Buffalo Palace (10 page)

From the German silver tin he removed the firesteel curved in a large and elegant C big enough to fit over the four fingers of his right hand. In his left he gathered some charred cloth, a bit of dried cotton boll, and the large gray chunk of flint. Striking downward on the sharp-edged stone with the firesteel, he began creating sparks, a few of which soon caught hold on the cloth, smoldering there within the boll’s loose fibers. Very softly he blew on the reddish coal he had created until it burned bright enough for him to slip the char beneath the tiny cone of kindling he had stacked up right at his knees.

One by one he set bigger and bigger twigs, then broke thicker branches to lay upon the flames until he had no fear of the fire sputtering out. Quickly rubbing his hands together over the rising heat, and at long last beginning to sense the fledgling fire’s warmth radiating on his chest and belly, Bass stepped over to the mare and threw back the dirty oiled Russian sheeting lashed on the off side of her packs, removing the blackened coffeepot. With the pot half-filled from the river he had just crossed, Titus set the water to boil while he went in search of some coffee among the supplies purchased back in Franklin.

With it and one of his dented cups set near his cheery fire, Bass finally draped his britches and shirt over clumps of nearby brush so the sun’s rays would strike them as he waited for the water to come to a boil. Then he stretched out on the grass, flat on his back, lacing his fingers behind his head to stare up at the spring sky, savoring the crackle of the fire close by, relishing the way the gentle warmth washed down from the sky to caress his skin.

As he closed his eyes, he remembered how good it had been to slip off into the forests of Boone County, Kentucky—his grandpap’s old fullstock flinter at the end of his arm, with the family’s old hound, Tink, loping ahead through the dapple of sunlight and shadow as Titus sought out rabbit or squirrel, turkey, or even some venison.

Like most boys growing up there at the edge of the frontier that stretched to the west a little farther with every
new year, Titus spent every moment his pap allowed him immersing himself in the woods. School and church and work behind the plow: those were the had-to’s. But for most young fellas like Titus, time was never sweeter than when it was spent hunting or setting snares and deadfall traps, learning the herbs and fruits and nuts one could gather from the forest’s bounty.

Most children learned early what it took to read game trails or the moss on the trees, the whorl of certain flowering plants or the caliber of the wind—all those things they must remember so they would never become lost or put themselves in danger of being hurt, alone and far from the family ground. When he and the other boys his age gathered at one farm or another, there would of course always be a tall tree to shinny up, there to lie along its wide branches and gaze down on the world below. Or the boys plunged deep into that band of thick timber and limestone bordering the Ohio River itself, where they explored sinkholes, caves, and rockhouses—imagining themselves to be river pirates or the flatboatmen who would repel any such bloody and vicious attack.

Of course, there was always the swimming hole. He smiled, remembering how he and the others had knotted an old rope to a high limb so they could swing out over the surface of the water shaded by that same tree, flinging themselves naked out through the summer air crackling with the buzz and drone of flies and mosquitoes, letting go of that rope at just the right moment so they could sail for those deliciously brief seconds totally free before they hurled downward into the cold green swimming hole.

Come a time in a young man’s life—it was only the boys who went to the pool they had dammed up for swimming. As a girl’s body began to change and bloom, she would no longer join her brothers and their friends.

Through his reverie Titus could hear the faint tumble of the water’s first turn to a boil. And likewise felt the tingle of his own flesh stir with the memory of Amy Whistler.

How fully had she bloomed in those weeks and months before they had consummated their young passion there on a summer night beside the moonlit swimming pond. So full and soft were the curves of her, the roundness
to the feel of her gliding up to him in the water … there beneath him where he laid her back on the grass beside the great boulders. But with that aching physical memory of the exquisite pleasure Amy brought him came also a flash point of anger at the coquette in her that had attempted to possess and corral him before he was ready to have his wings clipped, ready to be put in the wire cage the way a woman had done to his grandpap … the way his very own mother had imprisoned his pap.

Amy. Or Marissa. Oh, the wiles women used to snare men from the beginning of time. Roping them down with pleasures of the flesh, then later with the coming of children, and finally snaring them to stay on the land—plowed land. Land where a man walked behind an ox or mule, lashed and laboring as surely as did his beasts.

The boiling water hissed and tumbled, calling him from his reverie.

From the small pouch of pounded coffee beans Titus took a handful and flung the grounds into the pot, then carefully hooked a finger within the wire bail and dragged the pot from the edge of his fire. As the water continued to turn, Bass stood and moved off to test his wet clothing.

Dry enough they were. Into the still-damp britches he stuffed his legs, then slipped his arms into the warmth of his shirt. Around his waist he finally drew the wide belt and tightened it before kneeling at the fire, pouring himself a cup, then rocking back on his haunches to first draw in the savory fragrance of the coffee. Only then did he sip at the steaming brew.

Because the wool shirt itched when it became damp, he thought he might change back to the linen shirt. He smiled, recalling how riyerboatmen like Hames Kingsbury and the rest were really no different from other men on the razor’s edge of the frontier: they would wear one set of clothes until it fairly rotted off, then they promptly rooted around for something new to wear out completely in its time.

Not so very different was that from his own childhood, he mused as he sipped on the coffee there in the sun’s spring light. Most young’uns had no more than one change of clothing: their everyday wear, along with those clothes saved for Sunday-morning meeting as well as those
rare special celebrations of life. The marryings, birthings, and the funerals of friends
and
family … those cords of remembrance he felt still binding him to that past and that place had begun to grow thin and weak—very much like spider’s silk stretched to the breaking.

It struck Titus there by the rivers’ junction, now that he was here on the yonder side of the wide Missouri: he had been gone from home for almost as long as he had spent growing up in the house of his father. Considering, too, how Thaddeus Bass himself had known little else but the place where his father had set down roots before him. Yet, unlike Titus, never had Thaddeus desired to reach out, to explore, to search beyond what lay there
in
that small section of Boone County he plowed and planted. And that failure was something Thaddeus’s son could not fathom.

Staring down at the surface of the coffee in his cup, Titus wondered now about his family. How his pap had aged. How the intervening years might have marked his mam with gray and lines. His brothers and sister—they all were grown and would surely have families of their own now. Children carrying on the family cycle on the land.

And all he had to his name were these two hand-me-down horses, his guns, and the clothes on his back, along with what little else was packed on that mare.

A shadow flitted past him across the ground, startling him. He looked up in time to catch the crimson flutter of the cardinal as it disappeared among the timber north of his fire. So he smiled.

He might not own all that much, Titus decided as he stood and gazed into the west. For certain he sure as hell didn’t own much by most men’s standards.

But right now—he sensed he had all of that out yonder to call his very own.

The sheer size of the abandoned Indian camp was the first thing that struck him as he cautiously ventured in on foot, wary and watchful … having hidden the horses back downriver when he came across the first flurry of tracks.

But he found the village empty, deserted.

Now Bass could swallow down the lump of fear at last. His lungs felt as if he were taking his first breath in more than an hour. Titus forced his heart back down and finally emerged from the brush at the river’s edge to stare across the Platte at what some band of Pawnee had left behind. Then quickly he decided he’d best backtrack and fetch up the animals. No sense swimming the river on his own.

An hour later, dripping naked in the sun after another crossing, he dismounted on the north bank among the small rings of river stone he discovered near the center of each elliptical circle of pounded grass and hardened ground. For the most part the entire camp formed a great horseshoe, the horns of its crescent opening back to the east whence he had come.

Finding a good patch of grass near the trees along the bank, Bass ground-hobbled the horses and turned back to explore this wondrous, frightening place.

More than fifty circles and all that foot-pounded
earth plainly showed where this band of Indians had camped for some time this spring. At the western extent of the site Titus came across the wide trail of tracks and pole scrapings that led off to the west. They were wandering upriver.

“Maybeso they move off come the summer,” he said quietly in the silence of that big country as he turned about and stepped back into the camp crescent itself.

Here the land lay painfully silent. As quiet as anything he had ever experienced in those eastern forests growing as thick as quills on a porcupine’s back, as those forests he had come to know flatboating down the great waters of the Ohio and Mississippi, or walking north along the Natchez Trace.

More than two weeks had passed now since he had given wide berth to the dragoons and their Fort Atkinson. The day before he came in sight of the distant stockade, Bass had run across more and more signs of man’s passing: shod hoof prints, the heel stamp of soldiers’ boots, the crude cut of a wagon’s iron tires slashing down into the fragile earth. Trail and scent and sign that warned he was drawing close enough to that cluster of white mankind.

Turning abruptly, Titus had pointed his nose to the west—intending to ride two, maybe three days at the most in a roundabout to give himself plenty of room around the soldier post. But late that second day after cautiously leaving the Missouri behind and striking out overland, he was surprised when his westward path brought him right into a great, wide loop in the Platte River itself before it eventually gentled him back to the north. Surprised was he to discover as well that so shallow a river could enjoy such a formidable reputation among those frontiersmen who returned to St. Louis—men like Isaac Washburn.

Had the old trapper been yanking on his leg with all his bawdy tales of everything being bigger, or faster, or just plain wilder out here in the great beyond? Or dare he consider that he had not yet reached the Platte, that this was some minor river? Yet something innate within him told Titus he could not be mistaken on it—fact was that the big dragoon’s post did lay at the mouth of the Platte.

Shallow indeed, yet every bit as wide here as Washburn had claimed. So for the first time that afternoon,
Titus had looked off to the west, gazing toward the river’s far source away yonder among the distant, yet unseen mountains that gave birth to these waters. On the south bank he had knelt in the mud and grass beside the river, cupped his hands, and pulled forth a little of that mountain water. Bass looked down into it with something bordering on reverence, then brought it prayerfully to his lips.

As silt laden as it was, how much sweeter did it taste knowing he was that much closer to those high mountain snows giving birth to these waters! He drank his fill that day before turning west along the south bank of the river he knew would one day deliver him to the buffalo country, the great course of the Platte that allowed a man to pierce the kingdom of black, shaggy beasts Washburn guaranteed him ruled a great, rolling wilderness out there. How good its taste lay upon his tongue, this water from the Platte that was really all the more than a river: a magical road that would lead him to and through the buffalo ground, then ultimately deliver him to the high and terrible places few if any had ever seen.

Following the south bank another few days, Bass found the river led him back in a huge, sweeping curve to the south of west. Damn! but these western rivers could confuse and exasperate a man, he brooded. Every bit as disconcerting as a fickle woman who could turn back on herself just as soon as a man began to think he had her figured out!

First he had followed its bank into the west. Then the Platte led him north. And now it was wandering off to the south. And after all this meandering, just where in hell were those mountains that gave birth to this river, after all? A part of him prayed again that Washburn wasn’t as crazed as Hysham Troost had warned Titus the aging fur trapper would prove himself to be.