Death Rattle (18 page)

A large group of the Mojave followed their headmen to the visitors’ camp, bearing some last gifts of melons for their guests at this parting. From the front of the crowd stepped young Frederico. Over one shoulder he had tied a rabbit-skin blanket rolled into a cylinder. Over the other was suspended a four-foot section of grayish, greasy horse intestine now swollen with river water and tied off at both ends with a loop of braided twine.

“Wood-Leg,” he called in his imperfect Spanish as he stopped a yard in front of the white leader. “If I show you across the desert and on your way into the mountains … I have thought of one thing you can do to repay me.”

“Tell me,” Smith replied eagerly. “Tell
us
and it will be so.”

“I will take your men there—all the way to the ranchos,” Frederico vowed before the stunned white men as the sun just then struck the top of the canyon above them. “If you and your men will help me free my sisters from the Mexican soldiers.”

They put that oasis at their backs.

Frederico led them onto the desert near a grouping of tall, sandstone obelisks,
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gigantic, mute monoliths left behind after eons of erosion by wind and water. They reminded Bass of other eerie rock formations he had encountered across the seasons, giants that took shape and somehow grew animated in the last light of the day. Hoodoos, for sure.

Their horses carried them northwest around the base of some dry, forbidding high ground. Stopping among the late-afternoon shadows in the lee of those low mountains, the raiders spent their first night upon what Frederico told them might be the last good grass their horses would have until they reached the far mountains of California.

“The Injun said to save your water here on out,” Bill Williams warned the trappers. “He can’t rightly remember if’n there’s waterholes or not out there. Only come through part of it on his own. The rest of the way the Ammuchabas brung him in.”

The next morning’s march found the horses plodding slower and slower with the rising temperature. But as hard as they were working, the animals didn’t break into a lather. Titus figured the arid, superheated air was relentlessly sucking the moisture right out of the critters the way it was leaching it right out of him.

At midday when the sun sulled overhead like a stubborn mule refusing to budge, Frederico located a small patch of shady Joshua trees.

“We’ll rest the horses here,” Smith declared, his face coated with a thin layer of whitish dust.

“Sleep if you can, boys,” Williams suggested as the men slid from their mounts much the same way they would after a thirty-six-hour ride in the saddle. “I figger we ought’n wait out the rest of the day and move on come dark.”

With the setting of the sun, they put out again, their horses still slow, especially those wet mares they had to harness and picket at every stop to prevent them from bolting and turning for home back in the Rockies. Although the light had drained from the sky, the first part of the night remained remarkably warm. But by moonrise, the air began to cool. There was little vegetation growing upon the surface of the desert that would serve to hold in the day’s heat. And once the heat of the day evaporated a few hours into the night, these wastes turned downright cold. They sweated out the day, and now shivered in the saddle at night.

By the following morning as the sun came flaming off the horizon behind them, the raiders had their first real opportunity to behold what awaited them now in striking out from the Mojave villages. Far, far, far away along the western rim of the earth lay a ragged, broken skyline of distant mountains. Between here and there, in every compass direction, lay the almost colorless, lifeless, unmarked desolation of an unimaginable desert. Supporting no game to speak of, allowing no vegetation but an occasional and spiny species, this flat wasteland was interrupted by nothing more than patches of low, pale gray rock forms that served as the only landmarks to give the men their bearings on the bottom of this dry, trackless, inland sea.

For men who had penetrated the deepest recesses of the forests along this continent’s spine, for these hardy adventurers who had squandered their youth threading back and forth through the high Rockies, these bare, stony heights were simply not deserving of the appellation
mountains.
Such barren, rock-strewn, sun-baked iron heights as these only served to taunt a man,
reminding him of what incomprehensible beauty he had left behind.…

Again and again Scratch reminded himself that he had seen desert before. Not only when he and Asa McAfferty had attempted to trap the Gila River and were forced to flee an Apache war party across a stretch of desert, but he believed they had surely been through the worst country ever in those two weeks just before stumbling into the Eden of those Mojave villages. But … Titus Bass had never seen desert anywhere as bleak and barren as what stared them in the face at that moment.

Even on the high plains east of Crow country, truly an arid land where little rain ever fell, where late in the summer a man’s brains boiled out in the sun—nothing he had ever encountered could have prepared him for this descent into the maw of this fire-baked brimstone hardened beneath a merciless, unrelenting one-eyed sky. Scratch thought it was as if nature itself had shut off Mexican California, protecting it by setting an ocean on one side, then stretching this intractable desert on the other—both of them barriers few men would ever dare cross.

But, he constantly reminded himself, Peg-Leg and Ol’ Bill, along with Thompson and a few of their companions—they had crossed to California a few years back. Little matter that they had penetrated to the coastal country farther north, Bass convinced himself that those horse-stealing veterans could see the rest of them through.

Yet with the next morning’s sunrise as they limped into a parched, mud-baked cluster of skimpy vegetation
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and came out of the saddle to wait out the day, it didn’t feel as if they had covered much ground at all in that night just behind them. In the growing light, he couldn’t swear those distant mountains were any closer than they had been days ago when the Indian led them away from the Colorado and onto this bleak and empty desert.

“Maybeso, this is a easy way for them Ammuchabas
to kill us all off an’ steal our horses,” Silas Adair grumbled in resignation as he curled up in a narrow patch of shade thrown down by a scrawny, half-dead mesquite tree.

“Kill us how?” Reuben Purcell asked.

“This Frederico nigger we got for a guide,” Adair complained. “He leads us out here till we all die. Then the rest of ’em come out to rob our packs, take our guns, an’ pick over our bones!”

“That’s crazy talk,” Bass grumped at Silas as a wispy dust devil skipped past their shady shelter. “The sun’s boiling your brains to soup.”

“I’d give most anything to ride back to them Ammuchabas right now,” Jake Corn confessed. “This here country’s ugly as a dried-up tit.”

Every morning a breeze always came up like this, kicking dust and sand at them for a while, creating the little wisps of those dust devils every sunrise and sunset when the desert and the air above it were either warming up or cooling off. Blasted by sand: just one more torture man and beast had to endure in their interminable crossing.

Scratch shifted his big-brimmed felt hat down over the side of his face and laid his cheek on his elbow again as he did in attempting to sleep out every one of these lengthening days.

Their Indian guide didn’t know how long the journey would take, how many more days until they reached the western foothills and entered those green and beckoning heights. But when Titus turned to look over his shoulder at where they had come, those bluffs and mesas where the Colorado River cut itself through didn’t appear to be shrinking much at all.

From one muddy, dying waterhole to the next they plodded on, making camps around little seeps if need be, marking hours and miles and days until they could wearily collapse from their horses and fall into a light, restless sleep. Then the raiders reached a dry lake bed,
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where
they sank to their knees in disappointment, finding little to drink at a tiny spring they located among a patch of blackened, volcanic rock. Little of the parched grass to feed the horses.

And no more of their own horsemeat.

That morning they selected the weakest of their animals and slit its throat, catching most of the blood in kettles and cups for those men desirous to drink what many believed was truly a life-giving elixir, especially if a man suffered from want of the lean, rich meat of buffalo and elk, mountain lion or antelope. Too damn long with mountain fare. But here, so far from the Rockies, these refugees had only a poor, half-skeletal, dried-out old horse to choke down, its flesh turned gritty with an endless swirl of dust and sand.

Most days they simply couldn’t scare up any wood to speak of where they ended their night’s march. Which meant there was no cooking for the lean, stringy sections of meat they butchered from the weakest of the animals the raiders began to sacrifice every other day or so. Nothing more than the drying properties of the hot, ever present wind or the heat put out from a broiling sun to jerk those strips of black, stringy muscle the trappers draped upon the spiny cactus or laid upon the eons-old volcanic rocks that dotted the landscape where they rested out their days upon this floor of an ancient inland sea.

After those first three nights, time began to run together. When the sun eventually fell and no longer tortured the men and their beasts, the booshways stirred, moving slowly, deliberately among the raiders, goading the trappers onto their feet as the shadows lengthened. They would then take account of their horses, resaddle, and move out.

If they found an animal unable to make that night’s march, or if the trappers required more meat, the men sacrificed the poorest of the poor to the knife here in the coming of twilight when the raiders were more rested. At first the men had enjoyed a quaff of the hot blood as it squirted dark, thick, and sticky from the horse’s neck. But by the fourth day few were anxious to dip his head or
his cup down into that gaping wound. Something so hot, so syrupy, held little allure for these men slowly being sucked dry by the desert below and the sun above.

Lo, beyond the searing heat of the sun, they suffered another torture from that endless sky stretched above them. At least once a day blackening clouds appeared on the far horizon, quickly tumbling their way. In such dry, pristine air, the men could discern the thick streamers of rain advancing with that thunderstorm hurtling toward them. Instead of raising alarm, the sight brought cheer to these parched emigrants. Chattering like schoolboys playing hooky at a forest pond, the horse thieves stripped naked as a borning day hoping the rain would pelt man and beast alike.

But the storms never failed to hurry on past, every cloudburst sweeping by without a single drop ever touching the naked riders and the thirsty earth. Although the thick, swollen, storm clouds released a torrent of moisture from their undergut, every last bead of rain dried before it came anywhere close to the ground. As the sun reappeared and the air rewarmed, the horsemen pulled on their clothes once more, grown all the gloomier with that agony of expectation, the self-deluding torture of misplaced hope.

And every step of the way was accompanied by an incomprehensibly deafening silence.

Back home in his mountains the slightest sound would echo back to a man, reverberated off a granite escarpment or the thick forests themselves. Why, even the high plains rolled and pitched enough, truly a country so crisscrossed with coulee and watercourse that he could count on some echo to accompany most every sound.

But here in this endless desert, every utterance, each small scratch or cough or sneeze, was immediately swallowed up by the land’s utter immensity.

Be it the whicker of a horse too weak to make any more of a sound, or the groans of discomfited men as they lunged to a stop in their tattered moccasins and pitched onto their knees, immediately rolling into a ball in the only shade they could find … maybe no sound
louder than the steamy splatter of a man’s piss as it struck the iron-clad hardpan of the desert floor. This was a land violently jealous of its silence.

There were times Scratch chewed on a little of his dwindling reserves of plug tobacco, hoping to stimulate a little saliva. And when that would not work, he dug out a .54-caliber lead ball and slipped it under his swollen tongue. Five days after stumbling past Soda Lake, some of the men opened a vein on their wrists or the backs of their hands, sucking at some semblance of moisture retained by their bodies. A few even tried to drink their own hot, pungent urine. Although Titus understood it was more pure than any water they might stumble across in this hostile country, he could almost puke at the thought of gagging down something so warm from his tin cup.…

Hell, everything was damned hot in this desert.

“Here,” Bill Williams announced as he settled beside Scratch in the skimpy shade of a Joshua tree as the sun slipped off midsky.

Elias Kersey leaned forward on an elbow, peering at what Williams revealed in the upturned crown of his hat. “What’s that?”

“Leaves of a weed
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the Injun just give me to pass around.”

“What we s’posed to do with it?” Titus asked as he plucked out a leaf. “Chew on ’em to make our mouths water?”

Williams shook his head. “Lookee there what the Injun’s doing? He told Peg-Leg we was to smoke it.”

“What for?” Scratch inquired.

“Frederico says it helps take away the pain.”

Purcell crabbed over, the first to reach in and pull out enough of the weed to stuff down the bowl of his clay pipe. “Been a long time since I had a smoke anyways.”

It wasn’t long before the two dozen shared a few common
sparks that flint and steel ignited on smoldering char until all were sucking at the dried leaves that stung their tongues. Within minutes the men grew more quiet than usual, every one of them soon absorbed with a dreamy reverie brought about by the narcotic effects of the bitter leaves.