Crack in the Sky tb-3

by Terry C. Johnston

  By the time he found himself at the southern end of the Wind Rivers, turning west to make for the far side of the Tetons, Titus had attracted a trio of troublesome coyotes who followed him whenever he left camp to see to his traps. For days now he’d been feeding them with beaver carcasses and the bones of the game he brought down. Then a few days back he awoke to find his packhorse down, eyes open wide, barely breathing. A dark, gummy blood had gushed from its anus. He knelt at the pony’s head, rubbing an ear. As much as he had wanted to mourn what its loss would mean, Titus knew there was nothing he could do to save the animal.

  Eventually he stood, pulling the pistol from his belt. “You’re likely et up inside with something terrible.”

  The only thing for him to do was finish the job nature herself had begun.

  What with all he fed them, the coyotes faithfully stayed with him. In fact, the trio had dogged his backtrail so relentlessly Titus thought it strange that they weren’t loping around his camp this morning, making a nuisance of themselves as he went about packing for the day’s journey.

  Maybeso he ought to put another three or four suns behind him before he looked for a likely stream to trap. Seemed like summer was here and he had miles to go before he would reach Pierre’s Hole. Best to put some more country behind him.

  Sensing time slipping away from him like riverbottom sands, Scratch hurried to lash a pair of packs behind his saddle so they rested on the horse’s flanks, then turned to hang all the rest from Hannah’s elk-antler packsaddle. From the look she gave him, the mule didn’t much like the idea of carrying most everything on her back.

  The early sun was already climbing off that red smear of horizon far to the east. Damn, but he was burning daylight.

  No sooner had Bass gathered up Hannah’s lead rope and crawled into the saddle than the mule set up a noisy bawl. She yanked the rope from his hand so swiftly Bass almost lost his rifle. And by the time he had swung out of the saddle and laid the long weapon on the ground, the mule was wildly pitching about in a ragged circle—dipping her nose almost to the ground as she threw her hind legs into the air, hee-rawwwing loud enough to wake the dead, or at least scare away every winged thing for miles around.

  When he dodged out of her way, then immediately dived in to grab hold of her bridle, Hannah swung her big head in his direction, batting him out of her way as she passed on over the trapper—one of her small hooves landing squarely on his left foot.

  “God-damn!” he screeched as he collapsed in pain, making almost as much noise as the mule while she bucked and jumped about the small meadow.

  Sweeping up his rifle to use as a crutch, Bass hobbled out of her way, muttering unearthly curses on all those dim-witted brutes created to trouble man. Collapsing at the side of the clearing, it took only minutes for him to cut the moccasin off the foot, finding it already bruised and swelling while the mule went right on acting as if she were possessed of the devil.

  He clambered clumsily to his feet, stumbling and hopping over toward the animal as she flung the loads on her back this way and that. If he didn’t know better, Titus guessed she was trying to get herself out from under all those heavy packs he had just fixed atop her. Seizing a hitch rope, he hung on with one hand as the other frantically grappled at the first knot. Up and down she jolted him along with her loosening burdens until he suddenly freed the last knot and everything exploded off the mule. Including him.

  In the midst of the scattered bundles of possibles and plews he sat up, dusting himself off.

  “There, now, you cussed animule. Let’s just simmer down some,” he coaxed gently as she slowed her wild jig, eyeing him constantly.

  Bass got to his feet, standing on that good leg with the rifle propped under an arm as he hobbled over to the mule.

  “You’re ol’ bag of bones, you are, gal. And you could sure put a man in a fine fix up here.”

  After stroking her muzzle, he patted his way down her side to find the ugly gash opened up along her spine. As if someone had worked a knife back and forth to get that jagged slash in her hide. And that’s when it struck him.

  Wheeling about on that one good foot, he stumbled back to the packs, went to his knees, and dug at that small bundle of his possibles until he found it.

  “Damned sure,” he grumbled, angry at himself for not packing any better in his haste to be on their way that morning—too much in a hurry to see that certain possessions were kept from shifting, from working themselves loose.

  Like the Blackfoot dagger he had taken off that red nigger weeks ago. Plain enough to see how it had been jostled enough that it spilled from its beaver-tail scabbard, then cut right through the waterproof sheeting, then on through the mountain-goat saddle pad until its point began to jab along Hannah’s backbone. And as soon as she started to buck against the pain, her wild thrashing only made the laceration worse as the blade slashed back and forth to make for an ugly wound.

  After pushing some moistened tobacco leaf into the wound and covering it with a patch of beaver fur, Scratch sensed a weary loneliness come over him. The new sun was only then beginning to climb high enough off the hills that its warming rays had just started to descend down the border of thick green timber ringing this tiny meadow.

  Maybe there would be time enough to put the miles behind him for the day after he had rested here a bit longer. He could chance to let some of that pain ooze out of Hannah’s wound, to rest his swollen foot … to close his eyes and dream on things that had been, to dream on what was to be.

  Before him danced images of those Crow women moving in and out of Bird in Ground’s lodge that cold winter day not long after Bass had arrived. Although the entire village was packed and ready to move on, a large crowd gathered around this solitary lodge still standing. Emerging from the doorway a handful of old women brought out the dead man’s possessions and gave them away, one by one by one until most all of Rotten Belly’s people had received a little something that had once belonged to the warrior who had lived many years with his powerful man-woman medicine.

  And once the lodge was stripped of all that could be given away, an old, bent woman took up a burning brand from a nearby fire, and as others keened and wailed, she set the lodge hides aflame. Slowly turning aside, the people went to their horses and travois, setting off to the south for a new winter campsite.

  While a black, greasy spiral rose from what had once been his friend’s home.

  Friends. And home.

  Where he found friends, Titus Bass had always found a home.

  White faces swam before him now as those copperskins of the Crow faded from view. Come rendezvous he would reunite with old friends, make him some new ones … and drink that annual toast to the missing few who failed to come in.

  Recalling in that early-morning reverie how he had vowed to hoist a drink to Asa McAfferty’s memory—

  Through a sudden narrow crack that opened in his reverie, Scratch listened as the magpie took flight over him, cawing noisily in alarm.

  He did not move, peering through squinted eyes, listening to every sound, testing every smell the breeze brought to him.

  Nearby Hannah lifted her muzzle into the air.

  Were it a Injun—she’d be raising a ruckus.

  Could it really be a white man she’d winded?

  The old man squinted and barely made out the felt hat sitting motionless now behind some low brush across the clearing.

  Damn—but he hadn’t seen a white face in longer’n he ever cared to go again.

  Sudden hope fluttered in his chest like the rush of a thousand pairs of wings—raising his own spirit as high as that seamless blue belt stretched far above him, higher than his spirit had been in a long … long time.

  A white man.

  He figured there were answers come to the most private of prayers.

  “I heard you, nigger!” Titus hollered. “Might’n come out now!”

  Reluctantly, the felt hat rose, with the hairy face of a young man appearing beneat
h its wide brim, frightened eyes about as big as the quilled rosettes on Scratch’s leather shirt.

  Titus looked up and down the intruder’s frame. The bearded stranger already wore his hair hung long over his collar. Maybeso this feller’d been out here some time already.

  But he was still wearing store-bought woolen clothes—mussed and dirty to be sure, torn and ripped in places. And it was plain to see that his leather belt was notched up tight around a waist surely much skinnier than it had once been.

  And suddenly Titus Bass remembered that he too had been this young of a time long ago, come to these far and terrible mountains when he had been so damned ignorant that he wouldn’t have lasted ’less someone took him under a wing.

  His eyes misting with the heartfelt swell of inexplicable joy, Scratch’s voice croaked when now he used it.

  “C’mon over here. Lemme take a look at you.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TERRY C. JOHNSTONwas born in 1947 on the plains of Kansas and has lived a varied life as a roustabout, history teacher, printer, paramedic, dog catcher, and car salesman, all the while immersing himself in the history of the early West. His first novel, Carry the Wind, won the Medicine Pipe Bearer’s Award from the Western Writers of America, and his subsequent books, among them Cry of the Hawk, Winter Rain, BorderLords, and the Son of the Plains trilogy, have appeared on bestseller lists throughout the country. Terry C. Johnston lives and writes in Big Sky country near Billings, Montana.

  A Special Preview of

  RIDE THE MOON DOWN

  Here is the eagerly awaited sequel to Terry C. Johnston’s bestselling frontier trilogy, Carry the Wind, BorderLords, and One-Eyed Dream, as readers watch the mountain man Titus Bass continue his heart-wrenching journey through the perils of the Wild West.

  Ride the Moon Down is another triumph of the master of frontier fiction, Terry C. Johnston, who brings to life once more vivid slices of America’s history.

  Turn the page for a special preview of the opening chapter of this fascinating novel.

  The baby stirred between them.

  She eventually fussed enough to bring Bass fully awake, suddenly, sweating beneath the blankets.

  Without opening her eyes, the child’s mother groggily drew the infant against her breast and suckled the babe back to sleep.

  Titus kicked the heavy wool horse blanket off his legs, hearing one of the horses nicker. Not sure which one of the four it was, the trapper sat up quiet as coal cotton, letting the blanket slip from his bare arms as he dragged the rifle from between his knees.

  Somewhere close, out there in the dark, he heard the low warning rumble past the old dog’s throat. Bass hissed—immediately silencing Zeke.

  Several moments slipped by before he heard another sound from their animals. But for the quiet breathing of mother and the ngg-ngg suckling of their daughter, the summer night lay all but silent around their camp at the base of a low ridge.

  Straining to see the unseeable, Bass glanced overhead to search for the moon in that wide canopy stretching across the treetops. Moonset already come and gone. Nothing left but some puny starshine. As he blinked a third time, his groggy brain finally remembered that his vision wasn’t what it had been. For weeks now that milky cloud covering his left eye was forcing his right to work all the harder.

  Then his nose suddenly captured something new on the nightwind. A smell musky and feral—an odor not all that familiar, just foreign enough that he strained his recollections to put a finger on it.

  Then off to the side of camp his ears heard the padding of the dog’s big feet as Zeke moved stealthily through the stands of aspen that nearly surrounded this tiny pocket in the foothills he had found for them late yesterday afternoon.

  And from farther in the darkness came another low, menacing growl—

  Titus practically jumped out of his skin when she touched him, laying her fingers against his bare arm. He turned to peer back, swallowing hard, that lone eye finding Waits by the Water in what dim light seeped over them there beneath the big square of oiled Russian sheeting he had lashed between the trees should the summer sky decide to rain on them through the night.

  He could hear Zeke moving again, not near so quietly this time, angling farther out from camp.

  Bass laid a long finger against her lips, hoping it would tell her enough. Waits nodded slightly and kissed the finger just before he pulled it away and rocked forward onto his knees, slowly standing. Smelling. Listening.

  Sure enough the old dog was in motion, growling off to his right—not where he had heard Zeke a moment before. Yonder, toward the horses at the edge of the gently sloping meadow.

  Had someone, red or white, stumbled upon them camped here? he wondered as he took a first barefooted step, then listened some more. Snake country, this was—them Shoshone—though Crow were known to plunge this far south, Arapaho push in too. Had some hunting party found their tracks and followed them here against the bluff?

  Every night of their journey north from Taos Bass had damn well exercised caution. They would stop late in the lengthening afternoons and water their horses, then let them graze a bit while he gathered wood for a small fire he always built directly beneath the wide overhang of some branches to disperse the smoke. Waits nursed the baby and when her tummy was full Bass’s Crow wife passed the child to him. If his daughter was awake after her supper, the trapper cuddled the babe across his arm or bounced her gently in his lap while Waits cooked their supper. But most evenings the tiny one fell asleep as the warm milk filled her tummy.

  So the man sat quietly with the child sleeping against him, watching his wife kneel at the fire, listening to the twilight advancing upon them, his nostrils taking in the feral innocence of this land carried on every breeze. With all the scars, the slashes of knife, those pucker holes from bullets and iron-tipped arrows too, with the frequent visits of pain on his old joints and the dim sight left him in that one eye … even with all those infirmities, this trapper fondly named Scratch nonetheless believed Dame Fortune had embraced him more times than she had shunned him.

  Every morning for the past twenty-five days they loaded up their two packhorses and the new mule he had come to call Samantha, dividing up what furs Josiah Paddock had refused to take for himself, what necessaries of coffee, sugar, powder, lead, and foofaraw he figured the three of them would need, what with leaving Taos behind for the high country once more. By the reckoning of most, he hadn’t taken much. A few beaver plews to trade with Sublette at the coming rendezvous on Ham’s Fork where he would buy a few girlews and geegaws to pack off to Rotten Belly up in Absaroka, Crow country. When Bass returned Waits by the Water to the land of her people for the coming winter.

  Josiah. Each time he thought on the one who had been his young partner, thought too on that ex-slave Esau they had stumbled across out in Pawnee country,* on the others he left behind in the Mexican settlements … it brought a hard lump to Scratch’s throat.

  For those first few days after bidding them that difficult farewell, Titus would look down their back-trail, fully expecting to find one or more of them hurrying to catch up, to again try convincing him to remain where it was safe, maybe even to announce that they were throwing in with him once more. After some two weeks he eventually put aside such notions, realizing he and Josiah had truly had their time together as the best of friends, realizing too that their time lay in the past.

  Time now for a man to ride into the rest of his tomorrows with his family.

  One of the ponies snorted in that language he recognized as nervousness edging into fear. Whoever it was no longer was staying downwind of the critters.

  Kneeling, Bass swept up one of the pistols from where he laid them when he settled down to sleep. After stuffing it in the belt that held up his leggings and breechclout, Scratch scooped up a second pistol and poked it beneath the belt with the first.

  Gazing down at the look of apprehension on the woman’s face, he whispered in Crow, “Our daughter needs
a name.”

  He stood before Waits could utter a reply and pushed into the dark.

  The babe needed a name. For weeks now his wife said it was for the girl’s father to decide. Never before could he remember being given so grave a task—this naming of another. A responsibility so important not only to the Crow people, but important to him as well. The proper name would set a tone for her life, put the child’s feet on a certain path like no other name could. Now that his daughter was almost a month old, he suddenly realized he could no longer put this matter aside, dealing each day with other affairs, his mind grown all the more wary and watchful now that there were these two women to think of, to care for, to protect.

  More than his own hide to look after, there were others counting on him.

  No one was going to slink on in and drive off their horses—

  Suddenly Zeke emitted more than a low rumble. Now it became an ominous growl.

  One of the ponies began to snort, another whinnying of a sudden. And he could hear their hooves slam the earth.

  Where was that goddamned dog? Zeke was bound to get himself hurt or killed mixing with them what had come to steal their horses. In his gut it felt good, real good, to know that he wasn’t going into this alone. The dog was there with him. Bass quickened his pace.

  As that strong, feral odor struck him full in the face Scratch stepped close enough to the far side of the meadow to see their shadows rearing. The struggling ponies were frightened, crying out, straining at the end of their picket-pins right where he had tied them to graze their full until morning.

  He stopped, half-crouching, searching the dark for the intruders, those horse-thieves come to run off with his stock—

  A dim yellow-gray blur burst from the treeline. His teeth bared, Zeke pounced, colliding noisily with one of the thieves just beyond the ponies.