Larry McMurtry - Comanche Moon

"Do you think you can get off a shot?" Call asked. "If we don't kill it, it might get one of these horses, when it comes nightfall." Augustus began to lift his rifle out of the scabbard. Though both men were watching the jaguar, neither saw it leave. It was simply gone. By the time Augustus raised his rifle there was nothing to shoot.

"He's gone--it's bad news for the horses," Call said.

"I'll never forget seeing him," Augustus said. "He acted like he owned the world." "I expect he does--th world, at least," Call said. "I've never seen an animal just disappear like that." All afternoon, as they worked their way carefully through the narrow canyon, they often looked upward, hoping for another glimpse of the jaguar--but the jaguar was seen no more.

"Just because we don't see him don't mean he's not following us," Call said. "We have to keep the horses close tonight." Suddenly the canyon opened into the space they remembered from the time they were ambushed. The cliffso above them were pitted with holes and little caves. They stopped for a few minutes, examining the caves closely, looking for the glint of a rifle barrel or any sign of life.

But they saw nothing, only some eagles soaring across the face of the cliff.

"We ought to walk in, but we can't leave the horses," Call said. "That jaguar might be following us." "I think this camp is deserted," Augustus said. "I think we came too late." They rode slowly into the deserted camp, a sandy place, empty, windy. Only a ring of cold campfires and a few scraps of tenting were left to indicate that people in some numbers had once camped there.

Besides the tenting and the campfires there was one other thing that suggested the presence of humans: the skinning post, with a crossbar at the top, from which a badly decomposed, mangled, and half-eaten corpse still hung.

"Oh my Lord," Augustus said. He could barely stand to look at the corpse, and yet he couldn't look away.

"They say Ahumado had people skinned, if he didn't like them," Call said. "I supposed it was just talk, but I guess it was true." "I ain't piling no rocks on that," Gus said emphatically. The bloated thing hanging from the crossbar skinning post bore little resemblance now to anything human.

"I'll pass myself, this time," Call said.

He did not want to go near the stinking thing on the post.

In the pit, not far from where the two rangers stood, Inish Scull had slipped into a half sleep. Many times he had dreamed of rescue, so many that now, when he heard the voices of Call and McCrae, in his half sleep, he discounted the ^ws. They were just more dream voices; he would not let them tempt him into hope.

"We ought to search these caves," Call said.

"They might have had the Captain here. If we could find a scrap of his uniform or his belt or something at least it would be a thing we could take to his wife." "You look in the caves, Woodrow," Gus said. "I'll stand guard, in case that jaguar shows up." "All right," Call said.

As Call started for the largest of the caves at the base of the cliff, Augustus noticed the pit.

Because of the shadows stretching out from the pit it had been hard to see from where they entered the camp.

Curious, Augustus took a step or two closer--a stench hit him, but a stench less powerful than that which came from the swollen black flesh hanging from the skinning post. He stepped to the edge of the pit--f the stench it seemed to him that the pit might be a place where Ahumado tossed his dead. It could be that Captain Scull's body might be there; or what was left of it.

He looked into the pit but did not at first see the small, almost naked man sitting with his head bent down in the shadows near one wall of the pit.

Augustus saw some dead snakes, a broken cage, and a mound of dirt with the dirt not piled thickly enough to shut out the stench of death. He was about to turn away, disappointed, when the man sitting against the wall suddenly rolled two white lidless eyes up at him from beneath a long dirty mat of hair.

"Oh Lord! Woodrow .

Woodrowffwas Gus yelled.

Call, almost at the entrance to the first cave, turned at once and came running back.

"We found him, Woodrow! It's the Captainffwas Augustus said.

Inish Scull was still in his half sleep, listening listlessly to the dream voices, when he felt a shadow slant across the pit. With his eyes exposed he registered shadows even when he was looking down or trying to shield his eyes. If a vulture or an eagle soared above the camp he saw its shadow.

But the shadow that slanted across the pit was not a shadow made by a bird's wings. Scull saw a man looking at him from the edge of the pit; the man looked like the ranger Augustus McCrae. At the sight, panic stormed Scull's nerves again.

He vowed to be calm, but he couldn't. He leapt to his feet and sprang at the wall, hopping from one side of the pit to the other. When a man appeared who looked like the ranger Woodrow Call, Scull sprang all the harder. He spewed out ^ws in Greek and English, jumping frenziedly about the pit and at the walls. Again and again he jumped, ignoring the rangers' ^ws of calm. He jumped like a flea, like one of the thousands who had tormented him. He had become a flea, his duty to jump and jump, hopping up at the wall, hopping across the pit. Even when ranger Call slid down a rope into the pit and attempted to quiet him, to let him know that he was saved, Inish Scull, the Boston flea, continued to jump and jump.

Buffalo Hump let the summer pass, resting with his wives, climbing to the spire of rock to pray and meditate. At night around the fire the warriors made songs about the great raid. Hair On The Lip died suddenly; something went wrong inside her. ^w came that Blue Duck was the leader of a gang of renegades, white and half-breed, who killed and robbed along the Sabine River. In July Buffalo Hump went on an antelope hunt far north, near where he had taken the great buffalo whose skull he had used for his shield. He had heard that the antelope were thick in the north, and it was true.

In one day he killed seven antelope with the bow. Worm made a prophecy about the feat.

There was no fighting with the whites. The story came from an Apache that Gun In The Water and his friend McCrae had rescued Big Horse from the camp of Ahumado. The Apache said that Big Horse Scull was insane; he jumped around like a flea. The Apache mentioned that Ahumado had cut off Scull's eyelids, which was what had made him insane.

"No eyelids, what a clever torture," Buffalo Hump said to Slow Tree--it was Slow Tree who had brought him this gossip. When asked about Ahumado, though, Slow Tree grew vague. There were many stories, much speculation, but it had all come from Apaches and Apaches were all liars, Slow Tree reminded him.

"Tell me the stories anyway," Buffalo Hump said.

"No one has seen Ahumado all summer," Slow Tree said. "He left his camp at night, through a hole in the mountain. They think he went back to the place he came from, in the south.

Most people think he died." "What else?" Buffalo Hump asked.

"Two white men were found stuck on the sharpened trees," Slow Tree said. "No one does that but Ahumado." "Anyone can do it if they want to," Buffalo Hump said. "All they have to do is sharpen a tree and catch a white man, or any man. An Apache could do it. You could do it, if you wanted to. It doesn't mean that Ahumado is alive." "They say a jaguar lives in his camp now," Slow Tree said. "The Texans took away Big Horse Scull and the jaguar came. Some people think he ate Ahumado." "Ho!" Buffalo Hump said. "I have never seen a jaguar. Have you?" Slow Tree was reluctant to answer. He had never seen a jaguar, either, but he was reluctant to admit this to Buffalo Hump. He liked people to think that he was the wisest and most experienced chief, a man who had tasted every plant and killed every animal. He did not like to confess that he had never seen a jaguar.