Threads West, an American Saga Read online

  One leg slipped out from underneath Zeb as he was crossing a deeper drift and he almost fell. Catching himself on an aspen branch, he cursed under his breath. He glanced down at the laced-up leather boots that extended almost to his knee. He had fashioned them out of heavy elk hide by firelight over long winter nights in the notch cabin, one of several small log shelters he had built and called home from time to time. Gonna have to figure out some grippers for these one day.

  Moving with stealth to the edge of the willows that fringed the upper beaver pond, he crouched and looked carefully around once again. No bears, no wolves, no Indians—for now. Rising, he positioned the muzzle of the Sharps in front of him and slipped through the thin red branches of the willows until he stood on the edge of the water. On the other side of the impoundment, just a stone’s throw away, was the wet, furry head and clear V-wake of a swimming beaver.

  Taking a few steps toward a large log, red-brown with sun and rot and perched partially on the bank, he looked down to where it disappeared into the depths of the pond. He could make out his trap just a few feet from shore; his own image superimposed on the surface of the water over the snare.

  He took a moment to contemplate his wiry figure, clad in fringed, dirt stained, brown leather. The lower part of his reflected body was partially obscured by the foot of thin ice that still clung to the shore. A coonskin hat sat above a narrow face with deep-set eyes under bushy eyebrows. The facial features were distorted slightly by gentle riffles stirred by the breeze that wafted down the creek. Even that distortion did not hide two thick purple claw mark scars that descended from below the left eye diagonally down around to the left jawline and neck below the ear. The image grinned at him. Not very pretty are you?

  Reaching over his shoulder, he drew out the fourteen inch bone-handled blade that rested in the fringed and beaded sheath on his back. Carefully using the log for support, he sank his arm into the frigid waters up to his elbow and plucked the empty trap from the bottom. He let it lay in the matted winter grass to drip-dry and strode another fifty feet around the pond where he repeated the procedure with the second trap. It, too, was empty. After each action, he paused, peered and deciphered the sounds of the meadow. The beaver he had seen earlier had crawled on the bank and was busily gnawing on the bark of an aspen tree it had no doubt felled the night before. Kneeling, Zeb rested his left elbow on his left knee, taking careful aim at the beaver’s head with the Sharps. Pulling back the hammer, he leveled his right eye down the sites atop the forty-seven-inch blued barrel, then hesitated.

  Opening both eyes from his sighting squint, he lowered the rifle and gingerly uncocked the firing mechanism. The beaver halted its industrious work and stared at him from across the pond as Zeb spoke to it in a low voice. “Hell, you are a lucky damn critter today. I don’t need to make no noise, and I’m not much inclined to unwrap an entire pack for one pelt.” Slinging the traps over his shoulder, he watched the beaver for a moment longer. “We’ll see you next season. Have lots of young-uns.”

  Zeb walked with wary caution back to the horse and mules. He stowed the traps in the panniers strung behind the horse’s saddle, thrust the Sharps and Enfield deep into their scabbards, mounted and paused once more to scout in all directions. “All right, fellas, time to skedaddle.” Wheeling the mustang around, followed by the mules, he picked his way back down the slope, careful not to skyline their figures during the descent.

  It was not long until evening, and they still had two hours to the notch cabin. The crimson tendrils of the departing day kissed the tops of snowcapped peaks. Below the snowline of the nearest three mountains, the land had a red cast that mingled with the green of conifer stands. Cooled at higher elevations, the late afternoon air currents whispered gently downslope. His trail led him through grassy plateaus, rimmed by red rock, glowing and pulsing with the low angle of the sun. Stands of trees gathered in clusters wherever unseen springs bubbled to the surface. Here and there were tall, dark, abrupt outcroppings of stone. Bits of white quartz sparkled in the rocks, which stood like sentinels guarding the meadows in the stair-step terrain.

  As he rode, Zeb gave some study to his plan. He didn’t like towns—he wasn’t partial to being in the same vicinity as a lot of other people. Especially white folks. On the other hand, the two trading posts, Bent’s Fort along the South Platte, and the others, Vasquez or St. Vrain on the Arkansas River, would only give him a fraction of the real worth of his pelts, gathered during the long seasons of last fall and this spring. He wondered if he could tolerate the sights, sounds and smells of Cherry Creek for the few days it would take to sell or trade the skins.

  The edge of night was chasing the last of daylight from the western sky when Zeb reached the cabin. He tied off the mules and put the horse in the rough log corral. Then, patiently rigging the elementary block and tackle he had fashioned to a thick cottonwood limb, lifted the bundles of furs, still attached to the pack saddles, from the backs of the mules.

  He rubbed down the animals with straw and threw them some of the wild hay grass he had hand cut with a scythe the previous fall in the small sub-irrigated meadow by Divide Creek, just below the cabin. “Good job today, boys. I think tomorrow we just might start our trek down to the flats.” Reflecting for a moment, he spat the last of his wad of chew to the earth at the side of his feet and added, “Not that I’m all too fired-up about it.” Sliding the long horizontal poles over the heavy log bucks that constituted the jack leg enclosure, he turned and walked a few steps toward the cabin. Before reaching the front stoop, he stopped to regard the shadowed shape of the low-slung structure and rolled himself a smoke.

  It had taken a long time using the stock, pulleys and ropes to build the small shelter in this high-country nook. It was only sixteen by twenty feet but he had put great care into its construction. The large hewn logs at the base were well fitted, the walls rising with smaller logs until they disappeared under the sloped cover of the roof. The chink was a mixture of grass and dried mud borne by the mules, pail after pail from the inside corner of the creek a quarter-mile downstream. There the spring runoffs slowed and dumped silt before they made the turn to rush and tumble down the mountain. Probably need to rechink this coming season.

  Lodgepole pine rafters strung out unevenly below the edge of the roof over the small front stoop by the door. The roof, too, was a mixture of mud and grass, which, except in the worst of the storms, kept the weather from the interior of the cabin. He had fashioned shutters from smaller tree boughs over the four glassless windows, one on each wall. Each had a firing slit. He had never had to use them for defense. The rope-hinged closures kept out the wind and helped retain the heat. The door was thick and sturdy, built of three-inch thick rough-sawn planks hauled from Bent’s Fort and Cherry Creek nine years before, the last time he had been to the eastern edge of the mountains.

  Drawing deeply on the cigarette he exhaled slowly and critically surveyed the door. Zeb was used to having conversations with objects, his small remuda and himself. Sometimes it was comforting to hear his own voice. “I need to put in a real hinge system,” he said aloud. The four doubled-up leather hide strips, their ends nailed to the frame and inside edge of the door, held up for only a few months before they had to be replaced. Zeb stroked his mustache, “Maybe I will get me some of that hardware this trip. Metal ought to last a sight longer than hide.” Looking up at the sky, he sniffed several times. Damp. Smells like snow. Winter’s a long time goin’ up this high this year.

  In the cabin, Zeb lit the single oil lamp, which—along with one six-pane window—had miraculously made its unbroken way from the flatlands on that same trip almost a decade before. Need a refill on this lamp oil too. And tobacco and papers. I reckon I’d better make me a list. He built a fire in the fireplace that he had painstakingly crafted from creek cobblestones and makeshift mortar. Placing the metal triangle upright and its cast-iron hanging pot close to the flames, he cut off chunks from the salted elk that hung from the ceiling, addi
ng water, and throwing in some wild scallions and previous season asparagus he had gathered during the ride to the beaver ponds.

  Lying on the makeshift hide bed on the dirt floor, coonskin hat still on, he supported his head on one hand and watched the fire.

  “Yep,” Zeb said to the cabin logs that glowed amber from the flickers of flame, “Yep, I think I just might go to Cherry Creek. More money and I can get some things I won’t find up on the Arkansas. With luck, I can vamoose out of town in a day or two. That shouldn’t harm me none.”

  *****

  The morning was high-country spring crisp, almost cold, with a dusting of wet snow. The air warmed quickly as the sun rose over the sheer, interspersed, red rock ledges marching up the mountain across the creek and the light of emerging day danced on the riffles of the stream. Grimacing, Zeb began to roll a smoke and spat the last of his chew, which hit the upright on the hitching post in front of the cabin porch exactly in the center. He glanced out at the horse and the pack mules. “Be with you fellas in just a second.”

  Turning, he walked back into the cabin, opened one of the window shutters to allow in some light and rummaged for paper. He had learned to write at an early age, though his block print was painstaking. Sitting down on one of the two stumps that served as seats at the makeshift table, he whittled down the point of the pencil with a knife, licked the lead and began to write. The piece of tattered paper he found already had writing on it. Occasionally, on a cold winter night, as skins dried and after chores were completed, he would pencil out thoughts or notions inspired by the eerie groan of the wind as it played on the log corners of the cabin.

  Pausing, he stared vacantly out the panes of the cabin’s only glassed window, that old familiar melancholy emptiness simmering in his gut again. It was worn far worse on those long snowy nights when the creep of darkness between sunrise and sunset seemed interminable. It was rare that he could pick up a pencil and not think of his family, particularly his mother. She had been a schoolteacher in the small western Missouri town on the outskirts of St. Louis near the farm where he, his brother and parents lived. It was she who had insisted he be literate.

  His father had toiled on the one hundred sixty acres they called home. He had been a quiet, taciturn man. Zeb loved and respected him but they were never close. It was his mother, an attractive but rugged woman who looked older than she was, whom Zeb revered. She read him books of faraway places and strange adventures before he could read them for himself. It was the stories of the French and Spanish explorers that intrigued him most. Many nights he would fall asleep in his mother’s arms as they read together from the latest book. He loved to watch her teach during the two days a week his father allowed him to attend the one-room schoolhouse. He marveled at her kindness, patience and sincere wish to help others.

  Then there was the day his life turned inside out. He had gone into town for supplies. Despite his father’s admonition to hurry back, he had spent an extra hour with some friends. His mind had long ago blacked out the details but he could still feel the horror, panic and nausea when he saw the billows of thick gray smoke and heard scattered gunshots a few miles out from the farm. Several bands of white renegades had been terrorizing lonely farms along the Mississippi River north and south of St. Louis. Zeb knew what they did to their victims.

  Frantically slapping the lines along the flanks of the old team of horses pulling the wagon, he urged them into a gallop but he arrived too late. The outlaws were gone, with all the horses. Many of the livestock had been shot and those still alive were bleating in terror. His father and older brother lay face down, both shot in the back and scalped. They had obviously made an attempt to get out of the grain field and reach the house, now being consumed in a searing eruption of flame. Every building in the farmstead was burning. Searching desperately for his mother, he finally found her scalped body, dress half-torn away, eyes open and sightless in a pile of bloody hay behind the smoldering hay barn. From that point, his memory went blank.

  Townspeople who went out to the farmstead later told him he had fashioned grave markers and buried the three bodies but Zeb had never been able to remember any of that. The bank took the farm and he found a job working for room, board and meager wages for eighteen months at the livery stable, where he learned everything he could from every pioneer, trapper and cavalry man on their way to St. Louis to head west. He learned the renegades that had murdered his family were led by a half-breed who went by the name of Black Feather. He toyed with the idea of revenge but eventually concluded that what he wanted was to leave Missouri, hole up in the Rockies and never return.

  Taking two deep breaths, he exhaled slowly, closing his eyes until the scenes in his head faded. He finished his list, held the paper up to the light from the window, squinting and nodded his head with satisfaction. That ought to do. He felt strangely cleansed.

  Whistling, he headed to the corral to saddle Buck and reload the pack saddles and pelt bundles on the mules.

  CHAPTER 2

  May 3, 1854

  REUBEN

  Fifty-seven hundred miles east of the hewn, sun-faded logs of Zeb’s notch cabin, Reuben Frank leaned against the weathered planks of the hay wagon, watching the languid current of the Lahn River drift past the great white barn. Upstream lay several fields gridded by fences and hedgerows. The green, high blades of the growing grass had a slight remaining vestige of winter brown. Some shoots that forgot it’s spring. Watching his father drive a wagon pulled by two stout draft horses along one field, Reuben took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. I wonder what the seasons will be like over there? Lifting thin arms to chest height, his father slapped the lines to the draft horses with gentle authority. The large blocks of wood dragging behind the wagon prodded and tilled the manure of winter pasturing into the fertile earth. Just beyond the river, the rooftops of the village of Villmar were still glistening with a rare late season frost turned to dew by the morning sun.

  Looking down, he kicked one boot against the other to dislodge mud, his eye noticing an image of himself in the glass surface of a puddle remnant. The young man who stared back at him with worried eyes stood six feet tall with dark brown wavy hair. The image had an athletic frame, not particularly broad-shouldered but powerful nonetheless. Green eyes with a hint of gray sat in a wide face. Stroking his square jaw, his eyebrows furrowed in thought as he leaned against the rough sawn planks. He wondered if he would ever see his family, particularly his father, again.

  “Better get this hay out to the heifers,” he mumbled in an attempt to distract himself. Drumming his fingers unconsciously on the rim of the wagon bed sidewalls, he stood a moment longer to watch the familiar scene. The table conversation from the night before still rang in his head. I will miss this simple part of each day.

  They had all come in for the evening meal. Erik, the youngest, was an excellent cook and had taken over much of the domestic duties when their mother had died in 1852, two years prior. Slightly built, scholarly and musically inclined, he wore thick spectacles that were always slipping to the end of his nose before he pushed them back with an impatient gesture.

  “Helmon,” he said to one of his brothers, “you’ve been sitting there for half an hour. I told you I would call you when supper was ready. The least you could do is help set the table.”

  Rising, Helmon fumbled around the kitchen, his large frame seeming out of place as he set out dishes and looked for silverware. Handsome, although a bit overweight, he was a ladies’ man. His general philosophy was that any problem could be solved by pounding it into compliance, an attitude he shared with their eldest brother Isaac.

  “Supper is ready!” Erik called in his high voice.

  “If you were a woman, I’d marry you,” said Isaac, removing the straps of his overalls from his shoulders as he came in the kitchen door. There was a bite to his comment. He was at least four inches taller than Reuben, with large hands and a florid face. As the senior sibling of the four, he had taken it upon himself to
act as de facto head of the household as their father’s health deteriorated, though he often reluctantly deferred to Reuben’s careful reasoning. However, Isaac was a good farmer and knew how to make the land prosper.

  “It does smell good, Erik,” complimented Reuben, helping him place the platters of kosher beef sausage and boiled potatoes on the table. “Rye bread, my favorite.”

  “Yes, and the jam is there, Reuben, I know how you like lots of jam with rye bread,” smiled Erik, beaming at the praise.

  All four brothers had taken a seat but were waiting for their father, Ludwig. They heard his slow but steady footsteps as he made his way to the kitchen. He appeared through the low entry and sat down. Bowing their heads as he said the Hebrew blessing over the food, they watched hungrily as Erik served their father first. Then with good-natured jostling, they filled their plates.

  For a moment, the table was silent with the exception of the scratch of utensils on the china place settings.

  Sitting back and wiping his mouth with his sleeve, Isaac grinned, “Saw you walking with Hilda the other day, Helmon. She is a fine figure of a girl,” he teased.

  Helmon had a mouth full of food, and although his answer was indecipherable, his tone of voice was not. They all laughed and respectfully suggestive conversation followed about the girls in Villmar, and who liked whom best.

  When they had finished the meal and began to rise from the table, Ludwig motioned them to stay seated. “Erik, would you please clear the table?” asked Ludwig. His voice was soft.