Buffalo Palace (71 page)

How long would it take until he understood what the wrinkled old men had accepted—what had truly given them real peace?

Here Scratch stood in that winter forest, the boisterous singing and Hatcher’s scratchy fiddle only faint wisps on the
Tight
breeze that bitter morning … the first of a shiny new year by Caleb Wood’s careful count made on notched sticks he carried in a bundle tucked away in a saddlebag—a brand-new year for them all here in the heart of the winter, ten free men living out their days deep in the marrow of the Rocky Mountains.

Maybeso, he decided, autumn wasn’t the season he could expect to discover what he wanted most to know. After all, in autumn a man was still too damned busy to allow himself enough quiet to really hear. There were beaver
to be caught, distance to be covered, cold to prepare one’s self for.

More likely, Scratch thought, he would come to know his answers come a winter. Perhaps … even this winter. A time when life itself slowed, when the spin of days wound down and like thick black-strap molasses everything barely moved ahead at such a leisurely pace that a man was allowed time to rightfully consider and plan and to give thanks for what he has been given.

From what Scratch had come to know, for most trappers winter was a time to hunker by the fire, swapping lies, carefully embellishing and embroidering their stories of coups and conquests. A time when a man did just what the Injuns did: gathered close to the fires in their lodges, doing their best to stay warm and keep their bellies filled till spring. During that long period of endless cold, there simply wasn’t much reason for a man to ride his horses the way he did during the hunt for beaver or his annual trek to rendezvous—a fact that meant that come spring, a man’s animals would most likely be rangy, feisty, all but back to wild mustangs again. There’d come a time just before spring trapping began when a man would have to break his pony to saddle all over. But Scratch had never been one to allow that to happen.

Here in his third winter, just as he had done for both of those before, from time to time Bass would ride his saddle pony or strap the packs on Hannah’s back—to keep the animals broken in. Enough contact every few days to remind these creatures of his touch, of his smell—enough so these half-wild creatures would be reassured in the presence of a white man here in the land of so many red men.

Although … Scratch had to admit Hannah had been different almost from the start, right from that very first winter. Markedly different from those other mules he had known working at Troost’s Livery back in St. Louis, as well as those mules brought out of the Missouri country by traders to this far country.

Thinking about Hannah and her affection always caused a spot inside him to glow not unlike his mam’s bed-warming iron, no matter how cold the land became around him with winter’s icy grip. Many were the times
when the winds blew ferociously and the snow fell so deep that the animals had it tough pawing down to anything they could find to eat. From Silas, Billy, and Bud Scratch first learned he could feed his horse and pack animals a subsistence of cottonwood bark until the Chinook winds arrived to clear the land of snow … at least until the coming of the next winter storm.

Astounded at first—and convinced the three trappers were having themselves a great laugh at his expense—Bass was genuinely amazed when they showed him just how a hungry animal would take to the bark they peeled from cottonwood limbs and logs. After chopping short, firewood-sized pieces, the men would set about drawing their large skinning knives down the length of each limb to peel away the tender, soft underbark. Most times it was a cold, tedious, and laborious process, where a man was forced to kneel in the snow to accomplish his task: Scratch would lock a short length of wood between his knees as he crouched over it, then pull his knife toward him in a shaving motion, with each stroke producing a thin curl of palatable bark. Once he had enough to fill his arms, he would lay that big pile before the mule and other animals the way a man might lay out armloads of alfalfa or bluegrass.

One morning early their first winter together in the mountains Bass hadn’t been peeling near fast enough to keep up with just how rapidly Hannah could make the bark disappear. Without hesitation she eased over to where he was working, snatching up the curls of bark as quickly as he produced them. When he had stood momentarily to bend and flex the kinks out of his cold, cramped muscles, to his surprise Hannah moved right up to help herself. Putting one front hoof down on the middle of a branch to hold it in place, the mule bent low and began to rake her teeth across it, peeling the bark away each time. As he watched in utter amazement, she consistently managed to pull off short lengths of bark on her own.

“You just remember that now, ol’ gal,” he had instructed her that first winter. “Hap’ the time I don’t peel fast enough for that damned hungry belly of your’n—don’t you dare be shy ’bout digging in for your own self.”

As he stood there this cold morning, his head pounding
with hangover and finding himself a full year older, Scratch came naturally to think that Hannah was truly meant to come to him, just the way certain folks had shown up somewhere along the path his life had taken. Women. And friends. And even a mule. Times were a hand had gently touched his life, nudging it this way, or easing it there.

Mayhap it had been better in those younger days when he did not know enough to realize there was something greater than himself … better then than now with the nagging of this not knowing, with this wondering. Far better those days of reckless youth when nothing seemed of much import but the moment. Now, with each ring he put on every winter, Bass realized he knew less and less, so grew to sense just how precious was each day—for now he realized how those days grew less and less in number. Now he knew how each one might well be his last.

He had to know: just the way he had come to learn the alchemy of fire and iron and muscle in Troost’s Livery; the way he had learned to set and bait and blind a beaver trap in those high-country streams and ponds. This was something that must not elude him: knowing what force had brought him here, then continued to watch over him, and ultimately plucked him from danger more than once already.

Likely it had to be the very same force that had guided him north as he lay all but dead across Hannah’s withers. No, not just the North Star shining like some distant beacon, not only it—for he was certain something far greater than those tiny pricks of light in the night sky had steered him north to Goat Horn’s band of the Shoshone, north to Jack Hatcher’s bunch … and—dare he think it?—had guided him north right to that white buffalo calf … the animal that had saved his life.

“It true what they say ’bout that Three Forks country up yonder?” Titus asked the others at the fire one cold spring evening.

“True that it’s crawling with more ways for a man t’ die than most ever thought of?” Jack Hatcher asked in reply.

“Them three I was with,” Bass began to explain, “they didn’t want to go nowhere near Blackfeets.”

“Damn them red-bellies!” Isaac Simms shouted.

“No-account worthless niggers,” echoed Elbridge Gray.

Scratch asked, “I take it you fellas rubbed up again’ them Blackfeets, eh?”

Jabbing his sharp knife in the air, pointing at the others in the circle at that fire, Hatcher made his point. “Every damn last one of these here coons rubbed up again’ Blackfoot at least once.”

“An’ for most—once be more’n enough!” Caleb Wood exclaimed. “Just ask Jack hisself there.”

“Ask him what?” Bass inquired.

Wood continued, “Ask him about Blackfoots—how they took his own brother.”

Turning to look at Hatcher, Bass repeated, “They kill’t your own brother, Jack?”

For a moment longer Hatcher sat swabbing the oiled rag on the end of his wiping stick up and down the bore of his rifle. “It be the church’s truth. Jeb were with Lisa … long, long ago.”

“The Spaniard? Manuel Lisa?”

“That’s him,” Jack answered Titus. “Took him one of the first outfits to the upper river.”

With a knowing nod Matthew Kinkead added, “The Up-Missouri country.”

Then Hatcher continued. “My brother Jeb weren’t ’sactly with Lisa, howsoever. Stayed on with Henry’s bunch what tramped over to the Three Forks.”

“Long time back I knowed a man what was bound away to join up with Lisa out to St. Louie,” Scratch announced. “It were the summer just afore I left home for good. Long ago. Gamble, I remember his name to be. Damn if he weren’t a shot too: beat me good at the Longhunter Fair shoot.”

“Jeb was the best there was in our country,” Hatcher explained, smiling with brotherly admiration. “Damn—but there’s times I do miss him sorely.”

“Wait just a shake there,” Bass exclaimed. “You can’t be near old enough to have you a brother what went upriver with Lisa!”

“Shit!” cried Rufus Graham. “Jack Hatcher’s lot older’n you think!”

“Not near so old I cain’t whip your ass, Rufus!” Hatcher growled, then turned back to Titus. “Jeb was firstborn in our family. I was the babe. Ain’t really all that far apart in years, I s’pose. I was old enough to carry a rifle into the woods with him the fall and winter afore he left home for to join Lisa. It purely broke my ma’s heart when he left. And it broke my pa’s heart when Jeb never come back.”

For long minutes none of them spoke at the fire, perhaps deep in thought on what had been left behind, those who had been left behind—the price paid to seize hold of this life.

Night held back this season of the year, waiting just a bit longer each evening before it stole in to take possession of the day. Not like autumn, that other season of change: when night rushed in like a bold, brazen brigand. But for
now night held off, and so did they, likely every man thinking of loved ones left behind among the settlements and places where people gathered shoulder to shoulder.

A wet, cold spring it had become—almost from the first retreat of the snow up the mountainsides. Streams swelled to overflowing with the melting runoff tumbling down to the valleys below while icy rains hammered the land until the ground could hold no more. Nearly every ravine, coulee, and dry wash frothed in its headlong rush for the sea. The beaver hunting turned poor there in the country that drained the eastern slope of the Wind River Mountains. During such spring floods the flat-tails simply did not live by the same habits. And if they did emerge from their flooded lodges at all, the beaver were much more wary, harder to bring to bait, more cautious than a long-tailed house cat trapped in a room filled with bent-wood rockers.

One evening after it had been raining solid for the better part of a night and the following day, they sat by their smoky fire, broiling pieces of meat the size of their fists on sharpened sticks called
appolaz
. To his utter surprise, Bass heard that first yip-yip-yipping cry of a nearby coyote.

“Didn’t think they come out in the rain,” Scratch said, sniffling as he dragged his wet wool coat under his red, raw nose.

“That’s medicine,” Hatcher explained matter-of-factly as he poked a finger in his half-raw meat, then returned it to the flames.

“What’s medicine?” Bass repeated.

“That song-dog,” Graham said.

Titus scoffed, “What’s the medicine in some lonely ol’ coyote singing to the sun as it falls outta the sky?”

Clearing his throat, Hatcher said, “Scratch, ye damn well know I’d rather spit face-on into a strong wind than tell ye a bald-faced lie.”

“You ain’t ever told me no bald-face what I know of,” Bass admitted.

“Then ye damn well pin ye ears back and give Mad Jack Hatcher a good listen here. Some winters back I heard tell a coyote what comes out to howl in the rain—why, that coyote really be a Injun.”

“You mean a Injun coming round to scout our camp?”

“No—a
coyote”
Hatcher repeated. “A coyote what used to be a Injun.”

Starting to grin, Bass was sure now he was getting his leg pulled, and good. “No matter you swore you’d tell me no bald-face … I can tell when a man’s poking fun at me—”

“You believe what ye-wanna believe, Titus Bass,” Hatcher interrupted. “And ye ain’t gotta believe what ye ain’t ready to believe.”

Solomon Fish declared, “He’s telling you the straight of it, Scratch.”

“You mean you ain’t rousting me?” Titus asked.

Wagging his head, Hatcher replied, “No. Just telling ye the truth of it, as I knows the truth to be.”

For a moment he listened to that coyote wailing off-key out there in the soggy hills. “You mean to tell me that there ain’t no coyote singing out there?”

“Oh, there’s a coyote all right,” Caleb Wood testified. “A buffler coyote.”

“What’s a buffler coyote?”

Hatcher said, “Scratch, surely ye see’d how coyotes toiler the herds.”

Bass nodded. “Yep, them and the wolves. So that’s what you call a buffler coyote, eh?”

“Yep.”

Still grinning, Bass said, “So—what is it? A buffler coyote … or a Injun?”

Wood wagged his head like a schoolmaster who had grown frustrated explaining some fine point to one of his thickheaded young charges. “Tell ’im, Jack.”