More snow began to drift down across the death-scattered camp as the three survivors started to leave. Not that Edgar Okie took any active part in the preparations for the departure. He was deeply asleep, his breath faint, fluttering way down in his chest, barely feathering out in the cold air. As Crow bent over the blanketed figure Amaryllis came over and showed the first sign of interest in her son for some time. The first hint, Crow thought, that she still showed any motherly concern,
Then she spoke.
‘Can we not leave him here?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Leave him here. The child is clearly about to die. He will slow us down.’
Crow could hardly believe what he was hearing. It was odd, as he’d been thinking that they would do well to leave the dying boy, but he was always concerned mainly with his own salvation. But to hear Edgar’s own mother saying to abandon him!
‘Sure he will. But he’s your son, Amy.’
‘My name is, and you will please recall this, Mrs. Okie, Crow. Now my husband is happily deceased I am your employer. You are to be my bodyguard.’
‘And guide?’
‘Yes.’
‘Same deal?’
She hesitated. ‘Yes. The same as before. Now, rather than waste time talking shall we get on?’
‘The boy?’
‘I suppose we had best bring him along a little further, though …’ she tutted as if a careless porter had mislaid her hand luggage.
‘I could always slit his throat, Ma’am,’ he said, unable to hide the bitter anger. Unwilling to hide it.
‘You had best watch your tongue, Crow.’
‘I don’t give a damn, Amy, about you, or the boy. I got me the job of takin’ you to the black bird and finding the mine. If it’s there. And then …’
‘What do you mean “if” it’s there? Of course it is. The map’s been correct in every detail so far, has it not?’
‘Yeah,’ he admitted.
‘Then it will be there. And the silver will be there also. Do you know anything about silver, Crow?’
‘Some.’
‘I have seen it. Pure ore. Finest quality. It was the most wonderful …’ she licked her lips and clasped her bitten gloves to her bosom. Eyes looking inwards with the same kind of expression that she had shown when she had wanted Crow to possess her.
‘Got to go.’
‘Yes. I will take the ammunition and Richard’s spare pistol.’
‘Heavy for you. Both of ’em.’
‘I am not a weak woman, Crow. I know that when we met, what seems an eternity past, I was . . . unwell.’
‘That’s a way of puttin’ it. I’d have said you was hooked tighter than a tick to that heroin.’
She chewed her lip until he expected to see it bleed, eyes narrowed. He recalled for a moment Okie’s words about taking care of her. No, just take care. That was it.
‘I would not have you presume that I am still the woman I was. And please don’t reply to me with one of your foolish jests, Crow.’
He tugged at a forelock, grinning. The wind blew snow in his face and he tossed his head, the mane of long black hair flowing about his shoulders. ‘Then we’d best go. I’ll take the boy like before. You lead the spare mule.’
‘Why do we need it? It carries no food.’
‘That’s kind of true and not true.’
‘How do you mean?’ she snapped.
‘I mean that there’s enough food on its skinny carcass to keep all three of us in meat for better’n a week.’
Less than twenty minutes from the death of Richard Okie, the three of them set off again on the long trail towards the Black Bird Mine. If all went well they hoped to be within sight of it later that afternoon.
The weather closed in totally after barely two hours riding, the snow coming down thicker and faster than before. Shutting them off from the rest of the world. It was at the point in the map where Crow needed to be able to see well, counting narrow side-trails, to make sure he had the right one. Taking rough bearings off surrounding peaks that the snow had rendered as invisible as if they were in Africa. It was impossible to go on and he called a halt, leading the mules after his stallion, finding a slightly sheltered spot beneath some cliffs.
‘Can we not go a’foot?’ asked Amaryllis Okie, stamping her boot angrily in the deepening snow.
‘Sure we can.’
‘Then why . . .?’
‘Because we’d be lost within five minutes and dead within the hour. You want to go on, then don’t you let me hinder you, Ma’am.’
‘Shut your damned mouth, Crow.’
‘Yes, Ma’am. Want to feed your son, Mrs. Okie? Or maybe better not.’
‘Better not. I never liked him. A clumsy, ugly, fat child, too much like his father. Now he lies there slowing us down. If there was something to hand …’
‘A pillow, or somethin’ like that? Like the way Radley went?’
Her face went white as February snowfall and her hand fell to one of the gleaming pistols in her belt. Crow watched her movement, his face hard as stone.
‘Man draws on me, and I kill him. I can’t see a reason to treat you different.’
She fought a battle with herself and won it. Trying to paste a smile back in place, but it hung poorly on her angry lips.
‘We must not fall out, Crow. We are both all we have. And we must keep friends. I am sorry if I have been less than thoughtful with you. And for things I may have said. I am not … not myself.’
‘You look a whole lot more your real self now than any time since we met,’ he replied.
‘We have loved each other,’ she said, stepping in close to him and laying a hand on his arm.
‘Guess that’s not the word I’d have used. Not love, Amy. We screwed. That’s over. Most things are over now.’
‘Then we shall be friends. I have decided it. Good friends. And when the mine is found we shall be partners in it. Perhaps more …’ she said, coyly, leaving the end of the sentence dangling like an obscene invitation to him.
The snow stopped once more somewhere close to midnight, leaving drifts ten feet deep piled against the side of the trail. Crow walked back a hundred yards or so, peering out across the moonlit whiteness, seeing the track behind them was almost completely blocked. And all around, as far as he could see, every peak and rock was covered in a blanket of crisp snow.
‘Guess that’s the end of the chase for the Apaches,’ he said, to himself. They wouldn’t press on after such catastrophic losses in weather as bad as it had become.
It meant that all they had to fear was the weather worsening yet again. Though the shootist wondered whether if there might be another worry for him.
They ran into the bears in the early part of the next morning. The snow was so bad that Crow had tied Edgar across his saddle, shrouded in thick blankets, barely alive, but somehow still grasping to a spark of survival.
Amy came behind him, using his trampled steps to help her through the deep crust of whiteness. She led her own mule with her late husband’s animal pulling along at the rear.
There were five bears. Huge, black creatures, their thick coats crusted with snow and tipped with points of ice. Crow didn’t hear them coming because of the noise of his stallion’s hooves breaking through the smooth, deep white, crackling and rustling. The first warning he had was from his horse.
The black must have scented the bears’ rank odor and it pulled back, kicking up on its back legs, nearly pulling the bridle from Crow’s hands. It whinnied with terror and the shootist battled with it, struggling to draw the Colt, suspecting that it must be bears.
‘What is it, Crow?’ called the woman. ‘What’s scared him?’
The bears themselves answered her question, all of them coming in a lolloping run, seeming clumsy, yet covering the slippery rock as fast as a sprinting man. Their tongues hung out, spittle falling in gobbets from their gaping jaws, eyes gleaming redly with the prospect of so much fresh meat.
‘Oh, Jesus! Noooo!!’ screamed’ the woman, her voice raising shrill echoes from the cliffs all around, bouncing the sound back again and again. The noise was so loud that it actually had the effect of making the bears check, slowing down, and almost halting, sniffing suspiciously, glaring their hunger.
The stallion had passed through his first fear and was now quite locked away in mortal terror, seeing such fearsome enemies so close to him. Crow was forced to let him go, hoping that he wouldn’t bolt too far. Then drawing the scatter-gun as well, though he doubted what its effect could be against the thick-skinned animals.
There was a big old male, scarred across the nose, and four females. Two of them looking older and the other two younger. Crow figured that the early break in the weather must have caught the animals by surprise and they were now out foraging for needed food. All of them had finally halted, the male at the front, snuffling and shaking his great head from side to side, dribbling in the snow.
Even with the Winchester Crow knew that nothing would stop all of them once they got it firmly into their minds to charge. A big black bear weighed in at close to a half ton of lethal bone and muscle, and there wasn’t a bullet made that would stop that inside twenty paces. The Purdey would check one of the bears, and six bullets from the Peacemaker would deal with a second animal. That would still leave three.
The mules were both whinnying in mortal fear and Crow could hear the woman’s boots scrabbling for a hold in the frozen snow as she fought to hold on the reins. ‘Shall I let them go? Get my gun?’ she panted.
‘No. Hold them. Might be all we got left.’
The bears were still undecided and, on an impulse, Crow elected to walk towards them. Taking off his black hat, holding it by the wide brim, waving it backwards and forwards, making a hissing noise with his mouth.
‘Come on, you bastards. Get going. Come on! Get up, there!’
The Colt was back in its holster, the Purdey still in his right hand. Crow beat the hat against his thigh with his left hand, seeing doubt in the eyes of the bears. The big male snarled, so close that the shootist could smell the foulness of its breath. But the step it took was away from the advancing man.
He was less than ten paces from the male.
Five paces, and still the animal had only given that single step of ground back. The females were huddled together, uncertain what to do, eyes looking to the big male for a lead.
Crow flicked at the creature’s face, swiping it on the nose with the hat. Making it snarl again, but it took a further step back, lashing out with one of its front paws, nearly ripping the hat from his fingers.
The shootist advanced another pace, but this time the bear didn’t move, its neck extended, snapping at him with its strong yellow teeth. The scatter-gun was still in Crow’s right hand and he kept it pointed down, into the snow immediately in front of the male. Pulling both triggers at once, risking everything on a single throw.
Gouts of snow and splinters of rock and lead whirled about the bear’s face, dashing into its eyes and blinding it for a moment. AH five of the animals retreated at the sound and fury of the explosion, the females turning tail and starting to lollop back the way they’d come, whining with fear. Blood was trickling from the muzzle of the big male and it stood its ground only a moment longer than the others, before spinning about and following them. But that single moment seemed to Crow to stretch for ever. If the black bear had decided to still come on after him there would have been little chance.
As it was, they had survived again. He caught his stallion easily only fifty yards away, Edgar still safe on its back. Amy didn’t speak for some minutes after the incident, leading the mules.
Then: ‘That was close, Crow.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You were so brave.’
‘I don’t reckon that there’s truly any such thing as brave. There’s dying or living. You do what you can and maybe you get to live a whiles longer. That’s what some folks call brave. I don’t.’
The snow held off and the bears didn’t reappear, though Crow knew that they must have a den somewhere not too far off.
The next morning, according to’ the map, they were less than a half mile from the mine. Crow had halted the stallion, one arm supporting the sick boy, when his eye was caught by an unusual rock formation, way high up on the facing cliff. Something that he might not have seen from a hundred yards back or from a hundred yards further on.
‘Look.’
‘What?’
‘Up there,’ he said, pointing.
‘Where? I don’t see a thing.’
She had stopped a little further along the trail, leaning wearily forward in the saddle of the mule.
‘Come on here and look up. There. To the right, above that jagged scar on the rock shaped like a big letter “M”. See it?’
Amaryllis kicked her heels into the flanks of the burro, urging it on, reining it in when she was level with the shootist.
‘So, what’s so very important?’
‘See that …’ he began, but he saw her jaw drop and her eyes open wide with excitement, and he stopped talking.
‘The rock, Crow. Oh, Lord Jesus! It’s shaped like a falcon.’
He nodded. ‘Yeah, ma’am. Like a big black bird. We’re there.’