“Captain, I’ve got some advice,” Bigfoot said. “Let’s get to El Paso and then worry about the generals.”
Salazar smiled.
“It’s time to march,” he said.
4.
TOWARD NOON THAT DAY, as the company—strung out for almost two miles—struggled south, they came upon three dead cows, starved within a mile of one another. The buzzards were on the carcasses, but they hadn’t been on them long; all the carcasses were stiff from the night’s frost. Although all three cows were mostly just skin and bones, to the weary troop, at the point of starvation itself, their discovery seemed like a miracle. The men who lagged caught up—all the men were soon tearing at the thin carcasses with their knives, trying to scrape a few bites of meat off the cold bones.
Captain Salazar, with difficulty, restored order. He fired his pistol twice, to get the hungry men to back off. While they were making a fire and preparing to roast the bones and what little flesh remained, Bigfoot saw several specks rise into the air, from far to the south.
“I think them was ducks,” he said. “If there’s ducks there must be water. We can have us a fine soup, if that’s the case.”
“Well, we got the soup bones, at least,” Gus said. He ran south with Bigfoot and sure enough found a creek, mostly dry but with several small scattered pools of water.
The troop camped for two days, until every bone of the three animals had been boiled for soup. Most of the bones were then split for their marrow. The food was welcome, and also the rest. Through the two days and night, the prairie scavengers, who had been deprived of their chances at the carcasses, prowled around the camp. Coyotes and wolves stood watching during the day. Two ventured too close, a coyote and a wolf. Bigfoot shot them both, and added their meat to the soup.
“I don’t know about eating wolf,” Gus said. “A wolf will eat anything. This one might have poison in its belly, you don’t know.”
“Don’t eat it then, if you’re scared,” Bigfoot said. “There’ll be more for the rest of us.”
Call ate the wolf and coyote soup without protest. His bad foot, though still painful, was better for the rest. Near the little creek there were some dead trees—Matilda chopped off a limb with a fork in it, and made Call a rude crutch. She knew how much he hated having to be helped along by her and by Gus. He accepted it, because his only other option was death; but he accepted it stiffly. The look in his eyes was the look of a man whose pride was wounded.
“I thank you,” he said, in a formal tone, when she presented him with the rude crutch. But the look in his eyes was not formal—it was a look of gratitude. Gus saw how fond Matty had become of Call, despite his rudeness—he felt very jealous. He himself had been cheerful and friendly, and had courted Matty as much as she would allow, and yet—since the death of Shadrach—she had fastened her attentions on his surly friend. It annoyed him so much that he mentioned it to Bigfoot. Call and Matty were sitting together, eating soup.
Neither Call nor Matilda was saying anything, but still, they sat together, sipping wolf soup that a young Mexican soldier had just dished out of the pot.
“Now what’s the point of spending all that time with Call?” Gus asked. “Call don’t care for women. It’s rare that I could get him to go with a whore.”
Bigfoot studied the couple for a minute, the large woman and the short youth.
“Matty’s got her motherly side,” he said. “Most cows will take a calf, if one comes up that needs her.”
“Why, I need her, I guess,” Gus said—now that his belly didn’t growl quite so loudly, his envy had returned.
“I’m as much a calf as he is—we’re the same age,” Gus said.
“Yeah, but you’re easy to get along with, and Woodrow ain’t,” Bigfoot said.
“Well, then, she ought to be sitting with me, not with that hardheaded fool,” Gus said. “He ain’t saying a word to her—I can outtalk him any day.”
“Maybe it ain’t talk she’s after,” Bigfoot suggested.
Long Bill Coleman had been stretched out on the ground, resting on his elbow, as he listened to the little debate.
“Why are you griping, Gussie?” he asked. “She ain’t sitting with me, either, but you don’t hear me complaining.”
“Shut up, Bill—what do you know about women?” Gus asked, testily.
“Well, I know they don’t always cotton to the easy fellows,” Long Bill said. “If they did, I’d have been married long ago. But I ain’t married, and it’s going to be another cold night.”
“Why, he’s right,” Bigfoot said. “Matty likes Woodrow because he’s hardheaded.”
“Oh, I suppose you two know everything,” Gus said. He went over to where the two sat, and plopped himself down on the other side of Matilda.
“Matty and her boys,” Bigfoot said, smiling at Long Bill. “I doubt she expected to be the mother of two pups when she headed west with this outfit.”
Long Bill wished the subject of mothers had never come up. His own had died of a fever when he was ten—he had missed her ever since.
“If Ma was alive, I expect I would have stayed with farming,” he said, with a mournful look. “She cooked cobbler for us, when she was well. I ain’t et cobbler since that was half as good.”
“I hope this starving is over,” Bigfoot said. “I don’t want to think about cobbler or taters until we get back to where folks eat regular.”
The carcasses had been consumed completely—when the troop left, on the morning of the third day, they had no food at all. They were cheerful, though. The fact that they had seen ducks convinced many of the men that they were almost out of the desert. The Texans began to talk of catfish and venison, pig meat and chickens, as if they would be sitting down to lavish meals within the next few days.
Salazar listened to the talk with a grim expression.
“Señores, this is still the dead man’s walk,” he said. “We have far to go before we come to Las Cruces. Once we make it there, no one will starve.”
They marched three days without seeing a single animal; they had water, but no food. On the second evening, they used the last of their coffee. The brew was so thin it was almost colorless.
“I could read a newspaper through this coffee, if I had a newspaper,” Long Bill said, squinting into his cup.
“I didn’t know you could read, Bill,” Bigfoot said.
Long Bill looked embarrassed; the fact was, he couldn’t read. Usually, if he were lucky enough to come by a newspaper, he had a whore read it to him.
Call was as hungry as the rest of the troop, but because of his crutch, he was in better spirits, even though the crutch was rough and soon rubbed his underarm raw. He had nothing to pad the crutch with, though. Matilda offered to tear off a piece of her shirt and pad the crutch for him, but he refused her. By the end of the third day, his shoulder was paining him almost as much as his foot had. Matilda, tired of his stubbornness, ripped off a piece of her shirt and padded the crutch anyway, while Call slept.
Even so, Call lagged behind the rest of the Texans. He was not quite at the rear of the column, though; three of the weakest of the young Mexican soldiers lagged far behind him. Though Call could not speak their language, he had ceased to regard the young soldiers as enemies. They had starved and frozen, just like the Texans; he didn’t think they would shoot him, even if he hobbled right past them and tried to escape.
From time to time he glanced back, to see that the boys were still following him. He was afraid they might collapse and die, and he knew that if the company was too far in advance of them when they collapsed, Salazar would not go back for them. The Apaches had not bothered them for four nights; the assumption around the campfire was that they had given up, or decided the pursuit of such a miserable band wasn’t worth it. There were no horses to take, only a few weapons.
Captain Salazar was not convinced. He didn’t share the Texans’ optimism, in regard to Gomez.
“If he stopped, it is because he has other
business,” he told Bigfoot. “If he has no other business, he will follow us and try to kill us all. I don’t think he will attack—he will wait and take us, one by one.”
He posted as strong a guard as he could muster, knowing, even so, that half his soldiers would fall asleep on duty. But four nights passed, and no corpses were found in the morning.
“He wouldn’t wait four nights, if he was still after us,” Bigfoot said.
“He would wait forty nights,” Salazar told him. “He is Gomez.”
The wrapping on Call’s crutch had come loose—he stopped to rewrap it and, when he did, glanced back at the young Mexicans. It was then that he saw the Apache, a short, stumpy-legged man, with a bow in his hand, about to release an arrow. Before he could move, the arrow hit him in the right side. Call had no weapon—all he could do was yell, but he yelled loudly and the troop turned. Call gripped his crutch, prepared to defend himself if the Apache came closer, but the Apache had vanished, and so had the three Mexican soldiers who had been trailing behind. The plain to the north was completely empty.
Bigfoot came running up, and looked at the arrow in Call’s right side.
“Why, he nearly missed you,” he said. “The arrow’s barely hanging in you.”
Before Call could even look down, Bigfoot had ripped the arrow out—it had only creased his ribs. Blood flowed down his leg, but he didn’t feel it. The shock of seeing the Apache, only fifty yards behind him, left him dizzy for a minute.
Captain Salazar came running back to Call.
“Where did he go?” he asked.
Call, still dizzy, couldn’t tell him. He pointed to the spot where the short Indian had been, but when Bigfoot and Salazar and a few of the Mexican troops ran in that direction, they found no Indians. The three Mexican soldiers who had trailed Call were dead, each with two arrows in them. They lay face down, fully clothed.
“At least they didn’t get cut,” Long Bill said.
“No, he was in a hurry,” Salazar said. “He wanted Corporal Call—and he almost had him. You are a very lucky man, Corporal. I think it was Gomez, and Gomez rarely misses.”
“I saw him,” Call said. “He would have been on me in another few steps, if I hadn’t turned. I expect he would have put an arrow right through me.”
“If it was Gomez and you saw him, then you are the first white to see him and live,” Salazar said.
“He won’t like that,” Bigfoot said. “We’d best watch you close.”
“You don’t have to—I’ll watch myself,” Call said.
“Don’t be feisty, Woodrow,” Bigfoot said. “That old Apache might come back and try to finish the job.”
“I hate New Mexico,” Gus said. “If it ain’t bears, it’s Indians.”
That night Call was placed in the center of the company, for his own safety; even so, he slept badly, and was troubled by dreams in which Gomez was carrying Buffalo Hump’s great hump. One moment the Apache chief would be aiming an arrow at him, so real and so close that he would awaken. Then, the minute he dozed off again, it would be the Comanche chief that was aiming the arrow.
In the gray morning, cold but glad to be alive, Call remembered that a long time back Bigfoot had had a dream in which Buffalo Hump and Gomez rode together into Mexico, to take captives.
“Didn’t you dream about Buffalo Hump and Gomez fighting together?” he asked.
“Yes, I hope it don’t never come true,” Bigfoot said. “One of them at a time’s plenty to have to whip.”
“We ain’t whipping them,” Call pointed out. “We ain’t killed but two of them, and they’ve accounted for most of our troop.”
“I admit they’re wild,” Bigfoot said. “But they’re just men. If you put a bullet in them in the right place, they’ll die, just like you or me. Their skins ain’t the same color as ours, but their blood’s just as red.”
Call knew that what Bigfoot said was true. The Indians were men; bullets could kill them. He himself had fired a bullet into Buffalo Hump’s son and the son had died, just as dead as the three Mexican boys who had fallen to Apache arrows.
“It’s hitting them that’s hard,” he said. “They’re too smart about the country.”
So far the Indians had won every encounter, and not because bullets couldn’t hurt them: they won because they were too quick, and too skilled. They moved fast, and silently. Both Kicking Wolf and Gomez had taken horses, night after night—horses that were within feet of the best guards they could post.
“The Corporal is right,” Salazar said. “We are strangers in this country, compared to them. We know a little about the animals, that’s all. The Apaches know which weeds to eat—they can smell out roots and dig them up and eat them. They can survive in this country, because they know it. When we learn how to smell out roots, and which weeds to eat, maybe we can fight them on even terms.”
“I doubt I’ll ever be in the mood to study up on weeds,” Gus said.
“This is gloomy talk, I guess I’ll walk by myself awhile, unless Matty wants to walk with me,” Bigfoot said. He didn’t like to hear Indians overpraised, just because the Rangers found them hard to kill. There were exceptional Indians, of course, but there were also plenty who were unexceptional, and no harder to kill than anyone else. He himself would have welcomed an encounter with Gomez, whom Call described as short and bowlegged.
“I expect I can outfight most bowlegged men,” he remarked to Long Bill Coleman, who found the remark eccentric.
“I wish I still had my harmonica,” Long Bill said. “It’s dreary at night, without no tunes.”
5.
THE NEXT DAY THEY saw a distant outline to the west—the outline of mountains. Captain Salazar’s spirits improved at once.
“Those are the Caballo Mountains,” he said. “Once we cross them we will soon arrive at a place where there is food. Las Cruces is not far.”
“Not far?” Gus said. Even with his eyesight the distant mountains made only the faintest outline, and his stomach was growling from hunger.
“What does he think far is?” he asked Call. “We might walk another week before we come to them hills.”
Call’s shoulder had become so sensitive from the rough crutch that he had to grit his teeth every time he put his weight on it. His foot was better—he could put a little weight on it, if he moved cautiously—but he was afraid to discard the crutch entirely. The mountains might be another seventy-five miles away, and even then, they would have to be crossed.
That day, despite Captain Salazar’s optimism, the Mexican troops began to desert. They were hungry and weak. At noon the Captain called a rest, and when it was time to resume the march, six of the Mexican soldiers simply didn’t get up. Their eyes were dull, from too much suffering.
“You fools, you are in sight of safety,” Salazar said. “If you don’t keep walking, Gomez will come. He will kill you all, and you may not be so lucky as the three he killed with arrows. He may make sport of you—and Apache sport is not nice.”
None of the men changed expression, as he talked. After a glance, they did not look up.
“They’re finished,” Bigfoot said. “We’ve all got a finishing point. These boys have just come to theirs. The Captain can rant and rave all he wants to—they’re done.”
Captain Salazar quickly came to the same conclusion. He looked at the six men sternly, but gave up his efforts at persuasion. He took three of their muskets and turned away.
“I am leaving you your ammunition,” he said. “Three of you have rifles. Shoot at the Apaches with the rifles. If you do not win, drive them back, then use the pistols on yourselves. Adiós.”
Leaving the six men was hard—harder than any of the Texans had expected it to be. In the time of their captivity, they had come to know most of the Mexicans by their first names—they had exchanged bits of language, sitting around the fires. Bigfoot learned to say his own name, in Spanish. Several of the Mexican boys had started calling him “Beegfeet,” in English. Gus had taught two
of the boys to play mumblety-peg. Matilda and Long Bill had taught them simple card games. On some of the coldest nights they had all huddled together, moving cards around with their cold hands. As the weary miles passed, they had stopped feeling hostile to one another—they were all in the same desperate position. One of the Mexicans, who had some skill with woodwork, had, the very night before, smoothed the crack in Woodrow Call’s crutch, so that it would not rub his underarm quite so badly.
Now they were leaving them—Salazar and the other Mexicans were already a hundred yards away, plodding on toward the far distant mountains.
“I’m much obliged,” Call said, to the boy who had smoothed his crutch.
Several of the Texans mumbled brief goodbyes, but Matilda didn’t—she felt she couldn’t stand it: boys dying, day after day, one by one. She turned her back and walked away, crying.
“Oh Lord, I wish we’d get somewhere,” Long Bill said. “All this walking on an empty belly’s wore me just about out.”
That afternoon the company—what was left of it—stumbled on a patch of gourds. There were dozens of gourds, their vines curling over the sand.
“Can we eat these, Captain?” Bigfoot asked.
“They’re gourds,” Salazar said. “You can eat them if you want to eat gourds.”
“Captain, there’s nothing else,” Bigfoot pointed out. “Them mountains don’t look no closer. We better gather up a few and try them.”
“Do as you like,” Salazar said. “I will have to be hungrier than this before I eat gourds.”
That night, though, he was hungrier than he had been in the afternoon, and he ate a gourd. They made a little fire and put the gourds in it, as if they were potatoes. The gourds shriveled up, and the men nibbled at their ashy skins.
“Mine just tastes like ashes,” Gus said, in disappointment.
“It might taste better if it were served on a plate,” Long Bill said, a remark that amused Bigfoot considerably. Though he had strongly recommended gathering the gourds—after all, there was nothing else to gather—he had not yet got around to tasting one.
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