Blood of the Devil

by W. Michael Farmer

  I heard a wolf call my name in the bright moonlight and thought if Juanita had been born in a man’s body, we would have driven the Indah from our lands. Two camps over a five or six days’ ride apart, a wife anxious to give their husband a child in each one, I had never heard of such a thing. Yet, for our problem, the thought made much sense.

  “It’s a good thought. I’ll think on it. Have you talked with Moon about this?”

  “If you decide to do this, then we’ll all talk together before anything is done.”

  I nodded. “Enjuh.”

  I thought on Juanita’s plan until Moon’s next dream and decided I needed to take her to the Blue Mountains. I knew Kitsizil Lichoo’ had a camp in the mountains a day’s ride south from the American border. Perhaps, I thought, he’ll take us into his camp. A couple of days after Moon’s last dream, I had my wives sit with me, and I told them what I planned.

  Juanita nodded and looked at Moon. “It won’t be a good time when my husband is gone, but I think this will be a good thing for you, my sister.”

  Moon bowed her head and mumbled, “Whatever my husband and his first wife decide, I’ll do.”

  I shook my head. “We must do what will best serve you and make this witch’s dream that’s haunting you go away. If you have another thought, speak. We’ll find the best way.”

  Moon looked at both of us and shook her head. “I have no better way than for you to divorce me and send me away to live by myself.”

  “Then we’ll pack our ponies and leave when the sun leaves tomorrow.”

  Moon and I left the next night. We rode all night, and we hid and slept during the day. I decided to go to the camp of Kitsizil Lichoo’ by way of what the Indah called the Animas Valley and Hatchet Mountains. Once in the Blue Mountains, I found the Río Bonito and followed the trail I remembered using when my brothers and I left the Opata women and children in Kitsizil Lichoo’s camp. The trail led us to the rock formation I remembered looking like a finger pointing to the sky.

  From the rock formation, we worked our way down into the canyon where the camp lay hidden on a bench above a wide, full-flowing creek. We rode up the stream a short way and then up on to the bench, through tall brush, until suddenly the camp spread out before us with its people staring in surprise at the unannounced arrivals. There were more lodges in the camp than I remembered, but this did not surprise me. Kitsizil Lichoo’ had told me at that time that he expected the camp to grow larger with refugees from San Carlos and Elias’s camp, and it had.

  It was still early in the day, and Kitsizil Lichoo’ sat talking with several warriors around a fire in front of his stonewall lodge. When he saw us, I could see his teeth in a grin from all the way across the camp. He came directly to us and held up his arms in welcome, his red hair hanging long over his shoulders. He said, “My great friend, Yellow Boy, Killer of Witches, destroyer of Sangre del Diablo, welcome to our camp. I remember well the woman with you. Welcome, Moon on the Water, sister of Juanita. Climb down from your ponies and sit by our fire. Our young men will take care of them and bring your supplies to my lodge. Come.”

  I recognized two of the young men who came forward to take our ponies. They were Opata we had saved from Sangre del Diablo. I recognized Calico Dove, Kitsizil Lichoo’s second wife from the camp of Elias, and several of the Opata women we had saved who had taken warriors for husbands in the camp. It felt almost like returning to our home camp.

  Kitsizil Lichoo’ and I sat by the fire and talked most of the day. I told him all that had happened at the reservation since we returned, and why I had taken Moon on the Water as my second wife. I told him about her dream and why she needed to leave our little Mescalero camp. I asked him if we could join his camp with her to stay and me to be gone every other moon. He assured me that everyone in his camp knew me and would be glad if we stayed.

  That night we feasted and the next night, in council, all the warriors agreed they wanted us to come and stay with them as long as we wanted and would support Moon when I returned to Mescalero. The following day I, with the help of the black warrior who knew the secrets of the stones and had shown the other warriors how to build their lodges, started building a stonewall lodge for Moon and me.

  CHAPTER 46

  Indah BOY COMES

  I rode in the night following the same trail I had used to the Blue Mountains and returned to Mescalero after I had built a lodge for Moon on the Water. On the way, I stopped and stayed a day with my friend Rufus Pike, who told me to stay for a meal and tell him the news of the Mescaleros and our friend Kitsizil Lichoo’ in the Blue Mountains.

  Two days later, I came to Juanita’s lodge in the morning sunlight and found her waiting with the door blanket thrown back to let light in her tipi and to warm her face. She looked at me with shining eyes, “My husband returns. I’ve waited by the door every day since you left. Come. Your meal is ready, and so am I.”

  She pulled the blanket door closed and sat with me as I ate and told her of the trip to the Blue Mountains, of the camp of Kitsizil Lichoo’, the stonewall lodge I built for Moon on the Water, and that Moon had yet to have a bad dream before I left. When I finished eating, I lay down to rest, and Juanita came to me, and in our embrace, the passion and joy of the first night of our marriage came again.

  Whether I was going to the Blue Mountains or returning, I stopped to visit Rufus Pike. It was a good place for a little rest before two more days of steady riding to Juanita.

  Early in the Season of Earth is Reddish Brown, four moons passing since I had taken Moon on the Water to the camp of Kitsizil Lichoo’, I made ready to return to the Blue Mountains. Juanita came to me with a smile, put my hand on her belly, and said, “A child grows here. My dreams say it’s a son.”

  I thought my heart would burst with the good news. I hugged her without thinking or caring what the rest of the camp might think about it. “I’ll stay a little longer with Moon, but I’ll return for the winter before snow blocks the passes, and then I’ll stay until our son comes.”

  “My husband is wise. Enjuh.”

  In the Blue Mountain camp of Kitsizil Lichoo, Moon on the Water heard Juanita’s news with great happiness. “Juanita has waited a long time to give you a son. She shows that I, too, soon will carry a child. I’ll make a fine basket, a present for you to carry back to her.”

  “I’ll stay in one place or the other when snow fills the passes and canyons. Since Juanita carries our child, due early in the Season of Little Eagles, I’ll stay with her through the Ghost Face until the child comes before I return to you.”

  “That’s wise. I have plenty to do and Kitsizil Lichoo’ and the camps other warriors look after me, but I’ll long to see my husband. Come to me often while you’re here, that I, too, might carry your child.”

  I smiled. “Woman, while I’m here, you won’t be alone under the blankets.”

  She laughed and scrambled to her sleeping pallet. “Enjuh. I’m under them now!”

  I stayed all the extra time I could before returning to Juanita a few days before the first heavy snows came in the Blue Mountains. Our first son, a big, strapping baby boy with the grip of a wolf’s jaws on the throat of a whitetail came early in the Season of Little Eagles. Maria said we should give name him He Comes because he had finally appeared after a long time, and that’s what we called him. Four days after his tsach ceremony, I rode west to give Moon our good news and help her make her own child.

  On the way to the Blue Mountains, I stopped to visit Rufus and tell him my news. The way he whooped and danced, you might have thought the child his. He gave me a big cigarro and poured a little glass of whiskey for each of us. He had never given me whiskey before, but I had tasted it while I was a tribal policeman. We lighted the cigarros and drank the whiskey. No matter the glass, if I held it, soon it went empty, and I wanted more. When I asked for more whiskey, Rufus shook his head. “One glass is enough. Too much will make you sick. Your people don’t handle whiskey well. I know you know that, bein�
� a tribal policeman an’ all.”

  I nodded and turned the little glass upside down on his table.

  “Rufus Pike is a good friend to the Mescaleros.”

  “Just don’t wanna see you in no trouble is all. Let’s eat.”

  He filled me up on steak, beans, chiles, thick toasted tortillas, and coffee. I ate so much my swollen belly made me sleepy. I told Rufus I wanted to sleep out by his cattle pool where my People camped when we ran from the Blue Coats’ Chiricahua scouts, and Juanita nearly killed a scout, Soldado Fiero, with a stone from her sling to keep him from starting a massacre. I smiled at the irony. Soldado Fiero was the same scout I had killed in Chihuahua to save Tzoe’s life.

  Rufus said, “It’s still cold at night. You’ll freeze sleepin’ by that standin’ water. If you won’t stay in my shack, at least take one of these here heavy army blankets to put over yours to stay warm.”

  I was glad he offered it and went off down the path to the pool. The velvety, black night sky, filled with the points of light from an uncountable number of stars, wrapped me in its cold air as I lay down in warm blankets with my feet to the east. Turning my head a little, I saw the black outline of the mountain against the milky river of stars where I heard Ussen speak and then give me Power to kill witches.

  The blankets kept me warm and comfortable, and soon the mists of sleep filled my mind. I became an eagle soaring on great wings high over the mountains above me. I flew in the Season of the Ghost Face. Patches of snow lay scattered across the Tularosa basin far below me, and breaking clouds, heavy and dark with snow, sailed above me. The brown Indah wagon road came out of the mountains of the Mescalero and, like a scar on the face of the land, made a line past the great waves of white sand straight for the pass the Indah call San Agustin. I swooped down close to the road and, rising high again, saw a wagon driven by an Indah and beside him a young boy wrapped in a heavy blanket. Leading the wagon toward the pass, three vaqueros rode far ahead. I circled the wagon and vaqueros, two, three times, and then a strong wind caught and lifted me higher and higher into the sky, making the wagon and riders disappear, and a voice came, saying, The Indah boy comes. You have Power. Be ready.

  My eyes fluttered open. I was no longer an eagle soaring above the mountains and basin floor. I was a weary man staring at the stars. I wondered at the meaning of the dream, but told no one, and for a long time thought of it often to learn its meaning.

  Three harvests passed and I continued my trips to my second wife in the Blue Mountains and back to my first wife and son. My son grew strong and was a happy child. I taught him much even in his early years and brought him and his mother little presents often when I came back from the Blue Mountains. But I did not neglect my second wife and carried gifts and supplies to Moon on the Water, who never wavered in her belief that she, too, would give me a child as her sister, Juanita, had.

  I had learned to follow the canyons the camp of Kitsizil Lichoo’ used to take cattle from the hacendado ranchos. This trail let me reach the camp in the Ghost Face Season when the high passes across the Blue Mountains were blocked. I only used the hacendado trail in the Ghost Face Season because it took me an extra day to reach Moon on the Water this way, and sometimes even the canyons along the cattle trail might fill with snow.

  In the Ghost Face Season of the fifth harvest since Moon and I settled in the camp of Kitsizil Lichoo’, she came to meet me at the corral when I returned from the reservation. She took my arm, something Apache women didn’t do with their husbands often, as we walked to our stonewall lodge. I could feel the trembling energy in her fingers and wondered at her news.

  Inside the lodge, she wrapped her arms around my waist, looked at me, and laughed. “Ussen has smiled on us,” she said. “I carry your child.”

  I embraced her and smoothed her thick black hair blown by the wind and felt happiness fill me. “My happiness covers all the trails I ride. I’m a man blessed. I’m a man with a good and fruitful a wife.”

  “I don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl child, but I think it comes in the Season of Large Leaves, and the women here say they’ll help me. Will you be here when my time comes?”

  “I’ll be here. You and our child mean much to me.”

  “Enjuh, husband. Enjuh.”

  I stayed a little longer than planned that trip because a storm blew over the mountains from the west. It didn’t drop much snow in the canyons, but it still made travel hard so I waited it out.

  The ride back to Rufus’s rancho was cold and hard, but the wind was at my back, and since possible enemies like the Nakaiyes had sense and stayed inside, I rode during the day. Rufus said I had to stay inside with him, and I didn’t argue. I told Rufus of the child Moon on the Water carried. He whooped again and did his dance like he had for Juanita when she carried He Comes. We smoked a cigarro, and he poured me a glass of whiskey. The firewater felt good in my belly after the long, cold day on the trail from the Blue Mountains.

  The next morning when I left Rufus, the wind blew hard, and the light came cold and gray under heavy clouds racing toward the east. I knew it would be a slow day for me. I stopped a little distance down from over the top of Baylor Pass, let my pony rest, and scanned the basin floor with the Shináá Cho, looking for vaqueros moving cattle or travelers I might meet. In this way, I could avoid them and not provoke concerns that a wild Apache was loose from the reservation and hunted them.

  I stopped to scan the basin about the time of shortest shadows, although I couldn’t be sure about the time because the sun hid its face behind the clouds. Luck was against me. Vaqueros were moving a small herd south across the trail I wanted to follow to the Jarilla Mountains, and another crew gathered scattered groups of cattle into a large herd moving south and west. Two wagons traveled east on the brown, sand-covered road that ran past the waves of white sand. I saw three men and their ponies at the place Rufus called Aguirre Springs where we had waited nearly sixteen harvests ago to ambush the Chiricahua scouts chasing after us for leaving the reservation. I studied the men. They passed a bottle of whiskey between them and the sight of it made me thirsty for some. One of the men had a great ugly red bush of hair on his face and had an eye covered with a black patch.

  I waited and watched to learn when I might pass in the clear. I got my blanket from my pony, found a comfortable place to sit between two big creosote bushes with my back resting against a boulder, and studied the valley. After a while, the men at the spring mounted their ponies and rode off toward the road. They stopped at the west end of a long dip in the road and hid their horses behind them in an arroyo off to one side. I knew little of Indah ways, but any fool could tell an ambush was in the making. I looked down the road and saw three men far in front of a wagon like they led it, and on the wagon sat a man with a rifle across his knees and a small boy by his side. I had seen this before.

  ADDITIONAL READING

  Ball, Eve, Lynda A. Sánchez, and Norah Henn, Indeh: An Apache Odyssey, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK, 1988.

  Ball, Eve, In the Days of Victorio: Recollections of a Warm Springs Apache, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ, 1970.

  Blazer, Almer N., Santana: War Chief of the Mescalero Apache, Dog Soldier Press, Taos, NM, 2000.

  Bourke, John G., An Apache Campaign in the Sierra Madre, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 1987. Reprinted from the 1886 edition published by Charles Scribner and Sons.

  Bray, Dorothy, editor, Western Apache–English Dictionary: A Community-Generated Bilingual Dictionary, Bilingual Press/ Editorial Bilingue, Tempe, AZ, 1998.

  Goodwin, Grenville, Edited by Keith H. Basso, Western Apache Raiding and Warfare, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ, 1971.

  Goodwin, Grenville, and Neil Goodwin, The Apache Diaries, A Father-Son Journey, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 2000.

  Haley, James L., Apaches: A History and Culture Portrait, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK, 1981.

  Mails, Thomas E., The People Called Apach
e, BDD Illustrated Books, New York, NY, 1993.

  Opler, Morris, E., Apache Odyssey: A Journey Between Two Worlds, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 2002.

  Opler, Morris Edward, An Apache Life-Way: The Economic, Social, & Religious Institutions of the Chiricahua Indians, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 1996.

  Robinson, Sherry, Apache Voices: Their Stories of Survival as Told to Eve Ball, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, NM, 2003.

  Sánchez, Lynda A., Apache Legends and Lore of Southern New Mexico: From the Sacred Mountain, The History Press, Charleston, SC, 2014.

  Sonnichsen, C.L., The Mescalero Apaches, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK, 1958.

  Thrapp, Dan L., The Conquest of Apacheria, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK, 1967.

  Thrapp, Dan L., Al Sieber: Chief of Scouts, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK, 1964.

  Worchester, Donald E., The Apaches: Eagles of the Southwest, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK, 1992.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  W. Michael Farmer, a member of the Western Writers of America, learned about the rich mosaic of historic figures depicted in his books while living in Las Cruces, New Mexico, for fifteen years. He has a Ph.D. in Physics and has conducted atmospheric research with laser-based instruments he developed. He has published short stories in anthologies, won awards for essays, and published essays in magazines. His first novel, Hombrecito’s War, won a Western Writers of America Spur Award Finalist for Best First Novel in 2006 and was a New Mexico Book Award Finalist for Historical Fiction in 2007. His other novels include: Hombrecito’s Search; Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright: The Betrayals of Pancho Villa; Conspiracy: The Trial of Oliver Lee and James Gililland; and Killer of Witches, The Life and Times of Yellow Boy, Mescalero Apache, Book 1, winner of a 2016 Will Rogers Medallion Award and a Finalist for the 2016 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards in Historical Fiction and in Adventure-Drama, and Mariana’s Knight, The Revenge of Henry Fountain, Legends of the Desert, Book 1.