Just didn’t seem to make all that much sense to him to let the days go by with nothing more than another notch carved on a calendar stick to show for the passage of time. But when he had told Silas, Billy, and Bud of his intention to go back to working the surrounding streams, not one of the three showed any evidence that they were all that interested in joining him in his labors, there in the heart of winter. Evidently they were much more content to wait until the first arrival of spring before any of them freed the thick rawhide tie straps from the tops of their leather trap sacks. True enough and no two ways of Sunday about it: trapping was hard enough work—made all the more miserable still in the winter when a man had to sloe through thigh-deep wind-drifted snow just so he could closely examine the banks along the icy ribbons of streams or the caked shores of beaver ponds to find just where the animals traveled now that winter had frozen their domain solid.
But time was what Titus was rich in that winter. A man with a bounty of time, Bass used his wisely so that by the coming of the spring hunt he found himself already a wealthy man in fine, dark, glossy beaver plews.
Even before Silas Cooper’s outfit was ready to push on west toward the fabled Three Forks country.
16
In taking their leave of Big Hair’s River Crow, the four of them pointed their noses to the northwest, intending to strike the Yellowstone itself inside a week’s time. Leaving the upper Bighorn River country, they first had to push due north past a small range of low mountains, then cross the several forks of a creek system* before they could finally begin to angle off to the west.
The chill, early-spring wind had grown strong and blustery by the time Silas Cooper’s ragtag band struck the valley of the upper Yellowstone—a wind that knifed itself right into their faces and sank all the way to a man’s marrow as the horses and mules plodded west, step by step, day after day. Beside the gently meandering river they made their camp each night, then marched on come morning. The four of them made quite an impressive outfit, what with all the animals they had loosely lashed together traipsing along behind the trappers—in and out and around the groves of stately old cottonwood and those mazelike copses of willow, chokecherry, and alder where the deer burst from cover, spooking the antelope into turning and bounding off across the open bottoms. Farther up on the slopes of the nearby hills the elk grazed and watched, seemingly unperturbed by the passing of so many four-leggeds.
Some of those packhorses plodded a little less lively than the others: Scratch already had them loaded with the bulging packs of thick-haired beaver he had toiled through the long winter to trap, flesh, and keep vermin free as both spring and their departure approached. Indeed, as winter had aged and the weather hinted at warming, there had already been so many packs of beaver that come the first sign of thaw, Silas needed to trade for another ten Crow ponies from Pretty Weasel and Other Medicine, both brothers of clan leader Big Hair. Now there were easily two dozen saddle mounts, packhorses, and mules among the four trappers—an enviable remuda for any outfit and, as always, a juicy, tasty temptation dangled before any horse-hungry band of thieving warriors.
Those early-spring days spent leisurely trapping from creek to creek along the Yellowstone were mild and sunny, the nights still cold and frosty. But as the season matured, the skies stayed cloudy for days at a time, raining now and again, whipping up tremendous gales often accompanied by icy hailstorms that drove the trappers to seek out the shelter of protective cottonwood groves or the overhang of riverbluff rimrock. Many were the times those sudden and capricious storms passed on by, leaving a layer of icy white piled in drifts across the ground. As the gusty torrents rumbled on to the east down the Yellowstone Valley, the four would cautiously study the receding clouds, peer hopefully at the clearing sky overhead, then urge their nervous animals out of the timber and press on upriver, all those hooves crunching every bit as loud as if they were walking on parched corn spilled across a hardwood floor.
Every day, the farther west they marched, it became clearer to Titus just how hardy and courageous the Crow people were. A huge country itself to protect, Absaraka sat squarely in the middle of enemy territory. As Bird in Ground had taken pains to instruct, to the east ruled the seven fires of the Lakota and their allies, the Cheyenne. On the south roamed the hostile Arapaho, the sometimes friendly Shoshone, as well as the Ute and the Bannock, while to the west lived the strong and amiable Flathead along with the Nez Perce. East of the great north star lived the Cree and Assiniboine. Yet a little west of north roamed the greatest threat of all—the fiercest raiders of the high plains: the Itshipite, known to white trappers as the Blackfeet.
Three powerful clans—the Blood, the Piegan, and the Gros Ventre of the prairie—who banded together to form a mighty confederation that stretched all the way east to the English holdings of the Hudson’s Bay Company, then swept clear down along the northern Rockies until Blackfeet territory butted sharply against the home of the Crow.
Although outnumbered nearly four or five to one by any of its great enemies on the south, east, or north, the Apsaalooke held steadfast winter after winter, raid after raid, generation after generation, as few warrior clans could boast. Ever since a time beyond the count of any man then alive, the Crow had given birth to their babes, raised their children, and buried their old ones in that land. Winter after winter they had defended their home.
Although few, this proud and fearsome people, Bird in Ground had explained, was all that held back the tide of their many enemies.
“Wherever you go from Absaraka,” the young man instructed gravely, “you take your life in your hands. I know of no others who would be satisfied to take only your horses.”
Bass clawed at his itchy scalp as he replied in his halting Crow tongue, “These Blackfoot, they want my hair?”
Bird in Ground nodded. “You will be careful when you ride west with the others?”
“Yes,” Titus had assured his friend, who helped him trap and flesh many of those prime, blanket-grade beaver that winter, “we will all be very careful when we leave the safety of Absaraka. I aim to stay as far away as possible from the Blackfoot.”
For a long time the young man did not reply, as he seemed to be weighing what he wanted to say to the trapper. Finally he said gravely, “Perhaps it isn’t only the Blackfoot you should be wary of.”
Titus asked his new friend if he said that only because the other three made it more than plain they didn’t like Bird in Ground.
“No,” was the Crow’s surprising answer. “I tell you this because I do not like them. And my medicine warns me that you must not trust being with them.”
Trying to smile as if it were a joke, to make light of what caused him to sense a chill at the base of his spine, Bass replied, “The three—they took me in. They made me one of them. They taught me. They protected me. Why would they ever harm me?”