Crack in the Sky (11 page)

After two more songs one of the company men hollered, “Meat’s cut. Time for the fire!”

Night had deepened while a handful of trappers had butchered loose, bloody slabs of venison and elk. The trappers surged forward now that the supper call was raised, knives in hand, waiting for their portion. Jabbed on the end of long, sharpened sticks, the rich red meat sizzled over the flames, juices dripping into the crackling fire. Men grunted and groaned with immense, feral satisfaction until
their bellies could hold no more; then once again their thoughts turned to liquor. With pepper-laced alcohol warming their gullets, many of the men brought out pipes of clay or cob or briar burl, filling them with fragrant Kentucky burley, lighting them with twigs at the fireside before settling back against saddles and packs and bedrolls.

“I ain’t heard a squeezebox played that good since I floated the Mississap,” Scratch declared with pure appreciation as he eased down beside Elbridge Gray, his tin cup in one hand, a second helping of thick tenderloin impaled on the knife he clutched in the other.

Around a big bite of rare meat, Gray replied, “I’m rusty.”

“If’n that’s rusty,” Nathan Porter snorted, “I’d sure as hang wanna hear you when you’re oiled!”

Without benefit of fork, Bass held the slab of meat up, snatched hold of a bite-sized chunk between his teeth, then, holding the meat out from his lips, cut off that bite with the knife. Hardly the best of proper table manners, it was nonetheless an efficient way for a man to wolf down his fill of lean, juicy meat in less time than it would take most men to fill a pipe bowl and light it. While some ate more, and a few ate less, the standard fare in the mountains was two pounds of meat at a sitting.

Eventually Titus grew stuffed and well satisfied, ready at last for the coffee some of the company trappers had set to boil at the edge of the fires. As he wiped his knife off across the thigh of his buckskin legging, Bass turned to Elbridge. “You’ll play some more for us tonight?”

Gray asked, “You’re up to it, Jack?”

Hatcher replied, “Dog, if I ain’t. When ye’re done coffeeing yerself, Elbridge.”

Minutes later the two were at it again, the potent liquor continuing to flow, both company trappers and the free men frolicking with total abandon: dancing, singing, beating on the bottoms of kettles or banging two sticks together in time to the music They whirled in pairs or stomped about in a wild jig, knees pumping so high, they near grazed a man’s own chin.

The night had ripened and the moon had risen before Jack shushed them all.

“Gonna play ye one last song,” he told them as he stood wavering back and forth, clearly feeling his cups.

“It be a foot stomper?”

“No,” Hatcher growled with a snap.

Someone else yelled, “I wanna foot stomper!”

“Shuddup,” Caleb Wood grumped at the complainer.

“I allays play it,” Hatcher explained as the group fell quiet. “Allays …”

Solomon quickly explained to the others, “It’s his song, boys.”

Quietly, Gray asked, “You want me play with you?”

Jack nodded. “Sure do. Sounds purtier with ye siding for me, Elbridge.”

Hatcher led into the tune with a long, melancholy introduction. After a few bars Elbridge joined in, quietly, echoing Jack’s plaintive notes like the answer a man would hear to a jay’s call, the faint reply returning from the distance in those eastern woodlands where they had all been raised.

Closing his eyes as he dragged bow across strings, the tall, homely trapper began to sing to that hushed, respectful, firelit crowd.

For a moment Titus tore his eyes from Hatcher’s expressive, lean, and melancholy face, glancing quickly about at the others, every last one of them spellbound by the sad, mournful strains of the two instruments, by the plaintive, feral call of Hatcher’s voice as he climbed atop each new note.

One by one the ghostly wisps of people from his past slipped through his mind as Jack and Elbridge weaved their magic spell in that firelit darkness. A father and mother left behind in Kentucky what seemed a lifetime ago. Good men like Ebenezer Zane and Isaac Washburn, dead well before their time. Billy and Silas, and even Bud Tuttle too—those three who had come into Bass’s life, then gone to their downriver deaths.

Death so sudden in this wilderness. A man’s end come so in the blink of an eye on this unspeakable frontier. Every day was to be savored and cherished and fiercely embraced for all it was worth—a fact that every last one of these few gathered at the fire understood, knowing theirs would not be a Christian burial. No, none of these was the sort of man forever to lie at rest beneath some carved stone marker where family and friends could come to visit. Instead, theirs would be anonymous graves, an unheralded passing … their only memorial the glory of their having lived out their roster of days in the utter ecstasy of freedom.

To die Where the winter snows would lie deep in seasons still in the womb of time, their bones gnawed by predators, scattered to bleach below endless suns … to sleep out eternity where only the wind would come to sing in whisper over this place of final rest.

By the time Jack Hatcher’s bunch began to straggle back to their bowers and bedrolls across the creek from the grove where the company men had raised their camp, a strip of sky along the eastern horizon had begun to relinquish its lampblack, noticeably graying. Dawn was not far behind.

As he stumbled along, Scratch’s head throbbed, tender as a red welt. Barely able to prop his eyes open any more than snaky slits, his toes groped their way through the grass and brush. Scattered among the outfit’s packs and belongings, he finally located his blankets and lone buffalo robe. Sinking to the ground, Bass rolled onto his side and dragged the old Shoshone rawhide-bound saddle toward him to prop beneath his head. As he lay back upon it, the saddle’s wooden frame momentarily creaked beneath the weight of his shoulders, then suddenly split apart and collapsed—smacking his head against the hard ground and the saddle’s sideboards.

“What in hell are you about over there?” John Rowland demanded as he sat up, a disheveled sight to behold. He had come back to his blankets some time before the others.

Groaning as he gently rubbed the side of his skull with
two fingertips, Bass slowly sat up. Struggling to catch his breath against the hammer pounding inside his brain, he carefully adjusted the greasy, sweat-salted blue bandanna he tied over the top of his head not only to keep his long hair out of his eyes but to protect that bare patch of exposed cranium where he had lost his hair to an Arapaho horse thief.

“Shit,” Caleb Wood grumbled as he stretched himself out once more, “Scratch cain’t even lay down quietlike.”

Bass held up the chewed wooden frame pieces. “My goddamned saddle come apart on me!”

“Come apart?” Hatcher repeated in disbelief as he rolled onto his knees and crabbed over to Bass’s blanket.

“Look at it!” Titus shrieked in horror as he ran fingers over the ruin of his old saddle.

“I’ll be go to hell, boys!” Jack cried. “Come see for yer own selves!”

“See what?” Kinkead asked as he loomed over them.

“Right there,” Hatcher instructed. “See where the damned critters been eatin’ at it.”

“C-critters?” Titus squawled. “What critters?”

Hatcher’s eyes narrowed, looking over their encampment. “Go see to yer outfits, boys. Likely Scratch ain’t the only one chewed up.”

“Critters?” Bass repeated.

Hatcher watched the others scurry off to their own belongings before he turned back to Titus. “Wolves, more’n likely.”

“Wolves done this?” he asked, letting the ruined saddle spill from his hands.

“That ain’t the least of it, I’d wager,” Jack replied, nodding at the rest of Bass’s gear.

“Damn,” Scratch groaned as he turned to follow Hatcher’s eyes, discovering the mauled tatters of his buffalo-rawhide lariat, the scattered remnants of bridle, hackamore, and cinch, and even the remains of a leather-bound gourd canteen, all of it chewed into hardly recognizable shreds.

“More’n one of ’em done this, Jack!” Isaac Simms called out.

“Likely so,” Hatcher echoed. “They come in here in a pack.”

Titus shook his head as he stared at the firelit debris. “Wolves dare come this close to a man?”

“Hell,” Caleb growled, “likely was a pack don’t know enough to fear a two-legged man yet, Scratch.”

“Cale’s right,” Simms added. “Most wolf packs ain’t had enough run-ins with men to be scar’t off from us.”

“Chances be this pack hasn’t run across any big guns neither,” Hatcher explained.

“So them damned dogs just come waltzin’ in here?” Bass whined. “While’st we was off for supper?”

Rowland roared with laughter, slapping a knee. “And the critters had ’em their supper on your outfit!”

“Lookit all they chewed, Jack,” Simms clucked, wagging his head sympathetically.

“Bass ain’t got him near nothing left what don’t need some fixin’,” Rufus Graham declared.

“In a bad way too,” Titus grumped as he sat there in the midst of what debris remained of his leather tack and gear.

Hatcher knelt beside him. “Where’s yer pouch?”

“Jehoshaphat!” Bass swore as he whirled in a crouch, lunging for the tight roll of his extra blanket where he had secured his rifle and shooting bag before they had strolled over to the supper fires—for no other reason than to guard them from a quick-moving thunderstorm while they were gone from their camp. Yanking at the edges of the blanket, he rolled the weapon free, quickly inspecting the strap and bag, the narrow thongs securing the two powder horns to the strap, finding no damage.

“Ye’re a lucky man,” Hatcher intoned.

“Ain’t that the solemn truth,” Kinkead whimpered. “Look how they got to mine.” He held up what little remained of his bag, spare balls and a ball screw, his bullet mold spilling from the huge, ragged hole gaping in what Matthew had left of his chewed pouch.

“My only pair of spare mocs are gone,” Simms groaned as he picked through his few belongings.

Graham held up his old smoothbore, showing the others
those vivid teeth marks deeply scored up and down the shrunken, translucent rawhide wrap where in a time past he had repaired the cracked, weakened wood along the wrist of the stock. “They even tried eatin’ on this here. Just ’cause it’s leather.”

“Shit,” Bass said as he gazed round at the wolf pack’s destruction the others held up for view. “Maybeso this means we ought’n have a man stay in camp all the time, Jack.”

“Hell,” the outfit’s leader snorted, “come ronnyvoo, I don’t know a single man jack of these here yahoos be willing to stay ahin’t while the rest of us go traipsin’ off to have us whiskey, women, and song!”

“Not me!” Wood bellowed. “You ain’t leavin’ me behin’t!”

“Not me neither!” Rowland said. “You each watch over your own outfits!”

Hatcher turned back to Bass. “See. Any other time of the year, a man be willing to stay back to camp for the rest. Be it trapping time, fall or spring—a man don’t mind taking his turn hanging back at a trappin’ camp.”

“Maybeso we ought’n go cross the creek there,” Titus said, pointing. “Go yonder there with them company boys and put our camp with them. That way we ain’t gotta worry ’bout—”

“We don’t have to move camp,” Hatcher interrupted.

Bass couldn’t believe what he had heard. Did these lean and experienced trappers mean to tell him they were willing to take the chances of wild creatures slipping into their abandoned camp, to chew on anything and everything made of leather again in the future?

“S-so you’re telling me we sit and wait for these here wolves to come back and ruin some more?”

As straight-faced as he could say it, Jack stepped up to Scratch and declared, “No … we pee.”

Titus wasn’t sure he’d heard Hatcher clearly. “Did you say … p-pee?”

“Pee. Piss. Spray. Same thing, Scratch.”

“P-pee?” Bass noticed most of the others smiling,
some with hands over their mouths, trying to suppress their guffaws.