Crack in the Sky (53 page)

Because of McLaughlin’s kindnesses and his even-handedness in making those reparations to the destitute Americans, Smith now told the hushed gathering that, although the Snake River country was by treaty jointly held by the U.S. and Britain, he had taken it upon himself to promise on behalf of his company that no American trapping brigade would trouble any waters on the west side of the Rockies.

“But—damn! This here’s prime beaver country!” Jackson shrieked in protest.

“Trap over on the other side,” Smith suggested in that polite, preacher’s-son tone of his. “In
Jackson’s
hole!”

Round and round that afternoon the partners argued the question, but in the end the resurrected Smith’s Christian charities prevailed upon the other two.

“Maybeso it’s a hard country, after all,” Sublette relented. “We’re liable to lose good men, horses, and traps up there to the goddamned Blackfeet anyway.”

“There isn’t anything to be gained south and west of the Great Salt Lake either,” Smith informed the crowd. “No beaver of any worth down there.”

So Sublette prodded, “What you say of California, Jed?”

“Nary any sign there, and the Spanish soldiers are near as bad as Blackfeet.”

And in the last few seasons the valleys of the southern Rockies were being trapped by various brigades based out of Taos and Santa Fe: the Uinta and Wasatch front were trapped out by the likes of Etienne Provost and Ewing Young.

Compelled to decide just where they should concentrate their efforts now, the partners determined they would claim that country east of the mountains, on the southern fringe of Blackfoot country, in the land of the Madison and Gallatin, even crossing over to the Yellowstone to trap
the rivers west of where Milt Sublette’s brigade was at work.

Jedediah Smith’s crossings to the Pacific coast had cost the company thousands of dollars in animals and equipment. Accounting for both desertions and massacre, only two of the original expedition who had bid farewell to friends as they departed Sweet Lake back in 1826 were returned to this land of the shining mountains.

While some might eventually say that these expeditions were nothing less than catastrophes, at that moment in the late summer of 1829, there beneath the shadow of the Tetons in Pierre’s Hole—let no Englishman doubt that the Americans had come, once again stretching their arms from sea to shining sea.

Call it “manifest destiny,” call it what you will—the Americans had come to tramp and map, lay their traps and eventually conquer all of what lay between the Atlantic and the far Pacific.

By that summer of 1829 it was plain the Americans had come to stay.

Pushed up against the late-summer sky stood over a hundred hide lodges, brown as a Snake woman’s breast. While both the Shoshone and the Flathead bands chose to spread the horns of their camp circles across the valley floor itself, the white trappers had spread their blankets and raised their canvas shelters back against the trees that bordered this stream flowing right out of the snowfields still mantling the Tetons like a creamy shawl.

Here tarried the morning shadows, and cool mists clung to the surface of every narrow thread of water draining both the Teton and Big Hole ranges that defined this long, narrow valley. There was wood and water and graze enough for those hundreds of Indians and something on the order of 175 white men. With those who had followed Milt Sublette into the Bighorn country, all told, Bass reckoned that there was no more than 220 Americans working the mountains of the far west. A damned rare breed what wandered about in all that lonesome country.

The face of a white man wasn’t so common a sight—not yet, he figured that August morning. And he thought back to all those days and weeks and more he had spent on his own—alone by choice, or made lonely by chance. How many times in the past two years had he just wished
he could go without hearing another human voice? If only for a whole day. If only to go for enough days with nothing but the soothing quiet of the wilderness itself until that quiet became so overpowering that he could then seek out his own kind.

As long as he had yearned for that rendezvous on the Popo Agie, as much as he had reveled in this even bigger, bawdier Pierre’s Hole rendezvous, Bass awoke before sunup this morning, unable to go back to sleep. Restless, unsettled, not knowing what it was plaguing him with a nagging itch he’d have to find some way to scratch.

On the Popo Agie and again here, there had been enough copper flesh pressed against his to sate the woman-hunger until another winter had arrived. Enough too of the numbing alcohol to remind Titus of just how much a fool it could make him and the others as they rolled and wrestled and romped like the young pups none of them were any longer.

Two years now, he thought again—awakened and restless in that predawn darkness. And peered at the six long mounds that were Hatcher and his men cocooned in their blankets. Good men. Men who had saved his life, taken him in, made Bass one of their own. Men who had shown him the very best of the beaver ground in the Bayou Salade, then introduced him proper to Mexican territory, Taos lightning, and those gringo-loving senoritas.

Two years now …

Was there such a thing as too much companionship?

He grappled with that dilemma as he stared into the dark and impatiently waited for morning to come. Was this an itch to strike out on his own, or only that annual itch to be done with this summer fair and on to the autumn hunt, planning his winter ground, cogitating on where spring would find him breaking ice to set his traps?

So Scratch watched the light come creeping across the horizon, nothing more than a graying of the sky behind the jagged spires of those Pilot Knobs that rose so stately there could be no denying that a man must surely feel himself anointed to be here in this high kingdom, must surely consider himself one of the chosen to step foot in
this virgin land … in some way embraced as one of the few who would ever get a glimpse of what lay beyond this world and into the next. So high, so high did they travel that such men as he should surely see right on through the sky.

For too long he had lived in one place. Was it only that his moccasins grew itchy, and he grew anxious to be on the tramp again? Trapped back east among so many people for most of his life, to discover so late what a balm the aloneness could be for his soul. To discover just what the silence in all that was outside of him could do to create serenity for all that rested inside at the marrow of him.

Gone to the banks of the stream as the sun brushed the sky to blue and the Indian camps came alive, Bass splashed cold water on his face, then pushed himself out over the water on locked elbows, dipping his chin right into the bracing liquid so shocking it made him gasp. On the far side sat some women bathing their tiny naked ones in the grass, the children stoic and mute as the sparkling droplets tumbled from their shivering bodies onto the lush green blanket of trampled grass. As he stood, and finally turned to move away, the giggle of children drew him past some tall, concealing willow to find a trio of girls busily chasing a huge bullsnake with their sticks through the grass and brush.

They reminded him of little ones in those camps of the Ute, Crow, and Shoshone where he had passed winters at peace. During those long cold moons the warrior bands were content not to move until the village decided to pick up and find another valley when the wood ran low, or the game disappeared, or the ponies required more of the autumn-cured grass.

Perhaps the warrior had it right, after all, Scratch brooded as he headed downstream toward the Flathead camp.

Indian males celebrated their togetherness in many ways: in the buffalo hunt, at pipe ceremonies, making war, and with those informal talks on all manner of things as they sat in the warm sun while their women went about the camp chores. But, too, many were the warriors he had
known who would set off on their own for the hunt, or eager to earn themselves a battle honor, perhaps to steal horses, or only to find an answer to their seeking somewhere on high.

Suddenly stopping dead in his tracks, Scratch nodded emphatically. Although he was alone, he spoke out loud.

“Yes.”

Having decided answers came only to those who took their own path.

All a man found among others was the noisy answers that fit only those other men: a garbled babble of talk that was hard to divine.

To find his way back to that serenity he had first discovered in this huge land, Bass realized he had to make his way back toward solitude.

Barefoot and dressed in nothing more than tiny strips of cloth that served as breechclouts held around their waists by narrow rawhide strings, a half-dozen little boys came chasing after another handful as he neared the outer lodges of the village. Yelling taunts and shouting encouragement to one another, flinging their sapling lances or shooting their boyhood bows, they played at these deadly lessons of warfare, this study of dying and death learned so young.

At the edge of a morning fire sat a young woman who glanced up at the white man walking past. In her lap she cradled the head of her free-trapper husband, his eyes closed in exquisite relaxation. Carefully the Flathead squaw parted her husband’s coal-black hair, inspecting the scalp painstakingly—until she found another louse, which she seized and cracked between her teeth before tossing it into the fire, then continued her search for the next.

Men and women came and went on foot, or on horseback. Warriors rode past bareback, the expressive eyes in their impassive faces locked on some nether point and never touching his. Girls of marrying age watched him pass as they whispered to one another, their sparkling eyes gleeful above the hands they held over their mouths as they shared secrets about him, giggling coyly, playful at the arts of catching themselves a mate.

“Mr. Bass!”

He stopped, turning toward the sound of the voice, searching for the caller. Ahead in the shadows stood a small group of Flathead warriors, busy with some concern near a lodge door. One of the men waved, called out.

“Ho, Mr. Bass!”

Only then did he see how that warrior differed from the others. While the rest wore their hair plaited, braided, adorned, and unmistakably black, the one who called wore white.

“McAfferty? That you?”

Asa stepped away from the Flathead men. “You was up early—gone afore I rolled out this morning.”

“Didn’t sleep in.”

“I see’d such is the way about you,” McAfferty said as he came to a halt before Bass. “That what makes you so damned good a trapper?”

He grinned. “Maybeso, Asa. Get them flat-tails afore the day gets old.” Then, with a gesture, he asked, “What brings you to the Flatheads so early of the day?”

Shrugging, McAfferty replied, “I happed to spend me some of last winter with this very bunch. Stayed on in their country for spring trapping.”

“Spring gotta come late that far north.”

Shuddering slightly, Asa declared, “No truer words was ever spoke. I was hunting on my own hook and about to mosey south for ronnyvoo when I run onto some of Davy Jackson’s boys. Said they was soon to start back to join up with their booshway so to make their way to ronnyvoo their own selves. Sounded like a fine notion to me.”

Bass felt the sensation grow strong deep within him: something snagging his curiosity, pulling at it like the hooked claw of a golden eagle tearing at the body of its prey, peeling it back and making him suddenly aware of what lay beneath.

“You said you was … was on your own hook?”

McAfferty looked at him strangely a moment before answering, “Didn’t none of Jack’s boys tell you how I come to part company with ’em?”

“S’pose they did, yes.”

Asa stared off toward that far border of trees where the white men had their camp. “I ain’t one to stay with a gaggle of fellers, not for long I ain’t.”

“They said you up and had to take your own way.”

“Now, don’t go getting me wrong, Mr. Bass. Ain’t but a few men near as good as Jack Hatcher to lead a bunch of niggers what want to go their own road and do things their own way. And the rest … why, I likes some better’n others, but that’s a bunch what’ll be there when it comes time for the nut-cuttin’.”

Scratch nodded. “They’ve been at my back ever’ time I’ve needed some backing up. Never let me down, not once.”

“And they won’t. That just ain’t their way,” Asa argued. Then he seemed to regard the man before him carefully until he said, “You ain’t really the sort what cottons to a lot of folks around either, are you, Mr. Bass?”

“S’pose I’m not,” he admitted.

“How long you say you been with Jack’s outfit?”

“Almost two years now since I got my hair stole and Jack’s bunch run onto me up by the Wind River hills.”