The patrol crossed into Mexico on the 11th of April, 1886, sixteen men under Captain Garrick Voorssen, a careful Pennsylvanian and West Point man who had been through the Sierra Madre once before with Crook and come back thirty pounds lighter, with a tremor in his right hand that never quite left. They were chasing a small band of hostile Chiricahua, three to nine in number, last seen moving southwest from the headwaters of the Rio Bavispe. The band had hit a Mexican ranch the week before, killed two vaqueros, and taken three horses and saddle gear. The rancher, Don Saturnino Quintanilla, had ridden seventy miles to report it.
When he described the raiders, he used a phrase the men remembered: the ones who left the prints. He crossed himself when he said it. The Apache scout called Closson had been riding with the company for nearly a year. The payroll listed him as Closson, Indian scout, Company B, mounted, sworn 6 August 1885, no surname, a thumbprint where a signature should go.
He was about forty-two that spring, tall for an Apache, almost six feet, with a long pale scar running from the corner of his left eye into his hairline. He kept his hair cropped to regulation length and wore the dark blue blouse and canvas trousers issued to scouts. But under the blouse, around his throat, he wore a small leather pouch no man saw him take off, not even when he washed. For four days they rode south through mesquite and ocotillo, over bajadas of broken volcanic rock, into mountains the color of wet ash.
The heat reached a hundred and four at noon. By the third day the spare water was gone and they were rationing canteens at dawn and dusk. On the fourth day, at the mouth of an unnamed dry canyon where a seep of bad water made a flat of pale alkaline mud, Closson found a single print. It was the front paw of a mountain lion, a big one, nearly two hundred pounds, each pad and claw perfectly placed in the mud.
And then, about a yard ahead, the print of a man’s bare left foot. And another astride farther on. Then nothing, dry rock that would not take a print at all. Voorssen rode up and asked what it was.
Closson said this was not the man they were looking for. Voorssen asked what it was then. Closson said he did not have a word for it in English. Voorssen pushed him to give it in his own language.
The corporal, a twenty-six-year-old named Wendell Crane, heard the word and could not pronounce it. It had a soft hiss at the beginning and a close sound at the end. When Closson said it, the other two scouts, Biduya the Tonto and Nalin the White Mountain, stopped what they were doing and looked at him. Biduya said something sharp.
Nalin said nothing and went to check his saddle girth though he had checked it twice that morning. Finally Biduya translated: he says it is a skin one, a wearer of skins. We should go back. Voorssen looked at the print in the mud, then laughed, a tired laugh, and told them to mount up.
That night they camped in a saddle the Mexicans called El Cuello del Lobo, the wolf’s throat. The wind came out of the south carrying a smell the corporal had never smelled before and could never afterward describe except by what it was not: not a dead animal, not smoke, not sage. Sweet, he said, sweet the way old fruit is sweet when it has gone past ripe into something else. The horses would not lie down all night.
During his watch the corporal heard what he took for a coyote, but the sound seemed to come from directly above him, as if it were in the air at the height of a man on horseback. He stood, turned a slow circle with his Springfield at his shoulder, saw nothing, and told himself it had been a coyote and a trick of the wind. By the morning of the fifth day they had lost two spare mounts. One had pulled its picket in the night and vanished without a sound.
The second lay on its side, eyes rolled white, breathing fast and shallow, no mark on it. It died around noon without ever standing up. Then the older arriero led the captain downwind to where the third horse had been found. The corporal was not allowed to go.
When the captain came back he had taken his hat off and was holding it in his left hand, and his right hand was trembling so badly he had to put it in his pocket. Closson came back behind him, his face unchanged. The men were told the horse had wandered and gotten into trouble with predators. The corporal happened to bring the captain his coffee that evening.
Voorssen took the cup without looking up and said, very quietly, more to himself than to anyone: it was the way it had been opened. That is what I cannot get past. On the sixth day they came down into a basin about three miles long with a dry creek and the ruin of a Spanish mission at the far end. La Misión de San Lázaro de los Ojos, Saint Lazarus of the Eyes, built in the early 1700s and abandoned by the 1760s after trouble with the local O’odham.
Even the renegades did not camp there. The Mexicans said it was a place that remembers. Voorssen ordered the patrol to camp at the upper end, well away from the ruin. The arrieros built no fire.
They sat with their backs to the mission and whispered prayers in Spanish all night until the praying turned into something closer to begging. Around midnight the watch fire went out. The corporal sat up and saw the man tending it, a private from Ohio, standing twenty paces beyond the fire, facing south toward the mission. The private did not respond when called, or shaken, or slapped.
The corporal followed his gaze and saw, in the open door of the chapel, something standing: the height and shape of a tall man, very still, facing the camp. The impression he had of it, which he never tried to justify in fifty years, was that it was waiting for one specific person to wake up and look at it. The corporal turned the private around bodily, and the moment the private lost sight of the door he gasped and stumbled and said he had been watching the fire. Then he saw the cold ash, and he began to cry.
In the morning the private from Ohio was gone. His boots were set neatly together under the edge of the blanket, the way a man sets them when going to sleep. His Springfield was leaning against his saddle. His canteen was full.
The only thing missing was the man. A search party found one set of barefoot prints in the soft sand of the dry creek, leading south toward the mission. They stopped halfway across the basin. They did not turn around.
They simply stopped, as if the man had been lifted out of his stride. Closson rode out alone and worked the ground himself. He came back at noon and reported to Voorssen privately. The corporal, currying his horse on the other side of the picket, heard most of it.
Closson said: some of my people will not say the name. There are reasons. The name is a door. I will say only what it does.
It puts on the shape of what hunts. In open country, a lion. In timber, a bear or a wolf. In the dark places, it puts on a man.
It hunts very slowly. It hunts by waiting. It chooses one out of a group and waits until that one walks out alone. Then it takes him.
It is not in the mission. It has been in this camp the whole time. Voorssen asked why this patrol. Closson answered: because one of your men is already looking at it the way the dog looks at the door before the door opens.
Voorssen told Closson to go and do what he had to do. Closson said that if he did not come back by the second sunrise, the captain should ride, not look behind him, not wait for missing men, not bury the fallen. Then he took two canteens, a satchel, his Winchester, and a knife with a horn handle, and he rode south down the basin toward the mission. He left the rest of his gear at his picket.
He did not say goodbye to the other scouts. He did not look at any of the men. They waited through that day and into the evening. The watch fire stayed lit.
Sergeant Threlfall doubled the watch. Around ten o’clock the corporal, on watch with a private from New Jersey, saw a figure standing in the long grass at the edge of the basin, about two hundred yards out: a man shape, in what looked like the dark blue of a cavalry blouse and the lighter gray of canvas trousers. The corporal raised his Springfield and held the sight on the figure for a long count. The figure did not move.
It was the right height, the right build, wearing the same kind of clothes. The corporal knew, the way a man knows something in his own house has been moved during the night, that it was not Closson. He did not fire. He told the priest later that he did not fire because some part of him understood that if he fired and missed, it would know he could see it.
He made the private turn his head to the watch fire. When they looked back, the figure was gone. Around three in the morning, Nalin walked over and said quietly: do not stand watch tomorrow night. Tie the red cloth on your arm.
Tell no one why. He gave the corporal a strip of red cloth. The corporal tied it under his blouse. The next day went by.
Nothing happened. At noon Sergeant Threlfall fell asleep in the shade of his picket, and when he woke he was not the same. He called for coffee in a voice that was Threlfall’s voice but slightly too smooth. He did all the things Threlfall always did, checked the men, cursed the farrier about a horseshoe, scanned the country with his field glasses.
The corporal could not put a single thing wrong with what he was doing, and he could not stop watching. Around four, Threlfall squatted down in front of him and smiled. The corporal had seen Threlfall smile twice in fourteen months. Threlfall said: Corporal Crane, what is that under your sleeve?
The corporal said it was a tobacco pouch, that he kept it there so the captain would not see it. He said it calmly because some part of him understood that calm was the only thing that would save his life. Threlfall looked at him a long time. His eyes were the wrong color.
Threlfall had had blue eyes for fourteen months. The eyes looking out of his face now were a paler blue, almost gray, like ice water on a cloudy day. Threlfall said: show me the pouch. The corporal said he would, but first Threlfall had to tell him something.
In Yuma, two summers back, Threlfall had told him a story about his first wife. He said she had a sister. What was the sister’s name? The real Threlfall had told that story one drunken night, and he had cried when he said the name.
The thing wearing Threlfall’s face did not move for three seconds. Then it stood up. It did not answer. It did not blink.
It walked back across the camp and sat down and began to clean its rifle, and it did not look at the corporal again for the rest of the afternoon. The corporal found Nalin and said, with his lips barely moving: it is the sergeant. Nalin said without looking up from his leather work: no, it is not yet the sergeant. It is sitting beside the sergeant, but it has not finished putting him on.
At first light, Closson came back. He came on foot. His horse was not with him. He had dry, brown blood on his blouse.
He stopped a hundred yards out and called for the captain by name. Voorssen came out alone and went down the rise to him. The corporal was watching from the picket. He could not hear what was said.
Voorssen looked Closson over for a long time, then took a step toward him, then another. Closson did not move. Then Closson walked the last three paces forward, stood so close their hats almost touched, leaned in, and whispered something into Voorssen’s ear. Six words.
The corporal could not hear them. Voorssen took two steps back, the way a man steps back from a fire that has flared up, and his face went white. He turned and walked back up the rise, very steady, and said: Sergeant Threlfall, saddle the patrol. We ride north in twenty minutes.
We do not stop until dark. We do not stop at El Cuello del Lobo. We do not stop at the seep. We ride.
Threlfall, or what was sitting beside Threlfall, looked up from its rifle slowly and said: Captain, the men have not eaten. Voorssen did not look at it. Twenty minutes, Sergeant. They rode out at seven in the morning, left the dead watch fire and the abandoned bedroll, and rode north.
Closson rode at the back of the column, a quarter mile behind, alone. The corporal asked the captain why. Voorssen said: he is making sure. They rode through the wolf’s throat without stopping, through the canyon of the seep without stopping, until the horses were near collapse.
Then they made a cold camp on an exposed ridge with no fire and slept in their boots with their rifles in their arms. Closson did not sleep. He sat on a rock at the edge of camp and watched the southern horizon all night. In the morning, the corporal said, he looked like he had aged ten years in a night.
On the morning of the third day they crossed back into Arizona past a small customs post flying the American and Mexican flags. Voorssen ordered the men to salute, and they did, even the German privates, even the arrieros, even Closson. The thing wearing Threlfall’s face did not raise its hand. By then it was no longer pretending very hard.
It walked strangely, held its head at an angle Threlfall never would have, did not eat, did not speak. The horse it was riding began to shy whenever it came near, and on the second day across the border it threw the thing and ran. The thing got up and walked behind the column on foot. On the night before they reached the outpost, the corporal stood watch and saw it standing some distance from the camp in the moonlight, its mouth full of something dark, working its jaw the way an animal works its jaw trying to chew something too big to swallow whole.
In the morning it was gone. Tracks led away toward the south. Mountain lion tracks. This time they did not turn into anything else.
They simply went south and did not come back. Voorssen reported the patrol lost three men: one private by desertion, one sergeant to an unknown malady he asked be entered as brain fever, one civilian arriero to dehydration. The renegades had not been found, presumed to have moved south of the patrol’s authorized depth. The file was closed.
Sergeant Augustus Threlfall, fifty years old, of Ottumwa, Iowa, was listed as deceased on the 22nd of April, 1886, cause of death brain fever in the field. No body was returned. The file said he had been buried in Sonora in accordance with regulations. The grave’s coordinates were never recorded.
Closson was honorably discharged three weeks later. His discharge papers list the reason as expiration of service. He drew his final pay of fourteen dollars and forty cents and rations for one week. He left the post on foot, walking east, and was not seen at any cavalry post in the territories again.
Nalin left two days after him, also walking, also east, and was not seen again either. Voorssen finished his career on garrison duty in Wyoming, never accepted another field command, retired in 1898 as a major, and died the following year of a heart condition in his sister’s house in Philadelphia. His sister wrote that he had become deeply pious at the end, took to sleeping with a lamp burning, and said more than once that he did not want to be alone when he died, because of something he had heard a long time ago that he was afraid was waiting for him to be alone. Wendell Crane served out his enlistment, mustered out in 1889, drifted south, did some prospecting, married a Mexican woman in Cananea in 1892, and lived in northern Sonora until his death in 1941.
He took confession only twice in his life: once when he married, and once on his deathbed in the parish house at Bavispe. When he finished telling the priest the whole story, the priest asked what the six words were. Crane said he had never heard them. But the captain had told him two weeks later, one night back at garrison when he had had too much to drink, and Crane had never said them out loud again, not to his wife, not even to himself in the dark.
Then he said them. The priest wrote them down in Latin, because he was afraid of them, in the back of the parish register. The register sat in Bavispe for ninety years, then passed into a private collection in Tucson, where it was read by a man who said he told the story exactly as it was written. The six words translate roughly into English as this: it came back wearing my face.
The corporal spent the last hour of his life explaining what he had thought about for half a century. If Closson said those words to the captain, then the man standing in front of Voorssen was the real Closson, the one who survived, warning him to watch for the second one. But a thing wearing Closson’s face could have said the same words to make the captain trust it. The real Closson would have used a sign only the two of them knew, and Closson had not.
Either way, one Closson had gone into that mission and one Closson had come out, and the corporal had ridden three days back to the border with that Closson, watched that Closson, said goodbye to that Closson as he walked east alone on the fifteenth of May, 1886. For fifty years, every time he looked into a mirror he checked his own eyes for the pale color that was almost blue, and every time he passed a stranger on a road he looked at the stranger’s hands to see if they were shaking, and every time he saw a man walking alone in the long grass at the edge of his vision he crossed himself and looked away. Because he had understood by the end that Closson had not killed it. He had only sent it ahead, into the open country to the east.
With the last breath in his body he told the priest it was still out there, that he had felt it watching him from the day he came home, and that he had been able to feel it because of the red cloth Nalin had told him never to take off. He had worn it for fifty years and seven months. The priest took it off after he died, in accordance with his last wish: to be buried with the cloth in his hand, and not on his arm. At the very bottom of the page, the priest wrote a single Latin phrase he did not translate: Audi me, Domine, quia non finita est ista historia.
Hear me, Lord, for this story is not finished.