Douglas Preston - Thunderhead

As she was about to turn away, she noticed something else. A circular patch of skin had been cut from the foreheads of both horses. Examining these more closely, Nora saw that similar patches had been removed symmetrically from a spot on either side of the horse’s chests, and from two more spots on either side of their lower bellies. Why there? What could this possibly mean?

She shook her head and retreated from the killing ground.

“Who could do such a thing?” Smithback asked as she remounted.

Who indeed? It was the question Nora had been asking herself for the last hour. The answer that seemed most likely was too frightening to contemplate.

Within twenty minutes they had reached the base of the ridge. In another twenty, following the gentle trail up, they crested the top of the Devil’s Backbone. Nora brought the horses to a stop and dismounted again, gazing slowly over the vista ahead. The great divide looked out over thousands of miles of slickrock canyons. To the north, she could see the distant blue hump of Barney Top, and to the northeast, the silent sentinel of the Kaiparowits.

And, directly ahead, were the narrow vicious switchbacks that led down the face of the hogback ridge. Somewhere at the bottom lay Fiddlehead, Hurricane Deck, and Beetlebum.

“Tell me we’re not really going down that again,” Smithback said.

Nora remained silent. She dismounted and took a few steps from the horses, scouring the patches of sand that lay among the rocks. There were no signs of a horse; but then, the wind at the top of the ridge would have swept them away.

She looked back down the way they had come. Though she’d kept a careful lookout as they climbed, she had seen nothing but old hoofprints. She shivered; she knew very well there was no other way into the valley. And yet, somehow, the mysterious horse killers had left no sign of their passing.

Tearing her eyes away, she looked back around to the steep trail ahead of them, leading down the front of the Devil’s Backbone. It seemed to simply disappear over the edge into sheer space. She knew it was always more dangerous to descend than to ascend. The terrifying memory of how she’d scrabbled at the cliff face, feet kicking in dead space, returned with redoubled force. She rubbed her fingertips, now free of bandages but still tingling with the memory.

“I’m going to hike down a ways on foot,” Nora murmured. “You wait here.”

“Anything to stay off that trail,” Smithback said. “I can’t imagine a worse way down a cliff than that. Except falling, of course. And at least that’s faster.”

Nora began to pick her way down the steep trail. The first part, all slickrock, not surprisingly showed no signs of the mysterious rider. But when she reached the rock strewn part of the trail, she stopped: there, in a small patch of sand, was a fresh hoofprint. And it was from an unshod horse.

“Are we going down?” Smithback asked with a distinct lack of enthusiasm as she returned to the top of the ridge.

“Yes,” she replied. “Swire wasn’t seeing things. Somebody did come up here on horseback.”

She took a deep breath, then another. And then she began carefully down the ridge, leading Arbuckles. The horse balked at the lip of the trail, and after some firm coaxing Nora got him to take one step, and then another. Smithback followed, leading Compañero. Nora could hear the horse snorting, the scrape of bare hoof on stone. She kept her eyes firmly fixed on the trail ahead, breathing regularly, trying to keep them from straying over the edge into the infinite space below. Once, instinctively, she looked over: there was the dry valley below, the strange rock formations like tiny piles of pebbles, the stunted junipers mere black dots. Arbuckles’s legs were shaking, but he kept his head down, nose to the ground, and they inched their way down. Having been up the trail before, Nora was now aware of the most difficult spots, and worked to guide her horse past them when it was most necessary.

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—”