Quickly he unbuttoned the front of his worn and patched wool britches as he stumbled over to a far tree and drained himself with a sigh. The three had disappeared in the dark by the time Bass had on his coat, moccasins, and the wool cap he had fashioned from some blanketing cut from the bottom of his capote. Titus slung the leather trap sack over his shoulder and set off at a trot through the grass and elk cabbage that crackled with frost underfoot with every step. Eventually he caught up with them, following their muted whispers as the three of them stopped, turned about, and waited for the newcomer to join them.
“Thar’s the stream, Titus Bass,” Cooper declared. “What’s to do?”
“Set my traps, natural as you please,” he said, believing he gave the right answer.
“Just like that?” Billy asked.
Bass replied-with a nod, “Just like that.”
“Nigger—are you ever wrong!” Hooks guffawed.
“Hold your goddamned noise down!” Silas snapped. “I declare, Billy—y’ go and run off the beaver with your mouth one more time, I’ll cut out your goddamned tongue my own self!”
Hooks dropped his eyes, contrite and chastened as he pursed his lips into a narrow line of silence.
Bass felt sorry for him as he turned back to look at Cooper. “All right—s’pose you tell me what I do first.”
“Now you’re l’arning, Titus Bass,” Silas said with a faint smile. “Y’ do everything I tell you, the way I tell you, and when I tell you to do it—y’ll be a master trapper in no time … and we’ll get along fine.”
At first he glanced to the quiet Tuttle, then back to Cooper. “Awright, so tell me.”
The tall leader began to discourse on how a man first inspected a section of stream, looking for beaver slides, dams, or lodges built out in the middle of those ponds the efficient rodents had created in engineering their environment to suit themselves—mostly to protect their kind from four-legged, nonswimming predators. As Cooper had done yesterday afternoon before twilight while the others had established camp, he showed them how a man was to determine where best to set his traps. Silas led the other three into the leafless willow right to the streambank.
“There, Titus Bass,” and he pointed. “Show me what to do now.”
Bass yanked upon the sack’s drawstring and pulled one of the square-jawed iron traps from the leather bag. Setting it upright on the ground, he squatted over it as Washburn had taught him, pushing down on the two jaws with his heels, allowing them to flap down so he could set the pan trigger within the notch filed in the pan arm.
“Whatcha gonna do with it now, Titus Bass?” Hooks asked in a harsh whisper.
“Set it in the water,” Bass replied, hopeful he would get some of this right.
Billy wagged his head. “Not till you got your set made.”
“Set?”
Tuttle explained, “Where you gonna lay it, Titus.”
“How?”
Cooper nudged Hooks forward. “Billy, y’ show him.”
“C’mere, Titus Bass,” Hooks instructed, tugging Bass’s sleeve. “I be the one to show you first whack.”
“First … first whack?” Titus asked.
“Right off. Means I show you right off.” Hooks held out his hand. “Gimme one of your float-sticks. You got float-sticks, don’cha?”
“Here,” and he slapped one down in Billy’s open palm as Hooks pulled the second mitten from his hand by placing it beneath his armpit.
That reminded Bass how much he itched, so he dug fingernails again, not only at his neck and armpits, but also stuffing a hand in there between the folds of his blanket coat where he could get at his groin.
“You do got the varmits, don’t you?” Tuttle replied.
Bass shrugged and said, “They ain’t been troubling me long.”
He didn’t take his eyes off Hooks as Billy knelt on the bank, leaned over, whacked the stick against the thick rime of ice crusted at the surface of the water near the bank, and began digging and scraping beneath the surface with the end of the long float-stick. After a short time he shoved his coat sleeve up his arm, then stuck nearly the whole length of it under the surface.
When he brought the arm out and shook it, Billy stood, saying, “Put your damned hand down there, Titus Bass—and see what I made for your trap to sit itself on.”
Kneeling right where Hooks had, Titus stuffed his arm into the shockingly cold water, a chill that felt all the worse because of the dark at this predawn hour. His fingertips walked down the side of the bank until he felt the underwater shelf Billy had crudely dug out of the bank.
“I feel it. So you gone and made a flat place for the trap under the water.”
Cooper said, “Tell him what it’s for, Tuttle.”
“Put your trap down there, under the water, so the goddamned beaver don’t see it, you idjit.”
As he pulled his hand out of the freezing water, Bass turned to ask of Cooper, “What good does it do to hide your trap?”
“Beaver ain’t too stupid a animal, Titus,” Silas explained. “They smell your scent—where y’ve walked, where y’ go and spit—they won’t come anywhere near. Y’ been a stupid pilgrim to leave your traps on top of the bank afore now?”
“Yeah, I done that.”
Silas wagged his head. “Don’t y’ see that trap got your scent, maybeso that dead horse’s smell on it from packing it out here from St. Louis,” Cooper declared. “But under water—the beaver can’t pick up no man-scent.”
“And ’sides—you gotta have bait!” Billy added.
Tuttle asked, “Maybeso you didn’t have no bait to set out, did you?”
“B-bait? Hell—I ain’t fishin’ … I’m trapping beaver!”
Hooks and the other two snorted laughter behind their hands to muffle as much of the shrill sound of it as they could—a sound that grated Titus like a coarse file drawn across rusted iron.
“You was a lucky nigger,” Tuttle reminded him. “To catch a few old beaver ’thout no bait, and your traps sitting right on the bare ground, bold as can be.”
“I found me a place where there was tracks,” Titus protested. “And I caught me some beaver.”
Billy cheered, “You gotta l’arn to be sneaky!”
“How’d y’ like to learn yourself how to catch least two beaver to every three traps y’ set out?” Cooper said.
“That’s how good Silas here does—yessirreebob,” Billy declared.
“T-two beaver for every three sets?”
“And sometimes Silas fills ’em all,” Tuttle added. “Damn but he’s so good, it puts me to shame.”
“Maybe you an’ me just ain’t got the knack of it the way Silas do,” Hooks cautioned.
Standing, Titus measured the tall, black-haired man before him. “You really mean sometimes you fill all your god-blamed traps?”
“These here partners of mine speak the truth. I tried to teach ’em the best I could,” Cooper said. Then he leaned forward and said in a whisper, “Y’ wanna learn how to be as good as me—y’ll have to learn from me, Titus.”
And learn he did.
From that morning on Bass hung on every one of Silas Cooper’s words, soaking in all he could, asking questions of all three, and being sure he was the first to rise in the morning, the last to return to camp in the evenings after checking his sets. And right from that very first morning Titus got better and better at selecting where he should set the traps, deciding which side of the stream he would use for his set, and figuring how to leave his bait behind on the long willow limbs he jabbed into the frozen ground, the other end daubed in the “beaver milk” given him by the other three until he had caught enough animals to acquire some of the smelly bait for himself.