Cry of Eagles (27 page)

Near the highest elevations, the Pedregosas offered shelter in many forms. Deep caves ran through the bowels of the earth. Steep-walled canyons crisscrossed the mountain range, providing a network of passageways where Naiche and his followers could stay out of sight while moving ever southward, although almost never in a straight line that would have made their journey that much shorter.

Here, Naiche felt relatively safe from the doggedly determined white men who had been glued to their trail since they broke away from the reservation and entered the Dragoons. His sense of safety, however, was not shared by Chokole or Nana, and Juh seemed unusually watchful now.

Naiche had abandoned his plan to lay in ambush for the white men at the base of the mountains. He would select the right spot when he came upon it and then prepare a deadly bushwhacking for the white-eyes from which he was certain they would not escape, if they were mere mortal men.

Chokole scouted the trail ahead. Nana, the most experienced warrior in Naiche's dwindling band, brought up the rear with two young warriors, staying back a mile or more, climbing to higher crests and ledges to watch patiently for any sign of the three pursuers.

As the day wore on until the sun was directly overhead, Naiche relaxed more and more. The maze of snake-like canyons they followed were ancient pathways to the land of Mexico, known only to Apaches who once roamed this rugged terrain. The white men had found it easy to track shod cavalry horses in sand and softer ground, but in the heart of the Pedregosas dark rock had been carved by wind and water since the beginning of time. Even a shod horse left little more than scratches on the surface of stone-bottomed ravines and gullies. Stunted juniper and pine grew on higher slopes, appearing to be clinging to walls of rock with nothing hut roots to hold them in place. The Pedregosas were one of the driest mountain ranges anywhere, in Naiche's experience, and only someone who knew where to look would be able to find scarce water for animals and men.

Naiche's calm was soon interrupted when Chokole came galloping her pinto mare in his direction . . . he could tell by the way she pushed her wiry little mount that she'd seen something amiss in the trail ahead.

He rode far out in front of the line of pack horses and mules to reach her, hoping she was not bearing bad news, yet all but certain this would explain her haste. She had spotted some form of danger ahead. He was sure of it.

She pulled her pony to a halt in front of his bay, and then pointed back down the canyon from which she had ridden. “I saw two of the white-eyes, Chief Naiche,” he began. “They rode across the top of a ridge in plain sight. They did not try to hide from me.”

It was puzzling news—two of the whites who had proven to be so clever allowed themselves to be seen against the skyline.

“Why did they show themselves?” Naiche asked, knowing that Chokole would understand why he asked this very simple question that did not fit the actions of cautious men.

“It is a trick,” she replied. “They
wanted
us to see them, to follow them, thinking we would behave recklessly. I am sure they meant to lead me into an ambush.”

He grunted his agreement. “You are very wise, Chokole, not to follow them. What else could it be besides a trick to lead you to a spot of their choosing, where the other whites would kill you with their rifles?”

“My heart told me this . . . not to follow them,” she answered, still looking backward from time to time. “But this is also a sign that somehow, even without knowing these canyons, they have gotten ahead of us. They will be preparing an ambush where they believe we must travel.”

Juh rode up to overhear the conversation, for he knew that Chokole's return to the main band meant trouble was waiting for them somewhere to the south, the direction they must take to get to Mexico.

“What is wrong?” Juh asked, searching Chokole's face as if he could read her thoughts before she spoke to him.

“Two of the white-eyes rode across a high ridge in plain sight,” she told him. “They took no measures to stay off the horizon where no one would see them. It was a trick, of that I am certain.”

“Yes,” Juh muttered. “They hoped you would follow them to the killing place they picked out. It is grave news, to know they are ahead of us now. We will be forced to turn east or west to ride around them.”

Naiche's anger, and his fear, returned. “They must be mounted on good horses,” he said. “Only a strong animal with speed and endurance could get past us.” He turned to Juh. “Go back and tell this to Nana. Leave the younger men to guard our rear. We will need our best fighters to confront them, and our best trackers to find out where they are waiting for us in the canyon.”

“I will look for their tracks,” Juh offered. “My eyes are still young enough to see the hoofprints left by a white man on a horse with iron shoes. After I bring Nana to you, Naiche, I will go alone to find their horse sign.”

Chokole asked Naiche in a pleading voice, “Let me go with Juh. Two pairs of eyes are better than one. I can show him the ridge where I saw the tall man on his black horse, and the white man with long red hair.”

“It was the red-haired one and MacCallister you saw?” Naiche asked, for the revelation caught him off guard. The prisoner they had left to die in the desert said that Falcon MacCallister was an Indian fighter from the northern regions. Perhaps MacCallister was not as smart or as cunning as they first thought, to ride out in the open. But how had Mickey Free gotten ahead of them to join MacCallister? Free and the soldiers were still far to the north, according to his scouts.

“Yes, the one called Falcon,” Chokole replied. “He did not look down in the canyon even once when he crossed the ridge, and I knew then it was a trick to lure me to the place where they meant to kill me. The man with red hair rode behind him.”

“You are wise,” Juh said, staring south at towering walls of solid rock on both sides of the canyon they followed. “From up high on the rim, a good rifle shot could kill many of us. It is time to change direction when we come to the next fork in this ravine.”

Naiche's worries had only worsened, now that Mickey Free and Falcon MacCallister were between them and the Mexican border. He wondered again if MacCallister and the other white-eyes were from the Land of Shadows, able to ride great distances as the spirits of dead warriors from another tribe. But why would a spirit warrior from some faraway place make war on the Apache? It made no sense.

Juh continued to study the canyon walls south of them, the direction they had intended to take. “It is impossible for them to overtake us,” he said after a moment's thought. “These mountains are too rough for a horse to travel so quickly to take riders past us. We have covered many miles, and still we cannot outrun them.”

Chokole rested her Winchester on her bare thigh. “I saw them clearly, Juh. The one called Falcon and Mickey Free rode across the ridge. They rode slowly, giving me much time to make sure who they were.”

Naiche remained silent. If Chokole, Juh, Nana, or any of his followers believed they were being chased by spirit warriors from the Land of Shadows, their will to fight would be broken. Free was a human man, known to be such by all Apaches. But what of MacCallister and the men with him? Could they be ghosts from a distant past who fought the Apaches long ago?

“Look for their tracks,” Naiche said, privately believing that no ghost or spirit would leave tracks an Apache's eyes could see.

“I will bring Nana,” Juh said, wheeling his pony around to ride north, where Nana and two warriors scouted their backtrail for soldiers.

“Yes,” Naiche said, his mind elsewhere—on the possibility they were about to join a fight with spirit warriors, not mortal men. “Tell Nana to ride with you to look for the tracks made by Mickey Free and MacCallister, but do not follow them away from the ridge. I will lead our people to an offshoot canyon where we will ride in a different direction.”

Juh heeled his horse into a lope, riding back along the dim game trail at the bottom of the canyon.

It was then Naiche noticed that Chokole was reading his face very closely.

“What is wrong?” he asked her.

She lowered her face, as an Apache woman must when she says something of importance to a chief. “I believed I saw fear in your eyes, Chief Naiche.”

He would never admit being afraid. “You are wrong,” he said gruffly. “It was only the angle of the sun. I am not afraid of these foolish whites, or Mickey Free. When we find them, we will kill them. Their blood will spill the same as any others. Find their tracks on the ridge. When our people are in a safe place I will follow their tracks and kill them myself . . .”

Mickey Free reached up and rubbed the back of his neck. “I'll tell ye, Falcon, it do make my neck itch to have a bunch of heathen Apaches behind me an' me not doin' anythin' about it.”

“I know what you mean, Mickey. It was real hard not to let that female and the others with her know we saw them down there in the canyon.”

Falcon reined Diablo up at the edge of the precipice overlooking a deep canyon filled with juniper pine and other scraggly specimens of trees. Most of the vegetation in the Pedregosas was withered and yellowed, barely able to survive in such a dry, inhospitable climate.

Mickey walked his paint pony up to stand next to Falcon. He pulled a cloth sack of Bull Durham tobacco out of his shirt pocket and proceeded to build himself a cigarette.

When he had it going, he sighed deeply. “This has got to be the ugliest country I've ever had the misfortune to set eyes upon, Falcon. Even the snakes and scorpions look embarrassed to live here.”

“I agree. I guess that's why the Apache's been the only people who ever even tried to settle in these mountains.”

Mickey snorted through his nose. “Huh. The Apache are dumb enough to live anywhere. They're like animals, Falcon. Huntin' an' eatin' an' breedin', that's 'bout all they think about.”

Falcon cut his eyes to Mickey. The hatred the man felt for all things Apache was evident. It almost oozed out of his skin like sweat when he talked of them.

“Why do you hate the Apache so much, Mickey? I know they took you when you were a child, but there's got to be more to it than that.”

Mickey sat puffing his cigarette for a moment without speaking, his eyes far away, thinking of another place and another time.

“You ever talked to somebody who's been in prison, Falcon? Someplace really bad, like Yuma Territorial Prison? All they do is complain that the food was bad, the guards were mean and brutal, and they were worked too hard.”

He shook his head. “That's nothin' compared to what those bastards did to me, every day for ten years. I've got scars on top of scars 'til I don't hardly have no feelin' in my back anymore. Beaten, starved, worked until I dropped every day, treated worse than the mangiest cur in the village. . . it was a hell that I prayed every day to be delivered from.”

Falcon pursed his lips. “I know all that, but . . . there seems to be more . . .”

“You're right. There was this squaw, a little bit of a thing called Onasha. She wasn't real bright, kind‘a like her brain never grew to catch up with her body. Well, she got to bein' nice to me, would bring me water when it was hot, things like that. One thing led to another, an' me being a normal boy of 'bout sixteen with all the cravin's of the flesh that go with that age, one day I just kind' a grabbed her and tried to kiss her. One of the young warriors saw what happened an' ran off to tell the chief of the tribe.”

Falcon thought he knew what was coming next. “What did they do?”

“That night, they gathered the entire camp an' made me strip naked and stand in front of them while the squaws all laughed and pointed at me. Then, they brought Onasha out of her tent, stripped her naked, an' did the same thing. After a while, with her cryin' and bellerin', not really understandin' nothin' of what she'd done to deserve this, the young warriors all took her out in the darkness an' had their way with her. Afterwards they slit her nose to show she was dishonored, a whore.”

A single tear formed in Mickey's eye. “She ran off in shame, an' I never saw her again.” He shook his head. “Don't know if'n she killed herself or what. An' all because she was kind to a white-eyes.”

“They are a hard people,” Falcon said, looking away as Mickey reached up to wipe his eyes. “They have to be to survive in places like this.”

A few minutes passed without either man speaking. Finally, Mickey said, “Now, tell me again why you think the sight of the two of us is going to make Naiche turn his entire band of renegades around and head back into the trap the army's settin' for him.”

“They'll do it because we're the unknown. Naiche knows what to expect from the army. Every time he's gone up against them, when he's had proper weapons he's beaten them, so the army holds no fear for him.”

“But we do?”

“Yeah. Naiche must know you're here by now, and you're about the most famous Apache hunter and killer there is. And every time he's sent warriors up against me, they've come back dead. That's got to worry him some, maybe enough to make him change his direction away from Mexico and back toward where Major Jones has the army waiting for them.”

“What if it don't?”

Falcon smiled. “Then you and I are in for some heavy fighting. Matter of fact, I do expect a small war party to come up here looking for us. My bet would be that Naiche will send four of five of his most trusted and experienced warriors to sneak up on us and see if they can kill us.”

“No wonder my neck's been itchin'. What do you figure on doin' 'bout that, Falcon?”

“Why, we're going to disappear into thin air.”

As Mickey looked at him like he was crazy, Falcon stepped out of his saddle and handed Diablo's reins to Mickey. “Here, lead my horse over there toward that trail that leads back into those arroyos.”

As the Indian fighter walked the horses off, Falcon picked up a dead juniper tree branch and followed along behind, walking backward while erasing the animals' hoofprints in the fine sand and caliche dust. Once they were onto harder packed shale and rock, he climbed back onto his horse. When they looked back, their tracks walked up to the edge of the canyon and then disappeared, just as Falcon wanted them to.

“What now?” Mickey asked.

“Now we find some cover, someplace we can defend if Naiche's war party manages to find us.”

He pulled Diablo's head around and headed deeper into the maze of arroyos and small canyons that made up the Pedregosas, making sure to keep the horses on ground that would show no prints and leave no trail.

* * *

Several hours later, Chokole followed Juh and Nana with three other warriors as they trailed the white men.

Nana often had to get off his pony and get down on hands and knees to find the tracks in the areas where the ground was hard, or where the sand cover had been blown away by the everpresent winds.

Chokole watched the two old warriors' every move. It was always possible to learn something of tracking from men as experienced as these. Between them they had over one hundred years of living and fighting the white man.

It was almost like magic to the younger warriors how the old men could track horses over this terrain when they could see nothing. A broken twig, a dislodged pebble, the smell of horse urine where animals had relieved themselves, sprinkles of tobacco spilled while making a cigarette, all these things were noticed by Juh and Nana as they followed the white-eyes deeper into the Pedregosas.

Finally, they came to the ledge overlooking the canyon where Chokole had been when last she'd seen the pair. Juh and Nana got off their ponies and bent low over the ground, spreading out in ever widening circles, shaking their heads and talking softly to one another.

After a while, they walked back to the edge of the cliff and looked down into the canyon, as if looking for bodies that might have fallen off the ledge.

“What is wrong?” Chokole asked. “Where did they go?”

Juh looked up, his eyes worried. “There are no further signs. The tracks of MacCallister and Mickey Free end right here.”

Nana nodded his head in agreement. “We have searched for fifty paces in every direction. There is no sign they left here.”

“But that is not possible. Men and horses cannot fly,” Chokole said scornfully.

“You are correct, Chokole,” Juh said, staring out over the canyon. Then he pointed to high in the sky where a pair of hawks soared overhead, riding air currents while looking downward toward earth. “Men and horses cannot fly, but spirit warriors from the Land of Shadows can.”

“Bah!” she spat. “You talk like old women around the campfires at night. Mickey Free is no spirit warrior. He is merely a white man who takes pleasure in killing our people.”

“But what of MacCallister?” Juh asked, his eyebrows raised. “He walks without making a sound, he kills warriors who lie in wait to kill him without being seen, and he walks his horse over the edge of a cliff and disappears into the air. Is this not the behavior of a spirit warrior?”

Chokole felt gooseflesh prickle the back of her arms and Juh was spooking her, as well as the three young warriors with them. She saw them looking over their shoulders and gripping their many-shoot rifles so hard their knuckles were white. This would not do. She could not allow this old man to bring fear into the band led by Naiche.

“Enough,” she said. “Even if, as you say, MacCallister is a spirit warrior, what of Mickey Free? His tracks also disappear.”

Juh shrugged, looking at Nana. “Perhaps MacCallister killed Mickey Free and made him a spirit warrior, also, or perhaps he wrapped his arms around Free and his horse and carried them aloft with him. Who knows the ways of spirit warriors?”

Chokole jerked her horse around by its nose rein. “Let us search this way,” she said, pointing toward a faint trail leading down into some arroyos and canyons. “Perhaps your eyes are merely too old to see the signs that are there.”

She heeled her pony down the trail, looking back once to make sure the others followed her as she made her way down the side of the mountain toward the maze of canyons running in all directions.

Nana looked toward the heavens, mumbling under his breath as if he were praying to whatever gods he believed in to keep him safe from spirits that killed silently and then took wings to escape their pursuers.

Juh merely kept his eyes on the ground in front of them. perhaps hoping he might find some sign showing he was dealing with mortal men after all, and not some demons from the afterlife.

They progressed this way deeper and deeper into the rabbit warren of canyons and arroyos, with Chokole and Juh and Nana leading the way and the three young warriors bringing up the rear.

In the third canyon that they searched, they came to a sharp bend in the dry streambed they were following. After Chokole and Juh and Nana turned the corner, the first of the three braves in the rear pulled his pony to a halt, levering a shell into the firing chamber of his Winchester.

“What is it, Kotah?” asked one of his companions.

“I heard a twig break in that bush over there,” he said, aiming his rifle at a thick bramble bush intertwined with a halffallen down mesquite tree.

As he drew a bead on the bush, he heard a double thump behind him and turned quickly, his bowels turning to water as he saw the other two warriors lying bleeding on the ground, their throats cut and two men sitting astride their ponies.

Kotah opened his mouth to scream just as the long, razorsharp knife hurled by the man in black struck him in the chest.

His scream came out a strangled gurgle, and he stared at the hilt of the knife handle protruding from his chest, then back at the men who had killed him. His eyes slowly crossed and he fell from his horse to join his friends in the dusty caliche and sand of the streambed as he died choking on his own blood.

Falcon jumped off the Indian's pony and bent to retrieve his Arkansas Toothpick from the dead man's chest.

Mickey slipped off his pony and looked up at the ledge overhanging the canyon where he and Falcon had waited until the warriors were in the right position for them to leap down upon their ponies and kill them with quick slashes of knives across their throats.

Mickey shook his head. “I swear, Falcon, jumpin' down on those hosses was like somethin' outta a dime novel.”

Falcon grinned and used a branch to brush away their footprints as he and Mickey clambered back up the wall of the canyon.

“So now you feel like Black Bart the famous stagecoach robber, huh, Mickey?”

Mickey grunted with effort as he climbed the steep wall of the ledge. “Black Bart wasn't never crazy enough to try somethin' like that,” he growled.

They had barely scrambled out of sight above when Chokole and Juh and Nana came galloping back around the bend in the trail, their rifles held out in front of them as if they expected trouble.

“Aiyee!” Nana cried as he saw the three warriors lying in the dirt. The kills were so fresh one of the men was still bleeding, his lifeblood pumping out of his throat in a crimson stream, to be soaked up immediately by the thirsty soil.

As luck would have it, Falcon and Mickey startled a small covey of quail from a bush as they ran by, sending the birds flying out over the canyon with a loud thumping of wings.

“Look, Chokole,” Juh called, pointing at the pair of quail as they flew overhead. “The two spirit warriors take wing.”

Nana raised his rifle and began to chant in a deep guttural voice, nodding his head to some inner rhythm only he could hear.

“Hush, old one,” Chokole said, her head cocked to the side as she listened, hoping to hear hoofbeats, or any other sound that would convince her they were not dealing with spirit warriors.

She had never believed much of the drivel spouted by the old one's who sat around the campfires, amusing the younger children with their tales of spirits and gods and other supernatural things. She was always more sensible, believing only in the strength of her mind and the fierceness of her hatred for all things brought by the white man.

When she got down off her pony and could find no signs or tracks in the dirt, the hair on the back of her neck stirred, and she felt the first glimmerings of fear. Perhaps they were dealing with spirit warriors, after all for who else could kill three of their bravest young warriors without them making a sound?”