Crack in the Sky tb-3

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Ain’t right that I take more than I need to make it back,” John protested, laying a hand on Hatcher’s arm before his eyes touched those of the others. “I’ll be fine once I get there.”

  For a long moment Jack did not move, nor did he speak. Then, with a voice clogged with regret, he said, “Yes, Johnny Rowland. I figger you will be fine once ye get back to Taos.”

  So they had split off only what Rowland himself said he would take, everything else spread among those friends he was leaving behind, split among those men who one day soon would push on north themselves for rendezvous on the Popo Agie. And then Rowland had climbed into the saddle, waved as he turned his mount and packhorse, then never looked back as he reined out of the trees.

  As the seven stood watching the man and animals grow smaller and smaller against the immensity of the Bayou Salade, the sky slowly began to seep … a gentle, cold spring rain. And with the way the weeping clouds continued to lower down the mountainsides around them, Bass sensed they were in for a long day of it.

  As empty as his belly was that morning, Scratch hadn’t been hungry enough to eat like the others as they huddled over their tins of coffee at their smoky fire. Coffee was all he wanted to warm his gut that morning until he figured he could put it off no longer. Taking Hannah’s lead rope, Bass mounted up and rode off across the valley toward his half-dozen sets placed along a stretch of narrow stream that spilled into a wider creek tumbling toward the valley floor.

  He tugged the soggy wide-brimmed hat down more firmly on his head, sensing the way the greasy blue bandanna rubbed that patch of bare skull. As soon as he returned to camp that morning, Bass vowed he would start work on the scalp he was to wear in place of his own. Cutting it down to a workable size, curing and tanning it over the next few days—then making the final trim so that it would lay over that lopsided circle of bone.

  Then he decided. Instead of retracing his way back through yesterday’s sets, he turned downstream toward those last traps he had baited. Curious now to find out what had become of the two.

  Something had been at the butchered Arapaho’s body. Some of the gut-pile was gone; some creature had attempted to drag off the corpse.

  His eyes quickly scanning the scene, Bass slipped to the trampled grass, knelt by what remained of the man who had taken his scalp, and inspected the soppy ground. A free meal had drawn two of the lanky-legged beasts here. Sign of their pads tramping around the body, yonder around what they hadn’t finished of the gut-pile. It was enough to show him the wild dogs hadn’t been here too long ago.

  Looking up, Bass figured they were somewhere close enough to be watching him. He had scared them off, but not far enough away that they wouldn’t be ready to return when he was gone. Standing, he gazed around at the wall of forest there beside the creek. It was fitting, he decided. Fitting that the wild predators of this high land would come to reclaim the warrior’s remains. Just as Bird in Ground had begun to teach him winters before—that great circle of life and death, then life again.

  Of a sudden he remembered the second Indian, looking over to the grass and brush where he had left the wounded Indian. Hurrying back into the saddle, Titus brought the horse and Hannah around, moving them slowly across the soggy streambank as he leaned off the side, watching the ground and buckbrush for sign. In a matter of yards it became plain that the warrior had begun to crawl north, something pulling him on, something driving him out of the valley.

  Maybe he spent the whole night crawling. Then again, maybe no farther than he could force himself to go with that broken leg while it grew slap-dark and the night sky began to clot with rain clouds. The farther Bass went, following the trampled grassy path, the more he marveled at the warrior’s stamina.

  Scratch saw him ahead at the same moment the Arapaho heard the horses or felt their hooves on the ground—turning his head suddenly and peering behind him at the approaching white man. For but a moment the eyes showed fear … then slowly they narrowed into slits through which nothing but hate could show.

  Reining up, Bass sat in the saddle for several minutes, looking this way and that from time to time, his eyes always returning to the wounded man, who had refused to budge any farther. Scratch wasn’t sure, but he thought he could hear the warrior’s raspy breathing in the midst of that rain battering his hat, splatting on the nearby willow leaves.

  Finally he dropped to the ground, slowly moving back toward Hannah, always keeping his eyes on the Arapaho now. Reaching the mule’s side, Scratch quickly laid the rifle within the cradle of her packsaddle and made sure the oiled leather sock was secured over the lock’s hammer, frizzen, and pan. Patting the animal on her rump, he circled her flank and stepped toward the Indian.

  By the time Scratch reached the other side of the mule, the Arapaho was flopping back onto his belly, attempting to crawl away, clawing futilely at the wet grass, his fingers digging desperately into the muddy soil. But when the trapper drew close, the Indian gave up and slowly rolled onto his back. Pain fleetingly crossed his eyes again as he prepared to meet his attacker. Then the look of unmitigated hate returned as Bass set a moccasin on one of the warrior’s brown arms.

  Kneeling, Titus took hold of the man’s other arm and flung it out to the side of his body—then pressed his other moccasin on it. As he slowly settled onto his haunches, he firmly had the warrior pinned to the soggy ground. But even as Scratch dragged the skinning knife from the back of his belt, the Arapaho did not resist, did not struggle, did not move in the least. Instead he only stared, transfixed on the white man’s hand as it shifted the knife into position.

  Planting the tip of the blade high upon the man’s right breast, Bass slowly dragged it down in a straight line until he reached the last rib, just above muscles banding the taut solar plexus. Again he pierced the skin up high on the chest, right next to that first bloody laceration, and crudely dragged the knife downward again, widening the superficial wound. As he began to carve a third stripe of crimson, Scratch watched the warrior’s eyes, watched how the lids fluttered as the man fought to ignore the pain, doing his level best to show the white man how he refused to exhibit any weakness.

  With five long vertical cuts that together formed a bloody wound more than an inch wide, now Titus punctured the brown skin out near the hollow of the man’s right shoulder. Here for the first time he noticed how the brown flesh was goose-bumped with the soggy chill. After suffering through a night without the blanket that had been tied behind his simple snare saddle, after enduring this cold soaking—Bass felt a begrudging admiration for this Arapaho he pinned to the wet earth, a man who did not struggle as the white trapper began to drag the skinning knife vertically across his right breast … putting a top on the huge letter T. Four more times he scraped that blade across the brown flesh, opening the skin, moving glistening metal through oozing blood until he was satisfied with his work.

  Then he began to mark this enemy with his second letter. Down the left breast he dragged the blade in a wide gash, making it as long as he had the T, this new incision opened right beside the breastbone. After it too had been widened four more times, Scratch added two crude semicircles to that vertical line, forming a huge B.

  He finished by picking up a handful of the warrior’s hair in his left palm, splaying it out between his fingers a moment as he watched the Indian’s eyes move toward that hand.

  “No,” Scratch said, not much above a whisper. “I ain’t gonna scalp you, nigger. Save that for someone else to do. For ’Nother time.”

  Instead, Bass slowly dragged one side of the bloody knife blade across that clump of hair, then flipped the knife over to wipe off the other side on the hair. He placed the weapon back in its sheath.

  “Figger I marked you ’nough awready,” he said to the Indian. “Them’s my letters.”

  Taking his right index finger, Titus scraped his fingernail down the bloody cuts to retrace both letters, watching the warrior grimace as Bass opened up the wide lacerations and got them to oozing
all the more.

  “Want you to remember me, nigger. Want you to remember what you saw me do to your friend yesterday. I ain’t gonna make sign for you like I done yesterday when I told you that nigger scalped me. Want you go back to your people and tell ’em what happened here. Go back and show ’em my letters I put on you.”

  He wiped off the bloody fingertip in the warrior’s hair and stood, finding his knees had stiffened in the time he had been squatting over his enemy. Bass stepped off the warrior’s arms.

  “That’s gotta be some big medicine to your kind. You come crawling back to your people … telling ’em the story how I killed and cut up the man what took my hair. He your brother? Your friend?”

  After Titus waited a moment, staring down at the Indian’s face, studying it for some betrayal, he sighed.

  “It’s good you hate me now. Hate me for what I done to your friend. Hate’s good and clean … much better feeling than someone what just don’t give a shit. I understand hate lot better’n I can understand a man what ain’t got a heart big enough to feel big feelings. I figger a man what don’t hate big ain’t the sort what feels anything in a big way.”

  Slowly dropping to one knee beside the warrior’s shoulder, Bass pushed an unruly sprig of his own hair out of his eyes.

  “I had folks what took from me. It hurt so bad I wanted to hate someone, just one someone for it. But … I didn’t know who to hate, so it ate at me inside. Maybeso it still does.”

  Holding his fingertip just above the wounds, he quickly traced the letters again.

  “So you know that’s me.”

  Then he tapped the index finger against his own chest. And quickly retraced the letters again before tapping the finger against his own blanket capote once more to emphasize.

  “That’s my letters. That’s me. Want you tell ’em I killed the nigger took my hair. And I marked his friend with my letters. I could kill you, kill you for trying to kill me. But … I figger this gotta be bigger medicine.”

  He stood again.

  “G’won now, nigger. And remember what happened here. Remember who marked his letters on you … ’cause I want you to hate me. Want you to hate me bad as I been hating that nigger what stole my hair.”

  Bass turned and started away, then stopped and looked back at the man sprawled on the ground, unmoving.

  “Can you hate me bad as I been hating your friend? Maybeso that’s worse’n me killing you right off. Letting the hate eat you up the way it’s been eating at me.”

  Then he smiled crookedly at the warrior. “I’m gonna wear that nigger’s hair for my own now. And I carved my hate into you. So I don’t figger I got no more hate to eat me up now. Leastways, any hate for the one what stole my hair. That hate’s all gone now.”

  Scratch turned away and dragged the rifle off Hannah’s packsaddle, then stuffed a wet moccasin into a stirrup and rose to the wet saddle. Bringing the horse around, he led the mule down to the creek and crossed the water, its surface dippled with huge drops the size of tobacco wads.

  The hate was finally gone.

  Dragging the chill air deep into his lungs, Bass suddenly sensed how light he felt.

  So light he just might float right up through that jagged fracture forming in the clouds way out yonder in the sky. Right up through that crack in the heavens where the sun’s first rays were streaming through.

  Summer had a way of suddenly appearing there at your shoulder one day.

  The long spring had actually started with the last heavy snows of winter as the land renewed itself, then drifted past the soaking rains come to bless this high, parched land, and finally gave way to the here-and-gone-again thunderstorms that formed along the western horizon nearly every afternoon.

  Only a matter of weeks after Scratch put the Arapaho warriors behind him, summer reached the high country, and with its arrival came the time to begin their march southeast from the Bayou Salade. Following what Hatcher explained was the southern fork of the great Platte River, they turned northeast at the far end of the Puma Mountains, staying with the river canyon as it tumbled toward the far western edge of the great plains.

  There were days when they stuffed their bellies with elk, mule deer, and antelope. At other times they feasted on migrating duck and geese, or scared up an occasional fantailed, red-wattled turkey roosting in the low branches of the leafy trees blooming along the Platte’s meandering course.

  At the emerald foot of the front range they left the gurgling river behind as it meandered onto the plains while they hugged the base of the mountains in a course that led them due north. After more than two hundred miles, some eight long summer days of march, Hatcher’s band struck the North Platte, swam the animals over to the north bank, then turned their noses to the northwest.

  “I figger we come almost half the way,” Jack declared that evening as they went into camp beside the North Platte. “Maybeso ’Nother ten days is what it’ll take us to get where they told us Sublette’s gonna hold ronnyvoo.”

  They crossed better than 230 more miles, another eleven hot days of travel across the broken wastes—trudging up the North Platte to reach the mouth of the Sweetwater, climbing that river north by east toward the base of the Wind River Mountains, passing timeless monuments formed aeons before in a glacial age: the incredible humpbacked shape of Turtle Rock, then on to Split Rock as the high ground, buttes, ridges, and low mountain ranges continued to rise on either side of them. Where the Sweetwater angled off toward the southwest to begin its gradual climb toward the Southern Pass, the seven sunbaked, hardpan wayfarers crossed to the north bank of the stream and pressed on into the verdant foothills of the Wind River range. One after another of the tiny freshets rushed together out of the grassy meadows in sparkling braids to form narrow creeks that tumbled east toward the widening streams until they reached that low divide above the Popo Agie, or Prairie Chicken, of the Crow.

  In the broad valley below him, Bass spotted the narrow wisps of smoke rising from the leafy cottonwood canopies, eventually smeared and smudged by the cool breezes drifting down from those high places above them where thick mantles of snow still remained despite the advance of the seasons.

  He had figured there would be more camps.

  “Ain’t many of ’em here ’bouts,” Titus grumped.

  “Not yet, there ain’t,” Caleb Wood replied.

  “Don’t look to be no trader’s tents,” Hatcher complained. “We beat Sublette in to ronnyvoo.”

  Solomon declared, “Damn sight better’n getting here after all the whiskey’s been traded off!”

  Beyond the creek, on the far side of the tall green mushroom of trees, stood some two dozen browned hide lodges, their blackened smoke flaps pointed toward the east.

  “Sho’nies?” Rufus asked.

  “This here be their country,” Hatcher said. “Though I figgered there’d be more of ’em.”

  Bass said, “Maybeso it’s early for them too.”

  “Let’s camp!” Isaac Simms roared.

  Now, after all those weeks—the hot, dusty leagues—that curling blue ribbon of the Popo Agie beckoned them across those last two miles, down into the grassy bottom where the stalks rubbed a horse’s belly, brushed a man’s stirrups as the trappers fanned out in a wide front to make their presence known as white men upon nearing the camp. Again at last to see faces old and new, trapper and trader alike after so many months with only the earthy hues of Spanish skin or the coppery sheen of Indian flesh, both friend and foe alike … not to mention how they had tired of the sameness to one another’s drab, familiar faces.

  “Ho, the camp!” Jack was the first to bellow as they drew close, attracting the attention of those relaxing back in the shade of the towering cottonwoods.

  From up and down a short stretch of the river, more than twenty-five men appeared from the tall willows and brush, stepping into the brilliant sunshine of that midafternoon, the land grown so hot that shimmering fingers of heat wavered above the valley’s wide meadows. Th
ey shaded their eyes with flat hands or squinted up beneath the brims of their weathered hats to watch the strangers approach.

  “Where from, fellers?” a large man prodded the riders.

  Caleb Wood dragged his big hat from his head and smacked it across his dusty thigh, stirring an eruption that drifted off on the warm breeze. “Wintered down to the greaser country in Taos. Come up by way of Bayou Salade for spring trapping.”

  “Mexico, you say?”

  And a second man in the crowd asked, “Did I hear ’em say they rode up from Mexico?”

  Inquired another of those moving up on foot, “Are the plew prime down there?”

  “’Bout as sleek as I ever see’d ’em,” Jack replied as his group came to a halt near the trees and the others crowded close to the horsemen.

  A man came up to stand below Hatcher. “First thort you mought’n be some of Davy Jackson’s outfit.”

  “He ain’t working to the south last season, is he?” Jack replied.

  “No,” the man declared, “but some us figgered he was sending fellers over from the Pilot Knobs with his catch, like him and Sublette planned he would.”

  Isaac asked, “What’s the price o’ beaver this summer?”

  “Sublette ain’t come in yet,” the first man answered. “’Spect him any day now.”

  “Who you boys?” Solomon inquired.

  A tall, ruggedly handsome figure of a man Bass recognized had worked his way through the gaggle of greeters, scratching at a bearded cheek. He held up his hand to Hatcher, and with a distinct Scottish burr he announced, “I’m booshway of this brigade. Name’s Robert Campbell. We’re down from Crow country up on the Powder.”

  “Crow country, eh?”

  “But the Blackfeet were devils this year,” Campbell explained. “Lost four of my men to the bastards at the Bad Pass in the Bighorns.” They finished shaking and he dropped his hand. “Did I hear right that you’re not from Davy Jackson’s bunch?”

  “On our own hook,” Jack stated. “Hatcher’s my name.”

  Another man declared, “Heard of you afore. Welcome. Drop your leg and let’s camp!”