Crack in the Sky (44 page)

With five long vertical cuts that together formed a bloody wound more than an inch wide, now Titus punctured the brown skin out near the hollow of the man’s right shoulder. Here for the first time he noticed how the brown flesh was goose-bumped with the soggy chill. After suffering through a night without the blanket that had been tied behind his simple snare saddle, after enduring this cold soaking—Bass felt a begrudging admiration for this Arapaho he pinned to the wet earth, a man who did not struggle as the white trapper began to drag the skinning knife vertically across his right breast … putting a top on the huge letter
T
. Four more times he scraped that blade across the brown flesh, opening the skin, moving glistening metal through oozing blood until he was satisfied with his work.

Then he began to mark this enemy with his second letter. Down the left breast he dragged the blade in a wide gash, making it as long as he had the
T
, this new incision opened right beside the breastbone. After it too had been widened four more times, Scratch added two crude semicircles to that vertical line, forming a huge
B
.

He finished by picking up a handful of the warrior’s hair in his left palm, splaying it out between his fingers a moment as he watched the Indian’s eyes move toward that hand.

“No,” Scratch said, not much above a whisper. “I ain’t gonna scalp you, nigger. Save that for someone else to do. For ’Nother time.”

Instead, Bass slowly dragged one side of the bloody knife blade across that clump of hair, then flipped the knife over to wipe off the other side on the hair. He placed the weapon back in its sheath.

“Figger I marked you ’nough awready,” he said to the Indian. “Them’s my letters.”

Taking his right index finger, Titus scraped his fingernail down the bloody cuts to retrace both letters, watching the warrior grimace as Bass opened up the wide lacerations and got them to oozing all the more.

“Want you to remember me, nigger. Want you to remember what you saw me do to your friend yesterday. I ain’t gonna make sign for you like I done yesterday when I told you that nigger scalped me. Want you go back to your people and tell ’em what happened here. Go back and show ’em my letters I put on you.”

He wiped off the bloody fingertip in the warrior’s hair and stood, finding his knees had stiffened in the time he had been squatting over his enemy. Bass stepped off the warrior’s arms.

“That’s gotta be some big medicine to your kind. You come crawling back to your people … telling ’em the story how I killed and cut up the man what took my hair. He your brother? Your friend?”

After Titus waited a moment, staring down at the Indian’s face, studying it for some betrayal, he sighed.

“It’s good you hate me now. Hate me for what I done to your friend. Hate’s good and clean … much better feeling than someone what just don’t give a shit. I understand hate lot better’n I can understand a man what ain’t got a heart big enough to feel big feelings. I figger a man what don’t hate big ain’t the sort what feels anything in a big way.”

Slowly dropping to one knee beside the warrior’s shoulder, Bass pushed an unruly sprig of his own hair out of his eyes.

“I had folks what took from me. It hurt so bad I wanted to hate someone, just one someone for it. But … I didn’t know who to hate, so it ate at me inside. Maybeso it still does.”

Holding his fingertip just above the wounds, he quickly traced the letters again.

“So you know that’s me.”

Then he tapped the index finger against his own chest. And quickly retraced the letters again before tapping the finger against his own blanket capote once more to emphasize.

“That’s my letters. That’s
me
. Want you tell ’em I killed the nigger took my hair. And I marked his friend with my letters. I could kill you, kill you for trying to kill me. But … I figger this gotta be bigger medicine.”

He stood again.

“G’won now, nigger. And remember what happened here. Remember who marked his letters on you … ’cause I want you to hate me. Want you to hate me bad as I been hating that nigger what stole my hair.”

Bass turned and started away, then stopped and looked back at the man sprawled on the ground, unmoving.

“Can you hate me bad as I been hating your friend? Maybeso that’s worse’n me killing you right off. Letting the hate eat you up the way it’s been eating at me.”

Then he smiled crookedly at the warrior. “I’m gonna wear that nigger’s hair for my own now. And I carved my hate into you. So I don’t figger I got no more hate to eat me up now. Leastways, any hate for the one what stole my hair. That hate’s all gone now.”

Scratch turned away and dragged the rifle off Hannah’s packsaddle, then stuffed a wet moccasin into a stirrup and rose to the wet saddle. Bringing the horse around, he led the mule down to the creek and crossed the water, its surface dippled with huge drops the size of tobacco wads.

The hate was finally gone.

Dragging the chill air deep into his lungs, Bass suddenly sensed how light he felt.

So light he just might float right up through that jagged fracture forming in the clouds way out yonder in the sky. Right up through that crack in the heavens where the sun’s first rays were streaming through.

Summer had a way of suddenly appearing there at your shoulder one day.

The long spring had actually started with the last heavy snows of winter as the land renewed itself, then drifted past the soaking rains come to bless this high, parched land, and finally gave way to the here-and-gone-again thunderstorms that formed along the western horizon nearly every afternoon.

Only a matter of weeks after Scratch put the Arapaho warriors behind him, summer reached the high country, and with its arrival came the time to begin their march southeast from the Bayou Salade. Following what Hatcher explained was the southern fork of the great Platte River, they turned northeast at the far end of the Puma Mountains, staying with the river canyon as it tumbled toward the far western edge of the great plains.

There were days when they stuffed their bellies with elk, mule deer, and antelope. At other times they feasted on migrating duck and geese, or scared up an occasional fantailed, red-wattled turkey roosting in the low branches of the leafy trees blooming along the Platte’s meandering course.

At the emerald foot of the front range they left the gurgling river behind as it meandered onto the plains while they hugged the base of the mountains in a course that led them due north. After more than two hundred miles, some eight long summer days of march, Hatcher’s band struck the North Platte, swam the animals over to the north bank, then turned their noses to the northwest.

“I figger we come almost half the way,” Jack declared that evening as they went into camp beside the North
Platte. “Maybeso ’Nother ten days is what it’ll take us to get where they told us Sublette’s gonna hold ronnyvoo.”

They crossed better than 230 more miles, another eleven hot days of travel across the broken wastes—trudging up the North Platte to reach the mouth of the Sweetwater, climbing that river north by east toward the base of the Wind River Mountains, passing timeless monuments formed aeons before in a glacial age: the incredible humpbacked shape of Turtle Rock, then on to Split Rock as the high ground, buttes, ridges, and low mountain ranges continued to rise on either side of them. Where the Sweetwater angled off toward the southwest to begin its gradual climb toward the Southern Pass, the seven sunbaked, hardpan wayfarers crossed to the north bank of the stream and pressed on into the verdant foothills of the Wind River range. One after another of the tiny freshets rushed together out of the grassy meadows in sparkling braids to form narrow creeks that tumbled east toward the widening streams until they reached that low divide above the Popo Agie, or Prairie Chicken, of the Crow.

In the broad valley below him, Bass spotted the narrow wisps of smoke rising from the leafy cottonwood canopies, eventually smeared and smudged by the cool breezes drifting down from those high places above them where thick mantles of snow still remained despite the advance of the seasons.

He had figured there would be more camps.

“Ain’t many of ’em here ’bouts,” Titus grumped.

“Not yet, there ain’t,” Caleb Wood replied.

“Don’t look to be no trader’s tents,” Hatcher complained. “We beat Sublette in to ronnyvoo.”

Solomon declared, “Damn sight better’n getting here after all the whiskey’s been traded off!”

Beyond the creek, on the far side of the tall green mushroom of trees, stood some two dozen browned hide lodges, their blackened smoke flaps pointed toward the east.

“Sho’nies?” Rufus asked.

“This here be their country,” Hatcher said. “Though I figgered there’d be more of ’em.”

Bass said, “Maybeso it’s early for them too.”

“Let’s camp!” Isaac Simms roared.

Now, after all those weeks—the hot, dusty leagues—that curling blue ribbon of the Popo Agie beckoned them across those last two miles, down into the grassy bottom where the stalks rubbed a horse’s belly, brushed a man’s stirrups as the trappers fanned out in a wide front to make their presence known as white men upon nearing the camp. Again at last to see faces old and new, trapper and trader alike after so many months with only the earthy hues of Spanish skin or the coppery sheen of Indian flesh, both friend and foe alike … not to mention how they had tired of the sameness to one another’s drab, familiar faces.

“Ho, the camp!” Jack was the first to bellow as they drew close, attracting the attention of those relaxing back in the shade of the towering cottonwoods.

From up and down a short stretch of the river, more than twenty-five men appeared from the tall willows and brush, stepping into the brilliant sunshine of that midafternoon, the land grown so hot that shimmering fingers of heat wavered above the valley’s wide meadows. They shaded their eyes with flat hands or squinted up beneath the brims of their weathered hats to watch the strangers approach.

“Where from, fellers?” a large man prodded the riders.

Caleb Wood dragged his big hat from his head and smacked it across his dusty thigh, stirring an eruption that drifted off on the warm breeze. “Wintered down to the greaser country in Taos. Come up by way of Bayou Salade for spring trapping.”

“Mexico, you say?”

And a second man in the crowd asked, “Did I hear ’em say they rode up from Mexico?”

Inquired another of those moving up on foot, “Are the plew prime down there?”

“’Bout as sleek as I ever see’d ’em,” Jack replied as his group came to a halt near the trees and the others crowded close to the horsemen.

A man came up to stand below Hatcher. “First thort you mought’n be some of Davy Jackson’s outfit.”

“He ain’t working to the south last season, is he?” Jack replied.

“No,” the man declared, “but some us figgered he was sending fellers over from the Pilot Knobs with his catch, like him and Sublette planned he would.”

Isaac asked, “What’s the price o’ beaver this summer?”

“Sublette ain’t come in yet,” the first man answered. “’Spect him any day now.”

“Who you boys?” Solomon inquired.

A tall, ruggedly handsome figure of a man Bass recognized had worked his way through the gaggle of greeters, scratching at a bearded cheek. He held up his hand to Hatcher, and with a distinct Scottish burr he announced, “I’m booshway of this brigade. Name’s Robert Campbell. We’re down from Crow country up on the Powder.”

“Crow country, eh?”

“But the Blackfeet were devils this year,” Campbell explained. “Lost four of my men to the bastards at the Bad Pass in the Bighorns.” They finished shaking and he dropped his hand. “Did I hear right that you’re not from Davy Jackson’s bunch?”

“On our own hook,” Jack stated. “Hatcher’s my name.”

Another man declared, “Heard of you afore. Welcome. Drop your leg and let’s camp!”

“What’s your name, mister?” Caleb asked as he leaped to the ground and presented the stranger his hand.

“Jacob Slaughter.”

Campbell stepped over, waving his arm toward the trees. “C’mon, then—any man’s always welcome in Robert Campbell’s camp!”

“Yonder looks good for us,” Jack explained, pointing upstream. “We’ll picket the horses, then mosey down for supper.”

That evening the company trappers hosted Hatcher’s outfit. Over the flames broiled juicy quarters of elk and
antelope, as well as two bighorn sheep that hunters had brought down to camp earlier in the day.

“Ain’t never had me no sheep afore,” Scratch told the man who served up a slab of the red meat thicker than two of his fingers. He stuffed the end of the sliver in his mouth and sliced off a healthy bite, finding the texture and sweet taste of the meat entirely pleasant.

The company man settled on his haunches right at Bass’s knee. “And I ain’t never knowed no one gone to Mexico afore. Heard tell the food’s every bit as hot as the sun can boil a man’s brains there. Any of that true?”

“A feller can get hisself a pepper belly, that’s for sartin,” Isaac piped up on the far side of Titus.

“Forget the goddamned food!” A second of Campbell’s men squatted near them. “The women—tell me ’bout them.”

“Nawww,” Scratch said, shaking his head. “You don’t want us to go and tell you ’bout them Mexican women.”

“Hell if I don’t!” he roared in mock wounding.

“We been dry since we come in to ronnyvoo,” explained that first of the company trappers who pointed across the stream. “Them Snakes over there ain’t bringing out their wimmens for none of us.”

“Course they ain’t,” grumbled the second man. “Leastways not till Sublette gets here with shinies and foofaraw what can make any Injun woman plop on her back and open her legs for an American!”

“So go right ahead and tell us ’bout them greaser gals!” a third man exclaimed as he strode up, grease dripping from his lower lip into his chin whiskers.

“Why, now … they ain’t like no white gals I ever poked,” Bass said, trying his best to emulate that knowledgeable tone of the backwoods schoolteachers he had suffered under for so many years. “Not like no Injun women neither. My, my—”