The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4)

by Larry McMurtry

  Kicking Wolf smiled. It had been pleasant to do his old trick again, to walk without making a sound, to go up to a horse, or, in this case, a mule, to touch it and make it his while the owner slept nearby. It was a skill he had that no other Comanche had ever equaled. Though he had had to travel a long way across the llano in dry weather, it was good to know that he still had his old gift. It made up a little for Broken Foot and the cramps in his leg and the sadness of knowing that the old ways were gone.

  “I don’t move,” he said, to the credulous young man who could still not quite believe what he had seen. “When the time is right I am just there, by the horse.”

  “But I saw you—you were with me and then you were by the horse. I know you moved,” Dancing Rabbit said.

  “It isn’t moving—it is something else,” Kicking Wolf said.

  Dancing Rabbit pestered him all the way home, wanting to know how Kicking Wolf did what he did when he approached a horse; but Kicking Wolf didn’t tell him, because he couldn’t. It was a way—his way—and that was all.

  44.

  When Famous Shoes saw Kicking Wolf standing by the mule his thought at first that it was just another of his dreams. Since seeing the white owl come out of the earth he had had many dreams that were not good. In some of them Comanches were killing his children. In another Ahumado had him, and, in a third, a great flood came while he was on the llano. He tried to outrun the water but the flood swept over him and carried him down to where there was a great fish shaped like a Jaguar.

  Compared to those nightmares, seeing Kicking Wolf standing by the brown mule was not so bad. Then, waking, he thought he saw Kicking Wolf walking in the white moonlight—it might have been Kicking Wolf or it might have been his ghost.

  In the morning, when he had almost forgotten his dream, Famous Shoes walked over to where the brwon mule grazed and saw at once that no dream had occurred: Kicking Wolf had been there. On the ground, plain to see, was the footprint that he had seen so many times when he and Big Horse Skull had followed the Comanche horsethieves int Mexico. What he had seen in the moonlight was not a ghost but a man. Kicking Wolf had come for the mule and then left it. Famous Shoes found it surprising that the old Comanche would follow them all the way into the llano after one mule, but it was not surprising that he had left the mule once he saw how skinny it was. Kicking Wolf was a man who had always been choosy about horseflesh. He only took the best horses, and Deets’s brown mule could not even be said to be a horse.

  When Famous Shoes went to the campfire and announced that Kicking Wolf had been there, all the Texans put down their coffee cups and ran over to look at the tracks, bringing their rifles with them, as if they feared attack. They all looked around anxiously, but, of course, the llano was empty in all directions. Captain Call was vexed, but he had been vexed the whole way back because of the trouble with his boot heels. His boots were now so nearly useless that when they were in grass country he often walked barefoot. On the worst of the walk the rangers had had to drink their own piss, a thing that bothered Captain Call less than the fact that Blue Duck’s first shot had ruined his only boots. Fortunately they were only two days from the Brazos now and would not have to drink their own piss again. Far to the south, thunderclouds rumbled—the rain might soon fill the many little declivities that dotted the llano, turning them into temporary water holes.

  “Well, I swear,” Pea Eye said, looking at the tracks. “A man was here but he didn’t take the mule.” The sight of the footprints made him nervous, though. A Comanche had come close enough to kill, and no one had heard him. It was a scary thing, just as scary as it had been the first time he journeyed onto the plain.

  “Didn’t take it and I’m glad,” Deets said, for he was very fond of his brown mule, the only animal, after all, to survive the trip—the other horses had either starved or been shot.

  Augustus took his hat off and scratched his head, amused by what he saw—even though it was a dark joke. After the walk they had had, any joke seemed better than none, to him.

  “Why, he tuned up his nose at our mule, old Kicking Wolf,” he said.

  Call didn’t find it amusing. He would have liked to chase the man—it seemed that half his life had been spent chasing Kicking Wolf—but he had only a tired mule to chase him on. The rain clouds hovering to the south had been dancing away from them for a week; the Brazos River, still a full two days to the south, might have to be their salvation, as it had been for many travelers. Once again he had to carry with him, on a long trip home, a sense of incompletion. They had traveled a long way, hung ten bandits, but missed their leader, Blue Duck, murderer of his own father, and many others besides.

  Augustus, though, would not be denied his amusement.

  “How’s this for a scandal, Woodrow?” he said. “We didn’t get our man, and now we’ve sunk so low that a Comanche won’t even steal our mule. I guess that means the fun’s over.”

  “It may be over but it wasn’t fun,” Call said, looking at the long dry distance that still waited to be crossed.

  Contents

  Preface

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Part II

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Part III

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  For Maureen Orth,

  and

  In memory of

  the nine McMurtry boys<
br />
  (1878–1983)

  “Once in the saddle they

  Used to go dashing . . .”

  Preface

  Fictions—in my case, novels only, to the tune of about thirty—starts in tactile motion; pecking out a few sentences on a typewriter; sentences that might encourage me and perhaps a few potential readers to press on.

  In 1975, at home in my house in Texas, I peated out this:

  WHEN AUGUSTUS CAME OUT ON THE PORCH THE BLUE PIGS WERE EATING A RATTLESNAKE—NOT A VERY BIG ONE.

  Once the blue pigs and the remnants of the rattlesnake had been sashed away I devote a few sentences to Augustus’s partner, Captain Woodrow Call, who is in a nearby corral, trying to break an unruly young mare called the Hell Bitch, who catches him slightly off guard and takes a bite out of his shoulder.

  Captain Call, a Stoic, says nothing about this mishap but Augustus, an Epicurean, makes several comments, none of them welcomed by Captain Call. Thus, casually, begins Lonesome Dove, by far my most popular novel, and one that allows me to join the small company of “respectable” writers whose fiction deals with the American West: Cormac McCarthy, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Tom Lee and a handful of others, below whom comes the vast desert of the pulpers, the sons and daughters of Max Brand (Frederick Faust), Louis L’Amour and many hundreds of others.

  But I was not considering literary ranking or even literary merit when I wrote that first sentence about Augustus McCrae, the blue pigs and the quickly consumed snake. I was just doodling at the typewriter, hoping to find a subject or a character that might hold my interest.

  For quite a few years, there was, however, no sign of the Lonesome Dove. Two other books shoved ahead of it (Cadillac Jack and The Desert Rose) and my impulse to write about these two ex–Texas Rangers was feeble at first. I didn’t even have a title, until, by a miracle, I got one. There was an old church bus sitting in seeming abandonment beside a Texas road I was driving along. The sign on the bus said LONESOME DOVE BAPTIST CHURCH. I knew, at once, that I had had a piece of luck; I drove straight home and wrote the novel. A good title can save a book, and the sign on the old fading bus saved mine; tragic though it is it has added some happiness to the world.

  In the novel, Lonesome Dove is the small town in the Texas brush country from which Gus and Call, both ex-Rangers, and their crew, the Hat Creek Outfit, set out on their epic cattle drive to then sparsely inhabited Montana.

  But, if one cuts more deeply, the lonesome dove is Newt, a lonely teenager who is the unacknowledged son of Captain Call and a kindly whore named Maggie, who is now dead. So the central theme of the novel is not the stocking of Montana but unacknowledged paternity. All of the Hat Creek Outfit, including particularly Augustus McCrae, want Call to accept the boy as his son.

  Indeed, as I wrote on through a rather long book, I myself expected Woodrow Call to do the decent thing. I thought he would finally admit or acknowledge that Newt was his son. I kept expecting the redeeming scene to rise out of my typewriter some day.

  But it never did! The closest Call would bring himself to making the admission was to give the boy his horse, the famous Hell Bitch.

  And, in a later episode, the horse kills the boy, putting Newt beyond acknowledgement and making Lonesome Dove the tragic story it is.

  Many moviegoers who know horses were bothered by the fact that the Hell Bitch was in fact a gelding in the film. I taxed the director, Simon Wincer—himself a horseman—about this and he said the wranglers wouldn’t allow a mare in their remuda.

  And the blue pigs walked all the way to Montana just to be eaten. Life ain’t for sissies, as Augustus might have said.

  —Larry McMurtry, 2010

  All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.

  —T. K. Whipple, Study Out the Land

  Part I

  1.

  WHEN AUGUSTUS CAME OUT on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake—not a very big one. It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran into the pigs. They were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its rattling days were over. The sow had it by the neck, and the shoat had the tail.

  “You pigs git,” Augustus said, kicking the shoat. “Head on down to the creek if you want to eat that snake.” It was the porch he begrudged them, not the snake. Pigs on the porch just made things hotter, and things were already hot enough. He stepped down into the dusty yard and walked around to the springhouse to get his jug. The sun was still high, sulled in the sky like a mule, but Augustus had a keen eye for sun, and to his eye the long light from the west had taken on an encouraging slant.

  Evening took a long time getting to Lonesome Dove, but when it came it was a comfort. For most of the hours of the day—and most of the months of the year—the sun had the town trapped deep in dust, far out in the chaparral flats, a heaven for snakes and horned toads, roadrunners and stinging lizards, but a hell for pigs and Tennesseans. There was not even a respectable shade tree within twenty or thirty miles; in fact, the actual location of the nearest decent shade was a matter of vigorous debate in the offices—if you wanted to call a roofless barn and a couple of patched-up corrals offices—of the Hat Creek Cattle Company, half of which Augustus owned.

  His stubborn partner, Captain W. F. Call, maintained that there was excellent shade as close as Pickles Gap, only twelve miles away, but Augustus wouldn’t allow it. Pickles Gap was if anything a more worthless community than Lonesome Dove. It had only sprung up because a fool from north Georgia named Wesley Pickles had gotten himself and his family lost in the mesquites for about ten days. When he finally found a clearing, he wouldn’t leave it, and Pickles Gap came into being, mainly attracting travelers like its founder, which is to say people too weak-willed to be able to negotiate a few hundred miles of mesquite thicket without losing their nerve.

  The springhouse was a little lumpy adobe building, so cool on the inside that Augustus would have been tempted to live in it had it not been for its popularity with black widows, yellow jackets and centipedes. When he opened the door he didn’t immediately see any centipedes but he did immediately hear the nervous buzz of a rattlesnake that was evidently smarter than the one the pigs were eating. Augustus could just make out the snake, coiled in a corner, but decided not to shoot it; on a quiet spring evening in Lonesome Dove, a shot could cause complications. Everybody in town would hear it and conclude either that the Comanches were down from the plains or the Mexicans up from the river. If any of the customers of the Dry Bean, the town’s one saloon, happened to be drunk or unhappy—which was very likely—they would probably run out into the street and shoot a Mexican or two, just to be on the safe side.

  At the very least, Call would come stomping up from the lots, only to be annoyed to discover it had just been a snake. Call had no respect whatsoever for snakes, or for anyone who stood aside for snakes. He treated rattlers like gnats, disposing of them with one stroke of whatever tool he had in hand. “A man that slows down for snakes might as well walk,” he often said, a statement that made about as much sense to an educated man as most of the things Call said.

  Augustus held to a more leisurely philosophy. He believed in giving creatures a little time to think, so he stood in the sun a few minutes until the rattler calmed down and crawled out a hole. Then he reached in and lifted his jug out of the mud. It had been a dry year, even by the standards of Lonesome Dove, and the spring was just springing enough to make a nice mud puddle. The pigs spent half their time rooting around the springhouse, hoping to get into the mud, but so far none of the holes in the adobe was big enough to admit a pig.

  The damp burlap the jug was wrapped in naturally appealed to the centipedes, so Augustus made sure none had sneaked under the wrapping before he uncorked the jug a
nd took a modest swig. The one white barber in Lonesome Dove, a fellow Tennessean named Dillard Brawley, had to do his barbering on one leg because he had not been cautious enough about centipedes. Two of the vicious red-legged variety had crawled into his pants one night and Dillard had got up in a hurry and had neglected to shake out the pants. The leg hadn’t totally rotted off, but it had rotted sufficiently that the family got nervous about blood poisoning and persuaded he and Call to saw it off.

  For a year or two Lonesome Dove had had a real doctor, but the young man had lacked good sense. A vaquero with a loose manner that everybody was getting ready to hang at the first excuse anyway passed out from drink one night and let a blister bug crawl in his ear. The bug couldn’t find its way out, but it could move around enough to upset the vaquero, who persuaded the young doctor to try and flush it. The young man was doing his best with some warm salt water, but the vaquero lost his temper and shot him. It was a fatal mistake on the vaquero’s part: someone blasted his horse out from under him as he was racing away, and the incensed citizenry, most of whom were nearby at the Dry Bean, passing the time, hung him immediately.

  Unfortunately no medical man had taken an interest in the town since, and Augustus and Call, both of whom had coped with their share of wounds, got called on to do such surgery as was deemed essential. Dillard Brawley’s leg had presented no problem, except that Dillard screeched so loudly that he injured his vocal cords. He got around good on one leg, but the vocal cords had never fully recovered, which ultimately hurt his business. Dillard had always talked too much, but after the trouble with the centipedes, what he did was whisper too much. Customers couldn’t relax under their hot towels for trying to make out Dillard’s whispers. He hadn’t really been worth listening to, even when he had two legs, and in time many of his customers drifted off to the Mexican barber. Call even used the Mexican, and Call didn’t trust Mexicans or barbers.

  Augustus took the jug back to the porch and placed his rope-bottomed chair so as to utilize the smidgin of shade he had to work with. As the sun sank, the shade would gradually extend itself across the porch, the wagon yard, Hat Creek, Lonesome Dove and, eventually, the Rio Grande. By the time the shade had reached the river, Augustus would have mellowed with the evening and be ready for some intelligent conversation, which usually involved talking to himself. Call would work until slap dark if he could find anything to do, and if he couldn’t find anything he would make up something—and Pea Eye was too much of a corporal to quit before the Captain quit, even if Call would have let him.