The Brave Cowboy (35 page)

Burns stretched out on his belly between buttresses of rock and concentrated his attention on the scene within his purview, searching for the sign or smell of Man. Directly before him was a meadow of grama grass, with a few soft old gray boulders, mellowed by moss and lichens, sunk deeply and comfortably into the earth, each one surrounded by constellations of miniature alpine flowers. Snow lay in patches here and there, preserved in the blue shadows of the rocks. The meadow
ended at timberline about fifty yards below, in the stands of slender, white-barked aspens that fringed the dark forest of pine and spruce and fir. A dim trail wound out of the trees to the north, passed across the meadow near its center and re-entered the forest to the south, a quarter of a mile off. Burns followed the trail with his eyes; looking north he could see a small cubical structure of stone, a kind of shelter or lookout, set on the edge of the rim about a quarter-mile away. One window, black and empty, like a gunport, faced him from the south wall. He studied that for several minutes. Much farther to the north, five miles or more, he saw the two television relay towers—gigantic red and white skeletons of steel, like a pair of Martian monsters stranded on the brink of the world. There or near there, he knew, was the endpoint of the road that came up the mountain from the east.

He looked to the south: the rim of the mountain curved eastward, then westward, dropping off by easy stages into the dark shadow that was Scissors Canyon, ten miles away. Beyond that were the blue, smoky, pyramidal peaks of the Manzanos and the ranges of mountain wilderness that rolled on for three hundred miles toward Mexico. Burns stared southward, southward, until his eyes began to blur with longing and the ache in his heart crept up into his throat.

He was getting careless already. A man was walking along the rim toward him, less than a mile away, coming slowly closer, disappearing now and then among the aspens. Something familiar in that shambling gait, the stoop of huge shoulders under the negligible weight of a small, dark, haired-over head—Burns blinked his k, haired-over head—Burns blinked his eyes, narrowed and sharpened his glaze: almost at once he recognized the man as Gutierrez. Naturally, reflexively, the fingers of his right hand tightened around the reassuring heft and shape of the rifle by his side.

Burns plucked a stem of grama and chewed on it for a while, his eyes grave and thoughtful. He waited and watched and presently saw Gutierrez stop at the edge of
the rim, looking down. He heard or thought he heard an exchange of shouts—human noises. He waited for Gutierrez to act; he must have found the man that Burns had captured and shackled to the tree. In a moment he would undoubtedly climb down the rope to release him.

He picked a second stem of grass to chew on. He was not particularly comfortable lying there on the hard snow, which was beginning to thaw under the warmth of his body: he could feel a damp coldness pressing into his knees, thighs and elbows. And the westerly was sharp and bitter, a stiff whining persistent wind that penetrated his clothing and chilled his ears and fingers; he could hear it flurry and sough in the forest below, the excitement of the aspen leaves like the sound of falling water or a distant multitudinous applause. Burns listened, his eyes on Gutierrez, his right thumb on the hammer of the carbine.

Gutierrez stood for several minutes looking down over the edge of the cliff. Finally he got into motion again, head bent low as if seeking something on the ground, “and lumbered further along the rim toward Burns, a rifle or shotgun cradled in his left arm: the hunter.

Burns stirred on the crusted snow, surprised and alarmed. Below was the forest, dark, warm, deep, charged with secrecy; he looked at it with yearning, then forced his attention back to the left: something had changed in the aspect of the stone shelter on the north. Beside the black aperture in the wall a shadow had appeared, distorted by the stone surface into the shape of a serpent. Burns could see the shadow but not the open eye of a rifle. Five hundred yards.

Gutierrez approached from the south, now within a thousand yards—still far out of range.

The cowboy glanced down at his dried-out hands: on the back of each was a faint encrustation of salt. He felt for a moment the mad temptation of paralysis: to do nothing, nothing at all, to let the end come unre
sisted. He spat out the chewed-up grass and crawled backward on his knees and elbows, keeping his butt down until he was below the summit of the rise; there he turned and went on down among the chaparral and rocks, crouching nearly double; only when he was definitely below the skyline did he straighten up.

The mare was waiting for him, a sprig of oak leaves hanging from her mouth. He bent down to untie the reins from the base of the shrub, laying his rifle on the crushed dead leaves on the ground. His fingers were stiff with cold and strain; he fumbled uselessly with the knot, then raised his hands to his mouth to blow on them. At that moment he saw the Indian coming around the corner of the ledge below, not more than a hundred yards away; the Indian made a steady dry clashing sound as he walked over the leaves. Burns stared at him; the Indian stopped, looked up and saw him, frozen there on the slope, only half-hidden by the brush. They stared at each other through the yellowing light and through the sudden ringing silence that followed the Indian’s halt.

Burns reached for his rifle, then saw that the Indian was armed with only a walking stick; he went back to work on the knot, trying to keep his hands steady. The mare had tightened the simple overhand by jerking at the reins and for a moment it seemed to him, in his nerveless desperation, that he could do nothing. But the knot gave; at the same time he heard the Indian shout at someone coming up from below, still out of sight Burns picked up rifle and reins and started to scramble up the short slope to the top. For a moment Whisky resisted his lead and he swore, snarled at her: “You bitch, you whore, you murderin she-devil—come on! Hup!” and the mare stared back at him with her lustrous brainless eyes, lifted her right foreleg and followed him. He heard the Indian shout again but did not look back; he struggled up over the stones and slippery leaves and the mare heaved herself up after him, trail
ing a ruin of mangled leaves, crushed blades of yucca, a small dusty avalanche of stones.

They reached the top of the rise; Burns glanced back down and saw a second man appear behind the Indian, awkwardly unslinging a submachinegun. Burns kept going, hauling the horse after him, and as they cleared the high point of the rim and started into the meadow, he was followed and passed by fragments of exploded rock and the scream of ragged lead butterflies burning through the air above his head; he heard the barking stutter of the submachine gun in automatic fire, recoil, refire.

The forest was waiting, fifty yards down across the quiet, snow-dappled meadow of grama and lupine and mountain violets. Burns hesitated for a second: he saw Gutierrez running toward him from the south, saw him stumble, almost fall and keep on coming; he glanced to the north and saw a tall man in green military coveralls step out of the stone shelter and aim a rifle at him. There was no more shouting; the only sound, before the man in the coveralls started to fire, was that of the wind in the trees—the excited clashing and rustling of the aspen leaves—and the mare’s wild panting for air, and Burns’ own heavy breathing.

The man in the coveralls fired offhand, underestimating the range; the bullet cut through grass and plowed into the dirt twenty yards short of the target—Burns scarcely noticed it. But even so he could not deny the clamor of his nerves and blood and senses:
Run!
As Gutierrez was doing—as the man in the green military coveralls began to do. Instead Burns stepped back beside the mare, checked the cinch, slid the rifle into the saddle scabbard and then finally put his foot in the stirrup and pulled himself up into the saddle.

The man in the coveralls stopped running, knelt and fired again; the range was still too great: the lead slug smashed off a rock about a dozen paces north of man and horse. The rifleman raised his rear sight by a millimeter.

Burns turned the trembling mare toward the forest. “Hup,” he said, digging his heels into her flanks. Whisky started down, breaking at once into a trot—a little unsteady. She almost buckled at first, but recovered, steadied herself and began to lope. Burns drew her in, keeping her to a good stiff jarring trot. He raised one hand to his hatbrim and pulled the hat down firmly and straight. A matter of pride; the forest was not far away.

The man in the green coveralls fired again from his kneeling position, taking time and care.

Burns, gazing at nothing but the trees ahead, felt the bullet coming; he contracted, shriveling his entire body; at the same time he saw a flake of leather whip off the pommel of the saddle under his hands, and felt and heard the hiss of metal scorching the air. The mare’s ears shot up, quivered. They heard the sound of the shot a half-second later. Whisky leaped forward but Burns slowed her again with a pull at the reins.

On the south Gutierrez had stopped running, still too far away for a good shot. Behind Burns, at the crest, the Indian tracker appeared, silhouetted against the sky. He shouted again at the machine-gunner behind him, bent down, picked up a stone and tossed it after the man on horseback. A good try: the stone bounced off the mare’s rump and spun to the ground. Whisky snorted, spooked, leaped forward again, cantering over the whispering grass toward the trees. And this time Burns let her go, letting himself go, laughing like a wild fool. Within moments the white slim quaking aspens were all around him, bending in the wind, their yellow leaves chattering frantically, crazily, with the laughing hysteria of old mad women.

The man in the green military coveralls fired once more and missed; he remained on one knee, rubbing his jaw thoughtfully, and watched his target become shadowy, discontinuous, in the maze of the trees. Gutierrez took a random shot from five hundred yards away, aiming north northeast; he heard his bullet rico
chet from a rock and go singing into the blue toward Kansas. While on the rim above the meadow the Indian stood, pointing down into the forest. The young man panting and sweating and cursing beside him could see nothing, nothing but light, and insubstantial shadows; nevertheless he pulled and held the trigger of his Browning submachine gun, staggering slightly under its recoil, fighting against the upthrust of the muzzle, and liberally sprayed the grass and rocks and trees with hot shrieking bullets: he wounded several aspens.

“W
E
GONNA
GO
HOME
NOW
M
OREY
?” T
HE
RADIO
operator looked unhappy, plaintive, like a young lost beagle; his nose and fingers were turning blue with cold. He sniffled through his blue nose.

Johnson explored the inside of his collar. “You say they found Glynn?” He removed a sprig of tumbleweed and dropped it on the ground while the operator answered him. The wind seemed to be dying down now that the sun had gone under; still there was too much fine dust in the air for comfort. “What’d you say?” Johnson said.

“What?” The operator chewed on the dry chapped skin of his lip. “I said yes they found him. He was handcuffed to this tree. Gutierrez saw him and got him loose. He had a bad knock on the head.”

“Gutierrez?”

“Floyd—Glynn.”

“Yes,” Johnson stared up at the mountain: the red veins of iron in the granite which composed those towers and buttresses and cliffs were turning pink now in the last rosy flush of light from the sun that was already below Johnson’s horizon. As he watched the pink radiance deepened into lavender, retreating upward before the advance of the blue, violet and purple shadows. The night, he thought—the night is coming: that shade rolling up the face of the mountain, the black night coming from the east—it’s dark already in Tucumcari, in Santa Rosa, in Moriarty. Above the rim the eastern
sky was changing from blue to a pale cold green—(he suggestion of winter.

He turned to the west; the sun had gone down without glory behind a haze of smoke and dust, leaving only a dull yellow stain stretched across the sky, but to the southwest somewhere over Thieves’ Mountain a fat star glimmered, flickered, sinking. Venus, said Johnson to himself, Venus—evening star, planet of love…

Johnson broke off, abashed by his train of thought He looked over his shoulder at the radio operator; the radio operator was looking at him.

“Then they’re all up there now?” Johnson said.

“Sure—all of them.”

“What about the helicopter pilot?”

“Him too.” The operator watched him hopefully, sniffing. “You think we still might find this guy tonight, Morey?” he said.

“He’ll show up somewhere,” Johnson replied. “Sometime.”

The operator waited. Johnson scratched at his armpit, staring down at the sand and tangled brush by the jeep: I’m hungry, he thought. It was like a discovery; he freed his mind from the image of the mountain, the star. I’m hungry, he told himself. He heard the radio operator blowing his nose in forlorn desperation.

“All right,” Johnson said: “let’s go home.”

A
T
A
BEND
IN
THE
TRAIL
AND
NEAR
THE
BEGINNING
of the descent into the canyon, among a group of giant yellowpines, he halted the mare slowly, stiffly, let himself down out of the saddle. He was tired, almost dizzy with fatigue, but still he felt good, satisfied: he had been chewing on raw venison for ten miles and three hours. He sagged against the trunk of a pine, unbuttoned his jeans and urinated, staring at the same time down the mountainside into the purple gloom of the pass. The gloom was far from complete: the four-lane highway that wound through the bottom of the pass was alive, crawling, itching with motor traffic—an endless procession of tiny points of light proceeding like beads on a thread through the darkness, passing and repassing, vanishing, reappearing, fed into the night from apparently inexhaustible sources.