Death Rattle (74 page)

Oh, there were times he believed he could not take another step—when he gave himself a chance to blow, resting against a large clump of scrub pine, squatting there as he chewed on his dried meat, licking at the snow to wash it down before he forced himself to get back onto his feet and continue on. One time he awakened, scared to death because he hadn’t remembered falling asleep. Confused and disoriented as he blinked at the dim globe of the sun half hidden behind a thick streamer of clouds … desperately trying to remember where the
sun had been when he stopped for a few bites of stringy meat.

Try as he did, Titus couldn’t remember.

He felt the tears of frustration start to well up in his eyes as he shoved himself back onto his feet. And he pressed on, more determined than ever that he could cover as much ground on two legs as the pony could on four. Determined that he could do this without sleep. He had done it before when he was younger, back in those days when he and McAfferty slipped through the gauntlet of Apache country without much sleep. He had done it before. Bass told himself he could do it again.

When the young doe crossed his path the next afternoon, stopping suddenly no more than thirty yards ahead, Scratch did not resist. He brought her down with a quick snap shot, then lunged across the snowy terrain to watch that one big brown eye start to glaze as he laid his rifle across her flanks, wrenched out his knife, and made that first long incision from throat to pelvis. The warm, steamy entrails spilled out upon the blood-tinged snow.

Tearing his blanket mittens from his hands, Titus stuffed his cold, rigid fingers into the warmth of that pile of steaming guts, held his face close to the entrails, letting his stiff, rawhided face sense the blessed caress of the dead animal’s last warmth. When he opened his eyes again, he shoved back the sleeves on his capote and buckskin shirt, then dug for the liver. He cut it loose, dragged it out, slippery and steamy, cradling it a moment in both trembling, blood-soaked hands as he considered its meaning to him. Then Titus ravenously sank his teeth into its juicy heat.

One bite, then a second, and a third he tore from the raw meat—then suddenly turned his head aside as his cramped, revolted stomach violently flung itself upward, rejecting the hot, raw, bloody meat after being empty of most everything for much of the past two days. Dumbly, he stared down at the hot, yellow-tinged bloody flesh he had vomited into the snow.

Maybe he could take the liver along … oh, how he
didn’t want to abandon the meat. Ounce for ounce, in his weakened condition, the liver was the one part of the doe that would offer him the most energy. Yes, he could wrap it up in a small skin bag, eat it raw, suck its juices and blood, sometime later after his stomach had grown reaccustomed to food.

After swabbing some cold snow across his face and beard, greedily licking and sucking the blood-tinged flakes from his fingers, Scratch dragged the skinning knife back and forth, peeling the hide away from a rear haunch. When enough of the red, raw meat was exposed, he stabbed the tip of the knife into the thick muscles and carved himself out a double handful of warm flesh.

With it laid atop the pile of gut, he went back to peeling more of the green elastic hide from the muscle. When he had a patch big enough, Titus trimmed it free and stretched it on the ground. Then he cut an inch-wide, three-foot-long strip of green hide. Laying both the liver and the haunch roast in the middle of his crude square of hide, he gathered up the edges and lashed it closed with the strip. This he tied securely to his buffalo robe.

But before he stood again, he cut himself a long, thin strip of meat from that sundered haunch. Finally back on his feet, with his load settled across his shoulders and the rifle back in hand, Titus brought the raw, lean meat to his mouth and began to suck. Slowly at first, aiming to let his stomach grow accustomed to the warm blood and juices.

Assured his belly wouldn’t revolt, he stumbled away from the carcass and pushed on.

Just past sunrise the next morning he smelled wood-smoke on the wind. From the top of a knoll where he bellied to the skyline, Titus spotted the tiny cluster of mud-and-wattle huts, a collection of dogs and outdoor ovens in the crude shape of mud beehives—and realized it had to be a Mexican settlement. From the adobe chimneys rose thin streamers of breakfast fires. How taunting, how seductive, that alluring fragrance of woodsmoke.

Would these people know of what had happened down in Taos? Were any of these
pelados
in revolt against the Americans too?

He argued with himself, wanting to shout down his empty, protesting belly, telling it to stop arguing with him … then finally scooted back away from the skyline and plodded down the backside of the slope. Titus lumbered miles out of his way, staying behind a low range of hills, avoiding that tiny settlement
^*
and its Mexican inhabitants.

That day had dawned clear and cloudless, cruelly bright as the light bounced off the snow. He stopped to drag his mittens off while he caught his breath. Then poured a little powder from his horn into his left palm. He spit into the powder and mixed it up with a fingertip, swabbing that finger in a crude crescent below his right eye. He washed off the black goo in the snow, pulled the mittens over his hands, and pushed on.

But by midday the intensity of the sun had grown so cruel as its light reflected off the seamless, pristine white landscape that the powder painted beneath his eye was no longer effective. Dropping his buffalo robe to the snow, leaning his rifle across its bulk, he settled onto his haunches and dug into his wool possibles pouch, sewn from pieces of an old white blanket. While his leather shooting pouch hung at his right side, this second bag hung at his left, where it contained a second fire-starting set, extra tools and strips of rawhide whang, an extra bullet mold, and some cast balls. As well as two spare bandannas. Black and silk, and huge, he had bartered them off St. Louis traders summers long ago when supplies were still hauled out to rendezvous on the Wind, the Popo Agie, and the Green.

For a long time he stared down at the bandanna he pulled out of the pouch, feeling its texture with his fingers. Silk. Damn worm makes silk that put us beaver men out of work. Drove us out of a life.

Finally he dragged out his skinning knife and picked a few stray deer hair from the guard where they were
frozen in a thin layer of frozen, crusty blood. Scraping them off with his fingernail, Titus next cut the bandanna in half, diagonally, from one corner to another, and stuffed the section he didn’t need back in his possibles pouch. Then he trimmed off a four-inch-wide strip at the widest part of the bandanna and put the small, remaining triangle of black cloth into the pouch, securing the wide flap with its huge button made from the rosette found at the base of an elk antler.

He brought the long ends of the strip together, found the middle, then laid it across his knee. Measuring out the width of two fingers from that middle, he stabbed a crude slit some three inches long. Four finger widths from the end of that slit, he started to cut another slit—then he remembered it didn’t matter. It had been many years since he needed a slit for his left eye. Titus trimmed the cloth away so that he had one narrow gap no more than a half-inch wide.

Resting his knife atop his thigh, Scratch held the bandanna up to his eyes and positioned it. Looking left, then right. Ought to work fine. Quickly stuffing his knife back into its scabbard, Titus dragged off the coyote cap, then tied the long ends of the mask at the back of his head, knotting it atop the knot holding the bandanna around his entire skull, covering that patch of bare bone. He shifted the mask, stretching the silk cloth over his brow, satisfied he could see well enough through the narrow slit, then pulled his coyote cap back onto his head.

Standing, he gazed out onto the brilliant expanse of white wilderness and spotted the far range of hills. Even with the brilliant glare, his heart leaped because he knew those hills. At their foot he would find the Pueblo. Friends. Americans. Old comrades and compatriots who would rally their forces and ride back south to retake Taos from the butchers and murderers and fiends who had made war on not just government officials and soldiers—but on private citizens … on helpless women and children too.

Friends were gathered there inside the Pueblo on the Arkansas.

As the sun sank, the pain in his eye gradually lessened. He stopped to blow and pull the mask down from his eyes. It only took a man one time to suffer from snowblindness to teach him that he would do just about anything so he’d never suffer the pain and helplessness again. Like gritty, liquid sand trapped beneath the eyelid—grains that would not wash away with all the tears his burning, inflamed eyes produced. Damned slow to heal too. Days it took.

But he had managed to prevent it that day, first with the powder goo, and then with the sun mask. He had made it through that cloudless, sunny day without growing blind—forced to wait out more days before he could see well enough to move on.

With the black scarf hung around his neck, Scratch had trudged on into the waning of the light. Hopeful at first, it was long after twilight when he accepted that there wasn’t much chance for a moonrise that would shed enough light to brighten his way across the uneven ground.

With every dozen steps, a feeling grew inside him that he should have already reached the Arkansas. Time and again, Bass halted to catch his wind, staring with that one good eye to the west. Hoping to discern some blackened landmark rising against the pale evening sky.

He stumbled on beneath a bright dusting of stars that nonetheless failed to shed any of their light on the snowy land he crossed. At times he stopped and scooped up a handful of snow to give his parched mouth a little moisture. Dry and harsh was every breath of air in this high, arid country.

He was gasping when he imagined he heard a dog bark. Then a second dog answered that first with its own low, throaty warning.

The hair at the back of his neck bristled. Could be an Indian camp. Cheyenne or Arapaho down here in this country, he warned himself.

But at the brow of the next rise he stopped and stared, thinking he could make out the neatly organized rows of some dingy gray wall tents, interspersed with a few
darker huts partially constructed from logs at the bottom of the slope. He could smell woodsmoke now. And hear dogs raising a clatter.

This wasn’t any Indian camp. That much was for sure. Maybe he’d stumbled onto the army’s winter quarters up here near the Arkansas. Some of the soldiers Kearny had left behind to protect the nearby settlements at Bents Fort and the Pueblo.

Running onto these dragoons would be so much the better.

He reached the first of the tents before a dog slinked up to growl, daring to get close enough to sniff this strange creature that skulked out of the darkness. Swinging the rifle, he laid the narrow butt alongside the dog’s head with a resounding crack. It whimpered and bellied off with a pitiful whine,’ its tail tucked between its legs.

“Who goes there?” a voice suddenly called out from the darkness.

“Y-you a s-soldier?” Bass stammered with a dry tongue and an unused voice box.

A form loomed out of the night, taking shape from behind one of the tents. There were rustles of other movement farther behind the man.

“Soldier?” the man said as he inched closer. “I ain’t no soldier, mister. S’pose you tell me who you are?”

“You’re American, ain’cha?” Titus asked. “You t-talk like American.”

The man snorted as a dozen others hurried up to join him, each of them carrying some sort of firearm. “ ‘Course we’re American. What the devil are you?”

“I w-was … American,” he admitted. “Of a time … long, long ago. Born back to Kentucky. Seems so far away now. So many years too … years since I was American.”

The thirteen of them had him all but surrounded now, jostling close, shoulder to shoulder, as each of the strangers strained to make him out in the dimmest of light thrown off by those stars overhead.

“Where you come walking in from?” one of them asked.

“Taos. South. There’s been bad trouble,” he rasped. “Americans killed. Injuns and Mex greasers. Been killing Americans.”

“Taos—that’s more’n hundred fifty miles off!” another voice exclaimed.

“I come for help,” he admitted. “Was making for the Pueblo. Got friends there can help me. Don’t know how I got off my track and run across your camp.”

“The Pueblo?” the first, familiar, voice echoed. “You just missed it, off over there. We ain’t camped far from the Pueblo.”

“Gloree,” he sighed as his breath came easier. “Thort at first I was in a army camp. Dragoons come to take Mexico away from the Mexicans.”

“Army? No, we ain’t nothin’ but the army of God,” a new voice spoke up as some of the other men parted for the newcomer.

“Army of G-God?” he repeated, baffled completely.

“We’re the Saints,” someone declared. “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.”

“S-saints?” he repeated in a whisper, his head almost dizzy with confusion.

Weakened, thirsty, hungrier than he had been in many a winter … Bass almost doubted he was still standing.

Saints?

Oh, sweet Jehoshaphat! Was this how it was to die?

Maybeso he was really lying half dead and delirious, out of his mind, somewhere on that journey north! Maybe this was part of the horrible dream that came with dying.

Saints, they came and helped a man get done with the living.

Maybe he was so close to death that he just dreamed this cluttered collection of tents and log huts, these dogs barking and this group of Americans. Maybe all his weary, hungry brain could do was to paint this strange, foreign picture while he was passing through the frightening veil into death.

Saints?

“That’s right. Saints,” another voice affirmed. “Some folks call us Mormons—”

“This poor man doesn’t need a theological lesson now, Hyram,” a new and unfamiliar voice boomed from the dark.

The crowd parted for the huge bulk of him as he stepped into the breech.