A young voice whispered from behind me, “Brother, what took you so long?”
Turning slowly, embarrassed to be caught by a boy, I said, “You hide well, Ish-kay-neh. Where hide the others?”
“They wait for you in a cave on the other side of this ridge.”
“Horses and guns are safe?”
“Yes.”
“Enjuh! Go!”
“So the women and children distracted the scouts while you got away with your horses and guns?” I asked.
He Watches nodded and stared into the fire. “Ish-kay-neh ran into the camp and said he saw a line of soldiers and scouts coming from the Rinconada. We didn’t know if the scouts who rode off to the sides of the trail might find us. At first, we decided to all come here, but your woman has a warrior’s mind, Yellow Boy. She said, ‘If we all go, the scouts will find our trail and take us. Let the men stay hidden and free us when they can. Then we’ll all run from this place together.’ From what you heard at Blazer’s Mill, she knew the Blue Coats came to take our horses and rifles. She said the women and children must get between the scouts and our tipis and act as if they gathered food and did not know the Blue Coats would soon come down the trail. Then the scouts would see them and stop before they reached the tipis. She was right; it happened that way. Juanita led the women toward the trail with their baskets. I guess a scout found them, and the Indah scout chief told the scouts to take them on with the soldiers to the agency. Of course, he will send them back to catch us.
“Yellow Boy, tell us what we do to get our women and children back from the Blue Coats before the scouts find us.”
I slurped coffee Ish-kay-neh poured for me and thought while the men and boy across the fire stared at me. Finishing the cup and throwing the last few drops on the little blaze, I said, “Who rides with me?”
There were grunts and nods from each man and the boy.
“Enjuh! When the sun comes, we’ll go back to the ridge where I hid today and watch what happens until, like Coyote, we learn how to trick the Blue Coats into giving us back our women and children so we can leave this place.”
I watched them nod, and asked, “Where can we go to get away from the Indah? They cover the land.”
He Watches replied, “Victorio spoke of living with Juh in the Blue Mountains before he returned to Ojo Caliente. We could ask Juh to shelter us in his camp. With Juh’s help, we could go west of the great river, ride into the land of the Nakai-yes, the land of the Witch who kills and scalps our people. Maybe then we’ll find and kill this witch while Juh gives us a place to camp. I’ve waited a long time to find and kill him.”
Klo-sen nodded and spoke up. “I know the way to Juh’s mountain.”
“Klo-sen leads us to Juh,” He Watches said.
“Enjuh!” Shaken fists went up around the fire.
CHAPTER 34
THE STONE CORRAL
* * *
From a high northern ridge above the agency, I stood with the others and stared from behind the branches of piñon and pine, my eyes narrowed and teeth clenched at the scene far below us. Up and down the valley swarmed Blue Coats, their Apache scouts, and pack train muleskinners. Soldier tents stood along Tularosa Creek, forming long orderly rows, the soldiers’ horses and mules tied to picket lines, with other much larger tents sheltering supplies brought in by the pack trains. The scattered white from so many tents up and down the valley made it look like early March with patches of snow still on the ground. A haze hung in the crisp, cold air from cooking fires and the dust raised in the big stone corral where more than two hundred Mescalero horses milled.
Using Shináá Cho, I eventually found Juanita and the other women huddled by a fire near the creek’s southeast side where the People had been herded. Juanita’s little sister sat between Juanita and Maria, the three sharing a blanket. Studying every nook and cranny in the area with the Shináá Cho, I began to form a plan for stealing our women and children back by entering the creek above the Army camp after dark, moving downstream to the camp, getting the women to come to the creek, and leading them down to a place where the men could meet them with horses for a long, hard ride into Mexico. Beside the fury burning in my chest, hope for taking back the women grew, making my heart pound with anticipation.
I motioned the others to huddle with me.
“I see our women close to the creek near high banks. Before the moon rises, I’ll wade into the creek above the soldier camp and follow it down to them. The women will come with me. We’ll go down the creek and meet you with the horses and supplies from camp. We’ll ride to join Juh in Mexico. Ride west. Go around Tularosa village. Maybe camp and rest in Jarilla Mountains before riding to Mexico using night for cover.”
Beela-chezzi said, “Strong way you offer. How will the women know to come to you in the creek?”
I nodded toward Ish-kay-neh. “Little Brother will wander into the camp of the Blue Coats and say he’s separated from his family. The Blue Coats will put him with the others. He’ll find the women and tell them to listen for three calls of a googé (whip-poor-will) before moonrise. Because there are many women in camp, the guards let them go to bushes along the creek to do their business, going back and forth all night. Our women will go to do their business, but won’t go back. Instead, they’ll come into the creek with me. No one will miss them until sunrise. Will you do this thing, Ish-kay-neh?”
Ish-kay-neh was smiling. “I’ll do this. I’ll show I’m ready to be a warrior.”
I nodded. “It’s a dangerous thing you do. What say the warriors?”
They nodded, and Klo-sen spoke for them, “Ish-kay-neh goes. He’ll soon be a warrior.”
From the agency came the sound of low thunder, whistles, and yells. Looking back through the piñon and pines, we saw mounted Blue Coats driving the Mescalero ponies out of the stone corral standing across the creek from the agency house. They were headed up the valley road toward Fort Stanton. The warriors looked at each other and shook their heads in disgust. The Mescalero ponies would never be seen again, despite what Agent Russell had said.
The ponies gone and the dust beginning to settle, Ish-kay-neh turned to me and said, “Should I go now?”
I slowly nodded, despairing at the risks the unproven boy took. “Take no chances. Do as the Blue Coats tell you. If nothing changes, I’ll come tonight. If I don’t come, listen every night for three calls of the googé from the creek before the moon rises. We’ll never leave you and the women. Be strong. Let no fool shoot you, especially the scouts. They’ll shoot first and then ask why you’re there. The Blue Coats are slower to shoot. Use them when you can.
“Follow the ridge trail east; don’t go down to the agency on the same ridge trail the Blue Coats used who took our women because the scouts might backtrack and find us. In the valley off the ridge, move south down the trail going to the creek. The soldiers will find you soon.”
Ish-kay-neh swung his flat palm in an arc parallel to the ground and said, “I hear and understand. We’ll wait for the call of the googé.” He jogged up to the trail a few hundred yards and disappeared into the brush and junipers.
Just past the middle of the morning, the guards surrounding the People began herding them with their blankets and cooking pots into the now empty stone corral, which had a high stone wall and only one gate. The Shináá Cho showed me nothing as I tried to understand why they herded the People like livestock into a corral everywhere covered with fresh and dried horse manure to at least a hand width depth. My anger grew, fanned by my helplessness to do anything.
A little after the sun passed the top of its arc, using the Shináá Cho, I was able to spot Ish-kay-neh, who had wandered onto the agency grounds unnoticed. Soon a Blue Coat guard grabbed him and led him to the stone corral where words were said with the guards on the gate who thumbed Ish-kay-neh inside and motioned the Blue Coat away. Crowded into the corral, most of the People sat stoic in their misery.
After a while, the Shináá Cho showed a Mescalero go to
the gate, making signs he needed to do personal business. The guard laughed and pointed toward the corral’s back wall. Later, a chief, tall and straight, that I recognized as Nautzile, went to the gate guards and was led to the agency house. Soon Russell and Nautzile went to the commander’s tent. After a while, Nautzile returned to the corral, and soldiers appeared with picks and shovels and gave them to men near the gate to dig trenches in the brush a few yards away from the corral gate. Others came with buckets of water and poured them in the horse trough that the People had drunk dry. By late afternoon, a steady stream of two or three Mescaleros at a time left the gate for the trenches to return looking sick and exhausted.
Before nightfall, Blue Coats appeared driving a wagon loaded with wood and let the women build a fire in the middle of the corral. Soldiers brought big cooking pots used in their mess to feed them, but many of the captives refused to eat.
Before the moon rose, we crept away to our camp, wondering if fighting and dying with Victorio was the only way to end Blue Coat outrages.
Three days passed. Four. The original trickle of Mescaleros passing back and forth to the trenches had become a flood. After two days, they covered the stinking and full original trenches and dug more. By the fourth day, they covered the second set of trenches and dug more. Russell and Doctor Blazer made repeated visits to the commander’s tent. High on the ridge above them, we watched with increasing and helpless fury. Klo-sen and Beela-chezzi talked about committing suicide by attacking the guards on the corral gates so some might get free, but I fixed my eyes on getting the women and children out of the grasp of the Blue Coats and talked them out of their foolish ideas.
On the morning of the sixth day, the commander came out of his tent accompanied by Russell, Doctor Blazer, and the command surgeon. They stopped at the gate and talked to the guards, watched the sick Mescaleros stagger to and from the trenches, and then walked among them in the corral, the commander nervously slapping his gloves against his free hand. Soon they retreated to the commander’s tent. By the afternoon of the sixth day, the Blue Coats herded the People out of the corral and sent them back to the place where Russell had told them to camp near the creek in the first place.
We watched the new camp and waited. Juanita and the other women again spread their blankets and made their fire near the creek. Ish-kay-neh kept to himself, but stayed near them and spoke with Juanita or Socorro every day. In seven more days, nearly all the sick Mescaleros were steady on their feet.
That night around our campfire I said, “Tomorrow night there is a little moon and the googé calls from the creek.”
CHAPTER 35
RESCUE
* * *
G-prrip-prEE . . . g-prrip-prEE . . . g-prrip-prEE . . . I waited, straining to hear above the chorus of frogs and peepers. There! A faint splash upstream, I looked to my left and stared into the darkness. And then she was beside me, her chin up, standing straight, her little sister in her arms, the faces of the others appearing faintly in the darkness behind her. My first impulse was to reach for her, but, fearful of being caught by the guards or seen by others, I only smiled, beat my fist against my heart, and jerked my head for her to follow. She smiled and nodded as she hugged Moon to keep her still and motioned those behind her forward.
We stayed in the icy creek, slowly feeling our way downstream for a couple of hours, until it began to widen into a swampy place, its frog chorus deafening. I led them out of the creek and up onto the road where our men with the horses came out of the juniper shadows. Last out of the creek was Ish-kay-neh. I watched him and made the sign for “good,” my palm moving in an arc parallel to the ground. Ish-kay-neh nodded, smiling, obviously pleased he had been recognized for his courage and loyalty.
There were enough ponies for us all except for the little ones who rode with their mothers. I led them down the road toward Tularosa strung out in a line at a fast trot that became a lope and then eased back into a fast walk, a rhythm I kept up all night. In the distance, even with only a quarter moon, we could see the brilliant white sands in the black outline of the San Andres Mountains blocking out the horizon stars.
I stopped to water and rest the horses when we crossed Tularosa Creek. Juanita and I moved off to stand alone in the dark shadows of a cottonwood tree. She threw her arms around me, and I held her as we stood together silently sharing our joy in each other.
I said to her, “Wife, you’re a warrior. You make my heart soar. We must hurry. When the sun comes, the Chiricahua wolves will come tracking us. Indah chiefs will be eager to kill us all for getting away. Wolves do what chiefs say.”
“What will you do? Where will we go?”
“Two, maybe three, bowshots beyond this stream stands the village of Tularosa. We’ll ride around it and go to a hiding place in the Jarilla Mountains that He Watches knows. We’ll rest there and watch. When the wolves come, we’ll wipe them out. Soon, we’ll hide in the Blue Mountains in land of the Nakai-yes. In the Blue Mountains, you’ll live with me again. Maybe Juh can tell me of the Witch who attacked our people.”
She nodded. “I’m always your wife where we go, where we live.”
I said, “You’re my woman until the grandfathers take me.”
We crossed Tularosa Creek and turned west along the south edge of the great, billowing ocean-like waves of the white sands. When we rounded the monolithic cliffs of the Sacramento Mountains, we turned south across a great sea of newly green grama grass, and set a steady lope beside the high eastern cliffs rising a thousand feet above the basin still black in the shadows of the brightening dawn.
When the sun came, burnished, glowing gold above the mountains, we saw the gray and rusty red Jarilla Mountains off to our right, midgets compared to the giant, high cliffs on our left. As the day brightened, He Watches rode up beside me to take the lead into the Jarillas. He swung west around their northern end and rode south in their shadows until he came to a large thicket of ocotillo covered in brilliant red flowers growing next to a high vertical wall. He disappeared behind them, following a faint trail. In a hundred yards, dodging their sharp, ugly thorns, we turned into a crack in the cliff wall and rode deep into a narrow canyon that gradually widened and ended at a small natural tank fed by a spring dribbling out of the vertical southern wall.
We and our ponies drank long and deep. The women scraped sticks of ocotillo under low ledges on the canyon walls to drive out any snakes, scorpions, and centipedes before spreading their blankets to sleep in their shadows with the children. The men rubbed down the horses with handfuls of grass from small patches that grew near the tank overflow and then hobbled them to graze.
Then we ate a mixture of dried meat, mescal, herbs, and nuts the women had made before the Ghost Face Season. Ish-kay-neh and I were the first to climb to a ledge thirty feet up on the back wall to keep watch for the scouts sure to follow.
Ish-kay-neh, thrilled to be treated and respected like a man by the others, climbed to the high ledge and found a place to sit in the shadows and gaze across the sea of thin green grass dotted with dark green creosote bushes and light green mesquites, their leaves waving gently in the slow morning breeze. Thousands of yellow Nakai-yi poppy flowers and yellow and blue gourd flowers bloomed below with distant gray mountains surrounding them. Handing my rifle to Ish-kay-neh, I pulled myself up on the ledge and sat down to let my legs dangle off the edge as I looked across the scene.
Ish-kay-neh said, “Are the scouts coming?”
“They’re coming. But maybe we’ll leave before they find this place. They won’t come before dark to catch us. They won’t hunt for us in the dark, but we’ll ride far in the dark. He Watches knows this land.”
“How will we go?”
I pulled the Shináá Cho out, put it to my eye, and scanned the distant mountains to the west. I started my scan from the high mountains north and swung to the ragged peaks south before realization hit me, and I abruptly swung back a few degrees for a second look.
“What you see?”
<
br /> I continued to stare at the mountains for a moment before slowly lowering the Shináá Cho, smiling.
“I remember I know those mountains. I recognize two close together that Rufus Pike calls Rabbit Ears. I saw these mountains from the mountain where Ussen visited me. Tonight, we’ll ride to those mountains and find Rufus Pike. We’ll rest the horses, take care of the scouts there if they don’t come today, and then go to the land of the Nakai-yes in three, maybe four, suns. Ussen is good to us.”
“Who is Roofoos Peek?”
“An Indah, a friend of my father and me, the one who taught me to shoot. He lives alone and has cattle. He rides a mule and is a good shot. He will help us.”
“Enjuh. I’ll watch first. Yellow Boy rests.”
I nodded and pointed my rifle toward the sun’s position halfway to the top of its midday arc. “When the sun is there, I’ll watch, and you sleep.”
Ish-kay-neh nodded and moved into the shade of a boulder to watch.
When I sat with He Watches to discuss my idea about going to Rufus Pike, the old man asked, “What will we do there?”
“We’ll wait for the scouts and then ambush and kill them. I know a place where we can do this. You’ll see.” He Watches broke into a broad grin and nodded.
By deep twilight, we’d seen no sign of the scouts, not even dust streamers on far trails. We watered and saddled the horses and ate again as the night blanketed us with safety. At full dark, we mounted and filed out past the ocotillo, its red blossoms closed until the sun came again.
CHAPTER 36
CHIRICAHUA WOLVES
* * *
Killer of Witches: The Life and Times of Yellow Boy Mescalero Apache Page 21