Crack in the Sky (48 page)

Which of them might he convince that she simply
could not live without a clutter of shiny beads in his palm, without a strand of red ribbon, without a tin cup filled with trader’s sugar?

Which one of those cherry-eyed squaws would eagerly hike up her short leather dress and let him spend himself inside her before he grew one day older?

The next morning Campbell’s trappers had first crack at the treasures excavated from Sublette’s packs.

Company men were first when it came to trade goods brought west by the firm of Smith, Jackson, & Sublette.

“The rest of you gonna have to wait till tomorrow,” Sublette warned the small knots of free men who had gathered by the trader’s awnings. “Might so have to wait long as the day after till we get our company business taken care of.”

There weren’t all that many free trappers in yet, nowhere near as many men as the combined brigades—considering the number Campbell brought down from the Powder River country when coupled with the fifty-four hands Sublette brought out from St. Louis. Close to a hundred men already.

And no more than two dozen free trappers on the Popo Agie.

So all Bass could do was grumble. Sit in the shade and watch the company men come and go about their company business, come and go with their company kettles filled with Sublette’s whiskey.

It was enough to make a saint cuss a blue streak, had there been a saint in that valley of the Popo Agie.

“By damned, they better leave enough wet for our whistles and a good drunk or two outta this ronnyvoo!” Hatcher snarled.

Caleb added, “That trader better leave us enough plunder to see this outfit through ’Nother winter.”

“Likker!” Jack snapped at Wood. “The rest’ll take care of itself. Long as we get some likker.”

Most of the other free trappers hung close by the trader’s awnings too—watching as Sublette’s greenhorn clerks sorted through each company man’s hides, graded
them into three stacks, then lashed each stack into a bundle they hung from that huge wooden balance arm where another clerk carefully added weights until both sides swung evenly. That tally was entered in a tall leather-bound ledger—then Sublette informed that mountain employee what he had earned for the year. After the trapper had paid off what he owed from the last rendezvous, after he had settled up for any broken traps, lost tack, or busted saddles, after he had paid for a horse run off by the Crow … he would find out just how much, or how little, celebration he had in store for himself.

Lowest of the three stations of company men were the camp keepers.

“Mangeurs de lard,”
Hatcher instructed Bass in the mountain man’s hierarchy.

“Parley-voos?”

“Damn right,” Jack growled with disdain. “Frenchy pork eaters. Most of ’em, leastwise.”

Hatcher went on to explain that this bottom rung had received its name because those camp keepers who had accompanied the earliest expeditions forging up the Missouri River had been French laborers who ate salted sowbelly while the Americans dined on the lean red meat of game hunted on either shore. No better than slavery, Bass figured—forced to perform every dirty, menial task the booshway ordered.

“Company trappers are up from there a big notch,” Jack continued. “It’s where a man with any pluck at all got him a chance to show he’s up to Green River,” referring to that company’s name engraved right at the guard of their knife blades, clearly meaning a trapper who made the supreme effort to plunge into any effort clear up to the hilt. “That man’s got him a chance to prove he’s got the makings of a mountain man.”

While company trappers still had to do whatever task the booshway assigned, their reward nonetheless remained the coming season to show their brigade leaders that they could make a profit for the company as well as hanging on to their hair.

And if a man survived, then someone like Campbell or
Sublette or Jackson could promote that man to the top rung of “skin trapper.” Such a man signed on with the company but with no guarantee of wages. When he moved up from company to skin trapper, a man indebted himself for company equipment at the same time he swore to sell his furs only to the company at what price the company quoted. And if there was anything left over when his accounts were settled, then the skin trapper could more than satisfy his thirst for whiskey, or have enough in trade to buy himself a squaw for a night or two, perhaps enough to purchase himself a wife, who would accompany the brigade wherever it wandered in the coming seasons.

But above all three ranks of company men stood the most coveted class of all: the free trappers.

While they might be forced to wait until the trader dispensed with his hirelings, those free men had what Sublette desired most: the finest of plews brought to rendezvous by the “master trappers,” men who traversed the high country on their own hook, beholden to no booshway, in debt to no company.

While the Smith, Jackson, & Sublette men still wore a frontiersman’s wool or leather breeches and some sort of linen or calico shirt, most free trappers gaily sported Indian leggings and war shirt, the twisted fringes of which were caparisoned with tiny brass hawk’s bells, steel sewing thimbles, or strewn with Indian scalplocks, leather garments decorated with wide bands of brightly colored porcupine quillwork. Beneath that outer layer of warrior’s clothing they wore a greasy, soiled, and sooted cloth shirt and woolen longhandles when the seasons turned cold.

Many plaited their hair in two long braids, tied up in bright ribbons of red trade wool or wrapped with otter skin. They daubed purple vermilion down the center part in their hair, often smeared earth paint on their severely tanned faces, and trailed long fringes or small animal skins from the heels of their moccasins. Some ambled about camp wearing a colorfully striped blanket belted around their waist in the fashion of a tribal chief, while others brandished a wide wool sash finger-woven back in eastern woodlands, where they stuffed a brace of pistols, a tomahawk,
and perhaps the long stem to their personal smoking pipe.

How plain it was that this breed prided themselves on just how much like an Indian they appeared—but for the long, shaggy, ofttimes braided beards. Oh, how they seized this chance to swagger and strut before Sublette’s gaping greenhorns and mule-eyed pilgrims come fresh-as-dew to the far west.

It was just as clear that such men would never again feel comfortable setting their feet down among civilized company. Doubtful was it that any of their breed would ever return east. Little, if anything, remained for them back there in what had been.

As the long morning dragged on, Titus returned to wait out the hours in camp with Rufus, Elbridge, and the others. To kill some of the time, he brought both Hannah and his saddle horse into camp, securing them to a tree branch while he went to work fancying them up in the fashion of an Indian warrior. First he tied up their tails just as a man would do when about to ride off on the warpath. Then he braided their forelocks with narrow strips of varicolored Mexican ribbon he swapped from Caleb Wood for a single plew of beaver. Next Scratch braided the manes of both with more of that ribbon and looped in a half-dozen feathers from a golden eagle that Bird in Ground had killed during his first winter with the Crow. And finally he made a thick paste from the white clay he discovered in an alkali bed along the creek, using it to paint crude lightning bolts and hailstones, even pressing his own handprints along the neck and flank of both horse and Hannah.

That task complete, Bass collapsed against a huge Cottonwood, where he dozed as the air warmed and the flies droned.

Later that afternoon he meticulously honed his knife and camp ax on a stone and steel, then cleaned his weapons before he finally decided to run some balls for both pistol and rifle: melting bars of soft Galena lead in a small pot from which he dipped tiny ladles of the molten silver and poured the liquid into the round cavity of his bullet molds. Hot work this was at the edge of a fire in this
midsummer heat, but that sweaty job was one task more that helped him pass the hours while the free trappers waited for their crack at Sublette’s treasures.

After supper of elk tenderloin, buffalo tongue, and prairie oysters, he joined Hatcher, Fish, and Wood as they moseyed off for the company camp at twilight.

“I would’ve figgered a bunch the size of Campbell’s outfit would’ve had ’em more beaver took in,” Jack appraised as they came to a halt near Sublette’s awnings, where a handful of men still clustered around the stacks of blankets and crates of goods, arguing this point or that with the trader’s clerks.

“Maybeso that Powder ain’t so prime a country as it be back toward the mountains,” Bass observed.

“Not for beaver, it ain’t,” Solomon added.

“If’n a man wants to hunt him prime plew,” Caleb declared, “that nigger’s gotta stick his neck out some.”

“I ain’t never been afraid to stick my neck out some,” Jack said. “Way I see it—to get us the best fur, we gotta trap the edge of Blackfoot country … but I don’t aim to lay a trap where I’ll get my hull damned head cut off!”

Bass spread his fingers and ran them through the skins at the very top of three tall stacks of pelts under the wary eye of a Sublette clerk. “Our fur looks a damned sight better’n this here, fellas.”

“It ought’n be better,” Solomon grumbled. “We damned near lost our hair to Bug’s Boys trapping that beaver!”

“Bug’s Boys?” the greenhorn behind the beaver pelts repeated.

Hatcher gazed at the man fresh out of the settlements. “Ye ever hear tell of Blackfoot, mister?”

“Blackfoot? I heard tell of ’em, yeah. Sublette says the Englishers set them Blackfoot out to kill off Americans like his men.”

“Damn them black-hearted bastards,” Solomon growled. “Too many good men gone under at their hands.”

“Sublette says the Blackfoot is why Davy Jackson ain’t come in to Popo Agie yet.”

Titus asked, “Trader figgers Jackson’s gone under?”

The man’s head bobbed, his fleshy jowls quivering like the wattle at the neck of a tom turkey. “Maybe his whole outfit too. Just like Jed Smith—the other’n who’s a company partner. Word is he’s dead somewhere far west of here with all his men. Been two years now, and Smith ain’t showed up at rendezvous.”

“So Sublette figgers Jackson’s been rubbed out too?” Solomon repeated.

Leaning an elbow on a stack of pelts, the clerk said, “Jackson was up in Flathead country. And Sublette says that’s right near Blackfoot country. I suppose it ain’t hard to figure Jackson’s run into trouble and got himself killed too.”

Caleb clucked, “Damn well might be a real stroke of luck, for that leaves Sublette the whole company, don’t it?”

“Maybe, but Mr. Sublette figures to wait on here for a week or little more, then if Mr. Jackson doesn’t show, Mr. Sublette said he’s going to head on west to the Snake River with what he’s got in supplies to search for some sign of Jackson’s brigade before he turns back for the fall hunt.”

“That Smith feller’s gone,” Hatcher observed flatly. “This long and ain’t none of his bunch showed … why, it’s for sartin he’s been rubbed out. But Jackson, now, that’s a savvy booshway. I reckon he could pull his fat out of just about any fire.”

Caleb asked, “Sublette say if he figgered this was a good year for beaver?”

“I saw him just twice today, when he come around my tent with Campbell.” The clerk wagged his head and rolled his eyes heavenward. “Mr. Sublette just shook his head each time he looked through them furs his men brought in over the last season.”

“Don’t sound like he’s a happy man to me,” Bass observed.

“Not when he don’t have near all the beaver he was counting on taking in,” the clerk stated.

“And now he figgers he lost him his two partners,” Solomon added.

“So tell me if Sublette’s gonna trade for our furs come tomorrow?” Titus asked.

“He ain’t said nothing ’bout it, neither way,” the clerk admitted. “But from what I see, he’ll likely open up trade with all you fellers come morning. There ain’t any more company fur to take in. Leastways, not till he finds. Jackson’s brigade.”

“If he finds ’em at all,” Hatcher declared.

“What’s your tobaccy?” Scratch inquired of the hawk-nosed clerk who stood impassively writing down the value of the pelts another of Sublette’s employees was reciting from his weighing of Titus Bass’s plews.

“You buy your supplies down there.” The man jabbed a finger at another awning. “I just record your take.”

Bass felt as if Sublette and the company had everything arranged just so they could skin a cat every which way of Sunday. No matter if a man worked hard trapping, skinning, fleshing, and packing them beaver plews all the way through from last autumn, the St. Louis trader always held the high cards. But for those suspicious Mexicans down in Taos, there wasn’t another trader for better than eighteen hundred miles of the Popo Agie.

“This all you’re trading in?”

Bass looked up at the second of the clerks, a moon-faced man without distinguishable characteristics: he looked like every other settlement sort, town hanger, and citified nabob.

“That’s all I’m trading with you.”

The man went back to peering down at his ledger, dipped his quill, and went back to writing. “Not a good year for you, was it?”

“That ain’t all the fur I got.”

The clerk stopped his hand and glared at Scratch with the crimson creeping up from his neck. “I just asked you … if this was all you was trading.”

“It is,” Scratch repeated, flashing the man his teeth. “But it ain’t all I caught. Only what I trapped this last spring.”

Now the clerk was clearly angry at the confusion
caused him. He sputtered for a moment, his face growing as red as the Indian paintbrush that dotted this high valley in early summer. “Do you want to do business with us or—”

“I ain’t got no more furs to trade to
you,”
Titus explained, eager to settle the dust. “The rest I sold in Taos last winter.”

With a great rush of air the clerk sighed as if he had been asked to coax milk from a stone. “Very well.”

Back to his ledger he went, wagging his head slightly as he added and carried numbers from column to column. While the clerk finished his computations, Bass gazed over at the rest who had finished this grueling part of the process. Hatcher and the others already stood among the stacks and kegs, crates and boxes of trade goods—fingering this and that, chattering excitedly about most everything they picked up and held to the light. There remained no more than a handful of other free men waiting patiently behind Scratch for their turn at the trader’s scales.