Buffalo Palace

by Terry C. Johnston

  As he watched Rufus and Elbridge turn back to their packs, Bass stepped up to Hatcher, swatting at those tormentors that hovered around his face. “What’s this goober?”

  “Some calls it milk,” Fish replied.

  “Same thing,” Hatcher stated. He reached for the cherrywood vial hanging on his belt, untied it, and removed the antler stopper before he brought it beneath Scratch’s nose.

  “That’s beaver bait!” Titus exclaimed, making a face and scrunching up his nose with the awful tang.

  “Damn right it is,” Hatcher said, pouring a little of the thick milky-white substance into the palm of one hand. “That’s the goober a man puts on where he don’t want no skeeters biting at him.”

  In surprise Bass watched Jack, then Solomon and the others in the group, all busy themselves with smearing the potent, rancid, smelly discharge on their exposed flesh: face, neck, backs of hands—everywhere the mosquitoes might be tempted to land and begin their biting torment.

  “Best ye try some skeeter medicine,” Hatcher suggested. “Where’s yer bait?”

  “In my plunder. Hell if I’d figger to need it till we was setting traps.”

  Caleb asked, “Don’t skeeters trouble you none?”

  “Damn right they do!” Bass replied. “I just allays done my best to kill as many of ’em as I could.”

  “Here,” Jack said, handing his bait bottle over to Titus. “Get that there smeared on ye, and quick, afore them critters ea’cha alive! We’ll have us a buffler-wood fire going soon enough to take care of most o’ them pesky varmits. G’won—do it, ye stupid idjit—or yer bound to be pure misery by morning.”

  Reluctantly Titus took the cherrywood vial from Jack, its antler stopper hanging by a narrow thong from the neck of the bottle. Trying to hold his breath, Bass poured a little of the thick goo into a palm and brought it to his cheek. Wrinkling his nose and breathing through his mouth so he would not have to smell the stench, Scratch smeared the substance over his forehead, cheeks, down his throat and the back of his neck.

  “Gonna need more’n that, ain’t he, Jack?” Wood suggested.

  “Lather that goober on, Scratch,” Hatcher declared. “Gots to be enough to drive them skeeters off!”

  The nauseating repellent came from two glands that lay just beneath the skin near the hindquarters of the beaver. That castoreum was valued almost as highly as the animal’s pelt itself. Milking each of the glands from trapped beaver into his bait bottle, the trapper used the thick whitish castoreum to draw even more beaver to future trap-sets. It was that scent of an unknown rival that brought the curious, jealous, or territorial-guarding beaver to its iron-jawed fate.

  “Do like Jack told-you,” Caleb instructed as the rest of the band went about unsaddling the animals and making camp. “Smear that beaver milk on good.” He started away on camp chores himself. Long in torso and short in leg, Wood was a man who swayed so much when he walked that from behind, it looked as if he hobbled.

  By the time Bass finished smearing his skin good, he found he could better tolerate the stink, almost enough to stand being around himself. Jamming the antler stopper back into the bait bottle, he took it over to Hatcher. Jack squatted next to Joseph Little, who sat propped against a tree, not looking good at all.

  “Thankee, Scratch.” Hatcher took the bottle from Titus, opened it, and began to smear some on Little’s face. “Joe here says he ain’t feeling too pert. Mebbeso yer belly’s all bound up.”

  “Ain’t … ain’t my belly,” Little said, his glassy, fevered eyes half-open as Hatcher smeared goober on his mottled, grayish face.

  “Gotta be what it is, Joe,” Jack said. “Yer hide feels to be burning up. And yer wet as hell with fever.”

  “I been sweating like this near all day, Jack,” Little replied with a hoarse rasp. It was clear he was scared. “What you think it be?”

  “Don’t have me no idee,” Hatcher answered, flicking Bass a questioning look. “But I’m sure it ain’t nothing to fret yerself over.”

  Titus shrugged slightly as he knelt beside the two. The moment he touched Little’s mottled cheek, he pulled his fingers back, alarmed at the heat of the man’s fever. Little’s skin looked pale, almost translucent, save for the reddish splotches dotting his face and neck.

  “He ever get sick like this afore?” Bass inquired.

  “N-never,” Little answered for himself. “You g-get me some water? One of y’?”

  Scratch got to his feet and hurried off to fetch a kettle. By the time he returned from the nearby stream, having walked through clouds of buzzing tormentors, Hatcher had Little dragged over near the fire pit where Gray and Graham had their kindling going-well enough to begin work with what the mountain trapper called “buffalo wood.” Each took a dried buffalo chip from the rawhide sack where the band of free trappers stored this precious commodity, breaking the chips into small pieces, which they patiently fed to the flames.

  “Here, ye feed him some water, Scratch,” Hatcher stated as he stood. “I’ll haul over his blankets and we’ll get ’im covered up.”

  Little protested, pulling at his own damp shirt, struggling to get the sticky buckskin off his arms, over his head, as if he were suffocating in it. He muttered feverishly, “Goddammit! Cain’t y’ idjits see I’m burning up! Don’t want no damned blankets!”

  “Brung you some water—like you asked me,” Bass said, holding out a cup to Little.

  With his sweat-soaked shirt still crumpled over one shoulder and at his neck, Joe snatched the cup away like a man gone four days in the desert without a drink. His shaking hands brought it to his lips, where he managed to spill more than he drank before handing it back to Bass for more. He drank and drank, cup by cup from the kettle, and while he did, Scratch noticed the tiny red mounds there beneath Little’s arms every time the man raised them to gulp from the tin cup. Far more of the same small, angry welts dotted the pale flesh near his belt line.

  “Jack?” Scratch tried to say without alarm.

  When Hatcher had resettled beside Scratch at Little’s side, Titus said, “You got any idee what them be?”

  “These here red spots?” Joe asked instead, looking down at his own belly. “I got more.” He tugged back his belt where the breechclout hung and the buckskin leggings were tied.

  “Damn,” Hatcher said under his breath. “Ye know what them is, don’cha, Joe?”

  “They was t-ticks,” Little replied, his eyes half-closed as he keeled over to the side wearily, propping his head on an elbow.

  As Scratch dragged over another blanket and put it beneath Little’s head, Jack inquired, “Ye telling us ye knowed they was ticks?”

  “Yup.”

  “What happen’t to them ticks, Joe?” Jack asked.

  Slowly wagging his head, Little answered, “I got rid of ’em. All over me. But I got rid of ’em.”

  “How?” Hatcher demanded, his voice growing in volume and alarm. “How’d ye get rid of ’em?”

  “P-pulled ’em out,” Little said, quaking with a sudden tremor. He drew his legs up fetally, groaning. “Now, g’won and lemme sleep some. I’m tired and cold.”

  Jack pulled the blanket over Little’s shoulders, then motioned Bass to follow as he got to his feet. When the two of them stopped some yards away, the others came up to join them in a hushed circle.

  “Something he et?” John Rowland asked.

  “Ticks.”

  Several of them turned and looked at the quaking figure lying huddled in the blankets beside the fire.

  “He’ll go under, won’t he, Jack?” Caleb asked.

  It took a moment before he answered; then Hatcher said, “I ’spect he will.”

  “Damn,” Isaac replied, his eyes frightened as he pulled at his whitish beard stained with dark yellow-rown streaks.

  Wood added, “With the ticks, fellers—it only be a matter of time.”

  “Didn’t he know no better?” Gray asked, pulling off that cap he had made himself from a scrap of old
wool blanket, sewn complete with two peaks on either side of it to resemble wolf ears.

  “Said he pulled ’em all out,” Hatcher replied.

  “S’pose one of you tell me what you’re talking about,” Scratch finally demanded. “What you mean, he’s got ticks?”

  Kinkead scratched at his big red nose. “Like Hatcher said, Joe’s got ticks.”

  Bass shook his head, then scoffed, “You can’t all be so full of shit to think he’s gonna die from ticks!”

  Solemn Isaac Simms took off that battered felt hat of his, the brim singed in places where he had not been all that careful in using it to stir up many a dying fire. “Listen, Scratch. Joe ain’t listened to all that much Hatcher tried to teach him ’bout nothing—so it’s plain as paint Joe didn’t learn hisself ’bout ticks.”

  “W-wait, dammit,” Bass said. “Just how the hell does a man die from ticks?”

  “He gets the fever from ’em,” Hatcher explained, sadly shaking his head and the two legs on that badger cap too. “I only see’d one other like this.”

  “That feller go under too, Jack?” Fish asked.

  “Sartin as sun.”

  Scratch simply could not believe his ears. “J-just from ticks?”

  “From ticks,” Hatcher affirmed.

  “We could bleed ’im, Jack,” Wood suggested.

  “If’n Joe lets us, we’ll bleed him,” Hatcher agreed. “But Isaac the one’s gonna do it. He’s done it on us afore.”

  “Awright,” Simms agreed, turning momentarily to look at the figure lying by the fire. “I’ll bleed ’im if he’ll let me.”

  Bass watched Isaac turn aside quietly with Solomon Fish and go over to where Little shivered uncontrollably in his blankets. They both knelt and began talking so low, Titus could not make out what they said. Only then did he notice the sun was easing down on the far peaks rising to the west of them.

  “I’ll go over see if them two need my help,” Scratch declared, then turned from the group.

  He stood behind Fish and Simms for a few minutes as they tried desperately to hold Little’s arms still enough for Isaac to delicately prick open a vein in the sick man’s wrists. But because of the growing violence of his quaking, they succeeded only in scratching Little with the tip of the knife blade.

  When Hatcher came up to watch those last attempts, Bass quietly said, “You don’t need me for nothing, I’ll slip off for a while.”

  “Go right on ahead,” Jack declared. “Ain’t nothing more any of us can do here, I’m afeared.”

  Picking his way west from camp, Scratch came upon Elbridge Gray rooting among the brush along the streambank. They signaled one another with a wave, but neither one spoke a word. Already it felt as if a somber air were settling upon the valley.

  Gray hunched back over his work, crawling about on his knees, working his knife into the damp soil, digging, prodding things out of the ground. At every camp Elbridge was the one to go in search of wild onions or Jerusalem artichokes among the thick undergrowth along the river bottoms, the one among them all to dig up the tip-sina, a rooted tuber that grew out on the prairie.

  Bass wasn’t all that sure how long he walked, but when he stopped and circled back, Scratch could not see anything of their camp but the rising vale of a single wispy column of smoke emerging from the canopy of trees. That’s where he decided to go no farther. Nearby ran a game trail, on the far side of which stood a nest of large boulders. Bass climbed to the top and settled, drawing his legs against him, his arms knitted around them as he stared at the last lip of the sun slipping over the far, jagged horizon.

  Ticks.

  A critter so small a man might think nothing more of one than to yank it out of his hide and scratch where the damned thing had burrowed its head to suck at the man’s blood.

  It weren’t like ticks was anything new to him, neither. Hell, all his pap’s animals had suffered ticks from time to time—cows, and even Tink herself. Never had he given a second thought to yanking ticks right out of the old hound’s hide. Now the rest were telling him Joe Little was going to die from the ticks.

  A man don’t die. from ticks!

  Up here where a man could get froze to death or get hisself chawed up by a sow grizzly? Where a fella’s pony might slip a hoof on an icy ledge or he might get hisself killed by thieving red niggers? A hundred and one things might kill a man out here for sure and certain … but not no ticks!

  As the light began to drain from the sky, Titus brooded on it in that peculiar way he had come to dwell on all weighty matters. Scratch would cautiously reach out and barely touch a thing first before really grabbing hold of it—maybe even rub a finger or two across a subject before diving in to stir it up good. It was as if Titus Bass tested things a time or two, exactly like a man would stick his toe into the water, testing its temperature before jumping on in.

  Sure enough of a time not all that long ago he had been a man with a wild feather tickling his ass, a young pup what had come to the mountains as brave and stupid as a buffler in the spring with his nose stuck high in the air. But he’d been lucky. That, or Dame Fortune had merely smiled on one more of those rare men who went out and made his own luck happen.

  Luck or fate, or medicine. There was more than enough mystery to give a man pause out here.

  “Mind if’n ye have some company?”

  He looked down, finding Hatcher there at the foot of the boulders.

  “C’mon up.”

  Jack scrambled up and over the nest of rocks, settling near Bass. “They’re warm, ain’t they?”

  Scratch put his hand out to feel the boulder beneath him. For the first time he realized how the rock had absorbed the afternoon’s sunlight and heat. “Damn sight warmer’n the air up here.”

  After a few minutes Jack turned to look over his shoulder, then asked, “Ye don’t figger our fire’s too big, do ye?”

  Again Scratch glanced at the smoke. “You fearing Injuns, Jack Hatcher?”

  “Only them what come out’n the north.”

  They fell quiet again, both lost in thought until Titus asked, “Joe really gonna die?”

  “He might’n pull through,” Hatcher replied solemnly. “But I cain’t lay much stake on that. But there ain’t much else we can do ’cept keep ’im at his ease. I dug out the last of the likker for ’im. With that fever—Joe was plumb going out of his head.”

  “You done right, Jack,” Titus agreed. “Maybe help him sleep now.”

  “It don’t feel like I done nothing right, though.”

  Turning slightly on the boulder, Scratch said, “This is pure crazy, Hatcher. How’s a man die of ticks?”

  “I ain’t got me a answer for ye,” he finally admitted. “Me and Caleb see’d it only once’t afore.”

  “Seen what?”

  “Man die of tick fever.”

  “Tick fever? A mari really died of a tick bite?”

  After nodding, Hatcher said, “He bums up with a fever—just like Joe’s doing right now. Tweren’t nothing no man could do for ’im.”

  “Gotta be something, Jack—like you help a body through the croup-sick or the ague.”

  “Joe ain’t got none of that. Been bit by the ticks what kill’t him. What give him the fever and kill’t him.”

  “I know ticks. Ever since’t I was a boy—”

  “These out here ain’t the same, Scratch,” Hatcher interrupted. “Ain’t the same like them back east where we both come from. Not down there on the prerra neither. These up here in the mountains … they can kill a man.”

  “Sure as Blackfoot?”

  “Sure as Blackfeets … and that’s for sartin.”

  Almost in a whimper Scratch asked, “W-what’d Joe do wrong that he’s gotta die for it?”

  “Like he tol’t us his own self: he pulled them ticks outta his own hide.”

  “Shit, Hatcher. Man can’t leave the damned things stuck in there, can he?”

  Wagging his head, Jack sought to explain. “Listen, Scratch
: there’s a right way to set a trap, and a wrong way too. So there’s a way to get them ticks off your hide ’thout things turning out the way they did for Little.”

  “How so?”

  “Man’s gotta get hisself something hot and touch them sumbitcnes on the ass.”

  “Something hot?”

  “Like yer knifeblade ye heat up over the fire,” Jack continued. “Just touch them ticks on the ass, and they’ll come backing right on out.”

  “Come out’n a man’s hide—just like that?”

  “Ye gotta do it that way, Scratch,” Hatcher explained. “Wait till they pulled themselves out, then ye grab ’em and toss ’em in the fire.”

  “Can’t just pick ’em off.”

  “Joe did that,” Jack said gravely.

  Bass nodded. “And now he’s gonna die.”

  “’Cause when he pulled them ticks off him, the heads rip off then and there, and them heads stay buried there in a man’s hide.”

  “What of it—them heads?”

  “That’s the wust of it, Scratch,” Hatcher declared. “Them heads is what got the poison in ’em.”

  “So it’s that poison gonna kill Joe?”

  “He can’t last more’n two, three days now.”

  “We staying here?”

  Jack nodded, staring off into the distance. “We’ll trap. And in the by and by let the man die in peace. Give him a decent folk’s buryin’.”

  “Least we can do for a friend,” Scratch said.

  “The least I’d do for any man what rode with me,” Hatcher replied as he started to rise. “C’mon. Sun’s down. Time we got back and done ourselves up some supper. First light comes early—and we got traps to set.”

  Titus clambered down the boulders behind Jack, thinking on just how rare was this breed of man he had cast his lot with—these men with Hatcher, even Joe Little as he lay his final hours beside a fire tucked far back into the wilderness. Theirs was a special breed cut for a special place where few survived. Fire hardened on the anvil of blistering heat and soul-numbing cold. Beaten and pounded under relentless watchfulness, forged by adversity and quenched in that joy of truly relying on no man but their own kind. Theirs was truly a breed of its own.