Death Rattle (16 page)

“Can’t remember the last time I et rabbit,” Scratch admitted. “Likely it was back in Kentucky, when I was a younger lad.”

“How long’s that been?” Jake Corn inquired.

“Left home at sixteen,” he sighed wistfully. “Thought a time or two of going back. But it’s been, what—more’n thirty winters now I been gone. Likely. there ain’t no one left anyways.”

“Hell,” Kersey retorted. “I’ll bet you’ve got kin back there still.”

With a wag of his head, Bass confessed, “Only kin I
got now is them folks I left back in Crow country … and what good men I ride with too.”

“I thank you proudly,” Reuben Purcell replied.

Squatting on the ground with their brown hosts, the trappers picked the rabbit bones clean and tossed them into the fires. They were also served a pulpy root the Indians mixed with water, then scooped off bark platters with their fingers. After dinner the headmen presented the booshways with a generous basket of those roots to take along on their journey. Well after dark that night Philip Thompson led a handful of the white men back into the village, claiming there were enough of the half-naked women to go around because the Sanpet were more than anxious to have an infusion of some white blood into their tribe.

Scratch watched the men go, then rolled over and closed his eyes, thinking hard on that yearning in his loins, remembering how Waits-by-the-Water was the one to satisfy his every longing, turning and tossing uncomfortably in his hunger for her until sleep finally came.

On they plodded the following days, piercing a desolate valley surrounded by hills all but barren of any life. Each hoof, every moccasin too, stirred up choking billows and lingering cascades of the acrid alkali dust. Two nights later they killed and butchered one of the weakening horses—a tough, stringy meat that blackened quickly over the fires. From the carcass they butchered enough to feed the bunch for the next two days, if they conserved all they managed to carve from the bones.

A little south by west, Smith and Williams continued their march all the deeper into a dry, flaky land. Their eyes burned with the constant sting of the alkali dust, seared by the relentless sun, the trappers nonetheless persisted in their search for game. Anything. Even those poor, frightened rabbits. They saw nothing else—no antelope or deer, nothing to hunt but those tiny rabbits. Over time, the men were growing glum, quieter and quieter each night as they went into camp.

“Don’t you worry boys.” Peg-Leg did his best to cheer them around their greasewood fires. “This country won’t
last for much longer. We’re bound to strike that river I ’member joins down to the Colorado.”

Three endless days and one more give-out horse later they struck that very river,
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narrow and tumbling with silt, near its mouth. At sundown that evening Bass joined the others to sit right up to his chin in the turgid water—letting his body soak up all the moisture that this hellish country had done its best to suck right out of him.

Jake Corn slipped into the water with the handful of companions. “We’re going down the Colorado from here,” he explained what he had heard Smith telling some of the others in camp. “It’s gonna be a ways afore we hit the Ammuchabas.
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From there on, Peg-Leg says we got us a dry crossing.”

“D-dry crossing?” Bass nearly choked in disgust. “What the hell we been doing, if it ain’t been a dry crossing awready?”

“Ol’ Bill says there’s a stretch of some real bad desert coming up,” Corn continued. “A real water-scrape of it. Just a few days of dry lakes and disappearing rivers, though … then we’re in California—land of free horses.”

Sitting here soaking in the river, Titus had figured they had come through the worst of it: those trackless wastes, nothing but timberless buttes and mesas, plateaus and canyons meandering back to nowhere. So if they still had the worst ahead of them, why didn’t he just turn around here and start back for a more hospitable country come morning? No matter those Ute he would have to slip his way around …

It couldn’t be. There was no way possible on his own. By any reckoning, he was likely a thousand miles from her now. Where he lay on his blankets later that night looking up into the desert sky might as well have been on
the other side of the moon from Absaroka. Cool, green, snow-drenched Crow country. He swore he’d take a blizzard on the Mussellshell rather than another long day in this hell, simmering in his own juices. Absaroka, a land where even on these summer nights a man had to pull on a blanket to keep from shivering. How he yearned for the cool touch of her skin, yearned for just how fevered she made him.

Smith, Williams, and Thompson led out with the mares the next morning, guiding the raiders due south down the Colorado now, piercing a rainbow-hued land barren of much vegetation. No more than the scrub sage, stunted jack pine, cedar, and fragrant juniper. At times the trail was a tangle of brush and a litter of blackened volcanic rock—everything that drove Scratch to believe they had to be approaching the maw of hell itself.

They stumbled across a salt cave the Sanpet had spoken of as if it were a mythical place. Stepping inside the narrow, fifteen-foot-high entrance, no more than a crack in a canyon wall, Titus could not help but regard this as a most magical place. Less than ten paces from the narrow cave opening, a small chamber opened up, expanding to more than forty feet across. Here in the glow of their sputtering torches the walls, the ceiling, the cave’s very floor glittered with the most brilliant, snowy-white rock salt Scratch had ever seen.

No more would the raiders have to rely on gunpowder to season their stringy, tasteless horsemeat. With their butcher knives and axes, the trappers chipped hunks of it from the walls, packing all they dared load upon the failing horses as they pushed on down the red-brown torrents of the Colorado—a temperamental, impetuous pariah of a river.

But day after day they were forced to weave their way back from the Colorado, detouring around this branch or that of the river’s most tortured recesses.
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On through this kaleidoscopic wilderness, for as far as the eye could
make out in the shimmering heat and swirling Cones of the dust devils that dogged their march, they persevered. Day after day they pushed on, their horses weakening from want of proper fodder, the men growing more and more sullen and quarrelsome at the night fires. But Bass had made his vow to Bill Williams, avoiding any track that would cross the path of Philip Thompson.

They were more than halfway to California now. Which meant they were finally drawing closer and closer to their goal with every night’s camp. Come a day, Scratch promised himself, Thompson would cross him and he would no longer be bound by his promise to Solitaire.

For days now it had been a red, raw, inhospitable land not fit for habitation. They had been almost a week without spotting game of any kind, even the tiny black-tailed hares. Hardly any wood worth a man troubling himself with for their fires either. Only the stunted wash willow, the pungent creosote bush, mesquite, and the infrequent Joshua tree. Those, and the first of the barrel cactus, replete with long spines at the end of which was a tiny barb that made it torturous to pull out of moccasins, hands, and the thick, sweaty hide of their weakened horses that clumsily brushed by the barrels.

Every day saw one or more of the animals die off—simply unable to go on, perhaps unable to even stand come morning. So they put a lead ball into each poor creature’s brain and set to butchering what meat still remained on its bony carcass by the time the horse dropped, literally walked to its death.

Then, of a sudden one afternoon while the men were walking those horses too weak to carry them any longer, the raiders emerged from the canyon through the mouth of a valley that grew from five to fifteen miles in width. As every one of them drew up and halted, gazing about at the wondrous scene, Bass was struck with the feeling that what they were witnessing could not be real. He must surely be dreaming this, his brains cooked so severely that the mirages actually looked believable. He convinced himself that he was looking upon a mirage, since the
banks of the muddy Colorado now appeared fertile—bordered with grass and brush. Even some scanty timber stood here and there.

And nestled there in that wide bend of the beautiful valley sat the first of the Mojave villages.
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Green. A deep, luscious, vibrant green for as far as their tired, reddened, sunburnt, and alkali-seared eyes could see. Mesquite trees gave shade to long stands of wash willow. And everywhere a short, coarse grass beckoned their trail-weary horses.

Already the warning had been given, carried to the villages the very moment the white men had emerged from the mouth of the canyon.

Out of their shabby houses constructed of branches and mud, the Mojave bristled noisily, far outnumbering those strangers who had just appeared out of nowhere—these pale-skinned, dust-coated, emaciated scarecrows wearing the skins of animals hanging off their bones. More quickly than it took for a man to gulp down a tin of whiskey, the Mojave surged to the fore—seventy, eighty, no … even more than that confronted the white men. Perhaps more than even the trappers’ guns could handle. Each one of the short, dark warriors yelled at the top of his voice, clutching his bow at the ready, arrows pointing at the interlopers.

It was clear the Mojave did not hold the same soft place in their hearts for these white men as did the Sanpet to the north. From their belligerent actions there was no mistaking that they were a truly frightened people, a tribe somehow convinced that these pale strangers could mean no good.

Just when Titus was wondering what the booshways would do to push past this armed blockade ready to rub out the white men, Smith and Williams trudged wearily back to one of their pack animals and dug out some trade items. A pair of shiny tin cups Bill clanked together, some small, paper-backed mirrors Smith flashed in the sun,
along with coils of copper wire for bracelets and armbands. As Peg-Leg unfurled a long strand of red ribbon and allowed it to spill across the stunted grass, the faces of women and children suddenly appeared between the hips and legs of their men. All that angry talk hushed to a whisper, and now the Mojave began to mutter among themselves.

In moments the Indians parted slightly and four of their number stepped forward, cautiously to be sure, speaking in their indecipherable language. When the white leaders persisted in shaking their heads, unable to make sense of the sounds, they urged one of their number to move forward—a young man in his early twenties. Unsure and anxious, he spoke a few words.

“Louder!” Williams demanded across the open ground.

The youth started again, louder this time.

“By gad, Bill!” Smith exclaimed. “That’s Mex’ talk!”

Williams asked his partner, “Think you know ’nough to palaver with him?”

“We shall soon see, coon.”

“Buenas dias, amigo”
Peg-Leg began, scooping out of a waxed-paper bundle a handful of small hawk’s bells. These he shook gently in his palm as he slowly started forward, speaking more Spanish.

“Peg-Leg knows his Mex’ talk pretty good, eh?” Titus asked as he came up to stand at the elbow of Bill Williams.

“I wouldn’t know if’n you put your skinnin’ knife to my windpipe, Scratch,” he admitted. “Never learn’t much of it.”

“But you was trading down in Taos years ago!”

Williams shrugged. “Knowed me a li’l back when, I s’pose. ’Nough to get me by ’s’all. But—I don’t recollect much of their talk now.”

It wasn’t long before Smith returned to the trappers, bringing the youth and the three older men with him. “Bill—this here young feller run away from the missions.”

“Run away?”

“Them padres named him Frederico. He told me how them Mex’ padres whipped their Injuns and made life hard on ’em,” Peg-Leg explained. “He run off by hisself one night a few months back. Somehow made it across the desert and dry sinks on his lonesome.”

“By damn,” Williams whispered low, his eyes twinkling. “This here boy and them others come with him is what we need to lead us right back to that valley where the Mex padres got their missions and ranchos. He’ll damn well take us right to the horses, Peg-Leg.”

The same light flickered in Smith’s eyes. “I’m gonna ask these here chiefs ’bout us layin’ to in their valley for a few days—graze our horses to get ’em stronger afore we leave, put some meat back on the bones of our men, Bill. Just a few days to rest while you and me do some jawin’ with our young Frederico here about what desert lays atween us and them California ranchos.”