Authors: Terry C. Johnston
By the time they drew close to the Sangre de Cristos, Scratch imagined he could actually smell the burning piñon on the cold winter air in the gray light of a rosy dawn. At the knob of a hill they halted, their noses greeted with more of that smoke carried on a wind working its way out of the north, their eyes falling on the welcome sight of those clusters of mud-and-wattle huts, those neat rows of adobe homes arranged along a maze of narrow streets, all of them nestled across a whitewashed, snowy landscape.
McAfferty took in a deep breath, sighing. “
’Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them. Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and He delivered them out of their distresses. And He led them forth by the right way, that they might go to a city of habitation. ’”
Watching the keen fire in the man’s icy-blue eyes, Scratch shuddered with a gust of that cold wind and followed the white-head down the snowy slope.
Los Ranchos de Taos was the first village the trappers reached at the bottom of the broadening valley. Beyond it lay the largest of the local villages—San Fernando de Taos—lightly veiled this sunup by a low cloud of firesmoke. Farther still they could make out the squat buildings of San Geronimo de los Taos.
“I’ll lay it’s San Fernando where Jack Hatcher and his boys brung you,” Asa proclaimed, pointing out the prominent church steeple.
“We didn’t come in to town all that much,” Bass admitted. “Stayed out to Workman’s place, mostly. When we first come in, he said it was a far sight better if we didn’t show our faces in town too much. After we went for them women took by the Comanche—things was better for us.”
“‘And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself,’”
Asa quoted.
Wagging his head, Titus declared, “Much as they appreciated what we done, them greasers wasn’t about to
treat us like one of their own. ’Specially after that fight we had with them soldiers.”
“We’ll go round and lay up at Workman’s our own selves,” McAfferty instructed. “Be best we don’t make too much a show of ourselves. Not just yet. Till that whiskey maker tells us what be the temper of these here greasers.”
As they reined away from the road leading into San Fernando, Bass gazed longingly at the buildings still shuttered against the cold of the winter night, at the piñon and pine garlands draping the doorways and windows, at those ghostly wisps of smoke starting to curl from the chimneys of each low-roofed house as its inhabitants began their day.
“They prepare for our Lord’s blessed birthday,” McAfferty commented as they pitched toward the hills west of town. “Even these Mex celebrate the Lord’s sacred birth, Mr. Bass. Might’n be some hope for these people yet.”
A land of extreme contrasts this: dotted with flowering valleys in the spring, shadowed by high, snowcapped peaks year-round, with green rolling meadows butting up against the sun-baked hardpan, desert wastes speckled only with cactus, lizard, and scorpion. Along the banks of each of the infrequent streams grew borders of cottonwood sinking their roots deep to soak up the gypsum-tainted water that rumbled through the bowels of many an unaccustomed American come fresh from the States.
Here in dawn’s first light the snowy valley lay like a rumpled, cultured-folk bedsheet, rising unevenly toward the purple bulk of the surrounding foothills, farther still to that deep cadmium red of those slopes the sun’s first rising would soon ignite, mountainsides timbered with the emerald cloak of piñon, blue spruce, and fragrant cedar. How quickly the light changed as night gave way to day, as deep hues softened and the last of winter’s stars flickered out in the brightening sky right overhead.
The bruised-eye black of night faded around them, and Scratch said, “Caleb and them others, they didn’t tell me much at all ’bout the time you run with ’em.”
“Some men keep their own counsel, Mr. Bass,” McAfferty eventually replied.
“Will you tell me?”
Asa turned to look at Bass for several moments, then answered. “Been trapping for two years already by the time I hooked up with Johnny Rowland, Jack Hatcher, and the rest in Taos. That first season we worked our way north across the Arkansas.”
“That’s a good bunch,” Bass said.
“Johnny Rowland,” McAfferty said with fond remembrance. “Now, he’s a Welshman—almost like me own kin. Yes, I took to Rowland, right off.”
Two years of trapping and Indian fighting, wenching and wintering in Taos, found the free trappers up close to Arikara country.
Asa clucked. “Them critters never really took to a white man, Mr. Bass.” Then he growled bitterly, “
’Let death seize upon them, and let them go down quick into hell: for wickedness is in their dwellings, and among them.’”
Jack Hatcher’s brigade made the mistake of crossing the homebound path of a Ree war party returning from raids in Sioux country to the south. When both sides drew up, keeping their wary distance, the warriors signed that they sought only to trade with the white men. In order to buy themselves some time to slip off after dark, the trappers said they would open their packs—but not till morning.
“Night come on, and us fellers all gathered up round our li’l fire we made inside our packs where we figgered to fort up there at the edge of that Ree camp, ever’one of us ready for what be coming—knowing Rees’re good ones for hair stealing.”
Hatcher and McAfferty sent Joseph Little out to determine just how well the Arikara had them surrounded. He returned well after darkness with distressing news that there lay but one path for making good their escape without alerting the enemy. In the dark that would take them along a narrow prairie goat trail that switchbacked up the side of a thousand-foot bluff.
Bass exclaimed, “Sounds to be your powder was damp!”
With his mitten Asa smoothed his long white beard.
“‘Though a host shall camp against me, my heart shall not fear. And now shall my head he lifted up above my enemies round about me. Deliver me not over unto the will of my enemies.’”
But just as the trappers were gathering at their fire to lay plans for their flight, who should show up to speak to McAfferty but the war party’s medicine man himself, signing that he wanted to speak with Asa alone. The two stepped away toward the black belly of the timber, stopping just beyond the ring of faint firelight, in that darkened no-man’s-land between the two groups.
“When we got stopped in the dark, off from the other coons, that Ree nigger made it plain he wanted me Bible!” McAfferty roared in indignation. “
’Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them; I am the Lord your God!’”
“What happed?” Scratch asked. “Did that nigger get your Bible?”
“When I told him he wasn’t ’bout to get my Bible—the heathen tried to rip the book right outta me pouch—signing that he wanted the power of me own medicine!”
When McAfferty refused a second time, the Indian threatened that he would have the Bible before sunrise anyway … along with Asa’s scalp, which he said he would hang from his belt pouch.
“‘And they shall no more be a prey to the heathen, neither shall the beast of the land devour them; but they shall dwell safely, and none shall make them afraid,’”
Asa declared. “I wasn’t ’bout to be buffaloed by no red nigger. No matter he was a medicine man or not!”
But the trapper’s strong protests caused the Arikara to explode. At that moment the Indian suddenly yanked out his tomahawk, lunging in close … but McAfferty was just a little faster with his skinning knife.
“Parted that red nigger’s ribs, I did,” Asa admitted, patting the handle to his knife. Then he shuddered slightly, although the air had begun to warm with the sun’s coming.
“Dropped him where we stood.
’And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death.’
But … I didn’t take his scalp, Mr. Bass. I left him be where he fell.”
“You raised them Apaches’ hair. Why didn’t you take
his
hair?” Titus inquired.
“That was afore I knowed better.” Then McAfferty turned to gaze at Bass with a mortified look. “I wasn’t ’bout to cut off the hair of no medicine man! There’s been many a thing I done in my life I’m sure the Lord don’t look kindly upon … but I wasn’t gonna raise the scalp of a medicine man, Mr. Bass.”
“Way it looks, your horn was empty.”
“By damned—I was in a proper fix then and there,” McAfferty agreed. “
’Yet the Lord will command his loving-kindness in the daytime, and in the night his song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life.’”
“How’d you come to get your leg outta that trap you fixed to close around it?”
“Shaking just like the trembling earth come Judgment Day, I creeped on back to our camp and told them others real quietlike what just happened with the medicine man. Said I knowed for sure now the Rees was getting blackened up for morning. But Hatcher, Rowland, Kinkead, and the rest acted like they wasn’t listening to me—all of ’em just looked at me with the queer on their faces.”
Titus nodded. “They told me how you come back with your hair turned white.”
Slapping the top of his thigh, Asa said, “Damn if my head weren’t as white as the fur on a winter snowshoe hare! And that sure scared all them boys something fierce.”
Scratch asked, “Didn’t it scare you none?”
McAfferty quietly replied, “I was more scared than all the rest put together. I’d be damned for crucifying through all eternity if I didn’t admit it was the truth. The Almighty Hisself had turned my head to white—done it to show me the power of the Holy Ghost! ’For
the Lord most high is terrible; He is a great King over all the earth.’
It was plain as paint to me, Mr. Bass: Asa McAfferty had set his foot
on evil ground! I figgered I’d even had a hand in setting free them Rees, the devil’s own hellions, myself.”
“Hatcher said you all made tracks that night.”
“Somehow we got our horses up the side of that canyon in the dark and slipped off ’thout getting caught by them Rees. But it never were them warriors I was ’fraid of while we was running south.”
“What?”
“It were them evil spirits I could feel all round me—clawing at my shoulder, breathing on my neck, hanging just at the corner of me eye every time I turned to look.”
“Ghosts?”
“Maybeso,” he eventually answered as they reached the foothills. “They was the spirits from the beyond, Mr. Bass. The same spirits that ol’ Ree medicine man was carrying with him … them devil’s whelps what come after me then and wasn’t ’bout to let go their hold on me.
’Wilt thou shew wonders to the dead? Shall the dead arise and praise thee?’”
“Sounds like you was more scared of them spirits than you was scared of that Ree war party what was bound to be coming after you.”
“Abominations, Mr. Bass!” he began with a voice that shriveled to an ominous quiet. “Asa McAfferty ain’t never been ’fraid of anything he can see. What I can’t see be the only thing what scares Asa McAfferty!”
As they picked their way across the snowy landscape toward Workman’s caverns, he went on to explain to Bass how the trappers had galloped south from Arikara country. Weeks and many miles later, a restless, frightened Asa split off from the rest, and returned to Taos for the winter. The next spring he ventured north on his own.
“For the first time I liked the lonesome. And for the most part I been alone ever since I kill’t that medicine man.
’And the soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits, and after wizards, to go a whoring after them, I will even set my face against that soul, and will cut him off from among his people.’”
McAfferty was quiet for a long time as they pushed on, expectant of the sun’s appearance on the mountain
peaks above them. Finally he sighed when they came to a clattering halt on the rim of the prairie looking down at the canyon where Workman had erected his distillery. “Ever since that winter, seems most white fellers I run onto don’t take to traveling with a man what speaks the Bible, a nigger like me what begs the Lord for forgiveness ever’ day and night. I s’pose such folks just don’t care to be with a man who listens real hard to the voices of them spirits what be all round us.”
“Your Bible talking ain’t bothered me none,” Bass admitted. “And I figger a fella gets lonely enough for real company … he’s bound to start talking to any damn hoo-doo and spirit what’ll listen to him.”
“Listen to you now, Mr. Bass,” Asa snorted, then chuckled as he pressed his heels into the pony’s ribs and started down the side of the canyon toward Workman’s stone house. “
’The Lord bringeth the counsel of the heathen to nought.’”
“So you figger me for a heathen, Asa McAfferty?”
“No, I don’t,” he answered after a pause. “I figger you for the sort of friend what puts up with a very, very troubled man. A tormented man like me. An inflicted man what the Lord has set adrift in a world of woe and despair.”
“But you ain’t alone, Asa.”
Ahead of Titus on the trail descending into that dark canyon where the sun’s first rays still refused to shine off the icy granite flecked with snow, a somber McAfferty replied, “That’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Bass. In the end, no matter what … every one of us is alone.”
They’d limped into Taos with little more than it would take to outfit a band of Diggers. But they had their hide and hair. And—by damned—it was Nativity time in ol’ Taos town!
A holiday when every Mexican male appeared to turn and give the long-haired gringo a second look, when every cherry-cheeked, black-eyed senorita seemed to smile and flutter those long, dark eyelashes at him and him alone.
This second winter among the Mexicans was proving
all the more joyous than the first, perhaps because there weren’t all that many Americans around. From what Workman reported, most of the gringo trappers had spent only a few days here earlier in the month, then moseyed on down the road to Santa Fe. Those who remained behind were the quiet sort—not at all like Hatcher’s bunch, not the sort given to stirring up a ruckus among the Taosenos. A few here and there even remembered Scratch, remembered how he had been one of those daring Americanos who had risked his life to bring back the Comanche captives.