Crack in the Sky (83 page)

Sure enough, a little earlier than normal last autumn, Hannah and his horses had furred up just like the creatures of the wild. And they kept their heavy coats longer into the spring too. Although the skies domed a brilliant blue overhead as the air began to warm, large fields of snow lasted long on the north-facing slopes. The thaw came late to the Yellowstone country that eighth spring of his come out of St. Louis.

By the time he made ready to leave Arapooesh’s band, Titus Bass was packing two more large bundles of beaver hung from the elk-horn packsaddle on Hannah’s back. He had kept himself busy through the long months of short days.

When she brayed at him in protest at the load, he said, “Don’t know if that means you’re ready for the trail, or you’re squawking at me for packing you after you ain’t had much of nothing on your back all winter.”

He stepped up to her muzzle and grasped it between both hands and cocked her head so she could gaze at him with one eye. “Now, you know I ain’t no damned Ned.
Ain’t never been one what plants his nose under a robe all winter—no matter how warm the womens might be. Never has Titus Bass been a child to lay around camp all through a robe season.”

She rolled that near eye and brayed at him again. “I s’pose that means you and me both ’bout ready for the trail, ol’ girl. But first we best pay our respects.”

As Scratch slowly approached Rotten Belly leading his three animals, the chief emerged from his door, stretched lazily, then stepped around to the side of the lodge where the morning sun would warm him with its full glory. He sat, leaned back in his warmest buffalo robe, and closed his eyes. And didn’t even open them as the trapper came to a stop at his elbow.

“I hear the sound of heavy horses,” the chief said without looking up.

“We are ready to go, my friend.”

“You were happy this winter?”

Scratch thought a moment, glancing over at the lodge where he had spent many a night with the widow. “I had all I needed—yes, Arapooesh.”

“So you’ll come back our way soon?”

“I want to hunt the waters north of the Yellowstone next fall,” Bass replied. “Yes, I think it will be a good thing to come find your camp when the winter winds begin to blow.”

With a long sigh the chief finally looked up into the bright morning light and shaded his eyes with a flat hand. “You will stay safe, won’t you,
Pote Ani
?”

“I will.”

“Because I cannot talk you out of riding west from Absaroka, you must promise me that you will stay safe so that my eyes can look upon my old friend again come next winter.”

Kneeling beside the chief, Bass pulled off his mitten and laid the hand on Rotten Belly’s arm under that buffalo robe. The chief looked up at him, and Titus said, “I’ll be back soon. You know how short the seasons are up this far north, when winter lasts so long.”

Arapooesh knifed his hand through the flap in his
robe and laid it on Bass’s arm, saying, “My prayers go west with you. When you leave Absaroka in that direction, there is so much danger that can find a man alone.”

Standing, Scratch said with a smile, “I’m not looking to die just yet. I’ll watch behind me.”

Closing his eyes again, Rotten Belly said, “See you in the winter.”

“See you then, my friend.”

It took better than four days to ride down the Yellowstone to his cache, what with all the drifted snow and the boggy bottom ground, having to double back here and there. But eventually he dug at the icy, frozen snow that lay crusted over the earthen circle that plugged the neck of his small underground vault. For the next two days he busied himself with pulling out each bundle of beaver in turn, dusting every individual plew with Hannah’s currycomb, then closely inspecting each hide for sign of vermin that might burrow into the beaver felt and destroy the value of a hide. Once the plews were ready for their long spring journey toward rendezvous, Bass tied them back into bundles, then pushed the buffalo-hide shelter down into the cache. Positioning it high upon some freshly cut willow saplings, Bass left it at the center of the floor and backed out of the hole. Reweaving a network of narrow limbs, he finished his labors by muscling the round earthen lid back over the hole.

That night he built a fire atop his cache and the next morning scattered the ashes before he took up Hannah’s lead rope and rose into the saddle. Turning toward the Yellowstone, Bass headed west until he reached the crossing used for years without count by the massive herds blanketing these northern plains.

“Man knows what to look for, he can always find a buffalo crossing,” he said to Hannah, having taken to talking to her more and more with every day of his enforced separation from other humankind. “Don’t you know a man can’t hardly go wrong if he lays his nose along a buffalo trail.”

On the opposite bank of the river he pointed their noses west. Creek by creek, beaver stream by beaver
stream, he trapped as he went those days of early spring, shivering through the wintry cold of each night, savoring the brief hours of sunny warmth as the earth’s rising heat formed puffy clouds across the deep spring blue like the snowflash feathers of ducks upended and fishing in a spring pond.

At times he came across sign of hunters out from one band or another of the River or Mountain Crow, but Scratch never saw another person in those first few weeks as he took his time marching for that cleft through the mountains west of the big bend of the Yellowstone, a crossing he had made years before with Silas Cooper. Bass turned in the saddle and gazed back at the large packs of beaver both Hannah and the packhorse carried. Hard to believe what he had done in the past year: he hadn’t trapped this many pelts since the seasons he had traveled with those three who had taken him under their wings his first seasons in the mountains. But that learning had cost him—first in what share Silas split off for himself, and then to lose all the rest of his plews when the trio floated off downriver with his fur.

“Likely gone to the bottom of the goddamned Yellowstone,” he grumbled.

Likely where their three carcasses are right now, he brooded. All them plews and all that work—

Then he scolded himself. “No sense in thinking on what was and can’t do nothing about now.”

Titus turned around, putting his face into the cold slash of wind and tucked the long flaps of the capote back around his legs. As Scratch rocked gently in the Spanish saddle, his horse steadily carried him higher up the winding switchbacks that took him in and out of patches of timber and across broad, open, grassy meadows where he flushed up small herds of elk, spooking the creatures back into the shadows where they warily watched the three strange animals slowly climb out of sight as the sun sank lower against the far curve of the earth.

Across that last saddle before he reached the pass, Scratch discovered so much snow still crusted in the open places that it stretched all the way to the far line of mountain
and sky. He reined up, cautious. For a few moments he calculated how much light he still had himself in the day, then turned and looked behind at the beckoning timber where he could get out of the constant, cutting wind.

Better to try sloughing his way across that deep snowfield come morning when the animals were fresh and they had more hours of daylight to work the ground. Besides, the cold temperatures would refreeze the top layer of the snow and make it far better going right after dawn than it would be now after the high sun had mushed the icy crust.

“C’mon, girl,” he crooned to Hannah as he reined the horse around sharply and clucked to the mule to follow.

That night he lay awake by the dying fire listening to the wind moaning above him in the pines, remembering how the wind called to him at times as if in warning. Stirred by something he couldn’t reach out and touch, Bass kicked free of his robes and went over to Hannah. He led her closer to the saddle horse and tied the mule’s long lead rope in a loose loop around the horse’s neck. Then he played out the long rawhide rope knotted around the horse’s neck and trudged back to his bedding. There he wrapped the end of the rope beneath his capote belt and stuffed himself back between the robes.

Closing his eyes once more, Bass laid the long flintlock between his knees, tucking the pistol against his chest as he made a warm place for his cheek against the dark, curly hump fur.

The robber jays awoke him the next morning, cackling at him and the animals from the branches overhead, their shrill protests making him start with surprise. Blinking into the new light just then warming the eastern plains below him, Titus threw back the robes and blankets, then glanced up the slopes toward the snowy saddle where the first rosy rays of light angled up from beyond the east, striking the snowfields and turning them a pale, blood-tinged pink.

He’d slept longer than he had wanted—angry at himself because he had planned to be at the edge of the frozen pass just as soon as it was light enough to make their crossing.

Promising himself some coffee on the far side, Scratch tied up his bedding, then stepped out into the open, where he dampened the ground. After pulling up some thick branches of the gray sage, he went to the animals. He dragged off the dirty, greasy, trail-sweated chunks of canvas he laid over their backs on those coldest of nights, the better to help those creatures preserve some of their own body heat. One by one, he rubbed them down with those clusters of sage, warming himself in the process with the exertion. Then in turn the three were padded, saddled, cinched, and loaded with his few possessions and the fruits of his labor.

Behind them the sun was just beginning to raise its bleary red eye in the east as he reached the edge of the extensive snowfield.

“We’ll be across afore midday,” he reminded the animals, tapping his heels into the horse’s ribs.

One hoof at a time, one short, slow step—Scratch carefully calculated his crossing of the crusty, frozen snow. He kept his eyes moving from the surface right below him to the rosy appearance of the snow some twenty, maybe as much as thirty, feet ahead of him, studying the way the ice had shrunk around the edges of a boulder, the way the crust lay in frozen, scalloped patterns where the wind constantly chiseled across it day and night. Warming each day beneath the sun, then refreezing beneath the spatter of starlight right overhead.

For a moment he gazed at the shocking blue of the heavens domed above them, and sighed. “Up this high, up here where that sky is so clear … where the sky is so damned close—if a man listens just right, Hannah—why, he might well hear angels sing.”

Closer to heaven was he here, and therefore much closer to that other existence Asa McAfferty spoke of in such hushed tones. Being this high—with nothing between him and the full, aching stretch of sky right beyond his fingertips—if a man himself wasn’t wary and careful, he just might slip right on through that crack to the far side of life and death and all that lay in between.

Was it a land of the unknown crossed only by those
who slipped in and out of that crack in the sky … or by those who had themselves come eye to eye with one such spirit from that realm of the unknown? Just as Asa had with that Ree.

Thinking on those hoo-doos gave Titus such a chill that he pulled the capote’s flaps tighter around his chest and turtled his neck down a bit farther.

Step by step, one yard at a time, and he’d be off this wide-open snowfield and on the far side of the pass. Out here under the wide sky where the spirits might look down upon him creeping along, his animals like a trio of beetles burrowing their way across the bottom of a buffalo chip-might those spirits look down upon him and pluck him right up?

Scaring himself, Bass stared up at the blue, his chin quivering with the cold, shivering with the fright.

“You ain’t ever gonna get me ’thout a fight,” he suddenly bellowed at the cloudless sky.

Though it hurt his throat to yell that loud, he went on, “Might be some men what ride off to look for you … like Asa done—coming to stare death and dying in the eye. Like Asa had such a hankering to die hisself.”

Below him at the far western edge of the snowfield four magpies suddenly took flight from the tops of the distant trees as his voice boomed in an echo over their perch.

“But not me! I ain’t going nowhere easy as Asa McAfferty done! You’re gonna have to come for me. You’re gonna have to come ready to fight.”

He shuddered less with the wind by the time he reined up on the western side of the snowfield, turning the horse around and halting to gaze back at that open expanse of saddle he had just crossed there beneath the blue, there where a man had nowhere to hide, nowhere to run.

“Hoo-doos won’t dare come for a man what aims to fight,” Scratch boasted as he nudged his horse into motion once more. “Long as I ain’t so tired I can’t fight …”

Descending the steep western side of the pass, Scratch spent the rest of that day and the next locating a patch of ground he would use as his first camp for what he planned
would be an extended stay in this country just east of the Three Forks. Years ago the trapping there had been almost as good as it had been along the Mussellshell and Judith. A dangerous land where only the wary survived, however. But by the time he ran across a site that offered good cover, grass, wood, and water, Bass hadn’t crossed any trails nor come across any sign that would tell him the Blackfoot routinely made this valley part of their travels.

Except for that single fire, that lone point of light he had spotted down in the bottom of this valley years before, when he and the trio had come here to trap. Someone had built themselves a fire big enough to warm a passel of men.

Someone.

That next morning he awoke in the dark to find a cold early-spring fog cloaking the river bottom. Overhead no more than a matter of feet hung a foreboding layer of low clouds threatening to drizzle at any moment—it and the fog were both as cold and gray as ash flake in a long-dead fire. Stirring out of the robes and blankets, Bass stomped feeling back into his feet, then crabbed over to his packs to dig out the buffalo-hide moccasins. He planned to wear them to and from every trap site, taking them off before he entered the water to make his sets, then pulling them on once he was ready to turn back for camp.