by Chuck Tyrell
“Good. Wet. You eat.”
“I will.” Stryker took the stick and bit into the gooey blob. It tasted as green as it looked. But it was wet and the taste was not all that unpleasant. In moments, the green blob was gone and Stryker’s stomach was absorbing its water, as none ran in this forsaken corner of New Mexico. “Uum.”
“We run.”
Stryker gave Bly a blank stare, then a nod. “Don’t run, can’t run. I get your lesson.”
Bly struck out again in his loose-jointed jog, seeming to fit the country as if he was a natural part of it. A thought hit Stryker. A part of the country. The white man always tried to conquer and subdue his natural surroundings. The Apache tried to be a part of all that surrounded them.
Although the terrain was just as difficult; although the lack of water pierced like a demon; the afternoon didn’t feel as hard as the morning had. Maybe Stryker was learning something.
Bly jogged some twenty paces in front of Stryker. For some reason, the birds—bluebirds and rock wrens, the odd red-tailed hawk atop a paloverde, robins, and even Inca doves—did not flutter away when Bly passed, but moved a few feet when Stryker came along. A jackrabbit crossed the way ahead of Bly, and the moment it sensed the jogging Apache, it froze. Bly passed. The rabbit remained frozen with its long ears straight up in the air. But when Stryker neared, the big jack bounded away.
The sun completed some two thirds of its journey across the cloudless sky toward the blue-purple outline of the Potrillo Mountains. Another arroyo sliced through the desert floor, and Stryker reckoned it ran from northeast to southwest. Bly disappeared over the edge and was out of sight by the time Stryker reached the place where the Apache had gone into the ravine. The land leading to the arroyo were covered with gramma grass and the occasional one-seed juniper, but over the edge, the sides of the ravine were lined with rock fitted almost as if some giant mason had done a job there. Stryker pulled his Bowie from its sheath. If an attack were to come, this would be a prime place.
He didn’t drop into the arroyo from the same place as Bly. He went into the game-stalking mode. He slipped carefully southward along the edge of the arroyo. Almost half a mile from where Bly went down into the ravine, Stryker found a place where rocks had broken off the edges of the little canyon and created a stairway of sorts. Not a regular step-by-step stairway, but rocks lying so that he could reach the bottom of the ravine without exposing himself and, in his Apache moccasins, without making much noise.
Slowly he descended, taking care not to dislodge pebbles to betray his presence. A tiny sound from the southwest made Stryker freeze in place behind a large boulder. Another hint of sound came. Stryker made his breathing as shallow as he could. His grip on the handle of his Bowie knife tightened. A large animal? Bull elk? Bighorn sheep? Wild horse?
Was the sound a clop? A hoof striking stone? No hint of steel. Then Stryker recognized the sound of a walking horse ... no, walking horses. He squeezed himself into a crack between two boulders and went motionless, trying to breathe so shallowly that his chest and abdomen moved almost not at all.
He could see the bottom of the arroyo with his left eye. No breeze came down the ravine, so he didn’t have to worry about his clothing flapping.
Horses came, led by a dusky pony with dark points, mane and tail, ridden by a woman, though she dressed like a warrior. She held a bow in her left hand along with three arrows. Three warriors followed the woman, all young, perhaps untried, perhaps out to learn more about becoming a true warrior ... but led by a woman?
“Dahtegte.” Bly spoke from a place not a dozen yards from where Stryker stood, frozen in place.
The Apache horses stopped, as if Bly himself had commanded them.
“Bly?”
Bly answered in Apache.
Dahtegte grunted something that sounded like agreement.
“Gopan. You come out now.” Bly stepped from his cover and turned to look up at Stryker’s hidey hole. “Come,” he said. “Dahtegte is not to be feared now. Not painted for war.”
It seemed too easy. Too pat. Stryker made no move.
“Gopan.”
Stryker said nothing.
“I know of Gopan.” A woman’s voice.
Bly said nothing.
Stryker said nothing.
“Gopan took soldiers to the hill at the place white men call Cooke’s Road. He took mules, then killed them to keep soldiers and white men from wagons from Apache arrows and rifles. That day, Yuyutsu got no horses, no wagons, no children, no women to sell to the Nakaye. Apaches call you Gopan. He who protects.”
Bly said, “Come, Gopan. Dahtegte talk of Apaches. Maybe of Yuyutsu.”
Stryker stepped to the edge of the rocks, his Bowie in his hand.
Dahtegte laughed. “The great Gopan. Can he not trust Apache words? Or does he think we are like him, always speaking with no truth?”
Stryker jumped to the arroyo floor. “Here I am,” he said.
“We go,” she said, and gigged the dusky pony to a trot. The young men followed. Bly jogged along behind. Stryker brought up the rear, watching the moves and manners of the Apaches.
The riders went on in their original direction, which was opposite to that Stryker thought Bly was taking. But before opening his mouth, he thought. Then thought again. Bly’d not said where they were going. So it didn’t matter what Stryker thought. He cleared his head of questions and decided to listen to the desert.
The horses trotted. Bly jogged. Stryker lagged. The ponies left plenty of trail to follow so he didn’t worry about keeping up. He listened instead. The sun nearly touched the mountain range to the west and the shadows of trees and bushes lengthened across the land. A nightjar sent up his churring cry as the horses went by. Quail scattered into the thickets of creosote to the left of the path. Stryker heard and cataloged the sounds and movements as he jogged. He forgot the tired muscles in his legs. He forgot the dry air he took into his lungs. He forgot, and listened to the Earth.
Dahtegte stopped at dusk and said something to the youngsters. They flung themselves off their ponies and disappeared into the brush, pulling leather slingshots from their waistbands as they went.
“Fire,” she said to Bly. “Come,” she said to Stryker, and urged her pony toward a stand of cottonwoods. The trees occupied a swale in the flat land. Closer, Stryker saw that the four trees stood in a rough line beside the sandy bottom of a dry creek. Dahtegte swung a leg over the withers of her pony and dropped lightly to the ground. “Dig,” she said, pointing at the sand.
Stryker drew his Bowie and started for a creosote bush, intending to cut a digging stick.
“No.”
He stopped.
“Use knife.”
Stryker’s Bowie held a razor’s edge like no other, being a James Black Bowie with pieces of a star in the steel. He didn’t like the idea of using the knife to dig a hole in the sand. “No,” he said.
Dahtegte heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Would you die?”
Stryker folded his arms, unconsciously making them a barrier between himself and the Apache warrior woman.
She sighed again, pulled her own knife, which had the appearance of a common kitchen butcher knife, picked a spot between two cottonwoods, and commenced digging. She poked the knife blade into the sand several times, then pulled the loosened sand out of the pit with her hands. She dug the pit about a foot deep before the sand began to show dampness. Another six inches and water seeped into the pit up to the wet sand mark. In a quarter of an hour by the clock in Stryker’s head, there was enough water to give her pony a drink.
“Gopan. Drink,” she said.
Stryker looked at the water. The murk had settled out. The upper two inches of water showed clear as a mountain stream. Stryker scooped water from the pit with cupped hands and drank. It tasted of mud, slightly, but was wonderful to swallow. Stryker found himself wanting to dance a jig in exultation. Water. How great you are, Mother Earth, he mouthed. How great you are.
Stryker
drank long and deep, but Dahtegte said nothing. He wiped the moisture from his lips with the back of his hand. “Thank you, Dahtegte,” he said.
She shook her head. “Thank the cottonwood. It always grows where there is water.”
Stryker turned to the nearest cottonwood and bowed his head. “Thank you, sister, for showing us where to find what we need most.”
Dahtegte made a sound in her throat that could have been approval.
“We should take water back to Bly.”
She shook her head. “You know nothing. I show you how. Bly knows. He will do what he needs to live.” She kicked the sand back into the water hole until nothing remained. Only if one knew what to look for could traces of the water hole be seen. Dahtegte hopped on her pony and turned its head toward the place where Bly was to build a fire.
Stryker saw no smoke, which didn’t surprise him, and when they got to where Dahtegte had sent the youngsters away, the land was empty.
Chapter Six – Erasing the Color Line
Yuyutsu’s rancheria lay deep in the rugged Sierra Madre mountains, from which he raided south to punish the Nakaye as Apaches had for more than a century. The Nakaye paid for Apache scalps, man, woman, or child, and that meant a different kind of hunter now dogged Yuyutsu’s trail and sometimes came across his mountain hideaways.
War was a way of life for an Apache man, and revenge is the sweetest of successes. Nakaye and White Eyes cared not if the Indeh they murdered belonged to the band that may have taken a wagon train on the road called Cooke’s. So it mattered not to Yuyutsu. A white man was a white man and the only good white man was a dead one.
A village fell to Yuyutsu’s warriors. A village that raised corn and beans and prayed to a woman for protection. Yuyutsu grimaced a smile. Whoever would expect a woman to protect them? How easy it was to smash the skulls of those who knelt in supplication to that woman called blessed mother. All Indeh knew the mother of all men was Mother Earth, not some carved statue adorned in blue and white paint and a little gold leaf.
But it was a poor village with no horses to take, only burros. Useless burros. Even the women looked weak. Most Yuyutsu left behind, their skulls crushed, their scalps taken ... and left lying on their own faces. Three he took. Too few Apache women in the Sierra Madres, and the years had already proved that sons begat with Mexican women were good warriors, every bit as good as those with Apaches on both sides of the family tree. No guns worth taking. An old flintlock without powder. Two ancient Patterson Colts, also without powder. Yuyutsu took the knives. Knives could always be sharpened to blood-letting edges, and he took the axes. There could be some use for them, sometime.
“Nakaye soldiers come.” The warning was spoken close to Yuyutsu’s ears. No Apache lookout in his band would ever shout. Besides, it was beyond time to leave this poor town with its carpet of dead Nakaye bodies.
“You know what to do,” Yuyutsu said.
The lookout said nothing. He merely ran for his pony. His path away from the poor village was predetermined, as it was for every warrior, and each warrior rode in a different direction. All the Nakaye soldiers would find was a confusion of pony tracks that seemed to go nowhere.
Yuyutsu’s warriors would be in place just south of a gully that slashed into the Sonora Desert from the foothills of the Sierra Madre mountain range. The Nakaye never learned that Apaches struck when least expected.
He chose the gully because it was an unusual and quite difficult way into the Sierra Madres, a path the Nakaya officer would think likely because just enough pony tracks led in that direction from the village.
Just twenty-eight warriors rode in the band, including Yuyutsu himself, and the Nakaye soldiers numbered nearly one hundred, separated into two companies.
Nakaye horses snorted as they passed the Apaches hidden in plain sight less than half a mile from the gully’s eastern bank, but the Nakaye soldiers did not know how to read their horses’ fear.
First, arrows sprouted from the backs of the thirteen men bringing up the rear of the Mexican column. All fell from their horses, some living, some dead. Lithe brown forms leapt from the desert floor to positions behind mounted soldiers. Almost without exception, those soldiers fell with their throats sliced wide open. Their frightened hearts pumped sprays of blood in wild attempts to reach the now senseless brains.
Within minutes of Yuyutsu’s men starting the attack, ninety-seven Mexican soldiers lay dead on the desert floor, a small patch of scalp cut from their heads and left on their foreheads in distain for the practice of scalping, for which Mexicans paid bounty if the scalps were Indeh. Yuyutsu took their guns and ammunition, their blankets, and their sombreros ... and, of course, their horses. He left the officers’ kepis, as Apaches had no use for them.
~*~
Stryker did not return to Fort Bliss for twelve more days. Even then, he didn’t enter the fort compound but stayed at Bly’s camp until Samson Kearns came.
“Here, sir.” Samson’s voice came from outside Bly’s wickiup.
Stryker ducked through the opening.
“By the good Lord, sir. Y’all look like a Apache yourself.” Samson stood there in soldier blue, sharp creases in the legs and every polished brass button shining like gold. His kepi tilted at just the right angle to bring the bill down over his eyes. Reginald Kearns was every inch the top soldier.
“You look like those pants just came off McCabe’s shelf, Top.”
“Best to look sharp, sir, ‘specially when they’s white boys around with bullets in they guns.”
“And what are the Misfits like these days?”
“They knows you, sir, so they gives me no guff. And I don’t order no one but Ben Stroud an’ Boogie Hill around.” Samson paused, but his face said he had something else on his mind.
“Spit it out, Top.”
“Ben Stroud ain’t worth the bother, sir. My opinion, sir, you should toss ’im out. He ain’t a’tall fit to be a Misfit.”
Stryker chewed his lip. “Damn. He was a good scout, I heard.”
“Cain’t control his drinking, sir. Not a’tall. I say cut ’im, but all us Misfits is yours, sir. All yours.”
“Do me a favor, Top. Bring me a good uniform and a kepi. Should be one in my trunk.”
“Done, sir.”
“Done?”
“Yes, sir. I reckoned you’d be needing to dress up, so I brung your duds with me.” Samson handed over the haversack he’d held in his left hand.
Stryker couldn’t keep the surprise from his face. “I made no mistake when I made you the Misfits’ top soldier.”
Samson shrugged. “Part of the job, sir. Top sojer’s gotta know how his bossman thinks. We’uns learned how to do that before the late unpleasantness ever started ... sir.”
“Men shoot good?”
“I went’n got Sharpy Bailor a gun to match his name. A good Sharps .50.
“Can he hit what he aims at?”
“Yeah, man. Sharpy Bailor ain’t called Sharpy fer nothin’. He can hit anything the size of a bucket up to a thousand yards.”
“How ‘bout the men?”
Samson dug a toe into the dust in front of the wickiup. “Some can, some can’t.”
“Who?”
“The Greer brothers is okay. Paddy can’t hit a bull in the butt with a bucket a wheat, pardon my words. Fergie’s good. Willem’s gettin’ better, but he sure knows his powders and a keg of giant powder puts him on the same side as God—ready to send them what’s on the other side straight to Hell. Mick Finney’s better with a Bowie than with a rifle, and he’s downright good with that Yeller Boy a his. Buck ’n’ Edwardo ’n’ Boogie know which way to shoot, but that’s about all.”
“Lion? Ponies? What about them?”
“They been teachin’ whites ’n’ blacks ta run like reds,” Samson said. He cracked a smile. “Ten miles a day. and that goes up to fifteen day after tomorrow.”
“Good. Well done, Top. Men have any problem following a black top soldier?”
Stryker shot a hard look at Samson. “And none to speak of?”
“Like I said.”
“Oh-kay. Who’s doing troop laundry?”
“A Chinaman called Hung Cho.”
“Stand for a minute while I change.”
“Take all the time you need, sir. I ain’t goin’ nowhere. Besides, Major Adams says you’re to report to the General soon as you get back.”
Stryker sighed. A summons from General Hunter wouldn’t be good news, probably. He took a spit bath with a bandana and a bit of water from Bly’s olla. Over a breechclout, he donned the uniform Samson brought over in the haversack, including soft but highly polished boots, and a black gunbelt with his converted Remington Army six-shooter in its holster.
Dahtegte spoke from the shadows in the rear of the wickiup. “Now you look a White Eye soldier.”
“I am a soldier.”
She made no reply.
Stryker handed his Apache clothes to Samson. “Laundered, if you please, Top.”
“Yes, sir.” He paused. “Lieutenant?”
“What is it?”
“Mind if I kinda tag along to Major Adams’s?”
“Of course not. Why?”
“They’s some backyard fence talk ‘bout A Squad having no color line. I’d like it if we could make our way to the General’s office side by side.”
“I told you no color lines, Top. And I mean it. Make sure you wear your Remington, too. Hear?”
“Yes, sir. It’s cleaned and ready, sir.” Samson’s white teeth showed through the wide smile on his face. “If we could go by the Misfit Squad on the way, that’s be good, too. Just to show them misfits we got us a real by-the-good-Lord lieutenant running things.”
“Can do,” Stryker said. His face showed two weeks of beard, but he decided to leave it be. He set his kepi at the proper angle and set off toward the double role of tents that housed the troop known as Stryker’s Misfits.
“A Squad. Fall. In!!”
The misfits poured from their tents dressed in soldier blue with polished boots and buttons, boot-blacked gunbelts, and kepis at regulation angle. Even the scouts had regulation shirts with sergeant’s stripes.