Free Painted Horses by Malcolm Brooks Page B

unclouded water can’t be any worse than some of the food he’s recently eaten. The water is shockingly cold and he swallows only two or three mouthfuls. Even this amount sloshes in his belly like a frigid wave. He forgets to wash his face. A blast of pain shoots through his knee when he stands.
    An hour later he sweats out the water as he walks, the morning sunshine burning the chill of night fast from this shadeless environment. Though he believes this is still the month of May the sun beats down with the intensity of high summer. He has no hat and he can tell he will need one.
    The vegetation is sparse, consisting mainly of a species of spindly shrub with narrow gray-green leaves and scattered clumps of short-stemmed grass. The landscape dips and climbs, low-lying flats abutting chaotic jumbles of stone and long fissures rending the earth in two. He spies a band of horses, a large band, running before a great cloud of dust in the distance. He takes this as a single, favorable sign.
    He retreats into the fog of his mind for long stretches of time. His legs follow the tracks but his brain is nowhere around.
    He is with Cora. He catches himself mumbling to her.
    A chime seems to follow him and he thinks this is not real either. Or perhaps it is the chime of an angel, come to claim him.
    At the moment he barely has the ambition to be afraid.
    He is starving and his very brain throbs.
    The chime continues and he dully understands it rings not behind him but up ahead. He plods on, listening as the chime fades out and then sounds again. He passes through a narrow wedge between two raised tables, walking up through a shallow trough in the land. Midway up the trough a narrow gully cuts through crosswise, dropping downhill to his left through a chute studded with rocks. The sound of the chime carries through the chute like a draft through a flue.
    The chute opens to a flat plain and the floor of the plain appears to move. It shifts and writhes and he thinks he must be seeing things but the chime rings again and he figures it out. Sheep. He’s seeing a flock of sheep, milling and moving on the desert. He has been hearing the chime of a bellwether. Perhaps there is a farm. With food.
    He picks through the chute and has just reached the flock when a fine-featured dog appears out of nowhere. The dog stands between him and the sheep, pointed ears pricked. It studies him a moment and goes into a berserk barking fit, false-charging and then retreating again, white teeth flashing. John H stands stock-still and tries to cut through the haze in his mind, tries to figure this out.
    Fortunately he doesn’t have to. He hears a familiar sound on the hillside and looks up. The shod hooves of a horse, clattering on the rocks. A rider with a broad, battered hat directs the horse toward him. The rider shouts in some foreign tongue at the dog and the dog backs off and quiets but remains alert. The rider reins the horse and studies John H. John H notices a rifle in a scabbard, a shepherd’s crook across the pommel.
    The face beneath the hat is not young and while the rider does not strike John H as an Indian, neither is he exactly white. He has skin the color of new saddle leather, eyes like black roasted coffee beans. Both face and hands are gnarled with age but somehow both appear trustworthy. Perhaps it is the fact he is a shepherd.
    John H tries to think. The last time he trusted someone. An offering of peaches and now he is here. The sheep behind him number in the hundreds and one of them or another is always bleating and he cannot reason. He smells their collective animal smell.
    “I am Jean Bakar Arietta. You are injured.” He pronounces injured as though it begins with a pair of e ’s.
    John H does not recall he is covered in someone else’s blood. He finds it miraculous that Jean Bakar Arietta can perceive his aches and pains. “I fell off the train.”
    “Oh my.” He brings his horse down and dismounts. “My camp is a little bit