The Diezmo by Rick Bass (top fiction books of all time TXT) 📗

fragments of mineral so shiny that, when climbing with our faces pressed tight against those cliffs, we could sometimes see our own eyes reflected as if in blackened mirrors. It was an unsettling image—as if we had somehow been captured by the mountain and were now moving around inside it, or as if we were looking across time and space to another version of ourselves.

We kept ascending, a diminished army of thieves and gentlemen, but by nightfall had made only a few more hundred feet. We made camp on a narrow ledge, roping ourselves to crags and pinnacles, and slept fitfully in the freezing wind. All night, whenever I drifted off for even a few minutes of slumber, I dreamt of falling, as apparently did many of the rest of the men, and all night the mountain rang with our sleepy shouts of fear, while our unhobbled horses and mules wandered off to search in vain for a blade of grass, of which there were none, only stone and creosote bushes.

In the harsh cold red light of morning we awakened and understood, each of us, that the horses and mules would have to be slaughtered.

We set about this task methodically, using our knives and jeweled swords. It was sloppy, inefficient work, and as the floundering mules and horses staggered about bleeding to death, we raced after them, laboring to hold our empty gourds beneath leaping gouts of blood; and when the gourds were filled, we drank directly from the animals’ necks, gorging once more, while the rocks beneath us, like our faces and bodies, became painted bright crimson in the morning sun. The giants, Cameron and Wallace, were of invaluable assistance in this gruesome task, and worked with grim wordlessness, as if we had entered another land where language no longer mattered.

Charles McLaughlin followed us, sketching it all.

After we had drunk the blood of the horses and mules, we began carving on them; and because there was no wood for making real cooking fires, we set fire to the creosote bushes, a hundred or more such little fires burning all around us, and we cooked the meat as best as we could in that manner, searing it to warm gray on sticks held over the oily black smoke of the smoldering creosote.

Many of our shoes and boots had fallen apart completely on the rocks below, so we cut up the horses’ saddles, and the bloody hides themselves, in crude attempts to make sandals. And yet, we were not despairing. High up on the mountain, it seemed to us that we were free, even in our misery. We divided our $1,400 of silver, giving each man his share.

We pushed on higher up the mountain. At the next crest we paused to look down. Below us, like the spoor of our freedom, lay hundreds of charred and smoking bushes. The bright shattered rocks seemed almost alive in their brilliance now, and the skinned and shredded carcasses of nearly a hundred mules and horses lay broken open on the rocks.

Curtis Haieber, Jimmy Pinn, and Robert Gosk decided to stop for a while and nurse their feet. The rest of us kept moving, but by morning two more dropped out. Charles McLaughlin paused to sketch the deserters.

We ascended a ridge and were up out of the creosote and chaparral. The walking should have been easier, but it wasn’t, and by noon three more men dropped their packs and sat down and waved to the rest of us and told us to go on, go on, mas alla, farther on.

That night we couldn’t sleep. Our tongues were swollen and beginning to turn black. There was no more discussion of reaching the Rio Grande, or even of leaving this godforsaken country. We desired only water, and the next day we split apart further, with Cameron and Wallace still commanding a core of about fifty men and the rest unbraided into little tribes of five and six, with the agreement that any of us who found water would send up smoke signals.

McLaughlin stayed with us. He had been sketching Wallace and Cameron, drawing them even as they walked, and now he had begun to sketch me, too, which made me feel worthy and officerlike.

I still had the last beans in my pocket: a smaller fistful, but still a fistful. I had lost all hunger, craved only water, and was allowing myself one bean per day, which I sucked on from morning to evening. As we trudged, I counted and examined each bean—I had gone into the mountains with forty—and I wondered how many, if any, would be left when I was finally out of the mountains.

Later in the day, we abandoned our rifles and packs. Even Bigfoot Wallace lay down his musket, building a little cairn around it so that he might one day return to it. He was moving slowly; it took him an hour to perform this small task, and his usually sharp mind was torpid—he appeared befuddled at times by the choice of all the rocks that were available to him—and then we proceeded on, feeling, for a while, almost winged in our lightness.

There was little vegetation of any kind—we gnawed at the black lichen we sometimes found growing on the rocks, so that to anyone watching us from above, it would have seemed that we were gnawing at the rocks themselves—and when we encountered an occasional clump of prickly pear cactus, we dug these up with bleeding hands and chewed greedily at the spiny pads and succulent roots, trying to avoid piercing our swollen black tongues on the cactus spines.

That night we lay collapsed in the high desert. No one spoke, no fires were built, no sentries were posted. It was our fourth day without water. It seemed that all the water in the world was gone.

Overnight, John Alexander, who was sleeping but a short distance away from me, dreamt of water. In the morning, he told us that in his