Crack in the Sky tb-3

by Terry C. Johnston

  There had to be more, Scratch knew—his finger itchy along the trigger. With Zeke’s roar the thieves had to expect the owner of the horses to be coming.

  But as Bass looked left and right he couldn’t spot any others. Perhaps only one had stolen in alone.

  Then in the midst of that growling and snapping Scratch suddenly realized the dog hadn’t pounced on a horse-thief at all. It was another four-legged. A predator. A goddamned wolf.

  “Zeke!” he roared as he bolted forward toward the contest. Remembering that dog fight Zeke was slowly losing in front of the waterfront tippling house back in St. Louis when Scratch stepped in and saved the animal’s life.

  The damned bone-headed dog didn’t know when he was getting the worst of a whipping.

  Three of the ponies whipped this way and that, kicking and snorting at the ends of their picket ropes where he had secured them. Dodging side to side Bass rushed into their midst, ready to club the wolf off Zeke when the battle-scarred dog tumbled toward him under the legs of a packhorse, fighting off two of them.

  Two goddamned wolves!

  At that moment Samantha set up a plaintive bawl, jerking him around as if he were tied to her by a strip of latigo.

  Again and again she thrashed her hind legs, flailing at a third wolf that slinked this way and that, attempting to get in close enough to hamstring her.

  He’d fought these damned critters before, big ones too, high in the mountains and on the prairies.

  Taking a step back as Samantha connected against her attacker with a small hoof, Scratch jammed the rifle against his shoulder, staring down the long, octagonal barrel to find the target. Then set the back trigger.

  As the predator clambered back to all fours and began to slink toward the mule once more, he shut both eyes and pulled the front trigger. With a roar the powder in the pan ignited and a blinding muzzle-flash jetted into the black of night.

  On opening his eyes, Titus heard the .54-caliber lead ball strike the wolf, saw it bowl the creature over.

  Whipping to his left the trapper up-ended the rifle, gripping the muzzle in both hands as he started for the mass of jaws and legs and yelps where Zeke was embroiled with two lanky-limbed wolves, getting the worst of it. Slinging the rifle over his shoulder and preparing to swing the buttstock at one of the dog’s attackers, a fragment of the starlit night tore itself loose and flickered into the side of his vision.

  Landing against Scratch with the force of its leap, a fourth wolf sank its teeth deep into the muscle at the top of his bare left arm. Struggling on the ground beneath the animal as it attempted to whip its head back and forth to tear meat from its prey, Bass yanked a pistol from his belt as the pain became more than he could bear—fearing he was about to lose consciousness at any moment.

  He fought for breath as he rammed the pistol’s muzzle against the attacker’s body and pulled the hammer back with his thumb, dragging back the trigger an instant later. The roar was muffled beneath the furry attacker’s body, nonetheless searing the man’s bare flesh with powderburns as the big round ball slammed through the wolf and blew a huge, fist-sized hole out the attacker’s back in a spray of blood.

  Pitching the empty pistol aside, Scratch pried at the jaws death-locked onto his torn shoulder, savagely tearing the wolf’s teeth from his flesh. He rolled onto his knees shakily, blood streaming down the left arm, finding Zeke struggling valiantly beneath his two attackers, clearly growing weary. Bass pulled the second pistol from his belt and clambered to his feet. Lunging closer he aimed at the two darker forms as they swarmed over their prey, praying he would not miss.

  The moment the bullet struck, the wolf yelped and rolled off the dog, all four of its legs galloping sidelong for a moment before they stilled in death. The last wolf remained resolutely twisted atop Zeke. The dog had one of the attacker’s legs imprisoned in his jaws but the wolf clamped down on Zeke’s throat, thrashing its head side to side in its brutal attempt to tear open its prey, assuring the kill.

  Rocking down onto his hands, Bass frantically searched the grass for the rifle knocked from his grip, tears of frustration stinging his eyes. By Jehoshaphat! That dog was a fighter to the end. He had known it from the start back there in St. Louis when Zeke hadn’t run out of fight, even when he was getting whipped—

  Scratch’s fingers found the rifle, dragged it into both hands as he leaped to his feet, swinging his arms overhead as he rushed forward, yelling a guttural, unintelligible sound that welled up from the pit of him as he lunged toward the wolf and dog.

  The cool air of that summer night fairly hissed as it was sliced with such force—driving the butt of his long fullstock Derringer flintlock rifle against the wolf’s backbone. The creature grunted and yelped, but did not relinquish its hold on Zeke. Yellow eyes glared primally at the man.

  “You goddamned sonuvabitch!” he roared as he flung the rifle overhead again.

  Driving it down into the attacker a second time, Bass forced the wolf to release its hold on Zeke. Now it staggered around to face the man on three legs, that fourth still imprisoned in the dog’s jaws. Then with a powerful snap the wolf seized Zeke’s nose in his teeth, clamping down for that moment it took to compel the dog to release the bloody leg.

  Whimpering, Zeke pulled free of this last attacker, freeing the wolf to whirl back around. It crouched, its head slung between its front shoulders, snarling at the man.

  Once more Scratch brought his rifle back behind his head, stretching that torn flesh in the left shoulder.

  He was already swinging the moment the wolf left the ground. The rifle collided with the predator less than an arm-span away. With a high-pitched yelp the wolf tumbled to the ground. Scratch was on him, slamming the rifle’s iron butt-plate down into the predator’s head again, then again.

  Remembering other thieves of the forest, he flushed with his hatred of their kind.

  Over and over he brought the rifle up and hurtled it down savagely. Finally stopping as he realized he had no idea how long he had been beating the beast’s head to pulp.

  “Zeke,” he whispered even before he turned.

  Staggering toward the dog, Bass knelt beside the big gray animal. Weakly the dog raised its head, whimpered a bit, then laid its bloody muzzle in Scratch’s hand. He quickly ran a hand over the animal’s throat, fingers finding warm, sticky blood clotting in the thick hair. Then he dragged his hand over much of the ribcage, the soft underbelly, finding no other wounds to speak of.

  “Can you get up, boy?” he asked in a hopeful whisper. “Can you?”

  Patting the dog on the head, Titus stood shakily himself. “C’mon now, you can get up, cain’t you?”

  God, how his heart ached—not wanting to lose this dog the way he had lost Hannah, the way he lost so many other good friends—the way he almost lost Josiah.

  “C’mon, boy,” he urged as if it were a desperate prayer.

  With a struggle Zeke dragged his legs under him, thrashed a bit, then lurched upward onto all four. The dog staggered forward a few steps as Bass crouched, welcoming the animal into his arms. Zeke collapsed again, panting, its breath shallow and ragged.

  “Good ol’ boy!” he cried louder now, his face wet with tears. “We got ’em didn’t we? Got ’em all!”

  He needed light to look over the dog’s wounds.

  Gazing east, he figured it was nowhere near getting time for dawn. They could light a fire and he could see to Zeke before packing up and setting out early. Be gone by the time anyone who had spotted their fire could get close.

  For several minutes he knelt there stroking the animal as it laid against him, its breath growing more regular. Then he remembered Waits. She would have heard the shots and could well be near out of her mind with fright by now.

  “We ought’n go back,” he whispered as he bent over, stabbing his arms under the big animal, pulling it against him as he staggered to his feet.

  Its fur was warm and damp against the one arm as he started back toward their she
lter in the dark, his bare feet feeling their way through the grass.

  She was standing there against the trees in front of their blankets, holding a rifle ready as he emerged from the gloom. With a tiny shriek she dropped the heavy weapon and dashed toward him, throwing her arms around his neck, clinging against Bass and the dog.

  “He is wounded?” she asked in Crow as she drew back, swiping tears away with both hands.

  “Yes, but I won’t know how bad until I get a fire going.”

  “Your daughter is sleeping,” she said as she began to turn. “I will start the fire. You stay with the dog.” “That sure as hell is one ugly critter of a dog!”

  From the way the speaker was smiling, Bass could easily see the man meant no harm by his critical judgment.

  “I take it you’re a man what knows his dogs?” Titus asked as he neared the bare-chested white trapper who had stepped out from the trees and willows that lined the south side of Ham’s Fork of the Green River where every shady, cloistered spot was littered with canvas tents, lean-tos, and bowers made of blankets and oiled sheeting.

  Awful quiet here for a rendezvous, Titus had been thinking ever since their tiny procession marched off the bluff and made their way into the gently meandering valley. But after all, it was the middle of a summer afternoon and a smart man laid out that hottest time of day.

  The stranger whistled to the dog and knelt. “He your’n?”

  Bass reined to a halt as Waits came up beside him. “Zeke’s his name.”

  Patting and scratching the big dog’s head, the man observed, “He been in a scrap of recent, ain’t he?”

  “Pertecting our camp from a pack of wolves.”

  The man cupped Zeke’s jaw in a hand and peered into the dog’s eyes. “Had me a dog not too different’n this’un back in the States when I was a growing lad.” Then he sighed. “Likely he’s gone under by now. Be real old if he ain’t.”

  “My name’s Bass. Titus Bass,” and Scratch held down his hand to the stranger.

  “You’re a free man I take it?” the stranger asked as they shook.

  “Trap on my own hook,” he replied.

  “Then you’re likely the Bass a feller was lookin’ for, asking if you’d come in when they arrived a week or so back.”

  His eyes warily squinted as he searched the nearby groves of trees and canvas. “Someone asking after me?”

  “Big feller, English-tongued he was—”

  “By damn, them Britishers here again this summer?”

  “They are for sure.”

  “Where’s their camp?”

  “Off yonder,” and he pointed. “My name’s Nels Dixon. Ride with Drips.”

  “He that booshway with American Fur?”

  Dixon threw a thumb, gesturing over his shoulder. “Him and Font’nelle. That’s us over there.”

  “Good to know you,” Bass replied. “Where the free men camped?”

  “Some here and some there. Rocky Mountain Fur settled in on upstream ’bout eight miles or so. Sublette come in with his goods to trade, with ’Nother feller too.” Then after he glanced quickly at the woman and the child she had lashed inside that Flathead cradleboard swinging from the tall pommel at the front of her saddle, Dixon asked, “How long you been out here to the mountains?”

  Scratch smiled. “Come out spring of twenty-five.”

  “Damn—you mean to tell me you was a Ashley man for that first ronnyvoo?”

  Wagging his head, Bass replied, “Didn’t see my first ronnyvoo till twenty-six. But I made ever’ one since.”

  “That makes nine of ’em, Bass.”

  Drawing himself up, Scratch sighed, “Time was, I didn’t figure I’d ever see near this many ronnyvooz, Dixon. S’pose it’s nigh onto time for us to make camp.”

  “That sure is a handsome woman,” the man declared backing one step to grab himself a last admiring look at Waits by the Water. “I take it she yours.”

  “My wife. Crow. They are a handsome people. We been together for more’n a year now,” then he nudged his heels into the buffalo runner’s ribs.

  “Handsome woman, Titus Bass,” Dixon repeated. “But, like I said, that sure is one ugly dog!”

  “Thankee kindly,” Scratch replied with a wide, brown-toothed grin. “Thankee on both counts!”

  As the infant suckled at her breast, Waits by the Water watched her husband call the dog over and have it lay beside him as he squatted at their small fire. She studied how the man scratched its torn ears, the scarred snout, that thick neck the wolf tried vainly to crush—seeing how gently her husband’s hands treated the big dog, recalling how his hands ignited a fire in her.

  Her husband loved his animals, the buffalo pony and mule, and now this dog too. Almost as much as she knew he loved her and their daughter.

  “Have you decided upon a name?” she asked.

  He stared at the flames awhile. The only sound besides the crackling of their fire were the shouts and laughter from down the valley where the many white men camped and celebrated. How the white man could celebrate!

  “No,” he finally admitted, not taking his eyes off the fire. “This is so important, I do not want to make a mistake.”

  “Who do you want to name her if you don’t?” she asked.

  Her husband turned to look at her. “Isn’t it the father who gives a name among your people?”

  “It is one of the father’s family.”

  Wagging his head, Bass peered back at the flames. “Besides the two of you, I don’t have any family out here. I might as well not have any family left back there anyway. So there is no one to name our daughter but me.”

  “Arapooesh calls you his brother.”

  Nodding, Bass replied, “Yes, Rotten Belly is like a brother.”

  “Perhaps he can help us when we return to my people for the winter, chil’ee, my husband.” She sighed and gently pulled her wet nipple from the babe’s slack mouth. Waits laid the sleeping infant beside her and pulled the corner of a blanket over the child.

  “I am anxious to see Rotten Belly,” Scratch admitted. “It will be two winters since we have talked and smoked together.”

  “A good man, my uncle is,” she said, scooting over to sit alongside him. “You have decided where we will go when we leave this place of many white men?”

  “We will ride north when we go. There are beaver still to trap in Absaroka. We can take our time and work slowly north through the mountains while the flat-tails put on their winter fur, then find Rotten Belly’s camp for the winter.”

  She grinned. “I will be going back to my people a married woman.”

  “And a mother,” he added, looping an arm over her shoulder and pulling her against him. “Mother of a beautiful daughter.”

  “You still think of me as beautiful too?”

  Staring her full in the face, his brow knitted with concern. “I don’t ever want you to feel anything less than beautiful—for you are all my sunrises and all my sunsets. The way the light strikes a high-country pool.”

  “You still think of me as your lover?” she asked, slipping her fingers beneath the flap of his breechclout to barely brush his manhood lying there under the layer of wool.

  Waits wanted him now. All too fleeting were their moments alone. How desperately she wanted to know that he still thought of her as a woman, that the fire between them had not diminished now that she had given birth to their daughter.

  “Feel what you are doing to that-which-rises,” he said with a groan of pleasure. “Then you tell me if I could ever forget you were the lover I’ve searched for all my life.”

  Strange how it made it hard to breathe each time she felt him stiffen beneath her touch, sensing how her heart started to gallop. Then too, she always felt a tensing, a teasing flutter, that heated warmth begin down below where she craved him so. Now she snaked her fingers beneath the breechclout and touched his flesh. Just stroking him like this made her grow ready for him.

  She nestled her head into t
he crook of his shoulder as his hand probed through the large, open sleeve of her dress and found her breast. He found her nipple hardened in anticipation.

  “How long are you going to do that?” he asked. “Do you want to feel me explode in your hand?”

  “No,” she answered and pulled her hand away from his quivering flesh, leaning back-so that she freed her breast from his hand.

  Onto her knees she rocked, bending over to yank aside his breechclout, there beside the firepit where she could gaze at the hardness of him. It made her wetter in anticipation as Waits by the Water seized both sides of her buckskin dress and yanked it up to her hips as she swiveled herself atop him on her knees. Taking that rigid flesh in one hand, she planted the head of him against her dampness as she guided his other hand back into the wide, loose sleeve of her dress where he could fondle her breast.

  He responded savagely, imprisoning that firm, milky mound so roughly that she would have cried out in pain had she not already grown accustomed to his all-consuming hunger, his passion when they coupled.

  Both of them groaned together as she eased down upon his shaft, descending far too slowly for him.

  Her husband suddenly thrust his hips upwards against her, seating himself inside her warmth with a feral grunt of pleasure before he began to sway beneath her.

  Interlacing her fingers behind his neck, she leaned back to the full length of her arms as he bent forward to bite at one of her breasts through the thin hide of her dress. How she loved to feel the rhythmic bouncing of her breasts as the two of them rocked together, locked as one.

  But of a sudden he pulled his head away from the breast and yanked at the dress, shoving up from her hips and over her breasts as she stretched her arms to the starlit sky where the fireflies of sparks rose beyond the tops of the cottonwood trees. First to one side then to the other they leaned, struggling to get her dress off her shoulders and over her head … until he held the rumpled mass in one hand, and tossed it toward their bedding.

  Again she locked her fingers behind his arms as he bent forward to lick at her nipples, first one, then the other. She knew he was lapping at the warm milk that she could sense oozing from them as she neared the peak of her passion. Inside her he was growing even bigger, ready to explode and fill her with his release. He told her how he loved to suckle at her breasts, just enough to taste the milk her body fed their daughter. In little more than a moon since the birth, she had come to know how passionate her husband grew as he nursed on her. How mad it made him as he drove him in and out of her with a rising fury.