by J P S Brown
"I don't know, Manuelito. Some coward has done this."
Lucrecia carried Adancito to her room and put him to bed. Manuelito heard him whimper, speak, and be consoled by his mother until he was silent again. "He's warm now," Lucrecia said when she came back into the kitchen. "He told me he is hungry. He'll rest awhile so I can feed him."
The mare screamed with the fear only animals not endowed with tooth and claw for tearing flesh know how how to scream. She kicked the boards of the stall and screamed again. A low snoring moan filled the small valley of Las Animas and vibrated inside Lucrecia Martinillo's spine. She could almost feel the breath of the jaguar in her ear and smell his stale maw.
"Tigre!" she said and ran to the doorway. At that moment El Toro Buey let go his bull's challenge in a voice as strong as the jaguar's. The stall rattled on its posts as his horns lifted and thrusted against the boards. The moan of El Yoco came again on top of the bellow of the bull. The moan encompassed Las Animas and seemed to claim lordship over the place.
"How close is that animal?" asked Manuelito. "He sounds close enough to be in the house."
Lucrecia stepped out on the patio in the light and lifted her head. "He's on the hill where you can first see the house from the trail. He's upwind from us. I smell him."
All life in the valley was silent a moment, waiting on the humor of the visitor.
"That moan. Is that the way the tigre sings?" Manuelito asked.
"The tigre sings that way to scare up blood and flesh," Lucrecia said softly.
As though to substantiate Lucrecia, the jaguar raved at the valley. The sound was so pervasive that every voice in Las Animas save those of Lucrecia and El Toro Buey answered with whimperings of fear. Manuelito prayed confusedly to the jaguar. The sons of Martinillo called in small cries for their mother.
The small animals of Las Animas, awakened, hid in the corners each had chosen as safest for sleeping. The mare screamed again and hurtled into the boards that enclosed her. El Toro Buey challenged again. The boards of the stall gave way and Lucrecia and Manuelito heard the buckskin mare running away.
"El Toro Buey is loose now and he won't run." Lucrecia said. "He's our defense. We have no rifle, no pistol, no arms of any kind."
5
El Toro Buey bellowed with every step as he swung in a wide circle away from the house. He wanted El Yoco to know where he was.
El Toro Buey had centuries of the blood of bulls of fighting casta behind him. He was of the breed called corriente by the Mexicans, the common cattle of Mexico. The corriente has survived since the Spaniard brought his foundation stock of cattle in the colonization of Mexico. The blood of bulls of Spanish casta, the brave bulls raised for the bull ring, is strong in the corriente. The corriente is generally not as beautiful, as well made, as pugnacious toward life or human beings as the brave bull, but he has the bottom, the stamina, the valor, and nobility of the fighting bull. From the brave bull of his ancestry El Toro Buey inherited the sense that battle was good whether it be against a living adversary or for survival in hard country. He would not be intimidated and he would not run from pain. He would not miss a meal because of natural borders or any other adversity.
El Toro Buey was a throwback in physique to the brave bull. He was black. His every characteristic resembled those of the finest of brave bulls save one, his affinity for the Martinillo family. His eyes were wide set and clear. His head was short, his muzzle small. His shoulders were thick. His bone was thick, but his feet were small and quick. His body was long, but his loin, hips, and thighs were hard with supple muscle. His hind legs were straight as a quarter horse's.
Dominating all the fineness he had inherited from the fighting bulls was his pride--his wide, heavy, thick-based horns that tapered out to sharp points. His horns were as sharp as knitting needles and he was as quick and dexterous with them as a boxer is with his hands. He was capable of using his horns with all the fencing and killing power of sword or ax and he carried a half-ton of power behind them to drive, slice, fend, or chop away an opponent.
El Toro Buey loved to fight. This love was as strong as his love for breeding cows. He sired more offspring than any other bull in his region. He had plenty of competition because bull calves were not castrated by their owners, and all male cattle contested for the right of sireship from the time they were a year and a half old.
El Toro Buey had thrown many calves from cows that did not belong to the Martinillo. The Martinillo only had five cows. Martinillo had only to turn him loose after the summer clearing and plowing when the rains had come and the grass was green, and El Toro Buey would set about re-establishing his rights as sire over his querencia, his haunts. The range of his haunts were so phenomenally large that Juan Vogel wanted to take him to the slaughterhouse. No Vogel Brahma bull, or Hereford bull of his cousins, or Holstein or Charolais bull of other ranchers who were trying to improve their stock and always sold to Juan Vogel, had a chance at a cow if El Toro Buey was in the region when she came in heat. One encounter with El Toro Buey convinced any bull that to lock horns with him was to fight for the rest of his life, run, or be killed. Usually the bull so audacious enough to stand and fight soon found it a better course to run away and leave him to his pleasures.
El Toro Buey did not wait for his cows at the water holes where the well-bred, fancy, high-priced bulls waited with complacency. El Toro Buey caught them on the mountaintops, in the dry ravines, called them to him from across the canyons, backed them up on the brinks of precipices, ran them down on steep trails, crowded them into the density of the spiny forests, and then made it in time to the water holes to run off the fat, complacent bulls. The cows who walked docilely, gently, and unexpectingly to water were the cows he bred while he was resting. He liked his wild cows best, and he hunted them down and bred them first.
He was lucky he lived in a region where most of the ranchers were trying to improve their cattle breeds with bulls who would throw calves that yielded great amounts of beef. He had few corriente bulls to challenge him. He and the corriente often paced half a day to meet for a fight. They called each other all the way until they met and fought. El Toro Buey always won. In the fall the Martinillo would go hunt him up and find him fat, his hide shining, refreshed, and unwilling to return to Las Animas to do the work of an ox. The Martinillo needed him in the fall, but El Toro Buey also needed the Martinillo's protection. Cattlemen came to gather and wean their cattle in the fall. Cattlemen, expecting to find high-priced Brahma and Hereford calves, were going to find black corriente calves, the images of El Toro Buey. The Martinillo did not want El Toro Buey to get shot.
Now, he was swinging his body powerfully in a trot, a black bull going on the fight. He cast a long black shadow from the risen moon. His hooves struck the silver shine off the silt-covered rocks in the dried arroyo. He was headed for ground good for battle in the small hidden pocket of the ranch. His thinness gave him lightness of foot and movement. His neck hump swelled and rolled as he trotted. Dust sprayed from it. Dust he had bathed it with when he pawed the earth anxious to fight. He found the spot in the middle of the arroyo where he would fight. He threw up his head, tossed his horns, and sounded his cry, begging unashamedly for his enemy. El Yoco did not need to be begged. The swollen eye, shot through and heavy with clotting blood, had maintained his rage all day. Now the pain and pressure in his head made him crazy for a fight. He, like the wolverine of the North or the striped tiger of the East, was capable of vengeance. He was the headsman of his world and proud to perform his office whether it be for vengeance, for whim of mischief, for punishment, or for a favor to any being he considered in need of a quick death.
He rose from his place on the hill where he had been suffering. He walked out of the shadows of the trees, let his rich hide shine for a moment broadside to the moonlight. He ran straight to the top of a bank above the arroyo. He screamed for battle, dove for the bull, screamed again when he missed. He feinted to invoke the bull's charge, quartered on the bull like a banderillero, pr
esented his side as a target. The bull was forced to double back sharply against himself to follow him. El Yoco sprang lightly for the hump of the neck, making his body an immense banderilla. His jaws shut full of muscle and hide. His claws slashed the shoulders and back of the bull. El Toro Buey pitched high and tossed El Yoco forward. The jaguar lost the purchase of his claws. El Toro Buey jarred his front feet into the ground and kicked high behind. He spun when his hind feet struck the ground. For a moment El Yoco stood on his head, his teeth deep into the hump. As he was jerked high above the bull, he released the hold of his jaws so he could twist and land on his feet. El Toro Buey caught the jaguar in the ribs with the flat of his horn and threw him into the bank.
El Yoco rebounded and sprang to the bull's back again. The bull did not give him time to take hold. He bucked in a spin that twisted and swapped ends with each jump. The bull's hide rolled and twitched under El Yoco's claws. El Yoco fell awkwardly to the ground inside the spin and flattened before the bull's scooping horns. The bull rolled him along the ground and El Yoco punished his nose and forehead. The bull bucked over the top of El Yoco. El Yoco slashed him from his briskit to his thighs, but the bull stomped El Yoco in the back with both hind feet. El Yoco waited, his muscle and nerve impassionately61 it relaxed, ears flattened against his head, mouth open, teeth unsheathed.
El Toro Buey charged him again. The jaguar dodged the horns and went for El Toro Buey's throat, swinging his full weight from jaws he set close above El Toro Buey's jugular and windpipe. El Toro Buey tossed his head so high his front feet left the ground and the jaguar came loose with his mouth full of black hide. El Toro Buey caught the jaguar again the instant he hit the ground. He drove a horn into the jaguar's chest and tossed him so high the jaguar spread his legs like fans in the air as his body stiffened with its inability to take action until it returned to earth. He rolled with his impact on the ground and did not turn to meet El Toro Buey again. He ran away. El Toro Buey stopped, refusing to chase after a cowardly enemy. El Toro Buey challenged the jaguar again.
El Yoco slowed to a walk and went on without answering or looking back. The only sign he made that showed he knew El Toro Buey still wanted battle was the flattening of his ears, listening for pursuit.
El Yoco walked on to a high den he knew would be cooled by thick pine cover during the day. He lay down to rest and clean his wounds, soothe his sore places. He had fought and lost. He was in worse pain because he lost. His proud tawny cleanness had been flawed.
* * *
Lucrecia caught El Toro Buey when he came back to the house. She held the oil lamp high while she examined him. Dark blood splashed underneath him when he turned for her. He was so completely wet and shiny with blood that Manuelito thought at first the great toro buey had been down in a mud wallow. The man could not distinguish the color of the wetness in the moonlight. The smell of blood was strong. Lucrecia made Manuelito bring water from the kitchen and she washed the bull. She pressed striffing to the neck and shoulder wounds. She saw strips of hide hanging slack that she would need to sew back in place in daylight. She needed medicines for infection. She hoped Juan Vogel had livestock medicines with him, but herbs would do until she sent for them. She would go early to find zabila, a plant she could turn into a gelatin poultice for the worst wounds. She would heat the fat leaves of zabila on coals until the sap oozed into a clean jelly. She would apply them to hold down the infection the twenty knives of El Yoco's claws would cause.
She led El Toro Buey to his stall and tied him to the manger while she and Manuelito patched the boards to keep him in. Manuelito climbed to the loft to fill the manger with feed. He held up a bundle of corn fodder and looked confusedly around in the moonlight.
"And the little mother horse?" he asked, worried. "And the filly? Where will they be fed?"
"They're gone, Manuelito," Lucrecia said patiently. "We'll look for them in the morning. Throw a bundle for them outside the corral and come on to the house. You'll have to stay with the boys in the morning while I look for herbs. Then you must hurry and bring the Martinillo. El Yoco will begin killing now that he's been made to look foolish. He will need to convince us we lacked respect for him and he is better and stronger than we are. Martinillo will have to stop him before he begins a slaughter to show how great he is."
"My poor burrito, " Manuelito said, looking at the bundle of tasol in his hand. "He is tied all by himself on the trail without his supper. I don't even think I unpacked him."
"Don't you remember, Manuelito?" Lucrecia asked.
"No," Manuelito said, sorrowfully, almost weeping.
"You probably did. Don't worry. Come on to the house and have your supper. You'll have your coffee. You can have a traguito of the Martinillo's good mezcal before supper and a leaf of tobacco afterwards. We'll try to remedy everything, but not until morning."
* * *
The buckskin mare raced away to the place nature had fixed in her instinct for reunion with her foal, the place where the filly had last nursed. She did not find her colt. At Gilaremos the vaqueros caught her and one of them led her back to Las Animas. She was too tired and nervous to be ridden, too sick to be kept in a cow camp.
6
Adán Martinillo stopped on the tracks of his bay filly by a large nopal. His friend, Manuelito Espinoza, was with him.
"The filly turned back here, Manuelito," Adán said. He squatted by the track and rested. Manuelito squatted on the other side of the track and began building a cigarette from tobacco and corn leaf Lucrecia had given him that morning when she sent him for Adán.
"I think she headed home. I'll probably find her at Rancho Quemado. Maybe Lico caught her." Adán watched Manuelito lick both sides of the corn leaf, relishing it. "I came by Rancho Quemado early and Lico's woman said he was asleep, so I didn't speak with him," Manuelito said, pulling and smoothing the leaf gently. "I didn't see the filly and I didn't see my burrito. "
"But didn't you say you tracked the burro to the cliff of Carrizito, Manuelito? Don't you remember?"
"Ah, yes, I did. But I lost the tracks. I couldn't follow them by the cliff. Too broken and steep. I could have rolled off ."
Manuelito rationed himself a portion of tobacco from a plastic bag and carefully began to roll it in the leaf. Adán knew Manuelito could not be altogether present at any conversation while he was performing the operation of rolling a smoke.
"Did you find your lumber and the burro's packsaddle?"'
Adán asked, to break the spell the rolling of the cigarette was
causing.
"¿Como? What?" Manuelito asked.
"Is the burro still carrying his pack?"
"I found the cargo and packsaddle scattered in Arroyo Hondo. I found blood. My burro ran from the place I left him. Poor little burrito. He doesn't know running. I followed his tracks as far as I could. I didn't see the track of the tigre, but then the Arroyo Hondo is very rocky."
"He's probably gone home to Las Animas by now. I'll find him eating corn with Lucrecia. I'll track the filly and I'll look for my burro."
"Yes, I remember now. I was using your burro. Maybe I didn't find him because I was looking for the track of my burro. That's fine. My burrito is probably ready to come home now. He doesn't like to stay away from me and my hermanito, Don Panchito Flores Valenzuela. My burrito is not mutrero. He doesn't like to run away."
"I understand. I'm going now. I'll see you in Avena tomorrow."
"With the Grace of God," Manuelito said. He did not rise when Adán began to walk away on the tracks of the filly.
"I'll just rest here while I smoke my little leaf," he said when Adán was out of hearing.
Adán followed the tracks on a straight line toward Las Animas. He climbed the mountain above Limón. He stopped to breathe and looked down on the hacienda. He thought of how much life and death, fear, flight, and joy had passed by those old houses since they were abandoned for being too far away from life.
Adán walked on to a high plateau covered with
pine.
The ground was soft with pine needles. The tracks of the filly were deep from running. He saw the track of the tigre with them. Then he saw his bay filly. She was lying flat on her side the way colts sleep in the sun. His filly was lying too flat to be alive and sleeping. She had that final flatness all dead creatures assume the instant they begin turning into dirt again. Adán squatted by her. She had been killed so suddenly, so expertly, that she was almost still alive. Adán felt her life must surely be close nearby. This killing proved to Adán that the jaguar had spoiled. He had left evidence of how fine an assassin he was. The good and beautiful in El Yoco had become so full and rich that it had spoiled, become rancid, and would cause sickness from now on.
Adán sighed. He admired the tigre. Adán liked to share the Sierra with the wolf, the coyote, the lion, the eagle, the tigre, as was natural. Adán had felt privileged when he had first seen El Yoco. He was in awe of the range, the strength, the health, the unconscious, easy grace of the tigre. He admired the good humor of the healthy jaguar, the good humor of the strong being who disdains using his strength against the small or the puny unless he must eat. This tigre hated the filly, killed her for vengeance, and left her to rot.
Now El Yoco would have to be killed. No man was a match for El Yoco. Adán must learn more about him. He had to determine how a man in huaraches with only a single-shot .22 rifle was going to run a machine like El Yoco to ground. He only had his hunter's and vaquero's axiom to guide him: "Mas vale el paso que dure y no trote que canse. Better to use a pace which endures than a trot that tires."
He would begin by tracking El Yoco from this first crime. He would keep his own pace and try never to leave the track, even when he heard of new kills El Yoco made further along, kills Adán could go to for a fresher track, In this way he would learn the habits of El Yoco. One day he might be able to intercept El Yoco before he killed.
Adán unsheathed his knife and skinned the filly. He saw no reason for a good hide to go to waste. He would have jerked and dried the meat if he had found the filly sooner. Meat was meat. The filly was a filly to be admired and enjoyed, even loved, only as long as she was alive. As soon as breath left her she was meat, if she had not died of sickness or hunger. He folded the hide, tied it with his reata and slung it over his shoulder.
