It was a hard ride across the ridges of Crook’s Chiricahua trail, but late in the afternoon of our first day out of Carretas, we found the trail to Juh’s stronghold. We rode for the stronghold, looking for the trail Kitsizil Lichoo’ had followed until, as the sun was hiding behind the western Sierras and setting the sky on fire with reds, oranges, and purples, we found a deep canyon with good water and camped.
After we ate and talked awhile, I sat smoking and cleaning my rifle near the fire when Yibá asked to join me, and I told him I was glad for his company. There were many frogs and insects near the water, and their night sounds made a comforting chorus. Up on the ridge above us Coyote called for his brothers, and Bat darted after insects drawn to the fire.
Yibá stared in the fire and said, “The war trail is a hard one.”
I nodded as I finished oiling my rifle. “Yes, a hard one. It’s why Apaches train their young from an early age to endure suffering, to be strong, and to outlast their enemies. You see this now?”
“Yes, clearly. I can see I’m with strong warriors on this trail. I am strong but miss my mother and sister. Is this a sign I am weak?”
“You are not weak, Yibá. I miss my wife and child. This trip is the way we protect them. This is a good trip for you to learn all the things a warrior needs to know on the warpath.”
“I have learned much. Even your Indah friend, Roofoos Peak, teaches me much. Do you think we’ll get to the Elias camp before the witch?”
“No. The witch was gone four or five days before we came to his hacienda. We can only gain two, maybe three days on him. But, I don’t think he’ll catch Elias in his camp. Elias knows he’ll probably come, so I think Elias has moved to another camping place the witch doesn’t know and is watching for him. He has more warriors than the witch, but he won’t fight him. He’s afraid the witch has the power of demons and will curse his people if they fight. Elias will just stay out of the witch’s way.”
“Then why do we go to Elias? The witch will have come and gone. There’s nothing we can do.”
I shook my head. “There’s much we can learn. There are only two trails into the canyon camp of Elias. We’ve gained two or three days on the witch. If he stays a day at the old Elias camp, we’ll gain another. We’ll have a fresh pesh líí’beshkee’é trail to follow when he leaves Elias’s camp. If he comes back down the trail, we’ll follow and can ambush him. If he takes the other trail out of Elias’s camp, we’ll find Elias and learn where the witch is heading. Elias watches him come and go. Elias knows.”
Yibá nodded and stared into the fire while we listened to the frogs’ and insects’ songs and the water burbling in the stream. After a while, he said, “A personal question for Yellow Boy?”
“Speak. I’ll answer.”
Yibá looked at me as a child might when asking his father or mother for something from the sweet jar at Blazer’s store. “If I do well on this raid, you and the others have said I will be welcomed as a warrior. In a year or two, I’ll have enough ponies for a wife. Soon Moon on the Water will have her Haheh and be ready to take a man. Do you think Maria would let Moon accept ponies from me? If Maria accepted my ponies, and if Moon accepted me, we would be brothers.”
I had to look at the stars and pretend thought to keep from smiling. “There are many paths in your words. I haven’t seen Maria face-to-face since Juanita became my wife. But I know Juanita tells me that Maria thinks good things about all the boys and men now in our camp. How will you get your ponies for Moon? You will need four, maybe five. Moon is a hard worker, pleasant on the eyes, and built for having babies. She’ll bring a high price for her mother.”
“I’ll hunt and trap and maybe work at the sow meal (saw mill) for Blazer, trade up for better ponies, and maybe even gamble a little.”
“Be careful of the gambling. You can win big or lose much in the blink of an eye. Who will you ask to stand for you with Maria? I can’t look at her.”
“I’ve asked Beela-chezzi. He says he will when the time comes, if I still want him.”
“Enjuh. Beela-chezzi is a great warrior. He’ll do well for you. After Moon has her Haheh, dance with her in the round dances, and you’ll know soon enough if she’s right for you. Give her a good present after you dance, and she’ll know you’re a strong warrior, worthy of her consideration. Who knows? Perhaps we’ll be brothers. It will be a good thing if we are.”
The teeth in Yibá’s smile were brighter than the moon. “And if we are, will you teach me to shoot?”
I laughed. “I’ll teach you even if we are not brothers.”
The next day, at the time of shortest shadows, our trail crossed the trail Kitsizil Lichoo’ used to lead us to Elias’s camp. In the time it takes the sun to travel the width of four fingers across the sky, we found the ridge where we had camped on our rides to Elias’s camp. We were less than a day’s ride to the camp of Elias, and tracks and other signs showed that twelve to fifteen warriors had camped under the tall trees two or three nights or days earlier. Kah, looking through camp, waved me to come to a thin spot of grass where a little sunlight fell between the tall pine trees. He pointed at a track with his bow and said, “A pesh líí’beshkee’é track. Is it the same as you saw at the hacienda at Carretas?”
I didn’t have to study it. It was exactly the right size and had a minor defect on the inner rim of the pesh just like the other track.
I nodded. “Hmmph. The tracks come from the same shoe.”
We rode on, but sent Kah in front of us to ride back with warning if the witch and his band were coming back our way. The urge to ride faster on the narrow ledge trails was strong, but not strong enough to overcome being careful. We stopped for the night at dusk on top of a high ridge and made a cold, dry camp back in the trees off the trail in case the witch and his band came our way. After rubbing down and hobbling our ponies to graze the few grassy spots under the tall pine trees, we all sat together for warmth and ate the dried food warriors carry on raids.
Nearly all the day glow was gone when Kah made it to the top of our ridge and paused, trying to see what the trail did going down the other side. Beela-chezzi whistled like a googé and Kah turned and rode into the trees where we sat.
He dismounted and, holding his pony’s reins, squatted down beside us. Yibá reached for the reins and led the pony to where the others grazed, rubbed him down, and hobbled him for the night.
Kah said, “The boy is a good apprentice. He’ll be trustworthy on raids.”
He waited until Yibá returned, took a swallow of water, and, smiling, stuck his hand and arm down his long sack of trail food. “The witch passed through Elias’s camp, killed no one, but the camp’s wickiups had been torn apart, big carry baskets chopped to pieces, tall water jugs broken, and meat drying racks were torn down. My guess is he was looking for food. Elias must have known the witch was coming and left with his people. The witch and his warriors ride on down the trail.”
Beela-chezzi grimaced. “Now it becomes a cat-and-mouse game. The witch is in front of us. Unless we can get around him, he can set an ambush and take all our hair when he learns we follow. We must be very careful that he doesn’t see, hear, or catch us.”
Rufus nodded and spat. “Yes, sir, truer words ain’t never been spoke.”
The next day, before shadows were shortest, we sat on our ponies on the high ridge above the canyon where Elias’s camp had been. I handed my reins to Yibá and asked Rufus to cover me since the range into the village was far too long for all but the best of marksmen with a repeating rifle. I practically ran down the trail into the rancheria and began looking for some sign I might find that would tell me where the witch and his band rode.
As I tried to read the truth of the tracks, an old woman, most of her teeth missing, her old face a llano covered with wrinkles, stuck her head out of her hiding place in scrub oak lining the stream banks. When she saw we were Apaches, she came scrambling out of hiding to get close enough to give us a good look over.
&
nbsp; “You search for Sangre del Diablo? He’s not here. He rode away yesterday. Soon Elias will lead the people back.”
“What happened here, Grandmother?”
“You don’t ride with Sangre del Diablo and his Comanches?”
“No. I kill witches. Sangre del Diablo must die.”
“Yes, yes, he is a witch and must die. Three suns ago, a rider came galloping into our camp and told us an evil demon leading Comanches and Nakai-yes was coming. Elias knew this was trouble and told us all to go to the cave downstream and wait until he led us back.
“I’m an old woman. It’s too hard for me to walk to the cave. I can disappear as good as any other Apache. I waited here to see this Sangre del Diablo. When he and his warriors came to our camp, he became very angry. He wanted Elias, but Elias had disappeared. Elias is smart like Coyote. It takes a warrior smarter and more skilled than Sangre del Diablo to catch Elias and his people.”
I smiled. “Where did this witch go, Grandmother? Did you hear or see anything that might help us find him?”
She giggled, sounding girlish, but showing no more than three or four nearly black teeth in her bare gums. “Oh, yes, I heard him. He stood over there,” she said and pointed her shaking, gnarled old fingers at a big boulder near Elias’s council place. “He made a big ceremony, standing on that rock to decide what to do. He says his Power tells him to go to another Indeh rancheria hidden south of here on the Río Piedras Verdes near a Nakai-yi village. He says they can take many scalps and new slaves in both villages. The slaves they can take to Casas Grandes for much pesh-klitso (literally, yellow iron—gold). I know this place. We’ve traded meat for corn and beans there. They’re not Apaches, but it is well hidden, and they have good fighters. He’ll never find it.”
“How far is the rancheria, Grandmother?”
“A day down the trail if a warrior knows the way and rides hard.”
CHAPTER 33
SLAVES AND SCALPS
We rode as fast as we dared, but it took us nearly a sun and half the next one to follow the witch’s trail to the Indeh village on the Río Piedras Verdes. At the time of shortest shadows on the second day, we saw a black, smudgy plume of smoke rising high above the edges of a deep distant canyon until it disappeared in the wind. I knew what we would find under that smoke, for I had seen the work of Sangre del Diablo and his band on my own people, and its memory made my guts clinch like I had eaten bad meat and needed to vomit. I stopped my pony and pulled open the Shináá Cho. I could see a second plume, stronger and blacker than the one from the canyon, and maybe eight fingers’ ride across the canyon from the first plume. The second plume, I believed, must be from the Nakai-yi village.
I scanned the ridges above the twisting canyon and saw no one. The witch’s band had to be driving their captives along the river. We could get ahead of him by the next sun if we stuck to the ridges above the river.
By the time we rode down into the river canyon and into the smoking rancheria, the sun had fallen three hand widths from the top of its trail toward the western horizon. The rancheria had been Opata, not Apache. It made no difference to the witch, or to the Nakai-yes who paid him, as long as the scalps looked like they had been torn from Apaches. Bodies of men in their prime and the old lay scattered in drying pools of blood turning the sand black amid the debris of lodges reduced to piles of smoking ashes. The men, all shot more than once, lay facedown in the sand or on their backs staring with lifeless eyes at the darkening, turquoise sky, the few surviving their wounds, tortured and gutted, their privates slashed off and stuffed in their mouths. The old ones had their throats cut. All the bodies lay twisted and scalped, but I saw no women or children. Flies gathered in great hoards on the bloody, hairless heads. Great black birds had already begun to feed on some and others, like a gathering thundercloud, wheeled high, darkening the sky, looking for choice meals as the bodies lying in the hot sun out of the shadows of the canyon walls had already started to swell and stink.
I heard Rufus mutter, “Great God! We got to kill those demon bastards, ever damn one of ’em.”
Kah and Beela-chezzi sat their horses and stared at the carnage. Killing didn’t bother either one of them, but a torturous massacre of grandfathers and grandmothers and the slaughter of their fighting men, all killed for their hair, made the massacre an evil far beyond normal warfare: a witch’s evil, something to be despised. Yibá sat his pony, looking sick, as if he had eaten bad meat.
I knew my Mescalero friends would never touch a body, unless it was a relative’s. I said to Rufus, “Will you help me gather and burn the bodies? My friends cannot. They fear Ghost Sickness.”
He nodded, reaching in his vest pocket for a twist of tobacco. He cut a plug, popped it in his mouth, and started to chew. “Shore, I’ll help ya. I seen a pile of wood and some coal oil by a hut over yonder that ought to get a hot fire started. Ghost Sickness ain’t never bothered me none. Send yore friends downriver a little way to wash the stink of the day off, and we’ll get to work.”
As the sun fell behind the jagged horizon, we finished gathering the bodies and turned them into ashes with hot, roaring fires started with the burning oil and wood. The burning bodies smelled worse than those rotting in the sun, and the hot grease from them collected in glistening pools, becoming solid on the thirsty sand as it cooled. At least the ashes of those we burned returned to the land, and the black birds would have to look elsewhere to fill their hunger. Perhaps, I thought, tomorrow if I’m lucky I’ll take their revenge on this evil and give the black birds their supper.
Rufus and I washed in the river and purified ourselves in the smoke of sage we’d found in a basket near a rancheria sweat lodge. Beela-chezzi, Kah, and Yibá waited downstream for us to eat and to talk about attacking the witch’s band.
The night chorus of insects and frogs began close to the river in the deep shadows of the canyon. We ate in silence, each lost in his thoughts about the evil he had seen. Beela-chezzi finished his meal and took a long swallow of water from an army canteen Rufus had given him. He rubbed the back of his hand across his wet lips and said, “I studied the tracks out of here while you worked. There are maybe ten Comanches and five banditos herding about ten women and maybe fifteen little ones. The oldest cannot be more than ten harvests. It also looks like maybe ten pack animals are loaded with loot and supplies. It’s a big crowd to herd down this river. They’ll move slow.”
Back up the river, we could hear wolves howling and fighting in the rancheria over anything they found to eat. The smell of fresh blood in the sand, charred bones, and melted fat must have been driving them crazy. Beela-chezzi listened to them for a moment, shook his head, and continued.
“With all the women and children, I think the witch will herd them downstream to the llano for a trail straight for Casas Grandes. Just like the old woman at Elias’s camp said. Even with the moon, it’s too dark to move in that canyon without risking the captives getting hurt, and that would cost them money at the slave market. They’ll stop when it’s dark and make fires. The canyon walls are so steep the slaves can’t get away with two or three guards on either end of the camp. The witch will make his Comanches and banditos leave the women alone in order to keep their value in the houses of women or the slave market. They’ll have no fiesta or whiskey until after they get to Casas Grandes where they can spend their scalp and slave money on supplies, whiskey, and women. The Comanches and banditos are three times our number. We must be careful killing these demons, get them in a trap where they can’t escape, and kill them, every one.”
I nodded and pulled out a cigarro. We smoked to the four directions, and then I said, “Beela-chezzi speaks wise words. What does Kah think?”
Kah lay back on his elbows and, looking at the stars, made a face and shook his head. “It is as Beela-chezzi says, we must be careful when we try to kill these demons, or they’ll kill us. I want to live to see the child Deer Woman gives me.”
Rufus spat, worked his jaws some more, and sa
id, “Beela-chezzi has it about right. The fastest way for that damned witch to git them captives outta here safe is to stay on the river, and they’re gonna have to stop at night. We need to ride on the tops of the ridges and keep outta sight while we look for a good, narrow ambush spot down in that there canyon. I ’spect we’re gonna have to split up. Two of us got to git down in the canyon behind ’em, and two has to git in front of ’em, and we got to pick a spot where there ain’t gonna be much cover for ’em. We oughta figure out where our ambush is gonna be and ride for it. We got to git up on the ridge above the canyon tonight and ride downstream as far as we can in front of ’em so we can ride back toward ’em when they’s enough light to find a place for ambushin’ ’em.”
Beela-chezzi, Kah, and I were all nodding our heads when Rufus finished.
Yibá had our horses and mule watered, fed, and ready to ride. We left the smoldering, stinking rancheria made desolate by Sangre del Diablo, its remains to stay forever in our memories, and the need for vengeance burned in our spirits. Up on the high ridge above us, we followed the canyon rim as far as we could before the dawn came.
We saw and passed around the captives and the witch’s fires down in the canyon before the moon was near the top of its trail across the stars. It was very hard to see into the canyon with moonlight shadows covering most of the river. Off to the west clouds had gathered and occasional arrows of lightning flew between them. We rode until the moon was about four hands above the edge of the mountains (about 2 a.m.) and then stopped to rest on a little grassy rise back from the edge of the canyon. The lightning arrows had grown stronger but were so far away we couldn’t hear the Wind spirits or Thunder People. We hobbled our horses and mules so they could graze. Kah told us he would keep watch until dawn. We wrapped in our blankets near a thicket of junipers, the pine smell from their sap filling the warm air.
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