Apache Country

by Frederick H. Christian

“I never heard of them.”

  Ironheel looked away, his silence saying again what it had said before. Pind’ a’ lickoyé know what they know and Apache know what Apache know. He stood gazing down into the canyon below for a moment, then looked up.

  “Dokáh,” Ironheel said. Let’s go.

  Once again, Easton found going down the canyon was harder on the legs and spine than going up. More than once his feet dislodged a rock or a hummock of loose earth and he slid a yard or two downhill, arms flailing to maintain balance. Long shadows were already reaching out from the peaks of the mountains as they scrambled across a rocky gully toward the upward slope on the far side.

  For the second climb, Easton blanked out his mind again and did it, progressing what often seemed no more than a foot at a time, sweating, sliding, fighting the steep incline. When they reached the top he collapsed in a weary heap, dirty, exhausted, his sweat-soaked shirt sticking to his back. Ironheel squatted by his side, looking back down the rocky slope they had just climbed. His skin glistened with perspiration and his dark hair was plastered to his skull.

  “Bitch of a hill,” he said, one opponent respectfully acknowledging another.

  After resting a while they moved on through the steadily lengthening shadows, no longer taking the trouble to erase their sign. At night not even Mose Kuruk could follow it. Up ahead to the right they could see the darkened hulk of El Marcial. It was becoming more and more difficult to see the trail.

  “We going to make it before dark?” Easton said.

  “We better,” Ironheel replied.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  As they passed through a dense stand of trees, Ironheel stopped and crouched down to examine some animal droppings. He crumbled them between his fingers, smelled them.

  “Biih,” he said. “Deer. Looks like they come here pretty regularly.” He squinted up at the darkening sky. “N’juh.”

  Breaking a three-foot switch from a nearby tree, he stripped off its leaves. Then he tore a small strip of cloth from the tail of his shirt, tied it with a knot at the whippy end of the switch, and handed it to Easton.

  “Go hide over there,” he said, pointing at a thick stand of four foot-high piñon bushes. “Hold this so the rag is clear of the top of the bushes. Keep very still. When you hear the deer coming, twitch the rag. Very gently, understand?”

  Easton put on a puzzled face. “You want to tell me how I’m supposed to hear deer coming?”

  Ironheel made an impatient sound. “Ch’í’intiih ninatsekeesí,” he said. “Open your mind. Listen.”

  No questions, no arguments, Easton again reminded himself. He shrugged and went over to the spot Ironheel had indicated, behind the bushes. When he looked around Ironheel was gone. The great silence of the mountains descended on and enveloped him, the way mist surrounds a headland. He closed his eyes and thought about the eons it had taken to form these mighty upheavals of granite. He pictured dinosaurs foraging across the empty land, Tyrannosaurus Rex, triceratops and pterodactyl, long before the first hunter-gatherers came south from the tundra.

  Ch’í’intiih ninatsekeesí. Open your mind.

  He let out his breath in a long exhalation, thinking nothing, concentrating on the next inhalation, letting go of his thoughts. And very gradually he became conscious of the presence and subtle sounds of the millions of small things constantly moving around him, the twitter of unseen birds, the steady hum of bees, the tiny skitter of a kangaroo rat, the pale whir of a dragonfly’s flight, and the soft, shifting whisper of the leaves stirring on the trees.

  It was like being in a state of suspended animation, detached from and yet in harmony with everything. The longer he kept his eyes closed the sharper his hearing seemed to become. He heard the deer approaching long before he opened his eyes and saw them. They came hesitantly into sight, noses testing the wind, ears pricked for the slightest hint of danger. They were mule deer: a buck, three does, a fawn.

  Very gently he twitched the rod and the little rag pennant on top jiggled. The buck’s head came up, ears perked forward, poised for flight. The does stopped, dark eyes fixed on the moving rag. The little fawn came nearer then stopped, apparently as fascinated by the moving lure as were its elders. Amazed, hardly daring to breathe, Easton waited, watched, listened. The deer stood unafraid in the open clearing. Everything was still.

  And then it happened.

  Easton had always scoffed at cops who claimed to have actually seen bullets leave the muzzle of a gun and burn through the air, yet even in this poor light he quite clearly saw the arrow coming through the leaves, heard its simmering hiss, watched its flickering flight from left to right, saw it drive into the body of the buck deer just behind its left shoulder, as another came and then another, thwacking solidly into the animal’s body and dropping it to its knees as the does and the fawn scattered in panic.

  As they vanished, Ironheel came out of the shadows at a fast run, and Easton saw him throw himself on the thrashing buck and with one long looping sweep of his arm, slit its throat. He skipped nimbly back and away from the spurting arc of blood that leapt from the arteries and stood watching impassively as the life emptied out of the twitching animal.

  Easton stood up and walked over to his side. Ironheel was muttering in Apache. When he was finished he cut the arrows out of the body and laid them to one side. He cut the skin down the neck, along the centre of the body inside the front legs and then the back. When he had peeled the skin back off the carcass he cut the flesh along the sides, then broke the ribs and removed the entrails, laying them to one side. As they lay steaming in the cooling evening air he chanted something in Apache, atonal, raw.

  After severing the left hind quarter, Ironheel cut off the animal’s hoofs and horns and laid them aside, still intoning guttural vocables beneath his breath and making what appeared to be ritual gestures.

  “What are you doing?” Easton asked, unable any longer to contain his curiosity.

  “Giving thanks to Yusn,” he said. “Paying tribute.”

  Easton gestured at the entrails lying to one side. “That?”

  “For Crow. If I leave good food for him he will make me lucky.”

  Crow, Easton thought. Don’t ask. “The haunch is for us?”

  “Ha’ah.”

  “And the hoofs?”

  “It is usual to take the head home. We cannot do that. So we take the horns and hoofs. Then we will have luck again next time we hunt.”

  “What about the rest of the carcass?”

  Ironheel shrugged. “If I had yucca leaf strings I would hang it in a tree so the animals can’t get to it. But we have no time, so I will cover it with the hide and say to the animals, ‘This belongs to Yusn. Leave it alone.’”

  He folded the peeled pelt back over the remainder of the carcass and stood up, stretching his arms wide and chanting in Apache the words he had just spoken. Then, squinting up at the sky, he moved the dead deer around until its head was pointing east.

  “Baa ihe’danzigo,” he said to the sky, giving thanks.

  The ceremony of the kill, Easton thought, the head pointing east, where the sun rises, where the Apache pray to Yusn every morning. Somehow, up here in the wilderness, it all seemed fitting.

  “We’ll need cedar wood to cook the meat,” Ironheel said.

  “Because it tastes better,” Easton said, with a little smile.

  Ironheel looked surprised. “How did you know that?”

  “I didn’t,” Easton said. “But I knew if I asked, that’s what you’d answer.”

  Ironheel grunted something that sounded uncomplimentary and moved off through the trees, the deer haunch on his shoulder. Easton followed along, belly rumbling at the prospect of fresh meat.

  ~*~

  Night enveloped the mountains like a shroud. Inside the cave, it was dry and cool, the floor sandy and level. Outside, they could hear the sounds of small creatures skittering through the undergrowth, and once, the gentle whirr of an owl’s wings whispered past
in the darkness. The entrance to the cave was like a low tunnel that made a half turn to the right and opened up into a domed vault in which a man could stand comfortably upright.

  As they fumbled their way in, Easton thought he heard a soft slither of movement, and felt a chill of disquiet. Rattlesnakes love cool caves.

  “Any snakes in here?” he whispered, aware of the tension in his voice.

  Ironheel made an impatient gesture. “Snakes don’t like you any more than you like them. Don’t put your hands or your feet anyplace you can’t see them and you’ll be fine.”

  If that was supposed to be reassurance, Easton thought, it fell some distance short of target.

  “We need light. A fire,” he said.

  “Help me with this first,” Ironheel grunted, leaning hard against a big round boulder that stood to one side of the entrance to the cave. As he did Easton felt, rather than saw it move, and when he added his own weight to Ironheel’s the boulder shifted again, tilting to the right.

  “Again,” Ironheel said. This time the rock moved through about fifteen degrees to the right, partially blocking the entrance. It had obviously been used for this purpose before. Easton stood back and looked at it.

  “If that old man rigged that thing, he was no maricon,” he said.

  Ironheel nodded. “Keeps light in, cold out,” he said.

  A match scraped, limning Ironheel’s features in the flickering flame. Before the day faded they had gathered kindling and dry cedar wood to start a fire. The important thing to remember, Ironheel told him as they piled twigs and small sticks on to the growing blaze, was that you only needed a little fire to keep the chill out of the night air. Of course, a big fire kept you warm, too – running around looking for wood to keep it burning.

  Next they cut the deer meat into strips, roasted it and ate their fill, letting the fire die down to a red glow. Then they ate some of the cheese they had taken from the cabin in the canyon. It was a feast. After a while Easton got up and warily checked the rear of the cave. No snakes.

  “Don’t worry,” Ironheel grinned. “If he’s coming to visit, tl’iish bitseghál will give you a buzz.”

  “Ho ho,” Easton said.

  “Don’t like diamondbacks?”

  “Does anybody?”

  “Many Apache reverence them.”

  “But they kill them just the same.”

  “No. Never. It is better to appease the wrath of the evil one rather than incur its enmity. When Apache sees tl’iish bitseghál he says, ‘Go into your hole, ch’iin biyi’golinihi, and take your evil with you.’.”

  Although rattlesnakes were held in awe for their power to kill, no Apache would ever use any implement or weapon that had been touched in connection with a snake, he said. Some accounted for their misfortunes by the number of snakes that died during a summer and left the evil with them. He told about one old woman who swore her arthritis had been caused by stepping in the blood of a killed rattler.

  “You think us pinda’lick oyes will ever understand Apache?” Easton said.

  “No way,” Ironheel grunted.

  Not quite sure if he’d seen the hint of a smile around the corners of Ironheel’s mouth as he said it, Easton decided yet again that he had probably just imagined it. They lapsed into a not uncomfortable silence.

  “That chopper,” Ironheel said after a while. “The one that came after us up at Whitetail. Who has machines like that?”

  Easton had been thinking along those lines himself. “Only the big agencies with lots of money,” he said. “CIA. Secret Service. Drug Enforcement Agency, Immigration, Border Patrol.”

  “Hard to imagine any of them trying to kill us.”

  “Seguro,” Easton said. “So who?”

  “FBI?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Wouldn’t they be called in as a matter of course? Taking a hostage is kidnapping, isn’t it?”

  “I hate to blah your high opinion of the Feebs,” Easton said. “But out here in the boonies, FBI offices tend to be staffed mostly by misfits and burnouts who’ve been banished from the big time ‘a’, because they were too clever or ‘b’, they were too dumb. And because they don’t want to be kicked any further down the ladder, they tend to sidestep cases that look like winding up without a result. And this one would certainly qualify.”

  “Tell me more about this helicopter.”

  Easton nodded. “If I’m right, it’s a Hughes Defender. There would be at least two crew, with room for three or four more passengers. If she’s state of the art – and on what we’ve seen so far I’d say she is – they’ll probably have FLIR and a zoom thermal imager onboard.”

  “FLIR?”

  “Forward Looking Infra-red Radar. Basically a radar camera that turns darkness into a fuzzy greenish gray on a monitor screen. Imagine a badly-tuned TV, but with a picture clear enough to show roads, buildings, cars, and anything moving.”

  “And what does a thermal imager do?”

  “That’s the baby we’ve got to worry about,” Easton told him. “FLIR has limited vision. It can’t detect anything concealed from the naked eye—us under that log pile at Whitetail, for instance. But a TI will give you a picture of anything whose heat signature is as little as two degrees different from its surroundings, in daylight or complete darkness. It can tell by the heat emissions from the brakes, muffler and engine if a car has been driven recently. It can see inside houses, through trees and undergrowth. A good TI operator can even tell the difference between an animal and a human being.”

  “And they’ll have a good operator,” Ironheel said darkly.

  “Something else. If the chopper is hooked up to ground patrols, the operator can guide them directly to whatever or whoever he’s hunting. If it moves he can tell them where it went. Or they can land a team close to wherever it is.”

  “Hard to hide from,” Ironheel said.

  “But it can be done. As you know.”

  Ironheel looked thoughtful. “Kuruk,” he said, softly. “He’s with them.”

  “What?”

  “Bigonsih dakózhaa. I know it without knowing. If there’s to be a kill, Kuruk will want to be there.”

  “Why?”

  His answer was oblique. “Whoever hired him will think he’s doing it for money.”

  “But he’s not?”

  This time Ironheel made no reply. His face was like stone. His eyes glittered in the dying firelight.

  “It won’t take them long to check out Peachtree Canyon,” he said. “When they can’t find us, Kuruk will remember these caves.”

  “You think he’ll come after us?”

  “I know he will. Will the men in the chopper be able to tell we’re in here?”

  Easton looked up at the roof of the cave. “Thermal imagers can see through walls without too much trouble,” he said. “Maybe even ten or twelve feet of rubble. But I doubt they can deal with rock this thick.”

  “What about this?” Ironheel said, gesturing at the glowing remnants of the fire.

  “I don’t know,” Easton admitted.

  “How’s that plan of yours coming?”

  “Still got a few loose ends,” Easton said.

  Ironheel nodded thoughtfully, then stood up.

  “Ilháásh,” he said. “I’ll take the first watch.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Against the darkness of the night, something moved. It was not so much a sound as a subtle reverberation in the silent air, as though some great bird was passing unseen, beating the lambent sky with giant, noiseless wings. Easton knew at once what it was.

  He glanced at Ironheel, curled up asleep beside the ashes of the fire, slightly surprised he had not awakened. Maybe even Apache got tired, he thought, then crossed to the cave entrance and stood next to the big rock they had rolled across it. Outside, a faint breeze stirred the trees. Above them, the sky was a vast, star-speckled void. Although he could see nothing, he knew that somewhere in that blue-black infinity, the sinister search
helicopter was quartering across the sky like a prowling cat. He pictured an operator crouched over his monitors, alert for the smallest hint of movement or the bright static spot of a heat signature. He went over and touched Ironheel’s shoulder. The Apache sat up in one smooth movement, fully awake in an instant.

  “What is it?” he said, getting to his feet. Easton put a finger to his lips then pointed upwards, moving his forefinger in a circle. Ironheel padded across to the mouth of the cave, standing near the entrance as still as stone, all his senses tuned toward the sky outside.

  “You’re right,” he confirmed in a whisper. “How long have they been out there?”

  “A while,” Easton said. “You think Mose Kuruk is out there too?”

  “Maybe not yet,” Ironheel said. “But he’ll come.”

  “Perhaps we’ll surprise him,” Easton said.

  “He isn’t easy to surprise.”

  “There are five more caves besides this one,” Easton said. “The nearest is about two hundred yards downhill.”

  “You went outside?”

  “Before they came,” Easton told him. “I’ve lit a fire in one of the caves down there. Quite a big one. If I did it right it’s still burning.”

  It was a simple ruse: give the operator something to see. The idea had germinated when they had talked about the helicopter’s surveillance gear the preceding night. If it worked it might just give them the edge they needed.

  “You asked me if surveillance gear was foolproof,” he said.

  “And you said nothing was,” Ironheel replied.

  “That’s right. It’s machinery. It just tells you what kind of signals it’s receiving. It’s the operator’s evaluation that’s important.”

  Ironheel nodded his understanding. “And you gave him something to evaluate.”

  “Bingo,” Easton said.

  If the thermal imager picked up the heat signature from the fire, there was a chance the operator would conclude it was theirs – who else would be down there in a cave? – and flash word to Kuruk. Then, theoretically, Mose Kuruk would assume them to be where the TI said they had to be and act accordingly.