Will crawled to the edge of the lip and looked down at Olympus. The two blackened, shriveled husks that had once been living men remained chained to the fence posts, almost obscured from sight by masses of flies.
Boozing for the day had already begun and there was racket from the inside of the saloon. Outside, several Indians wandered aimlessly, faces blank, hands hanging at their sides. A few mumbled incoherently.
Mushrooms, Will thought.
One of the Indians seemed intent on climbing the slight rise from which Will watched the town. He was as clumsy as a drunk on a rolling log—he fell several times. When he struggled to his feet the last time, his lips and mouth were encrusted with sand but his face retained the same expressionless, zombielike semblance.
Wampus growled, but stopped when Will elbowed him.
For some reason, this babbling, weaving, mindless creature flared Will’s temper to full blaze. This piece of dung burned two innocent men. He might have killed Hiram or his wife or daughters. If the Indian had fought those two men . . . But he hadn’t. He’d burned them like kindling.
The renegade topped the rise twenty feet from Will and Wampus and saw neither man nor dog. A sharp ammonia smell reached Will almost immediately. The front of the Indian’s Union Army pants were soaked to the point of dripping. There was another wretched stink, too—that of long-dead carrion or an overloaded outhouse with a too-shallow pit.
Will snarled as he raised his arm and pointed at the renegade. Wampus was off in half a heartbeat, silent, belly close to the ground, ivory eyeteeth glinting in the sun.
Wampus hit this one from the front, his bowie-knife-sharp teeth in a death clamp on the man’s jugular. Blood spurted as if from a well spigot, but amazingly, the renegade fell almost gently and completely soundlessly. After a moment the blood stopped gushing. Wampus released his grip and stepped back. He sat, staring at the corpse, almost if he were bemused by it. Will watched silently, wondering what the dog would do next.
Wampus stood, moved ahead a step, and sniffed the blood at the renegade’s throat. Then he stepped back, sat, pointed his muzzle at the sky, and howled long and loud, the eerie sound echoing about the valley, washing over the town, resounding again and again, quieter each time, until it died.
There was nothing, Will realized, that was at all canine about that howl. It was all wolf, the kind of ululation that sent shivers up and down a person’s spine. Ray certainly knew his critters.
“Perfect,” Will smiled. “The wampus strikes again—this time in daylight.”
He clicked his tongue at Wampus and the two of them hustled back to where the pinto was tied. Will loosened his rope once again, wrapped the loop around the front legs of the carcass of the shaggy, tied off on his saddle horn, and rode back to the camp. He was sure there was no reason to hurry. This last manifestation of the wampus would keep the outlaws huddled in their gin mill, shooting at shadows and hearing sounds that weren’t there.
Will tied up to the buffalo carcass and dragged it along behind him almost to the camp. Then, he began his makeshift butchering. Wampus watched avidly, hungrily, drooling, tongue hanging out several inches. Will hacked off a section of ribs a yard long and handed them over to his dog. “Here ya go, pardner,” he said. Wampus took the ribs from Will gently, but as he trotted off, he flicked his prize onto his shoulders and back—the same way Will had once seen a timber wolf making off with a lamb. Will refused to let the thought linger. Still, that instinctive movment of the jaws and head . . .
The steaks were things of beauty. Will was able to carve away six of them of about two inches or more thick. They were nicely marbled with fat. He hated to waste the chops and the other cuts of meat, but he had no choice. He and Ray had no way to carry that much meat, and it would go rotten in a day or so under the sun.
True to his word, Ray rode into camp the evening of his second day out. He looked terrible: red-eyed, dust covered, slumped in his saddle, his weariness like a weight he could barely carry.
Ray’s horse had fared no better. The animal’s chest, neck, and flanks were gray-white with the froth of dried sweat, and his muzzle was damned near dragging on the ground. Will watched them approach. The horse wasn’t quite staggering, but he was weaving pronouncedly.
Ray rode past Will without speaking, directly to the sinkhole of tepid, foul water. He got down from his saddle like a ninety-year-old man and fell face-first into the sinkhole, his horse’s face next to his, both drinking like they’d hadn’t had water in years.
When Ray pulled his face out of the muck, his first words were, “You got any booze? I don’t want to hear any bullshit about my pledge to myself: a man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do. Now, you answer my question.”
Will scrounged through his saddlebag and came up with an almost-full pint of rotgut. He tossed the bottle to Ray. “Ain’t up to me to judge nobody,” he said, “ ’specially you, Ray.”
Ray nodded, pulled the cork with his teeth, and emptied the bottle in a matter of two minutes, drinking the cheap whiskey the way he’d drunk water a few minutes ago.
He pulled the saddle from his horse, hobbled him, and rubbed him down with handfuls of dried prairie grass. He let the horse drink again and then stumbled over to the fire pit.
“We got any grub?”
“How ’bout the biggest, thickest buffalo steak you ever seen? Think that’ll do ya?”
“Oh, I’d jus’ say so. Yep—I’d jus’ say so. Get sumabitches cookin’.”
“It’ll put up some smoke.”
“Screw the smoke. Git that shaggy over the fire.” It was an order, not a request.
Ray dropped his saddle and lay down, his head resting against the seat.
“You get through?” Will asked as he snapped a lucifer into flame and lit the kindling he’d arranged earlier.
“ ’Course I did. Wasn’t no pleasure ride, though.” He sat up, reached down to his boots, and unstrapped the pair of flat-roweled spurs he was wearing on his heels. He threw them, one at a time, as far out into the prairie as he could. “I hated to hook my good horse the way I done, but I’ll tell you this: there’s still a bunch of hostiles out there. Anyways, we made it. That’s what counts. All the wires went out. I stood right over the monkey as he sent ’em.”
Will was quiet, feeding the fire. He’d washed the meat and wrapped it in his slicker and wet it every time he thought about it—which was often.
Before long he had a pair of bison steaks skewered on the cleaning rod from his rifle kit.
The scent reached Ray, who’d been dozing. “How long?” he asked.
“Not long. Ten minutes, maybe.”
Ray moved closer to Will, the fire, and the meat. “How’d you come by this feast?” he asked.
Will rolled a cigarette and explained the whole package: his exploratory trip, the dead Indian, Wampus’s howl, the gimp shaggy—all of it.
“You give ol’ Wampus the heart?”
“Yeah. Liver, too.”
“Good. Real good. Ya know, that howlin’ don’t surprise me none. See, a wolf’ll howl like that after he defeats a enemy in front of his pack—or when he’s really proud of what he done. He won’t howl when they pull down a deer or even a elk. A bear, they will, if the bear was sizable ’nuff an’ a fighter.”
“Why this renegade, then?”
“I dunno. Why does the sun come up? Why does a fat baby fart? Thing is, don’t never try to predict what a wolf or a tight cross like Wampus’ll do.”
“But Wampus—”
“But Wampus, my ass! Wampus ain’t no different! Look, I had a friend named Bridger—another trapper an’ bounty hunter. He raised him up the sweetest li’l wolf bitch you ever seen. She purely loved that man, followed him, learned everything he wanted to teach her, slept next to him at night. She’d tear hell outta any man or animal threatened Bridger.” Ray was quiet then.