Philipp Meyer - The Son

“Well, it appears we have a live one,” said the captain.

“Maybe,” said McClellan. He was the lieutenant. “Or maybe they just threw her off in the brush like the other one.”

I knew she was alive. They had taken her and her brother, but her brother was too young, or he had cried or been noisy and she was smart enough to take a lesson from that, despite what they had done to her before tying her to the horse.

We stood on the banks another minute, collecting our thoughts, looking around at the hoodoos and canyons and tall grass and cedar; the Indians might be anywhere. It would not take Napoleon to make an ambush in country like this and we all wanted to stay in the flat open plain along the water.

After a few more miles we came to a bend thickly overgrown with cottonwoods and there was something about the light. The sun was coming up behind us. The captain and I eased forward and he looked through his glass while I looked through mine; there were some specks along the red rock, maybe five miles out.

“You seeing horses?”

“Yup.”

“Do they know we’re following?”

“I don’t think so.”

The sun was rising into their eyes but we turned around and cut through the brush anyway, keeping the trees and buttes between us and the Indians, gaffing hell out of our ponies. But when we got another look at them again, this time from the top of a small mesa, they’d put even more distance on us.

MIDWAY THROUGH THE day our horses were blown. The Comanches would have changed mounts twice and the captain was reckless, leading us through funnels and thickets at top speed. “They don’t want a fight,” he said. “They just want to get away.”

Meanwhile we were getting close to the Llano and the badlands had narrowed to a single canyon a few miles wide. Blocks of stone the size of courthouses had tumbled from the upper walls; there were forests of petrified stumps and logs, herds of pronghorn watching from the ledges. The Indians would have to climb out.

We were getting close to the canyon mouth and as we emerged from some cottonwoods, there they were, only a half mile ahead but six hundred feet above us. One of them turned to look and waved his arm. I was squinting through my field glass. It was Escuté.

I couldn’t make out his face, but I could tell by his straight back and crooked arm and the way he’d done his hair, which was unlike most Comanches. I wondered if N uukaru was with him. It occurred to me that N uukaru might not even be alive.

Then a flat crack rolled across the valley.

One of our men had a Sharps rifle with a tang sight, but he must have missed the Indians by a comfortable margin because they continued to wave as they disappeared over the ledge.

After three hours of riding into box canyons and other dead ends, we found the trail the Indians had taken. There was bear grass and juniper hanging above us, water splashing over shelves of rock nearly too high for our horses to climb. A few men with bows, firing down into the chasm, could have easily gotten all of us, so we moved slow. Our arms were shaking from keeping the pistols up. The ravine ended in a cul-de-sac. There was a wall covered with drawings and carvings, snakes and men dancing and horses and buffalo, a shaman in a headdress, the swirling figures you see when you fall asleep.

It had the feeling of a sacred place and we expected the Indians to appear above us and rain arrows from every direction. Then there was a rustling or whirring all around us and Elmer Pease began shooting. The rest of us jumped behind the closest rock.

There were no arrows. Instead there was a kind of dervish hanging in the air, a small tornado, though there was no wind, it was some kind of Indian spirit, and it floated about for a long time before moving back down the canyon, where it vanished.

The captain came out from behind his rock. “McCullough and Pease, get up behind that face and see if the path goes anywhere.”

An hour later we were on the Llano. The Comanches’ trail was faint but clear. In the tracks I saw three riders split west from the group, driving a dozen unsaddled ponies, leaving a large, clearly beaten trail, a diversion. The main body had continued north in single file, their tracks nearly indistinguishable among all the buffalo sign and rocks. I thought about the girl they had taken. Then I thought about Escuté.

“Here they go,” I said. I pointed toward the diversion.

AFTER FIVE OR six miles it petered out. I guessed they had been dragging brush and dropped it. Or they began to ride single file. Or they knew tricks I had never learned. We turned and followed our backtrack; we were six hours behind them and they all had fresh mounts. I got off my horse and stood looking around in the dirt, ignoring the trail they had left across the rocks, invisible to everyone else, but clear enough to me, a faint disturbance, scuffs here and there in the dust.

“I’m about stumped,” I said.

The captain looked at me.

“We could split up and see what we find.”

“We aren’t splitting up,” the captain said.

“We know they didn’t go west and they probably didn’t go south, either.”

“You don’t see anything?” he said. “Anything at all?”

“There’s no tracks,” I told him.

He didn’t believe me but there was nothing he could do. We went north along the caprock, putting the spurs in and hoping to get a glimpse of them against the horizon before the sun faded. I watched as we rode, our track slowly diverging from Escuté’s until finally we were on a different course entirely.

THE CAPTAIN DIDN’T trust me after that, but it didn’t matter. Two months later, we made an unplanned resupply trip to Austin and he found his wife entertaining a sutler. The captain’s pistol misfired and the sutler stabbed him to death.

After the burial we went to the jail and took the sutler into custody. The sheriff handed us the keys.

“You ain’t gonna do nothin’?” the man said, as we marched him past the sheriff. “Just let them hang me, is that it?”

As we led him out into the sunlight, he protested that he’d been one of the filibusters to survive Mier, but we pointed out that was a long time ago, and in another country, and it was time to acknowledge the corn.

A few blocks from the capitol we stripped him, cut off everything hanging between his legs, then fixed him with a riata and dragged him up and down Congress. By the time we strung him up he had stopped kicking. I thought we ought to scalp him, but everyone else thought he made a fine blossom just as he was and there was no sense cuttin’ it too fat. We went to the tavern and I was elected captain over McClellan. I waited till they were good and damaged and then went back to scalp the sutler. I had always been fond of the captain.

WITH THE EXCEPTION of N uukaru and Escuté, I had no doubts about my loyalties. Which were in the following order: to any other Ranger, and then to myself. Toshaway had been right: you had to love others more than you loved your own body, otherwise you would be destroyed, whether from the inside or out, it didn’t matter. You could butcher and pillage but as long as you did it for people you loved, it never mattered. You did not see any Comanches with the long stare — there was nothing they did that was not to protect their friends, their families, or their band. The war sickness was a disease of the white man, who fought in armies far from his home, for men he didn’t know, and there is a myth about the West, that it was founded and ruled by loners, while the truth is just the opposite; the loner is a mental weakling, and was seen as such, and treated with suspicion. You did not live long without someone watching your back and there were very few people, white or Indian, who did not see a stranger in the night and invite him to join the campfire.