Death Rattle (45 page)

Charlotte didn’t have to ask him a second time. Eager, Bass held out his arms and she immediately obliged, passing him one of the thick-furred pups. With the other dog still wrapped in her arm, she turned and led him back through the doorway as her muscular husband stepped aside. Back through the kitchen they wound their way, past small kegs and crates, on through the cool shadows in the pantry, eventually emerging through a low, narrow portal to find himself out in the autumn sun. Nonetheless, he discovered they were still standing inside the fort walls. She paused at one end of an oblong corral, where the black cook immediately stooped over a low, crudely erected pile of brush and firewood meant to serve as a small pen. She set her pup on the ground right in front of the low entrance to a small canvas shelter, where the four other pups burst into view, scrambling into the light around their weary but suspicious mother.

“There they be, Mr. Titus,” she said with the most cheerful tone. “Take your pick which one.”

When the pup he held suddenly became animated in his arms, all legs and eager yelps, Bass leaned over the firewood fence and returned the pup to his mother and siblings. Some of the other pups hopped right up to give him a good going-over with their noses, sniffing all that was new on his fur.

“I want two,” he confessed.

“Two?” And then Charlotte Green chuckled, her fleshy face becoming even rounder in mirth, her big bosom and shoulders quivering with laughter. “That be a double handful of trouble, that’s what!”

“So you lemme have two?”

“You can have ’em all if’n you want ’em.”

He considered that a moment, then thought of that long ride north. One pup, maybe two at the most—he could handle them. But not a half dozen wild, animated creatures as he marched his laden pack string north to Absaroka.

“Nawww, just two.”

“Which’uns you want, mister?”

Pausing a moment more to study them all as they boiled back and forth across their small enclosure—some scratching an ear, others tugging a sibling’s long tail as they wrestled, and the rest plopping down in the dirt near the security of their mother’s shadow—he quickly decided.

Bending over the fence, he scooped one into his hands, hoisting it aloft to glance between its hind legs. Then he gazed into the little male’s face. He approved of the look in the pup’s eyes as the dog’s tiny pink tongue repeatedly lapped in its attempt to lick Scratch’s face.

“This’un likes ye, mister,” Charlotte observed.

“Hold ’im for me, would ye?”

Titus moved past her to step round to another side of the enclosure where he held his hand down close to the ground. Three of the remaining five pups immediately came over to sniff his callused, rough hand. But one of
the three immediately nuzzled its tiny, cold nose into his palm, rubbing his fingers.

“You too,” he said as he scooped up the second pup and inspected its genitals.

“What you got there?” the cook asked. “A li’l girl? You wanna a li’l girl too?”

“Nope. Better for me to take two males, Charlotte.”

Again she chuckled with that merry laughter. “I knows! This way, the li’l boy won’t be crawlin’ on his li’l sister to make more pups, eh?”

“How much I owe you?”

“Nothin’,” she answered with a grin.

“I owe you somethin’ for these two pups,” he pleaded. Then Titus was hit with an inspiration as she shook her head emphatically. “Surely now, you’ve had your eye on something over to the trade room, woman! Some new beads, or a Mexican scarf. Maybe a bolt of cloth for a new dress—”

“I did see something!” Charlotte exclaimed as her eyes widened like white orbs swelling in a dark firmament.

He gulped, suspicious he might have offered too much. “What can I get for you?”

“I seen some …” And she squeezed an earlobe between her finger and thumb as she squinted, leaning close to peer at one of his wire hoops and those tiny small brass beads suspended from it. “Some real purty earbobs.”

Relieved, he shifted the dog into one arm and pulled her toward the door. “C’mon with me, Miss Charlotte! We’re gonna make us a trade!”

With the two pups in their arms, Titus and Charlotte threaded their way past hunters, trappers, and fort employees lounging in the last of the autumn sun cast against the east side of the inner courtyard, scurrying hip to hip into the trade room where they shuffled around a cluster of Mexicans and half-breeds arguing with one of the traders.

Charlotte began waving her free arm in the air to the clerks at the far end of the counter. “Mr. Goddamn! Ovah heah, Mr. Goddamn!”

Busy over a ledger at the far end of the long counter, Lucas Murray turned to peer over his shoulder as they approached. His face lit up when he realized who had called him out. “Charlotte!”

“You he’p me please, Mr. Goddamn?”

“Help you do what?”

“This here nice man gonna get me some earbobs I took a shine to.”

The fort’s head trader’s eyes trained on the old trapper. “You’re Bass—the one took all those blankets off our hands.”

He nodded, scratching the pup’s neck. “Like she said: I wanna trade for some purty earrings Charlotte’s put her eyes on.”

Murray leaned across the counter so he could put his lips near Scratch’s ear, whispering in delicious confidentiality, “You ain’t getting her something in trade for her bedding you. She gonna throttle your wiping stick, that the way of it?”

Titus roared as the trader straightened, stiffening in surprise. “Great Jehoshaphat! She’s got that husband of hers—the blacksmith! By the stars, I’m getting her them earrings she took a shine to in trade for these here two puppies!”

Nervously licking his lips in embarrassment, Murray sidestepped over to stand directly in front of the cook, only the narrow counter separating them now. “S’pose you tell me which ones you got in mind, Charlotte.”

Bass had to admit they did look good hanging from her ears, what with the way she wore her hair all pulled back and covered with that bright red, blue, and yellow Mexican scarf. As Charlotte was inserting the second earring through the hole in a lobe, Bass turned slightly, noticing the stack of pack baskets woven from oaken slats.

“How much you want for them baskets, Mr. Murray?”

The trader stepped down to the corner and picked one of them up by its single handle. “What you need one’a these for?”

“Two of ’em,” he declared. “One for each pup. Here, pass it over and lemme try it.”

He handed one of the dogs back to Charlotte, then clutched the remaining pup under one arm before he took the basket and set it on the floor. Then lowered the dog into the basket’s wide, oval mouth. Immediately the pup stood up inside, barely able to get its little nose over the top.

“These’ll work just fine,” Titus commented, taking his hand off the basket where he had been steadying it and the pup both. “How much you trade for two of ’em—and them earrings too?”

Charlotte’s infectious, uninhibited laughter split the trading room. Bass turned, watching the pack basket topple over and the puppy come tumbling out. It scrambled onto all fours and was just starting for the door when Titus leaped to grab it. He stood, scratching the pup’s ears as it went to licking his neck beneath the graying whiskers.

“ ’Bout got away from you, Mr. Titus!” she giggled as the dog in her arms squirmed.

Murray cleared his throat, “You got another two horses, I let you have both of these here baskets and Charlotte’s earbobs too.”

“Sounds steep to me,” Scratch reflected, allowing the pup to gently gnaw on his thumb with its tiny, sharp teeth.

“It ain’t steep,” Murray replied. “Could cost you more—but the Frenchmen was what used these baskets. So we don’t get much call for ’em anymore.”

“Two horses?”

The head trader nodded. “Two horses.”

“I’ll have your horses back here afore you bolt the gate at sundown tonight.”

Murray grinned as he turned to step back down the counter to his ledger. “You’re one I trust, Bass. Just put them two horses with the others you already brung up to the fort.”

“Well, now,” Charlotte sighed as she turned toward
Bass, lowering the framed looking glass she had been regarding herself in. “How I look?”

“Handsome as could be,” Titus said with a grin. “I declare, if you ain’t the most handsome woman this side of the Wind River Mountains!”

They were Injun dogs. Plain and simple.

Their long, wolfish snouts and short, peaked ears marked these mongrels as belonging to a breed much, much closer to their wild cousins than any civilized house or hunting breed preferred by white folks back east.

He could easily believe there might well be some prairie wolf in the pups, what with him getting that brief look at their mother. She was nothing more than a Cheyenne cur … that tribe being an extremely nomadic people who had long ago grown attached to those wild canines roaming the fringes of their villages in the prehorse days. From her narrow head and shallow rib cage, the bitch was nothing more than a typical Cheyenne camp dog, homely mongrel that she was.

But the male that had mounted her at the fragrant peak of her last season damn well had some buffalo wolf in him—if not an outright wolf himself. That wild, feral cast to the pups’ eyes, the forehead and lean haunches of the two—characteristics that all bespoke an ancient ancestry dating long, long before man and dog ever crossed paths to advance their mutual fortunes.

That first morning marching north, Scratch had them ensconced in their baskets, slung on either side of a gentle, hard-boned mare he figured had to be some eight to ten years old from the condition of her teeth. With a short lead rope he had loosely looped around her neck, he kept the mare close by his knee. Only once did one of the black-eyed pups ever grow fractious enough to clamber his way out of his basket.

Titus watched it out of the corner of his eye: that offhand pup scratching and clawing desperately, pulling himself up with all fours until the dog purchased a hold on the top of the basket with his powerful jaws—pulling
the rest of his roly-poly body behind him … then
phoosh
—he spilled all the way to the ground. Somehow the gentle mare knew and stopped, jerking back on her lasso Scratch had looped round his left hand.

Suspending his flintlock from the saddle horn using the braided loop he had knotted to the trigger guard, Titus dropped to the ground and stepped around the mare. Now the second pup, the one with those pale, ghost-colored eyes, was yelping—wanting out to play too.

Its darker-haired brother rocked onto its feet, shimmied to dust himself off, then immediately dove under the mare’s legs to flee the man just settling to his knees.

“C’mon, you li’l Digger,” he said as he stood, slowly moving to the other side of the mare.

Which caused the obstinate pup to scamper in the opposite direction.

Titus stopped, put his hands on his hips, and said in a quiet, clear voice, “So, you don’t wanna go north to Absaroka with me—that it?”

He watched how the pup settled to its rear haunches and cocked its head at him—as if trying to understand those sounds the man was making. Behind Titus the other pup kept up a pitiful yowl for its brother.

“It’s up to you. If’n you’re going, you get over here now so we can be on the tramp. I ain’t gonna take you up there to them two young’uns of mine less’n you wanna go with me on your own.”

He bent forward slowly, inching toward the pup—which suddenly darted to the other side of the mare again.

“Awright—there’ll only be one of you dogs get up there with us for the winter. Damn your li’l black eyes anyway. By mornin’ you’ll be breakfast for a b’ar!”

Scratch stood, dusting off the knees of his leggings and settling the elkhide coat around him once more as he strode around the mare’s head and took up the reins to his saddle horse. When he was settled, Bass loosed his rifle off the round saddle horn and clucked at the mare. “Giddap.”

It took no more than three of his heartbeats for the ghost-eyed pup to set up a mournful howl the moment it saw they were leaving its black-eyed brother behind. Scratch turned to gaze over his shoulder at the dog sitting on the prairie, dispassionately watching the string of packhorses pass him by, one by one by one. Eventually he was alone, and the big rumps of those cayuses were passing out of sight in the far trees lining a creekbank.

Yip-yipping, the black-eyed pup suddenly set up its own call—a plaintive cry far different than the mournful howl of its basket-bound brother.

“If’n he don’t come—we’ll both get over him,” Bass assured the grief-stricken, pale-eyed dog.

Then he glanced over his shoulder a third time, spotting the little pup scurrying along the line of packhorses, its short legs churning so furiously that it shot past the string of tall horses, making for the front of the line where the old trapper reined to a halt. After suspending the rifle from the horn again, Scratch eased himself slowly to the ground, turned, and descended to both knees, patting the tops of his thighs.

“C’mon, you li’l Digger! Get on up here!”

The puppy tumbled into his arms, every leg still wind-milling as Titus swept it off the ground—whimpering, burying its muzzle beneath Scratch’s elbow. He stood with the pup, scratching behind its ears. The way its brother was howling and leaping in its basket, Bass carried the black-eyed one over and let them both lick each other’s faces for a long moment before returning the darker one to his basket.

“You gonna stay there now,” he chided. “Leastways, till your legs are long enough for you to foller on your own.”

He scratched them both atop their bony skulls before remounting. “I sure hope you fellas gonna be as good a dog as ol’ Zeke was.”

Of a sudden it made his heart small and cold with mourning to remember that gray-haired hound. Loyal to
its dying breath … killed by the goddamned Blackfoot it was following to protect its family—
^*

He squeezed his eyes shut against the sting of tears and clucked for the saddle horse, gave the mare’s lead rope a tug. Damn, if he wasn’t getting more and more human all the time, he reflected as the sun emerged at the far edge of the prairie behind his right shoulder. Older he got, the easier it was for him to hurt, easier for his eyes to seep a little too. Ol’ Zeke. Damnation, if he hadn’t been about the best dog a man could ever deserve to have as a friend. He blinked and looked up at the rosy-orange clouds strung out in strips across the autumn-blue sky with the sun’s rising.