There wasn’t much to the place. A squat little block house nestled in a great gash of rock with a snake run out back and a single rusting wellhead above a dry wash streaked yellow with sassolite. Farther up the bluff, hidden among the catthorn, were three small cairns clustered around a shrine to Washton the Father.
He had ridden north from Sassalo towards the alkali flats at Dry Falls before turning east into the foothills of the Great Eastern Rocks. The humpback died on the second day and he said the words over the body before cutting long strips off the carcass and smoking them on a small fire of greasewood. He hated to leave the saddle but it might not make a difference now.
He cut a rough trail, holing up for days at a time in scoops among the rocks to watch for trackers but none appeared being more trouble than he was worth to try and take him now he was in the Rocks. At least as far a SecHed Admin might figure it. Unless the Rangers had taken interest.
He spent two days hunkered down in the rocks before coming down into the dry holler, then a little after noon on the third day he followed the switchback trail down from the shrine leaving his pack on the ridge and lugging only his faraday bag and his rifle.
He didn’t see her until he was halfway down the scarp. Back of the house, near the edge of the wash, she had a Big Brown up on the snake-gallows and was walking around it in circles, red to the elbows, shucking down the skin two-handed in a long bloody sleeve that hung in the dust. Working with both hands she sawed down the belly and threw the innards in great handfuls into the wash where a pack of dipshits was gathered pecking and tearing at the head. By the time he had reached the house she was already cutting away the meat from the backbone, hacking it off in rough chunks with the flensing knife and tossing them into the waiting wheelbarrow.
She heard him drop the bag and turned, not startled but holding the knife low out away from her body just the same. He stopped halfway in the yard still holding his rifle. They stood unmoving for several minutes before she seemed to register her own reflection in his helmet’s sunvisor. Gathering up an old dust cloak she she began to wipe the blood from her arms.
“They told me you was dead.”
For the first time in months a smile split open his cracked lips.
“Not hardly.”