except to eat, yet the whites considered him a great horse thief, though he only stole horses to trade them for slaves. Still, all the whites called him the Black Vaquero. Parrot knew such things--s now Parrot had sent Spider Who Hides to make his leg black. It was one of Parrot's jokes, probably. The Black Vaquero would at least have a black leg.
Ahumado did not reveal his injury to anyone.
He sat on his blanket, as he always did, watching the great vultures soar across the face of the Yellow Cliffs. There were fewer vultures now, because Ahumado had stopped hanging men in the cages, men the vultures could eat. Only a few of the vultures, or the eagles, still flew along the cliff, waiting to see if Ahumado would cage a man for them to eat.
Ahumado sat as he had always sat, listening, saying little. The wound in his leg was very small yet; no one had noticed it, or smelled the rot that would soon spread. Once he had thought the matter over for a day or two, Ahumado realized that it was more than just one of Parrot's jokes. Parrot had sent Spider to call him home; Parrot and Jaguar wanted him to leave the Yellow Cliffso, to stop harrying the whites with their thin cattle; Parrot and Jaguar wanted him to return to his home, to the jungle, where great serpents rested in the vine-covered temples. There was a broad tree near one of the temples, a tree with a great hole in it. Lightning had hit the tree and burned it away inside, so that there was a space in the tree large enough for a person to live in. When Ahumado was young an old woman had lived in the tree: her name was Huatl and she was a great curandera, so great that she could even cure the bite of the Spider Who Hides. In his youth Ahumado had often seen old Huatl; she lived in the split tree, near his home. She had told him that he would live long but that in his old age it would be his duty to return to the place of the split tree. When it was time for him to finish with his life as a human being, he was to lie near the tree with the hole in it; then he would sink into the earth and become a root. Lightning would come again and burn the great tree where Huatl lived. That tree would burn up but another tree would grow from the root that had once been the man Ahumado.
That tree would live for a thousand years and become the tree of medicines. The people would come in their weakness or illness to the tree of medicines and be cured.
In that tree would be all knowledge, all that Huatl and all the other great healers knew.
For three days Ahumado watched the tiny hole in his leg become larger; he watched as the ring of rot spread. On the third day he heard a sound deep in his ear and looked up to see Parrot fly like a red streak across the face of the cliff. He thought the sound in his ear was from Jaguar, who was somewhere near.
Ahumado knew then that he had been summoned. He was spending his last day in the canyon of the Yellow Cliffs. None of the people in the camp knew this, of course. The women went on with their work, washing clothes in the stream and making tortillas. The men played cards, drank tequila, quarrelled over dice, and tried to get the women to couple with them. Scull crouched in his cage, sheltering his lidless eyes from the sun. It was hundreds of miles to the jungle, to the place of temples. Ahumado knew he had better get started. He wanted to get across the first mountains before his leg became too bad.
He knew that by the time he reached the home of Jaguar he would have no leg. He meant to take a good hatchet with him, so he could make himself a crutch when his leg failed. That night he would crawl through a hole that only he knew about--the hole would take him through the belly of the cliff; it would take him past the dark men. He told no one; he would merely vanish--in the morning there would be no Ahumado. He would travel over rocks and leave no track. None of the people would know where he went. He would simply be gone.
There was only one thing left for Ahumado to do, in the canyon of the Yellow Cliffso, and it involved old Goyeto, the skinner.
'Sharpen your knives,' he told Goyeto.
'You had better get them as sharp as you can. They need to be very sharp today.' Goyeto brightened, when he received those instructions. They had taken no captives lately; there had been no one to skin. But now Ahumado wanted him to make the knives sharp.
He wanted the knives to be very sharp. It must mean that he had at last decided to let him skin the white man, Scull. There was no one else who was a candidate for skinning.
So Goyeto set about to make his little knives sharp--while Ahumado sat on his blanket, Goyeto whetted his knives, with skill. When they were ready he brought them to Ahumado, who tested them one by one. He used fine threads from his blanket, cutting the threads with the mere touch.
'Are we going to skin the white man?' Goyeto asked. 'I'll have him tied to the post, if you want.' When Ahumado turned to face him Goyeto's heart almost stopped, from the look that was in Ahumado's eyes. Goyeto did not even have the strength to stammer. He knew he had been discovered; an old sin, one he had committed many years before with one of Ahumado's women, on a blanket amid the horses, had been found out.
Goyeto had long feared discovery--Ahumado was jealous of his women--but Ahumado had been one hundred miles away, on a trip to catch slaves, when the woman coaxed him onto the blanket. She was a lustful woman; she had tried to coax him onto the blanket many times, but Goyeto had been too fearful of Ahumado's vengeance. He had only coupled with the woman that once.
When Ahumado turned his snakelike look on him, Goyeto knew who the knives had been sharpened for. He jumped up and tried to run, but the vaqueros quickly caught him. At Ahumado's command they took all his clothes off and tied him to the post where he had practiced his delicate art for so long. Goyeto felt such a fear that he wanted to die. No one but himself knew how to skin a man--if one of the crude young pistoleros tried to skin him it would just be butchery; they would hack his flesh off, with his skin.
Then Ahumado himself rose from his blanket and took the knives. He stuck them one by one into the post above Goyeto's head, so that, as one became dull, he could take another.
'Parrot told me what you did with my woman,' Ahumado said. 'He told me in a dream. I have watched you skin people for many years. I am your pupil in this matter. Now we will see if I have learned well.' Goyeto didn't plead. He was so frightened that all ^ws left his mind and became screams.
Ahumado began at his armpits and began to work downward. Old Goyeto had a big stomach-- Ahumado thought such a stomach would be easy to skin, but it wasn't. Goyeto screamed so loudly that people became confused and began to flee the camp. It was not merely the loudness of the screams that confused them, either. Ahumado was skinning the skinner --no one knew what it meant. It might mean that he was tired of them, that he meant to skin them all.
If they ran he might merely shoot them, which would be better than being skinned.
Goyeto's voice wore out long before Ahumado worked downward to the part that had been active in committing the sin, years before on the horse blanket. Goyeto's mind broke; he spewed liquids out of his mouth that mixed with his blood. Ahumado tried to skin one of his ears but Goyeto didn't feel it. He died in the afternoon, well
