Buffalo Palace (23 page)

Stopping, Silas regarded Bass a moment, then added, “Beaver big enough—ever’ last one of ’em seal fat an’
sleek, so fine that a man might damn well risk his own hair just to lay down his traps in that country.”

“Three Forks: my, my,” Hooks commented with a cluck of his tongue.

“Fine country,” Tuttle agreed.

“Country just crawling with Blackfoot niggers—yessirreebob,” Hooks replied.

On his way past Titus to fetch another pair of the animals, Cooper slapped Bass on the back of the shoulders. “Maybeso that’s where we’ll take Scratch here come next winter.”

“Blackfoot country?” Titus repeated. How the name of that land ignited images of a forbidden land.

“Beaver pelts nigh big as blankets,” Tuttle said. “Just big enough to bury a man in when those red niggers lift his hair!”

“Bud’s a might squampshus, you understand,” Cooper declared. “He h’ain’t much a trapper, so it don’t seem worthwhile to go up to that country and stick his neck out for the prime beaver.”

“Prime beaver,” Billy repeated in a shrill voice. “Beaver just calling out, ‘Yoohoo! Come an’ get me Bud Tuttle!’ Then ’nother beaver cross the stream hollers out, ‘No, Bud Tuttle—come an’ get
me!’
Pretty soon all them beavers is scrapping and fighting so hard to be the one what gets catched in Bud’s trap that the poor nigger never does catch him very many!”

“Sometimes, Billy Hooks,” Tuttle growled, his face flushing with anger, “you’re nothing more’n lucky. A lucky son of a bitch for what little brains you got left, what little ain’t already poured out your bunghole.”

“I may not be smart as you, Bud—but I’m sure as hell a better trapper’n you’re ever gonna be!”

“Right now all I want out o’ the two of you is for all you boys go drag in some timber—since you finished stringing up our corral, Billy.” Silas jumped into the argument as he brought up the last two horses. “Hush up your yammerin’ and get us plenty of wood. It’s fixin’ to get dark on us real quick.”

Tuttle strode up with the last of the mules in tow, asking, “How long you figger afore we’ll make it down to Park Kyack, Silas?”

“The north park? Why, lookee down there, Bud—an’ the rest of you. There it lay. Park Kyack.”

Hook wheeled about on his heel, his smile broadening. “Kyack? Down yonder’s where we’ll winter up with the Yutas?”

Cooper nodded. “That’s right, Billy. Y’ know what that means, don’cha?”

Leaping into the air with a wild, whirling, primal dance, Hooks shook and trembled like an old dog whose master had just returned home from a long, long journey. “Means womens! Womens! And more womens!”

That night Titus tossed in his blankets, unable to warm himself enough to escape the deliciously tempting dreams that flitted about the broken pieces of what shattered sleep he could capture.

Everywhere he looked, it was black. Up, down, and in all directions—then he realized he was floating in the water as black as the sky, stretching far, far to the horizon, where it touched the black sky and they became one. Only when Titus moved his arms to keep himself afloat did the starshine ripple across the surface of the water … then she was there.

Amy slowly pushed her way toward him across the black starlit water rippling in front of her as she slowly flung her arms out to stroke. As she drew ever closer, he could even see her bare feet break the surface now and again as her long legs kicked and paddled. Her shoulders bare and glistening with the water. Her white neck so long, and her dark hair strung out behind her. Then he saw a hint of the flesh at the tops of her breasts as they broke the surface, side to side with each stroke as she came closer, closer.

Waiting for her, Titus could feel his flesh harden, stiffen, lengthen—knowing that she was coming to him here in their secret pond. Here where they met to satisfy their great hunger.

Anxious, he reached out his arms to Amy—ready to draw her to him, to lift her up, then urge her down on the throbbing flesh between his legs … but as he strained to reach for her, she took a breath and disappeared beneath the surface.

“Titus,” a gentle voice called out to him over his shoulder, so close he could almost feel the woman’s breath on his skin. “Titus Bass.”

He turned from the ripples where Amy had disappeared to watch Marissa Guthrie drawing close, stopping there on the edge of the bank, stalks and flecks of hay cluttering her hair the way it always had when they had savagely coupled in the loft of her father’s barn there south of St. Louis.

“Oh, Marissa—it is you!” he heard himself exclaim, heart hammering, beginning to paddle for her.

“Come to me, Titus! I’ll give you children, and this land—give you everything a man could ever want—just come to me!”

How quickly she threw off her dress, naked beneath—then dived into the water. He felt almost ready to agree with anything Marissa asked as he reached her … her head coming out of the water right in front of him. Titus grabbed her naked shoulders in his two hands and lifted her hungrily out of the water to catch a glimpse of her breasts. How he had loved kissing them, sucking them, fondling them as it drove her wild with desire for him.

Bending, Titus nuzzled and sucked on them, lost in the pure heaven of the smell, the taste, the feel of her flesh. Then he brought his face up, planting his mouth over hers and opening her lips as he drew her breath into his lungs.

She tasted of cornmeal and hard cider, the tang of old smoke and that morning’s hog sausage gone stale on her breath. Marissa had never smelled quite like that before.

Titus drew his head back in wonder to ask her why, now, did she smell so … when he found he was holding the widow. She smiled, her eyes filled as they tearfully uttered their thanks; then she pulled his head down between her breasts once more, pressing him close, close, so close he could not breathe anything but the scent of her ravenous sex as she reached out and took hold of his hardened flesh, beginning to stroke it rapidly, urgently, savagely.

How he wanted in her before he exploded. And oh, how he begged the woman to place him there, but just as he began to murmur to her, the first great waves of relief washed over him. How miraculous it felt to have her hand
sliding up and down the length of him as he rocked against her, his face buried between her breasts as he groaned in sheer happiness.

Moments later, as he finished, Titus suddenly realized the water had disappeared, and with it the black sky overhead. Yet worst of all was the startling cold where his cheek lay. Instead of the widow woman’s breasts, his face lay against the old, scarred, unforgiving leather of his saddle. And instead of her hand wrapped around his hardened flesh, Bass realized it was his own.

Just as it was his loneliness for a woman—any woman—that troubled him with these dreams most every night now. How he prayed each time he awoke that it was not Amy nor Marissa, not even the widow woman the dreams were telling him he should join himself to. Praying it was nothing more than the woman hunger Tuttle spoke of, the sort of appetite every man in the mountains must endure for long periods of drought before he can dance and revel in the land of plenty with brown-skinned squaws who are every bit as hungry to have a man between their legs as a man is ravenous in his appetites to have himself planted in their moist heat.

Lying there, Titus found the night so quiet that he could hear the flames lick along the length of some of the limbs in their fire. Raising his head, Titus looked round at the other three, all four of them radiating out from the fire like spokes of a wheel. He dragged his cracked, thin-soled moccasins back under the layer of thick blankets and covered his head once more. Warmer was it to breathe here in the dark, he thought.

And closing his eyes again, brooding on how his own stark white flesh might well look pressed against the dark thigh or gently rounded belly of an Injun woman, Bass put himself back to sleep. Behind his eyes the white and brown flesh rubbed together so fast and with such savage fury that he wasn’t sure any longer if he really was master to his fate in coming here to this far, foreign, and frightening place … or in the end had he only discovered that he was nothing more than a slave to his hungers.

She smelled of smoke and grease.

Her clothing, which lay discarded at the far side of
this tiny lodge, smelled strongly of her woman scent mixed in with the firesmoke and the spatter of cooking grease. Even her skin and hair—spread there beneath his nose and across his chest like black, glossy tendrils as she lay sleeping—all of it smelled of smoke and grease and the shocking cold of winter forest.

Tui-rua-ci
.

Fawn, she was called.

Coals still glowed in the fire pit, and it was warm with her under the buffalo robes and heavy wool blankets. Morning would be a long time getting here in the heart of winter. Here, nestled in the marrow of the mountains. At long last now he could luxuriate in not having to rise before sunup to check a trapline.

Weary, Titus closed his eyes again, letting the blackness ooze over him once more. No longer did he worry about where the others were or what became of them. Silas, Bud, and Billy were all three likely out cold right about then—noisily sawing lumber the way they snored—having danced themselves silly in the ballet of that beast with two backs. Hooks was a hungry, voracious man with a sexual appetite that drove him to couple repeatedly with any woman, wife or daughter, young or middling, who either had her the slightest inclination to bed him or was graciously turned over to the white man as a gift from a good host.

And Bass figured Tuttle and Cooper weren’t the sort to lag far behind Hooks in the hunger department.

Most days in winter camp the four white men gathered to do nothing more than did the Ute men in winter camp: sit, eat, smoke, and swap their stories of past battles or their exploits in killing a bear or capturing an eagle for its feathers. Over the past weeks Titus came to understand the rudiments of that talk Silas, Bud, and Billy had with the Ute, slowly learning that universal language of the fingers, hand, and arm moving in a graceful dance of silent expression.

Then each night, from the Ute widow who had taken Titus into her lodge, he learned a little more of the tribe’s spoken tongue.

Not that she was all that much to feast your eyes on, but he could tell right off that second day after they
reached the Ute’s winter camp that she was good of heart. Besides, she knew just how to pleasure him in the blankets, and what she cooked over her lodge fires he could eat with relish. Although it had taken him some to get used to her boiling all them organs.

In fact, their first night together she had fed him elk heart—turned slimy and gelatinous simmering there in the kettle for what must surely have been the better part of the past three days.

“The ol’ man here,” Cooper had explained that first afternoon, telling Titus the results of a long exchange of sign language, some dutiful handshaking, and loud elocutions in both Ute and white tongues, “he’s the gal’s uncle.”

“Whose uncle?” Bass had inquired, his eyes searching the crowd of women and children who had gathered behind their men in welcoming the white men into their midst when the four had burst out of the timber into the bottomland, whooping and hollering to beat the band, firing their rifles into the air to greet the young warriors who had hurried out to meet them—their dark, brazen frowns turned quickly to happy smiles all round. Indeed, Titus could readily see why Tuttle had repeatedly emphasized that the Ute were a good people to hunker down with for the winter.

“Why,” Silas replied, “the woman who said she’d take y’ in, Scratch.”

“T-take me in?” he echoed, then immediately grew particular. “She be young or old?”

“Y’ grown particular?” and Cooper flashed him a disapproving look. “It don’t matter, do it?”

With a shrug Bass glanced over the female faces and said, “Long as it’s a place to sleep, I s’pose it don’t.”

Cooper slapped a hand on Bass’s shoulder. “Leastways, she’s old enough to be a widder woman.”

“A widder woman!” Billy shrieked. “Ah-hah! Scratch’s gonna fork him a widder woman for winter!”

“Just like the widder woman what give him the nits!” Tuttle had gushed with laughter too.

Enough laughter that it made Bass’s cheeks burn in embarrassment, and his stomach churn with a sudden angry seizure. Maybe he had no business expecting anything
better, what with his being the greenest among them, but to be made the butt of their jokes once again—after all this time and after so many jokes played on him … now, that galled him ail the more.

“A widow woman,” Titus repeated, the words tasting sour. He swallowed hard, forcing down the bitter tang of them as he was of a sudden reminded of the Widow Grigsby. Then he jutted out his chin. “By damn, you niggers—at least that squaw’ll be no stranger to gathering firewood!” He whirled on black-haired Billy to say right to the man’s face, “And I’ll wager she knows her wav around a kettle pot too, Billy Hooks! Better’n I can say for you!”

Cooper banged Tuttle on the back, roaring with good-natured laughter, throwing his head back and letting his voice rise to the winter sky. “Why, if the greenhorn here ain’t got him a bit of ha’r after all!”

Bass continued, “So if’n it’s here we’re to plop down for the winter, by Jehoshaphat, I figure to stay warm and keep my belly full at that widder woman’s fire!”

Tuttle slapped a hand on Hooks’s shoulder, the both of them sniggering uncontrollably. Bud said, “I’ll … I’ll bet that widder woman knows her way round under a buffler robe too, Titus Bass!”

Silas Cooper roared again at that, his Adam’s apple bouncing up and down between the thick, muscular cords in his neck, then told his three companions, “Good for us it be that all this high-larity come at just the time when these here Ute bucks is all smiling and acting good-natured themselves.”

“Wouldn’t be for us to be laughing at that ol’ chief’s gift of his niece, would it, now?” Tuttle observed, winking at Bass.

“Boys, looks to be we got us as prime a place to hunker down for the next few weeks as there be in the mountains,” Silas repeated later as the crowd began to disperse and the four chosen women remained behind in the bright afternoon light to take home their white lodge guests. “Empty your packs and keep your plunder at your side this first night. Be sartin y’ picket your animals outside your door come sundown—so it be close at hand for the first few nights. Jest in case.”