If she wasn’t picketed on those days, Hannah came right into camp even before the rest pulled out—seeming to know that the other animals were being saddled and prepared for departure while she was not. Until he eventually trained her better, having to swat at the mule with a switch and scold her, driving her out of camp, Hannah would turn over kettles and coffeepots with her nose, braying loudly to show her deep displeasure.
Many were the times on those chilly mornings when he’d grab the mule by her ears, yanking her head down so he could glare into one of her defiant eyes and growl an endless rash of words strung together to convince her just how angry he was with her impish antics. Later that day she’d slip up behind Titus as he was concentrating on one chore or another, suddenly shoving her muzzle right against his shoulder blades to knock him off balance, sprawling on the ground.
“You’re a she-devil all right,” he growled. “Times are I’ve thought to strangle you. But I can’t bring myself to it—not when I recall how you saved my life … twice already.”
Seemed as if she somehow knew what he was saying at those times, for Hannah would eventually come up to stand over him, lowering her nose right against him softly, her big eyes half-closed, twitching those peaked ears of hers as if in apology for her childish stunts. Lord, if she didn’t know just how to get herself back on his good side again.
As if he could ever be angry enough with Hannah to kill her. Maybe a man like Silas Cooper could have shot her easy as spitting … but not Titus Bass.
The days continued their march into autumn, each one imperceptibly shorter than the one before it. The mornings grew colder, a film of ice forming in the kettles and at the edges of the creeks until enough of the high, glorious light warmed them each day. Even a blind man would know that summer was over, that the seasons had turned, that they were beginning their headlong tumble toward winter.
A man with a good nose would surely know. Autumn mornings had their own unmistakable fragrance—that sharp, crisp tang to the air. The smell of this high country dying, or its life already dead for another cycle of the year. Grasses and brush had grown dry and brittle beneath the increasing bite to every breeze that knifed its way down from the high and hoary places. It smelled of winter on its way.
Autumn advanced with an amazing swiftness above their camp on every mountain slope. Each morning he found the descending line of gold-smitten aspens had inched a little farther down the hillsides toward the valley floor … as if autumn were creeping down upon them from above, a few yards more every night.
No more were there any of the hardy wildflowers tucked back in the protected meadows—swept away by the falling temperatures and the harshness of the winds, joining the summer-browned grasses in parched oblivion. Each day brought the deer and elk farther down the forested slopes toward the safety of their winter pasture in the valley. And these days of waning light brought the constant accompaniment of whistling elk calling other bulls to combat, or the slapping crack of bucks’ antlers locking, twisting, slashing in an ages-old combat. Males battling for the right to the harem, that struggle played out on the nearby slopes of dark pine-green and sun-splotched gold quakie.
Farther below in the valley itself, the cottonwood and willow would be the last to give way before the mysterious forces of nature and time and season. But ultimately their leaves began to shrivel with age, dried with the passage of time and the invisible hands of nature’s clock. Trees stood bare, stark, and skeletal against the golden, browning backdrop of the hills. Autumn’s breath was seizing hold of this land.
And so much of the rhythm of life appeared to grind slowly to a halt like a miller’s wheel brought rumbling to a stop by an unseen hand.
Yet as suddenly as life seemed to breathe its last, the Bayou Salade burst into frenetic activity across a week or more. Swarms of migratory birds blackened the skies now. Over the lower peaks and passes, formation after formation of the spear-headed migrations paraded across the crystal-clear autumnal blue. Each formation transformed itself from black specks spotted far off in the sky to become a low-swooping V of geese and ducks, angling in to settle across the ponds and still water of the valley with a thunderous concert of honking and splashes. First the longnecks circled, their heads craning, searching for a landing spot before making their long, graceful figure-eight loop across an open spot of marsh water. Then the huge geese slanted down in formation, banking sharply before they hit the skylit water, kicking up rooster tails of spray, squawking to one another, to the ones they were joining, or to those still descending from the sky above.
On those mornings that Bass found himself out in the autumn chill to set his traps, he would stand and stare for long periods of time at the pageant of sky and water and wing—there were so many of the ducks and geese that there could not possibly be room for any more out on the huge marshes and icy bogs. Yet still they came as if spewed out of the sky.
From this direction and that, the smoothbores echoed from the far hills, his fellow trappers out hunting, their guns loaded with shot instead of a huge round ball. And every night the men roasted the rich, fat meat over their fires, this a welcome change from a diet of elk and venison and buffalo.
Other, smaller songbirds feasted before the coming onslaught of winter on those insects, locusts, and beetles clinging cooled and torpid on those grasses dried by the slash of autumn winds. Time hung in the balance here, and fall was clearly a time when it was decided just what creatures survived, what creatures would not. Each species was making ready for the coming change in its own ages-old dance of the seasons, each life-form readying itself for the time of cold and death that was winter in this high country.
True, the coming winter would decide just what would live, and what would not. This intricate rhythm that hummed around him each new and glorious day was a rhythm begun so long ago that aeons had still rested in the womb of time.
The first storm came and went, not yet cold enough for the snow to stay longer than a couple of days. Then the second and third storms rolled through the valley, each snowfall lasting a little longer before it finally melted, soaking into the soggy ground, dripping off the thick spruce boughs, feeding every creek, stream, and freshet a sudden, final burst of life before winter would squeeze down hard.
“When you figger for us to pull out?” Elbridge Gray asked one evening around their fire as the wind came up, beginning to blow off the high slopes with a wolfish howl.
Standing to stretch, Hatcher said, “Trapping’s been so damned good—I’d like to stay right to the last day afore the passes close up.”
Caleb Wood declared, “Trouble is, a man can’t never tell when he’s gonna stay a day too long … till he tries and finds the passes are all snowed in.”
“Ye saying it’s time to go south?” Jack asked.
With a shrug Caleb replied, “I dunno. Last week or so I been thinking real hard on Taos—”
“Ain’t a one of us ain’t been thinking real hard on Taos,” Matthew Kinkead interrupted.
Hatcher stepped over and laid a hand on Kinkead’s shoulder. “Ye’ll be there afore the hard cold sets in.”
Matthew’s eyes softened, and with a hound-dog expression crossing his jowly face, he sobbed, “Wanna see my Rosa.”
John Rowland looked up and asked, “You ever get the feeling she might one day figger you for dead, Matthew? That you been gone so long from her … she goes out and gets herself ’Nother husband?”
Slowly wagging his big shaggy-bear head, Kinkead gave that considerable thought, then answered, “I don’t figger her the kind to do anything of the sort … not till one of you boys rode into Taos and tol’t her your own self I gone under.”