Colter had a single companion with him this time, a black-bearded trapper named John Potts who talked too much and ate too much but was tough enough and had his own traps, which cost ten dollars each—as much as you’d get for a hide—and were like stacked-up gold out there in the wilderness where there was no way to manufacture or repair them. They were heavy cumbersome things of iron and they had to be set out and held in place in the swift cold water by means of a stake driven into the bottom. The trappers would save the castor glands of beaver they’d killed and work them into a redolent paste that reproduced the scent the animals marked their territory with. They used this to cap a second, thinner stick that stuck up out of the water just high enough so that the beaver would have to step on the pan of the trap to boost himself up and get a sniff of it. Once the jaws closed on him, he’d dive and eventually drown.
Nobody knows how many traps Colter had but Adam liked to think of him as having ten, ten at least—more than Potts, anyway, because Potts was his inferior in everything, whether it was paddling upriver against the current all day or jerking meat or catching beaver to make the money to get him back out into the wilderness to catch more. What time of year was it? Fall. Fall, when the beaver pelts begin to thicken out again with winter coming on. Colter’s leg had healed by this point, though the scar was still puckered and red and he must have been thinking he’d just as soon have grown a new leg as be confined back at Fort Lisa with all those people around him and nothing to look at but bark-peeled logs and a big dull muddy river that had been all beavered out. He didn’t like people. Or not much, anyway. Not as much as being out there under the spreading sky and depending on no one but himself and why he’d taken Potts along no one could figure. Maybe Potts bribed him. Maybe that was it.
But there was a morning, first light, when they were checking the traps they’d set out the previous morning on a fair-sized creek that fed into the Jefferson—dusk and dawn, that was all they could risk, lie low through the day and don’t even think about starting a cookfire, making do with jerky and hardtack and whatever came to hand that didn’t need a flame under it—when Colter’s sixth sense kicked in. They were in their canoes, sticking close to the alder and willow that overhung the banks, silently going about their work. Fog steamed like breath out of the water and hung there, though it would soon burn off and leave them exposed. Colter was for packing it in, but Potts, greedy Potts, wanted to keep on till all the traps had been checked and re-baited. This was the part that always got to him, how Colter, who knew better, had hooked up with this clown and then gone against his own better judgment. But there it was. And still—still—even after they heard the clatter of hooves on the shore above them, Potts insisted that it was just a herd of buffalo coming down for a morning drink. Insisted, and spoke out loud too, though, of course, it was in a whisper. He must have said something like Don’t be a * or whatever the equivalent was back in the day.
That was when the Blackfeet appeared, a horde of them, painted, mounted on their ponies. There must have been two or three hundred of them or more. It wasn’t a war party, Colter could see that at a glance—there were women and children with them, crowding in now to peer over the bank at the two interlopers in the canoes. Maybe they’d only be robbed, that was what he was thinking—hopeful, always hopeful—and he made a peace sign and called out a greeting in their own language. He had maybe a dozen phrases in the Blackfoot language and could understand more than he could speak. Crow was the language he knew best. He could speak that fluently, but then the Crows, along with the Flatheads, were the enemies of the Blackfeet, which brought up a further complication—what if one of them recognized him as the sole white man who’d fought on the side of the Crows six months earlier? As for Potts, Potts didn’t speak anything. He just sat there in the canoe, looking as if he was going to shit himself.