by Ralph Cotton
“We’re as good here as anywhere,” he said to Dawson.
Dawson warily eyed the ledge farther along in front of them, and fresh tracks of the wolves leading away.
“I couldn’t agree more,” he said. He stepped farther back under the overhang and dropped the gathered pile of fire kindling in the dust. “I always say, if you can’t trust your horse . . .” He grinned stiffly and let his words trail.
Moments later the two sat side by side near a small fire made with a flint striker and some gunpowder from one of the Ranger’s rifle bullets. Beside the Ranger lay a creased and unfolded sheet of thick beeswax-coated paper that surrounded an open cartridge box. Beside the box sat a small battered four-shot pocket gun. As Dawson rubbed his sore, raw feet in the heat of the fire, Sam took the bullets from his rifle, checked them and put them aside. He replaced them with rifle bullets he kept stored in waxed paper for just such an emergency. The Winchester had performed well when he’d signal-fired it earlier, but with wolves prowling, he didn’t want to risk a misfire.
Dawson watched a small, battered coffeepot sitting in the low flames. In the pot a modest palmful of crushed coffee beans from the Ranger’s saddlebags began to boil in rainwater they’d caught running down from the ledge lying above them. The shotgun rider fanned the aroma of the coffee into his face and breathed deep.
“I wish this coffee was just waiting to wash down an elk steak smothered in onions,” he said.
“Let’s not talk about food,” Sam replied. He levered the rounds through the short rifle to make sure it worked properly, then reloaded. Picking up the pocket gun, he stood up in the heat of the small fire.
“Sorry,” said Dawson. “I’m used to Dan’l shutting me up all the time.”
Long’s body was leaning against the far wall in the tall afternoon shadows. A few feet away the roan stood with its head bowed, resting nearly asleep, a rear hoof tipped. Beyond the edge of the cliff overhang, the thunder and lightning had passed on, leaving a heavy rain falling in its wake.
“It’ll be dark soon,” Sam said. “I’m going to take a look ahead, see if I can find any more scrap wood,” he said. “Are you going to be all right here?”
“Right as a man can be, under these circumstances,” Dawson said, looking at his dirty, bloodstained feet as he rubbed them.
“Here,” said Sam, “I found this in my saddlebags.” He held the pocket gun down to the shotgun rider, butt first.
Dawson looked delighted. He snatched the gun quickly.
“Much obliged, Ranger,” he said, looking the gun over. He looked up. Sam saw the question in his eyes.
“I wanted to check it over first,” Sam replied. “I’m still not sure of it. It was awfully wet. The heat has dried it some. It’s only four shots.”
“Four shots, huh?” said Dawson, opening the gun’s chamber and reclosing it.
“It beats nothing,” Sam said quietly. “If it’s not too damp to fire.”
“Yes, it beats nothing,” Dawson said, gripping the gun by its barrel. “If it won’t fire, I can always wallop a wolf in the head before it gets the better of me.”
“I won’t be gone long,” Sam said. “If you need me back here, yell out.”
“Don’t you worry, Ranger, if a wolf sticks his nose around this ledge, you’ll hear me sure enough—hell, they’ll hear me all the way to Nogales.”
As Sam turned to walk away along the ledge, the roan, standing unhitched, stepped forward to tag along with him. But the Ranger stopped and took the rein dangling loose from the horse’s muzzle and led him back. Still, he did not hitch the animal. Instead he patted the roan’s withers and left it standing in place. From the fire, Dawson watched curiously.
This time when Sam walked away, the horse leaned forward a step but stayed where the Ranger had put it.
“You picked a peculiar time and place to be training a horse, Ranger,” Dawson called out, the battered pocket pistol lying in his lap.
“I didn’t pick the time or the place, Dawson,” Sam called back over his shoulder. “This horse has proved he wants to stay alive. The least I can do is teach him how.”
Dawson shook his head and looked back into the fire, rubbing his aching feet.
Sam looked back at the roan as he walked away along the ledge, seeing the animal staring back at him.
Chapter 7
Before the Ranger had gone fifteen feet along the ledge, when he stopped and picked up a short length of dry weathered pine lying at the bottom edge of the inner stone wall, he saw scrapes of bones from small game strewn around. Clamping the wood up under his arm, he walked on, the short rifle in hand, another twenty feet, where he found another short scrap of pine, this one with rough bark still clinging to it.
More bones, he told himself, looking all around. Countless paw tracks, some old and some recent, leading back and forth along the ledge path. The flooding had the night predators up and on the move. This looked like a trail they frequented heavily in foul weather. Wolf packs ate their larger kill wherever they took it down. But any wolf, especially a lone male, seldom passed up a chance to bed down and eat in a nice dry place.
Judging from the amount of tracks, Sam knew that a good size pack of Mexican lobos must be living here. Like the men he hunted, the wolves of the Sonoran Desert recognized no border. They followed their needs and their instincts. Anywhere there was a large pack, there would be lone males tagging along nearby hoping to gain acceptance. This low rocky line of desert hills belonged to El Sonora lobos, no doubt about it, he told himself.
For the next twenty minutes he busied himself gathering dry wood scraps until upon rounding a turn he stopped where the overhang ended in a falling rain and a steep, narrow path swung upward onto the slick, wet hillside. A flash of blue-white lightning blossomed and disappeared. Thunder exploded.
This is as far as you’re going, he cautioned himself, seeing at his feet a thick round piece of deadfall. Even though it rested out from under the overhang in the falling rain, he knew he could bank it against the fire and dry it out enough to burn, maybe to last throughout the night. Thinking about the coming night, he looked around at the rain and at the darkening, misty land below. Yes, this was as far as he could risk going. Negotiating this path back through the moonless dark would be treacherous, wolves or no wolves, he warned himself.
Stooping down, he grabbed the wet log and placed it atop the other wood he now held cradled in his left arm. But when he rose halfway to his feet, he froze, seeing the bared fangs of a large wolf standing up on the slick narrow path, staring down at him with a low growl. Lightning lit the big animal’s snarling face.
He kept calm, reached his thumb over the rifle hammer and cocked it slowly, the big leader watching him intently. As he cocked the rifle he saw a second wolf, then the dark outlines of a third and fourth, standing farther up the trail in the shadowy darkness. Recognizing more silver-black images up the trail and alongside it, he took a step backward, slowly, not about to drop the armload of wood, not about to do anything sudden that could cause a commotion or trigger an attack.
One firm pull of the trigger and he knew he had the lead wolf dead in its tracks. The others would scatter, but for how long? And how many others were there? No matter, he thought. This was no place to take on a pack of wolves. A high narrow ledge like this, even with his Winchester levering shot after shot, the pack would soon overpower him. He would go to the ground beneath a flurry of claws and fangs, or off the edge down a steep cliff hillside of jagged rock. Either way he would be dead.
Easy, boy. . . .
He noted the lead wolf’s growl grew quieter as he took his steps backward. The animal made no move forward, nor did he lower into a crouch in preparation for an attack. The fact that the lead wolf hadn’t immediately sprung upon him and brought the others with it gave him reason to think they weren’t ready to take him as prey—not right then anyw
ay, he told himself, his rifle ready to explode at the slightest sign from the big pack leader.
They had found the scent of man and horse on their trail and had ventured forward to take a look. Man they could do without, but warm horseflesh under a dry overhang on a wet night like this would be too much for the carnivores to pass up. Still, this was a curiosity call, he decided, backing away one cautious step after another without the lead wolf stalking forward.
Had he turned and run or made any sudden move at all, the wolf’s natural instincts would have been to pursue him, to take him down. But he wasn’t about to show fear if he could keep from it. After all, he’d spent the previous night holed up with a panther, he reminded himself.
So far, so good.
He moved backward slow and steadily and made his way around the turn in the narrow ledge without the pack leader following. Once he’d put the turn between him and the leader, he breathed a little easier. He knew predators were visual, no species more so than wolves. The fact that the wolf had let him out of its sight was a good sign. Now to keep the big leader back.
Before he had gone ten feet, he saw the tip of the wolf’s nose appear around the turn in the ledge path. With a loose, quick aim, he squeezed the trigger and watched a spray of rock fragments jump in every direction as the explosion resounded. The wolf’s muzzle vanished; a yipping cry went up as the animal spun in pain and fear and raced away.
All right, he’d had a good turn of luck. Now it was time to clear out, he thought. He retreated as the wolf’s cry grew farther away, out from under the cliff overhang and up the hillside. Unable to lever a fresh round into the rifle chamber without dropping his load of firewood, Sam hurried back toward the campsite. The firewood was too important to leave behind. When the wolves came back, as he knew they would, fire would be the only thing to hold them at bay throughout the night.
Now it was time for him to take the upper hand and keep hold of it however he could, he told himself. Clutching the armload of precious firewood to his chest, he hurried back to where Dawson and the horse waited for him. But before he’d gone a hundred feet, Dawson met him on the darkening ledge, limping along toward him on his blood-smeared feet. Rain sprinkled in under the overhang as lightning flashed and stood as if suspended for a moment.
“I—I heard your shot, Ranger,” Dawson said, gasping for breath, the battered pocket pistol clasped tight in his thick hand. “I came running.” He stared warily past Sam into the darkness along the ledge path. “Wolves, I figured?”
“You figured right,” Sam said. “Here, take this.” He held the armload of wood out for Dawson, who took it quickly. “I need to pull one up.”
“How many?” Dawson asked. He stacked the wood over into his arms, aware of its importance if they were going to stay alive through the night.
“Five or six, maybe more,” Sam estimated, levering the shortened Winchester. “I scared one of them back, but they won’t stay away for long. The darker it gets, the more they’re going to want to come for the roan.” The Ranger looked back along the ledge and saw the horse standing there, watching them in the shadowy darkness as lightning blinked on and off.
“Don’t worry, Ranger,” said Dawson. “I didn’t leave him behind. I couldn’t have left him even if I’d wanted to, unless I had a log chain on him.”
“Good, I’ve got him,” Sam said, stepping over to the nervous roan, taking the makeshift rein in hand. “You get ahead of us with the wood. We’ll follow you to the fire.”
“Looks like we’re in for a long night of it,” Dawson said. He glanced back along the dark ledge as he walked past the roan and the Ranger and hurried along ahead of them with the firewood.
As soon as the two men and the tense roan returned to the campsite, Dawson laid out the wood in a row, surveying each piece closely, speculating which logs would burn the longest before they would need to rekindle the small fire.
“If you get another shot at the pack leader, I hope you’ll do us both a favor and blow his danged head off,” Dawson said as he examined their supply of firewood on the ground.
“I don’t know that it was the leader I got a shot at to begin with, but I’ll kill whichever ones I have to kill to break up the pack and get us out of here alive,” Sam said. He stood holding the roan by its single rein, his arm looped up under its head. He rubbed its muzzle soothingly.
“Had I killed the wrong wolf up here on this tight ledge, there’s no telling what the rest of the pack would have done,” he said quietly.
“If it’s a small pack, four of five of them, they’d have broke up right then and got out of here,” Dawson put in.
“What if they’re not a small pack?” Sam asked flatly. “What if that wasn’t the leader?”
Dawson didn’t answer. Instead he looked back along the ledge in trepidation.
“I knew a buffalo hunter who told me a lot about wolves, from living in the high north country. He said a good pack leader keeps a loyal segundo, a number two who does his fighting for him.”
“I’ve heard that too,” said Dawson, keeping a wary watch on the ledge in both directions as wind-whipped rain howled and hammered across the hillside. He took a deep breath and shook his head.
Sam just looked at him, seeing how rattled he was.
“Don’t mind me, Ranger. I know you know what you’re doing,” he said. “I’m just running my jaw is all . . . nerves, I reckon. Two things I’ve always feared something awful is wolves and rattlers. Here I am so hungry, if I saw a rattler, I’d eat it before it stopped wiggling. But wolves, that’s a whole other thing.”
“I understand. Try to get yourself some rest,” Sam said. “They know we’re here. We’ll be hearing from them soon enough.”
“What about you, Ranger?” Dawson said. “You’re needing rest as bad as I am.”
Sam ignored his question, looking off along either end of the stony ledge path, knowing the wolves had access to them from either direction. He lowered his arm down from the horse’s head and saw it lower its head and relax. Then he sat down quietly with just enough rein hanging down for him to hold on to it at shoulder level.
The roan stood above him, dozing lightly, while the Ranger sat with the shortened Winchester across his lap, staring out into the darkness through the pouring rain. Moments passed; the storm raged. Two feet away Dawson sat in rigid silence, ready to tend and stoke the fire at a second’s notice. When the first long howl resounded along the hillside to their right, Dawson looked up, startled, gripping the pocket pistol.
Sam stared at him and nodded, feeling the roan snap awake and jerk at the rein in his hand. Rising to his feet, Sam stood close to the roan, settling it. He stroked its muzzle, rein in hand.
“They’ve thought it over,” he said quietly to the worried shotgun rider. “Sounds like they’re going to test us awhile.” He ran a hand along the Winchester, stopped his thumb over its hammer and cocked it.
“You going to take a couple of potshots at them—turn them back before they work up their nerve?” Dawson asked, looking back and forth in each direction as another howl rose from the other end of the ledge.
“Let them howl awhile,” Sam said. “It’ll give us an idea how many we’re facing.”
“The longer they howl, the bolder they’ll get,” Dawson cautioned.
“And the more surprised they’ll be when they find out we’re not helpless here,” Sam said. As he spoke, he stepped back and guided the roan a few feet from the fire. Dawson watched him reach behind his back with his rein hand and come back with a half dozen .45-caliber pistol bullets he’d popped from the band of his gun belt.
For the next hour they stood, ready and alert, hearing the howl of the wolves grow closer, bolder, more intent. The howling helped the Ranger draw a mental image of the pack’s numbers, the sound resounding across either end of the ledge path and along the hillside atop the overhang.
&nb
sp; “Step back, Dawson,” Sam said, judging the pack to have worked itself into a killing frenzy.
With a short torch he’d made burning in his hand, Dawson stepped back away from the fire as the Ranger reached forward and pitched the six pistol cartridges into the red, glowing embers.
“Here they come!” Dawson said, hearing the sound of running padded paws on the stone path to his left.
Almost before he’d spoken his words, a flurry of fur, fang and claw spilled around either end of the path into their wider camp area.
Sam turned loose of the roan’s rein and threw the shortened rifle into play. At hip level he fired, levered a fresh round and fired again. His first shot picked up a big wolf in full leap and hurled him out over the edge of the overhang. His second shot sent a young wolf rolling backward in the dirt, causing others to have to leap over him to continue their attack.
The sound of shots alone turned back the less courageous animals. But there were plenty left to tear two men and a horse apart. On Sam’s left, the roan whinnied in terror, but its hind legs pumped like pistons into the writhing, snarling wall of fur that had set its sights on horseflesh.
Sam levered another round, hearing the pocket gun explode in Dawson’s hand. He caught a glimpse of a wolf falling back, yipping, screaming in pain. Seeing that he himself had no time for a third shot, Sam swung the Winchester barrel around just in time to crack a wolf across its open, snarling mouth.
The animal flew into its pack mates, but it rolled onto its paws again and charged forward. This time a bullet from the Winchester nailed it backward in a twisting bloody ball of fur. But now other wolves were upon him; Sam felt fangs sink deep into his shoulder as he struggled too late to lever another round into the rifle chamber. He felt himself going down, the wolf’s jaws holding his shoulder in a powerful grip.
But at that second the bullets in the fire began exploding amid the charging pack. Bits of fiery coals sprayed up and filled the air like angry fireflies. Wolves panicked, not only at the roaring cacophony of gunfire and the spray of burning coals, but also at the feel of hot embers burning deep through their outer fur and sizzling on their skin.
