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slackened their pace to preserve the horses. But then, at the confluence of the Salmon, where they joined an old prospecting trail, they met a party of Bannocks, relatives of the Snakes, three men and a woman skinning a pronghorn buck, evidently joyful at their luck. They had but three sorry horses between them, bows and lances and a single muzzleloader; one was spitting blood. The men stood back suspiciously from their kill, notching arrows, and the woman stepped forward haranguing the strangers. She wore a black wool white-woman ’s skirt hiked up to her breasts and a cavalry trooper’s jacket with the buttons and insignia removed, those lank breasts bare with nipples like walnuts.
    They gave the Indians a wide berth, circling away from the arrows and then kicking up to a trot when they were into the trail again, quickly out of sight through the trees, the river gurgling over gravel drifts at the left. They kept on for a half mile, then he pulled up, dismounted, loaded the Big 50 and the Sharps, handed Good Luck the reins and said, “Ride on. Quick.” Then he added, “But come back ere nightfall.” And went to cover in a blowdown uphill from the river whence he could still see the trail. After an hour the Indians came on horseback, the woman riding double. They came silently, walking their horses, figuring to catch their prey when they camped. He let them ride so close there was no call for marksmanship and blew the shoulder off the first man with the Big 50, causing the woman some injury to her face, which appeared briefly as she fell from the horse, drabbled with gore like butchered meat, then dropped the second man with the Sharps. The third man had time to swing his mount, desperately thumping its scrawny flank with his bow, and dash down the trail. But he cleared the Sharps, loaded and fitted the percussion cap, aimed and shot the horse, severing one of the hind legs clean at the radius. Then he walked past the first set of bodies, still alive but moribund, reloading as he went, and killed the fallen rider where he fought to free his legs from under the struggling horse. He finished the others with his butcher knife, then dragged their bodies to the bank and heaved them into shallows. He caught their horses, retrieved the Big 50, and left the dying horse for varmints.
    Why do they come after me? he thought. Why does the world insist? he thought. He lived in a slaughterous universe under a doleful sign of dream from which he did not wish to awaken, for that seemed like death to him. You stop and you die, he thought. He met the girl coming back to find him, which was a surprise as he expected betrayal at every turn. He followed her glance and noticed for the first time the hematitic stains on his hands, his arms and spattered on his shirt, as though he had bathed in blood. She dismounted and shuffled to him without her sticks, taking his hands in turn, inspecting them with her fingers, palpating for wounds, then suddenly grazing his wrist with her hungry tongue, a gesture he could not interpret, though he felt it directly in his balls as if his body had rendered up a meaning he could not himself name. He found her muteness eloquent in ways he could not explain; she did not deceive him, veiling herself in words as people generally did until he just wanted to shoot them to make them shut up and be.
    Upriver, the land was scabbed and scotched with abandoned hydraulic mining works, dammed creeks, banks and hillsides scoured of trees and water-blasted, with gullies and fans of silt destroying the graceful curves of the old channel. He killed three Chinamen damming a creek to feed their water machines, leaving their bodies floating face down in the icy pond. In examining their campsite, he found bottles of whiskey. He opened one, tilted it back, swallowed half without stopping to breathe, neatly capped the bottle again and returned to looting. Presently he discovered buffalo-robe bedding in the