Buffalo Palace

by Terry C. Johnston

  Jack bent there in front of Scratch’s face, the fiddle and bow swinging loose from one hand, the other hand plopped on the top of Bass’s shoulder to steady himself as he rocked slowly back and forth. “Damn, nigger—ye got more grit’n most ever’ man I ever knowed, Titus Bass. But ye sure as hell cain’t hol’t your likker wuth a Sunday preacher man!”

  They all roared with that, which only made Scratch’s head thump and hammer all the more.

  Stumbling a little as he straightened, Jack swung his arms out as he announced to the group, “This here’s the birthday of Titus S. Bass. Shhh—don’t ye ever let no nigger know the S stands for Scratch.”

  “Here’s to Scratch!” John Rowland cried, shoving some of his bushy, unkempt hair out of his eyes.

  And then Hatcher was sputtering again. “Scratch be a man ever’ last one of us can depend on, that’s for sartin—sartin sure. A man made of pure fighting tallow.”

  “How the hell old are you?” Solomon Fish wondered, stuffing a hand beneath the gray wolf-hide cap of his, scratching at his blond ringlets.

  “Hell if I can figger it out for you right now!” Titus snapped angrily.

  “Hush your face, Solomon!” Jack ordered. “Dammit, here I am speechifying on this nigger’s birthday—so ye just keep respectful of this here serious occasion and keep yer ugly yap shut!”

  Beneath his sharp hatchet of a nose dotted with huge pores forever blackened with fire soot and dirt, Fish growled, “Your yap uglier’n mine, Hatcher!”

  “Bet you don’t know near the purty words Mad Jack here knows!” Elbridge Gray defended.

  “Thank ye, child!” Hatcher roared. “Now, all of ye raise your cups to this here ugliest nigger you’re bound to see out to the Shining Mountains! It’s his birthday, by damned! And ain’t none of us likely to see a more flea-bit, skin-chewin’, squar-screwin’, likker-lovin’ coon in near all of God’s natural creations!”

  With that Jack swung the fiddle up and jabbed it beneath his chin. Striking a pose, he dragged that old bow across those strings—succeeding in raising every last one of the hairs on the back of Scratch’s neck and grating on Bass like a coarse file dragged across some crude cast iron. If it weren’t for the sharp hammer strikes the whining notes caused in his head, he was sure Mad Jack’s fiddle playing would have made him throw up what he had left in his belly from last night.

  Barely cracking his eyes into slits as Mad Jack’s music picked up its pace and the other liquor-crazed trappers set to stomping with one another, Titus spotted the kettle of water nearby. At the moment, he couldn’t remember being thirstier. Grunting with that self-inflicted pain, he lumbered onto his knees shakily, trying desperately to shut out what noise he could from piercing his head with slivers of icy agony, just as if someone were shoving his mam’s knitting needles into both his ears, jabbing them right in behind his eyeballs.

  Fighting that cold, stabbing torture, Scratch peered down into the kettle, finding its surface crusted with ice. Angrily breaking the crust with his bare fist, Bass plopped over to squat in a heap, raising the kettle to his lips, where he ended up drinking less than he managed to splash in his lap—shaking so bad from a terrible concoction of numbing winter cold mixed with a brutal hangover and sprinkled generously with more of Mad Jack’s wild caterwauling and fiddle playing. He drank and drank until he suddenly needed to pee.

  As heavy as his head felt, as slow as his leaden legs and arms were to respond to even the little he ordered them to do—this getting himself up and moving off from the fire, to head anywhere away from the raucous merrymaking—it came as a great rush of relief to suck in a chestful of the frightfully cold air. He tramped through the snow, farther, farther still, as the sounds behind him slowly faded and his head no longer throbbed nearly as loud, nor as fitfully as it had. When he was finally able to hear the critch and crunch of his own thick winter moccasins breaking through the icy crust of the old snow, he figured he had come far enough to have himself a peaceful pee.

  Yanking open the flaps to his blanket capote, tugging aside the long tradewool breechclout, he let out a sigh and for the moment found himself no longer caring about much of anything else. How very quiet the forest became out here, away from the celebration—a grating, noisome celebration he was nonetheless happy the others were there to share with him. But here it was so utterly quiet, he could hear the faint hiss of his stream as it melted the icy crust. So, so quiet he was sure he could hear the snow falling, hear when each flake tumbled against his wind-burned, hairy face, when each flake spun itself into his long, curly, unkempt hair or landed on the sleeves of his thick wool coat.

  Through a narrow crack in the evergreen corduroy of tall trees Scratch found he could stand there in the quiet and look up at the foothills, beyond them at the east face of the Wind River Mountains extending north until their slopes totally disappeared beneath the lowering clouds bringing in this new snow. Those high mountains giving birth to the freshets that trickled down from the alpine snowfields to become the creeks and streams and eventually the rivers, all of which had been good to Hatcher’s bunch that fall. Between the Popo Agie on the southeast and all those little streams that flowed off the slopes of the mountains to feed the Wind River itself, the ten of them had found a virtually untrapped haven. By the time winter began closing in for good and the high creeks were freezing over, they had moved their way northwest across a great stretch of country, just by following the base of the mountains.

  Come spring and the first freeing of that icy jam holding back those winter-clogged creeks, the ten promised themselves they would again work back up the Wind’s course, cross on over far upriver, then attack the streams that striped the slopes on the north side of that great horseshoe of a valley. There they were sure they would find a virgin territory in those foothills of the mountains that bordered Crow country on the east and Blackfoot territory on the west. A crossroads of war trails that land was sure to be.

  Since taking their leave of the Shoshone and their grand buffalo hunt, the trappers’ cooking pots had never gone empty. As the days shortened and the temperatures dropped, the game slowly moseyed down to lower elevations, called to gather with that seasonal imperative, male and female to satisfy their species’ itch. Pronghorn antelope were the first to busy themselves with this annual ritual of courtship. In short order behind them the mule deer and whitetail began their dance of the seasons as bucks sparred and sought out fertile does. The renewal of life went on.

  And then one cold, breathless morning Bass and the others heard that first shrill whistle gradually descending into a snorting grunt. Somewhere higher on the slopes above the stream where they were working, the dropping temperatures had once again stirred the ancient juices in the lordly elk. Just as it was in a time before any man had laid his foot down in these valleys, the young bulls sensed the same urges, were drawn by the same lure, were seduced by the same fragrance on the wind … yet it would not be these males most young and eager who would claim the cows. Instead it was. only the deeper-throated, heavier-antlered bulls who had any chance at all to drive off all pretenders until each harem was secure from all challenge.

  It was an exhausting time for these old royals. Their necks swelled up, they were in constant discomfort, and they barely had time to eat. Instead, the herd bulls worked ceaselessly night and day keeping their cows rounded up and under their watchful scrutiny. Yet—that many fertile, fragrant females were sure to cast a scent on the wind guaranteed to draw some young bulls eager enough to take themselves a shot at the reigning monarch.

  Lowering their heads to dig up tufts of alpine meadow with their wide-flung antlers, each male shaking and trembling with the hormone flush of impending battle, taunting their challenger by flinging urine and semen across their own hide and that piece of ground they claimed, the bulls began their deadly dance: snorting, whistling, and Anally bugling their intention not to back away from battle.

  There had been days this past autumn when Scratch had finished
his trap setting, done with skinning out the beaver he caught without fail, and set aside his chores of stretching and fleshing those skins in camp, days when he crept to the edge of a meadow, or sneaked off to overlook a streamside arena from above in an outcropping of granite boulders—there to watch in wonder and listen in silence to this singular song dedicated to the cycle of the seasons—the bugling challenge of a bull elk. Nowhere else on earth did he believe there could be a sound quite like this ages-old call to battle.

  Overhead those late-autumn days the great longnecks strained south in wavering vees that pocked the deepening blue of the sky. Loud, raucous honking as the birds flapped on past high mountains and river valleys in their own seasonal quest.

  Up these verdant slopes in the darkened timber and down among the rocky bluffs, the bears were consumed with eating their last, stuffing themselves with every bite of plant or animal, anything they could find to last them through the long, cold, deep sleep of their kind.

  The leaves dried, some turned golden and others the crimson of bloody, iron arrow points—then hung there waiting until strong winds rushed down from the high glaciers, stripping tree and brush alike as the land finished off these last few pirouettes before it fell into a hush, ready to sleep on through the winter.

  While their horses cropped at the last of the dried grasses and grew heavy, shaggy coats for the season on its way, the industrious beaver went about making repairs to their dams and lodges. Those ever-curious beaver who came to investigate when they encountered a strange scent on the wind as the ten made their sets and laid their traps. One by one, Bass, Hatcher, and the rest gathered in the fat, seal-sleek flat-tails, trap-set by trap-set through that autumn. Every few days they would move on to camp by a new stream—there to find more dams or lodges, to discover where the beaver felled tracts of the forest, gnawing the timbered meadows into nothing more than flooded ponds dotted with hundreds of aspen stumps.

  That first morning at each camp found the ten of them fanning out in three directions to spend the day searching for any sign of man in that country—hoping not to discover sign of an enemy. Eyes along the skyline, and eyes on the backtrail. Close enough here to the Arapaho, who might raid out of the south, and close enough to the Blackfoot, who were known to come riding out of the north.

  Once assured that the nearby countryside was untraveled, the ten fell into their routine of eating, sleeping, trapping, stretching, and scraping. Morning and night an autumn fire felt especially good to these men who haunted this high land as winter threatened on the horizon—a fire to hunker close to on those coldest of days, for there was always work to be done in fall camp.

  If not repicketing the pack animals out to graze or riding the saddle horses to keep them exercised, there was always the nonstop scraping and stretching of the hides. If it weren’t a matter of repairing a saddle or bridle or some other piece of tack, then a man might find he needed to mend a sore hoof or perhaps even the bloody wound caused when one pony nipped at another in the cavvyyard. Now was the season when the men closely inspected the back and ribs of every one of their work animals—treating the saddle sores and cinch ulcers from summer’s long travels with what herbs and roots they had come to know would draw out the poisons, applying poultices that healed the flesh not only of beast but of man as well.

  Yet as autumn turned inward on its shortening days and slid headlong into winter, it could become a sad time for a mountain trapper finding himself with less and less work to do now that camp was rarely moved through the deep snow, now that most of the beaver in the nearby country were already caught. In that leisure a man surely had himself more time to reflect and remember, to fondly recollect last summer’s rendezvous here at a time when he must also ready himself for the long, ofttimes lonely, and idle winter … until spring temperatures finally freed the frozen streams, prodding the trapper back to his hard labors that would take him from valley floor on up to the high and terrible places: once more to spend his days wading up past his knees in icy water, searching out those sleek-furred rodents that were the commerce and currency of this far country.

  “Who was it learn’t ye to trap, Titus Bass?” Hatcher had asked him one of those glorious late-fall afternoons before Scratch wandered away from camp, just as the others had come to expect of him: off to watch the sun settling south of west.

  “Ain’t nobody learn’t me,” he had replied, then gazed down at his own hands he turned palms and backs. “Just these—seems my hands damn well learn’t all on their own.”

  “Not them three fellas you wintered up with?” asked Caleb Wood.

  For a moment he had gazed into the mesmerizing dance of the flames—thinking back on all that the three had taught him about survival and trust, about balancing the ledger for one’s own life time and again, the way season after season Bud, Billy, and Silas had taught him just how fragile life could be out here—how important it was to have someone to trust … perhaps even after you realized you could not trust them completely. Especially then.

  “They learn’t me, sure enough,” Bass finally answered, the reflection of the flames dancing across his bearded face. “But not ’bout trapping. Truth be, I was better’n all of ’em—damn near good as all of ’em put together too.”

  “Shit, if that ain’t a bald-face!” Isaac Simms snorted in disagreement. “How you gonna be better’n three trappers?”

  “Whoa, hoss!” Hatcher declared. “Just look at what this nigger’s brung in already.” He was pointing for the rest to regard Bass’s growing packs of fur. “If’n it weren’t that every last one of ye was pure punkins at laying a set—Ol’ Scratch here just might have any three of ye beat at that!”

  “Man does bring in the beaver, he does,” Rufus Graham grudgingly admitted.

  “So what’s yer secret, Scratch?” inquired the rail-thin John Rowland.

  With a slight shrug Titus replied, “Don’t know my own self, Johnny-boy. All I know is that I hadn’t been out here all that long when I come to callate that what I learn’t back there across the Big Muddy wouldn’t do me no good out here in this land. None of what I knowed back there was gonna hold me in good stead on the far prerra, not up in them high places. Not a damn bit of what folks learn on the other side of the river gonna do any of us a good goddamn anymore.”

  That autumn sunset as he had leaned his back against the trunk of a lodgepole pine and tracked the pale globe’s slow descent from the sky, he brooded some more on all that he had come to know, on what he had learned across those seasons he had managed to survive since leaving St. Louis all by his lonesome, on his own hook. And in all that time Bass had come to clearly understand that if anything could come natural to a man, then he had come natural to this nomadic trapper’s life. Just as the rivers came natural to Ebenezer Zane and Hames Kingsbury, how plowing at the ground came natural to his own pap and others of his kind.

  When a man’s clearly not cut of the right cloth for something—he best find what he is cut out for.

  As the saffron orb settled its fiery ring on the tops of the distant trees, Scratch thanked whatever force was listening right then … thanked that power in his own way for holding Titus Bass up in the palm of its hand and thereby bringing him out of that land of the east, keeping him safe as he crossed the open danger of the plains and prairie—eventually to deliver him up before this great snowcapped altar that that same powerful force had long ago erected here, right at the foot of an endless dome of sky. Here where the temple spires scratched at the underbellies of the clouds.

  Here—where there were no monuments to man, no puny steeples and church belfries—only what monuments the unseen hands and powers and forces at work all around him had created.

  So once more Bass felt small … so very, very small in watching the sun disappear behind the trees, there beyond those granite towers of the Wind River Mountains—so far overhead no trees dared grow. In this most private, spiritual moment at the end of each day Bass had learned to expect the coming of that cr
ushing silence at the instant twilight determined the first stars would peek through from heaven. It was the very same silence that each evening caused him to rewonder when he would come to know just what force it was that was so much greater than himself.

  When would he know it with the certainty of Fawn, the Ute widow with those eyes of ageless sadness? When was he to sense in his own heart all that the old, blind Shoshone shaman sensed in his? How long, Titus wondered, would he have to go on not knowing? How long until he, like that ancient one, could touch the pale hide of a white buffalo calf and finally hear the answer reverberate within his heart?

  How long would it take until he understood what the wrinkled old men had accepted—what had truly given them real peace?

  Here Scratch stood in that winter forest, the boisterous singing and Hatcher’s scratchy fiddle only faint wisps on the Tight breeze that bitter morning … the first of a shiny new year by Caleb Wood’s careful count made on notched sticks he carried in a bundle tucked away in a saddlebag—a brand-new year for them all here in the heart of the winter, ten free men living out their days deep in the marrow of the Rocky Mountains.

  Maybeso, he decided, autumn wasn’t the season he could expect to discover what he wanted most to know. After all, in autumn a man was still too damned busy to allow himself enough quiet to really hear. There were beaver to be caught, distance to be covered, cold to prepare one’s self for.

  More likely, Scratch thought, he would come to know his answers come a winter. Perhaps … even this winter. A time when life itself slowed, when the spin of days wound down and like thick black-strap molasses everything barely moved ahead at such a leisurely pace that a man was allowed time to rightfully consider and plan and to give thanks for what he has been given.

  From what Scratch had come to know, for most trappers winter was a time to hunker by the fire, swapping lies, carefully embellishing and embroidering their stories of coups and conquests. A time when a man did just what the Injuns did: gathered close to the fires in their lodges, doing their best to stay warm and keep their bellies filled till spring. During that long period of endless cold, there simply wasn’t much reason for a man to ride his horses the way he did during the hunt for beaver or his annual trek to rendezvous—a fact that meant that come spring, a man’s animals would most likely be rangy, feisty, all but back to wild mustangs again. There’d come a time just before spring trapping began when a man would have to break his pony to saddle all over. But Scratch had never been one to allow that to happen.