In the olden days, the stars that marked the great warrior had been more closely arranged, the man a mere boy and not fully grown. But even when young he had shown promise as a hunter and a warrior. He and the bull whose tail always pointed north had been great friends in those days. They rode across the sky in defiance of the firmament, laughing and howling, playing and hunting. Together, they ruled all, for the spear and hoof were a keener measure of power than land or title. The world beneath them stood quiet, and water ran everywhere like the softest of sands.
But the white bull belonged not to the boy but to his chief, the One Clansman. Sand was the Royal Bull, protected from the hunt and sacred. So when Sand returned from a long absence with a nick in his hide, it was Colorado’s spear that was blamed. Sand moaned and moaned and said this was not so, but none save for Colorado could understand the bull’s laments. The others heard only the pain, which stoked their anger.
The One Clansman was pulled from his tent and was asked to make a judgment. He approached his injured bull and studied the wound. When his hand came away red, it painted the sky at dusk. “It was the boy’s spear,” he said.
Outraged, the people of the tribe drove the boy out. They cast stones at him, which broke into smaller and smaller rocks. And still they threw them, until there was stone no more. The boy Colorado wintered by himself beyond the jagged peaks where no rock could reach him. And so began the winter of ten thousand ages. During this time, the belt of the great warrior Colorado never rose above the horizon, as was common in the cold months. The months stayed cold for a very long time.
Rain froze and gathered. The ice grew so heavy, it made valleys where once there were plains. The rocks used to drive the boy out now covered the old world. Sand and ice took turns burying the clan.
Countless moons and a thousand winds passed. Now a man, Colorado chased a cayote up the mountains, following his tracks, which led him over the peaks and down to his people. He had been absent so long, no one recognized him. Not even the great bull Sand, who had grown old, his hide and eyes gray, the scar on his flank a black and jagged mark. Nor did Colorado recognize his old friend of the hunt. The years had been too many. The world was upside down. Ancient maps had been redrawn and relearned.
The only reminder of what had happened was that black scar on Sand’s hide, and all the old bull knew of the wound was that the spear in Colorado’s hand had made it, and so the bull and the grown boy began to war with one another. Man and Sand were now at odds, could no longer find harmony. A fiction had become truth. Lost was the true story of how Colorado had saved the bull’s life. No one remembered the pack of cayotes clinging to Sand’s hide, how they’d been felled with a mighty blow from Colorado’s spear, a nick made in the bull’s flesh as the point caught him as well. The truth had vanished like the sheets of ice. A hide bore a great gash, just as the plains where Colorado hunted held a jagged line in the crust of the earth that marked the boundary of No Man’s Land.
Conner knew these legends, but he didn’t trust them. He was old enough to know more than one version of these stories. The tales he had learned as a youth had changed, and he imagined they’d been changing for as long as they’d been told. Back when the legends began, the sand that made the dunes had probably been solid rock.
But there stood the valley out of which no man returned. It lay before their campsite as he and Rob staked the tent a dozen paces from its jagged border. It was a hard line, this. The desert floor was cracked, the hide of the bull an open wound. And across this blew the sand. Out of No Man’s Land blew the sand. It blew across an injury that would never heal.
No Man’s Land. Despite the name, Conner didn’t know of a single boy his age who hadn’t ventured out to the rift just to jump across and back. It was a dare undertaken in trembling packs of youth, the taboos whispered on long hikes, the false tales each year of a boy who had slipped and had fallen into the chasm and whose screams could still be heard. “That’s how deep it is,” an older boy would invariably warn with a sinister smile. “You fall in and you fall forever, screaming and screaming, until you grow old and die.”
Conner had heard these warnings as a boy. Later, he had spoken them to others. When he had gone on his own trek, he had been nine years old and had known that it was the wind that made that noise. And for all the boys who seemed to annually plunge to their deaths, none were ever named. There were never any funerals or sobbing mothers. It was just older kids trying to scare the younger.
The chasm itself was a mere two paces across where boys made brave leaps. Once they crossed, they stood on the other side, trembling and afraid, chests thrust out in defiance of the noisy gods deep in the valley, feeling the wind and sand on their faces, thinking on warnings from fathers who had in their youth done the very same. And then they jumped right back, vastly relieved to have this ritual behind them.
And so it was said that no man returned from this land even though all men dipped a toe in unharmed. But Conner knew, as everyone else did, that legends and law did not have such hard borders as these. They were soft things, probed without bursting, until one pressed the point too far. And the danger in life was that no one knew when the skin would give, just as Colorado had not known how to fight an enemy who wrestled with his friend, how to aim true enough to hit only the one.
They set up the tent and made a fire and warmed bread and stew in silence, and Conner thought on these things. They lit the lamp and sipped caps of water and shared stories of stories about the long dead and long absent, and Conner thought on these things. That night, he lay in his father’s tent while embers throbbed red outside, and he dwelt on the legends, thinking how a boy might leap across that gap and live, but how no boy truly believed he had entered No Man’s Land. Not really. Not for honest. Because this was a place from which no soul returned.
No man, at least.
18 • No Man’s Land
Conner lay in his bedroll, counting down to the moment, feeling in his bones what his old man must’ve felt twelve years ago to the day. His heart thrummed louder than the rolling booms in the distance. He could feel his pulse in his temples. His blood ticked there like one of Graham’s old clocks. And after it had ticked for what felt like days, he rose as quietly as his father once had. Slipping from his bedroll, he could feel not only Rob’s presence in the pitch black but also Palmer’s, Vic’s, and his mother’s too. He was sneaking out on all of them.
The wind was his noisy accomplice. Conner waited until a gust shook and flapped the canvas, and just as the breeze passed and would not blow sand inside, he added to its nocturnal noise by parting the tent and stealing into the night.
The stars were bright outside, the sky clear, the air cool. There was a half-moon low to the west, giving the sand an even whiteness. That same moon had been high in the night when he’d left the tent to pee and used this commotion to remove his pack. He found the bag now by the light of the firepit’s glowing coals. He dumped the scoop out of his father’s boots and sat on the cool sand to pull them on. Conner shivered and his teeth chattered, as much from nerves as from the temperature. He felt the urge to pee again but knew he didn’t really need to. There was no water in him, only fear.
A wailing lament blew across the Bull’s gash, and the coals in the fire throbbed with life as they inhaled the breeze. There was a great and mysterious rumble in the distant earth that filled Conner’s chest and throat, a sound of beating drums, that echo eternal. He rose and slung the pack over his shoulders, cinched the truss around his waist to carry the load on his hips, and turned to look back one last time. He studied the dark form of the tent, barely aglow from the coals, his brother sleeping inside, all alone. And he felt a final tug of guilt and doubt before steeling himself and heading off into the noisy beyond.