Dragon Teeth

by Michael Crichton

  The arrow had pierced the flesh of his right leg, passing under the skin, pinning him to the seat. The flesh around the wound was puffed and purple and ugly.

  Johnson felt a wave of dizziness and nausea. Little Wind grabbed him. “Wait. Drink.”

  Johnson took a big drink. The dizziness returned.

  “I fix,” Little Wind said, bent over Johnson’s leg. “No look.”

  Johnson stared at the sky, at the moon. Thin clouds drifted past. He felt the whiskey.

  “What about Toad?”

  “Stay now. No look.”

  “Is Toad all right?”

  “No worry now.”

  “Where is he? Let me talk to him!”

  “You feel hurting now,” Little Wind said, his body tensing. There was a whacking sound, and Johnson felt a pain so sharp he screamed, his voice echoing off the dark cliffs. Immediately he felt a searing, burning pain that was worse; he could not scream; he gasped for breath.

  Little Wind held the arrow up, bloody in the moonlight.

  “Finish now. I finish.”

  Johnson started to get up, but Little Wind pushed him back. He gave him the arrow. “You keep.” Johnson felt warm blood pouring from the open wound; Little Wind bandaged it with a strip of cloth cut from his bandana.

  “Good. Good now.”

  Johnson pushed up, felt pain as he stood, but it was bearable; he was all right. “Where’s Toad?”

  Little Wind shook his head.

  Toad was stretched out in the back of the wagon. One arrow had pierced sideways all the way through his neck; two others were lodged in his chest. Toad’s eyes stared to the left; his mouth gaped open, as if he were still surprised to be dead.

  Johnson had never seen a dead man before, and felt odd as he closed Toad’s eyes and turned away. He was not sad so much as he felt that he was not here in this desolate Western place, that he was not alone with some Indian scout, that he was not in mortal danger. His mind simply refused to accept it. He sought something to do, and said, “Well, we better bury him.”

  “No!” Little Wind seemed horrified.

  “Why not?”

  “Sioux find him.”

  “Not if we bury him, Little Wind.”

  “Sioux find place, they dig him, take scalp, take fingers. Women come, take more.” He pointed to his crotch.

  Johnson shivered. “Where are the Sioux now?”

  Little Wind pointed to the plains above the cliffs.

  “They leave, or they stay?”

  “They stay. They come in morning. Maybe bring more warriors.”

  Weariness overcame Johnson, and his leg throbbed. “We’ll leave as soon as it’s light.”

  “No. Leave now.”

  Johnson looked up. The clouds were heavier, and there was a faint blue ring circling the moon.

  “It’ll be pitch-dark in a few minutes. There won’t even be starlight.”

  “Must leave,” insisted Little Wind.

  “It’s a miracle we’ve survived this far, but we can’t go on through the badlands in darkness.”

  “Leave now,” Little Wind said.

  “But we’ll die.”

  “We die anyway. Leave now.”

  They moved through utter blackness.

  Johnson drove the wagon, with Little Wind walking a few paces ahead. Little Wind carried a long stick and a handful of rocks. When he could not see the terrain ahead, he threw rocks.

  Sometimes, it took a long time for the rocks to land, and when the sound came back, it was distant and hollow and echoing. Then Little Wind would edge forward, tapping the ground with the stick like a blind man until he found the edge of the precipice. He would then point the wagon in a different direction.

  Their progress was exhausting, and painfully slow. Johnson could not believe they were making more than a few hundred yards in an hour’s time; it seemed pointless. At dawn, the Indians would charge down the ravines, pick up their trail, and find them in a matter of minutes.

  “What is the point?” he would demand when the throbbing in his leg became especially bad.

  “Look at sky,” Little Wind would say.

  “I see the sky. It’s black. The sky is black.”

  Little Wind said nothing.

  “What about the damned sky?” he demanded.

  But Little Wind explained no further.

  Shortly before dawn, it began to snow.

  They had reached Bear Creek, at the edge of the badlands, and they paused to water the team.

  “Snow good,” Little Wind said. “Unkpapa warriors see snow, know they follow us easy. They wait, stay warm by fire one, two hours in morning.”

  “And meanwhile, we go like hell.”

  Little Wind nodded. “Go like hell.”

  From Bear Creek they headed west across open prairie, as fast as they could with the horses. The wagon jolted over the prairie; the pain in his leg was severe.

  “Where are we going, Fort Benton?”

  Little Wind shook his head. “All white men go to Fort Benton.”

  “You mean the Sioux expect us to go there?”

  He nodded.

  “Then where are we going?”

  “Sacred Mountains.”

  “What sacred mountains?” Johnson asked, alarmed.

  “Thunder Mountains of Great Spirit.”

  “Why are we going there?”

  Little Wind did not answer.

  “How far away are these sacred mountains? What will we do when we get there?”

  “Four days. You wait,” Little Wind said. “You find many white men.”

  “But why are you going there?”

  Johnson noticed now that Little Wind’s buckskin shirt was seeping red, staining with blood.

  “Little Wind, are you hurt?”

  In a high falsetto voice, Little Wind began to chant a song. He did not speak again.

  They turned south, across the plains.

  Little Wind died silently on the third night. Johnson awoke at dawn to find him lying stiffly by the smoldering campfire, his face covered with snow, his skin cold to the touch.

  Using his rifle for support, Johnson dragged Little Wind’s body to the wagon, painfully hoisted it up into the bed, next to Toad’s, and drove on. He was feverish, hungry, and often delirious. He was sure he was lost, but he did not care. He began to remind himself to keep sitting up, even as his mind separated itself from his ordeal, creating distracting and confusing visions. At one point he believed that the wagon was approaching Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, and that he was searching unsuccessfully for his family’s mansion.

  Early in the fourth day, he found a clear wagon track, freshly used. The track wound eastward, toward a range of low purple hills.

  He went into the hills. As he continued on, he found places where timber had been cut and initials had been carved in trees—evidence of white men. It was very cold and the snow was falling heavily when he climbed a final ridge and saw a town in the gulley below—a single muddy street of square, utilitarian wooden buildings. He whipped up the horses and rode down to it.

  And that was how, on August 31, 1876, William Johnson, nearly fainting from hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and blood loss, rode with a wagonload of bones, and the dead bodies of a white man and a Snake scout, into the town of Deadwood Gulch.

  Deadwood

  Deadwood presented a bleak aspect: a single street of unpainted wooden buildings surrounded by bare hills—the trees had been cut down to provide lumber for the town. Everything was covered in a thin crust of dirty snow. But despite the dreary appearance, the town had the charged excitement of a boomtown. The main street of Deadwood consisted of the usual mining-town variety—a tin shop, a carpenter shop, three dry goods stores, four stables, six grocery stores, a Chinatown with four Chinese laundries, and seventy-five saloons. And in the center of it all, boasting a wooden second-story balcony, stood the Grand Central Hotel.

  Johnson staggered up the front steps, and the next thing he knew he
was lying on a padded bench inside the hotel, attended to by the proprietor, an older man with thick glasses and thinning greased hair.

  “Young fellow,” he joked, “I seen men in worse shape, but a percentage of them was dead.”

  “Food?” Johnson croaked.

  “We got plenty of food here. I’m going to help you into the dining room and we’ll get some vittles into you. You got any money?”

  An hour later, he was feeling distinctly better and looked up from his plate. “That was good. What was it?”

  The woman clearing the table said, “That’s buffalo tongue.”

  The proprietor, who was named Sam Perkins, looked in. Considering the rough surroundings, he was extremely polite. “I’m thinking you need a room, young man.”

  Johnson nodded.

  “Four dollars, payable in advance. And a bath can be obtained down the street at the Deadwood public baths.”

  “Much obliged,” Johnson said.

  “That pretty slash on your face is going to heal by itself, leave a scar, but that leg needs attention.”

  “I am in agreement,” said Johnson wearily.

  Perkins asked where Johnson had come from. He said he had come from the badlands of Montana near Fort Benton. Perkins looked at him in disbelief, but said only that it was a long way to come.

  Johnson stood up and asked if there was someplace he could store the crates on his wagon. Perkins said he had a room in the back, available to hotel guests, and that only he had the key to the lock on its door. “What do you have to store?”

  “Bones,” Johnson said, realizing the warm food had given him some strength.

  “You mean, animal bones?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You making soup?”

  Johnson didn’t appreciate the joke. “These are valuable to me.”

  Perkins said he didn’t think that anyone in Deadwood would be interested in stealing his bones.

  Johnson said he had gone through hell and back for these bones, and he had two dead bodies in his wagon to prove it, and he wasn’t taking any chances. Could he please store his bones in the storeroom?

  “How much space you need? It ain’t a barn.”

  “I got ten wood boxes of bones and then some other supplies.”

  “Well, let’s see them.”

  Perkins followed Johnson back out onto the street, looked in the wagon, and nodded. While Johnson started moving crates, Perkins inspected the snow-covered bodies. He brushed the snow away.

  “This one’s an Indian.”

  “That’s right.”

  Perkins squinted at Johnson. “How long you had these two with you?”

  “One’s been dead almost a week. The Indian died yesterday.”

  Perkins scratched his chin. He asked, “You thinking of burying your friend?”

  “Now I’ve got him away from the Sioux, I guess I will.”

  “There’s a graveyard at the north end of town. What about the Indian?”

  “I’ll bury him, too.”

  “Not in the graveyard.”

  “He’s a Snake.”

  “Good for him,” Perkins said. “We don’t have no problem with Snakes that is alive, but you can’t bury any Indian in the graveyard.”

  “Why not?”

  “Town won’t stand for it.”

  Johnson glanced at the unpainted wood buildings. The town didn’t seem to have been there long enough to have formed a civic opinion on any subject, but he simply asked why not.

  “He’s a heathen.”

  “He’s a Snake, and I didn’t bury him for the same reason I didn’t bury the white man. If the Sioux found the grave, they’d dig him up and mutilate him. This Indian led me to safety. I owe him a decent burial.”

  “That’s fine, you do what you want with him,” Perkins said, “long as you don’t bury him in the graveyard. You don’t want to cause trouble. Not in Deadwood.”

  Johnson was too tired to argue. He carried the crates of fossils inside, stacking them to take up as little space as possible, and made sure Perkins locked the room after he exited. Then he asked the proprietor to arrange for his bath, and went off to bury the bodies.

  It took a long time to dig the hole for Toad in the graveyard at the end of town. He had to use a pick before shoveling out the rocky earth. He dragged Toad out of the wagon and into the grave, which didn’t look comfortable, even for a dead man. “I’m sorry, Toad,” he said aloud. “I’ll tell your family when I get the chance.”

  When the first shovel of earth landed on Toad’s face, Johnson stopped. I’m not who I used to be, he thought. Then he finished filling in the grave.

  He took Little Wind’s body outside the town, along a side road, and dug a grave beneath a spreading fir tree on the slope of a hill. The ground was easier to dig in this location, which made him think the town should have located the graveyard there instead. The hill faced north, and from the site you could not see any sign of habitation or white men.

  Then he sat down and cried until he was too cold to stay out anymore. He returned to town, had his bath, carefully cleaning and bandaging his wounded leg. Then he pulled on his dirty, blood-crusted clothes again.

  In his hotel room, there was a small mirror above the washbasin, and he inspected the slash above his lip for the first time. The edges of the wound had started to heal but hadn’t closed up. There would be quite a scar.

  The bed was a thin straw mattress over a simple lumber frame.

  He slept for thirty hours, straight through.

  From Johnson’s journal:

  When I went down to eat in the hotel dining room, two days later, I discovered that I had become the most famous person in Deadwood. Over antelope steaks, the five other hotel guests—all rough miners—plied me with bourbon and questions about my recent activities. Like the proprietor, Mr. Perkins, they were exceedingly polite in their manner, and everyone kept their hands on the table when they ate. But I noticed, polite or not, that they did not believe my story.

  It took some time to learn why. Apparently anyone who claimed to have crossed from Montana into Dakota was on the face of it a liar, since anyone who tried it would be certain to die at the hands of the Sioux. But the fact was I had encountered no Indians at all since the attack on the wagon; Sitting Bull’s Sioux must have been to the north of us when we had made our crossing.

  But in Deadwood, the story was not believed, and this drew attention on my “bones,” which I had stored. One interested guest was a hard customer called Broken Nose Jack McCall, whose moniker was likely the result of a barroom altercation. Broken Nose also had one eye that looked steadfastly to the left, with a pale blue cast to it, like a bird of prey. Whether because of this eye, or some other reason, he was very mean, but not so mean as his companion, Black Dick Curry, who had a snake tattoo on his left wrist and the unlikely nickname “the Miner’s Friend.” When I asked Perkins why he was called the Miner’s Friend, the proprietor said it was a kind of joke.

  “What do you mean, a joke?” I asked.

  “We can’t get proof of it, but most folks reckon Dick Curry and his brothers, Clem and Bill, are the highwaymen who rob the stagecoaches and gold shipments going from Deadwood down to Laramie and Cheyenne,” Perkins explained.

  “We’re near Cheyenne?” I asked, suddenly excited. For the hundredth time I cursed my lack of geographical knowledge.

  “Near to there as anywhere,” the proprietor said.

  “I want to go there,” I said.

  “Nobody keeping you here, is there?”

  In high excitement, thinking of Lucienne, he returned to his room to pack. But after he unlocked the door, he discovered the room had been searched, and his personal articles scattered around. His wallet was missing; all his money was gone.

  He went downstairs to Perkins, at the desk.

  “I’ve been robbed.”

  “How can that be?” Perkins said, and accompanied him upstairs. Perkins viewed the room with equanimity. “Ju
st one of the boys, burdened with curiosity, checking out your story. They didn’t take anything, did they?”

  “Yes, they took my wallet.”

  “How can that be?” Perkins said.

  “It was here, in my room.”

  “You left your wallet in your room?”

  “I was only going downstairs to dinner.”

  “Mr. Johnson,” Perkins said gravely, “you’re in Deadwood. You can’t leave your money unattended for a breath.”

  “Well, I did.”

  “That is a problem,” Perkins said.

  “You better call the town marshal and report the robbery.”

  “Mr. Johnson, there’s no marshal in Deadwood.”

  “No marshal?”

  “Mr. Johnson, there was no town here this time last year. We surely haven’t gotten around to hiring a marshal. Besides, I don’t think the boys’d stand for one. They’d kill him first thing. Just two weeks back, Bill Hickok was killed here.”

  “Wild Bill Hickok?”

  “That’s him.” Perkins explained that Hickok was playing cards in Nuttal and Mann’s Saloon when Jack McCall came in and shot him through the back of the head. The bullet passed through Hickok’s head and lodged in the wrist of another player. Hickok was dead before his hands touched his guns.

  “The Jack McCall I had dinner with?”

  “That’s him. Most folks figure Jack was hired to shoot Wild Bill by folks who were afraid he’d be hired as town marshal. Now I reckon nobody’s eager for the job.”

  “Then who keeps the law here?”

  “There is no law here,” Perkins said. “This is Deadwood.” He was speaking slowly, as if to a stupid child. “Judge Harlan presides over the inquests, when he’s sober enough, but other’n that, there’s no law at all, and people like it that way. Hell, every saloon in Deadwood is technically against the law; this is Indian territory, and you can’t sell spirits in Indian territory.”

  “All right,” Johnson said. “Where is the telegraph office? I’ll wire my father for funds, pay you, and be gone.”

  Perkins shook his head.

  “No telegraph office?”

  “Not in Deadwood, Mr. Johnson. Not yet, anyway.”