Free On the River Styx by Peter Matthiessen

was you!” Traver panted. He roared hysterically in his relief, his laughter booming in the quiet grove. “You fall fo’ de oldes’ trick dey is, dass how smart you is, white folks!” He roared again into the silence. “Ol’ Traver toss de branch, ol’ white boy fooled, ol’ white boy cotch it in de haid! I mean! De oldes’ trick dey is!”
    Traver glared down at him, triumphant. The man lay silent.
    Traver ran the knife blade back and forth across the throat, leaving a thin red line. He forced his anger, disturbed by how swiftly his relief replaced it.
    “You de one dat’s scairt now, ain’t you? Try to kill dis nigger what never done you harm! You doan know who you foolin with, white trash, you foolin with a man what’s mule and gator all wrap into one! And he gone kill you, what you think ’bout dat?”
    The man watched him.
    “Ain’t you nothing to say fore I kills you? You gone pray? Or is I done killed you already?” Uneasy astride the body of the white man, Traver rose to a squat and pricked him with his knife tip. “Doan you play possum with me, now! You ain’t foolin me no mo’, I gone kill you, man, you heah me?”
    For the first time, Traver heard his own voice in the silence, and it startled him. He glanced around. The sun was bright red over the live oak trees, but quiet hung across themarsh like mist. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the white man with suspicion, but the other did not stir.
    He dead, Traver thought, alarmed. I done killed him dead.
    Avoiding the unblinking eyes, he picked up the rifle and stared at it, then he laid it like a burial fetish back into the grass. Now he stepped back, knife in hand, and prodded the body with his toe.
    “Git up, now!” he cried, startling himself again. “You ain’t bad hurt, Cap’n, you just kinda dizzy, dass all. Us’ns is got to do some talkin, heah me now?”
    But the body was still. A trail of saliva dribbled from the narrow mouth, and a fly lit on the grass near the bloody temple. Traver bent and crossed the arms upon the narrow chest.
    “You fall fo’ de oldes’ trick in de world,” Traver mourned, and shook his head. “Dass what you done.” Badly frightened, he talked to comfort himself, glancing furtively around the clearing.
    He started to back away, then bolted.
    The man rolled over and up onto his knees, the rifle snatched toward his shoulder. He sighted without haste and fired. Then he reached for his hat and put it on, and turned the brim down all around.
    Then he got up.
    Traver was a powerful man and did not fall. He could still hear the echo and the clamor in the marsh, and he could not accept what was happening to him. He had never really believed it possible, and he did not believe it now. He dropped the knife and staggered, frowning, as the man walked toward him. The second bullet knocked him overbackwards, down the bank, and when he came to rest, his head lay under water.
    His instinct told him to wriggle a little further, to crawl away into the reeds. He could not move. He died.
    1957

T HE W OLVES OF A GUILA
    O n those rare occasions when a lean gray wolf wandered north across the border from the Espuela Mountains, trotting swiftly and purposefully into the Animas Valley or the Chiricahuas or Red Rock Canyon as so many had in years gone by, describing a half-circle seventy miles or more back into Mexico, and leaving somewhere along its run a mangled sheep or mutilated heifer, then Miller was sent for and Miller would go. He was a wolf hunter, hiring himself out on contract to ranchers and government agencies, and if the killing for which he was paid was confined more and more to coyotes and bobcats, the purpose of his life remained the wolf. He considered the lesser animals unworthy of his experience, deserving no better than the strychnine and the cyanide guns that filled the trunk of his sedan. Even the sedan had been forced uponhim, when the wolf runs which once traced the border regions of New Mexico