The Crossing(26)

By late afternoon when he would dismount and advance toward her with the canteen she would dip slowly to the ground like a circus animal and roll onto her side waiting. The yellow eye watching, the ear shifting with little movements within the arc of its rotation. He didnt know how much of the water she was getting or how much she needed. He sat trickling the water between her teeth and looking into her eye. He touched the pleated corner of her mouth. He studied the veined and velvet grotto into which the audible world poured. He began to talk to her. The horse raised its head from its trailside grazing and looked back at him.

They rode on. The country was high rolling desert and the trail ran the crests of the ridges and although it seemed traveled he saw no one. On the slopes were acacia, scrub oak. Open parks of juniper. In the evening a rabbit appeared in the middle of the trail a hundred feet in front of him and he reined the horse up and put two fingers to his teeth and whistled and the rabbit froze and he stepped down and shucked the rifle backward out of the scabbard and cocked it all in a single movement and raised the rifle and fired.

The horse shied wildly and he snatched the reins out of the air and hauled it around and got it calmed. The wolf had vanished into the trailside brush. He held the rifle at his waist and levered the spent shell out of the chamber and caught it and put it in his pocket and levered a fresh shell in and let down the hammer with his thumb and undallied the rope and let the reins drop and walked back to see about the wolf.

She was trembling in the weeds just short of a small twisted juniper where she’d sought to hide. At his approach she sprang against the rope and stood thrashing. He stood the rifle against a tree and walked her down along the rope and held her and talked to her but he could not calm her and she did not stop trembling. After a while he took the rifle and went back out to the horse and shoved the rifle into the scabbard and walked back up the trail to look for the rabbit.

There was a long furrow down the center of the track that the rifle slug had plowed and the rabbit had been slung up into the bushes where it lay with its guts hanging in gray loops. It was all but in two pieces and he pooled it up all warm and downy in his hands with the head lolling and carried it out through the woods till he could find a windfall tree. There he kicked away the loose pinebark with the heel of his boot and brushed and blew it clean and laid the rabbit across the wood and took out his knife and straddling the log he skinned the rabbit out and gutted it and cut off the head and feet. He diced up the liver and heart on the log with his knife and sat looking at it. It didnt look much. He wiped his hand in the dead grass and took the rabbit and began to fillet strips from the back and hindquarters and to dice them as well until what he did have made a handful and then he wrapped them in the skin of the rabbit and folded away the knife.

He walked back and spiked the dead rabbit on a broken pine limb and went to where the wolf lay crouched. He squatted and held his hand out to her but she backed away at the end of the rope. He took a small piece of the rabbit’s liver and held it to her. She sniffed it delicately. He watched her eyes and the speculation in them. He watched the leather nostrils. She turned her head to one side and when he offered the piece again she tried to back away.

Maybe you just aint hungry enough yet, he said. But you’re fixin to get that way.

He made camp that night in a little swale under the windward side of the ridge and he skewered the rabbit on a paloverde pole and set it to broil in front of the fire before he even went to see about the horse and the wolf. When he approached her she stood and the first thing he saw was that the wrapping was gone from her leg. Then he saw that the stick between her teeth was gone. Then he saw that the cord with which her mouth was tied was gone.

She stood square to him with the hackles standing along her back. The catchrope tied to her collar and looped along the ground was frayed and wet where she’d been chewing it.

He stopped and stood dead still. He backed along the rope until he reached the horse and then untied the rope from the saddlehorn. He didnt take his eyes from her.

Holding the free end of the rope he began to circle the wolf. She turned in place watching him. He put a small pine tree between them. He tried to move in a casual manner but he felt all his motives naked to her. He handed the rope in a loop over the top of a high limb and caught it again and then backed away and pulled the rope taut. The slack came uncoiled out of the weeds and pine needles and tugged at her collar. She lowered her head and followed.

When she was standing under the limb he pulled the rope until her forefeet were all but off the ground and then slacked it just slightly and tied the rope off and stood looking at her. She bared her teeth at him and turned and tried to move away but she could not. She seemed to be at odds what to do. After a while she raised her injured leg and began to lick it.