Snake Trails

The dry morning air was cold enough for the grey eyed man to feel through his leather long coat. Morning was just breaking over the horizon. Besides the rumble of the engine and the sound of the tires grinding sand into pavement, it was quiet. The kind of quiet you can't find in the city, or a small country town, or in the mountains. A quiet like this only had a home in the desert. If death had a voice, it would sound like the desert. You really have to listen for it, but you're lucky not to hear its rattle. The man with the grey eyes brought his car to a stop several feet off the road and shut the engine off.

Nothing but quiet now.

A sound of rusted metal against rusted metal doesn't carry far as The Cowboy With Grey Eyes closed the door to the discolored chevy. Pulling back his long coat, he checks on his revolver. Flipping open the cylinder he eyes the unfired amunition for a moment before popping it back in place. It had been over a week since he felt the comfortable feeling of the pistol kicking in his hands. Flames lashing out as the gun drops men. He was grateful that he didn't have to hear the startled yells of men who suddenly find holes in them or the stench of drying blood. It has been quite for too long though. The silence wore him down.

Running his hands through his greying hair The Cowboy looked towards the rising sun and hoped the silence would end soon. He didn't esspecially like getting shot at but violence was how he made his living. The silence was even worse than getting shot at. The difference between knowing you're in danger and not knowing you're in danger. After a few close calls and getting shot at, beat up, stabbed, and of course actually shot; one builds up quite a bit of paranoia. The worry didn't show on his face, but he felt the tension in his gut. He reached into his coat and pulled out a ciggerette and a cheap gas station lighter. The red of the flame lit up his weather beaten face as he lit the ciggerette under a massive cupped hand.

Sand crunched under his brown steel-toed boots as he left the road of civilation and started out into a wilderness that resists taming with all of it's strength. The desert is harsh and refuses to nourish weak humans that do not know it's ways. Concrete and water pipes. Hot dog stands and Starbucks. A desert won't be tamed. It can be destroyed, utterly changed into a city with flashing lights and neon. But, the desert won't yeild. It's a place you go to die of thirst under the peircing sun, or shivering in the cools of night. It's a place you run hard and fast into when you're running from something. The law doesn't like chasing after people who nestle into someplace nice and uncomfortable. They become hard to track and most people figure they'll crawl back to society to get arrested like good criminals once nature was through with them.

Not Hester. He was a man who would suck the dew off a live rattler just to say that he did. The desert was nothing to him but a sandy patch in the road. He could stay buried for long enough that everyone would have forgotten about him as he slipped out of the state. Mother nature won't spit them all out. She'll take a few into her loving embrace, you gotta dig those sons of bitches out.

Even those who know how to survive develop those convinences that they don't much like giving up. For Hester it was the whiskey. Whiskey is what snitched on him.

The Man with Grey Eyes had made a stop at each liqour store on this side of the state looking for Hester. It had taken him over a month to finally catch a scent, but the trail was there. Hester was managing to live off the desert quite well, and he didn't bother paying for the wiskey. He was carrying a lever action rifle for that kind of business. Bad way to keep a low profile. Bad way to stay hidden.

Sparks kicked up as the ciggerette hits the sand. It burns ashy red for a moment before the heavy boot smothers it, kicking sand on top of it afterwards. Trouble with tracking snakes is you have to go where they go, and that means crawling on your belly.