“Ain’t no little bit of your piss gonna make no never mind to no wolf pack,” Scratch snorted cynically as he watched the other eight having themselves far too much fun for him to take this seriously.
“Ye can go piss yer likker away anywhere ye want, Scratch,” Hatcher stated. “Or ye can piss where it just might do all of us some good.”
“Awright—you had your fun with me,” Bass replied lamely. “I’m certain you boys just laughing inside on my count.”
“I’m dead to rights serious,” Jack argued.
“This is one critter to another,” Caleb declared.
“Wolf’ll stay away,” Solomon agreed. “I seen it my own self.”
Kinkead held up the ragged remains of his shooting pouch. “Wish’t we’d done it afore we went off to supper. Where ’m I gonna get me ’Nother bag now?”
“If’n there ain’t one to trade off these company fellers,” Rowland said, “we make you a new one, Matthew.”
Hatcher turned to Bass as the edge of the sun broke over the nearby hills, spreading day’s light into the valley. “Ye gonna pee … or ye gonna stand there gawkin’ at me like a idjit?”
With a gust of easy laughter, Scratch stepped away toward the far bushes, pulling aside his breechclout as he said, “I’ll take my turn at it, Jack Hatcher. Then I’m sleeping out the day.”
A damned good idea that had been: to sleep out the day there in the shade of their grove after last night’s drinking and raucous carousing at the brigade fire.
But near midday another of the company’s brigades hoved into sight along the eastern hills, the noise and excitement electrifying the valley. Among them rode the merry Daniel Potts.
“It’s been two year since last I saw you,” Bass cried with joy as Potts unhorsed himself among the early arrivals.
“That really you, Titus Bass?”
“Damn if it ain’t, Daniel.”
“Thort you might’n gone under, friend.”
“Came close,” Scratch replied, tapping a finger against the taut blue cloth tied over his head. “’Rapahos raised some hair an’ left me for dead.”
“But you’re standing here flapping your ugly mug just to show me you pulled through!”
“Damn right I pulled through, Daniel!” Scratch bellowed. “I been working on me a thirst for two year now … but we come riding in here to hear the traders’s already been out here and gone!”
“We’uns got our supplies back to early spring our own selves,” Potts explained, his merry eyes twinkling. “’Stead of you doing without come time for the fall hunt, I’ll see what I can spare you.”
“No, I don’t want you to go short of nothing—”
Daniel interrupted, “I won’t, Scratch. But likewise I won’t see no friend of mine go short neither. Not when I can help it.”
Craning his neck here and there, Bass glanced over the rest of the new arrivals. “Where’s that dandy goes by the name of Jim Beckwith was with you two year ago?”
“He ain’t with us—”
“Beckwith go under?” Titus asked gravely.
“Nawww,” Potts replied. “He’s riding with ’Nother brigade this spring. Are you here with them three what looked down their noses at Negra Jim?”
Wagging his head, Bass explained, “Them three … they went under.”
“How?”
“Rubbed out somewhere’s on the Yallerstone.”
“Potts’s face went sad as he said dolefully, “Likely Siouxs they were, Scratch. Maybeso Ree got ’em.”
“Let’s pull your truck off your horse and get it over to the shade, Daniel Potts!” Titus suggested, wanting nothing more than to shake off the gray cloud brought him by that remembrance of those three. “You’re the child what’s got two year of stories to catch me up on!”
Late that afternoon the growing encampment of white trappers witnessed the arrival of a large band of Flathead who announced that a sizable party of Americans would likely be reaching them sometime the following morning, as they were traveling not all that far behind the migrating village. By sunset the southwestern sky was dippled with the concentric swirls of rope-bound lodgepoles over which the women had stretched their smoked buffalo hides. Bright fires glowed at twilight outside each lodge as supper was prepared, a time when the young men were the first to venture into the trapper camp.
“They’re a pretty people, don’cha think?” Potts asked as he settled in beside Bass at a large fire.
“Handsome warriors they make, that they do.”
Invited to sit around the fires, the Flathead men joined the Americans for supper, then for many cups of hot coffee and much smoking of the pipes that made the circles time and again. And finally the old men showed up out of the darkness, two of them dragging a large drum between them. Setting it down within the firelight’s glow, the two squatted, quickly joined by others who likewise sat cross-legged and removed sturdy drumsticks from their belts.
One coarsely wrinkled man began to sing at the first thump of the huge drum, the others joining in as the songs and the celebration and the night went on.
It was near dawn that second morning when Bass and some of the others dragged back to their camp across the creek. He stumbled forward to his knees on the bedding, more weary than he could remember being in a long, long time. Then he collapsed onto the blankets and let out a long sigh.
“Wolves come back an’ chew up anything else of yer’n, Titus Bass?” Hatcher called out as his head sank back against his saddle.
“Not that I see, Jack.”
Hatcher chuckled. “Damn right they didn’t.”
Then Caleb said, “And they won’t neither—not with us peein’ a line round our camp the way we done.”
“That what kept the wolves away from our plunder, eh?” Scratch asked.
“One of these days, maybeso ye’ll believe,” Jack advised as he rolled onto a shoulder and let out a contented sigh.
“Right now all I wanna believe in is sleep,” Bass replied. “I got cut out of my sleep yesterday and again last night—so I’m aiming to sleep right on through to sundown today.”
From across their small camp Kinkead asked, “What ’bout the wolves slipping in to chew on your possibles while you’re napping, Scratch?”
“To hell with wolves. Long as the sonsabitches don’t gnaw on me, I’m sleeping right on through ever’thing.”
But undisturbed they were not to remain.
“Blackfoot to the north!”
It was near midmorning on that third day when the distant voice bellowing the terrible news split into Bass’s hazy dreaming there in a patch of shade where the breeze rustled the brush overhead.
“Blackfoot got some of our boys pinned down!”
His mind still numbed with half-baked, interrupted sleep, Bass rolled off his hip and onto his knees, blinking against the glare of bright summer light, trying to focus on the middistance where two horsemen were approaching out of the north, their lathered animals racing along the eastern side of the lake as they bellowed their warning.
Reluctantly, he joined the rest as they quickly splashed across the stream to stand with the company men as the two riders reined up in a shower of dust and grass clods. Both of them had stripped to the waist in the heat, tying black silk bandannas around their heads.
Some man on foot called out, “Damn if we didn’t take you for Injuns at first!”
One of the riders gulped, saying, “We throwed off our clothes to look the Injun when we rode through the Blackfoots what got us surrounded.”
“Who you fellers with?” Porter demanded as he lunged up to seize hold on one of the reins.