Blood of the Devil

by W. Michael Farmer

  The Jicarilla followed Red Pony’s path across the Tularosa Valley and pass through the San Andres Mountains to the great river. On the ride up the great river, many were starving and barely survived on the food they found in the bosque. I think the Blue Coats decided to let them starve after they camped by the great river outside Santa Fe, refused to leave, and demanded the Indah chief give them land in their mountains for their reservation. Santa Fe Indah and Nakai-yes, afraid the Jicarilla might go on the warpath, insisted they be given food and said in one voice and many words that the Indah chief had to find a way to make them move. In four moons, during the Season of Little Eagles, the next harvest, the Indah chief gave the Jicarilla their own reservation in the mountains at a place called Tierra Amarilla.

  When word came to Mescalero of what had happened to the Jicarilla waiting outside Santa Fe, the rest of the Jicarilla packed up, left the reservation, and were soon all gone to Tierra Amarilla. Cowart didn’t try to follow them or bring them back. We Mescalero smiled and danced to see them go, and the Jicarilla laughed and sang all the way home.

  I could find no deer or elk to hunt in the Ghost Face Season after the Jicarilla went north. They had taken nearly all of the big game in the two harvests they had stayed on the reservation. After four hunts where I returned with nothing but rabbits, I worked on my arrows and played with Kicking Wren while Juanita and Moon sat by the flickering orange and blue fire making baskets. Kicking Wren asked me to make many of the things girl children ask of their fathers. I carved her more dolls so she had a family—a warrior, his women, and their children. I cut a piece of feedbag cloth so she could wrap it around little lodge poles she cut from arrow wood to make a tipi for her doll family.

  While Juanita and Moon worked on their baskets and I my arrows and other weapons, Kicking Wren played between Juanita and me with the toys I made her. I asked her, “Kicking Wren, what will you give your man for his evening meal tonight?” She would grin shyly and whisper, “Don’t tell him, Father. It’s a surprise. I have mesquite bread, roast deer, beans, and potatoes. Then we will have a big circle dance.” I soon learned her menu was usually the same as Juanita’s.

  One day, I noticed she didn’t have the father doll I had made for her, and her baby was wrapped warmly in a moss bed she had made. As I smoothed and straightened an arrow shaft, I said, “Wren, is your man gone off hunting today? Do you need meat?” She looked at the tipi floor and slowly shook her head. “My man goes to bring a di-yen. Our baby is sick. It’s too hot.”

  I was surprised that Kicking Wren knew about sickness or di-yens curing anything. Juanita looked at her and raised a questioning eyebrow, too. I said, “How do you know your baby needs a di-yen? She looks good to me.”

  She picked the doll up out of its moss and held it to her chest as though to feed it and said, “I dreamed she was sick. I dreamed she went to the Happy Land before my man came with a di-yen.”

  I thought, This child should not be having dreams like that. I said, “Do you want me to sing a di-yen song for your baby and make it well?”

  She smiled, “Yes, please, Father. My man may not get back in time.”

  I put aside my arrow work and went through the motions of a di-yen sing for someone with fever. I chanted and sang, but used unintelligible words as I made up the ceremony. Juanita and Moon sat back and continued their basket making, but they weren’t happy. Making up a di-yen ceremony, especially if you were not a di-yen, could lead to trouble. Sometimes a di-yen might attack you. I knew it, but I didn’t think there would be any trouble because it all took place inside our tipi. No one else would know.

  When I finished chanting over the doll, I gave it back to Kicking Wren and said, “Daughter, your baby is sick no more.” Her laughter of delight lit up the tipi. Even Juanita and Moon smiled, and I thought, I wish all di-yens were this successful.

  The next day was warmer than it had been in a couple of moons and the children were out of the tipis playing in the snow and bright sunlight. It was a fine time to hunt, even if we found only rabbits. I took my brother, Little Rabbit, who had passed seven harvests, out of the children’s games and took him to hunt up on the ridge that led to the Rinconada. With my bow, we took four rabbits and divided them equally between us. I showed Little Rabbit how Sons-ee-ah-ray liked them dressed for her fire. When we returned to her tipi, she was very complimentary of her youngest son and said one day he would be a great hunter, for I taught him well.

  When I entered my tipi, I didn’t hear the happy talk I usually heard between Juanita and Kicking Wren. They sat together wrapped in a blanket staring into the fire, saying nothing. I had never seen my woman and daughter act this way before. I frowned and pointed my nose at them. “What has happened? Are you hurt or insulted?”

  Kicking Wren pulled a piece of the blanket over to hide all but her eyes from me. Juanita shook her head and pointed at a parfleche sitting on the ground across the fire from them. “Look and see.”

  I laid my blanket aside, took off my coat, and put my bow away before I squatted by the parfleche and opened the lid and saw a carved wooden figure. It was a roosting bird of some kind, its height about the width of my hand. I picked it up and looked at it in the firelight and wavering shadows. My hand trembled when I realized it was an owl. My People believed live owls carried the ghosts of evil men. I threw the carving in the fire and watched it flare up and quickly burn with a bright yellow and orange flame. I waited until it burned no more and broke its cinder apart until there was nothing at all left of it.

  It had turned dark outside, and I could hear sounds from other tipis of the People having an evening meal. I said to both of them, “Where did you find this?”

  Juanita looked at Kicking Wren, who had dropped the blanket covering her face and looked surprised that I had burnt the carving. Kicking Wren said in her soft little voice, “I showed it to Mother, and she took it away from me.”

  “But, where did you find it?”

  “I was playing with the others in the pine straw under the tall trees, and we found a warrior watching us play. He sat leaning against one of the trees that stood away from the others.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know. I’d never seen him before.”

  “What did he want? What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘Who is the child of Killer of Witches?’

  “I said, ‘I am! He’s a great warrior.’

  “He smiled and said, ‘I have a gift for you.’ He reached in his medicine bag, pulled out that carving, and gave it to me. He said it was for my dolls to have because you carved them for me, and he had carved this for me to go with them. Father, why did you burn the new carving for my dolls?”

  I made a hard face at Kicking Wren, not intending to, but because she had much to learn that Juanita and I had not yet taught her. She bowed her head and looked away, afraid I was angry with her. I stroked her face gently and explained, “Owls are where the ghosts of dead bad men go. The owl brings news of death. Avoid it whenever you can. Don’t listen to its words. The carving is a symbol of death. He is saying he plans to witch us by giving you this symbol of his evil. Tell me what the warrior looked like who gave this to you.”

  Kicking Wren stared at the fire for a few moments. Juanita stood up and left the blanket around Kicking Wren while she began to make our evening meal with the rabbits I had brought.

  Kicking Wren said, “He was wrapped in a black blanket. He had the skin of a cougar across his shoulders, and his bow case and arrow quiver were made from cougar hide, too. There were three long scars side-by-side on top of his left hand that ended on his fingers. His hair was long and gray like Beela-chezzi’s, and he wore it in braids. That is all I remember of him, Father.”

  “Hmmph. I’m sorry I had to burn your carving, little one, but it’s a symbol of evil and would have brought bad things to our tipi. Tomorrow, show me this tree where you saw him, and I’ll try to find him. Remember to always be careful around strangers, even ones who o
ffer you gifts. They may be witches who want to do you evil.”

  She nodded with wide eyes. “Yes, Father. I’ll always do this.”

  The next day Kicking Wren showed me the tree where the children found the unknown warrior. I found his tracks leading up the ridge and followed them. He wore moccasins of a style I had never seen before, very wide at the ball of the foot and quickly narrowing toward the heel. I lost the tracks in the rocks near the top of a high ridge. I circled wide, expecting to pick them up again, but found only cougar tracks following a deer over the ridge toward the reservation.

  Although the Ghost Face Season that harvest did not ache with the cold of the one before, the game driven away by Jicarilla hunting brought a big hungry cougar down from the high mountains to take our ponies and cattle. Several of the camps near the agency had lost one or two animals over a moon’s time. Although not many animals had been killed yet, it was enough to make some people poor without their horses and hungry without their beef.

  Agent Cowart asked Chief Nautzile to send out his best hunter to take the cougar. Nautzile asked several. No one went because Nautzile’s di-yen had told the People that the cougar formed from a shape-shifter who could only die by the hands of a Killer of Witches. I had helped Nautzile several times as a tribal policeman. He knew the story of my Power and that I had killed Sangre del Diablo. The day after I lost the tracks of the warrior who had given Kicking Wren the owl carving, Nautzile and his di-yen, an ancient old medicine man with three teeth and one eye, came to Juanita’s tipi and asked to smoke with me.

  We welcomed them and asked that they warm by the fire and then take a meal with me. They had honored my family and me with their long ride in the Ghost Face wind. I put their horses up out of the wind and fed them with hay the women had cut with long knives Dr. Blazer let us use in the Season of Large Leaves.

  When I returned from taking care of the horses, we sat down together and Juanita and Kicking Wren handed them steaming gourds of roasted meat, wild potatoes, slices of mescal, acorn bread, and nuts and dried juniper berries. Very grateful for the hot food and the coffee flavored with ground piñon nuts, Nautzile and the di-yen let Juanita fill their gourds twice.

  While we ate, we discussed how families camping close to the agency had made it through the season. Cracking a bone for its marrow, Nautzile shook his head and said several older people had gone to the Happy Land, taken by a sickness that wouldn’t let them breathe. He knew this was true. He had seen them before they were taken. The di-yen said in a thin, whispery voice a witch had taken them, but claimed, and I believed him, Cow-art refused to let him say so aloud. Nautzile coughed hard and spat in the fire. He nodded, yes, true, but said nothing else about it.

  When we finished eating, Nautzile had a long coughing spell. I worried he might not have the strength to return to his rancheria or might even die in Juanita’s tipi. When he finally stopped coughing, I pulled out a cigarro, lighted it with splinter from a fire log, and we smoked to the four directions. Nautzile coughed and wheezed as he blew smoke while the wind moaned and rattled the trees over our tipi. After the cigarro came back to me, he said that when he left his tipi, he felt the Ghost Face might take him on this trip, and it nearly had, but that now he felt much better.

  I frowned and asked, “Why did you come and not send someone stronger and younger?”

  He smiled and said, “A chief does the work of his people. I believed I had to come now and convince you to hunt the shape-shifting witch as soon as I could. I want it taken before its cougar eats more cattle and leaves my People hungry while it creeps off with a full belly. I know of your Power and skill with your rifle, Yellow Boy. I know that if a witch can change its shape into a cougar, then you still have the Power to kill it. I ask you to do this thing for our People.”

  I didn’t hesitate to answer. “Ussen gave me a Power to help the People. I’ll go with you tomorrow to kill the witch that can become a cougar.”

  Behind us, Juanita and Kicking Wren listened, and I heard sighs from both of them. I knew Juanita was considering the same thing as I in my thoughts. Was this the same witch who gave Kicking Wren the owl carving?

  CHAPTER 41

  SHAPE-SHIFTER HUNT

  The world spread out before me in black and white. Black from shadows, black from tall trees and twisted branches, black from the sky, white from the full moon’s light, white from the snow covering the canyon in smooth waves over brush and rocks, and white from stars. Wrapped in a good, thick Navajo blanket and, around it, an ancient buffalo robe, I waited for Cougar in a little wickiup covered by snow, moving only my eyes, slowly breathing in the cold, brittle air, and exhaling warm, misty steam into the scarf wrapped around my neck and lower face for warmth.

  I watched the canyon and the nearby corral surrounding the few cattle of No Foot, a warrior whose name was given because he left no sign when he traveled and was the best of trackers. No Foot had a good name. He didn’t even leave a trail in the snow when he left after he helped me build the wickiup under the tall pines above the corral.

  As the sun fell into the mountains and the shadows grew long, I saw the dark outline of a figure in a stand of pine two hundred yards from the cattle. He looked Apache, and he appeared to wear a dark blanket with some kind of animal skin on his shoulders. I tried using the Shináá Cho to see him better, but he stood in deep shadows, and I could not tell any more about him. He stayed there until darkness came, and then disappeared in the long shadows made by the rising moon.

  The moon, big and bright, floated above the eastern mountains to the north, sailed across the black, star-covered sky filled with cold, brittle air, and began falling into the mountains to the southwest. I watched, waited, and thought a long time about the Apache I had seen. From where I sat, I could not see his tracks. Nautzile’s di-yen said the Cougar came from a shape-shifting witch. Only a Killer of Witches had the Power to kill it or drive it away without being haunted. Was the Apache I had seen a witch, the same one who gave Kicking Wren the owl carving, merely a curious hunter, or even just No Foot? I couldn’t tell. I didn’t know, but whether a true cougar or a shape-shifting witch came to take No Foot’s cattle, I would kill it. I hoped it was the same one with the owl carving. My father, Caballo Negro, grandfather, He Watches, and Rufus had taught me over the early years of my life to believe only what I saw with my eyes, not what a di-yen or other man of importance believed. Even the witch I had killed, I knew only to be an evil man who claimed he was Chief of Witches to control those Comanches and banditos who rode with him and to keep Apaches away who might come after him. Still, I knew there were many things I did not understand or know. I listened and learned.

  The cattle hovering close together near the center of the corral became restless and started moving around, occasionally bellowing when their crowding together shoved some against the corral fence. The bull with great spike horns, the chief of the little herd, bellowed a challenge and turned to face the deep black shadows stretching from the trees on the far side of the canyon where I had seen the Apache earlier. The other cattle, three cows and two yearlings, stopped their milling about and bunched together behind the bull. He stood with his head up, intently watching the growing shadows, snorted once or twice, shaking his head, pawed the ground, and bellowed his challenge again.

  I felt my heart beat faster and my body tingle with excitement, ready to face the challenge given me because of my Power. I concentrated my attention where the bull watched and forced myself to steady. My breathing slowed, and I watched the scene, intent and easy like a warrior making a straight arrow. I cocked my rifle and put it against my shoulder, easing it out the open place in the snow wickiup to make sight pictures in the moonlight and shadow edges near the middle of the canyon, but the light made it hard to see the black sights on the rifle, and I saw nothing I could even practice sighting on.

  I stared at the same spot the bull watched, the end of tall pine shadows stretching toward the corral. The bull bellowed his challenge aga
in, stomping and pawing the ground. There was something strange about the tree shadows stretching out from the stand of pines on the far side of the canyon toward the corral. One spot in the shadows seemed to be lying on a wave of snow, but it looked darker than the surrounding shadow. I thought it might be a rock pushing out of the top of the snow. Then the rock moved.

  Slowly my eyes began to see the shape of the big cougar in the shadows surrounding it. It was the biggest cat I had ever seen. The idea of the shape-shifter drifted through my mind. I thought, Maybe Sangre del Diablo has somehow come back to haunt me, even with my Power. I drove the idea from my mind. Sangre del Diablo was no more. I had killed him, sent him blind to wander forever in the land of the grandfathers. The wounds I had from our battles no longer ached, even in the cold. If he had been a witch, he would never be one again. If this cougar were a witch, a shape-shifter, it was one I had never faced before. I shivered with excitement, and my teeth chattered. I clenched my jaws to stop and told myself to relax and do what Ussen had given me the Power to do.

  I knew I could hit the cougar from where I sat if I had a good sight picture, but the light was tricky and the air cold with shifting breezes. Uncertain I could hit anything, I waited for a better shot, hoping the bull or the cat didn’t force my hand before I was ready. A puff of wind passed through the tops of trees moving their shadows as they bent and returned. For a moment, the moving shadow exposed the cat where it crouched, its muscles gathered, making its skin ripple, its ears back, its tail swishing back and forth over the hard crust of the snow, its yellow eyes a peculiar white in the low light. Ready to charge and make meat, it took the measure of the bull’s great horns and hesitated. The puff of wind passed and the shadows returned.