No more would the big companies dispatch their trapping brigades into the high country. There was no money to be made in trading supplies for beaver pelts at a summer rendezvous on the Wind, the Popo Agie, or some fork of the legendary Green. Bridger and Fraeb formed a new partnership and brought out that last, undersized packtrain from St. Louis. Afterward, while Bridger led a small band of trappers north, Fraeb and Joe Walker started for California with a few men.
Bass had marched his family north with Gabe’s undermanned bunch. And when Bridger turned off for Blackfoot country, Bass had steered east for Absaroka and the home of the Crow. There would always be beaver in that country—even if he had to climb higher, plunge deeper into the shadowy recesses than he had ever gone before. And, besides, traders like Tullock were handy with their post over at the mouth of the Tongue. He’d continue to trap close to the home of his wife’s folk, trade when he needed resupply, and wait for beaver to rise.
The way beaver had before. The way it would again.
They had a fair enough winter—cold as the maw of hell for sure, but that only meant what beaver he brought to bait were furred up seal-fat and sleek. When the hardest of the weather broke, he took a small pack of his furs down to Fort Van Buren, only to find that Tullock couldn’t offer him much at all. So Titus bought what powder and lead he needed, an array of new hair ribbons for his woman, a pewter turtle for Magpie to suspend around her neck, and a tiny pennywhistle for Flea.
How Bass marveled at the way that boy grew every time he returned to the village. At least an inch or more for every week Titus rode off to the hills. Even more so when he returned from the long journey to the Tongue. He was four winters old now, his beautiful sister to turn seven next spring, looking more and more like her mother with every season.
When it used to break his heart at how Waits-by-the-Water first hid her pox-ravaged face,* it now gave him comfort that she had made peace with what the terrible disease had cost her: not only the marred and pocked flesh, but the loss of her brother. Every time Bass returned from the hills, came back from the wilderness to his family, he quietly thanked the Grandfather for sparing this woman, the mother of his children. And he never neglected to thank the All-Maker for the days they had yet to share.
With the coming of that spring following the last rendezvous, he decided to mosey south, taking a little time to trap, if the country looked good—but with the primary intention of being in the country of the upper Green come midsummer, when Bridger planned to reunite with Fraeb. Last year, before going their separate ways, there had been serious talk of erecting a post of their own.
Damn, if that news didn’t stir up a nest of hornets! Old hivernants the likes of Gabe and Frapp ready to give up on trapping beaver, them two turning trader!
Bass chose trapping and hunting over the mindless chores of a cabin-raising sodbuster. He figured he’d pounded enough nails and shingled enough roofs to last him the rest of his days.† So when Henry Fraeb’s twenty-two rode out for the Little Snake, Titus went along. He reckoned on sniffing around some country he hadn’t seen much of since he lost hair to the Arapaho. Might just be a man might find a few beaver curious enough to come sniffing at his bait.
Besides … among the old German’s outfit were some of the finest veterans still clinging to the old life in the mountains. This hunt into the coming fall might well be the last great hurraw for them all.
The long days of late summer seeped slowly past. There wasn’t much beaver sign to speak of, and where the men did tarry long enough to lay their traps, they didn’t have much success. The hunting wasn’t all that fair either. Game was pushed high into the hills. Bass and others figured the critters had been chivied by the migrations of the Ute and Shoshone.
Turned out the game was driven away by the hunting forays of this huge village of wandering Sioux and Cheyenne, not to mention that band of tagalong Arapaho.
The sun had been up a good three hours that morning when one of Fraeb’s outriders spotted a half-dozen horsemen on the crest of the hill across the Little Snake.
“If’n they was Yuta, them riders be running down here first whack,” Jake Corn snorted. “Begging for tobaccy or red paint.”
“Snakes too,” Rube Purcell added. “Poor diggers they be.”
“Ain’t either of ’em,” Elias Kersey growled. “That’s for certain.”
“Lookit ’em,” Bass remarked. “Just watching us, easy as you please. Ain’t friendly-like to stare so, is it, Frapp?”
The old German hawked up the last of the night-gather in his throat and spat. “Trouble is vhat dem niggers lookin’ at.”
Fraeb picked four men to cross the river ahead of the rest, making for the far slope and those unfriendly horsemen. Then the rest started their animals into the shallow river just up the Little Snake from the mouth of a narrow creek. The trappers had the last of the pack animals and spare horses across right about the time the first muffled gunshot reached them.
Every man jack jerked up in surprise, finding their four companions returning lickety-split, like Ol’ Beelzebub himself was right on their tails, one of their number clinging the best he could to his horse’s withers as they lumbered down the slope. Behind them came the six strangers. And just behind that half-dozen … it seemed the whole damned hillside suddenly sprouted redskins.
“Fort up! Fort up!” came the cry from nearly every throat as the four trappers sprinted their way.
The twenty spun about, studying things this way, then that—when most decided they would have to make a stand for it right there with the river at their back.
“Pull off them packs for cover!” one of them bellowed.
But Bass knew right off there weren’t enough packs to make barricades for them all. Not near enough supplies lashed to those pack saddles, and sure as hell not any beaver bundles to speak of. One last-ditch thing to do.
“Put the horses down!”
One of the bold ones gave voice to their predicament.
“Shoot the goddamned horses!” another voice trumpeted as the four scouts reined up in a swirl of dust.
That’s when Titus could make out the yips and yells, the taunts and the cries—all those hundreds of voices rising above the dull booming thunder of thousands of hooves.
A tall redheaded youngster next to him came out of the saddle and was nearly jerked off his feet when his frightened mount reared. From the look on the man’s pasty face Bass could tell this might well be the most brownskins he’d ever seen.
“Snub ’im up quick and shoot him!” Bass grumbled as he lunged over to help the redhead.
“Pistol?”
“Goddamned right.” Then Titus turned his back and double-looped his own mule’s lead rope around his left hand as he dragged the pistol from his belt with his right.
“Drop de goddamned hurses. Ebbery one!” Fraeb repeatedly roared, as the first animals started falling.
From the corner of his eye, Bass watched the redhead obey. As the mount’s legs went out from under it, the horse nearly toppled the trapper. But the redhead scrambled backward in time, spilling in a heap atop Titus’s thrashing horse.
“You got a pack animal?” Bass demanded.
The redhead lunged onto his feet, craning his neck this way and that, then shrugged.
“Get down and make ready to use that rifle of your’n,” Titus ordered, then turned to bid farewell to the mule just a breath or two before the screeching horsemen dared to break across the flat into range of their big, far-reaching rifles.