Sidewinder (2 page)

Big trouble.

He loosened his rifle in its boot and slapped the butt of his Colt .45. The Winchester was on half cock, with a shell in the chamber.

He let out his breath and began following the tracks. They led downward on an angle, away from the small mesa, and the ground was so uneven, rocky, and bramble-strewn that he could not see very far ahead. He leaned back against the cantle of his saddle as his horse descended down the steep slope, picking its way carefully over rough terrain.

The sky to the west was strewn with lavender clouds, their underbellies the soft pink of salmon. The sun was setting, and there was not much time if he was going to rescue that cantankerous cow and drive her back to his ranch. There was moisture in the wolf’s tracks, but the cow’s hoof marks were already turning dry.

In the distance, a red-tailed hawk sailed over the pine tops, its head turning from side to side as it hunted prey.

The loaves of clouds to the west began turning to ash, while the skyline glowed like a blacksmith’s forge. When the sun set, he knew, the air would turn freezing cold and the green mountains would turn into huge lumps of lampblack.

Brad awoke the following morning, determined to find the missing cow. By noon he hadn’t had any luck. Above him, jays flitted through the trees like scraps of blue sky fluttering through the green branches of the pines. They were almost silent, but Brad was aware of them, his senses honed to a fine edge. A man alone in the wild had to be a part of it, or its wildness could devour him. There were cougars and bears in that part of the country, not to mention rattlesnakes and humans less attuned to nature than he was, nim rod hunters who shot at sounds without seeing the animal itself.

He gave his horse its head as it picked its way down-slope, Brad’s gaze on the cow and wolf tracks, reining only when necessary to stay on track. The stillness rose up around him, that stillness that comes when a man is totally alone in the wild, the stillness of ancient mountains and desolate regions where few men venture.

He rode onto a wide shelf of grassy land that was still moist from the runoff of a recent rain. The tracks were well-defined, and he read them as if they were headlines in a newspaper. The cow’s hoofprints had drained of most of the moisture, while the wolf’s were still wet, glistening in the light as if painted in quicksilver. The wolf had not started to run yet, and it was obvious that the cow had been snatching tufts of grass along the way, as if it had some predetermined destination in mind.

The shelf gradually sloped down to a swale thick with tall waving grasses and a tangle of berry bushes. He heard the cow before he saw her. She was bawling from somewhere down below, and he heard the snarl of the wolf, saw its movement through the high grass.

Brad yelled out and headed his horse toward the sound of the bawling cow. It was tough going, and the cow’s cries grew louder. He rode up and felt his horse stumble. He heard the splash of water and the faint trickle of a stream. He saw the dam then, a beaver dam across a small stream. The cow was wallowing in deep water just below it, and the wolf was at her neck. Brad hauled in on the reins and dropped to the ground. He drew his pistol so fast, it was a dark blur. He took two steps and the wolf’s head rose up for just a second. He saw the slavering jaws, the bloodlust in the wolf’s feral eyes. He thumbed back the hammer on his single-action Colt .45 and the pistol roared, spitting sparks and flame. The wolf’s head jerked with the impact of the lead ball, and the animal tumbled into the stream, turning the water crimson.

Brad slid the pistol back in its holster and took another step. The ground slid out from beneath him, and he heard the ominous sound of a rattlesnake, so loud he thought the sound was coming from inside his own head.

He slid into a deep hidden hole five yards from where the brindle cow was floundering to get out, and that’s when he saw the coiled rattler atop a flat rock right next to the sinkhole. As he kept sliding toward the cow, the rattler struck, a scaled lightning bolt with its jaws open, fangs catching the sunlight, gleaming like surgical needles.

Brad lashed out a hand at the snake as it struck for his throat. The snake’s mouth closed on his hand, burying its fangs in the soft flesh of the heel. Brad rolled over, grasping at the snake’s head with his left hand, pinning its body beneath his leg. He pulled the head and fangs away from his hand, dug a thumb into its neck, a spot just behind its head, dug his fingernail into the scaly flesh, pushing, pushing inward with all of his strength, severing the hard crust of its skin until he dug into its flesh. He sawed back and forth with his thumbnail as the snake writhed beneath him, its tail, with its rattles, banging against his boot.

The brindle cow lurched from its wet sinkhole and lumbered off, with mud up over its hocks, bawling in terror as the sound of the snake’s clattering rattles shattered the silence of the afternoon. Sunlight played in the tops of the trees, the pines dancing with hand shadows as Brad bore down with his thumb, burrowing deep into the snake’s gullet, severing veins and gristle, choking off the serpent’s airway, his hand soaked with fluid. He felt no pain from the bite. The snake struggled to break Brad’s grip, turning its head so that Brad could see into its slitted yellow eyes, feel the forked tongue flicking against his fingers like something that crawled out of the night into a man’s dreams, causing him to shiver with its malevolent electricity.

Brad slid his index finger from his left hand into the snake’s mouth, pried its head back as he continued to crush its neck and drive his fingernail deeper into its rippling flesh. The snake thrashed and struggled, but the fangs lifted from the twin holes in the back of Brad’s hand. The puslike venom continued to shoot out from its hollow fangs, a milky flow with a yellowish cast.

He pinched the snake’s jaws together, held the head clamped between thumb and forefinger, then drew his knife from its scabbard. He severed the head from the body with one swipe, let the head fall to the ground between his legs. He took the knife and sliced a furrow between the two holes left by the snake’s fangs, sheathed his knife and began to bunch up the skin around the new wound. Venom oozed from his hand. He shook it, squeezed it, then sucked out the small gouts he could still see around the twin holes.

He felt movement beneath him. The snake’s body was still whipping and writhing, but the ground was also slipping down in a slow slide. He looked up behind him and saw the boulders beginning to move as well. One was teetering on a precarious perch. The ground was eroded, and there were rivulets of earth where once water had coursed. He slid even farther, and dropped the still wriggling snake and tried to turn over, claw his way out of the brush and loose shale.

His hand stung now, and he felt a numbness in his fingers. The sun was dipping ever lower behind the distant mountain peaks, the sky a pagan blaze of bronze and steel, flaring rays that torched the clouds as others turned to ocher dust and mourning ashes.

The boulders shifted and jostled against one another. The pebbles beneath him, caught by falling dirt and sand, slid down toward the depression in the earth. The first trickle became a torrent, and the boulders lost their footing and toppled. Gravity pulled at them, and they rumbled down, rolled and jumped like objects suddenly freed. The rocks crackled and boomed. A medium-sized boulder leaped into the air and came crashing down on Brad’s head.

He felt the blow, the sharp sting as his scalp opened up, and then he saw an explosion of bright stars and the sunset smearing into a gaudy blur. He sank from consciousness like the very stone that struck him and descended into an obsidian abyss, a darkness so black it wrenched the stars from the sky and oblitered all light and color.

Brad floated in that fathomless deep of sleep, sinking ever downward into a peaceful sea of oblivion while the boulders rumbled into the small gully and came to rest under mangled branches, releasing the fragrance of crushed leaves and dank soil as the sun slid behind a distant snowcapped peak and the shadow of dusk spread across the land.

The brindle cow broke into a trot at the noise and stopped when it was over, panting, sides heaving, rubbery nose twitching. Alone in the spreading darkness, it lifted its head and bawled at the sky until nothing was left of its bellow but a low grunt of despair.

The cow was alone, and its taste for grass left somewhere on the hillside, far from its home.

Felicity Storm stood on the front porch of the log house, staring up at the hills, the lowering sun. She was a firm, wiry woman with raven hair and hazel eyes, a patrician nose, the sculpted features of a Grecian goddess. But, there was a worried shadow flickering in her eyes as she spotted Julio driving cattle down to the pasture already filled with the grazing herd standing like statues in an ocean of grama grass. She wondered why Brad wasn’t with Julio, and the worry lines around her eyes deepened as she squinted into the falling sun.

She stooped over, her simple cotton dress flowing with the bending of her knees, clinging to her girlish form like running water. She picked up the wicker basket and tucked it under one arm, glided down the steps until her sandals touched ground. She walked to the side of the house where the clothesline danced with the dried parchments of her washing: sheets, underclothes, shirts and blouses, linens, all white, like unmarred documents. She kept her eyes on the hillside beyond the driven cattle, searching for Brad. She thought he might be chasing in a stray and would appear at any moment, framed against the pines and spruce like a conquering warrior returning from a long journey.

Carlos Renaldo came around the side of the house lugging a burlap bag over one shoulder. He, too, was looking in Julio’s direction, a worried frown on his face. He passed close to Felicity and stopped.

“I dug some potatoes for you,” he said. “I will put them in the house.”

“Just set them on the porch, Carlos. Did you get some for yourself?”

“Yes,” he said. “Where is Brad? He is not with Julio, and Julio has the cows that ran away.”

“I don’t know,” she said, lifting a pair of long johns from the line, folding them before putting them in the basket. “Maybe . . .”

She did not finish her thought because she saw the worry in Carlos’s face. He worshipped her husband, she knew, and his concern was genuine. She bit her lip and scrunched up her face, wondering if she even had an idea of where Brad could be. If one of the cows strayed, she thought that he would surely send Julio to chase it down. That should be Brad driving the cows back to pasture, not Julio.

“I will take the potatoes,” Carlos said, and went on his way toward the front porch.

Julio took off his hat and waved the cattle down into the pasture. The cows took off at a run and joined the grazing herd as if they were long-lost relatives returning to home and family.

The breeze stiffened, and Felicity saw the leaves on the birch trees jiggle and flash various shades of green down by the creek. The clothes flapped mindlessly on the line, sounding like a chorus of whips, and she grabbed a sheet that was beginning to slide off, rolled it into a ball, and dropped it into the basket. The breeze was warm at first, then began to cool as the sun’s rim glowed fiery orange just above the mountain skyline to the west, painting the long stretch of clouds a pastel pink on their underbellies while their tops faded to an ashen gray. Shadows crawled along the valley, and the canyons blackened into deep repositories of soft coal.

Felicity quickly pulled all the dry clothes from the line and stuffed them in her basket as Julio rode up to her, his face gray with shadow, the blazing sunset at his back.

“Where’s Brad?” she asked, a chunk of her heart caught in her throat, the remains pumping like a trip-hammer in her chest.

“He was following the track of the brindle cow. The cow, she strayed, and he went to get her.” He looked back over his shoulder at the dark pines on the hilltop and beyond, into the unknown. “I think he will come back soon.”