Crack in the Sky

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Sumbitch!” Jack grumbled, the bags under his eyes going liver-colored with frustration. “Caleb Wood! Get me my pouch yonder.”

  When the shooting bag was laid on the ground next to Scratch, Hatcher began digging through it all the way to the bottom as Bass raggedly caught his breath while the sharp pain slowly subsided. He watched Hatcher drag a short ball starter out of the pouch.

  “Roll him on his right side, fellas,” Hatcher said, of a sudden his voice much calmer than it had been since this operation had begun.

  While they gently rolled him onto his right hip, Titus stared at that ball starter: a short six-inch length of hickory ramrod embedded in a small hardwood ball that fit comfortably in a man’s palm.

  “Wha—what you gonna do now with that?”

  “I can’t pull that arrow outta ye,” Jack explained, holding the starter in the light, “so I figger to hammer it out.”

  “H-h-hammer?” Titus squeaked.

  “Hold him down,” Hatcher said, refusing to answer the question. “This is gonna hurt him, bad.”

  As much as he tried to keep his muscles relaxed, Scratch felt them tense as Hatcher set the brass-tipped end of that short ramrod into the hole on the front of his leg. He didn’t like the idea of what he knew was about to happen, watching Hatcher take his knife from its sheath, grip the blade, and prepare to swing the weapon’s handle at the round ball. He figured Hatcher was right about this, if nothing else: it was gonna hurt.

  The last thing Bass remembered was hearing the antler knife handle whack hollow against the hickory ball … then sensed his stomach rise, twisting itself into a fiery knot that hurled against his tonsils before he lost all sensation, the searing red flames of pain mercifully dissipating in a cool blue rush of blessed unconsciousness.

  Slipping down, down—scolding himself for ever having thought the pain was going to be unbearable, that it was going to be so bad he’d wet himself there in front of his friends … because right where he was at that moment, Scratch didn’t feel a goddamned thing.

  It wasn’t until the following morning that he learned how the others had hoisted him up on the back of a horse behind the muscular Matthew Kinkead, then tied the two of them together before setting off in the dark, riding south and east at a good clip toward the foothills lying tangled at the base of the western slope of the Rockies.

  The sun had felt good that morning, despite the fever he was running. Its touch was warm and reassuring there on the back of his neck as he awoke slowly, bouncing gently against Kinkead’s broad shoulders, gradually sensing the rub of the thick hemp rope wound across his ribs and back, slowly realizing what they had done because he didn’t have the strength to cling to the back of a horse by himself, much less hang on to consciousness during their perilous starlit ride.

  “Seen any sign of ’em?” he whispered in a hoarse croak that sunup, his words mumbled against Matthew’s back.

  “Nothin’,” Kinkead replied wearily.

  That one word was spoken loud enough to alert the others that Bass had come to.

  Hatcher eased his horse up on the off-hand side, the direction Bass faced with his cheek rubbing Matthew’s shoulder blade. “Mornin’ to ye, ol’ coon!”

  “Wh-where we …” Then realized his mouth was terribly dry.

  “Where we headed?” Jack finished. “To Bayou Salade, Scratch. Right where we been heading since we pulled away from Sweet Lake ronnyvoo.”

  “Mornin’, glory!” Caleb came up on Jack’s off side, smiling hugely as he leaned forward so Bass could see him. “How’s he doin’, Jack?”

  “Don’t look to be bleedin’ no more,” Hatcher said. “’Bout all I know is the nigger’s awake and thirsty as the burning pits of hell itself. Let’s see if’n we can find us a cool drink for him up ahead at that line of green, yonder.”

  “Likely a crik there,” Wood said, urging his horse into a lope so he could take the lead.

  “This time of year,” Kinkead declared, “I hope it ain’t a crik what’s dried up already.”

  “Nawww,” Jack said, his eyes smiling at Bass’s pasty face, “there’s bound to be water for this here arrow catcher. Even if we have to scratch for it.”

  What there was had been a trickle. Still, enough for the men to water the animals downstream after they untied Bass and eased him down into a patch of shade among the trees where the buzz and drone of summer’s insects accompanied the rustle of the leaves brushed by an intermittent breeze. They brought him the cool water a cup at a time. No matter that it was a little gritty, what with flowing so close over the sandy bottom of the creekbed—it tasted better than he could remember water tasting on his tongue in a long time. They bathed his face and neck, washed off some of the dried blood around the crusty strip of cloth binding up his wounds, and some of the men dozed as the sun rose.

  After a couple hours of fitful sleep, Scratch awoke to hear Hatcher rustling the men into motion. They had been off the trail long enough, he told them. They’d get a chance to sleep more that night if they put a few more miles, a few more hours, behind them.

  Back onto the horse went Kinkead. Up they hoisted Scratch again, two of them, a third cradling the leg as gently as he could, raising him to his rocking chair behind the saddle, where they retied him to Matthew; then all went to their horses and drove the pack animals away from that narrow little stream.

  Not until sundown did Hatcher select a secure place for a cold camp. No fire that night—but not one of them grumbled. They were either too tired to complain, or they damn well understood the stupidity of lighting a beacon that might well call down a reinforced Bannock raiding party on them again. That night Bass grew cold not long after moonrise.

  “We’re climbing a bit,” Solomon Fish explained as he knelt and laid another blanket over Titus. “Natural for you to get yourself a chill.”

  They kept on climbing the next morning, and for every day across the next two weeks as they tramped through the long hours of sunlight, winding into the high country. From time to time one of the group would point out a recognized landmark to the others. By the fourth day after the scrap with the Bannock, Scratch was staying awake longer as he rocked against Kinkead’s back. And by the end of that first week, he was finally able to move about on the leg, finding he could stuff his left foot into a stirrup and hoist himself onto the back of his horse without the muscles in that leg crumpling, collapsing, spilling him onto the ground.

  This matter of getting himself forked astride a horse was something a mountain trapper quickly learned was an affair of life or death. To ride was not a luxury, not some mere convenience. Having an animal and the ability to ride meant survival. To be without a horse, or to find that one could not stay in the saddle, might well be a death sentence.

  So again, from somewhere deep inside this determined man, came the strength and dogged resolve to mend himself. Mule-headed stubbornness even more than pride drove Titus to test the leg, to swallow down the pain and push beyond what he had known before as his limits of endurance. At each night’s camp Bass found himself almost too weary to eat as the fire was kindled and meat set to broil at the end of long green sticks driven into the earth around the fire. The ride, that work it took pushing up into the high country, picking a trail along the mountainsides, up and down, then up and down again—it all took its toll day after day. At night he slept so soundly, he rarely rolled over, slept until someone nudged him with a toe, announcing it was time to water the stock, pack, and move out again.

  “How far now to this Salade of your’n?” he asked Hatcher of a morning when they were both throwing bundles onto the sawbucks strapped onto the backs of their pack animals.

  “Ain’t far now.”

  “Take a guess for me.”

  “Don’t know for sure,” Jack replied, his eyes back to being merry sparkles of green light. “Can’t say. Soon, though.”

  By that time they had climbed east into the heart of the southern Rockies, following the tortuous path of a wind
ing river ever higher as the late summer days continued to shorten by a matter of heartbeats every evening, the air cooling more quickly at twilight, the streams and freshets colder than they had been since spring, fed by those snowfields suspended just overhead above timberline where the marmots squeaked and the golden eagles drifted upon the warm updrafts, searching for another meal.

  Up, up as the hooves of their animals crushed the dried, golden grasses having cured beneath the late-summer sun, on across the slopes as they picked their way through stands of rustling aspen, past the wide, bristling boughs of blue spruce, mile after shadow-striped mile of lodgepole forests. Finally near timberline, they turned almost due south, climbing from the headwaters of that westbound river, crossing over to the slopes where a new river system was given birth.

  “This here where the Arkansas has its start,” Jack explained late of an afternoon as they topped out on the brow beneath a jagged series of hoary granite peaks scratching at the clouds on both left and right.

  Here they let the horses have a blow.

  “The Arkansas what flows into the Mississap way down south?”

  “The same, friend.”

  Bass wagged his head, unable to comprehend it. “Why—I’ll be go to hell and et for the devil’s own tater, Jack.”

  “Ye been on the Arkansas, I take it?”

  “Never. Just by it, once,” Bass explained. “Never did I figger that water come all the way from these here mountains.”

  “Snow from the Shining Mountains, Scratch—’cause they allays got snow on ’em. Every li’l flake, every damned drop of rain, falls up here makes its own long, long trip till it reaches the sea.”

  “We must be getting close to that valley now, ain’t we?”

  Pointing east with his left arm, Hatcher replied, “Right over them high peaks.”

  “You figger we’ll climb over them?”

  “Nawww,” Caleb finally spoke. “Too much work on the animals.”

  Hatcher pointed south, down the long, narrow valley crimped between the two ranges. “We follow the Arkansas down till we reach the foot of the hills on our left. Ride right around ’em and we’re in the south end of the Bayou Salade.”

  “Some of the best trapping a man can do him,” Isaac Simms said as he patted the neck of his horse.

  “Best trapping anywhere in all the Rockies,” Rufus Graham added.

  Scratch asked, “Even good as the Three Forks country?”

  Nodding, Hatcher said, “I’ll put this country up agin’ that’un any day, Titus Bass. Ye ain’t been where we’re going—so I’ll ’How ye’re just plain ignernt about the Bayou. But the beaver ye’ll pull out of the streams yonder, right over them peaks … those beaver some of the best a man can trap hisself anywhere south of English country, or north of Mexico.”

  “They shine, that’s the bald-faced truth,” gushed Elbridge Gray.

  “Worth the trip, are they?”

  “The trip?” Hatcher echoed Bass. “This bunch gonna winter down to Rancho Taos—so South Park is right on our way.”

  Caleb declared, “And South Park gonna be right on our way north come spring green-up.”

  “When the flat-tails be some, so seal fat and sleek!” John Rowland crowed.

  Hatcher said, “Come spring, them big water rats gonna have ’em a winter plew knock yer eyes out, Titus Bass!”

  “Swear on my own heart! Way you niggers are talking,” Scratch observed, “makes a fella want to lift his tail up and get high behind to ride on over there right now!”

  “Titus is right, boys,” Hatcher said. “Let’s cover ground while we still got light.”

  Perhaps it was only the air’s tingle hinting at the arrival of autumn, but his skin goose-bumped as they all whooped, hollered, and cheered, urging the animals south downslope along those headwaters of the Arkansas, no more than a matter of days now from their goal. Up here so close to the sun, Bass found himself in awe once more how warm were the rays caressing his bare skin, how cool was every breeze that whispered out of the thick timber.

  His anticipation grew over the next week, what with the way the others talked every night of the Park, glorying on the promise of its beaver, on the herds of buffalo, elk, and deer said to blanket the valley floor. Just to sense the rising excitement within the other men as they crossed to the east bank of the Arkansas, each day hoping to reach the end of the mountain range where they could finally sweep around the foot of the hills and drop into the Bayou Salade.

  Of one golden afternoon, with the high sunlight gently kissing each early-autumn breeze, Bass slipped away into that place a man goes with his thoughts when he really isn’t thinking of a thing. They had been pushing hard since the first gray light of predawn, squeezing every mile they could out of the day. While all of them had been quiet for the most part, each man off in his own thoughts that afternoon like so many gone before, Scratch suddenly became aware of a change coming over the others. Gradually the men appeared to grow restless, shifting in the saddle, unsettled and anxious. Eventually some of them began to murmur to one another, tugging at their sweaty clothing, resettling their shapeless old hats atop their heads. It reminded him of a bunch of Kentucky schoolboys in those last few moments before the schoolmaster called for midday recess, or in those last breathless heartbeats every afternoon before the entire schoolhouse was freed at the end of the day—

  “Lookee yonder, Scratch. This be the end of the hills!” Hatcher exclaimed, pointing as they eased up the side of the slope toward a low saddle fringed with dark emerald timber. “Other side lays the Bayou Salade.”

  Feathers suddenly took swirling flight within his belly, like the flapping beat of huge wings. Sudden whoops startled him as John Rowland and Matthew Kinkead burst past him, hooves hammering by on either side as they drove their horses the last few yards to the top of the saddle there between stands of blue spruce, shot over the rise, then were gone from sight. Only their exultant voices reverberated off the hills.

  Then Isaac Simms shot by. And Rufus Graham careened past Hatcher and Bass, until Jack had time only to remind Solomon and Gray that some of them needed to stay back momentarily and see to the cavvyyard of horses and mules. At that reminder Scratch tightened his grip on Hannah’s lead rope, pulling the mare closer to his saddle mount. They were about to enter a special place by all accounts. Such magic was to be shared with all of a man’s friends.

  “That it?” he asked Hatcher almost breathlessly as they crowned the saddle, pulling Hannah’s rope so the mule came up right alongside him.

  Below the crest, down the smooth, treeless hillside, he watched the others race, zigging and zagging, waving hats and standing tall in the stirrups, passing one another in curving swoops, signaling back at those yet to come down the slope. Beyond them on the valley floor lay the slowly undulating clots of buffalo milling, grazing, lowing among the belly-high, mineral-rich grasses.

  “This is it,” Jack said quietly, his eyes twinkling with a peaceful contentment.

  “The Bayou Salade.” Spoken almost like a prayer of thanksgiving.

  Hatcher reached over and touched Scratch’s arm. “Way ye said it, I can tell ye feel the place awready.”

  Tugging at the back of the blue silk bandanna he had knotted over his skull, Titus replied, “I can’t remember seeing a valley near so purty, Jack. Not in all my days out here. Strange as it may sound to folks what ain’t never come to this here place, looking up to see such sculpturin’s as these all around ’em—I doubt their kind would ever understand if I tried to explain just how I feel right here an’ now.”

  “How’s that, Scratch?” Hatcher asked with a smile as wide as South Park itself.

  “You told me yourself the other night, Jack.”

  “Told ye what?”

  He rubbed the back of the bandanna over his missing scalp and hair, saying with a quiet, but keen, anticipation, “You told me I’d feel like this here’s one of them few places where a man can know just why it was he ever come out h
ere to the Rocky Mountains.”

  It was the marrow of the world.

  Scratch realized at last that this was the bone and sinew to which everything else in his known universe had always been attached.

  From these tall peaks where the snow never fully melted flowed the lifeblood of a whole continent. This truly was a place where a man found confirmation in the reason he ever dared to venture on past those folks back east not willing to risk all they ever had, continuing on by those not willing to dare enough in placing their very lives on the line … here suddenly to sense the close kinship a man could feel with a patch of ground, with a stretch of open country, with an entire virgin land that had embraced him.

  Welcoming him home.

  Into a small protected bowl the rest had taken their pack animals, stopping only when they had reached a secluded meadow ringed by thick timber and outcroppings of granite dotting the hillsides. A place big enough to afford enough pasturage for their remuda over the next two months or more, yet a place small enough to afford them ample security from chance discovery of their fires and shelters by roaming bands of raiders. More than enough wood—a litter of deadfall back in the thick groves … and water too: a narrow stream gurgling along its mossy bed right through the middle of the bowl. The stock would want for nothing as the last days of summer waned and the seasons turned.

  Here they would be sheltered by the timber on the surrounding hills and the rock outcroppings. The stone faces of the granite would reflect the heat of their small fires on the nippy mornings to come, again each cold evening that autumn was bound to bring anyone venturing this high. As well, these rocky faces would serve to better hide the entrance to their small bowl from any who might pass through the valley itself.

  “We used this here same place a couple seasons back,” Isaac Simms explained. “Oughtta be real safe here.”