden whoops startled him as John Rowland and Matthew Kinkead burst past him, hooves hammering by on either side as they drove their horses the last few yards to the top of the saddle there between stands of blue spruce, shot over the rise, then were gone from sight. Only their exultant voices reverberated off the hills.

Then Isaac Simms shot by. And Rufus Graham careened past Hatcher and Bass, until Jack had time only to remind Solomon and Gray that some of them needed to stay back momentarily and see to the cavvyyard of horses and mules. At that reminder Scratch tightened his grip on Hannah’s lead rope, pulling the mare closer to his saddle mount. They were about to enter a special place by all accounts. Such magic was to be shared with all of a man’s friends.

“That it?” he asked Hatcher almost breathlessly as they crowned the saddle, pulling Hannah’s rope so the mule came up right alongside him.

Below the crest, down the smooth, treeless hillside, he watched the others race, zigging and zagging, waving hats and standing tall in the stirrups, passing one another in curving swoops, signaling back at those yet to come down the slope. Beyond them on the valley floor lay the slowly undulating clots of buffalo milling, grazing, lowing among the belly-high, mineral-rich grasses.

“This is it,” Jack said quietly, his eyes twinkling with a peaceful contentment.

“The Bayou Salade.” Spoken almost like a prayer of thanksgiving.

Hatcher reached over and touched Scratch’s arm. “Way ye said it, I can tell ye feel the place awready.”

Tugging at the back of the blue silk bandanna he had
knotted over his skull, Titus replied, “I can’t remember seeing a valley near so purty, Jack. Not in all my days out here. Strange as it may sound to folks what ain’t never come to this here place, looking up to see such sculpturin’s as these all around ’em—I doubt their kind would ever understand if I tried to explain just how I feel right here an’ now.”

“How’s that, Scratch?” Hatcher asked with a smile as wide as South Park itself.

“You told me yourself the other night, Jack.”

“Told ye what?”

He rubbed the back of the bandanna over his missing scalp and hair, saying with a quiet, but keen, anticipation, “You told me I’d feel like this here’s one of them few places where a man can know just why it was he ever come out here to the Rocky Mountains.”

It was the marrow of the world.

Scratch realized at last that this was the bone and sinew to which everything else in his known universe had always been attached.

From these tall peaks where the snow never fully melted flowed the lifeblood of a whole continent. This truly was a place where a man found confirmation in the reason he ever dared to venture on past those folks back east not willing to risk all they ever had, continuing on by those not willing to dare enough in placing their very lives on the line … here suddenly to sense the close kinship a man could feel with a patch of ground, with a stretch of open country, with an entire virgin land that had embraced him.

Welcoming him home.

Into a small protected bowl the rest had taken their pack animals, stopping only when they had reached a secluded meadow ringed by thick timber and outcroppings of granite dotting the hillsides. A place big enough to afford enough pasturage for their remuda over the next two months or more, yet a place small enough to afford them ample security from chance discovery of their fires and shelters by roaming bands of raiders. More than enough
wood—a litter of deadfall back in the thick groves … and water too: a narrow stream gurgling along its mossy bed right through the middle of the bowl. The stock would want for nothing as the last days of summer waned and the seasons turned.

Here they would be sheltered by the timber on the surrounding hills and the rock outcroppings. The stone faces of the granite would reflect the heat of their small fires on the nippy mornings to come, again each cold evening that autumn was bound to bring anyone venturing this high. As well, these rocky faces would serve to better hide the entrance to their small bowl from any who might pass through the valley itself.

“We used this here same place a couple seasons back,” Isaac Simms explained. “Oughtta be real safe here.”

“Off the beaten road,” Hatcher added. “Not on any trails the tribes use when they crisscross the Park, coming and going as they please.”

“Fella should keep his eye peeled for brownskins?” Scratch inquired.

“Just look down there,” Jack advised. “See all the buffler. Then ye tell me if ye figger this be a place where the Injuns’ll come to hunt.”

Titus nodded.

And with every day that followed it made him marvel all the more just how alive was this valley. The variety of wildlife were drawn here for the natural salt licks. They came for the abundance of grass, itself rich with natural minerals. And, too, the creatures came for the cold, crystalline waters tumbling down from the high, treeless places like streamers of sunlit glitter itself.

From time immemorial man had followed the four-legged creatures into this valley. Where the game went, so followed the hunters after meat and hides, after tongues and survival. From one end of the valley floor to the other ran the boggy salt marsh that had led the French trappers and voyageurs to first give their name to this place, a sparkling series of ponds where beaver had dammed the creeks and streams into a necklace of quiet water. With the arrival of autumn an untold variety of ducks appeared overhead
every day, sweeping in from the north across the autumnal blue skies to join the great long-necked geese in a brief migrational layover in this magical place.

Their first morning in South Park, they had moved away from their breakfast fire into the stands of lodgepole to select and fell a number of long, thin trees they dragged back to camp, where they trimmed off branch and stub, then cut each pole to length. One by one the shelters took shape, most no more than lean-tos made from bowers laid across their lodgepole frames, finally covered with pack canvas and old blankets. More than a dozen were there: some men pairing up, a few of them preferring to sleep on their own, along with four large shelters built to protect the outfit’s supplies.

That night, well after dark when they completed their camp-making chores, Hatcher joined the weary men at the fire to run over the well-worn sequence of trapping in hostile country.

“Caleb, I want you and Rufus to hang back the first day.” Jack waited until the pair nodded. “Next day gonna be Scratch and Matthew.”

He went on and on, pairing the men, then waiting while each pair nodded to one another in recognition.

“That just leaves you again,” Elbridge stated.

“Ain’t no different’n it was after Little went under to the ticks last spring,” Jack explained. “With him gone after that bad scrape with the Blackfoot, we had us one odd man out.”

“I remember that,” Fish replied.

“So, boys—I’ll be the one what will hang back on my lonesome when it’s my day to stay in camp.”

It was not the practice of all Mad Jack Hatcher’s brigade to depart every morning to set traps along the streams and slides, down at the valley ponds.

With the exception of their solitary leader, in rotation two men took their turns lying back to camp for one day out of every five: using their time to repair tack and saddles, doctor the sores and saddle ulcers on riding and pack animals, trim hooves and mend bite wounds that a man had to expect among half-wild horses. From hides traded
off the Flathead back at Sweet Lake, some spent their camp day, even nights, around the fire, cutting and sewing additional pairs of moccasins. On occasion a man would tinker with a trap he found not working properly, or he might fashion himself a rawhide sheath for a knife, perhaps add some brass tacks to a belt or the stock of his rifle.

Never was there any end to the lot of a camp keeper. When more interesting work was finished, there was always more than enough to do tending the plews: fleshing the freshest beaver hides scratched with each man’s distinctive mark … cutting, trimming, and tying willow limbs into a wide hoop … finally lashing the day’s pelts onto the willow hoops—stretching, tightening, then stretching some more. With each new day these huge, round red dollars of Rocky Mountain currency dotted the campsite, stacked against every tree trunk, sapling, and clump of brush. More were brought in every afternoon by the seven who took their turn at the streams and slides and pools.

As the weeks passed, even Scratch grew astounded by their take. Rich as some previous seasons had been for him, he had never seen anything quite as bountiful as this. Large beaver, thick fur, not one empty trap any day. And nary a sign of brownskins about.

Most mornings he had thrown the much-worn, oft-repaired Shoshone saddle onto Hannah’s back, tied his two greasy trap sacks on either side of the horn, where they would hang at his knees, and move out with the other six who would be trapping that day with him. On those mornings when it was Bass’s turn to hang back to tend to camp duties, the mule had proved just as restless and out of sorts as he was when not allowed to venture into the pristine beauty of the valley.

If she wasn’t picketed on those days, Hannah came right into camp even before the rest pulled out—seeming to know that the other animals were being saddled and prepared for departure while she was not. Until he eventually trained her better, having to swat at the mule with a switch and scold her, driving her out of camp, Hannah
would turn over kettles and coffeepots with her nose, braying loudly to show her deep displeasure.

Many were the times on those chilly mornings when he’d grab the mule by her ears, yanking her head down so he could glare into one of her defiant eyes and growl an endless rash of words strung together to convince her just how angry he was with her impish antics. Later that day she’d slip up behind Titus as he was concentrating on one chore or another, suddenly shoving her muzzle right against his shoulder blades to knock him off balance, sprawling on the ground.

“You’re a she-devil all right,” he growled. “Times are I’ve thought to strangle you. But I can’t bring myself to it—not when I recall how you saved my life … twice already.”

Seemed as if she somehow knew what he was saying at those times, for Hannah would eventually come up to stand over him, lowering her nose right against him softly, her big eyes half-closed, twitching those peaked ears of hers as if in apology for her childish stunts. Lord, if she didn’t know just how to get herself back on his good side again.

As if he could ever be angry enough with Hannah to kill her. Maybe a man like Silas Cooper could have shot her easy as spitting … but not Titus Bass.

The days continued their march into autumn, each one imperceptibly shorter than the one before it. The mornings grew colder, a film of ice forming in the kettles and at the edges of the creeks until enough of the high, glorious light warmed them each day. Even a blind man would know that summer was over, that the seasons had turned, that they were beginning their headlong tumble toward winter.

A man with a good nose would surely know. Autumn mornings had their own unmistakable fragrance—that sharp, crisp tang to the air. The smell of this high country dying, or its life already dead for another cycle of the year. Grasses and brush had grown dry and brittle beneath the increasing bite to every breeze that knifed its way down
from the high and hoary places. It smelled of winter on its way.

Autumn advanced with an amazing swiftness above their camp on every mountain slope. Each morning he found the descending line of gold-smitten aspens had inched a little farther down the hillsides toward the valley floor … as if autumn were creeping down upon them from above, a few yards more every night.

No more were there any of the hardy wildflowers tucked back in the protected meadows—swept away by the falling temperatures and the harshness of the winds, joining the summer-browned grasses in parched oblivion. Each day brought the deer and elk farther down the forested slopes toward the safety of their winter pasture in the valley. And these days of waning light brought the constant accompaniment of whistling elk calling other bulls to combat, or the slapping crack of bucks’ antlers locking, twisting, slashing in an ages-old combat. Males battling for the right to the harem, that struggle played out on the nearby slopes of dark pine-green and sun-splotched gold quakie.

Farther below in the valley itself, the cottonwood and willow would be the last to give way before the mysterious forces of nature and time and season. But ultimately their leaves began to shrivel with age, dried with the passage of time and the invisible hands of nature’s clock. Trees stood bare, stark, and skeletal against the golden, browning backdrop of the hills. Autumn’s breath was seizing hold of this land.

And so much of the rhythm of life appeared to grind slowly to a halt like a miller’s wheel brought rumbling to a stop by an unseen hand.

Yet as suddenly as life seemed to breathe its last, the Bayou Salade burst into frenetic activity across a week or more. Swarms of migratory birds blackened the skies now. Over the lower peaks and passes, formation after formation of the spear-headed migrations paraded across the crystal-clear autumnal blue. Each formation transformed itself from black specks spotted far off in the sky to become a low-swooping V of geese and ducks, angling in to
settle across the ponds and still water of the valley with a thunderous concert of honking and splashes. First the longnecks circled, their heads craning, searching for a landing spot before making their long, graceful figure-eight loop across an open spot of marsh water. Then the huge geese slanted down in formation, banking sharply before they hit the skylit water, kicking up rooster tails of spray, squawking to one another, to the ones they were joining, or to those still descending from the sky above.