The Lonesome Dove Chronicles (1-4)

by Larry McMurtry

  “I hope we’re going away from it,” Gus said, several times. “I hope we ain’t going toward it.”

  “It won’t matter which way we’re going, if it wants us,” Bigfoot informed him. “Bears can track you by smell. If it wanted us it could be ten feet behind us, right now. They move quiet, unless they’re mad, like that one was. I had a friend got killed by a bear out by Fort Worth—I found his remains myself, although I didn’t find the bear.”

  Having delivered himself of that piece of information, Bigfoot said no more.

  “Well, what about it?” Gus asked, exasperated. “If you found him, what’s the story?”

  “Oh, you’re talking about Willy, my friend that got kilt by the bear?” Bigfoot said. “It was on the Trinity River—I figured it out from the tracks. Willy was sitting there fishing, and the bear walked up behind him so quiet Willy never even had a notion a bear was anywhere around—that’s how quiet they are, when they’re stalking you.”

  “So . . . tell us . . . was he torn up bad?” Call asked. He too was annoyed with Bigfoot’s habit of starting stories and failing to finish them.

  “Yes, he was mostly et—the bear even et his belt buckle,” Bigfoot said. “He had a double eagle made into a belt buckle. I always admired that belt buckle and was planning to take it, since Willy was dead anyway and didn’t have no kinfolks that I knew of. But the dern bear ate it, along with most of Willy.”

  “Maybe he fancied the taste of the belt,” Gus suggested. The notion that a bear could be ten feet behind him, stalking them, was a notion he couldn’t manage to get comfortable with. He turned around to look so many times, as they walked, that by morning his neck was sore from all the twisting. The night was so dark he couldn’t have seen the bear even if it had been close enough to bite him—but he couldn’t get Bigfoot’s story off his mind, and couldn’t keep himself from looking around.

  The dawn was soupy and cold—the snow turned to a heavy drizzle, and the plains were foggy. They had nothing to eat and had had no luck pounding their chains off with the few rocks they could find. The rocks broke, but the chains held. Exasperated beyond restraint, Bigfoot Wallace tried to shoot his chain off, only to have the musket ball ricochet off the chain and pass through the lower part of his leg.

  “Missed the bone, or I’d be done for,” Bigfoot remarked grimly, examining the wound he had foolishly given himself.

  Gus had been about to try and shoot his chain in two, but changed his mind when he saw what happened to Bigfoot.

  “We ought to stop and wait for clearer weather—we could be headed for Canada, I guess,” Bigfoot said. “There’s bad Indians up in Canada—the Sioux, they call themselves. I don’t want to go marching in that direction.”

  Nonetheless, they didn’t stop. Memory of captivity was fresh, and kept them moving. The need to stay warm was also a factor—they had nothing to eat, and no fire to sit by. Waiting would only have meant getting colder.

  The fog gradually thinned—by noon, they could see the tops of the mountains again. In midafternoon the sky cleared and the Rangers saw to their relief that they had been moving south, as they had hoped. They were far out on the plain, not a tree or shrub in sight.

  “I hope that bear don’t spot us,” Gus said.

  Though the fog and drizzle had been depressing, at least they had given them a little sense of protection; now they felt exposed—Indians on the one side, a grizzly bear on the other.

  “I see somebody,” Bigfoot said, pointing to two dots on the prairie, west, toward the mountains. “Maybe it’s trappers. If it is, we’re in luck.

  “Trappers always have grub,” he added.

  The two dots, however, turned out to be two of the Mexican soldiers—two young boys, not more than fifteen, who had happened to flee the bear in the same directions the Texans had taken—they were cold, hungry, and lost. Neither of them were armed. When they saw the Texans marching up, well armed, they both held up their hands, expecting to be killed on the spot.

  “What do we do, boys?” Bigfoot asked. “Shoot ’em or take ’em with us?”

  “We don’t need to shoot them,” Call said. “They can’t hurt us. I expect they should just go home.”

  The two boys were named Juan and José. One of them, Call remembered, had tended the nanny goats that supplied Captain Salazar his milk.

  “You’re going in the wrong direction, boys,” Bigfoot told them. He pointed north, toward the village they had started from.

  “Vamoose,” he said. “We ain’t got time for conversation.”

  The two boys, though, refused to leave them. When the Rangers started south, they followed, though at a respectful distance.

  “I expect they’re afraid of that bear,” Bigfoot said. “I don’t blame ’em much. The bear’s in that direction.”

  Call didn’t think the bear was following them—after all, it had a horse to eat, and an old man as well—but he admitted that it was hard to get the bear off his mind. He had supposed there could be nothing more fearsome in the West than the Comanches, but the great grizzly was a force even more formidable than Buffalo Hump. Even Buffalo Hump couldn’t kill a horse just by hitting it. He remembered how many times they had shot and stabbed the stubborn buffalo, before they got it to die. Yet, the grizzly was far stronger than the buffalo. What kind of gun would it take to kill a grizzly? He knew that men had killed bears, even grizzly bears, but having seen the bear scatter the militia, and reduce even Salazar to terror, he wondered what it would take to bring the beast down.

  In any case, it was another reason to stay alert. If a bear could sneak up on a man, as it had on Bigfoot’s friend Willy, it behooved them to be watchful.

  Walking near dusk, they surprised six prairie chickens and managed to run them down. The heavy birds could only fly a little distance. The Rangers, with the help of the starving Mexican boys, managed to catch all of them. They crossed a little creek, just at dark, with a few trees around it, enough to enable them to have a good fire. They let Juan and José eat with them, and sleep near the fire—the boys just had thin clothes.

  “That was luck,” Bigfoot said, as they finished the last of the birds. “Caleb can’t be too far, unless they’ve all been massacred. If we walk hard enough we ought to locate them tomorrow.”

  Call thought that was probably only hopeful thinking. So far, nothing Bigfoot or any of the others had predicted had happened the way it was supposed to. The plain was a vast ocean of grass—Caleb could be anywhere on it. Even a troop of men could be easily lost in such a space.

  This time, though, the scout’s prediction was accurate. All day they walked steadily south on the sunlit plain. Toward evening, they saw smoke in the distance, rising into the deepening blue of the sky. Like the smoke from the chimneys of the village where they had been captured, the smoke was farther away than it looked. It grew full dark as they walked toward it—now and then, from a roll of the prairie, they could see the flicker of the campfires.

  “But they might not be our campfires,” Call pointed out. “They could be Mexican campfires.”

  They stumbled on, the Mexican boys following apprehensively. Another hour passed before the fires were really close. No horses neighed, as they approached the fires. Gus began to feel fearful. He decided Call was right—it was probably Mexicans sitting around the fires, not Texans.

  “We could just squat and wait for morning,” he whispered. “Then we can see who it is—if it’s Indians, we’d still have a chance to get away.”

  “Shut up, they can hear you,” Call said.

  “I was whispering,” Gus told him.

  “Well, you whisper loud enough to wake the dead,” Call said.

  “Hold on—who’s there?” a voice said, and at once relief swept over the Rangers, for the voice that challenged them was none other than Long Bill Coleman’s.

  “Billy, it’s us—don’t shoot!” Bigfoot called.

  There was silence for a moment, as Long Bill absorbed what he had heard. />
  “Boys, is that you?” he asked.

  “It’s us, Bill,” Gus said, so relieved he couldn’t wait to speak.

  “Why, that sounds like Gus McCrae,” Bill Coleman said.

  “It’s us, Bill—it’s us,” Gus said, again.

  Long Bill Coleman peered into the darkness as hard as he could, but he couldn’t see a thing. Despite the fact that the voices had sounded as if they were the voices of Bigfoot Wallace and Gus McCrae, he remained apprehensive. It was an odd time of night for folks to be showing up. He had heard somewhere that Indians could do perfect imitations of white men’s voices, much as they could imitate birdcalls and coyote howls.

  He wanted to believe that the voices he was hearing were the voices of his friends—it was just that all the stories of Comanches imitating white men’s voices weighed in his mind.

  “If it’s you, who’s with you, then?” he called out, wondering if he was inviting a scalping. He cocked his gun, just to be on the safe side.

  “Gus and Call and two prisoners,” Bigfoot said. “Don’t you know us?”

  Just at that moment Long Bill caught a glimpse of Bigfoot, and realized he had been too suspicious.

  “Nerves, I’m jumpy,” Long Bill said. “Come on in, boys.”

  “It’s just us, Bill,” Gus said, to reassure the man that no ambush was imminent. “It’s just us. We’re back.”

  27.

  THE ARRIVAL OF THE three Rangers, in leg irons, trailed by two shivering Mexican boys, aroused the whole camp. The blacksmith soon had the chains knocked off. There were some who favored chaining José and Juan, but Bigfoot wouldn’t hear of it. The sight of so many Texans, all armed to the teeth, set both boys to quaking as if their last hour had come, and it would have come had some of the harsher spirits had their way. None were quite thirsty enough for Mexican blood to buck Bigfoot, though.

  “Those boys don’t want to fight,” Bigfoot said. “They’re too starved to fight, and so are we. What’s to eat?”

  Caleb Cobb looked rueful.

  “I’d like to lay out a banquet for you and the corporals, Mr. Wallace,” Caleb said. “I’m sure you deserve one, for making your way back to us under hazardous conditions.”

  “Hazardous is right, a damn bear nearly killed us all,” Gus piped up.

  “If one of you had had the foresight to shoot the bear, then we could lay out a banquet,” Caleb said. “As it is, we can’t. We ran out of food yesterday. We don’t have a goddamn thing to eat.”

  “Nothing?” Gus asked, surprised.

  “Not unless you can eat firewood,” Long Bill said. “We’re all hungry.”

  Quartermaster Brognoli sat by one of the fires. His condition had not improved. He still looked glassy eyed, and his head still shook.

  “Hell, we would have done better to stay prisoners,” Bigfoot said. “At least the Mexicans fed us corn. We even had soup when we were still in that little town.”

  “We’re close to the mountains—there’ll be deer, I expect,” Caleb said. “With a little luck we’ll all have meat tomorrow.”

  Call noticed at once that the company didn’t seem as large as it had been when they left it, less than a week earlier. He missed a number of faces, though, in many cases, the faces were not those to which he could put a name. There just didn’t seem to be as many men as there had been when they left. Jimmy Tweed was still there, tall and gangly, and Johnny Carthage, and Shadrach and Matilda, huddled around a fire to themselves. But the troop seemed diminished, and Bigfoot said as much to Caleb Cobb.

  “Yes, several fools headed off on their own,” Caleb admitted. “I expect they’re all dead by now, from one cause or another. I didn’t have enough ammunition to shoot them all, so I let them go. We’re down to forty men.”

  “Forty-three, now that you men are back,” he added, a moment later.

  “Forty-three, that’s all?” Bigfoot asked. “You had nearly two hundred when we left Austin.”

  “The damn Missouri boys left first—I expect they’ll all starve,” Long Bill Coleman said. “Then a bunch went back to try and strike a river. I wouldn’t be surprised if they starve, too.”

  “I don’t care who starves and who don’t,” Bigfoot said. “The Mexicans are bringing a thousand men against us. Salazar told me that. Even if they’re mostly boys, like Juan and José, we’ll have to shoot mighty good to whip a thousand men.”

  Caleb Cobb looked undisturbed.

  “I expect the figure’s high,” he said. “I’ll worry about a thousand Mexicans when I see them.”

  “The man who took us prisoner said a general was coming,” Call said—Salazar had dropped the remark while they were on the march.

  “Well, there’s generals and generals,” Caleb said. “Maybe their general will be a drunk, like old Phil Lloyd.”

  “Caleb, there’s too many of them,” Bigfoot said. “They’re raising the whole country against us. If you don’t have enough bullets to shoot a few deserters, how are we going to whip a thousand men?”

  “You damn scouts are too pessimistic,” Caleb said. “Let’s go to sleep. Maybe we can wipe out a battalion and steal their ammunition.”

  He walked off and settled himself by his own campfire, leaving the men apprehensive. Seeing the leg irons on the three Rangers had put the camp in a dour mood.

  “We ought to turn back,” Johnny Carthage said. “I can barely walk as it is. If they catch me and put me in leg irons I’ll be lucky to keep up.”

  “This is like it was the first time we went out,” Call said. “Nobody knows what to do. We’re worse off than we were with Major Chevallie. We’ve got no food and no bullets, either. We can’t whip the Mexicans and we can’t get home, either. We’ll starve if we turn back, and they’ll catch us all, if we don’t.”

  Gus had no rejoinder. The fact that there was no food in camp had left him in soggy spirits. All during the long, cold walk, through the snow and drizzle, he consoled himself with the prospect of hardy eating once they got back to their companions. Maybe someone would have killed a buffalo—he had visions of fat buffalo ribs, dripping over a fire.

  But there were no buffalo ribs—there was not even corn mush. He had eaten nothing since the prairie chickens—he felt he might become too weak to move, if he didn’t get food soon.

  “At least the Mexicans fed us,” he said, echoing Bigfoot’s remark. “I’d rather be taken prisoner than starve to death.”

  Caleb Cobb’s indifference to their plight annoyed Call. The man had led them so far out on the plain that they couldn’t get back—and yet the company was so weakened and so badly supplied that they couldn’t expect to defeat a Mexican army, either. He wondered if he would live long enough to serve under a military leader who really knew what he was doing. So far, he had not found one who could survive the country itself, much less one who could beat the country and the enemy. Buffalo Hump, with only nine men, had nearly destroyed Major Chevallie’s command, and now Caleb Cobb’s force of two hundred men had dwindled to forty-three before it even got to its destination.

  There was nothing to do but keep the campfires going and wait for morning. They made a fire not far from where Shadrach lay with Matilda. The old man was coughing constantly. Matilda came over briefly, to welcome them back. She looked dispirited, though.

  “This bad weather’s bad for Shad,” she said. “I’m afraid if it don’t dry up he’ll die. I do my best to keep him warm, but he’s getting worse, despite me.”

  Indeed, the old mountain man coughed all night—long, heaving coughs. Gus finally got warm enough to stretch out and sleep, but Call was awake all night. He didn’t leave the fire and walk, as he often did, but he didn’t sleep, either. Both the Mexican boys came and sat with him. They were fearful of all Texans, except the three they knew.

  Finally, just as gray light was edging across the long plain, Call slept a little, but the sleep produced a nightmare in which the great bear and Buffalo Hump both attacked the troop. Men were falling and running
, and he had become separated from his weapons and could not defend himself. He saw arrows going into Long Bill Coleman; the great bear had knocked Gus down and was snarling over him. Call wanted to attack the bear, but he had nothing but his hands. Then he saw Buffalo Hump catch Bigfoot and slash at his head with a knife. Bigfoot’s head came off, and the huge Comanche held it up and cried a terrible war cry.

  “Wake up . . . Woodrow . . . you’ve skeert the camp!” Matilda said, shaking him out of his dream. Juan and José were staring at him as if he had gone mad. Gus still slept, but men from the other campfires were rousing themselves and looking at Call, who felt deeply embarrassed by the scrutiny.

  “I didn’t mean to scare folks,” he said, his hands shaking. “I was just dreaming about that bear.”

  28.

  THE TROOP, HUNGRY, COLD, and discouraged, had marched only five miles when they topped a rise and saw the Mexican army camped on the plain before them. The encampment seemed to cover the whole plain; it stretched far back toward the mountains.

  Bigfoot saw the camp first and motioned for the troop to hold up, but the signal came too late. Two Indian scouts on fast horses were already speeding back toward the Mexican camp.

  Caleb Cobb was the only man on horseback. He rode to the crest of the ridge and surveyed the encampment, silently.

  “I told you they’d raise the whole country,” Bigfoot said.

  “Shut up, I’m counting,” Caleb said. He had his spyglass out and was looking the Mexicans over—if he was alarmed he didn’t show it.

  Bigfoot, though, immediately saw something he didn’t like.

  “Colonel, they have cavalry,” he said. “I’d make it at least a hundred horses.”

  “More than a hundred,” Caleb said, without removing his spyglass from his eye. “That’s what I’m counting. I make it a hundred and fifty horses.”

  Then he took the spyglass out of his eye and looked around at the men. He was astride the only horse.