himself, Bass lurched those few steps to the side of McAfferty’s mount, braced a shoulder against the animal, then heaved with all he had to shove the man’s upper body across the saddle.
Asa grunted, half-delirious, as he slid across the hot leather.
“That’s right, nigger,” Titus grumbled. “Hope it hurt you bad as it hurt me to get your flea-bit, crow-bait carcass throwed up there.”
Tossing McAfferty’s reins back over the flat, saucer-shaped horn, Scratch turned, exhausted, then caught his breath in the blazing heat of that unforgiving southwestern desert. Weaving forward, he patted the mule’s neck, murmuring assurance to her.
“I ain’t ’bout to die here. Not now.”
Then stumbled on by to take up the reins to his mount.
Stuffing his left foot into the stirrup, he gripped both hands around the horn—about the size and shape of a large Spanish orange—and managed to drag himself into the saddle. After he had shifted his weight back against the cantle, he brought the horse around, then leaned across to catch up the reins to McAfferty’s mount.
Urging his horse away, Bass clucked at Hannah to follow, his lips too dry again to whistle anymore.
He raised his eyes to the blazing bone-yellow sky overhead, praying his thanks that the mule and McAfferty’s horses chose to follow.
Where they were going, he didn’t have a goddamned idea.
But they had less than three hours to find water, or they wouldn’t last through the following day.
As much as he tried, Scratch couldn’t squeeze away the realization of what that came down to: they had less than three hours to keep their lead on the Apache who were following.
The Apache who wouldn’t be stopping for anything as long as they had a white man’s trail to follow.
18
Just what hell would be worse?
Dying of thirst? Or dying at the hands of those Apache?
One was slow … painful to the point of sheer, unbearable agony it was so slow. While the other was nothing short of a real gamble. It could be fast: taking a stone arrow in the lights, or through the heart, maybe having his head caved in by a war club or his throat slit with a knife as those pursuing warriors closed in for the dirty eye-to- eye of it.
Then again … from what they had decided some days back, the Apache likely could make a white man’s dying such a slow and exquisitely unimaginable torture that he might yearn all the more for this slow death from thirst as his tongue bloated until he could no longer swallow, no longer breathe. A savvy man might just have to prefer this agonizing broil right out under the sun itself to having the Apache hang him upside down over a low fire so that his brain slowly cooked and the blood that pooled in his head was eventually brought to a boil, his own juices so hot steam escaped from his ears.
At least that’s the way Hatcher’s bunch had described some of the most delicious ways the Apache could make a white man linger in his dying.
And all the way south from Pierre’s Hole, Asa had told him even more stories he had heard from other trappers who had worked the southwestern streams out of Taos and Santa Fe. Men who rode with the likes of Sylvester Pattie and his son, James Ohio Pattie, other men who trapped with Ewing Young or Etienne Provost. While the southern trapper did not have to concern himself with the horse-thieving Crow and the scalp-hungry Blackfoot, McAfferty made it plain that they would have to cross the land of the troublesome Diggers—so poor they ate insects and dressed in rabbit hides, a people who shot small rock-tipped arrows at the white trappers and their horses, arrows the Diggers used to hunt their small game and birds, rock-chip points nowhere big enough to cause death— just big enough that the Diggers would be a nuisance to their remuda of horses.
Pushing south from there a man entered the land of the Apache.
He realized the horse below him was beginning to move more slowly now, almost rocking from side to side as it plodded ahead. Bass did what he could to keep his head tucked to the side, his eyes closed. As the late sun dipped below the big brim of his hat, it still had enough glare to peel a man’s skin back. As he rocked atop his saddle, his thoughts slid back and forth, in and out of dream.
He desperately tried to remember, scolding himself that he must open his eyes every now and then to scan the horizon behind them for sign of the Apache—perhaps no more than a telltale spiral of dust barely discernible as it rose into the buttermilk sky.
Ahead or to the side he was forced to squint to cut out the glare in his search for some dark border that hinted at enough moisture to be a creekbed, murmuring something on the order of a prayer that he might locate that river bottom. Praying that they would again run onto the meandering course of the Heely they had abandoned days ago when they sprinted away to escape from these warriors who wore long breechclouts and tall leather boot moccasins, wide bandannas of colorful Mexican cloth tied around their heads. And poor skin quivers rattling with arrows.
Scratch hadn’t really seen them up close, not yet anyway.
Days back McAfferty had run across the sign late one afternoon—fresh tracks that suggested there were Apache in the area. Moccasin prints only, no pony hooves.
“That much be the Eternal Lord’s blessing,” Asa had exclaimed. “This ain’t a riding bunch. Ain’t stole no horses from the greasers east of here. Maybeso we got a chance to outrun ’em.”
That’s when Scratch had chortled. “Outrun ’em? Jehoshaphat! Have your brains been fried down in this country? Course we can outrun ’em—bunch of poor Injuns ain’t even got no horses to ride—”
“You stupid idjit!” McAfferty interrupted with a warning. “On foot them Apache can damn well keep up with a man on horseback.”
He had stopped his chuckling when he saw the serious pinch on Asa’s face. “You ain’t blowing a bald-face windy?”
“This is the Lord’s truth,” McAfferty swore. “I see’d it once my own self. Heard of it more’n a handful of times from others what saw it with their own eyes.
So those bastards could near keep up with a white man on horseback. And what little lead a man might gain through a day of riding was most times eaten right up when he stopped for the night, stopped to water and graze his done-in mount, stopped because it got just too damned dark to attempt crossing that unforgiving stretch of near-barren rock.
After crossing the Snake as they headed south from Pierre’s Hole, Scratch and Asa struck out for the Soda Springs northwest of the Sweet Lake before pushing on down along the foot of the Wasatch front, which took them through the valley of the Great Salt Lake. Skirting the eastern edge of that first, startlingly flat desert, they trapped the narrow streams draining the Pahvant Range, able to bring nothing more to bait than some miserably small beaver, their poor plews hardly worth skinning out. They plodded on, day by day, remaining hopeful that by working this far south, that autumn would last all the longer, that they could trap the Heely country right on into the middle of winter.
Resolutely they continued past the brilliant colors and haunting, wind-sculpted bridges and monoliths that made Scratch uneasy as he imagined those tall formations to be the ancient haunts of petrified monsters of a bygone era that might just return to life come dark, freed to roam this strange canyon and land of high desert until the next sun would rise.
Every distant sound, every changing shadow cast upon the rocks rising about him—it all pricked his imagination to conjure up fierce hoo-doos and formless wraiths.
Bass didn’t sleep near as good as Asa those nights they were forced to wait out the hours of darkness in this frightening journey through such an evil country. Without fail he sat up awake with their fire blazing, weapons in his lap, ears attentive to every groan of the incessant wind as it carved its way through the canyon, listening to every rolling rumble of the distant rocks tumbling off some nearby precipice, listening to the fading echoes of what might be footfalls of nameless beasts, the hair standing at the back of his neck.
As the sun itself arched farther to the south with each day, they tramped on, climbing through a high country
