Death Rattle (61 page)

Sunset road.
Titus thought it was a heart-wrenching and accurate description of this trail stretching from the eastern edge of the frontier all the way to Oregon country. A fitting name for the trail if for no other reason than he realized the sun was already setting on this raw and wild land. A way of life was ending as the sun set on an era, eons of living and dying in utter freedom. The glory days were over for men like him. All that life had been out here in these mountains was preparing to take its one last breath. Standing here now, gazing at the corduroy of tracks extending off to both horizons like the mourning scars on a woman’s arms and legs after she lost her man, Scratch knew he could hear the death rattle warning as it rumbled deep in the hollow breast of these mountains.

“Yes, maybe we can avoid them—but only for a time,” he consented. “I’m afraid that where their kind goes, they bring the sunset with them. For now they may just pass
on through, but they have still poisoned every inch of ground they touch.”

She stepped around in front of him again, staring up at his face to say, “We’ll go higher than these white people will ever dare to venture. We can take our children and the life we still have farther and farther back into the mountains—where these white settlers will be afraid to live.”

He pulled her against him. “It doesn’t matter how many miles I get away from them—because it’s the simple fact that they are in our country. Look at these marks on the ground. It means their kind has already come to
my
mountains. Think of how you would feel if another tribe came and squatted down right beside a Crow camp. It won’t work, ever. Those who are coming will ruin what I came out here for.”

“I can’t ever remember seeing you so sad, Ti-tuzz.”

“Maybe … because … I’m sorely afraid that what I came to get for myself, I went and ruined just by opening the door for these others to waltz right on through,” he tried to explain his disappointment, that bitter despair at what he believed he had done to bring about the downfall of his own kind. “I fear that what I came for is no more—and will never be again—because I pointed the way for the kind of folks who should never have come out here to destroy what once was.”

Two days later, after they made their late-afternoon camp in the shade of some rocky cliffs, Scratch led his wife and their children on a short walk into that narrow maw the Sweetwater had carved out of solid stone, a place where the river’s flow was so restricted that it boiled and foamed in angry fury every spring—a landmark the mountain man had given the most appropriate name: Devil’s Gate.

“I do not understand this expression,” Waits declared.

Bass did his best to translate, “When a person does nothing but wrong—the sort of wrong that constantly hurts other people—we call what that person does
evil.
And the creature who does the most evil in our world is called the devil.”

“Is this devil here in this place?” Magpie asked.

“No,” Titus answered, feeling as if he should never have attempted an explanation. “But the water rushes so fast it can cause a lot of trouble for men in bullboats.”

Waits lifted young Jackrabbit onto her hip. “So this is the doorway you spoke of, where the white fur traders must pass to take their pelts to the land of the east?”

“Yes.”

Flea stepped over, surprising his father with a perceptive question, “Why don’t the white men beach their bullboats back there behind us where the stream is quiet, then carry their furs around the canyon so they won’t spill into the water?”

“What you say makes a lot of sense,” Titus declared. “But there are times when men will do something that does not make as much sense, when they attempt something for the challenge or the danger of doing it.”

“Why?” Magpie asked.

“Perhaps it is something for young men to understand,” he began. “Why young Crow warriors make bravery runs at their enemy, why they go out alone to challenge the wilderness in search of a vision.”

From the way she looked at him, Titus got the feeling she was a little suspicious of his answer.

Then Magpie said, “Tell me, Popo—you never did anything that didn’t make sense.”

He ruminated on that a moment, gazing at the relatively low water in the river at this late season of the year. Then he explained, “I remember there were times in my own life that by doing something dangerous I felt that much more alive.”

“Maybe this is the reason we are on this journey to Ta-house, Ti-tuzz?” Waits asked as she slipped her hand through the crook of his elbow when she stepped beside him.

“You know better than that,” he protested. “I would never take you on a dangerous journey.”

“No, not the danger,” she replied. “But you have needed something to make you feel more alive, I think.”

Squeezing her gently against him, he asked, “Why do I need that?”

“Because, husband—your spirit has been yearning to free itself from the fences of Absaroka.”

“You do understand what a fence is?”

She nodded. “As you explained, the white man’s fence keeps animals inside, where they can’t wander away.”

So he snorted, “But Absaroka has no fences!”

“Are you sure, husband?”

Her certainty gave him pause. “Perhaps … I gave you the impression I needed to travel again, as we did in the long-ago days.”

“One long year of living with my people, one year of not leaving our village—that was easy for you,” she said with a grin as she looked up at him. “The second year was harder for you, but nothing you could not do because you loved me, loved our children.”

“And remember, I made a promise.”

“That promise is why you forced yourself to stay through a third year, husband,” she said. “But soon you were staring at a fourth winter of being a layabout in Crow country.”

“A layabout, am I?”

“All the older men are,” she explained. “It is what warriors do after they have spent many summers as young men riding off to steal horses or bring home enemy scalps.”

“An old man like me can’t be a warrior still?”

“Come along, let’s go back to camp so I can cook supper for our family,” she prodded, slowly turning him by the arm to start out of the canyon. “I understand that this journey to Ta-house is something your spirit needs now. Besides, it is something we can share with our children.”

“Especially Magpie,” he said as he looped an arm around his daughter’s shoulder and pulled her against his other side. “To show her where she was born that spring she became our first child.”

Something his spirit desperately needed, she had said.

Titus pondered that into the following day when they made camp in the lee of Turtle Rock.
^*
Its massive surface already bore the scratchings of numerous fur trappers as they inscribed their names and a date of passing this important landmark on the route to the Southern Pass. But what astounded Titus was the great number of names carved into the rock’s surface—names he did not recognize, accompanied by dates that saddened him all the more. A lot of time had passed, and with it more and more settlers punched their way right through the heart of what had once been an inviolable wilderness where only a few intrepid, daring souls dared walk.

As Magpie and Flea scrambled up the side of the immense rock, anxious to view the entire valley from its top, Titus traced some of the scratchings with his finger, a little baffled by just how much time had slipped by.

The last of the holdouts had gathered for their final, miserable rendezvous over on the Green in July of 1840. The following summer Fraeb’s hunting party was jumped by half-a-thousand Sioux and Cheyenne over on the Little Snake. So that made it 1841. All right, his mind hadn’t totally turned to horse apples.

And after wintering in Absaroka, the next spring he was trapping the fringes of the Wind River Range when he chanced upon Bill Williams and they began their epic trek for California and the land of Mexican horses. That would have been ’42.

In so many ways, that whole journey felt like it was no more recent than ancient history: returning to Bents Fort, trading his horses for blankets and kettles, beads, powder, and puppies too.

He turned to glance at the two dogs, fully grown long ago, watching them race back and forth at the foot of the rock, howling and yipping at the children scrambling up the rock above them when the dogs weren’t able to make the ascent. It struck him now—the dogs had grown. For
some reason, time had seemed to stand still once he made it back to Absaroka with those Cheyenne horses laden with trade goods. Maybe it felt the same for the Crow people who could not remember a time before the white man came.

Beyond that winter he returned to Absaroka, Scratch could mark time’s passage with his annual trips to visit other white men. Tullock and Van Buren were no more—the man had flown to unknown parts, and his post at the mouth of the Tongue had been burned to the ground. But the Crow had stumbled across a company trader named Murray who ran a new post called Fort Alexander. Would have been the fall of ’43.

Titus settled in the shade, leaning against the smooth rock, tracking his mind over the dimming back trails the way a man might turn around in the saddle to assure himself nothing was sneaking up on him. The next time he visited the post, Murray was gone and a Scotsman named Meldrum was there—yet he was only a little booshway to a fella named Kipp who the company kept busy building one fort after another. Autumn, ’44.

See there? He knew he could piece these things together, sure enough. And now—the next year when he returned with the village for some trading, Meldrum was minding the post himself while Kipp was away, gone downriver to Fort Union on some company business. That tallied his mental calendar up to ’45.

1845. So it must have been in the autumn of that year when he decided on taking his family south once the summer hunt was out of the way and they had jerked a lot of meat.

Waits-by-the-Water had left her lodge in the care of her sister-in-law, who had remarried, becoming a second wife to her own sister’s husband. With the older warrior, Bright Wings had someone to care for, someone to provide for her and the children. And Waits’s mother, Crane, had someone to watch over her as she grew infirm too. It did not make much sense to drag their lodgepoles behind
them all the way to the land of the Mexicans, so they had decided to travel light. If they encountered a thunderstorm, an odd occurrence late of a summer, they could find shelter, making do with their blankets and hides until the weather passed. He’d have them safely in Taos before the first snows.

Days later they crossed the Sweetwater, just upstream from where it poured into the North Platte. From there they followed the Platte south as it collected the water from untold streams and creeks on its tumble down from the high country.

“This is a land I have never seen,” Waits commented several days later as they left the broken terrain below and began their ascent of timbered slopes. “Has it been so long that I don’t remember our trip north from Taos after Magpie was born?”

He reassured her, “You’re right—you’ve never been here before.”

“You are taking us by a different route?”

“Yes,” he answered. “We’re going by a new path.” He glanced at the two children, who rode on either side of their five packhorses. “I thought it safer for us to stay in the mountains as much as possible since we are going through unknown country.”

“But you know the way?”

“I think I remember how to get us from here to South Park through the high country,” he declared.

“And from there we aren’t far from Ta-house,” she added. “So why do you want to travel in the mountains when it is harder for our horses and takes more time?”

So the older children would not hear, he quietly explained, “These mountains are no longer the same country I once knew.”

Her brow furrowed and she asked, “But—the mountains, they do not change.”

“No,” he whispered, “but the people in them do. Once I only had to worry about Arapaho who traveled through these high mountain valleys searching for plunder. But, years ago—you will remember the Sioux who
attacked us when we were on our way to the Vermillion Creek post?”
^*

Waits nodded, and her eyes flicked back to their children. “I agree. We are safer in the mountains.”

“Out there on the plains, where we traveled north from Taos more than ten summers ago, many tribes follow the migrations of the buffalo, north and south, moving along the base of the mountains. Not only Arapaho—but I fear the Sioux and Cheyenne have come to join them too. Where the buffalo graze at this time of the year, so too are the hunters who are working hard to kill enough meat to get their people through the winter.”

With a sigh, Waits nodded. “It is good I married a man so cautious!”

Camped in the heart of North Park six days later, for the first time Bass told her of Fawn, the Ute widow who took him in his first winter in the mountains.
^†

“I never knew you were partial to the Ute women,” she said, not raising her eyes from the child’s moccasin she was repairing.

“She was fair to me, not asking me to stay when it came time to go,” Bass explained. “For that I am thankful. If she hadn’t let me go the next spring … I never would have made it to Absaroka, where my eyes first saw you.”

“And when your eyes finally did see me?”

He snorted with laughter, “Then I was no good for any other woman! I had to have you and no other!”

High upon the southern slopes of that high mountain valley the mountain man called Park Kyack or Buffalo Park, he stopped them near the middle of the following day to give their horses a breather. From there he pointed out where the Ute village had stood.

“Flea, Magpie—I want you both to hold up all your fingers for me,” he instructed.

They glanced at one another, then looked in wonder at
their mother a moment before they turned back to their father and did as he had asked.

“There. I want the two of you and your mother to look at all those fingers on your four hands,” he said. “Two-times-ten of your fingers. One finger for each year it has been since I first came to the mountains. Two-times-ten winters now since my first winter here, spent among the Ute.”