Badlands Bloodsport

Skeets did. Fargo cast a quick glance around but didn’t spot Derek the Terrible lurking anywhere.

“How long ago was she bit?” Fargo asked.

“Not long. Jessica ran over and woke us immediately.”

“She should be all right, then. We’ll suck the poison out. A rattlesnake bite won’t usually kill an adult. With luck she’ll just be sick for a few hours.”

“Glad to hear it, wanker,” said a voice right behind Fargo, but before he could spin around something crashed into the back of his head. Fargo saw a bright orange starburst on his eyelids; then his legs bellied and the ground rushed up to claim him.

Now time and place meant nothing to Fargo. He felt the vague sensation of being tossed around like a sack of meal, then of riding on horseback. At some point he landed hard on the ground, his injured head exploding with pain. Countless minutes and hours passed, and when his eyes finally flickered open, the sun was warm on his face.

His ankles were trussed tight, his hands tied tight at the small of his back. He had been dumped on the open plain with nothing but sky above him and grass all around. His head felt as if he’d been mule-kicked, and he could feel the blood matted in his thick hair. The ropes bit into him like hot wire.

“Fargo, you green-antlered fool,” he muttered. “Falling for the damsel-in-distress grift.”

He tried to work out of the ropes, but evidently Englishmen knew their knots. At least they hadn’t killed him, but Fargo felt a queasy churning in his guts when he realized what this must be all about.

Those two big-city churn-heads were after buffalo. The same buffalo herd the Cheyennes had claimed as their own. Fargo didn’t give a tinker’s damn what happened to those boys, but the enraged Indians might well turn their horses loose and follow them back to camp. No one would be spared, and those lush female scalps would be highly prized.

Something else occurred to Fargo, something that made his face drain cold. If those two British hooligans were killed, who would ever notice the Trailsman here in the middle of the vast Plains? For that matter, even if Derek and Skeets escaped, Fargo couldn’t assume they meant to free him.

“Pile on the agony,” he muttered.

This view from ground level of the great Dakota Plains made Fargo feel tiny and insignificant. The dearth of trees, save near water, always astonished newcomers. A few, in fact, mostly women, even went loco from the lack of any fixed reference points. Fargo had always found their vast openness a mixed blessing. No one could sneak up on you, true. But likewise, it was hard to hide your presence. A man with a Big Fifty could drop you from a thousand yards off.

All this looped through Fargo’s mind as he patiently, doggedly worked his hands, trying to loosen the rope around his wrists. It chafed and burned, adding to the misery of his throbbing head, but he had no alternative. His ankles were trussed tight as a tourniquet.

Fargo was still working at the rope, making no progress, when the first gray wolf appeared over a low ridge in front of him.

His face broke out in cold sweat as the lupine predator watched him from steady, unblinking eyes. Fargo knew it was rare for a lone wolf to attack a full-grown man—unless it sensed that man was helpless. And Fargo was definitely helpless.

He would look less helpless if he got off his ass, and Fargo relied on his strong midsection muscles as he struggled up onto his feet, wavering at first because he could not plant his feet wide. Just then three more wolves appeared over the ridge, and he felt his blood seem to stop and flow backward in his veins.

A pack. All bets were off now. Fargo had seen wolves in a pack attack and bring down mountain lions.

This is no time to go puny, the Trailsman rallied himself. All four wolves put their bellies low in the grass, slinking toward him silently. Fargo broke into a rousing chorus of a favorite bawdy tune in the West:

“Bang-bang Lu-lu,

Bang ’er every day,

Who’s gonna bang poor Lu-lu

When I get old and gray?”

The natural curiosity of the wolf made them stop and watch him with cocked heads. Fargo kept singing verses from “Lu-lu Girl,” but these animals were slat-ribbed and clearly starving. In a minute they were coming at him again, the leader baring yellow fangs two inches long.

Over the dangerous years on the frontier, Fargo had developed a special talent, at moments of extreme peril, for separating himself from the present moment, for becoming both participant and observer. The participant in him was rendered helpless by strong rope and therefore certain his long trail had finally ended. But the observer in him remained calm and analytical, ideas crowding through his mind.

There’s one animal in the West, that observer reminded him, who scares the living shit out of all others, and that’s the grizzly.