Douglas Preston - Mount Dragon

They were now an hour and forty minutes ahead. Or perhaps a little less, considering the time it must have taken to arrange this irritating little tableau.

He returned to the opening of the cinder cone and began trying to discover where they had gone, fighting to keep anger and panic from making him sloppy. How could he have missed their exit tracks?

He moved around the periphery of the cone until he came again to the marks going in. He carefully examined the vicinity of the entrance. He followed the entrance marks, then traced them backward away from the cinder cone. Then again, and yet again. Then he cut for sign a hundred yards from the cinder cone, circling the entire formation, hoping to pick up the trail that he knew must lead out.

But there was no trail leading out. They had ridden into the cinder cone, and then vanished. Carson had tricked him. But how?

“Tell me, how?” he said aloud, spinning toward the shadow.

It moved away from him, a dark presence in the periphery of his vision, remaining scornfully silent.

He went back into the mock camp and checked the nearby hole again, more carefully this time. Nothing. He stepped backward, examining the ground. There were some patches of windblown sand and cinder fields on the floor of the cinder cone. To one side there was a small disturbed area that he had not examined before. Nye carefully knelt on his hands and knees, his eyes inches from the sand. Some of the marks showed skidding and twisting. Carson had done something to the horses in this spot, worked on them in some way. And here was where the tracks ended.

Not quite. He found a faint, partial imprint of a hoof in a patch of sand a few yards away. It showed, very clearly, why there were no longer any marks on the rocks.

The son of a bitch had pulled the iron shoes off his horses.

Within a few miles, Carson figured, they should reach the edge of the lava. He knew that it was critically important to get the horses onto sand again as soon as possible. Even though they were leading the horses rather than riding them, the horses’ hooves would quickly get sore. If they walked on lava long enough without wearing shoes, they would go lame. And then there was always the very real possibility of catastrophe—a horse cracking a hoof to the quick, or perhaps bruising the frog, the soft center of the hoof.

He knew that the naked hooves also left marks on the rock: tiny flakes and streaks of keratin from the hooves; the odd overturned stone; the crushed blade of grass; the stray imprint in a small patch of windblown sand. But these marks were extremely subtle. At the least, they would slow Nye down. Slow him considerably. Still, Carson dared remain on the lava only a few more miles. Then they would have to put the shoes back on or ride in sand.

He had decided to head north again. If they were to get out of the Jornada alive, they really had no choice. Instead of going due north, however, they had trended northeast, making sharp turns, frequent zigzags, and once doubling back in an effort to confuse and irritate Nye. They also walked their horses some distance apart, preferring two fainter trails to a single more obvious one.

Carson pinched the skin on his horse’s neck.

“What’s that for?” de Vaca asked.

“I’m checking to see if the horse is getting dehydrated,” Carson replied.

“How?”

“You pinch the skin on the neck and see how fast the wrinkle springs back. A horse’s skin loses elasticity as he becomes thirsty.”

“Another trick you learned from this Ute ancestor you told me about?” de Vaca asked.

“Yes,” Carson replied testily. “As it so happens, yes.”

“Seems you picked up a lot more from him than you’d like to admit.”

Carson felt his irritation with this subject growing. “Look,” he said, “if you’re so eager to turn me into an Indian, go ahead. I know what I am.”

“I’m beginning to think that’s exactly what you don’t know.”

“So now we’re going to have a session about my identity problem? If that’s your idea of psychotherapy, I can see why you failed as a psychiatrist.”

Immediately, de Vaca’s expression became less playful. “I didn’t fail, cabrón . I ran out of money, remember?”

They rode in silence.

“You should be proud of your Native American blood,” she said at last. “Like I am of mine.”

“You’re no Indian.”

“Guess again. The conquistadores married the conquistas. We’re all brothers and sisters, cabrón . Most old Hispanic families in New Mexico have some Aztec, Nahuatl, Navajo, or Pueblo blood.”

“Count me out of your multicultural utopia,” Carson said. “And stop calling me cabrón .”

De Vaca laughed. “Just consider how your embarrassing, whiskey-drinking great-uncle is saving our lives right now. And then think about what you have to be proud of.”

It was ten o’clock, the sun climbing high in the sky. The conversation was wasting valuable energy. Carson assessed his own thirst. It was a constant dull ache. For the moment it was merely irritating, but as the hours passed it would grow constantly worse. They had to get off the lava and start looking for water.

He could feel the heat rising from the flow in flickering waves. It came through the soles of his shoes. The plain of black, cracked lava stretched on all sides, dipping and rising, ending at last at a sharp, clean horizon. Here and there, Carson could see mirages shimmering on the surface of the lava. Some looked like blue pools of water, vibrating as if tickled by a playful wind; others were bands of parallel vertical lines, distant mountains of dream-lava. Still others hovered just above the horizon, lens-shaped reflections of the rock below. It was a surreal landscape.

As noon approached, everything turned white in the heat. The only exception was the surrounding expanse of lava, which seemed to get blacker, as if it were swallowing the light. No matter which way Carson turned, he could feel the sun’s precise angle and location in the sky, the source of an almost unbearable pressure. The heat had thickened the air, made it feel heavy and claustrophobic.

He glanced up. Several birds were riding a thermal far to the northwest, circling lazily at a high altitude. Vultures, probably hovering over a dead antelope. There wasn’t much to eat in this desert, even for vultures.

He looked more carefully at the black specks drifting high in the sky. There was a reason why they were circling and not landing: it meant there might be another scavenger on the kill. Coyotes, perhaps.

That was very important.

“Let’s head northwest,” he said. They made a sharp turn, staying apart to confuse Nye and heading toward the distant birds.

He remembered being extremely thirsty once before. He had been working a remote part of the ranch known as Coal Canyon. He’d ridden down the canyon tracking a lost bull—one of his dad’s prize Brahmans—expecting to camp and find water at the Ojo del Perillo. The Ojo had been unexpectedly dry, and he’d spent a waterless night. Toward morning his horse became tangled in his stake rope, panicked, and bowed a tendon. Carson had been forced to walk thirty miles out without water, in heat nearly equal to this. He remembered getting to Witch Well and drinking until he threw up, drinking again and throwing up, and still being utterly unable to slake his terrible thirst. When he finally got home it was old Charley who came to his rescue with a foul potion made out of water, salt and soda collected from a salt pan near the ranch house, horsehair ash, and various burned herbs. Only after he drank it did the unbearable sensation of thirst leave his body.