Chapter 4: The Long Hunt

The country opened up north of the cut, wide as an ocean and just as merciless. The ridges fell away to stone flats pocked with mesquite and dry wash, the kind of ground that gives up nothing easy. Tracks didn’t last there—wind took them, sun burned them clean. We rode single file, eyes low, the sound of hooves lost in the shimmer. Somewhere out ahead, he was watching this same country, maybe closer than we’d ever know, waiting for one of us to make a mistake.

The sun climbed slow and mean, turning the plains to a sheet of hammered brass. By noon the air shook with heat, and the horses’ hides darkened with sweat. We stopped only long enough to water them from the skins and check the lay of the land, each ridge the same as the one before, each horizon a new lie. If Darrant was leaving sign, it was too clever or too faint to see.

Toward evening we came to a dry arroyo, its bed littered with bones and driftwood. The wind ran down it like a whisper from far off, carrying the smell of dust and something older, iron, maybe, or blood turned to powder. Ellison studied the cut, one hand resting on his rifle. “He’s been here,” he said, not like a guess but a certainty. None of us asked how he knew.

We rode on as the light thinned, long shadows spilling over the flats. The land changed color, gold to ash, ash to bruised violet, and somewhere in that fading I felt the weight of him again, out there in the hush, setting the pace. Night was coming, and with it, the kind of dark a man could vanish into forever.

The trail bent west into a canyon, narrow and pale, walls cut high from the stone like ribs. The heat had nowhere to go there; it pressed down, thick and close, so even the horses breathed heavy. Ellison rode point, eyes tracing the ridgeline, and the rest of us followed single file into the throat of it.

The sound came first, one dry click, sharp as a hammer on flint, then the world lifted. Rock and fire came down together, a roar that ripped the air apart. I don’t remember falling, only the flash and the dust and the horses screaming. When I could see again, half the canyon was smoke and the rest was silence.

Ruben was gone, nothing left but the edge of his saddle and the echo. Carter and the C-B hand lay twisted near the wall, faces turned wrong, boots still smoking. Ellison was down but breathing, his shirt soaked dark. De Graaf’s leg bent under him like a stick gone soft. The blast had thrown me clear, burned the side of my head, left my ribs feeling split.

We crawled out before the fire took what was left. The horses had scattered, the canyon mouth choked with dust and stone. By the time night came, we’d made a lean camp in the open—no fire, no words. Ellison drifted in and out, whispering Darrant’s name like it was both curse and prayer.

That’s how the Quahadi found us, three half-dead men at the mouth of a canyon still smoking from the blast. They came quiet, faces painted, rifles slung low. They took our guns, bound our wounds, and carried us back toward the red hills. In their camp, I lay under hides and heard them speaking soft among themselves. One of them held up something from my saddlebag, a small pouch, faded leather stamped with a red sun.

The elders gathered close. They said little to me, but I saw the look pass among them. The pouch had belonged once to a Quahadi healer, traded years ago for a horse, or stolen; it didn’t matter which. To them, it meant the land still remembered what was owed.

“They kept Ellison alive three days. He never spoke after the second night, just watched the fire until his eyes went dim.”

“The elders learned from De Graaf about the pouch, and what had happened in the canyon.” They listened, nodded, and sent a rider to the C-B.

When I could finally stand, the elders summoned me to the fire. The oldest among them, the one they called the Dream Walker, said the medicine man we’d buried had gone on a spirit quest to seek Piah Pʉhakatu Nʉmʉ - the Man Who Brings Balance to Spirits.

I didn’t understand the words at first, only the way they looked at me after he spoke, like they were measuring something behind my eyes instead of the man standing there. The Dream Walker touched the pouch once, then pressed it into my hand. His fingers were rough, scarred from years of work and weather, but steady. He said the spirits that guided their healer had passed through fire and were seeking balance in the living world. Balance through me.

I told him I was no medicine man, just a trail hand chasing a ghost with a rifle. He only nodded, as if that was proof enough. “The ghost you chase,” he said, “carries the weight of many.” Then he drew a line of ash across my brow and turned away.

That night I lay awake listening to the wind move through the red hills. Somewhere out there, Darrant was still breathing, still drawing the circle tighter. And whether by spirit or by debt, the hunt had changed shape. It wasn’t just blood anymore, it was something older, heavier. Something that didn’t end with the killing.

De Graaf was waiting in the shade near a shelter the Quahadi had built from twisted cedar and stone. His leg was bound in splints, face pale, eyes sunk from the pain and the waiting. The tribe’s horses moved slow around him, dust rising in soft spirals.

“I heard they’re sending a rider for you,” I said.

He nodded. “Soon as the sun drops. He’ll deliver a note to the C-B, to send a wagon.” He looked out across the flats. “Ellison never came back from that fever.”

“I know,” I said.

He was quiet a long while. Then, “Before he went, he talked about you.”

I waited.

“Said you’d make big tracks on the land.” De Graaf’s voice roughened as he spoke, like he was quoting something he didn’t fully understand. “Told me there was a Texas Ranger once who said there was no stopping a man who knew he was in the right and kept a-comin’. Big tracks on the land. Those were words he used for few men. Only such as Bowie, Sam Houston, Goodnight, and Slaughter.”

“The wind tugged at the bandage, same as it took the trail, slow and certain.” Somewhere behind us, the Quahadi were singing low, the sound carrying like smoke.

I didn’t answer. The words settled between us, heavy as the heat. I’d never thought of myself in that company, and truth was, I didn’t want to. Men who made big tracks usually left graves behind them.

De Graaf shifted in his shaded spot. “You’ll find him,” he said. “I know it.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But finding ain’t the same as finishing.”

He gave a slow nod. “Still. Ellison thought you would.”

Three days later, the Quahadi brave led the wagon to their camp. They unloaded supplies for the tribe and tried to make a comfortable nest for De Graaf in the back. His wife had brought laudanum for the pain, and the medicine men gave her a mixture to brew a tea that would ease him without the bite of opium. They warned it would be a hard winter coming.

They’d also brought me a new mount—lean, strong, and restless for the miles ahead. I stayed until I could ride. The wind moved through that country like breath through bone—slow, hollow, unending. When the morning came and the hills turned gold, I packed what I could carry, took Ellison’s rifle, and headed north.

Darrant was still out there.

And now the hunt was mine alone.

The Llano Estacado stretched before me, flat, dry, and mostly empty. A great table of land reaching from Texas into New Mexico, hard as iron and near featureless to the eye. Heat shimmered on the horizon, the sky wide enough to swallow a man whole.

I rode north toward Roswell, near ninety miles from the Texas line. It was still a distant thought, just a word on a trail few men traveled. The land between was merciless, dust and sun by day, cold wind by night. I had no map, no guide, only the fact that Darrant had three weeks’ lead and a way of folding himself into the country until the country became him.

The days blurred. I rode through heat that rippled like glass, the land stretching endlessly, the sound of hooves the only measure of time. Once or twice, I caught faint sign, an old campfire, a print softened by wind, but never enough to be sure.

By dusk, the light went red and long, the horizon melting into shadow. I made camp where a dry creek bent north, kept the fire small, the smoke thinner still. The night pressed close, full of its own silence.

Tomorrow, I’d ride again. And the day after that. Until I found him.

Darrant was out there.

And I was coming for him.

By morning, the world was clean-swept, every edge scoured down to bone. The storm had erased the trail, but not the direction. Most men couldn’t help but leave a kind of rhythm behind them, where they camped, how they moved, when they rested. You could feel it if you stayed quiet enough.

I rode northwest through broken country, the kind where the wind never stopped talking. Mesquite grew low and mean. Buzzards wheeled lazy circles in the hard sky. Now and then I’d see old buffalo skulls half-buried in the sand, horns worn smooth by years of dust.

By noon, the heat was thick enough to bend light. I stopped at a dry arroyo, gave the horse a few mouthfuls from my canteen, then poured some into my hand to wash the grit from my face. The water went brown instantly. I caught myself staring at it, how fast it vanished.

That’s when I saw the sign.

A strip of hide tied around a greasewood limb, stiff and sun-cracked. Below it, the faint mark of a horse’s hoof, cut deep, like a heavy man in the saddle. Not more than a week old.

He was losing time.

I rode harder that afternoon, keeping the Caprock on my left, the horizon rolling like a sea. There was a feeling now, that I was no longer chasing, but being drawn. Like the land itself was leaning me toward him.

When the sun fell, I made camp in the lee of a bluff. The air smelled of rust and storm. I cleaned Ellison’s rifle, oiled the bolt, then sat with it across my knees until the stars came.

The stars came hard and close that night, crowding the sky like they were trying to see. The kind of cold that follows a dust storm had settled in, sharp enough to bite through the blanket. I kept the fire low, no more than a whisper of flame, and lay there listening to the night breathe.

Coyotes started up somewhere off to the west, their voices thin and hollow in the emptiness. Every sound out here carried farther than it should, the wind through the grass, a hoof shifting, the dry tick of cooling metal. You could start to think the land was alive, listening back.