Dead Man's Walk

Call and Gus found guns aplenty—each took two muskets and grabbed some bullet pouches. While Call was looking for a hammer, the bear came ripping through the side of Salazar’s tent. The black horse was twisting wildly at the end of the rawhide rope it had been tethered with. As the Texans watched, the bear swiped at the horse, as it had at Manuel. The black gelding fell as if shot, the grizzly on top of it.

“Let’s go, while it eats that horse,” Bigfoot said. He had a pistol and a rifle.

“I didn’t know a bear could knock down a horse,” Gus said. “I’m glad to be leaving, myself.”

“A bear can knock down anything,” Bigfoot said. “It could knock down an elephant if it met one—it et the Captain’s supper and now it’s carrying off his horse.”

As they watched, the great bear sank its teeth into the neck of the dead gelding, lifted it, and moved with it into the darkness. It dragged the horse over the top of the old cook, Manuel, as it moved away from the camp that was no longer a camp, just a few sputtering campfires with gear piled around them. Not a single Mexican was visible as the Texans left.

“That bear done us a fine turn,” Bigfoot said. “They’d have marched us till our feet came off, if he hadn’t come along and scared this little army away.”

Call was remembering how easily the bear had lifted the horse and moved away with it. The black gelding had been heavy, too, yet the bear had made off with it as easily as a coyote would make off with a kitten.

The snow continued to fall—once they got behind the circle of firelight, it was very dark.

“The bear went toward the hills,” Bigfoot said. “Let’s leave the hills—maybe we can catch one or two of them mules, in the morning.

Gus reached down to adjust his leg iron, and for a second had the fear that he had lost his companions.

“Hold on, boys, don’t leave me,” he said.

“By God, this is a thick night if I ever saw one,” Bigfoot said. “We’d better hold on to one another’s belts, or we’ll all be traveling single, pretty soon.”

They huddled together, took their belts off, and strung them out—Bigfoot in the lead; Call at the rear.

“We don’t even know which way we’re walking,” Call said. “We could be walking right back to Santa Fe. They’ll just catch us again, if we’re not careful.”

“I know which way I’m walking,” Bigfoot said. “I’m walking dead away from a mad grizzly bear.”

“He won’t be so bad, once he eats that horse,” Gus said.

“It’s just one horse—he might not be satisfied,” Bigfoot said. “He might want a Tennessean or two, for dessert. I say we keep plodding—we can worry about the Mexicans tomorrow.” “That suits me,” Call said.

THE THREE RANGERS WALKED through the snow all night, clinging to one another’s belts. All of them thought of the bear. It had killed a large horse with one swipe of its paw. Call remembered the flash of its teeth as it whirled toward Salazar’s tent. Gus remembered seeing several men shoot at the bear—he didn’t suppose they had missed, at such short range, and yet the bear had given not the slightest indication that it felt the bullets.

“I hope we’re going away from it,” Gus said, several times. “I hope we ain’t going toward it.”

“It won’t matter which way we’re going, if it wants us,” Bigfoot informed him. “Bears can track you by smell. If it wanted us it could be ten feet behind us, right now. They move quiet, unless they’re mad, like that one was. I had a friend got killed by a bear out by Fort Worth—I found his remains myself, although I didn’t find the bear.”

Having delivered himself of that piece of information, Bigfoot said no more.“Well, what about it?” Gus asked, exasperated. “If you found him, what’s the story?”

“Oh, you’re talking about Willy, my friend that got kilt by the bear?” Bigfoot said. “It was on the Trinity River—I figured it out from the tracks. Willy was sitting there fishing, and the bear walked up behind him so quiet Willy never even had a notion a bear was anywhere around—that’s how quiet they are, when they’re stalking you.”

“So … tell us … was he torn up bad?” Call asked. He too was annoyed with Bigfoot’s habit of starting stories and failing to finish them.

“Yes, he was mostly et—the bear even et his belt buckle,” Bigfoot said. “He had a double eagle made into a belt buckle. I always admired that belt buckle and was planning to take it, since Willy was dead anyway and didn’t have no kinfolks that I knew of. But the dern bear ate it, along with most of Willy.”

“Maybe he fancied the taste of the belt,” Gus suggested. The notion that a bear could be ten feet behind him, stalking them, was a notion he couldn’t manage to get comfortable with. He turned around to look so many times, as they wffked, that by morning his neck was sore from all the twisting. The> night was so dark he couldn’t have seen the bear even if it had been close enough to bite him—but he couldn’t get Bigfoot’s story off his mind, and couldn’t keep himself from looking around.

The dawn was soupy and cold—the snow turned to a heavy drizzle, and the plains were foggy. They had nothing to eat and had had no luck pounding their chains off with the few rocks they could find. The rocks broke, but the chains held. Exasperated beyond restraint, Bigfoot Wallace tried to shoot his chain off, only to have the musket ball ricochet off the chain and pass through the lower part of his leg.

“Missed the bone, or I’d be done for,” Bigfoot remarked grimly, examining the wound he had foolishly given himself.

Gus had been about to try and shoot his chain in two, but changed his mind when he saw what happened to Bigfoot.

“We ought to stop and wait for clearer weather—we could be headed for Canada, I guess,” Bigfoot said. “There’s bad Indians up in Canada—the Sioux, they call themselves. I don’t want to go marching in that direction.“Nonetheless, they didn’t stop. Memory of captivity was fresh, and kept them moving. The need to stay warm was also a factor—they had nothing to eat, and no fire to sit by. Waiting would only have meant getting colder.

The fog gradually thinned—by noon, they could see the tops of the mountains again. In midafternoon the sky cleared and the Rangers saw to their relief that they had been moving south, as they had hoped. They were far out on the plain, not a tree or shrub in sight.

“I hope that bear don’t spot us,” Gus said.

Though the fog and drizzle had been depressing, at least they had given them a little sense of protection; now they felt exposed— Indians on the one side, a grizzly bear on the other.

“I see somebody,” Bigfoot said, pointing to two dots on the prairie, west, toward the mountains. “Maybe it’s trappers. If it is, we’re in luck.”

“Trappers always have grub,” he added.

The two dots, however, turned out to be two of the Mexican soldiers—two young boys, not more than fifteen, who had happened to flee the bear in the same directions the Texans had taken —they were cold, hungry, and lost. Neither of them were armed. When they saw the Texans marching up, well armed, they both held up their hands, expecting to be killed on the spot.

“What do we do, boys?” Bigfoot asked. “Shoot ‘em or take ‘em with us?”

“We don’t need to shoot them,” Call said. “They can’t hurt us. I expect they should just go home.”

The two boys were named Juan and Jose. One of them, Call remembered, had tended the nanny goats that supplied Captain Salazar his milk.

“You’re going in the wrong direction, boys,” Bigfoot told them. He pointed north, toward the village they had started from.

“Vamoose,” he said. “We ain’t got time for conversation.”

The two boys, though, refused to leave them. When the Rangers started south, they followed, though at a respectful distance.