Death Rattle (19 page)

Scratch drifted, half dozing as he recalled the gentle rattle of the mountain breeze coursing its way through the cottonwood and quakie, the unmistakable soughing of that first wind of winter fingering its way through the branches of fir or pine, stabbing its way through the thick overcoat of the blue spruce.

For the longest time Titus had the unmistakable impression he was sleeping—despite the fact that he had his eyes open. And those eyes were no longer squinting but growing wider and wider instead as the sun gradually went down, marking the passage of time as twilight loomed around them. Looking to his left, Scratch found their guide loading some more of the dry leaves into his simple Indian pipe crafted from the hollowed-out legbone of a horse. Maybe that red nigger did have something here with smoking these crumbled leaves: how it eased a man’s pain. At least no one was complaining of the nagging, persistent discomfort they suffered from both the thirst and a belly-gnawing hunger.

Time passed and he couldn’t reckon on just how much. While the air cooled, Bass noticed the nearby horses lazily shifting from one exhausted leg to another, observed men rolling from hip to hip seeking to make themselves more comfortable in the windblown sand, or watched nothing more than the changing properties of the light as a shadowy band slid ever so slowly across the grease-hardened wrinkles and fading bloodstains smeared across the tops of his leggings. The last of the day’s light crept over him as if it were an animated creature of the desert itself.

Then he thought of them back in Absaroka. And found himself dwelling on her—on the way she laughed so uncontrollably with how easily he poked fun at himself. Remembering the way her eyes took on a deep
intensity when she hungered for him. So he naturally thought of pretty little Magpie and his bright, inquisitive Flea. He yearned to be back for their birthdays … but first he had to get out of this life-robbing desert.

Directly overhead sailed more than a dozen wrinkled-necked buzzards keeping an eye on the trappers and their animals, following their march, picking over the bones of the horse carcasses the raiders left in their wake. Eegod, but it hurt to stare at the sky too long, so he shut his eyes and waited for the pain to pass.

Sometime later he was awakened by a man’s heavy, labored breathing—and realized it was his own. Not daring to breathe deeply of the hot air because it burned his lungs like a blast from a blacksmith’s bellow. Reminding himself to suck it in shallow, shallow.

Upon opening his eyes he discovered the sun had leaked out of that last quarter of the sky, which meant even more time had passed. Quickly glancing at the heavens above them, he found it nearly black with wings. A few buzzards, yes—but even more of some bigger species, their immense wingspans circling overhead in that hot yellow sky.

Floating up there on the rising thermals, patiently waiting for the men to pick up and move on, so they could descend from the sky and pick over the remains of what the men left behind. Any strips of horseflesh clinging to the bones. Squawking and wing-flapping over the putrid gut piles. Sharp, curved beaks fighting off the others so they could peck at the dead, glazed eyes of the horses, feasting on the rotting carrion until there was nothing left but bone to bleach under the sun and course-less winds.

Come dark, they’d have to get out of here, Scratch decided. If they didn’t, those damned birds might well grow bold enough to attack the weaker horses and mules, maybe unto challenging the most defenseless of the men.

Titus closed his eyes again for a few minutes and tried desperately to think of how hell might feel. Could it be any worse than this?

Down in hell did the buzzards and other carrion eaters tear flesh from a man’s body, pick at his eyes … even before he was dead?

In hell did a man simply give up hope of ever seeing her again?

The condors and vultures had landed around them as the sun sank. Something more than a hundred of the birds had gathered—first blackening the sky over this daylong bivouac, eventually landing to encircle the parched men and their near-dead animals.

A few of the other raiders were just starting to stir as the shadows lengthened. Titus felt woozy, sick to his stomach, but as soon as he sipped at some of the warm water in his gourd canteen, the feeling started to pass.

“Bill,” he said when his eyes landed on Williams, “we gotta get this bunch moving soon as the sun’s gone.”

The old trapper nodded, slowly rocking onto his knees with a sigh. “The Injun says we should reach water afore morning.”

Just over Williams’s shoulder one of the buzzards fluttered across the sand to nab a sidewinder, its sharp beak striking out to clamp down on the snake, violently tossing its head side to side, then pitching the sidewinder into the air to break the snake’s back in a second place.

“Damn, if that sight don’t give me the willies,” Bill grumbled as he struggled to stand.

“C’mon, fellas,” Titus urged as he crouched over Kersey and Purcell. “Up, boys—up.”

One by one the two dozen were slowly coming back to life as the temperature dropped degree by degree. They sipped at the last of their mineral-laced water, bathing their cracked, swollen lips and their bloated, black-tinged tongues. Most of them had long ago learned to hold a small gulp of the water in their mouths, letting the moisture fully soak into the membranes before swallowing what little was left of the warm liquid that hadn’t been absorbed.

That first sip after a daylong drought always hammered the inside of a man’s skull almost as bad as some of Willie Workman’s raw-brewed Taos lightning going down on an empty belly. It made his eyes swim and burn. It set a man’s teeth and gums to aching after all those tissues had grown severely parched. And the longer these men went without clean water, the worse this torture would become.

“Save the last you can for the critters,” Bass reminded them.

Adair grumped a bit, but once their tongues were wet and a silk handkerchief dampened to tie around their heads or knot at their throats, most of the men set about carefully pouring what little they had left into their hats and offering that final measure to their horses or mules. Titus’s saddle horse licked the inside of his old felt hat with such gusto he was afraid the animal might well gnaw right on through the damp crown.

As it turned out three of the pack animals refused to get up. With some struggle, the men were able to strip the baggage off the horses. Then the booshways set about redistributing the loads carried by the rest of the animals. Weak as they were, Bass figured, the horses and mules really couldn’t be asked to carry much more weight.

While the sun continued to sink behind the far horizon, Bill Williams ordered the men to tear through their packs, paring what was needed from what they could leave behind. Powder and lead, heavy by any reckoning, was given primary consideration. The rest of their
possibles would go into smaller, lighter packs they went about lashing on the backs of those horses and mules still able to bear up under the burdens … if for only one more night, just until they reached a damp stretch of the Mojave River.

Everything else they would leave behind.

“Shouldn’t we cache it?” Reuben Purcell wondered, gazing over his shoulder at the mounds of supplies they were about to abandon in the lee of that stand of Joshua trees.

Kersey added, “Maybeso them Ammuchabas come steal all this from us—”

“Take it along if you can damn well carry it,” Titus grumbled, sunburned and short of temper.

A wounded look crossed Purcell’s face when he said, “Just figgering we should bury it.”

“If’n you got the strength to dig down into this here ground,” Scratch advised, “go right ahead and do it.”

“You don’t figger we’re coming back for it?” Kersey asked.

Bass shook his head. “I callate we oughtta find us a differ’nt road home—a ways north of here.”

No one disagreed with that.

“How far you reckon till we get to them hills?” Jake Corn asked as they started away from their stand of the spindly cactus trees.

Bass trudged beside him on foot, all two dozen men leading their weary horses now, including the eight reluctant broodmares they held on halters at the front of the ragged column. “Four days, maybeso five.”

Later that night, the trail grew a little easier on the men and animals. Until now they had been forced to fix their gaze on a distant landmark, then march directly for it, whereupon they would locate another landmark lying at the right compass heading. Over and over through the night. But now they struck the gently meandering bed of a river
^*
that appeared to steer them right into that distant
line of hills.
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For the most part, they found the riverbed dry. Here and there a little damp sand, just enough that they stopped from time to time in the middle of the night, got down on their knees, then scooped, dug, and tore at the sand in hopes of uncovering enough of the soapy water to give their suffering animals a drink.

A man could always cut off the flat ears of the pancakelike cactus, pluck out the spines, and slice through the armorlike protective skin so he could suck at the acrid-tasting pulp. But the horses and mules needed water, real water.

Finding nothing more than damp sand in those holes they clawed in the riverbed, the men lunged back onto their feet and stumbled away again beneath a sky so black it seemed to reflect the brilliance of a million stars. All Scratch could discern of the horizon in any direction was that the dusting of those twinkling stars abruptly ended somewhere far out there at the edge of the earth. That had to be the horizon, he reminded himself as they slowly plodded along in a world of dark velvet: a blackened sky above and this desert floor below them, the ground grown just as black as the heavens.

When the moon came up, it gave an eerie, silver glow to the pale desert hardpan. And with that light the land seemed to take on a renewed life. Tiny mice appeared, only to be hunted by the saucer-eyed elf owls streaking out of the darkness. Pin-legged, long-necked roadrunners darted in and out of the cactus, chasing string-tailed rodents and lizards alike. Mile after mile the invaders were kept company by those soft sounds rising along the dry riverbed as the night took on a life of its own: the incessant rattle of ground crickets, the flurry of wings, the hiss of scurrying feet scratching claws across the millennia-baked sand.

It was still dark when those in the vanguard spotted something shining in the meandering riverbed far, far ahead.

“I figger it for water,” Smith confided.

As the word bounced back along their ragged line of march, the men spread out in a broad front, every last one of them eager to see this revelation for themselves. Titus raised his nose, concentrated, then sensed what faint breeze was coming at his back. It would have been an entirely different matter if the air had been coming into their faces—

That’s when the first of the horses snorted. Then a few others whickered. And Scratch’s saddle mount tugged on its lead rope.

“They smell it!” Williams croaked with a dry, flaky throat. “Give ’em their head!”

Of a sudden the animals at the center of the march bolted. Weak as they were, and burdened too, none of them took off like uncorked lightening. A number of the men stood in among the horses, vainly trying to control the beasts now that the odor of moisture was faint—but certain—upon the shifting desert breeze. Two men collapsed as horses lumbered past them, their ungainly packs swaying side to side, knocking the trappers down.

After not speaking for so long, the first time Scratch attempted to yell he found his swollen tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. “L-let ’em go!”

This was no wild, picturesque stampede, this clumsy, lumbering dash for the water by those weak, emaciated, overburdened animals. Then men were right behind them, loping toward the shallow black pool.

Struck with wonder, Bass shuffled to a stop, staring at the distance and realizing for the first time exactly what he was seeing. A half mile to the west he spotted another shiny, narrow pool dimly reflecting the black of the night sky just the way a freshly-oiled gun barrel shimmered in firelight. Beyond it another quarter of a mile lay a pair of pools huddling strung end to end. And so on from there as his eyes crawled away to the western horizon.

Those spotty pools were all there was of the river. Here and there it disappeared beneath the sand, slipping back beneath the dried-up riverbed sand and flat-out disappeared. But unlike pools and ponds and small lakes of
water that would eventually evaporate under a relentless summer sun, this river continued to flow—sometimes above ground, more often just beneath the desert floor.

He shambled to a stop among the rest of the men who were sitting or lying right in the shallow, inky waters, splashing themselves as the horses and mules stood all about them, noisily slurping their fill.