Dead Man's Walk

“Of course you don’t see him; it’s dark,” Call reminded him. “I expect we can locate him in the morning. We’ll need him for Bigfoot, if he’s still blind.”

Call yelled three or four times, hoping to get a sense of Bigfoot’s position, but the scout didn’t answer.

“You try, you’ve got a louder voice,” Call said. Gus’s ability to make himself heard over any din was well known among the Rangers.

But Gus’s loudest yell brought the same result: silence.

“Can you die from getting your eyes scorched?” Gus asked.

The same thought had occurred to Call. The lightning storm had been beyond anything in his experience. The shocks of thunder and lightning had seemed to shake the earth. Once or twice, he thought his heart might stop, just from the shock of the storm. What if it had happened to Bigfoot? He might be lying dead, somewhere on the plain.

“I hope he ain’t dead,” Gus said. “If he’s dead, we’re in a pickle.”

“He could have just kept walking,” Call said. “We know the settlements are north and west. If we keep going, we’re bound to find the Mexicans sometime.”

“They’ll probably just shoot us,” Gus said.

“Why would they, if it’s just the two of us?” Call asked. “We ain’t an army. We’re nearly out of bullets anyway.”

“They shot a bunch of Texans during the war,” Gus recalled. “Just lined them up and shot them. I heard they made them dig their own graves.”

“I wish we could just go back to Austin,” he added. “Why can’t we? The Colonel don’t even know where we are. He’s probably given up and gone back himself, by now.”

“We’ve only got one horse and a few bullets,” Call reminded him. “We’d never make it back across this plain.”

Gus realized that what Call said was true. He wished Bigfoot was there—not much fazed Bigfoot. He missed the big scout.

“Maybe Bigfoot ain’t dead,” he said.

“I hope he ain’t,” Call said.

BIGFOOT WASN’T DEAD. As the storm was playing out, he lay down and pressed his face into the grass, to protect his eyes. The grass was wet—its coolness on his eyelids was some relief. While cooling his eyelids, he went to sleep. In the night he rolled over—the first sunlight on his eyelids brought a searing pain.

Gus and Call were sleeping when they heard loud moans. Bigfoot had wandered about a half a mile from them before lying down.

When they approached him he had his head down, his eyes pressed against his arms.

“It’s like snow blindness, only worse,” he told them. “I been snow blind—it’ll go away, in time. Maybe this will, too.”

“I expect it will,” Call said. Bigfoot was so sensitive to light that he had to keep his eyes completely covered.

“You need to make me blinders,” Bigfoot said. “Blinders—and the thicker the better. Then put me on the horse.”

Until that moment Call and Gus had both forgotten the horse, which was nowhere in sight.I

“I don’t see that horse,” Gus said. “We might have lost him.”

“One of you go find him,” Bigfoot said. “Otherwise you’ll have to lead me.”

“You go find him,” Call said, to Gus. “I’ll stay with Bigfoot.”

“What if I find the horse and can’t find you two?” Gus asked. The plain was featureless. He knew it to be full of dips and rolls, but once he got a certain distance away, one dip and roll was much like another. He might not be able to find his way back to Call and Bigfoot.

“I’ll go, then,” Call said. “You stay.”

“He won’t be far,” Bigfoot said. “He was too tired to run far.”

That assessment proved correct. Call found the horse only about a mile away, grazing. Call had been painstakingly trying to keep his directions—he didn’t want to lose his companions—and was relieved when he saw the horse so close.

By the time he got back, Gus had made Bigfoot a blindfold out of an old shirt. It took some adjusting—the slightest ray of light on his eyelids made Bigfoot moan. They ate the last of their horse meat, and drank often during the day’s march from the puddles here and there on the prairie. Toward the end of the day, Call shot a goose, floating alone in one such small puddle.

“A goose that’s by itself is probably sick,” Bigfoot said, but they ate the goose anyway. They came to a creek with a few bushes and some small trees around it and were able to make a fire. The smell of the cooking goose made them all so hungry they could not sit still—they wanted to rip the goose off its spit before it was ready, and yet they also had a great desire to eat cooked food. Bigfoot, who couldn’t see but could certainly smell, asked Gus and Call several times if the bird was almost ready. It was still half raw when they ate it, and yet, to all of them, it tasted better than any bird they had ever eaten. Bigfoot even cracked the bones, to get at the marrow.

“It’s mountain man’s butter,” he said. “Once you get a taste for it you don’t see why people bother to churn. It’s better just to crack a bone.”

“Yeah, but you might not have a bone,” Gus said. “The bone might still be in the animal.”

Bigfoot kept his eyes tightly bandaged, but he no longer moaned so much.

“What will you do if you’re blind from now on, Big?” Gus asked.Call felt curious about the same thing, but did not feel it was appropriate to ask. Bigfoot Wallace had roamed the wilderness all his life; his survival had often depended on keenness of eye. A blind man would not last long, in the wilderness. Bigfoot could scout no more —he would have to leave off scouting the troops. It would be a sad change, if it happened.

“Oh, I expect I’ll get over being scorched,” Bigfoot said.

Gus said no more, but the question still hung in the air.

Bigfoot reflected for several minutes, before commenting further.

“If I’m blind, it will be good-bye to the prairies,” he said. “I expect I’d have to move to town and run a whorehouse.”

“Why a whorehouse?” Gus asked.

“Well, I couldn’t see the merchandise, but I could feel it,” Bigfoot said. “Feel it and smell it and poke it.”

“I been in whorehouses when I was too drunk to see much, anyway,” he added. “You don’t have to look to enjoy whores.”

“Speaking of whores, I wonder what they’re like in Santa Fe?” Gus asked. Eating the goose had raised his spirits considerably. He felt sure that the worst was over. He had even argued to Call that the reason the goose had been so easy to shoot was that it was a tame goose that had run off from a nearby farm.

“No, it was a sick goose,” Call insisted. “There wouldn’t be a farm around here. It’s too dry.”

Despite his friend’s skepticism, Gus had begun to look forward to the delights of Santa Fe, one of which would undoubtedly be whores.

“You can’t afford no whore, even if we get there alive,” Bigfoot reminded him.

“I guess I could get a job, until the Colonel shows up,” Gus said. “Then we can rob the Mexicans and have plenty of money.”

“I don’t know if the Colonel will make it,” Bigfoot said. “I expect he’ll starve, or else turn back.”

That night, their horse was stolen. They were such a pitiful trio that no one had thought to stand guard. Eating the goose had put them all in a relaxed mood. The horse, in any case, was a poor one. It had never recovered fully from the wild chase after the buffalo. Its wind was broken; it plodded slowly along, carrying Bigfoot. Still, it had been their only mount—their only resource in more ways than one. They all knew that they might need to eat it, if they didn’t make the settlements soon now. The goose had been a stroke of luck—there might not be another.

Call had hobbled the horse, to make sure it didn’t graze so far that he would have to risk getting lost by going to look for it in the morning. They called the horse Moonlight, because of his light coat. Before Call slept he heard Moonlight grazing, not far away. It was a reassuring sound; but then he slept. When he woke, the hobbles had been cut and there was no sign of Moonlight. The three of them were alone on the prairie.