Death Rattle (6 page)

Poor fella wouldn’t be long now. Gut shot the worst way to go under. Man took a long, long time to die. Could be this one wouldn’t make it through another day of the bouncing, jarring ride as they pressed north by west for the Green River come morning.

He died quiet and merciful, sometime late on the afternoon of the second day’s march. That night at their waterless camp, the men took turns scraping out a shallow trough from the hard, flinty soil. The moon had risen by the time they rolled the body into its resting place, then covered the dusting of earth with what rocks they managed to find across the side of a barren hill.

Over low fires they broiled thin strips of the stringy horsemeat that was beginning to take on a sharp tang. What they had left wouldn’t spoil if they jerked it. Titus figured they’d be down to chewing on parfleche and eating their spare moccasins in another three or four days if they didn’t ration what little meat they had left among them.

In the cool air that third morning, they had themselves a bad scare.

“Shit,” one of the men grumbled as the whole bunch jolted awake in their blankets, “only see three of ’em.”

“Where there’s three watching—might well be three hundred waiting,” Bass declared.

Baker inquired, “What you figger ’em to be?”

For a moment longer he studied the gray hillside, then wagged his head. “Ain’t got no idea. But I don’t make ’em for Sioux still keeping an eye on us. They’d follered us, caught us in the open, and been done with us quick.”

“So who they be?” Elias Kersey asked.

They all watched as the trio slipped out of sight behind the far hilltop. “Don’t matter now,” Titus sighed. “They for certain ain’t the friendly kind.”

“Maybe Snake?”

“Maybeso,” Bass answered. “Or Yuta. Either way, what they see’d of us down here ’thout no horses, I reckon they figger us to be slim pickin’s. Ain’t worth stealing from, or worth killing.”

One of the younger trappers crawled over to ask, “That mean there’s a village close?”

“Likely it does.”

“Maybe we can find it today,” Rube Purcell said, enthused.

“Don’t set your sights that high,” he warned the angular man. “Best we can hope for is to find a trail and see if it might do to follow those tracks toward the Green.”

A pair of the Americans immediately set off for the distant hill in the predawn light. The rest waited in that waterless camp for them to return with their disappointing news that the riders had circled out of the southeast, and their trail led off to the southwest, a jumble of rolling hills.

Some of the men instantly began to grumble that they should have started for Fort Davy Crockett in Brown’s Hole, since that was likely the trio’s destination.

“Could be they were the last of the Sioux scouts keeping watch on us too,” Bass declared. “I’m making for the Green. There’s a lot I don’t mind gambling over—but walking right into that Sioux village again sure seems like short odds to me.”

When it came time to start out again a few minutes later, about half of the others didn’t immediately follow. He wasn’t going to let it matter to him if they had decided to take off on their own. Bass vowed to focus his efforts on cutting a fresh trail that might well mean finding a friendly village of Shoshone or Ute. At least Baker, Kersey, Corn, and Purcell were behind him—they were a steady lot.

A little later when he glanced over his shoulder, Titus discovered the rest of the bunch strung out behind him in a ragged procession, their moccasins and travois poles scuffing up small puffs of the yellowish dust. If the Sioux decided to hit the white men now, they’d be easy to roll on over.

It didn’t matter, he told himself. Just keep walking—every bone-jarring step was one more step closer to Waits-by-the-Water and the youngsters.

What the hell was he doing down here anyway? Had he come out of Crow country to trap beaver in the Wind River Range and the valley of the Green? Or, had he really moseyed south in hopes of holding on to a past that was dead and all but buried?

Maybeso, he had ventured down this way hoping to run into some of the old faces, to talk over the shinin’ times, share something of a bygone life. But Bridger had stayed behind to oversee the construction of his small post, and now even Fraeb was dead. As dead as the partnership between those two old hands.

Dead as the beaver trade.

Truth was, there weren’t enough trappers left in the mountains to make it worthwhile for Bridger to hunker down in one spot and become a trader. So who was it Gabe hoped to turn a profit on at the new post he was raising? The Yuta and Snake in that country?

The way of things now dictated a squaw got more for a buffalo robe than a man did for trapping beaver. No matter which way Titus looked at it, seemed his whole world had gone belly-up.

What was a man to do?

Spring came early, wet and muddy that next year.

Winter had been mild enough up north in Absaroka country, the sort of weather that made his feet itch to be up and on the move rather than lying around camp the way the Crow men would.

A fella could well grow soft and lazy between the last autumn hunt and first of spring trapping. So Bass had done his best to keep himself busy. All through that winter when he could no longer fight off the restlessness, he kissed his family of a morning and rode off alone for a few days at a time, haunting the icy streams and creeks where the beaver waited out the winter in their icy lodges. What beaver were left.

There were stretches of country where a man wouldn’t run onto any fresh sign—no newly felled saplings, no slides, no dammed-up meadows, and certainly none of the huge, domed lodges where the beaver and their kits spent the winter dry and warm. But if he persisted, if he pushed on into the seldom-tracked creek valleys, if he dared climb higher into the icy hills, he did find a few of
the flat-tails that had survived that onslaught of the last twenty years.

It was in such remote valleys that Titus Bass was rewarded with something more than a few sleek pelts. Gazing down upon those white slopes crisscrossed with the pale flesh of the skeletal aspen and furred with the verdant emerald of pine and spruce, he found himself renewed again and again. Listening to the sough of the wind in the snow-crusted evergreen as it fled to distant places, many times hearing nothing more than the quiet breathing of his three horses. Sometimes only the beating of his heart.

That deep, abiding cold, and a silence like no other.

On occasions at his solitary fire as winter’s darkness sank in around him early of an afternoon, he would look back upon those nine days of dragging his travois and the followers behind him, marching away from the country of the Little Snake, steadfastly pointing his nose for the country of the Green. Heat and dust, the sting of the alkali making his nose bleed, dust caking his mouth, burning his slitted eyes as they bore into the distance beneath that high, relentless sun. Eyes vigilantly searching the wavering, shimmering skyline for landmarks, for horsemen, for friends or foes.

Each day he found the others strung out behind him a little more. Some were just slow working up the wherewithal to start out in the morning, to kneel, pick up their travois load, and put that first step behind them. So a few were slow in making it in to their pitiful camp each evening as the light came down. They straggled in for hours after dark. And the following morning, they would straggle out—always following the deep tracks his drag scored in the flaky, wind-scoured topsoil.

He would look back over his shoulder at times, watching them coming, strung out like a few uneven beads on a thong grown too long, most of them wavering, lunging ahead a step at a time as the dust stived up from their moccasins, from the ends of every pole … and he would think how strange was the appearance of this dark, staggering creature—like some long, disjointed,
many-legged centipede dragging itself through the pale, yellow sand … body parts irrevocably following its head.

Dragged along by the sheer power of his will alone.

Persistent he became, if nothing else. One step at a time. One morning, one midday, and one afternoon at a time. Eat the dried horsemeat and promptly fall into the sleep of a man beyond weary, his mind grown too numb from the heat and the thirst to think on little else but to dread the coming dawn when he would have to scoop down inside himself once more and determine if he could push on this one more morning, this one more midday, and finally this one more afternoon as the sun burned itself a red track across the western sky.

It was afternoon when he thought he recognized the river valley from the low butte he had climbed, hopeful after these nine nights of fitful sleep, awakening at every cough, with every rustle of a man in his blankets—worrying if he should post a night guard … and in the end finding himself so hungry, so parched, so goddamned weary that he only worried in his dreams.

But there it was on that flat above the cutbank where the stream flowed into the Green. On that patch of bottom ground stood the dark shadow of those cottonwood logs piled one atop the other to form a small square … so reminding him of Bonneville’s post squatting far to the north along this same Green River.

“L-lookee there,” he croaked as Jake Corn and Jim Baker stuttered to a halt with their dust-caked travois.

“D-don’t see it too good,” Corn confessed, licking his cracked lips and squinting his red-rimmed, alkali-burned eyes. “Can’t see no roof.”

“That’s ’cause there ain’t no roof, Jake.”

Baker’s face went gray with disappointment. “Where’s Bridger, them others stayed back with him—”

“Way I lay my sights, they give up and pulled out sometime back,” he explained as two more trappers lunged to a halt nearby and took to gazing at the scene below. “But lookee there: that smoke low off again’ the hills—”

“Don’t see no smoke,” a Frenchman interrupted.

“There, miles up the valley.” And Titus pointed. “Look in the trees and you’ll see it.”

“S-so far away … still,” another man grumbled.

“What you take ’em for, Scratch?”

He looked at Baker, then grinned weakly. “Likely Snake. S’pose we keep on till we can pay our respects on their camp.”

It was nearly dark, with the last shreds of the longest shadows of the day clinging to the low places, when he heard the first dog bark. It so reminded him of coming home from a long day of squirreling in the thick woods, hearing ol’ Tink start to bark and bay as the old hound burst ahead, smelling home before he even reached the clearing and spotted the cabin and barn amongst the clutter of elm and oak.

A second dog had taken up the warning, and soon a dozen or more of the half-wild curs were yipping, their cries echoing off the low bluffs framing the valley where the last copper light was disappearing from a ragged string of clouds to the west. He shuddered to a halt between Baker and Corn the moment they heard the hoofbeats. Out of the tall willow and cottonwood more than ten of them streamed, spreading out in a broad front, bristling with weapons as they confronted the strangers staggering up one by one behind Bass.

First whack, those Snake had to see just how bad off these white men were. White men on foot? Glor-eee! That had to be something for them warriors to witness. Bass recalled a smattering of their tongue, inched through enough of his clumsy sign language too, to explain how they’d been jumped by the Sioux, forted up behind the horses and mules they were forced to sacrifice, then how they had dropped the pony being ridden by that warrior princess who surely had to be directing the battle. All of that before the trappers made beasts of themselves and started dragging their burdens back north.

How many days?

In response to the warrior’s question, Titus pulled the short twig from where he had it safely stuffed inside his
wide belt, and quickly brushed the pad of his thumb over the notches he had carved each night before he fell into a stupor of sleep, gazing up at the sky he hoped she was watching too.

Ten … this will be ten since we sent the Sioux packing.

There are more of you?

Bass had nodded. Then twice he flicked up the fingers on both hands as he held them out before him.

The horseman signaled the others on both sides of him, and most of the riders nudged their ponies away, streaming past on either side of the trio, hurrying on down the river valley to gather up the rest of the stragglers.

Turned out it was Rain’s camp. The old man who came to Fort Davy Crockett two years ago reporting that white men he had taken in for the night, fed, and given his finest hospitality had shown him their appreciation by stealing some of his horses.
^*
Two women helped the crippled, slow-moving old man out of his lodge to stand before the first dozen of the trappers who limped into that camp, trailed by a parade of children and barking dogs.

“I have seen your face,” Rain said as he studied Titus Bass up close with his rheumy eyes. “Two winters ago: did you ever steal my ponies?”

“No, I was not one of those who stole your horses,” Bass said in his halting Shoshone tongue, emphasizing it with his sign. “But, I went with the men who took your horses back from the white men who stole them from you.”