Apache Country (23 page)

“Nit’eke!” Ironheel shouted. “Friends, Mose!
Call off the dog.”

There was no reply. The dog continued to
lunge at them, snarling and tearing up the ground. Then the door of
the cabin opened and a man stepped out heavily on to the porch. He
was about six feet two, maybe two hundred pounds, neck like a bear.
He had on a red flannel undershirt and torn Levis, moccasins on his
feet. His long black hair was tied back in a ponytail, and his face
looked like it had been carved from a chunk of petrified wood. The
clenched fists holding the Browning shotgun were as big as
cauliflowers.

“Prince!” he roared, in that same deep,
hungover voice. “Prince, shut the fuck up!”

The dog fell instantly silent. Its head went
down and it slunk back to the foot of the porch steps from which it
had first come leaping, sprawling loose-jointedly on the ground and
panting noisily, its tongue hanging, its red eyes watching every
move that was made. Ironheel stepped forward, and Mose Kuruk
regarded him soberly, the way a man might examine a horse he was
thinking of buying.

“Ironheel?” he growled. “What the fuck you
doing up here?”

The question was general, but the burning
eyes were fixed on Easton, who could feel the hostility coming at
him like heat off a depot stove. Another Apache who didn’t like the
pinda’ lick’ oye. Maybe they only came in the one variety.

“Gúnla shíí,” Joanna Ironheel said, stepping
boldly forward with her chin up. She looked composed and unafraid
and Easton admired her. “You know me. I have been here before.”

“Izee’ nant’án,” Kuruk said. “The doctor,
right?”

“Right,” she said. “I came when you were
sick. Ten moons ago. Now I need your help.”

“Say what?”

“We went off the road up the hill a ways. We
need a ride down to the Agency so we can send up a tow truck—”

Kuruk glared at her. “You think I’m a fuckin’
moron, lady?” he sneered.

“Mose—” Ironheel began, but the big man waved
the protest aside.

“Skip the bullshit, n’dee,” Kuruk said
heavily. “It’s all over TV how you killed some old guy and a kid
down Riverside. Said there’s cops all over the County out hunting
you. There’s even a reward. A thousand bucks.” A thin smile touched
his lips and malevolence lit his eyes.

“Be a mistake to try and earn it now,” Easton
said gently.

It was the first time he had spoken. Kuruk
looked at him like he was a new species of rodent he’d never
encountered before.

“You’re the cop, right?”

“Right,” Easton said. “Easton. Chief deputy,
Baca County Sheriff’s Office.”

Kuruk nodded thoughtfully. “I hate cops,” he
said, holding Easton’s gaze to be sure he knew the insult was aimed
at him. “Especially white ones.”

Even though he knew they couldn’t afford to
antagonize the man, Easton felt his hackles rising. His tolerance
for being pissed on by every Apache he met was running pretty low.
Perhaps sensing his anger, Ironheel stepped in front of him before
Easton could reply.

“We are here to ask your help, Mose,” he
said, emphasizing each word. “And call your name.”

Kuruk’s scowl deepened. “Don’t waste that
tribal crap on me, Ironheel!” he rumbled angrily. “It don’t work.
And even if it did, I still wouldn’t owe this fuckin’ indaa cop
nothing.”

“Nobody’s asking you to help me,” Easton said
as placatingly as he knew how. “All we want you to do is give Dr.
Ironheel a ride down to the Agency.”

“I seen a chopper,” Kuruk said, as if Easton
had not spoken. “Big mother.”

“The men in it tried to kill us,” Ironheel
told him. For all the surprise or interest Kuruk showed he might
have been talking about the weather.

“All the more reason not to get involved,” he
rumbled. “Nothin’ in it for me, anyway.”

“Sure there is, Mose,” Easton said sweetly.
“Just think, for a few minutes you’d know what it feels like to be
a human being.”

All at once Mose Kuruk became very still, his
dark eyes fixed on Easton like some huge bear that has just come
out of the woods and seen prey. He carefully stood the shotgun on
its butt against the door jamb and straightened up, flexing his
massive hands. The air grew chill with threat.

“How about I come down there and break your
fucking back?” he rumbled.

“You’re welcome to try,” Easton said, lifting
the Glock so he could see it. “Given you can do it with six
nine-millimeter slugs in your belly.”

Kuruk nodded slowly, staring at him long and
hard. Then he shook his head from side to side, reminding Easton
yet again of a bear, this time one mildly amused by the standoff.
He bet himself Kuruk had more to say. He won.

“You got cojones, I’ll say that,” he said.
“For a fuckin white-eye cop.”

“Keep it in mind,” Easton told him.

Kuruk spat on the ground. Toujours la
politesse.

“Mose, we could use something to eat,”
Ironheel said. “Anything you can spare.”

Kuruk shook his head. “I already told you no.
I’m not getting into any of this. Your problems, you fix ’em.”

“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.

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 crossing 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.