Dead Man's Walk

by Larry McMurtry

  "Is it a buffalo?" Gus asked--then he saw the shape rear on its hind legs, something no buffalo would be likely to do.

  "That ain't no buf, that's a grizzly," Bigfoot said, springing to his feet. "Here's our chance, boys--let's go, while he's got 'em scattered." The great brown bear was angry--Call could see the flash of his teeth in the light of the many campfires. The bear came right into the center of the camp, roaring. Mexican soldiers fled in every direction; they left their food and their guns, their only thought escape. The bear roared again, and turned toward Captain Salazar's tent--old Manuel had just served him a nice rib of venison in the snug tent. Salazar fired several times, but the bear seemed not to notice.

  Salazar fled, his gun empty. Old Manuel stepped out of the tent right into the path of the charging bear, who swiped the old man aside with a big paw and went right into the tent.

  "Grab a gun and see if you can find a hammer, so we can knock these irons off," Bigfoot said. "Hurry, we need to move while the bear's eating the Captain's supper." Call and Gus found guns aplenty--each took two muskets and grabbed some bullet pouches. While Call was looking for a hammer, the bear came ripping through the side of Salazar's tent. The black horse was twisting wildly at the end of the rawhide rope it had been tethered with.

  As the Texans watched, the bear swiped at the horse, as it had at Manuel. The black gelding fell as if shot, the grizzly on top of it.

  "Let's go, while it eats that horse," Bigfoot said. He had a pistol and a rifle.

  "I didn't know a bear could knock down a horse," Gus said. "I'm glad to be leaving, myself." "A bear can knock down anything," Bigfoot said. "It could knock down an elephant if it met one--it et the Captain's supper and now it's carrying off his horse." As they watched, the great bear sank its teeth into the neck of the dead gelding, lifted it, and moved with it into the darkness. It dragged the horse over the top of the old cook, Manuel, as it moved away from the camp that was no longer a camp, just a few sputtering campfires with gear piled around them. Not a single Mexican was visible as the Texans left.

  "That bear done us a fine turn," Bigfoot said. "They'd have marched us till our feet came off, if he hadn't come along and scared this little army away." Call was remembering how easily the bear had lifted the horse and moved away with it. The black gelding had been heavy, too, yet the bear had made off with it as easily as a coyote would make off with a kitten.

  The snow continued to fall--once they got behind the circle of firelight, it was very dark.

  "The bear went toward the hills," Bigfoot said. "Let's leave the hills--maybe we can catch one or two of them mules, in the morning." Gus reached down to adjust his leg iron, and for a second had the fear that he had lost his companions.

  "Hold on, boys, don't leave me," he said.

  "By God, this is a thick night if I ever saw one," Bigfoot said. "We'd better hold on to one another's belts, or we'll all be traveling single, pretty soon." They huddled together, took their belts off, and strung them out--Bigfoot in the lead; Call at the rear.

  "We don't even know which way we're walking," Call said. "We could be walking right back to Santa Fe. They'll just catch us again, if we're not careful." "I know which way I'm walking," Bigfoot said. "I'm walking dead away from a mad grizzly bear." "He won't be so bad, once he eats that horse," Gus said.

  "It's just one horse--he might not be satisfied," Bigfoot said. "He might want a Tennessean or two, for dessert. I say we keep plodding--we can worry about the Mexicans tomorrow." "That suits me," Call said.

  The three Rangers walked through the snow all night, clinging to one another's belts.

  All of them thought of the bear. It had killed a large horse with one swipe of its paw. Call remembered the flash of its teeth as it whirled toward Salazar's tent. Gus remembered seeing several men shoot at the bear--he didn't suppose they had missed, at such short range, and yet the bear had given not the slightest indication that it felt the bullets.

  "I hope we're going away from it," Gus said, several times. "I hope we ain't going toward it." "It won't matter which way we're going, if it wants us," Bigfoot informed him. "Bears can track you by smell. If it wanted us it could be ten feet behind us, right now. They move quiet, unless they're mad, like that one was. I had a friend got killed by a bear out by Fort Worth--I found his remains myself, although I didn't find the bear." Having delivered himself of that piece of information, Bigfoot said no more.

  "Well, what about it?" Gus asked, exasperated. "If you found him, what's the story?" "Oh, you're talking about Willy, my friend that got kilt by the bear?" Bigfoot said. "It was on the Trinity River--I figured it out from the tracks. Willy was sitting there fishing, and the bear walked up behind him so quiet Willy never even had a notion a bear was anywhere around--that's how quiet they are, when they're stalking you." "So ... tell us ... was he torn up bad?" Call asked. He too was annoyed with Bigfoot's habit of starting stories and failing to finish them.

  "Yes, he was mostly et--the bear even et his belt buckle," Bigfoot said. "He had a double eagle made into a belt buckle. I always admired that belt buckle and was planning to take it, since Willy was dead anyway and didn't have no kinfolks that I knew of. But the dern bear ate it, along with most of Willy." "Maybe he fancied the taste of the belt," Gus suggested. The notion that a bear could be ten feet behind him, stalking them, was a notion he couldn't manage to get comfortable with. He turned around to look so many times, as they walked, that by morning his neck was sore from all the twisting. The night was so dark he couldn't have seen the bear even if it had been close enough to bite him--but he couldn't get Bigfoot's story off his mind, and couldn't keep himself from looking around.

  The dawn was soupy and cold--the snow turned to a heavy drizzle, and the plains were foggy. They had nothing to eat and had had no luck pounding their chains off with the few rocks they could find. The rocks broke, but the chains held. Exasperated beyond restraint, Bigfoot Wallace tried to shoot his chain off, only to have the musket ball ricochet off the chain and pass through the lower part of his leg.

  "Missed the bone, or I'd be done for," Bigfoot remarked grimly, examining the wound he had foolishly given himself.

  Gus had been about to try and shoot his chain in two, but changed his mind when he saw what happened to Bigfoot.

  "We ought to stop and wait for clearer weather--we could be headed for Canada, I guess," Bigfoot said. "There's bad Indians up in Canada--the Sioux, they call themselves. I don't want to go marching in that direction." Nonetheless, they didn't stop. Memory of captivity was fresh, and kept them moving. The need to stay warm was also a factor--they had nothing to eat, and no fire to sit by. Waiting would only have meant getting colder.

  The fog gradually thinned--by noon, they could see the tops of the mountains again. In midafternoon the sky cleared and the Rangers saw to their relief that they had been moving south, as they had hoped. They were far out on the plain, not a tree or shrub in sight.

  "I hope that bear don't spot us," Gus said.

  Though the fog and drizzle had been depressing, at least they had given them a little sense of protection; now they felt exposed-- Indians on the one side, a grizzly bear on the other.

  "I see somebody," Bigfoot said, pointing to two dots on the prairie, west, toward the mountains. "Maybe it's trappers. If it is, we're in luck." "Trappers always have grub," he added.

  The two dots, however, turned out to be two of the Mexican soldiers--two young boys, not more than fifteen, who had happened to flee the bear in the same directions the Texans had taken--they were cold, hungry, and lost. Neither of them were armed. When they saw the Texans marching up, well armed, they both held up their hands, expecting to be killed on the spot.

  "What do we do, boys?" Bigfoot asked.

  "Shoot 'em or take 'em with us?" "We don't need to shoot them," Call said.

  "They can't hurt us. I expect they should just go home." The two boys were named Juan and Jos`e.

  One of them, Call remembered, had tended th
e nanny goats that supplied Captain Salazar his milk.

  "You're going in the wrong direction, boys," Bigfoot told them. He pointed north, toward the village they had started from.

  "Vamoose," he said. "We ain't got time for conversation." The two boys, though, refused to leave them.

  When the Rangers started south, they followed, though at a respectful distance.

  "I expect they're afraid of that bear," Bigfoot said. "I don't blame 'em much.

  The bear's in that direction." Call didn't think the bear was following them-- after all, it had a horse to eat, and an old man as well--but he admitted that it was hard to get the bear off his mind. He had supposed there could be nothing more fearsome in the West than the Comanches, but the great grizzly was a force even more formidable than Buffalo Hump. Even Buffalo Hump couldn't kill a horse just by hitting it.

  He remembered how many times they had shot and stabbed the stubborn buffalo, before they got it to die. Yet, the grizzly was far stronger than the buffalo. What kind of gun would it take to kill a grizzly? He knew that men had killed bears, even grizzly bears, but having seen the bear scatter the militia, and reduce even Salazar to terror, he wondered what it would take to bring the beast down.

  In any case, it was another reason to stay alert. If a bear could sneak up on a man, as it had on Bigfoot's friend Willy, it behooved them to be watchful.

  Walking near dusk, they surprised six prairie chickens and managed to run them down.

  The heavy birds could only fly a little distance.

  The Rangers, with the help of the starving Mexican boys, managed to catch all of them. They crossed a little creek, just at dark, with a few trees around it, enough to enable them to have a good fire. They let Juan and Jos`e eat with them, and sleep near the fire--the boys just had thin clothes.

  "That was luck," Bigfoot said, as they finished the last of the birds. "Caleb can't be too far, unless they've all been massacred. If we walk hard enough we ought to locate them tomorrow." Call thought that was probably only hopeful thinking. So far, nothing Bigfoot or any of the others had predicted had happened the way it was supposed to. The plain was a vast ocean of grass--Caleb could be anywhere on it. Even a troop of men could be easily lost in such a space.

  This time, though, the scout's prediction was accurate. All day they walked steadily south on the sunlit plain. Toward evening, they saw smoke in the distance, rising into the deepening blue of the sky. Like the smoke from the chimneys of the village where they had been captured, the smoke was farther away than it looked. It grew full dark as they walked toward it--now and then, from a roll of the prairie, they could see the flicker of the campfires.

  "But they might not be our campfires," Call pointed out. "They could be Mexican campfires." They stumbled on, the Mexican boys following apprehensively. Another hour passed before the fires were really close. No horses neighed, as they approached the fires. Gus began to feel fearful. He decided Call was right--it was probably Mexicans sitting around the fires, not Texans.

  "We could just squat and wait for morning," he whispered. "Then we can see who it is--if it's Indians, we'd still have a chance to get away." "Shut up, they can hear you," Call said.

  "I was whispering," Gus told him.

  "Well, you whisper loud enough to wake the dead," Call said.

  "Hold on--who's there?" a voice said, and at once relief swept over the Rangers, for the voice that challenged them was none other than Long Bill Coleman's.

  "Billy, it's us--don't shoot!" Bigfoot called.

  There was silence for a moment, as Long Bill absorbed what he had heard.

  "Boys, is that you?" he asked.

  "It's us, Bill," Gus said, so relieved he couldn't wait to speak.

  "Why, that sounds like Gus McCrae," Bill Coleman said.

  "It's us, Bill--it's us," Gus said, again.

  Long Bill Coleman peered into the darkness as hard as he could, but he couldn't see a thing.

  Despite the fact that the voices had sounded as if they were the voices of Bigfoot Wallace and Gus McCrae, he remained apprehensive.

  It was an odd time of night for folks to be showing up. He had heard somewhere that Indians could do perfect imitations of white men's voices, much as they could imitate birdcalls and coyote howls.

  He wanted to believe that the voices he was hearing were the voices of his friends--it was just that all the stories of Comanches imitating white men's voices weighted in his mind.

  "If it's you, who's with you, then?" he called out, wondering if he was inviting a scalping. He cocked his gun, just to be on the safe side.

  "Gus and Call and two prisoners," Bigfoot said. "Don't you know us?" Just at that moment Long Bill caught a glimpse of Bigfoot, and realized he had been too suspicious.

  "Nerves, I'm jumpy," Long Bill said.

  "Come on in, boys." "It's just us, Bill," Gus said, to reassure the man that no ambush was imminent.

  "It's just us. We're back."

  The arrival of the three Rangers, in leg irons, trailed by two shivering Mexican boys, aroused the whole camp. The blacksmith soon had the chains knocked off. There were some who favored chaining Jos`e and Juan, but Bigfoot wouldn't hear of it. The sight of so many Texans, all armed to the teeth, set both boys to quaking as if their last hour had come, and it would have come had some of the harsher spirits had their way. None were quite thirsty enough for Mexican blood to buck Bigfoot, though.

  "Those boys don't want to fight," Bigfoot said. "They're too starved to fight, and so are we. What's to eat?" Caleb Cobb looked rueful.

  "I'd like to lay out a banquet for you and the corporals, Mr. Wallace," Caleb said.

  "I'm sure you deserve one, for making your way back to us under hazardous conditions." "Hazardous is right, a damn bear nearly killed us all," Gus piped up.

  "If one of you had had the foresight to shoot the bear, then we could lay out a banquet," Caleb said. "As it is, we can't. We ran out of food yesterday. We don't have a goddamn thing to eat." "Nothing?" Gus asked, surprised.

  "Not unless you can eat firewood," Long Bill said. "We're all hungry." Quartermaster Brognoli sat by one of the fires. His condition had not improved. He still looked glassy eyed and his head still shook.

  "Hell, we would have done better to stay prisoners," Bigfoot said. "At least the Mexicans fed us corn. We even had soup when we were still in that little town." "We're close to the mountains--there'll be deer, I expect," Caleb said. "With a little luck we'll all have meat tomorrow." Call noticed at once that the company didn't seem as large as it had been when they left it, less than a week earlier. He missed a number of faces, though, in many cases, the faces were not those to which he could put a name. There just didn't seem to be as many men as there had been when they left. Jimmy Tweed was still there, tall and gangly, and Johnny Carthage, and Shadrach and Matilda, huddled around a fire to themselves. But the troop seemed diminished, and Bigfoot said as much to Caleb Cobb.

  "Yes, several fools headed off on their own," Caleb admitted. "I expect they're all dead by now, from one cause or another. I didn't have enough ammunition to shoot them all, so I let them go. We're down to forty men." "Forty-three, now that you men are back," he added, a moment later.

  "Forty-three, that's all?" Bigfoot asked.

  "You had nearly two hundred when we left Austin." "The damn Missouri boys left first--I expect they'll all starve," Long Bill Coleman said. "Then a bunch went back to try and strike a river. I wouldn't be surprised if they starve, too." "I don't care who starves and who don't," Bigfoot said. "The Mexicans are bringing a thousand men against us. Salazar told me that. Even if they're mostly boys, like Juan and Jos`e, we'll have to shoot mighty good to whip a thousand men." Caleb Cobb looked undisturbed.

  "I expect the figure's high," he said.

  "I'll worry about a thousand Mexicans when I see them." "The man who took us prisoner said a general was coming," Call said--Salazar had dropped the remark while they were on the march.

  "Well, there's g
enerals and generals," Caleb said. "Maybe their general will be a drunk, like old Phil Lloyd." "Caleb, there's too many of them," Bigfoot said. "They're raising the whole country against us.

  If you don't have enough bullets to shoot a few deserters, how are we going to whip a thousand men?" "You damn scouts are too pessimistic," Caleb said. "Let's go to sleep. Maybe we can wipe out a battalion and steal their ammunition." He walked off and settled himself by his own campfire, leaving the men apprehensive. Seeing the leg irons on the three Rangers had put the camp in a dour mood.

  "We ought to turn back," Johnny Carthage said. "I can barely walk as it is. If they catch me and put me in leg irons I'll be lucky to keep up." "This is like it was the first time we went out," Call said. "Nobody knows what to do. We're worse off than we were with Major Chevallie.