Death Rattle

17

Somehow they managed to hold the Diggers back that third furious charge, then a fourth, but less concerted, rush too.

Between each wave of brown raiders, in those nerve-racking interludes while the trappers prepared for the next assault, the arrows never stopped falling out of the sky or whispering through the brush—most of the missiles falling harmlessly among the stunted cedar and sage. But a few of the deadly stone points randomly struck close to some of the men, causing no more than a nuisance.

But what proved even worse was that, over time, more than two dozen of the arrows—their small, stone tips meant for bringing down rabbits—did manage to strike much bigger targets: tormenting the last of the riding horses individual trappers had picketed close at hand, in camp. What with all the gunfire, screaming warriors, and a steady rain of stone-tipped arrows, these few frightened animals were being driven even more mad, becoming even more noisy as they fought their pins and handlers.

Then one of the riding mules collapsed with a brassy breee-hawwwww, spraying piss over two nearby trappers as it went down in a spraddle-legged heap. Two of the men promptly plopped down on the damp ground between the dying animal’s legs, employing its heaving rib cage as a breastwork.

“Lookit them li’l brown niggers!” Dick Owens cried, pointing at the two dozen or so warriors who had raced in a wide loop around the trappers’ camp and were scampering away after the fleeing herd.

“They’ll run from now clear to Judgment Day,” John Bowers declared. “Never gonna catch them California horses!”

But it was only a matter of minutes before those Diggers appeared to realize the futility of their footrace, grinding to a halt and turning around out there against the distant horizon. Failing to herd those frightened, stolen horses, the warriors sprinted back to rejoin the fight.

Moment by moment now, the brown noose formed by those Digger warriors perceptibly drew tighter and tighter around the white men. And as it did, the Indians were sure to grow more bold, certain to inch all the closer with their deadly bows. With the sheer number of arrows landing among them, the first of those terrible little stone-tipped missiles pierced Toussaint Marechal’s thigh. Then another arrow clipped Francois Deromme in the arm. The damned things came floating down at an arch, falling out of the late-afternoon sun, finding a man here or there. No matter where the arrows struck—in the arm, or the leg—they managed to leave a nasty and oozy wound, even where a tiny flint point slashed along Joseph Lapointe’s skull, scraping a bloody furrow just beneath that skin from the outer edge of his eye clear back to where it protruded from his ear, dripping crimson on his shoulder.

With a sudden grunt of surprise, Bass sensed the stone tip pierce the thick ham of his left buttock.

“Damn you, sonsabitches!” he roared while collapsing onto his opposite hip, seizing the arrow’s shaft in his free right hand.

Only meat, he brooded as he gave the shaft a tentative tug. The torment was white hot, making him clamp his eyes shut with the diminishing waves of sharp, piercing pain—but he kept tugging nonetheless. No bone—nothing but meat—for that tip to bury itself into. Nothing at all like Ol’ Bridger’s arrowpoint, left to calcify in his back for more than three years.^* So he managed to pluck the damned thing out of his ass with an agonizing, teeth-clenching struggle.

The sheer oozy tenderness of the wound, not to mention the ignominy of where he’d been shot this time, only served to make him all the madder at these exasperating enemies. Doing his best to shift his weight onto the opposite knee, Titus hurried through the ritual of reloading without wasting time digging for a greased patch to nestle the huge lead ball he shoved against the grains of powder he already had poured down the long barrel.

Aim, fire … then reload again—while the Diggers screamed at every charge and sang their death songs with every retreat. Aim, fire … then reload—while the trappers around him cried out when they were struck with an arrow, all of them cursing their little brown enemies, or shouting a fading encouragement to one another.

Damn, Scratch sulked angrily, chewing on the inside of his cheek, realizing just how thirsty he had become as their fight ground on and on. Just to think of it: here they were now, caught out in this godforsaken wilderness fit only for frightened ground rats, emaciated jackrabbits, and hairy spiders the size of a man’s tin cup—finding themselves with all but a handful of their horses run off. Put afoot here after all they’d gone through to steal those California horses, to rub the Mexicans’ noses in their theft. Stranded now in this blazing desert with no way out but to walk.

And to top things off, Bass knew with that jagged, seepy wound soaking the back of his breechclout, he wouldn’t be sitting a horse for days to come!

As much as the Diggers tried their damnedest to inch in close enough to attempt one final, deadly rush—they never worked up the courage to see it through. Wounded as some of the trappers were, they stoically, quietly, steadfastly went about their business tugging out the tiny stone arrowpoints, wrapping black silk bandannas around their bloody wounds, then went back to reloading, firing again, reloading and firing over and over as the shadows lengthened.

The sun settled to the far edge of the earth, and shadows faded there in the lee of those red-hued, iron-tinged rocks.

With that gradual, but most dramatic, change in the light playing off the huge boulders, all the fire gradually seemed to slowly seep out of the Diggers’ attack. One by one, and in small clusters, the warriors retreated behind the jagged rocks, slipping out of sight before they disappeared out of range—not only refusing to charge the thunderous guns anymore, but every last one of them choosing instead to race barefoot after those scattering horses.

“They got what they wanted,” Bass grumbled as the trappers watched the last of their attackers pull off and the desert fell quiet.

He tried to get up on one knee again, but that buttock still cried out in pain. The muscles had stiffened, cramping around the wound. Titus barely caught himself from falling to the side, then propped the rifle under his shoulder, pushing his way up on the good leg, refusing to think about what poison the goddamned red niggers had used to turn their annoying little arrowpoints into weapons that would bring a slow death.

“Daws, get a fire started,” Bill Williams ordered, more angry than a spit-on hen. “A big goddamned fire!”

“We gonna use that fire to light the night, Bill? Keep them Diggers off us?” Henry Daws asked.

“Yeah?” Pete Harris chimed in. “So’s we can see ’em coming after dark?”

“No, the fire I’m telling you to stoke ain’t for us,” Williams explained, his jaw muscles flexing in harsh ribbons.

Right then Scratch could read something in the older man’s eye that most of the younger men never would. Uncertainly, he hobbled up beside Williams and stopped to ask, “You fixing to roast some of this here meat, Bill?”

Williams nodded, a wild look to his bloodshot eyes. “Digger meat.”

In utter disbelief, Adair stuttered, “B-burn these here Injuns, Bill?”

“Damn right he is,” Titus confirmed.

“Y-you ain’t fixin’ to make meat outta these damn Diggers, are you!” Dick Owens shrieked.

“Meat’s meat,” Bill explained angrily, then turned to Scratch with a malevolent glint to his eyes. “You hear these whining squaws, Titus Bass? Men like you an’ me we ain’t never been so squampshus ’bout what we put down our feed bags!”

When Williams stomped away angrily, headed for the closest of the dead warriors, Rube Purcell stepped up and nervously asked Titus, “You two ain’t serious ’bout cooking them Injuns for us to eat?”

Bass stared at Bill’s back a moment more, then looked Purcell in the eye, declaring, “Maybeso we go an’ burn them dead niggers—it’s gonna teach the rest of ’em a lesson so they won’t follow us outta here.”

“That mean we ain’t gonna cook ’em to eat, right?” John Bowers prodded, wanting some real reassurance.

“Solitaire can eat Digger if he wants,” Titus grumbled. “As for me—I ain’t about to eat nothin’ or no one what shot me in the ass.”

Samuel Gibbon asked, “Sounds like we’re gonna burn ’em?”

“Ever’ last hell-dog of ’em,” Scratch declared defiantly. “You heard Bill! Now build a fire! A goddamned big fire!”

“We … we leaving, Scratch?” Reuben Purcell inquired as he came up to Bass’s elbow.

Titus pivoted around on his heel. “Damn right we’re leaving. We’ll count heads and what horses we got left. Bury them men we have to, drag the rest best we can. Once’t we get that fire blazing and them dead niggers throwed on the flames—we’re gone from here under them stars.”

Adair inquired, “Where you figger you and Williams gonna lead out tonight?”

Titus dragged the back of his hand across his parched, cracked lips. “Where, you’re asking me, Silas? Why—to see what horses we can still round up afore we push on for the Uncompawgray.”

Titus Bass elected to walk, leading his horse. It was that or suffer the agony of a saddle-pounding. That snare saddle with a thick leather mochilla draped over its frame simply wasn’t going to give his poorly placed wound the slightest comfort. Even with the furry padding of a small section of buffalo hide Scratch sliced from his sleeping robe, he found himself flinching with discomfort, if not wincing in downright pain when he tried to nestle down atop the saddle.

Unsteadily, he dropped to the hardpan desert floor, where he began to trudge the canyon ridges among the handful of their winged and wounded—those not able to move on their own. The rest hurried on into the dark with Bill Williams, following the wide, moonlit trail of the fleeing horses, their hoofprints dotted with the clutter of small moccasin tracks. Ol’ Solitaire had vowed he would make the Diggers pay for the trouble they had visited the trappers, even if Bill and the others didn’t get back but a dozen of those hard-won Spanish barb horses.

From time to time that evening, and on into the blackening of the desert night, Scratch turned to peer over his shoulder at that fading cone of flickering yellow light. A good thing the wind blew out of the west as evening came on, he pondered. The unearthly stench of those burning bodies was more than a right-minded man could stand. Not that Titus was squeamish—not in the least. Across all those seasons he’d spent west of the Big Muddy, after all, he’d killed enough of those who had attempted to kill him.

The Diggers could have sneaked up and cut out a small portion of the herd to feed their miserable selves, instead of attacking the white men settled down for some hard-won sleep, instead of greedily running off all those hundreds of California horses. Had the brownskins been satisfied at slipping off with just a few, chances were Scratch could have talked Williams and the others out of wasting any time or effort pursuing a paltry number of the scrawny animals.

But when those red niggers made it plain as sun they were out to kill white men, those red niggers deserved no quarter.

A man often made some allowance for simple-minded savages what didn’t know any better—but when the Diggers descended upon the trappers with their full intention of killing Williams’s raiders so they could steal everything of any glittering value … then the red-bellies sealed their own death warrants.

Out here in this hostile environment, just like the predator and the preyed upon—life had never been anything more than cheap.

“Once’t I hear dem Diggers eat their own chirrun when they get hungry ’nough!” Francois Deromme declared as he rode along, perched in his saddle above Titus, his left arm in a sling improvised from a black kerchief.

“Man’d have to be a animal to eat his own young’uns,” Joseph Lapointe grumbled.

“That’s what the hell they are,” Deromme argued. “I neber see’d it with my own eyes—but I hear more’n one man tell me dem Diggers get hungry ’nough, they eat their young.”

“Maybeso you’re right,” Lapointe agreed. “We all know them Mexicans ride up to this here country, for to steal women and young’uns, drag ’em back to Santee Fee and Touse for slaves in the fields. The Comanch’ and the Yutas do it, too—they’re always stealing Digger women and young’uns.”

“So you figgair dese here Diggers don’t give a damn ’bout their chirrun?” Deromme prodded.

“Look around you, fellas,” Scratch interrupted their discussion. “A empty belly in this here country gonna cry out for food only so long afore one of these red niggers gonna fill it any way he can.”

“You figgair they do eat their young, Bass?” Lapointe inquired.

With a halfhearted shrug, Titus said, “I figger these here Diggers gonna eat most anything they can put in their mouths just to stay alive.”

Rumors did indeed abound among the American fur men, not to mention those tales told down in the Mexican provinces, concerning the Diggers’ sacrificing their children to fend off starvation. Although no white man had ever actually witnessed such barbarity with his own eyes, many a trapper had seen how these pitiful wretches shamelessly abandoned their blind, lame, and young to die alone in the desert when fleeing from powerful attackers.

Another certainty that lent a weighty probability to such legendary cannibalism in the minds of these trappers was what this austere country did not provide in the way of sustenance. Rarely had a fur man ever sighted any real game in the form of deer or antelope. Most of the time, even the bony jackrabbits were hard to spot. In certain seasons, these Diggers somehow sustained themselves on a diet of crickets and grasshoppers, even ants and spiders too. Word had it the Indians dried these insects beneath the blazing sun, then pounded the bodies into a fine meal that, when mixed with a little water or the moisture squeezed from a cactus frond, would form a paste they could bake on flat rocks at the edge of their fires.

Bright as the stars were that night, not to mention the illumination from a three-quarter moon, the wide and scoured trail wasn’t all that hard to follow through those blessed hours of darkness. And in those final moments before the sky began to gray off the east as they trudged along, it even grew outright chilly. Feeling a little weak from the loss of blood and not having a thing to eat in the better part of a whole day, Scratch damn well didn’t want to let the desert’s cold sink in clear to his marrow. He stopped to rest for a few minutes while he untied his trailworn capote from behind the saddle and pulled it onto his arms, knotting the sash around his waist.

Then he continued into what remained of the yawning, black desert night.

“You hear that?” Henry Daws asked.

The few came to a halt around Bass, quieting their animals as all of them fell silent. Listening.

There it was, for certain. The sound of gunfire. Not a rip-roaring battle of it—but a few shots echoing now and then. Of a sudden, they heard the low, rumbling thunder too.

“Dem’s horses!” Francois Deromme cried.

Jack Robinson cheered, “An’ it sounds like they’re coming our way!”

“Damn if they ain’t,” Bass cursed, his eyes flicking left and right, frantically searching for cover. “We better be finding us somewhere to get outta their way.”

“You figgair dem others find the horses?” Lapointe inquired.

“Sure as hell did find ’em!” Deromme declared. “Dey bringing the herd back for us.”

“Hold on—I callate you’ve got things all twisted up,” Bass argued, knowing full well there wasn’t a good reason the herd had turned around in its tracks and was headed for them. “Them horses is on the run.”

Robinson asked, “Bill and the rest got ’em all back from the Diggers, didn’t they?”

That thunder of the hoofbeats seemed to swell noisily in the next few heartbeats as Titus grappled with what to do. In moments the horses would be all but on top of the handful of white men.

“Head for them rocks, fellas!” Bass shouted, lunging away despite the agony in that ham. “Diggers or Californy horses—this here desert’s dead set on killin’ me afore I can get back to the mountains!”

At the very moment the eastern horizon turned a blood-tinged gray, the front ranks of the herd took shape out of that arid dawn. A dark, bobbing wave thundered toward the wounded and halt as they scampered for a low cluster of volcanic rock. The trappers reached their shelter just before the flying manes and fluttering tails took form out of the slanting gray clouds of dust. Intermingled with the pounding hooves arose off-key yips and coyote calls of excited men.

Titus held on to hope that it would be Bill and the others, bellowing on the fringes of the herd.

But when some three dozen of the stolen animals loped past the rocks, the cries and hoots came right behind them, more distinct. And something clearly wasn’t right about those calls.

“It’s the Diggers!” Lapointe shouted.

“Get down!” Bass ordered as he realized the horizon wasn’t darkened with horses. It was clotted with the warriors. “Get down outta sight!”

It was plain that these Indians who had attacked them were, at least for the moment, consumed with chasing after a few dozen of the horses on foot. They were screeching and screaming at the horses, driving them south by west back in the direction where the trappers had been camped. One of the Diggers appeared to spot Bass as the warriors loped past on foot, yelling at the horses, keeping the animals on the run. But none of the Indians stopped. As Titus waited to be discovered and overwhelmed, his heart pounding, more than a hundred of the short brown Indians streaked by, their knees pumping like steam pistons as they raced after their four-legged quarry.

Their shrill, intermittent cries and the hoof thunder quickly died, swallowed by the utter emptiness of that desert morning.

“They didn’t spot us!” Toussaint Marechal called out.

“Shit—they saw us,” Bass protested, relieved that so many of the enemy was now heading away from their line of march. “Had to see us when we ducked in here. They just wanted them horses more’n they wanted our sorry asses.”

“We better get moving,” Joseph Lapointe said as he stood and adjusted the bloody bandanna that covered one of his eyes. “Them brownskins might just turn on around and come back for us.”

“Let’s hope we can catch up to the rest of dem horses,” Marechal said as he hobbled out of the rocks behind the rest.

“Better you pray we catch up to Bill Williams and the rest of our boys,” Scratch argued. “To hell with them Mexican horses while there’s red niggers out to raise our scalps in this here desert!”

It wasn’t until midmorning, with the late-summer sun starting to do its evil work, when Francois Deromme first spotted the faint scum of a dust cloud hugging the horizon to the north. Minute by minute, the cloud grew, advancing on that band of wounded trappers.

“You don’t figger it’s ’nother bunch of them Diggers, do you?” Joseph Lapointe asked.

Bass shook his head. “Naw. Nothing gonna raise dust like that but a whole passel of hooves.”

But just to be sure they didn’t get burned, the trappers quickly looked about, spotting a likely outcrop of rocks where they might find enough room to conceal themselves and their horses.

On and on, minute by minute, the shimmering gold cloud gobbled its way across the desert toward them. From time to time, sunlight glanced like streaks of mercury, rays glittering from the density of the cloud. Then the first of the volving legs emerged from the base of the dust.

“It’s them horses!” Jack Robinson screamed with glee. “See? It’s our horses!”

In the next heartbeat, not only did the front ranks of the horses emerge out of the billowing dust, but also two riders—both of them whooping and yipping like coyote pups on the prowl.

“I’ll be go to hell and et for the devil’s tater!” Scratch cheered as he started hobbling into the open.

He ripped his wide-brimmed felt halt off his head and started waving it at the horses and that daring pair of riders out in the van of the herd. With all those animals racing directly at him—from where he stood right then it seemed as if the desert was belching free every horse that had ever come out of California.

At the head of the herd, those two riders pointed and waved their big hats, one of the horsemen angling off to his left. Once those animals in the front flanks were following him, the other horseman turned aside as the herd pushed on.

“Jehoshaphat! If that don’t look to be Ol’ Solitaire hisself!” Bass roared, wagging his hat once more at the end of his arm.

Williams came up at a lope, his horse skidding on the flinty ground. Every inch of the man was coated with a thick layering of fine talc that shook loose, forming a gauzy cloud that billowed into a bright halo around him as his animal shuddered to a halt.

“Titus Bass! That really you?”

Scratch spat out some of the sand that was settling around them all, a choking, blinding cloud of it kicked up by those hundreds of horses. “ ‘Onery as ever, Bill,” he coughed.

“Damn, if you ain’t covered ground on your own shanks! Walked all this way with that arrer hole in your ass?”

“He did, Bill!” Deromme said with a cheer.

“That our horses?” Titus inquired, glancing at the herd as it peeled aside, headed west.

“What we could get wrangled back together,” Williams confided. “The rest we’ll let the desert have. Maybe them Diggers run across some of ’em one of these days.”

“Roast a haunch or two of Mexican horse, eh?” Bass said. “Where was you headed with ’em?”

“The horses? Why—we was comin’ back for you boys.”

“See?” Robinson said. “I told you all along Bill wouldn’t light out of the desert without us!”

Bass scooted closer to Williams’s bony knee, gazing up at the old trapper coated with that layer of brown dust. “Who’s leading ’em now?”

“Kersey,” he replied. “We figgered to find water for ’em afore night over yonder at them hills.” He pointed. Then looked down at Bass. “You coming with us?”

“Damn right I am,” Scratch growled. “A whole passel of them horses are mine, Bill. To get ’em this far, I near died of thirst, got my head shot off by Californy greasers, and a’most had my throat cut by a white man. I ain’t about to let any of you side-talking varmints run off with what critters are mine!”

Williams rocked his head back and laughed so hard some more fine dust shook off him in a mist. “I figger that means you’re coming with us! You sit a saddle yet?”

“Ain’t tried—but I’ll keep covering ground on foot any way you care to lay your sights.”

“That’s what I like in this man, boys!” Williams cheered. “You just can’t beat a good man what puts his head down and keeps on coming!”

“You heard, Solitaire,” Titus said to the others as he turned around to face them. “There’s a herd to wrangle. All you fellas what are fit to help them others with the horses, saddle up and catch them horses. The rest of you what’re ailin’ too bad can lay back and come along with me.”

Only Toussaint Marechal and Joseph Lapointe ended up staying behind with him, watching the others wave their farewells, then ease away toward the tail end of that massive herd.

Titus suddenly looked up and asked, “Ain’t you going on with the rest, Bill?”

Patting his dust-crusted, lathered horse on the withers, Williams said, “I’ll lay off running them animals for a while, Scratch. Maybeso, you boys could use some company on your leetle walk.”

“Much ’predated, Bill.”

The four of them had covered several miles in the blazing sun before Williams, right out of the blue, confessed, “We got less’n half what we drove outta California, fellas.”

Bass glanced over at the skinny man walking beside him, leading his own horse. “You figgered you’d make it back to the mountains with more, did you?”

Williams was slow to grin, but smile he did, his brown teeth a shade or two darker than the pale dust coating his severely tanned face. “Shit, Scratch—you got me there! Never in all my days could I have figgered to get this many horses out of California and ’cross that killer desert.”

“But we done it, Bill.”

“By damn, if we didn’t!” Williams exclaimed. “But just think of all them horses what left their bones behind us.”

“No reason for you to feel sad for gettin’ only half of ’em to the mountains. Lookit us—we’re standing here, still alive!” Titus snorted some dust out of his nose onto the desert hardpan. Then he looked squarely at Bill. “We had us some shining times out to Californy, didn’t we, ol’ friend?”

Williams smiled hugely, no longer grave, and slapped Titus on the back. “We did have us some fun, didn’t we, Scratch? By blazes, if we didn’t have us a whole damn lotta fun!”

It took them the better part of a week, but they finally put the Green River at their backs, escaping the worst of that broken canyonland where it took all they had to keep any more of the stolen horses from slipping away in that rugged country.

Throughout the days the trappers kept the animals under a rotation of wranglers while the rest of the men slept. At dusk they saddled up and ki-yiiied, waving hats and coils of buffalo-hair rope to start the last three broodmares they still had alive. No longer were they pushing the rangy animals, not the way they had run the herd out of California, goaded them over the mountains and into those first stretches of desert. None of the survivors wanted to lose any more of their horses. So the cautious men inched forward each night, searching out the water holes and springs.

For nights on end, Bass had been forced to follow the slow-moving caravan on foot. But by the time they had begun their climb into the first low foothills, Titus was tying on his last pair of moccasins, deciding it was time to give that ham a try before he was forced to walk barefoot. That evening he settled back into the saddle, tenderly doing what he could to keep his weight off that wounded buttock. Trying his best to ignore the painful hammer of the horse’s gait as it made its way over the uneven ground.

Far off in the distance, the verdant green of the Rocky Mountains beckoned seductively to these men who had outlasted months of desert sand, scorching sun, and their own limits.

It set Scratch to wondering how could a man live in such warm places as these, especially the sort of man who settled in valleys where other men congregated—building their shacks and huts and barns, forced to breathe each other’s air, where they had no seasons of winter, spring, or fall to their lives? How did folks live like that?

But he realized there were lots of men who did live out their lives perfectly content to do without the harsh edges any wilderness scraped away on a man, settlers who were absolutely content to live a life untested. His father had been one. One of the many.

It was Titus Bass himself who was too damned different to get along with the steady sort what came to fill up these open, feral, unforgiving spaces.

Crossing a wind-scoured country of cedar, juniper, and stunted yellow pine, the raiders were forced to angle north along the base of a great plateau. Once around the end of that towering ridge, Williams curved them around to the south-southeast. From here on out they would no longer travel at night and rest out the sun.

Three more days of driving the herd and they struck what the mountain men called the Blue River,^* one of the tributaries of the mighty Colorado. Finding enough water for their horses was no longer a problem. Nor wood for their night fires. No more would they have to cook their stringy horseflesh over smoky, struggling, greasewood fires.

They had returned to the Shining Mountains.

^* Ride the Moon Down

^* Today’s Gunnison River in southwestern Colorado, what the Mexican traders of that time called the San Xavier River.