Crack in the Sky (73 page)

“Man’s in a hurry to be gone from here, ’pears to me,” Rufus exclaimed.

As they all turned back to their campsite, Hatcher said, “He’s damn well got him somewhere to be, fellas. That’s for certain.”

“Wish I was the sort what could figger folks out,” Bass admitted, still staring after McAfferty even though he could no longer see the distant figures. “Sometimes what I know a man is keeping from me gets in my craw and eats at me for not knowing.”

Later that morning Jack came to a halt where Bass was finishing his work lashing the last bundle atop his pack animals. “Ye’re still bound for the Judith?” he asked.

“Good trapping, that country,” Scratch had answered as he tied off the last knot, knowing the saddest of moments had arrived. “If I keep my head and don’t let no roaming Blackfoots know I’m about—I’ll hang on to my hair.”

Hatcher had stepped up, opening his arms wide, seizing Titus within his bony embrace. “You’ll damn well watch over what ye got left for hair, won’cha?”

He heard a sob thicken the sound of Jack’s words. It made his own heart rise in his throat as he squeezed Hatcher fiercely, fiercely. “I’m prideful of my purty hair, Mad Jack. It’s gonna be long and gray afore you’ll ever think of seeing it hanging from any warrior’s lodgepole.”

One by one he had hugged the others, slapped them each on the back and promised to buy them a drink come whiskey time in Willow Valley, come the summer of thirty-one. But for now the rest were headed west, and he felt the
Judith pulling him north once more. As if that country might become as much his as he had come to love the Bayou Salade.

Jack stepped close and held up his hand after Bass was in the saddle. For a long moment Hatcher was silent before he finally spoke. “Yers is a damned ugly scalp anyway, Titus Bass. Not a warrior wuth anything a’tall gonna wanna take yer poor scalp.”

“You flea-bit, broke-down, crow-bait of a buzzard.” Bass shook heartily one last time, then flung Hatcher’s hand down with a wide smile and waved to them all. “You ain’t got no room to talk about just who’s got the worst case of the uglies! You boys watch your backtrail now! I’ll see you come summer!”

A painful memory, recalling how he rode off for the north, how he had turned in the saddle that one last time to look behind him, finding the six of them still standing. How they had all raised their arms and some had waved hats … it again brought that dry clutch high in his chest here beside the Yellowstone, two moons later.

But he had a cache to finish before he could push on for the Judith. To find a certain sandbar. And there to make medicine.

The sort of medicine a man could make only when he was truly alone. Truly on his own at long, long last.

How good were those last hot days of summer to think back upon now that winter had clamped its jaws tight upon this land. Those days that he rode out the long hours from well before sunrise until twilight squeezed down until nothing but starshine fell from the sky. Even the cool rainy days of autumn when he had turned back from the Mussellshell to dig his cache near the Yellowstone would have felt far better than this marrow-numbing cold.

Up ahead beneath the aching winter blue of the clear sky, he recognized that bulk of those hills as they tumbled down toward the valley of the Judith.

“Looks like we found it, girl!” he flung his voice back to Hannah, eager to share his mounting anxiousness with another. “Maybeso we’ll make camp up yonder for the night.”

For days now it had felt as if it were the thing to do: locate the place where he and Asa had camped late last spring as they’d worked their way north to the Missouri River—the site where for days McAfferty had ministered to his wounds, sewn up the worst of them on his hip and back with those short strips of buffalo sinew and downy tufts of beaver felt, then through day and night nursed
Scratch back to health with bone broth and broiled bits of meat.

It hurt to think about his old friend, pained him to wonder just what it was that lured a man into Blackfoot country all on his own—to go where certain death waited, go where few other white men would ever tread. A tangible ache throbbed in his chest each time he tried to figure out what made McAfferty ride off into a sure and certain death carrying nothing more than his Bible and his rock-hard faith that all his steps were guided by his God.

Most times Scratch could put his mind on other things, the way a man would pick up a checker piece and move it to another square. But there were times in the black of night, or the coming gray of morning, or in the day-long swaying rock of the saddle, that he found it wasn’t so damned easy to shift his thoughts away from a mortal fear for McAfferty’s life, if not his very soul.

Not so much afraid that the Blackfoot would butcher Asa as he was afraid of something he could not describe, could not put his hand out and touch. To fear a man of flesh and blood who came at you with his gun or club or knife was one thing. But Bass was coming to fear this journey of McAfferty’s had everything to do with what Scratch himself could not understand.

Titus Bass had never really been afraid of what he could look in the eye—whether it be man or beast. It was what Scratch could not see that scared the bejesus out of him now.

After hollowing out that hole on the north side of the Yellowstone not far from that huge, flat-topped sandstone monolith that stood on the river’s south bank, he went out that third morning and cut some willow branches, a mile downstream where they might not be missed and arouse suspicion. Then he chopped up some five-foot lengths of cottonwood deadfall and dragged them down into the hole, where he laid them out side by side to form a solid floor. On them his supplies would rest up and out of the dirt and mud in the event any water seeped into his cache. After a first layer of willow was stood against the walls and across the cottonwood floor, Bass started down with
the plews that he would not need to pack around until he was headed south for rendezvous next summer.

When he had all those autumn pelts and a little extra plunder secured in the cache, Scratch backed out through the neck of the hole and shoved in a last half-dozen leafy willow branches to finish off the lining of that shaft. Up on the ground once more, he jammed a cross-hatch network of willow limbs across the narrow neck of the cavern until it could support the replacement of the sod he had carefully removed in four large pieces when he had begun his excavation two days before.

The final act was then to start his supper fire right on the top of that entrance to the cache, hoping to obliterate as much evidence as he could. As the sun came up the next morning and he prepared to ride north for the Judith to trap on into the early winter, Scratch took note of two nearby landmarks one last time: the position of the two big cottonwoods and that outcropping of red sandstone rock, in addition to how many paces his treasure lay from the downed tree, how many paces up from the bank of the narrow creek.

Early next spring when his winter in Crow country was drawing to a close, he would come back here to dig up his autumn’s take and those few supplies he felt he could do without. But for now he had put the Yellowstone at his back and turned his nose north for the Judith, setting his course for that ground where the sow grizzly had forever changed everything between two men.

He brought the horse, Hannah, and the packhorses to a halt and sighed in the silence of this place.

Collars of old snow clung back in the shady places there in the copse of trees rising on the west bank of the river.

“It was good enough for us back then, girl,” he said quietly as he swung off his horse and rubbed his thighs quickly, “so it ought’n do for us now.”

As much as he wanted to walk down to the riverbank then and there, Bass resisted and instead busied himself with pulling the loads from the backs of the animals, removing saddles and blankets and pads from them all, leading
them one by one toward a small clearing where the cool autumn nights were beginning to brown the last of the tall grass. He secured the forelegs of the last of the three with twisted rawhide hobbles, rubbed each animal down with tufts of sage, then turned back to see to his camp. After resetting the firestones he and Asa had used there last spring, Scratch went in search of firewood, forced to look for more than a half mile in any direction before he found enough to last him through the coming two nights. It was plain that McAfferty had cleared the nearby ground of every last scrap of deadfall that would burn as he kept his vigil over the mauled and mutilated Titus Bass.

Then beside the fire pit he plopped down a hindquarter of the antelope he had shot that morning. With enough firewood laid in, and his bedding spread out, the time had come to fetch some water from the river bank. Snatching up the bail of his small cast-iron kettle, Scratch took a deep breath and started for the willows that lined the Judith a few yards off through the tall brush blanketing the meadow.

On the far side of the river the beaver had been at work for years without count. Those industrious creatures had backed up part of the river into some low bottomland, where they had constructed at least half a hundred mud-and-branch lodges. He spotted some two dozen of the flat-tails still swimming about in the shallow waters or at work on the trunks of nearby trees. And there, off to his left, was the narrow strip of sandbar lying beneath the sharp cutbank, at least what remained of it after the spring floods had uprooted huge sections of the river bottom and carved away large slabs of the bank, relocating them downstream.

Scratch wasn’t sure at first, but that spot some twenty yards to his left had a familiar feel about it—what with the gentle curve of the river, the overhanging vegetation, that small copse of trees on the far bank.

He and McAfferty had been gone from here about the time the snow-melt was gorging all the streams and creeks and tiny rivulets that fed the Judith, swelling the river in its
wide channel—well beyond the level of the sandbar. And with the way this land dried out at the end of each summer, that strip of ground at the bottom of the cutbank was once again exposed here in these chilly days as winter sank ever southward from the arctic.

Halfway there he grew pretty sure. After another half-dozen steps he was certain. Although the Judith had deposited some sand and native silt, along with some limbs and roots and assorted river trash around the remains—that big a carcass could only be but one of two creatures. Either a buffalo, or a grizzly.

And this skull plainly wasn’t huge and wide, nor did it bear a healthy set of horns.

No. That was the skull of a grizzly.

His veins ran cold of a sudden. And his belly crimped the way it did when he had gone the better part of a day without feeding. His mouth went dry and pasty, almost the way it had with his ordeal down in the desert of Apache country.

Predators had come and picked the bones all but clean before, perhaps since, the spring floods. A mountain man would call it high meat. A revolting victual Asa said the Mandans loved to eat on the high Missouri—meat gone bad … so decomposed it had liquefied enough that the Indians could spoon it out of the rotting carcasses of buffalo floating down the flood-swollen Missouri. When there was no end to rich, tender red meat a man could find on the hoof, why would anyone consider that putrid, stinking, worm-infested slime a delicacy?

In revulsion Titus swallowed his gorge back down and took two steps closer to the skeleton. Then a final step that brought him right to its side, awash in memory. Snatches of recall, tattered shreds of recollections: where he had been when he had fired his pistol, when he had rammed the stake into her chest, where he likely landed when she pounced on him and blotted out the sky; and … could he remember anything at all of where he’d been when McAfferty pulled him out from beneath the dead sow?

Just beyond the bones. There.

Bass stepped over, stopped. Trembling slightly.

It was almost like standing there and looking down on … on his own grave.

Had it not been for Asa, he would have died right there.

For a moment he fought the sting of tears and looked up and down the riverbank until he realized he could not stifle the sob.

Bass sank to his knees in the hard, frozen sand beside the grizzly carcass. Put out his hand. And laid it on the huge shoulder blade.

“You and me both, we was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said quietly. “If it been just the two of us—you’d won that day. If it’d been just me …”

Then he suddenly thought of the two cubs, orphaned the moment their mother had lunged out of the willows after them, having scented danger in the smell of a man who had blundered into the midst of their play. Bears had ’em a mighty, mighty strong nose.

And he knew in the marrow of him he could have been a quarter of a mile away, even a half mile or more … and it would have made no difference. He and that bear had been destined to bump up against one another on this very ground.

Scooting around on his knees, he leaned forward, and there beside the bear’s skull Scratch smoothed out a circle of sand some two feet across. At the edge of that crude circle he stuck some small twigs he broke off a chunk of driftwood to mark the four directions of the wind. The he pulled his tomahawk from his belt and used the back of the blade to break loose the sun-bleached skull from the top of the spine, setting it in the middle of his circle.