As they were stumbling along, pushed by the cold north wind, Gus happened to look back, a habit he got into after his encounter with the grizzly bear. He could not get Bigfoot’s story about the man who had been stalked while fishing out of his mind. It was worrisome that bears could be so stealthy.
When he glanced over his shoulder he got a bad start, for something large and brown was hurtling down toward them. Whatever it was was still far away—he could only see a shape, but it was a brown shape, the very color of a bear.
“Captain, get the rifles!” he yelled, in consternation. “There’s a bear after us.”
For a moment, the whole troop believed him—no one could clearly determine what was moving toward them, but something was, and fast. Salazar lined his men up and had them ready, their guns primed.
“I wish you’d let me shoot, Captain,” Bigfoot said. “Your boys are so scared I expect half of them will miss.”
“I expect it, too,” Salazar said. He walked over to the nearest soldier and took his musket. He walked over to Bigfoot, untied his hands, and handed him the musket.
“The last time I handed a Texan a gun, he shot me,” Salazar reminded him. “Please be honorable, Mr. Wallace. Shoot the bear. If we kill it we will have meat enough to make it across the dead man’s walk.”
Just then, Gus saw something that was even more unnerving: the bear leapt high in the air. It seemed to fly for several yards, before coming back to earth.
“Good Lord, it’s flying,” he said.
As he said it, the shape flew again—the whole troop was transfixed, even Bigfoot. He had heard many bear stories, but no one had ever told him that grizzly bears could fly. He squatted and leveled his musket, though the bear—if it was a bear—was still far away.
Some of the young Mexican soldiers became so nervous that they began firing when the hurtling brown object was still two hundred yards away. Salazar was irritated. The wind whirled dust from the plain high, so that it was hard to see anything clearly.
“Don’t fire until I say fire,” he said. “If you all fire now you will be out of bullets when the bear gets here, and he will eat us all.”
“I’m saving my bullet,” Bigfoot said. “I intend to shoot him right between the eyes—that’s the only sure way to stop a bear.”
Just then, the hurtling brown object collided with a hump of rocks and flew high in the air, above the dust. For the first time Bigfoot saw it clearly and he immediately lowered his rifle.
“Boys, old Gomez has got us rattled,” he said. “That ain’t a bear—that’s a tumbleweed.”
Salazar looked disgusted.
“Seven of you shot, and the tumbleweed is still coming,” he said.
“Why, it’s the size of a house,” Gus said. He had never imagined a weed could grow so big. It hurtled by the company, rolling over and over, as fast as a man could run. From time to time it hit a bump or a small rock and sailed into the air. Soon it was a hundred yards to the south, and then it vanished, obscured by the blowing dust.
“Let us have no more talk of bears,” Salazar said, looking at Gus.
They marched late into the night, with only a few bites of food. In San Saba the men had been given gourds, to use as water carriers—some of them had already drunk the last of their water, while others still had a little. The temperature had dropped and all the men longed for a fire, but there was nothing to burn, except the branches of a few thin bushes. The Texans gathered enough sticks to make a small blaze and were about to light it when Salazar stopped them.
“No fires tonight,” he said.
“Why not?” Gus asked. “I’d like to warm my toes.”
“Gomez will see it if he is still following us,” Salazar said.
“Why would he follow us—he’s done got our donkeys and most of our food,” Bigfoot asked.
“He might follow us to kill us,” Salazar replied.
“He could have killed you last night and he didn’t,” Bigfoot said. “Why would he walk another day just to do what he could already have done?”
“Because he is an Apache, Señor,” Salazar said. “He is not like us. He may have gone home—I don’t know. But I want no fires tonight.”
By midnight, the cold had become so intense that the men were forced to huddle together for warmth. Even huddled, they were so cold that several of them ceased to be able to feel their feet. Johnny Carthage could not overcome his dread. He tried to think of the sunlight of south Texas, but all he could think of was the terrible white sleet that had nearly taken his life a few days before. He was squeezed up against Long Bill—he could feel his friend shivering. Long Bill shivered violently, but slept, his mouth open, his breath a cloud of white in the cold night. Johnny began to wish that Bill would wake up. Bill had been his pard—his compañero. Bill had risked his life to locate him and bring him out of the terrible sleet storm. Now the dread of the cold was overwhelming him—he wanted Long Bill to sense it and wake up, to talk him out of what he meant to do with the small knife he had just taken out of his pocket. He wanted his oldest and best friend to help him through the night. Johnny Carthage began to tremble even more violently than the man he was huddled against. He trembled so that he could scarcely hold the knife, or raise the blade. He didn’t want to drop the knife. If he did, he might not have the strength to find it in the freezing night. He didn’t want to wake his friend, so tired from the long day’s march; yet, he needed his help and began to cry quietly, in despair. He didn’t want to live, his hope was broken; no more did he want to die, without his friend to help him. There was no sound on all the plain except the breathing of the exhausted men around him. The darkness was spotted with little clouds—the white breath of his compañeros. Johnny’s gimpy leg was aching terribly from the cold; his foot twitched, twitched, twitched; though he could not feel his foot he felt the twitching, regular as the ticking of a clock.
“Dern this leg,” he whispered. “Dern this leg.”
Then he opened the knife, and put the blade against his throat—but the blade was so cold that he withdrew it. He began to sob, at the knowledge that he hadn’t the strength to push the cold knife blade into his throat and cut. It meant he would freeze, but he could not do it amid the Rangers, because they would insist on making him go on. They would not accept the fact that he didn’t want to live anymore.
Johnny put the knife to his throat again, but again he withdrew it. The tip made a tiny cut in his neck and the cold seared the cut, like a brand. Johnny quietly moved an inch away from Long Bill, and then another. Slowly, waking no one, he eased out from the midst of the Rangers, a foot at a time. Even when he had slipped beyond the sound of their breathing, he merely scooted over the cold ground, a foot at a time.
Of all the Texans, only Matilda Roberts was awake. At night she had taken to sleeping between the two boys, making Call turn his torn back to her so she could warm it. Gus slept on the other side, squeezed up against her as close as he could get. Both boys slept, but Matilda didn’t. She saw Johnny Carthage—he crawled right by her. As he was about to go into the night he felt her gaze, and turned to look at her for a moment. He could only see her outline, not her face; nor could she see him clearly, yet she knew who he was and where he was going. Johnny paused in his crawl. The two of them looked at one another, through the darkness. Matilda opened her mouth, but closed it again, without speaking. Johnny Carthage was beyond her words—but she did reach out and squeeze his arm. She heard him sob; he touched her arm for a moment, before he crawled away. “Oh, Johnny,” she whispered, but she didn’t try to stop him. Since Shadrach’s death she had used her strength for the boys, Gus and Call—one was hurt, and the other was foolish. It would take all her strength, and perhaps more than her strength, to get them across the desert. She could not save them and Johnny Carthage, too—nor could Long Bill save his friend without losing his own chance to live. If the cold didn’t take Johnny, the stony ground would grind at him until it broke him. If he wanted to make his own end,
she felt it was wrong to stop him. His chances were slight at best; there was no point in his suffering beyond his strength.
Even so, it was hard to listen to the scraping of his poor leg, as he dragged himself over the hard ground, into the icy night. But the scraping grew faint, and then very faint. Soon she could hear nothing but the breathing of the two boys who slept beside her. Since the day when Caleb Cobb had struck his foot with the rifle barrel, Call had limped almost as badly as Johnny. Probably there were broken bones, somewhere in his foot—but he was young. The broken bones would heal.
Johnny Carthage crawled on until he figured he was almost two hundred yards from camp. He had worn one of his pants legs through and scraped one of his knees on the icy ground. Bigfoot had once told him that freezing men felt a warmth come over them, near the end; when he judged that he was far enough from camp not to be found, even if Long Bill should wake and miss him and come looking, he stopped and sat, shivering violently. He waited for the warmth in which he could sleep and die—he had been cold long enough; he was ready for the warmth, but the warmth didn’t come—only a deeper cold, a cold that seeped inside him and chilled his lungs, his liver, even his heart.
Desperate for the warmth, he opened his little knife again and clutched it tightly, meaning to plunge it into his neck, where the great vein was. But before he could grasp the knife tightly enough in his shivering hands, he looked up and saw a shadow between himself and the starlight. Someone was there, a presence he felt but could not see. Before he could think more about it, Gomez struck. Johnny Carthage finally felt the longed-for warmth—a warm flood, flowing down his chest and onto his freezing hands. For a moment, he was grateful: whoever was there, between him and the cold stars, had taken a hard task off his hands. Then he slipped down and the shadow was astride him, opening his pants. Before Gomez struck again, one-eyed Johnny Carthage had ceased to mind the cold, or to feel the pain of the knife that had severed his privates. Oh, Bill, he thought—then all thoughts ceased.
Gomez wiped his knife on Johnny Carthage’s pants leg, and moved quietly toward the Mexican camp. Long before he got there, he heard the snores of several sleeping men. He had planned to kill the shivering Mexican sentries and take their guns, but when he realized that the large woman was awake, he changed his mind. He did not want the large woman to know he was there. The night before, in the little cave where he rested, he had seen a snake, though it was much too cold for snakes to be moving about; worse, late in the night, he had heard the call of an owl, though he was far out on the malpais, where no owls flew. He knew it must be the large woman who summoned the snake and the old owl to places where they should never be. He knew the large woman must be a witch, for only a witch would be traveling through the malpais with so many men.
Gomez knew that the large woman had been the woman of Tail-of-the-Bear, and Tail-of-the-Bear had been a great man, perhaps a shaman. Gomez turned away from the camp at once; he did not want the witch to find out that he was near. If she knew, she might summon the owl again—the buu—and to hear the call of the buu twice meant death.
Gomez skirted the camp and walked several miles, to where he had left his two sons. One of them had found a wolf den that day—they had made a little fire and were cooking the wolf pups they had caught. Gomez wanted to eat one of the young wolves—it would give him cunning, and protect him from the buu and the witch, the large woman who had traveled with Tail-of-the-Bear.
2.
LONG BILL COLEMAN WAS frantic, when he discovered that Johnny Carthage had left him in the night. He felt guilty for not having watched his friend more closely.
“I expect he just went for a walk, to keep warm,” he said. “I ought to have kept him warmer, but it was hard, without no fire.”
Bigfoot did not suppose that Johnny Carthage had merely walked into the night to keep his feet warm; nor did Captain Salazar believe it. A few hundred yards to the east, they saw four buzzards circling.
“Bill, he went off to die—got tired of this shivering,” Matilda said, before Gus or anyone could comment on the buzzards. It was colder that day than it had been the day before. The whole troop was shivering.
Salazar allowed the Texans to burn their few pitiful sticks, but the blaze was not even sufficient to boil coffee. It died, and the only warmth they had was the warmth of their own breath—they all stood around blowing on their hands. When Long Bill saw the buzzards and realized what they meant, he had to be restrained from running to bury his friend.
“Bill, the buzzards have been at him,” Bigfoot said. “Anyway, we got nothing to bury him with. Gus and me will go and take a look, just to be sure it wasn’t some varmint that froze to death.”
“Yes, go look,” Salazar said. “But hurry. We can’t wait.”
When Gus saw the torn, white body of Johnny Carthage he immediately turned his back. Bigfoot, though, shooed the buzzards away and took a closer look. What he saw didn’t please him. Johnny’s throat had been slashed, and his privates cut off. The buzzards hadn’t cut his throat, nor had they castrated him. Bigfoot circled the body, hoping to see a man track—something that would allow him to gauge the strength of their opponents. If several Apaches had been there, that would be one thing. It would mean that none of them could sleep safe until they moved beyond the Apache country. But if Gomez was so confident that he would come to the camp alone, take a horse, kill a man—or several men—then they were up against someone as formidable as Buffalo Hump—someone they probably could not beat.
As Gus stood with his back turned, trying to keep his heaving stomach under control, Bigfoot remembered the dream he had had back on the Pecos, the dream in which Buffalo Hump and Gomez were riding together, to make war on anyone in their path, Mexican or white. Now, in a way, that dream had come true, even though the two Indians might be hundreds of miles apart, and might have never met. Buffalo Hump had almost killed them on the prairie, and now Gomez was cutting them down in the New Mexican desert. If the two men, Comanche and Apache, ever did join forces, the little troop standing around in the cold would have no chance. Texans and Mexicans alike would be drained of blood like poor one-eyed Johnny Carthage, their throats cut, and their balls thrown to the varmints.
He looked across the long, barren plain, hoping to see some sign—a wolf, a bird, a fleeing antelope, anything at all that would tell him where the Apaches were. But the plain was completely empty—only the gray clouds moved at all. Gus McCrae had dropped to his knees—despite himself, his stomach turned over; he retched and retched and retched. Bigfoot waited for him to finish, and then led him back to camp. He didn’t tell Gus what he knew, or what he feared. The troop was close to panic anyway—panic and despair, from the cold and hunger and the knowledge that they were on a journey that many of them would not live to finish.
“Did he freeze?” Long Bill asked, grief stricken, when Bigfoot came back.
“Well, he’s froze now, yes,” Bigfoot said. “We should get to walking.”
Call’s hurt feet were paining him even more than they had been. He had wobbled the day before, coming over a ridge; he hit his foot on a rock, and since then, had had a sharp pain in his right foot, as if a bone thin as a needle was poking him every time he put his foot down.
All that day he struggled to keep up, helped by Matilda and Gus. He noticed that Bigfoot kept looking back, turning every few minutes to survey the desert behind them. It became so noticeable that Call finally asked Gus about it.
“Did Johnny just freeze?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Gus said. “All I seen was his body,” Gus said. “The buzzards had been at him.”
“I know the buzzards had been at him, but were the buzzards all that had been at him?” Call asked.
“He means did an Indian kill him,” Matilda asked. She too had noticed Bigfoot’s nervousness.
Gus had not even thought about Indians—he supposed that Johnny had just gone off to walk himself warm, but had failed at it and frozen. He had only glimpsed the
body from a distance—it was blood splotched, like the body of Josh Corn had been, but he had supposed the buzzards had accounted for the blood. Now, though, once he tried to recall what he had seen, he wasn’t sure. The thought that an Indian had found Johnny and killed him was too disturbing to consider.
“I expect he just died,” Gus said.
The answer didn’t satisfy Call—Johnny Carthage had survived several bitter nights. Why would he suddenly die, on a night that was no colder than the others? But Call saw that Gus was going to be of no help. Gus didn’t like to look at dead bodies. He could not be relied on to report accurately.
Bigfoot was tempted to tell Captain Salazar what had happened to Johnny Carthage. He had a hard time keeping secrets. The day was bitter cold. The Texans were still bound at the wrists, and their hands began to freeze, from lack of circulation. As dusk came, Bigfoot felt his anger rising. Very likely, they were going to die on the dead man’s walk—he reflected ruefully that the sandy stretch of country was accurately named. Why tie the hands of men who were all but dead anyway? His anger rose, and he strode up to Salazar and fell in beside him.
“Captain, Johnny Carthage didn’t freeze to death,” he said. “He was kilt.”
Salazar was almost at the end of his strength—the pace he set was not a military pace, but the pace of a man unused to walking. His family had a small hacienda—all his life he had ridden. Without his horse, he felt weak. Also, he liked to eat—the cold, the wound on his neck, and the lack of food had weakened him. Now, just as they faced another day with little food and another night without fire, the big Texan came to him with unwelcome news.
“How was he killed?” he asked.
“Throat cut,” Bigfoot said. “He was castrated, too, but I expect he was past feeling, when that happened.”
“Why did you wait so long to tell me this, Señor Wallace?” Salazar asked. He kept walking, slowly; he had not looked at Bigfoot.
“Because this whole bunch is about to give up,” Bigfoot said. “They’ll panic and start deserting. Whoever killed Johnny will pick them off, one by one.”
The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4) Page 36