“This is it,” Jack said quietly, his eyes twinkling with a peaceful contentment.
“The Bayou Salade.” Spoken almost like a prayer of thanksgiving.
Hatcher reached over and touched Scratch’s arm. “Way ye said it, I can tell ye feel the place awready.”
Tugging at the back of the blue silk bandanna he had knotted over his skull, Titus replied, “I can’t remember seeing a valley near so purty, Jack. Not in all my days out here. Strange as it may sound to folks what ain’t never come to this here place, looking up to see such sculpturin’s as these all around ’em—I doubt their kind would ever understand if I tried to explain just how I feel right here an’ now.”
“How’s that, Scratch?” Hatcher asked with a smile as wide as South Park itself.
“You told me yourself the other night, Jack.”
“Told ye what?”
He rubbed the back of the bandanna over his missing scalp and hair, saying with a quiet, but keen, anticipation, “You told me I’d feel like this here’s one of them few places where a man can know just why it was he ever come out here to the Rocky Mountains.”
It was the marrow of the world.
Scratch realized at last that this was the bone and sinew to which everything else in his known universe had always been attached.
From these tall peaks where the snow never fully melted flowed the lifeblood of a whole continent. This truly was a place where a man found confirmation in the reason he ever dared to venture on past those folks back east not willing to risk all they ever had, continuing on by those not willing to dare enough in placing their very lives on the line … here suddenly to sense the close kinship a man could feel with a patch of ground, with a stretch of open country, with an entire virgin land that had embraced him.
Welcoming him home.
Into a small protected bowl the rest had taken their pack animals, stopping only when they had reached a secluded meadow ringed by thick timber and outcroppings of granite dotting the hillsides. A place big enough to afford enough pasturage for their remuda over the next two months or more, yet a place small enough to afford them ample security from chance discovery of their fires and shelters by roaming bands of raiders. More than enough wood—a litter of deadfall back in the thick groves … and water too: a narrow stream gurgling along its mossy bed right through the middle of the bowl. The stock would want for nothing as the last days of summer waned and the seasons turned.
Here they would be sheltered by the timber on the surrounding hills and the rock outcroppings. The stone faces of the granite would reflect the heat of their small fires on the nippy mornings to come, again each cold evening that autumn was bound to bring anyone venturing this high. As well, these rocky faces would serve to better hide the entrance to their small bowl from any who might pass through the valley itself.
“We used this here same place a couple seasons back,” Isaac Simms explained. “Oughtta be real safe here.”
“Off the beaten road,” Hatcher added. “Not on any trails the tribes use when they crisscross the Park, coming and going as they please.”
“Fella should keep his eye peeled for brownskins?” Scratch inquired.
“Just look down there,” Jack advised. “See all the buffler. Then ye tell me if ye figger this be a place where the Injuns’ll come to hunt.”
Titus nodded.
And with every day that followed it made him marvel all the more just how alive was this valley. The variety of wildlife were drawn here for the natural salt licks. They came for the abundance of grass, itself rich with natural minerals. And, too, the creatures came for the cold, crystalline waters tumbling down from the high, treeless places like streamers of sunlit glitter itself.
From time immemorial man had followed the four-legged creatures into this valley. Where the game went, so followed the hunters after meat and hides, after tongues and survival. From one end of the valley floor to the other ran the boggy salt marsh that had led the French trappers and voyageurs to first give their name to this place, a sparkling series of ponds where beaver had dammed the creeks and streams into a necklace of quiet water. With the arrival of autumn an untold variety of ducks appeared overhead every day, sweeping in from the north across the autumnal blue skies to join the great long-necked geese in a brief migrational layover in this magical place.
Their first morning in South Park, they had moved away from their breakfast fire into the stands of lodgepole to select and fell a number of long, thin trees they dragged back to camp, where they trimmed off branch and stub, then cut each pole to length. One by one the shelters took shape, most no more than lean-tos made from bowers laid across their lodgepole frames, finally covered with pack canvas and old blankets. More than a dozen were there: some men pairing up, a few of them preferring to sleep on their own, along with four large shelters built to protect the outfit’s supplies.
That night, well after dark when they completed their camp-making chores, Hatcher joined the weary men at the fire to run over the well-worn sequence of trapping in hostile country.
“Caleb, I want you and Rufus to hang back the first day.” Jack waited until the pair nodded. “Next day gonna be Scratch and Matthew.”
He went on and on, pairing the men, then waiting while each pair nodded to one another in recognition.
“That just leaves you again,” Elbridge stated.
“Ain’t no different’n it was after Little went under to the ticks last spring,” Jack explained. “With him gone after that bad scrape with the Blackfoot, we had us one odd man out.”
“I remember that,” Fish replied.
“So, boys—I’ll be the one what will hang back on my lonesome when it’s my day to stay in camp.”
It was not the practice of all Mad Jack Hatcher’s brigade to depart every morning to set traps along the streams and slides, down at the valley ponds.
With the exception of their solitary leader, in rotation two men took their turns lying back to camp for one day out of every five: using their time to repair tack and saddles, doctor the sores and saddle ulcers on riding and pack animals, trim hooves and mend bite wounds that a man had to expect among half-wild horses. From hides traded off the Flathead back at Sweet Lake, some spent their camp day, even nights, around the fire, cutting and sewing additional pairs of moccasins. On occasion a man would tinker with a trap he found not working properly, or he might fashion himself a rawhide sheath for a knife, perhaps add some brass tacks to a belt or the stock of his rifle.
Never was there any end to the lot of a camp keeper. When more interesting work was finished, there was always more than enough to do tending the plews: fleshing the freshest beaver hides scratched with each man’s distinctive mark … cutting, trimming, and tying willow limbs into a wide hoop … finally lashing the day’s pelts onto the willow hoops—stretching, tightening, then stretching some more. With each new day these huge, round red dollars of Rocky Mountain currency dotted the campsite, stacked against every tree trunk, sapling, and clump of brush. More were brought in every afternoon by the seven who took their turn at the streams and slides and pools.
As the weeks passed, even Scratch grew astounded by their take. Rich as some previous seasons had been for him, he had never seen anything quite as bountiful as this. Large beaver, thick fur, not one empty trap any day. And nary a sign of brownskins about.
Most mornings he had thrown the much-worn, oft-repaired Shoshone saddle onto Hannah’s back, tied his two greasy trap sacks on either side of the horn, where they would hang at his knees, and move out with the other six who would be trapping that day with him. On those mornings when it was Bass’s turn to hang back to tend to camp duties, the mule had proved just as restless and out of sorts as he was when not allowed to venture into the pristine beauty of the valley.