Death Rattle (15 page)

They had laid in camp that dawn, particularly watchful with the coming light for any attack from the Ute.

But while they could hear the dim, distant chant of the off-key and mournful death songs, the trappers didn’t see a thing of the unsuccessful horse thieves.

Even before the sun rose, booshway Williams had made a decision. “Keep cutting up your meat, boys,” Bill told the edgy, sleepless men. “Lay it out to dry and keep your guns primed. I figger us to stay here. Our flints are fixed just dandy right where we are.”

The old trapper had that right. Here the Americans had water, shade from the early-summer sun, enough to eat, with a little grazing for their animals too. Damn foolish for the men to risk abandoning this place if they hadn’t finished jerking the buffalo for their long journey … especially if those Ute were still out there, waiting to spring an ambush somewhere on down the trail.

Throughout that day the twenty-four of them took their rotation at horse guard while the rest continued the monotony of their butchering. Thin slices of the lean buffalo were suspended on a framework of green limbs
erected over smoky fires. Even more of the meat lay out in the sun, exposed to arid westerly wind. Near sundown one of the men hollered out, warning that he sighted a handful of horsemen appear on the crest of a nearby hill. The camp fell quiet while the two dozen came to stand and watch. As twilight faded, the distant horsemen disappeared from view, dropping out of sight behind the knoll.

“Keeping an eye on us,” Smith advised. “Sleep if you can tonight, fellas—but we’re making a running guard till first light when we can move out.”

After the Ute had slipped in so close the night before, it was natural that some of the trappers were outright jumpy their second night of guard duty. The slightest sound emanating out of the dark, even a sudden shift in the cool, desert breeze, snapped a man alert—aware of just how loud his own heart was pounding. It finally grew light enough that Smith and Williams awakened all the men to prepare themselves for a possible attack. But as the hills brightened around them, no warriors appeared. Near or far.

It was time to push on.

The men bundled their meat, kicked dirt on their fire pits, then saddled up before the sun made its call on the day. Twenty-four of them prodded their horses and pack animals into the high plateau country, keeping the Green River in sight on their left as they continued south, every step taking them farther and farther from the cool, beckoning mountains.

While the remainder of the remuda would loyally follow, the men put their efforts into keeping the broodmares out front. They were the animals ready to bolt away, turn around, and race for home to reunite with their colts. From time to time one of the mares would get it in her head that she was going to peel away from the rest and start back at a lope for the familiar, quickly tearing away at a wild gallop through the sage once the trappers attempted to turn her nose back to the south. It was dusty, exhausting work for the saddle horses pressed into this terrible duty of tearing mares away from their
colts. All for the sake of stealing more of their four-legged breed from California masters.

Six more mornings, middays, and long afternoons spent picking their way through the deeply scarred plateau before they were able to drop onto the bottom of what had the appearance of being a great three-sided bowl. Far to the east lay a few faint and jagged heights along the horizon. To the west stood the last great peaks of the snow-blanketed Wasatch Range. And ahead of them waited more of the low buttes and ridges as they pressed on down the Green through a land sunburnt anew, searching for a grand and muddy river.

Near evening two days later they struck the Colorado, camping near that junction where the Green willingly gives itself to a greater torrent rushing for the sea.

“You ever been on the Heely
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far south of here?” asked Jake Corn that night.

In that heartbeat he remembered an old friend, and a long-ago journey into the land of the Apache.
^†

“Yeah,” Titus said quietly, his gaze climbing to the myriad of stars overhead. Wondering just which one of them might belong to Asa McAfferty. “I trapped on the Heely of a time with a good man. We run traps together for a few seasons.”

Corn leaped up so he could stride over and squat right beside Titus. “Ever you two see a Munchie?”

“M-munchie?” Scratch snorted. “Some kind of furred critter—”

“Injuns,” Kersey corrected with a matter-of-fact air.

Now Scratch was bewildered. Wagging his head in consternation, he said, “Never heard of no Munchies.”

“Was hoping you’d see’d ’em,” Corn admitted.

Purcell nodded. “Me too.”

“Hell, I see the way your stick floats now,” Bass said. Tapping a finger against his temple, he continued, “These here Munchies are hoo-doos and such—”

“They’re real!” Purcell snapped, shaking the stem of his blackened clay pipe at Bass.

Titus peered at the nonplussed look on Reuben’s face, then quickly glanced at Kersey, and Corn. Finally, his eyes came to a rest on Adair. “You ever run across any M-munchies, Silas?”

“I ain’t see’d ’em neither,” Adair confessed, straight-faced, his copper-red hair gleaming in the fire’s light. “But—merciful a’mighty—I have knowed a half dozen coons said they seen the Munchies for their own selves.”

“Munchies,” Bass repeated the word again. “If they’re Injun … what sort of brownskin they be?”

“Well now,” Kersey sighed, looking around the group. “Rest of you boys tell me if I get any of this here story wrong.” He wagged his head as he studied Bass’s face. “Can’t rightly believe that here sits a man what trapped down on the Heely and didn’t ever see him a Munchie.”

Titus suddenly felt a compulsion to defend himself before this council of true believers. “Maybe I did, an’ just didn’t know it.”

Adair snorted. “From what I’ve heard: if’n you had see’d a Munchie, you’d damn sure know it!”

The others chuckled as darkness came down on that desert country quickly cooling with the disappearance of the sun.

“J-just how would I know a Munchie to see one?”

Corn cleared his throat, “Elias—
you
go right on and tell the man.”

Quickly rubbing a dirt-crusted finger beneath his nose, Kersey began to tell Titus Bass about that tribe of highly civilized, white-skinned Indians reputed to live in a deep canyon just beyond the valley of the Gila.

“I hear they eat off plates made of solid gold!” Purcell interrupted. Above his square-set jaw sat a mouth little more than a tiny crease in that expanse of chin. Even when he smiled—as he did right now—his mouth did not turn up at its corners. Instead, the narrow crease merely widened.

“And with forks of gold too!” Corn insisted, shoving back from his forehead some of his coal-black hair just
becoming dusted with a little gray at the temples, but most remarkable for the narrow white streak that emanated from the center of his brow.

Kersey waved a hand for quiet, then leaned toward Bass. “Every one of ’em wears gold earrings, bracelets, armbands, and anklets. Gold belts tied around themselves too.”

And Elias went on to explain that the Munchies were a peace-loving people who had somehow miraculously survived for centuries in the midst of the cruel Apache.

“Centuries?” Bass echoed. “How long’s that?”

Elias continued, describing how the Munchies were not Indians at all but descendants of a band of Roman adventurers who claimed they had sailed to North America fifteen hundred years before Columbus bumped into the eastern shores of the Americas. Rather than return home, they had intermarried with southwestern Indians. A peace-loving people, the Munchies didn’t even have a word in their tongue for “enemy.” And they no longer possessed any weapons.

Shaking his head, bewildered, Scratch observed, “Don’t know how the ’Pache ain’t wiped ’em out afore now. Them ’Pache stayed on my trail for days till they caught up and jumped us.”

“The Munchies too savvy for ’em,” Corn disputed.

Scratch’s eyes flicked from one man to the next, still a little skeptical. “After all this time, ain’t none of you ever seen a Munchie?”

“Can’t speak for Silas or Roscoe,” Kersey said, “but the three of us never been down in the Heely country like you was, Titus.”

“I ain’t ever trapped on the Heely either,” Adair admitted.

“So how you fellas so all-fired sure of these here Mun—”

“I know three fellers see’d Munchies,” Corn protested. “Three different times too!”

On around the fire it went, with each of them explaining how they might not ever have seen a Munchie with their own eyes—but they all knew at least one person
who had run onto the mysterious tribe of explorers sometime 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 piñon, 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.
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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.
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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.