Death Rattle tb-8

by Terry C. Johnston

  For men who had penetrated the deepest recesses of the forests along this continent’s spine, for these hardy adventurers who had squandered their youth threading back and forth through the high Rockies, these bare, stony heights were simply not deserving of the appellation mountains. Such barren, rock-strewn, sun-baked iron heights as these only served to taunt a man, reminding him of what incomprehensible beauty he had left behind.…

  Again and again Scratch reminded himself that he had seen desert before. Not only when he and Asa McAfferty had attempted to trap the Gila River and were forced to flee an Apache war party across a stretch of desert, but he believed they had surely been through the worst country ever in those two weeks just before stumbling into the Eden of those Mojave villages. But … Titus Bass had never seen desert anywhere as bleak and barren as what stared them in the face at that moment.

  Even on the high plains east of Crow country, truly an arid land where little rain ever fell, where late in the summer a man’s brains boiled out in the sun—nothing he had ever encountered could have prepared him for this descent into the maw of this fire-baked brimstone hardened beneath a merciless, unrelenting one-eyed sky. Scratch thought it was as if nature itself had shut off Mexican California, protecting it by setting an ocean on one side, then stretching this intractable desert on the other—both of them barriers few men would ever dare cross.

  But, he constantly reminded himself, Peg-Leg and Ol’ Bill, along with Thompson and a few of their companions—they had crossed to California a few years back. Little matter that they had penetrated to the coastal country farther north, Bass convinced himself that those horse-stealing veterans could see the rest of them through.

  Yet with the next morning’s sunrise as they limped into a parched, mud-baked cluster of skimpy vegetation* and came out of the saddle to wait out the day, it didn’t feel as if they had covered much ground at all in that night just behind them. In the growing light, he couldn’t swear those distant mountains were any closer than they had been days ago when the Indian led them away from the Colorado and onto this bleak and empty desert.

  “Maybeso, this is a easy way for them Ammuchabas to kill us all off an’ steal our horses,” Silas Adair grumbled in resignation as he curled up in a narrow patch of shade thrown down by a scrawny, half-dead mesquite tree.

  “Kill us how?” Reuben Purcell asked.

  “This Frederico nigger we got for a guide,” Adair complained. “He leads us out here till we all die. Then the rest of ’em come out to rob our packs, take our guns, an’ pick over our bones!”

  “That’s crazy talk,” Bass grumped at Silas as a wispy dust devil skipped past their shady shelter. “The sun’s boiling your brains to soup.”

  “I’d give most anything to ride back to them Ammuchabas right now,” Jake Corn confessed. “This here country’s ugly as a dried-up tit.”

  Every morning a breeze always came up like this, kicking dust and sand at them for a while, creating the little wisps of those dust devils every sunrise and sunset when the desert and the air above it were either warming up or cooling off. Blasted by sand: just one more torture man and beast had to endure in their interminable crossing.

  Scratch shifted his big-brimmed felt hat down over the side of his face and laid his cheek on his elbow again as he did in attempting to sleep out every one of these lengthening days.

  Their Indian guide didn’t know how long the journey would take, how many more days until they reached the western foothills and entered those green and beckoning heights. But when Titus turned to look over his shoulder at where they had come, those bluffs and mesas where the Colorado River cut itself through didn’t appear to be shrinking much at all.

  From one muddy, dying waterhole to the next they plodded on, making camps around little seeps if need be, marking hours and miles and days until they could wearily collapse from their horses and fall into a light, restless sleep. Then the raiders reached a dry lake bed,* where they sank to their knees in disappointment, finding little to drink at a tiny spring they located among a patch of blackened, volcanic rock. Little of the parched grass to feed the horses.

  And no more of their own horsemeat.

  That morning they selected the weakest of their animals and slit its throat, catching most of the blood in kettles and cups for those men desirous to drink what many believed was truly a life-giving elixir, especially if a man suffered from want of the lean, rich meat of buffalo and elk, mountain lion or antelope. Too damn long with mountain fare. But here, so far from the Rockies, these refugees had only a poor, half-skeletal, dried-out old horse to choke down, its flesh turned gritty with an endless swirl of dust and sand.

  Most days they simply couldn’t scare up any wood to speak of where they ended their night’s march. Which meant there was no cooking for the lean, stringy sections of meat they butchered from the weakest of the animals the raiders began to sacrifice every other day or so. Nothing more than the drying properties of the hot, ever present wind or the heat put out from a broiling sun to jerk those strips of black, stringy muscle the trappers draped upon the spiny cactus or laid upon the eons-old volcanic rocks that dotted the landscape where they rested out their days upon this floor of an ancient inland sea.

  After those first three nights, time began to run together. When the sun eventually fell and no longer tortured the men and their beasts, the booshways stirred, moving slowly, deliberately among the raiders, goading the trappers onto their feet as the shadows lengthened. They would then take account of their horses, resaddle, and move out.

  If they found an animal unable to make that night’s march, or if the trappers required more meat, the men sacrificed the poorest of the poor to the knife here in the coming of twilight when the raiders were more rested. At first the men had enjoyed a quaff of the hot blood as it squirted dark, thick, and sticky from the horse’s neck. But by the fourth day few were anxious to dip his head or his cup down into that gaping wound. Something so hot, so syrupy, held little allure for these men slowly being sucked dry by the desert below and the sun above.

  Lo, beyond the searing heat of the sun, they suffered another torture from that endless sky stretched above them. At least once a day blackening clouds appeared on the far horizon, quickly tumbling their way. In such dry, pristine air, the men could discern the thick streamers of rain advancing with that thunderstorm hurtling toward them. Instead of raising alarm, the sight brought cheer to these parched emigrants. Chattering like schoolboys playing hooky at a forest pond, the horse thieves stripped naked as a borning day hoping the rain would pelt man and beast alike.

  But the storms never failed to hurry on past, every cloudburst sweeping by without a single drop ever touching the naked riders and the thirsty earth. Although the thick, swollen, storm clouds released a torrent of moisture from their undergut, every last bead of rain dried before it came anywhere close to the ground. As the sun reappeared and the air rewarmed, the horsemen pulled on their clothes once more, grown all the gloomier with that agony of expectation, the self-deluding torture of misplaced hope.

  And every step of the way was accompanied by an incomprehensibly deafening silence.

  Back home in his mountains the slightest sound would echo back to a man, reverberated off a granite escarpment or the thick forests themselves. Why, even the high plains rolled and pitched enough, truly a country so crisscrossed with coulee and watercourse that he could count on some echo to accompany most every sound.

  But here in this endless desert, every utterance, each small scratch or cough or sneeze, was immediately swallowed up by the land’s utter immensity.

  Be it the whicker of a horse too weak to make any more of a sound, or the groans of discomfited men as they lunged to a stop in their tattered moccasins and pitched onto their knees, immediately rolling into a ball in the only shade they could find … maybe no sound louder than the steamy splatter of a man’s piss as it struck the iron-clad hardpan of the desert floor. This was a land violently jealous of its
silence.

  There were times Scratch chewed on a little of his dwindling reserves of plug tobacco, hoping to stimulate a little saliva. And when that would not work, he dug out a .54-caliber lead ball and slipped it under his swollen tongue. Five days after stumbling past Soda Lake, some of the men opened a vein on their wrists or the backs of their hands, sucking at some semblance of moisture retained by their bodies. A few even tried to drink their own hot, pungent urine. Although Titus understood it was more pure than any water they might stumble across in this hostile country, he could almost puke at the thought of gagging down something so warm from his tin cup.…

  Hell, everything was damned hot in this desert.

  “Here,” Bill Williams announced as he settled beside Scratch in the skimpy shade of a Joshua tree as the sun slipped off midsky.

  Elias Kersey leaned forward on an elbow, peering at what Williams revealed in the upturned crown of his hat. “What’s that?”

  “Leaves of a weed* the Injun just give me to pass around.”

  “What we s’posed to do with it?” Titus asked as he plucked out a leaf. “Chew on ’em to make our mouths water?”

  Williams shook his head. “Lookee there what the Injun’s doing? He told Peg-Leg we was to smoke it.”

  “What for?” Scratch inquired.

  “Frederico says it helps take away the pain.”

  Purcell crabbed over, the first to reach in and pull out enough of the weed to stuff down the bowl of his clay pipe. “Been a long time since I had a smoke anyways.”

  It wasn’t long before the two dozen shared a few common sparks that flint and steel ignited on smoldering char until all were sucking at the dried leaves that stung their tongues. Within minutes the men grew more quiet than usual, every one of them soon absorbed with a dreamy reverie brought about by the narcotic effects of the bitter leaves.

  Scratch drifted, half dozing as he recalled the gentle rattle of the mountain breeze coursing its way through the cottonwood and quakie, the unmistakable soughing of that first wind of winter fingering its way through the branches of fir or pine, stabbing its way through the thick overcoat of the blue spruce.

  For the longest time Titus had the unmistakable impression he was sleeping—despite the fact that he had his eyes open. And those eyes were no longer squinting but growing wider and wider instead as the sun gradually went down, marking the passage of time as twilight loomed around them. Looking to his left, Scratch found their guide loading some more of the dry leaves into his simple Indian pipe crafted from the hollowed-out legbone of a horse. Maybe that red nigger did have something here with smoking these crumbled leaves: how it eased a man’s pain. At least no one was complaining of the nagging, persistent discomfort they suffered from both the thirst and a belly-gnawing hunger.

  Time passed and he couldn’t reckon on just how much. While the air cooled, Bass noticed the nearby horses lazily shifting from one exhausted leg to another, observed men rolling from hip to hip seeking to make themselves more comfortable in the windblown sand, or watched nothing more than the changing properties of the light as a shadowy band slid ever so slowly across the grease-hardened wrinkles and fading bloodstains smeared across the tops of his leggings. The last of the day’s light crept over him as if it were an animated creature of the desert itself.

  Then he thought of them back in Absaroka. And found himself dwelling on her—on the way she laughed so uncontrollably with how easily he poked fun at himself. Remembering the way her eyes took on a deep intensity when she hungered for him. So he naturally thought of pretty little Magpie and his bright, inquisitive Flea. He yearned to be back for their birthdays … but first he had to get out of this life-robbing desert.

  Directly overhead sailed more than a dozen wrinkled-necked buzzards keeping an eye on the trappers and their animals, following their march, picking over the bones of the horse carcasses the raiders left in their wake. Eegod, but it hurt to stare at the sky too long, so he shut his eyes and waited for the pain to pass.

  Sometime later he was awakened by a man’s heavy, labored breathing—and realized it was his own. Not daring to breathe deeply of the hot air because it burned his lungs like a blast from a blacksmith’s bellow. Reminding himself to suck it in shallow, shallow.

  Upon opening his eyes he discovered the sun had leaked out of that last quarter of the sky, which meant even more time had passed. Quickly glancing at the heavens above them, he found it nearly black with wings. A few buzzards, yes—but even more of some bigger species, their immense wingspans circling overhead in that hot yellow sky.

  Floating up there on the rising thermals, patiently waiting for the men to pick up and move on, so they could descend from the sky and pick over the remains of what the men left behind. Any strips of horseflesh clinging to the bones. Squawking and wing-flapping over the putrid gut piles. Sharp, curved beaks fighting off the others so they could peck at the dead, glazed eyes of the horses, feasting on the rotting carrion until there was nothing left but bone to bleach under the sun and course-less winds.

  Come dark, they’d have to get out of here, Scratch decided. If they didn’t, those damned birds might well grow bold enough to attack the weaker horses and mules, maybe unto challenging the most defenseless of the men.

  Titus closed his eyes again for a few minutes and tried desperately to think of how hell might feel. Could it be any worse than this?

  Down in hell did the buzzards and other carrion eaters tear flesh from a man’s body, pick at his eyes … even before he was dead?

  In hell did a man simply give up hope of ever seeing her again?

  * The Needles, near present-day Needles, California.

  * Today’s Marl Springs.

  * Present-day Soda Lake.

  * Jimsonweed, smoked by the Mojave, as well as their neighbors: the Paiute, Cocopah, and Yuma.

  9

  The condors and vultures had landed around them as the sun sank. Something more than a hundred of the birds had gathered—first blackening the sky over this daylong bivouac, eventually landing to encircle the parched men and their near-dead animals.

  A few of the other raiders were just starting to stir as the shadows lengthened. Titus felt woozy, sick to his stomach, but as soon as he sipped at some of the warm water in his gourd canteen, the feeling started to pass.

  “Bill,” he said when his eyes landed on Williams, “we gotta get this bunch moving soon as the sun’s gone.”

  The old trapper nodded, slowly rocking onto his knees with a sigh. “The Injun says we should reach water afore morning.”

  Just over Williams’s shoulder one of the buzzards fluttered across the sand to nab a sidewinder, its sharp beak striking out to clamp down on the snake, violently tossing its head side to side, then pitching the sidewinder into the air to break the snake’s back in a second place.

  “Damn, if that sight don’t give me the willies,” Bill grumbled as he struggled to stand.

  “C’mon, fellas,” Titus urged as he crouched over Kersey and Purcell. “Up, boys—up.”

  One by one the two dozen were slowly coming back to life as the temperature dropped degree by degree. They sipped at the last of their mineral-laced water, bathing their cracked, swollen lips and their bloated, black-tinged tongues. Most of them had long ago learned to hold a small gulp of the water in their mouths, letting the moisture fully soak into the membranes before swallowing what little was left of the warm liquid that hadn’t been absorbed.

  That first sip after a daylong drought always hammered the inside of a man’s skull almost as bad as some of Willie Workman’s raw-brewed Taos lightning going down on an empty belly. It made his eyes swim and burn. It set a man’s teeth and gums to aching after all those tissues had grown severely parched. And the longer these men went without clean water, the worse this torture would become.

  “Save the last you can for the critters,” Bass reminded them.

  Adair grumped a bit, but once their tongues were wet and a silk handkerchief dam
pened to tie around their heads or knot at their throats, most of the men set about carefully pouring what little they had left into their hats and offering that final measure to their horses or mules. Titus’s saddle horse licked the inside of his old felt hat with such gusto he was afraid the animal might well gnaw right on through the damp crown.

  As it turned out three of the pack animals refused to get up. With some struggle, the men were able to strip the baggage off the horses. Then the booshways set about redistributing the loads carried by the rest of the animals. Weak as they were, Bass figured, the horses and mules really couldn’t be asked to carry much more weight.

  While the sun continued to sink behind the far horizon, Bill Williams ordered the men to tear through their packs, paring what was needed from what they could leave behind. Powder and lead, heavy by any reckoning, was given primary consideration. The rest of their possibles would go into smaller, lighter packs they went about lashing on the backs of those horses and mules still able to bear up under the burdens … if for only one more night, just until they reached a damp stretch of the Mojave River.

  Everything else they would leave behind.

  “Shouldn’t we cache it?” Reuben Purcell wondered, gazing over his shoulder at the mounds of supplies they were about to abandon in the lee of that stand of Joshua trees.

  Kersey added, “Maybeso them Ammuchabas come steal all this from us—”