by Joan Druett
Vultures. Their slow, circling, apparently motionless mode of flight was unmistakable. He pointed them out to Bernantio, saying, “They’re waiting for something to die.”
Manuel Bernantio turned in his saddle, and shaded his eyes with a thin brown palm. “No,” he said. “Some animal is dead already.”
Wiki wondered how he knew that. Surely, if there was a corpse, the vultures would have been on the ground, indulging in their ghastly banquet? Then Bernantio added, “If something drowns in the laguna salada, the vultures cannot scent it. They know there has been death, as they saw the last throes, but because of the salt they cannot locate the body. It often happens.”
Laguna salada—lake of brine. “Is that where they collect the salt for these dunes?” Wiki asked. He could see many ancient wagon-wheel ruts leading in that direction, and salt-rimmed potholes made by the hooves of many cattle and horses.
The rastreador didn’t answer. Instead, as he looked that way, too, his bearing became alert, as if he had suddenly discerned something he had missed before. Dismounting, he gave his bridle to a comrade to hold, and then cast back and forth about the ruts and potholes for what seemed a long time. Then he returned, and said, “The man who rode the horse that favored its hindfoot traveled on to the salinas.”
“Alone?”
Manuel shrugged. “It is impossible to tell.”
The sun was lowering, turning the distant heights to purple, and a breeze came up off the river. The short hairs on the back of Wiki’s neck lifted in a shiver, and he abruptly didn’t want to go anywhere near where the vultures circled. However, though Bernantio’s mouth, beneath the flourishing mustachios, was as straight as ever, Wiki knew that the rastreador was deeply chagrined that he had taken so long to see what was now obvious to him.
Back in the Bay of Islands, loss of face was an important issue, so Wiki understood how he felt. To allow Bernantio to regain mana—prestige—he said, “Would you think it was possible for you to do us the great favor of tracing those prints, even as it grows dark?”
Still, the rastreador was expressionless. However, Bernantio inclined his head in acknowledgment as he agreed, “I believe I can do it.”
Without another word, he remounted his horse and set off, with the others following in a line, as before. This time, Wiki was in the rear. As they progressed over a semibarren plain, where the short, scrubby bushes were armed with increasingly long thorns, the wagon ruts became deeper, having run through mud that had later baked dry in the sun. The horseman, obviously, had avoided these, though Wiki could not pick his tracks out of the general muddle. In places the furrows were crusted with salt, where puddles had become brackish and then dried out.
Abruptly, he became aware of a shocking smell, like putrefying eggs. His stomach clenched, and he expected to see the legs of some poor dead beast sticking up ahead. Instead, a flat shimmer appeared in the dun of the plain. It was like a vast plate, white and almost featureless, a reflection of the paling sky. The vultures still circled in the far reaches of the clouds, with a long line of pink flamingos arrowing south below them, but were yet some distance off.
Then Wiki understood that the great white shimmer was the salinas—a lake of solidified salt. The little cavalcade had stopped where the plain ended and the laguna salada began. As he joined them, they were sitting still in their saddles, staring over the wide lagoon, which was whiter than ice and eerily still, frozen in space and time. It was possible to see where there had been ripples in the original brine, which had set so fast the movement had been caught forever.
At his mare’s feet there was a thick ribbon of black mud, studded with giant crystals that gleamed in shades of yellow and green. “Padre del sal,” said Manuel Bernantio, pointing at the strange prisms. The band of mud marked the boundary of the salt lake. There was a reddish effect just below the surface of the salinas, which seemed to creep, very slowly, as if some incredible life-form lurked there, in the form of animalcula, perhaps. It emanated a greenish froth, which scudded toward them with a frisk of the breeze, and was the source of the terrible stench. When the wind died down the smell became so strong that it seemed to have physical force.
“The horseman traveled farther,” said Bernantio, who had dismounted to study the ground again, and gestured toward the west, where the vultures still patrolled the sky. “And,” he added, “I can see now that one other rider went the same way.” He climbed back into the saddle, and spurred his mount into moving again. Like the others, Wiki silently followed.
* * *
Just as the sun began to dip below the horizon a strange landmark bobbed into view, standing out black against the sky. It was on the top of a rise, and proved to be a huge thorn tree, its trunk about a yard around at the base. Its horizontal branches extended out for several feet, seeming quite luxuriant though very stunted in height. The sun was setting in a garish display of red and purple behind it.
As they came close it was apparent that the tree’s branches were dense with foliage—peculiar foliage, which turned out not to be leaves at all, but objects tied to twigs and impaled on the spines. Wiki counted broken bridles, bolas, animal skins, and pieces taken from old ponchos. Even more eerily, this strange tree was surrounded by scores of horse skeletons, some still complete, others widely scattered. A great heap of salt lay directly at the foot of the eminence where it grew, blown into the typical dunelike shape.
A vulture, colored dirty white so that it blended into the stony soil, hopped away as they came close. One of the horses snorted, and the bird spread black-tipped wings and clumsily flapped into the air, emitting a vile stench of decay as it went. Directly above, its brethren circled on and on in the paling sky.
Captain Stackpole pointed at the tree, and said, “What’s all that junk?”
Wiki asked Bernantio about it. “This is the Gualichú tree,” the rastreador explained. “It is revered by the Indians. Those objects are offerings. One must not tether one’s horse to this tree, or use any of its branches for firewood.”
“Why the horse bones?”
“Some say they sacrifice old horses here to make the young horses strong and fast, but I think maybe the real reason is that this is where they hold their feasts. The Indians like to eat the flesh of mares. I have seen them eat it raw, with the blood pouring down their chins.” Glancing up at the birds that hovered high in the sky, he observed, “They wait for yet another sacrifice.”
But Wiki had stopped listening. His whole attention was taken up by what he had suddenly glimpsed poking out of the salt—a human skull, with tiny scraps of flesh still adhering to it despite the attentions of the vultures. It was obviously still attached to a body that was buried in the dune, like the head of a man who had been lying on the sand, and buried up to his neck as part of some seaside game, then forgotten and left to die.
Wiki slid off his mare, keeping a convulsive grip on her bridle. For a moment, there was a jerk of nausea in his throat. When he crouched down, the skull grinned up at him, misshapen where the hard beaks of the vultures had hacked at the bone, the eye sockets vacant. There was a hole in the front of the skull where a bullet had penetrated the forehead, which looked like a third eye.
Hearing a step, he looked up. Captain Stackpole was standing close by, holding on to his own horse.
Wiki asked, “Do you have any idea who it was?”
“No, of course not.” Whaling was a hard trade that made hard men, but Stackpole looked and sounded shaken. “It’s just a skull,” he mumbled.
“We’ll see what the rest of the body looks like, shall we?” Enough time had elapsed for the kehua—the man’s earthly ghost—to have fled to the underworld, te pou, and so it was reasonably easy for Wiki to make his tone practical.
Without waiting for an answer, he stood up, looked around, and handed the mare’s bridle to one of the gauchos. Then he picked up a horse’s shoulder-blade bone, and used it as a spade. After a moment, Stackpole did the same, and gradually they uncovered the body of a slightly bui
lt man, clothed in a checkered shirt and rough duck trousers held up by an elaborately tooled leather belt, and lying on his back. Every fold of his clothes was full of white crystals, which sifted away with an audible rustling. The torso, arms, and legs were almost entire, having been preserved by the salt from both putrefaction and the carrion eaters. This was why the vultures circled and waited, Wiki thought—they knew there was more to the feast than one well-scoured skull, but because of the salt they couldn’t locate it.
He put aside his spade and crouched down again, studying the body where it lay in the opened trench. The unbuttoned neck of the shirt exposed a tarnished gold medal hanging from a braided string. Below the metal disk the cloth was flooded by a stain that had spread all the way to the fancy leather belt. The great blot had been bleached to a pale rusty color by the salt, but undoubtedly had been blood, because it had flowed out of the wound left by a big knife that had been shoved into this man’s chest and then yanked away. He had been frozen by death into a position where the shoulders were hunched higher than the waist, as if he had curled himself over the agony of the thrust that had killed him … and yet there was that bullet hole in the middle of the skull’s forehead.
It was ghoulishly easy to picture what had happened. Wiki straightened, and said, “Whoever stabbed him thought he was dead, and buried him, but then he came to life and lunged up in a last spasm, jerking his head out of the salt. The murderer must have been thoroughly spooked—he shot him to finish him off, but instead of burying him properly again he ran off, leaving him so that the skull was exposed to the vultures.”
Stackpole’s throat pulsed as he swallowed hard. He said in a low voice, “It sure does look that way.”
“Do you recognize him now?”
Instead of replying, Stackpole unfolded a jackknife, hunkered down, and cut the medal away from the string. He inspected it, and looked for a sick moment as if he wanted to throw it away. Instead, he closed his fist on it, and said briefly, “Aye.”
Wiki had a preternatural feeling that he knew the answer already. He said, “Adams?”
“Aye. That man was Caleb Adams.”
Four
January 26, 1839
When Wiki woke up, wrapped in his poncho and lying on his saddle blanket with his saddle fleece as a pillow, it was dawn, and he was covered with a heavy layer of dew. He was thirsty, because they had carried too little water for a decent draft of maté the previous night, but when he skimmed a palmful of droplets off his poncho they were too brackish to swallow. His skin and hair must be impregnated with salt as well as his clothing, he realized, for when he yawned his face felt stiff enough to crack.
The fire the gauchos had made out of horse bones had almost died down, and there was no water left and nothing to cook, so they put it out by throwing salt on it, setting up a little cloud of vivid blue sparks. Their steeds, thought Wiki, looked as hungry and thirsty as the men. They bucked angrily as the reassembled saddles were put on their backs and tightly cinched, and his gray mare was just as uncooperative.
Once he was finally mounted, he paused to study Caleb Adams’s grave. Perhaps, he mused, they should have dug the body out, and taken it to El Carmen to hand over to the authorities. However, the rastreadores did not have a spare mount, so someone would have been forced to walk, and over the long, hot trek the corpse would have become disgusting. He and Stackpole were already sickened by the ghastly pecked skull, which had suddenly become detached, and had rolled around grinning at them while they searched the dead man’s pockets to make certain they were empty. The decision to leave the corpse in the trench had been easy, and it had been a huge relief to pile the salt back, though not without making very sure that the skull was packed down with the body.
Stackpole had gone to some trouble to make Adams’s last resting place look like a proper grave. By firelight, he had whittled away at a broad piece of scapula, etching the words: “Caleb Adams, American trader, murdered by person or persons unknown, discovered 25 January 1839,” and this morning he had made a cross, with the scapula as the traverse and another horse bone for the upright, and had shoved it into the head of the grave.
Wiki turned to Manuel Bernantio, who was smoking as he, too, contemplated the grave. “You still cannot tell what happened here?”
Again, Bernantio shook his head. The light of day had made no difference. Any traces Adams and his killer or killers might have left of their struggle—if there had been a struggle here—had been destroyed by the vultures’ flapping and copious defecations.
Wiki deliberated, and then asked, “Do you think he might have been knifed somewhere else, and strapped to his horse for the journey?”
The rastreador pursed his mouth. “Perhaps,” he allowed. Then he gestured with his cigar at the horse skeletons, and said, “The victim’s steed may yet be here.”
That was a point, Wiki thought. The vultures would have made such short work of the exposed body of the dead horse that its bones would be indistinguishable from the rest. Then he wondered again what had happened to the packhorses after they had been unloaded of the provisions, down by the salt dunes at the side of the river. When he asked Bernantio about it, the rastreador paused, but finally shook his head. With a decisive movement, he spurred his mount, gesturing at his comrades to commence the journey back to the Río Negro.
The party took the much shorter direct route, bypassing the salinas by several miles, to find the salt dunes as deserted as before. When they reached the water the horses drank thirstily, the gauchos built a fire and made maté, and Wiki scouted around the hills of salt, but without finding anything to indicate a struggle.
Captain Stackpole was standing apart from the rest, staring out over the water. Wiki said to him, “We have to get back to the pueblo.”
“But what about my schooner?” the whaling master protested. “The gauchos promised to find her.”
“No, they did not,” Wiki contradicted. “And they’ve found Adams, which is more than you expected. Now, you have to pay them.”
Stackpole grimaced. “In money?”
“Chilean dollars would be best.”
Unfortunately, Wiki’s earlier suspicions about Stackpole’s financial state proved to be correct, and he had to help him out with a handful of the silver coins. Stackpole didn’t bother to thank him, fixing him with a cynical eye, instead. “Men who’ve whaled in the Pacific have assured me that kernackers are incurable thieves,” he observed. “I guess you’re the exception what proves the rule.”
“You might be surprised,” said Wiki wryly. In his home village it was very hard for anyone to hang on to personal possessions. Not only was hospitality lavish, and generosity a much admired virtue, but shared ownership was the rule, along with muru, a kind of ritual plundering that was an intrinsic part of most ceremonials, and which pakeha—foreigners—misinterpreted as theft. Once again, too, he refrained from pointing out that he was Maori, which was a different kind of Polynesian, and not a kanaka, which was the whaleman’s catch-all term for a Pacific Islander.
When the gauchos, having received their cash, bowed in acknowledgment of the role he had played in this sudden rush of riches, he nodded. One of them stowed the empty maté gourd behind his saddle, and they touched their spurs to their steeds. To Wiki’s surprise, they headed upriver, and he wondered where they were going. Why inland? And why with such an air of decision?
They were heading for the horizon in their usual flamboyant fashion, and it was far too late to ask, so he dismissed it from his mind, saying to Stackpole, “We’d better get going, too. We have to report the discovery of Adams’s body—and we should try to find Hallett.”
“The man who took my money,” Stackpole grimly agreed.
“Aye,” said Wiki, thinking they knew far too little about the mysterious Hallett, and that it was time they learned a lot more. He went on, “I wondered if he belonged to the Athenian. Back in October 1836 he bought a lot of provisions from Adams, and was in and out after that, mak
ing a few more purchases, and it could have been on behalf of the sealing brig. The clerk should be able to tell us something to confirm that. There’s also the possibility that he’s a ship’s agent, like Adams—which means he might be a local.”
“Or he could be at sea on my schooner.”
“True,” said Wiki. “But we have to try—it’s no use giving up just yet.” Decisively, he mounted his mare, listening to the grunts and groans as the whaling master stiffly followed suit, and set her into a trot along the well-worn path to El Carmen.
A couple of hours later, he heard Stackpole say in puzzled tones, “What’s up?”
Wiki, who had been deep in speculation, raised his head to see a great cloud of dust billowing over the trail. He reined in, and a herd of cattle came out of the haze, driven by women and children on horses. Behind them, more cattle dragged carts laden high with household goods. It looked as if the whole of the pueblo and surrounding countryside was in panic-stricken retreat—except for the men, it seemed.
As the crowd approached, warning cries rose up: “The French are coming!”
Wiki restrained his mare, who was dancing in nervous circles, having caught the atmosphere of alarm. He shouted, “The French? What do you mean?”
“They are coming to attack the pueblo and seize the countryside!”
The war between Buenos Aires and the French has spread to engulf the Río Negro, Wiki thought with alarm. It was what he had first feared when the lookout on the Swallow had spied the strange whaleship. The vessel had turned out to be Stackpole’s Trojan, but the danger had been real.
He cried, “Where are the French?”
“Their squadron is already off the mouth of the Río Negro!” a woman shrieked, and flailed a lash over the cattle she drove, setting up a commotion of hoofbeats and lowing.
Dear God, thought Wiki, the Swallow! The woman passed by with her cows, and another great cloud of dust was flooding toward them. This time, it was a flock of sheep, so long-legged and shaggy they looked like goats. Wiki and Stackpole drew their horses over to the edge of the river, and when the herders—who were all women, again—came abreast, Wiki shouted, “Where are all the men?”