But, he told himself too, they had already covered a little distance out of Taos. Every little bit he put behind him was that much less he had to endure.
Because of where he found himself at dawn the first morning, Scratch led his horse into the foothills. The going was rougher, a lot slower to be sure, but up on the slopes he could keep on moving instead of hiding out the day as a man would have to down below on the valley floor. Across the hillsides there was simply more cover. And he had a better view of things for miles around too. If he kept his eyes moving, and stopped to let the horse blow every now and again, he could keep on moving and not be forced to wait out the brief hours of daylight. He had to keep going. Everyone he loved was counting on him to get through.
Hour by hour, the journey began to take its toll: his horse began to grow weary. Already the snow lay deep on the western slopes of the Sangre de Cristos, and it continued to snow from time to time throughout that second day and into that second night. Then late in the morning of the third day, not long after he had rested the horse near a narrow stream fed by a small spring, the bone-weary horse stumbled, pitching him free as it went hind flanks over withers.
Landing hard on the icy snow and skidding among the sage, he had the air knocked out of his lungs. Bass lay there in the cold several moments, waiting for the sparks of bright, hot light to clear from his eyes. Slowly he sat up and brushed the snow from his hair, off the side of his face—so shockingly cold on his bare skin. Titus rolled off his aching hip and started crabbing toward his rifle and the fur cap—
Then froze on all fours, watching the horse scramble up from the sage and stunted pinon. Onto three legs, the fourth dangling like a marionette’s limb. Clearly broken just below the joint, flopping as the horse righted itself, then shuddered in pain.
He angrily swept up the cap and jammed it down on his head, his gut already churning as he cursed his damnable luck. Then Titus scolded himself for that stupid selfishness as he read the fear, the outright pain, evident in the horse’s eyes. Good, steady Cheyenne pony. Not some young, wild thing. Not any green Mexican horse. Instead, an animal bred for these mountains and high plains …
And it had carried him this far. As far as it was going to take him.
For what felt like a long time, he stood there with his arm wrapped under the pony’s neck, patting its strong muscles that frequently quaked with shudders of pain. He whispered to it softly, words strung together with little meaning, nothing more than their soothing sound as his eyes warily raked the valley below them. Bass found nothing moving but some antelope and a few white-tail deer.
He scanned the snowy slopes above him, and hoped the gunshot would not carry. It would be better to use his knife … but that way only seemed to prolong the agony. This animal deserved better. It had carried him north from the land of the Arkansas and the Cheyenne, crossed and recrossed the land of the Crow in the intervening years—hunting, trapping, and always migrating. This pony deserved to die quickly, deserved to be put down with mercy.
It took only a matter of minutes to untie the buffalo robe and his few fixings from behind the saddle, dropping them onto a patch of scrub pinon so they rested out of the snow. After pulling the pistol from his belt, Scratch had to use his pan brush to clean out the dusting of icy flakes clotted around the pan and frizzen before he recharged the pan with powder. Then stepped back over to the wide-eyed pony, patted its neck one last time.
“Thank you,” he whispered as he set the broad muzzle of the .54-caliber pistol just below the ear and pulled the trigger before he gave himself any more time to think about what he was doing.
Shuddering violently, the animal weaved for a flicker of a moment, then collapsed heavily to the ground.
“Thank you,” he repeated as he turned away from the head, quickly reloaded, then stuffed the pistol in his belt.
Over his shoulder he laid the wide, rawhide strap that was lashed around both ends of the roll of buffalo robe. Then picked up the long rifle. And continued north. On foot.
Folks were counting on him to see this through.
There were many times in those first hours after leaving the Cheyenne pony’s carcass that he regretted not carving some meat from one of its lean haunches. He had survived on horsemeat before. Wasn’t near so bad, a man got hungry enough.
With every step as he waded through snow that billowed around his knees—placing each moccasin ahead of him, then sinking forward until the foot contacted the ground, dragging the trailing foot out of the deep snow, across the icy crust, to plunge it ahead—step after step, he doggedly marched north. And with every hour, every mile, every exhausting breath, he used up more and more of his slim reserves of energy.
Oh, there were times he believed he could not take another step—when he gave himself a chance to blow, resting against a large clump of scrub pine, squatting there as he chewed on his dried meat, licking at the snow to wash it down before he forced himself to get back onto his feet and continue on. One time he awakened, scared to death because he hadn’t remembered falling asleep. Confused and disoriented as he blinked at the dim globe of the sun half hidden behind a thick streamer of clouds … desperately trying to remember where the sun had been when he stopped for a few bites of stringy meat.
Try as he did, Titus couldn’t remember.
He felt the tears of frustration start to well up in his eyes as he shoved himself back onto his feet. And he pressed on, more determined than ever that he could cover as much ground on two legs as the pony could on four. Determined that he could do this without sleep. He had done it before when he was younger, back in those days when he and McAfferty slipped through the gauntlet of Apache country without much sleep. He had done it before. Bass told himself he could do it again.
When the young doe crossed his path the next afternoon, stopping suddenly no more than thirty yards ahead, Scratch did not resist. He brought her down with a quick snap shot, then lunged across the snowy terrain to watch that one big brown eye start to glaze as he laid his rifle across her flanks, wrenched out his knife, and made that first long incision from throat to pelvis. The warm, steamy entrails spilled out upon the blood-tinged snow.
Tearing his blanket mittens from his hands, Titus stuffed his cold, rigid fingers into the warmth of that pile of steaming guts, held his face close to the entrails, letting his stiff, rawhided face sense the blessed caress of the dead animal’s last warmth. When he opened his eyes again, he shoved back the sleeves on his capote and buckskin shirt, then dug for the liver. He cut it loose, dragged it out, slippery and steamy, cradling it a moment in both trembling, blood-soaked hands as he considered its meaning to him. Then Titus ravenously sank his teeth into its juicy heat.
One bite, then a second, and a third he tore from the raw meat—then suddenly turned his head aside as his cramped, revolted stomach violently flung itself upward, rejecting the hot, raw, bloody meat after being empty of most everything for much of the past two days. Dumbly, he stared down at the hot, yellow-tinged bloody flesh he had vomited into the snow.
Maybe he could take the liver along … oh, how he didn’t want to abandon the meat. Ounce for ounce, in his weakened condition, the liver was the one part of the doe that would offer him the most energy. Yes, he could wrap it up in a small skin bag, eat it raw, suck its juices and blood, sometime later after his stomach had grown reaccustomed to food.
After swabbing some cold snow across his face and beard, greedily licking and sucking the blood-tinged flakes from his fingers, Scratch dragged the skinning knife back and forth, peeling the hide away from a rear haunch. When enough of the red, raw meat was exposed, he stabbed the tip of the knife into the thick muscles and carved himself out a double handful of warm flesh.
With it laid atop the pile of gut, he went back to peeling more of the green elastic hide from the muscle. When he had a patch big enough, Titus trimmed it free and stretched it on the ground. Then he cut an inch-wide, three-foot-long strip of green hide. Laying both the liver and the haunch roast in the middle of his crude square of hide, he gathered up the edges and lashed it closed with the strip. This he tied securely to his buffalo robe.
But before he stood again, he cut himself a long, thin strip of meat from that sundered haunch. Finally back on his feet, with his load settled across his shoulders and the rifle back in hand, Titus brought the raw, lean meat to his mouth and began to suck. Slowly at first, aiming to let his stomach grow accustomed to the warm blood and juices.
Assured his belly wouldn’t revolt, he stumbled away from the carcass and pushed on.
Just past sunrise the next morning he smelled wood-smoke on the wind. From the top of a knoll where he bellied to the skyline, Titus spotted the tiny cluster of mud-and-wattle huts, a collection of dogs and outdoor ovens in the crude shape of mud beehives—and realized it had to be a Mexican settlement. From the adobe chimneys rose
