About a week after Sundown and I first teamed up, we came across a small hunting party of Apache braves. There were four of them, huddled around a small campfire. Three slept wrapped in blankets, while a fourth stood lookout. We watched them for a few minutes from atop a nearby rise, then Sundown climbed off his horse and began heading toward the camp.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” I whispered.
“I’m going to go down and pay my respects.”
“Are you mad? The Apaches don’t like anyone who isn’t Apache—and they especially hate Whites!”
However, my warning was to no avail. By the time I’d finished my sentence Sundown was gone, swallowed up by the night. Seconds later, the Apache serving as lookout staggered backward, clutching at his throat. As he stumbled, he succeeded in firing his gun once, but it was too late. Sundown flitted amongst the hapless Indians like the shadow of a bat, killing them before they even had a chance to realize they were in danger.
I hurried down the side of the hill, still too stunned to do more than gape at the carnage in front of me. The smell of fresh blood was heavy in the night air, causing the dead Apaches’ ponies to whinny nervously and paw the ground with their hooves.
Sundown stood in the middle of the camp, his pale face dripping crimson. Now that the hard part was done, he was taking his time, going from body to body, draining the dead and dying warriors of their blood before it had a chance to coagulate.
“I saved you one,” he said, gesturing to a butchered brave he had yet to drink from. “I know vargr like their kills fresh and juicy!”
I stared at the dead Apache. My stomach growled and I began to salivate. Suddenly my mind was filled with the images of how I snatched poor Small Bear’s liver from his bleeding carcass, and how I tore open Flood Moon’s lovely, soft throat with my bare hands. I turned my eyes away from the freshly slain brave in self-disgust.
“Go ahead! What are you waiting for—?” Sundown urged as he knelt beside his second victim. “They don’t get any better with age, my friend!”
“I’m not hungry.” It was a lie. My stomach was growling like a sore bear, but I could not bring myself to knowingly partake of human flesh.
Sundown shrugged his indifference and resumed his feeding. “More for me, then.”
A few days I was riding Erebus, leading one of the ponies we’d taken from the Apache camp, when I saw some Comanche framed against the horizon. Although they were too far away for me to make out their clan, I knew they were following the buffalo, gradually making their way towards the Brazos River.
I reined Erebus to a halt and watched the cloud of dust stirred up by the hooves of the hundreds of ponies herded by the young boys of the tribe. So many horses together signaled that this was a wealthy clan, one that had won many ponies through successful raids against the Whites, Spanish and other Indian tribes. A handful of braves broke off from the main group and headed my way, whooping and waving their lances and shields, but I did not move. As they approached, I recognized their clan markings as those of the Penateka, my old tribe.
The braves were young and fierce, eager to show their contempt for the Whites. They rode their ponies around me in a tight circle, giving vent to war cries that would have chilled the blood of a true White Man. I sat quietly on my mount, watching them impassively. After a minute or two of shrieking and waving rifles and axes at me, they fell back. A young warrior rode forward. Although he was no older than myself, his hair was already plaited with the eagle feather of a sub-chief.
At the sight of the grim-faced Comanche, I suddenly grinned and lifted my hand in ritual greeting and called out in their tongue: “Good day, Quanah!”
The sub-chief seemed taken aback and blinked, frowning uncertainly. His eyes narrowed as he studied my face, only to widen in recognition a moment later. “Walking Wolf! My brother!”
Laughing loudly, we climbed down off our mounts and embraced one another in front of the perplexed young braves. After a few moments of pounding each other’s backs, Quanah turned to his fellows and pointed at me.
“This is my brother, Walking Wolf! The one I had thought lost to me!”
The braves muttered amongst themselves, and I could tell by the looks that passed between them that stories of my being the living hand of Coyote were still being circulated around the campfires.
“How have you been, Quanah? Is your father, Peta Nocona, well?”
At the mention of his father’s name, Quanah’s face darkened. “My father is dead. The season after you disappeared, Rangers came and stole my mother and baby sister from the camp. Peta Nocona tried to stop them, but it was no good. He died in the Antelope Hills from the wounds the Rangers gave him as he fought to save his wife.”
“That’s a shame, Quanah. Peta Nocona was a good chief. What of Eight Clouds Rising? Is he well?”
Again Quanah shook his head. “He died of the pox last season, along with Little Dove and many others in the tribe.”
Now it was my turn to look sad. Eight Clouds might not have made me, but in all the ways that counted, he had been my father. One of the braves called out to Quanah, pointing in the direction of the main body of the tribe. A young boy riding a spotted pony pulling a drag was coming our way. Quanah smiled and turned back to me.
“It looks like Medicine Dog has seen your return.”
“Medicine Dog? He’s still alive?”
“The Great Spirit will not allow him to die, at least that is what he claims,” Quanah said with a shrug.
The pony drew up beside me, and I could see the withered form of my old teacher huddled on the litter, wrapped in blankets like a grandmother. He turned his ancient face toward me and spoke. “Greetings, Walking Wolf. You have been a long time gone.”
As I stepped forward to reply, I could tell that the old shaman’s remaining eye has joined its twin in darkness. “Greetings, Medicine Dog. It is good to see you.”
“It is good to see you too, Walking Wolf. Although I see you with the eyes of my heart, not with the shriveled things in my head.”
“How are you, Medicine Dog? Do you still council the tribe?”
The old man shrugged. “In some things I am consulted. The older ones still come to me for advice. More and more, the younger ones turn to Coyote Shit in such matters. He is the shaman now.”
“Coyote Shit?” I couldn’t believe my ears. I’d known Coyote Shit from when we were boys—he was always coming up with harebrained schemes that ended up landing those foolish enough to go along with him in trouble. Perhaps the years had changed him, but I doubted he had half the vision with two good eyes that Medicine Dog had with none.
“You sound surprised, my son,” Medicine Dog said, a sly smile on his lips. “Do you doubt Coyote Shit’s ability?”
“The Penateka are making a mistake.”
“Perhaps. You shall be able to judge for yourself in a moment or two. Coyote Shit is coming.”
I glanced up and sure enough, there he was, riding toward the little band gathered around my horse. He looked pissed. Someone must have told him that old Medicine Dog had gone out to join Quanah. I’ll give him one thing—he knew how to make a show of it; he hopped off his horse without waiting for it to come to a full stop and pointed his coup-stick at me and thundered, “The White devil brings evil medicine!”
Quanah—who always had a low tolerance for Coyote Shit’s antics when we were boys—rolled his eyes. “This is not a White devil, this is my brother, Walking Wolf.”
Coyote Shit’s face darkened as the other braves laughed. “That may be so, but I say he carries bad medicine! If you doubt my word, ask the old man.”
Quanah looked to Medicine Dog, shrouded in his blankets. “Does he speak truly?”
Medicine Dog nodded. “Coyote Shit does not lie. Walking Wolf carries death with him.”
Coyote Shit pointed to Sundown’s leather sleeping shroud, lashed to the pony drag hitched to Erebus. “The evil lies in here!”
Quanah look
ed at me inquisitively. It was now up to me to explain myself. I decided to come clean.
“I carry with me a White Man who is dead during the day and walks at night. He drinks the blood of the living—both animal and man. He hunts them as you hunt the buffalo, in order that he might survive. He is very old and very wise, in his way. I wish to learn from him—but to do so, I must serve him in this fashion.”
Quanah eyed the leather bag, obviously trying to decide whether or not he should do something about its contents. “This living dead man—does he drink the blood of the Comanche?”
“He prefers the blood of settlers and Apache.”
Quanah mulled this over for a second. “Then I guess it is none of our business. If this dead man only drinks the blood of our enemies, we have nothing to fear.”
I glimpsed Coyote Shit, out of the corner of my eye, hunkering down and poking at the leather shroud with his coup-stick, as if trying to raise hornets from a nest.
“Stay away!” I snapped, allowing my vargr face to surface for the briefest heartbeat.
Coyote Shit yelped in alarm and scuttled backward on his hands and heels. I could tell, first by the look on his face, then by the smell, that he had soiled himself. This amused the assembled braves, who had a good laugh at the young medicine man’s expense. His face burning with shame, he strode back to his mount, doing his best to maintain some semblance of dignity amidst the catcalls. If I hadn’t known him to be a pompous fool with delusions of grandeur, I might have felt sorry for him.
“I must go, Quanah,” I said. “I have far to go. And I do not want to be close to where the Wasp Riders will make camp when it grows dark.”
Quanah grunted and nodded. “Perhaps you will return to us some other day.”
“Perhaps,” I replied.
With that, my old friend hopped back on his pony and led his band of braves back in the direction of the tribe. Only Medicine Dog remained.
“So—what do you think of Coyote Shit, now that he is grown?” the old man asked.
“He’s a fool!”
Medicine Dog shrugged. “Perhaps he is a holy fool. All I know is that the tribe would rather heed his words than mine.”
He pulled a leather pouch out of the tangle of blankets and shook it. I recognized the dry rattle of thunderstones—the fossilized bones of the great beasts that once wandered the plains in the time before the White Man even dreamed of this land. Medicine Dog was looking into the future.
“Coyote Shit is a small man who would walk in big shoes. What vision he has is dim, and he is too proud to allow his sight to grow. And in the end, his medicine will be false. He will lead the Comanche into the killing corral. Not within my lifetime. But soon.”
“And what about me? What do the thunderstones say about me?”
Medicine Dog stopped shaking the bag and shrugged. He frowned, and his withered eyes seemed to grow moist. “They say you still have much to learn. Much to see. Much to suffer. And they say you will not see me again. Goodbye, Walking Wolf.”
“Goodbye, Medicine Dog.”
The boy astride the pony clucked his tongue and it started away, hurrying to rejoin the others. I watched the old blind man sitting stiffly on the drag, facing backward, clinging to it as he was pulled across the plains, until he was swallowed by the dust on the horizon.
He was right. I never saw him again.
Alive, anyway.
Chapter Seven
I met the devil at Pilate’s Basin in 1861.
I don’t mean the kind of devil you see wearing red long johns and horns with a pointy tail and a pitchfork. No, this devil was more real than that. More personal. He was my very own private demon.
I’d been traveling with Sundown for close to a year by the time we made it to the high plains of what is now Kansas and Colorado. The high plains are an arid stretch of nowhere that would make God Himself cuss Creation. A fine, crystalline snow swirled endlessly in the high wind, making it a lot like being rubbed down with a piece of sandpaper. I was so freeze-dried, I couldn’t speak without making my lips bleed.
The sky was perpetually overcast, and sometimes the only way I could tell whether it was day or night was by Sundown climbing in and out of his shroud. It was late fall, heading into winter, and the days were growing shorter and the nights longer, so Sundown was spending more and more time out of his traveling shroud. Not that this did us much good—you could go weeks out there without seeing another soul, human or otherwise. As it was, we’d already sacrificed my horse to feed the both of us. I knew that if we didn’t find some real shelter soon, Sundown and I stood a good chance of dying like any other poor bastard who gets himself lost in the trackless wastes.
That’s when we came across Pilate’s Basin.
It wasn’t a town—not the way most folks picture one, leastwise. It was more a cluster of adobe buildings—no more than large huts, really—huddled against the wind. The warm, yellow glow of lantern light seeped out from the main building’s shutters, along with a thin spume of smoke. With cold-numbed knuckles, I knocked on the door, not sure what to expect from whoever might live inside. There was the sound of a bolt being thrown back. The door opened.
“Come on in, stranger! And be quick about it! I don’t want the wind puttin’ out my fire!”
I hurried inside, and the door was quickly slammed behind me. The inside of the adobe was small and warm, but surprisingly neat. As I turned to thank my host, I caught a glimpse of what looked to be a shrine of some sort next to a narrow cot. A woman’s shawl covered a crudely built table on which were set a couple of tallow candles placed in saucers, illuminating a faded and dog-eared rotogravure of a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman dressed in the black lace mantilla of a Mexican señorita.
Standing next to it was a man who was either thirty or eighty—it was hard to tell by his face, which had been severely weathered by the winds and harsh climate of the plains. Had he been without teeth, he would have resembled one of the dried-apple dolls children played with. Although his face looked prematurely aged, my host was powerfully built, with wide shoulder and big, callused hands.
“The name’s McCarthy. Who might you be, stranger?” he said.
“Skillet. Billy Skillet.”
This seemed to amuse him. “Is that a fact? Well, Billy Skillet, why don’t you go put up your poor horse before it freezes, eh? The stable’s around back. When you’re done, you can join me by the fire for a chat.”
“Sounds mighty good to me.”
I lead Erebus around the back of the adobe and put him inside the stable, quickly hiding Sundown’s shroud under a mound of hay. I then unhitched the pony drag and unsaddled the horse. As I worked, McCarthy’s own horses watched me nervously. Like most animals, they knew an unnatural thing when they smelled it.
By the time I made it back to the main hut, McCarthy was already seated in front of the open hearth, sipping coffee from a tin cup. “Brewed you some mud,” he said, pointing to a second dented cup sitting on the table.
“That’s good coffee!” I said through my teeth. It was black as goddamn and had a bite like a rattlesnake.
“Set yourself down and warm your stumps, Billy,” he said, gesturing for me to sit on a stool placed next to the hearth.
I did so and, without much in the way of prompting or preliminaries, McCarthy set about telling me the story of how he came to be stuck in the “devil’s bunghole,” as he put it.
“My parents came to this country from Scotland. They started out in Baltimore—that’s where I was born. My father worked as a clerk in a bank, tending other folks’ money every day of his life, bless him. Me, I never had much love for banks, or working jobs that killed a man from the inside out. I was the adventurous type. So I hired on with the U.S. Navy. I was a good enough sailor—until the day my captain accused me of insubordination. I didn’t take to having the cat on my back, that’s for certain. So I jumped ship—deserted, if you will—and ended up in Mexico. I met a lovely young woman there—” his eyes f
lickered over to the shrine beside the door. “And I fell in love with her. And she with me. Her family did not approve, however, since I was nothing but a lowly gringo. What could I possibly offer her? They were right and I knew it.
“I guess I could have put the pressure on Carmelita—that was her name—and had her insist on having me as her husband, but I was proud. I wanted to prove to both her and her family that I was sincere, that I was something besides an opportunistic Yanqui. So I agreed to work for her family, who had considerable land both in Mexico and America. Her father promptly sent me to the farthest reaches of their holdings, to oversee their herds on the high plains and operate this trading outpost. It was their way of washing their hands of me without resorting to killing me. That’s why I call this place Pilate’s Basin.
“I’ve been out here close to ten years. During that time, I’ve turned my place of exile into an unofficial traveler’s rest for those who come my way. All I ask in way of payment is news of the outside world.”
“What about the girl—Carmelita?” I asked, warming my hands as I spoke.
McCarthy smiled sadly and sighed. “She was very young. After a couple of months, perhaps a year, she forgot about me. She ended up marrying some fellow her family approved of. I didn’t know about it until I’d been out here, oh, six or seven years. By that time, she’d had a couple of young’uns and was fat as mud—or so I have been told.”
“If she went and married someone else, why are you still stuck out here?”
McCarthy shrugged. “I’ve gotten used to it, I reckon. Even though it can be mighty lonesome out on the high plains, at least I’m my own boss. There ain’t anyone to beat me or order me around. After all this time, I probably wouldn’t know how to deal with a town full of people, all running around and getting into each other’s business.”
I found myself liking McCarthy, who had willingly exiled himself for the love of a fickle young girl. It was a shame he was going to die.
My host got up to prod the fire with a poker as a particularly strong gust of wind slammed against the hut, rattling the shutters. He glanced in the direction of the door, as if expecting it to open. “It’ll be dark soon. I hope that other fellow didn’t get lost out there.”
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