The Greatest Horse Thief in History
D.J. Butler
July 1932
“Sugar beets, is it?” The man standing inside his own screen door might have been fifty years old, a few years older than Hiram himself. He dressed better than Hiram, in a button-down shirt and high-waisted trousers, though the calluses on his hands betrayed the fact that his work, too, included manual labor. His face was screwed into a tight and bitter shield.
He looked angry, but he didn’t look like a thief.
A creek splashed over rocks behind the house. In the background, across fields heavy with wheat, the town of Heber lay sprawled across the valley floor. Beyond it stood snow-capped Timpanogos.
“Someone tell you I’m a beet farmer, Mr. McCrae?” When Hiram came to a town giving away food, word tended to spread ahead of him. Elbert McCrae was the last man on his list to visit.
McCrae nodded. “A man can only fill his belly with sugar beets so much.”
Hiram nodded. “That’s why I stopped on the Provo Bench and traded the beets for bread and beef. Can I come in?”
McCrae hesitated, but opened the door. “The Provo Bench, huh? You know, they call it ‘Orem’ now.”
“After the railroad man. I just can’t bring myself to use some of these new names. Slow to change, I guess.” Hiram set down the crate of groceries he carried to kick the dust from his Redwing Harvesters and beat more dust from the legs of his denim overalls with his fedora. He gestured at the Double A sitting on the gravel drive. “My son?”
McCrae squinted. “Looks Indian.”
“He’s Navajo.” Hiram nodded. “Parents died in a fire, and my wife and I took him in.”
McCrae grunted. “May as well bring in the whole family. I do appreciate the groceries.”
Hiram beckoned to Michael. The boy slid out of the front seat of the truck and scampered up the porch, slipping in through McCrae’s front door in front of Hiram with a wooden crate full of groceries in his hand.
“Thanks for letting in the help, Mr. McCrae,” Michael said.
“You ain’t that much help,” Hiram grunted.
“I drive, don’t I?”
It was true. Hiram’s fainting spells made him uncomfortable driving more than short distances, so Michael drove. If the state legislature did what it was threatening, and started requiring a license from drivers, would Michael qualify?
Hiram pushed away the thought.
“You drive,” he agreed.
They set both boxes on a small table in McCrae’s kitchen. The table was just big enough to hold the crates on its white and green enamel top without McCrae raising its wings. “You got ice in that Frigidaire, Mr. McCrae? The bacon is cured, but the beef isn’t.”
“I got ice. I got food, too, comes to it.”
Hiram put the beef in McCrae’s large porcelain ice box. There was room for it, so he loaded the bacon and vegetables in as well. Despite McCrae’s claim, the ice box held nothing but ice and what Hiram had brought. “I’m glad you got food. And I’m glad I can bring you a little extra, Mr. McCrae. I’m just here to help.”
“Report to Salt Lake about my habits, is that it?” McCrae frowned. “How much am I drinking, am I attending church services, what exactly does an unmarried man like me living up in the Uinta Mountains do for fun? Come to meddle in the behavior of the working man?”
Hiram shook his head. “You’re thinking of Henry Ford. I don’t care what you’re drinking or whose company you keep, I’m just here to help. We’re all supposed to pitch in. Believe I heard Mr. Roosevelt himself suggest that.”
“That’s your job, is it? To pitch in?” McCrae snorted.
“It’s my ministry, I guess you’d say.” Hiram shrugged. “My job is to grow sugar beets.”
McCrae collapsed onto a soft chair, his bitter energy suddenly gone. “I’m sorry. I just… I worked all my life, Mr.…”
“You can call me Hiram. Hiram Woolley. My boy is Michael.”
McCrae nodded. “I worked all my life, Hiram. I ain’t comfortable taking help.”
Hiram sat on the sofa opposite. Michael sat beside him, bouncing slightly and drumming his fingers on his knees. The boy could stand to have his hair cut. For that matter, Hiram probably could, too.
“I don’t just bring food,” Hiram said. “Sometimes I help solve family disputes. Dug a well over in Price last week. I do what I can to be of assistance, when I don’t have to plant and harvest. Maybe I can help you find work, Mr. McCrae.”
McCrae stared at the hardwood floor.
“Horse ranching, isn’t it?” Hiram asked.
McCrae grunted. “Only ever owned one or two at a time, myself. But until last week, I was foreman on one of the local ranches. You really want to help?” McCrae nodded toward the back door, eastward. “Go talk to the owners of the Flying Z, get me my job back.”
Hiram sat quietly, hoping to hear still, small voices of guidance. He didn’t.
What to do? He had to help McCrae if he could. But the same neighbors who had sent Hiram to find Elbert McCrae had also suggested that McCrae might be a man who deserved to lose his job.
McCrae stared at him. How long had Hiram been silent? “I was told the Flying Z lost a herd,” Hiram said.
“Five hundred head.”
“The Oldhams figure it’s your fault the horses escaped?” The Oldhams owned the Flying Z.
McCrae laughed bitterly. “Worse than that, Hiram. They think I stole ’em. Thirty years of honest work under my belt and a spotless reputation don’t matter. They think I made five hundred horses just disappear. That’d make me the greatest horse thief in history, I expect. And hell, I’d be off in California or Texas, spending the money. Instead, I’m here, knocking door to door and asking for more work.”
“You don’t look like a guilty man,” Hiram agreed.
“And yet they won’t hire me back,” McCrae said. “Nor will any of the other ranches. And there’s no work for me in Heber, not even at the tack and saddle shops or in the slaughterhouse. Everyone figures me for a horse thief.”
“I’d like to help.” Hiram balanced his sweat-stained fedora over one fist as if it were a hat jack, looking out the window at the bleached blue sky. “You have any idea what happened to the horses?”
McCrae opened his mouth, shut it. He looked at Michael briefly, frowned, and then stood, pacing back and forth. “I don’t like to say.”
“I’ll go talk to the owners of the Flying Z,” Hiram said. “Whether or not you tell me anything else. But the more I know, the more I can help.”
McCrae stopped his pacing and stared at Hiram. “Yeah,” he said, “okay. It was Indians.”
Indians? Hiram tried to avoid looking astonished. “The Utes? Uintah and Ouray Reservation? It’s been a long time since the Utes rustled any horses.”
“I didn’t say it was them.” McCrae cleared his throat. “And I can’t say I really know one kind of Indian from another, begging your pardon, but I see the Utes from time to time, shopping down at Heber, or passing by at the Flying Z. They drive cars, they wear jeans and boots.”
“Surprise,” Michael muttered.
“The horse thieves looked… old-fashioned,” McCrae continued. “Horseback. Paint and feathers, the whole thing.”
The heliotropius in his pocket, the red-streaked green stone with so many useful properties, lay still; McCrae practiced no deception. Hiram felt a vague sense of disquiet. “I’ll go talk to the owners.”
* * *
“Of course, we’ll give Mr. McCrae back his job,” Ada Oldham said. Her husband and co-owner of the Flying Z, Ira, stood with his head and shoulders under the hood of his vehicle, grunting his agreement. “Just as soon as we get back our horses.”
“He says he didn’t steal them,” Hiram said. “I believe him.”
“He said Indians in war paint took the horses.” Ada wore her hair in a simple bun and dressed in calico. She and her husband were working on their Fargo truck together. The two-story ranch house must have had seven or eight rooms, judging from the outside—the Oldhams were doing well, but didn’t dress or act rich. In other circumstances, Hiram would have liked them very much, but now he felt waves of distrust radiating from Mrs. Oldham, and, tightening his own stomach, he tried not to radiate it right back. “You believe that, too?”
“I believe he isn’t a liar.” Hiram watched Michael bounce from side to side in the front of his own truck, the Ford Model AA. “Is he a drunk?” The former foreman had seemed a little defensive about his drinking habits.
“The man is a teetotaler, as far as I know,” Ada said. “Raised Kentucky Baptist. But really… war paint?”
McCrae hadn’t exactly said “war paint,” at least not to Hiram, but there was no sense picking a needless fight. “You got any maps?”
“What kind of maps?” Mrs. Oldham asked. Under the hood of the Fargo, Mr. Oldham banged metal against metal and cursed mildly. “If you’re looking for a highway, there aren’t any. That’s why we came out here to the Uintas to run our horses. Get away from the big towns like Provo and Ogden. Even Heber’s getting too big for my John’s taste, these days.”
“Just horses?” Hiram wondered.
“Also cattle.” Ada shrugged. “It was horses that got stolen.”
“All the maps you got. The older, the better,” Hiram said. “If you had any maps from when you first bought the land, I’d be especially happy to look at those.”
“What are you thinking, exactly?” She eyed him with suspicion.
“Mr. McCrae saw something,” Hiram said slowly. Then he dodged her question with a slight evasion that didn’t quite amount to a lie: “Maybe if I look on the maps, I’ll see what it was.”
“Like a rock formation he took in the darkness for an Indian in headdress?” Mrs. Oldham suggested dryly.
“Yes,” Hiram said. “Something like that.”
“I’ll give you all my maps,” Mrs. Oldham said. “Only remember, I’m not looking for an explanation. I’m looking for five hundred horses.”
“I get your five hundred horses back, will you hire Elbert McCrae again?”
“Of course.”
He waited with Michael by the truck while Ada Oldham went into the ranch house. The boy looked at Hiram with his dark liquid eyes and smiled. Hiram smiled back and tried not to let the sudden pang of loss, such as came over him every time he thought of his wife, twist that smile into a frown.
“So Mrs. Oldham seems to accept the idea that Indians might be thieves,” Michael said. “Only she doesn’t believe in the war paint.”
That ended Hiram’s nostalgia, and he tousled the boy’s hair.
Ada Oldham returned; her facial expression was softened. “I only got the one, or at least, only the one I can find.”
Hiram spread the map over the hood of his Double A. Michael joined him and looked at it over Hiram’s shoulder, standing on the running board and hoisting himself high into the air on the mirror.
“We’re here?” Hiram indicated a rectangle on the map.
“No, that’s our neighbors. Our house wasn’t built when this map was drawn. We’re here.” Ada Oldham pointed. “And the horses were penned here.”
She pointed at a meandering line. Above it, in a white space, were written the words Carre Shinob.
“Carre,” Hiram said. “I’m no good with languages, but that looks French to me. But Shinob… I don’t know. What is that?”
Ada Oldham shrugged. “The man who sold us the land gave us the map, and the map came with those words on it. I have no idea what they mean. The line there is the creek, and that’s where we had the horses penned. The space under those words is a ridge above the creek.”
“The French trappers got as far south as Utah, back in their day,” Hiram said. “Provo’s named after one of them.”
“I taught a little school, back when I was Miss Halstead,” Ada Oldham said. “And I think I remember enough French to know that carré is a square. That long, high ridge looks nothing like a square. But you’re welcome to go look around it all you like.”
“Bit far from the house, isn’t it?”
“You gotta go through Heber. We only moved the horses there this year; it was McCrae who suggested it. He scouted out all our land and said he thought that was the best grass. Used to keep the horses just across the road here.”
“Thank you.” Hiram handed back the map.
* * *
Since they were passing through Heber anyway, Hiram stopped and sent a telegram to his friend Mahonri Jones at B.Y. High in Provo. Mahonri was a librarian who loved a good riddle, and if his own library didn’t have the answer, he could walk up the hill to the university.
As Hiram and Michael bounced up the rutted road between high ridges, nearing the creek where the Oldhams had kept their cattle, the late summer sun began to sink.
“You were in charge of packing the truck,” Hiram said to his son.
“We have blankets and water and sandwiches.”
“What do we have for light?”
“A flashlight and an oil lantern. Did you pack the gun?”
“Go ahead and check,” Hiram suggested.
Michael looked into the glove compartment, finding the revolver and the spare full moon. “Shall I make sure it’s loaded? Maybe shoot a couple of fenceposts for good luck?”
“You let me handle the gun,” Hiram said. “You’re thirteen. You get the flashlight.”
The road ended at the gate of a rail fence that abruptly blocked off the canyon. The fresh darkness of mountain evening filled the canyon before them. Hiram and Michael both climbed out of the Double A. Hiram tucked the revolver into the back of his belt, and brought along the oil lantern and a box of matches.
Michael solemnly carried the flashlight.
“Can I climb it?” Michael asked.
“Stay close to me.”
They climbed the fence. Oil lantern lit, Hiram took slow steps. He breathed in the pine-scented air and, following the burbling creek, looked for horses. He saw plenty of fresh droppings, green, compact balls of recently-digested grass, but none of the beasts themselves and no gap in the fence through which they might have gone. McCrae was right; the grass here was tall and lush, and the stream looked year-round and abundant. And somehow, the horses were gone.
The ridge staring down from above the canyon was bare of trees for its upper half. In the nearly moonless night, its bulk was a shadow blocking out the enduring stars of the northern sky. Hiram found himself standing still, staring at the ridge, with the hair on the back of his neck standing up.
He pulled his fedora down tighter and scratched the back of his neck to make the feeling go away. It didn’t.
“Michael, does Carre Shinob mean anything in the language of the Dine?”
Michael’s Navajo was limited—he’d been a very small boy when Hiram and his wife had adopted him—but he remembered a few words. “The people live really far south of here, Pap.”
“I know.”
Michael circled his adopted father without slowing down as they talked. “I don’t think Carre Shinob means anything.”
Hiram nodded. He felt a flutter in his chest, and the hair on the backs of his arms was standing up as well. “Are you tired?”
“It isn’t late, Pap.”
“Shall we hike up that ridge?”
“We’d see better stars up there.” They didn’t see great stars anymore on the farm in Lehi; Salt Lake was just too close, and Utah Valley was filling up with farms. But on new moons, Hiram liked to drive Michael out west toward Tooele, where the sky was as dark as it had ever been for Jim Bridger.
They hiked up the slope. As they gained elevation on its flank, Hiram saw that the ridge hunkered down into a saddle and then rose to a final promontory before dropping into the two streams that had carved it.
“Up there.” He pointed, and a shiver ran up his spine.
“Pap,” Michael said. “I have a funny feeling in my stomach.”
Hiram did, too. It was a feeling he’d felt the one time he’d ridden the tilt-a-whirl in Salt Lake, a sensation that reminded him of falling. “Let’s both keep our lights on,” he told his son. “That way we can always see each other.”
The night air was crisp in the Uintas, even in August, but the hillside was steep and Hiram was sweating by the time they reached the saddle. He shook sweat out of his fedora, wiped his forehead on the back of a sleeve, and then rolled both sleeves up past his elbows.
Michael stuck close to his side as he caught his breath. The boy shone the watery yellow beam of his flashlight in all directions, but especially up to the top of the promontory.
“There’s no one up there,” Michael said.
“Right,” Hiram agreed. “Let’s go have a look.”
At the height of promontory was a flat patch of bare earth, bordered by a handful of weathered stones and a few stubborn bushes, barely larger than weeds. In the center of the stones lay a low pile of rocks, oblong in shape, about seven feet by three.
A pile of rocks such as you might lay over a body in a shallow burial.
“What is this place?” Michael’s voice trembled.
Hiram shivered, but not from the chill; there was no wind and he was sweating. A sensation like an electric current played along his spine. He wasn’t especially sensitive, not like Grandma Nettie had been. The veil had been thin for that old woman, and there were moments when past and present alike, as well as the movements of spirits and angels, seemed to be an open book, written for her exclusive reading. Hiram didn’t have that.
But neither was he an insensate clod. A spirit waited atop this hill.
He stooped to examine the rocks and saw that some had been disturbed. He crouched to poke in the earth where the stones had been removed and found a strange set of objects: a scrap of canvas cloth, a large animal claw with a hole drilled through it, one leather glove with the tips of the fingers and thumb cut off, and a strip of paper.
Unfolding the paper, he found an improbable signature: Brigham Young.
Hiram stood and took a slow breath. Should he take Michael back to the truck? But the boy was already nervous; surely being left alone in the truck would terrify him, despite his bravado.
Hiram could come back another night, but it was a long drive from anywhere he was willing to sleep, and besides, a spirit that was here tonight might not be here tomorrow.
“Listen, son.” Hiram knelt, to be able to look Michael directly in the face as they spoke. “I’m not going to lie to you. I think there are spirits on this hill.”
“More than usual?” Michael asked.
Hiram nodded. “But remember, a spirit has no flesh and bone, and cannot hurt you. No matter what it shows you, it can’t make you do anything. And if you want it to go away, you can cast it out in the name of Jesus.”
“I remember.” Michael swallowed. He was a brave boy. Hiram tousled his long hair and Michael smiled faintly.
“I want you to turn your flashlight off, but hold on to it, and keep your thumb on the switch.”
“I can do that.” Michael turned off his flashlight, and gripped it with both hands. “Are you going to turn off your lamp?”
“No,” Hiram said. “I’m going to use it to try to talk to the spirit.”
Michael swallowed so hard that Hiram could hear his Adam’s apple move. “Why?”
“I want to help Mr. McCrae get his job back.”
“You think the spirits might know where the horses are?”
“Yes.”
Michael nodded.
What on earth was the scrap of paper signed by Brigham Young? A contract, an old deed to the land? A missionary commission? An order for wheat? Hiram shook his head.
He set the lantern on the ground beside the oblong heap of stones.
“I can tell you’re here,” he said.
Nothing. The air was still. A hundred yards away though he was, Hiram thought he could hear the bubbling of the stream.
“This must be a lonely place. Don’t you want to talk?”
The stars shone down, cold and now queerly unfamiliar, as if Hiram had forgotten his years of star lore, or had been transported to an alien world under a different zodiac.
“That’s my lantern on the ground. I know you can see the flame. If you can hear me, make the flame dance. Don’t try to put it out, just move it.”
The air was still. Hiram fixed his eyes on the lantern.
“Just move the flame. Just a little.”
The flame jumped. As if struck by a sudden gust of wind, the flame snapped sideways for a split second before returning to its normal, upright posture.
Michael jumped, too, pressing himself against Hiram’s side.
Hiram wrapped an arm around Michael’s shoulder. “Very good. Now I’m going to ask you questions. If the answer is yes, make the flame move again. Gently, you don’t want to put it out.” But what to ask?
Michael shivered, and Hiram drew him close.
“Is there more than one of you?”
The flame moved.
“Are there fewer than ten?”
The flame moved.
That was a relief. However much the idea of a ghost discomfited Hiram, the idea of a multitude of ghosts was much worse.
“Are there two of you?” Nothing. “Three? Four? Five?”
The lantern’s flame moved.
Strange, though. The heap of stones was the size and shape of the grave of a single person.
“Are you all men?” Nothing. “All women? Both men and women? Men, women, and children together?”
The flame moved.
Hiram frowned. “Are you a family?”
The flame moved.
“Pioneers?” Hiram asked. “Mormons?”
Nothing.
“Indians?”
The flame moved.
Hiram pressed the ghosts in this slow fashion, eliciting additional information. The Indians hadn’t died in this spot, but had been moved here. Asking about revolutions of the stars, he thought he got the information that they had been here for seventy years—that made 1865, which was consistent with the signature of Brigham Young, who died in 1877.
He stabbed in the dark, but couldn’t land on a question that threw any more light on the paper.
“Two weeks ago, horses were stolen from the valley below this ridge.” Hiram paused. “Did you take them?”
The flame moved.
Michael was shaking.
“Will you give me back the horses?”
Nothing.
Hiram took a deep breath. “Will you trade the horses with me?”
The flame moved. The ghosts would trade.
But how to find out what to trade?
“Pap,” Michael said softly, a hint of a whimper in his voice, “is that you running your fingers through my hair?”
Hiram’s hand was on Michael’s shoulder. He grabbed the lantern in his other hand and raised it high; as if disturbed by unseen fingers, the boy’s hair moved about on his head.
“Turn on your flashlight,” he told his son, trying to keep his voice calm. “We’re going back to the truck.”
* * *
They finished out the night in a rented room in Heber. Hiram was awake two hours after falling asleep, with the peep of the egg-yolk sun through the paper blind. Michael, despite coming down from Carre Shinob trembling with nerves, slept another four hours.
He was thirteen years old, and Hiram let him sleep.
No response came to the telegram that day. Hiram examined the objects more closely. He learned little, except that the glove was not of home manufacture—it had a tag stitched inside it, faded now into illegibility. He bought a pair of long leather shoelaces at the mercantile and threaded one through the claw, which he then wore around his neck, right alongside the Chi-Rho talisman that protected him from enemies.
The scrap that contained actual legible words—the name Brigham Young—was the least comprehensible thing to him. He considered driving back up the ridge with a shovel and unearthing whatever lay beneath those stones, but if the spirits involved—and there were definitely spirits involved, and not just spirits, but the ghosts of dead human beings—were disturbed, then digging up the grave would only disturb them more.
They had offered to trade with him. No, that wasn’t quite right, he had asked whether they were willing to trade and they had indicated yes. Or perhaps, the one of them that was speaking had indicated yes. He shouldn’t assume he’d been speaking to the same spirit the entire time, since he hadn’t asked.
But then that spirit, or another of them, had ruffled Michael’s hair.
Had they wanted to trade for his son? Or had they wanted to take Michael? They had said they were Indians. Hiram and his wife had adopted the boy because he was without family—Hiram had been close to the child’s father in the Great War—and because they’d been unable to have family of their own. Not all Indians were happy with white people adopting Indians—did the dead Indians want to take Michael away from him?
Would that involve them killing Michael?
Hiram shook the thoughts out of his head. He needed more information. Short of digging up the grave…
“Are you okay staying here tonight?” he asked Michael. “We’ll lock the door, and I’ll leave you here with milk and graham crackers and all the pulp magazines the mercantile has? As long as they’re not too lurid, that is.”
“I don’t know, Pap.” Michael grinned. “I can handle some pretty lurid stuff.”
* * *
With the sun still up, Hiram climbed up into the saddle of Carre Shinob. There he built a little fire and brewed himself tea, using a packet he always carried in the Double A, hidden inside a folded state map he never used. His grandmother had called the tea “the devil’s snare,” but she’d taught him to use it. The muddy brown infusion made from the jimson weed opened the mind to the universe. To an unprepared mind, that let in chaos—hallucinations, clowning, madness. To a prepared mind, it could let in revelation.
He put the tea in his thermos flask, just a single cup. It would be enough. He put his hand into the glove, and the claw around his neck. He clenched the scraps of paper and canvas in his gloved hand, and he stood beside the tumulus.
Watching the sun sink, he emptied his mind of all thoughts. He inhaled, focused on Michael’s safety, reminded himself that the boy was in a bright room eating graham crackers and reading detective stories, and exhaled, letting go of that concern. He did the same with thoughts of McCrae’s belligerence, the Oldhams’ indifference, his own physical safety.
With the stage of his mind empty, he placed onto it the questions he had. Who were the ghosts waiting there? What was their connection with the physical objects he held? Why had they taken the Oldhams’ horses? What would they want in return for releasing the beasts?
He drank the tea—hot or cold, it was disgusting, and Hiram wasn’t one to sweeten anything with sugar.
Then he lay down on the grave.
It wasn’t comfortable, but it was necessary. This, too, was an old technique he’d learned from his grandmother. Solomon had practiced it, she’d told him, sleeping in the Temple of the Lord until Jehovah himself appeared. The Greeks knew it, and the old Arabs. Mind open, heart focused on his questions, Hiram Woolley lay on the rocky mound and waited to see ghosts.
He touched the Saturn ring on his finger. It was made of lead, forged by Hiram himself from a simple mold, and scratched by him with the sign of Saturn while that planet was strong in the skies. Saturn ruled melancholy, and dreams, and insight.
He fell asleep.
* * *
Hiram saw a man on a horse. Around his neck, the rider worse a necklace of teeth, claws, and bones. Several of the talons might have passed for the one Hiram had found on Carre Shinob. Two young Indians, a boy and a girl, led the horse by its reins, and the man sat stiffly, staring down at them.
Hiram looked down at himself. Wool trousers, muddy boots that weren’t his. But he wore fingerless leather gloves on each hand—gloves he recognized.
Whose eyes was he seeing through? Whose memories were these?
He looked again at the rider, and realized with a shock that the man was a corpse. His legs were strapped to the animal and his back was strapped to a plank that rose from the saddle behind him, the whole arrangement keeping him upright in death. The dead man’s fist was clenched around a sheet of paper.
A sheet of paper that had once been signed by Brigham Young? But why would a dead man carry such a thing?
To prove his status? To prove to his ancestors, or to his gods, that he, too, was a mighty chief, a person worthy of a friendship with Brigham Young, famous chief of the Mormons?
It was only a guess, but if felt right to Hiram.
He stood on a high bluff, but this was not Carre Shinob. A wide valley full of yellow grass stretched out to the west. This was not the Uintas, it felt more like Beaver or Parowan, with lower hills and cultivated land.
He heard weeping. There were words, but not in a language he knew.
Looking about, he saw that a man standing beside him also wore a wool suit, and had the craggy face and pale hair of a northern European. Everyone else on the scene, maybe as many as fifty people, was Indian. Hiram knew enough Navajo to recognize their dress and a few of their words, and this was another people.
The two weeping children led the horse to a hillside tomb, a small natural cave that had almost been bricked in with stones and mortar. Indian men untied the corpse and carried it inside.
But the glove? It remained on Hiram’s borrowed hand, outside the tomb.
And there was no canvas in sight.
Here was only part of the answer to Hiram’s riddle, at best.
Brother Morley, the other European man said in an urgent whisper, you cannot allow this to happen!
Allow what to happen?
Shut your mouth, Hiram found his body saying. Do you want another war?
The other man was sullen, silent.
Then let them have the foolish traditions of their fathers. I will speak my eulogy and keep my vow.
Let them have their traditions, aye, no matter what?
No matter what.
The dead man arranged, the Indians stood in front of his tomb. Two women stood in the open doorway itself, and though the others fell silent, they continued a feverish chant under their breaths.
One of the men nodded to Hiram.
Colorow was a great man, Hiram said. He made war on the Mericats and the Mormonee, and he was a mighty leader in war. Then he made peace with the Mormonee, and he was mighty in peace as well.
The Indians nodded, satisfied.
Then the warriors standing to either side of the chanting women stepped forward. With long knives, they slit the women’s throats.
Hiram wanted to scream. The body whose eyes he borrowed panted and sweated, but did nothing.
Could this be a lying vision? Jimson weed was called the devil’s snare for a reason, and could send dishonest dreams, as well as true ones.
But no, Hiram had a strong mind, and he was prepared.
And the vision had answered some of his questions.
The killers laid the two murdered women—sacrificed women—inside the grave with the chief’s body. As they finished bricking up the opening, the onlookers returned to weeping and song.
Hiram still wanted to scream, but he forced himself to keep watching.
With the tomb sealed, the two wailing children were led forward. With a shock, Hiram realized that theirs was not the obligatory crying of a professional mourner, or the general sorrow of someone whose tribe has lost a leader, but was caused by real terror.
They knew what was coming.
Then sacrificers drove long iron spikes into the stone to either side of the tomb. They shut iron collars around the necks of the two children, and then with short chains, they shackled the children to the tomb.
The dead chief’s tribe turned and walked away, singing.
The man with the gloves and his white companion went with them.
The cries of the shackled children rose piteous to a deaf heaven.
* * *
Coming up out of the jimson weed trance, Hiram felt cold. He ached from the rocks and his blood pulsed sluggishly in his veins, ineffective against the freezing Uinta night.
He couldn’t let himself come up, he needed to see more.
He tightened his fists around the scraps of paper and canvas.
More, I need to know more.
He forgot the cold, and sank again.
* * *
He found himself under a swollen moon, standing on the same high ridge beside the Indian chief’s tomb.
You stood the earlier passage, Hiram was saying. He leaned closed into the face of the craggy blonde man he’d seen before. The earlier passage was worse.
In that murder, and heathen sacrifice, are worse than grave robbing, aye. The other man was furious. But don’t pretend that what you’re proposing now ain’t a sin, just the same.
They’re asking us. His brothers. It isn’t robbing, it’s just moving the dead, to keep him safe, preserve his honor.
Hiram pointed at four Indian men as he spoke. Everyone wore long wool coats, and their exhaled breath puffed up in tiny clouds.
The blond man shook his head, shoulders slumping in surrender, and Hiram and the others got to work.
With slow movements and chanting a song Hiram didn’t understand, the six men knocked in the stones that bricked up the chief’s tomb. Hiram and his fellow white man stood back, and the Indians crept into the tomb holding a white canvas sheet.
When they emerged, there were three bodies in the sheet.
Them, too? Hiram asked, pointing at two small skeletons lying outside the tomb. Years must have passed, because the flesh had all fallen—or been eaten—from their bones, and the collars around their necks had fallen off, together with their skulls.
The Indians nodded.
Hiram helped gather up the children’s bones. Picking up one of the skulls—the boy’s?—he found it still covered with a thick mop of black hair. He ran his fingers through it and felt tears trickle down his cheeks.
They bundled all five skeletons into the canvas and then together the six men hoisted the bones up onto the back of a buckboard wagon. Hiram climbed into the seat and took the reins, shushing his uneasy horses.
Where are we taking the chief? he asked.
North and east, one of the Indians said. Far. A place called Carre Shinob.
* * *
Hiram drove into Heber with ache in his bones and disquiet in his stomach. A chief had died and been buried somewhere in the west, and then reburied here. The man’s grave had been disturbed by McCrae and the Oldhams’ horses, and his ghost had taken the herd.
The chief would give the horses back, but after seeing the man’s funeral, Hiram’s fear that what he wanted in return was the life of his son Michael intensified.
A light in the telegraph office drew him to park there in the gray dawn light, setting the handbrake of the Double A and shuffling into the creaking wooden building. The clerk’s desk was vacant, and Hiram stood gratefully in the heat of a coal stove in the corner, feeling its warmth slowly burn away the frost that had sunk into his bones.
The clerk dragged himself to his place behind the desk, blowing his nose through a drooping mustache and into a yellowed old handkerchief. “I got a pot of coffee, if you want some.”
Hiram shook his head. “Thank you for the stove, though. I only stopped in because my boy’s still sleeping, and I wanted to see if I’d had an answer.”
“Oh yeah, you’re the fella with the queer words. I gotta say, you look more like a farmer than a… whatever kind of man would be sending telegrams like that one.”
“I am a farmer. Beets. Down at Lehi.”
“That explains it. Let me check.”
“Thank you.”
The clerk dug into his clip stand of messages and came up with one. “Here you go, came in last night while Jensen was working. He didn’t have an address to send it on to. Looks like your answer’s just about as strange as your question.”
“I planned to come in to pick it up.” Hiram tipped the clerk a precious nickel and took the telegram. The telegram was from Mahonri, and it was much longer than the question. Mahonri behaved as if he had an unlimited budget for sending telegrams; since Hiram was the beneficiary, he couldn’t complain.
Carre Shinob is legendary place where chief Walkara’s bones were moved. Walkara also known as Colorow and Walker as in Walker’s War. Most famous horse thief in history rustled 3000 horses in California in a single day. What are you doing up there?
“Thank you,” Hiram said again, and headed for the boarding house.
* * *
“They think I’m crazy at the slaughterhouse,” McCrae grumbled. The foreman carried a large bag slung over his shoulder and grimaced from the weight as he climbed the ridge to Carre Shinob.
The bag was full of horse bones.
“Did you tell them you wanted to make soup?” Hiram squinted at the sky. In the evening’s last blue-gray light, a sheet of glowering clouds gathered. In the east, over the higher Uintas, he saw lightning flash, and then the ensuing thunder crawled past him.
That should help, if anything.
But the storm made him even more glad he’d left Michael a second night in the boarding house.
“Yeah, I tried your joke. That’s why they think I’m crazy.”
“Well, if this doesn’t work, you don’t get your job back, and then I guess you’re out of options, and you’ll have to leave town. So as I see it, the opinion of the slaughterhouse crew shouldn’t worry you much.”
“And if I do get my job, I stick around, and I get the reputation of an eccentric who makes horse soup.”
“You could have told them the truth,” Hiram suggested.
They reached the saddle of the ridge, and McCrae set down his sack. “And what is the truth?”
Hiram set down his sack, which contained wooden rattles, a small hand drum, and a square of sheet metal, bowed over to squeeze it in. “Some would call it magic. My grandmother would have denied that.”
McCrae spat thick phlegm into the dirt. “And what would she have called it?”
Hiram looked up at Chief Walkara’s grave mound. “She’d have said that when you need to get something done, you do what works. A cunning woman or a cunning man is just somebody who knows what works.”
“I guess on the whole I’d rather be known as the fella who wants to drink horse soup. Shall we get this started, then?”
Thunder rolled across the ridge, fat drops of rain splattered on their faces, and Hiram nodded. The heliotropius was said to be able to call rain. Sadly, it had no power to dismiss rain clouds.
They commenced at the far end of the ridge from the relocated bones of Chief Walkara. With the peals of thunder becoming more frequent, until they almost seemed to roll over the top of each other, the two men inched down the ridge. Elbert McCrae shuffled slowly, shaking his head and trying not to look at Hiram.
Hiram danced, kicked his toes into the softening dirt. He also whinnied and snorted, making all the horse-like noises he could.
McCrae carried the sheet metal, and he flexed and shook it. The sound he made was closer to the thunder’s noise than to the sound of actual horses. Hiram beat the drum, shook the rattles, and clapped his hands in turn. It was his best imitation of the sound of a running herd, but it was rude and childish at best.
Would it be enough?
He kept his eye fixed on the tumulus, but saw nothing.
As they climbed toward the site of the grave, McCrae traded the sheet metal for the sack of bones. He shook his head. “That’s the weakest damn horse imitation I ever heard, Woolley.”
Hiram chuckled. “I’m trying, but I’m more of a mule and truck man, myself.”
“A horse sounds like this.” And then McCrae began to neigh and whinny for all he was worth.
And he really did sound like a horse.
They climbed the promontory prancing together. At the top, rain mixed with hail pounded down on them as they trotted three times in a circle around the stones, McCrae scattering the bones from his sack all over the knob of earth.
Then Hiram stopped, and McCrae stopped with him. The foreman wore a surprisingly cheerful grin.
“We brought you these horses, Chief Walkara!” Hiram cried, addressing the low mound of stones.
Lightning flashed, illuminating the top of the hill—it was still empty of life other than the two men.
“We brought you these horses to trade!” Hiram added.
The rain had become entirely hail. Hiram shivered. He felt cold, tired, and suddenly alone. He was too cold from the mere weather to be able to feel whether there were spirits present, and there was no way he could light a lamp in these conditions.
“We give you this herd!” He tried one last time. “We ask you to bring back the Oldhams’ herd!”
Nothing.
He sighed.
“That’s it, then.” McCrae kicked at the muddy earth. “Well, foolish as I feel, I appreciate the effort.”
Hiram nodded. They trudged down off the promontory Carre Shinob, heading down the saddle toward the valley below.
Lightning flashed.
McCrae sucked breath in past his teeth. “You see that, Woolley?”
Hiram raised his eyes. “What?”
Lightning flashed again. The valley below them was full of horses. Not phantasms, but flesh and blood beasts, huddling together beneath the trees to shelter from the storm.
“He brought them back,” Hiram murmured.
Lightning flashed a third time. Hiram smelled horses surrounding him, felt their heat as they passed, and heard the thunderous rattle of hooves on the ridge—and yet the ridge held not a single flesh-and-blood horse.
At the high end of the valley, standing just outside the rail fence penning in the horses on that end, Hiram saw a band of Indians. He only saw them for a moment, but he saw them clearly and he knew their faces. He’d seen them before.
He’d seen their funeral.
But now all five sat on horseback. Chief Walkara faced Hiram with one arm raised over his head, holding a spear in greeting.
Hiram raised his own arm in return, and then the Indians were gone.
The heat, smell, and sound of the phantom horses passed with them.
“I’ll be damned,” McCrae said.
“I don’t think so. Anyway, I hope not.”
McCrae took two steps away from Hiram, as if mere proximity would damn him. He cleared his throat. “What do I… what do I tell them?”
Hiram felt tired. “Mrs. Oldham said she wasn’t looking for an explanation. She just wanted her five hundred horses back. She said she’d hire you right back.”
“She’ll think I stole them.”
“Tell her we found the Indians. Tell her the Indians weren’t from around here, but they were famous horse thieves, and we bought the horses back. That’s the simple truth, as I see it.”
McCrae nodded slowly. “And if she asks what we paid?”
Hiram began trudging down to his truck. “Then, Mr. McCrae, I would consider telling a lie.”