Sin Killer

by Larry McMurtry

  Though confident now of his skill, the Ear Taker knew that all the skill in the world could not prevent accident. Sooner or later, if he continued to take ears near Santa Fe, someone would see him. There were Apache trackers so skilled that they could track anything—one of them might be employed to track him. Old Prickly Pear Woman, whom he visited frequently, often cautioned him about the risks he was taking.

  “The spirits don’t like it when we learn to do things too good,” she reminded him. “They set traps—good traps—it’s to remind us that we are only people. You have taken enough of these ears around here—I think the spirits are getting ready to trick you. You better go somewhere else, if you want to keep taking people’s ears.”

  The Ear Taker knew she was right. Lately he had had the feeling that someone clever was watching him. Often he caught rabbits looking at him steadily, which was disconcerting. Sometimes he came quite close to the steady-looking rabbits, but they didn’t flee. They merely hopped a few steps and resumed their steady looking.

  The next day he spent several hours in the plaza, just walking around, chatting with a few people. No one bothered him, or even seemed to notice him, but when he left Santa Fe and walked out into the country, the first thing he saw was a big jackrabbit, watching him. The traders had no interest in him, nor the soldiers, but every rabbit he saw seemed to be looking at him. This was a worrisome thing.

  The next day the Ear Taker climbed to the top of a butte several miles from town. The butte was a holy place; men came there seeking visions. The Ear Taker waited all day but only near dusk did he see anything that might give him a clue about what the spirits might be planning. As the sun was sinking a great dust devil blew up, far to the north, the dust swirling high in the air. Then the sun struck the dust in such a way as to make a kind of dust rainbow, a thing the Ear Taker had never seen. The dust devil headed in a northerly direction and finally dissolved. The Ear Taker believed he had been given a sign, and what the sign suggested was that he go north. Perhaps if he went north, where there were also said to be careless whites—trappers, hunters, families traveling west—the spirits who were annoyed with him for being so good at cutting off ears would leave him in peace for a while.

  The minute the Ear Taker made his decision and started north, the rabbits began to run away from him again.

  The Ear Taker walked from moonrise to moonrise. At dawn he walked through a large prairie dog town and was pleased to note that there were no small owls to be seen, although owls often occupied the dens of prairie dogs. The presence of owls always indicated that death was near—the fact that he didn’t see a single owl gave him confidence that he had made the right decision.

  Two weeks of strong walking brought the Ear Taker into the Sioux country, near the Platte River. On his walk he had not seen a single soul, neither white man nor red man, but he knew that when he crossed the brown river and traveled along the Holy Road, he would soon find humans again. On his walk he had mostly eaten wild onions, plus one porcupine. When he came to the Platte River he was hoping to find some berry bushes, but just as he saw the curve of the river he also spotted two antelope. At once he lay down and made himself part of the ground, for the antelope were grazing right toward him. He had his light spear with him, whose poison should be fresh enough to kill. The antelope had no inkling of the Ear Taker’s presence, of that he was sure, and yet only a moment later they both raised their heads and at once took flight to the west. He had been flattened against the ground when the antelope ran—soon he began to pick up the vibrations made by a number of horses. As the Ear Taker watched, about twenty Indians came loping out of the south, their object being to capture three white men, two of them mounted on small horses, the third driving a wagon. The Ear Taker assumed that the three whites would either be killed on the spot or else carried off someplace where they would have to suffer the appropriate tortures. Instead, to his surprise, a parley took place— the young white man driving the wagon was obviously making a plea for mercy. The young warriors looked restless; they were clearly eager to hack up the whites, but an old chief, who rode a white horse, restrained them.

  Then two of the white men dismounted and pulled a huge red blanket of some kind out of the wagon; then they built a fire in a bucket and began to pump fire into the blanket, causing it to expand and take on a kind of round shape—it rose from the ground and hung like a red moon over the prairie. This sight startled the young Indians very much—it startled the Ear Taker too. A blanket had turned into a kind of moon, with a basket underneath it, which two of the white men climbed into. To the Ear Taker it all seemed like strange magic; but then, he reminded himself, he was in a new country and should have expected unusual things to happen.

  Then, immediately, something even more unusual took place. The young white man who had been conducting the parley with the Indians loosened some ropes and the big moon rose into the air, with the two white men sitting comfortably beneath it. Soon the two men were high above the river. The old Indian shot an arrow at them, but his arrow merely hit the basket and fell back. A breeze pushed the red moon west—soon the two men were well out of range of any arrow.

  It was all too much for the young warriors, who galloped away, leaving only the two old men and the young white man who had been driving the wagon.

  Seeing the two white men fly was by far the most astonishing piece of magic the Ear Taker had ever witnessed. The north country was clearly where the spirits disposed themselves differently than the spirits of the desert. After a bit the two older Indians rode away, not even bothering to kill the young white man, who caught the two horses and soon proceeded on west along the river in his wagon. The Ear Taker would have liked to discuss what he had just seen with old Prickly Pear Woman, but of course that was impossible—he would have to observe the peoples of this strange country a little longer and then draw his own conclusions.

  The sun was sinking—it would be night soon, and night was the Ear Taker’s element. It occurred to him that he could test the situation a bit by following the white boy letting him make camp and go to sleep, and then taking one of his ears. He got up from the ground and carefully followed the wagon, though keeping to his side of the river and watching the skies for any sign that the two flying men were returning. He also watched closely for any sign that the young white man had unusual powers—he did not want to allow himself to be tricked, on his first day in the north country. He remembered that he had been tricked, not long before in Santa Fe. He decided to take an ear from the famous white trader John Skraeling, known to Indians as the Twisted Hair. Skraeling was a very light sleeper, thus difficult to rob, as many thieves had discovered to their sorrow. Skraeling slept under his own wagon; the Ear Taker thought it would be a good test of his stealth, to sneak up and take one of Skraeling’s ears. The trader was a sick man, who coughed a lot; some of his helpers were just waiting for him to die, so they could divide up his goods, but none were quite bold enough to attempt to kill him.

  The Ear Taker chose a moonless night on which to make his attempt. He crept up on Skraeling’s wagon and listened carefully for the man’s breathing, which would tell him where the head was. It was then that the gods played their trick: Skraeling wasn’t breathing, though surely he had been when he crawled under the wagon. The Ear Taker crept closer, listening. Thirty yards away some trappers were drinking and carousing, making enough noise that the Ear Taker couldn’t hear the sleeping man’s light breath. Carefully he put his head under the wagon, but still he heard nothing. No living man could breathe that quietly, he thought— and then he realized the truth. Skraeling had crawled under the wagon and died of his own sickness; the Ear Taker had waited one day too long to make his attempt. Since he was there, he took an ear off the dead man anyway, but the mischievous spirits had managed to upset his plans.

  At dark the young white man stopped and made a hasty camp. It was clear to the Ear Taker that he was a clumsy boy—he had no skill in hobbling horses or making camp. No doubt his
job was just to follow the fliers around and do chores for them when they came down.

  When dusk deepened, making it easy to move without being observed, the Ear Taker crossed the river, so he could observe the boy more closely. The young man seemed to be a very ordinary fellow. During the hour or more that the Ear Taker watched he became a little annoyed at the thought of old Prickly Pear Woman, who had managed to convince him that the spirits were likely to set traps for him. She liked to stir people up, getting them all worried about disasters that never happened. She told one old man, who had been her lover once, that he had offended the Toad people and would turn black as a result. The old man didn’t turn black, but he worried so much about the Toad people that he stumbled into a gully and broke his neck. That very incident had convinced the Ear Taker that it was not wise to believe everything old Prickly Pear Woman said. Probably she was just bored, and had merely been amusing herself when she told him the spirits might be laying a trap.

  Once he determined to go on and take one of the young white man’s ears, the Ear Taker carefully observed the usual cautions. He waited until the moon was behind a cloud before creeping into the camp. The boy was a loud snorer, making the position of his head easy to determine. Taking the ear took only a second. The young man jerked, but did not wake up. The Ear Taker left immediately, recrossing the river. He walked most of the night and then hid himself in some bushes and slept. The ear taking had gone well, and he felt relieved, but he still had no intention of being careless. After all, he was in new country, where there might be new rules.

  12

  Amboise felt safe where there were trees . . .

  AMBOISE D’AVIGDOR was a deep sleeper, particularly so after a day on which he might have died a terrible death. Since the Partezon, crudest of all Indians, had spared him, Amboise didn’t feel he had much to worry about. Of course, his bosses would be in a terrible fury when he caught up with them the next day; they would have expected him to follow their flight, make their fire, cook their dinner, and lay their beds. The dreadful threat posed by the Partezon had not impressed them; they were safe in their basket, applying themselves to the cognac and cheese. It was irritating, but that was just how his bosses were.

  Amboise himself was from the Chippewa country, his father a voyageur in the land of the mille lacs. Amboise felt safe where there were trees; he did not enjoy being alone on this vast prairie. He could handle a canoe better than a wagon, and he much preferred the company of trappers and river Indians to these two rude Europeans.

  Yawning, Amboise soon stretched out on a blanket between the wagon and the campfire—he at once began to send his rasping snores out into the night. He slept deeply, cooled by the night breezes—for a moment he felt a sting like an insect bite but did not come fully awake. The sun was high before he opened his eyes and looked about him absently. Then he saw, to his surprise, that the grass near where he had just slept seemed to be red. Surely the grass hadn’t been red when he lay down, else he would have chosen a different spot. Then he noticed—what was more puzzling and also more annoying—that his shirt was red too. When he put up a finger to scratch his cheek, his finger came away red. These reddenings of grass, shirt, and finger were quite puzzling to Amboise. He walked off a little distance and relieved himself; time enough to figure out the source of this puzzling redness later. Only when he happened to notice a lot of green flies buzzing over the reddened grass did it occur to him that the redness might be blood. The two palfreys were quarrelsome beasts, always at odds with the sorrel gelding that pulled the wagon. Perhaps while he slept the horses had fought, bitten one another until the blood flowed. But the palfreys were grazing placidly, some distance away, and the gelding didn’t have a mark on him. Besides, his own cheek was bloody, which would be an unlikely result, if the horses had fought.

  As he stood by the river, perplexed by this odd circumstance, it struck Amboise with sudden force that the blood must be his own. At once he raised his hand to his cheek, and it came away bloody.

  Amboise’s first fearful thought was that he had somehow been scalped. Perhaps the old Indian who had seemed so uninterested in him the day before had slipped back in the night and scalped him. Astonished that, as a scalped man, he could still walk around and make water, Amboise rushed to the wagon and quickly pulled out Clam de Paty’s little shaving mirror, a useful object that he was obliged to locate for Monsieur de Paty every morning when he was ready to shave.

  Amboise opened the mirror, which was in a handsome leather case, and quickly had a look at himself, a procedure that only deepened his puzzlement. One of his cheeks was very bloody, and yet it was plain that he still had his hair, and looked, on the whole, very like his healthy young self. But what could have occurred to make him so bloody? His bosses were always berating him for his clumsiness, but could he have been somehow clumsy enough to cut himself while he slept? Such a loss of blood seemed to indicate that he had been bleeding most of the night, and yet, where was the cut? Could he have walked in his sleep, fallen on some rocks, or perhaps accidentally cut himself on the axe that he used to chop firewood? None of these explanations really satisfied, since he had awakened exactly where he lay down. Clam de Paty’s little mirror was small—until Amboise tilted it at an angle, it hardly showed his whole face. When he did tilt it, what it showed plainly was that one side of his face was bloody and one side normal, if rather stubbly—unlike his bosses, Amboise could rarely find the leisure to shave. The more he tipped and slanted the mirror, the more it struck Amboise that, after all, something was rather odd about his face—something just a bit off— but because of the abundance of dried blood he could not at once say what it was. Then he put up a finger, meaning to scratch his left ear, and found that, instead, he only scratched his temple. Very carefully Amboise tilted the mirror and made the astonishing discovery that he no longer had a left ear. At first he could not credit his own vision, which was apt to be bleary and not too precise in the first moments of the new day. He had gone to sleep with two ears on his head—he felt quite sure of that fact—and yet now he seemed to have only one, which defied all the laws of nature, as Amboise understood them. For a minute he blamed the mirror, a small mirror, inadequate for close inspection; and yet, play with it though he might, he could not make the mirror contradict his first impression, which was that he no longer had two ears. The right one was there, stiff as an ear should be and even fairly clean. But the left ear was simply not there, a fact so startling that Amboise sat down and fell into a faint, in which he dreamed that he was bathing in a cool river. In this dream, a brief one, he definitely had two ears. He did his best to delay a return to consciousness, but despite him, consciousness soon returned—a glance at the mirror was enough to confirm the dreadful fact: he was a man with only one ear, an inadequacy that was likely to strike his employers as very discreditable indeed. His employers were exacting men, so exacting, in fact, that Amboise found he was worrying more about how to explain the situation than he was about the loss of the ear itself. Bitter as they would be about the fact that he had not presented himself to make the fire and arrange the bedding, they would take one look at him in his altered state and at once draw the worst conclusions. Very likely they would conclude that he had taken advantage of their absence to borrow one of their shaving kits, perhaps had tried to shave using one of their mirrors, and in an excess of clumsiness, cut off his own ear. The fact that he had smeared blood not only on Clam de Paty’s mirror but on much of their kit as well would lend strength to such an assumption. Amboise wondered again if he might, somehow or other, have cut his own ear off, concluding that it was impossible. His first suspicion— that an Indian had crept in and cut it off while he slept—was undoubtedly the right explanation. The old Partezon, who seemed so uninterested in him, had had his sport after all. There was no sign of the ear anywhere—whoever cut it off took it away. Who was more likely than the Partezon to commit such a cunning act?

  Very hastily Amboise took Clam de Paty’s mirror
to the river and washed it clean of blood. Then he stripped and ducked himself several times, so that he would be clean too. A quick check in the mirror revealed a hole in the left side of his head, but with no ear to shield it. The gristly appendage that had been with him for all of his twenty-one years was now gone.

  He carried a bucket of water up from the river and did his best to clean the blood off the various articles in the wagon, making rather a damp job of it. Then he hitched the gelding to the wagon, put the palfreys on a loose rein, and hurried off as fast as he could go to the west. He was anxious to be back with his bosses before the old Indian came back and stripped him of his other ear—and perhaps a few other parts of himself as well.