Wolves At Our Door

by J P S Brown

  As Dolly Ann’s horse took his first steps across the payment, the cattle watched her go, Kane moved in on them from the south side, the Lion moved in from the north, and Cody Joe pushed them from behind. A cow took the lead and followed Dolly Ann’s horse, two more tiptoed hesitantly after her, and that was all the rest of the herd needed to follow her through the militia and across the highway en masse. The crew pushed the herd through the pasture gate and the Lion and Cody Joe went to find and repair the hole in the fence where the cattle had escaped. Kane and Dolly Ann rode back to get the pickup and trailer.

  They dismounted behind the trailer. The Militiamen pulled up behind them and blinded them with their pickup’s headlights. Kane did not want to try to load the horses with the headlights bathing the inside of the trailer.

  He held his hand over his eyes and looked toward the pickup, to show the people their light was too bright. Nobody in the pickup moved or spoke. Kane could have led his horse back to the driver’s window to speak softly and with much consideration for the feelings and sensibilities of the Militiamen, but that would have endangered his horse. The traffic had begun to run by and the trailer was parked on the edge of the highway.

  Horses can be loaded at night into a trailer bathed in light, but only if they trust the person who leads them in. They don’t like to go anywhere that is bathed in bright light, because of the way their eyes have been positioned in their heads by their creator. They have wonderful eyesight straight ahead, and they can see as well behind themselves. Because of that, a bright light from behind them does not show them anything in front of them, it blinds them.

  At seventy-five years of age and no longer light of foot, Kane did not want to get in front of his horse, coax him over the high step into the trailer, and lead him inside on top of himself. From his position in front of the pickup, Kane asked the driver to shut off the headlights so he could load his horse.

  "Goddammit, that’s why we’re here, to light up the trailer so your stupid animal can see where it’s going. Load it so we can go," a woman’s voice shouted.

  "He can’t see," Kane said.

  "Dammit, you damned dumb cowboy that’s what we’re here for, to furnish light so your damned horse can see. Load your damned horse. Are all cowboys as damned stupid as you?"

  Dolly Ann stepped in front of the pickup and took Kane’s horse’s reins. "I guess you’ll have to go back and give them some school on how to load a horse, Pappy or we’ll be here all night."

  ”No," Kane said. "We won’t." He searched the ground until he found a rock the size of his fist, walked up to the right headlight, and put it out with the rock.

  "What the . . . What in the world . . . ?" came from inside the pickup. Kane looked straight at the blank windshield, took two deliberate steps to the other headlight, and put that one out too. Then he raised the rock over his head as though he would let go at the windshield. "Back up, back up, back up," a man’s voice shouted. The driver peeled rubber backward out of the mad cowboy’s range. Kane and Dolly Ann loaded their horses and drove away while the Militiamen got out and wailed about the damage he had done to their peepers.

  As Kane exited the southbound lane to go back and pick up the Lion and Cody Joe, Dolly Ann said, "Pappy, you scare me sometimes."

  "How’s that, darling?" He was trying to decide on the horse he would ride tomorrow.

  "For one thing, didn’t you see that those people had guns? What if they had decided to shoot you in self-defense when you attacked their pickup?"

  "Don’t you know, darling? Those people's guns don’t shoot."

  "They do too, Pappy, and those people thought you were crazy."

  "I’m no crazier than my granddaughter who told everybody her ass was dying a while ago."

  The Lion and Cody Joe were standing in the parking lot of the Tubac bar when Kane returned with the trailer. They loaded their horses and piled into the 7X’s crew cab, and Kane headed for home. Cody Joe fell asleep immediately. He could not sit five minutes in a moving pickup without falling into a dead sleep. Then again, it had been a long day.

  "Where was the hole in the fence, compadre?" Kane asked the Lion.

  "In an arroyo. The hole was wide as the wash, and all the wire was gone."

  "What are you telling me?"

  "Whoever cut the fence took all the wire with them and left a hole they didn’t think we could patch without making a trip to town for new wire."

  "What did you do?"

  "I stole the wire we needed from Jimmy Garrett’s house fence."

  "You had enough with that?"

  "Oh, yes. His is an old five-wire fence, so we took the bottom strand off one side and closed our hole. Jimmy probably won’t even know it's gone."

  "Good."

  "As soon as I can, I’ll take back the wire I stole."

  "I’ll call Jimmy tomorrow."

  "Who would cut a hole in a man’s fence so his cattle could get out on the highway?"

  "Edward Abbey." Kane laughed.

  "Who is that, Pappy?" Dolly Ann piped in, wide-awake.

  "I thought all you hard-twists were asleep."

  "Who is Edward Abbey?"

  "He’s a guy who used to cut fences."

  "Why would he do that?"

  "He was looking after the world, like the Militiamen."

  "Yeah, the great Militiamen."

  "Ain’t we lucky, granddaughter? We had Edward Abbey and a militia of true Americans looking after us tonight."

  SEVEN

  Adan Martinillo spied on La Golondrina for a week from a place in the escarpment above the hacienda. He realized the first day that he had arrived too late, because no racehorse was being trained there. He watched Ibrahim and the grooms bring all the horses out of their stalls every day and no racehorse was put to work. Martinillo realized he might not find where they had taken the horse. Abdullah was not at the hacienda either, so Martinillo was sure he had gone somewhere else to train Auda. The horse might even have been taken to the racetrack in Rio Alamos for his training.

  Martinillo had about decided to give up and go home, but that night Abdullah returned horseback to La Golondrina, and the next morning he and Ibrahim appeared at 4:00 a.m., saddled horses, and rode east. Martinillo followed and at dawn he saw that they carried rifles slung over their backs. The muzzles jutted on the skyline. Martinillo followed them back toward Canela and into the High Sierra.

  He kept his distance behind them. At sundown an armed sentry appeared and led Ibrahim and Abdullah into a deep ravine. Martinillo followed more carefully after that. If other sentries were posted on the way, they would be facing Adan and would have a good chance to see him before he saw them. He left the trail and stalked the ravine the way he would a cave full of lions.

  Ibrahim and Abdullah were too taciturn. He wished they would at least carry on a conversation as other travelers did. They did not talk at all between themselves or with their guide as they descended into the ravine. They rode good, quiet rock horses too. The trail was well used and well maintained, so they did not roll loose rocks. After they descended into the ravine, Martinillo lost all sight and sound of them and thought he could not follow without being seen. He decided to watch the ravine from on top. If he had to go in, he would wait until full dark.

  The canyon was a quarter mile wide and at least five hundred feet deep. A clear stream flowed along the bottom. A large field of uniform and neatly spaced poppies grew beside the stream.

  Martinillo hid in a place that allowed him to see across the ravine and watched the bottom for Ibrahim and Abdullah. They appeared again directly beneath him, and he kept pace with them as they rode along the bottom. They dismounted in front of a group of adobe buildings at the head of the canyon.

  He found a good lair in which to hide. He could see into the windows of the buildings and hear the conversations of the people. He heard horsemen patrolling the mountain behind him, but he knew he could not be seen. No one could see him unless they stopped directly above him
.

  Martinillo knew how to make himself comfortable in a hunting lair. This one was spacious enough so that he could change positions and sleep. He could lie on his stomach all day and study his prey. Now, at an age when everybody considered him old, he could be more comfortable in a lair than he had ever been. He could make a querencia, a haven of almost any measly place as long as he could see and hear what he wanted to and not be seen from any side. He enjoyed a feeling of bienestar, well-being, when he found himself in a good lair from which to hunt formidable prey. This lair on a vantage point above the ancient ravine called La Culebra, The Snake, was as fine as any he had known.

  The helicopter that had unloaded the wolves at the lookout point of Guasisaco was parked at the end of a landing strip. Martinillo remembered the number on it. The people in the buildings sounded happy. The ones who served as sentries called often to one another, so Martinillo almost always knew where they were. Most of the people in the bottom had gone inside the buildings by the time he settled in his lair the first night. Counting the sentries, he estimated that about thirty people lived there, an unusual gathering in the Sierra. He had never seen a gathering of more than ten people this far away from a village. At roundup time on the ranches only five to ten people came together. Roundups were gatherings of men. Martinillo could hear women in the buildings. The people spoke softly and that meant they were content. He liked it when his prey was content, because that meant he had not been discovered. It disturbed them and made them anxious when they discovered him.

  He liked it that he could put a name and location to this place. He had always heard of La Culebra ravine. The Lupinos had owned this part of the Sierra all his life, but he had never seen it. His father had once delivered some oxen to don Nesib Lupino here and had told Martinillo about it. Now, comfortable in his lair, at the successful end of eight days of patient stalking, he slept.

  A tart odor awakened him early. He raised up and saw that a clean white smoke emerged from the chimney of the newest building. He did not know much about opium goma, gum, but he knew when it was cooked it became a heroin dope called Mexican Brown. Everybody in the Sierra knew that, and he had been told that it smelled like vinegar when it was cooked.

  The denizens of La Culebra were early risers. They began to stir at the end of the second sleep, about 4:00 a.m. Martinillo's lair was above horse corrals. He had heard them move and blow softly in the night, heard a mare squeal none too softly. At first light, a man with a tattooed, shaved head walked to a place underneath Martinillo and talked to the horses while he fed them. Martinillo could not see him attend to the horses, but knew what he did. The sounds men and animals made at feeding time were known to any man who did it himself.

  Martinillo watched the man head back to the lighted bunkhouse.

  He dressed oddly. The people inside the bunkhouse coughed, sneezed, and spoke softly in the early morning. Martinillo heard the sound of their coffeepot when someone set it on a stove, heard it picked up and the hot stuff poured into a cup. Anybody knew that sound. He missed the warm vapor of a cup of coffee under his nose and the smell of the brew. He heard the people sip loudly, the way Kane and Vogel said that Abdullah sipped his coffee. They said all Arabs did that. Martinillo thought that is true, there are a lot of Arabs in that bunkhouse. They sounded as though they had a contest going to see who could sound most like a man who strangled when he sipped his coffee. Martinillo smiled to himself. He could smell and almost taste the coffee.

  One building was used as a cook shack and the women slept and worked there. One of them carried food to the building where the men slept. A man met her at the door and took it from her.

  Before sunup Martinillo heard an airplane approach. Then its sound filled the canyon. A twin-engined, red and white airship came into sight and passed him so close he could see that it carried three men. The pilot’s sleeves were rolled halfway up his forearms. Martinillo watched the airplane bank over the buildings, double back, land on a strip along the poppy field, and taxi to the side of the helicopter. The airplane buzzed like an insect, then the engines ceased and the propellers clacked and stopped.

  Ibrahim and Abdullah and three others came to the stables to saddle two horses with riding saddles and four mules with packsaddles. Martinillo saw plenty to study in the men who helped Ibrahim and Abdullah. He seldom left the Sierra, or read a newspaper, or came within a hundred miles of a television set, so he did not know what a city slum gangster looked like. He had never even heard of such a gangster. So it was that he had a chance for the first time in his life to marvel at the appearance of the three men who walked away with the pack string. He had never seen such outlandish dress. Two of them wore trousers cut off below the knees to show their hairy legs. One’s trousers had slipped halfway down his hips, bagged on the legs, and dragged the ground. The trousers bunched over his shoes and hid them. The man never tried to hitch his trousers back up where they belonged, on top of his hips, but somehow they stayed on. The two men in short pants had shaved the hair completely off their heads, but the other had shaved lanes between thick, short borders of hair that appeared to have been lacquered and lay uniformly like the rows of opium poppies in the ravine.

  He had never seen anybody wear tattoos over every visible surface of their skin the way these men did. They wore tattoos on both cheeks, their chins and foreheads, and the tops and backs of their heads. The one in the long trousers wore a ring in his nose and the end of his nose was tattooed red. All of them wore dainty earrings and clurnsy-looking, clodhopper rubber shoes that made tracks like a tractor.

  As people emerged from the buildings, Martinillo saw that thirty of them wore the uniform of tattoos and shaved headsthey were what Mexicans called pelones.

  Men emptied out of the buildings, formed in the center of the yard, and began to exercise in unison as a leader gave orders. The leader spoke good Spanish, but his accent was foreign to Martinillo. Martinillo knew only the accents of his countrymen in Chihuahua and Sonora. After he had listened to this group of pelones awhile, he knew that he had never heard their special brand of Spanish.

  Only seven of the people wore full heads of hair. All of these people were dark-headed, olive-complexioned, and cultivated full beards. They wore sweatshirts with hoods and most of the time kept them pulled over their heads. The hoods were ample and loose, and when they were in place, the faces could only partially be seen.

  The seven who wore the hoods were instructors who lectured the pelones in English. The hooded men did not care if the pelones saw their faces, but they seemed to care that somebody might be watching them from afar. Martinillo could not imagine that they suspected he was there, but it seemed that they wore the hoods to keep somebody like him from seeing them.

  Three young women came out of the cookhouse and sat by the door to take the sun, but their heads and necks were covered with rebozos. They watched the airplane’s two passengers cross the stream on stepping-stones and walk up to the cookhouse. The pilot went to the helicopter to perform some service to the cockpit.

  One of the passengers was short and slight and wore khaki trousers, hiking boots, and a pilot’s leather jacket. A red baseball cap and black sunglasses almost masked his small face completely. He carried a long, flat case by its handle.

  The other passenger was Rafa Lupino. After the exercise session, Rafa introduced his companion as John Smith, the company’s new weapons instructor. John Smith laid his case on a chair by the women and in English began to lecture the pelones on the value and absolute necessity of well-aimed small arms fire in combat.

  Ibrahim and Abdullah and their helpers loaded the pack animals with cargo from the airplane and led them across the stream to the buildings. Rafa ordered the helpers to unpack and open the cargo. Four heavy canvas duffel bags were opened in the yard and Martinillo took out paper and pencil to draw what he saw. He drew two projectiles that looked like big bullets. He drew a hollow tube that an instructor held on top his shoulder and sighted while he gave ins
tructions on how to use it. He drew rifles that used heavy, curved clips of ammunition. He drew Uzis and their clips. He drew grenades, and brown, square packages that Adan knew must contain high explosives, because the faceless man demonstrated the application of detonator caps to the contents. Each instructor separated four or five students from the rest to give them individual schooling. Weapons, ammunition, and explosives were spread on tarps on the ground and the hooded men instructed the pelones on their uses and capabilities.

  Ibrahim and Abdullah brought the animals back to the stables. Abdullah then came out with Auda, the horse that Lupino would race against Gato, and led him down to the stream. The horse drank sparingly. Martinillo had seen the horse win two races in Rio Alamos. Abdullah talked softly to the horse. He brought him back and saddled him with a jockey saddle. He led him in a wide circle by the buildings and let him stop often to watch the men at their school. After an hour of this, he returned the horse to the stable, tightened his cinch, and helped a boy up on his back.

  The boy rode Auda at a walk down the smooth path of the airstrip between the stream and the poppy crop, then around a bend in the canyon out of sight. After a while he came back to the airstrip, back to the stable, then turned around and repeated the sashay up the airstrip.

  Auda watched everything, from the buzzards high on their invisible steps in the sky to the glint of the sun on the skins of the airplane and helicopter. He listened to the voices. He looked back over his shoulder often at Abdullah. He walked and watched with healthy vigor and enthusiasm.

  An hour later he was unsaddled and led into a pool in the stream. The boy stripped to his underwear and bathed him with a pan. He brought him back to the stable wet and dripping. Abdullah wiped the water off his coat with a slim board that had been whittled into a blade, then handed him back to the boy to be walked dry.