Crack in the Sky (69 page)

In addition, the white-head muttered in and out and roundabout, speaking of that Ree medicine man who wore a grizzly’s head for his own powerful headdress, wore a cluster of grizzly claws around his neck, even performed his incantations with his two hands stuffed inside a pair of dried and shriveled grizzly paws, which he swiped at the air to invoke the bear’s spirit when he came to demand McAfferty’s Bible. Came to steal Asa’s personal medicine.

“Leastways—that’s how I knowed that son of a bitch was a hand servant of the devil his own self,” McAfferty growled. “He come to me to make his grizzly medicine on me—and when I didn’t just hand over me Bible to him … he made more evil medicine on me, called the grizzly spirit to come fetch me.”

From time to time Bass awoke to find McAfferty talking still, talking to no one at all—Scratch supposed—for Asa was standing, slowly moving this way around the fire, then turning to walk in the other direction. The way the white-head hunched himself over at times, arms held out from his body, fingers clawed before him, growling like a bear, then muttering or shouting in fury. Moving again, sputtering his fireside sermons on and on through the dark of night or the light of those late-spring days as Bass slept, gathering strength.

“A evil omen, this,” McAfferty mumbled one of those starless nights as the rain smacked the broad leaves overhead.

So thick was the cottonwood canopy that little of the
mist reached them here in this copse of trees. Like hailstones striking rawhide, Bass believed he could hear each and every drop hit the leaves.

“We been trouble for each other, Mr. Bass,” he explained another time as he helped Scratch eat, pulling the broiled meat apart with his fingers and laying small fibers of the elk tenderloin on Titus’s tongue.

“Trouble?”

“The bear—it’s only the latest sign, don’t you see?”

Scratch chewed on the meat, sensing his strength slowly returning after enduring days of nothing but broth and bone soup. “I figger ary a man gonna run onto Injuns, Asa.”

“Them Apache stalked us like demons. They wasn’t human.”

“Then it was demons I killed aside the Heely, McAfferty,” he argued. “And I kill’t me a lot of ’em to save your hide. To save us.”

McAfferty measured him with an appraising look, then stared back down at the meat he was tearing apart with his fingers. “Those greaser soldiers too—”

“They was looking to get some gal forked around ’em,” Bass snorted. “Weren’t no demons there.”

“Taos used to be a good place,” he reminded. “I went there times afore and it was a good place, Mr. Bass.”

“You ever have you a spree and look for a woman, there in Taos?”

“No. I never laid with no whore.
’Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.’”

For a moment he felt stung by Asa’s condemnation. But then—every man here in the mountains was entitled to live in his own way. Long as no man passed judgment on him, Titus Bass would abide by that man.

Then Scratch said, “I’m a man what wants to lay with a woman, Asa. I need that. And it’s all right that you don’t—”

“‘But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.’”

“Don’t you see I love the feel, the smell … I love the taste of a woman.”

“Maybe we’re come of two different worlds, Mr. Bass,” he finally declared.

There. It was said. No sense in asking the white-head what he meant by that. Pretty plain to see Asa’s thinking, to grasp just what he had come to across the last few days as Bass lay-in and out of this world. Hell, it was easy enough for a man all on his own to talk himself into most anything. All the easier for that preacher to see the bear as something more than a bear.

Finally he took the small piece of meat from McAfferty and began to slowly pull slivers off for himself. “Mayhaps you’re right. So you figger to lay all our troubles at my door?”

“Never in my life have I suffered such tribulations as I have with you, Mr. Bass,” he admitted quietly, almost apologetic for speaking it. “But don’t get me wrong: the trapping’s been good with you. I admire any man what’ll go where you gone with me to trap beaver.”

“We made us a pair,” Bass agreed, knowing the tear in this fabric would never be rewoven. “But you’re of a mind to go your own way.”

“Ain’t you ready your own self? Ready to go your own way ’thout me?”

He couldn’t admit that he wasn’t ready.

Yet Titus knew he wasn’t the sort who could go days and weeks and much less months without some human contact. Be it a partner, or an outfit of free trappers, even a wandering band of Indians who spoke a language he hardly understood. How precious was just the sight of a human face, the sound of a human voice, the possibility of some human touch.

But instead Scratch said, “I reckoned on it a time or two in the last year.”

“Been paired up almost that long, ain’t we?”

“Almost a year. Ronnyvoo’s coming.”

McAfferty nodded. “Soon as you’re able to travel, we’ll mosey south. Trap along the way if we find a likely place. Soon as you’re strong enough, Mr. Bass.”

He didn’t figure there was a lick of sense in beating a dead mule. How’d you figure to change a man’s mind when it was his heart already made up? Why waste his breath when Asa McAfferty believed Titus Bass was the cause of all his tribulations? When Asa refused to even consider that it was his belief in evil and spirits and the Ree medicine man that brought him to tear apart the best partnership in these mountains?

Was there any sense in trying to talk to McAfferty about it come a month from now? Perhaps when he had more strength to argue with the white-head. Maybeso days and weeks from now, someplace on down the trail. Somewhere closer to rendezvous. Someplace away from this river valley where he had made the mistake of bumping into the sow grizzly and her cubs.

Somewhere much, much farther away from this low-hanging, evil patch of torn and sundered sky.

Spring was all but done anyway. And with it the good trapping too.

Time for a man to be making tracks for rendezvous.

Time for him to be sorting through just what he would do when company trappers and free men gathered in the valley of the Wind River. Soon he’d have to decide if he would throw in with Mad Jack Hatcher’s boys … or if he would set off on his own hook now. Alone against the mountains.

Maybeso this was the season to set his own direction. Just as he had six years before: leaving behind St. Louis and the east and all that he had been. Proving to himself that he could reach the high mountains on his own.

But even then Bass remembered—just as he was beginning to believe he had beaten the odds stacked against him, he was suddenly forced to stare failure in the eye … about the time the three of them had shown up. To his reckoning, events never had allowed him the chance to succeed, or let him fail all on his own. Back then Silas, Billy, and Bud had come along to save his hash.

And ever since then it seemed that every time he had chosen to steer his own course—why, his fat had tumbled right back into the fire. Damn the fates if it hadn’t.

Only God knew how Titus Bass had tried to make it alone after his first three partners had disappeared down the river, getting themselves rubbed out in the bargain.

For all his trouble trying to set his own course, he went and got himself scalped.

It took Jack Hatcher’s bunch to yank his fat from the fire that time.

Then shortly after deciding to pull off from those fellas, he and McAfferty had come a gnat’s hair from going under down in Apache country, close as he ever wanted to come again in his living life. Only bright spot in that whole dank memory had been the fact that he had saved McAfferty’s life along with his own in reaching that river in time to end their thirst, in time to prepare for the Apache.

But no sooner did they make it back to the Mexican villages than Asa had to rescue him in that knocking shop. Later to save his life a second time with that she-grizz.

Scratch wondered if his wanting to stay together with McAfferty might only come from his longing to right the scales. To square himself with the man who had not just evened things by rescuing him at the whorehouse … but had gone on to pull him back from death’s door on that sandbar beside the Mussellshell River. Maybe, just maybe, Scratch thought, he might be resisting McAfferty’s notion of splitting up only because that would make it near impossible for him ever to clear his accounts with the white-head.

If he was anything, Titus Bass realized he wasn’t the sort of man who could stand going through the rest of his days knowing that he owed someone for saving his life a second time.

It was something that nettled him as they began their journey south from the Judith, up near the Missouri itself, then continued to eat at him as they made their way on down the valley of the Mussellshell, picking their way between mountain ranges. After crossing the Yellowstone, Bass and McAfferty reined to the southeast, skirting the foot of some tall snow-covered peaks then steered a course that took them through a wide cleft in two lower ranges.

Near there they struck the Bighorn, following it south until the Bighorn became the Wind River.

At the hot springs they tarried for two nights among the remnants of countless Shoshone and Crow campsites. Here where warrior bands had visited far back into the time of any old man’s memory, the two had the chance to sit and soak in the scalding waters so comforting that they made Scratch limp as a newborn babe before he would crawl out, crabbing over to a cold trickle of glacial snow-melt that had tumbled all the way down to the valley from the Owl Creek Mountains. There he splashed cold handfuls of the frigid water against his superheated flesh, then scampered back, shivering every step, to settle once again into the steaming pools. Back and forth he dragged his slowly healing carcass, sensing the stinking, sulphur-laden water draw at those poisons that could near eat up a man’s soul. Like one of his mam’s drawing poultices she would plaster upon an ugly, gaping wound, Bass felt those hours he lay in the springs renew not only his flesh, but his spirit as well.

By late in the afternoon of that second day, Titus called for McAfferty to bring his knife along to the pools. Once more the heated water had softened the tough sinew Asa had used to sew up his ragged wounds—and now he was ready.

“Come cut your stitches out,” he asked of the white-head.

“Lemme have a good look at ’em first.” “They’re heal’t.”

McAfferty finally pulled his knife from its scabbard and plunged it beneath the scalding water after he had inspected the thick ropes of swollen welt. “You heal fast, Mr. Bass.
’This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles.’”

Titus bent over and turned his bare back and hip toward his partner. “I’m ready. Cut ’em out of me.”

“My sewing wasn’t purty,” Asa muttered as he pricked the end of the first short length of animal tendon and began to tug it from the tight new skin become a rosy pink with the heat.

“But your sewing likely saved my life.”

Between the long edges of every jagged laceration, McAfferty had stitched tiny fluffs of downy-soft beaver felt as he’d crudely closed the wounds by the fire’s light. But now nothing was left of that beaver felt—all of it absorbed by Scratch’s body until all that remained were those thick purplish-red welts roping their way across his shoulder, down his back, over his hip.

Titus Bass would carry that mark of the bear for the rest of his natural life.

As tight as it was, in time that new skin would stretch and loosen, and he would move that shoulder, move that hip without so much as a protest from it. But Scratch knew he would never … could never … forget coming face-to-face with a force so powerful it could rip the sky asunder, reach through, and devour his very soul.

No more than two days later they reached the valley where the Popo Agie drained into the Wind River. Those wide and verdant meadows were dotted with several camps of Indian lodges, small herds of grazing horses, and a scattering of blanket-and-canvas shelters lying stark against the green banks of both rivers.

“Har, boys!” Scratch cried, feeling an immediate and very tangible joy rise in him like sap in autumn maples.

A handful of white men came out of the shady trees to squint up at the two newcomers. One of them asked, “Where you in from?”

Bass replied, “The Mussellshell and the Judith.”

Another stranger inquired, “You must be free men?”

“We are that,” McAfferty answered this time.

So Titus asked, “You know of Jack Hatcher?”

A third man nodded and moved forward a step as he pointed on up the valley. “Seen him and his outfit, come in already. Don’t know if they’re still here. But they was camped on past Bridger’s bunch.”

“D-don’t know if they’re still here?” Bass repeated, disappointment welling in him like a boil. “They pull out early?”

“Naw,” replied the first man. “Just that ronnyvoo’s
’bout done for this year. Ain’t no more beaver for Sublette to wrassle from us. You boys are the last to wander in from the hills.”