In the late spring of twenty-one he found himself among the outflung Missouri settlements, hearing news that two traders by the name of McKnight and James had cast their eye on the villages of northern Mexico.
“Asa McAfferty had no home in the white diggings,” he said. “And this was one nigger what had him nothing or no one to leave behind. Even the tiny flocks I was shepherd to didn’t heed to my warnings that the world was near its end. ’For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not!’”
“That when you come west? Twenty-one?”
“I was a man broke down, ground under the heeclass="underline" ready to look west for my salvation, Mr. Bass,” and he nodded. “The west—where a man depends only upon the Lord … and mayhaps a rare friend, for his daily salvation. ’This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles.’”
On through the late autumn Bass and McAfferty continued their crossing of the craggy mountains and the desert wastes as the days continued to grow short, as the nights lengthened beneath each starlit ride, pushing hard for the Rio Grande. It was snowing the night they reached its banks—a light, airy dusting, the air around them filled with the sharp tang of a harder snow yet to come.
“Santy Fee ain’t far off now,” Asa said, nodding to the east.
“We going there?”
“Not ’less’n we want to cut out more trouble for ourselves,” McAfferty replied. “’They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in.’”
Downstream at a ford they crossed that black, shimmering ribbon in the dark and rode until the sky began to lighten in the east before locating an arroyo where there were enough leafless cottonwood to provide some shelter, branches to disperse the smoke from their tiny campfire, modest protection from any distant, any curious, eyes.
So they skirted Santa Fe and its seat of Mexican territorial power, wary of the frequent army patrols the officials sent out—soldados instructed to detain any gringo careless enough to be caught on Mexican soil with beaver but with no Mexican license to trap that fur. Better was it for them to stay with the Rio Grande as they continued north each night rather than make for the well-traveled road that lay between the territorial capital and that string of villages in the Taos valley itself.
By the time they drew close to the Sangre de Cristos, Scratch imagined he could actually smell the burning piñon on the cold winter air in the gray light of a rosy dawn. At the knob of a hill they halted, their noses greeted with more of that smoke carried on a wind working its way out of the north, their eyes falling on the welcome sight of those clusters of mud-and-wattle huts, those neat rows of adobe homes arranged along a maze of narrow streets, all of them nestled across a whitewashed, snowy landscape.
McAfferty took in a deep breath, sighing. “’Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them. Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and He delivered them out of their distresses. And He led them forth by the right way, that they might go to a city of habitation. ’”
Watching the keen fire in the man’s icy-blue eyes, Scratch shuddered with a gust of that cold wind and followed the white-head down the snowy slope.
Los Ranchos de Taos was the first village the trappers reached at the bottom of the broadening valley. Beyond it lay the largest of the local villages—San Fernando de Taos—lightly veiled this sunup by a low cloud of firesmoke. Farther still they could make out the squat buildings of San Geronimo de los Taos.
“I’ll lay it’s San Fernando where Jack Hatcher and his boys brung you,” Asa proclaimed, pointing out the prominent church steeple.
“We didn’t come in to town all that much,” Bass admitted. “Stayed out to Workman’s place, mostly. When we first come in, he said it was a far sight better if we didn’t show our faces in town too much. After we went for them women took by the Comanche—things was better for us.”
“‘And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself,’” Asa quoted.
Wagging his head, Titus declared, “Much as they appreciated what we done, them greasers wasn’t about to treat us like one of their own. ’Specially after that fight we had with them soldiers.”
“We’ll go round and lay up at Workman’s our own selves,” McAfferty instructed. “Be best we don’t make too much a show of ourselves. Not just yet. Till that whiskey maker tells us what be the temper of these here greasers.”
As they reined away from the road leading into San Fernando, Bass gazed longingly at the buildings still shuttered against the cold of the winter night, at the piñon and pine garlands draping the doorways and windows, at those ghostly wisps of smoke starting to curl from the chimneys of each low-roofed house as its inhabitants began their day.
“They prepare for our Lord’s blessed birthday,” McAfferty commented as they pitched toward the hills west of town. “Even these Mex celebrate the Lord’s sacred birth, Mr. Bass. Might’n be some hope for these people yet.”
A land of extreme contrasts this: dotted with flowering valleys in the spring, shadowed by high, snowcapped peaks year-round, with green rolling meadows butting up against the sun-baked hardpan, desert wastes speckled only with cactus, lizard, and scorpion. Along the banks of each of the infrequent streams grew borders of cottonwood sinking their roots deep to soak up the gypsum-tainted water that rumbled through the bowels of many an unaccustomed American come fresh from the States.
Here in dawn’s first light the snowy valley lay like a rumpled, cultured-folk bedsheet, rising unevenly toward the purple bulk of the surrounding foothills, farther still to that deep cadmium red of those slopes the sun’s first rising would soon ignite, mountainsides timbered with the emerald cloak of piñon, blue spruce, and fragrant cedar. How quickly the light changed as night gave way to day, as deep hues softened and the last of winter’s stars flickered out in the brightening sky right overhead.
The bruised-eye black of night faded around them, and Scratch said, “Caleb and them others, they didn’t tell me much at all ’bout the time you run with ’em.”
“Some men keep their own counsel, Mr. Bass,” McAfferty eventually replied.
“Will you tell me?”
Asa turned to look at Bass for several moments, then answered. “Been trapping for two years already by the time I hooked up with Johnny Rowland, Jack Hatcher, and the rest in Taos. That first season we worked our way north across the Arkansas.”
“That’s a good bunch,” Bass said.
“Johnny Rowland,” McAfferty said with fond remembrance. “Now, he’s a Welshman—almost like me own kin. Yes, I took to Rowland, right off.”
Two years of trapping and Indian fighting, wenching and wintering in Taos, found the free trappers up close to Arikara country.
Asa clucked. “Them critters never really took to a white man, Mr. Bass.” Then he growled bitterly, “’Let death seize upon them, and let them go down quick into helclass="underline" for wickedness is in their dwellings, and among them.’”
Jack Hatcher’s brigade made the mistake of crossing the homebound path of a Ree war party returning from raids in Sioux country to the south. When both sides drew up, keeping their wary distance, the warriors signed that they sought only to trade with the white men. In order to buy themselves some time to slip off after dark, the trappers said they would open their packs—but not till morning.