“Oh, shit,” Fric said, his face falling.
But when we bellied up over the ridge, we saw that it was one of our own hunting parties—Hunk and Korti were gutting the deer, while three of the older men whose names I could never remember sat their horses and looked glum. I thought of them all as Grumpy, from the Seven Dwarfs. Their expressions didn’t change even when Fric and I came whooping down the slope toward them, skidding and falling in the snowdrifts in our relief at finding friends. Hunk, who had stripped off his shirt for the messy business of cutting the deer’s windpipe from the inside, withdrew his arm from the steaming chest cavity and stood up bare-chested, reaching for his rifle. He was red to the shoulder, his arm studded with gleaming, purple-black clots of the deer’s shattered lungs, and his stubble-bearded face looked deadly. But it relaxed into a grin at the moment he recognized us. It suddenly struck me as funny that I should be running with joy toward so savage and gruesome a figure—running away from my own father into the protective embrace of a bloodstained bandit. It must have been hysteria, because I couldn’t stop laughing even while Fric was telling them about Frac’s death, and the Bear God who was stalking us all.
We hopscotched back to Ratty’s camp, always leaving two men in ambush on our backtrail as the rest of us rode cautiously ahead in stages, then waited in a defensive perimeter while the rear guard caught up. Hunk led us on a sinuous course that kept us in the open as much as possible, so that we could steer clear of the most obvious ambush sites and keep our backtrail in view as long as possible. For most of that bright, tense afternoon it seemed that his precautions were unnecessary. We saw no sign of Tilkut, and I began to hope that maybe he had satisfied his lust for revenge back there at the dump. But then, just as we were nearing camp, he killed two of the Grumpys who had been left as rear guards, and we never even heard him do it.
We had waited on a knoll not far from camp for the Grumpys to catch up. When they didn’t show after about half an hour, Hunk ordered us to fan out and retrace our track, very cautiously. We moved back at a painful crouch, slow, our rifles at high port, locked and loaded. Back where the Grumpys had set their ambush, we found a wide blood trail in the snow, and we followed it down a gully to a big snowdrift. The bodies of the two Grumpys were stuck head-down into the drift, with only their limp, rag-wrapped, moccasined legs protruding. The bodies felt strangely light as we dragged them out of the snow, and then we saw why. They were headless.
Hunk studied the single set of tracks that led away from the bodies, but at that moment none of us was brave enough to follow it out. Our courage had frozen like the blood on those raw stumps. Fric and I dragged the bodies back to the place where we had picketed the ponies while Hunk, Korti, and the surviving Grumpy fanned out around us, ready to return fire. As we approached the knoll, we could hear the ponies whinnying to one another in that strident tone they use when they’re scared or hurt. Near the top of the rise, two faces stared at us —the faces of the dead Grumpys. The heads were stuck on stakes just over the rim of the hill, so that they were glaring down at us as we climbed, their mouths glummer than ever above the stiff, red roaches of their bloody, frozen beards.
All the horses had been hamstrung, except for the packhorse that had carried the butchered deer meat, and that horse was gone. Hunk methodically shot the crippled ponies, and we gutted them out, so that at least their meat would not go to waste. I unlashed the gas cans from my pony before Hunk shot him. Then we hiked, leg-weary and numb with cold or fear, down into camp. It was dark when we got there.
Ratnose took the news calmly enough. He even smiled during Fries account of how Frac had been tortured—a knowing, nodding grin—and flicked his eye in my direction. “That Tilkut sounds like a bad operator, hey, Runner?” he said. It was the first notice he had taken of me since the night with Twigan, and I relaxed a bit for the first time since then. But not for long.
“I wonder what brings him to us, don’t you, Runner? Could it be that he’s queer for toy dump trucks, the way you were when you first joined our merry band? Or does he covet our women? Could it be something that simple?” He laughed his croaking kingfisher laugh.
“Well, there’s nothing we can do about him tonight: no moon; we couldn’t track him safely in this kind of darkness. And the snow will still be there tomorrow. We’ll post a heavy watch tonight and take after him first thing in the morning.” Ratnose fingered the scar on his throat, coughing delicately as he often did when the old wound bothered him. “And when we catch him, we’ll have some entertainment along with our revenge.”
I got out of Ratty’s cave as quickly as I could after the meeting broke up and took the two cans of gasoline down to the shed where the Husky was parked. I still hadn’t seen Twigan since our return—actually, I’d been too uptight and excited to look for her in the crowd—but she showed up while I was pouring gas and oil into the bike’s tank. Even in the half-light of the campfires I could see that she had been beaten up. Her right eye was black, and her nose looked puffy. Her upper lip was thick and scabbed.
“Hey,” I said as she sidled into the shed, her eyes downcast, tentative, as was her style. I slipped my hand under her long, cool hair and rested it on the nape of her neck. Her neck was warm and smooth, almost fragile.
“I skinned out the bear like you told me, Runner,” she said.
“The hide is drying, but with the storm and all, it is taking longer than I . . .”
“Cut it out,” I said. I pulled her up close to me, feeling the knots in my stomach loosening as her body came up against mine. Strange, I thought: when I came here last year, she was just my height; now I’m a head taller than she is.
“Who beat you up?”
“Nobody. I fell down a cliff during the blizzard.”
“Come on,” I said, “was it Blondie, or was it . . . him?”
Tm so sorry about Frac dying,” she said. “I missed you while you were gone, Runner.”
“If it was Blondie, I’ll kick her ass up to her shoulder blades.”
She leaned back and looked up at me, her teeth shining under the fat lip.
“And what if it was Ratty?”
“I’d still do it,” I said finally. “But I’d have to wait awhile and pick my shot.” She laughed, but it was a kindly laugh.
I finished fueling the bike, and then we walked up to the cave that Fric and Frac had shared. It was totally dark inside. When I lit the fat lamp, I saw Fric lying in his bunk, staring up at the roof. He pretended that we weren’t there. The air in the cave smelled sickly sweet with grass fumes, and there were three thick roaches spread fanwise in the stone ashtray that rested on Fric’s belly.
“You hungry?” I asked him. He didn’t say anything.
“Well, Twigan will fix us something to eat. I’d like to stay here tonight, if it’s okay with you.”
“Okay,” he said slowly. After a while he giggled.
Twigan went down to the communal cookpot and came back with a pail of steaming-hot stew. Then she sliced some bread from a dark loaf she had under her arm. While she ladled the stew into a couple of skull bowls, Fric sat up; the smell of the stew must have finally penetrated his dopey haze. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was, and I scoffed down two bowls, along with half the loaf of bread. The stew was delicious, the meat tender and sweet.
“Jeezus that’s good,” I said at last. “What is it?”
“Puppy meat,” Twigan said. “While you were gone, Ratnose took up a new sport. He uses that big fly rod he got from the Indian, Johny Black, and he casts for puppies. When he hooks one, he plays it in like you would a big salmon and then strangles it for the stewpot. He says we have too many puppies anyway, and he needs the practice for the fishing season.”
Fric groaned and pushed his bowl aside, then rolled another bomber.
40
OUR TRACKING PARTY, twenty men strong, rode out of camp at first light. During the night the wind had veered around to the southeast, and now you could smell summer on it—warm,
wet, and woody. The sky was clear, and we would have to work fast, because by the time the sun reached noon the snow would all be gone from the south-facing slopes, and with it the Bear God’s tracks. At the site of the previous days massacre, Ratnose ordered Beppo and five other men to butcher out the horses and then pack the meat, along with the bodies of the two dead Grumpys, back to camp. A skunk had been there during the night, and both heads were already badly gnawed.
“I want Runner and Hunk on the point,” Ratnose told us as our horses milled around, twitchy at the smell of death. “You two are our best riflemen, and we may just get a long shot somewhere up ahead. I want the automatic weapons at the middle of the column, ready to spread out in case we’re flanked or enfiladed. What weapons does he have besides the BAR?”
“Probably grenades,” Fric said. “We found plenty of them at the dump.”
“He could have a light mortar, too,” I said. “I saw a couple of cases of mortar rounds in one of the Quonsets.”
“If he had a mortar, he’d probably already have dumped a few rounds into camp,” Ratnose said. “And packing a mortar along would require another horse, most likely, which would slow him down some. If he does have one, he’ll be planning to take a stand somewhere and drive us into a perimeter defense, then unload on us before we can scatter. One man against a dozen: he wouldn’t stand a chance.”
Ratty had his eye on me, looking for an objection, but I kept quiet. Hunk and I moved down off the knoll, where Beppo’s meat saws were already growling, and followed the tracks of the man and the packhorse down into a stand of lodgepole pines. There we found where he’d tethered his riding horse. He had wasted no time, but had mounted up and lined it on down the draw toward the southwest. With the warming effect of the wind, the tracks were already melting into plate-sized depressions with soft, rounded edges—easy to follow. We rode about a hundred yards ahead of the main body. It was warm so I took off my hat and stuffed it into a saddlebag. That way, I thought, if he is up there waiting to zap us, he might recognize me and not shoot.
Though I really doubted that he could recognize me now. I had grown a lot in the months since I ran away. My whiskers had come in, and now I wore a seedy black beard and moustache. My hair was shoulder-length and clubbed back with a strip of rawhide. Wind and sun had burned me darker than I had ever been back home, or even on the Hassayampa in midsummer. I was dressed all in skins, like the rest of Ratty’s men. Even up close, he would be hard put to recognize me as his only begotten son: my nose, which had been broken in that crazy ride on the bronco, lay over to one side under a pronounced bump. My voice was different, too—not just naturally deeper, but gravelly: the result of my unconscious imitation of Ratnose. And my carriage had changed as well. I rode and walked with a mountain man’s painful slouch—the result of too much time on horseback and of the many sprains and bruises picked up as a matter of course in that kind of a life. If he shot me out of the saddle for a bandit, I couldn’t really blame him. Because I was one.
Judging by his tracks, though, it looked like ambush was the last thing on his mind. He had headed straight down through the hills toward the high desert, moving at a trot most of the time and pushing his horses into a canter on the few level stretches.
“Tilkut have good weather nose,” Hunk said after an hour or so of tracking. “Afraid we track him out if stay close with snow down. Smell warm wind coming. Ride out far, far from camp, then come back in when ground clear.”
Already the snow was nearly gone. The sun was past the equinox, hard and hot. We saw crocuses flowering through the thin white crust on the southerly slopes, and the shadbushes along the streams were fat with flowers about to burst. Dwarf willow and osier stitched the wet spots yellow and red, and there were waterfowl on all the sloughs—vast, cackling, barking, squalling sheets of ducks and geese, swirling up into the air like multicolored feathery tornadoes as we trotted past. The grouse were already drumming up on the ridges, and from time to time they spooked us with their sudden, chain-saw roar. Most of the white was gone from the rock ptarmigan. At the lower levels, we saw suckers as long as a man’s leg bellying their way up the muddy riffles to spawn.
“Ah, yes, Runner, the cruellest month,” said Ratnose as we halted, about noon. He wheeled his pony up next to mine and scrutinized the barely visible track. The sun had sucked up the snow, and already the faint arcs of the horseshoes were crumbling into caked mud. “Memory and desire . . . I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” He smiled his brown little smile at me and slapped me on the shoulder. “But you don’t know Eliot, do you? I’m remiss in your education. I should send you back to school. How would you like that?”
“This is school enough for me,” I said.
“But your father wouldn’t agree to that, would he? Your father wouldn’t like to see you out here riding with a bunch of nasty outlaws. Your father wouldn’t like to think of you scrambling your brains on cannabis and spending your nights diddling a thirteen-year-old whore? Living on a diet of bugs and dog meat? Getting shot at by a psychopathic sniper? Going for days on end without brushing your teeth or changing your underwear? Hey?”
“I don’t think he would mind it one bit,” I said, feeling stiff and flushed with anger all at once. “He always thought I was too soft.”
We rode out into the desert, following the trail that grew ever fainter. I had never been this far south of camp before. To our right was the low chain of hills that marked the course of the Hassayampa. Behind us, the Altyn Tagh rose like a blue-black wall topped with white. Ahead of us, about a day’s ride, another ridge of hills erupted from the flats—dry hills, dark and treeless, with no snow on the crest. Off to our left, the desert sloped flat into a tan and featureless infinity.
Soon the mud gave way to long stretches of wind-smoothed rock, and we had to circle outward, quartering to pick up the odd set of hoof prints. The warm wind from the southeast grew hotter, with grit in its teeth. We rode with our hat brims down and our eyes squinched tight. Then we lost the trail completely.
“He’ll need water, so he must be swinging toward the river,” Fric said.
“There’s water in the Jawbone this time of year,” Ratnose said, pointing to the bare hills due south of us. “If you know where to look.”
“Yeah, but does he know that?”
“We have to assume so. And the Jawbone is honeycombed with caves—very good defensive ground. During daylight, he can see anything coming from this direction for miles. And he has plenty of meat.”
“So what do we do?”
“We go in there and root him out.”
41
WE PUSHED ON until well after dark, eating and dozing in the saddle, swinging to the west after sundown so that we might intercept the edge of the Jawbone at the point where it came closest to the Hassayampa. When the ground began to rise, Ratty sent Hunk ahead to find a wadi where we could hole up for the night. He found one that had a little surface water in it. We dug a shallow well for the horses and then made a fireless camp, rolling up in our saddle blankets against the wind, which had lost all its warmth with the setting of the sun. The night sky was moonless, starless, humming with a sandy wind that felt out the gaps and seams of our blankets as cleverly as a pickpocket. Still, it had been a hard day’s ride under the blinding sun, with the tension building all the way, and soon most of the band were snoring. I dozed off myself, fitfully, waking from time to time with a start from some nightmare which immediately faded from my consciousness. Around about midnight, I snapped awake again, but this time the nightmare was real: Ratnose was standing over me, grinning.
“Let’s take a walk, Runner,” he whispered. “Just you and I and the wind.”
We walked down the wadi and out into the flatland, Ratnose leading the way. Behind us the Jawbone rose, blurred through the grit in my eyes so that it appeared as some low black cloud, spreading against the charcoal sky. Ratnose stopped in the lee of a boulder and sat down carefully.
“There are scorp
ions out here,” he said, “and the worst sort of snakes. But they aren’t as mean as what’s up there.” And he gestured at the Jawbone. “Who is he, Runner?”
I said nothing. The wind worked its fingers down the nape of my neck and sandpapered my spine.
“Come on, Runaway, I asked you a question.”
Nothing.
“All right, let me suppose, then.” He reached behind him and pulled his toadstabber; I caught the glint of it in the murky light. He began to clean his fingernails, his head down and his voice as grating as the wind. “Let me suppose that a man and his boy are coming up the Hassayampa, up from the cities on a hunting-and-fishing expedition. Let me suppose that the man is wise, that he has heard of Ratanous, of the bandit’s evil ways. Let me suppose as well that the man has even met Ratanous—shot at him, hurt him, killed some of his men. But that was long ago, and the man assumes Ratanous is dead, or gone, or both.
“But let me suppose that the higher he gets on the river, the weaker this assumption grows. After all, the river has a way of eroding false assumptions, doesn’t it, Runner? It rots them like meat in warm water and flushes them away. So the man waxes fearful. Ratnose is there, Ratnose is around him, somewhere. Ratnose has designs on the man’s life. Or perhaps on the life of his son. The man decides to press his luck no further. He will leave the Hassayampa.
“But the boy doesn’t want to leave—not just yet. He knows nothing of Ratnose, or perhaps he knows only the good things about Ratnose—that Ratnose is wild, willful, free, mean, all-knowing . . .”
“Fuck you,” I said. “I never thought you were all-knowing.”
“Aha! The Runaway speaks! What did you think of me, then?”
Nothing.
“Just so. But you were interested, curious, compelled to learn more about this romantic bandit leader of whom naught but ill was spoken. And when the Indian stole your things and sold them to Ratnose, you decided to continue even though your father wanted to go home. Laudable pluck, Runner. Well done! You walked right into my trap.”
Blood Sport Page 17
