Buffalo Palace (32 page)

Shuddering, Scratch thought how good it would feel to have Fawn next to him. Maybeso there really would be women down to the trader’s rendezvous in a few weeks’ time, just as Billy and Silas had been saying over and over
again. A man might hold out that long, he considered, working up hope once more. Yes, indeed: a man could get himself through the spring and the autumn … just so he could have him a woman at the height of summer, as long as he had one with him too through the deep of winter.

He kicked back the blankets, stood, and tightened the wide belt around his blanket capote. Then he reached into his possibles pouch and pulled out the blue scarf. Holding two opposite corners, Scratch whipped it into a thin band he tied around his head to hold the long hair over his ears for warmth. Stuffing his coyote-hide hat down on his head, Titus bent over the remnants of last night’s elk. He dug among the chunks of the meat they had boiled, then set to cool in a second kettle. What they hadn’t eaten now had a dusting of snow upon it. He blew some of the icy crust off each piece as he stuffed it into a large piece of oiled nankeen cloth, then rolled up the square so it would slip down into the shooting pouch he slapped over his right shoulder.

With the fullstock rifle in his. blanket mitten and still no sign of life from the others, who went right on snoring in their buffalo-robe cocoons, Bass crept away into the cold mists of that spring morning in the high country, eager to get the jump on the day, and the jump on Silas’s boys.

He hadn’t covered much ground before the calves of his leggings were soaked by the wet, melting snow that clung heavily to everything in his path—frosted to every blade of grass and thick-leafed swamp cabbage, crusted on every willow or aspen leaf. The swirling, thick fog was cold all by itself as it danced and whirled on the ground around his knees, yet it became thicker still the closer he got to the upstream meadow where he had been taking beaver hand over fist for the last six days without seeming to put a dent in the rodents’ population.

And every last one of them was a prime fur. “Seal fat and sleek)” was how Billy Hooks had described the first of the pelts Titus had brought back to their camp.

“Damn near the finest I ever see’d,” Tuttle had commented as he began to help Titus scrape the excess flesh
and fat off the back of each hide before they stretched it upon a willow hoop.

Damn pretty things they were too—near as satiny as any fur Titus had laid eyes on were those plews of his. And dark, much darker than their lowland cousins he had trapped before. By Jehoshaphat, spring trapping was the prime doin’s in a mountain nigger’s life, he recalled Silas exclaiming more than once since leaving the Ute winter camp. Sure and certain, he thought again now—there were no two ways about it. Spring trapping up this high was where a man was sure to make himself a small fortune in beaver. No better time of the year for a man to bust his ass: knowing he’d soon be swapping those furs in on one hell of a spree come the time to meet the trader at rendezvous.

It was a life Bass knew he was going to relish. Hell, there wasn’t a thing he didn’t already love about this life he had decided to wager everything on more than a year ago back in St. Louis. No man to boss him around up here, why—a man rose or fell by his own efforts and not those of others. As much affection as he had felt for Hysham Troost, Titus purely savored working on his own hook.

Standing the rifle in a crook of some willow near his first set, Scratch stepped sideways off the slippery bank and into the freezing water that steamed into the cold air. Above him the granite peaks and talus slides were brushed with a golden rose in the coming of the sun as the day’s first light touched only the highest places.

Down here life was still nothing but shadow as Bass inched toward the float-stick, snagged it with his bare hand, and dragged it over to the bank. At the end of the chain hung the trap, and in its square jaws hung a heavy beaver—slick and dripping as he eased it out of the water. Onto the bank he heaved it, then clambered up after the carcass. Squatting on the two powerful springs, Titus freed the animal’s leg, laid the trap aside, and pulled the skinning knife from its scabbard at the back of his belt.

Rolling the beaver over onto its back, Scratch started the slit at the anus and worked the knife carefully up in a straight cut toward the lower jaw. That done, he sliced around the legs near the body itself and prepared to remove
the precious plew. Now with the unnecessary legs removed and a quick whirl with the knife to hack off the large, scaly tail, Titus laid his finger along the flat top of his skinning knife and began the slow, careful work of separating hide from body, a few inches of connective tissue and fat at a time. Almost like peeling back the robe off Widow Grigsby’s shoulders: pulling and slicing, pulling and slicing a little more as the plew relinquished its hold on the carcass.

From the rump end he worked forward, finally peeling the hide from the head itself, right down to the animal’s nose. Holding it up, Bass inspected it quickly, as he did with every one, looking first at the flesh side to see that he hadn’t been too quick and eager, and thereby sloppy, causing his knife to slip and cut through the plew. Then he could admire the thick, damp, oily fur on the opposite side.

After resetting the trap and smearing more of the sticky bait on the tip of the willow limb poised over that much-used slide the beaver had carved themselves down the slippery bank, Titus poked a long whang of stiffened rawhide through one of the empty eye sockets and slung the heavy green plew over his shoulder. Snagging the beaver’s scaly tail root, he flung the carcass as far as he could into the brush away from the pond. A few feet away he retrieved his rifle, threaded his way back through the willow, and slogged on to the second set.

One after another one he pulled up a beaver. It had been this way for days. Not a single empty trap. Fourteen more plews by midmorning when he finished resetting his traps and turned back for camp. Those fourteen would make for a full day of fleshing and stretching. As boring as the work was, it remained somewhat joyous work, nevertheless: knowing now just what each one of those hides should be worth come the middle of summer when they got on over to the Willow Valley by the Sweet Lake.

Through the thin vertical straps of lodgepole shadow and the patches of early sunlight, he saw the gray film of firesmoke and the slow, deliberate movements of the three as he drew close. Cooper was late turning them out this morning.

“Ho! The camp!” Bass called out.

Billy Hooks turned, his face quickly painted with that ready smile. “Ho! Scratch!” Then he peered more carefully at Bass as Titus lumbered up with half of his burden at the end of each arm. “Will you lookee at that, boys?”

Bass himself turned to find Cooper squatting over a pile of his own beaver hides. Silas rose and set his big ands down on his hips. “Pound some powder up my ass and strike fire to my pecker! Looks to me like this here green pilgrim got him a haul of prime plew awready today, boys!”

Titus was proud to boast, “Fourteen of ’em, Silas!”

“Fourteen?” Cooper repeated as he came around Scratch’s shoulder to have himself a look at the two heavy bundle of green hides. “All these since yestiddy?”

“Skinned ’em this mornin’.”

“An’ don’t they look like big’uns too,” Cooper went on, admiringly.

Bass glowed with the praise, fairly crowing. “Nearly every one—bigger’n any I ever catched.”

Slapping his hand down on Bass’s shoulder, Silas nodded once and said, “Fellas, this here greenhorn nigger gonna have him the finest pack of plew come time to talk to the trader, don’t y’ think?”

“For balls’ sake if he won’t!” Bud agreed, and Billy bobbed his head eagerly.

Then Tuttle stepped up to heft both rawhide straps from Titus, flinging the green hides toward the area of camp where they fleshed the skins and lashed them inside willow hoops—where more than two dozen of those willow hoops stood propped against trees this morning, their skins drying, hide side up.

“C’mon, y’ two. We got us a long way to go this morning,” Cooper ordered, the slash of a grin on his face. “We ought’n go see if we can catch ourselves some of them prime plew like Scratch here done.”

Joking good-naturedly among themselves as they always did, the three gathered up their trap sacks and float-sticks, bait and weapons, before easing off downstream where they had been trapping for the last six days with moderate success. But unlike Bass’s good fortune, the three had been forced to move farther and farther downstream with each succeeding day.

Once he had some more limbs steepled on the fire, and the coffeepot set on the flames to boil, Titus turned back to the fourteen green hides. One at a time he slid them off the thick rawhide whang, laid each down, and rolled it up tightly, flesh side in so they would not air-dry prematurely. All but the last one he tied up with thin cords of fringe to prevent them from unrolling. On that last one he began work there beside his morning fire as the coffeepot began to spew a thin trail of vapor from its spout.

From his leather possibles pouch, where he carried everything a man might require to survive in the wilderness, Scratch took one of those large iron awls he had fashioned for Isaac Washburn and himself back in Troost’s St. Louis livery. Stuffing one of its two sharpened ends into the hole drilled in a rounded knob of wood that fit his palm, Scratch began to carefully poke holes around the outer circumference of the first plew, grabbing an empty willow hoop from those stacked to lean against some deadfall. When he had selected a long loop of rawhide cord from among those hanging on knots and broken limbs around their campsite, Titus began the process of lashing the hide to the hoop.

Leaving himself better than a foot of the rawhide cord free, Scratch shoved the pointed end of the cord through the first hole he punched at the extreme edge of the soft green hide, then looped the cord over the thick willow limb and repeated the process of poking the cord through the next hole, round and round and round, over the willow hoop and through the succeeding holes until he had the beaver plew completely circumscribed.

Now began the most time-consuming part of the job at hand: ever so slowly stretching the hide into a large round shape to fit the round hoop. Tugging on loop by rawhide loop, Scratch painstakingly moved around the hoop again, stretching the hide out another fraction of an inch. A little more on the next trip around. Then stretched it more, and more. Finally, after uncounted trips around that willow hoop, the beaver plew had been worked as taut as the head of an Indian war drum, fashioned into that crude shape the mountain man called his “beaver dollar.”

The coffee had begun to hiss and spew, so he grabbed a short limb and used it to pull on the bail to ease the pot back off the flames. There on the bed of glowing coals it would remain warm for some time to come. Then …

Oh, how Titus hated what grueling work came next: fleshing.

Yet he figured he should make a start of it before Tuttle came back to finish up the hides—at least flesh this first one. So far this spring they had them an easy bargain worked out. Titus was far better at lashing the plews within their willow hoops, so he did that for Bud. And Tuttle didn’t much mind the fleshing, a chore most beaver men considered “squaw’s work.” Funny thing was that here, as in most camps of fur trappers, there simply weren’t any squaws to complete the back-bending, shoulder-sore labor of removing every last bit of flesh, fat, and connective tissue from the backside of the beaver plew once it had been stretched on its frame.

Near a stack of empty willow hoops, Scratch found one of the fleshing tools, its half-round wooden handle well darkened with oil from the hands of those who had labored with it. Screwed between the two long halves of the wooden handle was a rounded piece of thin iron, sharpened on its convex side, enough room left in the iron blade so that a man’s fingers could slip through the slot and firmly grip the flesher.

Flipping the hoop so it laid fur side down, Titus squatted, sighed, then knelt over the plew to begin dragging the sharp edge of the flesher against the grain of the beaver’s skin—gradually lifting that excess flesh, thick straps of fatty tissue, and thin strips of connective fascia. Time and again he peeled the sticky residue from his crude flesher and went back to work, until he eventually had the hide scraped to within a thumb’s width of the edge of the plew where the rawhide loops secured it to the willow hoop.

Slowly volving his shoulders as he rocked back on his haunches, Scratch felt the pull and tightness in his back with the hunched-up work he truly felt was fit only for a squaw. Weary as the work made him, the rest could wait until Tuttle returned, he figured. Then together they could begin to work on the other thirteen, plus what others Bud
would manage to bring back from his own traps that morning.

Titus crabbed forward and poured himself half a tin cup of the steaming coffee as more of the sun shot down through the trees in narrow shafts of misting light. He scooted his rump over to lean back against a large trunk of some deadfall, his feet to the fire, and sipped his coffee.

Here in the sun, its warm rays creeping up his legs, the heated coffee tin cradled between his hands, Scratch slowly closed his eyes. No doubt was there that the best beaver men moved out of camp before first light. But just as sure was it that a man might reward himself with the luxury of a little nap once he was back in camp with the prior day’s catch. Titus sat the coffee tin beside him on the trampled ground, folded his arms, and let his chin whiskers fall to his chest.

Startled by the chirk of a squirrel in the branches high overhead, he awoke sometime later, aware he had indeed been dozing with no recollection of just how much time had passed. But picking up the cup and taking a sip of the cold coffee gave him some idea of just how long. He flung out the dregs and poured himself another half cup. That was the way he had learned not to waste valuable coffee: drinking only a half cup at a time so that it wouldn’t cool prematurely.

After a few sips on the hot brew that invigorated him, Scratch got to his feet and moved off toward his side of the small camp to roll up his bedding he had abandoned before first light. There among his pack goods he stopped of a sudden—staring down at the four packs of beaver hides he had trapped in valley and high-country streams since first reaching the mountains last autumn. Three … damn if three of the packs didn’t look smaller than he remembered.