The Diezmo by Rick Bass

Author:Rick Bass
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Still others split off from Cameron and Wallace’s group. They struck out on their own, descending back into the desert, although they failed to encounter the waterfall that Alexander and Oldham had found.

It was still cool up in the mountains, but out on the desert, the weather had turned warmer. We could see the shimmering heat waves rising from the desert below, and could see where many of the men had tossed their threadbare blankets on top of scrub brush to make crude tents, and then crawled beneath them to die. Others scratched at the thin soil with their fingernails, digging as if searching for buried treasure; but we saw then, as they wallowed in that freshly dug depression, that they were simply trying to use that brief coolness of the newly exposed soil to take some of the radiant heat from their fevered, baking bodies.

They appeared to be eating the cool dirt they had just dug, applying it to their cracked and blistered mouths. They drank their own urine.

There were others strung out all over the mountainside and crawling around in the valleys. The mountain was bleeding men. I don’t know why we stayed on top. Cameron and Wallace appeared confused, directionless, almost lifeless. I tried to formulate a plan, tried to dream an idea, a strategy, anything that might give us hope, no matter how improbable, but could think of nothing, could instead only desire, like the others, water. Even a single jar would have been enough, even a single swallow.

Looking back at the trail of our misery, we could see rafts of vultures, looking like columns of black smoke, circling the ruin of horses and mules several miles distant. Anyone could look up at the mountain and see where we had been and where we were going.

Indeed, it turned out, entire villages had been observing the stupor of our progress and our descent. Barragan’s men, now well rested, well watered, well armed, had ridden around to the north, knowing that that was where the mountain would spit us out. They were waiting patiently there, at the mouth of the Cañon de San Marcos, where they began snaring Texans one by one and two by two, like fish in a weir.

We who were left remained far atop the mountain, watching the soldiers below, still waiting for us. Our upper group had dwindled from seventy to twenty. We had no water, no food, no weapons, and it was not going to rain; neither did it seem that any divine intervention was going to reach us. Charles McLaughlin had stopped sketching and instead sat numbly, staring, as we all were, at the smoke from the soldiers’ fires far below.

There was nothing to do but surrender, no other alternative in the world if we were to have another chance at life, yet Wallace and Cameron seemed unable to discuss this fact, and I saw that it was up to me to broach the subject, that it was my responsibility to try to save myself, as well as the tatter of men scattered around me.

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