Tie My Bones to Her Back (29 page)

Some days they ran wolves or lions with Sir Harry’s pack—tireless, long-legged brutes, huge Irish and Russian wolfhounds, mastiffs, burly, bouncy Norwegian elkhounds, slim whippets and greyhounds, and a few rangy Airedales that delighted in tearing the cornered coyotes to pieces when they finally ran them down, the little wolves cowering in submission at last, grinning up with their ears laid back, their bushy tails between their legs, and the Airedales descending upon them with swift, strong, wrathful jaws to rip them limb from limb. The dogs quickly treed the lions, and Sir Harry shot the tawny, long-tailed cats as they crouched on flimsy branches high in the ponderosas. The cats fell twisting and screeching, and the pack had to be whipped off before they ruined the pelts.

“Magnificent,” His Lordship said.

O
N ONE MEMORABLE
evening just at dusk, as Raleigh, Milo, Dai Jones, Perce Watling, and His Lordship rode back to camp after a fruitless day in pursuit of Rocky Mountain goats, they suddenly confronted a small, humpbacked, shovel-nosed bear pawing tentatively at a dead mule deer.

“Where’s his mama?” Milo whispered.

“Hand me the ten-bore, Dai,” said His Lordship in plangent tones.

“We’d better wait a bit, sir,” Raleigh said quietly. “That’s just a baby bear. He wouldn’t be traveling on his lonesome just yet, so there’s likely a mother around here somewhere.”

“The rifle, please, Mr. Jones.”

Dai looked at Raleigh, shrugged his eyebrows and shoulders. “Aye, Your Lordship.”

He slapped the rifle into Sir Harry’s hand and stepped back respectfully.

The baby bear squinted upward, searching out the sound of their voices. Then it gave up and took another whack at the deer’s haunch.

Raleigh said, “You’d better wait, Harry. There’s bound to be a bigger one nearby. Best save your lead for the mama.”

“I require a family group, Captain McKay,” Lord Malcombe said stiffly. “The British Museum have made it quite clear. As you’re no doubt aware, I already have a fine male, a fair female, and two cubs from up north. This juvenile will round out my group quite nicely. Should the mother come and by chance prove better than the female now in my possession, all the better. Now let me shoot, and the rest of you keep alert to whatever other bears may be lurking in the vicinity. Leave none of them alive.”

He shot.

The baby bear yowled and bit its shoulder.

Sure enough, at her offspring’s cry the mother bear materialized from a patch of nearby brush and ran at the party with the speed of a racehorse. Before Perce Watling could raise his rifle, she had crushed his head with one blow of a front paw. As she passed Dai Jones, she slapped him across the belly and he fell. Then she turned toward His Lordship.

Raleigh, ten paces off to one side, shot her behind the left ear, a quick shot with the Sharps. She fell with a thump that frightened the horses and sent pine duff cascading over His Lordship’s boots. He stood there with his mouth agape, pale beneath his tan.

“My God, that was fast,” he said finally. “Thank you, McKay—not only were you right about the mother bear, but you saved my bloody neck with that shot.” He went over to where Dai sat in the dust, looking down at his lap. Blood had soaked the lower front of his shirt and his trousers. “Ah thinks she gutted me, look-you.” His Lordship knelt to study the wound, pulling back the torn shirt with hesitant fingers. Gray-green coils of intestine poked through the ragged rips in the loader’s abdomen. Sir Harry winced, rose, and walked away to retch behind a nearby sage.

Raleigh and Milo lashed Watling’s body to the back of his horse and built a travois for Dai after wrapping his midsection with the remainder of his shirt. They could come back later to skin the bears. It was a long ride to the bivouac. Dai was dead by the time they reached camp, his bristling eyebrows locked in permanent bemusement. They all drank a lot that night and buried their dead at sunup.

Sir Harry insisted that the dead men be interred in proper coffins, which he had his carpenters construct from the floor boards of a broken-down wagon. Then as Perce and Dai were lowered into the rocky ground, His Lordship spoke a few words over them. Teamsters, pastry chefs, muleteers, dog tenders, sommelier, wranglers, grooms, farriers, and half-breed Shawnee trackers looked on solemnly.

“‘They say the Lion and the Lizard keep / The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep,” Sir Harry said. “‘And Bahram, that great Hunter—the Wild Ass / Stamps o’er his Head, but cannot break his sleep.’”

“Amen,” intoned the mourners.

T
HEY HUNTED SLOWLY
south and east, onto the Staked Plain. Summer came sweltering ever more intensely upon them with each day’s drop in elevation. Pine and spruce gave way to sage and prickly pear and ocotillo. Spanish bayonet stabbed the horses’ legs and they left a blackening trail of blood spattered across that hard-baked, hoof-clanging earth. Mirages plagued them, and one day they saw a great city rise from the plain in the distance, its towers gleaming white as quarried marble, shimmering in the heat, men falling from the parapets as if in the act of mass suicide, falling into the broad avenues below. Closer at hand, the city faded into a band of scrawny, hammerhead ponies cropping panic grass. Many of the wild horses were pintos whose blotchy white markings no doubt accounted for the imagined marble of the dream city.

As the wagon train crossed the prairie one morning, Sir Harry’s eye was caught by a band of pronghorn antelope grazing half a mile away. “Good time to try the Gatling,” he told Raleigh. “Five years ago in Carlsbad, the Prussian general staff tested one of these guns against a hundred of their best riflemen, all of them armed with the new Dreyse needle gun. The range was 800 meters. Prussian volley fire scored 27 percent hits, the Gatling 88.”

With the wagons halted, His Lordship whisked off the gun’s canvas cover. “
Voilcil
” he said, grinning. “Behold the true ‘Beast.’”

Raleigh had to agree. The Gatling gun was squat, ugly, about as elegant as a cotton gin. Six separate muzzles protruded from its gleaming brass barrel. A dizzying array of knobs, studs, and set screws to control elevation and rate of fire bulged from the contraption, and a crank which both rotated the barrels and fired them protruded from the right side of the breech. Sir Harry pointed to a heavy black drum made of metal attached to the top of the gun.

“This is a new loading device patented by a man named Broad-well,” he said. “The drum on this model holds four hundred rounds. It’s too heavy for one man to lift, so we have to use a block and tackle. Once it’s in place, though, the operator merely has to take aim and turn the crank. Dr. Gatling’s ingenious bolt-and-cam mechanism does the rest—loads, fires, extracts the spent shell case, then spits it out and starts all over again, quicker than you can say ‘knife.’” He stepped aside. “Here, old man, why don’t you have a go?”

Raleigh leaned in behind the gun and aligned the sights, adjusting them to 800 yards. He swung the muzzle to the left-hand side of the antelope band, now standing steadily, their heads up, all of them staring at the wagon train but uncertain of what this strange sight portended. Raleigh took off his hat and waved it back and forth above his head. Three or four bucks stepped quickly toward the wagons, curious as always about the flagging motion. Raleigh took a deep breath and turned the crank handle twice, traversing the gun slowly from left to right as he fired. A near-continuous roar fractured the prairie silence. Clouds of billowing smoke obscured his sight picture. When it blew clear, eight pronghorns lay dead in the sage, while four more struggled feebly to regain their feet. The rest of the band had fled, white rumps bouncing away from the slaughter into the dusty distance.

“Welcome to the Industrial Revolution,” Sir Harry said. “Can you imagine what Bonaparte might have done with one of these guns at Waterloo? We’d all be eating snails.”

_____

N
OW THEY BEGAN
to cut the trails of many unshod ponies mixed with human footprints, small parties for the most part, but in aggregate a considerable number.

“Mr. and Mrs. Lo on the move to new huntin’ grounds,” Raleigh said.

“Not a war party?” Sir Harry asked.

“No. See the drag marks left by the travois? The Indians use their tepee poles to haul their goods. If a trail shows lodgepole tracks, it means they’re travelin’ with women and children. But if you find the tracks of many ponies and no drags, then you’d better look out. War party more than likely. Best thing to do, move out in the opposite direction—fast.”

“We have enough men and guns to defeat any Indian tribe in the West,” Sir Harry said. “At least on the defensive. Give me a troop of English cavalry and I’d pacify this wilderness in a month’s time.”

“I doubt it,” Raleigh said. “This is Kiowa and Comanche country.”

“What does that signify?”

“Persistence.”

“Hah!”

“Bloody-mindedness.”

“We’re bloodier of mind.”

I’ll agree with you there, Raleigh thought.

“Command of the country—they know every wrinkle in it, every waterhole, every place to lay an ambush. It’s their own back yard.”

“It’s not a difficult country,” Lord Malcombe said. “Flat as a billiard table, this terrain. Our horses are longer of limb, sounder of lung; we’d run them down in a mile. From what I’ve seen of these sorry redskins, they shoot arrows or old muzzle loaders. We have modern repeating rifles and the Gatling. All my men are chosen marksmen. Even McIntosh, my fly tier, is a crack wingshot. Some of these lads, the best of them, were with me in India, fought against
real
Indians—Sikhs and Pathans and British-trained sepoys in the Mutiny. Old Dai, rest his soul, not to mention Bentley, who succeeds him, were with me north of Cape Colony against the kaffirs. Cetewayo’s Zulu impis weren’t much when faced with a true British square, and your red niggers aren’t half the soldiery the Zulus were. Bring them on and I’ll show you.”

He cantered toward the horizon.

“How old do you reckon that pup to be, Milo?”

“Not yet thirty, I’d say. Twenty-four or -five.”

“Hellfire. He’d have still been foulin’ his diapers at the time of the Indian Mutiny. Mere bullshit he’s givin’ us. All blow, no show.”

R
ALEIGH DRANK THAT
night. This country was flat and empty, as Lord Malcontent had said, but both Raleigh and Milo had seen it sprout Kiowas and Cheyennes and Comanches in the wink of an eye, thick and fast as buffalo grass after spring rain.

“I don’t like this,” Sykes said.

“Me neither.”

“What say let’s draw our pay first thing tomorrow?”

“He won’t give it to us.”

“No. But we by God should oughta get out of here anyways. We won’t have lost so much on the deal. We can cut out a few of those blood horses, sell ’em at Griffin to the blue shirts for a whole lot more’n he’d pay us.”

Raleigh thought about that for a minute. He knew the Limeys would never be able to track them. But His Lordship might possibly report the horse theft to the Army at Fort Griffin, and horse theft was a hanging offense.

“Let’s see them as far as the North Canadian anyways,” he said. “It’s only a few days ahead.”

Sykes grunted. Yes or no? Raleigh wondered. But Milo wouldn’t go anywhere without Raleigh along for protection. The poor dumb redneck couldn’t see a Hostile a quarter mile off, his eyes were that weak. As weak as His Lordship’s, but Sykes had no eyeglasses.

_____

I
N THE MORNING
Raleigh rode out ahead of the train toward a butte to the southeast. He’d saddled Vixen because she had the smoothest gait in his remuda, and what old Otto used to call the
Katzenjammer
was on him bad today. He felt fragile and tried heavy breathing. It didn’t work. Something had left him during the night. The whiskey had stolen it. Another dream of battle had drained it away. He couldn’t remember the dream, but he knew it was awful, as usual, and he knew it was his manhood that had been sapped from him, as usual, but he also knew that it would return as time burned the booze away. That was the thing about whiskey. It gave you time off to confront your woes.

He contemplated the butte. He couldn’t very well scale the granite tower, not in this condition, so he circled it. The best way up was from the south. Leaving Vixen to graze near a spring at the shallow base of the butte, he slogged his way to the top through heavy chaparral, lugging the Sharps with him, pausing often to catch his breath. From the high point he scanned the horizon with his field glasses. Nothing. He could just hear the faint, distant boom of buffalo rifles, unless it was his hungover heart pounding in his eardrums.

I’m boozin’ too much lately, he thought, and not for the first time. But it’s the only way I can get rid of it.

Rid of what?

Her
, goddamnit, the memory of her, of what we did to her.

He squirmed in his bones as he recalled it.

He’d been surprised to learn, from a cavalryman at Camp Supply, that Jenny and Otto Dousmann were alive. Surprised, at first elated; then, when the fact sank in, the possible repercussions frightened him. The trooper had been up at Fort Dodge and told a sad story of a woman who’d come in after the norther, a yellowhaired woman, with her brother, a hide man so badly froze that the doc had to saw off one of his arms.

Hellfire . . .

You were once an officer and a gentleman, by act of the Congress of the Conflagrated States of America. But you were never a gentleman, or even a very good officer. You’re poor white trash, always have been. You killed the best goddamn general officer in the world, Old Blue Light, your own commander, and you killed him at the moment of his greatest triumph. You killed him because you were scared that night—you were pisswilly scared all through the war, admit it, you . . .
poltroon.

No—those were buffalo rifles, all right. Scattered over the plains ahead of him, to the east and the north and the south. Through the dirty yellow-brown heat haze of the horizon he could see darker clusters, black, slow-moving blotches of living meat—buffalo as far as the eye could see. And the hide camps would be nearby, havens of hope away from this elfin English madness, good solid Americans with real food, buffalo steaks, and corn dodgers, grease over it all, and likker to cut the grease.