There wasn't much to do when it was your lookout. He would scan the horizon with the glasses every few minutes but see nothing. There were good sight lines to the north and west, and that's why Tom had chosen this spot. It was most likely that any posses would come from either the north or the west, but they had been running long enough that one could come from any direction. No doubt some had scattered and scouted along the Chiricahuas and even down toward Mexico. So there was no lane of sure safety.

There were a few hawks and an occasional vulture drifting high in the winds above them, too high to be actively hunting but just moving around trying for a sight or scent. Around him, the insects were at work, too. Ants mostly. They were also scouting and occasionally walking across his hands. He made a game of it, seeing if he could just sit there and watch them go without trying to brush them off. And many just walked across his hand as if it were just another obstacle and crawled off the other side and kept going. The ones that wanted to go up his shirtsleeves he brushed off or grabbed and crushed with his fingers.

They were black ants, and mostly they didn't bother you. But a bite from one stung real bad. The old-timers knew you could suture a cut with them, pressing their heads into the wound until their jaws snapped shut around the cut. Then you squeezed their bodies off, leaving the heads on the wound, holding the edges together. He had done it a number of times, but he mostly remembered the Old Man doing it to him when he was only a kid.

He was playing near the corral back in New Mexico. He had come up hard against the corral and opened his upper arm on a piece of snipped wire that was holding some of the branches together. He opened a pretty good gash. The blood flowed freely, and that scared him bad.

The Old Man came then, answering his screaming. The Old Man tried to calm him, but the blood kept coming, along with the screaming. The Old Man dragged him to the trough at the far end of the corral, washed the blood off, and looked at the ragged cut. “Jesus, look what you done, you little turd monkey.” And when John looked and saw the cut, the blood already welling and starting to spill again, he began to cry again. The Old Man went from what might have been a touch of tenderness to anger. He reached down, picked up an ant, and mashed it into the cut. When John felt the fire of the bite, he began to yell and kick at the Old Man.