Winter was coming early the country. In the mountains a hundred and fifty miles north of Santa Fe the rabbits were already turning from brown to white so they would be invisible in the snow—the young ducks swam in squadrons on the ponds waiting for the first storm—the dawn skies echoed to the honking wedges of southward flying geese.
It was a lonesome sound. It was a lonesome country. But it was a country where a man could breathe deep and spread his elbows and own the whole sky if he wanted. Kelly Morgan wanted. In these mountains he had discovered a kind of freedom he had never found in the river towns of the Mississippi or even the frontier vastness of Texas. He’d been hunting for something all his life and now he’d found it, even though he couldn’t put a name on it.
They trapped all through October and into November, moving north all the time. It was sometime in mid-November when they pitched their sixth camp north of Taos in a nameless valley somewhere in the Sangre de Cristos. It was their custom for one to tend camp while the other two were on their traplines. That first morning in the new camp, Kelly and Saunders took their trapsacks and rode into timber, separating as soon as they found water. Kelly moved upstream a mile before he found sign. It was a newly felled cottonwood. No bark had been cleaned off so he allowed it had been cut for a dam instead of food. Beavers were mighty sensitive critters and the sound of a horse stamping or its casual snort might send them packing. So Kelly tethered his roan in timber high above the stream and hiked back down with his rifle and trapsack.
A hundred feet above the felled cottonwood he found the slide. This was the path used by the beavers to ascend the bank, a muddy trough worn slick as bear grease by the fat little rumps of kit beavers sliding back down after they made their cuttings.
From his sack he got a LeCroix trap. He cut a foot long stake from a young willow and drove it into the sandy creekbed at the foot of the slide. Then he attached the trap by its chain and sank it beneath the surface. If a caught beaver tried to swim away he could only go the length of the chain and there the weight of the trap would drown him in deep water.
A woodpecker’s staccato tattoo broke out somewhere on his flank and Kelly straightened with a jerk. He stared around him at the shadowed, gurgling creek, wondering at his jumpiness.
Slung on Kelly’s shoulder belt was an elkhorn phial of beaver medicine, a noxious mixture made from the musk of a male beaver and nutmeg and whisky. A man who used it couldn’t wash its powerful stink off from one end of the season to the other, but it had a strong attraction for the beavers. Rubbing this bait on another peg, he drove it into the sandy shore just above the trap.
Then he moved on downstream. It took him a good part of the day to locate the rest of the sign and empty his trapsacks. He planted the last one below a dam. He was just splashing on the medicine when the single echoing flap of a beaver tail upstream made him straighten again. The beavers were strange, gregarious creatures. They lived in clans and built bridges and lodges together and warned each other when danger was near by slapping their flat tails on the water.
The noise came again, not just one slap now, but a whole volley, echoing down the timber aisles like the applause of some giant audience.
Fast as he moved, Kelly made no sound. Heedless of the man-scent he left now, he lunged up the bank and ran flat-footed for the nearest screen of brush. He was loading as he ran. With a deft flip he opened his powder horn and tilted a measure of glistening black Dupont into the charge-cup hanging to the bottom. This he dumped into the muzzle of his rifle. Without lost motion he slid open the brass trap-cover on the side of the gunstock and snatched out a greased linen patch, jamming it onto the half-ounce ball he slipped from his shot pouch. He pulled his hickory rod from its fittings beneath the gun and rammed patch and ball down the full length of the Hawkins barrel.
By the time he was pulling out his ramrod he was flat on his belly in a thick screen of chokecherry, ready to fire.
He lay there in the chill shadows with the forest utterly silent about him. This was a common occurrence when trapping in Indian country. If it was Cheyenne they might be hunting, but if it was Blackfeet they might be after scalps.
Finally he put his ear to the earth and felt the faint tremor of many hoofs. It was what had startled the beavers. It seemed to come from upstream and he watched till he finally saw them, like shadows moving through the cottonwoods. There were three white men, dressed like trappers. Two of them were herding a dozen pack animals loaded with empty apishamores. The third was leading Kelly Morgan’s roan.
Kelly waited till they were twenty feet away. Then he said, “You kin stop right there. I got you dead to rights.”
They pulled up sharply, looking around in consternation. The man leading the roan put a tight rein on his fiddling horse and sang out.
“Who are you?”
“The man what owns that horse,” Kelly answered.
The leader relaxed in his saddle. He was tall by any standards, narrow enough to dive down a Jake Hawkins barrel, dressed in a rotten shirt of antelope hide and age-yellowed buckskin britches. He had a jumptrap jaw and beadlike eyes and when he smiled it made him look like a fox.
“You give us a scare,” he said. “I’m Vic Jares and we’re a party o’ free trappers. How about showing yourself?”
“How about lettin’ go o’ the roan?”
Jares glanced at the roan, grinned again, ruefully. “It’s yours. We found it hitched up high. Didn’t know if you’d lost your hair to some Injuns or what.”
It didn’t satisfy Kelly. But he was convinced this was all of the party, and stood up, rifle pointed at them across his hip. He stepped out of the thicket without crackling a twig. Jares indicated his two companions.
“Wingy Hollister and George Quinn,” he said.
Hollister was a one-armed man, seven ax handles wide, with a ruddy face, unctuous as a deacon. He wore the inevitable shoulder belt laden with the endless assortment of trapper’s tools, and at the very bottom of the belt, within easy reach of his swinging hand, was a Mandan tomahawk. He bowed his head and addressed Kelly with a voice like a tolling bell.
“My blessings, brother. May the sun always shine upon your hearth.”
George Quinn was a burly Irishman, bald as an egg. He scratched habitually at the hedge of pink hair growing like a fuzz on his jowls and his eyes twinkled secretively at Kelly from pouches of sallow fat. After the introduction, all three waited. Coldly, Kelly introduced himself. Then he nodded at the empty apishamores on their pack horses.
“Ain’t you startin’ sort of late?”
“We’re all finished,” Jares said. “Ran into poachers south o’ Colter’s Hell. Cleaned us out, traplines and camp.”
“The misguided sinners even appropriated our sustenance, brother,” Hollister said. “We’ve partaken of neither flesh nor fowl for three days. We’d appreciate it if we could join you at your camp, and perhaps beg a crumb or two.”
Quinn rubbed wet lips, grinning. “And mebbe a drink.”
“Venison steak and pemmican,” Kelly said. “And nothing to drink but branch water.”
Quinn sighed and rolled his eyes sadly at Hollister. Jares tossed the reins of the roan to Kelly, eyes darting to his face.
“Be mighty welcome to us, Morgan. My belt buckle’s gnawin’ my backbone.”
Kelly swung onto the roan. He had not unloaded the Jake Hawkins and kept it tilted up so the ball wouldn’t roll out. As they headed down the canyon, Jares asked:
“Any news from Santa Fe?”
“Last we heard, they’d kicked out the old bunch and made some Taos Indian the new governor,” Kelly answered.
“We got later word, then. The Indian was killed and they set this Nicolas Amado up as governor.”
Kelly shook his head. The tortuous course of Mexican politics had always baffled him. Jares filled out the story. A girl named Teresa Cavan had figured in the assassination somehow. The Assembly had broken into the governor’s chambers to find her with Augustín Gomez and several others standing around Villapando’s dead body. Only their drawn guns had kept the Pueblo Indians in the Assembly from tearing them apart. Word had immediately been sent to the remaining insurgents camped about the city. Infuriated, they marched upon the Palace, declaring a mob vengeance upon those responsible for Villapando’s death. In the last moment, General Amado had arrived with a force of Perea’s dragoons, putting the mob to rout and saving his compatriots within the Palace.
Mention of Teresa Cavan brought her picture back to Kelly—red-headed, green-eyed, soft as a cat, with claws to match. Thought of her had been with him constantly since leaving Taos.
It was black night by the time they reached camp. On a high meadow carpeted with browning grama grass a trio of half-faced shelters had been set up. Rawhide ropes had been stretched between young pines to form a corral for the horses, and rocks lay in a pair of blackened fire circles before the shelters.
The first man they saw as they rode in was Turkey Thompson. He stood at the edge of the meadow, completely naked, his stringy body white as the underside of a fish in the reflected light of the campfires. His clothes lay on an anthill a few feet away and he was complacently watching the ants carry the lice off the garments. After the introductions, he said, “When them damn vermin git to bitin’ harder than me, I figger it’s time to delouse.”
Cimarron Saunders had gotten back to camp before Kelly. He was crouched over the carcass of a fresh-killed deer, cutting steaks. The riders checked their horses beside him and Kelly performed introductions again. Saunders grinned slyly up at Jares. He scratched at his matted red beard and licked his lips.
“Vic Jares,” he said. “Name’s familiar.”
They spitted haunches over the fire and fried steaks and roasted the head whole in a pit filled with hot ashes. They gorged themselves and sat around too full to move, swapping windies and yarning. Saunders cleaned his saca tripas on his pants, then turned the blade over in his hands.
“Ever see a knife like that?” he asked Jares. “Gets-the-guts, they call it. Got it off a Mex in Chihuahua. Got these verses etched in the blade. Bravos, they call ‘em. One fer each man it’d killed, he claimed. With this you tickle a man’s ribs a long time before he laughs.” Saunders chuckled. “Whaddaya think o’ that?”
Jares’s bright eyes darted about the clearing. “I’m a Green River man, muhself.”
“Tripe is sweet but bowels are better.” Saunders threw back his head to emit his booming laugh. “Great scabby booshways, if that don’t take the gristle off a painter’s tail—”
He broke off as a blade flashed through the air. It struck the trunk of a pine, twenty feet away, quivering there. It was a Bowie knife.
All of them looked at Kelly. His hand was still in midair. He put it in his lap, belching.
“I been listenin’ to you brag for ten weeks. Let’s see you make it good.”
The blood flooded Saunders’s coarse-featured face, filling his eyes till a network of little red veins tinged the corners. He looked around the circle, hefted the knife, then tossed it.
The curved blade sang past the tree, inches off its mark. Saunders let his breath out in an angry gust. The one-armed Hollister patted his bulging belly, chuckling softly.
“The bowels were full enough, brother, but the tripe was evidently not to its liking.”
Saunders’s thick lips twisted. “Maybe you could do better.”
Somehow it took all their eyes to the tomahawk, slung so handily at Hollister’s side. The man’s unctuous smile caused his twinkling little eyes to disappear in their pink pouches of fat.
“It is a Delaware weapon, brother, and they too have a saying. Never put your blade to flight, unless it comes back with a scalp.”
There was a moment of silence. Then Saunders emitted a disgusted curse and rose to go after his knife. He came back without bringing Kelly’s Bowie. Kelly rose and walked to the tree. Thompson picked up a bullhide bucket, as if going after water. He stopped beside the tree.
“Whaddaya think?”
“I don’t like it,” Kelly said. “They was heading north, yet they said they’d come from Colter’s Hell.”
“If they was in Colter’s Hell, how could they hear about what happened in Santa Fe before we did?” Thompson asked.
“We’ll stand watch tonight,” Kelly said. “I’ll take it till twelve.”
Near the fire were the racks made of willow withes to stretch the fresh beaver pelts and keep them from shrinking as they dried. There were a score of these pelts pegged to the racks, harvest of their last days in the fifth camp. Kelly took one off and placed it fur-side down on the graining block, a log peeled of its bark and rubbed smooth with sand. After scraping all the meat and fat from the hide, he dipped beaver brains from a trade kettle and patiently worked them into the pelt to keep it pliable. He stretched it up to dry again and took down another.
The camp grew silent, with the fire dying and the men falling asleep. After fleshing and stretching, Kelly pressed the pelts into a bale, lashing it, setting it under the buffalo robes covering the other bales. They had over five hundred pelts beneath those robes, worth six dollars apiece in Santa Fe. Turkey Thompson said that even counting out Ryker’s share, such a harvest would pay them much more than a company trapper made in a whole year.
Near midnight, Cimarron Saunders stirred in his blankets, threw them off, and rose. He shambled to Kelly, scratching his curly red beard. He glanced at the sleeping strangers, twenty feet away.
“Can’t sleep, them damn kyeshes on my mind,” he muttered. “You want I should take the dogwatch?”
“Suits me,” Kelly said.
He went to his bedding and rolled in. But he remembered Saunders’s first reaction to the strangers; something stuck in his craw and he couldn’t give himself up to sleep. He narrowed his eyes to mere slits and began breathing easily and deeply. After a while Saunders passed him, going over to check the corral.
He passed out of sight. Kelly heard the horses snort softly. Then he heard the soft tramp of Saunders’s feet, coming back. He kept on breathing evenly, like a man asleep. The padding of moccasined feet stopped, a foot from him.
Saunders was at his head, out of sight of his slitted eyes. If he opened them, the man would see. He remained still, breathing, listening.
Then he heard the rustle of clothes against a body violently put into motion.
He twisted over like a cat and saw Saunders dropping to one knee at his head, the saca tripas already descending. His twisting roll to one side took him out from underneath and the knife went hilt-deep into the earth where his chest had been an instant before.
Saunders pulled it out with a curse and wheeled toward him, lunging again. But Kelly already had his Bowie out, slashing at the man. His blade slit Saunders’s knife arm wrist to elbow as it whipped in. The man lunged backward with a howl of pain that woke the whole camp.
Lunging after Saunders, Kelly saw Turkey Thompson roll out of his blanket and come to his knees. Turkey blinked once and then scooped his loaded Jake Hawkins from beneath the blanket. Before he could draw a bead Wingy Hollister sat up in his robes twenty feet away and threw his tomahawk. The bright blade buried itself between Turkey’s shoulder blades and he squawked like a strangled chicken and fell face down across his rifle.
Rushing Saunders, Kelly blocked the man’s wild thrust and drove the Bowie for his belly. But Saunders caught his wrist and lunged against his body. Grappled for that instant, Kelly had a dim sense of both Jares and Quinn rushing him. Their rifles were unloaded and they had them clubbed over their heads.
Quinn was first and in the last moment Kelly tore free from Saunders and threw himself backward into the sloppy little Irishman. Quinn’s rifle descended in front of Kelly, missing him completely, and they both went down in a tangle.
Sprawled backward on the Irishman, Kelly had a glimpse of Jares, right on top of him, and of the man’s descending rifle. He rolled away from the blow but it caught him across the left shoulder, stunning him. Hollister was on his feet now, running in from the other side. Kelly was still rolling and it took his face right into Hollister’s kicking boot.
The world exploded. But with shocking pain came a roaring rage. It drove Kelly up, blinded, sobbing with agony, a giant rising up through the kicking, pounding mass of their bodies. He caught someone and grappled the man to him. Quinn pawed at his legs. Stamping the man back down, Kelly saw that he held Jares. The man swung a wild blow at his face. Kelly took it and wheeled him bodily around in a great arc and flung him like a sack of meal at Hollister.
Empty-handed, Kelly roared like a wild man and threw himself at Saunders’s knees. It knocked the man flat.
Saunders flopped over and came up on top of Kelly and drove the saca tripas at him. Kelly couldn’t block it and the blade slid between his ribs. In a spasm of pain and weakness he grabbed Saunders to him before the man could pull the blade out and their struggles flopped them over and over till they struck the steep dropoff behind the bales of pelts.
Like ten pins they rolled over and over down the rocky slope toward the stream bed below. Kelly’s wound robbed him of strength and he lost Saunders. Somewhere in the descent the knife pulled out of him. He came to a stop on the sandy beach, so sick and dazed he could not move for a moment. Above him he heard them shouting as they came down the bank.
Kelly’s outrage went through him like a fire, seeming to burn out pain and weakness for a moment. He rolled over and came to his hands and knees.
It was like new agony to face the fact that he was too weak to fight. He could hear them crashing through the underbrush above and sliding down the slick places and knew he had but a moment left.
If he stayed on the white sand they could trail him by his blood. He crawled toward the stream. He came across a body and felt the curly beard of Cimarron Saunders. The man must have hit his head on a rock rolling down the slope. He was out cold.
Kelly reached the stream and slid into the icy water. He turned downstream and crawled like a sick animal, wheezing and mewing in pain. Then he heard the first one reach the beach behind him, and he bit his lip to stifle the sound till tears came from his eyes. As from a great distance—though he knew it wasn’t far—came a shout. “Here’s Cimarron. He’s down flat.”
A man answered, farther away, and Kelly recognized Hollister’s voice. “Where is our fallen brother? I fain would put the quietus on him.”
Jares called, then, “Hollister, you trail upstream. Me’n Quinn’ll go down.”
He knew he had to get out of the water. The stream narrowed and he felt thickets clawing at him. If that brush grew far up the bank it would hide his blood, in this moonless blackness. He pawed his way through the thickets, crawling up the bank opposite to camp. He made noise at first, going as fast as he could, because he knew the sound of their running would cover it. Then he slowed down and lowered himself to his belly, moving like a snake through the bushes, biting his lip again to keep from giving voice to his pain.
He reached the top of the slope, fifty feet higher than the stream below, and lay on his belly in a carpet of pine needles. He was so dizzy he couldn’t think now. If they had guessed where he left the stream and were following him, he couldn’t do anything about it. He was weak as a newborn kitten. Then he heard Quinn shouting, way downstream.
“He ain’t here, Jares.”
“Keep on,” answered Jares. “He was bleeding like a stuck pig. He knows the only way he can hide his trail is in the water.”
It was like fresh agony to concentrate. Only the force of a terrible will could prevail over such pain, such weakness. He had to think about each movement a long time before he made it. For socks he wore wool wrappings. He took off his moccasins and unwrapped the strips and folded them into a compress, putting it beneath his bloody shirt and pressing it into the wound. Then, holding it there, he tried to rise.
He got only to his knees, and weakness swept him. He must have passed out as he fell. When he came to a few seconds later, he was flat on his face. He would crawl, then. He got to his hands and knees. With one hand holding the compress tight to the wound so there would be no dripping blood to leave a trail, he crawled. Like a three-legged dog, he crawled.
He crawled across a meadow littered with pine needles and into dense timber. He crawled until he found some granite outcroppings near a ridge that would leave no marks and he followed this down the ridge. Finally the croppings crossed the ridge and he followed them over and then found some more dense brush that led him down-slope. At the bottom he found another gurgling branch of the stream and crawled into it, moving toward headwaters.
The bastards wouldn’t find him now. He’d get away from ‘em if he had to crawl clear to Santa Fe, and then he’d turn right around and come back after ‘em, and he’d get ‘em, he’d get every God damned one of ‘em.