before crossing a great river and striking across part of its desert, making for the green, lofty mountains they watched rise in the distance.
Choosing not to tarry at all to set their traps in those hills visited by Taos brigades, they put that high land behind them, pressing on south by west, guided every plodding step of the way by those landmarks Asa McAfferty had set to memory, recited firsthand from the lips of those who claimed to have looked down from those foothills at the basin below, where a man got his first glimpse of the Gila as it spilled southwest across a virgin land.
“No man you know of ever trapped this river?” Scratch had asked that first night they’d camped beside the Gila. This sure didn’t appear to be beaver country the likes of which he’d ever seen before.
“No one I heard of ever gone on down toward the Mex desert to see what lies in that country,” McAfferty had asserted. “The trapping outfits turned back from here.”
There had to be a cause, Bass reasoned. After all these weeks and, lo, the endless miles—surely there was something that had caused those hardy brigades to turn about and search for more hospitable country to the north and east of the Heely. At first he had figured it was only the heat and the yawning maw of the desert the farther south they rode that gave him a sense of unease … as they stopped here, then there, whenever they came upon beaver sign.
On their fourth day moving downstream the partners ran onto the beginnings of a lush valley fed by untold creeks spilling into the main river, a long and meandering country verdant enough to support a rich population of industrious flat-tails busily damming up their world into an endless series of ponds as the Gila continued its path between the foothills of two mountain ranges.
For more than a month they worked through the slowly shrinking daylight hours, trapping the unwary beaver never before chivvied in that country. Then McAfferty had spotted the moccasin prints late of an afternoon. After returning to camp, then taking Bass to study them with him, they both decided there was sign of enough warriors to cause them concern—no matter that those warriors were prowling about the country on foot.
“I heard tell from one of Pattie’s men that a man can foller the Heely upstream into the mountains,” Asa had asserted.
“How far them mountains be?”
“Far enough,” and McAfferty had pointed to the east. “A good ride will put ground atween us and them red heathens. ’P
McAfferty had gone on to describe how he was told they could continue up the Gila, following it into the foothills, and eventually the mountains—saying all a man had to do was continue north by east from there in making his crossing of the high country, up and down through a series of broken ridges until he eventually dropped into the valley of the Rio Grande del Norte.
“The river what leads us right on into Taos for to winter up,” Asa had declared, gesturing dramatically with an outswung arm as he pointed to the northeast.
“You figger we ought’n load up and set off soon as it’s dark?”
But McAfferty had shaken his white head as he considered the plateau above the brushy draw where they had made camp the night before. “Nawww. Each of us take our watch tonight, go out come morning to collect our traps and turn back upriver for the mountains. The Lord my God will watch over and deliver us.”
Instead, they had spotted the warriors approaching from the rocks above just before first light. Abandoning what traps remained in the waters of the Gila, the white men fled, doggedly pursued right on into a country that reminded the ex-circuit-riding preacher of that land where Moses had led his Hebrews in their escape from a vengeful Pharaoh.
“Verily—that ol’ King of Egypt watched the destruction of his army beneath the hand of the one true God!” McAfferty had declared optimistically. “But God still had to punish His people with years of wandering in the desert because they turned from His voice.”
At their backs now, the sun was sinking behind the low, jagged, rocky bluffs that passed for hills in this desert country. Scratch remembered how three days before he had begun to wonder if he and McAfferty hadn’t themselves turned away from God’s voice—punished by being driven into an unforgiving desert, pursued so relentlessly by the Apache that they had eventually abandoned the Gila in a vain hope of eluding the warriors.
Leaving the river and crossing a low, rocky divide, Bass and McAfferty had fallen headlong into a basin where little but stunted brush and withered cactus struggled above the sun-baked hardpan. A sandy soil dotted with wide patches of golden, heat-seared bunchgrass broke up the monotony of the landscape as they pressed on for that thin, jagged line of purple beckoning from the distance.
In those mountains he knew they would find water, shelter, escape from their pursuers.
But on the morning of their second day without water they had spotted a second band of Apache off to their right in the distance—and were forced to turn sharply away from their goal. Forced to plunge deeper into a desert tracked only by jagged scars of waterless, scorpion-infested arroyos. At the bottom of one after another they had stopped only long enough to scrape down through the powdery sand with no luck, finding not so much as any damp soil before remounting their thirsty horses and urging their pack animals on behind them. Relentlessly keeping an anxious eye on the country at their backs, Bass was sure they had passed through the gates of hell itself.
Too many days. More waterless miles than he could recall. So much of his hope shriveled and drying the way the stunted plants in that land curled up and died. There had been no turning back. In every direction the prospects looked much the same. But only to the east did there appear the promise of cool, beckoning shade beneath that jagged scrap of autumn sky, while over their heads, hour after hour, hung nothing more than the sun, hovering like a sulled mule refusing to budge. It made his mouth water to gaze at that distant line of purple high country where a ragged batch of black-bellied clouds cluttered the eastern horizon.
Autumn rain. Bright green streaks of hot, phosphorescent lightning cracking the distant sky. Offering no more than a remote hope. Perhaps nothing more than despair for the man gradually dying of thirst now forced to watch those faraway thunderclouds, realizing he might never again feel the caress of cool rain upon his cracked, peeling, sunburned face.
Yet enough light flickered from heaven, streaking down through each jagged crack in the sky with every burst of that pale-green heat lightning, enough to give him renewed hope as they struggled on now, struggled on past the falling of the sun at their backs.
Suddenly the horse beneath him jerked its head, tugging the rawhide reins from his loose grip. In that next moment he heard Hannah snort. Instantly afraid the animals had winded Indians, Bass peered quickly to the right and left, painfully twisting his aching, thirst-ravaged body to gaze behind them. Nothing but a spiny dust column here and there as tiny whirlwinds zigzagged their way across the barren wastes. Nothing but those capricious spirals of the same alkali dust coating his nostrils, seeping into every pore, gumming up his swollen, blackened tongue and parched throat, making it hard to swallow around the tiny pebble he held beneath his tongue.
As he watched, the horse bearing McAfferty’s body suddenly side-stepped, pulling at the reins Scratch was holding—yanking them right out of his hand. Before he could get his own legs to respond, to kick his mount into motion, Asa’s horse was lumbering away, rolling into a clumsy lope with that deadweight of the trapper slung sacklike over its saddle.
Much as he might want to keep making for the distant mountains, Bass let his horse have its head as he followed vainly behind McAfferty’s animals. In their midst waltzed his ever-loving Hannah, her loads shimmying from side to side as she struggled to keep her footing on the uneven sands.
Wide-eyed were every one of the creatures, their dust-caked nostrils swelling all the bigger as they loped on yard after yard up a long, low rise toward a band of striated white and ocher bluffs looming in the middistance.
Up ahead of him some fifty yards at the top of that rise, he watched Asa’s body slipping to the off side, spilling headfirst onto the hard ground after the horse took another half-dozen steps. His body cartwheeled away from the hooves and came to rest on its back.
Struggling to stop his own resistant mount, yanking back repeatedly on the reins to get it halted, Bass had barely begun to swing his offhand leg over the saddle when the horse suddenly bolted, yanking his hands from the braided loop of rawhide, snatching the big cottonwood stirrup from his left moccasin and spilling him onto his hip.
Dazed, Scratch crawled to his knees and crabbed over to his partner.
“As-Asa,” he croaked, his voice disused in those last dry hours of the chase.
Gripping McAfferty’s chin in one hand, he pulled off the sweat-soaked hat and shook the white head.
