“Damn if Isaac Washburn didn’t tell me none of this,” he grumbled in confusion bordering on exasperation the afternoon he reached that union of the north and south forks.
But as frustrated as he was, in the end Titus decided to stay with the northernmost. The way he saw things, it only made sense because that was where he should be headed after alclass="underline" to the central if not the northern reaches of the Rocky Mountains. Washburn had mentioned nothing of those southern mountains, failing to say if there even were mountains down in that country. So if ol’ Gut hadn’t said nothing about it—why, then, Bass figured there wasn’t much worth concerning himself about down south anyways.
Sure enough, the old trapper had been right on target with most everything he had told Titus before he got himself killed back there in St. Louis. Right about everything except that warning about the Pawnee who lived along the Platte. There had been plenty enough chance to bump right into them all along. Yet except for running across sign of that village migrating along the great river before its trail started moseying its way off to the north away from the Platte, Titus hadn’t seen a feather or war pony either one.
“Nothing more’n pure, dumb luck,” he had muttered to himself more than once in all those weeks since, thinking back how consumed with caution and cold camps he had been.
Dumb luck—which meant he walked straight on through Pawnee country without a single run-in. Far better luck than ol’ Gut and Hugh Glass had themselves when they had headed east to St. Louis, deviled by the Pawnee near the whole way.
Days past those forks, the country started to evolve once more as he pushed ever westward, leading that packmare day after day, wearing down the soles of his first pair of Washburn’s moccasins and starting on the second. As the ground beneath his feet was crusting into a flaky hardpan, Titus worried so much about walking himself out of his last two pairs of moccasins that he took to cutting pieces of green buffalo hide he could lash around the soles of his thinning footwear.
Now the hills became more sharply defined, and all the creeks and streams slashed their way down through the land to form sharp-sided bluffs and buttes, each one striated over centuries of constant erosion by water and wind. Here he found more timber, willow, and brush flourishing along each water course he came across. It was clear he had passed out of the rolling tableland, where the buffalo ruled as undisputed monarchs, entering a country where he no longer had the herds of those shaggy beasts constantly in sight as he plodded west on foot.
He found this to be a country populated by varieties of deer—some surprisingly larger than others. He hunted them down in the brushy bottoms where they spent their days, or waited for them near the creeks and streams where the creatures came to water early of every morning or late of the evenings before scampering off to their beds. Most of the males were already coming into velvet, their antlers covered with that thin, mosslike covering that at times hung in tatters all about their faces.
And there were other creatures he spotted from a distance: the sharp-snouted badger and wolverine, and those wild turkey, which roosted in the low branches of the trees very much the same as their cousins did back east, not to mention what he took to be tiny prairie gophers he encountered, animals that barked at him just like dogs in those huge colonies where they lived together for mutual protection against the great-winged birds who hunted with claw and beak, sweeping over the towns pocked with burrows. Most every day he had to pass through one such community, he and the mare assaulted by the yip-yipping of so many tiny, angry voices.
At times he even caught sight of a brown-or a reddish-coated bear—animals that whirled and loped away at the first sight of him and the horse. Not a day passed that Titus did not spot what he figured to be a variety of pong-horned deer on the nearby slopes—almost a sort of long-legged goat-shaped creature, he surmised—a bit smaller but even more fleet than its mule-eared or white-tailed cousins. And most every night he went to sleep serenaded with the distant crooning of those song-dogs crying out from the surrounding hillsides as if to announce his presence to others of their kind.
Lo, the birds! As big as he had known them to be back east along the Ohio and Mississippi, they proved to be all the bigger the farther west he progressed. Although he had seen many a hawk before, the immense wingspans on these western species came as no small wonder to Bass. Not to mention how big those eagles grew hunting the skies along his line of march. As well, he grew astounded at the size of the wrinkle-necked turkey and black vultures, which congregated at the remains of what carrion the wild dogs and rangy wolves had not consumed.
So it was that time and again he was struck that this was a harsh land devoid of all mankind—although he occasionally did come across some old Indian trail of pocked pony prints and the scraping of poles as those people went about their seasonal migrations. Not a day passed when he did not fear he would run onto a village, or that he would be discovered by a wandering hunting party.
Not to see the enemy proved to be far more frightening than knowing right where the brownskins were, or just how many he might have to confront.
Fact was, none of Bass’s contacts with Indians had ever fostered in him a favorable view of brownskins. Especially that run for his life from the Chickasaw there along the Mississippi River when he was but sixteen years old and fleeing the constraints of his family. And what few Indians had wandered into or traveled through old St. Louis hadn’t impressed him to feel much in the way of human charity as welclass="underline" they either presented themselves as a haughty, distant, and foreign race characterized by arrogance, or they appeared to be nothing more than a race of flea-bitten beggars trampled over in a rush of settlers and slowly being whittled away by the white man’s dominant culture.
One or the other, Titus had long ago decided, there wasn’t much to admire in or desire to emulate any brown-skin. They looked different, talked different, in fact—everything about them was entirely foreign as another life could be from how he himself had grown up and come to be a man. Struggle as he might, there was little he could think of that he would possibly want to talk over with one of those haughty, better-than-thou warrior chiefs or grease-stained, hand-held-out beggars.
No sense in a man trying his damndest to run onto any Injuns, he decided. Best to just stay as far from any brownskins as he possibly could … for at the worst such two-legged creatures might well spell danger for him, at the least an ignorant Indian was nothing but a pure-dee waste of effort for any white man venturing into an unknown wilderness.
Better that his own dumb luck hold so he could continue on his way for the mountains, untroubled and alone.
Alone was just how he was feeling that midafternoon as he plodded on beneath the baking sun, leading the packmare through the easy footing he found a quarter mile or so out from the Platte. He discovered he could almost doze as he trudged along, laying one foot in front of the other, his eyes barely open as he picked his way through the waist-high buffalo grass. Almost like sleeping: with the warmth on his back and the rhythmic sway to his gait, accompanied by that hypnotic clop of the packmare following behind.
For the last few hours his thinking had been consumed with wondering on how many more days and weeks it would take for him to reach those high and shining mountains described so eloquently by an unlettered Isaac Washburn in terms of undisguised awe that bordered on nothing short of reverence.
Arousing himself from his dull stupor, Titus licked his dry lips … then, squinting to be sure, he studied the distant horizon as it seemed to waver and strangely take shape far, far out there before him—heat shimmers all dark and purple and jumbled there at the edge of the earth. For a moment he glanced up at the sun, hung ahead him nearly at the three-quarters mark of its path across the sky … then quickly back to stare at that shifting, shimmering horizon.