“The Big Muddy’s fair boiling with red niggers,” he told himself out loud more than once as he wrestled with his inner agony. “Likely it be that the three of ’em just bought into more’n they could barter for on that river’s track. Injuns got ’em up there—or Injuns got ’em coming back.”
As much as a man might refuse to grapple with it, he had to accept that the three of them were gone. Dead. Rubbed out.
And the only way there was to get on with life was to get on … with people. Bass had to find one of those brigades. He had to be among others until this pain eased. It might take a few days. More likely it would take weeks, and Bass might just decide to throw in with Fitzpatrick’s bunch for the fall hunt, joining up for as long as the winter. He could trade off what he didn’t need in the way of all these horses to the company men for some coffee and sugar, anything he didn’t already have enough of back there among the packs. The brigade’s booshway might even have some liquor left. And rum or whiskey might just go a long way to helping numb a bit more of the pain.
Titus was sure the only way that hurting would stop and he could venture back out on his own was to do one thing. If he was to survive inside, he knew he had to scare up some faces and voices and eyes crinkling in laughter.
Knowing that the best chances for finding any of that healing lay over in that Sweet Lake country, Scratch eagerly set off before sunrise the next morning, unable to sleep after coming to his decision. All night he had brooded on it, concluding that his best chances of running onto a brigade moving out with the breakup of rendezvous lay in his striking out to the north. At least he knew there would always be one brigade moving northeast into the high mountain country to trap through the autumn. There might even be two brigades he could run across—since another was likely to march east a ways from the Sweet Lake country before pointing their noses directly north.
Chances were better than good that he would run onto one such brigade somewhere to the north—or at least come across sign of their passing, and he could hurry along their backtrail until he caught up with them. That morning he put the Green at his back and struck out east, following the meandering path of a narrow river* that he knew would eventually lead him back toward the mountains and Park Kyack. Scratch felt a new chapter opening on the book of his life. Instead of plunging back into that high country to search for the Ute, this time he would strike out to the north upon reaching the foothills.
All the better to avoid the Arapaho who came to raid the Ute for ponies and plunder. Titus knew firsthand just how that warrior tribe craved ambushing their ancient enemies.
It simply made a lot more horse sense to stay as far out of the way of those thieving Arapaho as he could.
*Pompey’s Pillar, east of present-day Billings, Montana
*South Pass in present-day Wyoming
*Present-day Yampa River, known among the Rocky Mountain fur trappers as the Little Bear River
18
“Whereaway you bound, my son?”
In his dreamlike reverie Titus peered up at the old man leading a fine horse up to his evening fire. Nighttime had come early that autumn so long, long ago now … and with it the cold as he rode closer to the city of his dreams.
Lulled now into daydreaming once more by the late-summer heat on his back and the rocking-chair gait of the saddle horse beneath him, Scratch’s wandering mind remembered that fine fall evening.
“St. Louie,” he had answered the stranger.
Bass had been a sull young’un back then, with no more than nineteen summers under his belt.
“Ah,” the old fellow replied as he halted, his expressionless face staring down in study at the small, cheery fire a moment, then finally regarded the youth and the rifle across the youngster’s lap. “I am but a poor wayfarer. Do you mind if I share your fire and a bit of conversation this night?”
Bass tossed another limb onto the flames and shrugged. “I was just getting used to the lonesome.”
At the sudden beating of several pairs of wings, his eyes fluttered open—blinking—to find himself on horseback … realizing he had been dreaming, remembering. How that younger man had, perhaps for the first time in his life, been truly getting used to the lonesome.
When at the age of sixteen Titus took off from home, he hadn’t gone that many days before he yearned for the sound of another’s voice, just the look and smell and nearness of other humans. So what with the riverboatmen and the Ohio River whore called Mincemeat, along with the others who saw him across the wide Mississippi to Able Guthrie’s farm, and then with Guthrie’s most desirable daughter herself … why, he hadn’t ever been truly alone ever since the day he’d run off—just himself and the forest.
Back then he realized this aloneness would take some getting used to. Some men took to it natural. Others never would—so it was best their kind stayed back east of the river. The third sort were like himself, Bass figured: they could do with bouts of aloneness as long as there were times when a man set his sights on being with folk. Those occasions between the long stretches of aloneness before the loneliness began to creep in—the bawdy summer celebrations of rendezvous or settling into a friendly village for the winter—he had come to believe would be enough to hold the lonelies at bay.
What he would give now for to share food and fire with a friend—even a stranger as strange as Garrity Tremble.
With that steady rock of the horse as they plodded east along the Little Bear River, he let his eyes slowly droop and drifted back to remembering….
Recalling how the old man turned toward a tow sack he had tied behind his well-worn saddle, explaining, “I have food to offer, young man. You decide to share your fire and your talk, I’ll share supper.”
Wayfarers they both had been that night. Perhaps ever after and still, they both remained wayfarers. That is, if the old man had not died in all those cycles of the seasons, those roundabout circles of his life in the intervening years. Perhaps Garrity Tremble did still ride the circuit, his only home the old saddle strapped on the back of the blooded thoroughbred. A homeless wanderer—very much as Scratch himself had come to be out here in this great wilderness. Now he rode the circle of the seasons—alone for the most part … yet always yearning to circle back toward those shining times when he would again look upon the faces of friends, when his ears would resonate with the sound of their familiar voices and laughter.
On that cold autumn night along the Mississippi a dozen years before, Titus had asked of the old man, “Where are you off to?”
Raising an arm that looked more like a winter-bare branch poking out of the sleeve of that huge, ill-fitting coat he wore, the stranger pointed off here, there, then off in another direction altogether. “No place special. Off to where the spirit moves me. God tells me where I am to go—as He told the wandering Israelites of Moses and Joshua of olde. Yet, truth be it, I—like you—am ultimately alone. Alas, that is God’s condition yoked upon the shoulders of us all, isn’t it, son? As many as we might have around us, family and acquaintances, we are still alone in this life, and God makes the only sure friend we will ever truly have.”
With a snort of doubt Titus had said, “I’ve had me lots of friends.”
From beneath the bushy eyebrows that stood out like a pair of hairy caterpillars on the pronounced and bony brow, the stranger sneered, “Yes—I can see by all these companions you have brought along with you on this journey.”