Buffalo Palace (18 page)

So Titus turned back to gaze into the west once more. The mountains were there—limned in indigo light by the long-ago falling of the sun. They were reachable and real. No longer something of legend and myth. Indeed, he told himself, after all these days and the many, many miles, he had come so far that he no longer could see what had been, could no longer see
who
he had been.

Yet on this evening, with the light rapidly draining from the summer sky, it was possible for him to catch a
glimpse of what he was now to be … to fathom at long, long last the man he was to become.

The mountains were there, finally within reach. He had only to stay his course for the next few days, with that jagged line looming larger against the sky with every step he took.

After nigh onto a lifetime of waiting, Titus Bass had come to the Rocky Mountains. And in the deepening embrace of that twilight, he joyously welcomed the man he was to become.

Dry and wispy as old ash, the snowflakes struck his cheeks as he stepped out from the copse of aspen trees and stared up at the graying sky. Just a few flakes for now. But with that look of the horizon, this appeared to have the making of the first hard snow of the winter.

Hard to tell just what month of the year it was anymore up this high. Titus had been up here, wandering through these southern foothills and into the lower reaches of the mountains, since late summer and early autumn. Some time back he’d given up trying to sort things out like keeping track of months, deciding that none of it really mattered out here no more anyway. Long ago—back to late spring as he’d pushed west along the Platte River—he had decided that keeping track of days at this or days at that was a fool’s errand, and though he might well be accused of being a fool on other counts, he vowed not to be a counting fool. All that folderol about numbers and ciphering their meaning was merely one thing more to be shet of and left behind back there where he had lived another life.

With that sort of thing at his back, Titus had moved through the summer not in the least worrying what month it must surely be. June wasn’t all that hard to sort out—it had already been June before he’d first spotted his Rocky
Mountains off in the distance. And July brought true warmth to the days he’d spent climbing with the mare into those first pine-shaded places south by west of the Platte River, where a narrowing stream led him into the high country. From there he could look all the farther to the west and the northwest, seeing for the first time how the snow lingered on those distant peaks. From his high vantage point it was plain to see that even at this late season the white still mantled some of those mountains nearly halfway down their dark sides.

“That’s where I’m wagering we’ll find the best beaver hides,” he had confided to the mare, the only creature thereabouts to listen to him.

More and more of late he had taken to talking out loud to her, if for no other reason than to hear the sound of his own voice. Likely, it was the only human voice for hundreds of miles around, he told himself.

Bass had tried setting Washburn’s traps in that cold stream leading him up through that first high ground,
*
at times in those feeder creeks that spilled into it, too. Each time he did just as Isaac had instructed him back in St. Louis: with the bait-stick and the trap-shelf and the float-stick too. But for all his effort, only a half-dozen scrawny muskrats had been curious enough to get themselves caught. Titus hadn’t even thought enough of them to skin them. Why, compared to the beaver hides he had seen congregate in huge packs on the wharfs at St. Louis from the upriver country, those half-dozen puny skins weren’t worth the trouble it would take to bloody his skinning knife.

“Weather’s bound to be lot more the sort that makes a flat-tail critter put on a heavy hide up there,” he commented to the mare as they moseyed on west toward the distant white-capped peaks. “Snow means cold, and cold means thick fur, seems to me, girl.”

That sort of reasoning made sense to him, it did. Especially after he had managed to trap four unwary beaver in that small range of high mountains off to the southwest—just four, after all those days he went out to his
labors among the streams and those aspen that quaked with the slightest breeze on the hillsides above him. And now that he had wandered down from those unproductive mountains in bitter resignation, striking out for the northwest—yearning to reach that range where the snow looked to lay all the heavier at those upper elevations, even as summer was lost to the first signs of autumn.

Into those foothills he had led the mare as the seasons began to turn and the days grew imperceptibly shorter—climbing ever higher, trying this stream, then that. A bit more luck had he, but not near as much as Bass had hoped when he’d moved into the southern reaches of this extensive mountain range. For some days now the quakies had begun to turn gold.

There had been two quick dustings of snow already, weeks ago. Both had melted by the following day, the air steaming in the shafts of golden light piercing the leafy branches of the trees. Then of late the weather turned downright warm again as Indian summer set in. But up here among the high foothills, where it seemed he spent one fruitless day after another, the cycle of life was soon to change. After less than two weeks of sunny days and cool nights, it had smelled of snow this morning when he’d kicked his way out of his blankets.

After watering the bushes Titus took the mare out a distance from camp where she could graze on some good grass; then he returned to kindle his fire and set the remains of last night’s coffee on to reboil. With a breakfast of venison steak washed down, it was time to bring the old mare in and pack her up for their daily routine: a trip out to set more traps. This morning, like so many that had gone before, he promised himself it would be different. His luck was bound to change today.

It had begun to snow those dry, ashen white flakes by the time he got himself moving out to fetch up the mare. Through the trees he saw her, some distance off, kicking a hind leg, then whipping her head around to nuzzle at her belly. At the edge of the clearing he stopped, watching, frightened at what he saw. When she began to stretch her neck out before bringing her head around again to nuzzle at her stomach, he was finally convinced.

“Damn, if you don’t likely have the colic,” he grumbled
as he approached and untied the long lead rope from a tree. She was hard to lead at first, bobbing her head, pulling back from him, near yanking him off his feet when she did, then stopping suddenly to blindly kick one hind leg or the other.

“That’s it, girl,” He tried to soothe best he could, knowing how a horse with the colic sensed the growing pain in its belly, suffered the bloating swell and the unre-ieved pressure, kicking their legs, stretching out their necks, nosing their own bellies in some frantic, dull-witted desire to release that pent-up pressure.

“Troost always walked the colic off,” he told her as he tried to draw close to her head.

But she stretched out her neck again, then nearly knocked him to the ground as she suddenly whipped around to try nuzzling her belly once more.

“C’mon—we’re gonna walk it off,” he told her with a tug on the rope that got her moving slowly. “Always worked before.”

And he hoped it would work again.

Hysham Troost had called it the sand colic: what a horse got when it ate a bunch of sand mixed in with its feed, so much sand that it collected in every one of those low bends and twists of the horse’s gut until it was nearly impossible for any of the animal’s feed to make it on through their system. That’s when the real trouble with sand colic started—when the mare got bloated up with all that unrelieved pressure that would have to be eased or else.

Or else.

For more than an hour he led the mare around and around that small clearing, with the horse meandering more and more slowly each time they made the circle. Finally he admitted that with the way she was acting so poorly, they would not be venturing out that morning to set more traps. If nothing else, it was a relief just to get the mare back to camp, where he could water her and keep her close at hand while the colic worked itself out of her system.

Tossing some more limbs onto his fire, Bass slid the coffeepot over to the edge of the flames to rewarm what was left from two heatings. Then he turned to grab up one
of the big, heavy woolen blankets he intended to wrap around himself as he sat by the fire … when he heard her go down.

As Titus wheeled around, a big part of him was already praying that he hadn’t heard the animal collapse. Any horseman knew the chances were somewhere between slim and damn poor for a horse that went down. If you could keep them on their feet, you had yourself a chance. But once an animal went down …

He felt like swearing as he flung the blanket off his shoulders among the rest and lunged toward her as, the big neck and head were the last to hit the forest floor covered with a thick carpet of pine needles. But swearing wouldn’t help—as much as he wanted to curse someone, some thing … to keep from cursing his own self.

Down on his knees Titus slid the last few feet to slowly reach under her head, bringing it gently into his lap. Her eyes were wild, glazed with pain, her sides heaving as she thrashed that upper hind leg. Something noxious and foul gushed from her hind end … then she seemed to lie still, nostrils flaring, eyes still rolling. From time to time they even seemed to come to a rest looking at him—pleading, perhaps—then moved on.

“Maybe that means you got it on outta your system,” he pleaded with the mare quietly, figuring the gush had been just that, the way a man might get himself the green-apple quickstep and with all that pressure built up inside him from the unripe fruit might well make himself feel right pert once he had himself a decent shit.

“Let’s hope that’ll fix you—”

Then she thrashed her head a little as he held her, vainly trying to raise it enough to reach back to nuzzle her belly, at the same time that top rear leg began to fling about again. And he knew she hadn’t found any relief by ridding herself of whatever foul substance had gushed from her hind end.

He didn’t know how long he stayed there cradling the mare’s head that morning but realized the coffeepot boiled again—smelling it, downwind of the fire as he was. Over time his fire burned down to nothing but thin wisps of smoke, then slowly went out as he watched. And waited.
And tried to think of what more Hysham Troost would be doing for a horse suffering the sand colic.

He didn’t realize he’d fallen asleep right there with the mare’s head in his lap the way it was until he came awake with something tapping on the sole of his boot and a voice booming in his ears.

“I’ll be go to hell!” the deep voice cried. “It be a white nigger for sure!”

Bass jerked up, his eyes squinting, blinking, straining to see through the veil of trees and gently falling snow as the dark form moved back from him and brought up a rifle to point at his belly.

Bass sat frozen, his bowels run cold—come awake suddenly to stare up, then down the immense figure before him. The man was dressed in a blanket coat, hood pulled over his head, with a black beard that reached to midchest and a belt around his waist where several long black scalps hung near his knife scabbard. From the greasy, muddy bottom of his coat extended his legs, stuffed within two faded, red-wool blanket tubes, fringe gently swaying at their outer seam above thick winter moccasins.

How Titus wished now that he’d brought the rifle close. “What … just who the hell are you—”

“Injuns! By damn, we’re Injuns!” a new voice shrieked from the timber, drawing Bass’s attention as another figure leaped into the camp clearing—dressed completely as an Indian like the first, the fringe on his leather war shirt whirling round and round as he danced toward Titus: whooping and hollering, rhythmically clapping his hand over his mouth,
woo-wooing
and stomping round and round in some ungainly imitation of a scalp dance.

Suddenly that figure whirled up beside the first man and stopped, asking, “What you figger him to be doin’ just a’squatting there by that horse, Silas?”

Titus set fus eyes again on the tall, dimly lit figure in the hooded coat standing over him in that gentle fall of early snow, his face hidden in shadow.

The tall figure said, “Shit—stupid son of a bitch appears to be rockin’ that god-danged horse to sleep, don’t he, Billy?”

Then a third voice laughed along with the two standing
there in front of Bass. From the shadows that new voice shouted.

“Injuns!”

And a third long-haired Indian-look-alike came stomping and whirling and
woo-woo-woo-wooing
into the clearing, shrill and sounding every bit like a savage warrior bent on taking a scalp.

Damn! Titus swallowed hard, watching the third hairy, bearded man dance up, watched how the second joined in the dance and chanting, watched with growing uneasiness the way the first figure continued to stare right down at him—his face hidden within the hood of his blanket coat.

No, Bass told himself—I don’t wanna fear no man, red nor white.