Sin Killer

by Larry McMurtry

  Unhappily this confidence only lasted until the charging warriors dropped off the ridge at the eastern end of the hunters’ encampment and saw that the valley was covered with a thick white fog from one end to the other. Walkura had only seconds in which to make a decision. What to do? His warriors were in full charge—to halt now, after they had already made a kill, would very likely dampen enthusiasm for the battle ahead. If the Utes had to pull up and wait for the fog to clear, many of the warriors would probably lose interest in the fighting and go home. Some of them were so greedy that they might wipe off their war paint and claim innocence, in the hope that the generous Ashley would give them presents. After all, it was only because of an erratic horse that they had killed the white man—what were they supposed to do when a white man with a rifle rode into their midst?

  “The witches made it foggy!” old No Teeth yelled—he had no business even being in the battle but had not been able to resist a chance to deal with the white witches.

  Walkura ignored him and charged into the fog. He didn’t need witches to explain a fog—the days were warm and the nights chill, and that explained the fog—which didn’t make the problem any less disastrous to the Utes’ battle plan, which involved taking the trappers by surprise and hoping they were too drunk to react quickly. In the night, getting himself ready for the fight, something had been nagging at Walkura’s mind, something pertaining to the battle, but everyone in the camp was talking at once and the young warriors were placing bets on which mountain man they would kill—Walkura could never quite remember the factor he felt he might be failing to consider; but now, as his horse raced off the ridge right into a wall of thick white fog, he remembered what he had forgotten: the likelihood of early morning fog!

  Only, now he was in the fog, and his warriors were in it too, still in full cry—and there was not a thing to be seen. It was as bad as going into battle in a white blizzard. Walkura didn’t know what to do—the warriors were pressing on, right behind him; he now rather regretted that his vanity had prompted him to lead the charge. Now, if he wasn’t lucky, he might be struck down by his own men; their blood was up, they would strike at anything they could see, and perhaps, once they got nervous, at things they couldn’t see. Walkura was actually less worried about the danger of the mountain men, who were not likely to shoot their guns unless they could see a target. The Utes, with their dripping hatchets, were, for the moment, a worse threat.

  Walkura cautiously pulled up his horse. He didn’t want to race along and smack into a rock, and, as he remembered, there were several rocky outcroppings at the eastern end of the valley—it occurred to him that he might do well to veer to the north, where there was higher ground. He might get higher, above the fog, and gain at least some sense of where the combatants were as the battle proceeded.

  Cautiously, Walkura turned north—the fine fury that had led him to charge into battle was quickly giving way to a feeling of glumness, even failure. What had he done now? He might have been home enjoying a bit of amorous activity with his Modoc girl, but, instead, he had let old Greasy Lake’s wild talk of bears and witches and the Wandering Hill lead him into launching a foolish raid into the Valley of the Chickens. Those who questioned his leadership any-way—and there were always people who questioned a leader’s decisions—would point out the obvious fact that he should have expected to find fog in such a valley in the early morning at that time of year. The fact that they had only launched the charge because they had jumped the three hunters would not matter to such people, who made a pastime of finding fault with his leadership. Even though they had killed a hunter, the naysayers would claim that this was no excuse for forgetting about the likelihood of fog— never mind the fact that once a bunch of Utes had killed a white man and were yelling their war cries and racing their horses, the last thing they would want to hear was that it was foggy up ahead.

  Overhead, the sun was only a pale yellow ring— how Walkura wished it would gather strength and burn away this fog while there was still a chance of fighting. But the sun was weak yet, and everyone, whites and Utes alike, was groping around in a clinging mist, their weapons useless, their spirits sinking, as his were.

  On one or two occasions Walkura thought he saw a shadow that might be a person—he had an arrow ready, but then realized, each time, that the shadow was only a tree. What amazed him was how totally this fog had managed to swallow his war party of nearly thirty warriors. They had all plunged into the fog and now there was not a trace of them—not a sound could be heard. For a moment Walkura thought he might locate a warrior or two by whistling like the prairie hens for which the valley was named; but he soon discarded that option. He had never been able to do birdcalls very well—if he flubbed his imitation he would only give his position away. What he had begun to wish for, as he inched his way north, was a means for just calling it all off and starting the day over. Only one life had been lost, and that had been an accident. There was no real need for this battle. The whites were irritating, of course, but at least they brought good presents. Why couldn’t they just explain the accident, smoke a peace pipe, do a little trading, and perhaps have a few horse races once the fog lifted?

  It was fun to plan a battle, rattle weapons, and dance and puff oneself up, but when something like this fog comes along and spoils everything, why try to pretend that there is still a chance for a glorious fight? If a warrior bumped into a trapper and they wanted to go at it, Walkura had no objection. But the big Ute assault had failed; the fog had just swallowed it up.

  As Walkura picked his way carefully north, thinking these gloomy thoughts, the fog began to lighten a little. He thought he heard something like a bear, though not a full-grown bear. Then, for a moment, the fog broke in front of him and he saw not one but two young bears, cubs still, growling and rolling around with each other, having a playful tussle. When he realized that the bears were just cubs, his annoyance with Greasy Lake increased. Were these the Bear people the witches were supposed to be talking to?

  Then Walkura saw one of the little witches, a girl just old enough to begin to be a woman, standing not far from the cubs, watching them roll around in play—he wondered if he ought to capture this girl—it wouldn’t hurt to have two young wives, after all. But then the swift Six Tongues appeared out of the fog. He had a gun but didn’t raise it—he seemed to want the girl to help him catch the cubs and carry them down into the safety of the fog.

  Walkura at once loosed an arrow at Six Tongues— a good shot, too—but before his arrow even struck Six Tongues, Walkura suddenly tumbled off his horse. To his surprise, when he tried to rise, he saw that a limb had grown out of his chest. It took him several moments to focus his eyes and determine that the object protruding from his chest wasn’t a limb, it was an arrow; and there stood the Sin Killer, ready to loose a second arrow from his bow. Walkura could not see Six Tongues, who must have wandered down into the fog. Walkura thought he had probably killed the man, but there was no way to be sure. What he was sure of was that the Sin Killer, a man some Utes scoffed at as being no very good fighter, had just drawn his own heart’s blood. Walkura felt mildly surprised: few white men could use the bow so well. He got to his knees and tried to grip the arrow hard and rip it from his breast; but quickly and quietly his grip loosened, his strength left him, his hands fell away; he slumped to his side and then lay back. He wondered if the Sin Killer would want to scalp him—but no one came, no scalp knife bit; the sky that should be growing lighter grew darker instead, grew as dark as deepest night. For a time, with the steady pulsing out of his blood, Walkura felt a sense of rise and fall, of soaring and dipping; beneath his palms he felt the grass, the good grass of summer, wet a little from the fog, the grass that fed buffalo and elk, antelope and doe—soon, Walkura knew, he would be one with all that had been, and the deep grass of summer would cover him with its peace; he did not feel sad, though he did regret, a little, that he had not had more time with that lively Modoc girl.

  60

&
nbsp; “I’ll see that he wants to!” she said.

  NA-TA-HA was not one to suppress his criticisms when he thought a raid had been handled badly; and few raids of recent years had resulted in such a complete botch as the raid Walkura had led on the trappers who were gathered with Ashley in the Valley of the Chickens. It was true that they had made an immediate kill, but that was the result of panic on the part of the hunter’s horse—panic that brought the victim right into their midst.

  Then, after that promising beginning, Walkura had insisted on plunging the warriors into a fog so blinding that they had to slow their horses to a walk, after which the whole war party picked its way timorously through the Valley of the Chickens, never making contact with a single trapper.

  “I might have hit one trapper,” High Shoulders said. “I think I ran over somebody just as we ran into that fog.”

  “You think, but you don’t know,” Na-Ta-Ha countered. “You probably just ran over a dog.”

  The Utes, who had ridden east to west through the valley, were on their way home. Nobody could expect warriors to fight in fog that thick—there was no reason to apologize for their retreat. Walkura had been in the lead when they all plunged into the fog, so everyone assumed he was somewhere up ahead.

  “You watch—he’ll be sitting there ready with a lot of excuses when we get home. He’s an old man. He’s been to the Valley of the Chickens before. He should have known there would be fog.”

  Most of the warriors, disappointed because there had been no chance to kill trappers or witches, agreed wholeheartedly with Na-Ta-Ha’s criticisms.

  But then Walkura’s horse came galloping up from the rear, and Walkura wasn’t on him, a fact that immediately contradicted Na-Ta-Ha’s theory.

  It was then that High Shoulders remembered that old No Teeth had been with them—they had all tried to make him stay at home but he defied them and had been racing along happily when they all dashed into the fog.

  “I don’t see No Teeth, either,” High Shoulders said.

  There was an uneasy pause—their war chief and their medicine man both seemed to be missing.

  High Shoulders, with the boldness of youth, spat out a harsh opinion.

  “We were chasing the Sin Killer, remember?” he reminded everyone. “The Sin Killer probably killed them both.”

  Na-Ta-Ha felt uncomfortable with that theory. What if the boy was right? What if he himself had just been criticizing a war chief who had died heroically, a victim of the deadly Sin Killer, the man who had driven a lance through a Piegan? If that turned out to be the case, Walkura’s relatives, some of whom were in the war party, would never let him forget his wild criticisms. Na-Ta-Ha immediately changed his tack.

  “We have to go back,” he declared. “If those two are dead we have to recover their bodies—or else we’ll be disgraced.”

  “And if we do go back we’ll probably be killed ourselves, by the Sin Killer or Bridger or the Broken Hand,” High Shoulders announced.

  Bitter as the prospect was, the war party immediately turned back toward the Valley of the Chickens. They would be disgraced forever if they failed to see that the body of their great war chief, Walkura, was brought home and given proper burial.

  When they reached the Valley of the Chickens the fog had long since burned off and the whites were themselves conducting a burial down by the river. A tall woman was playing an instrument that gave off very mournful music. The music was so sad-making that several of the warriors were close to tears, although they had no idea who was being buried.

  When the whites noticed that the Utes had come back, Na-Ta-Ha hastily made the peace sign and old Sharbo, looking very sad, walked over to parley with them. He told them it was the old lord’s son they were burying—he had been returning from the creek and had been fatally trampled in their wild charge.

  “There—I knew I ran over somebody,” High Shoulders observed.

  Sharbo confirmed that both Walkura and No Teeth were dead. It seemed that Walkura had shot an arrow into Six Tongues, who was Sharbo’s son. Six Tongues was not dead, but the arrow was near his heart and had not been removed, which was why Sharbo looked so worried.

  “But if Walkura shot Six Tongues, who shot him?” one warrior wanted to know. Walkura had always been quick to discharge arrows—it was hard to imagine anyone beating him at that game.

  “The Sin Killer,” Sharbo said—his face was drawn and gray.

  By the river the Englishwomen and a few of the mountain men were singing over the dead boy— their voices carried far. The Utes did not consider it polite to linger any longer, or parley anymore—not while death songs were being sung. One Ute asked Sharbo if he thought that, after a day or two had passed, it might still be possible for them to do a little trading with Ashley. Sharbo said he didn’t think Ashley would object—trading was the point of the rendezvous, after all. The Utes solemnly gathered up the two bodies and rode away with them. It was not clear what had happened to No Teeth, but he was known to be a reckless rider, more reckless than expert. Probably his horse had run into a tree, or pitched him off into some rocks. There was not a mark on him—he even seemed to be smiling. The cynical view was that he had overmatched himself when it came to the white witches. No Teeth was always bragging about how slowly and professionally he would put the white witches to death—and yet now it was No Teeth who was dead. No doubt the white witches had known the old shaman was coming and had used the fog to lay a clever—indeed, fatal—trap for him.

  Tasmin sang dutifully over the grave of her unfortunate brother Bobbety Berrybender, whom she had so often ridiculed. He had been calmly pursuing his interest in freshwater Mollusca and had started to the camp for breakfast when he happened to walk right in front of thirty charging horses. Buffum was nearly hysterical with grief, and Father Geoffrin not much better. How sad it was, Tasmin thought, to be dead on a day of such beauty, for, once the fog lifted, the valley was so lovely that merely looking at it produced a kind of ache. The fog that had doomed young Bobbety had saved the rest of them from attack—beauty and death thus closely bound together, as Tasmin supposed it often must be.

  “He was ever my ally in family quarrels, Tassie … I shall be very lonely without him,” Buffum sobbed.

  The little priest, sad, small, and trembly, seemed shrunken with regret.

  “I knew we ought to have taken that nice boat back down the river,” Father Geoffrin said. “We could have gone straight to Paris and bought lots of clothes—and now we never shall.”

  Jim Snow had carried Pomp down the hill and laid him on blankets in William Ashley’s wagon. Several of the mountain men looked at the arrow and shook their heads, so close to the heart was it. Hugh Glass was the only other trapper to have sustained an injury—he had stepped on a shard from the whiskey jug Tasmin had broken and cut his big toe to the bone.

  As soon as the last hymns of requiem were sung over Bobbety, Tasmin rushed back to Pomp. She was torn by the knowledge of how cruel she had been to him, only the day before—he who had been so loyal through so much. As she rushed up the slope she was hoping that somehow Jim had pulled the arrow out, and that she might see Pomp smiling his diffident smile again. Instead she found Ashley, Jim, and the two bear cubs, both whining miserably, sure that something was wrong.

  Pomp was still alive, but his breathing was shallow and irregular, his pulse anything but strong.

  “What can we do, Jim?” she asked; but her resourceful husband for once had no answer.

  “You might ask the priest,” Jim told her. “He got that bullet out of Cook—maybe he could ease this arrow out.”

  Tasmin went to look for Father Geoffrin, who was still down at Bobbety’s grave. The mountain men all sat around disconsolately, talking in low tones, drinking little. Joe Walker incautiously voiced the opinion that they might as well start digging a second grave— Tasmin at once whirled on him.

  “No such thing, Mr. Walker,” she said. “Pomp Charbonneau is going to live—I’m just hurrying of
f to talk to his surgeon now.”

  Father Geoffrin still sat by Bobbety’s grave, sipping from a cup of brandy, which he at once offered to share with Tasmin. She took a searing swallow.

  When Tasmin asked him if he would at least try to cut the arrow out of Pomp, Father Geoff flexed his fingers thoughtfully.

  “It’s the arteries that worry me,” he said. “If I nick one, our good Pomp will quietly bleed to death.”

  “Yes, but if you don’t make the attempt, he will certainly die,” Tasmin said. Just then old Charbonneau joined them, trailed by Pedro Yanez and Aldo Claricia, neither of them sober. Charbonneau seconded Tasmin’s point.

  “A Ute put that arrow in my boy, not you,” he told the priest. “If my good son dies, it’ll be the Ute’s doing, not yours. I fear you’re the only one among us who has the skill to save him.”

  Father Geoffrin looked thoughtful for a moment; then he handed the brandy to Tasmin.

  “Very well, monsieur,” he said. “I had better get to it while the light’s good.”

  Charbonneau, dirty and disordered as ever, tears coursing down his cheeks, sat down wearily by Bobbety Berrybender’s grave.

  “Here I’ve been traveling thirty years in these wild places, and not a scratch on me,” he said. “And now it’s my young Pomp who gets an arrow in him.”

  “We were nearly killed by a great bear ourselves,” Aldo remarked sadly.

  Up the slope Tasmin could see a flurry of activity. Cook was heating water. Jim Snow and Kit Carson took the sides off the wagon, so it could be used as an operating table. Jim Bridger fetched more firewood. Father Geoffrin was painstakingly sharpening his knives and laying out his tweezers.

  “If only Janey was here,” Charbonneau remarked. “Janey could pull him through.”

  “Who?” Tasmin asked. She had never heard Pomp speak of a Janey. Could it be that he was not so virginal, after all?