Buffalo Palace (11 page)

Oh, the many times he had yearned to strike out due west, leaving the Platte behind—resenting himself for having to depend on the river, forced to rely on a dead man’s guarantee. Now that he had come to stand beside this fabled Platte himself, he had no reason not to believe he shouldn’t catch his first glimpse of the mountains rising just beyond the next stand of hills. If not them, perhaps those hills just beyond.

Indeed, Titus had left the hardwood forests behind some days back, emerging almost of a sudden onto a plain where he reined up, then slowly dropped from the saddle to stand in utter awe at the rolling immensity of what lay before him. From that point on it was clear the trees no longer grew in great mats of thick, meandering forest blanketing hillside and valley alike. Instead, the green lay in clusters dotting the great tableland, confined to pockets and ravines wrinkling the countryside, the emerald-green vegetation for the most part tracing the path of streams and creeks and what narrow, gurgling rivers fed the flat, shallow expanse of the Platte itself.

At that night’s fire Titus had sensed he had just crossed an even more indelible border than was the barrier of the Missouri River itself. Oh, with his own sixteen-year-old eyes he had marveled as the great eastern forests had given way to rolling delta while the riverboat crew steered their craft past the Walnut Hills and old Fort Mc-Henry, floating down the lower reaches of the Mississippi. Yet, for the most part, the immense trees and timbered forests still predominated those riverbanks and the high bluffs where great-winged birds took flight from wide, stately branches bedecked with long gray beards of Spanish moss.

But out here the trees no longer grew as tall, no more were their trunks as big around. No more did he recognize the familiar leaf of the elm, the maple, the varieties of oak. Almost as if this harsh and difficult land stunted what was allowed to grow upon its own breast.

“Water,” he had decided.

It was all because of water. Or more so the want of it. Back east vegetation grew in abundance—a green, leafy, shady profusion. But out here the brush and trees struggled for want of water, sending roots deep to penetrate the sands for what moisture the land had captured during the passing of spring thunderstorms.

So as he had stood there at that margin of immense hardwood forest thinning itself to become the borderland that would take him on west into his yondering quest, Titus found himself liking this land best. Far better than that to the east and south was it. Back there he found it hard to see long distances, so thick did the vegetation
grow. But here—yes, from here on out—a man could gaze so far that he just might see halfway into tomorrow itself.

Beneath the floppy brim of his old beaver-felt hat, Titus had stared across the distance, determining that to survive in such a land he would have to train his eyes to take in more. A man back east, why—he didn’t have to concern himself with more than a few rods of open ground … the distance across a glen or meadow, before he plunged back into the tangle of thick and verdant forest.

But out here a man had to accustom his eyes to measuring the heft of great distance. He must teach himself to read all manner of things from far off. The course of rivers and streams recognized only by their dim green outline disappearing at the distant horizon. Too, a man had to better read the game he would pursue across great distances—startling the whitetail out of the brush and across the open ground, the turkey and quail that roosted where they found shade and protection along the water courses. And he reminded himself he must make certain his eyes always moved from one point of the compass to the next. Constantly—for there were other men who traveled this wild, open country too, seeking game, horses, plunder, and scalps.

Readily did he see that in a land such as this, a man must be vigilant in assuring that he did not stand out against the horizon, against the country itself.

Then it had struck him. How did he ever come to know such a startling fact of life and death?

That core of him that had been honed, ground to a fine edge in the eastern forests of his youth—then all but ignored, lying fallow and forgotten there in St. Louis beside the Mississippi all those years—he sensed that core of him had been pricked, aroused, enlivened anew in his arrival at the edge of such a vast wilderness. Again, something within him gave thanks to that same force that traced out the course of rivers, the comings and goings of the wild animals with each season, the force that strummed some nerve with a responsive chord, awakening something buried within him after so long a time of mute deafness.

In looking about him then, as if to weigh the presence
of that force far greater than mere man would ever be, Titus squinted—studying distance. Hefting the sheer meaninglessness of time out here in all that abundance of space. Realizing that he feared. Knowing that his fear was the selfsame as that of the wild things.

Indeed, his instincts told him this was a far more dangerous place than that eastern land of the Shawnee, Mingo, and Chickasaw. For here there might be no place for a man to hide.

At the root of him, a tiny part of Titus had yearned for the protection of those thick forests, those great bulking shoulders of gray limestone jutting from the red earth where one might take cover, there to lie in wait for game or man. And he remembered the smell of that country. Damp enough that a woodsman could come to know the scent of saltpeter caves—homing in on them with nothing more than his nose, there to gather some of that mineral for making his own gunpowder.

Bass had trembled slightly, staring out at this vastness he did not know, a space and wilderness that he did not understand. Back there, in those eastern forests, he had grown up learning what it took to live well. He knew which was the chestnut oak a man gathered for its tan-bark: that wood containing the yellowish tannin he could use in curing the hides of the creatures he shot and skinned. A man likewise knew to look for white oak, harvested for barrel staves.

A child spent his youth back there among the hemlocks dotting the ripple-walled sandstone quarries lying among the canebrakes. On the high ridges of the pine forests, cedar jutted from the pale limestone walls. A world of many colors that was made for a child: yellowing poplars reaching for the sky among the opalescent yellow of hickory and chestnut and beech, the red and gold of maple and sweet gum, the deep bloody crimson of black gum and dogwood. Even the leafy oaks, his favorite, often lingered until spring, their color gradually changing from autumnal red, to bronze, and then to the brown of decay as they clung to their branches.

But out here an endless plain of green lay stretched beneath that forever blue of the sky. Across it—the scar that marked the Pawnees’ route west.

All around him in this abandoned camp stood the remnants of their meat-drying racks and the litter of slender shreds of hides crusted with hair. He knew what they had been doing here: scraping the skins of animals to remove all the excess fat and flesh as close as they could to the edge of each hide, that narrow border left raw, then trimmed away and discarded. Small animals—deer and antelope. Now that winter had released this land, the people living upon it would no longer have to survive on the small creatures.

Now they would hunt the shaggy beasts.

For some distance around the camp Bass could see how the ground was trampled, the grassy swales cropped by a herd of ponies he figured were filling their own bellies on the new green shoots after a long, long winter. Then he turned to look at the two animals delivering him there. While the mare ate and ate every bit as much as did the Indian pony, she did not appear to flourish on her diet of spring grass. Not that she had noticeably weakened, but beneath the packsaddle his fingertips had begun to discern the emerging ridge of backbone, the faint corduroy of the old girl’s ribs.

And in staring out at the wide scar of trampled ground that disappeared over the rolling hills to the west, Titus wondered how smart he would be in following that Indian trail carved beside the Platte. What with the grass eaten down, perhaps not so wise a choice for feeding his hungry animals.

Yet something primal told him to follow their trail … for these Pawnee most surely were gone in search of the same shaggy beasts they had hunted ever since a time long forgotten.

That afternoon, not long after leaving the abandoned village, good sense convinced Bass to recross to the south side of the river, where he pushed on ever more cautiously, his eyes searching the ground that lay before him, hoping to find a knoll tall enough that would allow him to locate the Indian village on the march somewhere out before him. How far ahead of him were they? How long had it really been since they had passed through this piece of country?

Growing frustrated, he admitted he did not know. Then cursed himself for not knowing how to know. Surely there must be some means by which a man would tell from the age of the hoofprints on that wide trail, from the dryness of the limbs used to build their meat-drying racks, from the depth and age and texture of the ashes in those half-a-hundred fire pits lying at the center of those rings of trampled ground.

There must be some way to learn—there had to be … before a man was forced to learn his lessons all too late. The way he had learned about Chickasaw warriors all too well back in his sixteenth summer. Learning all he had ever wanted to know.

But he was nearly twice as old now. And that angered him: what had he learned in those intervening years that was of any good to him now? How to get a Kentucky flatboat and its crew of randy, hardy men down the great Mississippi with its cargo, which could be sold for a rich man’s ransom in the bustling, multihued seaport of New Orleans? How to love a woman who warned him not to—a woman who one day left without warning, without a word of explanation? How to build a barn, from cutting down the trees for lumber to seating the pegs a man used instead of iron nails on the frontier? All that and a little something of the black art of fire and iron, of sweat and muscle? Perhaps that most of all: from Able Guthrie and Hysham Troost, he had come to know how to bend metal to his will, fashion it to the task at hand.

Yet in the end Titus had learned best just how deeply satisfied a man could become in a job done well. For its own sake. Not for the faint, fleeting praise of others. But the true value of his toil, his effort, his devotion to the task.

Out here, he realized, there were no others to judge him. As well, there were no others to depend upon. Very simply, if he was to make it, it was up to him alone to feed, clothe, and protect himself from the elements … from the savage men who roamed this savage wilderness.

With his realization Bass sensed his own personal power grow as he put mile after mile behind him, as the east and everything of it fell farther and farther at his back. But in this great test of solitude and oneness with
himself, he knew he had to come to terms with and control the loneliness. There were, after all, times in his life when he could recall wanting company so badly that … that it hurt more than he cared to remember.

Just as he was fleeing all the hold the east had on him, so was Titus attempting to escape that need in him to depend upon others, that loneliness so keen it often caused him great pain. So it was he realized he needed to keep his mind out of those dark places that made him long for any of what had been abandoned back there, to yearn for any of those left behind.

Those days seeped one into the next like the spring storms that he watched approaching out of the west, clouds tumbling one over the other as they drew nigh—clouds gone white to gray and gray to black. Yet despite the storms, each new day the air warmed that much more, and the land gently rose beneath him.

One morning birthed so clear, so quiet, the entire prairie seemed a bell jar of silence—no other living thing in sight but him and the two horses, no birds above nor four-legged critters bounding off through the tall, waving grass, no stir of life down among the water courses that lay in the land-wrinkles lying against the sides of every hill.

For the life of him, it appeared the country was changing, evolving again. Not near as abruptly as the land had converted itself from thick forest to open plain where the trees clustered here and there only … but as he turned to gaze back, he was all the more sure the land now became something unto itself. Land only now, denied of forests and thick stands of timber. Forgotten by all but the hardiest of narrow streams and shallow rivers. Cast here essentially alone beneath the great pale-blue dome of sky, the land came to exist of and for itself. Beyond him the hills rolled up in the distance to abruptly become striated bluffs topped with the waving feathers of the tall grass. He felt himself shrinking in all that vastness—this sudden compression suffered here beneath the endlessness of the sky as it and the land stretched on and on, and on.

Like nothing he had ever seen before back there. Like nothing he could have prepared himself for.

The infinite quality of it permeated him all the more
because his pace seemed so agonizingly slow when measured against the vastness of the landscape. There were days when it felt as if he had barely moved from morning get-up, coffee and breakfast, until he chose a campsite that night where he curled up in blankets as the stars winked into view overhead. For more than two weeks now he put at least twenty-five, sometimes more than thirty, miles behind him in a day. Yet in country such as this, that sort of travel often left a man to turn around and look back upon reaching his evening’s camp—able to see some feature of the land that showed where he had crawled from his bed that very morning.

So open and without borders was this kingdom. So utterly vast that few landmarks really existed. Little was there beyond the Platte and the endless river bluffs to excite his attention, to prick his interest. Then the land became monotonous enough to lull him to sleep in the saddle as the pony gentled him west, always keeping the south bank of the muddy, meandering Platte in sight. From time to time he would open his eyes into slits, staring off this way and that to assure that he was the only thing moving in all that vastness, then let his eyelids droop once more as he continued to rock in that old saddle he had repaired for Isaac Washburn.