Positioning the mule beside the big pine’s trunk, Titus slowly clambered up the rotting deadfall until he stood nearly opposite her tail root. Seizing hold of the ropes at the top of her packs, he leaned against her, pulling himself onto Hannah’s rear flanks. Securing a second hold farther up, Titus pulled himself a little farther onto her back. Nestled there between the two bundles that were lashed to her pack frame, he settled himself. Down between them he wouldn’t be near so likely to fall off as she picked her way across uneven ground while he fell asleep.
Which was just what he wanted to do more than anything right then. With his good left arm, Bass dragged the red blanket over his head, nudging it on down over his back so that it covered his legs, flaps draping off either side of the mule’s packs. Now he would be warm, here under the blanket and next to her hide, warm no matter how cold this late summer night would become as Hannah carried him into the coming darkness.
At least he would be warm here, no matter how empty his belly. Warm, though he realized how fast his strength was flagging. Were it not for that nest within the packsaddle, Bass knew he simply didn’t have the strength to stay on her back. Without meat he might not be able to hold on much longer. Without meat he might never be strong enough to climb back on. Hunger was a cruel torturer.
Taking the long lead rope into hand, Scratch raised his chin to search the heavens a moment until he found what he looked for.
Gently reining Hannah around to the right, he told her, “Let’s go, girl. Time to carry me some.”
As he clucked to her with his tongue, Bass guided her toward that great patch of black sky there beneath the North Star. The big handle on that water dipper pointed the way he would go. In only a matter of minutes his eyes grew too heavy for him to hold them open any longer.
“Keep going, girl,” he whispered to her, stroking her withers, patting her neck and mane. “Take us north.”
Hannah moved out faster this evening than she had carried him that first night, perhaps sensing that now he was secured among her baggage. The ofttimes gentle, sometimes jarring rock-a-bye motion of her gait lulled him deeper and deeper as he repeated wearily, “Take us north. Find us … something to eat.”
At times during the night he awoke, lifting his sore, pounding head, and gazing into the starry black blanket overhead. Then he might tug a little this way or that to nudge a correction to their course before he let his head collapse once more and he was asleep again in his warm nest down between those bundles lashed to the crossed arms of the worn sawbuck saddle.
The North Star beckoned the way … suspended far, far ahead of them in the night.
He slept again, knowing that the only way he’d ever follow that star was on the back of this mule.
20
It was cold enough that he could see his breath come in gray streamers against the murky light of predawn, curling up before his eyes, then wisping off on each gentle gust of breeze.
The land rose gently on either side of him as Hannah plodded along. Since awaking he had realized she was beginning to slow—too weary after the night’s march beneath her added burden. He shifted slightly, rolling to his other hip between the sawbucks. And breathed deeply of the cold breeze that gusted against his cheeks. It was good, he told himself. With it in his face he would not be on the downwind of man or animal.
Turning his face to the right, regarding the paling sky, Scratch felt relieved that the mule had been moving him steadily north through another night. Soon enough he would have to tug on her rope, steer her off to one row of these hills or another, hoping there to find a sheltered draw where he could hoist himself off her back and crawl into the brush. Perhaps this morning he would have enough strength to yank back the thick, oiled Russian sheeting and spend the time and strength it would require of him to release the packs from their frame. But as weak as he was, how was he ever going to get the packs reloaded?
How many days now? he asked himself. Had it been two nights? Or three? Two, he decided—which meant she had suffered for the better part of three days without having her burdens removed.
“You’ll want yourself a good roll, won’t you, girl?”
By damn, he knew how she must feel—knowing how he got a’times, ready to back up to a rough-barked tree where he’d strop his back up and down slowly, deliciously, giving himself one hell of a good scratching.
“Find you a good patch of grass where I can sleep and you can eat your fill.”
Just the mention of food caused his stomach to roil like summer’s thunderheads. That little bit of flour hadn’t lasted him long at all. No better than bread for a man who was grease hungry. Lean, red meat … dripping juice as it was just barely seared over an open flame. Enough of it to fill not only his belly, but to satisfy his tongue and teeth and mouth with chewing on something that was a delight to just about all his senses.
Like buffalo.
He couldn’t help it—thinking on the meat again the way he had last night while jabbing his moistened fingers into that flour sack. Dreaming about buffalo was about as natural a thing for a grease-hungry man to do as breathing itself.
Damn—but his imagination was even playing tricks on him! Not only was it making his mouth water and damn near drool with the fancied taste of a slab of buffalo hump ribs … but now his nose was getting in on the act. He could even smell ’em.
God knows Bass would recognize that tang on the wind anywhere. A herd had it a particular fragrance: musky, dank, earthy, too.
So here his nose was joining in with his imagination—both of them conspiring to make him all the more miserable for meat. Why, he’d spent enough time around the herds beginning with that crossing he made of the plains to know exactly how buffalo smelled, enough time downwind from the beasts so that he wouldn’t spook them as he threaded his way on through the heart of mile after blackened mile of the huge creatures that damn well blanketed the rolling hills and gentle valleys.
There simply was nothing else like that scent on the wind. Whether it was the tons of dung they dropped in their grazings and wanderings, or the sweetish-sour stench of the dusty, sweated, tick-and-flea-infested beast itself … there was nothing else like the smell of buffalo.
He vowed he’d have himself a talk to his imagination one day real soon. For it to make his mouth water just thinking about chomping down into a thick pink slab of tenderloin was one thing. But for his imagination to actually make him smell the creatures was something altogether too damn much to take—
And upon opening his eyes his breath clutched in his chest. Finding it hard to swallow as his heart rose with anticipation, Bass whispered, “Hannah, you brung me here a’purpose—didn’t you?”
She gave no answer as he continued to stare at the widening valley ahead of them as they emerged from a neck into the great, grassy bottomland. On either side arose low hills. And from east to west, slope to slope across the bottom, the entire scene was blotted with the black coagulate of grazing buffalo.
Surely this was a dream, he told himself as the mule continued him toward the center of this hallucination. At that moment he heard the first faraway bawl of one of the beasts. Could it be that his ears were tricking him too?
Barely raising his head there beneath the red wool blanket, he stared as she carried him closer and closer to a large, slowly meandering knot of the beasts. Closing his eyes momentarily, Bass drank in their scent, deeply. Then reached out with his right arm to reassure himself the rifle was still there beneath the pack ropes. As tight and sore as was his shoulder and arm, at least it no longer caused him hot flushes of agony to move them.