The bright muzzle flash flared against the murky snow scene as Shadrach sank to the ground beneath the dead animal’s weight.
“Load me!” Scratch bellowed, dropping the rifle over the cow’s carcass so that it landed right beside Sweete.
“Don’t think I can move my arm,” he groaned. “The shoulder, can’t move it—”
“Your pistol?”
“Only one is empty,” Shadrach admitted.
“Try your best to hold the rifle up ’cross’t your arm, Shad,” he begged. “The rest of this pack don’t know your gun’s gone empty.”
“H-how many more?”
“I see’d four more of ’em out there in the snow,” he replied, watching the dark shadows lope back and forth, no more than fuzzy blurs in the dancing snow.
“I—I’m bleeding bad, Scratch.”
“Where?” he asked, not taking his eyes off those ghostly attackers.
“First’un got my leg,” he answered weakly. “Likely I can wrap it tight. The last’un got my shoulder … it didn’t have time to rip out a hunk of meat. But—when that first’un got his teeth in my arm … hell, I can’t feel a thing from my shoulder on down.”
“That’s good, you don’t feel the pain so bad,” he soothed, worry already worming in his belly. “Wrap your other hand around your arm, Shadrach. Clamp down tight—see if that holds off the bleeding.”
As Sweete did what Bass suggested, Titus went about quickly reloading. But after pouring in a measured antler tip of powder, he decided not to waste any more time fishing out a patch lubricated with bear grease from the pouch that hung at his right hip. Instead, he started the ball into the muzzle with his thumb, then rammed it home with the straight-grained hickory wiping stick.
“What’s your caliber, Shad?”
“Six … sixty-two.”
“Shit,” he grumbled as he clambered over the cow’s partially bared carcass. “Gonna have to dig a ball out for your gun. Pistol too?”
“It’s the same. Sixty-two.”
“Good man,” he whispered as he knelt beside Sweete, quickly peering down at the arm his friend had clenched between the fingers of his big right hand. “Allays good to have the same caliber for rifle and belt gun too. H-how’s that bleeding?”
“Dunno. Can’t tell yet.”
“Hold down on it tight for a little more,” he sighed, fearing the worst would come through in his voice. “Lemme get all our guns loaded, then we’ll have me a look at what you gone and done to yourself.”
It took some doing, getting both rifles and those two big belt pistols reloaded as the wind drove icy snow against his bare hands. What with his trembling from the cold and the shaking from his fear in not knowing how bad off Shadrach might be, the process took longer than it should have.
“Don’t see ’em no more,” Sweete whispered as Titus laid Shad’s rifle back against the man’s bloodied leg.
He looked up quickly. “Them wolves?”
“Sounds like they took off.”
“I ain’t paid that much attention.”
“You get the pelts for me,” Sweete asked.
As he looked over at his friend’s eyes, Bass said, “Forget the goddamned pelts—” then shut his mouth. “It’s getting dark. Maybeso I can come back in the morning for ’em, Shad. Right now, I best take a look at these here holes them no-good prerra wolves chewed in your hide.”
“Easy there, hoss,” Sweete groaned as Titus grabbed hold and began to straighten the appendage. “That leg hurts fierce.”
“Think it’s froze for now.”
“The bleeding?”
Titus nodded. “Likely I won’t have to cut off your hoof, pilgrim.”
Sweete screwed up half a smile and snorted, “That’s good news to this child. Lookit my shoulder, too.”
Scooting behind Shadrach, Bass rose on one knee to have himself a good look at that broad, muscular shoulder. “Lucky, coon. Damn lucky.”
“Not bad, eh?”
“You got so much there for the critter to bite through—coat and shirt and all. Ain’t any bleeding to it.”
“Tore through my coat good down here,” Sweete said, bringing his arm away from his belly.
“Lemme see.”
As Shad brought his red, glistening hand away from the torn wound, it was easy to see the battered flesh wasn’t going to stop bleeding from the intense cold, much less on its own.
Scratch sighed. “Put your hand back on it and hol’ tight as you can.”
“It bad?”
“We’re gonna get that bleeding stopped.” He turned aside, reaching for his oldest skinning knife at his back.
“Don’t worry ’bout nothin’ else—just get me to Shell Woman.”
“Damn you,” Titus snapped angrily, frustration threatening to overwhelm him. Despair lurked all around them, right out there in the snowy, dancing, swirling coming of darkness. “We ain’t going nowhere till we get that bleeding stopped. I ain’t gonna have you bleed out getting back to the women.”
“You just don’t want them wolves come follerin’ my blood tracks, do you?”
He jerked up to find Shad grinning in the whitish light. “Good thing you can still laugh about spilling all your damn blood, Shadrach. Here, hold tight—right here, like that.”
After he had Sweete’s hand better positioned over the wound, Scratch scooted behind the carcass and butchered free a small rectangle of long, thick fur from the cow’s front shoulder. Then he cut three narrow strips from the rear flank, each more than a foot long and no more than a half inch wide. Quickly wiping the knife off on the cow’s frozen fur, he jabbed the weapon back into its scabbard and returned to Sweete’s side.
“Here now, move your hand,” and he positioned the rectangle of fur over the wounded forearm. “I ain’t gonna take the time to cut the sleeve on your coat and shirt. Time enough for that once we get you to quit bleeding like a gutted hog.”
In a rasp he said, “I love you too, Scratch.”
As he finished wrapping the green, elastic hide around the wounded arm, fur side down, and looked up at his friend’s face, Titus asked, “What you mean by that?”
“Just what I said,” Shad admitted with a little difficulty. “Man does what you’re doing for me—I figger that friend cares something deep for me.”
“Don’t know where you’d ever get that idee, Shadrach,” he grumbled as his eyes smarted hotly in the bitter cold. “Hold down hard on this now,” he snorted as he slowly moved his hands aside, allowing Sweete to grip onto the furry rectangle lapped over the wound.
One at a time, Titus looped the long, narrow strips over the green hide, pulling with all his might on the tough, thick, elastic hide until Sweete grunted in discomfort, if not in outright pain, then knotted each strip in turn over the buffalo fur bandage.
“If’n that don’t stop the bleeding by the time I get back from fetching up the horses, I’m gonna have to tie off the arm, Shadrach.”
For a long moment Sweete stared up at Bass’s grim face while Titus stiffly got to his feet and stood over his friend. Shad finally asked, “You thinkin’ I could lose the arm?”
“Better the arm than you dying right here.”
Shad looked down at the arm. “Damn, I ain’t ready to die … an’ I ain’t ready to lose my arm neither. If I’m goin’ under, you gotta get me to Shell Woman. She’ll know what to do. I swear—she’ll know what to do for me, Scratch.”
“Ain’t much more she could do for you ’ceptin’ what I awready done—”
“Get the horses back here,” Sweete interrupted with a plea. “Leave me one of your guns case them other’ns figger to sneak back in on me ’cause I’m down.”
“There’s four of them bastards left.”
“You leave me one of yours, that makes three guns,” Sweete said, putting on a brave face of it. “For the last’un, I got my knife.”
“Here,” and Bass knelt, laying his pistol in Shad’s lap. “I ain’t gonna be long.”
Sweete looked up into Scratch’s moistening eyes. “I know.”
Without another word, Titus laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder, then turned and lunged into the wind, his bare face suddenly stung by the icy snowflakes hurtled this way and that by the capricious gales.
He knew he could get the horses back to Shad before the man bled out, maybe even get Shad back to where they left the women and children at a warm spot below the ridge, where they were going to build a fire and make camp after the men took off to hunt down some supper. But after that, Scratch didn’t know what the hell to do.
Except for getting the man back to his woman. That was the least he could do for his friend. If Shad wanted to believe Shell Woman could heal her husband, then it was fine by him. Whatever a man wanted to believe in.
At those times when his hands had failed to make a difference in saving a friend’s life, Bass had felt as if he had been brought to his knees—hammered down in frustration, in despair, in anger too. So he didn’t rightly think what he was doing could be called praying, not real church praying, as he lumbered blindly through the stinging snow, making for the mouth of the coulee and their horses.
But if there were some spirits out there watching, or those missionaries’ God hovering up in His heaven right now, then it stirred a fury in Titus Bass that such a powerful being as the First Maker could snatch his friend from him so quick and capriciously.
As much as he had wanted to believe before—just as he had been coming to accept the presence of a power much greater than himself … something always happened to make him doubt in the goodness of a creator or divine being. So if that holy and all-powerful spirit wanted to make itself known to Titus Bass … it damn well better do it now.
FOUR
“You figger I’ll ever use this arm again?”
When Shad Sweete asked that of him, Titus Bass was stunned. He turned to gaze at his friend standing in the shadows of the tall adobe wall at old Fort Vasquez. “What makes you think you won’t be back to wrasslin’ bears and whoopin’ Injuns real soon, Shadrach?”
“It’s been a long time,” he said with a heavy resignation. “Too long.”
“Who’re you to say it’s been too long?”
Sweete shrugged.
So Bass took a step closer to the tall man and asked, “What’s Shell Woman tell you? She ain’t said it’s time to take that sling off.”
“No, she says I ain’t ready for that … not yet.”
“C’mere, Shadrach,” he prodded, gesturing for the big man to walk with him to the center of the plaza at the middle of this small adobe trading post.
Near the western wall Waits-by-the-Water was giving Shell Woman a tour of this once-thriving fur post where Titus and his family had spent the better part of a winter years gone now.* Doing her best to explain this and that to Shell Woman by sign, pointing, and impromptu gestures, she was entertaining the five children to give the two men some time to themselves there in the deteriorating hulk of this fort, unoccupied almost five years now. Before it had been abandoned, Andrew Sublette and Louis Vasquez gave it their all in the Arapaho trade here on a wide, grassy flat along the east bank above the South Platte. It was here, Shad had explained to his wife as they approached the deteriorating mud walls, that he had worked a few seasons for the partners after the summer rendezvous were no more. Here stood a part of his past, a piece of his life before he first came among Gray Thunder’s band and took a shine to a pretty, doe-eyed girl.
Even though the partners had raised their post more than two hundred miles north of Fort William down on the Arkansas River, the influence of the Bent brothers ranged far and wide along the Front Range of these southern Rocky Mountains. Within two trapping seasons, the Bents and Milton Sublette’s own older brother, William, had consolidated the lion’s share of the Indian trade, not to mention what few men still trapped on their own instead of slaving for the overbloated American Fur Company. While Andrew ended up throwing in with his older brother’s economic fortunes, Vasquez had ridden north and eventually formed a partnership with Jim Bridger—the two of them constructing their first small post on Black’s Fork of the Green River by early autumn in ’43.
“Look ’round you, Shadrach,” Titus suggested. “Look at ever’thing around you here.”
“Ain’t nothing left,” Sweete grumped. “Nothing to look at—”
“That’s where you’re wrong, my friend.”
Sweete looked down at him strangely, as one might regard a soft-brained town idiot. “Ain’t nothing to see here but mud walls and them broke-down wood gates, a few corral posts, an’ what’s left of the fur press that ain’t been burned to ash by the Injuns.”
Wagging his head, Bass said, “You ain’t lookin’ close enough.”
“At what?”
“Lookin’ at all the shinin’ times you had here,” he whispered, a mystical enthusiasm rising in his voice. “Take a look over there,” he said as he turned Sweete on his heel. “An’ over there too. You was here for times that was some, Shadrach! Times got tough an’ I won’t argue with you that this place is drying up like a ol’ buffler wallow … but it sure as blazes shined while you was here.”
Titus stood looking up at his tall friend’s face, watching something new come into Sweete’s eyes as the big man studied the mud walls, the charred, half-burned gate barely suspended from its iron hardware at the entrance, at those empty, lifeless windows along the walls of the low-roofed huts appearing very much like the empty eye sockets of a buffalo skull … and realized Shadrach was finally seeing more than the abandoned facade. His eyes were finally looking back across the years to a day when this spot teemed with life. A long-ago day when he stood tall and bold against what the future might throw at him. Back to a day before their breed was abandoned and they were all left to wander evermore.
“You see what Shad Sweete was when he stood here many seasons ago?”
He nodded slowly. Then turned his head to look down at his older friend. “I can see more’n some empty post ever’body turned their backs on.”
“Can you see what you was meant to do, meant to be, when they pulled the fur business out from under us?”
Shad went back to staring at the walls. “No, Scratch. I can’t see that.”
“Good.” He slapped Sweete on the back. “None of us can see ahead into what days’re still to come. We’ll leave that up to them ol’ rattle-shakers and Injun medeecin men. Now, lookee right over there.”
“At them women?”
“Shell Woman. Hell yes, you idjit,” he snorted. “Lookee there at that young pup o’ your’n holding on to his mam’s hand so tight, at that li’l girl Shell Woman’s got in her arms.”
“I see ’em.”
“That’s all the gonna-be you need to worry about, Shadrach. Don’t go frettin’ on what was—”
“But … my goddamned arm!”
“You’re the only one worried ’bout it. Shell Woman sure as hell ain’t.”
“It’s my arm,” he groaned. “If’n I can’t take care of that family over there—”
“You been doin’ fine by ’em ever since that wolf chewed you up and spit you back out!”
Sweete’s eyes narrowed menacingly. “I can’t wait till I’m strong ’nough again to toss you in the river.”
“The Platte over there?”
“Yeah—I’ll throw your ol’ ass in the Platte.”
“Just be gentle with me, child,” Titus pleaded, his hands clasped together prayerfully. “Promise me you won’t do it till summer.”
Looking down at that left arm bound close to his chest in a sling fashioned from a huge black bandanna of silk, Shadrach sounded wistful. “Hope by summer, I can toss us both in the river.”
Overhead a ragged V of Canada geese curled low, making their noisy descent on the nearby river. In silence both men watched those final moments of flight as the birds ceased flapping, raised their wings into double arches all the better to catch the wind, and dropped their le
gs beneath them as they descended onto the South Platte, squawking with a flourish and a spray of water.
Sweete said, “First of them I’ve see’d this year.”
“Honkers making their way north, Shadrach. Day at a time,” Titus said. “Just like us: a day at a time.”
That snowy, hoary night back south along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, Scratch had convinced himself that no one was going to stop Shad’s relentless bleeding. But old as he was, despite all that he’d seen out here in these wild and mysterious places—Titus Bass was in for an experience he never could have imagined he would witness right before his eyes, especially back in those days when he was young and far too cynical to believe in anything beyond the reach of his own hands. Had that night happened to a younger Titus, why—he likely would have refused to accept what he had seen, and passed it off as nothing more than his mind playing hoo-doo tricks on him with some strange and inexplicable occurrence. As it was, Scratch had witnessed something that rocked him down to the soles of his winter moccasins, then did his damnedest to wrap his mind around what marvel had overtaken all of them. By dawn he had come to accept that there was no other explanation but that they had all been in the presence of Shell Woman’s protector spirits.
Bringing back their horses from the coulee, Titus had somehow managed to clumsily get Shadrach off the ground and into the saddle, weak and groggy as Sweete had become. With that small, lone pouch of buffalo tongue and boss meat lashed between the sawbucks on the packhorse, Bass had clambered aboard his mount and taken a moment longer to wrap a big bandanna over the coyote fur cap, knotting it beneath his bearded chin to hold the cap down against the growing strength of the icy gales. Then he had closed his eyes. Drawing in a deep breath, he dithered on whither direction they should go. With the disappearance of the sun behind the storm clouds, gone were the landmarks that had brought them here to the buffalo. Nowhere to be seen were the guiding stars he had always relied upon at times like these.
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