One of the braves waved them into shore and they had no choice but to comply. Both canoes hit the sandbank at the same time and Colter sprang out to stand up straight and face them down to show he had no fear, but Potts wouldn’t get out. They’re going to kill us, he said in a choked voice, but they’re going to torture us first, and he tried to back the canoe away but one of the braves took hold of the paddle and then, when Potts went for his rifle, the brave grabbed that. At this point, Colter, who was stronger than any two of them combined, waded in, snatched the rifle away and handed it back to Potts. (Why, Adam always wondered, when they should have just waited them out? What was he thinking? Or maybe he wasn’t thinking, maybe he was just reacting.) That, unfortunately, started a chain of events no one could stop. Potts pushed back in his canoe and it shot out to midstream, at which point one of the Indians let fly with an arrow—shush—and there it was, embedded in Potts’ left hip, blooming there, the feathers trembling like rose petals in a breeze. And what did Potts do next? Snatched up his rifle and shot the closest Indian to him, which was the one who’d tried to take it away from him, now hip-deep in the water and looking hate at him. An instant and it was done. And in the next instant every brave there was using Potts for target practice.
So Potts was dead, dead in a matter of seconds, and Colter was standing there on the shore amidst all the hostiles howling like scorched demons and the women sending up their weird ululations of grief over the dead brave and half a dozen Indians in the creek now and wading to the canoe to drag it back to shore. Where they went at Potts’ corpse like a butchers’ convention, the women especially, hacking at him till he was unrecognizable, just meat, slick and wet and red. And Colter? Still there, still standing, still staring out unflinchingly, in another place altogether, ignoring them.
What was that like, seeing your companion gutted and dismembered out of the corner of your eye and not thirty feet away? How could anybody have just stood there instead of panicking and trying to make a run for it? Colter did. Five minutes, that was all it took for them to finish hacking at Potts till there was no more left of him than a skinned rabbit, and then they turned to Colter. Everybody was jabbering at once, crowding in to threaten him with hatchets, spears, the points of arrows and knives, their faces contorted and their mouths flung open so that every word, every shriek was delivered in a thunderstorm of spit. And they stank. They really stank. Stank worse than corpses come back to life. As if it mattered. As if anything mattered to Colter other than somehow saving his own skin. In the next moment he was stripped naked, his clothes sliced off him by the squaws’ knives, and here was what was left of Potts’ organs flung at him to spatter his chest with blood. One woman—the widow who’d been a married woman ten minutes before—was brandishing something in his face, flailing him with it, and what was it? White, flaccid, a twist of pubic hair and the sorrowful deracinated sack of what had been Potts’ testicles and the other thing attached to it, limp and bright with blood, and it could have been a turkey neck, stripped of skin and feathers, but it wasn’t.
So what was he shooting at? Was she serious? Movement, that was what. Who knew who was out there, whether it was the officers of the law or the Chinese smuggled up from Mexico on the panga boats they abandoned on the beaches till there were more pangas than seals and bundles of kelp combined or just some dog-walking shithead who was already dialing 911? And if he strapped on the night-vision goggles and whoever it was was gone in the space of those twenty seconds, what did that prove? That they were elusive. That they were smart. That they were watching him harder than he was watching them and that they were watching her too. He’d seen movement and so he fired, just to keep them off, just to let them know what his Chinese Norinco SKS Sporter semi-automatic assault rifle could do in the hands of somebody who really knew how to use it no matter what his father said or tried to say when his Aunt Marion gave it to him for his twenty-third birthday because her husband was dead and you didn’t have any use for a rifle when you were dead unless maybe you were a zombie and his Uncle Dave might have been a zombie in real life but definitely wasn’t going to be coming out of his grave anytime soon.