Thunderhead

Just before the second switchback, Nora heard Arbuckles’s hooves skid, and in a panic she dropped the lead rope, but after a brief scrabble the horse stopped, shaking. Clearly, the unshod hooves had better purchase on the trail. As she bent down to pick up the rope, two crows, riding air currents up the face of the cliff, hovered past them. They were so close, Nora could see their beady eyes swiveling around to look at them. One let fly a loud croak of displeasure as he passed by.

After twenty more heart-stopping minutes, Nora found herself at the bottom of the trail. Turning, she saw Smithback make the last pitch to the bottom. She was so relieved she almost felt like hugging him.

Then the wind shifted, and a terrible stench reached her nostrils: the three dead horses, lying perhaps fifty yards away, draped over some broken boulders.

Whoever had come this way would no doubt have inspected those horses.

Giving Arbuckles’s reins to Smithback, she walked in the direction of the dead horses, fighting rising feelings of horror and guilt. The animals lay widely scattered, their bellies burst open, their guts thrown across the rocks. And there, too, were the tracks she was seeking: the tracks of the unshod horse. To her surprise, she saw the tracks had not come up from the south, as their expedition had, but led instead from the north: in the direction of the tiny Indian village of Nankoweap, many days’ ride away.

“The trail goes north,” she said to Smithback, indicating for him to dismount.

“I’m impressed,” the writer replied as he slipped to the ground. “And what else can you tell about the trail? Was it a stallion or a mare? Was it a pinto or a palomino?”

Nora pulled the horseshoes from a saddlebag and knelt beside Arbuckles. “I can tell it was probably an Indian’s horse.”

“How in the hell can you tell that?”

“Because Indians tend to ride unshod horses. Anglos, on the other hand, shoe their horses from the moment they start them under saddle.” She fitted the shoes to Arbuckles’s hooves, tapped the nails through, then carefully clinched them down. Swire’s horses, their hooves soft from years of wearing horseshoes, could not be left shoeless a moment longer than necessary.

Smithback pulled out the gun Swire had given him, checked it, then replaced it in his jacket. “And was there somebody on that horse?”

“I’m not that good a tracker. But I sure don’t think Roscoe’s the type to be seeing things.”

Nora fitted the shoes onto Smithback’s horse. Then, leading Arbuckles by the guide rope, she began following the single track, which showed two sets of prints: one going, the other coming. Although the wind had scoured small sections away, the trail was clearly visible as it wound north through the scattered clumps of Mormon tea bushes. For a while, it ran along the base of the hogback ridge, and then it veered away, into a series of parallel defiles hemmed in by low ridges of a black volcanic rock.

“Where’d you learn to track, anyway?” Smithback asked. “I didn’t know the Lone Ranger was still on the lecture circuit.”

Nora shot him an irritated glance. “Is this for your book?”

Smithback looked back in comical surprise, his long face drooping. “No. Well, yes, I suppose. Everything is fair game. But mostly I’m just curious.”

Nora sighed. “You Easterners think tracking is some kind of art, or maybe some instinctive ethnic skill. But unless you’re tracking across rock, buffalo grass, or lava, it’s not all that difficult. Just follow the footprints in the sand.”

She continued northward, Smithback’s voice vexing her concentration. “I can’t get over how remote this land is,” he was saying. “When I first got here, I couldn’t believe how ugly and barren it all was, not at all like the Verde Valley where I went to school. But there’s something almost comforting in its spareness, if you think about it. Something clean in the emptiness. Sort of like a Japanese tea room in that way. I’ve been studying the tea ceremony a lot this last year, ever since—”

“Say, do you think you could hobble that lip?” Nora interrupted in exasperation. “You could talk Jesus out of going to heaven.”

There was a long moment of blissful silence. Then Smithback spoke again. “Nora,” he asked quietly, “what is it, exactly, you don’t like about me?”

Nora stopped at this, turning toward him in surprise. The writer wore a serious expression, one of the few she remembered seeing on his face. He stood, silently, in the shadow of Compañero. The cowboy clothes, which had seemed so ridiculous a week before, had now become a real working outfit, creased and dusty, well suited to his long frame. The pasty complexion was gone, replaced by a ruddy tan that matched his brown hair. She realized, with a small shock, that this was the first time she had heard him call her by name instead of the odious “Madame Chairman.” And although she couldn’t analyze it—and didn’t have the time, even if she felt inclined to do so—a part of her was pleased to think Smithback was concerned about how she felt about him.

Nora opened her mouth to reply: You mean, other than the fact that you’re a brash, smug guy with an ego the size of Texas? But she stopped and turned away, realizing this wasn’t fair to Smithback. For all his eccentric ways, she had grown fond of the journalist. Now that she knew him better, she realized his ego was tempered by a certain self-deprecation that was charming in its own way. “I didn’t mean to snap at you just now,” she said. “And I don’t dislike you. You almost screwed up everything, that’s all.”

“I did what?”

Nora decided not to answer. It was too hot, and she was too tired, for this kind of discussion.

They moved on slowly as the sun climbed toward noon. Though the trail was relatively easy to follow, tracking by eye was still exhausting work. The hoofprints took them through a weird country of broken rocks, knobs, and humps of sandstone. The prints appeared to be following a faint and very old trail. On horseback now, Nora kept them moving as quickly as she could without losing the track. The midday sun beat down relentlessly, burning off the glaring white sand, flattening and draining all the color from the landscape. There was no sign of water anywhere. And then, unexpectedly, they passed through a lush valley, full of grass-covered sand and prickly pear, sprawling in gorgeous bloom.

“This is like a garden of Eden,” Smithback said as they made their way through the brief, verdant patch. “What’s it doing here in the middle of the desert?”

“Probably the result of a heavy rainfall,” Nora replied. “Rain out here isn’t like it is back in the east. It’s very localized. You can get a huge downpour in one place, and a mile away see ground still parched and dry.”

They made their way out of the lush valley and back into the stony desert. “What about lunch?” Smithback asked.

“What about it?”

“Well, it’s almost two. I like to dine fashionably late, but my stomach has its limits.”

“It’s really that late?” Nora looked at her watch in disbelief, then stretched in the saddle. “We must have covered fifteen miles from the base of the ridge.” She paused a moment, considering. “Pretty soon we’ll be crossing into Indian land. The Nankoweap reservation begins somewhere up ahead.”

“So what does that mean? Any chance of a Coke machine?”

“No, the village is still a two-day ride from here, and it doesn’t have electricity in any case. What I mean is, we’ll be subject to their laws. Any Indians we meet aren’t likely to look too kindly on a couple of outsiders blundering in, accusing them of being horse killers. We have to be careful how we do this.”

Smithback considered this a moment. “On second thought, maybe I’m not so hungry.”

The faint trail seemed to go on forever, winding through a senseless tangle of arroyos, hidden valleys, shadowy ravines, and dunefields. Vaguely, Nora guessed that by now they had crossed into Indian country, but there was no fence and, of course, no sign. This was the kind of land that the white men had given to the Indians all over the West, she knew; utterly remote and useless for just about anything.