by Lukens, Mark
Jed had stayed up the last few hours until morning, still shaken by the dream. He tried to tell himself that he was just nervous about apprehending Red Moon. Not scared, just nervous. Cautious. Any man who wasn’t a little nervous going up against a man like Red Moon was a fool. Yeah, maybe that nervousness—that cautiousness—had sparked the bad dream.
And maybe the rumors about Red Moon being a Navajo medicine man had spooked Jed a little, too. Some even said Red Moon was some kind of witch doctor. Jed didn’t believe in that kind of stuff, but the men who had told him about Red Moon seemed convinced of it. Jed was sure that the stories about Red Moon were just tall tales conjured up by people who didn’t even know him, rumors spread about a man whose culture they didn’t understand, a culture they didn’t want to understand. When it came to these gunslingers and bandits, some people liked to turn them into larger-than-life legends. Usually when Jed finally crossed paths with these “legends,” he found himself a little underwhelmed.
They stormed the farmhouse at dawn, kicking the door in and barging in with guns drawn. Red Moon was sleeping in bed with the woman he’d shacked up with, and he never even had a chance to go for his gun. He surrendered immediately. And Jed was glad he had surrendered so easily. Some wanted men went for their guns when they were cornered, preferring a shootout rather than facing the embarrassment of dangling from the end of a hangman’s noose in front of a town full of gawkers. Some wanted men preferred to go out in a blaze of glory.
In his years of chasing down wanted men, Jed had only faced five men who had gone for their guns rather than surrendering. He’d killed three of the men and wounded the other two. Most men though, like Red Moon, surrendered without a fight once they realized they didn’t have a chance in a shootout. Maybe they wanted those extra few days of life even if it was in a jail cell and a courtroom. They wanted to cling to those extra hours of life even though they knew the inevitable was coming soon. Maybe some of them regretted their decision of not shooting it out as they walked (or sometimes they were dragged) up the gallows steps, dishonoring themselves at the end by sobbing and begging with their hands tied behind their backs. Some of them, right up to the end, swore they had committed no crimes.
*
Jed slowed his horse down when they were closer to a group of boulders at the entrance to the narrow canyon. Buzzards still circled the air over the canyon in the distance, some of them diving down while others took flight. His horse was snorting and bucking just a little, spooked by something in that canyon, possibly picking up the scent of blood . . . and death.
“We have to ride through it,” Jed told David. “No other way around.”
David didn’t answer Jed, but he looked as nervous as the horses were.
Their horses clopped over the hard-packed dirt and rock as they made their way down into the canyon floor where the rock walls closed in, leaving a narrow passage to ride through. About halfway through the canyon, Jed saw the splashes of dried blood along the rock walls. It looked like someone had taken their blood-soaked hand and dragged their fingers along the face of the rock, the fingers leaving behind four long stripes of blood.
The blood trail on the rock wall ended, the long streaks of blood faded to nothing. On the dirt below was a severed hand, the wrist a ragged mess with a string of gristle trailing out. The end of a snapped-off bone gleamed white among the gore. The skin of the hand was light brown—like David’s skin. A little farther along the canyon floor there was a piece of flesh that was unidentifiable and riddled and pecked apart by the buzzards’ beaks.
Jed felt his stomach turning. He knew whose body parts those were—and he was sure David knew it, too.
“Come on,” Jed told David. “We need to keep moving.”
CHAPTER 2
As Jed and David rode away from the canyons, Jed thought back to when he had apprehended Red Moon, and he was suddenly there again, reliving those moments.
Red Moon showed no fear when Jed and his men captured him in the farmhouse. He showed no fear when they shackled his wrists together and sat him atop their spare horse. But after a few hours of riding, when they approached the woods, Red Moon finally showed fear and spoke his first words: “We should not go in those woods.”
Jed wasn’t going to let a prisoner dictate his travel route back to Smith Junction. When he got Red Moon there, the trial would be quick, and the justice even quicker; Red Moon would hang for his crimes.
According to Jed’s map, the woods were a shortcut—they were going to shave at least two or three days off of their trip.
The shortcut had seemed like a good idea at the time, but after a few miles into the woods Jed began to regret his decision.
Jed was sure they were being followed. He couldn’t see or hear anyone in the woods, but the feeling of being followed wouldn’t go away. He wondered if it might be claim jumpers waiting for the right time to ambush them and take Red Moon for the bounty. During his eleven years as a U.S. Marshal, Jed had never personally dealt with claim jumpers before, but he’d heard stories from other lawmen and bounty hunters about them. And the high price on Red Moon’s head would surely be a temptation.
Jed suspected that whoever was following them was part of Red Moon’s gang. Even though Jed was pretty sure Red Moon wasn’t with a gang at the moment, the outlaw had ridden with different gangs in the past.
Or it was always possible that the men following them were just run-of-the-mill bandits, highway robbers hoping to get whatever they could, ignorant of the bounty on Red Moon’s head.
Then again, maybe no one was following them. Maybe his nerves were getting to him. He didn’t usually get nervous. He’d been a lawman and a bounty hunter most of his life, beginning deputy work when he was eighteen years old. He’d worked with his father at first, but then he struck out on his own after his father had been killed a few years later. No, he didn’t usually get nervous, and he trusted his gut feelings that had been honed as sharp as a scalping knife over the years.
If he would have listened to his gut feelings in those woods, if only he would have listened to the warning from Red Moon, then maybe his men would still be alive. But Jed had been antsy to get Red Moon to Smith Junction, eager to collect his bounty and get this over with. He hadn’t even planned on spending much time in Smith Junction after he dropped Red Moon off, not even sure he would stick around long enough to watch the outlaw hang. He decided he would go back home even though no one was waiting there for him. His wife, Clara, had died five years ago from pneumonia. There was no one at his homestead now, no one except Chavez who came around a few times a week to do some work around the place, helping Jed out when he was away.
Jed glanced back at Red Moon as they rode deeper into the woods. Red Moon was a few inches shorter than Jed, but where Jed was gangly and broad-shouldered, Red Moon was thick with muscle. Red Moon wore a pair of wool pants, the bottoms of which were stuffed into a weathered pair of cowboy boots. His leather shirt was greasy and old. He wore very little jewelry except for a rawhide necklace with a silver charm dangling from it. His long dark hair was parted in the middle and hung loose down to his shoulders. He had a scraggly goatee with just the first strands of gray showing. He rode easily in the saddle, a natural horseman. He was an intimidating man, but in these woods, Red Moon was scared—Jed could see it.
They stopped their horses when Jed saw something dead in the clearing up ahead. Even from thirty feet away, he could tell that something wasn’t right about the carcass. The thing in the trail looked almost like the chopped up remains of an animal, like something on a butcher’s table. But with the sharp points of broken bones sticking out from the bloody flesh and the ribs exposed on the outside, it looked like the animal had been turned inside out somehow.
“You reckon it’s a deer?” Roscoe asked as he rode his horse up next to Jed’s.
“Maybe a cougar got to it,” Dobbs suggested.
Jed didn’t respond to either of them. There was no telling what kind of animal th
e thing was anymore, but he didn’t think this was something a bear or a cougar would have done. And a bear or cougar certainly wouldn’t have left this much meat behind to spoil in the sun.
“Look at the bones on the outside of it,” Roscoe said. “It looks like it was chewed up and spit out.”
“I can’t tell where . . . where its head is,” Dobbs said. “You reckon it’s gone?”
Dobbs was right. Maybe the head had been taken. Or maybe it was hidden somewhere inside that mound of glistening meat and bone.
“Someone’s following us,” Jed told the two men as he turned towards them.
Roscoe and Dobbs stiffened in their saddles. Dobbs looked around at the woods as if he might spot their pursuers.
“How do you know we’re being followed?” Roscoe asked. “You see ‘em?”
“I didn’t see anybody,” Jed told him. “But I believe we’re being followed.”
Roscoe didn’t argue.
Jed could tell that Roscoe and Dobbs were running the possible suspects through their minds like he had done earlier: claim jumpers, Red Moon’s gang, highway bandits.
“I just want you two to stay alert,” Jed told them, but he was focusing mainly on Dobbs.
Both men nodded, their faces grim.
Jed looked back at the obscene carcass down the trail.
“An animal did not do that,” Red Moon said.
Roscoe turned his horse around to face Red Moon. “You know who did?”
Red Moon didn’t answer.
Roscoe glanced at Jed. “Maybe he knows who’s on our trail.” He looked at Red Moon again. “You know who’s following us?”
Red Moon sat motionless in his saddle.
Jed didn’t think the Navajo was going to bother answering Roscoe, but then Red Moon spoke: “Yenaldooshi.”
“What the hell’s that?” Roscoe asked Red Moon.
Red Moon didn’t bother translating the word.
“I think that Injun knows who’s following us,” Roscoe said, nudging his horse closer to Jed’s. “I think it’s some of his men.”
“That true?” Jed asked Red Moon. “Are your men following us?”
“I have no men with me,” Red Moon said. “What follows us is much worse.”
“What do you mean by that?” Jed asked.
“He’s just trying to scare us is all,” Roscoe said and spit out a long stream of tobacco juice. “Whoever it is, we’ll be ready for ‘em.”
“You cannot be ready for the yenaldooshi,” Red Moon said.
“What is that?” Jed asked. “What’s that word mean in English?”
“Skinwalkers,” Red Moon answered.
CHAPTER 3
It was getting later in the day as Jed’s horse veered towards a group of rocks off to their right, the canyon with the body parts and smears of blood on the walls long behind them now. Jed allowed his horse to head towards the rocks; he looked at David who followed along. “They probably smell water over there,” Jed said, but the boy didn’t answer.
When they reached the rocks Jed spotted small pools of water, probably rainwater collected in the holes and depressions in the rocks, but the water could have come from an underground reservoir.
Jed dismounted and let his horse drink from the pool of water, patting the horse’s shoulder for a moment. This wasn’t his horse; both of these horses were from David’s home—they were his dead father’s horses. Jed’s horse had been taken in the woods last night. All of their horses had been taken.
“We’ll rest here for a few minutes,” Jed told David. “Go ahead and walk around a little. Stretch your legs.”
David dismounted while his horse drank from a pool of water among the rocks. David walked away, but not too far. He looked up at the endless blue sky—there were more buzzards circling in the air high above them.
Jed filled up his canteen. He took a few long swallows—the water was cold and clean. He held his canteen out for David. “You want some?”
David walked over to Jed and gently took the canteen from him. He used both hands to lift it to his lips, drinking the water and spilling some of it down his chin. After he was done, he handed the canteen back to Jed.
“It’ll be dark soon,” Jed said as he filled his canteen back up again. “We need to find a place to camp for the night.” He looked around. Now that they were out of the low canyons and up on higher, flatter ground, there wasn’t much in the way of cover for a camp.
A few minutes later they were back on their horses. As they rode away from the scattering of rocks and boulders, Jed’s mind began to slip back to the woods yesterday, and soon he was there again.
*
Jed and his men ventured deeper into the woods, getting farther and farther away from that strange inside-out carcass they had seen on the trail earlier. They found a large clearing to camp in; it was the biggest one they’d seen so far in the woods. The trail they had been following through the woods picked up again on the far side of the clearing. To the left of the clearing, a rock wall rose up thirty feet and ran along for at least three hundred feet. From its highest point the rock wall sloped back down to the forest floor on both sides. At the bottom of the rock wall, right in the middle, there was a dugout large enough for a man to stand up inside; the rock wall hung over the dugout like a porch roof. The dugout looked almost like the entrance to a cave, but it only went back about five feet underneath the rock wall. It would provide a nice place to camp and protect their backs; they couldn’t ask for better in the middle of these woods.
Roscoe built their campfire at the edge of the rock overhang while Dobbs tied their horses to a few trees that were bunched together where the rock wall came back down towards the ground. The horses were farther away than Jed would’ve liked, but they were still within fifty yards of their camp.
Red Moon was a little closer to them, only thirty yards away from the camp in the other direction. Jed had wrapped a length of chain around the base of a tree and locked it to Red Moon’s shackled wrists in front of him. The chain would keep the Navajo outlaw from running in the night, and Jed thought it was more humane than tying the man’s legs together all night. There was enough slack in the chain around the tree so that Red Moon could lie down if he wanted to—Jed brought him an extra blanket, a bowl of beans with jerky in it, and some coffee. But Red Moon had left the blanket rolled up beside him and he ignored the bowl of food and cup of coffee. He sat there with his back against the tree, not moving a muscle.
Jed was about to walk back to the camp, but he looked at Red Moon. “We both know what’s going to happen to you when we get to Smith Junction. No sense making things worse. If your men are following us, then just tell me now so we can be ready. You could call them off when they get close enough. I don’t see any reason for anyone to get killed tonight.”
“They are not my men,” Red Moon answered. “I told you that.”
“Skinwalkers, huh?” Jed said.
Red Moon nodded. “The same ones who turned that animal inside out on the trail. They will do the same thing to us. You cannot stop them. I cannot stop them. No one can.”
Jed was done with Red Moon’s fairy tales. He left the man alone in the darkening woods and went back to the campfire.
The horses were a little jumpy as the night fell quickly, the darkness covering everything except their little beacon of campfire light. The four horses snorted and whinnied in the dark, perhaps sensing something close by—if not Red Moon’s men, then maybe a bear or a cougar.
“What about what that Indian said earlier?” Dobbs asked after they were quiet for a moment. He had finished his beans and cradled his coffee cup in his hands like he was trying to warm his fingers up. He sat cross-legged, close to the campfire. His eyes were wide in the darkness, his skin so pale it almost seemed luminous.
“Skinwalkers?” Roscoe asked. He leaned back on his pack underneath the rock overhang, lost in the shadows it created. He took another sip from his whiskey flask.
“Yeah,” Do
bbs said. “What are they supposed to be? I mean, I know they’re not real, but . . .”
“Just a legend, kid,” Roscoe said.
They were quiet for a moment. Jed watched Dobbs, and he could tell that the boy wasn’t going to let the idea of skinwalkers go. It was almost like Dobbs wanted to hear a ghost story by the campfire.
“Yeah, but what is the legend?” Dobbs finally asked.
Roscoe didn’t answer.
“If you’re too scared to talk about them—” Dobbs began.
Roscoe sat up quickly. “I ain’t scared of nothing.”
Dobbs smiled, knowing he had riled Roscoe. “So what are they?”
Roscoe shrugged.
Jed was pretty sure Roscoe was stalling because he really didn’t know what skinwalkers were. He’d heard the name before and knew that they were some kind of Navajo legend, but that was probably the extent of his knowledge on the subject.
“I heard they’re witches,” Jed said, rescuing Roscoe from stumbling through an explanation, part of which he would probably just make up anyway. “Witches that can transform into animals.”
Dobbs considered the idea for a moment.
“Like shapeshifters,” Jed went on. “You ever heard of shapeshifters?”
Dobbs just shrugged. “I guess not.”
“Shapeshifters are men that can turn into animals like wolves or bears, and then turn back into men again. Sometimes it happens during a full moon.”
Dobbs stared up at the moon at the edge of the trees, the moon not quite up over the clearing just yet.
“What about werewolves?” Jed asked Dobbs. “You ever heard of werewolves?”
“Yes,” Dobbs answered, his face brightening a little. “I heard of them.”
“Well, skinwalkers are supposed to be kind of like werewolves.”
Dobbs looked out at the darkness of the clearing, staring at the woods at the other side.
“Look at his face,” Roscoe cackled. “You got him scared of werewolves now.”
