Hell, right here where he stood Titus figured he was damn well far beyond the curve of the earth from everything he had ever known before. Even as high as he stood in these mountains, last winter’s snowpack barely yards above him, the timberline not all that far beyond that, Bass could not look back and see the mouth of the Platte, not that widow’s cabin at Boone’s Lick nor trader’s store at Franklin, much less the barn he had helped raise on the Guthrie farm south of St. Lou. As high into the sky as he stood at that moment—why, Titus couldn’t even see beyond the jagged tumble of gray granite and emerald-green that marked cleft upon cleft as the mountain ranges stood hulking one against the other without apparent end.
But he knew these high peaks had to end the farther west he pushed … there they would allow a man to gently ride back down their sunset-side slopes onto the prairie among the burnt orange of the paintbrush and the sego lilies and the upwind sage that always filled a man’s nostrils. He had never been there yet, not in all his searching to the west last autumn. Nor had Isaac Washburn.
But Silas, Bud, and Billy had, by damned. And that’s where they were headed in this easy tramp toward rendezvous. They’d seen the end of the mountains and the beginning of the great dry basin that most said was where rivers eventually sank into oblivion and the desert stretched toward the sunset until it finally ran smack up against even more mountains.
Beyond that was rumored to be the great salt ocean where Lewis and his friend Clark had dared take their men some twenty years before. And now here he stood, squarely in that land of fable and myth that had no end until it dropped off suddenly into that salt ocean. At N’Orleans, Titus had looked out with sixteen-year-old eyes and tried to imagine where all that water could carry those tall-masted ships.
No more did he wonder on all that white canvas thrown up against the wind, for here, among the gigantic heave of granite escarpment thrust against the very same sky … here he could cast his gaze upon tumbling boulder fields of talus and scree stretching wider than the Ohio River itself, why—Titus stood beneath the white umbrella of clouds he could almost reach up and touch. There, just inches beyond the reach of his fingers.
He looked back to the east again, perhaps to will his vision to penetrate through the haze and all that distance just whence he had come. The Ohio River borderlands of Boone County. Then Louisville and Owensboro. Natchez-Under-the-Hill and the dense forest road that took a man north through the Chickasaws’ and Choctaws’ wilderness and on back to home.
But he saw none of that from here. Home now lay beneath the soles of his moccasins. And there was no wilderness back there anywhere near as mighty as was this where he dropped his trap sack and suddenly went to his knees to rock forward and lean out over that murmuring stream—just to sip at what must surely be God’s own holy water, so cold it set his back teeth on edge.
Beard dripping, Scratch rocked back on his haunches and looked up at those cold snowfields mantled around the high peaks just beyond their camp. And there and then he closed his eyes—praying as best he could remember having learned to pray at his mam’s knee: her old, yellow-eared Bible flung open and draped over her lap like two great wings of some bird that she was certain one day would lift her up and carry her away to everlasting paradise.
Rising once again, he brought the trap sack up with him and set off, sweeping around a bend in the creek another two hundred yards until he reached the edge of the flooded meadow where the flat-tailed rodents had long been at work. Perhaps since the day after the beginning of time. How his heart beat that much faster, just to let his eyes rush over all the signs of their industry: tender saplings and young trees hawed off by those busy front teeth less than a foot from the ground, more than two dozen muddy slides marked the beavers’ descent from grassy banks into that watery world of their own making, and at least a double handful of those crude, dome-topped lodges rising from the middle of their pond—lodges where the animals were safe from all but one predator.
Last fall as he began his new life as a beaver-man, Titus had taken a sharpened sapling and waded out to the closest lodge. There he had curiously jabbed and levered, chipping away at the chewed limbs and mud chinking until he had broken through, then peered inside at the dark inner world abandoned by the frightened animals who kept right on slapping their tails on the surface of that pond nearby. He saw the inner shelf where the beaver crawled up and out of the water to sleep, there to feed on the tender green shoots and new limbs they dragged down the banks, into the water, then under the surface and into their lodges.
They would have that hole repaired inside of three days, maybe only two, he had estimated from how hard he saw the animals work. And when he had found the hole covered with new limbs and fresh mud the very next day, Bass felt a newfound respect for this creature he stalked, trapped, skinned, and sometimes ate.
“You gone an’ hit dead center this time, ol’ coon,” he breathed all but to himself as he stared now at the immensity of the beaver pond.
Then quickly glanced downstream where he feared the others might have followed him there.
For a moment more he listened. Only the racket of a chirking squirrel complaining overhead and the shadow-flash of a swooping flock of black rosy finches broke the stillness. Then came the rustle of branches and a handful of leaves spilling to the surface of the pond. In and out of the shadows on the far side he made out the familiar waddle of the fat rodents all about their business of chewing back the forest’s edge a tree at a time.
Cautiously he set down the sack, then freed the knot at the top, stuffed the strand of half-inch rope beneath his belt and plunged a hand into the sack to pull forth the first trap. With it set beside him in the grass, hidden there behind the clumps of low, leafy brush, Scratch used his belt knife to saw free a narrow branch, then sharpened the widest end to a point.
Standing again, he quietly slipped off downstream to a place where he could enter the water far from the beavers’ slides. The first step wasn’t the hardest. It was the third or fourth as he inched deeper into the stream—his body past the first, startling shock of the cold, this water just descended from glacial melt. Now his calves began to ache and his toes disappeared from all feeling. Still he plodded on, each leaden foot feeling its way forward across the rocky bottom, pressing his way upstream, back toward the flooded meadow.
Slowly he moved, keeping to the afternoon shadows as best he could, his eyes and ears alert to those beaver that might discover him as they went about their business on the far side of the pond, and he went about his. At the ninth slide he figured he had come far enough, nearly halfway around the meadow. It wouldn’t do to press his luck beyond here, Titus figured.
There he jabbed the bait-stick into the side of the bank so that it hung low over the slide. Titus kept it down to make it all the easier for an unsuspecting animal to get himself a real good sniff of the end of that bait stick where he smeared some castor—that pale, milky substance taken from a pair of glands in the beaver’s groin. The animal used it to sleek and waterproof its thick hide. But to smell strange castor come to their pond—why, that would pique the curiosity of any of these flat-tails hereabouts.