Dance on the Wind: A Novel (Titus Bass)

This is the first book of a 3-part series. Titus Bass is a 16-year-old who cannot stand the thought of living out his life on a farm. His 18-year-old girlfriend wants to keep him on his family farm and she is willing to lose her innocence to make sure he stays. After a pregnancy scare, he finally leaves by night, taking the shirt and food his mother had laid out for him. With him goes his grandfather's rifle, with which Titus won the shooting match as the best marksman in the county, having lost only to a passing outdoorsman. Titus finds, and fights, Indians as a member of a flatboat crew enroute to New Orleans with a load to sell. Along the way, he is introduced to drinking, fighting and women who sell their favors. The trip downriver is full of adventure, including the death of the flatboat's owner. The rest of the crew, plus the widow of another flatboat captain, finally make it to the southern city, sell the goods and boat, and make their way back north. Along the way Titus frees a colored man, then gives the poor slave his legal freedom. After living with a family south of St. Louis, helping on their farm and eventually loving their daughter, he finally takes off, again by night, and makes his way to the city. Little does he know, and we are not told till the 3rd volume, that he left a pregnant girl behind. Titus spends almost 9 years in St. Louis, becoming a skilled blacksmith, and during the final year befriends an older man who is anxious to get back to the western mountains to trap beaver again. As he makes the traps, they talk over many weeks, and spend too much time drinking and fighting in taverns. Just about the time they have accumulated the goods and necessities for the westward trek, the older man is killed, and Titus takes off by himself after earning the right to a fine mountain rifle. His blacksmith employer gives Titus a saddle and other gear, and Titus saddle his older friend's horse and rides away. The next volume, no. 2 in the series, is Buffalo Palace, an equally-engrossing story.

Know someone who started out on a quest and never made it? There are two things about this book that I got caught up in. First, the description of the life of those who rode the flat boats down the Ohio and on down the Mississippi. I learned a lot about a way of life I was barely conscious of and it opened up a whole new area of interest for me. Second is how sidetracked one can get in life. People don't always reach their destination on the first, second or even third try. And a lot of times, for those who risk, they don't ever make it. People make mistakes, they screw up, and sometimes they give up. The course of one's life is rarely a straight path and this book is about as good an account of that as your likely to find.

This book by Terry Johnston is like all his others (and I have them all), excellent! Terry has a unique gift in his telling of the history of the mountain men of the Rocky Mountains. He brings them to life in a remarkably vivid fashion and his readers leave each book with a sense of awe and anxiety in waiting for his next publication to hit the shelves. "Dance on the Wind" is well worth your time and as is typical of a Johnston novel, you'll have a hard time waitin' for the next one. Read it!

In Dance On The wind, Terry C. Johnston remains at the top of his genre --call it HIS genre because he is truly in a class by himself. With hard-bitten characters like ole Titus Bass and a historical playing field so real and accurate it makes you long to be there, it's easy to see why Terry's work sets high on the shelf alongside Twain and London with equal acclaim. While others wonder where westerns are going and what they should be, Johnston has been there and back --ready for the next run

The authors research and knowledge of the period is excellent. Page by page you get the opportunity to become Titus Bass and live his story from the moment he's born to when he's finally only a small step from living his dream of seeing and hunting the, "buffalo" of his grandfathes' tales. It has been far to long a wait for this next chapter in the life of Ol' Scratch. For the reader who has an appetite for more, you can join Titus again when he finally ventures out onto the plains, and learns the way of the mountain men, by reading, "Buffalo Palace", which is, thankfully, currently available. The bad news is that after reading, "Buffalo Palace", we'll have to wait for the third book in this trilogy.