Crack in the Sky (56 page)

Should they drop the animals now and fort up, preparing for the inevitable?

There wasn’t any question that the Apache would follow
them, relentlessly. Both he and Asa knew it. The warriors had been dogging their trail for the better part of five days already. Pursuing the trappers right on through the cleft in the mountains, across the plateau, driving them right on down into this sea bottom of a desert.

There wasn’t a reason in all of God’s creation why the Apache would give up now. Especially when the trappers’ horses were slowing, when the white men hadn’t come across water in three days … when the sonsabitches could waltz right in on him and Asa come nightfall.

More than ever, Bass realized he had to get them to some shelter. Trees … not a prayer of finding that much cover out here. Maybeso some rocks to hunker behind. By a miracle perhaps they would happen upon some animal’s den out of the sun and out of sight near a narrow stream. Water and shelter, both.

Which did a man need more right now? he brooded hopelessly, his mind unable to cling to one thing for too long.

Plain enough to see they needed water and shelter, both.

But to get the strength to push on as long as it would take to find that water and shelter, Scratch realized he needed more blood. He needed to open up one of the horse’s ears. Maybe even open up a leg back of the pastern.

Daringly, he hobbled away from Asa’s saddle, inching his way toward his own horse’s neck and up to its head, struggling to focus on the ear. But of a sudden he stopped, stumbled to the side and made for McAfferty’s packhorse. Its ears were bigger. He ran his hands over one of them, finding it all the thicker, jug-headed cayuse that it was. Best to cut Asa’s animal. Besides, he rationalized, if it meant that he might have to coax some additional bottom from his own horse in the hours to come, then the smart thing for him was to bleed McAfferty’s mount.

Wobbly there beside the big head, Scratch pulled out the skinning knife while he positioned the ear in the flat of his hand. As he brought the knife close, one of the big eyes
rolled back as if to inspect what the human was about to do.

“Easy, boy,” he murmured at the gelding.

It was all he could do to keep his balance on those watery knees, to hold the horse’s twitching ear steady as he drew the knife down one of the fat veins.

The blood burst readily from the wound as he yanked the knife away, immediately poking his head beneath the ear, his dry mouth flung open, its blackened, bloated tongue protruding like a huge strip of half-dried buffalo liver, doing his utmost to catch every precious drop of that hot stream of life. Milking the ear from the wide base, he continued to steadily stroke toward the cut he had made, squeezing gently below the wound as the horse began a slow, circling sidestep. For every one of its moves, Bass moved—always staying right with that drooling wound as he licked and swallowed until the animal finally relented and stopped so Scratch could pull gently down on the base of the ear, urging the big head closer to his own face. Now he pressed his lips right against the open vein, lapping every bit as greedily as any man would suck at fresh marrow bones pulled warm and toasted from the fire.

The hot, thick liquid dribbled from his lower lip, down his chin into his gray-brown whiskers.

Suddenly he drew back for a moment, gasping for breath—as his lungs felt the shock of the heated air. He clenched his eyes shut and sucked some more of the warm blood.

Finally sensing his stomach lurch in revolt of the warm fluid, Bass pulled away, gasping again.

It was a few moments before he realized he was standing there on his own. No longer was he barely holding himself up, braced against the horse. As he tugged down the floppy brim on his felt hat, Scratch felt his stomach slowly settle. Perhaps it had made peace with the blood.

To straighten his shoulders now, draw himself up, and flex his arms and knees—all made him feel one hell of a lot better than he had for days.

He blinked his eyes and stared off into the distance: first here, then there as he licked his lips, conscious of the
blood’s sharp metallic tang coating his mouth. They had maybe as much as three hours till dark. Less until sunset … but something more than that until it would be dark enough for them to venture forth without being spotted by the Apache out there, somewhere in the distance.

No sign of a dust cloud, but then—the Apache wouldn’t be the sort to raise a cloud of dust, would they?

Squatting beside his partner in Hannah’s shadow, he slowly raised McAfferty across his leg again. “We gotta push on, Asa.”

“G-go on ’thout m-me.” The voice sounded hollow, thick with despair.

“Help me get you up,” Scratch demanded.

“Leave m-me. Lo, I travel through the deserts—”

“I ain’t leaving you,” he argued, shifting himself beside McAfferty.

“Just y-you go on ’thout—”

“Shuddup, you stupid idjit.”

Pulling Asa’s arm straight out from the shoulder, Scratch ducked his head under it. Looping his right arm around McAfferty’s thigh, he rolled his partner and struggled to get both his legs under the man’s deadweight as he rocked back—settling as much of the load right over his shoulders, then his legs, that strongest part of his body.

Weaving, wobbly at first, he quivered as he steadily rose with Asa slumped across his shoulders. Steadying himself, Bass lurched those few steps to the side of McAfferty’s mount, braced a shoulder against the animal, then heaved with all he had to shove the man’s upper body across the saddle.

Asa grunted, half-delirious, as he slid across the hot leather.

“That’s right, nigger,” Titus grumbled. “Hope it hurt you bad as it hurt me to get your flea-bit, crow-bait carcass throwed up there.”

Tossing McAfferty’s reins back over the flat, saucer-shaped horn, Scratch turned, exhausted, then caught his breath in the blazing heat of that unforgiving southwestern desert. Weaving forward, he patted the mule’s neck, murmuring assurance to her.

“I ain’t ’bout to die here. Not now.”

Then stumbled on by to take up the reins to his mount.

Stuffing his left foot into the stirrup, he gripped both hands around the horn—about the size and shape of a large Spanish orange—and managed to drag himself into the saddle. After he had shifted his weight back against the cantle, he brought the horse around, then leaned across to catch up the reins to McAfferty’s mount.

Urging his horse away, Bass clucked at Hannah to follow, his lips too dry again to whistle anymore.

He raised his eyes to the blazing bone-yellow sky overhead, praying his thanks that the mule and McAfferty’s horses chose to follow.

Where they were going, he didn’t have a goddamned idea.

But they had less than three hours to find water, or they wouldn’t last through the following day.

As much as he tried, Scratch couldn’t squeeze away the realization of what that came down to: they had less than three hours to keep their lead on the Apache who were following.

The Apache who wouldn’t be stopping for anything as long as they had a white man’s trail to follow.

Just what hell would be worse?

Dying of thirst? Or dying at the hands of those Apache?

One was slow … painful to the point of sheer, unbearable agony it was so slow. While the other was nothing short of a real gamble. It could be fast: taking a stone arrow in the lights, or through the heart, maybe having his head caved in by a war club or his throat slit with a knife as those pursuing warriors closed in for the dirty eye-to-eye of it.

Then again … from what they had decided some days back, the Apache likely could make a white man’s dying such a slow and exquisitely unimaginable torture that he might yearn all the more for this slow death from thirst as his tongue bloated until he could no longer swallow, no longer breathe. A savvy man might just have to prefer this agonizing broil right out under the sun itself to having the Apache hang him upside down over a low fire so that his brain slowly cooked and the blood that pooled in his head was eventually brought to a boil, his own juices so hot steam escaped from his ears.

At least that’s the way Hatcher’s bunch had described
some of the most delicious ways the Apache could make a white man linger in his dying.

And all the way south from Pierre’s Hole, Asa had told him even more stories he had heard from other trappers who had worked the southwestern streams out of Taos and Santa Fe. Men who rode with the likes of Sylvester Pattie and his son, James Ohio Pattie, other men who trapped with Ewing Young or Etienne Provost. While the southern trapper did not have to concern himself with the horse-thieving Crow and the scalp-hungry Blackfoot, McAfferty made it plain that they would have to cross the land of the troublesome Diggers—so poor they ate insects and dressed in rabbit hides, a people who shot small rock-tipped arrows at the white trappers and their horses, arrows the Diggers used to hunt their small game and birds, rock-chip points nowhere big enough to cause death—just big enough that the Diggers would be a nuisance to their remuda of horses.

Pushing south from there a man entered the land of the Apache.

He realized the horse below him was beginning to move more slowly now, almost rocking from side to side as it plodded ahead. Bass did what he could to keep his head tucked to the side, his eyes closed. As the late sun dipped below the big brim of his hat, it still had enough glare to peel a man’s skin back. As he rocked atop his saddle, his thoughts slid back and forth, in and out of dream.

He desperately tried to remember, scolding himself that he must open his eyes every now and then to scan the horizon behind them for sign of the Apache—perhaps no more than a telltale spiral of dust barely discernible as it rose into the buttermilk sky.

Ahead or to the side he was forced to squint to cut out the glare in his search for some dark border that hinted at enough moisture to be a creekbed, murmuring something on the order of a prayer that he might locate that river bottom. Praying that they would again run onto the meandering course of the Heely they had abandoned days ago when they sprinted away to escape from these warriors
who wore long breechclouts and tall leather boot moccasins, wide bandannas of colorful Mexican cloth tied around their heads. And poor skin quivers rattling with arrows.

Scratch hadn’t really seen them up close, not yet anyway.

Days back McAfferty had run across the sign late one afternoon—fresh tracks that suggested there were Apache in the area. Moccasin prints only, no pony hooves.

“That much be the Eternal Lord’s blessing,” Asa had exclaimed. “This ain’t a riding bunch. Ain’t stole no horses from the greasers east of here. Maybeso we got a chance to outrun ’em.”

That’s when Scratch had chortled. “Outrun ’em? Jehoshaphat! Have your brains been fried down in this country? Course we can outrun ’em—bunch of poor Injuns ain’t even got no horses to ride—”

“You stupid idjit!” McAfferty interrupted with a warning. “On foot them Apache can damn well keep up with a man on horseback.”

He had stopped his chuckling when he saw the serious pinch on Asa’s face. “You ain’t blowing a bald-face windy?”

“This is the Lord’s truth,” McAfferty swore. “I see’d it once my own self. Heard of it more’n a handful of times from others what saw it with their own eyes.
’Arise, O Lord; save me, O my God: for thou hast smitten all mine enemies upon the cheek bone; thou hast broken the teeth of the ungodly.’”

So those bastards could near keep up with a white man on horseback. And what little lead a man might gain through a day of riding was most times eaten right up when he stopped for the night, stopped to water and graze his done-in mount, stopped because it got just too damned dark to attempt crossing that unforgiving stretch of near-barren rock.

After crossing the Snake as they headed south from Pierre’s Hole, Scratch and Asa struck out for the Soda Springs northwest of the Sweet Lake before pushing on down along the foot of the Wasatch front, which took
them through the valley of the Great Salt Lake. Skirting the eastern edge of that first, startlingly flat desert, they trapped the narrow streams draining the Pahvant Range, able to bring nothing more to bait than some miserably small beaver, their poor plews hardly worth skinning out. They plodded on, day by day, remaining hopeful that by working this far south, that autumn would last all the longer, that they could trap the Heely country right on into the middle of winter.

Resolutely they continued past the brilliant colors and haunting, wind-sculpted bridges and monoliths that made Scratch uneasy as he imagined those tall formations to be the ancient haunts of petrified monsters of a bygone era that might just return to life come dark, freed to roam this strange canyon and land of high desert until the next sun would rise.

Every distant sound, every changing shadow cast upon the rocks rising about him—it all pricked his imagination to conjure up fierce hoo-doos and formless wraiths.

Bass didn’t sleep near as good as Asa those nights they were forced to wait out the hours of darkness in this frightening journey through such an evil country. Without fail he sat up awake with their fire blazing, weapons in his lap, ears attentive to every groan of the incessant wind as it carved its way through the canyon, listening to every rolling rumble of the distant rocks tumbling off some nearby precipice, listening to the fading echoes of what might be footfalls of nameless beasts, the hair standing at the back of his neck.