“Fine place, ain’t that Taos?” McAfferty said in a low voice, letting go of Bass’s elbow and licking his lips almost as if remembering the taste of aguardiente and Mexican tobacco.
“Catched all the beaver I needed to outfit for me ’Nother year, ’long with a little likker—”
“But think of what you’d have if all them beaver been your own.”
Wagging his head, Scratch said, “A man don’t need all the beaver to hisself.”
McAfferty stepped right around in front of Titus again, toe to toe. “But there’s some men what need one hell of a lot of country for their own. Now, you just try to tell me I got you wrong, Mr. Bass. You tell me you ain’t one to wanna drink up all that big space out there for your own self.”
“I … I ain’t never thought about—”
“You tell me you ain’t the sort what wouldn’t jump at the chance to see new country, country where you chose to go—not where you foller along behind the rest.”
He shook his head, as if it didn’t make sense. “Much as I fought me Blackfoot, I ain’t so damned certain a man on his lonesome ain’t a crazy nigger just waiting to die.”
Asa rocked back on his heels a moment. “So you’re the sort figgers you wanna die in a tick bed back east somewheres, white folk’ sheets pulled up around as you go off to sleep, eh?”
“Damn well don’t.”
McAfferty’s booming voice beginning to rise dramatically, Asa stated, “Then set off on your own hook—and say to hell with Blackfoot country when there’s more land to see than you and I both’ll ever lay eyes on in our natural lives.”
If it wasn’t downright contagious, just the way this ex-circuit-riding preacher man stirred up the juices within him.
“You understand that, don’t you, Mr. Bass?” McAfferty said. “You don’t have to trap Blackfoot country, less’n you cotton to the idee of losing more of your scalp.”
“Lost all I wanna lose—”
“There’s country far south of here what ain’t had a trap set in it. Ever.”
“There’s country like that down to Taos?”
McAfferty wagged his white mane vigorously. “I ain’t talking about Taos, or that Santa Fe country. I’ve heard tell of other rivers what take a man off torst the Californios.”
“There’s beaver there?”
“There’s beaver on the Heely!”
Scratch swallowed hard, considering, weighing, hefting it the way he would hoist his trap sack first thing of an evening as he went out to make his sets.
Eventually Titus asked, “Ain’t a white man been there afore?”
“Not one I hear tell of ever set a mokerson down out in that country.”
Bass finally tore his eyes from McAfferty’s convincing gaze to stare again at the deep-purple-hued peaks. “Sounds to me like you’re talking about a couple fellers throwing in together, Asa. Them two fellers what Jack and the rest of his bunch says’re the best trappers in these here mountains.”
Asa stepped up so close that Scratch could feel the warmth in the man’s breath as he spoke, their noses all but touching as they locked eyes. “I’m saying you throw in with me, Mr. Bass—and you ain’t ever gonna wish you hadn’t. There’s streams out there so thick with beaver, a man don’t have to … but you said it ain’t the beaver you’re here for, is it, Mr. Bass?”
“The plews keep me in coffee and powder,” Titus declared. “The fur buys the geegaws for a squaw or two—”
“But the beaver ain’t what brought you,” McAfferty interrupted, a single finger tapping against Bass’s breastbone. “And that beaver ain’t what keeps you here either.”
Right there, staring into the depths of that man’s blue eyes, he was certain McAfferty was peering right on down into his very soul. Finding the truth there that he himself had rarely considered, if ever admitted to. Perhaps this was the same powerful pull that he had seen drag grown-up folks out of those crowds gathered on the banks of rivers back east in Kentucky where he had grown up, the lure that pulled men and women right out of the crowd to join a preacher man standing waist-deep down in the stream, the same seductive call that caused those people to turn themselves over to that preacher and have themselves laid back in the water within the cradle of his arms….
“I ain’t so sure—”
“You’re certain enough that you don’t belong in no outfit no more, Mr. Bass,” Asa interrupted, his voice softer now.
“Don’t mean I can just ride off from Jack and the others—”
“And I ain’t expecting you to,” McAfferty whispered. “You wanna hook up with me?”
“Hadn’t thought ’bout it afore.”
“But you’re thinking ’bout it now.”
He finally nodded.
“Telling ’em’s a simple thing,” Asa explained. “Jack Hatcher’s the sort what understands. Time came for me to go, I set it by him and he didn’t stand in my way.”
Bass nodded again, then said, “So did Matthew Kinkead, and Johnny Rowland too.”
“Them too, yes,” McAfferty echoed. “Comes a time when a man must make his own way and don’t follow the shadow of others.”
“I’m a better trapper’n any of ’em,” Scratch declared, surprising himself.
“You ought’n be showed for just how good you are!”
Scratch turned and gazed at the distant trees across the creek, off in the direction where he had pitched camp with Jack Hatcher’s bunch. Where Asa McAfferty camped too. Then he peered back at the white-head. At last he spoke.
“Where’s that country you said ain’t never had a trap laid down in it that you know of?”
“On the Heely.”
“I s’pose you’re right that if nary a white man ever set a foot down in that country,” Titus confirmed, “then it bears out that there ain’t never been no traps set along those rivers.”
McAfferty’s eyes widened, a smile crinkling that stark white beard. “No one there, Mr. Bass. No one … but Injuns.”
It felt as if the very air around him were sucking him dry.
Not anything like the steamy country back where Bass had grown up along the Ohio and the Mississippi: where a man slowly simmered in his own juices.
Out here far beyond the western slopes of the southern Rockies they had confronted an unimaginable heat, the air around them so hot, Scratch figured it could boil fat off a flea. The sunlight grew so intense that several times a day Scratch swore his skin was shriveling, becoming just as crisp as those cracklins his mam used to fry up for him back in Kentucky … so stark and white was the radiance all around him that it felt as if his eyes were melting while he struggled to focus them on the dancing horizon, everything shimmering in the distance through the midst of that incomprehensible heat.
And the farther south they pushed, the hotter it became.
They desperately needed to find water for their animals, for themselves, before there was nothing left of him but a cracklin like those pan-fried pork rinds his grandpap had so loved to eat. Just to find a pool in some stream deep enough for him to sit—even to lie right down in—submerged right up to his chin so every square inch of his body could soak up that blessed moisture.
Titus didn’t know what was worse: sizzling beneath his thick buckskin war shirt as they plodded on hour after hour, or how the sun’s powerful rays penetrated right on through that old linsey-woolsey shirt he wore under the buckskin, soaking up the sweat. This morning both he and McAfferty had decided to strip to the waist about the same time, lashing their garments behind their saddles as they kept on moving. It didn’t take long for Scratch to realize just how big a mistake that was.
By midafternoon, with the sun still hanging high and seemingly reluctant to begin its slide into the west, Bass realized he was growing light-headed. Strangely … dreamlike. Everything he peered at around him had an unreal quality to it, shimmering, all the edges ill defined and watery, every object pale, all but translucent as they were swallowed up in the endless waves of heat rising from sand and rock and brush alike.