Death Rattle tb-8

by Terry C. Johnston

  And there was no sense in trying to turn back the calendar in hoping to run down his old partner Jack Hatcher. Any reunion they might have shared had been snuffed out by a Blackfoot bullet in Pierre’s Hole. Not to mention how Asa McAfferty had gripped fate itself by the throat and strangled the life out of it high in a snowy bowl at the end of a long manhunt.††

  But there had been a man who had stood at his shoulder through one skirmish and ordeal after another, a man who had lived through some of the last glory days of Titus Bass. And he was still alive … at least according to Mathew Kinkead’s claim. How long ago was it? Back in the fall of ’42, that’s when Kinkead declared the man was doing well for himself.

  “Yes,” Waits-by-the-Water said with a smile as harsh winds gusted a new snow outside their lodge, “I remember your friend, Josiah Paddock. Do you remember that you believed I loved him?”

  “I was pretty stupid back then.”

  “You were all I wanted, Ti-tuzz.”

  “I can still remember what a fool love can make of a man.”

  “Love did not make you a fool,” she corrected. “It was jealousy. Blind jealousy.* After all these winters, is your heart telling you that it must apologize to me again for thinking I did not love you?”

  He gently touched her hand with his callused fingers that morning as they sat by the fire with their children. “Every day with you is like a new beginning. I am thankful for each morning like this when I awake and you are with me.”

  She leaned against him, her cheek resting against his chest. “When you were away—and I believed you were gone forever—every day was a torment I could never describe to you. So I know your words are strong when you tell me how thankful you are to be here with me. I am grateful for every day, season, and year we have shared since you returned to me—not once, but twice.”

  Then she gazed into his eyes. “You don’t need to bring up old memories and mistakes to make me grateful for this time we have in our lives.”

  Touching her cheek, he admitted, “I asked if you remembered Josiah for a reason. You remember his wife—Looks Far Woman? Their little son, Joshua, too?”

  “I remember them, and the mud lodge where we stayed in Ta-house,” she said.

  “Rosa is gone,” Scratch confided. “And Mateo Kinkead has married another.”

  “I hope she will make him as happy as Rosa made him when they were together in Ta-house—”

  “Do you want to go?”

  Waits’s brow furrowed as she looked him squarely in the eye. “Go … where?”

  “Taos.”

  Her eyes grew wide, and she immediately laid fingers over her lips in that Indian way of preventing her soul from escaping in unabashed wonder. She turned slightly, looking at Flea, at Magpie who held little Jackrabbit in her lap, as the three of them chewed on some dried chokecherries the children had collected last summer.

  “It is so long a journey—we will take the children with us?”

  He grinned, and said, “I’ve promised I wouldn’t go anywhere without my family!”

  “T-to Ta-house?” she repeated.

  “What is this Ta-house?” Magpie asked before Titus could answer his wife.

  Waits turned to her daughter, saying, “Far, far, far to the south—farther away than I had ever gone before, or have been ever since—is a land where a people live in mud lodges, eat food that is hot on your tongue, and talk much different than the Americans where your father comes from.”

  “This is the place our father wants to go?” Flea asked as he cupped some chokecherries in his hand for his three-year-old brother, Jackrabbit.

  “It will be a grand adventure!” Waits cried, enthused. “It has been …”—and she counted on her fingers—“twelve summers since we left that place with our baby daughter!”

  For Magpie, the enthusiasm was clearly contagious. “Do we start soon?”

  Titus shook his head. “The snow is too deep and the cold would make such travel too dangerous—for a fourth winter in a row. To start out now might well kill us all. No, we won’t leave until late this summer when the buffalo are migrating south once more.”

  “Ta-house.” Flea tried out the word, then turned to his father. “Popo, what will you find in this faraway place that makes you want to go back after so many summers?”

  Scratch thought, then said, “Old times, and old glories, my son. But mostly … I want to find an old friend.”

  * Jim Beckwith—adopted by the Crow, he lived among them for many years, took several wives, and fathered many children before he grew weary of the diversion and abandoned his families and adopted people.

  * Present-day Bear Lake, in northeastern Utah; Buffalo Palace.

  * Ride the Moon Down

  * The Ute tribe; Buffalo Palace.

  * Dance on the Wind

  † One-Eyed Dream

  †† Carry the Wind

  * BorderLords

  27

  The family traveled as light as they dared when they set off on their march south out of Absaroka. Down the Bighorn at the Wind River, they entered the land of the Shoshone. From the Wind they continued up a tributary until it elbowed its way directly toward the saddle of the Southern Pass, lying to the west. In less than a morning’s march from there, they struck the Sweetwater, following that river east.

  For the first time in all his years in the mountain West, Scratch spotted long grooves cut upon the land, a corduroy of iron-tired tracks—more of them than all the carts in a trader’s caravan would carve while plodding their way to a rendezvous encampment.

  “What is this?” Waits asked him as he stood afoot, gazing first to the eastern horizon, then turned to stare as those scars followed the landscape rising toward the Southern Pass. “These are not the marks made by travois?”

  “The white man’s boxes you have seen teams of horses pull into summer rendezvous many years ago.”

  She gently wagged her head. “There must be many of them going across the mountains.”

  Bass laid his arm around her shoulder and snugged her against his side. “I hope that’s where they all keep right on going. Hope they don’t ever stop. I don’t really care how many of them want to cross the mountains … just as long as they push on through.”

  “These people, the ones who made these tracks,” Waits-by-the-Water said with a small, unsure voice, “they aren’t like you and the other fur hunters?”

  “No, they are no way like us,” he answered grimly.

  Titus remembered all that he had run away from back there in Boone County, on that farm outside the tiny crossroads of Rabbit Hash. “The folks who leave marks like this on the land are the sort of folks who will cut through the ground with huge knives, to plant their crops and make them grow. Folks who come in their wagon trains aren’t like me at all because when they stop somewhere … they mean to stay put.”

  “Then they are not like my people either.”

  He grinned at her. “They sure as hell ain’t.”

  “Are you, Ti-tuzz?” she asked, surprising him. “Are you like my people?”

  Scratch realized he must answer her truthfully. “No, I’m not like your people either. Not like white folks, and I’m not like Indians. Figured out I wasn’t much good at being white—but, trouble is … I’ll never be an Indian in my heart.”

  “You are a man in between,” she put it succinctly.

  For a long moment he stared deeply into her eyes. “Perhaps I am just that, Waits. A man in between. Not a white man, and not an Indian either. So it pains me even more deeply to think of what’s coming.”

  “Tell me, Ti-tuzz. What do you see coming out there, on the far horizon?”

  He gazed into her eyes with such sadness, such despair in realizing his time had come and was all but gone. The evidence of it lay in those scars beneath his feet. “The white people, there are too many of them. They keep growing like the blades of grass in the spring—spreading everywhere. And where they go, they push out who was there before. I
t will not be good when they reach Absaroka.”

  “Perhaps we will be old or long dead by then,” she said with hope in her voice.

  Scratch looked at his three youngsters a moment as they tossed rocks at a fleeing jackrabbit. “I pray the children will be very old, perhaps long dead too, by the time this land is swallowed up by whites.”

  “Perhaps wiser men could prove me wrong,” Waits said as she stepped against him, resting her cheek against his chest, “but I don’t think the future can be changed now.”

  A deep pain stabbed through him. “You’re right. What’s to come, will come … and one man like me can never stop it.”

  She explained, “Surely the buffalo will be wise enough to stay far, far away from these travelers. So let the white people go on to where the sun sets, and we’ll stay away from this sunset road, like the buffalo.”

  Sunset road. Titus thought it was a heart-wrenching and accurate description of this trail stretching from the eastern edge of the frontier all the way to Oregon country. A fitting name for the trail if for no other reason than he realized the sun was already setting on this raw and wild land. A way of life was ending as the sun set on an era, eons of living and dying in utter freedom. The glory days were over for men like him. All that life had been out here in these mountains was preparing to take its one last breath. Standing here now, gazing at the corduroy of tracks extending off to both horizons like the mourning scars on a woman’s arms and legs after she lost her man, Scratch knew he could hear the death rattle warning as it rumbled deep in the hollow breast of these mountains.

  “Yes, maybe we can avoid them—but only for a time,” he consented. “I’m afraid that where their kind goes, they bring the sunset with them. For now they may just pass on through, but they have still poisoned every inch of ground they touch.”

  She stepped around in front of him again, staring up at his face to say, “We’ll go higher than these white people will ever dare to venture. We can take our children and the life we still have farther and farther back into the mountains—where these white settlers will be afraid to live.”

  He pulled her against him. “It doesn’t matter how many miles I get away from them—because it’s the simple fact that they are in our country. Look at these marks on the ground. It means their kind has already come to my mountains. Think of how you would feel if another tribe came and squatted down right beside a Crow camp. It won’t work, ever. Those who are coming will ruin what I came out here for.”

  “I can’t ever remember seeing you so sad, Ti-tuzz.”

  “Maybe … because … I’m sorely afraid that what I came to get for myself, I went and ruined just by opening the door for these others to waltz right on through,” he tried to explain his disappointment, that bitter despair at what he believed he had done to bring about the downfall of his own kind. “I fear that what I came for is no more—and will never be again—because I pointed the way for the kind of folks who should never have come out here to destroy what once was.”

  Two days later, after they made their late-afternoon camp in the shade of some rocky cliffs, Scratch led his wife and their children on a short walk into that narrow maw the Sweetwater had carved out of solid stone, a place where the river’s flow was so restricted that it boiled and foamed in angry fury every spring—a landmark the mountain man had given the most appropriate name: Devil’s Gate.

  “I do not understand this expression,” Waits declared.

  Bass did his best to translate, “When a person does nothing but wrong—the sort of wrong that constantly hurts other people—we call what that person does evil. And the creature who does the most evil in our world is called the devil.”

  “Is this devil here in this place?” Magpie asked.

  “No,” Titus answered, feeling as if he should never have attempted an explanation. “But the water rushes so fast it can cause a lot of trouble for men in bullboats.”

  Waits lifted young Jackrabbit onto her hip. “So this is the doorway you spoke of, where the white fur traders must pass to take their pelts to the land of the east?”

  “Yes.”

  Flea stepped over, surprising his father with a perceptive question, “Why don’t the white men beach their bullboats back there behind us where the stream is quiet, then carry their furs around the canyon so they won’t spill into the water?”

  “What you say makes a lot of sense,” Titus declared. “But there are times when men will do something that does not make as much sense, when they attempt something for the challenge or the danger of doing it.”

  “Why?” Magpie asked.

  “Perhaps it is something for young men to understand,” he began. “Why young Crow warriors make bravery runs at their enemy, why they go out alone to challenge the wilderness in search of a vision.”

  From the way she looked at him, Titus got the feeling she was a little suspicious of his answer.

  Then Magpie said, “Tell me, Popo—you never did anything that didn’t make sense.”

  He ruminated on that a moment, gazing at the relatively low water in the river at this late season of the year. Then he explained, “I remember there were times in my own life that by doing something dangerous I felt that much more alive.”

  “Maybe this is the reason we are on this journey to Ta-house, Ti-tuzz?” Waits asked as she slipped her hand through the crook of his elbow when she stepped beside him.

  “You know better than that,” he protested. “I would never take you on a dangerous journey.”

  “No, not the danger,” she replied. “But you have needed something to make you feel more alive, I think.”

  Squeezing her gently against him, he asked, “Why do I need that?”

  “Because, husband—your spirit has been yearning to free itself from the fences of Absaroka.”

  “You do understand what a fence is?”

  She nodded. “As you explained, the white man’s fence keeps animals inside, where they can’t wander away.”

  So he snorted, “But Absaroka has no fences!”

  “Are you sure, husband?”

  Her certainty gave him pause. “Perhaps … I gave you the impression I needed to travel again, as we did in the long-ago days.”

  “One long year of living with my people, one year of not leaving our village—that was easy for you,” she said with a grin as she looked up at him. “The second year was harder for you, but nothing you could not do because you loved me, loved our children.”

  “And remember, I made a promise.”

  “That promise is why you forced yourself to stay through a third year, husband,” she said. “But soon you were staring at a fourth winter of being a layabout in Crow country.”

  “A layabout, am I?”

  “All the older men are,” she explained. “It is what warriors do after they have spent many summers as young men riding off to steal horses or bring home enemy scalps.”

  “An old man like me can’t be a warrior still?”

  “Come along, let’s go back to camp so I can cook supper for our family,” she prodded, slowly turning him by the arm to start out of the canyon. “I understand that this journey to Ta-house is something your spirit needs now. Besides, it is something we can share with our children.”

  “Especially Magpie,” he said as he looped an arm around his daughter’s shoulder and pulled her against his other side. “To show her where she was born that spring she became our first child.”

  Something his spirit desperately needed, she had said.

  Titus pondered that into the following day when they made camp in the lee of Turtle Rock.* Its massive surface already bore the scratchings of numerous fur trappers as they inscribed their names and a date of passing this important landmark on the route to the Southern Pass. But what astounded Titus was the great number of names carved into the rock’s surface—names he did not recognize, accompanied by dates that saddened him all the more. A lot of time had passed, and with it more and more settlers punched the
ir way right through the heart of what had once been an inviolable wilderness where only a few intrepid, daring souls dared walk.

  As Magpie and Flea scrambled up the side of the immense rock, anxious to view the entire valley from its top, Titus traced some of the scratchings with his finger, a little baffled by just how much time had slipped by.

  The last of the holdouts had gathered for their final, miserable rendezvous over on the Green in July of 1840. The following summer Fraeb’s hunting party was jumped by half-a-thousand Sioux and Cheyenne over on the Little Snake. So that made it 1841. All right, his mind hadn’t totally turned to horse apples.

  And after wintering in Absaroka, the next spring he was trapping the fringes of the Wind River Range when he chanced upon Bill Williams and they began their epic trek for California and the land of Mexican horses. That would have been ’42.

  In so many ways, that whole journey felt like it was no more recent than ancient history: returning to Bents Fort, trading his horses for blankets and kettles, beads, powder, and puppies too.

  He turned to glance at the two dogs, fully grown long ago, watching them race back and forth at the foot of the rock, howling and yipping at the children scrambling up the rock above them when the dogs weren’t able to make the ascent. It struck him now—the dogs had grown. For some reason, time had seemed to stand still once he made it back to Absaroka with those Cheyenne horses laden with trade goods. Maybe it felt the same for the Crow people who could not remember a time before the white man came.

  Beyond that winter he returned to Absaroka, Scratch could mark time’s passage with his annual trips to visit other white men. Tullock and Van Buren were no more—the man had flown to unknown parts, and his post at the mouth of the Tongue had been burned to the ground. But the Crow had stumbled across a company trader named Murray who ran a new post called Fort Alexander. Would have been the fall of ’43.

  Titus settled in the shade, leaning against the smooth rock, tracking his mind over the dimming back trails the way a man might turn around in the saddle to assure himself nothing was sneaking up on him. The next time he visited the post, Murray was gone and a Scotsman named Meldrum was there—yet he was only a little booshway to a fella named Kipp who the company kept busy building one fort after another. Autumn, ’44.