Crack in the Sky

by Terry C. Johnston

  At least that’s the way Hatcher’s bunch had described some of the most delicious ways the Apache could make a white man linger in his dying.

  And all the way south from Pierre’s Hole, Asa had told him even more stories he had heard from other trappers who had worked the southwestern streams out of Taos and Santa Fe. Men who rode with the likes of Sylvester Pattie and his son, James Ohio Pattie, other men who trapped with Ewing Young or Etienne Provost. While the southern trapper did not have to concern himself with the horse-thieving Crow and the scalp-hungry Blackfoot, McAfferty made it plain that they would have to cross the land of the troublesome Diggers—so poor they ate insects and dressed in rabbit hides, a people who shot small rock-tipped arrows at the white trappers and their horses, arrows the Diggers used to hunt their small game and birds, rock-chip points nowhere big enough to cause death—just big enough that the Diggers would be a nuisance to their remuda of horses.

  Pushing south from there a man entered the land of the Apache.

  He realized the horse below him was beginning to move more slowly now, almost rocking from side to side as it plodded ahead. Bass did what he could to keep his head tucked to the side, his eyes closed. As the late sun dipped below the big brim of his hat, it still had enough glare to peel a man’s skin back. As he rocked atop his saddle, his thoughts slid back and forth, in and out of dream.

  He desperately tried to remember, scolding himself that he must open his eyes every now and then to scan the horizon behind them for sign of the Apache—perhaps no more than a telltale spiral of dust barely discernible as it rose into the buttermilk sky.

  Ahead or to the side he was forced to squint to cut out the glare in his search for some dark border that hinted at enough moisture to be a creekbed, murmuring something on the order of a prayer that he might locate that river bottom. Praying that they would again run onto the meandering course of the Heely they had abandoned days ago when they sprinted away to escape from these warriors who wore long breechclouts and tall leather boot moccasins, wide bandannas of colorful Mexican cloth tied around their heads. And poor skin quivers rattling with arrows.

  Scratch hadn’t really seen them up close, not yet anyway.

  Days back McAfferty had run across the sign late one afternoon—fresh tracks that suggested there were Apache in the area. Moccasin prints only, no pony hooves.

  “That much be the Eternal Lord’s blessing,” Asa had exclaimed. “This ain’t a riding bunch. Ain’t stole no horses from the greasers east of here. Maybeso we got a chance to outrun ’em.”

  That’s when Scratch had chortled. “Outrun ’em? Jehoshaphat! Have your brains been fried down in this country? Course we can outrun ’em—bunch of poor Injuns ain’t even got no horses to ride—”

  “You stupid idjit!” McAfferty interrupted with a warning. “On foot them Apache can damn well keep up with a man on horseback.”

  He had stopped his chuckling when he saw the serious pinch on Asa’s face. “You ain’t blowing a bald-face windy?”

  “This is the Lord’s truth,” McAfferty swore. “I see’d it once my own self. Heard of it more’n a handful of times from others what saw it with their own eyes. ’Arise, O Lord; save me, O my God: for thou hast smitten all mine enemies upon the cheek bone; thou hast broken the teeth of the ungodly.’”

  So those bastards could near keep up with a white man on horseback. And what little lead a man might gain through a day of riding was most times eaten right up when he stopped for the night, stopped to water and graze his done-in mount, stopped because it got just too damned dark to attempt crossing that unforgiving stretch of near-barren rock.

  After crossing the Snake as they headed south from Pierre’s Hole, Scratch and Asa struck out for the Soda Springs northwest of the Sweet Lake before pushing on down along the foot of the Wasatch front, which took them through the valley of the Great Salt Lake. Skirting the eastern edge of that first, startlingly flat desert, they trapped the narrow streams draining the Pahvant Range, able to bring nothing more to bait than some miserably small beaver, their poor plews hardly worth skinning out. They plodded on, day by day, remaining hopeful that by working this far south, that autumn would last all the longer, that they could trap the Heely country right on into the middle of winter.

  Resolutely they continued past the brilliant colors and haunting, wind-sculpted bridges and monoliths that made Scratch uneasy as he imagined those tall formations to be the ancient haunts of petrified monsters of a bygone era that might just return to life come dark, freed to roam this strange canyon and land of high desert until the next sun would rise.

  Every distant sound, every changing shadow cast upon the rocks rising about him—it all pricked his imagination to conjure up fierce hoo-doos and formless wraiths.

  Bass didn’t sleep near as good as Asa those nights they were forced to wait out the hours of darkness in this frightening journey through such an evil country. Without fail he sat up awake with their fire blazing, weapons in his lap, ears attentive to every groan of the incessant wind as it carved its way through the canyon, listening to every rolling rumble of the distant rocks tumbling off some nearby precipice, listening to the fading echoes of what might be footfalls of nameless beasts, the hair standing at the back of his neck.

  As the sun itself arched farther to the south with each day, they tramped on, climbing through a high country before crossing a great river and striking across part of its desert, making for the green, lofty mountains they watched rise in the distance.

  Choosing not to tarry at all to set their traps in those hills visited by Taos brigades, they put that high land behind them, pressing on south by west, guided every plodding step of the way by those landmarks Asa McAfferty had set to memory, recited firsthand from the lips of those who claimed to have looked down from those foothills at the basin below, where a man got his first glimpse of the Gila as it spilled southwest across a virgin land.

  “No man you know of ever trapped this river?” Scratch had asked that first night they’d camped beside the Gila. This sure didn’t appear to be beaver country the likes of which he’d ever seen before.

  “No one I heard of ever gone on down toward the Mex desert to see what lies in that country,” McAfferty had asserted. “The trapping outfits turned back from here.”

  There had to be a cause, Bass reasoned. After all these weeks and, lo, the endless miles—surely there was something that had caused those hardy brigades to turn about and search for more hospitable country to the north and east of the Heely. At first he had figured it was only the heat and the yawning maw of the desert the farther south they rode that gave him a sense of unease … as they stopped here, then there, whenever they came upon beaver sign.

  On their fourth day moving downstream the partners ran onto the beginnings of a lush valley fed by untold creeks spilling into the main river, a long and meandering country verdant enough to support a rich population of industrious flat-tails busily damming up their world into an endless series of ponds as the Gila continued its path between the foothills of two mountain ranges.

  For more than a month they worked through the slowly shrinking daylight hours, trapping the unwary beaver never before chivvied in that country. Then McAfferty had spotted the moccasin prints late of an afternoon. After returning to camp, then taking Bass to study them with him, they both decided there was sign of enough warriors to cause them concern—no matter that those warriors were prowling about the country on foot.

  “I heard tell from one of Pattie’s men that a man can foller the Heely upstream into the mountains,” Asa had asserted.

  “How far them mountains be?”

  “Far enough,” and McAfferty had pointed to the east. “A good ride will put ground atween us and them red heathens. ’Pour out thy wrath upon the heathen that have not known thee, and upon the kingdom that have not called upon thy name.’”

  McAfferty had gone on to describe how he was told they could continue up the Gila, following it into th
e foothills, and eventually the mountains—saying all a man had to do was continue north by east from there in making his crossing of the high country, up and down through a series of broken ridges until he eventually dropped into the valley of the Rio Grande del Norte.

  “The river what leads us right on into Taos for to winter up,” Asa had declared, gesturing dramatically with an outswung arm as he pointed to the northeast.

  “You figger we ought’n load up and set off soon as it’s dark?”

  But McAfferty had shaken his white head as he considered the plateau above the brushy draw where they had made camp the night before. “Nawww. Each of us take our watch tonight, go out come morning to collect our traps and turn back upriver for the mountains. The Lord my God will watch over and deliver us.”

  Instead, they had spotted the warriors approaching from the rocks above just before first light. Abandoning what traps remained in the waters of the Gila, the white men fled, doggedly pursued right on into a country that reminded the ex-circuit-riding preacher of that land where Moses had led his Hebrews in their escape from a vengeful Pharaoh.

  “Verily—that ol’ King of Egypt watched the destruction of his army beneath the hand of the one true God!” McAfferty had declared optimistically. “But God still had to punish His people with years of wandering in the desert because they turned from His voice.”

  At their backs now, the sun was sinking behind the low, jagged, rocky bluffs that passed for hills in this desert country. Scratch remembered how three days before he had begun to wonder if he and McAfferty hadn’t themselves turned away from God’s voice—punished by being driven into an unforgiving desert, pursued so relentlessly by the Apache that they had eventually abandoned the Gila in a vain hope of eluding the warriors.

  Leaving the river and crossing a low, rocky divide, Bass and McAfferty had fallen headlong into a basin where little but stunted brush and withered cactus struggled above the sun-baked hardpan. A sandy soil dotted with wide patches of golden, heat-seared bunchgrass broke up the monotony of the landscape as they pressed on for that thin, jagged line of purple beckoning from the distance.

  In those mountains he knew they would find water, shelter, escape from their pursuers.

  But on the morning of their second day without water they had spotted a second band of Apache off to their right in the distance—and were forced to turn sharply away from their goal. Forced to plunge deeper into a desert tracked only by jagged scars of waterless, scorpion-infested arroyos. At the bottom of one after another they had stopped only long enough to scrape down through the powdery sand with no luck, finding not so much as any damp soil before remounting their thirsty horses and urging their pack animals on behind them. Relentlessly keeping an anxious eye on the country at their backs, Bass was sure they had passed through the gates of hell itself.

  Too many days. More waterless miles than he could recall. So much of his hope shriveled and drying the way the stunted plants in that land curled up and died. There had been no turning back. In every direction the prospects looked much the same. But only to the east did there appear the promise of cool, beckoning shade beneath that jagged scrap of autumn sky, while over their heads, hour after hour, hung nothing more than the sun, hovering like a sulled mule refusing to budge. It made his mouth water to gaze at that distant line of purple high country where a ragged batch of black-bellied clouds cluttered the eastern horizon.

  Autumn rain. Bright green streaks of hot, phosphorescent lightning cracking the distant sky. Offering no more than a remote hope. Perhaps nothing more than despair for the man gradually dying of thirst now forced to watch those faraway thunderclouds, realizing he might never again feel the caress of cool rain upon his cracked, peeling, sunburned face.

  Yet enough light flickered from heaven, streaking down through each jagged crack in the sky with every burst of that pale-green heat lightning, enough to give him renewed hope as they struggled on now, struggled on past the falling of the sun at their backs.

  Suddenly the horse beneath him jerked its head, tugging the rawhide reins from his loose grip. In that next moment he heard Hannah snort. Instantly afraid the animals had winded Indians, Bass peered quickly to the right and left, painfully twisting his aching, thirst-ravaged body to gaze behind them. Nothing but a spiny dust column here and there as tiny whirlwinds zigzagged their way across the barren wastes. Nothing but those capricious spirals of the same alkali dust coating his nostrils, seeping into every pore, gumming up his swollen, blackened tongue and parched throat, making it hard to swallow around the tiny pebble he held beneath his tongue.

  As he watched, the horse bearing McAfferty’s body suddenly side-stepped, pulling at the reins Scratch was holding—yanking them right out of his hand. Before he could get his own legs to respond, to kick his mount into motion, Asa’s horse was lumbering away, rolling into a clumsy lope with that deadweight of the trapper slung sacklike over its saddle.

  Much as he might want to keep making for the distant mountains, Bass let his horse have its head as he followed vainly behind McAfferty’s animals. In their midst waltzed his ever-loving Hannah, her loads shimmying from side to side as she struggled to keep her footing on the uneven sands.

  Wide-eyed were every one of the creatures, their dust-caked nostrils swelling all the bigger as they loped on yard after yard up a long, low rise toward a band of striated white and ocher bluffs looming in the middistance.

  Up ahead of him some fifty yards at the top of that rise, he watched Asa’s body slipping to the off side, spilling headfirst onto the hard ground after the horse took another half-dozen steps. His body cartwheeled away from the hooves and came to rest on its back.

  Struggling to stop his own resistant mount, yanking back repeatedly on the reins to get it halted, Bass had barely begun to swing his offhand leg over the saddle when the horse suddenly bolted, yanking his hands from the braided loop of rawhide, snatching the big cottonwood stirrup from his left moccasin and spilling him onto his hip.

  Dazed, Scratch crawled to his knees and crabbed over to his partner.

  “As-Asa,” he croaked, his voice disused in those last dry hours of the chase.

  Gripping McAfferty’s chin in one hand, he pulled off the sweat-soaked hat and shook the white head.

  “‘I am forgotten as a dead man out of mind: I am like a broken vessel,’” he gasped as Bass’s shadow came over his face. “Figgered to lay here till I was dead, Mr. Bass.”

  “You ain’t dead.”

  “I can see by the looks of your face you ain’t St. Peter waiting for me at the gates of heaven neither.”

  Bass watched McAfferty’s eyes close, then flutter open again in the fading light as day slowly gave way to night. “Sundown, Asa.”

  “What happened?”

  Scratch looked up. “Animals bolted on us.”

  “Might as well be dead now. No horses. Been this long, and no horses.”

  “You been out of your mind, Asa,” he explained. “We been … been covering ground.”

  “Don’t matter, I s’pose. ’Thout them horses,” he whispered wearily. “‘For my life is spent with grief, and my year with sighing: my strength faileth because of mine iniquity, and my bones are consumed.’”

  How he wished McAfferty wouldn’t keep on spouting about their being without horses now. Peering behind them, Bass declared, “I don’t see nothing. Maybe they give up.”

  “’Pache don’t give up,” said the cracked, swollen lips. “We’re in a fix anyways you set your sights,” Bass admitted as he rocked up onto one knee and started to stand. “Damp powder and no way to dry it, that’s our fix here and now.”

  “Leave me,” McAfferty demanded. “Find some water.”

  “Night’s coming on. Ain’t gonna leave you—”

  “Best leave me when it gets dark.”

  He brooded on that, again measuring horizon after horizon, then brought his eyes back to that bluff ahead of them where the rise of land lay smeared in contrasting layers
. “Maybeso I’ll figger to go see where them horses run off to. Foller tracks. Catch one up. Come back for you.”

  “‘Give us help from trouble: for vain is the help of man,’ Mr. Bass.”

  Scratch started to rise onto the other leg, painfully. “You rest. I’ll … find us some water.”

  “Get water or there ain’t no sense coming back for me.”

  Something strange in the voice yanked him back to stare down at McAfferty’s face once more. There was a new, distant look in those dust-caked eyes. The haunted look of a man teetering on the precipice of the eternal and staring into the bottomless void at the instant his feet were about to give way.

  Titus briefly touched Asa’s shoulder, laying his hand there in the hollow, where he swore he could feel the rattle of each of McAfferty’s shallow breaths.

  “I’ll be back,” he whispered. “Shortly.”

  After watching the eyes close within that dark, sunburned face, Bass struggled back onto his wobbly legs, uncertain of each step as he commanded his feet to shuffle forward beneath his weight. Yard by painful yard he slowly ascended what remained of the gentle slope toward that rise from where he figured he might look over enough ground to spot the runaway animals disappearing toward the striated bluff, its hues beginning to darken as the light continued to fade from the desert sky.

  A soft breeze met him in the face as he neared the top of the slope. Something more than a choking, sand-dry wind—bearing with it a hint of some new scent on that warm air as he dragged it into his nostrils.

  At the top his legs stopped beneath him suddenly of their own accord. It was better than lunging on over, only to have to come back up, he figured. His eyes began to descend to the base of the bluff as he drew in another of those mercifully blessed breaths of that new air. Then spotted the five animals below him.

  No more than three hundred yards away at the bottom of the gentle slope, they stood among a scattered profusion of belly-high brush and boulders that had tumbled from the side of the nearby sandstone bluff. At least the animals had found some cover for the two of them to hole up in—someplace where they could make it a little tougher for the Apache to get at them than it would be out on the open flat.