The Time of The Cat 28

TWENTY-EIGHT

STORMBREAKER

The trouble on the reservation had started a few weeks before. The first thing that happened was old Lucy Black Hat went missing. According to her niece, who lived with her, she’d gone out in the evening to walk to the liquor store and hadn’t come back.

It had happened before, and it was usually because she’d gotten drunk and ended up sleeping it off in some bushes someplace. This time, though, it’d been a couple of days, so me and some of the boys went out to her place and tried to track her. It was mostly because her niece is sweet on William, and he told me, “Stormbreaker, I really need some help tracking. You know I ain’t any good at it.” That, and the fact that I like him, convinced me to get the guys and go check on her.

He spent more time talking to the niece than actually looking for tracks. I’m a better tracker anyway, but it wasn’t much use. Lucy had been gone too long and the wind had been pretty high, so there was hardly any sign left.

We managed to track her down the road a ways, but when the tracks petered out, William said, “Stormbreaker, why don’t you and the others go on down the road a piece and see if you can pick them up again? I’m going back to her trailer, just in case Susannah might happen to remember anything else that could help.”

I snorted, and a couple of the others laughed out loud at this transparent excuse, but we turned and walked off down the road. William is a pretty likable young guy, and we wanted to give him a chance with her.

We walked about another half mile, and then I picked up Lucy’s tracks again. This time, she wasn’t alone. There was another footprint set that was walking behind her. In places, it covered her tracks partially, so I knew it was following, and from the condition of those tracks, they had been there about as long as hers.

There was one dusty stretch where the following tracks were very clear, and they caused us some consternation. There was something funny about them. They looked like a man wearing some kind of shoes, but they were very narrow, and the depth of the impression showed that the follower had a very strange way of rolling his feet.

About a hundred feet after that, there were some odd marks on the road, and both sets of tracks ended. It looked as if they’d gone off into the weeds, and we poked about off to the side of the road. There were some broken branches in the sage, and the smell of crushed leaves was heavy in the air.

We walked along trying to figure out where they’d gone until we finally picked up the tracks of the stranger, but not Lucy’s. His tracks were deep enough that it looked like he could have been carrying Lucy. We followed them out from the road towards a bluff and finally came across what remained of Lucy in a dry arroyo that snaked along across the flats.

There had been some coyotes there, but they hadn’t touched much. Even so, it looked as if something that was not a coyote had chewed on her throat and upper arms. Overall, it was a pretty bad thing to see, and a couple of the guys turned pale and stepped back a ways.

Well, we finally got the police out there, but those numskulls thought that Lucy had gotten drunk and fallen into the arroyo and died and then been set on by coyotes. We didn’t think too highly of that theory, but we’ve learned not to argue with those guys. It don’t do any good, and it makes them angry, and they like to take that out on us.

The next thing that happened was Jessie Nine-Toes turned up missing. He’d gone out in the morning to cut some firewood and hadn’t come back that night, and his wife was mighty put out about it, too.

“How am I supposed to cook without any fuel?” she complained. “And, what’s going to happen if it turns cold? This house ain’t too warm as it is, and it ain’t even cold yet.”

She had a reputation as a terrible complainer, and we often kidded Jessie about it. A couple of the guys also made some fun of him going out to cut wood.

“Maybe he missed with his ax again.”

“Yeah, and this time he did cut his whole leg off, not just his toe.”

Jessie had been splitting wood a couple of years ago and drinking pretty heavily at the same time. As the bottle got low, he took a swing at a log to trim off a stub branch, and the ax glanced and cut his little toe right off. It didn’t slow him up much. He tied a rag on it and poured some whiskey on the rag, and it healed up just fine, but people still made fun of him sometimes.

I looked at the jokers with a mean look, trying to indicate that they should shut up around his wife. She was pretty worried for all of her complaining.

“Don’t you worry, Mrs. Smith. We’ll go take a look for him. He’s probably in town at the bar or thrown in jail,” I said, trying to be reassuring.

“Oh, God, no!” she exclaimed. “The last time that no-good fool got drunk in town, it cost us three hundred dollars in court costs! He’d better have cut off his leg, and you can tell him that for me.” She had worked herself up into a pretty temper, so we got out of there as fast as possible before she started in on us.

William thought that Jessie would have driven down the road a couple of miles and then turned onto a dirt road which led to a small stand of trees on the edge of the Res, so we decided to hike down that way. When we got there, we saw his tire marks and followed them into the treed area. His pickup was sitting there under the pines with the door open and an empty bottle lying by the rear wheels.

“It looks like he drove in here and started drinking, but I don’t see no tracks where he walked out,” I observed after walking around the area. It was kind of rocky where the pickup was parked, and that made it hard to find any trace of trail.

After I looked around for several minutes, I found another one of those strange footprints. This one, like the ones by Lucy, looked as if the maker was heavily burdened.

“Here’s one of those weird tracks, and it may be that he carried Jessie off,” I said.

The others agreed that Jessie could have been captured., He wouldn’t usually put up much of a fight when he was drunk. Some people get fractious when drinking, but Jessie mostly became passive and ended up comatose.

We continued our looking, but we never did find anything else. William took the pickup back to the wife, and she told him that it might be better for Jessie if he didn’t show up for a few months, so that was the end of that.

The only problem in my mind was the odd footprints. I was pretty worried about those, so when William’s kid sister disappeared on the way to school, I decided that enough was enough. William was out visiting Susannah, but his mother called me,

and I rounded up some of the other guys to go look for her.

When we found some more of those strange tracks, we worked at it until we traced them to the old Quonset hut. We were conferring on how best to proceed, assuming that the weird-footed guy was carrying a gun, when this big, white guy and a beautiful blonde showed up driving a pickup that I recognized as belonging to a local rancher named Dan Dayle.

Dayle wasn’t the type to loan anything, so I figured the two had stolen the pickup. We thought they might be part of the group that took little Kimana, so we were pretty hostile at first, but it soon appeared that they knew more about what we were faced with than we did. We discussed the situation with them, and the man told us he was going after the kidnapper through what he called a transporter. We were angry enough to go along, so we asked him to wait while we all went and got our deer rifles.