by Téa Obreht
“Don’t worry,” George whispered to me. “In a few days, they’ll get right again.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There are wounds of time and there are wounds of person, Misafir. Sometimes people come through their wounds, but time does not. Sometimes it’s the other way around. Sometimes the wounds are so grievous, there’s no coming through them at all.”
“Why not?”
“Because man is only man. And God, in His infinite wisdom, made it so that to live, generally, is to wound another. And He made every man blind to his own weapons, and too short-living to do anything but guard jealously his own small, wasted way. And thus we go on.”
* * *
—
In the morning, we reached Butcher’s Canyon and the barrens beyond. Eighty miles of shimmering scald. Not a riffle of charted water, and somewhere out there, the girl’s stranded wagon train.
George wanted us to travel by night, but knew we had little time. The sun shot up and fastened your shadow to the hardpan. Ahead of me, the horizon was interrupted only by the soaked linen of Mico’s shirt. I watched his head grow looser and looser on his neck as the light whitened. “Hey,” I said, whenever he listed a little too much.
“Not one word to me,” he said. “Goddamn you.”
Along came trees and flatlands and stretches of dead grass. Travois poles. Antelope ribcages and jaws. The thick curlicue of a single ramhorn. The charred remains of an Indian camp, and several hours later a roofless church whose glittering floor cut our fingers as we sifted through it. “Jewels?” Jolly asked in wonderment. George shook his head and pointed at the empty windows. “Vitrages.”
* * *
—
I guess I’m trying to remind you: we been through far worse than this. Put yesterday’s talk from your mind. I’m sorry I misled you. You’re watered now, Burke. You’re shaded. Sure you’ve a little shot in you, but the pain will subside. It always does. And already you’re getting that leg under you. At least we know what we’re riding toward—we didn’t, back then.
A few hours’ sleep saw us moving again to close the final stretch before sunrise. The edges of the sky were still paling, and as we rode on the stars came reeling out. Toward midnight, the girl pointed upward. We were coming into the shadow of a mesa rimmed with rockspurs. “I know them giants,” she said. “I know this place.”
George drew up to me. “Listen.” From the foothills ahead there came a hollow, swooping note. It was still rising when another joined it, and then another. You heard it yourself round about then, and started so suddenly that I had to pull back with both hands.
“If wolves are here,” George said, “we are too late.”
He was right, of course. He kept the girl back when we got to the wagons. We wrapped our coats around our mouths to strain out the smell. At the foot of the mesa, we found a dry wash with what had lately been a mule lying in it. The wolves had been at it, and a grin of its rib bones shone up white by moonlight. A trail of upended wagonboxes led us up the wash and out the other side, where flurries of paper coursed into the ditch. Beneath a wagonbonnet’s broken bows was visible the twisted bootsole of a man whose face was so ruined we couldn’t guess his age, save by the white of his beard. We found the women shot up a little way off in the trees. There were four of them, and we covered them up as quickly as we could.
“How many were in your party?” Jolly asked the girl. All were accounted for. He did not tell her how they had perished. He couldn’t decide what would be worse: to live knowing that her journey had failed to prevent their demise, or that she had been destined to escape their fate.
The wolves had gone as far as the bluff, but we could see their eyes above us while we dug the graves. After Mico had stitched the last of the bodies into a blanket, I took a final turn about the place. The hardpan was strewn with paper. There was a little creosote brake about a hundred yards off with what looked like streamers caught in the branches. That was where I saw her: a woman, naked as the plain. She was standing very still among the trees with her hair coursing down her shoulders. She looked straight at me. Then her gaze moved to you, the absurdity of you—for the dead, as you know, can still be surprised. After a while, I turned you sidewise so she could see better. Her face and shoulders were striped with thin cuts, and the knifestrike to her chest shone with some black, spectral substance I imagined must be blood. The others were there too, further back in the trees. The old man was stooping to scratch around in the dirt.
They were all moving past each other, the mother and the little girl and the old man, too—and it struck me, after all these years of seeing the dead, as I stood there holding your bridle and with your breath in my hair, that I had never seen more than one at a time, and had never realized: they were unaware of each other’s presence. Suddenly, the gruesome way they had fallen seemed the least mournful thing about this place. They could see the living, but not one another. Nameless and unburied, turned out suddenly into the bewildering dark, they rose to find themselves entirely alone.
* * *
—
We cut southwest of that dismal killing ground and found a creek about eight miles later. It was just coming on morning. You were first to the water. We knelt on the bank and splashed our faces. The girl hung back. We were ashamed, I think, to be so thirsty in front of her, to want so urgently for anything but life itself after what we’d seen. Bending to drink, I saw one of the wolves among the trees ahead. It drifted through the stand and disappeared every few seconds so that I had to strive to find it again.
“Misafir?”
“I said: ain’t he just like a shadow?”
“You ever seen anything like that before?” Jolly’s face was all twisted up. “I been across the world, Misafir, and never in my life. Indians?”
“You’d think it,” I said. “But all those boxes? All that paper left behind? I doubt it.”
Our girl was laid up with a dull, faraway look. Nobody could think what to say to her. I made a lean-to of you, and we dozed awhile, the three of us, but she would not lie on my arm as she previously had. I slept sour and miserable, and I reckon you must’ve, too, but you tamped down my misery and I hope I tamped down some of yours.
You know what came next: we woke to the hum of voices. Four riflemen had come up the rise and were now leading their horses to the water’s edge. The first of them was a huge, bearded grotesque who marked you straightaway. “Christ crucified, what the hell is that?”
I stood to explain myself in a hurry: we were with Lieutenant Ned Beale, bringing water to a stranded wagon train. This here was one of the War Department’s camels. But my summation did nothing to avert their guns. I felt a keen, sharp awareness of your hulk behind me. You—broad as a ship, broad as any damn thing a man could hit at any distance without effort or skill. The thought sat right down on my chest, and I found I couldn’t breathe.
“We don’t want trouble.” Jolly had sat up from under his jacket. He, too, had his rifle across his knees.
The big man took us all in. “Well, our regards to Lieutenant Beale,” he got around to saying. “We can’t help hearing about all the good work he doing.”
Whatever had been thinning out the air now disappeared. The grotesque held out a hand, and Shaw came down to the bank and shook it. George did too, then knelt down and got to splashing water over his face. The riders set about unpacking. Saddlebags were swung down; shirts removed, pale legs freed from rumpled boots. Pretty soon, someone was laughing. The whole thing had turned companionable so easily.
That was when the girl woke and leaned herself against me.
“That’s my hoss,” she whispered.
“Camel, honey.”
She shook her head. “No—that’s my hoss.”
She pointed to a slight roan one of the riders was now unsaddling. “My old hoss my papa gave me.” She though
t she was still whispering, but talk around the creek abruptly subsided. I could see Shaw shifting from foot to foot, deciding whether or not to go on pretending he hadn’t heard her.
But it was not up to him. The grotesque’s rifle went up again and he fired pointblank at Shaw. I didn’t see what happened next, for I seized the girl and the two of us went crashing into the wash. By the time I’d got my bearings, you were surging to your feet and bullets were singing off the ground. Shaw was all sidetwisted, dragging himself out of the creek on his elbows. The riders had fallen back behind the rocks, and from this cover issued the thunder of their volleys. It felt a lifetime, though it could not have been more than a few seconds, for Jolly was only now springing onto Seid, who raised himself with a roar, and the two of them went churning across the water. Mico, close behind on Saleh, followed. They cut through the fireline and over the flat—and though their charge had drawn the gunfire away from us, we were now faced with the prospect of firing on our enemy with our own men among them, Jolly chasing down a reckless fella who’d decided to run, and Mico turning already to cut back through. I went on firing into the rocks, at glimpses of hat and shoulder, until one of the distant rifles quieted. By then Saleh had been hit, and, reeling, thrown Mico. Jolly now came charging back, but it was Seid dealt the final blow: we watched the last of the roughnecks crumple under the camel’s legs.
Our losses came to this: Shaw was gutshot. Mico’s wound was cleaner—only a ball to the shoulder—but he’d shattered ribs falling and could not be made to sit up at all. We moved camp about a quarter mile downvalley, but Mico was breathing so shallow that we were forced to stop. George feared that his broken bones were sticking his lung. Every time he was moved he howled so desolately that my own stomach began to ache. Jolly was wiping his eyes. “Mimi,” he said. “Don’t breathe so deep.”
Shaw kept spitting at the girl. “God damn you. Didn’t anyone teach you keep your mouth shut?” This earned him a kick to the knees from George, which would have silenced most. But not sometime Private Gerald Shaw. He was in the kind of froth men can’t see past. He went on cursing us to a man, in varying combinations of debasement and bestiality, till George finally knelt down beside him.
“I don’t know what you imagine, son, but you ain’t never making it back to Beale. Quiet down while we still have the decency to keep you company till you’re dead.”
By sundown the trees around the wash were dark with buzzards, and the wolves had come. We could hear them by the creek, quarreling over what was left of the roughnecks. It struck me that we’d wronged ourselves more than them, not digging at least a shallow grave. When I said this to Jolly, he looked at me sourly. “Why?” After one of the wolves dragged a forearm within sight of our camp, George set off in what he guessed was Beale’s general direction with the girl mounted up behind him. She looked back at us once. I never saw her again, for by the time our ordeal was over she’d been left to the care of some good-hearted woman who raised her up to prosper, and as a young lady she took a train all the way west to some safer reach, where she lived out her life in a world that grew ever more worthy of her and she never thought of us again. Or so I’ve always told you.
* * *
—
While Jolly and I were lashing branches together to make sleds, a wolf appeared on the flat. We knew it was there because you and Seid were restless, and after a time we could see the thin gray haze of its body darting left and right in the dark. It slid back into the brush only to return a little while later with two or three of its kin. They all sat down together at the edge of the trees and watched us.
We yoked you to the sleds and started off down George’s trail. About two miles out, we began hearing the wolves. Just their movement in the brush at first, and then their song. Your tail was batting madly, I remember, and you huffed like a locomotive. You kept trying to twist around to get a look at them. When one crossed our trail just ahead, you wheeled after it, and it took all my strength to keep you from overturning poor Mico. He was gray and had only uttered two words since his fall: “I’m cold.”
“Will he pull through?” I said.
“Maybe,” said Jolly. “If he lasts the night.”
We came to an abandoned trading post and barricaded ourselves inside. The depot was a thin, hollow place. The bones of a roof were overlaid at strange angles between us and the stars. The door did not touch the ground, and the adobe walls had crumbled away leaving hollows that faced out into the dark. Outside, the wolves were singing. The boldest of them had long shadows that appeared in the gaps below the door, sometimes taking the form of men. We fired blindly into the field, but they would only go off a little way before returning again.
Shaw sat sweating fireside. “You gone leave me to them?”
“No,” Jolly said.
“I don’t believe you.”
“We won’t.”
We were sitting back to back, Jolly and I, with our guns outfaced through the brickwork. Shaw had gone so pale he was almost green, and he fought hard to keep awake. Perhaps he feared that if he grew faint, we might kill him. He wouldn’t go more than a few minutes without talking. “I worked awhile with a trapper up near Medicine Bow. He used to climb them Sioux scaffolds to get bodies to bait wolves with. Once we found a bunch of slaughtered Mormons in a valley, but he wouldn’t take none of them for bait. I figured he didn’t want the sin on him. But do you know what he said? ‘It ain’t me that don’t want them harm—it’s the wolves. Wolves can be three weeks starved but won’t touch a hair of no white corpse. They’s less beast than the Indians that way.’ ”
“You sure?” Jolly said. “Didn’t seem too bothered about eating them riders back there.”
He was holding Mico’s head on his lap and trying to tilt some water between his cousin’s teeth. I held out my canteen and Mico drank so long I had to pull it from his hand.
“By God,” he said. “That’s really everything, Misafir.”
He sat up and looked around. “Ali,” he said. “I can’t believe it’s this shithole I’ll be dying in.” Minutes later, he was back in his daze.
Shaw watched him. “Don’t look like he gone pull through any more than I am.”
Sometime later the first of the wolves started scratching against the door. Quick, loud scrapes, like it was already in the shack with us. Jolly fired, but the scraping only stopped for a moment before starting up again. Pretty soon, we could see the dirt flying and the shadow of its paws working quickly. “Jesus,” Shaw kept saying. “Jesus.” You were rocking back and forth, belching with rage. If let, you’d have broken your harness and brought the whole place down. I got on my stomach and fired straight into those fast-moving shadows. But the wolf just went on digging. Another started by the door. By this time they were so many, I thought all the world was made up of howling.
“I’m just that glad,” Shaw said. “I’m just that glad you lads are here with me.” Then he turned and sent his heel straight into Mico’s chest.
The sound Mico made was very like a wolf. Jolly sprang to his feet. I lay there bellied while Mico drowned in blood, and I watched my friend’s rifle tilting down to meet Shaw’s chin. This is exactly as I remember it. Shaw lay on his back with both feet on the floor, and his whole being shook with the effort of sitting up. “Almighty God,” he said. “Take me up.”
“You’re going no place save into the teeth of them devils out there.”
“Maybe. But at least they’ve plenty to work on now before they get to me.”
Burke—you were there. You know. Jolly stood sighting down. Before I knew what I was doing, I had turned my rifle and fired once in the direction of Shaw’s head. Then everything—even the wolves—went still.
* * *
—
We wrapped Mico in blankets and buried him under the floor of that little depot, and that is where he still sleeps to this day. We got back there onc
e—remember?—in the years afterwards, and stood listening for him, but he did not appear. It made me glad to know his rest was uninterrupted.
Shaw’s body, on the other hand, we dragged for what must have been about eight miles. Then we left him there for the wolves. I didn’t turn back after we cut him loose lest he touch me and get his want into me.
The wind had blown over George’s tracks, so for a long while we guessed our way forward, dragging Saleh when she stalled to wait for the rider she had lost. It was three more days before we found water: a shallow stream, thin and brilliant, laid like a mirror in the dust. By that time you were frothing up and starting to list a little, left and right, and your hump had got an awful sag to it.
Jolly and I crouched together at the water’s edge and cast the warm, sweet light over our faces and dwelled in the secret silence of relief.
“Imagine we didn’t go back to the others,” Jolly said, after prayers.
“Imagine.”
“I mean it, Misafir. We could pretend to die out here. Go and find our fortune. Who would miss us?”
* * *
—
Well, Burke. I wonder sometimes if he really meant this. I’m glad he said it, for it betrayed the wanderer in him, the want he couldn’t be rid of. I must admit I was tempted—which I’m sure does not surprise you. But I thought of George and Lilo waiting for us at the campfire, and for once I didn’t run, which is how a late October evening found us rejoining Beale’s packtrain on the eastern shore of the Colorado River where it left its canyons and eased down a wide wash in its finally blue course to Yuma.
Beale had got himself turned around once or twice and stalled in the end trying to find a fording place. There was no crossing yet in those days, only palisades that plunged down and vanished in deep water. Scouts had been sent up and downstream, but their news was grim: no navigable shallows having been found, it would now be necessary to swim the stock.
