McCarthy, Cormac - Cities of the Plain by McCarthy Cormac

Author:McCarthy, Cormac [McCarthy, Cormac]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 06 General Fiction
ISBN: 9780679747192
Publisher: Vintage International
Published: 1999-05-24T10:00:00+00:00

HE AND BILLY STOOD over the dead calf and Billy walked back out following the dragmarks and stood looking over the country.

How far out did you go? he said.

Not far.

It’s been a stout somethin to drag that big calf.

You think it’s been a lion?

No. A lion’d of covered it up. Or tried to.

They mounted up and rode out on the backtrack. They lost the track on the hard ground and picked it up again. Billy followed the track over the gravels by raising or lowering his head and catching a certain angle of the light. He said that the disturbed ground had a different look and after a while John Grady could see it too. The day was cool. The horses were fresh with the morning and the weather and seemed unworried.

Range riders, said Billy.

Range riders.

Detectives.

Pinkertons.

The calf had been cut out and run down and killed in open country. Billy dismounted and walked over the ground. There was blood on the rocks, black from the sun.

You dont think it’s just been coyotes? said John Grady.

I dont think so.

What do you think it’s been?

I know what it’s been.

What?

Dogs.

Dogs?

Yep.

I aint never seen any dogs out here.

I aint either. But they’re here.

In the days that followed they found two more dead calves. They rode the Cedar Springs pasture and they crossed the floodplain below it and they rode the surrounding traprock bluffs and the mesa that ran east toward the old mine. They found tracks of the dogs but they did not see them. Before the week was out they’d found another freshkilled calf not dead a day.

There were some old Oneida number three doublespring traps on a shelf in the saddleroom and Billy boiled and waxed them and they carried them out the next day and buried three of them around the carcass. They rode out before daybreak to check the sets and when they got to the kill the traps were all dug out and lying on the ground. One of them was not even sprung. The carcass itself was little more than skin and bones.

I didnt know dogs were that smart, said John Grady.

I didnt either. They probably didnt know we were that dumb.

You ever trap dogs before?

No.

What do you want to do?

Billy picked up the unsprung trap and reached under the jaw and sprang it with his thumb. It chopped shut with a dead metal sound in the quiet morning air. He cut the wires and wired the rings together and hung the traps over the horn of his saddle and mounted up. He looked at John Grady.

We just aint found where they’re usin is all. They might walk in a blind set.

You think Travis’s dogs would run em?

Billy sat looking out at the long morning light on the rocks of the mesa. I dont know, he said. That’s a pretty good question.

They took a packhorse and carried a kitchen box and their soogans out to the mesa and made camp. They sat drinking coffee from tin cups and watching the coals flare and lapse in the wind’s fanning of them.

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