Crack in the Sky by Terry C. Johnston

Author:Terry C. Johnston [Johnston, Terry C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-75580-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

15

Near everyone he knew was gone. Hatcher had said that’s what become of most of them what ventured out to the far mountains.

Some time ago Jack declared theirs was the sort of man who discovered they wasn’t cut out for what it took to make a life for themselves out here … so they skeedaddled back east. If they were lucky enough to keep their hair until they fled, like Daniel Potts. Bass figured there was a lot of men who had no business being out here, men who hadn’t been fortunate enough to get back east before their luck ran out.

Even Jim Beckwith—giving up on the mountain trade and throwing in with them Crow. Much as he liked Bird in Ground’s people, Titus couldn’t imagine himself staying on as a full-time member of the tribe. It was getting to be all he could do to stay on as a member of Jack Hatcher’s little brigade of free trappers.

Maybeso he just wasn’t the joiner sort. Perhaps by the time winter arrived, he might decide to go his own way, see how his stick would float all on his lonesome. Maybe he’d be able to rendezvous with Mad Jack’s men every summer. Leastwise, it sure didn’t seem none of them were the kind to give up and skedaddle back east like Potts, not the sort to turn over and go to the blanket like Beckwith done. Hatcher’s bunch was cast-iron, double-riveted beaver trapper, all the way to the muzzle, by damned.

But he suddenly remembered Kinkead and Rowland. Both of them Hatcher’s men, both of them the hardy, hang-on sort who wouldn’t turn around for the backtrail. Yet they had given up the mountains in exchange for a life among the inhabitants of a foreign people in a faraway Mexican village.

For every man who ventured west beyond the Missouri, perhaps there did indeed come a time when that man had filled his life with all the mountain peaks and ribbons of valleys, with all the sparkling beaver streams and snowy, untrammeled meadows that his soul could contain. Perhaps he realized his kind needed something more that only the settlements could offer: something that only women and crowds, buildings, clutter, and closed-in skies could give him.

But damn the settlements while there was still beaver in the mountains!

Damn them white women and their whiny ways, getting a man all bumfoozled the way they could so a man didn’t know fat cow from poor bull and damn well didn’t even care a cuss!

And damn them all them tight places where folks back east chose to live, crawling all over themselves with a racket of wagons and carriages and surreys too, shoving down narrow streets, squeezed in by buildings so tall a man was hard-pressed to see all the sky a man was made to see.

Not to mention the smell of such places where folks lingered far too long!

Not that he wasn’t glad most folks were content to live that way, satisfied to stay back east in their settlements and towns and big, sprawling cities.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.