Death Rattle

8

Their hosts actually lived on both sides of the Colorado. Three other villages stood across the muddy river. No sooner had the pale-skinned visitors shown up than the inhabitants of the other towns began to noisily cross the roiling current on flimsy rafts constructed of reeds lashed together with a fibrous rope. These white strangers were nothing less than a curious spectacle. Never before had the Mojave seen many outsiders pass through their country.

These were a strong, athletic people. Part of the Yuman family, they had a reputation for being fierce and aggressive warriors. For generations beyond count, the Mojave men had practiced extensive body tattooing using strong plant dyes—red, blue, and even white, to adorn their swarthy skins with potent symbols. Most of the men wore only a short, reed breechclout, and all went barefoot, using no moccasins of any description. When off on a rare hunt that would keep them away from their village for several days, most men wore nothing at all.

It was the custom of the women to wear nothing more than a short reed skirt around their hips. All that exposed flesh of breast and leg only served to entice the Americans into offering a handful of buttons or a yard of simple cotton ribbon in exchange for a few minutes of heated coupling behind one of the squat huts.

From the way the headmen instructed their most alluring young women to post themselves around the periphery of the trappers’ camp that afternoon, Titus figured the Mojave were not only eager to trade for some of the strangers’ goods but also exceedingly anxious to have white bloodlines mingle with theirs for generations to come.

These simple people lived in small, four-sided log-and-mud shelters, a crude roof of thatched brush over which the Mojave tossed sand for added insulation from the heat. For a tribe not prone to do much hunting that would have to take them far from this canyon of the Colorado, it was an uncomplicated life. Instead, the staple of their diet was the salmon they speared or caught in fibrous nets. Too, the Mojave cultivated extensive gardens of beans and corn, water- and muskmelon, and even some cotton. A mainstay was their wheat, which they stored in tall, upright, cylindrical granaries with flat tops, until they were ready to grind their wheat into flour.

While the men did not often hunt, the Mojave did nonetheless relish horsemeat. Rather than using equine animals for transport from place to place, these Colorado River Indians instead caught, raised, and even stole horses simply to eat. Much easier, Bass thought, than walking out of this valley to search the surrounding desert for a few scrawny rabbits or tortoises.

Here after their long, torturous ride through a barren, desolate canyon country devoid of game or good water, a trackless desert waste fit only for the likes of lizards, cactus, and spiny toads … why, to Titus Bass this fertile, green valley where these dark-skinned people raised their horses and cultivated a variety of crops seemed like a veritable Eden.

Late in the afternoon while the trappers were stoking their supper fires, eight of the Mojave men left their village, heading for the white man’s camp. But just short of the trappers, those eight stopped and dropped armloads of wood onto the grass. While a half dozen of the men turned on their heels and made for the village once again, two of them began to sort through the wood, selecting a few lengths of timber. For the next few hours Bass watched the men erect a small scaffold from the wood those six others continued to deposit near the white man’s camp, lashing the timber together with a fibrous rope the Mojave women braided from rushes and reeds. Beneath the low, upright braces, the men piled smaller brush and limbs. But it wasn’t until long after supper that he learned the purpose of that empty scaffold.

As soon as the sun had passed behind the far western wall of the canyon, the entire valley was thrown into shadow. With supper finished and the air cooling, most of the trappers sallied off from the fires, headed for the village and those young women who waited just close enough to the white men to make their willingness known. Everyone from their mess had departed for the village and a long-overdue coupling except for Bass and Roscoe Coltrane. They sat smoking their clay pipes, staring at the flames or the newly emerging stars. Twilight was already smearing the shadows into night when they heard the approach of many feet.

Both trappers turned to find more than fifty of the Mojave headed their way. At the van of their march, four men carried a long form on their shoulders. Behind the quartet walked two women holding torches that sputtered, licking at the evening breeze. Stopping beside the scaffold, the four hoisted the body atop the low platform. As they stepped back, the two women came forward, accompanied by a lone man who now recited a long, mournful dissertation.

“I s’pose they’re praying,” Bass whispered to Coltrane.

Roscoe nodded, but uttered not a word.

With a wave of his hand, the Mojave shaman inched back, gestured, and gave the order to the two women. They leaned forward on either side of the scaffold and jammed their torches into the thick nest of driftwood and dried grass stuffed beneath the body. A quiet, eerie chant began as the flames caught hold, an off-key dirge that grew in volume as the fire grew hotter, leaped higher, licking all around the deceased, beginning to consume him.

“Ever you know any folks what burn their dead?” Bass asked of Coltrane.

Captivated, Roscoe never took his eyes off the ceremony, his face illuminated with the dancing light from those flickering flames as he shook his head.

“Me neither,” Bass replied.

He watched as one Mojave after another stepped from the crowd, carrying a few meager items in their hands. A woman carried a bow. Another female had some crude fibrous clothing draped over her arm. A young man raised aloft a club for all to see, while a young girl moved forward carrying a short spear in both hands.

Titus said, “I figger they’re gonna burn ever’thing that man had to his name. Like some of the Injuns in the mountains give away all a man has after he’s dead.”

The shaman continued to reel off more of his foreign and mystical words, then paused before he gave the order. The individuals who held those few meager belongings now tossed them atop the body being consumed by flame, then every one of them quickly shrank back from the great heat the funeral pyre generated. Its growing light reflected off the striated orange and reddish-brown canyon walls as exploding fireflies of sparks spiraled skyward from the river valley.

As the scaffold collapsed and the flames began to recede, members of the dead man’s family retrieved a few burning limbs from the fire and set off behind the shaman when he started the crowd back for the village. The group stopped at one of the huts, where the family came forward together, setting the dry walls aflame with those faggots carried from the funeral pyre.

“Almost like he never lived,” Bass whispered morosely. He saw Coltrane wag his head sadly, then turned again to watch the flames greedily lick away at the brush and log shelter. “Rubbing out ever’ sign he ever was. Ever’thing he ever had is gone in less’n a goddamned night. Not a single trace that fella was ever around … ’cept for his kin still breathin’.”

As the bonfire died and many of the village finished obliterating almost every clue of a man’s existence among them, night deepened in the valley of the Colorado while most of the white men cavorted with the willing young women of the Mojave.

After brooding on it there in the fire-lit darkness beside that silent man, Scratch finally admitted, “I s’pose that’s just about all there’ll be for any of us, Roscoe. Things come an’ things go, and when we die we don’t need ’em no more. Maybe burning all his plunder’s a fair notion of things. Older a man gets, he finds out such foofaraw wasn’t important anyway. Maybeso these here Injuns got a good notion when all’s said an’ done … for what’s truly important still remains long after any of us is gone.”

Coltrane turned and gazed at Bass’s face, then the once-mute man spoke for the first time in many weeks. “What’s important to you?”

Initially startled by the reticent man’s sudden speech, Titus finally declared, “Kin, Roscoe. Kinfolk, and what few friends I can count on.”

Three more days passed while the white men languished in this unexpected Eden.

During those long, early-summer days most of the men ate or slept or frolicked in the river with some of their newfound female friends. And when night came down, the exuberant trappers stomped and jigged and sang, until they could wait no longer and slipped back into the shadows to couple with one of the Mojave women.

At the fires each evening, Frederico stammered through his poor Spanish, explaining his childhood in California, while Peg-Leg translated haltingly for the others. The young Indian described how in his youth he chose to become a novitiate working in the fields among hundreds of other Indians, all of them living under the rigid strictures of the padres’ church. But the lessons he learned were not the sort that would save his heathen soul from an eternity of damnation. Instead, Frederico, like the hundreds of primitive California Indians living in the hills and vales surrounding every Catholic mission, soon discovered they were nothing more than slaves who toiled in the vineyards, sweated over the extensive fields, tending to virtually every need or whim of the Mexican friars and those soldiers posted nearby.

Growing more and more disillusioned with the cruelty of his religious taskmasters, Frederico determined he would run away to those mountains lying far to the east of the mission. With two companions he escaped during the return of a work detail, the trio managing to hide until nightfall when the three young men started for the distant foothills. But they soon learned that even the foothills and high slopes covered in their evergreens were no sanctuary. Mounted Mexican soldiers caught up to them.

Rather than return to the mission and the torment he would have to suffer, one of the young men threw himself off a rocky ledge, his broken body tumbling into the chasm below. Frederico and his friend were promptly clamped in shackles and turned around for the mission.

When the pair hobbled along too slowly to keep up with the soldiers’ horses, the boys were lashed with braided horsehair quirts. Stumbling and falling constantly, they finally reached the mission, where both collapsed at the feet of the friars—who immediately ordered their most trusted Indian servants to bind the runaways to a pair of posts erected a few yards outside the walls. There a stern, steel-eyed, and militant padre took a rawhide cat-o’-nine-tails from his rope belt and turned the runaways’ backs to ribbons of blood and tattered strips of flesh.

With pooling eyes now, Frederico related how he had passed out with the severity of the flogging, unable to endure the pain or loss of blood any longer. The last sounds he heard were the unearthly cries of his young friend. Later, when he awoke in a cell where his feet were shackled, Frederico asked a friar when he could see his friend. The priest declared that his friend had gone away mysteriously … and would never be coming back.

Yet in his bones, Frederico knew that last part was nothing less than the ugly truth. Few of the escaped slaves ever survived their recapture. Their deaths simply served as a vivid example to the other Indians forced to witness the brutal public flogging of those who attempted to flee their cruel bondage to these self-righteous and most holy Mexican taskmasters.

Not long after Frederico’s recapture, his two young sisters were transferred from the mission, taken away to join a group of women who were consigned to the nearby soldier barracks where they served as concubines for the Mexican cavalry. Overwhelmed with a sense of helplessness, eaten up with utter hopelessness, Frederico realized he alone could do nothing to free his sisters from their fate. All he could do was to attempt another escape. That, or die trying.

This time when he made his dash east to the foothills of those beckoning mountains, he did not tarry to hide among the timber and the boulders. Instead, Frederico scaled the slopes, pushing all the way to the top of a narrow pass, where he gazed down upon that impenetrable desert below him. One last time he peered over his shoulder to the west where lay nothing but a legacy of misery and pain. There wasn’t a thing left for him but torture and death at the hands of his Mexican conquerors if the soldiers ever recaptured him. The young Indian crossed over, pitching himself into the desert.

Discovered near death where he lay huddled in the skimpy shade of a patch of cactus, parched with thirst and unable to move, Frederico was rescued by a few young Mojave warriors who had ventured onto the wastes in search of wild horses, hunting for any branded animals that might have escaped the California missions and extensive ranchos. Taking the half-dead slave to their villages on the Colorado, the Mojave hissed and snarled when Frederico explained why he had such a patchwork of terrible scars across his back and shoulders.

From that day, his rescuers never asked again of the pale-skinned strangers far to the west. The Mojave had saved his life and given him a home.

“Will you guide us back through that pass in the mountain?” Peg-Leg Smith asked Frederico when the young Indian had finished his dramatic tale that third night at the fire.

“You will not be lost,” Frederico replied, wagging of his head with reluctance.

“What do you want to lead us?” Smith inquired. “Tell me what I can give you in trade. We need you to show us the pass through the mountains that will take us to the ranchos.”

This time Frederico shook his head more emphatically. “There is nothing you can give me that would make me take another step across that desert. Nothing in this world that will make me return to the land of my murderous captors.”

In the cool, shadowy dawn that next morning, the booshways had their grumbling men rolling out early, ordered to bring their horses and pack animals into camp. Onto the pack saddles they tied skins filled with horsemeat they had traded from the Mojave. Every man went to the river one last time to fill his gourd or oaken canteen, along with those skin bladders the booshways had purchased from the Indians.

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,^* 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^* 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,^* 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^* 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.

Scratch drifted, half dozing as he recalled the gentle rattle of the mountain breeze coursing its way through the cottonwood and quakie, the unmistakable soughing of that first wind of winter fingering its way through the branches of fir or pine, stabbing its way through the thick overcoat of the blue spruce.

For the longest time Titus had the unmistakable impression he was sleeping—despite the fact that he had his eyes open. And those eyes were no longer squinting but growing wider and wider instead as the sun gradually went down, marking the passage of time as twilight loomed around them. Looking to his left, Scratch found their guide loading some more of the dry leaves into his simple Indian pipe crafted from the hollowed-out legbone of a horse. Maybe that red nigger did have something here with smoking these crumbled leaves: how it eased a man’s pain. At least no one was complaining of the nagging, persistent discomfort they suffered from both the thirst and a belly-gnawing hunger.

Time passed and he couldn’t reckon on just how much. While the air cooled, Bass noticed the nearby horses lazily shifting from one exhausted leg to another, observed men rolling from hip to hip seeking to make themselves more comfortable in the windblown sand, or watched nothing more than the changing properties of the light as a shadowy band slid ever so slowly across the grease-hardened wrinkles and fading bloodstains smeared across the tops of his leggings. The last of the day’s light crept over him as if it were an animated creature of the desert itself.

Then he thought of them back in Absaroka. And found himself dwelling on her—on the way she laughed so uncontrollably with how easily he poked fun at himself. Remembering the way her eyes took on a deep intensity when she hungered for him. So he naturally thought of pretty little Magpie and his bright, inquisitive Flea. He yearned to be back for their birthdays … but first he had to get out of this life-robbing desert.

Directly overhead sailed more than a dozen wrinkled-necked buzzards keeping an eye on the trappers and their animals, following their march, picking over the bones of the horse carcasses the raiders left in their wake. Eegod, but it hurt to stare at the sky too long, so he shut his eyes and waited for the pain to pass.

Sometime later he was awakened by a man’s heavy, labored breathing—and realized it was his own. Not daring to breathe deeply of the hot air because it burned his lungs like a blast from a blacksmith’s bellow. Reminding himself to suck it in shallow, shallow.

Upon opening his eyes he discovered the sun had leaked out of that last quarter of the sky, which meant even more time had passed. Quickly glancing at the heavens above them, he found it nearly black with wings. A few buzzards, yes—but even more of some bigger species, their immense wingspans circling overhead in that hot yellow sky.

Floating up there on the rising thermals, patiently waiting for the men to pick up and move on, so they could descend from the sky and pick over the remains of what the men left behind. Any strips of horseflesh clinging to the bones. Squawking and wing-flapping over the putrid gut piles. Sharp, curved beaks fighting off the others so they could peck at the dead, glazed eyes of the horses, feasting on the rotting carrion until there was nothing left but bone to bleach under the sun and course-less winds.

Come dark, they’d have to get out of here, Scratch decided. If they didn’t, those damned birds might well grow bold enough to attack the weaker horses and mules, maybe unto challenging the most defenseless of the men.

Titus closed his eyes again for a few minutes and tried desperately to think of how hell might feel. Could it be any worse than this?

Down in hell did the buzzards and other carrion eaters tear flesh from a man’s body, pick at his eyes … even before he was dead?

In hell did a man simply give up hope of ever seeing her again?

^* The Needles, near present-day Needles, California.

^* Today’s Marl Springs.

^* Present-day Soda Lake.

^* Jimsonweed, smoked by the Mojave, as well as their neighbors: the Paiute, Cocopah, and Yuma.