The blood spoor stopped with the blood’s source.
“Huh,” said Rooster. “I guess they turned on … no. What the hell did that?”
It was the medium-sized dog that Kimble had wounded. The pack had chewed on the body, but the head was lying in pieces.
Precise pieces.
It had been split bilaterally, like an anatomy illustration, right down between the ears, eyes, nostrils. One side was lying intact, the plane of the incision tilted toward the sky, displaying sinuses, throat, the top of the spine, and the brain split right down the corpus callosum. The other half had been sliced crosswise, in uniform half-inch sections perpendicular to the first cut and they were spread in order beside the other half. By contrast, the neck looked like it had been torn from the body.
Frank said something heartfelt in Dineh.
“You said it,” agreed Ruth.
Frank opened his mouth to answer, then shut it again, studying the ground around the dead dog. “I guess I noticed something odd back when we found the tracks in the mud.”
“Odder than this?” said Barney.
Frank said, “Pretty odd.” He looked down at the precisely cut chunks of dog head. “But, no, maybe not this odd.”
“What was it?” asked Rooster.
“One of the dogs has four right front feet.” He knelt near the dog head but not facing it.
Rooster frowned. “I’m not getting you.”
Frank pointed at the ground in front of him. “Look. That big dog stood right here? I’ve got good tracks of both front feet and one of its rear feet.”
“Yeah.”
“Every one of those tracks is the same. Look. See that little V-shape in the middle of that pad? Some sort of scarring, probably.”
“Oh,” said Ruth, kneeling down beside him. “That V-mark is in both the front prints.” She shifted. “And the back paw print, also. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s worse than that. Look at the right-left symmetry. They’re all right paws, the same right paw. In the mud, I saw all four feet. They were all the same.”
“That’s just dumb,” said Barney. “Why would a dog have the same paw prints on every foot.”
Rooster just pointed at the sliced chunks of dog head. “Why would a dog do this?” He looked closer, waving his hand to shoo off some of the gathering flies. “How could anybody? Haven’t seen cuts this clean, especially through bone, since before the bugs came. Really good metal knives could do it. Maybe you could do this with a ceramic bone saw, but it would sure take a long time and it wouldn’t look anywhere near as neat. I mean, the bone looks polished!”
Ruth had stopped looking at the ground and was scanning the bluff and the river. “Do you really want to chase … this?” Her gesture included both the tracks and the dissected head.
Rooster sucked his lips in and sat back on his haunches. He looked first at Frank, who shrugged slightly, then at Barney, who said, “I think someone’s playing a prank on us. How could a dog do that?”
Frank looked amused. “Maybe it wasn’t a dog. I don’t see any other tracks. I suppose whatever did it could have flown in and then flown off.”
“What do you think, Frank?” asked Rooster.
Frank shrugged again. “I must admit, I’m curious. We had a weird crow last year, that flew wrong, but it was following the other birds around. I didn’t get that close to it, but when it settled on a branch, the branch bent. I mean more than it should have. Not sure I want to fight this thing, but at the least I’d like to see it.”
“Hell,” said Barney, “no matter what it is, I’d rather fight it out here than back home while it’s killing my goats.”
Rooster nodded reluctantly. “There’s some sense to that, too.” He flipped his spear and shoved it into the ground, then unslung his crossbow, cocked, and loaded it. He pulled the spear from the ground and looked at it.
Kimble stepped forward. “I can carry it. Keep it ready.”
“Uh.” Rooster looked at Ruth. “Not sure if you’re going on with us.”
Kimble turned. Ruth was frowning at the dog parts. “Well, Sensei?”
“Not sure this is a good idea, but it would be better to know what’s slinking around.” She blew air out through her lips. “We’ll go on for a while at least.”
They followed the tracks through the bosque for another mile. Once, where the river had uncovered an old junk refrigerator, they had to wade across the river to avoid bugs, but the river was only ankle deep. Frank eyed the tracks. “The dogs didn’t go around the bugs at all,” Frank noted.
The tracks led them to a thicket of salt cedars at the base of the bluff at the edge of the bosque. The dirt cliff rose straight up behind the brush and Frank skirted around the edge of the cedars until he reached the other side. “The tracks go in there. They don’t come out.”
Rooster and Barney, who’d been standing right next to the brush, turned to face it and stepped back several paces.
“Well, I don’t like the idea of going in there,” said Ruth.
“Burn it,” suggested Barney.
They just looked at him and he turned red.
“Oh. Grass fire.”
“The bosque could burn all the way to the Jemez,” Rooster said.
“Let’s do it old school,” said Ruth. “You guys cover the downstream half and Kimble and I will act as beaters. See if we can get them to come out on your side.”
“Thought you didn’t want to go in there,” said Rooster.
“Hopefully we won’t have to.”
The three men positioned themselves about thirty feet away from the thicket in a semicircle that covered the downstream two-thirds. Frank put an arrow to his bow and stuck three others into the ground next to him, fletching up. On seeing this, Rooster did the same thing, only he dropped to one knee so he could brace his elbow on his forward leg and pull the shorter bolts from the ground. Barney took up a similar posture, but he just laid his replacement barrels on the ground beside him, double-checking the orientation.
While they were doing that, Ruth and Kimble gathered fist-sized river rocks and a couple of stout sticks.
“Want your spear?” Kimble asked Rooster.
“Uh, sure.”
Kimble stuck it in the ground near Rooster’s quarrels and trotted back around to Ruth.
“Ready?” asked Ruth.
“I guess,” said Frank.
The other two men nodded.
Kimble banged a short stick against his jyo, loud as he could. Ruth began pitching the rocks into the underbrush, low, changing her aim slightly with each one. On her fourth shot, there was a yelp from the brush. She pitched more rocks in that general direction. Kimble moved closer to the salt brush, dropped his short stick, and began whaling on the bushes with the jyo. There was another yelp from inside the brush and then Kimble heard the crossbow twang, followed almost immediately by the discharge of one of Barney’s barrels, then the more muted noise of Frank’s bow twice in succession and yelps of pain.
“One pulled back in!” yelled Frank. “Watch it!”
Kimble, still flailing at the brush, didn’t see the pit-bull cross dart out of the bush to his right and, teeth bared, lunge at his exposed heel.
“Look out!” shouted Ruth.
Kimble twisted away as he heard the warning, followed almost immediately by a solid “thunk.” He saw Ruth’s jyo pull back and the dog drop into the sand, suddenly limp.
He backed away from the brush. The dog’s head was lopsided, a definite dent behind one eye.
“You can look at it later,” Ruth said. “Keep your eyes open.”
“Yes, Sensei. Thanks.” He backed away from the edge of the brush, his jyo held for thrusting. They were all frozen, watching, waiting for more movement. When nothing else happened, Ruth called, “How many did you get?”
“Four.”
“We got one, too,” Ruth said.
“Oh,” said Frank. “What with the dissected one, that leaves just one. The od
d one.”
Kimble took a step back.
“I’d like to get a look at that,” said Rooster.
“Me, too,” said Ruth. “But I don’t want anyone hurt, to get that look.”
Frank walked around toward Ruth and Kimble. “Give it a hole to run through,” he suggested. “We can try some more rocks, too.”
They moved the semicircle more to the upstream side, leaving a gap near the bluff, and Kimble gathered more rocks for everyone. Barney changed out his barrel and stood ready. “If anything has a chance of stopping it, it’ll be the gun, right?”
Ruth said gently, “And what if it doesn’t like being shot at?”
Barney retorted, “What if it doesn’t like you pitchin’ rocks at it? Besides, I’m sure the dog I shot didn’t like it, but he didn’t have much say, either.”
Frank and Ruth exchanged glances and Frank shrugged.
They picked up rocks and threw in unison, starting at the near edge and shifting their area of concentration. They could hear the rocks rattling through the branches and striking the bluff and the ground and then a clanking sound.
Rooster froze. “Christ. I swear that sounds like metal.”
“Couldn’t be,” said Barney. “Where are the bugs?”
Rooster looked uncertain. “It was about dead center. Everybody?”
This time there were several clanking hits followed by the rustling of underbrush and then a cracking sound as one of the taller salt cedars abruptly fell to one side.
“What’s that smell?” asked Barney.
“Ozone,” said Ruth.
“I see movement!” Barney said excitedly, pulling the gun higher. Everyone shifted over to where they could look past Barney toward the far end of the brush.
The dark dog took three deliberate steps out of the underbrush and its head swiveled toward them. It looked like a Doberman except there was no brown on it, just an oily black. Where there should have been eyes there were slightly darker patches. The ears were triangular—sharp, with impossibly straight edges.
Ruth said, “I don’t think you should…”
Barney fired, and the ceramic projectile hit the creature squarely in the chest and splintered, flying off in fragments. The dog took one involuntary step backward and then steadied.
It crouched.
“Shit,” said Frank. Barney scrambled to change barrels, fumbling.
The black dog turned and jumped up, twenty feet, to catch the top of the bluff with its forepaws and pull itself up over the edge, triggering a small landslide with its rear legs. On top it turned once more and looked back at them, then, with another spurt of dust and flying grass, it was gone.
* * *
THEY reported the incident to the council, but Ruth told Kimble later, “They didn’t believe it. I doubt they’ll pass it on to the Rangers.”
Rooster replaced the saplings where the dogs had broken through his fence and finished the enclosure the next week. There were no more problems with the sheep and Kimble went home with a basket of chicks and half a sack of chicken feed. They built a rammed-earth coop with a removable roof and let the chicks have the run of the garden. As the chicks fledged out, the squash beetles ceased to be a problem.
A week later, a storm rolled in from the west and it rained for three straight days.
Kimble huddled inside the cottage. He’d spent enough time out in the weather during his time in the capital.
Ruth, on the other hand, stood outside the door and let the drops splash across her face. “The drought is over,” she said.
“Yes, Sensei.”
6
Kimble Goes to Town
Ruth woke one morning and couldn’t breathe.
“I imagine it’s allergies,” she told Kimble, but she had him lead class that afternoon. The next day was worse and Kimble fetched Marisol Aragon, the Territorial Medical System nurse, from the village.
“It’s asthma,” Marisol said, measuring Ruth’s lung capacity with a plastic flow meter. “Pretty bad, too.”
Marisol gave Ruth prednisone pills to relieve the immediate symptoms but said, “This is short-term. I want you to go on an inhaled corticosteroid. That’s a much safer long-term solution, but I don’t have any here. I can get some from the capital, but it will take a month. Better if it was quicker, but it’s a catch-22. Traveling would most likely aggravate the asthma.”
“I can go,” said Kimble. “If I rent a horse, I can be back in four days.”
Marisol, not tall, but still a head higher than Kimble, eyed him dubiously, but Ruth nodded and said, “Go see if you can hire one of Mr. Kenney’s mounts.”
Matt Kenney greeted Kimble warmly but shook his head violently at the request. “Hire a horse? When I’d probably have two less without your help? I’ll lend you Suze.” He led Kimble to a small, brown quarter horse with a gray muzzle. “Both my boys started on Suze. They’re on to bigger mounts now, but she’ll go all day with someone your size. Fact is, she doesn’t get the exercise she should, so a trip to the capital and back would be good for her.”
“I don’t feel right not paying,” Kimble tried again.
“Use the money on feed and put her in a livery while you’re there. We just epoxied new fiberglass shoes, but if there’s a problem, see a farrier.” He patted the horse on her flank. “One thing—she’s a bear for holding her breath when you’re tightening the cinch.”
Kimble left the next day in the cool of the morning, reversing the route Ruth and he had walked to Perro Frio. He was an adequate horseman, having ridden his schoolmates’ hacks around the village and on occasional school excursions, but even though he was in good shape, his muscles weren’t used to an entire day of riding. Getting out of his bedroll the next morning required rolling over to all fours and struggling upright. The evening before, it had taken him over twenty minutes to get the cinch off, so he doubled the end back in a slipknot. He didn’t knee Suze in the belly as Mr. Kenney had recommended, but he waited, watching her breathing, and tightened the strap again, and then again.
On this last one Suze whuffed, turned her head, and looked back at him reproachfully.
He’d made even better time than he’d thought. He reached Nuevo Santa Fe’s south gate by noon, in time to stable Suze and get the cabrito tacos at Griegos.
Marisol had given him a script for the medicine and he only had to wait a half hour at the TMS pharmacy before receiving several disk-shaped inhalers, nasal sprays, and some pump-operated “rescue” inhalers. “These ones are tricky. Outside the territory they use pressurized ones, but they’re metal.” The pharmacist talked about their use and gave him a ream of instructions for Ruth to read.
Next he took an order and check to Retterson & Morales, building supplies. The dojo walls were as high as they were supposed to be and the concrete roof beams had been laid in place. “Our freighter will deliver the roof tiles before the end of September,” they assured him.
He felt odd being back in the capital—the bustle seemed louder, more frenetic. The loiterers seemed scarier. He felt like it had changed on him, but he realized it was really he who’d changed.
He saw people he’d known slightly, who would have greeted him a year ago. Now they glanced at him and squinted, like his face was teasing their memories without effect. He was feeling sad about this when he ran square into César Castellanos.
“Kim-BULL. Where you been, man? I thought sure the Rangers dragged you off, but then they came around again last week, so I knew they didn’t.”
Kimble had been about to name his new home but stopped mid-word. “Perr—they’ve been asking for me? By name?”
“They were asking for Kim Creighton, but someone must’ve recognized you from the new photo ’cause now they’re asking for Kimble, too.”
“They have a new photo?”
“They’ve got the old one, but they also have one of those aged-by-computer ones. That one looks a lot more like you.”
Kimble fought the urge to look around for Ran
gers. He took out the floppy cloth hat he’d been wearing while riding and put it on his head.
“So where have you been?”
He thought he could trust César but he didn’t want Rangers showing up at Ruth’s door. “Better you should be able to say, ‘I don’t know.’ Right? I mean, why add one more thing you’d have to talk about at confession.”
César laughed. “But you’re all right? I mean, you look good. You’re nowhere near as skinny as you were.”
“I’m good. I’ve got a good place to live, good work, and good schooling. And I’d rather not be dragged back to my good-for-nothin’ old man and ruin it.”
They talked about mutual friends, acquaintances, and enemies. César’s voice was deeper and he informed Kimble that he was walking out with Jessica Potter from his parish.
“What’s that on your lip?” Kimble kidded.
“That’s my mustache.” It wasn’t a very definite mustache.
“That’s a relief,” said Kimble. “I was afraid it was a caterpillar. A very sick caterpillar.”
“Well, Jessica likes it so you can just shove it up your—”
“Great seeing you.”
Before talking to César he’d planned to leave the next morning but now Kimble moved through the mid-afternoon crowds to the stables, trying to exude casualness. He panicked a bit at Southgate, when he saw an entire troop of Rangers lined up through the gate, not mounted yet, but apparently headed out. Their saddle holsters all held the composite gyro rifles and they all had two-and-a-half-foot truncheons hanging from their belts. Kevlar helmets and vests were bundled behind their saddles. There was a squad of lancers, too, carrying eight-foot shafts.
Kimble swerved toward Griegos but several of the Rangers were in line there, too, picking up food.
He took a deep breath, resettled the saddlebags over his shoulder, and headed back to the gate. A family—mother, father, son, and two daughters with unmistakable resemblance to each other—were walking out of the gate, the son pushing a two-wheeled garden cart full of purchases. Kimble took two long strides and joined them, walking through the gate at their side, earning a hard look from the mother, who shifted her purse to her other arm.