Shock has a dulling effect on the senses. I had learned that before. I did not move, I did not cry out, and perhaps it saved my life. It was a long time before I was able to feel sufficiently to care. For the moment, I found my numb mind trying to fasten itself on small things. The direction in which we were going, doubling back for part of the way over the trail we had traveled. The still, scattered bodies of the laughing young soldiers who had been so alive this morning, looking like ungainly, broken puppets in their blue uniforms.
The sun was unbearably hot, but we were moving towards the mountains whose shadows seemed to reach out menacingly toward us. Jewel was as stiff and silent as I was.
The ride became a nightmare in itself. The Apaches appeared to feel neither heat, nor weariness, hunger nor thirst. The horses became lathered, their breathing labored, and still they made no attempt to stop and rest them. Their faces were blank and ugly looking. They did not talk, and their silence was all the more unnerving.
I knew only that we were riding through what appeared to be a desert of desolation. Later I was to learn that this was the Jornado del Muerto: journey of death, literally translated from the Spanish. Had I known it at the time it would have made no difference to me. Perhaps death would have seemed preferable to thinking of what might happen to us when the Apaches finally halted for the night.
We had reached the forbidding-looking San Andres mountains when the first horse dropped in its tracks, its rider skillfully flinging himself from its back before the unfortunate animal fell. Our captors butchered the animal immediately; some of them stuffing hunks of raw meat into their mouths, chewing it, and then spitting it out.
From here on we were supposed to walk. Jewel and I were roped together and dragged over the rough, stony terrain, not daring to stop or to complain. “They’ll kill either one who couldn’t go on,” she warned me in a low voice, and their faces and attitude toward us led me to believe that they would indeed do so.
The surviving horses were also led, with the remains of the huge steaks the Indians had carved out of the dead animal wrapped in hide and draped across the light blankets which served as saddles.
I cannot remember how far we walked, or how often I stumbled; my captor turned around to scowl and mutter fiercely at me whenever this happened. My feet, in shoes hardly meant for walking, were blistered and swollen. Each step was agony, and still I knew that I had to go on. My lungs labored for breath, my hair hung in damp, straggly strands around my face. Nothing mattered except taking one more step forward, and then one more.
The trail we followed was tortuous and rocky, sometimes a deep cleft in the side of a mountain, and often a narrow indentation in a wild-looking, weirdly formed outcropping. There were times when we could not walk two abreast, and Jewel dropped behind me. I heard her breathing in great, heaving sobs.
We made camp for the night in a narrow, oddly shaped canyon with steep walls wider in the middle than at both ends. It was an easy place to defend, but who could possibly find us here? We had crossed a virtual desert, and these ancient volcanic mountains were composed mostly of rock and shale where the hoofs of the unshod ponies the Apaches rode would leave no tracks. No, both Jewel and I were lost, perhaps in more ways than one.
How could this have happened to me? How could I have been so unprepared for the violence that lurked beneath the surface of even the most beautiful morning?
Jewel and I had been made to understand, by gestures and guttural grunts, that we were to perform the duties of squaws. We were shown what kind of twigs to gather. When the small, smokeless fire was lit, we were given the horsemeat to cook. Jewel, half-crying, looked helpless. Thankfully I remembered how our cooks had prepared meals in India, when we had gone on tiger hunts. I had the strangest impression that my captor was rather proud of me when I showed Jewel how to sharpen a twig against a stone and skewer the meat on it.
The smell of cooking meat turned my stomach, and I had to bite down on my lip to keep from retching. It brought back the memory of the soldiers, skewered with arrows to hold them down, the terrible smell of burning human flesh. I knew that Jewel was thinking of the same thing, and we dared not look at each other.
The Indians ate, watching us covertly. I gathered that we would be allowed to eat what was left when they were through.
“We have to eat!” I whispered fiercely to Jewel. I was the stronger one now, I was younger, and she looked half-dead with exhaustion.
The horsemeat was tough and stringy, but not unpalatable, and the Indian who had taken me gave me a little water to drink from an old army canteen he carried slung around his neck. He was about to tie my wrists together again, but I made a staying gesture, and began to take off my shoes, feeling their eyes watching me. When that was done, with considerable pain and difficulty, for my blisters had burst and my stockings adhered to torn flesh, I looked him in the eyes and ran my fingers clumsily through my hair. They were all silent now, watching me closely as I begun to braid my hair in one long, single plait that hung down my back. I had to tear a strip of cloth off my already tattered skirt to tie at the end of my thick braid, something like a little girl’s hair ribbon. Finally, and more as a gesture of defiance than anything else, I tied another, slightly wider piece of material around my forehead, Indian-fashion, with the ends trailing down past my ear.
The man who had captured me gave an unintelligible grunt—whether of approval or not I did not know. But Jewel, I’d noticed, had begun to follow my example, pulling her bright hair, which was slightly shorter than mine, back from her face and tying a knot of cloth around it. I had no idea what we looked like. We were probably dirty, disgusting spectacles. And perhaps even the Apaches were fussy about the women they took. At any rate, they had decided to leave us alone that night. We were roped together again, a dirty blanket flung over us, and then we had to try and sleep.
Early the next morning we were roughly shaken awake and were each handed a pair of hastily contrived moccasins that we had to keep on our feet by tying each one firmly around the ankles with strips of torn cloth. My feet were swollen and sore and they oozed blood, but at least the moccasins made walking more bearable than my boots would have done.
We walked again, until my mind was a dull void, stopping for a
few minutes every two hours or so. This, I am sure, was more to rest us and the remaining horses, than because the Apaches themselves needed it.
Jewel and I were past making any attempts to talk to each other. When they stopped, we stopped, immediately falling onto the ground and staying there until we were dragged onto our feet again.
I don’t know how many miles we covered, pushing our way deeper and deeper into the rocky depths of the mountains. It seemed as if nothing could grow here except a few hardy, twisted shrubs for which I had no name, and the occasional, inevitable cactus plants.
The Apaches, who apparently knew the uses of everything in this godforsaken country, would sometimes cut off the top of a cactus plant and scoop out the pulp, chewing it until they had extracted all the liquid from it and then spitting it out. I was thirsty enough not to care, and it wasn’t, in the end, too unpleasant to taste.
We walked for hours, or was it for days? Is it possible to fall asleep on one’s feet and still keep on walking? We were climbing now, and amazingly, as the sun began to die, we began to come across signs of vegetation, especially where water had collected in ancient craters and scooped-out hollows in the mountain.
Our captors quickened their pace and began to talk to each other in their strange language that sounded like a series of grunts in varying tones. The two horses that carried the silver also quickened their pace. They had been the only ones fed and watered. No doubt if they had collapsed Jewel and I would have been forced to carry the heavy sacks until we, in our turn, also dropped in our tracks.
I felt my heart sink when another Apache rose suddenly from behind a ridge, his rifle ready. We were waved on with more grunts, and I saw his expressionless eyes touch me and move on to Jewel. No doubt he was used to seeing captives and plunder brought in here! I had gathered that there must be a camp of some sort here, and as we worked our way upward through a rocky cleft the ground dropped sharply down again, forcing us to scramble to keep our balance. Below were trees, thickly clustered along a small stream. Small fires glowed before strangely shaped brush structures, and dogs snapped and growled, not daring to bark, it seemed.
Jewel and I were dragged into camp like chained captives at the chariot wheels of a Roman conqueror. It was dusk, with a half-light that was a glow in the sky. Women and children ran out of their brush wickiups, surrounded us, and I could see neither kindness nor pity in any of the faces that peered at us.
“Oh, God, what now?” Jewel whispered, and I licked dry lips, trying to carry my head high although my mind was already echoing her question. What now? Would they kill us? Torture us? Or was there worse to come?
I had heard tales of women staked out and raped by Apache warriors, of being beaten to death by their squaws. There was no worse fate for a white woman than to be taken captive by Apaches. Was it Colonel Poynter who had told me this, or had it been Todd? All this time I had been concentrating every ounce of my mind and will upon walking. Now, as Jewel swayed against me and some of the squaws began to prod at us viciously with long sticks, every frightening story I had ever heard came back into my mind. I think the women would have treated us worse if the Apache who had captured me, and who appeared to be a man of some importance, had not waved them away. We were not to be beaten to death by the women then.
Other men had come up, and I gathered that there was much boasting being done. We were pointed at; the saddlebags containing silver were pointed at. The warriors carried handguns and carbines belonging to some of the dead soldiers, and these drew many admiring glances and grunts.