Douglas Preston - Mount Dragon

Carson drew to a halt. He dismounted and bent down, feeling the blades of grass. Side oats grama, high in protein: excellent for the horses.

“We’ll stop here for a couple of hours,” he said. “Let the horses graze.”

“Shouldn’t we keep going while it’s still dark?” de Vaca asked. “They might send helicopters.”

“Not over the Missile Range,” Carson said. “In any case, we won’t travel far in daylight without finding a place to hole up. But we have to take full advantage of this dew. You’d be surprised how much water the horses can take in grazing dewy grass. We can’t afford to let this pass. An hour spent here will give us an extra ten miles, even more.”

“Ahh,” said de Vaca. “A Ute trick, no doubt.”

Carson turned toward her in the darkness. “It wasn’t funny the first time. Having a Ute ancestor doesn’t make me an Indian.”

“A Native American, you mean,” came the teasing reply.

“For Chrissakes, Susana, even the Indians came from Asia. Nobody’s a ‘Native American.’ ”

“Do I detect defensiveness, cabrón?”

Carson ignored her and removed the lead rope from Roscoe’s halter. He wrapped the cotton rope around Roscoe’s front hoof, tied a knot, gave it two tight twists and looped it around the other hoof, tying a second knot. He did the same to the other horse. Then he took off the flank cinches and looped them through the O-rings on the halters, so that the buckled ends dangled loosely together.

“That’s a clever way to hobble them,” de Vaca said.

“The best way.”

“What’s the cincha for?”

“Listen.”

They were silent a moment. As the horse began to graze, there was a faint sound as the two buckles of each cinch clinked together.

“Usually I bring a cowbell with me,” said Carson. “But this works almost as well. In the still of the night, you can hear that clinking three hundred yards off. Otherwise, those horses would just vanish in the blackness and we’d never find them.”

He sat back in the sand, waiting for her to say something more about Ute Indians.

“You know, cabrón ,” de Vaca said, her disembodied voice coming to him out of the darkness, “you surprise me a little.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, you’re a hell of a fine person to cross the Jornada del Muerto with, for one thing.”

Carson blinked in surprise at the compliment, wondering for a moment whether she was being sarcastic. “We’ve still got a long way to go. We’re barely one-fifth across.”

“Yeah, but I can already tell. Without you along, I wouldn’t have had a chance.”

Carson didn’t respond. He still felt there was less than a fifty-percent chance they’d find water. That meant a less than fifty-percent chance of survival.

“So you used to work on a ranch up there?” De Vaca spoke again.

“The Diamond Bar,” said Carson. “That was after my dad’s ranch went broke.”

“Was it big?”

“Yep. My father fancied himself a real wheeler-dealer, always buying up ranches, selling them, buying them back. Usually at a loss. The bank foreclosed on fourteen sections of patent land that had been in my family for a hundred years. Plus, they got grazing leases on two hundred sections of BLM land. It was a hell of a big spread, but most of it was pretty burnt up. My father’s fancy cattle and horses just couldn’t survive in it.”

He lay back. “I remember riding fence as a kid. The outside fence alone was sixty miles, and there were two hundred miles of interior fencing. It took me and my brother the whole summer to ride fence, fixing it as we went. Damn, that was fun. We each had a horse, plus a mule to pack the roll of wire, staples, and stretcher. And our bedrolls and some food. That jack mule was a mean son of a bitch. His name was Bobb. With two b s.”

De Vaca laughed.

“We’d camp out as we went along. In the evening, we’d hobble the horses and find a low spot to lay out our bedrolls and light a fire. The first day out we always had a big steak, carried frozen in the saddlebags. If it was big enough, it’d just be thawed out by dinnertime. From then on, it was beans and rice. After dinner we’d lie around, faces to the stars, drinking camp coffee as the fire died down.”

Carson stopped talking. It seemed like a vague dream of centuries ago, those memories. And yet the same stars he’d looked at as a kid were still there, above his head.

“It must’ve been really hard, losing that ranch,” de Vaca said quietly.

“It was about the hardest thing that ever happened to me. My whole body and soul was part of that land.”

Carson felt a twinge of thirst. He grubbed around in the sand and found a small pebble. He rubbed it on his jeans, then placed it in his mouth.

“I liked the way you lost Nye and those other pendejos in the Hummers,” de Vaca said.

“They’re idiots,” Carson replied. “Our real enemy is the desert.”

The offhand comment made him think. It had been an easy task to lose the Hummers. Surprisingly easy. They hadn’t turned off their lights while tracking him. They hadn’t even divided up to search for the track when they reached the edge of the lava flow. Instead they had just barreled southward like lemmings. It surprised him that Nye could be so stupid.

No. Nye wouldn’t be so stupid.

For the first time, Carson wondered if Nye was with the Hummers at all. The more he thought about it, the less likely it seemed. But if he wasn’t leading the Hummers, then where the hell was he? Back at Mount Dragon, managing the crisis?

He realized, with a dull cold thrust of fear, that Nye would be out hunting them. Not in a loud, ungainly Hummer, but on that big paint horse of his.

Shit. He should have taken that horse himself, or, at the very least, driven a nail deep into his hoof.

Cursing his own lack of foresight, he looked at his watch. Three-forty- five.

Nye stopped and dismounted, examining the tracks as they headed north. In the strong yellow glow of his flashlight, he could see the individual grains of sand, almost microscopic in size, piled up at the edges of the tracks. They were fresh and precarious, and no breath of wind had disturbed them. The track could not be more than an hour old. Carson was moving ahead at a slow trot, making no further attempt to hide or confuse his trail. Nye figured the two were about five miles ahead. They would stop and hide at sunrise, someplace where they could rest the horses during the heat of the day.

That’s when he would take them.

He remounted Muerto and urged him into a fast trot. The best time to catch them would be just at dawn, before they even realized they were being followed. Hang back, wait for enough light for a clean shot. His own mount was doing fine, a little damp from the exertion but nothing more. He could maintain this pace for another fifty miles. And there were still ten gallons of water.

Suddenly he heard something. He quickly switched off his light and stopped. A gentle breeze blew out of the south, carrying the sound away from him. He stilled his horse, waiting. Five minutes passed, then ten. The breeze shifted a little, and he heard voices raised in argument, then the faint tinking of something that sounded like saddle rigging.

They had stopped already. The fools figured they had shaken their pursuers and could relax. He waited, hardly breathing. The voice—the other voice—said nothing.

Nye dismounted and led his horse back behind a gentle ridgeline, where he would be hidden and could graze unmolested. Then he crept back to the lip of the basin. He could hear the murmuring voices in the pool of darkness below.