“Historical evidence of the banditry endemic along the upper Hassayampa dates at least from the Tenth Century, when the Arabic adventurer Masudi of Baghdad, records the slaughter near Tor of ‘full half a thousand infidels’ by the murderous Minkhar il Jerbouk, most bloodthirsty of the region’s robber lords.’ Masudi, whose travels in the course of a roving lifetime took him as far afield as Ceylon, East Africa, the Aral Sea and even perhaps Cathay, avers that in all his wanderings he never met Minkhar’s like’ when it came to sheer, imaginative butchery.
“ ‘Physically this Minkhar is unprepossessing—small of stature, one-eyed, sharp-featured—but his looks belie an intellect exceeded only by his innate and rather magnificent aura of evil,’ writes Masudi. ‘His favorite tortures involve not just the mutilation of the flesh, but of the mind as well,’ Masudi spares us further details, but three centuries later we gain an insight into the specifics of Hassayampan cruelty. David of Ashby, the Dominican friar who visited the region circa 1250 A.D., was captured by ‘the Robber Rhinoskiouros’ in the mountains west of Hymarind and spent a fearful winter with the band. ‘This heathen cutthroat,’ writes Friar David, ‘hath concorde with Beelzebub, and from him taketh the following power: that when he and his robbers are bent on rapine and pillage, he worketh a spell by satanic craft through which the day waxeth dark as the devil’s hinder-most parts, and his victims can scarce see their hands before their faces. This darkness he spreadeth over a distance of a fortnight’s journey. Though Rhinoskiouros himself is but halfsighted, he possesseth the eye of the cat, and the darkness is to him like unto the day at meridian. His victims thus captured like blind men on the High Street, he delighteth in perverting the young to his wicked ways, pitting them soul to soul against their elders, so that finally the young destroy their loving parents . . . mutilating them in heart and limb alike . . . while their new satanic master laugheth with wicked glee.’
“Ashby was finally released by this monster, but only after he consented to having ‘carnal knowledge of a large, dead fish.’
“Other travellers in later centuries were less fortunate than the English Dominican. Nikolai Nevski, a descendant of the sainted Alexander, ventured into the Hassayampa country from Novgorod in the 15th Century on a trading mission, only to have his entire party slaughtered and devoured by ‘the 10,000 slaves of the Bandit Mishlitsa,’ who was also known as ‘The Gnawer.’ This outlaw demonstrated his strength of jaw by personally biting off all of Nikolais toes and then releasing him to limp back to Russia over the mountains . . .
“Even as recently as the late war between Russia and Japan we hear of banditry and murder most foul on the upper reaches of the river. In the winter of 1904-05, an entire Japanese battalion was captured east of the Hsien-Ho Gorges by a warlord named Hananezumi, who cunningly coerced the officers to renounce the code of bushido by which they lived, then reported this betrayal to their enlisted men, who thereupon turned on the officers and emasculated them. ‘Afterward,’ writes the sole survivor, a sergeant named Takahashi who escaped down the river by hiding under a drowned cow, ‘this long-nosed devil Hananezumi wore as a monocle in his empty eye socket a dried testicle cut from our commanding officer. The rest of us he skinned and ate.’
“. . . It was this last bit of gruesome information that got me to thinking,’ Myerson writes at the conclusion of this chapter. “All of the Hassayampa’s most infamous outlaws were one-eyed; all of them were described as small and sharp-featured; all were possessed of a morbid wit. With the aid of friends better versed than I in linguistics, I discovered that all of the bandit leaders bore roughly the same name. Minkhar il Jerbouk translates from the Arabic as “Nose of the Rat.’ Rhinoskiouros from Greek as “Nose-Squirrel.’ Mishlitsa as ‘Mouseface,’ from the Russian. And Hananezumi, from the Japanese, as ‘Ratnose,’ Perhaps the position is hereditary, or perhaps . . .”
I could read no further. Ratnose had been around for a long time. He would doubtless still be here.
20
I FIND IT AMAZING that the lower animals should hunger for ice, an element quite alien to their diets. Yet I have seen ice please so many animals. My dogs beg ice cubes on hot days. The gray bears of the Upper Hassayampa tear great, splintery mouthfuls of it from the rotting snowbanks of the Altyn Tagh, gagging and drooling as it shatters in their jaws. Often they rip their gums and palates on the hard, green ice that lies in the lee of the windy ridges: quite a sight, the shaggy cave bear in his summer coat, rancid with the grease of the carrion he has eaten, the long, gay loops of blood, clotted with ice, festooning his grizzly mandible. At moments such as these, tucked away in some hunter’s cranny in the hills, watching the gray bear at his uncaloric snack, I can understand my own appetite for ice. I develop a sudden thirst—no, rather a hunger—for a Scotch-on-the-rocks. Ah, the rocks! The clear shards flavored ever so faintly with whiskey, crunching between the molars. Aggression and harmlessness all in one act.
So it was that late one afternoon, with the Altyn Tagh looming brown and white in the distance, I developed an irrational craving for ice. The river swept west, but ahead of us rose a wave of foothills on which the last few snowbanks of the previous winter lay melting—wastefully, it seemed to me. There was still a full quart of Johnny Walker Black Label somewhere at the bottom of my pack, and the urge for an iced whiskey rose as persistently as the mountains themselves. “Let’s cut up there into the hills and get some ice,” I said to my son. He looked up from the dwarfed birches of the riverbank to the soft purples and greens of the foothills and pondered.
The climb to the ice was anything but chilly. Once we left the shade of the Hassayampa’s alpine shrubbery, we were fully exposed to the steady heat of a cloudless subarctic sky. The sun filled half of that heaven with a hard white light that bled the blue from the rest of it. Only the withered gorse retained a hint of the soft yellows we usually associate with the sunlight of more southerly latitudes. As we climbed the ridge, which appeared gentle from the riverbank but was in fact so steady in its upward surge as to prove deadening to our legs, we found ourselves sweating in spurts, gasping, despising the sweet stink of crushed heather that rose from our boots. We tacked our way up the ridge on ancient caribou paths, steering by the cairns that dominated the skyline—Neolithic burial mounds, Myerson called them, though to us they appeared the fortresses of trolls, or maybe bears, or maybe both.
We paused often in the course of that hot afternoon to take coffee breaks in the shade of the smaller monuments. The stone was cool and smooth, with a scent—imagined or real—of hair and decay issuing from the gaps between those gray molars of the past. Below us, the Hassayampa wound its clean curves through the riparian forest. Now and then we saw squadrons of strange beasts rise from the Hassayampa’s strand—griffins and mandiggers, perhaps, wasplike at this distance, their wings glinting in the hard white sun and their crowlike squalls reaching us long after they themselves had settled out of sight on the farther bank. Of course we could not hear their cries while our little gas-burning stove was on, heating the water with its dragon roar of a voice, but often we heard them while we sat there breathing the comfortable aroma of our coffee.
There were artifacts to be found around the cairns, and my son quickly learned to dig for them. Kicking with his boots and poking with his hatchet, he turned up seven flint fleshing knives, four bronze ewers, three rotten axheads, a cloven helmet of a cuprous alloy, three quarters of a ceramic pisspot decorated with backwards swastikas, a delicately carved but pornographic toothpick probably hewn from a subhuman shinbone, and the skull of an animal which I tentatively identified as a Loocritter.
“You can’t go wrong by digging into the past,” I told him when he came up with the skull in his hands. It was brown, crumbling around the slash that had taken the Loocritter’s life centuries earlier, but the single unbroken band of ivory that comprised the animals dentition, top and bottom, was still intact. “This animal, I think, was the Loocritter, or Leucrota as it used to be called. It’s ext
inct now, but my grandfather’s father used to hunt them up here shortly after the Civil War. They ran in herds, like antelope and horses, and they were damned quick. The only way to take them was with bait. You couldn’t run them on a good pony—even with a lead, running down off a hill. If you drove them into a corral, most of them would chew their way out in a matter of minutes”—I showed him the sharp curves of ivory that armed the Loocritter’s jaws—”but if you put down a good load of horseshit in the corral, they’d stay. They loved to eat dung. Sometimes you could nail them just by putting down a few yards of well-aged manure. They’d nose on into it and just stand there, munching away and rolling their eyes at you while you primed the rifle and sighted and shot. They’d even keep chomping after they were dead, or so my grandfather said. He knew a hunter who had his fingers bitten off by a dead Loocritter when he went to drag it away by the nostrils.”
“What did they shoot them for?” my son asked.
“They’d knock out the ivory jaw bands for shipment back to Philadelphia. There was a market for them there. Chastity belts, something like that.”
At the top of the ridge we found the first tailings of snow-gray and grainy, but underlaid with a layer of clean green ice. While my son chipped away at the ice with his belt ax, I prowled on up the ridge in search of sign. I had the Luger in hand, a round in the chamber for fear of gray bears—no, not fear exactly, but rather anticipation. The heat of the climb was in my throat and up my back like slivers of steel. Waiting to satiate the hunger for ice, I was hungry for conflict. From this height of land, I could see the Upper Hassayampa in its entirety, and I knew what lay along that sinuous, seductive coil of river.
In the snow just over the top of the ridge I found the sign of three horses. They had been shod quite recently, judging by the sharp edges of their iron, and they were rather small horses, carrying light loads. I slipped and skidded over the wet black rock of the ridge, backtracking them for half a mile. When I found horse droppings, I stopped to break them open, to smell them—like a Loocritter, I thought wryly. The droppings were very poor in quality: the horses had been eating the sparse browse of these mountains. There were none of those rich, crumbly oat hulls that we associate with the well-fed horses of our Eastern valleys. These were hill ponies, hill-raised and hill-fed, but shod at some expense and effort to their owners.
Then, in the silky snow of the lee ridges, I found a spot where a rider had dismounted to take a look-see and to urinate. He had walked up the back of the mountains to peer down on the Hassayampa—perhaps to observe the climb that my son and I had undertaken that very afternoon. He had worn, on his feet, my eyes told me and my memory affirmed, the crimp-laced, knee-length moccasins of the Mountain Wyandot, and there was blood in his urine. A sick and desperate savage, I thought. Probably ahead of us—with a companion and a packhorse, or with two packhorses, or maybe with two companions. No, not with two companions—not this far out from home and with no packhorse. If they were that desperate, they would have ambushed us long since. Probably two men and a dwindling supply on the third horse.
I slid back down to where the boy was cutting ice. The bottle of whiskey was already chilling where I had buried it in the snow. I mixed his Kool-Aid with some ice water in my snow-chilled canteen, added more ice, and then poured myself a tall, strong whiskey in the other aluminum cup. I dropped four chunks of clean, green ice into the whiskey. Then I loaded the Winchester pump gun with Double-O buckshot and stood it upright against the ancient grave beside me. By then, the whiskey was ice-cold.
21
WE SPENT THE NIGHT in the lee of the cairn, without a fire. There was no firewood, and even if there had been I would not have burned it for fear that the flames might draw unwelcome guests. We boiled some jerky over the stove, melted a slab of goose fat over that, and added the last of our dehydrated potatoes. It made a palatable stew, particularly tasty thanks to the thin, cold mountain air. We finished the meal with a chocolate bar and cups of steaming Ceylon tea—mine laced with whiskey.
“Did you see any bear sign up there on the ridge?” my son asked me as he ate his chocolate.
“No,” I said, and I told him about the horse tracks. And their implications.
“Why don’t we get up early and try for one of those bears?” he said. “We’re short of meat, and with the weather getting colder the way it is, we could always use the hide.”
“I don’t think we should risk it,” I said. “The gunfire might attract those horsemen to us, and I’d like to avoid a fight this far from home. If one of us gets hit . . .”
“You don’t have to worry about gunfire,” he said. “Look what I found in the cairn while you were up on the ridge.” He reached behind his backpack, which was propped at the head of his sleeping bag, and came up with a crossbow. The stock was of weathered oak inlaid with ivory; the bow itself, short, recurved, and carved from what seemed to be the flexible jaw band of a giant Loocritter. The string and the trigger mechanism were made of a copper alloy, though the nut that released the string was carved from ivory. The inlays on the stock showed bearded men on snowshoes killing a great cat—probably an ounce, or snow leopard. Maybe a mountain tiger. They were using crossbows of the same design. The cat was crouched in the shelter of a wind-warped fir tree, its fangs bared and one paw cocked to lash out at the shuffling hunters. Crossbow bolts bristled from the cat’s side and throat. The creator of this scene had been a miniaturist of no mean skill: puffs of ivory steam issued from the mouth of the largest hunter, obviously the hunting chief giving orders to his men, and a nimbus circled the cat’s head like a frozen halo.
“What about quarrels?” I asked. “Did you find any in the grave?”
“Quarrels?”
“The arrows you shoot from a crossbow are called quarrels. They’re shorter and heavier than longbow arrows, and the heads aren’t barbed.”
“Like these?” He held out a handful of green arrowheads, some with rotting wood still set in the cavities.
“Great,” I said, “but what do we do for shafts?”
“How about the wooden rods we use for cleaning the shotguns? I could whittle one of them down, or even both of them. We’ll be back into the woods along the river soon enough and we can replace them there.”
I looked down into the valley, where the river showed only a few steely glints in the twilight. The trees down there were stunted, gnarled. Not much chance of finding a straight limb for a cleaning rod. Then I realized the ridiculousness of my objection: why worry about cleaning the shotguns when we had a chance to go after cave bears? We could always use our bootlaces to draw patches and brushes through our gun barrels. My son spent the rest of the evening whittling down the pine rods and fitting the arrowheads, fletching the bolts with grouse feathers, tying down the vanes with monofilament fishing line until it got too dark to bend a knot.
“We’ll practice with the crossbow in the morning and then hunt along the ridge, keeping the river in sight,” I said as we zipped our sleeping bags. “I’ll back you up with the Luger on any bear we come across. You’re right: we sure could use some meat and a good, thick bearskin.”
It rained during the night—a cold, sheeting rain that felt all the chillier for the ancient granite markers towering over us. I slept uneasily with the shotgun under the edge of my ground- cloth, loaded and with the choke wide open. The rain stopped at first light. The sky to the east was lemon yellow, and it sent a sour shiver down my back. We could see the dim shapes of mandiggers flapping along the river far below; their skirling cries reached us on a raw wind. A breakfast of jerky and tea, an hour’s practice with the crossbow, and we moved out along the ridge. The crossbow shot flat and hard at thirty paces, punching neatly through an old shirt stuffed with heather. The tightly braided copper wire of its string had not weakened with the centuries. I dug up the Luger and tucked it into my waistband at the small of my back. We walked slowly, stopping short of the skyline whenever the rolling ridge dropped away from us, then easing up to
scan the country ahead. The sun was high, but with no warmth to it, when we spotted a small band of vervex scuttling up a draw ahead of us. They were gray-brown, with scrawny horns, and they were in a hurry.
“Keep down and don’t move,” I told my son. But nothing appeared chasing the sheeplike creatures. We backtracked them down the draw, and my son found what might have been a horseshoe print at the edge of a thicket of dwarf willow. The print disappeared before our eyes as the heather sprang back upright, but it seemed that the horse had been heading northwest, just as we were.
“Are they shadowing us or are we shadowing them?” he asked, laughing.
“It’s no joke,” I said. “The only animal up here that would consciously stalk us is man. All the tigers have been shot out of here, and the bears are timid unless you’ve got them cornered.” I looked down toward the valley. The Hassayampa was nearly a mile below us, and up ahead it looped to the left, carrying its safety even farther from the open ridges. “Maybe we ought to forget about bears until the return trip, or until we’ve gotten clear of these horsemen.”
“Aw, come on,” he said, rolling his eyes. “We haven’t nailed anything big on the whole trip. The mastodon was a dink, and so was the marlin. There weren’t any aurochs left in the aurochs country. All the caribou seem to have gone north, and you say that the tigers have been shot out. That leaves bear, and I want a bear. Come on, Pop!”
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