Death Rattle

in the past, even to providing vivid and detailed descriptions that corroborated previous accounts given by other witnesses.

“Do tell,” Bass finally relented. “Maybeso we’ll get ourselves a look at one of these here Munchies on our way to Californy.”

Kersey shook his head emphatically. “No, we ain’t gonna be nowhere close to Munchie country, Scratch. Nowhere close.”

They turned southwest the next morning, following the north side of the Colorado the best they could, yet hour by hour that path grew all the harder as they found themselves climbing and descending, climbing and descending through a canyon country without relief for horse or horseman. As the days stretched longer, the sun grew hotter, their ride becoming all the dustier the arther south Smith, Williams, and Thompson led them toward distant ridges draped with green, a most seductive color to men choking on alkali dust and gagging on the salts in tainted water. Oh, how that green beckoned them more every day.

The raiders had gone through most of their dried meat by the time they had crossed two narrow rivers and made it to those luring heights covered in pinon, cedar, and dwarf pine. A few antelope, an occasional mountain sheep or lion, and those ever present black-tailed hares that flourished in this country were the simple fodder brought into camp each night as the raiders threaded their way across a convoluted maze of canyons. When they could, the horsemen stuck with the high ground, gazing down upon those bewildering wrinkles that explained what shrinking and drying the earth’s crust had undergone eons ago.^*

Out of that labyrinth they steadily climbed, emerging atop a high and desolate plateau country. Off to their left the Colorado had begun to carve itself into a torturous, twisting canyon of unbelievable depths. The days grew longer, hotter still, the air so dry that the breeze itself sucked the moisture right out of a man. Bass hadn’t been across this sort of barren, timberless territory since that flight from the Apache along the Gila River. All around them rose the mesas and buttes long ago carved by wind and water, now brushed with vibrant tints of crimson, ocher, and a violet hue that deepened as the sun sank each evening.

“You fellas cross any sign of Injuns today?” Bass asked the others at their fire that night.

“Lots of sign,” Corn replied. “Ain’t see’d no Injuns howsoever.”

Kersey peered at Bass, asking, “You ain’t getting spooked, are you?”

“Maybeso I didn’t see what I thought I saw,” he confessed.

But that night as he lay in his blankets, holding at bay the memory of her touch, the feel of her mouth on his, Titus could not convince himself that he hadn’t seen that squat, naked, deeply brown Indian duck from sight as Bass rode along the far right flank of the raiders. By the time he reined away from the rest and loped over to the rocks where he had seen that brief flicker of movement, the Indian was gone. So he lay in the dark now, trying to tell himself that what he had seen could only have been some four-legged critter.

The next evening, however, the Indians showed themselves.

Panic gripped the whole outfit as they were going into camp for the night. On foot both booshways scrambled through the horses to reach the post where one of the guards stood pointing.

“Well, damn-me!” Reuben Purcell exclaimed in a gush. “There must be a hunnert of ’em!”

But these were not the Ute who had dogged their trail weeks ago. No, these Indians did not carry weapons of war—nothing more than crude spears with a sprinkling of small bows among them. Besides, these short, stocky Indians did not own any horses. All hundred or more of them showed up on foot.

Their leaders stepped out from the center of that broad line of squat, brown bodies, calling out from a safe distance, hailing the white men. Smith, Williams, and Thompson waved in a friendly enough manner, then moved forward on foot. Both small groups stopped some twenty yards from the other and immediately went to making sign.

When the booshways returned to their men, Williams announced, “This here bunch called the Sampatch.^* They was a real skittish sort last time we come through here a few years back—’bout as shy as deer mice with a red-tailed hawk circling overhead. But yestiddy they sure ’nough recognized ol’ Peg-Leg here with that wood pin tied under his knee!”

The Sanpet headmen had invited the white men into their camp located several miles off. The trappers rode among the tiny brush huts, staring down at the wide-eyed children and the bare-breasted women dressed in short grass or rabbitskin skirts. As the sun began to set and the temperature moderated, many of the Indians tied cloaks of rabbit fur over their shoulders for warmth while a supper ritual began. As open, welcoming, and warm as the Ute had been treacherous and deceitful, the Sanpet offered their very finest to their guests from the north.

“Can’t remember the last time I et rabbit,” Scratch admitted. “Likely it was back in Kentucky, when I was a younger lad.”

“How long’s that been?” Jake Corn inquired.

“Left home at sixteen,” he sighed wistfully. “Thought a time or two of going back. But it’s been, what— more’n thirty winters now I been gone. Likely. there ain’t no one left anyways.”

“Hell,” Kersey retorted. “I’ll bet you’ve got kin back there still.”

With a wag of his head, Bass confessed, “Only kin I got now is them folks I left back in Crow country … and what good men I ride with too.”

“I thank you proudly,” Reuben Purcell replied.

Squatting on the ground with their brown hosts, the trappers picked the rabbit bones clean and tossed them into the fires. They were also served a pulpy root the Indians mixed with water, then scooped off bark platters with their fingers. After dinner the headmen presented the booshways with a generous basket of those roots to take along on their journey. Well after dark that night Philip Thompson led a handful of the white men back into the village, claiming there were enough of the half-naked women to go around because the Sanpet were more than anxious to have an infusion of some white blood into their tribe.

Scratch watched the men go, then rolled over and closed his eyes, thinking hard on that yearning in his loins, remembering how Waits-by-the-Water was the one to satisfy his every longing, turning and tossing uncomfortably in his hunger for her until sleep finally came.

On they plodded the following days, piercing a desolate valley surrounded by hills all but barren of any life. Each hoof, every moccasin too, stirred up choking billows and lingering cascades of the acrid alkali dust. Two nights later they killed and butchered one of the weakening horses—a tough, stringy meat that blackened quickly over the fires. From the carcass they butchered enough to feed the bunch for the next two days, if they conserved all they managed to carve from the bones.

A little south by west, Smith and Williams continued their march all the deeper into a dry, flaky land. Their eyes burned with the constant sting of the alkali dust, seared by the relentless sun, the trappers nonetheless persisted in their search for game. Anything. Even those poor, frightened rabbits. They saw nothing else—no antelope or deer, nothing to hunt but those tiny rabbits. Over time, the men were growing glum, quieter and quieter each night as they went into camp.

“Don’t you worry boys.” Peg-Leg did his best to cheer them around their greasewood fires. “This country won’t last for much longer. We’re bound to strike that river I ’member joins down to the Colorado.”

Three endless days and one more give-out horse later they struck that very river,^* narrow and tumbling with silt, near its mouth. At sundown that evening Bass joined the others to sit right up to his chin in the turgid water—letting his body soak up all the moisture that this hellish country had done its best to suck right out of him.

Jake Corn slipped into the water with the handful of companions. “We’re going down the Colorado from here,” he explained what he had heard Smith telling some of the others in camp. “It’s gonna be a ways afore we hit the Ammuchabas.^† From there on, Peg-Leg says we got us a dry crossing.”

“D-dry crossing?” Bass nearly choked in disgust. “What the hell we been doing, if it ain’t been a dry crossing awready?”

“Ol’ Bill says there’s a stretch of some real bad desert coming up,” Corn continued. “A real water-scrape of it. Just a few days of dry lakes and disappearing rivers, though … then we’re in California—land of free horses.”

Sitting here soaking in the river, Titus had figured they had come through the worst of it: those trackless wastes, nothing but timberless buttes and mesas, plateaus and canyons meandering back to nowhere. So if they still had the worst ahead of them, why didn’t he just turn around here and start back for a more hospitable country come morning? No matter those Ute he would have to slip his way around …

It couldn’t be. There was no way possible on his own. By any reckoning, he was likely a thousand miles from