threes or like that.”
“OK. I’ll play.”
After two hours, Will would have owed Ray $125,000 if they’d been playing for real money. Will tossed his cards to Ray. “This is a pain in the ass. You bluff too good. Hell, you didn’t have nothin’ but horseshit an’ slivers, most of them hands you won.”
“ ’Nother hand?”
“Hell no.” Will was staring over his friend’s shoulder. “We might better get ready for rain, anyway. Looks like there’s a storm comin’ up outta the east.”
Ray turned to look. It was still a good ways off, but the sky had become slightly darker to the east. “Yeah. Nothin’ we can do ’bout it but get wet, I guess.” He gazed east for several minutes. “Funny. I ain’t seein’ no flashes of lightning at all—none. Even that far away, you’d think we’d see a couple.”
“Dust storm?”
“Nah. That ain’t what a duster looks like. It’s too high in the sky an’ there’s no wind behind it. It’d be moving a lot faster if it was a duster.” As they watched, the ends of the storm spread wider and the center grew darker and heavier. There was an odd, electric tension in the air, not like the calm before a summer storm, but more like that created when there’s a constant, just barely audible sound that makes the hair rise on the back of a man’s neck.
Both men felt it; neither mentioned it.
About an hour and a half later the horses got screwy, pulling at their stakes, arguing, snapping at one another.
“We’d best hobble them two before they get to fightin’ ’an tear one ’nother up,” Ray said, “or take it in their heads to run off.”
For the first time since Will had known the pinto, the horse moved away from him. When he pursued it, the horse swung his back around, dropped his head, and kicked out with both rear hooves. Had a hoof struck Will, it would have crushed his head like an anvil dropped onto a cherry pie from a considerable height, or crushed his rib cage and punctured his lungs and heart.
Will moved very carefully around the horse and managed to snag the rope that led from the stake. He walked down the rope slowly, humming quietly, shushing the horse when he became fractious again. Finally, he was able to slide the hobbles on the pinto’s forelegs.
Although he was turned away from Ray, it was obvious his friend was having much the same problems. “Ya lop-eared sonofabitch,” Ray snarled. “Ya keep this shit up an’ I’ll truss your scrawny ass like a Christmas goose, goddammit!”
Ray had had quite enough. He stormed back to his saddle, his face red and distorted, and fetched his throwing rope. He dropped a clean loop in front of his horse and tugged it as soon as the animal stepped into it, suddenly pulling the two forelegs together. The horse teetered and squealed until Ray shoved his shoulder, knocking him down. He slipped on his hobbles, released his rope, mumbled, “Ya dumb bastid,” and walked over to Will. They both turned their attention to the storm.
“Ain’t movin’ very fast,” Will said.
“No—but she’s gettin’ bigger: wider an’ taller an’ darker . . .”
“Damndest thing I ever seen,” Will said. “An’ lookit Wampus. He’s scared shitless.”
The wolf dog certainly did look frightened. He stayed a few inches behind Will’s heels, cringing so his gut touched the ground, his tail tucked tightly between his legs. His eyes, like those of the horses, seemed as large as wagon wheels.
“Somethin’s real wrong out there,” Will said. “I don’t—”
Ray hushed his friend with a raised hand. “Listen careful. You hear what I do?”
Will listened intently, eyes tightly shut. The tension he’d felt earlier had translated itself into a quietly sawing buzz that was all the more ominous because of its lack of real volume. Hell, a half hundred head of beef on a run would make three times the noise. “What’s . . . ?”
“Jesus Howard Christ,” Ray said. “That ain’t no rain storm or dust storm. Them is grasshoppers, Will!”
“Grasshoppers?” Will asked incredulously.
“Abs’lutely! I never seen nothing like this, but a fella from Missouri—another wolf-bounty boy—he tol’ after he give up wolfin’ an’ started farmin’, he lost a whole fifty acres of wheat.” Ray was talking rapidly now, almost too fast to follow. “The sonsabitches et the stalks right down level with the ground. They et all the clothes his woman had hanged out to dry, much of his tack an’ leather riggin’s for his two-bottom plow, his saddle, a buncha kittens his kid was raisin’ up, his manure pile, his—”
“How can a grasshopper eat leather an’ cloth an’ such?”
“One hopper can’t but ninety thousand billion of them can eat any goddamn thing they come across. I hear tell they ate up a baby in Kansas. I dunno how true that is, but it’s what I heard. Kinda tough on the poor baby if it
Ray stopped talking and took several deep breaths.
“OK. Here’s what we gotta do.
“First, we cover our mouths an’ noses with our bandannas. Then we stuff li’l plugs of cloth in our ears. If hoppers git in there . . . well . . . and then we gotta plug up the horses’ ears an’ their nose holes, if we can do it. Wampus need plugs in his ears, too. Here’s another thing, too: every snake an’ rabbit and scorpion and prairie dog in all them acres is gonna be haulin’ ass away from the hoppers. We gotta keep the horses close together as we can, an’ use stout sticks to whack the piss outta the rattlers an’ sidewinders. See, they go nuts an’ bite ever’thin’ they see.”
Will already had his bandanna in place and was tearing up his second shirt to make plugs for his ears and for his horse and dog. “You need some’a this?” he asked Ray. “No sense in us both ruining a shirt if we don’t have to. I got plenty for me an’ my critters.”
“Good idear. While I’m pluggin’ up my horse, how ’bout you tearin’ off a couple branches to pound snakes an’ scorpions with? Won’t be long ’fore they’re here, an’ they ain’t lookin’ to be friends with us. Oh—and tuck your drawers into your boots an’ tie one a them sleeves around your neck good an’ tight. If what my friend tol’ me is true—an’ I got no reason to think it ain’t—the hoppers’ll be all over us real soon.”
Neither Will’s horse nor his dog put up a fight as he jammed balls of cloth into their ears. Both animals were trembling and the pinto had broken a heavy sweat. Wampus stayed in place a couple of inches behind Will, belly to the ground, following his every move.
The buzz had turned into a flapping, pounding sound—like that of the wings of a frantic bird except many, many times louder. Will hacked off a couple of desert-pine branches and trimmed them clean of shoots and suckers. He tossed one to Ray. Will stood between the horses. Ray was in front of him a few strides.
The rabbits came first, covering the ground like a dirty brown blanket, running their hearts out. It was hard to believe that there could be so many jacks in one place, but there they were, wild-eyed, many with their tiny pink tongues protruding from their gaping mouths as they sucked air.
The prairie dogs were next, scrambling, banging into one another, falling, running over each other. Then came the snakes.
Will had never seen so many goddamn rattlers in his life, and neither had Ray. They didn’t glide smoothly as they generally did, but seemed to move in almost jerky, spasmodic leaps ahead, stopping every so often to raise their heads eight or ten inches above the ground as if they were periscopes on those rebel underwater ships. Ray began slamming reptiles with his stick, yelling and cursing at them. Only a few got past him and Will handled those easily enough. The horses stood stock-still, paralyzed with fear, the scent of the snakes reaching their brains even through the cloth jammed into their nostrils. And then, suddenly, there was nothing in the world but grasshoppers, impossibly massive numbers of them, with virtually no space between them. They came on with a roar composed of millions—billions—of the miniscule abrasive sounds each made, amplified by a figure too large to imagine.
In a matter of seconds both horses, both men, and the wolf dog were blanketed with foraging hoppers. The horses, now beyond panic and into a state of raw instinct, wanted nothing but to run, to get this horror behind them. They reared and bucked in spite of the hobbles, their piercing squeals barely audible over the infernal racket of the insects. Will was pulled from his feet, blinded by the hoppers sheeting his face, afraid to open his eyes, and had to release the ropes he had on each horse. Without the use of their forelegs, the horses stumbled and fell and were unable to get up, their hooves sliding on the crushed grasshoppers that now covered the prairie floor like a
