Wolves At Our Door

by J P S Brown

  This was not the first time that Kane and the Lion had caught members of this gang doing violence on the American side of the line. They had been at war with the Lobos gang for two years. The war started when the partners caught four Lobos on the run carrying the quarters and loin strip of a 7X beef they had killed. After the thugs had fired the barn at the 7X headquarters, Kane and the Lion had tracked them back to the carcass of the beef. The hoodlums had evidently fired the barn as a diversion so they could kill the beef and escape with the meat.

  The Lobos gang was now a fixture on border ranches. They robbed, raped, and beat everyone they could catch and vandalized any property left unguarded. They had built a reputation as predators. Newspapers on both sides of the line gave them publicity. That made it so Kane and the Lion knew exactly with whom they waged war. The thugs even wore uniforms: shaved and tattooed heads and bodies, sleeveless T-shirts, high priced athletic shoes, and trousers that hung down on their hips and bagged over their shoes.

  Now, Kane and the Lion were being given the undivided attention of the three conscious and bruised Lobos. "We better shoot them," the Lion said, and he drew his Winchester from a holster under his leg. "What if they come back when we’re not around and hurt somebody?"

  "They might come back," Kane said. "But it will be a while. The first one I hit still looks woozy and will probably not wake completely up until the middle of next month. I whipped the second so bad he’ll pee every time he thinks about it. One thing about reata, and hard-twist whippings, they linger unpleasantly in the minds of thugs."

  "Let’s shoot them and drag them back across to the line," the Lion said. "Nobody lives on the ranch on the other side since the Roldan family went broke in the drought. The Mexican bank that owns it now doesn’t look after it. We won’t even have to dig their graves. We’ll just lay their carcasses in a wash and cave the bank over them. Their corpses will rot in peace and not even their bones will be found. Nobody will miss these maggots anyway."

  "Well, if you want to do that, Andres, let’s drive them over there and shoot them after we've got them in the wash. Why tire our horses by dragging them?"

  "Fine with me," the Lion said. "Get going pelones," he ordered.

  The three sound thugs shuffled toward Mexico.

  "Wait a minute," Kane said. "Pick up your partner, or drag him, but he goes with you."

  Kane whacked the burly thug on the head with the double of his rope. "What’s your name, Snake Eyes?" he said.

  The burly thug could only see Kane from the corner of his eye because the Lion’s rope was too tight on his throat. "Now you want to know my name, man?" he squeaked.

  "Give me a name and tell me the truth, or I’ll look in your pocket and find out for myself, or I’ll make one of your friends say it. You don’t want to tell me your name? How would you like us to drag you again?"

  "Armando. It’s Armando, here or anywhere."

  "Well, Armando Here or Anywhere, you and your friends are going to lose your lives when we get you across the line, so if you know any prayers, say them."

  Kane drew a .22 magnum pistol from his chaps pocket and fired a round between Armando’s feet without aiming. "I’m not a good shot, but I won’t have to shoot you from far away, collared as you are. You’re lucky that bullet didn’t take off your knee, or your balls, because I didn’t take aim, but I’ll pull the trigger on the next one with the barrel in your ear."

  The thug who Kane had run over with his horse, the smallest in the pack, had been making gasping, sobbing sounds. "Ay que la chingada," the Lion said. "The little one’s about to bawl. No, he is bawling."

  "Are you weeping, you miserable little shit?" Kane said. "It won’t save your life, so save your breath. Shut up and walk."

  Kane and the Lion herded the thugs across the border and up a dry wash to a place by a stretch of loamy bank and ordered them to lie on the ground head to toe. The partners dismounted and tied the thugs’ hands and feet behind their backs with piggin’ string. Kane then unsheathed the knife that Abdullah had given him and earmarked each thug the way he did his 7X calves by notching out a swallow fork in the top of their ears.

  As the partners rode away and left the thugs tied, bleeding, and bawling, the Lion said, "Good idea, Jim. Now we’ll know who they are. It would have been a shame to turn them loose without earmarking them. Even their-mothers probably disowned them long ago."

  "Yeah, some shaved-headed, tattooed people who dress that way must be good people," Kane said. "This way, we start a new brotherhood of the failed thugs we’ve captured. Now at least they carry the kind of disfigurement that will do some good. The disfigurement of a tattoo doesn’t do any good for them, or for us. Now we can tell the good ones from the bad ones."

  The partners intercepted Dolly Ann and Cody Joe as they rode out the gate of the horse pasture to look for their grandfather.

  "What happened, Pappy?" Dolly asked.

  "We caught four Lobos threatening two young illegals," Kane said.

  "What did you do to them?"

  "Nothing. They scattered and ran too fast"

  "You didn’t chase them?"

  "What for? What would we do if we caught them?"

  "We thought we heard shots/’

  "One of them had a popgun that he shot at us while he ran away."

  "He missed?"

  "He didn’t think he had time to stop and take aim."

  "We saw you driving some people. What was that for?"

  "Oh, those were some Lobos who got lost."

  "Where did you take them?"

  "Back across the line."

  "Why did you do that?"

  "They got lost over here, but they knew their way home."

  "Just so you don’t get in trouble, Pappy/’ Dolly Ann said.

  "Don’t worry, darling. We got no trouble. Those Lobos have the trouble. I think we scared them,"Kane grinned at the Lion.

  The 7X crew returned to the Buster camp and found it in shambles. Their beds had been shredded, their victuals and utensils stolen or scattered on the floor. The cast-iron woodstove lay in pieces, the victim of someone who had wielded the camp’s sledgehammer. Kane did not tell anyone that his grandfather had packed that stove to the camp in pieces on mules. He did not show how much it bothered him, because he did not want to make a fuss over the way he felt.

  The crew used the rest of the day to salvage what they could. The tatters that were left of their beds would serve them if they worked hard enough to be tired when they lay down to rest at night. They found canned food that was still good, and they found all the eggs intact. The Kanes always packed the eggs on the mules last and unloaded them first. Dolly Ann had laid them in the cool, dark bottom of a closet. The next day, on their first drive, the crew found a yearling steer with a broken leg. They left him behind and went on with the herd. He wandered in later to be with his fellows. After they worked the herd, they caught him and butchered him and found a .25-caliber bullet in the leg. The crew discussed this and decided that the wound was fresh enough to have been caused by the thugs Kane and the Lion had escorted across the line.

  The crew hung the yearling’s carcass in a tree every night, then wrapped it in a tarp and stowed it on the floor inside the closet during the day. At six thousand feet, Buster camp was plenty cool at night. The crew also salvaged some coffee, flour, beans, potatoes, and most of the grain for the horses. They cooked over an open fire and got used to it. The crew’s precious coffeepot, cast-iron skillet, and Dutch oven had been hidden under the floor of the cabin, so the raiders missed them. Soon, all the signs of destruction disappeared. After they cooked one meal on the open fire the first night, they decided to sleep outside too. Their tarps would still turn water, and that was all the shelter Kane and the Lion had used for half their lives. The crew even moved its camp to the pool at the foot of the high mountains for a while and caught trout at suppertime.

  The crew did not speculate on who had tried to destroy their camp.

  They
did not even discuss it until the last evening before they returned to headquarters. Dolly Ann worried about it more than any of them, and she finally brought it up.

  "Who do you suppose tore up our camp, Pappy?" Dolly asked.

  "It doesn’t matter," Kane said. "We’ll never catch them."

  "What can we do about it?"

  "We’ve always left this camp wide open, so people who needed shelter could use it, and we’ve never been sorry about that. Now, we’ll pack up everything we can and take it back to headquarters, like other ranchers do."

  "We’ll have to get a lock for the door, Pappy."

  "Won’t do any good. Vandals would love an excuse to break down the door. No, we’ll have to leave it open, but we won’t be able to count on the cabin for shelter anymore. Somebody will probably burn it, before long. The government has been after us to tear it down anyway."

  "Why Pappy?"

  "The environmentalists want the government to condemn our property here and restore it to its natural beauty. That means no cabin."

  "Can they do that?"

  "No . . . well, maybe and maybe not, but some darned tree hugger can come up here and burn it down and we can't stop him."

  "Gosh, Pappy."

  "Don’t worry about it, darling. We’re all right. From now on we’ll make camp at a different place every time we come up here and keep an eye on the country better. We’ll gather and brand out of a holdup at a different place every day and do a better job."

  "What’s a holdup, Pappy?" Cody Joe asked.

  "You know what a holdup is, Button. We’ll hold them up where we find them, rope them out of the holdup and brand them right there, then go on to the next bunch. We’ll carry our outfit on the mules and camp anywhere we want. We might even break some workhorses and pull a wagon up here and live out of that. That’ll be a lot more fun and a lot less worry than being dependent on a cabin for shelter. The great outdoors is a whole lot better place to live anyway."

  "What about those hoodlums you and the Lion ran off the day we packed in, Pappy?" Dolly Ann asked. "What can we do about them? They’re the ones who shot and crippled the yearling we butchered, aren’t they? Them, or somebody like them."

  "That’s not hard to figure out. We’ll go armed like our grandfathers did when they came to this country. We’ll have to learn to defend ourselves against different kinds of bandits again, that’s all. I'd call them Apaches just to give them a name, but that would be an insult to Apaches."

  "You shoot somebody, you’re in trouble, Pappy."

  "They say a man can shoot in self-defense, or in defense of his property. Those hoodlums who got away the other day would shoot us in a Hong Kong minute, claim self-defense, and get away with it."

  "Nobody’s going to actually shoot anybody, are they, Pappy? Nobody in this whole country would try to hurt you that way, would they?"

  "No, and I’m not going to carry a pistol, Dolly Ann. Too heavy, and it might get in the way of my roping arm."

  "I don’t know. It might not be a bad idea to go armed from now on, Pappy," Cody Joe said. "How can rustlers be stopped without a firearm? If we have to run and get the law, the rustlers’ll get away before the sheriff can head them off. If they’re going to be stopped, the rancher has to do it."

  "We put the run on them a few times, they’ll probably learn to stay off our place, won't they, Cody?" Kane said. "What do you think, Lion? How do we stop the cow thieves?" This he asked as though he and the Lion had not figured out how to deal with cow thieves years ago.

  "Report them to the sheriff," the Lion said. "It’s the only way. Any other way brings too much trouble."

  “I say kill them where we catch them and lay them across the carcass of the beef they butchered, then call the sheriff, like ranchers used to do," Kane said.

  "Don’t kill anyone, Pappy/’ Dolly Ann said.

  "I'm only kidding, girl," Kane said.

  "I know it, Pappy. And I know you wouldn’t want to hurt anybody, but you don’t fool me. I know you have a pistol in your chaps pocket."

  Güero Rodriguez had been using Kane’s Buster trail along the spine of the San Juan mountains for two years. The day Kane caught him bothering his grandchildren on the Manzanita trail, Güero had been careless and in a hurry or he would never have been caught out in the open by Kane. From now on, he would only use the Buster trail, and Kane would not catch him again.

  He needed that Buster trail and had begun to think of it as his own. He did not mind being caught with his Arabs by Kane as much as he minded being terminated by the people who paid him to smuggle warm bodies and merchandise in and out of the United States. His backers had already warned him that he better learn to stand prosperity and not get careless about it, or he would be terminated. That meant that he would be left outdoors with a hole in his head and the coyotes would eat him and scatter his bones.

  Güero had not authorized the destruction of Buster camp, because he used it often. The three men who had done it were angry at Kane and Cañez for running them down and dragging them with their horses. Güero had been ordered by his superiors to harass the ranches along that border. That was why he sent the four Lobos to kill a steer in Ruby pasture. That was a good way to harass a rancher who was married to his cows, and it was also a good source of pocket money for the Lobos. Güero let them keep the money they received for meat they carried back across the line. As a training exercise, he sent them out afoot with knives and a small caliber pistol to steal meat and bring it back. To steal fresh meat afoot was a bloody strenuous business and a good initiation for a young man into Los Lobos.

  Gtiero had a more practical and profitable method of rustling beef for himself. He owned two pickups with campers. His men cruised remote pastures in those pickups, shot a beef for each pickup, winched them into the trucks, cut their throats and let them hang off the bumpers, and bled them out as they drove away. One minute máximo to shoot the beef in the forehead and hook on to him. One minute to winch him aboard and cut his throat. Five minutes to bleed him out, a few more seconds to winch the bloodless animal all the way into the truck and close the camper door, y vámonos back across the line with the meat.

  From a peak only three miles away, he watched the 7X headquarters with his binoculars on the day the Kanes rode back from Buster camp. His peak was a few feet higher than eight thousand feet and Kane’s house was at forty-five hundred, so he could look down on it with his $4,ooo German binoculars and watch everything the Kanes did outside their buildings. After he decided that he would steal Dolly Ann Kane and retire from all this hiking in the woods, he had watched her at Buster camp and now he would watch her at headquarters every day. Now, a four-man crew would accompany him when he crossed the border onto the 7X for any reason. Now that the girl was at headquarters, he would leave the crew on the trail and go down for a better look at her. From another hiding place only a hundred yards from the house, he could see into her room and right into the shower in her bathroom.

  That night the family of the 7X sat down to a supper of fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy and corn on the cob. The men did not take their eyes off Dolly Ann. She was the only woman in their family. Cody Joe was too young to have formed an enduring attachment for a wife-like woman, and the two geezers had outlived all of theirs, so they loved to watch Dolly Ann, the only female they had left to attend to them. Halfway through supper, a highway patrolman drove into the yard to tell them that some of their cattle were out on the I-19 freeway at Tubac. Only one of their pastures bordered I-19. The Lion had ridden around that fence only three weeks ago and found everything intact. The 7X crew saddled horses, loaded them in a gooseneck trailer, and hurried to the freeway.

  At Tubac, the Kanes came upon their cattle dodging headlights of north- and southbound traffic and grazing on the grass of the median. Kane stopped and unloaded the Lion and Cody Joe and their horses on the north side of the cattle, then made a U-turn and took Dolly and their horses back toward Nogales and unloaded on the sout
h side of the cattle.

  The patrolman called his cronies to help him stop traffic while Kane’s crew bunched the cattle in the median. The cattle were not easy to handle, because the headlights of the cars and trucks blinded them. Then, before the patrolman’s help arrived to stop traffic, a pickup load of people roared up and unloaded on the highway between the cattle and their 7X pasture.

  The crew tried to start them across the southbound lane of the freeway toward their pasture gate and the people turned them back. A tall, leggy blond in tight trousers that showed off her busy butt and sported a holstered revolver high on a hip gave the orders. When the cattle turned back, the crew gave them room so they would not spill over the northbound lane into the traffic and the town of Tubac.

  "Now, everybody, keep your arms outstretched and advance on the cattle and we’ll do these cowboys' job for them," the blonde ordered.

  "Lady," Kane said, "what do you think you’re doing?"

  "What does it look like I’m doing?" the woman said. She stood in the headlights of the pickup, and Kane did not think she could see beyond her nose.

  "Whatever it is, it’s wrong," he said. "If you’ll just please move yourself and your friends out of our way, we’ll move these animals back across the highway and into their pasture in one minute."

  "You idiot, we’re here to keep them off the highway. Are you so stupid that you don’t know you’re about to cause an accident?"

  "They need to cross the highway to get home. You’re blocking the way. Get out of the way."

  When two of the older militia saw that she did not understand "Get out of the way," they tried to interpret for Kane, but she paid them no attention.

  "Stand your ground, Militiamen," the woman ordered. "We’re in charge here now."

  That was all Dolly Ann Kane could stand. "Militia my dying ass," she yelled at the woman. "Militia is it? Take your counterfeit militia asses out of our way; or we’ll run these cattle right the hell over the top of you." She rode around the herd toward the line of Militiamen and shouted, "Pappy, stick these cattle right up my horse’s butt and I’ll lead ’em across."