Behind them the sun was just beginning to raise its bleary red eye in the east as he reached the edge of the extensive snowfield.
“We’ll be across afore midday,” he reminded the animals, tapping his heels into the horse’s ribs.
One hoof at a time, one short, slow step—Scratch carefully calculated his crossing of the crusty, frozen snow. He kept his eyes moving from the surface right below him to the rosy appearance of the snow some twenty, maybe as much as thirty, feet ahead of him, studying the way the ice had shrunk around the edges of a boulder, the way the crust lay in frozen, scalloped patterns where the wind constantly chiseled across it day and night. Warming each day beneath the sun, then refreezing beneath the spatter of starlight right overhead.
For a moment he gazed at the shocking blue of the heavens domed above them, and sighed. “Up this high, up here where that sky is so clear … where the sky is so damned close—if a man listens just right, Hannah—why, he might well hear angels sing.”
Closer to heaven was he here, and therefore much closer to that other existence Asa McAfferty spoke of in such hushed tones. Being this high—with nothing between him and the full, aching stretch of sky right beyond his fingertips—if a man himself wasn’t wary and careful, he just might slip right on through that crack to the far side of life and death and all that lay in between.
Was it a land of the unknown crossed only by those who slipped in and out of that crack in the sky … or by those who had themselves come eye to eye with one such spirit from that realm of the unknown? Just as Asa had with that Ree.
Thinking on those hoo-doos gave Titus such a chill that he pulled the capote’s flaps tighter around his chest and turtled his neck down a bit farther.
Step by step, one yard at a time, and he’d be off this wide-open snowfield and on the far side of the pass. Out here under the wide sky where the spirits might look down upon him creeping along, his animals like a trio of beetles burrowing their way across the bottom of a buffalo chip-might those spirits look down upon him and pluck him right up?
Scaring himself, Bass stared up at the blue, his chin quivering with the cold, shivering with the fright.
“You ain’t ever gonna get me ’thout a fight,” he suddenly bellowed at the cloudless sky.
Though it hurt his throat to yell that loud, he went on, “Might be some men what ride off to look for you … like Asa done—coming to stare death and dying in the eye. Like Asa had such a hankering to die hisself.”
Below him at the far western edge of the snowfield four magpies suddenly took flight from the tops of the distant trees as his voice boomed in an echo over their perch.
“But not me! I ain’t going nowhere easy as Asa McAfferty done! You’re gonna have to come for me. You’re gonna have to come ready to fight.”
He shuddered less with the wind by the time he reined up on the western side of the snowfield, turning the horse around and halting to gaze back at that open expanse of saddle he had just crossed there beneath the blue, there where a man had nowhere to hide, nowhere to run.
“Hoo-doos won’t dare come for a man what aims to fight,” Scratch boasted as he nudged his horse into motion once more. “Long as I ain’t so tired I can’t fight …”
Descending the steep western side of the pass, Scratch spent the rest of that day and the next locating a patch of ground he would use as his first camp for what he planned would be an extended stay in this country just east of the Three Forks. Years ago the trapping there had been almost as good as it had been along the Mussellshell and Judith. A dangerous land where only the wary survived, however. But by the time he ran across a site that offered good cover, grass, wood, and water, Bass hadn’t crossed any trails nor come across any sign that would tell him the Blackfoot routinely made this valley part of their travels.
Except for that single fire, that lone point of light he had spotted down in the bottom of this valley years before, when he and the trio had come here to trap. Someone had built themselves a fire big enough to warm a passel of men.
Someone.
That next morning he awoke in the dark to find a cold early-spring fog cloaking the river bottom. Overhead no more than a matter of feet hung a foreboding layer of low clouds threatening to drizzle at any moment—it and the fog were both as cold and gray as ash flake in a long-dead fire. Stirring out of the robes and blankets, Bass stomped feeling back into his feet, then crabbed over to his packs to dig out the buffalo-hide moccasins. He planned to wear them to and from every trap site, taking them off before he entered the water to make his sets, then pulling them on once he was ready to turn back for camp.
Looking again to the priming in both pistol and rifle, he stuffed the camp ax and a tomahawk into the back of his belt, where his skinning knife hung in its rawhide scabbard. Throwing the heavy buffalo-hide sack bearing a dozen American and Mexican traps over his shoulder and clutching his long bait-sticks under his arm, Bass lunged forward through the frosty grass as the dark canopy limned a thin line of sunny blue behind the jagged eastern skyline above his valley camp.
At the water’s edge he dropped the sticks and sack, then leaned the rifle against a clump of willow. Throwing his mittens down beside the traps, he pulled off his capote and yanked up his shooting pouch. Overlapping the wide strap, Titus poked a long leather whang through a series of holes so that he could fasten it with a knot. That done to severely shorten the strap, Bass could count on keeping his pouch and horn tucked high above the surface of the creek, pulled right under his armpit now as he waded into the freezing water.
By the time he had seven traps set at the foot of slides and other likely spots where the lush new grass had been trampled by tiny paws, or saplings had been felled by the toothy rodents, Scratch was finding he wasn’t near so cold. With the sun’s impending arrival, the air had begun to warm slightly. How good a fire would feel against his skin, how good some hot coffee would feel in his empty belly when he made it back to camp—
He looked up, froze. Listening. Something twitching inside him. Like a warning.
Staring at the far bank, Scratch watched the shudder and dance of the fog as it thinned, just then beginning to burn off. Like a gauzy tangle of lace laid against a bride’s dark hair, the mist clung in tatters against the dark, leafy brush. Somewhere on that far bank a bird chattered.
And he finally breathed again.
“Sometimes it gets too damned quiet,” he sighed.
Bending again to work at the shelf he had been scraping away with the camp ax a few inches below the water’s surface, Titus watched the way the light glittered across the slowly moving surface of the water. A magpie suddenly broke into flight overhead, freezing him immediately. The noisy rush of those black wings faded; then all was quiet once more.
“Got yourself spooked,” he whispered. “Only natural—this close to Blackfoot country again.”
As he carefully pulled the trap off the bank and slowly lowered it into the water, pan set and ready for business, Bass thought on McAfferty.
Had Asa ever found what he was looking for? But, then, what was it the white-head wanted most? he wondered. It wasn’t money, really. So was it power? Something many men desired.
Scratch wasn’t sure, but there at the end he had come to believe McAfferty had acted as if he was trying to find himself a sure way to die. Was it death that the white-head wanted most—the death that so far had eluded the man, frustrating him, because Asa believed he wasn’t worthy of living?
No—Titus knew it had to be something else that Asa had gone to do in Blackfoot country. Something besides getting himself killed by a band of Blood or Piegan or Gros Ventre. Just riding into that country to find some warriors to cut him down and hack off his hair wasn’t the neat, tidy end to McAfferty’s story, Bass decided.
He struggled to make sense of why some folks did what they did with their lives. Then decided such metaphysical matters were simply beyond his reach.
Stepping upstream a few yards, Scratch hoist
ed himself out of the water where he wouldn’t leave his smell near the last trap-set. Standing, he allowed his leggings to drip on the warm ground just now starting to steam, the mists rising into the cold air as the sun peeked over the mountain skyline.
With that first, frightening yip—he whirled on his heel, staring at the far bank. Down into the water leaped three screaming horsemen. A fourth reined up on the opposite bank, his pony shuffling in a sidestep as its rider twisted on its back, brought down his straightened arms in pointing the arrow at the white man.
Bass was moving in a crouch as the arrow hissed behind him.
From the corner of his eye he saw the painted bowman nocking another arrow against his string.
Behind him the horsemen clattered across the creek, their ponies severely slowed by the water that swirled up to their bellies as their powerful legs churned against the current. Wild cock’s-combs of brilliant spray spewed into fans of cascading, iridescent waterfalls around the legs of each warrior. For but an instant a lone beam of early sunlight glinted off that single knife blade embedded in a long wooden staff swung at the end of one of the brown arms.
Their cries boiling upon his heels, Scratch whirled as he heard one of the ponies lunge onto the bank behind him.
Yanking the pistol from his belt, he dragged back the hammer, straightened his left arm, and pulled the trigger.
Damp powder in the pan …
Swooping up on his pony, the Indian drew back with his tomahawk as Titus yanked his weapon from the small of his back where he had it stuffed in his belt. Only time enough to grip the handle in both hands as the pony hurtled past, the warrior swinging down as Bass bent at the knees, springing forward, planting the wide blade in the man’s belly as the Blackfoot’s weapon knocked the fur cap right off the trapper’s head.
Hot blood splattered Scratch’s face as the dying warrior raced on past, pitching off the far side of his pony with a loud grunt.
For no more than a heartbeat he glanced at the bush where he had dropped his coat and mittens, where he had stood his rifle before entering the stream. Then the rising falsetto in that voice yanked him around like a child’s string toy—twisting so quickly in his waterlogged moccasins on that frosted grass that Scratch stumbled to his knees an instant before a tomahawk cartwheeled past him, careening noisily through the thick brush behind him.
Pulling the skinning knife from his belt, he watched the closest one yank up a war club where it had hung by a thong at the saddle’s horn in front of the warrior. Over his head the Indian swung this terrible weapon studded with a half-dozen six-inch-long deer-antler tines embedded in a round knot of carved wood to which a handle was attached with rawhide and brass tacks like a medieval mace, closing in on his prey.
Titus lunged aside as the tines slashed the air beside his cheek. Landing on his elbow, he rolled up onto his knees, cocking his arm back far enough before he flung the knife at that third horseman racing for him with an arrow strung in his bow.
The warrior’s bow pitched forward as he suddenly clutched at the knife that caught him high in the chest below one outstretched arm. His pony hurtled past in a blur.
Just beyond the spot where Bass’s rifle stood, the Blackfoot with the antler-studded club was already yanking back on his rein, nearly bringing his pony to its knees as he savagely wrenched its head to the side. Bass glanced at the rifle, instantly calculating its distance from him, how fast the warrior would reach him, how much time it would take for a tired old trapper to reach the weapon … then set himself in a crouch as the horseman kicked speed back into his mount, racing into the open with that club held high overhead, his mouth o-o-ing with some primal death cry as he lunged toward his pale-skinned enemy.
Starting to leap to the right, Bass feinted and instantly whirled to the left at the last moment instead, causing the warrior to swing his club off balance. It was all the man could do to stay on his pony’s back as he galloped by.
Now he had both time and distance to his advantage.
Rising immediately to burst into a sprint, Scratch raced headlong for the rifle as he heard the cries of not one, but both, of the last two horsemen. He dared not look over his shoulder, afraid to find the bowman from the far bank suddenly within arm’s length.
Onto his soggy knees he skidded, snatching at the rifle as he slid against the brush, yanking back the hammer to full-cock. Setting the rearmost of the two triggers, he started his turn. Wheeling about with the weapon, Bass rose on one knee and rammed the buttstock back into his shoulder, jamming his bare finger into the front of the trigger guard.
Finding that enraged horseman setting his pony in motion again after a knee-grinding turn, kicking the pony savagely as he cried out in rage, swinging his fearsome weapon into the coming light of day … Bass held.
Held.
Held a little longer as he let the front blade rise while the Blackfoot lunged closer. Both warrior and pony wide-eyed, the man’s mouth a large black hole, that horse’s nostrils shooting jets of steam into the cold of the early-spring morning.
Held—
With a roar the rifle erupted.
The ball struck the Blackfoot with such force that it jerked the man back to the rear flanks of the pony, where he sat for a moment as if unfazed; then with the next bounce the body pitched on backward in a graceful somersault to land on its belly. Unmoving, as still as winter grass.
When Titus yanked at the knot on the pouch strap, the shooting bag dropped to his hip as he watched the bowman’s horse leap onto the bank no more than twenty yards away. Digging a hand into the bottom of the bag, he pulled out three balls, stuffing them into his mouth before he jammed the powder-horn stopper between his teeth and pulled it free.
With the horn’s narrow end against the muzzle, he poured some powder down the barrel as the warrior neared, swinging up his bow at the end of his outstretched arm.
Pressing his lips against the rifle’s muzzle, Bass spat a single ball down the barrel at the same moment he yanked the ramrod from its brass thimbles along the underside of the forestock.
No time to prime the son of a bitch.
Without any conscious thought, acting only on animal instinct, Scratch reversed the rifle, gripping both hands around the end of the barrel, starting its swing into the air as the bowman leaned off his pony, smacking that short elk-horn bow against the white man’s temple at the very moment Titus planted the rifle butt in the horseman’s belly.
Stunned into seeing hot, red stars, Scratch pitched to his knees—part of him yelling out to the rest … ordering him to move, to get off his knees, to forget the nausea and the shower of lights and get himself out of danger.
Stumbling up onto one knee, he wobbled to the side and fell over, his head in as much pain as the day he had been scalped by the Arapaho. Feeling as heavy as his trap-sack, Titus feared he wouldn’t get his head off the ground before the warrior got to his feet.
Less than twenty feet away the Blackfoot rolled to a stop against a clump of brush, lunged over onto his knees where he shook his head, then seemed to draw a sudden bead on the white man still stretched upon the frosty ground.
The moment the warrior started forward, the Indian drew a huge double-bladed knife from a long beaver-tailed scabbard at his hip.
Like a puff of winter breathsmoke suddenly gone with a gust of wind, Bass squeezed his eyes shut, then dragged them open reluctantly. Leaning onto his left knee and arm, he struggled to rise, reaching at the back of his belt for the camp ax.
Then remembered it was at water’s edge by his trap sack.
Tomahawk gone. And the knife scabbard empty.
He rose to his full height, wobbled shakily there on the balls of his feet, wondering how much longer his dizzy head would let him focus on the charging warrior, setting himself for the coming impact … his eyes transfixed on that huge, double-edged dagger clutched in the Blackfoot’s hand.
In that last moment Titus glanced at the painted face, the lower half completely black
from just below the eyes—that horizontal line disappearing back at both ears, this greasy black smeared over the chin and down the jawline in a ragged semicircle that arced from the bottom of one ear to the bottom of the other…. Then Titus tried hard to fix his wavering, watery eyes on the dagger as his knees buckled, going soft as freshly boiled Kentucky sour mash.
Likely what saved him.
So surprising the warrior that the Blackfoot stumbled, lunging forward with his left arm straightened before him—seizing the white man’s capote in that hand as Bass collapsed backward, yanking the Indian over him in an ungainly somersault.
By the time Titus had rolled onto his hip and rocked up to his feet, the warrior had braced himself on the ground and lashed out with a leg, whipping it against Bass’s ankles—knocking them out from under him. As Titus spilled onto his back, he watched the Blackfoot blotting out a piece of the sky as soon as the Indian leaped for him.
With both hands Scratch locked a grip around the brown wrist that clutched the handle of that huge dagger, its dark wood decorated with the tiny heads of more than a hundred brass nails. Which meant the warrior was free to squeeze down on the white man’s throat with his left hand.
For those next few heartbeats that Bass figured might be his last, he stared up at the contorted face just inches away—the eyes squinted and glaring into his there above that shelf of black war paint. As the warrior grunted, struggling to force the wide double-edged blade into his enemy with one hand, straining to crush the white man’s windpipe with the other—Titus smelled the dried meat on the Indian’s hot, stinking breath.
As much as he tried to breathe, he couldn’t drag any air past that claw closed around his throat. How his lungs began to burn while the black of night slowly seeped down across his eyes. Not much left of the strength needed to hold off that knife.
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