He had no time to think. Barely enough to jerk back the hammer to full-cock and pull hard on the set trigger before yanking back on the front trigger. He hadn’t aimed. Everything done on feel, impulse—as the enemy, with the top half of his face painted in black, leaped through the shadows, across that last five yards, a huge club circling over his head, sunlight glinting off the three sharp knife blades swinging down from the sky toward Bass’s head.
For a moment more the black face screamed, then went silent, contorting as the warrior fell, skidding to his knees. It was as if the lower strings of a marionette had been suddenly cut as the warrior crumpled—yet with that headlong motion his right arm continued to bring that war club forward, released at the end of his arm: whirling onward with a dull hum.
Glinting. Flashing in the sun.
On instinct Bass brought up his rifle at the last moment, ducking aside as the club tumbled into him. Its long handle struck the rifle with a wooden clunk, and the blades tumbled on past.
Slicing.
He grunted as he fell, rolling onto his shoulder—finding the fall hurt as he spilled onto his belly in the snow. Afraid, remembering that his rifle was empty, Bass rocked onto his knees. Allowing the rifle to fall out of his hands, he turned to find the warrior spilled facedown in the snow. Titus yanked the pistol from his sash, cocked and pointed it, trembling, at the fallen enemy.
“Scratch!”
Whirling about on his knees in the deep snow, Bass saw Hooks thirty yards away, ramming home a ball, seating it deep against the powder and breech of his rifle. Racing halfway between the two white men, a warrior came to a halt in a spray of snow, went to one knee, and brought the string back on his bow as it came up to his cheek in one smooth, swift, blurred arc of motion.
Instead of firing, Bass dropped onto his shoulder—his mind suddenly iced with hot nausea as he rolled, then came back up on his hip and brought the pistol up, aimed at the warrior moving in a blur to pull a second arrow from the same hand that clutched the bow.
Jerking back on the pistol’s trigger, he felt the weapon jump in his hand. A great gray puff of smoke issued from the short muzzle as Bass swapped the pistol to his left hand and with his right pulled the last weapon he could use for his defense.
With the knife held out before him he leaped upon the bowman who clutched his upper arm—a red, glistening ooze seeped between his fingers as his face showed surprise the moment the white man collided with him.
Titus seized a hunk of the Indian’s hair in his left hand, drew the skinning knife back at the end of his fully extended right arm, and slashed downward with all the fury he could muster. It hurt so to feel the warrior wrenching away from his left arm … then suddenly his right hand felt warm. Flecks of warmth spat against Bass’s face as the blood gushed.
No longer able to hold the struggling warrior with his weakened left arm, Titus flung the Indian backward as the enemy quivered and thrashed—his throat slashed so completely that his head keeled to the side, nearly severed from his body.
“That’s the way to shine, nigger!”
Bass jerked up with a feral growl, finding Silas Cooper scuttling toward him out of the shadows. Behind the tall man there were muffled shouts and the whinny of horses. Cooper went to his knees beside Titus.
“That red nigger’s skelp is yours, Scratch!” he cried out in exultation, slapping Bass on the back.
Wincing in pain, Titus grunted as icy shards filled the base of his skull, Sent shooting stars exploding behind his eyelids as he struggled to maintain consciousness.
“Damn nigger!” Cooper’s voice called out above him. “Scratch’s hurt. Billy!”
For some time Titus struggled to keep from losing his breakfast, then remembered they hadn’t really stopped for a noonday meal. Only a little yellow bile spilled up as his empty stomach revolted and he retched on the snow.
“You’ll be awright,” Hooks was saying over him somewhere.
Then someone was wiping cold snow on his face. Bass’s eyes fluttered half-open so that he could look up into Billy’s face.
Of a sudden, there beside Hooks’s hairy face, was Turtle’s, both of them staring down at Bass like masks suspended in the air above him.
“It’s over, Scratch,” Bud confided softly.
As much as he tried to listen to the silence of that rocky lodgepole clearing, Titus couldn’t hear anything. Maybe the silence meant that it really was over.
“Looks to be the greenhorn got two his own self!” Cooper suddenly bawled in triumph, appearing behind the other two, who continued to stare down at Bass. “How’s he gonna fare, Billy?”
“Get me his coat off and I can tell you better, Silas.”
They yanked and jerked, pulling his belt and sash off, then parted the blanket coat so that they could drag it down the left arm enough to look at the shoulder wound.
“It’s deep,” Hooks said solemnly.
“But clean enough,” Tuttle added. “She’ll knit up in time.”
Bass’s eyes opened now and then, fluttering in pain as the others prodded and pulled; then a great pressure was added to the source of his pain. He closed his eyes and wished they would just cut the arm off—it hurt so damned much.
“Don’t you go to sleep on us,” Tuttle commanded about the time Titus felt more cold snow rubbed on his cheeks, across his forehead, some of it spilling against his eyelids.
He blinked the cold away, trying to say something—to tell them to leave him sleep—but no words came.
“Think he wants us get him his skelps, Silas!” Billy roared over his shoulder at the tall man.
“By damn—this here pilgrim’s got his first Injun ha’r, this’un does!” Cooper bellowed lustily. Then he stuffed his face right in between Hooks’s and Turtle’s, saying in a softer voice, “Don’t y’ worry none, Scratch. I’ll go right off an’ fetch up them two skelps of your’n my own self for y’-”
“Silas,” Tuttle spoke through that thick, suffocating blackness slipping down over him, “I don’t think Scratch heard you none.”
There were pieces of it that came to him from time to time, like the ragged, painful consciousness that brought him awake with startling suddenness, yelping in protest before he would pass out again.
Yet, thankfully, Bass was able to pass through most of the homebound journey suspended in that blessed blackness where pain will take a man when it becomes more than he can bear.
Three of the injured Ute were dragged back to the village in improvised travois, like Scratch. The rest of the wounded stoically rode their ponies back to Park Kyack’s southern reaches.
Four of those warriors who had been at the very lead of the hunt that terrible day returned to their people slung over the backs of their ponies.
Once again the Ute had paid an awful price in their ages-old warfare with the Arapaho, who season after season continued to contest any trespass onto land they considered their own, on either side of the great tall mountains scraping the undergut of the winter-blue sky. None of the old Ute warriors were ready to give in and move off, leaving the Arapaho the freedom to roam that country. And with this loss of four young, healthy men, the entire village was now even more resolved to resist the violent encroachments of a people who had only recently begun to push up from the eastern plains into the fastness of the Rocky Mountains.
To the Ute way of thinking, the Arapaho were the interlopers, nothing more than unwanted trespassers, dangerous and deadly newcomers … at the same time what white men the Ute had run across had posed no danger—after all, the trappers were far too few, showing up infrequently at best, then moving on quickly enough without setting down roots. In short, the pale-skinned beaver hunters posed no real threat to Ute sovereignty of these high mountains, parks, and pine-ringed valleys.