And that’s how they had come to spend this past winter with the tall and haughty Crow, a season known among that tribe as baalee, “When the Ponies Grow Lean.”
From that mountain valley where Titus learned all he ever cared to know about grizzlies last autumn, the white men had continued easing their way on north, down into the fertile lowlands, where many of the streams draining the high country were dammed here and there, the timbered and sheltered places converted into deep ponds where the industrious flat-tails constructed their beaver lodges. There, too, late one autumn day, they had spotted the first Indian they had seen since rendezvous.
It had started off snowing earlier that morning, no more than an inch or two of fine, dry flakes. Nothing at all like the heavy, wet, icy snow that Titus had known back east. By afternoon, as the four of them saddled up once more and set out to check their traplines, the thick charcoal blanket of clouds had even begun to scatter and lift. A few shafts of brilliant light touched the valley here and there with gold, shimmering against the new, pristine snow.
“How far you figger it is till we reach this here Yallerstone country we aimin’ for?” Hooks asked as the horsemen eased up out of the willows and onto the flats again, across the narrow creek from their campsite.
Cooper wagged his head, staring off. “Got no idea how much farther it be. Just that it still lays north some.”
“A handful of days,” Bass offered abruptly with such conviction that he even surprised himself. It took a moment before he noticed the way the other three had turned to regard him in wonder. A bit self-conscious, he added, “No more’n a week.”
“That true, Silas?” Tuttle inquired, eyeing suspiciously.
“How the hell’d I know? I never come through this way!” Cooper snapped; then he glared at Bass. “So tell us just how the hell y’ think y’ know.”
“Don’t,” Bass answered. “Not for certain. Just feels like it ain’t all that far.”
Turning back around in his saddle, Silas grumbled, “I s’pose we’ll just have to see about—”
“L-lookee there, Silas!” Hooks interrupted with a sputter.
The other three looked where Billy was pointing. Off to the north on the brow of a hill sat a half-dozen horsemen, something on the order of a mile away, maybe a little more. They sat there motionless as statues, as if they had always been there on the crest of that rise.
Tuttle whispered hoarsely, “W-where’d they come from?”
“Keep moving,” Cooper said, his voice gone quiet despite the great distance between the two parties.
“We just let ’em know we see ’em, eh?” Bud asked.
“I s’pose that’s the make of it,” Cooper agreed.
Billy dragged the greasy wool of his capote sleeve across his lower face and asked, “What you make ’em to be, Silas?”
“They ain’t Blackfoot,” Titus declared instead.
Flicking the younger man a glare, Cooper answered, “They ain’t Blackfoot—that’s as plain as paint.”
Tuttle asked, “How come you say not?”
“Blackfoot wouldn’t let us see ’em,” Silas replied.
To which Bass added, “Damn right: Blackfoot’d just sit off somewhere and watch us, maybeso wait to lay onto us somewhere up the trail.”
“You figger it that way, Silas?” Hooks said, turning to Cooper for confirmation.
“I figger this young’un here might be right on that, first whack.” Then for a moment Cooper studied the distant figures there against the backdrop of that lifting gray sky: loose-hair and feathers, scalp locks and fringe tussled with the tease of every little gust of breeze that crossed that hilltop. “Yeah—Scratch likely be right, fellas. This here got the feel of Crow country. And I figger them Crow just lookin’ us over to see what we’re all about.”
Bass inquired, “Ever you been to Crow country?”
“Not this far south,” Cooper explained. “We come on down the Yallerstone with Henry’s bunch many a year back. Got as far as the mouth of the Bighorn. But I ain’t never been south from there.”
Billy nodded. “Yessirreebob—this here’s new country to us all!”
“What you s’pose is up now?” Tuttle asked.
They were watching as the half-dozen horsemen all turned away together and slowly disappeared over the backside of the hill.
“I figger we’ll find out soon enough,” Cooper answered, his words doing damned little to allay any apprehensions.
But to play things smart, Silas sent Billy and Tuttle back to camp with orders to bring in the pack animals and sideline them—just in the event those six horsemen decided to romp on through and drive off a few mules and horses for themselves.
For the rest of that afternoon Cooper and Bass never strayed from eyeshot of one another: most often Silas was the one to stay in the saddle, watching and listening, attentive to the middistance, while Titus checked each one of the group’s sets, pulling out a beaver here and there if one of the wary animals had stretched his rodent luck enough. They were back at their camp to rejoin the others well before twilight as the temperature began to slide rapidly and the western sky became a burnished autumn umber—bringing with it cold enough to cause a man’s thoughts to turn to buffalo robes and warming his feet by a fire.
For the next three days, as watchful as they were, not one of them saw a telltale sign of any horsemen. It was almost enough to make a man disbelieve he’d seen anything of horse-mounted warriors that winter afternoon as the sky cleared and the sun broke through.
Then came the fourth morning.
As was usually the case, Bass awoke before the others in the dark, cold stillness of predawn. Dragging the buffalo robe and blankets around him as he shifted closer to the fire ring, he punched life back into the coals, filled the coffeepot with icy water from the trickle still flowing in the nearby creekbed, then nudged the others before he moved off to the mouth of a nearby ravine where he had picketed Hannah and his horse right in camp. Being the first up most every morning just naturally saddled Titus with the responsibility of freeing up the stock from their picket pins, usually put out to graze on the downwind side of camp some distance away, taking the animals to water while the coffee heated.
After returning from the creek with Hannah and his saddle mount, tying them to a span of rope strung between two trees where he had made his bed, Titus headed off toward the copse of old timber where the rest of the stock had been picketed for the night.
He was breathless by the time he sprinted back into camp to find the others just sitting up in their blankets, rubbing grit from eyes and scratching one place or another on their dirty anatomies.
“The horses! They’re gone!”
Cooper rose to one knee as the robe slipped off his shoulders, turning to stare right at the mule and horse. “Pray y’ tell me what the hell those are!”
Huffing to a halt, Bass braced his hands on his knees, heaving for air at the same time he tried to explain. “Not them … I didn’t … put mine down … with your’n.”
“What’re y’ trying to say?”
“Rest of the stock’s gone.”
“Gone?” Cooper repeated. “Y’ mean y’ found they all just pulled up their pins an’ moseyed off last night?”
“Unh-uh,” Titus replied. “They didn’t pull up pins and mosey off—”
Silas leaped off the ground, fists working and angry. “Goddammit! Tell me!”
“They was took!”
Squinting hard as he stood glowering down at the shorter Bass, Silas demanded, “How the hell y’ so sure they was took?”
“I see’d tracks.”
“Horse tracks?”
“No,” Titus answered. “Mokerson tracks. Lots of ’em.”
The three of them had followed Scratch to the nearby grove, where they read what story the hard, brittle grass and flaky soil had to tell them. More than a dozen of them by a reasonable count—at least ten, anyway … all crept into the stand of trees together, spread out, a
nd began silently cutting the picket ropes from the pins driven securely into the hard ground. One by one the horses and mules had been led away in the direction the thieves had come on foot—until they reached a spot about a mile away, where it was plain to see the warriors had tied their own ponies.
Back and forth over the ground the four of them moved, bent at the waist, stopping to kneel from time to time, studying. But not one of them studied the ground as much as Titus Bass. The way the moccasins curved tightly down from the big toe along the tops of the other toes at a sharp angle. Except for the size of each print, and perhaps the depth of each print and the length of stride—those factors accounting for the varying height and weight of the thieves—the moccasins were all made the same: although sewn by different women, they all appeared to be cut from some very similar pattern.
“Lookee here, fellas,” Bass said as he laid his own right foot down beside a clear impression of a thief’s right foot.
As the others came up, Titus slowly lifted his own moccasin.
“What the hell y’ got to show me?” Cooper snapped.
“Look,” Bass repeated, squatting to point at the thief’s print. “See how this’un’s shaped like this, here an’ here.”
“Yeah,” Hooks replied. “So?”
“See here on my print I just made,” Bass instructed. “It don’t look the same, does it?”
“I be go to hell and et for a tater!” Tuttle gushed, kneeling beside Bass and pointing. “It ain’t the same, Silas.”
Wheeling on Bass, Cooper spat, “S’pose y’ go and tell me what good that’s gonna do us, Scratch.”
With a shrug Bass said, “No earthly good a’tall.”
Fuming, Cooper declared, “Then why all the preachin’, y’ weasel-stoned pup?”
“Just showin’ you something I figgered out,” he said as Cooper wheeled away angry. “Figgered out … all on my own.”
Titus stood there watching the backs of the other two join Silas Cooper’s as all three stomped off for camp—on foot. The wind punched right out of his sails, and with no one wanting to share in the joy of his personal discovery, his shoulders began to sag as he followed in their wake.
For the rest of that morning the four of them worked feverishly at hiding from view and prying eyes what beaver they had taken that season, caching the packs of plews and what excess plunder they couldn’t pack off now, stowing all of it here and there within the thickest clumps of willow and alder—as out of sight as they could make it. Then they covered their sign the best they knew how, dragging branches over their footprints so no tracks would point the way to their cache of beaver and camp goods.
With Hannah and that lone saddle horse swaybacked beneath all their blankets and robes, along with their cooking gear, some coffee, flour, beads, and vermilion, in addition to several extra pounds of powder and a few bars of bullet lead, the four finally set out on foot shortly after midday … following the backtrail of the horse thieves.
Most all day Cooper muttered under his breath until they made camp that first evening. As twilight sucked the last warmth out of the sky, Scratch took Hannah’s long picket rope and tied it to the wide leather belt holding his capote around his waist when he curled up in the robes and blankets, his feet toward the fire. Billy Hooks did the same with the saddle horse. They were not about to chance losing these last two animals to whatever thieves roamed that country. That first tug, even a faint tussle on the ropes, would serve as the alarm.
By the time it was slap dark that frigid autumn evening, Silas, Scratch, and Tuttle were asleep. Each in turn would be awakened through the long night to stand his watch: to listen to the distant call of the owls on the wing, the cry of the wolves on the prowl and the yapping of the nearby coyotes; to sit alone and feed the fire while the others snored. Alone in one’s thoughts of women and liquor, remembrances of old faces and young breasts and thighs. To think back as the cold nuzzled more and more firmly around a man, here in the marrow of the Rocky Mountains.
The following morning they awoke to a lowering sky. The wind that had been puffing gently out of the west quickly quartered around, picking up speed as it came out of the north. With no other choice they walked into the brutal teeth of that wind until early afternoon when the clouds on the far horizon began to clot and blacken, hurrying in to blot out the sun. Within an hour icy sleet began to pelt them, coating everything, man and animal and all their provisions alike, with a thin, crusty layer of ice.
By sundown they were exhausted, forced to stumble on foot across a slippery terrain, leading the mule and horse up and down creekbanks and coulees, forced to search for more open ground where the footing wouldn’t be so treacherous—but where they knew they might be easy to spot by the horse thieves. It turned out to be the sort of day that reminded Titus just how quickly the cold could rob a man of his strength, the sort of icy cold that might even come close to stealing his resolve and will to go on.
Nearly at the end of their worn-out rawhide whangs, the four hobbled into a grove of cottonwood near the lee side of some low hills and tied off the weary animals. While two of the trappers kicked around in the snow to gather up deadfall, another brought in water from the nearby stream, and the last of them brushed snow back from the ground where they built their night fire.
“I’ll take first watch,” Scratch volunteered as they chewed on their dried meat and drank their scalding coffee.
“Best by a long chalk,” Tuttle said, “than for a man to get hisself woke up when he’s dead asleep, smack in the middle of the dark an’ the cold.”
Better was it to stay awake, he thought as the night deepened, and stand to first watch. But when he had turned Billy Hooks out and crawled off to his robes and blankets, Titus found he could not sleep. Instead he lay shivering beside the crackle of their small fire for the longest time—unable to escape his fear of just what might become of them out here without the rest of their animals, in the middle of a wilderness where the brownskins came and went as they pleased, taking what they wanted from a white man.
Damn well didn’t seem near fair, it didn’t—when he hadn’t come to stay among these hills, beside this stream, after all. Only to take a few beaver and move on to new country. No more than passing through. So them Injuns had no right to have call on taking what wasn’t theirs. No right at all.
Nothing like Silas Cooper, no it wasn’t. The man took what Scratch grudgingly admitted was his share—but Cooper hadn’t taken it for naught. No, it was his rightful share in exchange for saving Bass’s life, for keeping Bass alive, for teaching Bass day in and day out. By damn, to Titus that was a fair exchange between two men.
But this stealing of a man’s horses and mules. Putting that man afoot as a blue norther bore down on these high plains and uplands. And the worst part of it was that the new snow had eventually blotted out the trail the farther north they walked. Still, the four of them had a good notion the thieves were leading them north, right into the teeth of the coming weather.
That day the trappers had even agreed that they would find the thieves up yonder, in that. Yellowstone country. No matter that they didn’t have a trail to follow. All they would have to do was keep watch from the high ground, a ridgetop or the crest of a hill, straining their eyes against all that bright and snowy landscape—searching for some sign of a pony herd, a cluster of brown lodges nippling against the cold skyline … and if nothing else, maybe they’d spot some ghostly smudge of firesmoke trickling up into the autumn sky.
That’s how they found the Indian camp, far, far off the next afternoon.
From a distant ridge they could make out the lighter brown of the buffalo-hide lodgeskins scalded black at the smoke flaps, each cone raising its gray offering of heat, and food, and shelter from the cold. Ponies grazed beyond the lodges on what grass they pawed free or snow. People came and went on foot among the lodges, down to the thick groves of tall cottonwoods, or to the narrow stream meandering in its crooked, rocky, springtime-wide creekbed.
“Who they look to be?” Tuttle asked anxiously as they huddled there on the ridgetop as the wind came up.
Hooks prodded, “They ain’t Blackfoots, is they?”
“Blackfoot would’ve rubbed us out first—then took the horses,” Bass reminded them, feeling exposed and vulnerable against the skyline. “Maybeso we ought’n get ourselves down off this ridge, Silas.”
Cooper didn’t say a thing for the longest time, studying not so much the village as he looked here and there across the valley for horsemen. Then he watched the way the men acted in camp, for it ought to be plain if they were a hostile bunch or not.
Scratch agreed when Silas explained to them as much.
“Maybeso this bunch showed us they didn’t mean us no harm but for takin’ our animals.” Titus looked this way and that, growing more nervous what with the way they were backlit by the afternoon’s light.
Cooper glared at Bass, saying, “But we come here to get them horses back. Then—maybeso I’ll mean them some harm.”
“Only us again’ all of them?” Tuttle squeaked.
Shaking his head, Silas admitted, “Nawww—it don’t have to be a fight, boys. We just wait till dark—sometime after moonset. Then we’ll slip in and get what’s rightfully ours.”
“J-just like that?” Hooks asked. “We ain’t never … not ever gone an’ stole horses from Injuns, Silas.”
“A first time for ever’thing, Billy.” Having snarled the rest into the silence of their own private thoughts, Cooper gazed off into the valley for a few minutes. “Looks to be a likely place off down yonder where we can lay up and wait till it’s good and dark—”
“God-damn!” Scratch bawled, yanking his longrifle out of the crook of his left arm.
With the sudden appearance of the horsemen, the others were doing the same—but in the span of three heartbeats they realized their four guns were little match for the two dozen or more who burst from the trees on one side, breaking over a nearby hilltop on the other.
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