killed the only man that ever cared for me,” she said. “And now you’ve killed me.”
They were the first words that he had heard her speak.
As the ice sank lower, carrying her downstream, and the black freezing water rose over her legs and hips, she called out to him again: “From now on, you will drift like a blind man between the worlds, not knowing if you’re dead or alive, or if the unseen world exists, or if you’re dreaming. Three times you will disappear to yourself and all that you know, and three times you will—”
She said something more, but he was unable to hear the words as she slowly sank beneath the ice.
When the days became longer and formations of geese and ducks flew overhead, Zebulon cinched his pelts on the backs of his two mules and rode off on his horse. He was a tall, raw-boned man drifting through the mountains in greasy buckskins, with matted yellow hair falling over his shoulders, his gnarled trunk scarred top to bottom from knife and arrowhead wounds, as well as wounds secret and unimaginable.
That year the rendezvous was held along the Purgatory River, at the end of a narrow valley dotted with clumps of cottonwood and stunted alder. As Zebulon walked his horse toward the sprawling camp of half-starved Indians and drunken mountain men, he was confronted by an ancient Arapahoe squaw wearing a top hat and a dirty brown blanket thrown over a long red skirt. In one hand she held a large war club made of an elk’s horn, in the other, a rattle. As he guided his horse around her, a luminous veil of smoky light shivered down her body. He thought of Not Here Not There, staring at him with angry, accusing eyes. As he looked closer, her shape dissolved into a mulatto woman with high cheek bones and finally, into the frozen death mask of a white-haired Mexican crone.
The Arapahoe laughed at his fear. Shaking her rattle, she circled him three times until he finally lost consciousness and fell headfirst off his horse. When he struggled to his feet, his body covered with mud, the Arapahoe was gone as if she had never been there in the first place.
He continued toward the camp, his spirits revived by long whoops and gun shots as the assembled traded pelts for supplies, swapped horses, gambled, and brawled. He had earned the right to let it all bust out, he promised himself, no matter that tight-assed company agents were offering only two months credit for supplies—including whiskey, coffee, and gunpowder—that no mountain man, particularly this one, could live without. Or that he knew the talk around the campfires no longer would be about who had been scalped or gone under or who had done what to whom and for what. Nossir. On this particular night he was in no mood to hear about the collapse of the fur trade, or the booming California gold rush, or the wave of ignorant flatlanders that were spreading across the mountains like a plague of locusts, or the last days of the free-trapper, when a mountain man could ride wherever he wanted and perform any sort of mischief that suited him. A way of life that was being replaced by sinkhole towns and know-nothing Eastern greenhorns honking the arrival of civilization and the dictates of the Sabbath—none of which, at least for him and his kind, were even remotely possible. Nossir, he announced again. This mountain lunatic was going to sink his teeth into what was directly in front of him and chew the pleasures of this particular rendezvous to the bone. Ready or not.
After he accepted a low cash offer for his pelts, he drank himself toward oblivion. His spirits raised to the frothy brim, he engaged in a tomahawk-throwing contest followed by several rounds of three-card monte, then a hurried poke with a Pawnee squaw, and, with a dozen other mountain desperadoes, a wild free-for-all in the greasy mud that came to a sudden end when a crazed Polack tried to bite off his lower lip.
“Hoorah fer mountain doin’s!” Zebulon shouted, smashing the Polack’s nose halfway into his skull and kicking out what was left of his teeth. The two men then staggered arm in arm to join other lunatics sitting around a fire, smoking and drinking firewater by the bank of the swollen Purgatory. They drank straight through the night, the river roaring past them high on the spring flood as they stuffed sloppy buffalo innards down their wet throats, singing and swapping a winter’s worth of windy lies and tall tales.
The next morning he hoofed his way through a drumthumping, fiddle-scratching fandango, then played poker around a torn blanket spread over the frozen ground. He won more than he had any right to, considering that he was unable to make out the numbers on the cards.
“Bad is best,” he yelled, slamming down one winning card after another. In previous years, he wouldn’t have stopped until he had lost his entire winter haul and found himself buried in debt to the Fur Company. That was the all-or-nothing code that he had always lived up to. Another year always came around, and when his pouch was finally empty and his body bruised and broken, he would head back to the mountains to hunt and heal himself and move on, to drift wherever the wind and his raw instincts took him. It was a grand free-for-all life that he took for granted, one that he never thought would end. But this year was different, and he had just enough presence of mind to sell one of his mules and ride out before he lost it all. Things end, he told himself as he pondered his options. Stealing and raising horses—he was skilled and experienced for that, enough to secure a cattle ranch on the headwaters of the Green. Or maybe he could make a stab at the California gold rush, even though that greedy stampede was at the bottom of his possibles list. In any case, he wasn’t getting younger; hell, he was near thirty-five, or was it forty? He had never counted the years and his folks had never bothered to tell him. But one way or the other, he was riding down a river of no return on a leaky raft, a sloping drift headed for the rapids unless he figured out how to change. His mind was wandering, his body wasn’t what it used to be, and more and more he felt the ominous presence of a dark shadow looming up behind him.
~ ~ ~
On his way back to the mountains, he planned to give himself the luxury of a pause in Panchito, a squalid high-desert settlement that he had hid out in more than once—gut shot or on the run from a war party or a round of horse-thieving from one of the sprawling Spanish ranches south of Santa Fe. It was a place where he could wet his beak and lay out with a seasoned whore without worrying about being drilled in the back or skinned in a crooked poker game.
Two days outside of Panchito a storm slammed down from the north and twice he was blown off his saddle by gusts of ice-blue wind and sleet that slashed against his cheeks like razor blades. Not able to make camp because of the rocky terrain, he let his horse and mule drift beyond boundaries or any sense of direction. Several times he looked back as if he were being followed, but nothing moved beyond the heavy scrim of falling snow. When he finally reached a sheltered hollow he picketed the horse and mule and burrowed into a snowdrift, covering himself with a buffalo robe.
The next day the storm passed and he continued on through heavy drifts, his moccasins and leggings frozen solid, the eyes of his half-dead horse and mule covered with icy sleet. In the evening the skies parted and he could see the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, their cold vermilion peaks promising a measure of deliverance, enough anyway, to keep him plowing on toward Panchito and a rest-up in the town’s two-bit cantina.
The promise of refuge ended with a low rumble followed by a rushing mass of up-rooted trees, rocks, and snow that swept him off his horse as easily as a matchstick tossed over a waterfall. Running, tumbling head over heels, he rolled along the edge of the boiling avalanche until he landed in a deep drift.
Half conscious, he lay spread-eagled on his back, waiting for a second eruption or last exhale, whichever came first. He wasn’t exactly a stranger when it came to facing the misty beyond, or the jornada del muerto, as he had heard death referred to south of the border. There had been other times: when he’d been lost and half frozen in a blizzard, wounded in more than one saloon shoot-out, nearly scalped by an Apache war party, fallen headfirst off a butte, to name a few.
He was interrupted by a second avalanche that sounded, as it roared upon him, like a dam busting loose. Slammed forward, more
