Death Rattle (62 page)

Their eyes looked over the twenty brown fingers they held up, spread apart, then gazed down at that grassy park below them. An elk bugled at that moment. Its singular sound always made the hair stand on the back of his neck.

“Two-times-ten,” Waits repeated the number. “That is a long time for a man to take risks with his life.”

“I don’t have to take chances anymore,” he said. “Now that I have everything I ever wanted, I’ve learned I should never take risks again.”

Crossing the divide they dropped into Middle Park, another, but smaller, mountain valley. All around them now the elk were bugling, the cows herding up for the rut and the bulls beginning to spar as the grasses dried a little faster now and the morning breeze carried a stiff chill with the sun’s rising.

As they climbed across the high saddle that carried them from the south end of Middle Park, the sky lowered with a harsh, metallic urgency. They plodded through a swirling storm the rest of that day, camped, then awoke to the same storm. On through that day they pushed, then most of a third before he could finally start them down into the northern reaches of that southernmost of the mountain
pares,
known to the mountain trapper by its ancient French name—Bayou Salade.

“Does this ground look familiar?” he asked his wife when they halted and dismounted just past midmorning the following day.

She looked high on either side of them, studying the ever-rising tumble of snow-covered slopes that climbed into the belly of the gray clouds. “I have been here before?”

“Not this spot,”
^*
he replied. “But you’ve been in this valley.”

She peered down the narrow vale running north to south. Then she looked at him again. “This is where you killed the men who attacked Looks Far Woman.”
^†
Waits-by-the-Water turned and gazed into the valley once more, and shuddered with the memory. “And this is where all four of us had to slay the others who came after us when you killed the first warriors.”

“That was a long, long time ago,” he said, watching her eyes glance at Magpie. “Yes, when those events took place, you already carried our daughter in your belly.”

She turned in her prairie saddle to look at him, rubbing a mitten across the hot tears that had spilled down her cheeks. “I don’t want to spend a lot of time in this place, Ti-tuzz. The memories are bad. Please—take us through as much of this valley as you can before it grows too dark to ride.”

Till the end of that shrinking day, and on through the next, Scratch pushed the children and their animals alike—from that first gray stain of predawn until the last moments before the arrival of slap-dark, putting behind them every mile they could—sensing his wife’s growing anxiety to be gone from this place of an undeniable horror.

Halting at midday only to water the animals and climb down from the saddle to stomp circulation back into their legs, Bass’s family doggedly pressed on as the winds blew stronger and the snows fell deeper upon those slopes above them. The farther south they marched, the more an old nostalgia rose in him like the buttercream that floated to the surface of the steamy milk he had just coaxed from his father’s cows back in Rabbit Hash. With each new day, he felt as if he knew how it was to be a mule with the scent of a home stall strong in its nostrils.

As the days continued to shorten, he found himself
growing all the more restless and increasingly impatient at their night fires, where he began to talk more and more of the Taos valley, more and more of the spicy food and heady liquor and that strong native tobacco—not to mention how he described the raucous, risky recollections of his adventures in that dangerous Mexican village. He tucked the blankets and robes over their three children, who slept together to hold the dropping temperatures at bay, then crawled in beside his wife. Waits snuggled tightly against him.

“I have grown a little afraid of something, husband,” she whispered.

He combed her hair between his fingertips and soothed, “That was more than ten long winters ago. You don’t need to fear the Arapaho now.”

“It isn’t them I am afraid of,” she explained, wagging her head against his chest. “Ever since that day when we looked at all the tracks made in the grass by the white man’s little houses, I started to wonder about something.”

“If not the Arapaho, what makes you frightened?”

“I saw how you looked at those white-man tracks going off to the far horizon in both directions. Ever since, I’ve been scared that you no longer feel you belong in Absaroka.”

He saw how much worry was etched on her face. “Why would you think that?”

“The spring when Magpie was born, and we were going to leave Ta-house—you told me it was time for us to return north to the mountains because they knew our names. To return home to the land of my people.”

“Yes, the mountains are our home—”

“But, Ti-tuzz,” she interrupted, “I fear going to Ta-house means your heart has changed.”

“Changed?”

“I think you will want to make Ta-house our home now,” she confessed. “Because you have grown tired of Absaroka in the last few winters.”

He took a few minutes to consider his answer, then said, “If you think back to that time we spent in Taos ten
years ago, I think you will remember one thing is clear: That land ain’t for me. In the same way, I could no more go back to Saint Louis with all the crush of folks and their judging eyes. No, I wouldn’t dare sink down roots in Saint Louis, or in Taos, neither. Too many folks for my liking. Besides, the life people in those places hold dear is a life that turns my heart hard and cold.”

“You are sure? You don’t want us to live in this Ta-house?”

He chuckled, looking down at her eyes. “No. It’s a fine place to visit every ten years or so, but it isn’t for the likes of me, woman.”

“But—if your heart isn’t at home in Ta-house, are you sure it’s at home in Absaroka?”

“The only thing I am certain of anymore is that my home is with you and the children,” he admitted, clutching her tightly against him. “Where you are, that is my home.”

Her voice quivered when she asked, “Do you mean to say that your home is not in Absaroka?”

“No,” he admitted. “I don’t really know for sure where my home is anymore. This country is changing, and the old ways have been yanked out from under me. I fear I’m not a man who can easily change. All that I once believed in has been battered and wounded and shredded in recent years.”

“What you call your code?”

“Yes. It’s a different time. Now folks are lying. Friends stealing from friends. Men saying one thing to me when they damn well don’t ever mean to stand by their word. And all them newcomers too—black-robed priests and hard-nosed missionaries, prissied-up white gals and their whiny ways … why, this is just no longer a country where a man can count on his friends if little else. What’s wrong is … I’m afraid I’ve gone and outlasted my days.”

“You are not old, Ti-tuzz,” she pleaded with him. “You have many, many winters yet.”

“It’s not just how many winters I have left to live. The trouble is, I may be nowhere near ready to die, but my
days are already in the past,” he admitted, overcome by a flood of memories. Sadly, he confessed, “There’s bigger, even more terrible changes coming for this land, and I’m sure I won’t know where I belong when they come.”

After marching out of the bottom of Bayou Salade, Scratch pointed out to his family the beginnings of the mountain range that stretched far into the haze on the southern horizon.

“Children,” he haled them as they stopped to let the animals blow. “Among the white men long, long ago there once was a very holy man. This holy man was betrayed by his friends and nailed in a tree to die. Long ago when the Mexicans first looked upon these mountains at sunset, they noticed how the snows were painted with a red glow. Because of that color, they gave a name to the mountains—
Sangre de Cristos”
he spoke the three words in Spanish. “That’s Mexican talk meaning the blood of the one who was betrayed by his friends, the blood of that holy man, shed while he was dying.”

“They think the holy man’s blood is still on those mountains?” Flea asked.

“Only because the peaks are colored red like blood at sunset,” he explained.

Then Titus pointed down at the narrow northern reaches of the valley below them, showing the children where the valley eventually widened its funnel into a fertile, verdant floor carpeted with autumn-crisp grass crunchy beneath the icy remnants of a recent snow.

“And down there, you see that river on the far side of the valley?”

“Is that called the blood river?” Magpie inquired.

“No,” her father said. “It is called the grand river of the north.”

“Why do they call it that—when we have come so far south?” Flea contradicted.

“This is pretty far north to the Mexicans,” Bass told them. “Once we are in this valley—we know we are in Mexico.”

Flea shaded his eyes and studied the land below them. “I can’t see the village of the Mexicans.”

Titus snorted with a grin. “We still have a few days to go, son. We probably won’t see a Mexican anywhere this far north.”

“If they won’t come here to protect their country the way Crow warriors protect Absaroka, then this land should not belong to a people too lazy or cowardly to protect it.”

“That may be, son. The land where we stand might still well be the land of the mountaineer like me, and the Indian like you. The Mexicans talk big and puff out their chests—but they’ve never had the manhood to come north to confront this country on its own terms like the Americans always have.”

“How many days now, Popo?” Magpie asked.

“Less than a handful. The worst of the ride is over.” Then he sniffed the cold air deep into his lungs and turned to gaze at Waits-by-the-Water, his eyes growing big as Mexican conchos. “Glorree, woman! Why, I swear I can smell tortillas frying and beans boiling already!”

Two short winter days later Scratch caught sight of his first herd of wild horses racing along a low ridge not far ahead on their left. Not one of the creatures exhibited the least concern about the humans plodding through their territory. In fact, the wild horses loped along their line of march for several hours with an easy nonchalance, as if intending to discover where these strangers were headed and what they were all about. The farther south they pushed, the more of those mustangs they encountered crisscrossing their trail day after day.

“What tribe lets their horses run free?” young Flea eventually asked his father.

“They are wild horses,” he explained. “About as wild as any creature you’ll find out here, son. Almost as wild as you!”

“If I were a little older,” Flea announced, “I would like to steal these horses and take them back to my people.”

Bass grinned. “Just the way your father went to California to steal Mexican horses. Truth is, Flea—the land of
the Mexicans, here or in California—is a horse thief’s paradise.”

“I would steal many, many horses to give away to my people,” Flea boasted.

“You make me proud,” Scratch responded. “To truly be a rich man—”

“A warrior must give away all that he does not need for himself,” Flea completed his father’s moral.

Bass pounded the boy on the top of the thigh with gratification. “One day soon you will be the richest man in the eyes of all your people!”

As they rode south along the Rio Grande del Norte, Magpie and Flea remarked with growing frequency at their wonder at just how the changing face of this country differed from what lay to the north in their homeland.

Indeed, this region of the Southwest, where the Rocky Mountains gradually began to trickle out, was nothing less than a land of extremes. While the warming temperatures of each spring would give birth to richly flowered valleys, at the same time tall mountaintops rose well above the desert floor, still mantled with snow. Lush, green meadows blanketed the foothills all the way down to sun-baked desert wastes speckled with ocotillo and barrel cactus, mesquite and paloverde trees, as well as the meandering black of lava fields that served as a reminder of an even more ancient time.

For millennia without count, this had been the land of the lizard and horned toad, the rattlesnake, tarantula, and the scorpion, but this was also a country where a man found cottonwood and willow bordering the infrequent gypsum-tainted streams where that warm “gyp”
water was likely to give the unacclimated stranger a paralyzing bout of bowel distress.

The plains of this vast, yawning Rio Grande River valley stretched upward toward the purple bulk of timbered foothills, from there up to the burnt-umber red of serrated mountainsides dotted with the ever-emerald-green of fragrant piñon and second-growth cedar. Every sunrise, Titus Bass would be the first out of the robes to gaze around their camp, finding the red, naked ridges glaring back at him like a swollen, inflamed wound. But by the time the sun was rising behind those heights and they were putting to the trail, the children would find that same red vista already brushed with a hazy blue. Then late of the afternoon, the skies finally turned a deep purple as the sun tumbled to its rest.