Chapter 18

We had a week of peace and quiet, and damned if it didn't get boring! What do you make of that!?!

By this time we were well into the wilds of the New Mexico Territory desert, and we were expecting to see our first Navajos pretty soon. In some ways they were harder to fight than other Indians because so many of them still used bows and arrows. It wasn't because they couldn't get guns, it was more because it was the traditional way to fight. The result of this was that they were much sneaker than the Apaches because they had to get closer to make a hit a certainty, at least they thought so. Personally, I always thought that the real reason was their lousy shooting, but I guess that was a matter of opinion.

Anyway, The Navajos were masters of ambush, and often the first you would know of their presence was an arrow sticking out of you or your horse. They were the closest things to Marine snipers when it came to guile and concealment in this day and age.

It may be that the lack of action was even having an effect on Running Fox, because he did not detect any hostile activity until my horse went down with an arrow in his throat. A few more arrows came our way, but that was the only one that did any real damage. We were moving relatively slowly, so I was not hurt when I jumped from my horse. The horse fell on his left side, so I had no trouble in pulling out my Winchester, though my Remington was out of action under the horse's body.

We had been caught in a slight depression between two sand hills, so we could not see the attackers. They were on the back side of a hill and out of sight, though we knew where they had fired from because of the angle of the arrows after they landed. We also knew that there were seven Navajos because that was the number of arrows we saw.

I quickly evolved a plan and sent Joe and Running Fox with their horses around the sand hill opposite the one concealing the Navajos. I wanted to find out if my Marine training was as good as I thought it was, and if I still remembered enough of it to make good use of the training.

For what I had in mind, I didn't need the Winchester, so I left it behind as I started crawling along the base of the hill where the Navajos were hiding. I was going after the Indians with my tomahawk! I still had my revolvers if I got into bad trouble. Joe and Running Fox were supposed to keep the Navajos distracted until I could catch up to them. I was wearing my camouflage clothing, so I had high hopes of my plan working.

This plan was not just a bit of machismo showing up, but I really felt that I needed to know if the camouflage actually worked, since I didn't think that the strings and twists of a conventional gillie suit were appropriate for the desert. Also, I wanted to know if I really did know enough to teach Joe, and eventually John, how to survive. These Navajos were the perfect test case with Joe and Running Fox to back me up.

The shooting from my friends started before I reached the back of the subject hill, so they were right on cue. I slithered around to where I could see the Navajos, and there were seven of them, as we had expected. It was then that I realized my goof—there was no way that I could take on seven men in good condition all at one time! How the hell had I made such a stupid mistake? I guess that I was so used to using a rifle at long range that I had let habit take over. Shit! Well, now I was going to have to mend that error.

If I could get to within 50 feet, I could take all of them out with my revolvers. However, getting that close was going to take all of my skill. Occasionally, one of the Navajos would rise to shoot an arrow, but they were more messing around than seriously attacking. It was as if they were stalling around as they waited for more of their people to show up. Uh-oh, if that was true, I was in deep shit!

Just about that time was when six more Navajo warriors came jogging up to join their friends. As soon as I saw the newcomers, I froze in place and actually held my breath, hoping that my camouflage was good enough to keep me alive. It must have worked, because one of the newcomers came within 30 feet of me and never noticed the lump lying on the ground. These guys were carrying rifles, mostly Winchesters, so I realized that the fun and games would be over shortly.

Moving very slowly to try to keep from being noticed, I added a cartridge to all four of my guns and held one revolver in each hand. I was lying down behind a very low ridge of sand which would do no good when it came time to stop bullets, but it was serving to add to my concealment. The Navajos started to shoot their guns at my friends, and that was when I acted.

Firing as fast as I could take aim, I emptied all four pistols into the Navajos. There were 13 warriors to begin with, but my 24 shots had managed to reduce the count of living Indians to only three. Two were slightly wounded, but one had managed to escape my shooting untouched. I had no opportunity to reload before the three charged at me. I took my tomahawk in my right hand and my bowie knife in my left and rolled to my feet to have as much freedom of movement as I could manage.

Knife fighting had been taught to me by an expert, a Marine sergeant who had been in Nam, as well as in the Middle Eastern sand. He had a few scars to show that he had been in fights, but the fact that he was still walking around proved that he knew what he was doing with a knife. I planned to use my knife mainly as a defensive weapon and the tomahawk as my offensive weapon. The head of the tomahawk was steel and obviously made by Whites, but it had been taken from a Navajo, so I knew that it was an effective weapon. The head had a 2-inch-wide blade on one side and a 4-inch-long spike on the other side. The head must have weighed about a pound and a quarter, so it was the perfect weapon of its type.

The unwounded man got to me first and took a swipe at me with his knife. I parried the swing with my knife while chopping at his arm with the blade of the tomahawk. I guess that he had never faced this combination of weapons before, because he seemed awkward as he attacked. My tomahawk blade caught him in the right arm just below the elbow and caused him to drop his knife. Before he could recover, I reversed my knife to slit open his belly and turned to face my other attackers. My first opponent fell forward with a scream of pain and frustration as he tried to stuff his intestines back into place, but they were too slippery from the gushing blood for him to accomplish much. I knew from experience that he was as good as dead and not a problem anymore.

The other two Indians had almost reached me, and I could see that the nearest one had a bullet wound in his thigh muscle. The other one had blood running from a bullet gouge at his temple. It was bright red blood, so I expected him to collapse pretty soon from loss of arterial blood. Therefore, I concentrated on the man with the thigh wound.

Neither man was as sure on his feet as I was, so I had little trouble sidestepping to put my first target between me and the other man. This time, I attacked. I took a swing with the tomahawk at the wounded leg, knowing that the man was going to try to jump back. That move was instinctive and would have taken a lot of training to overcome. Well, he jumped back, and, as he did, I lunged forward enough to catch him in the crotch with the spike from my tomahawk. He was wearing a loin cloth, so I could not see exactly where my blow hit, but he screamed bloody murder and blood gushed from the wound when I pulled the spike out. I knew that I had hit only flesh because I had so little trouble pulling back to remove the spike from his body. I guessed that I crushed at least one ball and punctured his bladder. Whatever I hit, the man collapsed so quickly that I almost lost the tomahawk from not moving fast enough.