Dead Man's Walk

by Larry McMurtry

Bigfoot considered himself to be practical to a fault—if a man had to kill himself in a hurry, it was best to know exactly how to proceed. “Don’t go sticking no gun in your mouth, unless it’s a shotgun,” he advised, noting that Long Bill looked a little green. Probably the alkaline water didn’t agree with him.

“What’s worse than having your pecker chewed off?” Blackie inquired. “Oh, having them pull out the end of your gut and tie it to a dog,” Bigfoot said, pouring himself more chickory. “Then they chase the dog around camp for awhile, until about fifty feet of your gut is strung out in front of you, for brats to eat.” “To eat?” Long Bill asked. “Why yes,” Bigfoot said. “Comanche brats eat gut like ours eat candy.”

“But what was that you said, just now?” the Major asked. “It’s hard to concentrate, with Matilda cutting up this ugly turtle.” “I had a dern dream,” Bigfoot admitted. “In my dream Gomez was raiding with Buffalo Hump.” “Nonsense, Gomez is Apache,” the Major said. Bigfoot didn’t answer. He knew that Gomez was Apache, and that Apache didn’t ride with Comanche—that was not the normal order of things. Still, he had dreamt what he dreamt. If Major Chevallie didn’t enjoy hearing about it, he could sip his coffee and keep quiet.

“These low dogs have been killing Mexicans, Major,” Bigfoot said. “They probably took supper with some little family and then shot ’em all and took their hair.” “That would be unneighborly behavior, if true,” Major Chevallie said.

Gus soon forgot the incident, but Call didn’t. He listened to Kirker sharpen his knife and wished he had the authority to kill the man himself. In his view Kirker was a snake, and worse than a snake. If you discovered a snake in your bedclothes, the sensible thing would be to kill it. Major Chevallie had looked right at the snake, but hadn’t killed it.

“They say an Indian can imitate any sound,” Gus remarked. “They can fool you into thinking they’re a wolf or a coyote or an owl or a cricket.” “I doubt a Comanche would pretend to be a cricket,” Call said.

“Full moon,” Bigfoot said. “It’s what they call the Comanche moon. They like to raid into Mexico, down this old war trail, when the moon is full. They like that old Comanche moon.”

Probably Major Chevallie had just stolen a uniform. Texas was the sort of place where people could simply name themselves something and then start being whatever they happened to name. Then they could start acquiring the skills of their new profession—or not acquiring them, as the case might be.

“I didn’t know people had that much blood in them,” Gus said. “I thought we was mostly bone inside.” Call didn’t admit it, but he had the same belief; but from what he had seen that morning, it seemed that people were really just sacks of blood with legs and arms stuck on them.

“Buffalo Hump has an army, too,” Call reminded his excitable friend. “If he can find ten warriors to ride with him, then he’s got an army.

A wind rose—it whirled Call’s straw hat off his head and sailed it a good thirty feet, which annoyed him. He hated above all to lose control of his headgear.

nuisance, of course, but it wasn’t because of the horses that he felt sad. He felt sad for all of them: the Rangers, Matilda, the little family that had lost its roof. They were small, and the world was large and violent.

“Why, I believe I’ve smitten Mr. McCrae,” Clara said, with a laugh. “I doubt I could smite you, though, Mr. Call—not unless I had a club.” With no more said, she turned and began to unpack a large box of dry goods. Call turned and left, a little puzzled by the shop girl’s remark. Why would she want to smite him with a club? She seemed a friendly girl, though the meaning of her remark was hard to puzzle out.

“It just means you make a dollar more a month,” Bigfoot said. “Life’s just as dangerous, whether you’re a corporal or a private.” “With a whole extra dollar you can buy more liquor and more whores,” Bigfoot added. “At least you can if you don’t let Gus McCrae cheat you out of your money.”

A sandy-haired fellow with a pair of blacksmith’s pinchers was pulling prickly-pear thorns out of the dentist’s face and neck when Call strode by. The dentist groaned, but the groans, on the whole, were milder than the howls of his patients.

“No, you can’t, you’ll have to eat most of these horses, I expect,” Goodnight said. He looked at the solemn group of men, some of them with hopes still high for adventure and booty in New Mexico. Not for the first time, he was impressed by the folly of men.

“Eating fish is like eating air,” Jimmy Tweed observed. “It goes in but it don’t fill you up.”

“Love’s a terrible price to pay for company, ain’t it, Matty?” Caleb said. “I won’t pay it, myself. I’d rather do without the company.”

what wasn’t excusable, in his view, was setting off on a long, dangerous expedition without adequate preparation. He resolved that if he ever got to lead Rangers, he would see that each man under his command received clear training and sound instruction, so they would have a chance to survive, if the commander was lost.

A minute or two later, they saw a dot on the horizon. The dot didn’t seem to be moving. Bigfoot thought it might be a wagon. Call couldn’t see it at all, and grew annoyed with his own eyes. Why wouldn’t they look as far as other men’s eyes?

Fifteen bullets ought to be enough to kill anything—even an elephant, even a whale. The buffalo wasn’t very large. It ought to fall, and yet, perversely, it wouldn’t. It seemed to him that everything in Texas was that way. Indians popped out of bare ground, or from the sides of hills, disguised as mountain goats. Snakes crawled in people’s bedrolls, and thorns in the brush country were as poisonous as snakebites, once they got in you. It was all an aggravation, in his view. Back in Tennessee, beast and man were much better behaved.

“That ring was pure silver,” Gus said. “I told you there was silver out here.” “You didn’t mention the firing squad, though,” Call said.

Gus remembered seeing several men shoot at the bear—he didn’t suppose they had missed, at such short range, and yet the bear had given not the slightest indication that it felt the bullets.

there were bears in heaven; of course, he might not be in heaven. The fact that he felt the pain might mean that he was in hell. He had supposed hell would be hot, but that might just be a mistake the preachers made. Hell might be cold, and it might have bears in it, too.

As they were stumbling along, pushed by the cold north wind, Gus happened to look back, a habit he got into after his encounter with the grizzly bear. He could not get Bigfoot’s story about the man who had been stalked while fishing out of his mind. It was worrisome that bears could be so stealthy.

Then, with the shivering, terrified children tied on one horse, he struck east, taking only those children that were old enough to be useful slaves. The others he killed, along with their parents. At one hacienda he tied the whole family, threw them on their own haystack, and burned them.