Bad Medicine

by Paul Bagdon

  “And . . . ?” Will asked.

  “I swung by Bridger’s cabin one spring a couple years later, ’spectin grub an’ a bottle. What I found was my frien’ ripped into bits an’ pieces, liver an’ heart gone, a arm here an’ another there, tool an’ eggs gone, eyes tore out . . . an’ so forth. So you listen to me good, Will Lewis: Wampus ain’t a puppy dog. One day he’ll turn. I flat-out promise you that. I can’t say when. I wish I could, but I can’t. It’ll happen, though, an’ it’ll be a sad thing, ’cause you ain’t gonna be ready.” Ray was quiet for a long time. “I can’t say, though, that I ever seen a cross love a man like Wampus does you. There’s always a ’ception to a rule, no?”

  Will stared into the fire for several uncomfortable moments. “Looks like the meat’s ready,” he said.

  The crippled buffalo was even better than the men expected—and the aroma of it cooking made them expect a lot. Because he was barely older than a yearling, he hadn’t yet developed much muscle that would make his meat tough. And being a gimp slowed him way down, always trailing the herd, spending more time grazing, building up that sweet marbling meat lovers savored.

  Buffalo meat isn’t radically different from beef, although it has a distinctive, slightly gamey flavor that makes it yet more appealing to those who are fond of it.

  After they’d eaten much more than they needed—including Wampus, who worked off his feed burying knuckle bones and other choice bits and morsels—Will leaned back against his saddle and built a smoke. Ray made up some coffee and set the tin can aside to cool to a handling temperature. He picked the can up with a pair of small branches; both began to smoke as he moved the “coffee pot.”

  “Oughta get you a tin can an’ we wouldn’t have to pass this one back an’ forth,” Ray said. “Ain’t that I’m complainin’—there’s nobody else I’d rather share my fine coffee with, mind you—but it’d make things easier.”

  “Yeah. I’ll do that. Funny thing—any moron saddle tramp can cook up a shaggy steak, but it takes a special touch to brew real good coffee. An’ I’ll say this: you make the strongest, best-tastin’ java I ever had the damn good luck to drink.”

  “Well thanks, Will. You ain’t generally one to hand out compliments.”

  “No, I ain’t. Sometimes they’re deserved, though.”

  The men watched the embers of their cook fire fade from white to red to almost black. Wampus, asleep next to Will, whimpered, and his front paws scampered a bit, as if reaching out for something.

  “Chasin’ a rabbit, I ’spect,” Will said.

  “More likely sniffin’ after a wolf bitch, doin’ his best to climb on her. Them stud wolves like their ladies a awful lot.”

  “Ya know,” Will said, “I don’t know that I’m sure ’bout how much wolf blood flows in Wampus. I don’t doubt there’s some—maybe a good bit—but I never seen nothin’ wolflike ’bout him.”

  “Well, lemme count for you: One—that howl. No dog howls like that. ’Course a blue tick has a howl that’ll carry farther an’ clearer than a wolf’s, but that’s a complete different thing. Two—the way he hunts—hell, Wampus could find and fetch in a jackrabbit in the middle of a ocean. And three—the way he pulls a man down an’ kills him dead quiet in a heartbeat. No dog ever borned can do it like that.”

  Will rolled another cigarette. “You might could have some points, I’ll admit,” he said after lighting his smoke with a lucifer. “But look at that critter, Ray. He’s got the heart of a pussycat an’ . . . an’ he loves me. He purely does. He coulda took off the second I got that wire from ’round his neck, but he stayed on with me. Why? Gratitude! Gratitude an’ love. Ain’t a wolf ever lived or will ever live that showed them two things to a man.

  “I know you know wolves, Ray. I ain’t disputin’ that fact. Thing is, though, in any breed of animals there’s one or two that’s way different from the others, that goes sideways from his breed. I’d say Wampus is that one—the strange one. Wouldn’t you agree with that?”

  Will waited for a response. His only answer was a grinding, nasal snore. Ray was sound asleep. Will rolled another cigarette, smoked it, tossed the nub into the moribund fire, and slept.

  The next morning Ray came up on Will, who’d walked a couple hundred yards out into the prairie. “What’re you doin’?” Ray asked.

  Will seemed to scramble for words. “I . . . uhh . . . jus’ thought I’d take a little walk ’fore the sun gets to work. Yeah—a little walk.”

  Ray sighed. “If any of those boys got the wires yet, it’d be a miracle. We ain’t goin’ to see no one for two, three days at the earliest. You standin’ out here like a totem pole ain’t gonna draw ’em in any sooner.”

  “I s’pose.”

  “Anyways, Wampus’ll let us know if anyone’s comin’ toward us. Look, c’mon back. I got some coffee brewin’.”

  They sat close together, passing the can back and forth until it was empty.

  “Wanna play some cards?” Ray asked. “I got a deck in my saddlebag.”

  “Ain’t but two of us. Two fellas can’t play poker.”

  “Sure they can. We jus’ deal a hand and set it down an’ play ’gainst each other.”

  “I’m not much on gamblin’, Ray. I never saw no sense to it.”

  “I didn’t say nothin’ ’bout money. We jus’ play for pertend. Thing is, you can’t bet a hundred on a pair of threes or like that.”

  “OK. I’ll play.”

  After two hours, Will would have owed Ray $125,000 if they’d been playing for real money. Will tossed his cards to Ray. “This is a pain in the ass. You bluff too good. Hell, you didn’t have nothin’ but horseshit an’ slivers, most of them hands you won.”

  “ ’Nother hand?”

  “Hell no.” Will was staring over his friend’s shoulder. “We might better get ready for rain, anyway. Looks like there’s a storm comin’ up outta the east.”

  Ray turned to look. It was still a good ways off, but the sky had become slightly darker to the east. “Yeah. Nothin’ we can do ’bout it but get wet, I guess.” He gazed east for several minutes. “Funny. I ain’t seein’ no flashes of lightning at all—none. Even that far away, you’d think we’d see a couple.”

  “Dust storm?”

  “Nah. That ain’t what a duster looks like. It’s too high in the sky an’ there’s no wind behind it. It’d be moving a lot faster if it was a duster.” As they watched, the ends of the storm spread wider and the center grew darker and heavier. There was an odd, electric tension in the air, not like the calm before a summer storm, but more like that created when there’s a constant, just barely audible sound that makes the hair rise on the back of a man’s neck.

  Both men felt it; neither mentioned it.

  About an hour and a half later the horses got screwy, pulling at their stakes, arguing, snapping at one another.

  “We’d best hobble them two before they get to fightin’ ’an tear one ’nother up,” Ray said, “or take it in their heads to run off.”

  For the first time since Will had known the pinto, the horse moved away from him. When he pursued it, the horse swung his back around, dropped his head, and kicked out with both rear hooves. Had a hoof struck Will, it would have crushed his head like an anvil dropped onto a cherry pie from a considerable height, or crushed his rib cage and punctured his lungs and heart.

  Will moved very carefully around the horse and managed to snag the rope that led from the stake. He walked down the rope slowly, humming quietly, shushing the horse when he became fractious again. Finally, he was able to slide the hobbles on the pinto’s forelegs.

  Although he was turned away from Ray, it was obvious his friend was having much the same problems. “Ya lop-eared sonofabitch,” Ray snarled. “Ya keep this shit up an’ I’ll truss your scrawny ass like a Christmas goose, goddammit!”

  Ray had had quite enough. He stormed back to his saddle, his face red and distorted, and fetched his throwing rope. He dropped a clean loop in front of his horse a
nd tugged it as soon as the animal stepped into it, suddenly pulling the two forelegs together. The horse teetered and squealed until Ray shoved his shoulder, knocking him down. He slipped on his hobbles, released his rope, mumbled, “Ya dumb bastid,” and walked over to Will. They both turned their attention to the storm.

  “Ain’t movin’ very fast,” Will said.

  “No—but she’s gettin’ bigger: wider an’ taller an’ darker . . .”

  “Damndest thing I ever seen,” Will said. “An’ lookit Wampus. He’s scared shitless.”

  The wolf dog certainly did look frightened. He stayed a few inches behind Will’s heels, cringing so his gut touched the ground, his tail tucked tightly between his legs. His eyes, like those of the horses, seemed as large as wagon wheels.

  “Somethin’s real wrong out there,” Will said. “I don’t—”

  Ray hushed his friend with a raised hand. “Listen careful. You hear what I do?”

  Will listened intently, eyes tightly shut. The tension he’d felt earlier had translated itself into a quietly sawing buzz that was all the more ominous because of its lack of real volume. Hell, a half hundred head of beef on a run would make three times the noise. “What’s . . . ?”

  “Jesus Howard Christ,” Ray said. “That ain’t no rain storm or dust storm. Them is grasshoppers, Will!”

  “Grasshoppers?” Will asked incredulously.

  “Abs’lutely! I never seen nothing like this, but a fella from Missouri—another wolf-bounty boy—he tol’ after he give up wolfin’ an’ started farmin’, he lost a whole fifty acres of wheat.” Ray was talking rapidly now, almost too fast to follow. “The sonsabitches et the stalks right down level with the ground. They et all the clothes his woman had hanged out to dry, much of his tack an’ leather riggin’s for his two-bottom plow, his saddle, a buncha kittens his kid was raisin’ up, his manure pile, his—”

  “How can a grasshopper eat leather an’ cloth an’ such?”

  “One hopper can’t but ninety thousand billion of them can eat any goddamn thing they come across. I hear tell they ate up a baby in Kansas. I dunno how true that is, but it’s what I heard. Kinda tough on the poor baby if it is true.”

  Ray stopped talking and took several deep breaths.

  “OK. Here’s what we gotta do.

  “First, we cover our mouths an’ noses with our bandannas. Then we stuff li’l plugs of cloth in our ears. If hoppers git in there . . . well . . . and then we gotta plug up the horses’ ears an’ their nose holes, if we can do it. Wampus need plugs in his ears, too. Here’s another thing, too: every snake an’ rabbit and scorpion and prairie dog in all them acres is gonna be haulin’ ass away from the hoppers. We gotta keep the horses close together as we can, an’ use stout sticks to whack the piss outta the rattlers an’ sidewinders. See, they go nuts an’ bite ever’thin’ they see.”

  Will already had his bandanna in place and was tearing up his second shirt to make plugs for his ears and for his horse and dog. “You need some’a this?” he asked Ray. “No sense in us both ruining a shirt if we don’t have to. I got plenty for me an’ my critters.”

  “Good idear. While I’m pluggin’ up my horse, how ’bout you tearin’ off a couple branches to pound snakes an’ scorpions with? Won’t be long ’fore they’re here, an’ they ain’t lookin’ to be friends with us. Oh—and tuck your drawers into your boots an’ tie one a them sleeves around your neck good an’ tight. If what my friend tol’ me is true—an’ I got no reason to think it ain’t—the hoppers’ll be all over us real soon.”

  Neither Will’s horse nor his dog put up a fight as he jammed balls of cloth into their ears. Both animals were trembling and the pinto had broken a heavy sweat. Wampus stayed in place a couple of inches behind Will, belly to the ground, following his every move.

  The buzz had turned into a flapping, pounding sound—like that of the wings of a frantic bird except many, many times louder. Will hacked off a couple of desert-pine branches and trimmed them clean of shoots and suckers. He tossed one to Ray. Will stood between the horses. Ray was in front of him a few strides.

  The rabbits came first, covering the ground like a dirty brown blanket, running their hearts out. It was hard to believe that there could be so many jacks in one place, but there they were, wild-eyed, many with their tiny pink tongues protruding from their gaping mouths as they sucked air.

  The prairie dogs were next, scrambling, banging into one another, falling, running over each other. Then came the snakes.

  Will had never seen so many goddamn rattlers in his life, and neither had Ray. They didn’t glide smoothly as they generally did, but seemed to move in almost jerky, spasmodic leaps ahead, stopping every so often to raise their heads eight or ten inches above the ground as if they were periscopes on those rebel underwater ships. Ray began slamming reptiles with his stick, yelling and cursing at them. Only a few got past him and Will handled those easily enough. The horses stood stock-still, paralyzed with fear, the scent of the snakes reaching their brains even through the cloth jammed into their nostrils. And then, suddenly, there was nothing in the world but grasshoppers, impossibly massive numbers of them, with virtually no space between them. They came on with a roar composed of millions—billions—of the miniscule abrasive sounds each made, amplified by a figure too large to imagine.

  In a matter of seconds both horses, both men, and the wolf dog were blanketed with foraging hoppers. The horses, now beyond panic and into a state of raw instinct, wanted nothing but to run, to get this horror behind them. They reared and bucked in spite of the hobbles, their piercing squeals barely audible over the infernal racket of the insects. Will was pulled from his feet, blinded by the hoppers sheeting his face, afraid to open his eyes, and had to release the ropes he had on each horse. Without the use of their forelegs, the horses stumbled and fell and were unable to get up, their hooves sliding on the crushed grasshoppers that now covered the prairie floor like a grotesque green snowfall from hell.

  Wampus was rolling wildly, digging his shoulders into what should have been ground but was, instead, two inches of grasshoppers, the thick brown exudate—tobacco juice, as the cowboys called it—staining his coat. He snapped futilely at the hordes, accomplishing nothing but filling his mouth with hopper parts and guts. Will and Ray slapped at themselves ineffectually. Even with pants tucked into boots and bandannas tight to their necks, the cursed hoppers got into their clothing and the sensation of the beating wings, the sharp-edged legs, and the seeping flow of tobacco juice was enough to drive a sane man ’round the bend. Will tried rolling on the ground—forgetting there was no ground, beyond millions of grasshoppers. He stumbled to his feet with more hoppers touching his flesh than he’d had before he attempted rolling.

  It was impossible to see; the cloud of insects was so thick that there was no space between them. They were a writhing sheet of foul, tremendously destructive creatures that brought forth a driving, atavistic fear in man and animal alike.

  The onslaught ended abruptly. One moment the very air was crawling with hoppers and the next only a few stragglers leapfrogged past. Even the mass of hoppers on the ground moved after those in the air—except for those that’d been crushed, rolled on, or stomped into paste. Dead and dying snakes littered the ground; dead prairie dogs and jackrabbits were scattered about. There hadn’t been many scorpions—at least that the men could see. They’d stamped on those.

  The men stripped down and shook their shirts and pants vigorously, emptying their clothing of hopper corpses. They picked the crushed ones off their skin as if they were scabs, often gagging as they did so.

  Will tossed his bandanna on the ground in disgust, first holding it out in front of him. “Lookit this goddamn thing,” he said, “dripping with ’bacco juice. Damn! It’d make a shit fly puke.”

  They looked around them, awestruck. There was nothing green—or even brown and dessicated by the sun—left on the prairie. It was as if a giant scythe wielded by a demon spirit had attacked the area
as far as the eye could see.

  The horses, still hobbled, hadn’t gotten far and now stood together, heads hanging, breathing heavily, insects glued to their panicked sweat. Will and Ray cleaned their mounts using the edges of hands as scrapers. Wampus, finally standing erect, cleaned himself, except for those his paws and teeth couldn’t reach. Will took care of those for him.

  “Ya know,” Ray said, “as bad as this was, some good’s goin’ to come out of it.”

  “How so?”

  “Think about it, Will. The whole wampus thing. See, the redskins believe a wampus can control nature, control the weather. They gotta see the hopper attack as a plague ordered by the wampus.”

  Will considered that. “Then we oughta plan an attack real soon—hit ’em while they’re still seeing visions of hoppers an’ wampus comin’ after them.”

  “Right. The grasshoppers headed right for Olympus. The outlaws could stay in their saloon, but most of the windows—maybe all of ’em—were shot out, so that cesspool was just a-crawlin’ with hoppers. We know how they react to your wolf dog, an’ if you up an’ add that to a plague of bugs they figure the wampus set on ’em, well, we got us a buncha scared enemies—real scared.”

  “I dunno, Ray. One Dog jus’ hired on a herd of new guns. We don’t know where they come from or who they are—or what they can do with a pistol or rifle.”

  Ray grinned derisively. “Sure. I ’magine they hired on the Earp brothers, Billy Bonney, John Ringo, Bill Hickok, ol’ Doc Holliday, all them Clanton boys, an’ the goddamn Pope, right?”

  Will laughed heartily. “Thing is, the Pope could never fan a .38 or .44 worth a damn. But yeah, you’re right. Still, they got a army and we got us. We’re better an’ faster an’ a whole bundle smarter than they are, but they can put a awful lot of lead in the air.

  “Seems to me you got a plan, Ray.”

  “Oh, yeah. An’ a damn fine one.”

  “Tell me.”

  “First I gotta show you somethin’.” He led Will over to their saddles, their boots crunching on dead hoppers. The grasshoppers hadn’t had time to do any real damage to the saddles, although both were splotched with amber saliva from them. “I got some neat’s-foot erl,” Ray said. “We’ll clean our tack later.” He crouched down and opened his saddlebag, from which he removed a wooden box about sixteen inches long and six inches wide.