Death Rattle (48 page)

Once he had started into the Gap, Bass began to train an ever-more-alert eye on the blue horizon, searching for any sign of smoke or dust, something that might foretell of a village in camp or some Crow on the move. Yellow Belly’s people could be anywhere in this stretch of country now, he reminded himself. Deep in winter the band might push far south of the Gap, seeking out those protected valleys as the weather intensified its icy fury. But for now, he figured that the village would still be migrating across more open country. Anywhere west from the Bighorn. Pushing on, Titus continued down that river to its junction with the mighty Yellowstone.

From those high southern bluffs he halted to let the horses blow and water while he had himself a look with his brass spyglass. Dragging it from his possibles bag, Scratch snapped open the three long, leather-wrapped sections and began to search the north bank of the Yellowstone, slowly scanning to his right as the Bighorn flowed off to the northeast. Then he inched it around to the south, searching the lower Bighorn valley. Still nothing.

They had to be west of there, he decided. Turning to the left, Titus began to scan the north bank of the Yellowstone for any sign of movement, human or otherwise.
Twisting
the sections into focus on the horizon, he inched the spyglass across to the southern bank of the wide, icy-blue river. In due time the Yellowstone would ice up for the season.

How desperately he wanted to find them, spot some wispy tower of smoke perhaps, that his eyes strained and grew tired. So tired for the strain in the winter light, from his willing it to be so, that his eyes began to water in the dry cold as the sun sank behind a bank of purple-blue storm clouds. Certain that, by morning, they would have
more snow on the ground. For now he could find them shelter somewhere down below.

As he started the horses away, descending through a defile, Scratch decided that was likely what the Crow themselves had done: gone in search of some sheltered valley where they might have more protection from the winter storms sure to roll through with more regularity now.

From firsthand experience, he knew both the river and mountain bands generally spent the early part of the winter out in the open country. But as soon as the storms began to batter the Yellowstone country with some regularity, the Crow migrated to those sheltered valleys in the lee of mountains. True enough, Yellow Belly’s bunch could be over east visiting and trading with Tullock at the mouth of the Tongue—but the odds of that were a might slim. They usually put off that sort of journey for the leanest times—late in the winter—after the women had plenty of furs tanned, ready for bartering.

Yonder to the northwest along the Yellowstone lay that country where, he recalled, Bridger’s brigade had wintered back in the early part of ’37. Titus thought back fondly on that cold time when he was hunkered in among the Crow with his family and decided to pay a visit to see some old friends where the trappers had set up their winter quarters nearby. Ol’ Gabe himself, Shad Sweete, big Joe Meek, and others too hadn’t been regaling one another with tales of bygone glories for very long at all when some Blackfoot showed up.

“That there weren’t no leetle war party, mind you, boys,” he said now to the dogs loping near the saddle horse’s legs. “It were a hull shitteree of them bad-hearted niggers. Fact be—there was more of them red niggers’n any of us ever laid eyes on!”

Late of a subfreezing winter day those warriors had gathered in force just downriver, clearly intending to wipe out one of the largest contingents of Americans ever to boldly penetrate the southern extreme of that country claimed by the Blackfoot. The sun went down, and the temperature plummeted with it. As darkness closed in
around them, the Blackfoot drums began their haunting echoes.

“We could hear ’em beatin’ on their parfleche and screaming their war songs,” Scratch explained to his canine audience as they continued downslope. “Such noisome sounds could turn a lesser man’s heart to water—hour after hour of that goddamned music, just knowing that come morning there was more’n enough Blackfoot to wipe all of us out three or four times over.”

Then one of the trappers had shouted for the others to look north into the night sky. The horizon was ablaze with pulsating lights, resplendent with exploding streamers of throbbing color. But downriver a short distance, it appeared those northern lights gradually began to change hue. As the trappers watched, the sky bowed directly over the Blackfoot war camp erupted in a brilliant crimson.

“Damn, if it didn’t seem like the heavens themselves was bleeding!” Titus declared dramatically as he related the story to those two dogs.

It had proved to be a long, sleepless, and brutally cold night. And with the gray of dawn, while the ice fog began to swirl and shift, the trappers saw the Blackfoot coming—led by a war chief who had a white robe wrapped about his shoulders.

“We figgered that was it, boys. The last sunrise any of us niggers would ever lay eyes on. But, ’stead of rolling on over us, them Blackfoots squatted right down and had themselves a war council not far from our barricades.”

After some spirited debate, the war chief advanced alone to a spot midway between his warriors and the Americans. In sign he explained that the spirits must not be pleased with their plans to attack the trappers. The chief and his headmen had decided that blood-red sky arched over their end of the river valley was nothing less than a bad omen.

“An’ them niggers did skeedaddle, just like that!” he clucked, trying his best to snap his fingers within the thick blanket mittens. “Happened, just like I told it—not far yonder there, on the north bank of the Yallerstone.”

Corne morning, he’d continue west along the Yellowstone, Titus decided. About the only way to search was to make the sweep and look for sign. Maybe come across some evidence of hunters ranging out from camp. Spot enough smoke to account for a village. Cut some trail sign—

He studied the lowering sky at the western rim of a world shrinking smaller and smaller as his day came to an end. The tops of those far mountains had disappeared beneath a bank of heavy clouds. Snow would be atop them by nightfall. With no possibility of cutting trail sign after the storm.

As his eyes began to scan the countryside immediately ahead for a sheltered nook, he figured the best he could hope for was that in two—maybeso three—days after the storm had waned, the Crow men would again venture out to hunt as the weather faired off. But for the next day or so while the storm left icy remnants of its passage through the countryside … both game and hunters would be laying low.

It was nearing twilight when he found a copse of trees big enough to bring all those horses under cover, an open spot in the middle big enough where he would eventually scrape back the crusty snow to build his fire and spread out his bedding. The first item of necessity was to stretch out a long length of one-inch rope between several of the trees surrounding the center of the copse where little of the old snow covered the grass the horses would dig at. By the time he was done bringing the horses into his makeshift rope corral, Titus felt himself breaking a sweat. And his work had hardly begun. Sometimes, everything needed doing at once.

As the dogs scampered off to sniff among the nearby willow while the light continued to fade, Bass tore off his elkhide coat and mittens. The wind was coming up—a sharp, brassy tang announced a hard, dry snow on its way.

Wearing only the buffalo-hide vest for warmth now, he tore at the knots in the hitching ropes with his bare fingers, hoisting the loads from the horses’ packs,
uncinching the saddles and heaving them outside the rope corral. When the last loads hit the ground, Bass dragged all the baggage he wouldn’t need into four piles, then carried the rest toward the base of three cottonwoods that might as well have grown from the same root system, their trunks stood so close. Together the three would make a fine reflector for his fire in the coming storm.

Storm. Fire. Wood.

But first he needed to water the horses—

Titus heard the dogs barking enthusiastically, a different and excited tone from their throats—almost playful. They must have found themselves a porcupine, he thought as he untied two of the horses and led them out of the corral by their halters, heading for the creek less than sixty feet from his shelter.

The dogs persisted in their yipping and howling. If they’d found themselves a porky, or a smelly polecat either one, Titus figured, he would have heard them yelping piteously by now: their eyes and noses stinging with a spray of poison, or their sensitive muzzles punctured by a hundred tiny, sharp needles. Sometimes the only way to learn was the hard way.…

He thought about that harsh wilderness reality as he continued to bring the horses, two-by-two, down from the corral to the creekbank where he had knelt and hacked at the thin ice with the tomahawk he carried slung in the back of his belt. He listened, looked about, as each pair of animals drank their fill.

Most folks simply didn’t realize that in this sort of country, winter’s cold dried a body out even more than the heat of summer. Recognizing that he must do better in such matters, Scratch vowed he would water the horses more often through the days ahead—especially as he taxed them with their long search in the bitterest of northern cold.

From even farther away now he heard the dogs bark … then went back to thinking how he had somehow survived while learning things the hard way. No matter what it was that confronted him—he had endured. From what knowledge he had acquired on his father’s
farm in Boone County, Kentucky, to all that he had absorbed during his journey downriver with Ebenezer Zane’s boatmen. Soaking in what Isaac Washburn had to teach him before Titus ever ventured to the mountains, not to mention all the brutal mistakes he made learning his mountaincraft from Silas Cooper—no matter all those intervening years, Titus Bass had survived despite the odds continually pitted against him.

Out here there always had been risks, perils, outright dangers that would surely chew up lesser men.

So why was it that he was still standing, approaching his forty-ninth birthday? How had he managed to cheat death so damned often … when other men—those undeniably much stronger and those most certainly much smarter—had fallen prey to this wilderness, succumbed to the challenges and the dangers this raw land brandished as a weapon against man’s intrusion?

When other men were bigger or faster, when that many more who had come and gone were clearly more learned of mind—why was it that Titus Bass had outlasted all but the hardy few who remained, steadfast holdouts like him?

What had singled him out for this honor?

From the echo of their barking, he could tell the dogs were making their way back. He stood listening to the dying of the light as the last pair of horses drank their fill. As the last rays of sun slowly drained behind the nearby bluffs, his old wounds began to ache with the great and deep cold that settled in the river valley.

Had he survived merely because he was so vigilant and wary? Or, quite the contrary—had he survived because he had ignored the odds and refused to shrink from those dangers that caused lesser men to cower—taking risks that spared his life in the end, while other less daring souls fell to less ordinary circumstances?

The two dogs burst onto the scene, causing the horses to snort in surprise, perhaps in disgust, at the canines’ playfulness. Titus turned and led those last two horses back to join the others as the dogs came up, bounding around him.

“Here. Here, boys,” he said as he dropped the lead ropes and patted his knees, calling the dogs. Something on their muzzles, a difference to their noses.

He wrapped an arm around the black-eyed one and held him close for an inspection. “Well, now—lookit you, Digger. What’s this?”

Swiping his mitten across the black nose and into the pale fur behind it, Bass grew suspicious.

Biting off his mitten, Bass dropped it at his knee while he licked his first two fingers and used them to wipe at the dog’s nose. Then he held the fingertips beneath his nose and smelled. Immediately brought the fingers to his mouth, tasting them lightly with the tip of his tongue.

“Ashes, boys. You had your noses in a fire pit, ain’t you?”

He let the darker pup go, snagged his mitten and pulled it on as he stood. Staring off in the direction where the pups had gone to investigate.

Not that the ash could have been warm—sensitive as their noses were, these dogs wouldn’t have done that. Even so, had it been as recent as last night’s fire pit, still had been a whole day—hunters up and moving off at daylight, clearing out of this country …

But, if they had been Crow hunters—why hadn’t they just returned to their village after their hunt instead of spending the night out in the cold?

Maybeso it wasn’t a Crow fire. Damn, he hated feeling squampshus like this on what had become more and more like home ground after all these years.

Looking around at this place he had chosen, Scratch sighed. He’d build a fire, cook his supper, and heat some coffee. Then take the precaution of building a straw man he would stuff beneath some robes to give the appearance of a man sleeping.

That done and the fire banked, he’d slip off into the dark, back among the cottonwood shadows where he would dig a narrow trench after nightfall. Into that shallow hole he’d lay enough of the glowing coals he could scoop from the fire pit, then sprinkle a thin layer of dirt over them before spreading his sleeping robes atop the
trench. That done, he’d sleep warm, hiding back in the dark, laying right where he could keep watch on the fire and campsite through the trees.

Something told him. Maybe it was the fact he hadn’t found the Crow village by now. Compounded by the dogs investigating that ash from an old fire.

Then again … maybe it was nothing more than that finely tuned edge of discomfort that had saved his life so many, many times before.