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The snow lay in deep pockets on the slope and he floundered down through them, steadying himself along the naked rocks until his hands were numb with cold. He crossed with care a gravel slide and made his way down the far side among the rubble stone and small gnarled trees. He fell and fell again, scrabbling for a handpurchase in the dark, rising and feeling in his belt for the pistol. He was at this work the night long. When he reached the benchland above the canyon floor he could hear a stream ru
Most of the snow had blown or melted from off the plain on which he found himself. Tandem storms were blowing down-country from the north and the thunder trundled away in the distance and the air was cold and smelled of wet stone. He struck out across the barren pan, nothing but sparse tufts of grass and the widely scattered palmilla standing solitary and silent against the lowering sky like other beings posted there. To the east the mountains stood footed blackly into the desert and before him were bluffs or promontories that ran out like headlands massive and sombre upon the desert floor. He clopped on woodenly, half frozen, his feet senseless. He'd been without food for almost two days and he'd had little rest. He cited the terrain before him in the periodic flare of the lightning and trudged on and in this ma
When he went on again the fire seemed to recede before him. A troop of figures passed between him and the light. Then again. Wolves perhaps. He went on.
It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.
When the sun rose he was asleep under the smoldering skeleton of a blackened scrog. The storm had long passed off to the south and the new sky was raw and blue and the spire of smoke from the burnt tree stood vertically in the still dawn like a slender stylus marking the hour with its particular and faintly breathing shadow upon the face of a terrain that was without other designation. All the creatures that had been at vigil with him in the night were gone and about him lay only the strange coral shapes of fulgurite in their scorched furrows fused out of the sand where ball lightning had run upon the ground in the night hissing and stinking of sulphur.
Seated tailorwise in the eye of that cratered waste he watched the world tend away at the edges to a shimmering surmise that ringed the desert round. After a while he rose and made his way to the edge of the pan and up the dry course of an arroyo, following the small demonic tracks of javelinas until he came upon them drinking at a standing pool of water. They flushed snorting into the chaparral and he lay in the wet trampled sand and drank and rested and drank again.
In the afternoon he started across the valley floor with the weight of the water swinging in his gut. Three hours later he stood in the long arc of horsetracks coming up from the south where the party had passed. He followed the edge of the tracks and sorted out single riders and he reckoned their number and he reckoned them to be riding at a canter. He followed the trace for several miles and he could tell by the alternation of tracks ridden over that all these riders had passed together and he could tell by the small rocks overturned and holes stepped into that they had passed in the night. He stood looking out from under his hand long downcountry for any dust or rumor of Elias. There was nothing. He went on. A mile further and he came upon a strange blackened mass in the trail like a burnt carcass of some ungodly beast. He circled it. The tracks of wolves and coyotes had walked through the horse and boot prints, little sallies and sorties that fetched up to the edge of that incinerated shape and flared away again.
It was the remains of the scalps taken on the Nacozari and they had been burned unredeemed in a green and stinking bonfire so that nothing remained of the poblanos save this charred coagulate of their preterite lives. The cremation had been sited upon a rise of ground and he studied every quarter of the terrain about but there was nothing to be seen. He went on, following the tracks with their suggestion of pursuit and darkness, trailing them through the deepening twilight. With sunset it grew cold, yet nothing like so cold as in the mountains. His fast had weakened him and he sat in the sand to rest and woke sprawled and twisted on the ground. The moon was up, a half moon that sat like a child's boat in the gap of the black paper mountains to the east. He rose and went on. Coyotes were yapping out there and his feet reeled beneath him. An hour more of such progress and he came upon a horse.
It had been standing in the trace and it moved off in the dark and stood again. He halted with his pistol drawn. The horse went past, a dark shape, rider or none he could not tell. It circled and came back.
He spoke to it. He could hear its deep pulmonary breathing out there and he could hear it move and when it came back he could smell it. He followed it about for the better part of an hour, talking to it, whistling, holding out his hands. When he got near enough to touch it at last he took hold of it by the mane and it went trotting as before and he ran alongside and clung to it and finally wrapped his legs about one foreleg and brought it to the ground in a heap.
He was the first up. The animal was struggling to rise and he thought it was injured in the fall but it was not. He cinched his belt about its muzzle and mounted it and it rose and stood trembling under him with its legs spread. He patted it along the withers and spoke to it and it moved forward uncertainly.
He reckoned it one of the packhorses purchased in Ures. It stopped and he urged it forward but it did not go. He brought his bootheels sharply up under its ribs and it squatted on its hindquarters and went crabbing sideways. He reached and undid the belt from its muzzle and kicked it forward and gave it a whack with the belt and it stepped out right smartly. He twisted a good handful of the mane in his fist and jammed the pistol securely in his waist and rode on, perched upon the raw spine of the animal with the vertebra articulating palpable and discrete under the hide.
In their riding they were joined by another horse that came off the desert and walked alongside them and it was still there when dawn broke. In the night too the tracks of the riders had been joined by a larger party and it was a broad and trampled causeway that now led up the valley floor to the north. With daylight he leaned down with his face against the horse's shoulder and studied the tracks. They were unshod Indian ponies and there were perhaps a hundred of them. Nor had they joined the riders but rather been joined by them. He pushed on. The little horse that had come to them in the night had moved off some leagues and now paced them with a watchful eye and the horse he rode was nervous and ill for want of water.