And so it was that after he had repacked the mule and set forth once again, Bass vowed that he would never stray too far from those distant mountains ever again. Once he arrived, he promised never to leave them. Never to wander so far away that he could no longer see them at the edge of his sight, just as they were right then. They were to be his compass, his lodestone, the very anchor for his life from there on out. The way some men back east dared never to wander too far from the rivers where they plied their trade and lived out their lives … Titus swore these mountains would from that day forth be the marrow of his world, swore that on a mighty oath for what would be the rest of his natural days.
Late that afternoon after pushing farther west, Titus brought down one of those prong-horned goat creatures he found were almost too curious for their own good. He skinned back the tan-and-white hide, butchered off the steaks and two hams he wanted from the rear flanks, then moved on west to scare up a good camp for the night. Not until the sun had disappeared behind the jagged wall of peaks far beyond did Titus discover just what he wanted.
It was a shady nook at the side of a hill that offered good water from a stream coming in from the south, plenty of firewood, and enough trees that his smoke would be dispersed among the branches—in the event any brownskins were lurking about. But most of all, the campsite sat just so: positioned in a way where he could gaze into the west as the meat broiled on sticks hung over the fire and the coffee began to boil.
After stuffing himself, with great care he loaded his old briar pipe with tobacco as twilight sank around him. How he enjoyed the utter silence of the night as it came stealing over the land, broken only by an occasional call from the wild dogs populating the nearby hills.
Like a gentle nudge, something caused him to turn and look back to the east where it had already grown dark as pitch—the sky flecked with the first stars. Back yonder, to what he had left behind, to what he had chosen to abandon. Funny, he thought—but he could not see anything back there that reminded him of what was left behind. Nothing there to show him what he had abandoned … yet right here in this spot he could look upon his goal.
So Titus turned back to gaze into the west once more. The mountains were there—limned in indigo light by the long-ago falling of the sun. They were reachable and real. No longer something of legend and myth. Indeed, he told himself, after all these days and the many, many miles, he had come so far that he no longer could see what had been, could no longer see who he had been.
Yet on this evening, with the light rapidly draining from the summer sky, it was possible for him to catch a glimpse of what he was now to be … to fathom at long, long last the man he was to become.
The mountains were there, finally within reach. He had only to stay his course for the next few days, with that jagged line looming larger against the sky with every step he took.
After nigh onto a lifetime of waiting, Titus Bass had come to the Rocky Mountains. And in the deepening embrace of that twilight, he joyously welcomed the man he was to become.
6
Dry and wispy as old ash, the snowflakes struck his cheeks as he stepped out from the copse of aspen trees and stared up at the graying sky. Just a few flakes for now. But with that look of the horizon, this appeared to have the making of the first hard snow of the winter.
Hard to tell just what month of the year it was anymore up this high. Titus had been up here, wandering through these southern foothills and into the lower reaches of the mountains, since late summer and early autumn. Some time back he’d given up trying to sort things out like keeping track of months, deciding that none of it really mattered out here no more anyway. Long ago—back to late spring as he’d pushed west along the Platte River—he had decided that keeping track of days at this or days at that was a fool’s errand, and though he might well be accused of being a fool on other counts, he vowed not to be a counting fool. All that folderol about numbers and ciphering their meaning was merely one thing more to be shet of and left behind back there where he had lived another life.
With that sort of thing at his back, Titus had moved through the summer not in the least worrying what month it must surely be. June wasn’t all that hard to sort out—it had already been June before he’d first spotted his Rocky Mountains off in the distance. And July brought true warmth to the days he’d spent climbing with the mare into those first pine-shaded places south by west of the Platte River, where a narrowing stream led him into the high country. From there he could look all the farther to the west and the northwest, seeing for the first time how the snow lingered on those distant peaks. From his high vantage point it was plain to see that even at this late season the white still mantled some of those mountains nearly halfway down their dark sides.
“That’s where I’m wagering we’ll find the best beaver hides,” he had confided to the mare, the only creature thereabouts to listen to him.
More and more of late he had taken to talking out loud to her, if for no other reason than to hear the sound of his own voice. Likely, it was the only human voice for hundreds of miles around, he told himself.
Bass had tried setting Washburn’s traps in that cold stream leading him up through that first high ground,* at times in those feeder creeks that spilled into it, too. Each time he did just as Isaac had instructed him back in St. Louis: with the bait-stick and the trap-shelf and the float-stick too. But for all his effort, only a half-dozen scrawny muskrats had been curious enough to get themselves caught. Titus hadn’t even thought enough of them to skin them. Why, compared to the beaver hides he had seen congregate in huge packs on the wharfs at St. Louis from the upriver country, those half-dozen puny skins weren’t worth the trouble it would take to bloody his skinning knife.
“Weather’s bound to be lot more the sort that makes a flat-tail critter put on a heavy hide up there,” he commented to the mare as they moseyed on west toward the distant white-capped peaks. “Snow means cold, and cold means thick fur, seems to me, girl.”
That sort of reasoning made sense to him, it did. Especially after he had managed to trap four unwary beaver in that small range of high mountains off to the southwest—just four, after all those days he went out to his labors among the streams and those aspen that quaked with the slightest breeze on the hillsides above him. And now that he had wandered down from those unproductive mountains in bitter resignation, striking out for the northwest—yearning to reach that range where the snow looked to lay all the heavier at those upper elevations, even as summer was lost to the first signs of autumn.
Into those foothills he had led the mare as the seasons began to turn and the days grew imperceptibly shorter—climbing ever higher, trying this stream, then that. A bit more luck had he, but not near as much as Bass had hoped when he’d moved into the southern reaches of this extensive mountain range. For some days now the quakies had begun to turn gold.
There had been two quick dustings of snow already, weeks ago. Both had melted by the following day, the air steaming in the shafts of golden light piercing the leafy branches of the trees. Then of late the weather turned downright warm again as Indian summer set in. But up here among the high foothills, where it seemed he spent one fruitless day after another, the cycle of life was soon to change. After less than two weeks of sunny days and cool nights, it had smelled of snow this morning when he’d kicked his way out of his blankets.
After watering the bushes Titus took the mare out a distance from camp where she could graze on some good grass; then he returned to kindle his fire and set the remains of last night’s coffee on to reboil. With a breakfast of venison steak washed down, it was time to bring the old mare in and pack her up for their daily routine: a trip out to set more traps. This morning, like so many that had gone before, he promised himself it would be different. His luck was bound to change today.