Apache Country

by Frederick H. Christian

  “Save your breath,” Easton told Ironheel. “I’d sooner starve than beg.”

  Kuruk glowered dispassionately at him.

  “Doc here asks me, I’ll give her a ride to the Agency,” he said. “I owe her a favor. You, I don’t owe jack shit.”

  Before Ironheel could remonstrate further, his sister laid her hand on his forearm to deter him.

  “Don’t argue,” she said. “Just go.”

  “This how Apache help each other in times of trouble?” Easton said to Ironheel. “You’d get more sympathy from a stepped-on sidewinder.”

  Rage relit Kuruk’s eyes. He snatched up the shotgun and took a step forward. The big dog got to its feet with a savage growl, looking up at expectantly at its master.

  “You’ve said your piece, asshole,” Kuruk rasped. “Now get the fuck outa here!”

  He emphasized the command with a jerk of the shotgun.

  “Glad to,” Easton said. “Be good to get away from the stink.”

  Kuruk’s expression did not alter. He watched impassively as Easton strode purposefully off down the hill, then said something to Ironheel in Apache. Ironheel nodded and jog trotted after Easton, already a hundred yards away.

  “You made a real enemy there,” he said as he caught up.

  “I’ll stay up all night worrying about it,” Easton said. “What did he just say to you?”

  “Ádádint’ii. It means watch out, don’t let anyone kill you.”

  “Why did he say that?”

  “He said he wants that pleasure for himself.”

  Easton turned and looked back. As he did Mose Kuruk bared his teeth in a savage grin and pantomimed snapping a stick with his hands. Then he tilted back his head and roared with laughter. The sound followed them down the hill.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  They worked their way slowly back up the hill to the head of Paul’s Canyon and turned west along a stony ridge. It was never easy to move fast in the high country, and impossible to travel in a straight line. Such trails as there were – often overgrown and sometimes all but impassable – generally followed the canyons downhill. Some meandered through dry wildernesses of boulder and rock; others alongside what in snow melt time would be racing creeks of varying widths, now either dried-out rock gullies or babbling streams running in deep-cut gorges that had to be forded time and again during the descent.

  It soon became evident to Easton that even where trails existed, Ironheel was avoiding them, charting a cross-country course that was rarely straight and always difficult, often obstructed by fallen trees, dense thickets or shattered, piled rocks that had slid down the mountainsides during the melting of the glaciers a zillion years earlier. He covered the ground at a steady pace, surefooted, never looking back. Whenever there was clear running water he stopped and they drank. Then he moved on.

  Easton simply concentrated on keeping up. The thin air at nearly nine thousand feet made for punishing going. After an hour or two, the long throb of pain from the wound in his side returned. After two hours more, he was going on will power alone.

  As they worked their way from ridge to ridge, Easton realized that wherever possible, Ironheel was moving over rocky outcrops or hard ground where their feet would leave no impression. Lower down, where there was no choice but to cross soft ground, he would hunt around for fallen tree branches to use as brooms to sweep away the traces of their passing. It seemed like an excess of caution.

  “No such thing as too careful,” Ironheel said. “Only not careful enough.”

  “You think we’re being followed?” Easton asked him.

  “Maybe not right now,” was the enigmatic reply.

  “Then why all this?”

  “So you get into the habit,” Ironheel replied.

  People used to walking only on sidewalks tended to put their heel down quite hard and then roll forward on to the ball of the foot, he explained. Do that out here and you left a trail a good tracker could follow as easily as the white line on the highway.

  “When Apache walks, baa natsi’okees, he thinks,” he said. “Think as you walk. Put your feet down flat so you don’t leave heelmarks. If you snap off a branch, scuff up leaves, flatten a patch of grass, anyone who knows what to look for will find it.”

  “But nobody knows we’re up here,” Easton argued.

  Ironheel nodded. “And this way no one will.”

  Easton was tempted to observe that he knew damn few cops who could follow a man by looking for scuffed-up leaves or flattened grass. He might have also argued that walking flatfooted made it that much more tiring, but decided not to.

  No arguments, no questions.

  After a while he got the hang of it. It was just as easy to avoid walking on soft ground when possible, just as easy to gently push branches aside rather than break them, skirt hummocks of grass or clumps of weed he would otherwise have unmindfully trampled down, delineating their trail as clearly to skilled eyes as if they had left tracks on purposes.

  Think Apache. It made sense.

  “Do all Apache know how to do this?” he asked as they moved like walking shadows between the trees. Ironheel shook his head.

  “Not any more.”

  “But you?”

  “Twenty, thirty years ago, many Apache kept to the old ways,” he said. “My father was one of them.”

  Jason Ironheel, he said, was a grandson of one of the most revered Apache warrior leaders of all time, Loco, last leader of the Mimbres, or Warm Springs, Apache. Famed for the frenzy with which he had fought as a young warrior, Loco – Grey Wolf – had lost an eye in a fight with a grizzly. He was canny, shrewd, and pragmatic, more of a peacemaker than his warlike contemporary Victorio. He married three times – his wives were Chiz’pah’odlee, Chich’odl’netln and Clee’hn. Loco had many children and died age eighty-two on the Fort Sill Reservation in Oklahoma.

  “Did you ever meet him?”

  Ironheel shook his head. “He went to the Happy Place in 1902. His sixth son was my grandfather.”

  “And he taught you all this?”

  “Not all.”

  In those days, he said, the older men taught Chiricahua boys to hunt duck by stringing together the shells of the big gourds that grew in the river bottoms and letting them float down among the feeding birds. At first the ducks would scatter, but after a while they got used to the bobbing gourds, and did not notice the fresh ones with peepholes in them, or the boys’ heads inside, or that from time to time one would pull a bird under and swim off with his prize.

  Walks-like-a-Man taught them how to track bears that would lead them to honeycombs in the woods and not get killed doing it, then get the honey and bring it home, where it was used with mesquite beans and acorns for making pinole flour.

  “We’d come out of the woods with our eyes streaming from the smudges, covered in welts and stings, sick as dogs from gorging on honey. But da’odlíí – proud, like warriors coming back from a horse-stealing raid. It wasn’t just you’d got the honeycomb. You’d outsmarted shash, the bear.”

  And in the process, they learned how to read the trail of other denizens of the wild: mbá, the coyote, má, the fox, ba’ nteelé the badger, chaa, the beaver, jaadé, the antelope and tsétahgo gidi, the mountain lion. How to track them and kill them without ruining their pelts.

  “We had no guns, so we learned to make bee ijizhé — traps, snares. We collected gish, arrow canes along the streams and tsélkani, mulberry branches for bows. Then we learned how to use them.”

  “Boys hunted bobcats with bows and arrows?” Easton said.

  “Our job was to locate them,” Ironheel replied with a shake of the head. “Then the men would go out after them. It was a big thing to have an arrow quiver made of bobcat pelt, with the tail hanging down.”

  “And now it’s Tony Lama boots,” Easton grinned.

  About four hours of hot, hard hiking later they had worked their way to within striking distance of US 70, the main highway. This they achieved by cross
ing the three ridges flanking two more canyons that joined to the north of their position. When they reached the crest of the third, above what Ironheel told him was Fence Canyon, Ironheel stopped to rest. He didn’t say anything or ask Easton how he felt; he just stopped and waited, his face without expression. It wasn’t sympathy; just something that needed to be done, like getting off a horse to let it walk unburdened awhile.

  Below and behind them, the ragged logging trail to Apache Summit snaked between the trees. Off to the south, the long hulk of Harley Mountain rose against the sky. There was a Forest Service lookout station up there, he recalled; too far away, though, for the Rangers to see them.

  As they slogged on, Easton stoically tried to ignore the long, reaching ache in his legs and thighs, and the occasional inadvertent stumble, reminding him how out of condition he was. To make things worse, Ironheel didn’t even look winded. Easton remembered something he’d read a long time ago, that in the old days an Apache warrior could walk forty miles in a day, then steal a horse and be ready to fight a pitched battle. Maybe Ironheel could do it, he thought. Me, no. The way he felt right now he couldn’t have fought a pitched battle with a gopher.

  “Tell you what, though,” he thought out loud. “I could kill for coffee.”

  Ironheel nodded absently but did not reply, like a man with more important things on his mind. The sun moved down a notch in the afternoon sky. Huge white formations of cumulus clouds sailed by overhead like galleons on the Spanish Main. It was cool beneath the trees. Every so often they would come out of the forest and into a meadow bounded by thickets of soapweed and scrub oak. Banks of sweet clover, wild roses and showy loco weed added a riot of color.

  “Tell me something,” Easton said. “Where in the hell are we and where are we going?”

  Ironheel stopped and hunkered down, motioning Easton to join him. He picked up a dry stick and scraped lines into the dirt. They looked like a big letter `Y’ lying on its side with the open arms facing east.

  “The long straight is Dolorosa Creek,” he said, pointing with the stick. “Mescalero Agency right here where the arms join.”

  Easton nodded his understanding. The main stem of the `Y’ was the highway, US 70, which ran alongside the creek down to Dolorosa. The top arm followed the north fork up to Rio Alto. The lower one was a minor road that branched off at Mescalero and followed the south fork of Dolorosa Creek, meandering up through the ski area and mock-Austrian village of Highcroft. Parallel to that road ran a state road which joined the main highway about three miles north of Mescalero.

  “Right opposite the junction is Goat Canyon,” Ironheel said, making a line in the dirt with his stick. “There’s a trail that goes around in back of the Rio Alto Rodeo Grounds and up toward Grindstone.”

  “How long will that take?” Easton asked.

  Ironheel squinted up at the sun. “It’s about nine, ten miles from here as the eagle flies,” he said. “We ought to be up there late afternoon, maybe six, six thirty. How do you feel?”

  “High as the flag on the Fourth of July,” Easton said, ignoring Ironheel’s frown. He probably didn’t know too many show songs, either. “We heading for the Sagrados?”

  Ironheel nodded. “Just the foothills. From there we can try to work our way up into the Marcials, then come around into Riverside from the north.”

  “How far is that?”

  “Altogether? Forty five, fifty miles.”

  Less than an hour by car, Easton thought ruefully. Covering three, four miles an hour, even if they could keep moving eight slogging hours a day, it would take a minimum of two days to get even within reach of help. Always supposing they managed to evade their pursuers, and always supposing he could keep up with Ironheel, neither of which was by any means guaranteed. Ironheel had set a fierce pace from the start and it didn’t look like he was going to make any concessions.

  “You going to be able to do this, Easton?” Ironheel said, as if he had read Easton’s thoughts.

  Easton nodded. “I’ll do it.”

  “Gets pretty tough.”

  “You told me that before.”

  Ironheel shrugged. Your funeral.

  Using a fallen branch to obliterate the map he had drawn in the dust, he stood up, looking down toward the Dolorosa valley. He pulled in a long deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “Hiit’ash doleel.” he said. “Let’s take a walk.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Around five thirty, with the sun dropping down toward the Sierra Blanca, they reached the junction of Cienegita Canyon and Carrizo Creek, not far from a back road that ran down from the Forest Service lookout tower at the head of the creek and then into Rio Alto past the KRRR radio tower. They had to scramble into the brush a couple of times when a vehicle came bumping up the rough track behind them, but apart from that they saw no one.

  From the Cienegita junction they clambered up another ridge and reached the flatter top of Grindstone Mesa. Below them in its narrow canyon, the little resort town of Rio Alto basked in the late afternoon sun. Twenty-odd years ago it had been a pokey little wooden cabin village catering to the local hunting trade. Now it sprawled all over the mountains, with downtown gambling casinos and luxury hotels and every kind of restaurant from Tex-Mex to Thai.

  In spite of Easton’s slowing pace, they made good time along the ridge. After they had walked about another two miles, they came down a steep gradient trail into a pretty wooded canyon that sloped sharply up to the west, the bright yellow flowers of goldenrod and prickly pear decking its flanks. They followed the rocky watercourse uphill for maybe half a mile before Ironheel stopped and looked around like Brigham Young making his big decision.

  “Hanányol,” he said. “Rest.”

  Easton sank gratefully to the ground. The complete stillness of the mountains enveloped them. Although they were no more than a couple of miles from the bustling streets of Rio Alto, this deserted canyon could just as easily have been on the far side of the moon. He could hear mourning doves lamenting in the trees. Ironheel dug a heel into the earth. It was soft and loamy. He looked at Easton and pointed downward.

  “Dig a hole.”

  “What for?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Using their hands and Ironheel’s hunting knife they made a hole with shelving sides, maybe eighteen inches deep at the bottom and the same across. Next Ironheel told Easton to go get some large pebbles from the creek bed and showed him how to line the hole with them while he foraged for dry leaves, pine needles, and small twigs. When he came back he placed them in a layer on the stones, then lit them with a book match. They burned rapidly with a bright flame and very little smoke.

  He piled on thicker twigs and sun-dried cottonwood branches he had picked up in the creek bed, breaking them into lengths of about three or four inches. Sweetly pungent smoke curled up. The fire sparked as they puffed at the embers and an old song his father used to play on the radiogram started going around in Easton’s head. It took him a while to remember the title was “I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire,” and the group that sang it were called The Ink Spots. Like to see them try to get away with a name like that today, he thought.

  “Keep feeding the fire,” Ironheel told him, getting to his feet. “Those stones need to be really hot.”

  “You going somewhere?”

  Ironheel ignored the question and set off downhill with long, confident strides. Easton watched him until he disappeared silently into the trees further down the canyon. Once again he was surprised by the man’s ability to move so quietly, almost without sound. Move like the wind, he had said earlier in the day. Hunched over the fire, making sure it didn’t generate too much smoke, Easton felt like he was back in his own backyard, with Jessye watching him get the barbecue going.

  “Daddy, who invented fire?”

  “It was discovered, honey, not invented. Fire was always there. It needed someone to discover it. The cave men, I guess.”

  “But how did they fin
d out how to make fire burn?” She persisted.

  “Probably by accident,” he said. “Maybe lightning struck and they carried the flame back to their cave. Or maybe they rubbed sticks together until there was a flame and that was how it began.”

  “Poor cave men,” Jessye sighed. “No Easi-start.”

  After maybe half an hour Ironheel reappeared as silently as he had departed, a chicken hanging limply in his right hand. In his left hand was a bundle of green tule shoots.

  “Apache recipe,” he said, holding up his trophy for Easton to see. “First, steal a chicken. How’s that fire?”

  “Ready when the chicken is,” Easton said. “Where did you get it?”

  There were a couple of scratch-ankle farms back along the Cienegita, Ironheel told him as he methodically plucked the chicken, small places set back a little distance from the creek. All he had to do was find one that didn’t have dogs, grab a chicken and wring its neck.

  When the bird was plucked he gutted it and dropped the giblets on the ground, cut off the head and feet, then divided the carcass roughly into four sections. His movements were deft and sure. Raking the red embers of the fire aside with a stick, he laid the chicken pieces skin down on the hot stones beneath. They made a fat, sizzling sound and almost immediately gave off a mouth-watering aroma.

  “N’zhoo,” Ironheel said appreciatively. “Good.”

  He reached for the tule shoots, laying them crisscross over the jointed bird until it was covered completely. Then, using a forked stick, he pushed the stones from the side of the pit closer up against the already smoking flesh.

  “Cover it,” he said.

  Using their hands they piled the earth they had dug out of the pit on top of the tule shoots and tamped it down until they could no longer hear the chuckling sizzle of the meat underneath it.

  “Is this what you call a belly fire?” Easton asked. Surprise flickered momentarily in Ironheel’s eyes. He shook his head.

  “Earth oven,” he said, settling back on his haunches. He was silent for a moment, as if working out which words he wanted to use. “Don’t know many whites who know about belly fires.”