Death Rattle

in has been battered and wounded and shredded in recent years.”

“What you call your code?”

“Yes. It’s a different time. Now folks are lying. Friends stealing from friends. Men saying one thing to me when they damn well don’t ever mean to stand by their word. And all them newcomers too—black-robed priests and hard-nosed missionaries, prissied-up white gals and their whiny ways … why, this is just no longer a country where a man can count on his friends if little else. What’s wrong is … I’m afraid I’ve gone and outlasted my days.”

“You are not old, Ti-tuzz,” she pleaded with him. “You have many, many winters yet.”

“It’s not just how many winters I have left to live. The trouble is, I may be nowhere near ready to die, but my days are already in the past,” he admitted, overcome by a flood of memories. Sadly, he confessed, “There’s bigger, even more terrible changes coming for this land, and I’m sure I won’t know where I belong when they come.”

After marching out of the bottom of Bayou Salade, Scratch pointed out to his family the beginnings of the mountain range that stretched far into the haze on the southern horizon.

“Children,” he haled them as they stopped to let the animals blow. “Among the white men long, long ago there once was a very holy man. This holy man was betrayed by his friends and nailed in a tree to die. Long ago when the Mexicans first looked upon these mountains at sunset, they noticed how the snows were painted with a red glow. Because of that color, they gave a name to the mountains—Sangre de Cristos” he spoke the three words in Spanish. “That’s Mexican talk meaning the blood of the one who was betrayed by his friends, the blood of that holy man, shed while he was dying.”

“They think the holy man’s blood is still on those mountains?” Flea asked.

“Only because the peaks are colored red like blood at sunset,” he explained.

Then Titus pointed down at the narrow northern reaches of the valley below them, showing the children where the valley eventually widened its funnel into a fertile, verdant floor carpeted with autumn-crisp grass crunchy beneath the icy remnants of a recent snow.

“And down there, you see that river on the far side of the valley?”

“Is that called the blood river?” Magpie inquired.

“No,” her father said. “It is called the grand river of the north.”

“Why do they call it that—when we have come so far south?” Flea contradicted.

“This is pretty far north to the Mexicans,” Bass told them. “Once we are in this valley—we know we are in Mexico.”

Flea shaded his eyes and studied the land below them. “I can’t see the village of the Mexicans.”

Titus snorted with a grin. “We still have a few days to go, son. We probably won’t see a Mexican anywhere this far north.”

“If they won’t come here to protect their country the way Crow warriors protect Absaroka, then this land should not belong to a people too lazy or cowardly to protect it.”

“That may be, son. The land where we stand might still well be the land of the mountaineer like me, and the Indian like you. The Mexicans talk big and puff out their chests—but they’ve never had the manhood to come north to confront this country on its own terms like the Americans always have.”

“How many days now, Popo?” Magpie asked.

“Less than a handful. The worst of the ride is over.” Then he sniffed the cold air deep into his lungs and turned to gaze at Waits-by-the-Water, his eyes growing big as Mexican conchos. “Glorree, woman! Why, I swear I can smell tortillas frying and beans boiling already!”

Two short winter days later Scratch caught sight of his first herd of wild horses racing along a low ridge not far ahead on their left. Not one of the creatures exhibited the least concern about the humans plodding through their territory. In fact, the wild horses loped along their line of march for several hours with an easy nonchalance, as if intending to discover where these strangers were headed and what they were all about. The farther south they pushed, the more of those mustangs they encountered crisscrossing their trail day after day.

“What tribe lets their horses run free?” young Flea eventually asked his father.

“They are wild horses,” he explained. “About as wild as any creature you’ll find out here, son. Almost as wild as you!”

“If I were a little older,” Flea announced, “I would like to steal these horses and take them back to my people.”

Bass grinned. “Just the way your father went to California to steal Mexican horses. Truth is, Flea—the land of the Mexicans, here or in California—is a horse thief’s paradise.”

“I would steal many, many horses to give away to my people,” Flea boasted.

“You make me proud,” Scratch responded. “To truly be a rich man—”

“A warrior must give away all that he does not need for himself,” Flea completed his father’s moral.

Bass pounded the boy on the top of the thigh with gratification. “One day soon you will be the richest man in the eyes of all your people!”

^* Today’s Independence Rock in central Wyoming.

^* Fort Davy Crockett; Ride the Moon Down.

^† Buffalo Palace

^* Today’s Kenosha Pass in Colorado.

^† One-Eyed Dream

28

As they rode south along the Rio Grande del Norte, Magpie and Flea remarked with growing frequency at their wonder at just how the changing face of this country differed from what lay to the north in their homeland.

Indeed, this region of the Southwest, where the Rocky Mountains gradually began to trickle out, was nothing less than a land of extremes. While the warming temperatures of each spring would give birth to richly flowered valleys, at the same time tall mountaintops rose well above the desert floor, still mantled with snow. Lush, green meadows blanketed the foothills all the way down to sun-baked desert wastes speckled with ocotillo and barrel cactus, mesquite and paloverde trees, as well as the meandering black of lava fields that served as a reminder of an even more ancient time.

For millennia without count, this had been the land of the lizard and horned toad, the rattlesnake, tarantula, and the scorpion, but this was also a country where a man found cottonwood and willow bordering the infrequent gypsum-tainted streams where that warm “gyp” water was likely to give the unacclimated stranger a paralyzing bout of bowel distress.

The plains of this vast, yawning Rio Grande River valley stretched upward toward the purple bulk of timbered foothills, from there up to the burnt-umber red of serrated mountainsides dotted with the ever-emerald-green of fragrant pinon and second-growth cedar. Every sunrise, Titus Bass would be the first out of the robes to gaze around their camp, finding the red, naked ridges glaring back at him like a swollen, inflamed wound. But by the time the sun was rising behind those heights and they were putting to the trail, the children would find that same red vista already brushed with a hazy blue. Then late of the afternoon, the skies finally turned a deep purple as the sun tumbled to its rest.

For much of the last few weeks, Titus Bass had threaded his family and their nine animals through this high land of brilliant color and startling contrast, following the Rio Grande almost due south. But early one afternoon, they stopped to rest and water the stock near the mouth of a narrow creek that spilled out of the hills to the east, mingling its frigid snowmelt with the Rio Grande.

After drinking his fill at the bank, Scratch got back to his feet and swiped a hand over his mouth and beard before pulling on the blanket mitten once more. “This stream is called the Little Fernandez.”

“Another Mexican name I don’t understand,” Magpie commented.

Her father grinned and slapped her rump as he stepped around her to reach his horse. “The more Mexican names there are to hills and creeks, the closer we are to Taos, little girl!”