Death Rattle tb-8

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Take it along if you can damn well carry it,” Titus grumbled, sunburned and short of temper.

  A wounded look crossed Purcell’s face when he said, “Just figgering we should bury it.”

  “If’n you got the strength to dig down into this here ground,” Scratch advised, “go right ahead and do it.”

  “You don’t figger we’re coming back for it?” Kersey asked.

  Bass shook his head. “I callate we oughtta find us a differ’nt road home—a ways north of here.”

  No one disagreed with that.

  “How far you reckon till we get to them hills?” Jake Corn asked as they started away from their stand of the spindly cactus trees.

  Bass trudged beside him on foot, all two dozen men leading their weary horses now, including the eight reluctant broodmares they held on halters at the front of the ragged column. “Four days, maybeso five.”

  Later that night, the trail grew a little easier on the men and animals. Until now they had been forced to fix their gaze on a distant landmark, then march directly for it, whereupon they would locate another landmark lying at the right compass heading. Over and over through the night. But now they struck the gently meandering bed of a river* that appeared to steer them right into that distant line of hills.* For the most part, they found the riverbed dry. Here and there a little damp sand, just enough that they stopped from time to time in the middle of the night, got down on their knees, then scooped, dug, and tore at the sand in hopes of uncovering enough of the soapy water to give their suffering animals a drink.

  A man could always cut off the flat ears of the pancakelike cactus, pluck out the spines, and slice through the armorlike protective skin so he could suck at the acrid-tasting pulp. But the horses and mules needed water, real water.

  Finding nothing more than damp sand in those holes they clawed in the riverbed, the men lunged back onto their feet and stumbled away again beneath a sky so black it seemed to reflect the brilliance of a million stars. All Scratch could discern of the horizon in any direction was that the dusting of those twinkling stars abruptly ended somewhere far out there at the edge of the earth. That had to be the horizon, he reminded himself as they slowly plodded along in a world of dark velvet: a blackened sky above and this desert floor below them, the ground grown just as black as the heavens.

  When the moon came up, it gave an eerie, silver glow to the pale desert hardpan. And with that light the land seemed to take on a renewed life. Tiny mice appeared, only to be hunted by the saucer-eyed elf owls streaking out of the darkness. Pin-legged, long-necked roadrunners darted in and out of the cactus, chasing string-tailed rodents and lizards alike. Mile after mile the invaders were kept company by those soft sounds rising along the dry riverbed as the night took on a life of its own: the incessant rattle of ground crickets, the flurry of wings, the hiss of scurrying feet scratching claws across the millennia-baked sand.

  It was still dark when those in the vanguard spotted something shining in the meandering riverbed far, far ahead.

  “I figger it for water,” Smith confided.

  As the word bounced back along their ragged line of march, the men spread out in a broad front, every last one of them eager to see this revelation for themselves. Titus raised his nose, concentrated, then sensed what faint breeze was coming at his back. It would have been an entirely different matter if the air had been coming into their faces—

  That’s when the first of the horses snorted. Then a few others whickered. And Scratch’s saddle mount tugged on its lead rope.

  “They smell it!” Williams croaked with a dry, flaky throat. “Give ’em their head!”

  Of a sudden the animals at the center of the march bolted. Weak as they were, and burdened too, none of them took off like uncorked lightening. A number of the men stood in among the horses, vainly trying to control the beasts now that the odor of moisture was faint—but certain—upon the shifting desert breeze. Two men collapsed as horses lumbered past them, their ungainly packs swaying side to side, knocking the trappers down.

  After not speaking for so long, the first time Scratch attempted to yell he found his swollen tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. “L-let ’em go!”

  This was no wild, picturesque stampede, this clumsy, lumbering dash for the water by those weak, emaciated, overburdened animals. Then men were right behind them, loping toward the shallow black pool.

  Struck with wonder, Bass shuffled to a stop, staring at the distance and realizing for the first time exactly what he was seeing. A half mile to the west he spotted another shiny, narrow pool dimly reflecting the black of the night sky just the way a freshly-oiled gun barrel shimmered in firelight. Beyond it another quarter of a mile lay a pair of pools huddling strung end to end. And so on from there as his eyes crawled away to the western horizon.

  Those spotty pools were all there was of the river. Here and there it disappeared beneath the sand, slipping back beneath the dried-up riverbed sand and flat-out disappeared. But unlike pools and ponds and small lakes of water that would eventually evaporate under a relentless summer sun, this river continued to flow—sometimes above ground, more often just beneath the desert floor.

  He shambled to a stop among the rest of the men who were sitting or lying right in the shallow, inky waters, splashing themselves as the horses and mules stood all about them, noisily slurping their fill.

  “These critters gonna get loggy,” Scratch warned.

  “W-what the hell differ’nce it to you?” Thompson snarled as he pulled his face out of the pool, water sluicing down his brown beard in rivulets.

  Bass turned away from Thompson, telling Williams, “We let these critters drink too much, Bill—they’ll be loggy.”

  “Will you listen to that?” Thompson roared as he slapped the surface of the water in derision. Behind his own galling laughter arose that of his friends. “Bass wants us to quit our drinking and pull the horses off!”

  “I’ll bet he wants to have the water all for his own self!” John Bowers sniped at Thompson’s elbow.

  “You’re hobble-headed, you stupid son of a bitch,” Bass snapped back as Bowers got to his feet.

  Williams grabbed hold of Bowers’s arm. “Hol’t on, boy.”

  Bowers tried to shake his arm free. “Maybeso he’d like to have me hold ’im under till he drinks his fill!”

  “There’s more water ahead, Bill,” Titus explained. “The animals don’t gotta drink till their bellies swolled up right here.”

  Williams and most of the others turned slowly to peer in the direction Bass pointed. Some more of them got to their feet, water streaming off them in waves as they peered west.

  “T-this cain’t be the last of it,” Peg-Leg Smith agreed softly, its sound a question as he dragged the Indian guide out of the pool and onto his feet beside him. In a staccato drumbeat of harsh Spanish, Smith growled at the escapee. Then slowed down the second time he repeated his demands.

  Back and forth they chattered a minute more until Smith freed his grip on the Indian’s shoulder.

  Peg-Leg turned to the others and explained, “Says this here river’s gonna lead us all the way to the mountains now. On the other side lays them California ranchos.”

  “Ho-o-o-o-e-e-e!” Williams cackled as he hopped a jig in the shallow water, sending up rooster combs of spray.

  Bass stomped up, splashing. “Tol’t you, I did. We’ll have us water all the way to the mountains now!”

  He immediately looped his right arm into Bill Williams’s right elbow, and they proceeded to slog and splash around and around in the utter joy of their deliverance.

  “Better we stay here rest of the night,” Smith said as he slogged over to the pair coming to a breathless halt.

  Williams peered behind them, recognizing the narrow gray band that lay at the curve of the flattened horizon. “Day’s coming soon enough, true enough, Peg-Leg.”

  Bass grudgingly agreed. “These animals got too much water in their bellies awready—ain�
�t gonna be fit to go on now.”

  Thompson roared, “There the bastard goes again—telling us the wisdom of his mind!”

  “For this he’s right!” Williams snapped. “Me an’ Peg-Leg say we stay put right here. Maybeso we’ll find something for the critters to eat when it get light.”

  Smith nodded. “And push on come evening.”

  Later, as the gray streamers of dawn gradually crept over the horizon, it was plain enough for Scratch to recognize that the horses and mules had been too long without enough water, too long at this little pool that they weren’t gonna be worth a damn. A man or beast gone too long without sufficient water had the stomach shrink so profoundly that on their first ingestion of large amounts of water they would grow painfully sick. Within minutes of their reaching the pool, the first of the horse thieves began to crawl to the riverbank on their hands and knees, retching, puking up the salty, gritty, mineral-laced water their bellies simply refused to hold down.

  Those strongest among them began to strip the animals of their packs and saddles, dropping the baggage onto the sand. Later, as the light began to balloon around them, the trappers for the first time saw the extent of the grass that surrounded the pool here in the midst of the desert’s austere severity. And as dawn approached, their eyes made sense out of the shapes in the mid-distance. Vegetation. Not just barrel and cholla and ocotilla cactus. Not just the stunted, half-dead mesquite and Joshua trees … but vegetation that might actually shade a man.

  With the coming of day, they gazed into the westward, recognizing how each short pocket of the narrow river coursed through a fertile vale watered by the river in those patches where it remained above ground. Where it disappeared, the vegetation ended. On and on, above ground and under, all the way to that far string of low hills, each tiny oasis was strung together on a narrow ribbon of moisture that, come late summer, would disappear entirely. A time when every last one of these oases would wither and shrivel like a cluster of overripe fruit, dying for another year.

  Instead of that monotonous gray and volcanic black of their endless days on the desert, this sunrise greeted them with a surprising palette of colors: the whites of mariposa lilies and tiny primroses, violet lupine, and the fleshy-pink verbena, not to mention the untold hues of every nearby cactus now blooming in their abbreviated cycle of life.

  For the moment it reminded him how Waits-by-the-Water harvested mountain and prairie wildflowers in the spring, drying them before she crushed the petals and crowns, then dumped them into large rawhide bags. For weeks and weeks thereafter, she would rub the petals on her skin or into the thick folds of her hair, the very air around her a heady aura with their gentle scent.

  How he wished she were there to see this with him, the children to frolic upon the short, matted grasses and splash at the riverbank where the water had turned a brief, rosy hue as the sun burst over the edge of the earth. Small wrens and cactus sparrows once quiet and still, hidden among the branches of the trees and brush, suddenly began to trill and call as the light came up. As the air began to warm over time, even the flies came out. Not tiny, shriveled creatures, but those huge, cruel, bloodthirsty horseflies that so troubled man and beast alike in the mountains.

  There must be enough life abounding in each small oasis for these brutal, biting creatures to feed upon.

  As he laid there in the shade, occasionally swatting at those huge, hot-footed tormentors, Bass saw the desert as a land where every species fed off something else. Even the simplest part of the equation—like these damnable horseflies—might appear sleepy, perhaps slothful throughout most of the day as the sun’s fiery intensity grew. Still, every creature was both predator or prey in a most inelegant food chain. Every creature bred to be swift in attack or fleet in escape. Both traits necessary for survival in this hostile land.

  It had always been that way. Knowing when to attack, when to retreat.

  With this desert dawn Scratch came to realize that in this knowing lay the utter heart, the very secret, to his survival.

  Those in the lead had dismounted and stood, men and animals filling a small clearing at the skyline. Riderless horses came to a halt and began to crop at the grass with the broodmares, taking advantage of this midday stop.

  Bass came up behind them, sliding out of the saddle before he threaded his way on foot through the grazing horses to reach the broad flank of two dozen men staring west from the saddle of the mountain pass.* Below their feet lay the land of the Californios.

  Through eyes long blasted by desert sands, baked by an incomprehensible heat, reddened with days upon days of tortured sleep—they peered down upon the land of the Mexicans. Ranchos and missions, horses and mules, señoritas and squaws, mild ocean breezes and sweet Spanish wine.

  “Damn, if that don’t look good to this child, Peg-Leg!” Bill Williams squealed with delight, slapping a bony hand on his partner’s back.

  Smith turned and looked over his shoulder at the twenty-two riders they had brought across the desert to reach this mountain portal to California. “How long you figger it’ll take for us to get the boys and our animals ready for some raids?”

  “Better part of a week,” Williams admitted. “Maybe more.”

  “Way I remember it,” Thompson boasted as he came up to stop nearby, “them Mex soldiers didn’t put up no fight a’t’all, and sure as hell didn’t follow us for far neither. I don’t figger we oughtta worry ’bout wasting our good time resting up—”

  “You wanna go off on your own now,” Williams interrupted him, “you just go ahead, Thompson. Take the men what wanna ride with you and go. I don’t want no man—not even you—giving me no trouble on anything I say from here on out.”

  “I wasn’t meaning no—”

  “G’won and leave, Thompson,” Williams snapped.

  Thompson glanced a moment at Smith, as if to implore his old friend’s support. But while Peg-Leg might have been his friend, it was immediately plain that Smith was not about to go against Williams merely to support Thompson’s foolhardy eagerness. The chagrined trapper admitted, “I don’t wanna go off on my own hook.”

  “There’s only one way we’re gonna grab for the biggest herd of horses ever was stole from California,” Williams declared sternly, louder now as he began to address the whole group, “and that’s for all of us to hang together, cover each other’s backs all the way in, and all the way back out.”

  “Bill’s right on that track,” Smith confirmed. “We don’t hang together when the gunsmoke starts flying—ain’t many of us gonna make it out of California alive.”

  “So let me ask this here and now, one time and one time only,” Williams growled at them. “Any man here what figgers he can lead this bunch better’n Peg-Leg and me … let that man step right up.”

  Most of the men twisted this way and that, glancing quickly at one another to spot any movement. But no one stepped forward.

  “Looks like it’s just you an’ me gonna booshway this bunch, Bill,” Smith said.

  Williams pointed down the slope. “Yonder I see a meadow where two of them li’l cricks run through. Plenty water, and there’s more’n ’nuff timber down there too. Good grass for the horses while they fatten up again.”

  “Let’s go make camp, boys,” Smith suggested. “We’ll stay put till we put some meat back on our own bones, an’ it comes time for us to shine on them Mex ranchos.”

  Across the next eight days the horses grazed, sticking close to those eight wet mares the trappers kept picketed close at hand. After only five days of rest, Frederico argued with Smith that he wanted to move on—if not with the white men, then by himself. Smith protested that such an unwise move would put the guide in danger, might well get him caught by the soldiers and put to death by the priests … then where would the horse raiders be?

  Without their damn-fool guide, that’s where!

  Ultimately, Peg-Leg convinced the Indian that he was better off not going anywhere near the mission or the soldier fort either beca
use of the chance of getting caught. The bitter truth of it, he explained to Frederico, was that should the Indian be seized by the Mexicans, then there was nothing stopping the white men from going right on with their plans to steal horses and mules. Without Frederico, there was no reason for the Americans to go through with their plan to rescue his sisters. The two of them would remain prisoner concubines of the soldados.

  The Indian’s only chance to free his sisters lay in doing exactly as the Americans told him.

  Behind them stretched hundreds of miles of desert wilderness, a land with little to offer beyond waste and want. But below their mountainside camp lay rolling green plains, cold streams tumbling toward the valley, slopes dotted with more vegetation than they had seen since abandoning the Rockies: willow bordering the creekbanks, shady groves of sycamore and elder dotting the hillside.

  On that eighth night of recouping their horses and their strength in the hills, Williams announced, “Be ready to ride at sunup.”

  That momentous morning they kept the broodmares on short tethers as they rode into the dimly lit dawn emerging over California. The men closely ringed the rest of the horses, with riders hugging both flanks, their best horsemen riding drag to keep the stragglers caught up now that they were dropping into the unknown—a foreign country where most of these invaders had, until eight days before, never watched a single sunrise. A land where these Norteamericanos would not be welcome because they had come to steal what belonged to the ricos, those wealthy landowners.

  The twenty-four were trespassers in this green, fertile land captured between that low range of mountains the Americans were putting at their backs and the coast where the great salt ocean began. Strangers. Interlopers. Trespassers. And thieves.

  Down they curved through the pass that took them on a southern route, down the timbered slopes into the foothills where the native grasses grew even taller still, nourished by the moist breezes and what rain the mountains trapped. As much as he strained and squinted into the west as the sun came over the range at their backs, lighting up everything before them, Bass could still not see anything blue in the distance. When, he wondered, would they lay eyes on the ocean?