The High Rocks

by Loren D. Estleman

  I was glad of the excuse to keep moving. With no clouds for insulation, the entire range was laid bare to the elements, rendering useless our heavy clothing and making the snow squeak beneath our horses’ footsteps. I rubbed my face at intervals with my gloves to keep the blood circulating, but as soon as I stopped the numbness would creep back in and I’d be forced to do it again. After a while my arms felt like lead. I kept at it, however, driven on by a boyhood memory of a trapper I had once seen in Doc Bernstein’s office, a young man who had been found unconscious in the snow on the outskirts of Staghorn. His face had split from exposure and had begun to ooze blood and raw meat through the cracks. It must have been as painful as it looked, because that night he had made his way to his gun and put a bullet through his brain. I rubbed until the skin felt raw and then I went on rubbing.

  The trail led down a steep slope on the windward side of the mountain, an irregular incline swept by the wind in some places to bare rock interrupted in the middle by a crevice some twelve feet wide.

  “Devil’s Crack,” I told Rocking Wolf, once we’d stopped to view it from a distance of fifty yards. “Two miles long and a hundred feet deep at its shallowest point. We’d save several hours if we jumped it.”

  “And if we did not make it across?”

  “Then I guess we’d save the rest of our lives.”

  He grunted distrustfully, but a quick glance around seemed to assure him that there was no place nearby to set up an ambush, so he gathered up his reins and, slapping his stallion smartly on the rump, took off down the slope at a gallop. I did the same, but there was no way the mare could hope to catch up to an animal at least six years her junior, and that was why we were several lengths behind Rocking Wolf when I spotted the thong.

  It had originally been covered with snow, but the wind, its gusts confined to this side of the mountain, had exposed a two-foot length to glisten wetly in the light of the moon where it had been made fast to an upended tooth of shale. It was taut as a guitar string and raised about a foot and a half above the ground.

  I shouted a warning to the Indian and drew back on the reins so hard the chestnut reared onto its haunches and slid on its rump for twenty feet before coming to a stop. I was pitched off and had to grab the thong in both hands to keep from sliding over the edge. I stopped with my boots dangling in mid-air. But it was too late for Rocking Wolf. His horse hit the thong, screamed, and pitched forward onto its chest with an impact that shook the mountain. For a frozen moment, Indian and horse were a tangle of arms and flailing legs, fighting for traction on the icy rock. Then they sailed over the edge of the crevice and into space. The stallion’s screams echoed off the walls for an impossible length of time, then ceased abruptly. The wind whistled irreverently in the silence that followed.

  It was not a long silence. I was lying stretched out full length on my back, my gloved hands clutching the thong that had just claimed Rocking Wolf’s life and saved mine, when I heard a sound like a guitar string being plucked and the thong, weakened when the Indian’s horse had struck it, gave away where it had been lashed to the rock. I began sliding.

  I was about to go over when a hand grasped my collar, stopping me. Beneath my feet, an outcropping of brittle snow fell apart and sifted down toward the bottom of the crevice. Icy air played over my boots and up inside my pants legs where they hung over the edge. But the grip on my collar held firm and began pulling me backward. Empty space gave way grudgingly to solid ground. In another moment I had gained enough footing to turn over and see my rescuer. In that instant it occurred to me that I might have been better off if I’d fallen, because I found myself staring into the grinning, bearded face of Bear Anderson.

  7

  He was even bigger than I remembered. Crouched though he was, one leg thrust out for balance, its mate drawn up beneath him, a massive hand clutching the jagged rock to which the thong had been tied while he maintained his grip on me with the other, he was nearly seven feet of solid muscle without an ounce of suet anywhere. He was made to look even more ponderous by the bearskin he wore poncho-style over a buckskin shirt and pants tucked into the tops of fur boots the size of snowshoes. The eyes beneath the rim of his fur hood were the clear blue of his Scandinavian ancestors’, and his features, despite the leathery grain of his complexion, were even and handsome enough to turn the head of a mining camp’s most hardened prostitute. His full beard, like his shoulder-length hair, was reddish and streaked with yellow. The only flaw was a jagged patch near the corner of his jaw on the left side where the whiskers grew sparsely over scar tissue—the remnant, I judged, of an old tomahawk wound. But for that, he hadn’t changed in fifteen years.

  The mystery of where he had come from so quickly was explained by the snow clinging to his shoulders and the front of his bearskin. Lord knew how many hours he had lain there after setting his trap, covered with snow from head to foot, waiting for his pursuers to come along and blunder into it. He had the patience and ruthless cunning of a tracked cougar. He didn’t appear to recognize me, but I don’t suppose it would have mattered if he had. I was an intruder in his territory and worse, I had been riding with one of his mortal enemies on his own trail. The grin he wore disturbed me. I had a feeling it was the last thing a lot of Indians had seen this side of the happy hunting ground.

  I decided to bluff it out. “Long way down,” I said, acknowledging his assistance with a nod.

  “Goes all the way to the bottom.”

  A cracker-barrel answer, flat and noncommittal as a storekeeper agreeing that rain was wet. His voice was gentle and curiously high-pitched for a man his size, but held a harsh edge as if he wasn’t used to using it. He watched me through unblinking blue eyes.

  “I reckon I would have too, if you hadn’t happened along,” I ventured.

  “Reckon.”

  The conversation was becoming one-sided. I tried to pull myself farther up the slope, but failed to purchase a grip with my gloves on the smooth wet surface of the rock and gave up. My chest and stomach grew numb where I was lying in the snow. I was painfully aware that the scalp-hunter’s fist on my collar was the only thing that stood between me and oblivion, and from the look on his face I gathered that he was debating with himself whether it might be a good idea to let me go. At length he sighed resignedly and pulled me up onto a better footing.

  “Thanks,” I said, and started to get up.

  He didn’t reply. Instead he swept a loglike arm around behind me, crushed me to his chest, and with his free hand thrust against my chin began pushing my head backward until my spine quivered like a drawn bow. One of Ezra Wilson’s stitches on the back of my head popped audibly.

  “What’s your name, injun lover?” Anderson demanded, through his teeth. “What you doing in my mountains?”

  I couldn’t answer. He was holding me so tightly I couldn’t breathe and the pressure on my jaw made it impossible for me to form words. Blood pounded in my head.

  “Answer me, injun lover!” He increased the pressure.

  My lungs screamed for air. I was like a swimmer going down for the last time within sight of a shore full of people; help was only a cry away, but I was unable to ask for it. My spine creaked where he was bending me backward. I fought to retain consciousness. My eyesight shrank to pinpoints of light in a black shroud. Bear Anderson’s contorted features faded into insignificance and I felt myself floating away from my body. Then I felt nothing whatsoever.

  Half-formed images chased each other endlessly through my head. Now I was suspended in mid-air, my head, arms, and legs dangling while some unseen force bore me upward over uneven ground to where the air grew thin and sharp as flying thorns. Next I was lifted even higher and transported from pale moonlight to abysmal darkness, where small furry things with membranous wings fluttered about me, brushing my face with feathery strokes. In the next moment I was pitched like a sack of grain to the earth. After that there was a long stretch of nothing until I awoke with heat on my face.

  The first
thing I saw when I opened my eyes was flame. I drew back in panic, pain shooting through my abused joints, only to find to my relief that I was lying on my side and looking into nothing more dangerous than a campfire, consuming a small pile of wood a foot in front of my face. Around me, the warm light cast by the fire rippled over stone and splashed weird, writhing shadows over walls and ceiling tinted orange by the glow. Beyond the flame was a black void. I was in a cave or tunnel of some sort, and I was not alone.

  In the entrance, two eyes glowed eerily green in the reflected light of the fire. As I watched them a chunk of wood rolled off the top of the pile and crashed into the heart of the flames, sending up a spurt of yellow and illuminating the opening. I found myself staring into a narrow face with a coalblack muzzle and mouth parted to reveal two rows of sharp, curving teeth separated by a dripping tongue. Amber eyes with black slits in their centers studied me as if in fascination. One pointed ear, the muscles of which had been torn in some long-forgotten fight, refused to stand up like its mate, and so hung sullenly almost to the corner of the jaw. Beyond this was a bushy neck, a deep chest tapering to a visible ribcage, and two powerfully bowed forelegs covered with matted gray fur. The wolf was in view but an instant, and then the flare died and only the glowing eyes remained.

  There was a roar in the cave. Something buzzed past my right ear. I heard a yelp and then the thudding sound of feet fading into the distance. A thin stream of dust, dislodged from the cave’s ceiling, settled onto my head and down inside my collar. I rolled over onto my right side. In the gloom at the back of the cave, Bear Anderson sat upon a flat rock with a Spencer in his hands, a plume of white smoke twisting out of the barrel.

  “Just nicked him,” he said, more to himself than to me. “That won’t make the old bastard any easier to handle after this.”

  “You talk like you know him,” I said. My voice sounded strange in the comparative silence that followed the shot’s echo.

  “Ought to. Two years ago he and his pack cost me the best horse I ever had. We go back a long way together, Old Lop Ear and me.” He fished a fresh cartridge out of his pants pocket—he had doffed the bearskin—and reloaded, jacking a shell into the chamber to replace the one he had fired. He grunted with the effort. That′s when I noticed the dark stain on his buckskin shirt along his left side.

  “How bad is it?” I asked, nodding toward the wound.

  “Just a graze.” He laid the Spencer on the stone floor by his feet and sat gripping his knees in his enormous hands. “Bullet scraped around the ribs and got stuck in back. Can’t reach it, but it ain’t doing me no harm. I’m letting it bleed out some before I try to dress it. How you feeling?”

  “Sore.” I placed a tentative fingertip against the back of my head. It still throbbed, but the cut had ceased to bleed a long time ago. I unwound the bandage and cast it into a dark corner of the cave. Cold air stabbed at the wound. “What I’m wondering about is how come I’m still alive.”

  He grinned, lighting up his end of the cave. “Not because of anything you did,” he said. “You should of said something when I asked who you was, Page. I’d of snapped your spine like a chunk of dry firewood if I didn’t recollect you at the last minute.”

  “What was I supposed to do, knock it out in Morse code on your forehead?”

  Behind Bear, my chestnut and a rangy dun that stood a good hand higher than the biggest horse I had ever seen began to snort and nicker, straining at the bonds hobbling their forelegs. They had just caught the wolf′s scent. Bear made soothing noises deep in his throat and reached out to stroke the dun’s muscular breast. “Easy, Pike.” He said something to it in a guttural tongue that sounded like Blackfoot.

  “Where are we?” I looked around.

  He laughed.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t recognize Spirit Peak! Hell, this is where you and me used to cook our rabbits when we was kids. The injuns think this is where all the evil shades meet to plot their wicked deeds. They won’t come nowhere near it.”

  “You live here?”

  “Just part of the time. Mostly I like to be where I can keep an eye on what the Flatheads are up to.” He studied me curiously. “You going to tell me how come you was riding with Rocking Wolf?”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Not if you want some fresh air. It’s a ten thousand foot drop from here to the bottom of the mountain.”

  I told him. He listened in silence.

  “Got a badge?” he asked, when I had finished.

  I flashed the scrap of metal I carried in my breast pocket. He stared at it a long time, but that was just for show. The Bear Anderson I knew had never learned to read. Finally, he nodded and I put it away.

  “So that part′s true,” he said. “How do I know about the rest? You might be in with that bunch that tried to bushwhack me night before last. Come to think on it, you didn’t act very surprised when you seen I was wounded.” He reached down and scooped the rifle off the floor with a deft movement of his right arm. “Start talking.”

  “There’s not much to talk about. I met them west of here yesterday, if it was yesterday. How long have I been here?”

  “Six hours. Two more from Devil’s Crack to here. Keep talking.”

  “Church—that’s the leader of the gang that jumped you—is being paid five thousand dollars by the U.S. government to bring you in, dead or alive. It seems you’re standing in the way of a treaty with the Flatheads.”

  He spat. “A treaty with Two Sisters ain’t worth belly skins. He’ll sign it with one hand and lift your scalp with the other.”

  “Tell that to Ulysses S. Grant. He’s the one who authorized the warrant.”

  “What business does General Grant have with me?”

  “He’s not a general any more. He’s the President. That is, he was until recently. At any rate, his signature is still good, since he signed it before he left office. Right now I’d say you’re just about the most wanted man in the country.”

  He grimaced suddenly and placed a hand in the area of his left kidney.

  “Why don’t you let me take a look at that?” I started to get up, and found myself staring down the bore of the Spencer.

  “Sit,” he said. I sat.

  Outside, the wind hooted past the entrance, turning the entire mountain, which I remembered as a network of caves, into a gigantic pipe organ. The fire flared and buckled with the current of air inside our shelter. It was getting colder outside.

  “Hand me that sack,” said Bear. He indicated a worn gunny sack heaped against the cave wall near where I sat. It was mottled with brownish stains, some old, others fresh and moist. I hefted it and was surprised to find that it didn’t weigh much, though it bulged with its contents.

  “What’s in it?” I undid the knot in the top.

  “None of your business. Hand it here.”

  I ignored his warning tone and looked inside. It was full of scalps.

  “Satisfied?” He stretched out an arm as long as my leg and snatched the bag from my grip. He opened it and began pulling out specimens, which he stretched out on the floor at his feet. The cave filled with the stench of rotting flesh.

  When the last of the scalps—there were seven of them—were lying before him, he produced a bowie knife from the sheath at his belt, cut five leather strips from the fringe on his shirt, and knotted them together. This resulted in a thong six feet long, upon which he proceeded to string the scalps.

  “What do those do for you?” I was just beginning to get over the shock of that grisly discovery, when I’d been expecting to find food in the sack. Now eating was the farthest thing from my mind.

  “You wouldn’t understand it.” He tied on the last of the scalps and set the knot with his teeth. Then he stood and secured one end of the thong to a jagged crag in the wall nearest him.

  “Try me.”

  “Ammunition.” He stepped across to the opposite wall, found a fissure in the granite, and jammed the thong’s knotted free end into it. Now
the scalps were strung like hideous Christmas cards across the cave. “You’d be surprised what the sight of a dozen or so of them things hanging from your belt will do to a injun when he’s all fired up for a fight. I seen them turn tail and run after just one look. Course, they don’t get far.”

  The stench of the bloody relics was getting to the mare, which whinnied shrilly and tossed its head, trying to get its teeth into the hobbles that held it. Bear’s dun, however, remained unperturbed; the big horse had found a patch of green moss growing out of a crack in the stone floor and was busy nibbling at it. The scalp-hunter laid a heavy hand on the mare’s neck and smoothed back its bristling withers. Immediately it began to breathe more easily. He had a way with animals.

  “You eat recent?” he asked me.

  My appetite wasn’t what it had been before I’d seen his trophies, but I had no wish to starve to death. I shook my head.

  “There’s a buckskin pouch under them ashes,” he said, nodding toward the fire. “Pull it out.”

  I seized a stick from the fire and stirred the ashes until I encountered a bulky object and worked it out smoking into the open. Although it had probably been dampened and was still covered with what I supposed had once been wet leaves, the buckskin was now dry beneath a coating of soot. I used the stick to push aside the flap. Immediately the aroma of roasted meat enveloped me. Sclaps or no scalps. I was suddenly ravenous. But I remembered my manners. I offered Bear the first piece, a leg so tender it fell apart in my hand. He shook his head.

  “You eat it,” he said. “I swallowed enough rabbit in the last few weeks to sprout my own fur. That’s about the only thing that′s left after them last three winters. I had my taste all set for some venison, but your friend Church spoiled that in good shape.”

  “He’s no friend of mine.” I said it through a mouthful of meat so hot it made my eyes well up. Bear saw my predicament and tossed me a patched-up canteen full of water. I gulped it too fast and nearly choked to death. It was the best I’d felt in days.