made them all so hungry they could not sit still?they wanted to rip the goose off its spit before it was ready, and yet they also had a great desire to eat cooked food. Bigfoot, who couldn’t see but could certainly smell, asked Gus and Call several times if the bird was almost ready. It was still half raw when they ate it, and yet, to all of them, it tasted better than any bird they had ever eaten. Bigfoot even cracked the bones, to get at the marrow.
“It’s mountain man’s butter,” he said. “Once you get a taste for it you don’t see why people bother to churn. It’s better just to crack a bone.”
“Yeah, but you might not have a bone,” Gus said. “The bone might still be in the animal.”
Bigfoot kept his eyes tightly bandaged, but he no longer moaned so much.
“What will you do if you’re blind from now on, Big?” Gus asked.Call felt curious about the same thing, but did not feel it was appropriate to ask. Bigfoot Wallace had roamed the wilderness all his life; his survival had often depended on keenness of eye. A blind man would not last long, in the wilderness. Bigfoot could scout no more ?he would have to leave off scouting the troops. It would be a sad change, if it happened.
“Oh, I expect I’ll get over being scorched,” Bigfoot said.
Gus said no more, but the question still hung in the air.
Bigfoot reflected for several minutes, before commenting further.
“If I’m blind, it will be good-bye to the prairies,” he said. “I expect I’d have to move to town and run a whorehouse.”
“Why a whorehouse?” Gus asked.
“Well, I couldn’t see the merchandise, but I could feel it,” Bigfoot said. “Feel it and smell it and poke it.”
“I been in whorehouses when I was too drunk to see much, anyway,” he added. “You don’t have to look to enjoy whores.”
“Speaking of whores, I wonder what they’re like in Santa Fe?” Gus asked. Eating the goose had raised his spirits considerably. He felt sure that the worst was over. He had even argued to Call that the reason the goose had been so easy to shoot was that it was a tame goose that had run off from a nearby farm.
“No, it was a sick goose,” Call insisted. “There wouldn’t be a farm around here. It’s too dry.”
Despite his friend’s skepticism, Gus had begun to look forward to the delights of Santa Fe, one of which would undoubtedly be whores.
“You can’t afford no whore, even if we get there alive,” Bigfoot reminded him.
“I guess I could get a job, until the Colonel shows up,” Gus said. “Then we can rob the Mexicans and have plenty of money.”
“I don’t know if the Colonel will make it,” Bigfoot said. “I expect he’ll starve, or else turn back.”
That night, their horse was stolen. They were such a pitiful trio that no one had thought to stand guard. Eating the goose had put them all in a relaxed mood. The horse, in any case, was a poor one. It had never recovered fully from the wild chase after the buffalo. Its wind was broken; it plodded slowly along, carrying Bigfoot. Still, it had been their only mount?their only resource in more ways than one. They all knew that they might need to eat it, if they didn’t make the settlements soon now. The goose had been a stroke of luck?there might not be another.
Call had hobbled the horse, to make sure it didn’t graze so far that he would have to risk getting lost by going to look for it in the morning. They called the horse Moonlight, because of his light coat. Before Call slept he heard Moonlight grazing, not far away. It was a reassuring sound; but then he slept. When he woke, the hobbles had been cut and there was no sign of Moonlight. The three of them were alone on the prairie.
“We’ll track ‘em, they probably ain’t far,” Bigfoot said, before he remembered that he was blind. His eyes were paining him less, but he still didn’t dare remove his blinders.
“If he was close enough to steal Moonlight, he could have killed me,” Call said. The stealth Indians possessed continued to surprise him. He was a light sleeper; the least thing woke him. But the horse thief had repeatedly come within a few steps of him, yet he had had no inkling that anyone was near.
“Dern, it’s a pity you boys don’t know how to track,” Bigfoot said. “I expect it was Kicking Wolf. That old hump man wouldn’t follow us this far, not for one horse. Kicking Wolf is more persistent.”
“Too damn persistent,” Gus said. He was affronted. Time and again, the red man had bested them.
“All they’ve done is beat us,” he added. “It’s time we beat them at something.”
“Well, we can beat them at starving to death,” Bigfoot said. “I don’t know much else we can beat them at.”
“Why didn’t they kill us?” Call asked.
“I doubt there was more than one of them?I expect it was just Kicking Wolf,” Bigfoot said. “Stealing horses is quiet work, but killing men ain’t. He might have woke one of us up and one of us might have got him.”
“It’s a long way to come for one damn horse,” Gus commented. He still stung, from the embarrassment of being so easily robbed.
“Kicking Wolf is horse crazy, like you’re whore crazy. You’d go anywhere for a whore, and he’d go anywhere for a horse.”
“I don’t know if I’d go halfway across a damn desert, for a whore,” Gus said. “I sure wouldn’t for a worn-out horse like Moonlight. Kicking Wolf is crazier than me.
“Bigfoot looked amused. “There’s no law saying an Indian can’t be crazier than a white man,” he said.
All that day, and for the next two, Call and Gus took turns leading Bigfoot. It was tiring work. Bigfoot had a long stride, longer even than Gus’s?the two of them had almost to trot, to keep ahead of him. Then, too, the prairie was full of cracks and little gullies. They had to be alert to keep him on level ground?it annoyed him to stumble. It stormed again the second night, though with less lightning. Water puddled here and there; they were not thirsty, but once they finished the last few bites of horse meat, they had no food. Call was afraid to roam too far to hunt, for fear of losing Gus and Bigfoot. In any case they saw no game, except a solitary antelope. The antelope was in sight for several hours?Gus thought it was only about three miles away, but Call thought it might be farther. In the thin air, distances were hard to judge.
Bigfoot considered it peculiar that the antelope stayed in sight so long. Not to be able to use his own eyes was frustrating.
“If I could just have one look, I could give an opinion,” he said. “It might not even be an antelope?remember them mountain goats that turned into Comanches?”
Reminded, Gus and Call gave the distant animal their best scrutiny. Gus was of the opinion that the animal might be a Comanche, but Call was convinced it was just a plain antelope.
“Go stalk it, then,” Bigfoot said. “We’ll sit down and wait. A little antelope rump would be mighty tasty.”
“Let Gus stalk it,” Call said. “He’s got better eyes. I’ll wait with you.”
Gus didn’t relish the assignment. If the antelope turned out to be a Comanche, he would be in trouble. He was hungry, though, and so were the others.
“Don’t shoot until you’ve got a close shot,” Bigfoot said. “If you can’t hit the heart, shoot for the shoulder. That’ll slow him down enough that we can catch him.”
Gus stalked the antelope for three hours. The last three hundred yards, he edged on his belly. The antelope lifted its head from time to time, but mostly kept grazing. Gus got closer and closer?he remembered that he had missed the first antelope, at almost point-blank range. He wanted to get very close?it would do his pride good to bring home some meat, and his belly would appreciate it, too.
He got to within two hundred yards, but decided to edge a little closer. He thought he might hit it at one hundred and fifty yards. He kept his head down, so as not to show the animal his face. Bigfoot had informed him that prairie animals were particularly alarmed by white faces. Indians could get close enough to kill them because their faces weren’t white. He kept his hat low, and his face low, too. When he judged he was within about the right distance, he risked a peek and to his dismay saw no antelope. He looked?then stood up and looked?but the antelope was gone. Gus ran toward where it had been standing, thinking the animal would have lain down?then he glimpsed it running, far to the north, farther than it had been when they first noticed it. Following it would be pointless; for a moment, stumbling around after the antelope, he felt a panic take him. He could not be sure which direction he had come from. He might not even be able to find Bigfoot and Call. Then he remembered a rock that stuck up a little from the ground. He had passed it in his crawl. He walked in a half circle until he saw the rock and was soon back on the right course.
Even so, he was disgusted when he got back to his companions.
“I wasted all that time,” he said. “He took off and ran. Let’s just hurry up and get to New Mexico.”
