The High Rocks

by Loren D. Estleman

  A shotgun exploded deep inside my head, spraying the walls of my skull with red-hot pellets that burst in turn behind my eyes and dizzied me so that I had to clutch at the bedstead to keep from falling. My stomach did a slow turn, like a whale rolling over in deep water. Then, with excruciating slowness, the pain began to subside. At length my vision returned and I found myself standing with knees bent, holding onto the bedpost with a kitten’s grip. I welcomed the throbbing inside my head as an old friend.

  After a few minutes of searching, I found my clothes in a heap at the bottom of a scarred wardrobe in which there was nothing else but Ezra Wilson’s shirt drooping from a wire hanger on the rod. I dressed, easing the hat on last so that it topped the bandage, and went out through the darkened barbershop. Wilson hadn’t stirred.

  The snow was an inch deep on the street and still falling. The cold air felt good on my aching head. I spent ten minutes banging on the door of the mercantile before Bart Goddard came storming out from the back, wearing his nightshirt and carrying a double-barreled shotgun, and another twenty getting him to open up and sell me enough supplies for a two-week journey. As I was leaving with the bundles he muttered something that I wouldn’t have stood for had I been in any condition to do something about it. I pretended I hadn’t heard him and headed back down the street toward the livery stable, where I was in luck. There was a light on in the office and the old man was awake.

  My cash supply was running low by this time. I’d brought along a little extra for emergencies, but as I hadn’t anticipated any the extra wasn’t much. So instead of renting a better horse I paid the old man for the care he’d given the chestnut mare, brought in by the sheriff, and asked him to saddle it and load up the supplies I had brought with me while I called on Henry. I felt strange going through all these familiar motions; but for the hour and the way my head felt, it might have been the day before yesterday.

  The door to the sheriff’s office was locked, but there was a light on inside. I knocked.

  “Just a minute,” called Henry’s voice.

  It seemed longer before the door was opened. He was hatless and in his shirtsleeves, and he had either just put his gun belt back on or had been in the process of removing it when I knocked; the thong with which he usually tied down his holster was hanging loose down the seam of his pants leg. He was surprised to see me.

  “No lectures, Henry,” I said, when his expression became disapproving. I went past him into the office.

  His desk was bare except for a pan of hot water standing on top of it. Next to it was a folded towel—a thick one, most likely stolen from Arthur’s Castle. I dipped a couple of fingers into the steaming water and put them to my mouth. They tasted of salt.

  “How’s the wrist feel now that you’ve soaked it?” I asked the sheriff.

  “Better.” He closed the door. “What are you doing out of bed?”

  “I came to borrow a revolver and a rifle. Got any to spare?”

  “You’re not going after Brainard.”

  “No,” I said acidly, “I just thought I’d do a little rabbit hunting up in the mountains. It’ll be good for my head. Of course I’m going after him. That’s what Blackthorne pays me for.”

  “He’s dead, Page. You’d just be wasting your time.”

  “If he’s dead I’ve got to see his body. The judge won’t settle for anything less and neither will I. Do I get the guns or not?”

  He got his key ring out of the desk, went over to the gun rack, and unlocked a padlock securing the chain that held his half-dozen rifles and one shotgun in place. “Which do you want?” he growled.

  “I’ll take the Henry, if that’s the best you’ve got.”

  He tossed me the carbine, a slightly battered piece with a triangular chunk missing from the stock. From a drawer in the bottom of the rack he took a box of shells. I accepted it and loaded the rifle. “What about a revolver and gun belt?” I reminded him.

  “This is the only other one I have,” he said, handing me a gun and holster he’d taken from the drawer. “This means I can’t get mine fixed until you come back. If you come back.”

  I slid the revolver from its holster. It was a Peacemaker like his other one, but unlike his other one the butt was plain wood without a trace of ivory. I freed the cylinder and thumbed it around. It was loaded. I strapped on the belt. “Care to come with me?”

  He laughed shortly. “I’m not paid to commit suicide,” he said. “Besides, that’s out of my jurisdiction.”

  “That never stopped you before.”

  “No, thanks.”

  I nodded, eyeing him thoughtfully. Suddenly I whipped the Colt out of its holster and pointed it at him.

  His reflexes were sharp. No sooner had I made the move than his right hand swung down and scooped up his own gun. Then it spun from his grip and clattered loudly to the floor.

  For a long moment we stood staring at each other, me over the barrel of the gun he had given me, Henry with his right arm crooked and not a weapon within reach. The ticking of the clock on the wall behind his head sounded like pistol reports in the silence.

  I holstered the Colt. “Rheumatism, right?”

  “It comes and goes.” He sank to his heels and retrieved his gun. His right hand reminded me of a gardener’s claw, it was that bent. “How’d you guess?” he asked, when he was standing again and the gun was in its holster.

  “You were too quick to say no when I asked you to come with me,” I explained. “You like action too much to give me that answer that soon. And when I asked you about your wrist, you changed the subject. How long have you had it?”

  “A year and a half, maybe longer. Lately it’s been getting worse. If it wasn’t for my reputation, I suppose I’d have been dead long ago.”

  “You can’t get by on your reputation forever.”

  “I know it.” There was annoyance in his tone. “What else can I do? I’m too old to punch cattle. The only other thing I know how to do is use a gun, and now I’m losing even that. Where do I go, to the Old Sheriffs’ Home? There aren’t enough old sheriffs around to make a thing like that worthwhile. We don’t live that long.”

  “Who else knows?”

  “No one. Doc Bernstein knew—he guessed it, just like you—but there was nothing he could do for it, except prescribe laudanum when the pain got too bad. I tried it once, and it put me out for twelve hours. I haven’t had any since. I’ll take my chances with the rheumatism.”

  I let it drop. “Watch your back, Henry,” I said. “Tell Wilson I’ll be back to pay him.” I slung the Henry under my arm and headed for the door.

  “That’s what you think,” he retorted.

  Tracking was impossible after the snowfall, but if what Henry had told me was true, there was only one way Brainard could have gone. West of the Clark Fork, a couple of hundred thousand years before even the Indians came, glaciers had carved a wedge five hundred feet wide through the Bitterroot Mountains. From the point where the ice had emerged, the pass took a ragged turn north toward Canada, narrowing as it progressed until there was barely enough room for a man on horseback to squeeze between the encroaching pillars of rock. In another million years it would close up tight. For now, however, it was the shortest available route through the range in the direction Brainard was heading, and it was more than a safe bet that he would choose to take it rather than attempt to push my buckskin over the nearly vertical mountains. I reached the opening shortly before noon and dismounted to take a look around. That’s when I found the fresh tracks.

  There were a lot of them near the northern edge of the opening, churning the snow into dull piles and exposing the brown earth beneath. They represented six or seven horses, none of them shod. A hunting party, I judged, returning with its game from a trip into the plains. Flatheads, or they would have avoided the mountains entirely. The tracks were only a few hours old. While studying them, I felt a crawling sensation between my shoulder blades and wondered if I was being watched. I stood up and scanne
d the peaks, but they were the same color as the sky, and the outline of a human head would have been impossible to see against the woodash gray of the clouds. I decided that if someone was watching it was too late to do anything about it. I mounted up and steered the chestnut into the pass, taking what advantage I could of the narrow strip of shadow left by the pale glimmer of the sun directly above my head.

  It was late afternoon when I found them. The horse smelled them first and shied, tossing its head and chortling through its nostrils. Then I caught a whiff. A musty smell, like you get when you split a deer carcass down the middle and spread its ribs. My stomach, empty now of the venison broth I’d had that morning, began to work. I breathed through my mouth and coaxed the mare forward into a stand of low pines up ahead.

  Leslie Brainard, what was left of him, hung naked by his wrists from a buckhide thong wound around the trunk of a pine six feet above the ground. His legs had been pulled back so that he straddled the trunk, his ankles lashed tight behind it. Ragged stripes of purple glistened from his collarbone to his pelvis where the flesh had been torn in strips from his body. His eyes started from their sockets farther than I had thought they could without actually popping out onto his cheeks. His mouth was wide open as if he had been screaming, but his screams had been incoherent because his tongue had been cut out. A hole the size of a fifty-dollar gold piece showed black and empty between his breasts. He would have welcomed it.

  His tormentors hadn’t outlived him by more than a few minutes. Five of the seven Indians lay where they had fallen; the other two had managed to crawl several yards through the snow before expiring. Behind them, the trails they had left were streaked with red. None of the corpses had been stripped of furs or buckskins, which would have been the case had the attackers been their own kind. Four still had weapons in their hands. All they were missing was their scalps.

  I swung out of my saddle, holding onto the reins to keep the mare from galloping away in its panic. The snow was trampled with footprints. One, a blurred oval such as a fur boot might leave, was nearly large enough for me to stand in with both feet. At first I thought it was a normal print that had grown with the melting of the snow around it, but then I found more of them and I remembered.

  I tethered the horse to a juniper bush, pulled off a glove, and squatted to feel for a pulse at the throat of the Indian lying nearest me. The snow was no colder than his flesh. In his abdomen he sported a hole identical to the one in Brainard’s chest. I inspected the others. Same story, although the holes weren’t always in the same place. One of the Indians, a crawler, had a second wound in the back of his head, puckered with powder bums, as if his killer had walked right up to him and placed the muzzle against his skull before pulling the trigger. This time Mountain That Walks had left no one to tell the tale.

  My first intimation that I wasn’t alone with the corpses came when I heard a squeaking footfall in the snow behind me. I swung around, drawing my gun.

  “A mistake, white skin.” The words were grunted rather than spoken, as though torn from a throat that had not used the language in years.

  The way out of the pines was sealed off by a semi-circle of mottled horses, astride the bare backs of which sat a dozen fur-clad riders whose features looked oddly alike within the frames of their shaggy head pieces. Their hair was long and black and arranged in braids hanging down onto their chests, their eyes black slits in the glare of the minimal sunlight coming off the fresh snow. They were the corpses on the ground around me come to life. The only difference was that each of them was armed with a carbine, and that every one was trained on me. Almost every one.

  The one that wasn’t was slung over the shoulder of the Indian in the center, the one who had spoken. This one had a moon face, fleshy for a brave, in which not a crease or a wrinkle showed, making it look like a child’s India rubber balloon with features painted on it. The impression of lifelessness was carried further by the fact that the face wore no expression at all. His mouth was bland, his eyes like doll’s eyes and without brows. They watched me unblinkingly. For all its emptiness, though, the face carried more of a threat than the scowling visages of his companions with weathered rifle stocks pressed against their cheeks and index fingers poised around the triggers.

  I returned the Colt to its holster. I needed no more convincing to know that I’d wandered into a trap set by Rocking Wolf, nephew of Two Sisters and next chief of the Flathead nation.

  5

  For two beats after I put away the gun, no one moved. We might have been snow sculptures in that lonely glade. Then, at a signal from Rocking Wolf, the brave mounted at his right lowered his gun and trotted over to me, where he sat looking down at me with an expectant scowl.

  “You will surrender your weapons,” directed the Indian in command. His English was ponderous but correct.

  Thinking that it was becoming increasingly difficult for me to hold onto a firearm, I unbuckled my gun belt and handed it up to the brave. There was another long silence while his eyes searched me from head to foot. At length they settled upon the hilt of the knife protruding above the top of my right boot. The scowl became ominous. I stopped, drew the knife from its sheath, and gave it to him, handle first.

  While the brave had been engaged in disarming me, Rocking Wolf had nodded again, this time to a savage at his left, who swung past my skitterish mount and hooked the Henry out of its scabbard, then tossed it to his superior. Rocking Wolf caught it in one hand and examined it perfunctorily. With a shrug he handed it to another brave.

  “I do not applaud your preference in firearms,” he told me. “What is your name, and what have you to do with the thing that has happened here this day?”

  I told him my name. “As for the rest,” I added, “I prefer to talk it over with Two Sisters. Where is your chief?”

  Rocking Wolf barked something in Salish. Immediately the brave who had relieved me of my revolver and knife reached down and snatched a handful of my collar, thrusting the point of the latter weapon against my jugular as he did so. His hands smelled of rancid bear grease.

  “Perhaps opening your throat will show us the way to your tongue,” said the chief’s nephew.

  The bite of the knife acted as a spur to my already racing thoughts. “Killing me will gain you nothing, Rocking Wolf,” I said hoarsely. “Whereas allowing me to live may lead you to the hiding place of Mountain That Walks.”

  The forbidden name brought a reaction from all who understood the language, even Rocking Wolf. Again there was a long silence. I felt a drop of blood trickle down my throat and into my collar.

  “How is it that you know my name, white skin?”

  I hesitated, allowing my eyes to slide toward the Indian holding the knife. At a nod from his superior the brave withdrew the blade and relinquished his grip on my collar.

  “I used to run into you and your brother, Yellow Horn, in the mountains when you were hunting.” I rubbed my throat, smearing the blood. “That was many years ago. Few words passed between us at those times.”

  “I do not remember you.”

  “It’s likely you didn’t notice me. I was always with Bear Anderson, him who you call Mountain That Walks.”

  For an instant, Rocking Wolf let slip his mask, revealing the naked hatred that writhed beneath. Nine rifles were poised to fire; there was a beat during which I was one harsh syllable away from death. Then he retreated behind the India rubber facade once again.

  “You are either very brave or very foolish to tell me that,” he said. “I have not yet decided which is the case.”

  “Do we have a bargain?”

  “What makes you think I value your knowledge? The murderer of my people has left a clear trail to follow, and we are expert trackers.”

  “Now who’s being foolish? Nightfall is less than two hours away. Even Salish can’t track a man in the dark. By tomorrow the snow will have returned to cover the trail. I grew up with Anderson, remember; I know how he thinks. I alone can lead you to his lair.
”

  He studied me in silence. His thoughts were impossible to read. After an eternity he looked to the brave with the knife and gave him a curt order. Reluctantly, the brave backed his horse away from me.

  “Mount your horse,” Rocking Wolf directed. “You will get your meeting with the chief.”

  I waited until all weapons were put away, then stepped forward to untie the chestnut.

  It was the work of five minutes for the braves to gather up their dead and sling them over the backs of their horses. When that was done, Leslie Brainard was left alone to decorate the tree where he had met his merciful end. By morning the wolves and coyotes would finish the job that had been started by the Indians.

  “Where is Yellow Horn?” I asked Rocking Wolf, once I was in the saddle. “I don’t see him in your party.”

  “My brother is dead,” he said. “Killed last winter by Mountain That Walks.” He gave his horse a kick and led the way north.

  The pass inclined steadily upward to about six thousand feet, where it leveled out, yielding what would have been a spectacular view of the sunset over the Bitterroot had it not been for the thickening veil of clouds that reduced the violent reds and purples to a vague rust on the horizon. Soon even that was gone, and from then on we felt our way forward with only the aid of the snow’s own mysterious source of illumination. An hour after sundown it began to snow again, this time in large wet flakes that slithered down our faces and made sizzling noises when they struck the ground. I dug my chin into my chest for warmth. Around me, the Indians rode straight as andirons; in their bearskins they remained as warm as if they hadn’t left their fire-lit lodges.

  The Flathead camp was laid out across a broad spot in the pass, between two cliffs of sheer rock. Only the tops of the temporary animal-hide structures were visible above the snow. Here and there a torch burned, its flame flaring and faltering beneath the snow’s untiring assault. A hundred yards before we reached the camp we were stopped by a rifle-toting sentry atop the east cliff, who addressed our leader in rapid Salish.