My eyes adjusted to the moon’s light, and I saw then that all was not perfect, that something had marred the furrows. Something had passed transversely across them, crumbling their ridges and compacting the previously loosened and sifted soil.
The marring was far too large to be the stippled tiny hoofs of deer, and yet too even for the stumbling destruction of cattle or horse. There was instead a wild elegance to the script, and an ominousness.
I walked out into the field toward those tracks, being careful not to disrupt any of the ridges I had so carefully plowed. When I came to the tracks—so fresh that I knew they had been made only moments earlier—I crouched and examined them, and I recognized them to be those of a great cat, a jaguar, its prints wider than the spread of my hand: tracks such as I had seen in my travels of half a century ago, and even occasionally in the country around my home as a child, before settlers and civilization killed all the jaguars off.
Something moved at the far end of the field, back in the trees’ darkness; something dark stirred within the darkness, then was gone.
I was barefooted, but the night was warm and I felt no chill. I set out across the field in the moonlight, following the script of those fresh tracks down toward the trees.
Acknowledgments
In the fall of 1842, with the new Republic of Texas barely six years old, and tensions between Mexico and Texas still raw and rife—as they would continue to be, even after Texas was ultimately admitted to the United States—a small army of Texas volunteers invaded Mexico in defiance of the Texas president Sam Houston’s explicit orders, though perhaps with his contradictory, tacit assent, off the record. This much seems true: one leader, William S. Fisher, defied the expedition’s leader, Alexander Somervell, and crossed over the Texas-Mexico border, seeking war.
The militia volunteers committed atrocities on both sides of the border (as many of them had already committed against the Comanches, in the years preceding their adventure in Old Mexico). Decapitations, inhumane treatment of prisoners, questionable documents, economic inabilities to wage sustained war, political ambitions: all that exists now existed then. For readers interested in the facts of this period, works by the great Texas historian T. R. Fehrenbach, such as Lone Star, would be a fine beginning point, as would the invaluable Soldiers of Misfortune:The Somervell and Mier Eocpeditions by Sam W. Haynes, and Mier Expedition Diary: A Texas Prisoner’s Account, by Joseph D. McCutchan, edited by Joseph Milton Nance. The Adventures of Bigfoot Wallace by John Duval, circa 1870, is an interesting read, as is Fanny Gooch Inglehart’s 1910 chronicle The Boy Captive of the Texas Mier Expedition: A Thrilling Episode of the Texas Republic.
It’s standard practice for novelists trafficking in history to establish the traditional caveat along the lines of “Any inaccuracies are solely the responsibility of the author, not the subjects,” etc.; but in this instance, the novelist has traveled some distance beyond what might be termed “historical fiction.”
Certain things are factual, others imagined: all, one hopes, are true to the spirit of this novel, if nothing else. General Somervell, a significant part of the historical raid, is largely absent in this accounting, which focuses, through a fictional narrator, on the leadership of two other Texans, Thomas Jefferson Green and William Fisher. This book is not intended to be read as a replacement for or even a supplement to Texas history, but instead has arisen from that history and heritage. The novel was written in the first days of the invasion of Baghdad; for that emotional truth I can claim no evasion or caveat. Certain historical timelines and key incidents are factual. For others I found no reference beyond the truth of my own engagement with this story, its landscape, and the nature of men and nations at war.
I’m grateful, as ever, to my editors—Harry Foster and Alison Kerr Miller—and for help by Beth Kluckhohn and Will Vincent, and my typist, Angi Young, and to Robert Overholtzer and Rodrigo Corral. I’m grateful also for the editing of Tom Jenks and Carol Edgarian of Narrative magazine, which serialized this novel—and to my agent, Bob Dattila, and to Terry Jones for help with Spanish translations, and the biologist Jerry Scoville for help with thè natural history of Mexico.
Visit www.hmhbooks.com to find more books by Rick Bass.
About the Author
RICK BASS’s fiction has received O. Henry Awards, numerous Pushcart Prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Most recently, his memoir Why I Came West was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.
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