The Wild Girl by Jim Fergus Page A

pursued her from below, or had she heard the dogs trailing her again, she would almost certainly have kept climbing. As it was, Billy Flowers believed that he had preempted her next move, forced her to seek a secure hiding place, the natural instinct of animals. She would wait until after dark before she traveled again, which gave him nearly two hours of daylight still to find her.
     
    The girl lay crouched in a shallow cave in the rocks, listening. She could hear the dogs barking distantly where they must still be chained, for the sound did not come closer or change direction. She heard the clattering hooves of the mule climbing the arroyo, striking rock, reverberating through the earth all the way down to her hiding place, and from there entering her bones. She heard the chain rattling, a sound which she would forever after associate with dogs. And she knew from all this that the old White Eyes was after her, had ridden up the canyon to the top of the ridge, was now on foot himself above her and that he must have at least one dog with him.
     
    She was naked now, but for her moccasins and a breechclout that covered her sex. She had lost her small ration of roots. She knew that she could survive the night here; it was a small enough space and well protected, although it would be very cold. She did not think that the old White Eyes would find her, at least not before dark. The rocks themselves did not betray footprints and she had been careful to sweep away the little bit of sand and pebbles that she had disturbed at the entrance to the cave. But the dog would eventually find her, and if she waited until dark to move, she would be exposed to the night cold with no way of covering herself. All this she considered.
    The cave smelled faintly of cat urine and she found beside her in the dark a small piece of dried scat, so that she knew a she-lion must have denned up here to give birth, the scat left by one of her kittens. The girl hoped that the lion wasn’t coming back here tonight, although she was far less afraid of that right now than she was of the old White Eyes. She lay curled in the cave, exhausted now beyond the point of simple tiredness. She slept.
     
    It had been the one they called Indio Juan who had brought the Mexicans down upon the People once and for all. He who had been bitten in the face by a rattlesnake when he was a boy, so that he had the snake sickness, the madness, his face grotesquely disfigured. It was Indio Juan who would ride boldly with his warriors in full daylight into the tiny mountain villages and announce from astride his horse, “
Yo Indio Juan
.” And he would laugh as the villagers in the street fled screaming in all directions, and he and his men would kill them all, entire towns thus depopulated.
     
    It had been Indio Juan’s idea to steal the Huerta boy, although the girl’s grandfather, the white Apache named Charley, tried to talk him out of it. The Huertas were a powerful ranching family and Charley knew that such an act would do nothing but further enrage the Mexicans. He and Juan quarreled over this, but Juan was loco and no one could tell him what to do, and the more Charley told him not to steal the boy, the more determined Indio Juan became to do so. Knowing the trouble this would cause the People, Charley finally took his own small band and moved farther south, to another
ranchería
deeper into the Blue Mountains.
    The girl was sorry to see her grandfather leave and she wished that she could go with him. Her own father had been killed by Mexican soldiers some years before and her mother, Beshad-e, had married Indio Juan’s cousin. And because her sister was married to Indio Juan, she had no choice but to stay with his band. So it was among the People.
    They had taken up their positions in the hills above the Huerta ranch, waiting patiently, as is the Apache way, watching for weeks until they knew the daily habits and rhythms of the ranch, knew all who lived there, who came