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

by W. Michael Farmer

As I neared our resting place, He Watches, Klo-sen, and Beela-chezzi rode out to me, leading my horse already saddled. Fear filled their faces, and He Watches said, “Come; we must leave this place. The Witch knows we’re here. He already plans to kill me.”

  I swung into the saddle and led them toward the hill with the stone watchtower rising above a thick stand of juniper. From that tower, a guard might sit and see for miles watching for approaching Apaches or other raiders. We found a hollow dip near the top of the hill on the backside facing away from the adobe compound where we could hobble our horses to graze and rest without being seen. After eating a few handfuls of cured meat mixed with dried berries and nuts and chewing dried mescal our women had made, we sat close together facing each other. I pulled a cigarro, lit it, smoked to the four directions, and passed it to He Watches and then Klo-sen and Beela-chezzi.

  I said, “He Watches, tell us how the Witch knows we’re here and plans to attack us.”

  He Watches, pale, his skin gray in the early morning shade, said, “When the moon was high, shining straight down on the lake, I heard an owl call my name. Three times, it called. It was the Witch. Death called, and I heard it. Later, when I crawled to the lake to fill a canteen with water, I saw a fat, ugly snake coiled, waiting to strike me, waiting to make me sick with its poison. The Witch is trying to kill me. I struck the snake with my staff, and it slid away and disappeared. I waited for it to come back, but it did not. That witch knows we’re here. He’ll kill us in a bad way. I say we go away, and, like Juh, leave him alone.”

  Klo-sen and Beela-chezzi frowned and nodded at He Watches’ words, and then sighed and looked at me. I looked in the eyes of each man and saw fear, so I started speaking. “I found the Witch and watched him all night. His men include Comanches. They danced, making ready for a new raid. They all held fresh scalps. They did this also after they took the hair of our people. The Witch is a giant Nakai-yi-Comanche mongrel, very strong, and very tall. He sat on a chair of black and gold, pounded rhythms with his fists, drank the strong water of the Nakai-yes, and did nasty things with the women around him, things only a witch dares do to a woman.

  “Near dawn, when the fire was low and his Comanches snored in the bushes with the women they took, he sent one of his women for a sack. When she returned, her face told me it stank. He opened the sack, reached in, and pulled out a scalp with long, black hair. He held it up laughing and howling like a wolf. Ears were on the scalp, and from the left ear hung the same blue stones strung on a silver loop like my father wore.

  “This is the Witch who killed our People! I don’t care if he knows we’re here and sends owls calling for our deaths or snakes to strike us. I’ll kill him.” I thumped the butt of my rifle to emphasize each word as I said, “His . . . evil . . . will . . . not . . . stand! Go or stay. You don’t have less heart in my eyes if you go. Here I stay and kill the Witch or die. That is all I have to say.”

  He Watches stared at the ground, slowly shaking his head. Klo-sen and Beela-chezzi crossed their arms and studied the horizon, and the only sounds came from the wind caressing the grass and junipers and carrying the pungent smell of juniper sap from bushes around the stone tower. I finished my cigarro, crushed its last embers in the sand, and buried it, wondering if I were strong enough to face the Witch alone and telling myself I didn’t care as long as I had the opportunity to kill him.

  He Watches looked in my eyes and said, “I’m the one who heard the owl. My life in this land is nearly gone. The giant Nakai-yi Comanche must pay for the evil he did to our People. I will fight this witch with you, Grandson.”

  Beela-chezzi looked at Klo-sen, who nodded, and then at me. “The Witch must die. If we fight him together and with the Power of Ussen, he will die. We’re with you.”

  I nodded, shook my fist, and said, “We’ll kill this witch for Ussen and our People.”

  CHAPTER 40

  DECEPTION

  * * *

  Beela-chezzi said, “Tell us how we’ll kill this witch. The Witch has ten Comanches, maybe more, and seven or eight vaqueros, all fighting men. Also, the Witch has demon power. Only three of us can fight the Witch’s band from ponies or hand-to-hand. Only you have Power to kill the Witch and shoot out his eyes. He Watches is brave and shoots good, but he can’t move fast as warriors do. How can we beat this enemy?”

  I pointed with my rifle toward the rutted road passing the hacienda. “The trail southeast goes to Casas Grandes; the trail west turns north and goes to Janos. Juh says the Witch sells scalps for silver in Casas Grandes and trades silver for supplies, whiskey, guns, and bullets. Last night, I saw Comanches and vaqueros dance with scalps. The Witch made big talk, saying soon they’d go raid for scalps, cattle, horses, and slaves. He gave his band much whiskey and plenty of time with slave women. He’ll send a wagon with scalps to Casas Grandes for supplies. The next day, the wagon will come back.”

  Beela-chezzi smiled, and I nodded and explained in detail, “We’ll ambush them and take the wagon. The wagon that goes to Casas Grandes will come back early and empty with a dead driver. That way, we’ll separate the Witch from supplies and whiskey. Without them, the vaqueros and Comanches won’t stay with the Witch. They’ll run, find and ride with other banditos, and go back to their people. We’ll make ’em afraid to stay. We’ll kill them in the bushes where they take women, make ’em die in a hard way, make ’em think bad enemies have come like the wind. Ussen will make them think we are ghosts when we are not. He will keep us men. We’ll make right what the Witch did to our People. I’ll kill the Witch.” I tapped my right index finger against my temple and asked, “What you think?”

  The other three, who had leaned forward to listen, sat back, crossed their arms, and as one man nodded agreement.

  Klo-sen said, “This we’ll do. We’ll wipe out all the Comanches and vaqueros he leads. These evil ones who murdered our People and took their scalps, we’ll make ugly in the land of the grandfathers. They must die.” He paused a moment and asked, “Will you kill the Witch in his own hacienda?”

  I nodded. “This I’ll do. Ussen gives me Power. I’ll kill the Witch. We’ll wipe out his band. They’re under his power, so they’ll die.”

  We took turns watching the hacienda the rest of the day, but saw little activity except by a few women and small children working gardens by the stream or vaqueros and Comanches working livestock in nearby corrals. Darkness fell under high, overcast skies turned blood red by the falling sun, portending coming rain.

  We saddled our horses, rode off the backside of the low hill, and swung around the two adjoining taller hills to ride north across the llano until we reached the rutted road from the hacienda running east toward Rio Casas Grandes. In the low light, we rode parallel to the road ruts to avoid leaving tracks the sharp-eyed Comanches might see. Within three miles, we found a good place for an ambush. There the ruts crossed a long stretch of flat llano, and nothing but short grass, knee-high bushes, and occasional ocotillo were visible for several miles. I thought, Perfect, the last place to expect an ambush.

  We spent the rest of the night looking for the best places by the road to hide and talking about what to do when the wagon riders fought back or tried to get away. We marked the places for Klo-sen and Beela-chezzi to hide, using blankets covered with a thin layer of dirt and sand and made to look like innocuous little ripples in the llano stretching away into the distance.

  A golden glow on the edge of the world defined by the eastern black mountains appeared as we watered our thirsty ponies at the big green lake and then retreated to the stone watchtower where we again took turns watching the hacienda compound and resting in the shade of the junipers around the tower.

  It rained in the mountains, but stayed dry on the llano. Two days under a fiery sun and two cool nights under a quarter moon passed. During the days, we watched the hacienda and the women and children working in green, fertile gardens and Comanches and vaqueros coming and going through the big double doors in the compound walls.
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  Each night Klo-sen, Beela-chezzi, and I crept into the tree shadows along the south side of the stream by the hacienda compound and watched the Comanches and vaqueros, standing or sitting around fires eating, drinking, playing Monte, and swapping stories before calling it a night and disappearing through the gates toward the bunkhouse inside the walls. Each night a Comanche called Segundo, who appeared to be the Witch’s second in command, gave a few men, singled out for a special reward, their choice of women, slave or free, who drank and laughed with them while sitting on their laps. As the moon began falling toward the west, and the inky black shadows from its white light lengthened, the women, carrying blankets, led the men off into the darkness under the trees to places, they, no doubt, had visited many times before.

  Sangre del Diablo, towering above them all, visited with his men at their fires, discussing the day’s business, telling stories, and listening to their jokes. He watched them gamble, and acting like he was one of the boys, played with the women, laughing as he fondled their breasts, made nasty comments about their need to ride a big horse like him, and slapped their behinds. But for all the good humor, I noticed he only sipped his whiskey and stayed alert before returning to the hacienda with two or three women he had chosen trailing behind him.

  On the third night, we crossed the stream to the north side and waited for the men and their women to leave the fires in front of the hacienda compound gates. First one, then a short time later another, and then another couple sauntered away into the dark shadows under the trees and brush where there came laughter, shouts of excitement, and moans of ecstasy. We crept closer to the couples in their brush and grass beds.

  In the shadow’s dim light, I watched a drunk Comanche, his long, shiny black braid hung over his left shoulder, leave the gates and stagger after a young Nakai-yi woman, probably not yet married when she was taken, carrying a blanket. She went to a place by a big cottonwood tree on the edge of the stream where grass and bushes were still bent from previous visits, and I was hiding in the brush across from the place, close enough to reach out and touch the blanket. The Comanche, laughing, stumbled in the dark and flopped down beside her.

  I heard her say, “What pleasures does mi hombre want from me tonight? The last time we were together, you wanted me to be the mare to your stallion. You were a big, strong stallion. You pleased mi much. I tell the other girls about you. They want to be your mare, too.”

  The Comanche grunted his pleasure at her words. “Ha! Bring them on. I’ll show them what a true stallion is. Here in the dark I can see nothing. Let us play Witch.”

  “Witch? Do I know this game, Señor?”

  “You know, let me do to you what Sangre del Diablo did to that woman in front of us all the other night.”

  “Ah, yes, I remember it well. She still wants to hide her face from the rest of us. Did the Witch make her sleep so he could pleasure her? Can you do that for me, but not in front of everybody?”

  “Yes, yes, I can do that for you and not in front of everybody. I cannot even see my moccasins in this darkness. Soon the moon comes, and then it will be better. Take off your skirt and top and lie close beside me and I’ll pleasure you as Sangre del Diablo did that woman, but when the moon comes we’ll do other things, eh?”

  “Sí, mi hombre. Let me feel how good you are with your hands. I know how good you are with other parts of you.”

  They laughed and I heard them pull off their clothes and lie back on the blanket. I heard a few moans of pleasure from her and after a while the Comanche snore and the deep breathing of the woman while I waited for a little moonlight through the trees to show me just how they lay.

  I cut the Comanche’s throat and planned to leave the woman sleeping, but her eyes snapped open when his blood spilled across her chest. She opened her mouth to scream but fear of discovery made the slash of my razor-sharp blade across her windpipe lightning fast, leaving only gurgles and dying wheezes. The last sound she probably heard was the Comanche’s scalp with that long braid tearing free from his skull. I crawled into the brush toward another couple I’d heard wrestling around on a blanket. I hoped Beela-chezzi and Klo-sen had it as easy as I had in taking my first scalp.

  None of the four couples disappearing into the shadows of the trees that night returned. We hadn’t scalped the women. We washed the blood from the scalps we had taken and the blood splatters from our bodies downstream from the hacienda before disappearing to the watchtower hill.

  I hung the bloody scalps of the Comanches on a stone in the watchtower next to those Klo-sen and Beela-chezzi had taken and sat down to stare at them. My disgust with what I had done made me want to vomit. I shook my head. Ussen played the jokester. The ironies that my father had told me not to take scalps, unless for good reason, and the killing and scalping of men who probably scalped my father, were not lost on me. It was eye-for-an-eye justice. I hoped killing these men and their women was enough to spread fear through the compound, making the band bolt for Casas Grandes, leaving the Witch behind. But, I knew in my heart the taking of scalps was not the Apache way.

  After nearly two years, my patience finally felt rewarded, and I knew I had to think and act like a patient hunter, waiting to take an animal with only one shot, all a hunter expected to have, a valuable lesson I’d learned years ago when I’d begun training under He Watches and my father. Now I understood the value of that training. I had one chance to face the Witch, one chance to send him blind, naked, and without hair to the land of the grandfathers. One chance was all I wanted or needed.

  He Watches and I used the Shináá Cho to watch the groves of trees between the hacienda gate and the stream. The women used by the Comanches and vaqueros usually returned to the compound before dawn, leaving the men snoring and passed out on the blankets in the brush until the heat, flies, and other insects finally bit and crawled over their faces and bodies enough to awaken them. Then they’d make their way to the stream, drink the tepid water, wash their faces, have a smoke, and then wander back to the compound for frijoles and tortillas cooked by an old crone on an ancient black and charred cook stove in the big hacienda kitchen. The sun was well above the eastern mountains when we heard screams and wails from the women who had been sent to find the late sleepers.

  Soon blankets wrapped around bodies and tied off with rope were placed side-by-side on a high pile of wood in a bare spot by the stream. A bell on a tower in the hacienda rang solemn tones calling men to the hacienda courtyard. Using Shináá Cho, I watched Sangre del Diablo, who stood with crossed arms and his face twisted by a scowl. His men listened to him, and after Segundo handed him a torch, he led them to the bodies and put the torch on the wood. Flames instantly reached skyward. The Witch raised his arms and sang as he threw powder on the fire, making it flare brightly. A great, greasy, black column of smoke rose high and then bent toward the east. The Witch turned and walked back to the compound gates as his men then poured into the trees, rifles at the ready. We looked at each other and smiled.

  Comanches passed out of the trees on the south side of the stream, their rifles cocked and ready, hunched over, looking for ground signs, motioning others to come look when they found a disturbed stone, a piece of broken grass, or a scrape in the dirt that perhaps shouldn’t be there. Vaqueros followed them, smoking corn shuck cigarettes, their eyes nervously darting in all directions, their hands on the dark wooden handles of their holstered revolvers ready for instant use. We knew the trackers would soon find signs that pointed them toward the top of our watchtower hill.

  I pointed toward our waiting horses tied behind the hill, each saddled and carrying a small juniper tied to a length of rope. Mounting, He Watches, Klo-sen, and Beela-chezzi rode down the backside of the hill staying out of sight of the hacienda and the trackers. I waited, picking targets in case I had to shoot before the trackers were distracted.

  They rode out on the rutted road across the llano not more than a mile away from the hacienda, dropped the junipers, and galloped east down the
Rio Casas Grandes road. The brush bouncing and dragging across dusty llano raised a streaming dust plume like that made by many riders. The Comanches and vaqueros saw it immediately. They turned from their path up the hill and ran for the hacienda.

  The Shináá Cho showed Sangre del Diablo, arms crossed, waiting for them at the gate. He listened while they told him with many howls and yells of anger what they saw and pointed where they had seen the dust streamer. He called out four Comanches from the group, made chopping motions with the flat of his hand as he spoke, and then with a feminine flick of his wrist sent them to chase the dust streamer. I thought I saw strange designs, perhaps tattoos on the hands of the Witch. I shook my head as the Comanches mounted their ponies and thundered out of the corral, riding east to follow and perhaps catch the source of the dust plume they had seen. The Witch is smart. He still has half his fighting men while he tries to learn how many enemies made the dust streamer.

  Sangre del Diablo pointed at three vaqueros and spoke. One of them ran inside the hacienda, and the other two caught two horses in the corral, put them in a wagon harness, and hitched them to a buckboard sitting next to a corral. The vaquero who ran into the hacienda returned holding a lumpy flour sack in front of him, his nose wrinkled, and threw it in the back of the wagon. One man drove the wagon. The other two saddled horses and rode behind him down the rutted road. I nodded and smiled. The Witch is cashing in his scalps.

  As we had planned, three miles from the hacienda, Klo-sen and Beela-chezzi slowed their mounts to a walk and gave their reins to He Watches. They pulled themselves up to stand on their saddles and jumped to boulders on a small hill to leave no tracks dismounting. He Watches then raced on toward Rio Casas Grandes, the junipers bumping, rolling, and pounding the llano dust to keep the plume in play.

  I have thought many times about He Watches and how the Comanches must have caught him. Our plan was for him to get to the river and lose those who Sangre del Diablo sent after him. I can see his pony covered in lather and heaving, He Watches barely hanging on, when it splashed into the Rio Casas Grandes and its cool cottonwood shade on the slow-moving water. He would have cut the ropes tying the junipers to the saddles and let them drift away downriver while the horses took a few short swallows of water. Looking back through the trees, he must have seen a growing dust plume from his pursuers in the distance. He would have led the ponies at a walk upstream toward Casas Grandes until he found the wagon road coming in from the west and rode up on it so the tracks of his ponies mixed in with those already there before he turned to ride for the watchtower. Somewhere along the road, those four Comanches, their rifles cocked and ready, would have appeared out of the hot, fiery afternoon glare, surrounded him, and knocked him off his pony before they tied him across the saddle and brought him back to the hacienda for Sangre del Diablo to enjoy killing. My grandfather was right. He had heard the owl, and his time was not long in this land. When I saw him later, I knew he had not been easy to take.