The horse had taken everything with it when it went, which was the sort of
joke the country liked to play on a man who had nothing to spare. Three
nights back, in a dry camp above the San Juan, something had come through
the dark on padded feet — lion, Micah judged later, from the way the gelding
had gone straight up in its picket rope like a hooked fish — and the rope had
parted, and the horse had run. It had run with the saddle on its back and the
saddlebags under the cantle, and in the saddlebags were his food, his spare
shirt, his coffee, his tobacco, and eleven of his thirteen cartridges. It had run,
as near as he could tell from the first morning's sign, generally south and
generally downhill, the way water and frightened horses and ruined men all
tended to go in that country.
Micah Thorne had followed it for three days on foot.
He was good at following. The army had taught him the trade the way it
taught everything, by making it a condition of eating, and three years of
drifting since had kept the skill oiled. He read the gelding's trail the way
another man might read a newspaper left on a depot bench: idly, thoroughly,
and with most of his attention somewhere else. Here the horse had stopped to
blow, at a seep no bigger than a dinner plate. Here it had shied at something
and gone sideways in a scatter of stones. Here, on the second morning, it had
found grass worth the stopping for, and cropped it close, and Micah had
cursed it with real feeling, because a horse that stops to graze is a horse that
no longer remembers being chased, and a horse that no longer remembers
being chased is in no hurry at all.
The sign was cold now, hours old where it was not a day old. He walked it
anyway. There was not much else on offer.
He had a rifle slung across his back, a Sharps carbine worn bright at the
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edges, and two cartridges in the loops of his belt, and the rifle was company
he did not expect to use. He had a canteen at a quarter, which he rationed the
way a miser pays out coins — a swallow at sunup, a swallow at noon, a
swallow when the light went, each one argued over. He had a knife. He had
boots that had been resoled twice and were now parting company with their
uppers at the left toe, so that every few miles he stopped and bound them
with strips cut from the tail of his shirt, which had grown shorter as the boots
grew worse. He had a shirt that was mostly road. He had his hat. He had his
hands, and they were empty, and there was a sense in which — though he
would not have put it so, even to himself, alone, with no one to hear the
foolishness of it — he had arranged his whole life, these three years past,
around keeping them that way.
What he did not have, walking, was a destination. That was deliberate.
Destinations were how a man got expected, and being expected was how a
man got asked questions, and questions were how the past caught up with a
fellow and sat down across the fire from him and waited, patient as a
creditor. Micah's doctrine, polished by three years of use, was simpler than
most men's and harder: he was gone. He was gone from the army, gone from
the territories he'd scouted, gone from every ranch bunkhouse before the
second season, gone from the freight camp before the freight was unloaded,
gone down the road while the coffee was still warm in the cup he'd left
behind him. A man who is gone cannot be handed an order. A man who is
gone cannot be pointed at a map and told, ride there, look at that, tell us what
sleeps in that valley. He intended to find his horse, which was fair — the
horse was his, and owed him a ride — and then to be gone again, in
whichever direction the morning offered.
In the late afternoon of the third day, the trail did something he did not care
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for. It stopped wandering and it went down.
The country there was broken rimrock and juniper, falling away southward in
long benches toward a river he could hear before he could see. The gelding's
sign ran straight down a game trail into the bottoms, fresh enough in the soft
ground to show the print whole — and Micah's own boot, coming down a
slope of loose shale, slid a hand's breadth and fetched up against a stone, and
he stood still a moment with the small pain singing in his ankle and looked at
what the valley was, now that the valley had him in sight of it.
The Animas ran green and slow between walls of cottonwood, and the
cottonwoods were turning. That was the first thing. They went gold in ranks
along the river, gold and still-green and gold again, the color coming up the
bottomland like a tide, and the late light lay on them and made the whole
valley seem lit from underneath, as if the earth itself had decided to celebrate
something. Smoke rose in a dozen thin columns. Lodges stood in their ranks
along the bank — forty, fifty of them, the hides pale and smoke-darkened at
the peaks — and beyond the lodges, in the bend of the river where the grass
was best, the horse herds grazed in their hundreds, with boys on the edges of
them and dogs in the grass, and somewhere a drum was being tuned, or a
kettle hung, or a child was practicing an instrument of torment upon a length
of hollow wood.
It was a Ute valley. He knew the lodge shapes and he knew the herd marks,
near enough, and he knew from the treaty talk that had filled the agency
newspapers two winters back that there was a band settled in this country
under the old agreement — Kapota people. A reservation valley. A people's