Buffalo Palace

by Terry C. Johnston

  Now the hills became more sharply defined, and all the creeks and streams slashed their way down through the land to form sharp-sided bluffs and buttes, each one striated over centuries of constant erosion by water and wind. Here he found more timber, willow, and brush flourishing along each water course he came across. It was clear he had passed out of the rolling tableland, where the buffalo ruled as undisputed monarchs, entering a country where he no longer had the herds of those shaggy beasts constantly in sight as he plodded west on foot.

  He found this to be a country populated by varieties of deer—some surprisingly larger than others. He hunted them down in the brushy bottoms where they spent their days, or waited for them near the creeks and streams where the creatures came to water early of every morning or late of the evenings before scampering off to their beds. Most of the males were already coming into velvet, their antlers covered with that thin, mosslike covering that at times hung in tatters all about their faces.

  And there were other creatures he spotted from a distance: the sharp-snouted badger and wolverine, and those wild turkey, which roosted in the low branches of the trees very much the same as their cousins did back east, not to mention what he took to be tiny prairie gophers he encountered, animals that barked at him just like dogs in those huge colonies where they lived together for mutual protection against the great-winged birds who hunted with claw and beak, sweeping over the towns pocked with burrows. Most every day he had to pass through one such community, he and the mare assaulted by the yip-yipping of so many tiny, angry voices.

  At times he even caught sight of a brown-or a reddish-coated bear—animals that whirled and loped away at the first sight of him and the horse. Not a day passed that Titus did not spot what he figured to be a variety of pong-horned deer on the nearby slopes—almost a sort of long-legged goat-shaped creature, he surmised—a bit smaller but even more fleet than its mule-eared or white-tailed cousins. And most every night he went to sleep serenaded with the distant crooning of those song-dogs crying out from the surrounding hillsides as if to announce his presence to others of their kind.

  Lo, the birds! As big as he had known them to be back east along the Ohio and Mississippi, they proved to be all the bigger the farther west he progressed. Although he had seen many a hawk before, the immense wingspans on these western species came as no small wonder to Bass. Not to mention how big those eagles grew hunting the skies along his line of march. As well, he grew astounded at the size of the wrinkle-necked turkey and black vultures, which congregated at the remains of what carrion the wild dogs and rangy wolves had not consumed.

  So it was that time and again he was struck that this was a harsh land devoid of all mankind—although he occasionally did come across some old Indian trail of pocked pony prints and the scraping of poles as those people went about their seasonal migrations. Not a day passed when he did not fear he would run onto a village, or that he would be discovered by a wandering hunting party.

  Not to see the enemy proved to be far more frightening than knowing right where the brownskins were, or just how many he might have to confront.

  Fact was, none of Bass’s contacts with Indians had ever fostered in him a favorable view of brownskins. Especially that run for his life from the Chickasaw there along the Mississippi River when he was but sixteen years old and fleeing the constraints of his family. And what few Indians had wandered into or traveled through old St. Louis hadn’t impressed him to feel much in the way of human charity as well: they either presented themselves as a haughty, distant, and foreign race characterized by arrogance, or they appeared to be nothing more than a race of flea-bitten beggars trampled over in a rush of settlers and slowly being whittled away by the white man’s dominant culture.

  One or the other, Titus had long ago decided, there wasn’t much to admire in or desire to emulate any brown-skin. They looked different, talked different, in fact—everything about them was entirely foreign as another life could be from how he himself had grown up and come to be a man. Struggle as he might, there was little he could think of that he would possibly want to talk over with one of those haughty, better-than-thou warrior chiefs or grease-stained, hand-held-out beggars.

  No sense in a man trying his damndest to run onto any Injuns, he decided. Best to just stay as far from any brownskins as he possibly could … for at the worst such two-legged creatures might well spell danger for him, at the least an ignorant Indian was nothing but a pure-dee waste of effort for any white man venturing into an unknown wilderness.

  Better that his own dumb luck hold so he could continue on his way for the mountains, untroubled and alone.

  Alone was just how he was feeling that midafternoon as he plodded on beneath the baking sun, leading the packmare through the easy footing he found a quarter mile or so out from the Platte. He discovered he could almost doze as he trudged along, laying one foot in front of the other, his eyes barely open as he picked his way through the waist-high buffalo grass. Almost like sleeping: with the warmth on his back and the rhythmic sway to his gait, accompanied by that hypnotic clop of the packmare following behind.

  For the last few hours his thinking had been consumed with wondering on how many more days and weeks it would take for him to reach those high and shining mountains described so eloquently by an unlettered Isaac Washburn in terms of undisguised awe that bordered on nothing short of reverence.

  Arousing himself from his dull stupor, Titus licked his dry lips … then, squinting to be sure, he studied the distant horizon as it seemed to waver and strangely take shape far, far out there before him—heat shimmers all dark and purple and jumbled there at the edge of the earth. For a moment he glanced up at the sun, hung ahead him nearly at the three-quarters mark of its path across the sky … then quickly back to stare at that shifting, shimmering horizon.

  “Damnation. Likely we got another of them windy storms boiling up out yonder,” he muttered, turning to direct his comment to the mare as he lurched to a weary halt. “Mayhap we should find us a place to make camp afore that rain rolls over us like some of ’em have.”

  Quickly he scanned the southwest, then took himself a measure of the land off to the northwest, seeking something that might hold promise in the way of forting up against the bluster of a bullying storm replete with horrific wind, rain, and ofttimes hail. Already he had come to expect a brief thunderstorm most every afternoon out here along the upper reaches of the Platte—but, damn, did he hate the hail. Those icy shards hurt each time they came hurtling out of a particularly angry patch of blue-black clouds overhead. Hurt the mare so bad, she cried out in something close to humanlike pain as he scampered to take shelter under her belly and those packs she carried atop her ribby sides, the only cover there often was for miles around.

  “We ain’t gonna be caught this day, no, we’re not, girl,” he promised the mare. “There, yonder—I see some big trees not too far off. We’ll skedaddle down there now till that storm blows on over.”

  Off to the side of the bluffs he hurried the horse, down from the ridgetop where he first spotted the dim outline of the storm’s approach. Among an extensive grove of cottonwood Titus prepared for the bad weather by dropping the packs from the mare’s back, tying her rope to one of the trees, where she should have adequate shelter against the pelting hail. Then he went over to settle down between the two small packs himself, dragging the canvas over the packs and his head too. Breathing a sigh of satisfaction that he was at last prepared for the impending onslaught, Titus listened expectantly for telltale sounds of the storm’s approach.

  Squatting there, he waited and listened. At times Bass caught himself dozing off. And waited some more. But through it all he did not hear the wind whipping itself into a fury, driving the rain and hail before it.

  The longer he listened, the more he grew suspicious—thinking the storm had taken a different track to the north or south around them.

  “Let’s go have ourselves a look-see,” he told the mare as he threw bac
k his canvas shelter, stood, and untied her long rope.

  He vaulted onto her bare back, saying, “Maybe that storm moved on by us—what say we go find out for my own self?”

  Side to side he switchbacked the horse up the side of the bluff they had descended to take shelter, then brought the mare to a halt at the top to survey the heavens overhead. A blue expanse dotted with white, fluffy clouds—as beautiful as a man would want his sky to be. To the south, and north, and even to the west as far as he could see, the sky remained unthreatening—except that jagged line of purple-blue thunderhead still clinging to the tar western horizon.

  “Ain’t like nothing I ever seen: just sitting out there ’thout coming this way a’tall,” he muttered in confusion to the horse, more in disgust that he had been ready this time when no storm came crashing over them.

  Yet as he continued to stare at the distant smoked-glass horizon—it slowly dawned on him. Perhaps … yes, there might be a reason this truly wasn’t like any storm he had ever seen—especially now that he had himself a good, long gander at it … because maybe, just maybe, that wasn’t a jagged, roiling, rumbling thunderstorm gathering on the far horizon after all.

  “Do you think?” he asked himself aloud, leaning forward to speak into the mare’s ear. “Could it be … them far, far mountains?”

  To see them at long, long last for the first time, sitting atop that steady old horse there on that rocky bluff of pale ocher, the gentle summer breeze strong in his face, perhaps a wind bringing him the scent of those far-off and terrible places. No, not clouds at all hulking way off yonder at the end of his mortal sight … but the … the god-blamed Rocky Mountains!

  “Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!” he shrieked in a sudden gust of realization at the same moment he began to hammer the mare’s ribs with his heels.

  She gamely shot away, obediently rolling into a trot.

  “Whaaaa-hooooo!”

  Into a lope she finally took herself, then eased up into a gallop as he hugged close to her neck, one hand double-wrapped with that lead rope, the other hand tangled in her mane as they raced west toward that thin purple-blue border of jagged landscape. Down the far end of the bluff they tore together, right onto the rolling, rugged valley—ever westward!

  “By damn—we gonna make it to them Rocky Mountains, ol’ girl!” he whooped in ecstasy, then bellowed again at the top of his lungs as the mare surged ahead with all the speed she could muster for her rider. “Whaaaa-hooooo!”

  It had taken so many weeks, and months too, just to leave that hardwood country behind, then suddenly to find himself pitched into a monotonously bare and rolling tableland when through all his waiting Titus had figured the country would become increasingly more hilly the closer he got to those distant, shining mountains. But instead the world around him had only become flatter, ideal for the numberless buffalo that grazed on the land’s rich bounty of grass.

  “Glory! Glory! Glory!” he repeated in a wild screech as the hot breeze whipped tears from his eyes.

  So long had he waited to see them with his own eyes, each night along the way remembering just how he had let his imagination paint such vivid pictures in his mind while Isaac Washburn had told him this and told him that about the far places of the west the old man had himself seen. Night after night of imagining and dreaming on them, it seemed those mountains had grown all the larger, loomed all the bigger until here he was at last—suddenly struck with disappointment that what lay before him was not as tall, nowhere near as grand, nor jagged, nor threatening, nor ultimately challenging as Washburn had made them out to be.

  Nowhere near the majestic mountain ranges his very own rich and fertile and ready imagination had been making them out to be all these months.

  So in no small measure of disappointment he began to pull back on the rope, slowing the mare out of her surging run to the west.

  For well over a year Titus had been preparing for this moment—yet here he was, of a sudden trying to make sense of it, to reconcile Gut’s description of the Rocky Mountains with what undramatic and uneven outline lay there against the far horizon.

  At last he brought the horse to a halt. Bass slid to the ground but continued to stare until he kicked a toe at a clump of bunchgrass.

  “Damn—if I ain’t got a head filled with stupids!” he roared, feeling the fool of a sudden. “It ain’t that them mountains is puny, girl … just that they be too damned far away for us to see ’em proper!”

  He sat there some more soaking in that distant vista before slowly turning the mare about to retrace their path. And from time to time he glanced back over his shoulder at the far jagged line.

  “Gonna take us a few days afore we get there,” he consoled himself. “Leastways, now we see where it is we been heading all this time. Out there—why, that be the end of our journey, girl!”

  Like everything else in his life, he decided, this was to be only a matter of keeping one foot landing in front of the other—hard times or slick. He’d come this far by putting his head down and not giving up no matter if the water was bad or the game was scarce, no matter that there’d been cold camps for lack of firewood or the possibility of scalp hunters out and afoot. But no matter any of that, Titus Bass was here at the brink of the Rocky Mountains—where he could look out there and see them for the first time in all his born days.

  And so it was that after he had repacked the mule and set forth once again, Bass vowed that he would never stray too far from those distant mountains ever again. Once he arrived, he promised never to leave them. Never to wander so far away that he could no longer see them at the edge of his sight, just as they were right then. They were to be his compass, his lodestone, the very anchor for his life from there on out. The way some men back east dared never to wander too far from the rivers where they plied their trade and lived out their lives … Titus swore these mountains would from that day forth be the marrow of his world, swore that on a mighty oath for what would be the rest of his natural days.

  Late that afternoon after pushing farther west, Titus brought down one of those prong-horned goat creatures he found were almost too curious for their own good. He skinned back the tan-and-white hide, butchered off the steaks and two hams he wanted from the rear flanks, then moved on west to scare up a good camp for the night. Not until the sun had disappeared behind the jagged wall of peaks far beyond did Titus discover just what he wanted.

  It was a shady nook at the side of a hill that offered good water from a stream coming in from the south, plenty of firewood, and enough trees that his smoke would be dispersed among the branches—in the event any brownskins were lurking about. But most of all, the campsite sat just so: positioned in a way where he could gaze into the west as the meat broiled on sticks hung over the fire and the coffee began to boil.

  After stuffing himself, with great care he loaded his old briar pipe with tobacco as twilight sank around him. How he enjoyed the utter silence of the night as it came stealing over the land, broken only by an occasional call from the wild dogs populating the nearby hills.

  Like a gentle nudge, something caused him to turn and look back to the east where it had already grown dark as pitch—the sky flecked with the first stars. Back yonder, to what he had left behind, to what he had chosen to abandon. Funny, he thought—but he could not see anything back there that reminded him of what was left behind. Nothing there to show him what he had abandoned … yet right here in this spot he could look upon his goal.

  So Titus turned back to gaze into the west once more. The mountains were there—limned in indigo light by the long-ago falling of the sun. They were reachable and real. No longer something of legend and myth. Indeed, he told himself, after all these days and the many, many miles, he had come so far that he no longer could see what had been, could no longer see who he had been.

  Yet on this evening, with the light rapidly draining from the summer sky, it was possible for him to catch a glimpse of what he was now to be … to fathom at long, long last the ma
n he was to become.

  The mountains were there, finally within reach. He had only to stay his course for the next few days, with that jagged line looming larger against the sky with every step he took.

  After nigh onto a lifetime of waiting, Titus Bass had come to the Rocky Mountains. And in the deepening embrace of that twilight, he joyously welcomed the man he was to become.

  6

  Dry and wispy as old ash, the snowflakes struck his cheeks as he stepped out from the copse of aspen trees and stared up at the graying sky. Just a few flakes for now. But with that look of the horizon, this appeared to have the making of the first hard snow of the winter.

  Hard to tell just what month of the year it was anymore up this high. Titus had been up here, wandering through these southern foothills and into the lower reaches of the mountains, since late summer and early autumn. Some time back he’d given up trying to sort things out like keeping track of months, deciding that none of it really mattered out here no more anyway. Long ago—back to late spring as he’d pushed west along the Platte River—he had decided that keeping track of days at this or days at that was a fool’s errand, and though he might well be accused of being a fool on other counts, he vowed not to be a counting fool. All that folderol about numbers and ciphering their meaning was merely one thing more to be shet of and left behind back there where he had lived another life.

  With that sort of thing at his back, Titus had moved through the summer not in the least worrying what month it must surely be. June wasn’t all that hard to sort out—it had already been June before he’d first spotted his Rocky Mountains off in the distance. And July brought true warmth to the days he’d spent climbing with the mare into those first pine-shaded places south by west of the Platte River, where a narrowing stream led him into the high country. From there he could look all the farther to the west and the northwest, seeing for the first time how the snow lingered on those distant peaks. From his high vantage point it was plain to see that even at this late season the white still mantled some of those mountains nearly halfway down their dark sides.