As the others came up, Titus slowly lifted his own moccasin.
“What the hell y’ got to show me?” Cooper snapped.
“Look,” Bass repeated, squatting to point at the thief’s print. “See how this’un’s shaped like this, here an’ here.”
“Yeah,” Hooks replied. “So?”
“See here on my print I just made,” Bass instructed. “It don’t look the same, does it?”
“I be go to hell and et for a tater!” Tuttle gushed, kneeling beside Bass and pointing. “It ain’t the same, Silas.”
Wheeling on Bass, Cooper spat, “S’pose y’ go and tell me what good that’s gonna do us, Scratch.”
With a shrug Bass said, “No earthly good a’tall.”
Fuming, Cooper declared, “Then why all the preachin’, y’ weasel-stoned pup?”
“Just showin’ you something I figgered out,” he said as Cooper wheeled away angry. “Figgered out … all on my own.”
Titus stood there watching the backs of the other two join Silas Cooper’s as all three stomped off for camp—on foot. The wind punched right out of his sails, and with no one wanting to share in the joy of his personal discovery, his shoulders began to sag as he followed in their wake.
For the rest of that morning the four of them worked feverishly at hiding from view and prying eyes what beaver they had taken that season, caching the packs of plews and what excess plunder they couldn’t pack off now, stowing all of it here and there within the thickest clumps of willow and alder—as out of sight as they could make it. Then they covered their sign the best they knew how, dragging branches over their footprints so no tracks would point the way to their cache of beaver and camp goods.
With Hannah and that lone saddle horse swaybacked beneath all their blankets and robes, along with their cooking gear, some coffee, flour, beads, and vermilion, in addition to several extra pounds of powder and a few bars of bullet lead, the four finally set out on foot shortly after midday … following the backtrail of the horse thieves.
Most all day Cooper muttered under his breath until they made camp that first evening. As twilight sucked the last warmth out of the sky, Scratch took Hannah’s long picket rope and tied it to the wide leather belt holding his capote around his waist when he curled up in the robes and blankets, his feet toward the fire. Billy Hooks did the same with the saddle horse. They were not about to chance losing these last two animals to whatever thieves roamed that country. That first tug, even a faint tussle on the ropes, would serve as the alarm.
By the time it was slap dark that frigid autumn evening, Silas, Scratch, and Tuttle were asleep. Each in turn would be awakened through the long night to stand his watch: to listen to the distant call of the owls on the wing, the cry of the wolves on the prowl and the yapping of the nearby coyotes; to sit alone and feed the fire while the others snored. Alone in one’s thoughts of women and liquor, remembrances of old faces and young breasts and thighs. To think back as the cold nuzzled more and more firmly around a man, here in the marrow of the Rocky Mountains.
The following morning they awoke to a lowering sky. The wind that had been puffing gently out of the west quickly quartered around, picking up speed as it came out of the north. With no other choice they walked into the brutal teeth of that wind until early afternoon when the clouds on the far horizon began to clot and blacken, hurrying in to blot out the sun. Within an hour icy sleet began to pelt them, coating everything, man and animal and all their provisions alike, with a thin, crusty layer of ice.
By sundown they were exhausted, forced to stumble on foot across a slippery terrain, leading the mule and horse up and down creekbanks and coulees, forced to search for more open ground where the footing wouldn’t be so treacherous—but where they knew they might be easy to spot by the horse thieves. It turned out to be the sort of day that reminded Titus just how quickly the cold could rob a man of his strength, the sort of icy cold that might even come close to stealing his resolve and will to go on.
Nearly at the end of their worn-out rawhide whangs, the four hobbled into a grove of cottonwood near the lee side of some low hills and tied off the weary animals. While two of the trappers kicked around in the snow to gather up deadfall, another brought in water from the nearby stream, and the last of them brushed snow back from the ground where they built their night fire.
“I’ll take first watch,” Scratch volunteered as they chewed on their dried meat and drank their scalding coffee.
“Best by a long chalk,” Tuttle said, “than for a man to get hisself woke up when he’s dead asleep, smack in the middle of the dark an’ the cold.”
Better was it to stay awake, he thought as the night deepened, and stand to first watch. But when he had turned Billy Hooks out and crawled off to his robes and blankets, Titus found he could not sleep. Instead he lay shivering beside the crackle of their small fire for the longest time—unable to escape his fear of just what might become of them out here without the rest of their animals, in the middle of a wilderness where the brownskins came and went as they pleased, taking what they wanted from a white man.
Damn well didn’t seem near fair, it didn’t—when he hadn’t come to stay among these hills, beside this stream, after all. Only to take a few beaver and move on to new country. No more than passing through. So them Injuns had no right to have call on taking what wasn’t theirs. No right at all.
Nothing like Silas Cooper, no it wasn’t. The man took what Scratch grudgingly admitted was his share—but Cooper hadn’t taken it for naught. No, it was his rightful share in exchange for saving Bass’s life, for keeping Bass alive, for teaching Bass day in and day out. By damn, to Titus that was a fair exchange between two men.
But this stealing of a man’s horses and mules. Putting that man afoot as a blue norther bore down on these high plains and uplands. And the worst part of it was that the new snow had eventually blotted out the trail the farther north they walked. Still, the four of them had a good notion the thieves were leading them north, right into the teeth of the coming weather.
That day the trappers had even agreed that they would find the thieves up yonder, in that. Yellowstone country. No matter that they didn’t have a trail to follow. All they would have to do was keep watch from the high ground, a ridgetop or the crest of a hill, straining their eyes against all that bright and snowy landscape—searching for some sign of a pony herd, a cluster of brown lodges nippling against the cold skyline … and if nothing else, maybe they’d spot some ghostly smudge of firesmoke trickling up into the autumn sky.
That’s how they found the Indian camp, far, far off the next afternoon.
From a distant ridge they could make out the lighter brown of the buffalo-hide lodgeskins scalded black at the smoke flaps, each cone raising its gray offering of heat, and food, and shelter from the cold. Ponies grazed beyond the lodges on what grass they pawed free or snow. People came and went on foot among the lodges, down to the thick groves of tall cottonwoods, or to the narrow stream meandering in its crooked, rocky, springtime-wide creekbed.
“Who they look to be?” Tuttle asked anxiously as they huddled there on the ridgetop as the wind came up.
Hooks prodded, “They ain’t Blackfoots, is they?”
“Blackfoot would’ve rubbed us out first—then took the horses,” Bass reminded them, feeling exposed and vulnerable against the skyline. “Maybeso we ought’n get ourselves down off this ridge, Silas.”
Cooper didn’t say a thing for the longest time, studying not so much the village as he looked here and there across the valley for horsemen. Then he watched the way the men acted in camp, for it ought to be plain if they were a hostile bunch or not.