The Threepersons Hunt

To a White Mountain Apache like Joe Threepersons this Reservation was what “home” was to Robert Frost: the place where when you go there they have to take you in. Pete Porvo was right: if you had to have a map you wouldn’t find him.

So what am I doing here?

Following orders? Being a good German? Acting like a stalking horse for the white masters? Lisa had asked him why he stayed in the department and kept taking their insults and he’d told her, I’m just trying to earn my gold watch. But there wasn’t a whole lot of truth in that.

Another time he’d tried to explain it to her: I come from a long line of white Indians. It gets to be a habit. My great-grandfather rode scout for General Crook, he was an Army Indian. Helped them track down Geronimo.

For his great-grandfather there’s been a kind of logic to it: Navajo and Apache were bitter enemies in those days, never more so that after the 1860s when the Navajo were tricked, trapped and massacred by Kit Carson’s armies so that forever afterward the Navajo nation had been subjugated and humiliated at gunpoint into Reservation bondage while, not far to the south, the Apache tribes continued for twenty years to run free and proud. The Navajo hated the Apache for their freedom; and so the Navajo scouts had gone to war against the Apache even when it meant fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with white soldiers. It was the only war the whites would let them fight, so they fought it. It was better than no war at all.

My grandfather and my father were Agency Police on the Window Rock. My grandfather rode a while with Burgade’s Rangers. My father fought in the Aleutians and out in Kwajalein and Okinawa with the Seventh Division. So you see it’s an old and dishonorable tradition in my family, fighting for the white man. When I was in the Army it was peacetime but they sent me overseas to Seoul for a year, so I took a flag of Navajo design and planted it on Korean soil and claimed it for the Navajo nation.

He’d done his tour of duty with the Military Police and then he’d gone to the university at Tucson on the GI Bill. A Highway Patrol recruiter had visited the campus the spring before graduation. So here he was in a uniform with a Sam Browne belt and a big hat and a six-gun in a clamshell holster on his hip just like a movie cowboy, an d he had had ten years of chasing speeders down the highways and untangling bloody wreckage and living on café chili and coffee. And now they’d sent him to track down a young fugitive Apache who was up there slamming around somewhere in those hills with a .30-30 rifle that could go off any time: an Apache who was trying to cross an emotional minefield and might just be in a frame of mind to take some people with him.

Watchman resented it with the feeling he had been wound up and pointed in Joe Threepersons’ direction and turned loose for the entertainment of the white bastards who’d revel in watching two Indians square off, the same way they delighted in watching cockfights and prizefights between black men and Mexicans.

3.

Watchman was down on one knee inspecting the hoof-prints when the whacking boom of an explosion froze him in alarm.

Rifle shot; he recognized the sound a second later. Its hard echo beat across the hills.

The report was directionless. Watchman crouched back against a ball of scrub oak. His head turned quickly, he tried to watch everything at once. There was no way of knowing whether that rifle was shooting at him or at something else but he could hardly ignore it.

He unsnapped the holster and palmed his service revolver. The adrenaline pumping through him made his hand shake.

The rifle boomed again and this time the bullet made a crease in the earth twenty feet to his right; it whined away like a flat stone skipped across a pond.

He heard the nearby crack of the next one. It broke some twigs out of the scrub oak beside him.

He threw himself belly-flat behind the scrub oak and fired two blind shots in the general direction he thought the rifle had spoken from.

Instinct prompted panic but his experience steadied him. There were two possibilities. Either the rifleman was a terrible marksman or he hadn’t meant to hit Watchman. Either way it meant he wasn’t likely to get killed right here and right now.

He edged his face forward past the clumped stems of the oak to peer back toward the road ruts where the shots had come from.

This time he saw the muzzle-flash. The bullet shook the scrub oak.

That was two in a row the rifle had put into the oak; so the odds changed. Not a poor marksman; they were warning shots.

Flat on the ground he considered his horizons. There was a dip behind him, twenty feet away—a shallow crease in the land that had probably been a torrent two hours ago. He began to slide back toward the gully; he triggered three .38s toward the place where he’d seen the muzzle flame, rolled into the gully and slithered in the mud and a rifle bullet chopped the air overhead.

Now what the hell?

He was fumbling to reload. Two cartridges dropped from his hand and he left them in the mud.

You’ve got no right to scare a man this way. He whacked the cylinder closed and fired a couple of potluck rounds. The revolver slammed against the heel of his hand in recoil; the racket had his ears ringing. The stink of cordite fouled the air.

There was a shot but it wasn’t aimed anywhere in his direction—it didn’t have that sort of crack. He searched the brush but his view was restricted by the scattered fat trees. He caught the reflection of sunlight off something metallic and he was rattled enough to turn his sights that way before he realized it was only sun-glare bouncing off some part of his own car.

He moved ten feet to one side to change his field of view through the clumps. There was another rifle shot. Again it wasn’t aimed in his direction. It had a muffled explosive sound as if it were being fired away from him.

He moved again but still couldn’t see anything. There was a third rifle shot and then a fourth, these last two quite close together. Thoroughly mystified he crawled up over the lip of the gully into a cluster of piñons and slithered between them, his uniform soaked with mud, prising the branches apart with his left hand and poking the revolver out ahead of him.

Then he heard briefly the crunch and scrape of someone moving through heavy growth; after that the padding of footfalls in the soft earth, a man dogtrotting. The sound dwindled quickly.

4.

He edged cautiously back toward the dirt track and found the place where the rifleman had squatted down to shoot at him. Deep heel-indentations and pointed toes: cowboy boots. Everybody around here wore cowboy boots, that didn’t mean a thing.

Quite obviously the man was gone. When Watchman got to his feet he heard the distant revving of an engine being started. The roar settled down to a chug and went whining away in a low gear.

He put the revolver away in its clamshell holster and started ru

Whoever it was had followed him up the highway in a car. So it wasn’t Joe Threepersons.

The Highway Patrol cruiser squatted like a derelict on its rims. Watchman walked around the car and stared unhappily at the four bullet-shredded flat tires.

He broke a leafy twig off a scrub oak and rubbed it between his palms to clean them. Then he contemplated the 6.3-mile walk back to the highway.

You’re being a pretty stupid Indian. He tramped over to the car. The bottom of the door scraped the ground when he dragged it open.

It hadn’t occurred to the rifleman to disable the police radio. Watchman switched it on and hoped he hadn’t parked in a dead spot and put the microphone close to his lips.