Crack in the Sky

by Terry C. Johnston

  “No, Thomas!” Jack replied. “They’re prayin’ ye’ll just stay away from ’em with that li’l willer switch of yer’n when a real man like me carries round a oak stump in his britches!”

  “I swear, Mad Jack Hatcher—you go spreadin’ talk like that, why—I’ll sit down right here, unbuckle my wood leg, and take after you with it! Whup you like a poor man’s field hand—whup you about the head and shoulders!”

  “Ye take yer peg off, Smith—ye’ll never stand no chance of catchin’ a sprightly fella like me!”

  “I can move when I wanna,” Peg-Leg argued, then smiled hugely in that flushed face. “In the robes an’ out!”

  Fish roared, “Ain’t no way you’re ever gonna catch a squaw, Tom—less’n she wants to be catched.”

  “’Nough of ’em still want me to catch ’em!” Smith gasped, his face red with easy laughter. He held out the peg and bent his good leg, collapsing again to the grass, where he rolled onto his back to thrash around, screaming as if in a fit, “Oh, me—I’m dyin’ o’ thirst, boys! Hoo-yoo! I’m dyin’ o’ thirst! Rum me quick! Rum me!”

  Hatcher scissored his legs so he stood directly over the man, his fiddle and bow tucked beneath his left arm, peering down as somber as a settlement undertaker. “Maybeso ye ought’n dig poor Tom his grave, fellers. He’s sure to die of thirst, don’cha see?”

  With a small whimper Smith asked, “W-why, Jack?”

  “We ain’t got us nary a drop of likker left in our camp!”

  Smith bolted upright like he’d been gut-shot, his eyes gone wide. “You ain’t g-got no more l-likker in camp?”

  “Mad Jack said it true!” Caleb declared.

  His eyes glaring in anger mixed with disappointment, Smith sputtered, “T-then what the hell are you f-fellers so gay about?”

  Solomon Fish waved an arm toward the mountains, explaining, “Tomorrow we’re off for the high country and our autumn hunt!”

  “That’s all?”

  Hatcher nodded. “That’s all I need to make me happy.”

  “Where you going this year, Jack?” Smith prodded, and he relaxed back on an elbow.

  Jack chuckled. “We ain’t none of us tellin’.”

  “Awww, c’mon now,” Peg-Leg pleaded. “Don’t reckon to foller you anyways—”

  “I can’t be sartin of that,” Hatcher grumped.

  “You know I’m headed to Californy, Jack.”

  Isaac Simms inquired, “What’s way yonder in Californy, Peg-Leg?”

  “Dark-skinned womens.”

  “Hell, child,” Elbridge argued, “they got dark-skinned women where we’re headed to winter up in Taos.”

  Gazing at the sky, Smith got a wistful look in his eyes as he said, “Not like the dark-skinned womens I heard tell of live out to Californy.”

  “Ain’t they Mexicans just like the folks down to Taos and Santy Fee?” asked John Rowland.

  Wagging his head, Smith said, “No, sir. Them down that way just be poor Injun and greaser half-breeds.”

  “So tells us what sort of dark-skinned women they got in California,” Hatcher demanded.

  “Womens there got royal Span-yard blood in ’em.”

  Rufus said, “That so?”

  Peg-Leg nodded. “The truth of it. And I hear them gals is looking to show a good time to any American rides their way.”

  Jack roared, “Hell, the womenfolk down to Taos show an American a mighty fine time, Tom!”

  “You boys go and winter up to Taos now,” Smith advised. “As for me and my band—we’re headed for Californy to see just how hot them high-toned Span-yard gals can get when a outfit of real men come riding into their country!”

  “Hell, the real men will be riding into Taos come this winter!” Hatcher roared as he propped the fiddle under his chin.

  “Real men?” Smith asked, cocking his head to the side and grinning as he looked around him at each of Jack’s trappers. “Real men would’ve saved a last drink for their old friend, Peg-Leg Smith! Afore we all hit the trail!”

  “Har!” Jack snorted. “Any man claims he has a real wood peg for a cock wouldn’t come beggin’ in my camp for no last drink!”

  His face turning sad and downcast, Smith puffed out his lower lip and moped, “Looks like you found me out, boys! I ain’t got no hardwood cock that will pleasure a gal all night long.” Then immediately he grinned as he began to boast, “But this here’s one child what can still outride, outshoot, outbeller, and outthump the lot of you weak sisters! Mark my words, fellers—there’s comin’ a time when all the fun will be gone in these here mountains. And on the day you sorry niggers come dragging your sorry asses into Californy—don’t ’spect Thomas L. Smith, the king of Californy, to be waiting there with open arms for any of you!”

  “You gonna own all of Californy?” John Rowland asked.

  He turned on Rowland, one finger jabbing at the sky. “I damn well will own it, child! When the Mexicans have everything south of the Arkansas, when Sublette’s company rules the Rockies and American Fur owns the Missouri, ’cause Hudson’s Bay lays its claim to everything else west of here … then all that’s left for likely fellers like me to do is plant my stake out to Californy, where the pickin’s is good.”

  “But the price of beaver ain’t fallin’, Tom,” Hatcher argued.

  “I see more niggers coming out here every year,” Smith replied in a quiet, grave tone. “Every summer they bring more trappers into these here mountains. One day they’ll bring a train of wagons. Then they’ll bring out white womens! And you boys know what comes next, don’cha?”

  Isaac asked, “What, Tom? What comes next?”

  “Everywhere white womens go, they build churches an’ towns, stores an’ schools! They bring in the constables an’ the lawyers—all of ’em telling men like us, ‘You cain’t do this! You cain’t do that!’”

  “Too damn much room out here for to worry ’bout any of that,” Titus finally spoke his piece.

  Smith turned to regard the stranger he did not know. “Maybeso, mister. Maybeso. But I do know there’s a passel of folks back east—likely enough to fill up all of this out here if’n the first ones come out and spread the word.”

  “I figger a man can just keep moving ahead of ’em,” Scratch observed.

  He hobbled toward Bass unsteadily, his eyes squinting in the bright summer light. “S-stay ahead of ’em, you said?”

  Bass nodded. “Yep. Stay out front of all them what come west to raise their houses and towns.”

  With a wag of his head Smith said, “What kind of life is that gonna be for niggers like us, boys? What good is life for a man just to be pushed on ahead of the crowds … knowing them settlement folks is ruining everything we left behind when we moved on?”

  “Maybeso a man don’t have to turn around and see what they’re doing to what he’s left behind,” Bass protested.

  “No,” Smith said quietly. “No, he don’t. Just like he don’t have to cry when he loses a good friend neither. A man just don’t have to give a damn when them farmers and white womens and towns come out here and ruin all this for the likes of us.”

  “So that’s the reason ye’re haulin’ yer plunder to California, is it?” Hatcher asked.

  “For the life of me, I don’t think I can bear to watch this country get ruin’t, Jack. I’ll go on to Californy, where there ain’t too many greasers, where I can steal some horses and trap me some beaver too.”

  “Can’t make me believe it,” Titus said solemnly. “Look around you. There’s too damn much room out here for all this ever to get ruin’t on us.”

  Smith wagged his head, a great sadness come into his eyes. “The folks are comin’, boys. They always have … an’ I guess they damn well always will.”

  How long did they have? Scratch wondered.

  He raised his eyes to gaze at the late summer blue and wondered, How long would it be before numberless columns of smoke would smudge the skyline the way it had in St. Louis? How long before the dust o
f wagon wheels and plowshares and thousands of feet and hooves would clog up a man’s nose and make it hard for him to breathe normal?

  How long before what he had found out here was no more, and he had to climb higher and higher, up from these rolling prairies and plains, to escape those who always came in the wake of the first to open a land. Smith was right about that. They always came.

  They always would.

  The longhunters had pushed over the Cumberland, down into the canebrakes when the stalks stood twice as tall as a man, when the game was plentiful and the buffalo still haunted the eastern timber. But in the wake of those lonely individuals came men with their families following the same narrow footpaths and game trails into the virgin forests until they came to a meadow, a grove of trees by a stream—a place where those men and their women decided to set down their roots then and there. They built cabins and turned the soil, planted their seeds and fought off the Indians there beyond the edge of the frontier.

  And eventually they watched others come, leapfrogging over them to inch back the dangerous edge of that frontier a few miles, a few more days farther to the west. Season by season, year by year, farm by farm. They had always come.

  And there was no reason for Titus to believe that they wouldn’t always continue to come.

  On his way west Scratch had seen them with their toes dug in, clinging fast to the country along the Missouri River. Settlers and widows, families and farms. Merchants and towns. How far would they push before they ran up against the buffalo country? And what then?

  That land wasn’t fit for farming, he convinced himself, hopeful. That soil wasn’t rich and black like the ground he had turned over with a plow back in Kentucky. The domain of the buffalo was nothing more than poor grassland, not at all fit for raising corn or tobacco, hemp or squash or potatoes. The settlers who came to raise crops would eventually discover that they couldn’t grow anything in that ground and would therein refuse to venture farther.

  So men like Tom Smith were wrong, Bass told himself.

  Farmers would not dare probe very far beyond the hardwood forests. Surely the buffalo ground would serve as a buffer, as a no-man’s-land where the great plains blanketed by those shaggy beasts would forever protect these high prairies and tall mountains from the masses of humanity he had seen streaming across the Mississippi on their ferries, rumbling right on through the byways of St. Louis, hurrying their wagons west.

  It just wouldn’t happen here.

  This simply wasn’t a quiet, closed-in country like that back east of the river. This land was too damned wild, too open and unruly ever to be tamed the way that country had been. Like a horse broke to saddle or a mule to plow, like a man broke to marriage … that was the kind of country folks could tame.

  Not this. Not here and surely not now.

  This was a land no man could tame, and these were men every bit as tough to break to harness.

  “We got visitors,” Fish announced just loud enough that the others could hear.

  He didn’t point, but the others just naturally looked left to Solomon’s side of their march. Up the far side of a gentle slope Bass caught sight of them. He had been so wrapped up in lazily musing in the hot afternoon sun that he might well have been asleep on horseback.

  “How many ye make it?” Hatcher asked.

  “Maybe a dozen,” Fish replied. “But you can bet there’s more we don’t see.”

  “That’s for sartin,” Caleb warned.

  “Maybeso they’re just watching,” Kinkead said, faint hope in his voice.

  “For now anyway,” Jack stated. “They’ll keep their eye on us and figger a place to make their play. If not today, then tomorrow.”

  “What are they?” Titus asked.

  For a moment they all looked at the horsemen sitting passively at the skyline atop their ponies, just far enough away that a rifle shot would not reach them, close enough to see the long, unbound hair lifting in the hot wind, some feathers and scalp locks fluttering beneath the chins of the horses.

  “Bannawks,” Jack declared.

  “Likely so,” Elbridge Gray agreed.

  “This here’s Bannawk country,” Rufus Graham put in his vote.

  “They good to Americans, like the Flathead?” Scratch asked. “Or they devilsome, like Blackfoot?”

  “Man can’t allays callate that,” Hatcher explained. “But more times’n not, Bannawks don’t mind running off yer horses, taking yer plunder, and raising yer hair if ye give ’em a chance.”

  Wood said, “You ask me, they ain’t to be trusted.”

  “Bannawks ain’t as brave as Blackfoot,” Hatcher explained, “and they ain’t as sneaky as Crow. But this bunch is likely to make a run at us sooner’n later.”

  “Two of ’em just turned off back of the hill,” Graham declared.

  The rest of the horsemen continued to watch as the party of white trappers and their remuda of pack animals pushed on by, plodding slowly up and down the low swales in the rumpled bedsheet of this land baking under a late-summer sun. It raised the tiny hairs on the back of Scratch’s neck just to look up at those motionless statues … until as one the warriors reined their ponies to the right and disappeared from the skyline.

  Dusk would arrive all too soon.

  “We better be looking for a place to make camp and fort up,” Kinkead declared.

  “We’ll find something ahead,” Hatcher said. “Keep yer eyes peeled for water.”

  That was most important in something like this. No one had to explain that fact of life and death to these men. In seeking out a place to camp most nights on their journey south from Sweet Lake, they looked for a spot that promised wood and water and some open ground all round, not only for grazing their animals until dark when they would be brought in close, but open ground any enemy would be forced to cross in pressing their attack, making themselves good targets in the bargain.

  A couple hours later as the sun was sinking toward the low range of western hills, they discovered a narrow stream issuing from a ravine where a small spring bubbled up from a green and grassy haven of thick brush and saplings.

  “Likely this is the best we’re gonna find,” Hatcher stated after he had halted them and dismounted alone to explore the ground nearby. “Let the animals drink, then graze ’em close in. Hobble every one, and tie ’em up two by two.”

  “You ’spectin’ trouble tonight?” Rowland asked.

  “I figger they’ll make a run at our horses, first whack,” Hatcher replied. “With Injuns, the horses always come first. Whether they try for us and our plunder tonight, or wait till tomorrow morning, I’ll wager they try to run off the animals right after dark.”

  Without a word the other eight swung down off their ponies and went about their business. Some stepped off a ways to relieve themselves, others squatted up and down on sore, trail-worn knees, loosening up kinks and cramps. No man had to ask what needed doing. Each of them had been through this sort of preparation before. And they all knew their mutual safety depended upon the weakest link in their chain being ready to protect the rest of the group with his life.

  As it had turned out, Hatcher’s band was the last to abandon the Sweet Lake rendezvous site. They watched one company brigade head north, the other turn east, while small outfits of free trappers drifted off to the four winds. Every group had its own particular medicine to try for the fall hunt. A few of the bands had even paid for a private session with a Flathead shaman camped near rendezvous, in hopes of ascertaining a likely spot to find a rich lode of the flat-tailed rodents that were the currency of these mountains.

  While the white men waited patiently, the dark-skinned diviner burned his smudge of sweetgrass, smoked his pipe, consulted his special buffalo bones tossed onto a piece of rawhide, or even peered into the gutted carcass of a badger or porcupine or rock gopher the trappers had brought in for just that purpose. There in the blood pooled at the bottom of the creature’s cavity the old man could fathom the best course for the w
hite men to take, just as folks back east might pay to have their futures foretold by an all-wise soothsayer reading the pattern of damp tea leaves whorled at the bottom of a china cup.

  So off the many groups had journeyed in just as many directions, by and large keeping their destinations to themselves, disclosing no more in their leave-taking than that fearless call, “Meet you on the Popo Agie!”

  A fall, a winter, and then a spring but to come before then.

  Another year of travel, trapping, and hanging on to one’s scalp before another rendezvous would bring them all together.

  Hatcher’s outfit had tramped almost due south for several days before they struck the Bear River and from there headed east on a climb around the southern end of a range of low mountains, finally dropping over the hogback into an arid bottomland where they began to angle to the southeast. Striking the Green, and crossing to its east bank, they plodded south along the river’s path, stopping only to rest through the short summer nights, again to eat and graze the animals briefly at midday.

  With the high green country beckoning to them, pulling them onward, Hatcher’s men kept their noses pointed toward the west slope of the Central Rockies. South of the Uinta Mountains they finally left the Green behind, and upon striking the ancient Strawberry-Duchesne Indian trail, the trappers turned directly east as the ground began to rise below them.

  In that great basin lying at the western foot of the White River Plateau, the Bannock had found them.

  Scratch sat in the tall grass, some drying clumps of brush right against his back—all but hidden from any intruders until that enemy would be on top of him. He had volunteered to wait here, some distance out from their camp as the sun disappeared and the light began to fade. When the raiders came for the horses, they would have to pass right by him. Then he would be at the enemy’s back—alone when the shooting started.

  The worst that could happen, Titus figured, was that he would have to grab up a horse and race back to camp if things got tight.

  As the air began to cool, the deerflies began to rise, buzzing and droning through the tall grass—seeking some fleshy creature to bite and bleed. As much of the springwater as he had swallowed upon reaching the spring, he found himself thirsty now, still parched from their long, dusty day. From his pouch he pulled a twist of dark tobacco leaf, cutting from it a small knot about the size of the end of his thumb. Just enough to stimulate his salivation. Stuffing it inside his mouth, Titus returned the twist to the pouch, then suddenly slapped his right cheek.