Killer of Witches: The Life and Times of Yellow Boy Mescalero Apache

by W. Michael Farmer

  I saw no other riders on or near the Indah road from the east. The fear of what I might find at Cha’s camp was like a ghost haunting me, driving me. I feared I might not come in time to catch the Witch and kill him before he destroyed the People. I kept asking myself, what happens if the Witch comes and I’m not there to kill him?

  My pony and I crossed the great salt flats close by the Guadalupes after the sun was gone and the stars were out. I rode around great sparkling stretches of shallow water that collected there for a short time in the season of rains. The outline of the mountains with the one the Nakai-yes call El Capitán, the most south, ragged and black, blotting out the eastern stars on the horizon, told me I was so near, yet so far away from Cha’s camp. Studying the stars as I crossed the salt flats, I decided I ought to reach Cha’s camp a little after dawn.

  I rode up the wash and into the big canyon as golden light in the east lighted the top of the mountains. Even in the low light, I saw the trail sand churned up and tracks from many ponies running down the wash heading for the llano. Birds in the junipers lining the low reaches of the canyon walls began to call.

  I smelled smoke. I had never smelled smoke before this far from the camp. Fear of what my dream told me sent my heart racing. My pony, almost home, wanted to run for the camp. I let him go.

  I passed the horse herd meadow, but there were no horses, not even mules, and the boys who watched them, too, were gone. I checked the rifle’s cartridges, cocked the Yellow Boy’s hammer to safety, and rode on. Up the trail climbing to the camp’s meadow, the trail I had run up so many times as a boy and beginning warrior, I saw thin plumes of smoke twisting and curling above the treetops at the camp.

  I wished my eyes lied as I stared at what was left of the camp and felt the sour water from my gut rise in my throat. Ashes still smoking lay where once the People had lived in their tipis, slept and kept warm in their blankets, used pots and baskets in their work, and made weapons. Bodies of children, women, warriors, and old ones lay scattered around the camp meadow and under the trees, some shot, some trampled, some with their throats cut, and all scalped. I slid off my pony and desperately ran from one body to the next, hoping I would not find my family, but I found my father and never felt more helpless and in so dark a place in my life.

  Dragged through brush and fire, his body was so torn and scraped, I barely recognized him. His body showed many bullet wounds. I counted five in his front torso, one in the back, and one in his temple. The scalpers had included his ears, from which had hung a silver wire loop with carved turquoise horses in the left ear, when they scalped him, and they had cut off his genitals and stuffed them in his mouth and ripped open his belly so his guts spilled out. Without his scalp, his face sagged into a nearly shapeless mass. Staring at the man who made me and taught me nearly everything I knew about the land, about hunting, about weapons, and about life, I swore in a cold, focused fury that settled in my chest and burned there that the Witch who did this to my father and our People would take many days to die, cursing the day of his birth, and enter the land of the grandfathers blind forever.

  I looked at the remains of every body in the camp, but my mother, little brother, Socorro, He Watches, and a few others, I did not find. I prayed to Ussen that somewhere they were still among the living. I swore to find them, swore to Ussen to avenge this evil. Then I sat down by the remains of my father, buried my head in my hands, and prayed a long time to Ussen that my father would go to the Happy Land. Water comes to Indah eyes when their hearts burn with the fever of sorrow, but my eyes stayed dry. I am an Apache, a son of Caballo Negro and a son of Ussen.

  I put my father back together as best I could, pulling his face back straight, tying his guts back together, and laying his genitals back where they belonged. I lay him on my horse blanket and wrapped and tied him in it. I strained to lift him, and the memory of how he had looked when I found him filled my throat with mesquite thorns. I carried him to a spot in the talus along the west side canyon wall and, laying his body there in a crack in the canyon wall, covered it with stones. The rest of the day, I spent burying the other bodies under rocks in the talus.

  I covered the last body, a girl child, as the shadows grew long. Finished, I fell to the ground weak and hungry, almost out of my mind. A bleeding wound bathed my soul in grief and rage for the deaths of my father and our People. I tried to think clearly on how to find the living in my family, but images of vengeance for this day made all my thoughts dark.

  I lay there in the grass and growing darkness, my body smeared with the blood of my father and my people, my mind drifting from one thought to another as the stars appeared. My growling stomach reminded me I hadn’t eaten in over two days and nights, and I had worked hard all that day. I drank from the spring-fed creek that ran by the camp and washed a little before I stumbled along the trail to the cave hidden in the east canyon wall where the women stored food for the winter. I pulled back the junipers in front of the entrance, lighted a match, and had enough light to see our winter supplies hadn’t been touched. A parfleche case on top of the first layer of grass and sticks that separated other layers of parfleches held dried beef. Another, not nearly as heavy, had dried berries and nuts, another dried mescal, and another dried prickly pear fruit.

  I didn’t want to risk revealing myself with a fire, but carried a few food parfleches back to the creek and ate some dried beef, cutting off small pieces and letting them soften in my mouth for a while before I chewed them. A few handfuls of dried berries mixed with acorns and the beef made my hunger go away.

  In the deep twilight, I pulled off my moccasins and lay down in the cold creek water, its flow full and fresh from the season of rains, its rushing water surrounding me and washing away the heat of the day and the grime of my labor and the blood of my father and the people I’d buried. I had often played in this stream as a boy, and for a moment, I was a child again hunting monsters in the water before the memory of the day returned to me. I rested there, not moving, until the full night came with a chorus of crickets and frogs and tree peepers. I scrubbed my body with sand from the slow pools and crawled up on a rock shelf next to the stream to dry.

  Somewhere down the canyon, a coyote howled the grief I had not spoken. I took my blanket and found a place under a juniper to sleep. I wanted my mind clear and rested before I decided what to do next. I remembered what the People said about ghost sickness coming from handling dead bodies not of your own family and other things they made and touched, but I didn’t care. I remembered Ussen told me not to fear ghosts. If ghost sickness didn’t take me now, I had heard the voice in my vision correctly and would know for certain that I had the blessing of Ussen. Perhaps Ussen meant for ghost sickness to stay away from a killer of witches because its power brought death I was not meant to have.

  At dawn, I crawled from under the juniper and ate more meat and berries. The sorrow and burning need to avenge my People and family were hot, heavy stones pressing on my heart. Many questions fluttered through my mind. Who did this evil thing? Did a witch truly come, or just a great enemy? Why didn’t Cha and other warriors drive them off? Why were the People all scalped? Why murder children and women when they can be made slaves and sold to the Nakai-yes? How had the Witch surprised the camp when guards watched the trail? Had the guards escaped or been taken for slaves? Where is my family?

  I decided to look for my family beginning first at the place He Watches used on the high ridge. Perhaps, if I were very lucky, I might see a dust or smoke plume that showed where they were on the llano. Maybe they went south to the Apache camps in the Davis Mountains. Maybe that was where Cha and his scouts were. I had to find them. I had to learn who did this and take the full measure of vengeance against them using the Power Ussen gave me.

  CHAPTER 22

  FINDING HE WATCHES

  * * *

  I stood on the big flat rock a long time where He Watches had built his fires for signal smokes and thought of the times I sat with him under the over
hung shelf below the rim and used the Shináá Cho to look along the road from the east and across the llano disappearing into the gray haze to the south. Now alone, staring at the llano, the taste of bitter disappointment was strong in my mouth for not killing the Witch before he spread his evil on the People. Many thoughts came. Many thoughts left. I knew only that I had to find what was left of my family and pour burning coals on the head of the Witch.

  Maybe, I thought, I’ll see some trace of our enemies or my family if the spirit of He Watches helps me. I climbed down the path through the big rocks to He Watches’ place. When I stepped around the boulder that hid the place from above, a cocked rifle was pointed at me and two bright eyes stared at me from the gloom. My surprise and joy made me jump and nearly carried me backwards to the rocks far below. I ran forward, held his shoulders, and looked in his face.

  “He Watches! Grandfather, is it truly you or a spirit from the Happy Land?”

  Relief flooded He Watches’ face, and he croaked, “I am here. You return. Enjuh!”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Shot through the meat in my good leg, but the bullet hit no bone. Socorro made medicine from her herbs. It heals.”

  “Where are the others? Tell me what happened.”

  He Watches lay against his favorite boulder, bowed his head, and sighed. He motioned toward a water bladder. “I need water before I can speak of these things. I thought I might die of thirst unless I saved enough to keep me alive until I am strong enough to crawl down to the creek. But, I’m not healing fast enough to crawl to water before I run out of it here. You’ve saved my life.”

  I handed him the bladder, and he pulled on it slowly for a time before giving it back to me. He licked his cracked lips and said, “The day we were attacked, Socorro, Sons-ee-ah-ray, and your little brother left the camp at dawn with some of the other women and their children to gather plants and nuts to keep us fed in the Ghost Face Season.

  “Caballo Negro planned to come here with me, make arrows, and watch for Cha when there was enough light to ride his pony and my mule up the trail. We ate from Sons-ee-ah-ray’s stew pot and decided in two or three suns we must go for you at Roofoos Peek ranch. We had just finished the last of the stew when we heard shots from down the canyon in the horse herd meadow. Caballo Negro grabbed his rifle, and, with a few other warriors still in the camp, ran for the horse meadow. He didn’t get far, just beyond the biggest circle of lodges, when Comanches and Nakai-yes came charging up the trail shooting anyone in front of them—warriors, children, women, old men—everyone they saw. I fired my rifle from the tipi, but I don’t think I killed any of them.

  “I saw Caballo Negro go down, and then rise to one knee and shoot a Nakai-yi and two Comanches off their ponies before many bullets killed him. They roped him around his feet, and a giant with no hair, his body painted black and his head painted to look like a skull, dragged him back and forth through the camp, across fires, stones, and cactus, while shooting into the tipis, killing many.

  “One of their bullets hit my good leg. I tied it off to stop the bleeding and crawled off to the brush from where I shot when I could. I hid there and watched what they did. I have never seen such evil. They were worse than the Comanches in the old days when we fought them. They killed everyone and cut up your father, expecting to disgrace him in the Happy Land, but they were too late. He was long dead when the giant started dragging him. He was the one who led them, the big, ugly giant with no hair and the painted body and head, probably a Nakaiyi—Comanche mongrel. He sat on his pony laughing and shooting anyone still living while he watched the Comanches disgrace your father. When he saw no one still alive, he told his men to take every scalp. Across the great river, Nakai-yes pay much for Apache scalps. I have never seen so many bodies mutilated, so many disgraced. Those men were not human beings. They handled the dead with no fear. They even took Caballo Negro’s hair with his ears and gave the scalp to the giant, who, I have no doubt, is a witch. He held Caballo Negro’s scalp high and shook it whooping in victory. No doubt they were all witches come to kill us. Our People cannot fight this great evil so much stronger than us.”

  I hung my head, remembering my vision. “Because of me, this happened.”

  Grandfather squeezed my shoulder and shouted, “No! Not so!” He looked in my eyes and said, “Those who lived prayed to Ussen that you’d return. They need you now. Cha and the other warriors are nowhere to be seen. If you were here at the attack, that witch would have killed you, too.”

  I shook my head. “You don’t understand. My vision came in a high place near the ranch of Rufus Pike.” I told him of the gift Ussen had given me to help the People and that my name was to be Yellow Boy. “Three suns later, a dream that this would happen visited me and said I must return to the People, but I didn’t come in time. My Power is strong enough to kill this witch and those with him. All this death and destruction came because I was slow to return.”

  He Watches stared off into the haze over the far llano, slowly shaking his head, his eyes narrowed, brow wrinkled. At last, he said, “Your vision and Power from Ussen comes when the People need them. Your enemies will call you Yellow Boy. It is a great name for a great warrior with a strong weapon. Enjuh! Your dream told you to come to this place. One day you will kill the Witch and leave him blind and cursed in the land of the grandfathers. This I know. Do not look back. Do what you can each today. Each new rising sun is another chance to make past days right.”

  We sat together saying nothing for a while. His words gave me comfort and hope to put the past day’s attack in balance and make the murders of my People and my father right. I started to wonder if the others were alive, maybe slaves. “Grandfather, what of the women and children not in camp? Where are they? What happened to them?”

  “When they heard the shooting, they ran back to camp but kept their heads and stayed out of sight until our enemies left. Socorro and Sons-ee-ah-ray found me passed out in the brush. Socorro made medicine for my wound, and they helped me up to the watching place. They hid a fire here, fed the children, and ate with me. We talked of what must be done. The old camp is now a place of the dead. We cannot stay. Many ghosts and much sickness will be there. Even if we could stay, the enemies who found it might come back. Some wanted to wait for Cha to return and ask him what to do, but that might be many days, and new food supplies have to be gathered. All the food they put aside is now in a place of the dead and cannot be touched without danger of ghost sickness.”

  I stared at the ground. I had handled dead bodies to bury them. I had eaten food that might give me ghost sickness. Again, I prayed to Ussen that my Power made me safe from ghosts and ghost sickness. I cannot become sick, if that is part of my Power.

  He Watches said, “Some of the women wailed. Gathering new food supplies takes time. No time left, not much food to gather. The little ones and women will starve in the Ghost Face Season. One said not to worry, that Cha could raid the Nakai-yi villages across the great river for food. Another said that with many of his warriors gone to the Happy Place, he might steal a little, but there could be no big, quick raids. Then Juanita spoke.”

  My ears stood up like those of a listening wolf when He Watches spoke of Juanita. I liked her and was happy I had not found her scalped and mutilated like her father, whom I had buried with the others.

  “She said her father spoke often of the Mescalero Reservation six or seven days’ ride to the northwest where, if you go in and give up to the agent, the Indah will give you food and protect you from the other Indah who want to kill you. ‘Let’s us go there,’ she said. ‘We can walk there in maybe ten or fifteen suns, less if we find horses. We have knives, blankets, and a little food. We can do it. Why not go there?’

  “The women were quiet a long time as they thought about Juanita’s words. I stood, leaning on my stick, and said, ‘Go. Do as Juanita says. She speaks wise words. You won’t starve. I’ll stay here until Cha returns and tell him what happened and where you have gone. Whe
n the sun comes, go. Stay on the eastern side of the mountains. There’s more water on that side, and it’s easier to find than on the west side. I’ll follow you with Cha and his warriors.’

  “The women looked at each other and nodded. With one voice they said, ‘Enjuh!’ When the sun came, they left for the reservation. Socorro wanted to stay with me. I told her the young women and little ones needed her wisdom and skills, so she must go with them. She didn’t like it, but she went. They left yesterday. You must go and help them. They need a warrior with them.”

  I said, “I’ll find the women and help them to the reservation before I find and kill the Witch, but you must come with me, Grandfather. We all need you and your wise words. When Cha comes, he’ll follow our trail. Now, we go.”

  He Watches looked in my eyes and nodded. “Now we go . . . Yellow Boy.”

  CHAPTER 23

  FINDING SURVIVORS

  * * *

  I tied He Watches and his supplies on my pony, and leading it, followed the women’s twisting trail out of the mountains. It was the same trail through the dark green junipers and mountain brush that Caballo Negro had followed into the mountains when we had run from the Blue Coats nearly ten years earlier.

  The women left a trail that was easy for an Apache to follow but impossible for an Indah to see. They walked some, ran some, stayed on rocky ground, and hid well where they made water. Down from the mountains in the rough, brown foothills, where scattered mesquites, creosotes, and yuccas grew, they turned northwest but stayed in foothill arroyos where they couldn’t be seen on the horizon.