IX
Hank had to pause for a breather, lowering Oliver to the earth as gently as could, but he would be gutted and damned if he ever gave old age an inch. Ten more steps and he might have had to drop the poor kid. Good thing Oliver was a half-pint. Skinny, nervous types needed to learn how sit down and eat a goddamn potato. Nevertheless, Hank’s arms and shoulders and legs burned with the exertion. His back would pay him an even harsher recompense tomorrow.
In the skillet-flat expanse of endless prairie grass, he spotted the agency buildings and attendant Indian tent camp, still about a mile and a half away.
In the distance, a thunderstorm roiled dark against the infinite sky, growing larger from the last time he looked.
Hank took his hat off, wiped his brow, and looked to the heavens.
Directly above him, three dusty, black shapes made lazy intersecting loops. Beady, black eyes in naked, scarlet heads peered down with otherworldly patience.
“You bastards go look somewhere else,” he grumbled.
The tops of the grass rippled and floated with the brush of the wind, but his eye caught a movement that went against the flow, something moving low through the grass. Several somethings. A glimpse of mangy, grayish-brown fur through the grass, quiet and slinking low through the deepest grass.
Stalking toward him.
“What the hell?”
By the movement of the grass, he counted at least eight of them. If they were coyotes, he had little to fret about. Coyotes never attacked people. Maybe if they were starving, they might try to snatch a baby away. On the other hand, in all his sixty-five years, he had never seen more than two of them together. Coyotes were lone scavengers; they did not hunt in packs like wolves.
Nevertheless, a pack of somethings was converging on him. With a cold chill, he looked behind him and saw several more passages slinking through the grass. A bushy, tawny tail. Yellow eyes and lolling tongue and grinning fangs.
“Goddamn.”
He trained his Colt at the movement of the nearest, perhaps forty feet away, cocked, aimed at the location most likely to be its head, and fired. The thunder of the pistol echoed with the sound of the bullet tearing through the grass. His target stopped moving, but still he could not see it. It was right there, close, but still invisible.
He cast about him.
None of them were running away.
Coyotes always fled for the horizon at the sound of a gunshot. Always.
Patches of grass started moving again, quiet and slow. “Goddamn it.” How close did he dare let them get before he started shooting? He could not pick up Oliver and shoot at the same time, and there was no question now that he and the McCoy kid were their intended prey.
He spun, and they were close enough now that they were beginning to emerge from the grass. Coyotes for sure, slinking low, slavering, fangs bared. At least ten of them, more like fifteen, with him at the center of a shrinking circle.
Five shots left in his pistol. If one shot did not scare them off, would five more? Would he have time to reload if they attacked en masse? Unlikely.
The closest one, perhaps the largest coyote Hank had ever seen, perhaps as large as a wolf, locked eyes with Hank, grinning, growling, with an intelligence in its eyes that startled him.
He raised his pistol and shot it between the eyes, and it dropped like it had been clubbed.
The rest of them charged forward. In a heartbeat, a rush of tawny shapes swarmed toward him, snarling and yipping and snapping. Four more times his pistol barked, and four coyotes tumbled in mid-charge, but still the rest of them came.
They were all over Oliver, going for his hands, his legs, his throat. Oliver moaned and feebly tried to defend his face. Hank lunged at them, kicking, flipping his pistol in his grip and using it for a club. The beasts snapped and yipped in pain. Some fled a short distance and returned, some lunged at Hank, snapping at his hands, at his pistol.
Hank roared with fury, feeling bones crunch under his boot, skulls collapsing at the butt of his pistol, swinging blindly, blood spattering his face, teeth tugging at his boots, at his trouser legs. Oliver cried out in pain and terror. Clothes tore and teeth tugged and dragged at him.
Hank pummeled and kicked, with one hand dragging a beast by the scruff of the neck from Oliver’s boot, and crushed its face with the butt of the pistol. It died instantly, spasming and spraying blood.
In a red haze of rage and battle fury that he had not experienced since 1863, he seized the dead coyote’s forelimbs and swung the carcass like a weapon at the others, smashing and trailing blood in great spinning arcs until the remaining coyotes finally started to back away.
Hank roared at the top of his lungs, “Get the hell out of here, you mangy devils!”
They flinched back and fled.
Ten of them lay dead around him, one forty-pound mass hung limp in his hands, and six or eight more dashed away through the grass.
Hank roared again and slammed the carcass against the ground, driving a fresh gout of blood from its ruined head. He snatched his pistol back up, eyes scanning for returning threat, and started to reload. His mouth was as dry as sandstone, his thundering heart shooting pain through his entire chest, each breath a tearing ache.
Oliver groaned beside him, half-weeping with pain and fear.
As Hank loaded his pistol, he gave Oliver a quick appraisal. He expected to see nothing more than a mass of savaged limbs, but Oliver seemed to have suffered only a handful of real bites. His clothes and boots, on the other hand, had been damned near shredded.
Oliver’s voice was pained wheeze. “What was that, Marshal? Coyotes don’t go after people!”
“That was the goddamnedest thing I ever saw.” Hank snapped the loading gate closed, cocked the pistol, and scanned the area. He spotted two shapes moving away through the grass. Taking stock of himself for a moment, he realized that there was barely a scratch on him. His hands, however, were caked with blood and fur, and his pistol was slick with gore.
Why had the coyotes focused their attack on Oliver, not the one who could fight back? Was it because they sensed a wounded man? Easy prey?
He knelt beside Oliver and looked him over more closely. “Anything worse, boy?”
“Still gutshot, Marshal, but them bastards didn’t do me much more harm. Except maybe my arm here.” Oliver raised his left arm feebly. Fresh blood soaked the torn shirtsleeve.
Hank peeled the sleeve back, surprised that the kid had much more blood to lose. The bite looked superficial. Maybe a couple of stitches were all that was necessary.
“You ever seen anything like that before?” Oliver said.
“I ain’t even heard of anything like that before, except maybe in dime novels.”
“The black god sent them. It wants me.”
“Lay off the talking nonsense. Are you ready to move again?”
“Just leave me here for the coyotes, Marshal. I can’t take the pain no more.”
“Getting ate alive ain’t no way for a man to die. Now, shut up and just let me catch my breath a piece. We’ll be there soon. It’s only another mile and a half or so.”
Oliver’s eyes closed with dread, but he nodded.
Hank looked up into the sky, and saw the buzzards had circled lower, anticipating a feast of dead coyote. Too bad these coyotes had shed their winter fur. He might have been able to come back to retrieve the pelts, but they were worth nothing at the furrier with their winter fur falling out in chunks.
Why had they attacked at all? These did not appear to be starving. Coyotes always lived on the fringe of life, scavenging mostly. They did not run in packs.
How long these thoughts would trouble him, he could not guess.