On the River Styx (8 page)

Traver cursed him, close to tears. The hunter had only to watch from the trees at the end of the dike. Until dark, Traver was trapped. The hunter would sit down on a log and eat his food, while Traver lay in the cold pool and starved. The whole world was eating, hunting and eating and hunting again, in an endless cycle, while he starved. From where he lay, he could see a marsh hawk quartering wet meadows, and an eagle’s patient silhouette in a dead
tree. Swaying grass betrayed a prowling otter, and on a mud flat near him, two jack snipe probed for worms. Soon, in that stretch of ditch that he could see, a young alligator surfaced.

Thank de Lo’d it you what stole my coon. Thank de Lo’d dis pool too shaller fo’ you daddy.

The alligator floated, facing him. Only its snout and eyes disturbed the surface, like tips of a submerged branch.

What you waitin on, Ugly? You waitin on ol’ Traver, man, you got to get in line.

The insects had found Traver, and he smeared black mud on his face and hands. Northeast, a vulture circled slowly down on something else.

Whole world waitin on poor Traver. Whole world hangin round to eat on Traver.

And though he said this to cheer himself, and even chuckled, the sense of the surrounding marsh weighed down on him, the solitude. Inert, half-buried, Traver mourned a blues.

At dark, inch by inch, circuitously, Traver came ashore. He knew now he must track the man and kill him. His nerves would not tolerate another day of fear, and he took courage from the recklessness of desperation.

Again the cabin was lit up, but this time he smelled coffee. The man’s shadow moved against the window, and the light died out. The man would be sitting in the dark, rifle pointed at the open door.

The hunt ended early the next morning.

T
RAVER BELLIED ACROSS
a clearing and slid down a steep bank which joined the high ground to the marsh. His feet were planted in the water at the end of Red Gate Ditch, and on his right was a muddy, rooted grove of yaupon known as Hog Crawl. The hunter was some distance to the eastward.

Traver had a length of dry, dead branch. He broke it sharply on his knee. The snap rang through the morning trees, and a hog grunted from somewhere in the Crawl. Then Traver waited, peering through the grass. He had his knife out, and his rabbit club. Lifting one foot from the water of the ditch, he kicked a foothold in the bank. Below him, the scum of algae closed its broken surface, leaving no trace of where the foot had been.

The man was coming. Traver could feel him, somewhere behind the black trunks of the trees. The final sun, which filtered through the woods from the ocean side, formed a strange red haze in the shrouds of Spanish moss.

Out of this the man appeared. One moment there was nothing and the next he was there, startling the eye like a copperhead camouflaged in fallen leaves. He moved toward Traver until he reached the middle of the clearing, just out of Traver’s range, facing the Hog Crawl. There he stood stiff as a deer and listened.

Traver listened too, absorbing every detail of the scene through every sense. The trap was his, he was the hunter
now, on his own ground. The cardinal song had never seemed so liquid, the foliage so green, the smell of earth so strong.

The white man shifted, stepping a little closer. The hog snuffled again, back in the yaupon. Traver could just make it out beneath the branches, a brown-and-yellow brindle sow, caked with dry mud. Now it came forward, curious. It would see Traver before it saw the white man, and it would give him away.

Traver swallowed. The sow came toward him, red-eyed. The white man, immobile, waited for it also. When the sow saw Traver, it stopped, then backed away a little, then grunted and trotted off.

Traver flicked his gaze back to the man.

He was suspicious. Slowly the rifle swung around until it was pointed a few feet to Traver’s left.

He gwine kill me now. Even do I pray, O Lo’d, he gwine kill me now.

Traver was backing down the bank as the man moved forward. Beneath the turned-down brim, the eyes were fixed on the spot to Traver’s left. Traver flipped the butt of broken branch in the same direction. When the white man whirled upon the sound, Traver reared and hurled his club. He did not miss. It struck just as the shot went off.

Traver had rolled aside instinctively, but this same instinct drove him to his feet again and forward. The man lay still beside the rifle. The hand that had been groping for it fell back as Traver sprang. He pressed his knife blade to the white, unsunburned patch of throat beneath the grizzled chin.

Kill him. Kill him now.

But he did not. Gasping, he stared down at the face a foot
from his. It was bleeding badly from the temple but was otherwise unchanged. Pinning the man’s arms with his knees, he pushed the eyelids open with his free hand. The eyes regarded him, unblinking, like the eyes of a wounded hawk.

“Wa’nt quite slick enough fo’ Traver, was you!” Traver panted. He roared hysterically in his relief, his laughter booming in the quiet grove. “You fall fo’ de oldes’ trick dey is, dass how smart you is, white folks!” He roared again into the silence. “Ol’ Traver toss de branch, ol’ white boy fooled, ol’ white boy cotch it in de haid! I mean! De oldes’ trick dey is!”

Traver glared down at him, triumphant. The man lay silent.

Traver ran the knife blade back and forth across the throat, leaving a thin red line. He forced his anger, disturbed by how swiftly his relief replaced it.

“You de one dat’s scairt now, ain’t you? Try to kill dis nigger what never done you harm! You doan know who you foolin with, white trash, you foolin with a man what’s mule and gator all wrap into one! And he gone kill you, what you think ’bout dat?”

The man watched him.

“Ain’t you nothing to say fore I kills you? You gone pray? Or is I done killed you already?” Uneasy astride the body of the white man, Traver rose to a squat and pricked him with his knife tip. “Doan you play possum with me, now! You ain’t foolin me no mo’, I gone kill you, man, you heah me?”

For the first time, Traver heard his own voice in the silence, and it startled him. He glanced around. The sun was bright red over the live oak trees, but quiet hung across the
marsh like mist. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the white man with suspicion, but the other did not stir.

He dead, Traver thought, alarmed. I done killed him dead.

Avoiding the unblinking eyes, he picked up the rifle and stared at it, then he laid it like a burial fetish back into the grass. Now he stepped back, knife in hand, and prodded the body with his toe.

“Git up, now!” he cried, startling himself again. “You ain’t bad hurt, Cap’n, you just kinda dizzy, dass all. Us’ns is got to do some talkin, heah me now?”

But the body was still. A trail of saliva dribbled from the narrow mouth, and a fly lit on the grass near the bloody temple. Traver bent and crossed the arms upon the narrow chest.

“You fall fo’ de oldes’ trick in de world,” Traver mourned, and shook his head. “Dass what you done.” Badly frightened, he talked to comfort himself, glancing furtively around the clearing.

He started to back away, then bolted.

The man rolled over and up onto his knees, the rifle snatched toward his shoulder. He sighted without haste and fired. Then he reached for his hat and put it on, and turned the brim down all around.

Then he got up.

Traver was a powerful man and did not fall. He could still hear the echo and the clamor in the marsh, and he could not accept what was happening to him. He had never really believed it possible, and he did not believe it now. He dropped the knife and staggered, frowning, as the man walked toward him. The second bullet knocked him over
backwards, down the bank, and when he came to rest, his head lay under water.

His instinct told him to wriggle a little further, to crawl away into the reeds. He could not move. He died.

1957

O
n those rare occasions when a lean gray wolf wandered north across the border from the Espuela Mountains, trotting swiftly and purposefully into the Animas Valley or the Chiricahuas or Red Rock Canyon as so many had in years gone by, describing a half-circle seventy miles or more back into Mexico, and leaving somewhere along its run a mangled sheep or mutilated heifer, then Miller was sent for and Miller would go. He was a wolf hunter, hiring himself out on contract to ranchers and government agencies, and if the killing for which he was paid was confined more and more to coyotes and bobcats, the purpose of his life remained the wolf. He considered the lesser animals unworthy of his experience, deserving no better than the strychnine and the cyanide guns that filled the trunk of his sedan. Even the sedan had been forced upon
him, when the wolf runs which once traced the border regions of New Mexico and Arizona had become so few and faded as to no longer justify the maintenance of a saddle pony. The southerly withdrawal of the gray wolf into the brown, dust-misted mountains of Chihuahua and Sonora had come to Will Miller as a loss, a reaction he had never anticipated. He was uneasily aware that persecution of the wolf was no longer justified, that each random kill he now effected contributed to the death of a wild place and a way of life that he knew was all he had.

Nevertheless, with mixed feelings of elation and penitence, he would travel to the scene of the last raid. There he would scout the area for scent posts where the wolf had left fresh sign. Kneeling on a piece of calf hide, he worked his clean steel traps into the earth with ritualistic care, rearranging every stick and pebble when he had finished, and carrying off the displaced dirt on the hide. His hands were gloved and his soles were smeared with the dung of the livestock using the range, and leaving the scene, he moved away backward, scratching out his slightest print with a frayed stick. Nor did he visit his traps until the wolf had time to come again, gauging this according to the freshness of the sign and according to his instinct.

Because of his silence and solitary habits, his glinting eyes and wind-eroded visage, his full Navajo blood, Miller was credited with the ability to think like an animal. His success was a border legend, and while it was true that he understood its creatures very well, he was successful because he did not take their ancient traits for granted. The dark history of
Canis lupus
, the great gray wolf of the world, he considered an important part of his practical education. Not that Miller accepted the old tales of werewolves and
wolf-children, or not, at least, in the forefront of his mind. But the heritage in him of the Old People, the deep-running responses to the natural signs and sacraments, did not discount them. The eerie intelligence of this night animal, its tirelessness and odd ability to vanish, had awed him more than once, and he had even imagined, in his long solitude, that should he ever pursue it into the brown haze to the south, the wolf spirit would revenge itself in that shadowed land. Such knowledge lent his life a mystery and meaning that the church missions could not replace, and his mind asked no more. He was not a modern Indian, and he shunned the modern towns. Like the wolf itself, he abided by older laws.

N
IGHT POWERS WERE
incarnate in the Aguila wolf, which was known to have slaughtered sixty-five sheep in a single night and laid waste the stock in western Arizona for eight long years, fading back into the oblivion of time in 1924. One trapper in pursuit of it had disappeared without a trace, and Miller had always wondered if, at some point in that man’s last terrible day beneath the sun, the Aguila wolf had not passed nearby, pausing in its ceaseless round to scent the dry, man-tainted air before padding on about its age-old business. Somewhere its progeny still hunted, and he often thought that the black male that once circled his traps for thirteen months and dragged the one that finally caught it forty miles must have descended from the old Aguila.

Most wolves gave him little trouble. Within a week or ten days of its raid, the usual animal would trot north out of Mexico again and, retracing its hunting route in a counterclockwise direction, investigate the scent posts, pausing
at each to void itself and scratch the earth. At one of these, sooner or later, it would place its paw in a slight depression, the dirt would give way, and the steel jaws would snap on its foreleg. If its own bone was too heavy to gnaw through, and the trap well staked, it would finally lie down and wait. It would sense Miller’s coming and, if still strong enough, would stand. Though its hair would bristle, it rarely snarled. Invariably, Miller stood respectfully at a distance, as if trying to see in the animal’s flat gaze the secret of his own fascination. Then he would dispatch it carefully with a .38 revolver. But when the wolf lay inert at his feet, a hush seemed to fall in the mesquite and paloverde, as if the bright early-morning desert had died with the shot. The red sun, rising up, would whiten, and the faint smell of desert flowers fade, and the cactus wrens would still. In the carcass, already shrunken, lay the death of this land as it once was, and in the vast silence a reproach. The last time, Miller had broken his trap and sworn that he would never kill a wolf again.

S
OME YEARS PASSED
before two animals, hunting together according to the reports, made kills all along the border, from Hidalgo County in New Mexico to Cochise and Santa Cruz counties in Arizona, with scattered raids as far west as Sonoita, in Sonora. They used the ancient runs and developed new ones, but their wide range and unpredictable behavior had defeated all efforts at trapping them. The ranchers complained to the federal agencies, which in turn sent for Will Miller.

Miller at first refused to go. But he had read of the two wolves, and his restlessness overcame him. A few days later, he turned up in the regional wildlife office, a small, dark,
well-made man of forty-eight in sweated khakis, with a green neckerchief and worn boots and a battered black felt hat held in both hands. Beneath a lank hood of ebony hair, his hawk face, hard and creased, was pleasant, and his step and manner quiet, unobtrusive. He had all his possessions with him. These included eight hundred dollars, a change of clothes, and the equipment of his profession in the sedan outside, as well as an indifferent education, a war medal, and the knowledge that, until this moment, he had never done anything in his life that had dishonored him. Placing his hat on the game agent’s desk, he picked restlessly through the reports. Then he asked questions. Angry with himself for being there, he hardly listened while the agent explained that the two wolves seemed immune to ordinary methods, which was why Will had been sent for. Miller ignored the patronizing use of the Indian’s first name as well as the compliment. Unsmiling, he asked if the two wolves were really so destructive that they couldn’t be left alone. The agent answered that Miller sounded scared of
Canis lupus
after all these years and, because Miller’s expression made him uneasy, laughed too loudly.