Tie My Bones to Her Back

by Robert F. Jones

  The war party showed itself again an hour before sunset, at least a dozen strong this time, and all of them wearing paint. Now they were truly redskins. Mister Lo always painted before battle. They must have waited for reinforcements to make sure of their attack. Nearsighted Milo hadn’t spotted them yet, and Otto hadn’t told him. He didn’t want to get into a futile debate over what they should do. Now he had no other choice.

  “We’ve got company, Sykes,” he finally said. “You see ‘em out there, just over the top of that ridge to the right?”

  Milo squinted and turned white.

  “Let’s leave the hides and ride for it, back to camp,” he said. They had Otto’s horse, Edgar, and Zeke, the old riding mule, tethered and bridled behind the Murphy wagon. “Let the red fuckers burn the wagon and eat the damn oxen. It’ll give us a good lead on ‘em. An Injun can’t pass up a chance at fresh meat and a nice warm fire.”

  Goddamn quitter, Otto thought.

  “No,” he said. “There’s only a few of them, probably just young bucks off the reservation for a little sport. Next time we spot ‘em, I’ll give ‘em a shot across the bows with the Sharps. If they see we’re willing to fight, they might think better of it and go away. You know what Mister Lo calls the Sharps. The gun that shoots today and kills tomorrow.’ I can drop ‘em at half a mile, and they damn well know it.”

  The Georgian steadied down. I should have told him sooner, Otto thought, let him get used to the idea.

  “If it does come to a fight, we’ll get in among the hide bales,” he said. They had compressed the bales tightly, wrapping each bundle of hides with a rope and using a wagon wheel for a winch, but leaving a hidey-hole in the center. A man could shoot safely from the hole even if Mister Lo got within bow range. It was a leather fort.

  “We probably ought to go watch-and-watch tonight,” Otto said. “One of us sleep in the wagon while the other keeps a lookout.”

  Milo made a face.

  Herr Gott, I shouldn’t have mentioned it, Otto thought.

  “All right,” he said, trying to regain lost ground, “let’s stop now while we’ve still got good light and I’ll go out with the Sharps and see if I can’t knock over a couple of ‘em.”

  “You gonna take the horse?”

  “No, I’ll leave him here, I’m better off on foot. They’re less likely to see me.”

  Otto crouched as he neared the top of the rise. There was always this anticipation on the plains, sometimes eager, wanting to see what lay beyond, but just as often reluctant. It could be the death of a man. He got down on his belly and snaked to the top, the Sharps nestled in the crooks of his elbows. Its weight reassured him. He peered through the grass stems.

  Yes, there they were. Ten, twelve, no—fifteen of them now. Seated on their scrawny ponies in conference. Not more than five hundred yards away.

  He studied them for a moment, then eased the Sharps forward, elevating the tang sight to “500” as he did so.

  How fast could their ponies cover the intervening ground?

  Very fast.

  He looked for the leader of the group. It was an older man, of course. His face was painted black on one side, red on the other. Otto saw gray in the leader’s scalp lock. Three eagle feathers. He swung the Sharps to cover the man, hanging him on the crosshairs of the peep sight just in the middle of his naked red-and-black chest. He cocked the hammer . . .

  A ratcheting clack, but the forgiving prairie wind obliterated it before it reached the savages.

  He squeezed the set trigger to arm the hair trigger that nested just ahead of it. A sweet, quiet, oily click. He nestled his shoulder snugly into the rifle’s curved butt, his cheek tight on the smooth, oiled comb. Refined his sight alignment. Moved his forefinger up to the hair trigger, barely grazing its familiar, cold, smooth arc. Took a deep breath and then released it in a sibilant hiss, slowly, slowly. Just like killing buffalo.

  I’ll roll the bastard . . .

  The smoke spurt nearly obscured the leader as the bullet took him, but Otto saw him launched miraculously, horrified, off his pony’s back. Before the leader hit ground, Otto had twisted sideways, downhill. He ran for the next ridge. He levered the spent case out of the breech as he ran, took a loaded cartridge from between his left thumb and forefinger, and fed it into the breech, closed the lever but kept his right thumb on the cocked hammer of the Sharps in case he had to dive for cover in the grass. He didn’t want the rifle going off without him aiming it. He had run this way before, many times, during the war, but then he was pulling a paper cartridge from his flapping leather bullet pouch, biting off the bitter end of the case, inserting it with difficulty into the muzzle of the Springfield, ramming it home and trying as he ran to jam a copper cap onto the nipple of the rifle without dropping it. This was certainly simpler. Hurrah for progress.

  He hoped the young bucks would be delayed by the death of their chieftain, but as he reached the top of the rise he saw a painted rider galloping toward him, bow in hand and an arrow nocked. Otto knelt at the ridge top, watching down the octagon barrel of the Sharps as the Indian neared. He looked no older than a drummer boy. Braid flapping to the gallop, eyes hot and close-set, his jaw working in rage. A lightning flash of yellow ocher zigzagged down his blue-painted face from brow to chin. Lather blew from the corners of his pony’s mouth. A bold horse and rider. Otto blew him off the pony with a bullet through the chest at a range of no more than fifty yards.

  Then he stood and ran for his life.

  When Otto topped the ridge, rifle reloaded, sprinting back to the safety of the wagon, he saw immediately that his horse was gone. Milo had run for it. The oxen milled and plunged where they stood on the trail. Two of them were down with arrows in their sides. Another arrow protruded from old Zeke’s shoulder. He was worrying it with his long yellow teeth. Zeke saw Otto and brayed once, like a jackass. His eyes rolled wildly in his long, knobby head.

  Otto grabbed the last belt of cartridges out of the wagonbed. Each belt held forty-two rounds. He’d shot away two from the belt he’d carried up the hill. That left him more than eighty shots. He pressed his fingers hard against the sides of the mouthshaped wound the arrow had kissed in Zeke’s shoulder. The shaft looked as if it was buried three inches deep.

  “Easy, old boy,” he whispered in Zeke’s gyrating ear. “You’re the best mule in the world.”

  Pressing hard, he yanked the arrowhead loose from the muscle. Zeke shuddered and raised his hammer head. He shuddered again and brayed. Otto untied the reins.

  No time for the saddle. He jumped once to get on Zeke’s tall back. He failed. An arrow whipped past. On the next leap he succeeded. Zeke needed no urging. They galloped off toward the southwest, toward Owl’s Head Butte, which reared black and crooked against the fading red glow of the sunset.

  They reached it in the last of the daylight. He urged the mule partway up its steep slope and looked to the north. Behind them he could see the dull, flickering, red-and-yellow glare of the burning wagon. Vagrant gusts of a cold, fresh wind carried the stench of burning hides to their nostrils. Zeke snorted repeatedly at the smell. The wind had swung around to the northwest and Otto thought he could smell snow on it when the gusts weren’t clotted with hide fumes. Weather coming on.

  He dismounted and led Zeke in a scrambling climb to a tall, pointed boulder near the top of the butte. From a distance the butte resembled the head of a great horned owl, and this would be one of its ears. Old Zeke had outrun the Indian ponies. Otto led the mule behind the boulder, out of the way of future arrows, and knotted the reins to the bole of an oak sapling growing from a crevice. He could hear hoofbeats approaching and turned to lay the rifle over the sloping side of the owl’s ear. Three horsemen galloped toward him, well ahead of the other Indians. He took a quick sight and dropped one of their ponies. Reloaded. Knocked an Indian from the back of his horse. Reloaded. Killed the third devil with a lucky head shot as he whirled his pony and tried to race out of range. Then he searched the gras
s for the man whose pony he’d dropped. Spotted him crawling away. Killed him. That’s five of them down, he thought. Only ten to go.

  But the remaining Indians reined in at extreme rifle range. Knotted up to confer. He elevated the tang sight to 1,000 yards, added a bit more by raising the muzzle, and fired into the group. A pony whirled and dropped. An Indian howled. The rest then galloped away.

  They’ll be back, Otto thought. Where the hell do I go from here?

  During the night he made up his mind.

  He crept down to one of the dead ponies before dawn, removed the apishamore from its back, and, bending low, hurried back to Zeke. He cut the buffalo-hide saddle blanket into four pieces and, with thongs sliced from one of them, bound them tight to Zeke’s hoofs. That way the mule’s iron shoes wouldn’t ring on the rocks as they sneaked away.

  He didn’t know where the remaining Indians were. Maybe they’d only sent one of their number back to wherever the main body was camped, to get more reinforcements, or maybe they’d all gone. He knew he’d killed the leader of this band, and he’d probably killed the next oldest and most experienced warriors

  with his sundown fusillade. He had to head south, back to McKay and Jenny. Milo had certainly gone that way, and more than likely, to cover his sorry performance, had told them that Otto was dead. Jenny would be grieving.

  No, he couldn’t expect help until morning at the earliest, and maybe they wouldn’t come at all, certainly not if McKay believed he was dead at the hands of a large band of Hostiles.

  He led the mule back down through the dark, taking his time, making sure of every step. “Don’t worry, old fellow,” he whispered in one tall ear, “we’re going to be all right come sunup.”

  WALKS LIKE BADGER had heard the shots Otto fired the previous evening, when he killed the three front-running Kiowas at Owl’s Head Butte. Crazy for Horses led them in the direction of the gunfire, though it meant hooking a bit south again rather than onward to their destination. Halfway to the butte they met the ten surviving Kiowas. They were just boys, and frightened, though they refused to show it. A white man had killed five of their party, they said in sign language, for no good reason. By surprise. From a distance with a rifle that shoots today and kills tomorrow. Like the one Crazy was carrying. The spider had killed their leader, Bad Pants, who in his dying breath had ordered them to return to the main camp of the Kiowas and make medicine for his soul. They were obeying his orders as fast as they could. They were good soldiers.

  Walks like Badger had also been the first to cut the spider’s trail, in the half-light of early morning, as they circled the butte shaped like an owl’s head. Walks didn’t speak much, but he had sharp ears and eyes.

  Not to be outdone by a youngster, Crazy had sharpened his own senses then, and he was the first to see the spider far ahead of them soon after daybreak. The spider was riding a mule. Following a low meander of the prairie, the three Elk Soldiers kicked their horses into a gallop and tried to cut him off. But the spider had outsmarted them, cutting to his right as part of a zigzag pattern. Crazy had loaded the big new rifle and tried three shots at him, at a range of about half a mile, as the mule topped a ridge. He had not hit the spider, but he hoped he had frightened him. The mule walked steadily onward, yet it looked as if it was weakening. Perhaps the Kiowa boys had wounded it yesterday. Walks found blood in the mule’s dung a few minutes later, confirming Crazy’s guess. Black blood. The mule must have a wound in its belly. Soon it would die. Then they would kill the spider. In the storm that was coming, it would be easy.

  THE NORTHER STRUCK when Otto was within ten miles of the camp. The Indians were close on his trail. At least one of them had a rifle, a Sharps Big Fifty by the sound of it, and had tried a few ranging shots from a long way off. One bullet threw dust not far to his right. Where had the rifle been earlier? Why hadn’t they used it in their attack on the Owl’s Head, or even earlier? They could have killed oxen, mule, and horse at their leisure, or killed him and Milo just as easily. No, they wouldn’t have wanted to hurt the horse. He had seen no sign of firearms, though, and certainly not heard any shots. Maybe these weren’t the same Indians. He could make out only three of them this time, and their hair seemed braided on both sides now. A Cheyenne or Arapahoe hairstyle, possibly Sioux, though they weren’t likely to be this far south.

  He saw the dirty line of the snow scudding toward him on the edge of the wind, wriggling like a bone-white sidewinder, moving with incredible speed. Then the wind’s sound came to his ears, a steadily increasing roar that became, as it neared, louder even than the nonstop artillery barrages at Gettysburg. Oh yes—a norther was indeed blue, he thought. The sky above the snow snake was almost the color of a brand-new Army uniform.

  The Indians would make their move under cover of the storm. As soon as it hit and obscured him from their vision, he must break off to the right or left, sharply, and get Zeke into a gallop. The old mule was about blown. The blood he’d lost from the shoulder wound must have drained him more than Otto realized.

  When the snow hit, Otto kicked Zeke in the sides, and the animal galloped a few hundred yards. But Otto could feel him faltering at every jump. Then Zeke threw up his head, blew bloody froth from his nostrils, and rolled his eyes backward in his head until he was almost looking at the man. Zeke stopped and fell forward to his knees. Otto slid from his back. Zeke rolled weakly onto his side. Only then did Otto see the broken-off shaft of an arrow protruding from Zeke’s side, low on his belly. Tears suddenly stung his eyes. Every time Otto had kicked him to get him galloping, his boot must have hit that arrow shaft. Zeke vomited black blood into the snow. His eyes stared up into Otto’s, and it seemed to the man that the mule was begging for something.

  He drew the revolver and cocked the hammer. He imagined an X drawn from the animal’s right ear to left eye, then from left ear to right eye. He aimed at the spot where the lines crossed and pulled the trigger. At the buck of the shot, gunsmoke bloomed and blew away on the wind. The mule’s head fell, squarely brainshot. Didn’t feel a thing, Otto thought. Wish I could say as much.

  Then he ran. The footing was already miserable, snow piling fast and slippery underfoot, half blinding him when the wind swirled around to the south. It nearly knocked him down a few times. He couldn’t see three feet ahead. He blundered into a thornbush, almost dropped the Sharps, recovered his balance, and pushed on. He smelled sage underfoot, sharp through the snowy wind. He thought he could make out a bluff through the sheets of horizontally blowing snow and he ran for it. Get to the top of that and make your stand, he thought. He staggered forward, but immediately the bluff was obscured by another sheet of stinging, blinding sleet that turned the whole world white to within an inch of his eyeballs.

  Then, as suddenly, the air was clear.

  The bluff was a horse with an Indian on its back. The Indian was coming toward him.

  Fast.

  The Indian had a long-handled war club in his right hand and was swinging its polished stone head counterclockwise in great circles as he galloped. Two braids, no warpaint on his face, only intense concentration. Otto raised the Sharps to his hip. The Indian was close. He fired.

  Walks like Badger flew from the pony’s back.

  OTTO TOOK REFUGE just below the lip of the wide, deep coulee into which he’d tumbled. Thick brush grew there. He nestled into it and let the snow build up on his back, head, and legs. The Indians couldn’t find him here without dogs, and even a foxhound would be hard-pressed to take a scent in this blowing hell of a weather. He tucked the Sharps under his body to protect the action from freezing. Christus, it was cold! Christ, that was a lucky shot. He couldn’t have been five feet from me when I fired. Didn’t have time to get the rifle to my shoulder. He’d have taken my head off with that damned club. God but it’s cold! Maybe the snow will insulate me some. I might lose a couple of toes, though. Frostbit already, feels like. I’m all sweated up from the run. Should be moving, so my longjohns don’t freeze from the sweat. Ca
n’t, though. They’re out there.

  Twice in the next hour he thought he saw one of them, moving wraithlike through the billows of falling, blowing snow. Never for long enough to take a shot, though, even if he was willing to risk one. The cold’s got to be getting to them, too, he thought. Indians are tough, but not that tough. Remember those poor hide men in the blizzards last winter. First one started in mid-December and blew for eight days. Two more storms in January. Major Dodge at the fort said more than a hundred buffalo hunters died along the Arkansas alone. Mules froze standing in their traces. The sky was a solid blast of ice particles. Bob Wright had to burn his wagons for firewood. Sawbones at the fort performed seventy amputations. Some fellows lost arms and legs, both. Washtub cases, they called them. Otto had talked to one of them, an old skinner named Josh Beasley. Beasley told him how it was, freezing like that. He begged Otto to shoot him, there in the fort’s infirmary with the stink of bedpans and gangrene all around. Shoot me, for Christ’s sake, or give me some cyanide, how can I live like this? I can’t shoot myself with no hand nor no feet, the frost even took my pecker off me. Tears in his eyes. Otto didn’t shoot him, though. But he told the sawbones. The sawbones said he’d maybe give old Josh a long, long pull on the laudanum bottle. And then a few more. It’s a pleasant way to go, he said.

  Otto was shivering nonstop now, muscles out of control, great convulsive shudders that he knew would go away soon, leaving him incapable of movement. After that he’d go to sleep, like as not, and wake up a block of ice. You’ve got to move, he told himself. You’ve got to move—now!

  “HAÁHE, TWO SHIELDS.” It was Cut Ear. “I almost shot you for a spider.” He looked at Tom’s face. “What tried to eat your head, a white bear or a wolf?”

  Tom merely grunted. “Have you had a fight with the spiders?”

  “One of them,” Cut Ear said. “We hunt him even now. His mule died. He shot Walks like Badger through the shoulder. Tore him up pretty bad.” He told Tom about the Kiowas and the burned wagon. “The Kiowas said another spider ran away, on a good horse.”