The expriest turned and looked at the kid. And that was the judge the first ever I saw him. Aye. He's a thing to study.
The lad looked at Tobin. What's he a judge of? he said.
What's he a judge of?
What's he a judge of.
Tobin glanced off across the fire. Ah lad, he said. Hush now. The man will hear ye. He's ears like a fox.
XI
Into the mountains - Old Ephraim - A Delaware carried off –
The search - Another probate - In the gorge - The ruins - Keet seel -
The solerette - Representations and things -
The judge tells a story - A mule lost - Mescal pits -
Night scene with moon, blossoms, judge - The village - Clanton
on the management of animals - The trail out.
They rode on into the mountains and their way took them through high pine forests, wind in the trees, lonely birdcalls. The shoeless mules slaloming through the dry grass and pine needles. In the blue coulees on the north slopes narrow tailings of old snow. They rode up switchbacks through a lonely aspen wood where the fallen leaves lay like golden disclets in the damp black trail. The leaves shifted in a million spangles down the pale corridors and Glanton took one and turned it like a tiny fan by its stem and held it and let it fall and its perfection was not lost on him. They rode through a narrow draw where the leaves were shingled up in ice and they crossed a high saddle at sunset where wild doves were rocketing down the wind and passing through the gap a few feet off the ground, veering wildly among the ponies and dropping off down into the blue gulf below. They rode on into a dark fir forest, the little Spanish ponies sucking at the thin air, and just at dusk as Glanton's horse was clambering over a fallen log a lean blond bear rose up out of the swale on the far side where it had been feeding and looked down at them with dim pig's eyes.
Glanton's horse reared and Glanton flattened himself along the horse's shoulder and drew his pistol. One of the Delawares was next behind him and the horse he rode was falling backward and he was trying to turn it, beating it about the head with his balled fist, and the bear's long muzzle swung toward them in a stunned articulation, amazed beyond reckoning, some foul gobbet dangling from its jaws and its chops dyed red with blood. Glanton fired. The ball struck the bear in the chest and the bear leaned with a strange moan and seized the Delaware and lifted him from the horse. Glanton fired again into the thick ruff of fur forward of the bear's shoulder as it turned and the man dangling from the bear's jaws looked down at them cheek and jowl with the brute and one arm about its neck like some crazed defector in a gesture of defiant camaraderie. All through the woods a bedlam of shouts and the whack of men beating the screaming horses into submission. Glanton cocked the pistol a third time as the bear swung with the indian dangling from its mouth like a doll and passed over him in a sea of honey-colored hair smeared with blood and a reek of carrion and the rooty smell of the creature itself. The shot rose and rose, a small core of metal scurrying toward the distant beltways of matter grinding mutely to the west above them all. Several rifleshots rang out and the beast loped horribly into the forest with his hostage and was lost among the darkening trees.
The Delawares trailed the animal three days while the party moved on. The first day they followed blood and they saw where the thing had rested and where the wounds had stanched and the next day they followed the dragmarks through the duff of a high forest floor and the day after they followed only the faintest trace across a high stone mesa and then nothing. They cut for sign until dark and they slept on the naked flints and the next day they rose and looked out on all that wild and stony country to the north. The bear had carried off their kinsman like some fabled storybook beast and the land had swallowed them up beyond all ransom or reprieve. They caught up their horses and turned back. Nothing moved in that high wilderness save the wind. They did not speak. They were men of another time for all that they bore Christian names and they had lived all their lives in a wilderness as had their fathers before them. They'd learnt war by warring, the generations driven from the eastern shore across a continent, from the ashes at Gnadenhutten onto the prairies and across the outlet to the bloodlands of the west. If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.
They cut the trail of the party early the next day and by nightfall of the day following they had overtaken them. The lost warrior's horse stood saddled in the caballado as they had left it and they took down the bags and divided his estate among them and that man's name was never said again. In the evening the judge came to the fire and sat with them and questioned them and made a map upon the ground and scrutinized it. Then he rose and trod it out with his boots and in the morning all rode on as before.