Buffalo Palace by Terry C. Johnston Page B

feared. Knowing that his fear was the selfsame as that of the wild things.
    Indeed, his instincts told him this was a far more dangerous place than that eastern land of the Shawnee, Mingo, and Chickasaw. For here there might be no place for a man to hide.
    At the root of him, a tiny part of Titus had yearned for the protection of those thick forests, those great bulking shoulders of gray limestone jutting from the red earth where one might take cover, there to lie in wait for game or man. And he remembered the smell of that country. Damp enough that a woodsman could come to know the scent of saltpeter caves—homing in on them with nothing more than his nose, there to gather some of that mineral for making his own gunpowder.
    Bass had trembled slightly, staring out at this vastness he did not know, a space and wilderness that he did not understand. Back there, in those eastern forests, he had grown up learning what it took to live well. He knew which was the chestnut oak a man gathered for its tan-bark: that wood containing the yellowish tannin he could use in curing the hides of the creatures he shot and skinned. A man likewise knew to look for white oak, harvested for barrel staves.
    A child spent his youth back there among the hemlocks dotting the ripple-walled sandstone quarries lying among the canebrakes. On the high ridges of the pine forests, cedar jutted from the pale limestone walls. A world of many colors that was made for a child: yellowing poplars reaching for the sky among the opalescent yellow of hickory and chestnut and beech, the red and gold of maple and sweet gum, the deep bloody crimson of black gum and dogwood. Even the leafy oaks, his favorite, often lingered until spring, their color gradually changing from autumnal red, to bronze, and then to the brown of decay as they clung to their branches.
    But out here an endless plain of green lay stretched beneath that forever blue of the sky. Across it—the scar that marked the Pawnees’ route west.
    All around him in this abandoned camp stood the remnants of their meat-drying racks and the litter of slender shreds of hides crusted with hair. He knew what they had been doing here: scraping the skins of animals to remove all the excess fat and flesh as close as they could to the edge of each hide, that narrow border left raw, then trimmed away and discarded. Small animals—deer and antelope. Now that winter had released this land, the people living upon it would no longer have to survive on the small creatures.
    Now they would hunt the shaggy beasts.
    For some distance around the camp Bass could see how the ground was trampled, the grassy swales cropped by a herd of ponies he figured were filling their own bellies on the new green shoots after a long, long winter. Then he turned to look at the two animals delivering him there. While the mare ate and ate every bit as much as did the Indian pony, she did not appear to flourish on her diet of spring grass. Not that she had noticeably weakened, but beneath the packsaddle his fingertips had begun to discern the emerging ridge of backbone, the faint corduroy of the old girl’s ribs.
    And in staring out at the wide scar of trampled ground that disappeared over the rolling hills to the west, Titus wondered how smart he would be in following that Indian trail carved beside the Platte. What with the grass eaten down, perhaps not so wise a choice for feeding his hungry animals.
    Yet something primal told him to follow their trail … for these Pawnee most surely were gone in search of the same shaggy beasts they had hunted ever since a time long forgotten.
    That afternoon, not long after leaving the abandoned village, good sense convinced Bass to recross to the south side of the river, where he pushed on ever more cautiously, his eyes searching the ground that lay before him, hoping to find a knoll tall enough that would allow him to locate the Indian village on the march somewhere out before him. How far ahead of him