This is the memory pass, from Nietemau.

Somewhere in the Misty Mountains, the wild men danced.

Their beards were thick and long and stuck with burrs, smelved of campfires and grease

and venison and whiskey.

The chowt and swer and cheetah cards and spill things and fight over the few women who had

found themselves up on that mountain under the stars.

So so many stars.

They'd pass pipes, shout and Spanish and French and English, and the languages of the

Blackfoot and the Hopi and the Zoony and the Navajo and the Cree and the Yut and the

Washoe and the Chashonin and the many peoples of the Western lands.

Some would pass out to wake in the morning with pine needles pressed into their cheeks.

Someone would die, surely more than one, what would the whiskey and the wild men all together

again for one time a year?

Men who spent most of their lives alone out in the woods, reading the forest floor, laying

on traps, setting snares, shooting bears, clubbing beavers, removing skins with knives

they'd wash clean in the streams that flowed from these mountains.

It was called a rendezvous, this rufus.

No matter where these men were from, no matter how they came to be trappers, no matter

what language they heard on their heads during all those days and months alone.

They knew at least that one word in French and they'd picked up enough English or Spanish

or Blackfoot or Hopi to do the business required to sell those skins, as the men from the Eastern

fur companies would weigh their work and count up the dead and give the wild men gold to go

...