The Wild Girl by Jim Fergus

simply vanished within it.
     
    He thought, but only for the most fleeting moment, that perhaps she had, after all, been some kind of spirit being. But Billy Flowers was no great believer in supernatural manifestations, preferring to believe that both God and Satan worked more quietly in the souls of men.
    Flowers knew instantly from the dogs’ posture what direction the girl had taken. He quickly scanned the surrounding country, catching just the slightest movement in the rocks above the river bottom, a movement so fleeting that it was little more than the memory of a movement. But it was enough. He considered but quickly rejected the notion of releasing the dogs, for he knew that if they caught her, they would certainly kill her, and that knowledge would as surely make of him a murderer. Instead, he unhooked a small liver-spotted bitch named Queenie and secured her chain to his own belt. Then he picked up the girl’s ragged dress, which stank of her wildness, and he rubbed it in the dog’s nose. “Now, Queenie, you are going to trail this heathen girl,” he said. He picked the dog up by the collar and with a rattle of chain swung her up onto the pommel of his saddle, where she balanced herself deftly. Accustomed to having dogs as passengers, John the Baptist did not flinch. Flowers climbed up behind.
    He knew that with her head start, the girl could easily outrun him on foot. Nor did he attempt to ride into the steep rocks where she had fled, for it would clearly be impassable to the mule. Instead he followed the river bottom, until they came to the first dry arroyo that spilled down out of the hills, and up this he rode.
    John the Baptist was the best mule Billy Flowers had ever owned, seemed to know where they were going even before his rider, as well as the best way to get there. He was an athletic animal and understood his limits, pushed himself as far and fast as he knew he could safely go, sometimes farther and faster than Billy Flowers would ever have expected or attempted himself. And he let his rider know, in no uncertain terms, when he could go no farther. Flowers respected the animal’s courage and judgment and had never asked him to do anything that he said he could not do.
    The arroyo was so steep where it topped out on the ridge that the mule took the last few steps as a series of grunting lunges, trying to keep forward momentum in order to avoid sliding back down on the slick rock. Flowers leaned forward in the saddle, holding the dog splayed tight around the mule’s withers, trying to keep their weight as neutral as possible. “That’s my boy, John,” he whispered like an entreating lover in the mule’s ear, “that’s my good John, almost there now, yes, my John.”
    With a final lunge, dog chain rattling like the mail-clad mount of a medieval knight, John the Baptist gained the level ground of the ridgetop, trotted a few paces, snorted, his sides heaving. “Well done, John,” Billy Flowers said, patting the mule’s lathered neck. “We’ll leave you here now.” He dropped the dog Queenie to the ground and dismounted behind her, hobbled the mule’s front legs, and from behind the saddle untied the thongs that held his lariat on one side, and his coiled bullwhip on the other. “You wait right here for us, John, and we’ll be back shortly with the heathen child.” Caught up now in the excitement of the hunt, a thrill that had not paled for him in better than sixty years, Billy Flowers had not yet even stopped to ask himself why it was so important that he capture the girl.
    Flowers knew that he was above her now, and that she would probably move laterally in the rocks, looking for a crevice or a cave in which to hide. He did not think that she’d come right away to the top, but would first find a place to lay up, a place where she’d feel safe from the dogs, and where she could stop and listen to see if they pursued her. Prey does not run unless chased—a central law of the hunt. Had he