Buffalo Palace

by Terry C. Johnston

  Nearby, the stream murmured in its gravel bed, talking on and on day and night without stop as it started last winter’s snowpack on a rushing tumble toward the distant sea. For a long moment he gazed downstream, studying the tiny riffles and widening vees formed behind every small boulder midstream, wondering if that water passing by him right then would eventually boil into the North Platte, joining all the rest of spring’s melting runoff to swell the prairie rivers, finally to spill into the muddy Missouri before merging itself with the mighty Mississippi as it lolled its way past St. Louis … down, down to N’Orleans, where the quadroon and many-hued whores plied their trade, where ebony-skinned slaves stood shack-led on auction blocks, and the great sheets of canvas strained against the wind on those mighty, three-masted, oceangoing vessels come there from far off beyond the very curve of the earth.

  Hell, right here where he stood Titus figured he was damn well far beyond the curve of the earth from everything he had ever known before. Even as high as he stood in these mountains, last winter’s snowpack barely yards above him, the timberline not all that far beyond that, Bass could not look back and see the mouth of the Platte, not that widow’s cabin at Boone’s Lick nor trader’s store at Franklin, much less the barn he had helped raise on the Guthrie farm south of St. Lou. As high into the sky as he stood at that moment—why, Titus couldn’t even see beyond the jagged tumble of gray granite and emerald-green that marked cleft upon cleft as the mountain ranges stood hulking one against the other without apparent end.

  But he knew these high peaks had to end the farther west he pushed … there they would allow a man to gently ride back down their sunset-side slopes onto the prairie among the burnt orange of the paintbrush and the sego lilies and the upwind sage that always filled a man’s nostrils. He had never been there yet, not in all his searching to the west last autumn. Nor had Isaac Washburn.

  But Silas, Bud, and Billy had, by damned. And that’s where they were headed in this easy tramp toward rendezvous. They’d seen the end of the mountains and the beginning of the great dry basin that most said was where rivers eventually sank into oblivion and the desert stretched toward the sunset until it finally ran smack up against even more mountains.

  Beyond that was rumored to be the great salt ocean where Lewis and his friend Clark had dared take their men some twenty years before. And now here he stood, squarely in that land of fable and myth that had no end until it dropped off suddenly into that salt ocean. At N’Orleans, Titus had looked out with sixteen-year-old eyes and tried to imagine where all that water could carry those tall-masted ships.

  No more did he wonder on all that white canvas thrown up against the wind, for here, among the gigantic heave of granite escarpment thrust against the very same sky … here he could cast his gaze upon tumbling boulder fields of talus and scree stretching wider than the Ohio River itself, why—Titus stood beneath the white umbrella of clouds he could almost reach up and touch. There, just inches beyond the reach of his fingers.

  He looked back to the east again, perhaps to will his vision to penetrate through the haze and all that distance just whence he had come. The Ohio River borderlands of Boone County. Then Louisville and Owensboro. Natchez-Under-the-Hill and the dense forest road that took a man north through the Chickasaws’ and Choctaws’ wilderness and on back to home.

  But he saw none of that from here. Home now lay beneath the soles of his moccasins. And there was no wilderness back there anywhere near as mighty as was this where he dropped his trap sack and suddenly went to his knees to rock forward and lean out over that murmuring stream—just to sip at what must surely be God’s own holy water, so cold it set his back teeth on edge.

  Beard dripping, Scratch rocked back on his haunches and looked up at those cold snowfields mantled around the high peaks just beyond their camp. And there and then he closed his eyes—praying as best he could remember having learned to pray at his mam’s knee: her old, yellow-eared Bible flung open and draped over her lap like two great wings of some bird that she was certain one day would lift her up and carry her away to everlasting paradise.

  Rising once again, he brought the trap sack up with him and set off, sweeping around a bend in the creek another two hundred yards until he reached the edge of the flooded meadow where the flat-tailed rodents had long been at work. Perhaps since the day after the beginning of time. How his heart beat that much faster, just to let his eyes rush over all the signs of their industry: tender saplings and young trees hawed off by those busy front teeth less than a foot from the ground, more than two dozen muddy slides marked the beavers’ descent from grassy banks into that watery world of their own making, and at least a double handful of those crude, dome-topped lodges rising from the middle of their pond—lodges where the animals were safe from all but one predator.

  Last fall as he began his new life as a beaver-man, Titus had taken a sharpened sapling and waded out to the closest lodge. There he had curiously jabbed and levered, chipping away at the chewed limbs and mud chinking until he had broken through, then peered inside at the dark inner world abandoned by the frightened animals who kept right on slapping their tails on the surface of that pond nearby. He saw the inner shelf where the beaver crawled up and out of the water to sleep, there to feed on the tender green shoots and new limbs they dragged down the banks, into the water, then under the surface and into their lodges.

  They would have that hole repaired inside of three days, maybe only two, he had estimated from how hard he saw the animals work. And when he had found the hole covered with new limbs and fresh mud the very next day, Bass felt a newfound respect for this creature he stalked, trapped, skinned, and sometimes ate.

  “You gone an’ hit dead center this time, ol’ coon,” he breathed all but to himself as he stared now at the immensity of the beaver pond.

  Then quickly glanced downstream where he feared the others might have followed him there.

  For a moment more he listened. Only the racket of a chirking squirrel complaining overhead and the shadow-flash of a swooping flock of black rosy finches broke the stillness. Then came the rustle of branches and a handful of leaves spilling to the surface of the pond. In and out of the shadows on the far side he made out the familiar waddle of the fat rodents all about their business of chewing back the forest’s edge a tree at a time.

  Cautiously he set down the sack, then freed the knot at the top, stuffed the strand of half-inch rope beneath his belt and plunged a hand into the sack to pull forth the first trap. With it set beside him in the grass, hidden there behind the clumps of low, leafy brush, Scratch used his belt knife to saw free a narrow branch, then sharpened the widest end to a point.

  Standing again, he quietly slipped off downstream to a place where he could enter the water far from the beavers’ slides. The first step wasn’t the hardest. It was the third or fourth as he inched deeper into the stream—his body past the first, startling shock of the cold, this water just descended from glacial melt. Now his calves began to ache and his toes disappeared from all feeling. Still he plodded on, each leaden foot feeling its way forward across the rocky bottom, pressing his way upstream, back toward the flooded meadow.

  Slowly he moved, keeping to the afternoon shadows as best he could, his eyes and ears alert to those beaver that might discover him as they went about their business on the far side of the pond, and he went about his. At the ninth slide he figured he had come far enough, nearly halfway around the meadow. It wouldn’t do to press his luck beyond here, Titus figured.

  There he jabbed the bait-stick into the side of the bank so that it hung low over the slide. Titus kept it down to make it all the easier for an unsuspecting animal to get himself a real good sniff of the end of that bait stick where he smeared some castor—that pale, milky substance taken from a pair of glands in the beaver’s groin. The animal used it to sleek and waterproof its thick hide. But to smell strange castor come to their pond—why, that would pique the curiosity of any of these flat-tails hereabouts.


  Quietly reseating the stopper in the bait bottle that hung from his belt, Scratch crouched forward, bending at the knee, and with one hand began to dig away at the bank there a half foot below the pond’s surface. With a proper shelf excavated, he next worked at squeezing closed both of the tough iron springs on the trap so that the jaws fell open. Only then could he slip the trigger into the notch on the round pan that lay in the center of the open jaws.

  Carefully he moved the trap under the water, settling it upon the shelf, then adjusted the end of the bait-stick so that it hovered right above the hidden trap. It wouldn’t be long before one of the flat-tails came down that slide, winded the scent of a strange beaver, and waddled over to investigate. When it did, chances were almost certain it would end up stepping right on the pan in trying to get itself a good sniff of the bait—when the trigger would release, snapping the smooth iron jaws shut on the beaver’s leg.

  And what the frightened animal did then would be crucial to Scratch having a pelt to scrape and stretch and eventually barter off to a trader … or it would mean losing a trap somewhere at the muddy, grassy bottom of this forest pond.

  From the back of his belt he took a long branch he had selected from a nearby stand of lodgepole. Then he stretched out the trap chain to its full length, one end of which was looped around a trap spring. Slipping the branch through the large eye-ring at the other end, Bass drove a sharp end into the bottom of the pond.

  Once the jaws had slapped shut around the unwary beaver’s leg, the animal would instinctively dive for the safety of deep water, paddling frantically for the middle of the pond and its lodge. But on the way it would be caught at the end of the trap chain that it had unknowingly dragged down the length of the branch, where the trap-ring would be snagged beneath a large knot. Reaching deep water near the middle of the pond, the beaver would find it impossible to swim back again to the surface, and drown without any damage to its glossy pelt, which would one day be fashioned into a fine top hat for some eastern gentleman, mayhap even a winter muffler for some gussied-up city gal all aswirl in yards upon yards of starched crinoline, taffeta, and satin.

  Slowly Scratch turned, careful to make as little noise in the water as he could, keeping to the shadows as the sun continued its descent, here where a man grew his coldest in this water just recently given birth by ice fields. But it was here, just below the dripping shelves of snowy cataracts, just beneath the overhang of melting glaciers, that beaver grew their thickest pelts and maintained those winter coats long into the spring.

  Trap after trap he set that afternoon, returning to his trap sack each time on the same circuitous route through the water so that his scent would not become entangled with the brush or the ground near any one of his sets. Ten bait-sticks he cut late that afternoon, and ten shelves he carved away beneath the water’s surface there at the bottom of ten slides.

  Ten beaver would he collect come morning light.

  Those last two traps at the bottom of the sack felt as heavy as a small anvil to his weary arms as Scratch finally slogged downstream, taking his leave of the flooded meadow only after the sun had disappeared behind the high peaks looming far overhead.

  Those ten beaver would again put him ahead of Cooper’s catch. Even farther ahead or Billy’s. And poor Turtle wasn’t even in the running. Yet Bud made himself useful around camp, scraping hides, whipping together the willow hoops on which the others would stretch their beaver plews into the distinctively round “beaver dollars.” As poor a trapper as Bud Tuttle was, to Scratch’s way of thinking he was a damned good man to have along as a camp keeper and fire tender.

  His feet heavy, and shuddering with the chill of evening coming, Titus plodded back toward that distant flicker of their camphre signaling like a beacon through the quaking aspens. Coffee and some elk loin would set well on his stomach this night.

  He vowed to keep the meadow secret until he had pulled his beaver come morning.

  By damn! This would be the last night Silas Cooper would have to gloat.

  Now they’d all see just who in tarnation was the master trapper in these parts!

  10

  That white-headed trader’s whiskey tasted good enough, by damn—nonetheless, Titus still had him a serious hankering for some good old Monongahela rum, generously sweetened with raw cane sugar, the likes of which they served in every watering hole, tippling house, and gunboat brothel on the great rivers back east.

  Bass licked his lips, savoring the tang of raw tobacco and red pepper on his tongue, the faintest sweetening of strap molasses … then slowly awoke, still running his tongue over his bottom lip—hoping there was more to drink.

  Rubbing the grit from his eyes, Scratch sat up, finding the others still dead to the world around the coals in their fire pit, none of them more than shapeless mounds buried beneath an inch-thick, wet snow. That cold white blanket covered most everything as he reluctantly came awake—feeling as if the cold spring fog had pierced him to his marrow. He peered through the trees, finding the horses still as statues in their rope corral, not bothering to paw at the ground this early.

  Shuddering, Scratch thought how good it would feel to have Fawn next to him. Maybeso there really would be women down to the trader’s rendezvous in a few weeks’ time, just as Billy and Silas had been saying over and over again. A man might hold out that long, he considered, working up hope once more. Yes, indeed: a man could get himself through the spring and the autumn … just so he could have him a woman at the height of summer, as long as he had one with him too through the deep of winter.

  He kicked back the blankets, stood, and tightened the wide belt around his blanket capote. Then he reached into his possibles pouch and pulled out the blue scarf. Holding two opposite corners, Scratch whipped it into a thin band he tied around his head to hold the long hair over his ears for warmth. Stuffing his coyote-hide hat down on his head, Titus bent over the remnants of last night’s elk. He dug among the chunks of the meat they had boiled, then set to cool in a second kettle. What they hadn’t eaten now had a dusting of snow upon it. He blew some of the icy crust off each piece as he stuffed it into a large piece of oiled nankeen cloth, then rolled up the square so it would slip down into the shooting pouch he slapped over his right shoulder.

  With the fullstock rifle in his. blanket mitten and still no sign of life from the others, who went right on snoring in their buffalo-robe cocoons, Bass crept away into the cold mists of that spring morning in the high country, eager to get the jump on the day, and the jump on Silas’s boys.

  He hadn’t covered much ground before the calves of his leggings were soaked by the wet, melting snow that clung heavily to everything in his path—frosted to every blade of grass and thick-leafed swamp cabbage, crusted on every willow or aspen leaf. The swirling, thick fog was cold all by itself as it danced and whirled on the ground around his knees, yet it became thicker still the closer he got to the upstream meadow where he had been taking beaver hand over fist for the last six days without seeming to put a dent in the rodents’ population.

  And every last one of them was a prime fur. “Seal fat and sleek)” was how Billy Hooks had described the first of the pelts Titus had brought back to their camp.

  “Damn near the finest I ever see’d,” Tuttle had commented as he began to help Titus scrape the excess flesh and fat off the back of each hide before they stretched it upon a willow hoop.

  Damn pretty things they were too—near as satiny as any fur Titus had laid eyes on were those plews of his. And dark, much darker than their lowland cousins he had trapped before. By Jehoshaphat, spring trapping was the prime doin’s in a mountain nigger’s life, he recalled Silas exclaiming more than once since leaving the Ute winter camp. Sure and certain, he thought again now—there were no two ways about it. Spring trapping up this high was where a man was sure to make himself a small fortune in beaver. No better time of the year for a man to bust his ass: knowing he’d soon be swapping those furs in on one hell of a spree com
e the time to meet the trader at rendezvous.

  It was a life Bass knew he was going to relish. Hell, there wasn’t a thing he didn’t already love about this life he had decided to wager everything on more than a year ago back in St. Louis. No man to boss him around up here, why—a man rose or fell by his own efforts and not those of others. As much affection as he had felt for Hysham Troost, Titus purely savored working on his own hook.

  Standing the rifle in a crook of some willow near his first set, Scratch stepped sideways off the slippery bank and into the freezing water that steamed into the cold air. Above him the granite peaks and talus slides were brushed with a golden rose in the coming of the sun as the day’s first light touched only the highest places.

  Down here life was still nothing but shadow as Bass inched toward the float-stick, snagged it with his bare hand, and dragged it over to the bank. At the end of the chain hung the trap, and in its square jaws hung a heavy beaver—slick and dripping as he eased it out of the water. Onto the bank he heaved it, then clambered up after the carcass. Squatting on the two powerful springs, Titus freed the animal’s leg, laid the trap aside, and pulled the skinning knife from its scabbard at the back of his belt.

  Rolling the beaver over onto its back, Scratch started the slit at the anus and worked the knife carefully up in a straight cut toward the lower jaw. That done, he sliced around the legs near the body itself and prepared to remove the precious plew. Now with the unnecessary legs removed and a quick whirl with the knife to hack off the large, scaly tail, Titus laid his finger along the flat top of his skinning knife and began the slow, careful work of separating hide from body, a few inches of connective tissue and fat at a time. Almost like peeling back the robe off Widow Grigsby’s shoulders: pulling and slicing, pulling and slicing a little more as the plew relinquished its hold on the carcass.