Ride the Moon Down tb-7

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Drink this,” she said to him in Crow, holding the cup out between them. Then, as he peered up at her with grateful eyes, Waits spoke in English. “Coffee … for husband’s s-sick head.”

  He tapped his puckered lips with a fingertip. After she leaned over to kiss him, Bass whispered, “What’d this ol’ bonehead ever do to deserve such a good woman like you?”

  After swilling down several pint cups of coffee and gnawing on some flank steak from the antelope carcass they had hanging in a nearby tree, Titus started to feel halfway human again. By early afternoon the roll of thunder had eased at his temples, and that greasy pitch and heave to his belly had departed.

  “Do you want my help?” she asked when he brought the mule into camp and dragged over the two small bales of beaver he had to trade.

  “You’re a pure delight,” he said in English.

  “Dee-light?” she repeated.

  Grinning, “Do you know the word smile?”

  “Smile, yes,” and her whole face lit up.

  “You make me smile in here,” he said using her tongue, tapping his chest. “A big, big smile in here.”

  “Too, me,” she attempted in English as she pulled up the thick, woolly packsaddle pad made from a mountain sheep and lapped it over the mule’s back.

  Minutes later beneath the painful glare of a summer sun he encountered a pack train on the move that afternoon, migrating toward him, moving up Ham’s Fork.

  “This here Wyeth’s outfit?” he asked as he brought his pony alongside three of the horsemen who were wrangling less than a dozen horned cows at the far side of the march.

  “It is,” one answered.

  “Where’s Wyeth?”

  “At the head, yonder,” and that second man gestured toward the front of the cavalcade stirring dust from every hoof into the still, hot air.

  “Thankee,” Bass replied as he kicked heels into the pony and they bolted into a lope, crossing the narrow bottomland that meandered between bare bluffs and the twisting stream.

  In no time he was standing in the wide cottonwood stirrups, hollering, “Wyeth! Wyeth!”

  One of the figures ahead turned in the saddle, bringing a hand to his brow as he peered from beneath the brim of his hat. “I’m Wyeth.”

  Slowing his pony to match the pack train’s pace, Bass found himself suddenly grown anxious that his afternoon of reunion and celebration had put him one day late in trading for what the three of them would need through the coming year. The Yank’s brigade was clearly on its way.

  “You pulling out?” he asked of the leader. “Leaving ronnyvoo?”

  “Not yet,” the man answered. His small eyes in that overly narrow face squinted in the shade beneath his hat brim. “That time will come soon,” and he sighed with resignation. “But for now, we’re only migrating upstream to find more grass for our stock.”

  “Them cows I see’d over there?”

  Wyeth grinned. “That’s what’s left of the herd we started with.”

  “You gonna open for trading?”

  That question plainly startled Wyeth. His eyes blinked in surprise as he appeared to consider his response. “W-why, there hasn’t been anyone wanting to … not a soul’s come to me, our tents to trade. Suppose I would be willing to trade. Uh, yes—well, we do have near everything we brought west with us from Missouri to supply Rocky Mountain Fur.” Wyeth grinned. “Yes, mister—I’ll be open for business tomorrow morning after breakfast.”

  With great relief Bass inquired, “You eat early or late of a morning, Wyeth?”

  The trader smiled even bigger, the sharply chiseled edges to his lean face easing somewhat with mirth. “I’m one to eat early.”

  Bass held out his hand and shook with the Yankee before he loped away. “I’ll see you after breakfast.”

  “I said it last year, and I’ve said it more than once this summer already,” Wyeth declared to Bass that following morning, “but most of these men out here in the mountains are nothing less than a low breed of scoundrel.”

  “You countin’ me in that bunch?”

  Wyeth slung his head back and laughed heartily. “Not by a long shot, Mr. Bass.”

  Titus thumbed through some more of the lighter amber-colored flints. “If’n you had yourself whiskey to trade, I’d be one to give you all my business.”

  “Looking to give yourself a celebration, are you?” Wyeth asked. “And a good-sized headache when you’re done too?”

  “Maybe a good carouse, but the days are past when Titus Bass gets so far down in his cups he can’t crawl back out till a morning or two later. Gimme a dozen of them wiping sticks,” and he shoved a double handful of flints across the top of a wooden box at Wyeth’s clerk.

  “How many winters you been out here, Bass?”

  “Twenty-five were my first summer.”

  “An Ashley man.”

  “No,” and he wagged his head emphatically. “Come west on my own hook and paid dearly for it, I s’pose. Lost some hair to some red niggers down to Bayou Salade, but I ain’t gone under yet.”

  Wyeth clucked sadly, then said, “Appears the only ones making any real money out of the mountain fur trade was Ashley and now Sublette. Damn him, damn him.”

  “Heard how he finagled the Rocky Mountain Fur boys to break their agreement with you.”

  “Sublette overtook my supply train not far out of the western settlements,” Wyeth declared, “and he stayed ahead of me the rest of the way.”

  “Knowed the trail better, I’d s’pose,” Bass stated as he rubbed a thumb across the edge of a camp ax.

  “I couldn’t travel as fast as he with the cattle,” Wyeth explained. “Started out with more. But what I have left we’ll put to good use eventually.”

  “How much for an ax?”

  “Two-fifty,” Wyeth said.

  “Gimme two. What you figger to do for fur season?” Titus said as he inched down the rows of crates and blankets Wyeth’s men had opened and spread across a shady patch of ground beside Ham’s Fork—not all that far south of where Bass had camped with his family so that he might stay as far away as he could from the loud and raucous company camps pitched downstream toward Black’s Fork.

  “I may send some of the men out. I’ve been struggling to convince more to sign on with me when I venture into the Snake River country.”

  “Beaver country there.”

  “Yes,” Wyeth exclaimed, beaming. “I want to get as far as I can from that country where Sublette and Campbell are building their fort on the Platte.”

  “Jehoshaphat!” he exclaimed, coming to a stop. “W-where on the Platte?”

  “Mouth of La Ramee’s Fork, right there on the trail to the mountains.”

  Nodding, Bass said, “I know the place. Damn, a fort just east of the mountains. And you know them two Bent brothers got theirs down south on the Arkansas. So you’re gonna trap west of the mountains, eh?”

  “I’ve got these men in my employ, and a supply train filled with trade goods,” Wyeth explained. “I’ll put them to work in the Snake country before the end of August, then go on to the mouth of the Columbia. Plan to return to the Snake before winter sets in hard.”

  “All the way down the Columbia,” Bass repeated. “Going to see that white-headed Doctor there?”

  “No. I’m meeting a ship there. Our enterprise plans to catch enough salmon to fill the belly of that ship before we turn it around for Boston and I turn east to rendezvous with my brigade.”

  “I got a friend what’s come here with Hudson’s Bay,” Bass explained. “It was him told me about how Sublette dealt you off the bottom of the deck with Rocky Mountain Fur.”

  “Ah, but Doctor McLoughlin’s spies don’t realize that I’ll be up there on the Columbia real soon to take, for myself some of their salmon!” Wyeth spouted with glee.

  Titus ran his thumbnail down a bar of lead. “What’s your lead going for?”

  “Dollar the pound.”

  “Gimme twenty pounds,” Bass ad
vised. “Tell me, how you figure them Hudson’s Bay men are spies?”

  “Hell,” Wyeth gushed, “they couldn’t come here expecting to do much business at all. You take a look at their camp?”

  “I was there yestiddy.”

  “See much in the way of trade goods?” Wyeth prodded. “Anything anywhere close to what I got laid out for you here?”

  Scratch looked it over, side to side, and had to admit the Yankee was right. “Didn’t see nowhere near what you got.”

  “And you won’t—because they didn’t bring but enough to make a little show. They aren’t here to trade, not really. They come to be McLoughlin’s eyes and ears. Ever since Jedediah Smith stumbled into Vancouver, the Doctor wants to stay informed of just what Americans will be trapping this side of the mountains—in what Hudson’s Bay claims is their country.”

  “Maybeso,” Bass replied, not really wanting to admit that Jarrell Thornbrugh could be there for the unexpressed purpose of spying in the American fur country for McLoughlin.

  And this was American fur country, no matter what Hudson’s Bay believed, no matter what treaty some government fellas had signed their names to in jointly occupying this ground. But if the central Rockies ever began to run out of beaver, Bass was damned sure the American trapping brigades would push farther and farther west, bumping right up against the British outfits with greater frequency.

  Mayhaps that would leave the northern rivers for him to trap with little crowding to speak of.

  Scratch turned to find one of those who had been grading his pelts now coming up behind Wyeth. “What you gonna give me for my beaver?”

  Wyeth took the slip of paper, glanced at it, then stuffed it into the pocket of his canvas breeches. “You didn’t have much in the way of fur.”

  “Already took care of most down to Taos.”

  “Didn’t leave you with much in the way to outfit you for another year,” Wyeth explained.

  “I don’t need much. ’Sides, I got some possibles cached up on the Yallerstone,” Bass replied. Then he gestured toward all that he had chosen so far. “My plews gonna cover what’s here? And still leave me a little for at least one good whiskey headache?”

  “Believe me, Mr. Bass,” the Yankee said, “for bringing the last of your furs to me instead of taking them to that thief William Sublette, you’re going to get yourself a one-day bargain in trade goods—the likes of which you’ll never see again!”

  Throughout the rest of that morning they arm-wrestled on the value of the last of Bass’s pelts, then on the price of each and every item Scratch had pulled from the crates and barrels of trade goods. And when it was over, they both could smile and have themselves a drink, toasting their mutual fortunes.

  “I’ll be trapping up in Crow country,” Bass explained, eyeing the number of crates and bales in Wyeth’s camp. “My wife’s people. If’n the furs are good up there, I’ll stick close to home for spring too. You gonna haul this hull outfit around, supplying ’em from your winter camp?”

  Wyeth stared at the last of his whiskey shimmering in the bottom of his cup a moment, then declared, “I suppose I have no choice—seeing how I’ve been left with all these trade goods, abandoned by a faithless group of bastards who are refusing to honor their contract with me.”

  “Goddamned shame a man’s word ain’t wuth near what it used to be,” Bass commiserated.

  “So what does such a man with all these trade goods do, Mr. Bass?”

  For a minute he reflected on the possibilities. “I been out to the Columbia where you said you was going to meet that ship of your’n.”

  “You’ve been to Vancouver yourself?”

  “Yep—so I don’t figger a savvy nigger would wanna build hisself a post anywhere near the white-headed Doctor.”

  “McLoughlin,” Wyeth said thoughtfully. “Yes. It wouldn’t make a lot of sense, would it?”

  “Mayhaps a man with all this plunder to trade”—and Bass swung his free arm in a semicircle to indicate the profusion of goods—“should stake out his own ground.”

  “His own ground?”

  “Find hisself a spot where he won’t have no one near to bump up again’ him in business.”

  Wyeth’s eyes shone wide and bright. “Yes, yes!”

  “Someplace where he would plop hisself down and be there with his post and his goods for the trappers what wander by,” Bass explained, seeing that fire of excitement flicker boldly in the Yankee’s eyes. “Someplace where that post of his would bring in the friendlies.”

  “The friendlies?” Wyeth drained his cup, setting it aside.

  “Tribes what cotton up to the white man.”

  “Yes! Like the ones here,” Wyeth cheered. “Flathead, Nez Perce.”

  “Snake too.”

  “Why, the Shoshone roam that Snake River country.”

  “Good place as any for a man to be when he’s got him a passel of trade goods.”

  Slapping both palms down on the tops of his thighs, the Yankee vaulted to his feet suddenly. “A good place where I’ll raise my fort—squarely in the middle! Right between the Hudson’s Bay at Vancouver on the Columbia … and the post Sublette and Campbell are raising at the mouth of La Ramee’s Fork! God bless you, Titus Bass! God bless you!”

  “W-what the hell you bless me for?” and he found his cup being filled by the exuberant Yankee.

  “All is not lost! Don’t you see?” Wyeth swept up his own cup again, pouring some amber fluid into it from a clay jug. “From the other outfits come here to rendezvous, I’ve somehow managed to add another thirty men to my brigade … and now I know where to base my operations! By building my own fort squarely in the western country!”

  As for Wyeth, the Yankee did have little choice but to swallow the bone he had been thrown at this turn of life’s trail.

  There truly was no recourse against those who had conspired against him, just as he himself admitted in correspondence written to his financial backers in the East over the last few days, “For there is no Law here.”

  Fair play and honesty had apparently counted for nothing under the hot summer sun that second of July as the Wyeth brigade set out for the Snake country, escorting Jason Lee’s party of five Protestant missionaries bound for the land of the Nez Perce with what remained of their horned cattle.

  A hungover Bass had finished loading up the last of the goods he had traded from Wyeth that morning as the Boston merchant eagerly prepared to pull out for the west, accompanied by a pair of naturalists he had escorted from St. Louis: Thomas Nuttall, a botanist, and John Kirk Townsend, a Philadelphia ornithologist.

  Grittily shaking hands with the two partners who had done nothing to stop Sublette’s underhanded scheming, Wyeth grimly prophesied to Fitzpatrick and Bridger, “You will find that you have only bound yourselves over to receive your supplies at such price as may be inflicted on you, and that all that you will ever make in this country will go to pay for your goods. You will be kept as you have been—a mere slave to catch beaver for others.”

  Upon marching away from that rendezvous in the valley of Ham’s Fork, the Yankee tipped his hat and smiled at Sublette and Campbell, those who had done everything in their power to destroy the success of his business enterprises, vicious competitors who out of some species of curiosity had come to see him off.

  To them and the remnants of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company partners, Wyeth vowed, “Gentlemen, I will roll a stone into your garden that you will never be able to get out.”

  His was a threat that would echo even louder across the years to come.

  The unmerciful August sun stung Bass’s eyes with the burn of mud-dauber wasps as he stepped from the cool shelter of the cottonwoods along Ham’s Fork to watch the approach of those eighteen Frenchmen and half-breeds moseying unhurriedly behind Thomas McKay and Jarrell Thornbrugh. The seething orb had just emerged from the ridges to the east, but already the motionless air felt stifling.

  “Not a good day for the trail!” Titus called o
ut as the ragged column approached.

  “We better get out while we still have some fat on our bones!” Thornbrugh roared, and brought his tall horse to a halt. He swiped a hand down his sweaty face. “Not one of us used to this bloody heat, Scratch.”

  “Figure we can stay and sweat in the shade,” McKay declared, “or we can start back to our country—”

  “Where it’s cooler,” Thornbrugh interrupted, “and green too!”

  For a moment Bass regarded the austere beauty of the burnt-sienna bluffs that rimmed the valley, shoved up like massive, mighty shoulders against the pale summer-blue of the morning sky. “Green there all the time, ain’t it?”

  “Winter or summer,” McKay agreed.

  “You can keep it,” he told them. “I’ll stay on here where there’s real seasons. Much as I hate the summers—I’d rather have me my seasons.”

  “The snows don’t get deep in Oregon country,” Thornbrugh chided as he started to rock out of the saddle. “And the snows don’t stay near as long as they do in your mountains.”

  “You ain’t got me to worry about moving in with you, Jarrell!”

  “If not, will we see you next rendezvous?”

  He watched the Englishman step up before him. “’Less I’ve gone under—that’s for sartin.”

  “You have all you’ll need for another year, my friend?”

  “Believe I do.”

  “Powder and lead—”

  “Yep.”

  “Blankets and beads?”

  “Yes, Jarrell,” he answered with a smile. “Even got some girlews and geegaws off Wyeth in my trading.”

  “That Yank’s sure to trouble the Company,” McKay snarled. “I just know it, Jarrell.”

  Thornbrugh turned back to Bass. “You’ll watch what you got left for hair?”

  “I got me others to watch over now,” Scratch replied.

  “They’re beauties, let me tell you,” the tall man exclaimed with admiration. “Good thing the wee one takes after her mother—gorgeous as she is.”

  “Wouldn’t do to have a sweet babe like that take after her mud-ugly ol’ man, would it?”

  And then they stood there, motionless a long moment longer, staring at one another, growing in the unease of knowing the time had come once again.