by Bart Paul
I sheathed my rifle, then went hunting Creed’s horse. It wouldn’t do to just leave him. I found him tied downstream from the snow cabin, close to the bank where Creed drowned Harvey’s mules those years before. I pulled off the saddle and slipped the bosal off his nose and left them in the grass, then turned the horse loose. He just stood there like a good horse for a minute. After another minute I heard him trotting away down the trail. They’re sociable buggers and don’t easily leave a herd, even if it’s not their own.
I walked back to Erika and untied my sorrel.
“You ready to travel?”
“I’m ready,” Erika said. “Is that guy the only one?”
“Nope.”
I stepped aboard and grabbed up the string of saddle horses, and we headed down-canyon at a fast walk, nothing more. The ground was still rough as hell, and darkness didn’t make it any easier. I needed to fix my eyes on the trail ahead and listen for anything that wasn’t right. Erika seemed nervous and wanted to talk, but I didn’t and I shushed her. We rode like that for half an hour and my eyes adapted to the shifting dark. Finally, I pulled up in a narrow spot where the granite and timber were close on either side.
“Why are we stopping?” she said.
“I thought you might want to see where you were buried.”
I pointed her towards the boggy spot where Jack and I had found the young whore’s body. It was dark and creepy and hard to see. We didn’t linger.
The shale of the Roughs was wet with the rain that came and went with the gusts. There were no trees or cliffs out on that loose rock for shelter. We saw our first lightning then. In a flash I caught sight of Creed’s horse, steam rising off his wet back. He was standing on the shale ahead of us like he was waiting, like the dead man’s horse was showing us the way if we were crazy enough to take it. There was nothing to do but keep moving and try not to slip. I could hear the constant clack of hooves sliding on rock. We crossed a high spot where we could see down-canyon over the trees. Way out there, down toward the meadows, I saw a quick flash of light. Maybe a headlight. Maybe a busted blood vessel in my brain. More than likely that would be our reception committee, or the next part of it anyway.
We were down-canyon of the Roughs when I pulled up.
“Is everything okay?” Erika said.
“Get off. Check your cinch.”
“I think it’s okay.”
“Check it like your life depended on it.”
She got off and so did I. I cinched up my gelding and the other eight head, making sure anything tied to the saddles would stay tied. Then I dropped a fifth round into the magazine to replace the one I’d left in Creed’s heart. When I was finished I walked up to the zebra dun.
“I’m going set the stock loose.”
She looked at me like I was crazy.
“VanOwen’s got more ginks waiting down there in the meadows, and god knows what we’ll find at the pack station.”
“So?
“We need a diversion. Something to run interference for us. The stock’ll run and keep running. We’ll follow and sneak along behind them best we can.”
“Won’t they just scatter?”
“They know where home is. The steepest part’s behind us, so once they get to running we’ll have hell’s own time trying to stop ’em. Packers in the old days used to do this all the time till scared backpackers complained and the Forest Service told the packers they couldn’t do it anymore. I’m thinking the saddle horses’ll blast out first and the mules being more sensible will follow. When I turn the first one loose, you be ready to ride, but hold your horse back if you can. Got it?”
“I think so,” she said. “Let me help.”
I unstrung the four mules and handed her two, their lead ropes tied up to the sawbucks so they wouldn’t drag. Erika held them each by the cheek piece, one on either side of her with her reins wrapped around the horn. I untied the riding horses and turned them loose one by one as quiet as I could, as not to start a stampede right away. The first horse ran off down-trail as I loosened the last one. The mules were fidgety. Erika let go of her two, then snatched her reins when the dun bolted after them. I set loose the other pair, and they all followed the horses. We were on flat ground, and it didn’t take the animals long to know they were all at liberty. The herd busting out got my sorrel amped up and ready to rage. I had to grab a handful of mane and swing up on the fly as he blasted out after the others. I yelled to Erika.
“Take a deep seat.”
Then we rattled on down the trail at a dead run.
There was no way to control the horses out in the lead for the first mile or more. As much ground as they’d covered that day, they knew where they were heading and just wanted to fly, so Erika and I had to sit tight and ride. The sky opened up on us with lightning cracking and wind beating the rain into our faces. Moonlight shot in and out of black clouds overhead, and branches jabbed us as we clattered by. We made a wild chase of it like we were riding lightning with hell on our trail. Racing in the dark like that was scary as crap, but except for the possible death and dying part, it was almost fun.
The horses and mules finally settled into a steady pace, single file, following the trail they knew would take them home. I tried to look back from time to time to see how Erika was hanging, but with the rain in my eyes and mud splattered up from the mule in front of me, most of the time I had to depend on just hearing the zebra dun pounding behind. Then for a single moment I saw a huge bolt of fork lightning hitting behind Flatiron Ridge, putting a silver edge around Erika’s black shape. I counted the seconds till the thunder came.
Erika had one bad wreck, and I heard her go down as the dun lost his footing, maybe tripping on a root or maybe just hitting a slick spot wrong. She hit so hard I heard the air whoosh out of her in a grunt. I wheeled the sorrel and grabbed the dun without dismounting. The horse didn’t look like it’d busted anything. If I’d got off, we both would have ended up afoot. It took Erika a minute to even get on her hands and knees and longer to catch her wind and drag herself back in the saddle. Her right side was dark with mud and her right wrist just hung there. I asked her if it was busted but she shook her head.
“Think I just sprained it,” she said. “Did that once—high school basketball.”
She said it hurt like crazy, but she hadn’t come this far to quit now.
The horses and mules were out of sight by then. Erika got mounted, and we rattled our hocks, still covering the ground way faster than what was safe. My sorrel took a bad stumble in the aspen thickets somewhere below Blue Rock, and I thought I was going to take a header myself, but that boy somehow lurched and scrambled and kept his front feet under him and we never stopped moving.
I thought we were running ahead of the storm, the lightening hitting behind us in the higher country. The stock had settled into an easy trot when the whole canyon lit up bright as noon and you could count every one of the million aspen leaves, a million green shapes all around us. The thunder came right with the lightning, exploding the same instant with no time to count “one-one-thousand.” The whole earth shook under us, and my hair stood up under my hat. It hit so hard and so loud it jolted us in our saddles and scattered the stock again. I ducked my head and covered my face as my horse dove off into trees that I couldn’t see and blackness closed back over us. The sorrel ran flat out. I was cut on the face and hands, and my jacket pocket was torn off, taking one of my gloves with it.
It was a while before Erika and I reconnected. Our horses stumbled and crashed back to the trail when lightning flashes let us find it. She looked battered and torn, but she had stayed aboard. It was half an hour before we caught sight of the stock ahead of us in the aspen thickets above the first meadow, still goosey and easily spooked. We pushed our horses through the rocks to close the distance, and I saw the leaders lit up in a bit of brightness out ahead. This time what I was seeing wasn’t lightning. I guessed this was the headlight I’d spied earlier. Part of the reception committee Cre
ed had mentioned before he died.
I saw glimmers in distant branches, then the beam of light turned toward us, spinning white in the rain swirls in front of our faces. Then I heard shots, flat and heavy like a shotgun. We pushed our horses hard as we dared and were close on the tails of my stock when a man’s shape stepped into the glow. He was carrying something long and black. He raised it and fired two times more at intervals and one of the shots ripped into aspen leaves close to my ear. The light wheeled in the shifting dark like it was circling close to the trail, then the man just vanished and all I could see were the wet, slick rumps of my animals running hard before they disappeared into the night. We rode into the white beam. A thin guy in a raggedy-assed parka lay twisted on his back moaning with blood on his face. A horse won’t usually run over the top of a human unless it feels scared or confined, and my animals were both. The guy looked like he took a whoopin’. A rifle stock wrapped in electrician’s tape poked out of the mud—like it was maybe the same shotgun I’d bent over the bartender’s nose in Reno. The guy on the ground could’ve been the same city guy at the table with VanOwen that day. Or he could’ve been just another willing casualty. I jumped my horse over him and didn’t stop. We were past the man in an instant, then the light ahead of us bobbed across the meadow and stopped hard, pointing into the ground.
I yelled to Erika to pull up and I rode over to a four-wheeler nose down in a cattle wallow half-full of mud and rainwater. The rider’d fallen off the seat into the goop and looked up at me like a crazy person. It was the bartender, the one with the ponytail. In the glare from his headlight, I could see his face was bruised purple under a big bandage that straddled his nose.
“What’re you laughing at, you bastard?” he said when he recognized me.
“Old Sonny’s brought the A-team, that’s for sure.”
“You gonna help me?”
“Sure. You got a phone? I’ll call you some help.”
The guy pulled a flip phone out of his back pocket and held it up to me like it hurt him to move. I could see a pistol Velcro-ed on his belt.
“It might be too wet,” he said.
“You’re probably right.”
I leaned down and grabbed the phone and chucked it as far as I could out into the dark then goosed the sorrel into a lope back to the trail where Erika was waiting. I could hear the gunsel yelling at me and could see the zebra dun just ahead when the next lightning popped. After a few seconds we heard two pistol shots but we were already leaving the guy far behind.
We rode on for a while at a walk. My animals had slowed, and we all needed a breather. Creed’s brown horse appeared out of the dark, fastwalking in the lead now like he was part of the band. It started raining again, light but steady. We rode without a word. The full moon was just a glow parked on the top of the clouds. I fiddled with Sarah’s radio, trying to keep it dry and make it work. I heard her voice for a second, then nothing but static. Finally, I could hear her—crackly but clear.
“Hey, baby, is everything okay?” she said. “I wasn’t expecting to hear from you so soon.”
“Erika Hornberg is alive.”
“My god. How do you know for sure?”
“She’s right here with me.”
I gave Sarah a quick rundown how Erika followed my party to Little Meadows but got herself trapped coming-and-going with me trapped right along with her, and how we had to leave my customers and take the stock with us. She and I had both suspected Erika might still be alive, but neither of us had figured how she’d pull it off. I told Sarah about the VanOwen gunsels who’d been laying for us on the trail, and how it was a good bet there’d be more up ahead. She said she’d get hold of Aaron.
“Now you need to radio Mitch, babe.”
“I don’t think that’s such a great idea,” she said. “If there’s a way to louse this up, he’ll find it. He’ll want to make the collar himself, then turn her over to those ‘incompetent pencil-pushers at the Bureau.’”
“If you don’t tell him, he could have your badge.”
For a few seconds there was nothing but silence and static on the radio.
“You look damn fine in your uniform. I’d miss that.”
I could hear her getting exasperated, even through the crappy connection. She said something garbled that might’ve been, “… you jerk.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell him. Now, will you be careful? You worry me.”
“I will. But if we get Aaron on board, this whole thing could be over quick.” I didn’t say how exactly it could be over.
“Let’s hope,” she said.
“Oh, I turned the stock loose. They come rattling in, we’ll be right behind them.”
“Then you better let me get to work.” The radio crackled and went dead.
“You hear that?”
“Yeah,” Erika said. “Now what you’re doing makes sense,” she said. “The way the stock—”
“Let’s just keep moving.”
We kept to a walk the length of the meadow with me in the lead. The rain had slacked, but we were already wet to the bone. The zebra dun pulled next to me again.
“So this is it?” Erika said.
“This is it. Keep your eyes open. Be ready to bust out if anyone’s on the trail. We’re gonna blast in behind the herd in the dark and hope nobody sees us.
“What about the FBI?”
“Sarah will’ve set up a deal with Aaron Fuchs by the time I get her back on the radio. Your surrender in exchange for the money.”
“I was just looking for a way to jump off that runaway horse,” she said. She started to blubber.
“Cut it out. You’re doing the right thing. The only thing you can do.”
I saw her take a deep breath. “Then I hope this works.”
Sarah radioed me back about fifteen minutes later.
“Mitch says you have to turn over Erika Hornberg to him.” She spoke crisp and loud. “Otherwise he’ll consider that you’re harboring a fugitive.”
“Tell him I’m bringing her in to surrender.”
“Is that true?”
“Yeah. Just not to him.”
“He can probably hear you,” she said. “It’s an open frequency.”
“Right.”
“Anything else?”
“You may want leave the corral gate open and my pickup parked alongside the gate like a wing. You know. For whenever I come in. Probably be hours and hours.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll park my Silverado up by the trailhead with the keys under the visor. So it doesn’t get dinged up.”
“Good move. Where’s Mitch now?”
“In his SUV parked by the bridge,” she said. “He just pulled in.” I could hear Mitch muttering for a second, trying to shush Sarah. He sounded good and mad, but semi-confused. Sarah didn’t say anything more about a meet with Aaron, which was just as well.
“You know I’ll be thinking of you, honey,” she said.
The radio buzzed and clicked off.
I looked at Erika.
“Let’s go.”
She nodded, and we stirred up the stock. The animals ahead of us perked up and took off at a trot. The pack station was less than a mile ahead. They knew they were almost home and there was the chance of hay in the mangers. I hissed and slapped my wet romal on my wet chinks. We could hear the horses and mules grunting and blowing, their hooves fading off, then speeding up as something spooked them, just the rush of a herd on the move. Ahead we could see the first glow of the yard lights in the tops of the trees. We’d hit an easy lope by the time we started winding through the Jeffrey pine above the creek. We were half a mile out when the storm opened up on us again, the wind blowing Erika’s parka back from her drenched face. Thunder followed lightning, the bare ground slick with a layer of mud under soaked pine needles. Then the glow in the treetops ahead of us faded to black. The generator must’ve shorted out in the storm or somebody shut it off. We kept riding, keeping our eyes focused on the middle distanc
e and the rumps of the running mules.
We were pounding steady as we rounded the last curve through the aspen before the pack station. With the yard lights off, the place went from moonlight to darkness and back again. I could just see deputy Sorenson in a wet Smokey hat and slicker standing on my porch peering out with a Maglite in his hand. I leaned down over the neck of the sorrel to be less visible. I couldn’t tell if Erika had done the same.
We rumbled into the sloppy yard as lightning popped, the stock goosey as they got hemmed in by buildings and corral fence and strange vehicles. Another deputy in a yellow rain-suit stood in the middle of the dirt road ahead of the herd, then scrambled backwards and disappeared. Whether he fell or dove I couldn’t tell, but you could see where he’d landed because each critter shied at exactly the same spot as they barreled by like one long twisty animal.
The saddle horses ducked through the open gate into the big corral with the mules just behind. Creed’s horse overshot the gate in the dark of the unfamiliar place. He spun and slipped when he got to my truck then turned and trotted in after the rest. Somebody stepped from behind the truck and shut the gate after the last horse. It was too shadowy to tell who the somebody was. There were no other animals in the corral, which meant the rest of the stock was out in the pasture. The horses and mules jogged around the perimeter, stirrup leathers flapping as they checked the mangers for hay and found none. We jogged right behind them, our heads down. Erika and I circled along the fence until we came to the pasture gate on the opposite side of the corral. The gate swung open a couple of feet so fast it spooked our tired horses. We ducked right out of the corral past Harvey who was standing behind the gate. He swung it closed quick so the other animals wouldn’t run out behind us. I saw him point across the pasture. Nobody said a word.