Buffalo Palace (55 page)

Bass took a step back as he let go of Cooper’s hand. “Time’s come for me to watch out for my own hide, ain’t it?”

Smiling, Cooper said, “That’s for certain sure, Scratch. Keep your eye on the skyline.”

Titus watched Billy and Bud wade over to the first raft with a splash, untie it, and step on board. “Yep—and you boys watch your hair!”

“Best you keep your nose in the wind, Titus Bass,” Billy called out as he squatted down among the bales of beaver and took up the long rudder pole he planted down in the fork of a stout branch lashed to the back of the raft.

“I’ll do that, Billy Hooks!” he called out.

Tuttle took up the long pole and pushed the first big raft away from the shore, poling toward the faster water in midchannel. “We’ll have us a good, long drink together real soon, Scratch!”

“I’ll count on that, Bud,” he called back, raising his hand to the pair as their craft was nudged by faster water.

Cooper slipped his big hat off his head and plopped it down on top of those beaver packs Bass had worked so hard to pull out of the icy mountain streams. Taking up his long pole with one hand, Silas gathered some of his stringy, unkempt hair in the other, tugging on it as he sang out.

“Keep your hair locked on tight, Titus Bass!”

“Don’t you worry none about me!” Scratch sang back in reply as he started to trot downstream along the grassy bank, watching Cooper’s raft ease into the fast water now, beginning to pull away all the faster. “I’ll watch my topknot!”

Then Cooper had his back turned and had his long pole reversed, putting the flat paddle end down into the water and the pole itself to rest in the Y-shaped branch they had lashed at the back of the raft. With it he would keep the craft at midriver where the spring runoff ran deepest.

Glancing downstream, Bass saw the first raft, made out the dim shape of those big bales of fur, and the pair of tiny figures on board—one of them working the crude rudder as the Yellowstone hurried them east toward that Missouri Fur Company post near the mouth of the Bighorn. Then they were swept around a gentle bend in the river and gone from sight.

He turned back to watch Cooper glide by at a fast clip, watching, watching, watching until the tall, thick-shouldered man was gone around that curve in the Yellowstone too. Then Titus stared at that spot in the river, those tall cottonwoods sixty, seventy feet or taller … as things grew quiet save for the nearby animals cropping at the spring grass, the cry of meadowlarks and the bothersome chatter of a nagging magpie too, the gentle breeze sneaking through the new leaves above him with a faint, reassuring rustle.

Then for a moment it got so quiet, he could almost hear his heart beat … except for the voice of the river running over its rocky bed, pushing itself against a boulder here and there with a foaming rush.

So quiet was it, so alone was he again, that Scratch
succumbed to the temptation to fill that empty void as he watched that distant spot on the river, there between the wide banks of the Yellowstone where the three had disappeared.

“Yepper,” he sighed, every bit as quietly as the breeze itself. “I’ll watch my topknot.”

No one was waiting for him there at the mouth of the Bighorn.

For the better part of two weeks Scratch struggled to keep that cavvyyard together as he marched east to meet up with Silas Cooper and the other two. A lot of work for one man.

There was watering the critters two at a time every morning before he fried himself his own breakfast. And there was keeping them strung out enough on the trail that they didn’t jam up so close they would bite on one another or tear at one another’s tails—but not so far apart that they took on unruly notions. Good thing, he thought, these animals were used to being around one another by and large and had made of themselves a good herd. That helped each night when it came time for him to find a place to camp.

Bass stopped early enough at the end of every one of those lengthening days to water them again two by two by two while the others grazed and rolled, dusting themselves as the mosquitoes and flies came out in springtime clouds to torture man and beast alike. And when the watering was done, Titus would build himself a fire down beneath the branches of the biggest cottonwood he could find along the banks of the river. The leaves and that incessant
breeze in the valley of the Yellowstone helped to disperse the smoke rising from his cookfire, as well as hold down the number of tormentors wanting a taste of his flesh, to draw some of his blood.

After broiling his antelope or venison shot along the trail, Bass would drink his coffee, light up his pipe, and enjoy the temporary warmth of the fire as the night came down and the temperature dropped. Then when the cooking gear had cooled off enough to stuff it away in one of the panniers he could sling back atop Hannah’s back—closing on the time all light was just about gone from the sky, he poured out the dregs of his coffee and kicked dirt into the tiny fire.

That done, Bass mounted the saddle horse, took up Hannah’s lead rope, and rode over to where the other animals grazed on the tall grass. There he clucked, whistled, and called as he pulled Hannah through their midst. And most times, without much trouble at all, the rest of the horses and mules followed. Two miles, perhaps, sometimes more, on downriver—and when he had found a likely spot for more grazing beneath the stars, a likely spot where a man could roll up in his blankets for a cold, fire-less camp, then he would circle back around the small herd to let them know that here they could stop following and start eating again.

In country where the
Apsaalooke
themselves had so many enemies, it would never pay for a man to become too careless. Especially a man with so many horses.

Not that he feared the Crow. Not Big Hair’s people—now that they knew him. Now that he had spent a winter among them.

Yet repeatedly Bird in Ground had warned Scratch: the Blackfoot came raiding as the spring winds grew warm. Just as the River Crow would go riding off to raid Blackfoot country. Ponies and scalps … and if the opportunity presented itself—the Crow would always bring back an infant or a young child. Such stolen treasures would one day grow up to be
Apsaalooke
, no longer the enemy. After all, Bird in Ground had explained, there were never enough Apsaalooke, would never be enough when it came to defending their homeland against the powerful enemies who had Absaraka surrounded.

Perhaps it was true that
Akbaatatdia
did watch over his people, the Crow, protecting them from all those who outnumbered them.

Perhaps that powerful spirit that Bird in Ground called Grandfather Above had watched over Titus Bass, as well, while he was in Absaraka. Not that Scratch had ever been one to particularly believe in the naming of spiritual forces, as others, both white and red, were wont to do. Those who believed in such things had always seemed to be the sort to turn their lives over to such spirits rather than trusting in themselves, he figured. Whether it was the white man’s God, his Lord of Hosts, even the Archangel Michael and ol’ Lucifer himself—or the simple, unadorned beliefs of an honest man like Bird in Ground, who explained that the Grandfather Above was present in all things, and the closest spirit the Crow had to the white man’s devil could only be the playful practical joker called Old Man Coyote.

So perhaps it was that trickster who was toying with Titus Bass right now as he forded the Bighorn near its mouth, swatting his arms at clouds of mosquitoes and big green deerflies that hovered above the sweating backs of every one of the horses and mules as they splashed up through the brush on the east bank.

There simply was no fort on either side of the Bighorn River.

In angry frustration he lashed Hannah’s lead rope to some willow, knowing the other animals would not wander far, then remounted and pushed the saddle horse down the bank, fording the swollen Yellowstone. Riding an arc of more than two miles from east to west along that north bank, Scratch found no fur-company buildings nor pole corrals, no sign of any white men. Only some two dozen old lodge rings and fading black fire pits on this side of the river. Sign that was likely more than a year old. That, and a lot of buffalo chips scattered among the hoof-pocked ground.

In utter, all-consuming disappointment he swam the horse back over late that afternoon, redressed into his dry clothing, then got the animals moving east once more, growing more confused and concerned for his partners.

Perhaps they hadn’t made it, he began to fear. Maybe
some accident had befallen them back yonder between here and the great bend of the Yellowstone. Worse still—attacked. But, no—he tried to shake off that nagging uncertainty as he pushed on east away from the Bighorn itself, resolutely.

After all, he’d come down the Yellowstone behind them. Wouldn’t he have seen some sign of a fight if the other three had been jumped by a Blackfoot raiding party that chanced onto the trappers? Wouldn’t he have seen one of the rafts pulled up to the bank, or if it had been set adrift, wouldn’t he have seen it snagged in some of the driftwood piles the Yellowstone itself gathered every few hundred yards when running full and frothy the way it did in spring?

Wouldn’t there be a chance he’d seen a body trapped in the same downriver driftwood piles?

Unless the Blackfoot dragged ’em off, he convinced himself. Half-alive. Tall and gory were the tales of how the Blackfoot loved to torture a man….

And then Bass told himself that he could have missed all sign of the trio’s destruction, because he had only come down the north bank of the Yellowstone until reaching the mouth of the Bighorn—and he hadn’t hugged right up to the bank, at that. What with picking the easiest country to cross with all these animals, Titus hadn’t always stayed in constant sight of the riverbank. Could be he’d missed something. Could be there’d been some sign on the south side of the river, and he’d passed it right on by.

But he hadn’t come far from the east bank of the Bighorn—the certainty of what had befallen the others looming all the larger with every step—when he spotted the ruins squatting on a small thumb of high ground not far ahead.

After dismounting nearby and leaving the saddle horse to graze with the rest, Scratch hurried to the burned and overgrown ruins of the small log post—hopeful that he would find where the trio were to leave him their notice. At least now he knew for certain there was no Missouri Fur Company post here where the trio could trade their plews for goods and liquor. And that meant that now he knew the three would have to push on down the Yellowstone, on down the Upper Missouri until they got
close to the Knife River … but where was the word from them they had promised to leave him?

Perhaps an angry band of Indians had burned down the fort’s cabins and stockade in some long-ago season past … or maybe the white traders had done it themselves when they’d abandoned the post. Maybe the Crow trade wasn’t all that profitable for the company, he mulled. Not any longer, since men like Ashley had come to the mountains with skin trappers of their own to strip a piece of country bare. Maybeso the fur companies that had of a time ruled on the northern rivers no longer could survive the competition.

Stepping over the burned hulk of a cottonwood wall now collapsed into the soil where the stockade and cabin ruins were being overgrown year after year by grass and weed and the blooming purple crowns of wavyleaf thistle, Titus remembered how Cooper said the traders were operating their post not all that long ago.

“Twenty-one,” Bass said to himself, scratching at his bearded cheek. “Maybe twenty-two it was.”

But Silas and the rest said they had been here not long after the fort had been constructed and manned … just like the Spaniard Manuel Lisa had raised his own fort somewhere nearby more than ten years before that.

Back of the ruins rose a soft-sloped knoll he hurried to on foot, climbed, then carefully appraised the surrounding country. How he wished now that there was some high point of rimrock the likes he had discovered back upriver a ways, some great flat-topped promontory where a man could see for himself a good stretch of country.
*

But from up here on this low knoll, and from his explorations back by the mouth of the Bighorn itself, Scratch could see no indication of another stockade. Too much time had passed since Lisa and Henry had abandoned the northern country.

“Mayhaps a dozen years or more,” he reminded himself quietly, despair sinking in atop that hill.

After all those winters and summers, there simply
wouldn’t be much left of an abandoned stockade and some dirt-roofed cabins, a post burned down by those who sought to leave nothing behind for the brownskins. Too many seasons for the ground itself to reclaim any ruins, grass too tall for him to spot anything, anyway.