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them, tight but not tourniquet-tight. He left the compresses in place fifteen or twenty minutes and then he removed them and was satisfied to see the bleeding had stopped, at least on the surface. He tore off a few bits of frayed skin and then lapped the openings together as well as he could while he brought the bandanna up around his leg again and tied it firmly.
    Now it was best not to move for a while. You had to leave the wounds alone for the raw edges to start to knit together.
    He heard an owl talking in the cactus somewhere uphill of him. That made him feel a little better because it suggested a way to get food but right now it was sleep he needed and he lay flat seeking it.
    But sleep was hard to come by. There was thinking to do, there was emotion to accommodate.
    He spent a long time remembering John B. Wilstach whom he had known six years and partnered with for three, in the army, and half another year since mustering out.
    Then he was thinking about Gutierrez and Sweeney and Ben Stryker, and mostly about Mr. Jed Pickett with his big voice and his stiff blond mustache. Of course they hadn’t planned to cut Boag and Wilstach and the other new hands in at all. They’d just wanted strong backs to move the gold for them while they used their rifles and shotguns to keep the town of Hardyville at bay. Boag and Wilstach and Frailey and those two Yumas and the rest of them had Been pack animals to Mr. Pickett, nothing more than pack animals. When you were done using a pack animal you turned him in or turned him out. Mr. Pickett had left half his pack animals in Hardyville for the citizens to play with and he’d thrown the other half overboard after shooting the two Yuma Indians to death and trying to kill Boag and succeeding in killing John B. Wilstach. There were white men who did that kind of thing for sport. Nobody had shot Frailey; Frailey was white and Frailey took a white man’s view of it—a bad turn of the cards so Frailey would forget it and move on.
    So they’d been shooting at Wilstach and Boag in the water not because there was any real reason to kill them but just because it was fun to shoot at moving targets.
    Falling off to sleep Boag wondered if Mr. Pickett knew what it was like to be a moving target that somebody was shooting at for fun.

3
    By daylight the gunshot ugliness in his leg was annoying: there was no point putting his weight on it yet because that would bunch the muscles and tear the things open again. He dragged himself around slowly doing what had to be done: a drink from the river first, and then up the bank until he came to a game trail in the brush where animals came down to drink. That took more than an hour although he found the game trail within a half mile of John B.’s grave. He spent two hours breaking sticks and honing them against rocks to make a figure-four trigger of branches on top of which he balanced the biggest stone he could claw out of the ground and roll up the bank on his knees. If a deer came along first it would be bad luck because the deadfall wasn’t tall enough off the ground and the deer would just knock the thing over. He had to hope the first drinkers after dark would be maybe badgers or a ’possum.
    If it didn’t work there was always that owl he’d heard in the night. The owl would hunt in its own bailiwick and when Boag heard it make its kill he would scare the owl off its meal and steal his supper. There was also the river but Boag didn’t like fish much.
    The banks were crowded with arrowweed and rushes and the occasional stunted scrub willow. It was a long day’s work breaking branches but by sundown he had a pile big enough to suit him. Then he crawled back to the grave and exhumed John B. Wilstach.
    The smell was bad. Boag stripped the clothes and belt off his friend and left John B. in the grave with nothing but his boots on, and covered him up again.
    He tore the clothes in strips and used most of the