“Likely gone to the bottom of the goddamned Yellowstone,” he grumbled.
Likely where their three carcasses are right now, he brooded. All them plews and all that work—
Then he scolded himself. “No sense in thinking on what was and can’t do nothing about now.”
Titus turned around, putting his face into the cold slash of wind and tucked the long flaps of the capote back around his legs. As Scratch rocked gently in the Spanish saddle, his horse steadily carried him higher up the winding switchbacks that took him in and out of patches of timber and across broad, open, grassy meadows where he flushed up small herds of elk, spooking the creatures back into the shadows where they warily watched the three strange animals slowly climb out of sight as the sun sank lower against the far curve of the earth.
Across that last saddle before he reached the pass, Scratch discovered so much snow still crusted in the open places that it stretched all the way to the far line of mountain and sky. He reined up, cautious. For a few moments he calculated how much light he still had himself in the day, then turned and looked behind at the beckoning timber where he could get out of the constant, cutting wind.
Better to try sloughing his way across that deep snowfield come morning when the animals were fresh and they had more hours of daylight to work the ground. Besides, the cold temperatures would refreeze the top layer of the snow and make it far better going right after dawn than it would be now after the high sun had mushed the icy crust.
“C’mon, girl,” he crooned to Hannah as he reined the horse around sharply and clucked to the mule to follow.
That night he lay awake by the dying fire listening to the wind moaning above him in the pines, remembering how the wind called to him at times as if in warning. Stirred by something he couldn’t reach out and touch, Bass kicked free of his robes and went over to Hannah. He led her closer to the saddle horse and tied the mule’s long lead rope in a loose loop around the horse’s neck. Then he played out the long rawhide rope knotted around the horse’s neck and trudged back to his bedding. There he wrapped the end of the rope beneath his capote belt and stuffed himself back between the robes.
Closing his eyes once more, Bass laid the long flintlock between his knees, tucking the pistol against his chest as he made a warm place for his cheek against the dark, curly hump fur.
The robber jays awoke him the next morning, cackling at him and the animals from the branches overhead, their shrill protests making him start with surprise. Blinking into the new light just then warming the eastern plains below him, Titus threw back the robes and blankets, then glanced up the slopes toward the snowy saddle where the first rosy rays of light angled up from beyond the east, striking the snowfields and turning them a pale, blood-tinged pink.
He’d slept longer than he had wanted—angry at himself because he had planned to be at the edge of the frozen pass just as soon as it was light enough to make their crossing.
Promising himself some coffee on the far side, Scratch tied up his bedding, then stepped out into the open, where he dampened the ground. After pulling up some thick branches of the gray sage, he went to the animals. He dragged off the dirty, greasy, trail-sweated chunks of canvas he laid over their backs on those coldest of nights, the better to help those creatures preserve some of their own body heat. One by one, he rubbed them down with those clusters of sage, warming himself in the process with the exertion. Then in turn the three were padded, saddled, cinched, and loaded with his few possessions and the fruits of his labor.
Behind them the sun was just beginning to raise its bleary red eye in the east as he reached the edge of the extensive snowfield.
“We’ll be across afore midday,” he reminded the animals, tapping his heels into the horse’s ribs.
One hoof at a time, one short, slow step—Scratch carefully calculated his crossing of the crusty, frozen snow. He kept his eyes moving from the surface right below him to the rosy appearance of the snow some twenty, maybe as much as thirty, feet ahead of him, studying the way the ice had shrunk around the edges of a boulder, the way the crust lay in frozen, scalloped patterns where the wind constantly chiseled across it day and night. Warming each day beneath the sun, then refreezing beneath the spatter of starlight right overhead.
For a moment he gazed at the shocking blue of the heavens domed above them, and sighed. “Up this high, up here where that sky is so clear … where the sky is so damned close—if a man listens just right, Hannah—why, he might well hear angels sing.”
Closer to heaven was he here, and therefore much closer to that other existence Asa McAfferty spoke of in such hushed tones. Being this high—with nothing between him and the full, aching stretch of sky right beyond his fingertips—if a man himself wasn’t wary and careful, he just might slip right on through that crack to the far side of life and death and all that lay in between.
Was it a land of the unknown crossed only by those who slipped in and out of that crack in the sky … or by those who had themselves come eye to eye with one such spirit from that realm of the unknown? Just as Asa had with that Ree.
Thinking on those hoo-doos gave Titus such a chill that he pulled the capote’s flaps tighter around his chest and turtled his neck down a bit farther.
Step by step, one yard at a time, and he’d be off this wide-open snowfield and on the far side of the pass. Out here under the wide sky where the spirits might look down upon him creeping along, his animals like a trio of beetles burrowing their way across the bottom of a buffalo chip-might those spirits look down upon him and pluck him right up?
Scaring himself, Bass stared up at the blue, his chin quivering with the cold, shivering with the fright.
“You ain’t ever gonna get me ’thout a fight,” he suddenly bellowed at the cloudless sky.
Though it hurt his throat to yell that loud, he went on, “Might be some men what ride off to look for you … like Asa done—coming to stare death and dying in the eye. Like Asa had such a hankering to die hisself.”
Below him at the far western edge of the snowfield four magpies suddenly took flight from the tops of the distant trees as his voice boomed in an echo over their perch.
“But not me! I ain’t going nowhere easy as Asa McAfferty done! You’re gonna have to come for me. You’re gonna have to come ready to fight.”
He shuddered less with the wind by the time he reined up on the western side of the snowfield, turning the horse around and halting to gaze back at that open expanse of saddle he had just crossed there beneath the blue, there where a man had nowhere to hide, nowhere to run.
“Hoo-doos won’t dare come for a man what aims to fight,” Scratch boasted as he nudged his horse into motion once more. “Long as I ain’t so tired I can’t fight …”
Descending the steep western side of the pass, Scratch spent the rest of that day and the next locating a patch of ground he would use as his first camp for what he planned would be an extended stay in this country just east of the Three Forks. Years ago the trapping there had been almost as good as it had been along the Mussellshell and Judith. A dangerous land where only the wary survived, however. But by the time he ran across a site that offered good cover, grass, wood, and water, Bass hadn’t crossed any trails nor come across any sign that would tell him the Blackfoot routinely made this valley part of their travels.