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been.
    Then he was running, reloading, cursing as the snow caught him and bowled him over. He held the rifle in the air even as he tumbled, rolled up on his feet and threw away another cap, replaced it and took aim in case someone was moving in the camp. But nothing moved. He went on at an easier pace, straight across the valley, crashing through the spring crust over and over, not stopping for the creek, nascent, engorged, descending like molten glass out of the pond over a beaver dam, but going straight in up to his chest with the Sharps overhead, fighting the current and feeling with his feet for holes or rocks, sinking into the cold gravel bottom. Stop and die, he thought. He cut for the treeline away from the camp and circled to come at it from beyond the tethered horses, still anxious he might have missed something. There were three Indian ponies, short-legged pintos with big heads, thick necks and scraggly manes, unshod but their hooves had been well trimmed.
    He pushed cautiously into the campsite. The Big 50 still leaned against the tree. The woman breathed with a liquid rasp, her face swollen grey-blue, a plume of pinkish brain matter caught in her black hair. She was Snake by her tattoos, the ones they called Diggers for their primitive ways, built like a tugboat and tall for a woman. Her squaw-man was dead with a curiously bloodless hole going into his spine and a bigger hole coming out the front with the entrails bursting through and bits of bone. His forage cap was gone. The dead man was going to grey like himself, but with the added pathos of a bald spot like a monk’s tonsure. He pulled the dead man’s boot off, rolled up his trouser leg and found the scar where a M inié ball or a sliver of shrapnel had swept off most of the calf muscle. It was hard to say which side he had fought on. The forage cap didn’t mean anything. The people coming west were mostly Southerners like himself. Both man and woman had their eyes open, but what they saw was in another world altogether.
    He snapped up the Big 50 and the saddles and tack and quickly harnessed the horses, one for packing, two for riding, but one without a saddle. There was coffee, sugar, salt, flour, biscuits, salt beef and pemmican in the pack, also a cask of black powder, lead pigs, a bullet mould, wadding, pliers, a skinning knife and a wooden box containing nitric acid and aqua regia for testing gold. He rolled up the squaw’s buffalo robe with another he found in the lean-to and lashed them both onto the mule pack with hide thongs. He hung the traps from the crossbuck, then coursed back and forth through the woods behind the campsite like a dog hunting a scent until he found the bale of furs — black bear, grey wolf and bobcat — hidden in a shallow overhang. He dragged the bodies under the lean-to then collapsed the frame over them, kicked out the fire. He believed the woman was still breathing when he left her, which he could scarcely credit, injured as she was, except that he knew when his time came it would be just as slow and difficult. He mounted and rode out, leading the pack horse and spare on a string, letting the horse pick its way along the flooded creek till he spied a likely ford and crossed, then clambered up past the elk bones. By the sun, it was just after noon.
    In the Eyes o f Another Man You See the Enemy
    He incinerated the hut and the remains of the pole barn ere they departed and threw what bones he could find into the conflagration. Then they rode hard to the mouth of the valley into the high desert between the Lemhi Mountains and the Lost River Range where the Pashimeroi trickled like a green snake in the summer, the almost treeless mountain slopes on either hand covered in scree and dust-blown snow, looking like the mountains of the moon. At the river they reined north toward Leesburg and the Bitterroots. There was no track nor sign of travellers and after the third day when the thaw continued they