Crack in the Sky

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Off the beaten road,” Hatcher added. “Not on any trails the tribes use when they crisscross the Park, coming and going as they please.”

  “Fella should keep his eye peeled for brownskins?” Scratch inquired.

  “Just look down there,” Jack advised. “See all the buffler. Then ye tell me if ye figger this be a place where the Injuns’ll come to hunt.”

  Titus nodded.

  And with every day that followed it made him marvel all the more just how alive was this valley. The variety of wildlife were drawn here for the natural salt licks. They came for the abundance of grass, itself rich with natural minerals. And, too, the creatures came for the cold, crystalline waters tumbling down from the high, treeless places like streamers of sunlit glitter itself.

  From time immemorial man had followed the four-legged creatures into this valley. Where the game went, so followed the hunters after meat and hides, after tongues and survival. From one end of the valley floor to the other ran the boggy salt marsh that had led the French trappers and voyageurs to first give their name to this place, a sparkling series of ponds where beaver had dammed the creeks and streams into a necklace of quiet water. With the arrival of autumn an untold variety of ducks appeared overhead every day, sweeping in from the north across the autumnal blue skies to join the great long-necked geese in a brief migrational layover in this magical place.

  Their first morning in South Park, they had moved away from their breakfast fire into the stands of lodgepole to select and fell a number of long, thin trees they dragged back to camp, where they trimmed off branch and stub, then cut each pole to length. One by one the shelters took shape, most no more than lean-tos made from bowers laid across their lodgepole frames, finally covered with pack canvas and old blankets. More than a dozen were there: some men pairing up, a few of them preferring to sleep on their own, along with four large shelters built to protect the outfit’s supplies.

  That night, well after dark when they completed their camp-making chores, Hatcher joined the weary men at the fire to run over the well-worn sequence of trapping in hostile country.

  “Caleb, I want you and Rufus to hang back the first day.” Jack waited until the pair nodded. “Next day gonna be Scratch and Matthew.”

  He went on and on, pairing the men, then waiting while each pair nodded to one another in recognition.

  “That just leaves you again,” Elbridge stated.

  “Ain’t no different’n it was after Little went under to the ticks last spring,” Jack explained. “With him gone after that bad scrape with the Blackfoot, we had us one odd man out.”

  “I remember that,” Fish replied.

  “So, boys—I’ll be the one what will hang back on my lonesome when it’s my day to stay in camp.”

  It was not the practice of all Mad Jack Hatcher’s brigade to depart every morning to set traps along the streams and slides, down at the valley ponds.

  With the exception of their solitary leader, in rotation two men took their turns lying back to camp for one day out of every five: using their time to repair tack and saddles, doctor the sores and saddle ulcers on riding and pack animals, trim hooves and mend bite wounds that a man had to expect among half-wild horses. From hides traded off the Flathead back at Sweet Lake, some spent their camp day, even nights, around the fire, cutting and sewing additional pairs of moccasins. On occasion a man would tinker with a trap he found not working properly, or he might fashion himself a rawhide sheath for a knife, perhaps add some brass tacks to a belt or the stock of his rifle.

  Never was there any end to the lot of a camp keeper. When more interesting work was finished, there was always more than enough to do tending the plews: fleshing the freshest beaver hides scratched with each man’s distinctive mark … cutting, trimming, and tying willow limbs into a wide hoop … finally lashing the day’s pelts onto the willow hoops—stretching, tightening, then stretching some more. With each new day these huge, round red dollars of Rocky Mountain currency dotted the campsite, stacked against every tree trunk, sapling, and clump of brush. More were brought in every afternoon by the seven who took their turn at the streams and slides and pools.

  As the weeks passed, even Scratch grew astounded by their take. Rich as some previous seasons had been for him, he had never seen anything quite as bountiful as this. Large beaver, thick fur, not one empty trap any day. And nary a sign of brownskins about.

  Most mornings he had thrown the much-worn, oft-repaired Shoshone saddle onto Hannah’s back, tied his two greasy trap sacks on either side of the horn, where they would hang at his knees, and move out with the other six who would be trapping that day with him. On those mornings when it was Bass’s turn to hang back to tend to camp duties, the mule had proved just as restless and out of sorts as he was when not allowed to venture into the pristine beauty of the valley.

  If she wasn’t picketed on those days, Hannah came right into camp even before the rest pulled out—seeming to know that the other animals were being saddled and prepared for departure while she was not. Until he eventually trained her better, having to swat at the mule with a switch and scold her, driving her out of camp, Hannah would turn over kettles and coffeepots with her nose, braying loudly to show her deep displeasure.

  Many were the times on those chilly mornings when he’d grab the mule by her ears, yanking her head down so he could glare into one of her defiant eyes and growl an endless rash of words strung together to convince her just how angry he was with her impish antics. Later that day she’d slip up behind Titus as he was concentrating on one chore or another, suddenly shoving her muzzle right against his shoulder blades to knock him off balance, sprawling on the ground.

  “You’re a she-devil all right,” he growled. “Times are I’ve thought to strangle you. But I can’t bring myself to it—not when I recall how you saved my life … twice already.”

  Seemed as if she somehow knew what he was saying at those times, for Hannah would eventually come up to stand over him, lowering her nose right against him softly, her big eyes half-closed, twitching those peaked ears of hers as if in apology for her childish stunts. Lord, if she didn’t know just how to get herself back on his good side again.

  As if he could ever be angry enough with Hannah to kill her. Maybe a man like Silas Cooper could have shot her easy as spitting … but not Titus Bass.

  The days continued their march into autumn, each one imperceptibly shorter than the one before it. The mornings grew colder, a film of ice forming in the kettles and at the edges of the creeks until enough of the high, glorious light warmed them each day. Even a blind man would know that summer was over, that the seasons had turned, that they were beginning their headlong tumble toward winter.

  A man with a good nose would surely know. Autumn mornings had their own unmistakable fragrance—that sharp, crisp tang to the air. The smell of this high country dying, or its life already dead for another cycle of the year. Grasses and brush had grown dry and brittle beneath the increasing bite to every breeze that knifed its way down from the high and hoary places. It smelled of winter on its way.

  Autumn advanced with an amazing swiftness above their camp on every mountain slope. Each morning he found the descending line of gold-smitten aspens had inched a little farther down the hillsides toward the valley floor … as if autumn were creeping down upon them from above, a few yards more every night.

  No more were there any of the hardy wildflowers tucked back in the protected meadows—swept away by the falling temperatures and the harshness of the winds, joining the summer-browned grasses in parched oblivion. Each day brought the deer and elk farther down the forested slopes toward the safety of their winter pasture in the valley. And these days of waning light brought the constant accompaniment of whistling elk calling other bulls to combat, or the slapping crack of bucks’ antlers locking, twisting, slashing in an ages-old combat. Males battling for the right to the harem, that struggle played out on the nearby slopes of dark pine-green and sun-splotched
gold quakie.

  Farther below in the valley itself, the cottonwood and willow would be the last to give way before the mysterious forces of nature and time and season. But ultimately their leaves began to shrivel with age, dried with the passage of time and the invisible hands of nature’s clock. Trees stood bare, stark, and skeletal against the golden, browning backdrop of the hills. Autumn’s breath was seizing hold of this land.

  And so much of the rhythm of life appeared to grind slowly to a halt like a miller’s wheel brought rumbling to a stop by an unseen hand.

  Yet as suddenly as life seemed to breathe its last, the Bayou Salade burst into frenetic activity across a week or more. Swarms of migratory birds blackened the skies now. Over the lower peaks and passes, formation after formation of the spear-headed migrations paraded across the crystal-clear autumnal blue. Each formation transformed itself from black specks spotted far off in the sky to become a low-swooping V of geese and ducks, angling in to settle across the ponds and still water of the valley with a thunderous concert of honking and splashes. First the longnecks circled, their heads craning, searching for a landing spot before making their long, graceful figure-eight loop across an open spot of marsh water. Then the huge geese slanted down in formation, banking sharply before they hit the skylit water, kicking up rooster tails of spray, squawking to one another, to the ones they were joining, or to those still descending from the sky above.

  On those mornings that Bass found himself out in the autumn chill to set his traps, he would stand and stare for long periods of time at the pageant of sky and water and wing—there were so many of the ducks and geese that there could not possibly be room for any more out on the huge marshes and icy bogs. Yet still they came as if spewed out of the sky.

  From this direction and that, the smoothbores echoed from the far hills, his fellow trappers out hunting, their guns loaded with shot instead of a huge round ball. And every night the men roasted the rich, fat meat over their fires, this a welcome change from a diet of elk and venison and buffalo.

  Other, smaller songbirds feasted before the coming onslaught of winter on those insects, locusts, and beetles clinging cooled and torpid on those grasses dried by the slash of autumn winds. Time hung in the balance here, and fall was clearly a time when it was decided just what creatures survived, what creatures would not. Each species was making ready for the coming change in its own ages-old dance of the seasons, each life-form readying itself for the time of cold and death that was winter in this high country.

  True, the coming winter would decide just what would live, and what would not. This intricate rhythm that hummed around him each new and glorious day was a rhythm begun so long ago that aeons had still rested in the womb of time.

  The first storm came and went, not yet cold enough for the snow to stay longer than a couple of days. Then the second and third storms rolled through the valley, each snowfall lasting a little longer before it finally melted, soaking into the soggy ground, dripping off the thick spruce boughs, feeding every creek, stream, and freshet a sudden, final burst of life before winter would squeeze down hard.

  “When you figger for us to pull out?” Elbridge Gray asked one evening around their fire as the wind came up, beginning to blow off the high slopes with a wolfish howl.

  Standing to stretch, Hatcher said, “Trapping’s been so damned good—I’d like to stay right to the last day afore the passes close up.”

  Caleb Wood declared, “Trouble is, a man can’t never tell when he’s gonna stay a day too long … till he tries and finds the passes are all snowed in.”

  “Ye saying it’s time to go south?” Jack asked.

  With a shrug Caleb replied, “I dunno. Last week or so I been thinking real hard on Taos—”

  “Ain’t a one of us ain’t been thinking real hard on Taos,” Matthew Kinkead interrupted.

  Hatcher stepped over and laid a hand on Kinkead’s shoulder. “Ye’ll be there afore the hard cold sets in.”

  Matthew’s eyes softened, and with a hound-dog expression crossing his jowly face, he sobbed, “Wanna see my Rosa.”

  John Rowland looked up and asked, “You ever get the feeling she might one day figger you for dead, Matthew? That you been gone so long from her … she goes out and gets herself ’Nother husband?”

  Slowly wagging his big shaggy-bear head, Kinkead gave that considerable thought, then answered, “I don’t figger her the kind to do anything of the sort … not till one of you boys rode into Taos and tol’t her your own self I gone under.”

  “And even then Rosa’s the sort of woman what just might expect one of us to bring her something special of yer’n, Matthew,” Hatcher explained as he knelt by the coffeepot. “Something what would show her ye was really gone.”

  Isaac Simms asked, “What would that be, Kinkead?”

  “Yeah,” echoed Solomon Fish, “what would be the one thing we’d have to show your Rosa to prove to her you been rubbed out?”

  He scratched his big onion bulb of a nose with a dirty, charcoal-crusted finger, deep in thought. Then he said, “I s’pose it’d be this here kerchief I wear round my neck.” Using a couple of fingers, Kinkead lifted the soiled black cloth, emblazoned with a multitude of painted red roses in full bloom.

  “Rosa give you that, didn’t she?” Titus asked.

  He nodded, looking down at it a moment. “Winter afore last, when this bunch was all in Taos—afore we come north last two year. She and me, we bought this here kerchief down to a poor woman’s blanket she had spread out in a warm spot there in the sun, over to the Taos square.”

  “I remember that ol’ brown Injun gal!” Rowland crowed with excitement. “I see’d that same kerchief my own self that morning and was coming back to buy it.”

  Kinkead nodded, grinning. “Yep: that were the first time I met this here skinny son of a bitch.” And he pointed at the rail-thin Rowland.

  “We got to talking,” John began.

  Then Kinkead continued, “And you said you was done with that bunch you’d been trapping with for more’n a year.”

  “Some folks just ain’t meant to run together,” Rowland agreed.

  Matthew said, “You told me your outfit was breaking up that winter, picking sides then and there in Taos.”

  “Yep, some fellers following Ewing Young, and some others saying they was gonna tag along behind Antoine Robidoux. Only me and McAfferty didn’t take no side when the outfit tore apart.”

  “McAfferty?” Hatcher inquired. “That when you two come and hooked up with us?”

  With a nod Rowland looked up at their brigade leader and answered, “Damn—but that nigger never was the same since’t he killed that Ree medicine man. He started to get … strange after that. Strange and … downright spooky.”

  “Damn if he didn’t after he killed that medicine man,” Fish replied.

  “Just the fall afore we run all the way south to Taos—two year ago now.”

  “All the way from Ree country. That was a far piece to travel just to winter up,” Graham observed.

  “McAfferty, he was a nigger what wasn’t gonna stay in that country where he’d just killed the ol’ rattle shaker,” Rowland recalled. “Hell, he told us it wasn’t healthy for a man’s hide to be caught in country anywhere close to where the Ree stomped around.”

  Scratch found that long trek hard to believe. “Just for him killing a Ree medicine man you tramped all the way down to Taos?”

  “Don’t you see?” Rowland tried to explain in a quiet voice that hushed the others. “This here McAfferty had him dark hair—shiny like a new-oiled trap and near black as the gut of hell itself—afore the night he had to kill that Ree medicine man.”

  Bass asked, “What you mean, had to kill the Ree?”

  For a moment Rowland pursed his lips as if he were trying to pull out the particulars of that memory. “Something to do with what feller had the strongest medicine … to do with that medicine man fixing to steal McAfferty’s Bible.”

  “He
carry a Bible hisself?” Scratch inquired.

  “Yup,” John answered. “The man left us with hair black as charred hickory. An’ he come back with it turned.”

  “No shit?” Titus asked. “So that’s when his hair become white?”

  Turning to Bass, Rowland explained, “McAfferty’s hair is as white as new snow.”

  “What turned his hair?” Titus inquired.

  John stared into the fire for long moments before answering. “Maybeso the hoo-doos.”

  “Hoo-doos!” shrieked Rufus Graham with a gust of sudden laughter.

  “That’s right,” John said, nonplussed. “Like I said, McAfferty left our bunch with black hair … and come back with it and his beard turned white.”

  Rufus declared, “Like the man see’d a ghost!”

  With a shrug Rowland continued, “The man never told any of the rest of us what scared him so. Said he wouldn’t talk about it—claimed that he’d always counted on God to watch his backside agin’ the devil.”

  “Not a word of what hoo-doo spooked him, eh?” Caleb asked.

  “Nary a peep did we pull outta him,” John explained dolefully. “All the way down to Taos that fall, I don’t recall the nigger sleeping much at all.”

  “How’s a man get by ’thout any sleep?” Scratch asked with a yawn.

  “All I can tell you is on our trip south that white-headed nigger was awake when I closed my eyes ever’ night, and he was awake when I opened my eyes again come morning.”

  Skeptically, Scratch asked, “Awake, doing what?”

  “Just looking up at the sky near all the time, moving his lips like he was talking to somebody, keepin’ a tight hold on his Bible.”

  “That’s spooky right there,” Hatcher declared.

  “He packed that Ol’ Bible along in his possibles ever since I knowed him. Never saw him pull it out much,” Rowland explained. “But after that night when he come back with his head turned white, McAfferty was one to keep that saddle-worn Bible right in his hand or laying by his side … ever since.”

  “McAfferty sounds to me like a man what got hisself spooked but good!” Bass observed.