This is a grim fairy tale of another sort. It first appeared in a collection of Texas folklore called Straight Texas back in 1937 and took on new life in the internet age. I accidentally stumbled across it while researching a Texas Ranger gunfight that took place near Lake Espantosa back in the 1870's. I was captivated by the bizarre yarn. So I started searching for the original version that everyone kept citing as their source to see if there was more detail to be found. I am not sure how much is actual folklore or how much was made up by the author. He's pretty specific with dates but includes no actual data to back up why he chose them. So I don't know how much of it actually happened. Likely none of it. Still, it's a fascinating yarn with much of the mythic about it. I am currently toying with the idea of weaving the yarn into a larger novel I dream of doing but felt I needed to write out my own version of the tale in order to figure out just how to insert it. So here 'tis. I stretched the blanket a bit, throwing in some new twists and turns of my own with a dusting of pulp fiction style, yet still managing to mix in some real history as well. Hope you enjoy this weird tale of South Texas.
The Devil's Own
Dear Mother,
The Devil has a river in Texas all his own
and it's made only for those who are grown.
Yours with Love,
Mollie
The old woman’s care-worn fingers traced her daughter's barely literate scribbling. The envelope bore a postmark from some place called Copano Bay in that far away land of Norte Mexico - a land where every American murderer, swindler, adulterer and debtor fled to escape the sword of justice. Now it had swallowed up her Mollie. She read the lines through the mist of her cataracts, her lips mouthing the words, anger and fear gnawing her heart. Mollie went missing months ago. April Thirteenth. A Friday, of course. Gone out to milk the cows one morning and never returned. Her brothers found a wicked looking Bowie knife stuck in the ground. The handle was crusted black with blood. They knew it to be the blade of John Dent: outlaw, card-sharp, drunk, man-killer. He was wanted through Georgia for murdering his own partner and absconding with their fur profits. This ne'er-do-well and Mollie spent many a romantic moment together over the summer before the word spread about the murder. His proposals were refused by Mollie's clan, the Pertuls, even before they knew his hands were stained with blood. He vanished after his partner's murder. Mollie disappeared a week later. He left the Bowie knife to mock his heartsick new in-laws.
The Pertul clan searched all through the county, screaming out Mollie's name under a sunset streaked with the color of blood. They sloughed through the muddy Chickamauga River bottoms looking for any sign of their beloved daughter, sister, cousin. They finally found a few tracks near the banks and some sign that a canoe was launched into the chocolate brown waters. Whatever had happened, whether she had gone willingly or no, she lay now forever out of their reach. The Pertul cabin lay in the grip of mourning for months. The night creatures of the Georgia hills listened mutely to the sobbing of a mother drifting from beyond cabin walls. This letter was the first news of Mollie since her vanishing. It was very cold comfort. Mollie Pertul’s mother neatly folded it up and placed it inside the giant trunk that kept all their important papers and keepsakes. Then she laid down and died.
The Pertul clan searched all through the county, screaming out Mollie's name under a sunset streaked with the color of blood. They sloughed through the muddy Chickamauga River bottoms looking for any sign of their beloved daughter, sister, cousin. They finally found a few tracks near the banks and some sign that a canoe was launched into the chocolate brown waters. Whatever had happened, whether she had gone willingly or no, she lay now forever out of their reach. The Pertul cabin lay in the grip of mourning for months. The night creatures of the Georgia hills listened mutely to the sobbing of a mother drifting from beyond cabin walls. This letter was the first news of Mollie since her vanishing. It was very cold comfort. Mollie Pertul’s mother neatly folded it up and placed it inside the giant trunk that kept all their important papers and keepsakes. Then she laid down and died.
John Dent and Mollie Pertul bound themselves in the chains of holy matrimony quickly in Georgia before rushing overland to New Orleans. From there they sailed for the Mexican port of Copano Bay. The feelings of excitement and love still burned bright enough in the young beauty to instigate her sending such a coldly worded letter to her mother, teasing her with the strange names of the places John told her they were heading to. She rejoiced in her newfound freedom. But before another month passed, she began to wish herself safely back home on the banks of the Chickamauga, for John took her to the farthest outpost of civilization in a country already composed of almost nothing but wilderness and Indians. The destination was Devil’s River, and the magnet was Spanish gold.
Devil’s River flows into a fog-capped lake aptly named Espantosa. In Spanish it means something like "Fear." It’s entire history is one black whirlpool of tragedy sunk in the great desert of the Texas borderlands. When the Spaniards first discovered it, they found the waters literally black with alligators. But this natural jewel of water in the parched lands of South Texas made the lake and river a vital stop on the journey between Mexico City and Santa Fe. A golden thread of commerce soon strung along it’s reptilian shores, and mule trains pregnant with the weight of Spain’s millions trekked to Mexico’s capitol city. At least, till the Comanches discovered the roadway.
It took one raid to cut that golden thread - an entire wagon train decimated in a few minutes, mutilated bodies of Spaniards and horses dumped into the lake. The bags of gold were tossed on the roiling backs of gators for the Comanches had no use for them other than a few bars they kept as trinkets. They also figured the hungry reptiles would prove safeguard against any other Spaniards on the hunt for what spoils they left. Spain had been fighting a losing battle with these fierce lords of the plains for decades. It hadn’t been long since an army of two thousand Comanches and Kiowas wiped an entire mission off the face of the earth near present day Menard. His Spanish majesty's forces decided to find another route. The gold was left to be hoarded by alligators like the dragons of yore.
A century passed over the sickly waves, empires fell, and a new colony picked this ill-starred spot to settle: the Dolores Colony - the colony of Sorrow nestled on the banks of Lake Fear. Actually named after Empresario John Charles Beale's wife, María Dolores Soto y Saldaña, the name is too close to the word "Dolorous" to refrain from a grim pun. The colony still thrived at the time of the Dents arrival but its doom fast approached. Insects, hailstorms, late freezes, triple digit temperatures in spring annihilated the sustenance of the poor colonists. Depression settled upon the colony's shoulders. Family after starving family fled failure by moving to nearby San Fernando Springs (present day Del Rio.)
As any good Texian knows, Revolution reared its head in 1835. Rumors of massacre and rape bellowed forth from Zacatecas as Santa Anna's army marched north through the snowstorms of an unusually frigid winter. The bleak news sent most of the Dolores colony scurrying for American soil. One of the larger refugee groups found themselves surrounded on the Matamoros Road by Comanches taking advantage of the general confusion. All were slaughtered except for two women and two children. The women were eventually rescued by American traders. The children vanished into the vast endless horizon of Comancheria. They either died or were raised as Comanches. Their family's corpses sank beneath the murky waters of Lake Fear and fattened the insatiable guardians of the waters.
John Dent refused to leave. The shimmering siren of Spanish gold held him like a vice. Now he’d be able to work in peace with most of the settlers gone. He'd always been afeared of people figuring out why he was dredging the lake on moonlit nights and try to claim the treasure for their own. He’d already murdered his best friend over a share of meager fur trapping profits. He wasn’t about to share a Conquistador’s ransom with a bunch of hard scrabble farmers. He continued to trawl the black waters under the nightlight of a Comanche moon, heedless of the dangers he ran - or of the danger he placed Mollie in. He watched for the burning witch fires that legend say float like lanterns above buried treasure. In his mind's eye he saw a firmament of lights burning like stars floating upon the waves. Dreams of El Dorado danced in his head all the time now: golden phantasms of Spanish doubloons, bar silver, the horrific faces of Indian gods melded out of molten gold haunted his dreams, seasoned his food, and squeezed out in any room he had left in his heart for Mollie. Their marriage died more or less in its crib.
That is why her pregnancy filled her with such sadness. Mollie lived essentially alone in a small cabin on a packed dirt floor behind walls daubed with mud to haphazardly keep the wind out. All the white women were gone. Only a few Mexican families lived nearby, and they were more Indian than Spanish. They never visited her, and she never made the trek to their thatched jacales. More and more she thought of her mother, her brothers, and all that she so recklessly left behind. All she had now was a symbol of the love she once had for John growing inside of her to keep her company as his days and nights spent on the lake left their bed cold and empty. After the settlers moved away, Nature began to close in upon the lone cabin, taking back Her territory foot by foot. Deer, geese, ducks, grouse, quail, curlews, rabbits, all overran the land. They were never short of meat - but their meager garden that the pregnant Mollie tended everyday was quickly packed into the bellies of all these critters. And at night the wolves howled.
Mollie was used to hearing the lone cry of a wolf at night growing up in the dark forests on the Chickamauga. But the South Texas nights were filled with the dreadful cry of immense wolf packs crying out in one tongue to their lunar goddess. The howls at night swelled in intensity till it sounded as if the entire cabin lay in a crawling circle of wolves. Livestock vanished one by one. Their horses screamed at night in terror. Sometimes as she looked out the window she saw what seemed like a sea of fireflies floating in the dark. Eyes. Yet, John seemed not to care. He floated upon the waters of Espantosa day and night, steering clear of the baleful reptilian eyes that bobbed to the surface and watched his every move. There were fewer gators than in the days of Spain but many a shadow sliding beneath the surface attested to their plentiful number. John cursed them and spat but stayed away. He hoped that the treasure didn't lie within a cove of the lake where the things sunned themselves in the heat of the day. It was the one spot of the lake he could never get close to. The gators never left it.
Mollie's frustration and distress mounted higher and higher as each day passed. She felt her baby kicking inside of her. Her maternal instincts worked at her heart and she felt her days weigh heavier and heavier as a constant dread gripped her. The few hours John spent at the cabin were not spent talking. She had food prepared - meager fare. Not even enough corn for cornbread. Some dried venison soaked and turned into a stew that did nothing but fill the belly with monotony. Her mouth revolted at the constant menu but their child needed the sustenance. Mollie stared out over the table length at her husband - scraggly beard, hollowed eyed, skin burned brown by the South Texas sun. A mute stranger.
Months passed.
A farmer and his wife watched a lone rider racing over the hill towards their jacale. They knew the galloping silhouette against the dark thunderheads before he came anywhere near them. Only one other man lived anywhere nearby and from the wife's guesstimation it would be near time for the wild-eyed man's child to be born. The eyes burning above a forest of mustachios and beard made the woman sick to her stomach. John told her through signs and broken Spanish that Mollie had been in labor for days and was bleeding heavily. The woman grabbed a sack and filled it with all the herbs and secret things a bruja might need to bring a life into the world. Little time could be lost if Mollie wasn't dead already. She launched out of the hut. She looked right and left for John and saw only a cloud of dust trailing back to the Dent home. Thunder cracked the sky and the fast approaching storm plunged all into a shadow world.
She followed the best she could. Lightning followed in her wake and deep surges of thunder shook the ground under her, speeding her chase. Faint howling crackled to life all around her. It surged louder and louder. Deep, savage, starved. Lobos. The wild howls exhaled as one long moan from the jaws of hundreds of wolves. Nature at last came to square accounts with the last white invaders of their domain. Two great hordes of fur and fang closed in on the lone shack on the Devil's River like ravenous jaws.
In her mind, the curandera saw the young woman set on by the wolves, limbs torn from her body, heard her screams mixed with howls on the wind. Lightning threw her to earth with a blinding flash and a cataclysmic boom that shook her very bones. It took her a few minutes to regain sight and pull herself to her feet. The Lobos were silent. All sound had stopped but a soft ringing in her ears. She struggled to her feet gripping her head in her hands. Bright splotches flooded her eyes; vision swam past islands of neon colors. She collapsed on her haunches waiting for the effect of the lighting strike to wear off.
Precious minutes blew by before the woman could finally begin to run again towards the Dent shack. Another mile of cactus and caleche flew beneath her worn feet before she saw the pile of horseflesh crumpled up on the trail ahead of her. She neared the burnt mess. John Dent's horse. A large black blotch showed the lightning's kiss. Blood lay everywhere. She couldn't tell if it came from the horse or the missing body of his master. She ran about in a wide circle looking for Dent, hunting a wounded man crawling in search of succor. Nothing. Not even a trail.
"Merciful God, was he was blown to dust? It's not possible..."
Suddenly remembering the horrible situation of Mollie, she quickly left the search for a disintegrated John and dashed off for the shack on Devil's River.
"Merciful God, was he was blown to dust? It's not possible..."
Suddenly remembering the horrible situation of Mollie, she quickly left the search for a disintegrated John and dashed off for the shack on Devil's River.
She arrived too late. She only wished that Mollie had been blown to atoms like her ne're do well lover. There was not much left. A great sticky puddle of dark crimson, bits of limbs scattered and a rib cage much gnawed upon. No head. And no sign of the baby. The woman dropped to her knees in a wave of nausea. Life in the desert is harsh and unremitting. Horror and acts of casual brutality are daily dinner conversation. But the meaningless horror of an innocent mother and child literally swallowed up by predatory Nature was too much to bear even for this seasoned mystic who had seen the demons of the Wild Horse Desert and whispered to the dead in the lonely watches of the night. She wretched as thunder trailed away in the distance.
The remains of Mollie Pertul Dent were buried by the hands of a witch and the rain soaked earth accepted her to it's cold forgetfulness. Her undertaker whispered a hail Mary and prayer for the lost girl's soul then began to root around inside the run down shack. Mollie's touch lay upon the place in small subtle ways. She had done her best to keep the house as clean as you can keep a bundle of sticks with a dirt floor but in the last few terrible months of pregnancy she hadn't been able to much of anything. The bruja hated to think of the days and nights of bitter loneliness as the young woman cried herself to sleep as her husband floated the black waves of the haunted lake. Then her agonizing hours of labor as she struggled to bring a child into a world, the terror that swallowed her as the ring of lobos charged the cabin, and her last few moments as she dragged her bleeding body and new born child in the dust before the final moments. The witch didn't like to think of the newborn's brief introduction to the world. She finished rooting around in the now unspeakably cold and lonesome shack. She found a handful of letters with Mollie's handwriting that she never had a chance to mail to her mother - words of sorrow and pleadings of forgiveness. The brujah couldn't read English but she deduced her name from the signature. She tucked them into her shawl and promised to herself to see them mailed the next time she and her husband traveled to a trading post. She closed the door on the dark feeling that she felt strangling her every second she stood inside that sad place. She walked back out into the evening sky. The violet crown falling over the horizon's brow seemed a sharp contrast to the bleakness she felt inside. She shook off the brooding evil angel on her shoulders and walked into the twilight.
And miles away, a newborn baby nursed from a wolf's warm flesh under the lidless eye of a leprous moon.
And miles away, a newborn baby nursed from a wolf's warm flesh under the lidless eye of a leprous moon.
Years passed... A Republic arose then absorbed into a larger Republic. Gold and Empire made their standard sacrifices to Mars as the United States and Mexico went to war. America won her empire in the halls of Montezuma. Borders became hotbeds of banditry and Indian tribes fought viciously at a Fate they felt quickly closing in on them...
Emerald Eyes watched the scalps tear off with a fleshy pop. It reminded her of her brothers and sisters' teeth tearing back the skin of their latest kill and digging into a delicious buck or stray cow. The thought made her stomach growl hungrily but the site before her left her curiously ill at ease. Wolves never ate each other. She wasn't sure if the humans were eating each other but she sense that whatever was happening wasn't the natural order of things. But then again, she wasn't a great example of the natural order herself. All her pack loved her but still, she often felt an outcast. Hairless but for the thick mane of hair wrapping her from head to toe in a tangled blanket, she was envious of her wolf family's beautiful warm coats. Her teeth were not sharp or lovely as the fangs of her people, her broken nails nothing like the sleek claws of her sisters. She was a wolf in her soul but physically she was a teenage girl. A teenage girl watching the casual violence of other human beings with the curious mind of an animal. There was something more savage about these humans than the life of a Lobo could grasp. There lay a malignant streak of cruelty running beneath it all. Wolves never killed for sport. They killed for food or some other survival need. But this blood lust was driven by something more all consuming than hunger. She couldn't translate what she saw there but she knew that it was something terrible. Yet she was still fascinated by it. Perhaps her soul wasn't entirely that of a wolf.
Glanton finished sawing off the scalp from the Mexican child while the other men around him slashed and carved at the remains of the child's family. They wanted it to look like an Apache raid so no questions would be asked by Rangers. This required bits cut off to show proof of torture and other similar desecration of the corpses. "You about done making your masterpiece over there?" Glanton barked out. "Rangers will be this-away before long."
"Just about, boss. Let me finish stuffing this Christmas goose." A shaggy, broken toothed lieutenant kicked and shoved the dead family dog into the open chest of the family patriarch. He kicked at it venomously with a bleeding leg bearing the teeth marks of the now dead guardian. " 'Paches will get jealous at how good we are at playing Injun."
"Helps if you are as ugly as one," laughed Glanton. "Gets you more into the spirit of things, right Kid?" He winked at one of the men, a Cherokee youth who went by the very original nickname of "The Cherokee Kid." The Kid just scowled silently at Glanton as he lit the family's home on fire. Glanton tied off the child's scalp to his saddle. "I reckon that is enough. We better all vaminose now." He pressed his ear to the ground. "Horses heading this a-way." Glanton spat and mounted. "Best haul in a week." The other ragged and begrimed men of foul face and tangled beards mounted up too. They were a motley crew of outcasts: Anglo, Sonoran, Cherokee, Delaware, Canadian French, Texian, Irish, Comanche, and a black freedman.
"No hard feelings. Just business," grunted the dog kicker to the silent family as he kicked his horse and rode after his compadres. Smoke from the burning family jacale wrapped cold forms in its black tendrils.
Emerald Eyes watched the smelly men disappear through the curtain of fire. She also scented more horses headed towards her and felt the vibrations of the earth. She quickly decided she didn't need to be around when the critters called "Rangers" showed up. She followed the beast men - frightened but fascinated.
John Glanton, scalp hunter, and his gang of human refuse had grown weary of earning bounties from the Mexican government for Apache scalps. They were tired of the battles it took with full grown warriors. The fighting cut into their hide and, more importantly, their drinking, so when they realized that the black hair of innocent Mexican farmers served just as well, they thought Christmas had come early. Glanton found a perverse humor in serving Mexicans the same desserts they paid him to served up to the Mescaleros and Lipans. A veteran of the Mexican War, he bore the Mexicans no love and his brain always teetered on the brink of insanity anyway since the slaughter of his wife and child by Apaches back near San Antonio. Since that bleak day he'd rode a endless warpath against all mankind - especially the Apache. Rumors whispered grotesque tales of mule loads of raised hair hanging on the walls of his home before he at last rode out and plunged into the forgetfulness of the Southwest.
Emerald Eyes knew none of this. She followed at a cautious distance. They stank more than the usual human, ripe with sweat and other foulness she couldn't place. If a soul can stink she smelled it. She skirted the edges of their path avoiding wandering eyes as they looked out for Rangers. One of the gang drew her attention more than the rest. There was something vaguely familiar about him. She couldn't find a reason for it. She never came into contact with humans. Her brain never connected the dots between the similarities in their forms. Their souls weren't right. They gave her the same feeling in her belly as that woman in white she often glimpsed walking along Devil's River at night. She sobbed and wailed to the indifferent stars, hands writhing in agony as she clutched the empty air for her children. Her eyes empty sockets searching the night for the babies she had drowned before running off with her lover. Emerald Eyes didn't know anything about the specter's past but she sensed the empty vacuum in her chest that she also scented in Glanton. Both were devils damned to wander for a redemption that would not come and lost ones that would never return to their embrace.
She tracked them to their camp. Still out of reach, she squatted, wrapped in her cocoon of dirty hair, watching with lolling tongue as the men lit their camp fire and started roasting up some venison they had left tenderizing. Her nose drank in the biting spice of the mesquite and the smell of roasting flesh lured her to creep closer than she normally would have. She hadn't eaten all day and her belly howled within her.
Glanton saw her first - a creeping, undulating hairy caterpillar-like thing. He reckoned her to be an Indian wearing the skin of some strange animal. Emerald Eyes didn't see him bring his rifle to his shoulder. The explosion catapulted his men to cover. The ball hit the dirt right beneath her, ricocheted, creased her neck and sail off into the rocks about her. She hit the earth paralyzed. Her wild mind clawed frantically at her new prison. She smelled the humans rushing towards her in an avalanche of rankness she couldn't escape. She growled and barked as menacingly as she could as they surrounded her with their rifles pointed inches from her. Glanton squatted on his haunches and pulled back the curtain of hair.
"Hell's Bells boys! Ain't 'Pache at all. We caught ourselves a wild girl."
A few of the men chuckled as they leered. "Think she is crazy, boss?"
"More than likely. Even greasers and you redskins wear clothes and bathe every once in a while."
Emerald Eyes howled in terror. It was a strange wail that writhed and twisted into something bestial and agonizingly sad. The men shivered. Even these men, calloused by the causal horrors of frontier life and warfare were unsettled by a sound so unnatural. It was as if all the suffering they had every inflicted was concentrated in one long accusation of grief and condemnation.
"Reckon she's a bruja?" Dog Lover felt more unsettled than the rest. "I've known a few of them and got my belly full of the supernatural."
Glanton shook his head. "I don't think so. A bruja would have eaten the bullet or blocked it somehow. I think this gal actually thinks she is a lobo. Maybe her family was kilt and it drove her insane. Either way, she will not stay stunned for long. Let's get her back to the camp and figger out what to do with her." Dog Lover nodded. He was less talkative than he'd been before. Something about the girl filled him with a strange unsettled feeling...like he was living in a nightmare that he'd had before but forgotten in the morning light.
The girl howled and barked and snapped her yellow teeth at the men as they tied her up and carried her back to camp. The hands of more than a few wandered and explored. In those days a completely naked female rippling with muscle was not easy to come by. Many a man could go their whole life without seeing a completely naked woman. So they took immense pleasure in their discovery. Strange water flowed from her eyes for the very first time in her life. She didn't know what her tears were and none of her people could tell her. Wolves don't feel shame.
They tossed her inside the broken down ruin of an old trading post at the corner of their camp. They had turned it into their scalp smoker. The scents overwhelmed her mind. All the scalps on their "hunting expedition" dangled by their hair drying in the mesquite smoke of a small fire smoldering on the dirt floor. The stone walls were black with the stink of burning mesquite. She could smell the hair and their many scents drifting above her like thoughts, short stories woven into each strand of hair. Her mind raced with sensory overload. She heard each voice, each scream and cry from each scalp. They spoke to her in the unknown language of humans. She couldn't understand their pleas but felt the terrible fear and last agonies in each piece of that firmament dangling above her. All her fear and other emotions she couldn't identify found voice in her long drawn out howls to the deaf desert stones. At last she felt a tingling in her limbs. Her body was waking up...
Her howling sank into Dog Lover's brain. It burned and stabbed and twisted in his head. "The howling is driving me insane, boss." He spat out the pemmican he'd been munching on. "She's been yowling all day. What the hell are we going to do with her?"
Glanton took a pull at his bottle of mescal. He'd acquired an all-consuming passion for it during the war in Mexico. He spent most of his time at the bottom of a bottle.
"I do not know. She belongs to someone. She's some crazed lost soul that's been living out here a long time. She's white - you can tell by her eyes. Someone will be looking for her. And that means a reward. Since the Rangers will be sniffing around back where we came from, we can take her on up to Fort Leaton. Get a reward or sell her off. Easy money." He drank deep. "Since none of your tales of witchfires and buried treasure have panned out to much, I reckon she can do your share of the work."
"I done told you, it's out there. Somewhere. I don't seem to remember any of y'all wanting to risk your hide with them gators. Nor did any of y'all over tax yourselves with the shovels." He yanked the bottle from Glanton's hand and took a long pull. "Well, reward or no reward, I am going to muzzle the bitch." Dog Lover stumbled from the campfire towards the scalp smoker. The moon bled silver through chinks and cracks in the stone walls, weaving a great spider's web of moonbeams about the dangling scalps.
"Hellooooooo pretty puppy."
She glared at him through curtains of mane. She had been gnawing hard at her bonds and finally seemed to be making some progress at splitting the rope fibers. His shadow moved towards her through the shafts of pale light. His eyes seemed to glow with a demonic gleam.
"I have got my bellyful of your yowling. So, you need to keep quiet and keep still." His Bowie knife was a liquid bar of silver in the moonlight. "Or am I going to give you a haircut you won't soon forget?" He loomed over her trembling form. "All your pretty pretty tresses would make many a trophy to add to the pack mule." Grimy fingers played with her filthy locks. "Rapunzel, Rapunzel...let down yer hair." His rank breath punched her highly sensitive nose with a brutal assault of mescal, tobacco and festering gums. She pressed herself against the wall and struggled at her bonds. She wanted to melt into the wall. The man's eyes burned with a fever of lust and moonlight as his hand sought her secret places. She snarled and snapped as she fought violently against the cords around her hands and feet. He shot backwards. Her hair fell back, and her contorted face shone in the moonbeams.
Dog lover looked stunned for a few moments. "Damned if you don't look like someone I used to know. Alrighty, you want to play a little rough, Rapunzel? I can oblige you. I like a little struggle anyway. Gets the juices flowing." He licked his lips loudly. The flapping noise sent the girl into another howl. Blood ran down her wrists and ankles from the ropes binding her. "Howl long and loud pet, for you will find it mighty hard to howl again through a slit windpipe. It'll be more like whistling." He laughed terribly and started whistling as he moved towards her again, knife upraised and blazing like a brand in the icy moonlight.
His whistling wilted beneath a sudden howling from the hills. The girl's eyes flashed with fiery hope as more eerie notes blossomed out in the great Dark. More and more lifted up the song. Her spirit soared.
'Hell's belched forth her choir." Glanton slowly stood and pointed his trembling rifle at the wheel of sound erupting about them. "Must be a hundred at least. Ain't no earthly Lobo pack that size." Yet howls kept multiplying and swept closer and closer. The other men backed up into an armed circle next to him. The noose of sound tightened around them, peppered with snarls, yips and barking.
Emerald Eyes howled and tried to leap to her feet. Her people were here to save her at last. She pulled and gnawed at her bindings. Her captor stumbled towards the exit. He felt her eyes on him and heard the low growl in her voice as she continued to gnaw her way to freedom. He couldn't get close to her for fear of her snapping jaws. "Stay back bitch!" He turned to run, tripped over the stones in the smoking fire and hit the ground hard. The world spun and the howling stopped.
Glanton and crew now huddled together in the center of a ring of golden eyes. Absolute silence wrapped them in a strangle hold. "They're watching us, toying with us," whimpered a feller aptly named "Crying Tom" Hitchcock. "Ain't natural. Them ain't natural lobos. Damned devils from the pit. What we gonna do, boss?"
Glanton tried to keep his trembling rifle steady and pointed at the wavering eyes. "We ain't going to be making any sudden moves, I can tell you that. Do NOT fire unless they charge us. If they do, then let 'er fly and devil take the hindmost." Cold sweat burned his eyes and salted his lips.
Emerald Eyes roared in triumph as her bonds snapped beneath her teeth and she leaped upon her stunned captor. His knife lay a few feet away, knocked away in his fall. His revolvers waited useless back in camp. He punched and kicked at her, but her champing jaws tore at them, and he screamed as he felt his fingers crunch to splinters in her mouth. "Help me boys, help me, she's done for me!" But his compadres couldn't move. For now, a ring of stone silent wolves stared at them. Fur coats of rippling quicksilver in the moonlight, tongues dripping, eyes glowing hellfire, they stood silently around them. Watching and waiting. The only sound was the heavy panting of man and beast.
"HELP ME BOYS!" Emerald Eyes drank in his terror with relish. The fear in his own green eyes filled her with a feeling she'd never experienced before - glutted vengeance. Wolves never thought in those terms. She knew not what it was, but it went beyond pure self-defense. Her heart raced with the new feeling, experiencing the first euphoric taste of intoxication. She reveled in it. She tossed her mane back wildly and let loose a paean of victory that froze the marrow of all who heard. Her face was wild and beautiful and terrible in the silver lamplight of the goddess of the hunt, framed by dozens of dangling scalps.
"Mollie?" John Dent didn't have time to connect the dots before the face of his dead abandoned Mollie - stamped forever on the face of their daughter - sank her teeth into his throat and tore it out...
Emerald Eyes, face caked in the blood of her father, melted into the night with the rest of her pack. No scalp hunter fired a shot. They watched in terrified wonder as the darkness took the girl and her adopted tribe. They stayed awake, pressed back-to-back, till dawn broke pink as prickly pear over the desert hills. Then they collected their scalps and rode away. But not before adding Dent's scalp to their haul. His hair was black, so it would fit right in with the rest. They left the body as a peace offering for the wolves. The wolves never touched it. But the coyotes sure did.
The name of John Glanton soon became anathema all along the border. He eventually met his much-deserved end near Yuma, Arizona. Caught by surprise and surrounded by vengeful members of the Quechan tribe, his throat was slit from ear to ear, scalp shorn, belly gutted, and all remains burned in a great fire alongside a dog that had been tagging along with the gang.
Emerald Eyes, or the Lobo Girl of Devil's River as she came to be known in local legend, was never captured again. She had her belly full of mankind and never tracked them out of curiosity again. There were still sightings of her now and again for a decade or so before she vanished without a trace from the historical record. The wolf population of South Texas has disappeared as well, the last holdouts killed in the 1920's. The "civilization" they fought so long against eventually won out. The last time she was seen, a goatherd claimed to have happened upon her nursing wolf pups at the banks of Devil's River. Both humans fled the sight of the other. Some old timers spread talk about seeing wolves with faces that looked peculiarly human, as if man and beast had mated and born a child. Of course, that's physically impossible, but they still swore the most solemn oaths that they saw strange hybrid beasts out there in the wild places about Devil's River. "If man can bear the Mark of the Beast, cannot Beast bear the Mark of Man?" Either way, nothing more was seen of Mollie Dent's daughter or her supposed children. Yet for decades to come, goatherds and cowboys working along Devil's River spoke in terrified whispers of eldritch howling in the night that sounded unlike any other wolf - or wolves - in Texas.
The Truth of the Matter...
"Hell's Bells boys! Ain't 'Pache at all. We caught ourselves a wild girl."
A few of the men chuckled as they leered. "Think she is crazy, boss?"
"More than likely. Even greasers and you redskins wear clothes and bathe every once in a while."
Emerald Eyes howled in terror. It was a strange wail that writhed and twisted into something bestial and agonizingly sad. The men shivered. Even these men, calloused by the causal horrors of frontier life and warfare were unsettled by a sound so unnatural. It was as if all the suffering they had every inflicted was concentrated in one long accusation of grief and condemnation.
"Reckon she's a bruja?" Dog Lover felt more unsettled than the rest. "I've known a few of them and got my belly full of the supernatural."
Glanton shook his head. "I don't think so. A bruja would have eaten the bullet or blocked it somehow. I think this gal actually thinks she is a lobo. Maybe her family was kilt and it drove her insane. Either way, she will not stay stunned for long. Let's get her back to the camp and figger out what to do with her." Dog Lover nodded. He was less talkative than he'd been before. Something about the girl filled him with a strange unsettled feeling...like he was living in a nightmare that he'd had before but forgotten in the morning light.
The girl howled and barked and snapped her yellow teeth at the men as they tied her up and carried her back to camp. The hands of more than a few wandered and explored. In those days a completely naked female rippling with muscle was not easy to come by. Many a man could go their whole life without seeing a completely naked woman. So they took immense pleasure in their discovery. Strange water flowed from her eyes for the very first time in her life. She didn't know what her tears were and none of her people could tell her. Wolves don't feel shame.
They tossed her inside the broken down ruin of an old trading post at the corner of their camp. They had turned it into their scalp smoker. The scents overwhelmed her mind. All the scalps on their "hunting expedition" dangled by their hair drying in the mesquite smoke of a small fire smoldering on the dirt floor. The stone walls were black with the stink of burning mesquite. She could smell the hair and their many scents drifting above her like thoughts, short stories woven into each strand of hair. Her mind raced with sensory overload. She heard each voice, each scream and cry from each scalp. They spoke to her in the unknown language of humans. She couldn't understand their pleas but felt the terrible fear and last agonies in each piece of that firmament dangling above her. All her fear and other emotions she couldn't identify found voice in her long drawn out howls to the deaf desert stones. At last she felt a tingling in her limbs. Her body was waking up...
Her howling sank into Dog Lover's brain. It burned and stabbed and twisted in his head. "The howling is driving me insane, boss." He spat out the pemmican he'd been munching on. "She's been yowling all day. What the hell are we going to do with her?"
Glanton took a pull at his bottle of mescal. He'd acquired an all-consuming passion for it during the war in Mexico. He spent most of his time at the bottom of a bottle.
"I do not know. She belongs to someone. She's some crazed lost soul that's been living out here a long time. She's white - you can tell by her eyes. Someone will be looking for her. And that means a reward. Since the Rangers will be sniffing around back where we came from, we can take her on up to Fort Leaton. Get a reward or sell her off. Easy money." He drank deep. "Since none of your tales of witchfires and buried treasure have panned out to much, I reckon she can do your share of the work."
"I done told you, it's out there. Somewhere. I don't seem to remember any of y'all wanting to risk your hide with them gators. Nor did any of y'all over tax yourselves with the shovels." He yanked the bottle from Glanton's hand and took a long pull. "Well, reward or no reward, I am going to muzzle the bitch." Dog Lover stumbled from the campfire towards the scalp smoker. The moon bled silver through chinks and cracks in the stone walls, weaving a great spider's web of moonbeams about the dangling scalps.
"Hellooooooo pretty puppy."
She glared at him through curtains of mane. She had been gnawing hard at her bonds and finally seemed to be making some progress at splitting the rope fibers. His shadow moved towards her through the shafts of pale light. His eyes seemed to glow with a demonic gleam.
"I have got my bellyful of your yowling. So, you need to keep quiet and keep still." His Bowie knife was a liquid bar of silver in the moonlight. "Or am I going to give you a haircut you won't soon forget?" He loomed over her trembling form. "All your pretty pretty tresses would make many a trophy to add to the pack mule." Grimy fingers played with her filthy locks. "Rapunzel, Rapunzel...let down yer hair." His rank breath punched her highly sensitive nose with a brutal assault of mescal, tobacco and festering gums. She pressed herself against the wall and struggled at her bonds. She wanted to melt into the wall. The man's eyes burned with a fever of lust and moonlight as his hand sought her secret places. She snarled and snapped as she fought violently against the cords around her hands and feet. He shot backwards. Her hair fell back, and her contorted face shone in the moonbeams.
Dog lover looked stunned for a few moments. "Damned if you don't look like someone I used to know. Alrighty, you want to play a little rough, Rapunzel? I can oblige you. I like a little struggle anyway. Gets the juices flowing." He licked his lips loudly. The flapping noise sent the girl into another howl. Blood ran down her wrists and ankles from the ropes binding her. "Howl long and loud pet, for you will find it mighty hard to howl again through a slit windpipe. It'll be more like whistling." He laughed terribly and started whistling as he moved towards her again, knife upraised and blazing like a brand in the icy moonlight.
His whistling wilted beneath a sudden howling from the hills. The girl's eyes flashed with fiery hope as more eerie notes blossomed out in the great Dark. More and more lifted up the song. Her spirit soared.
'Hell's belched forth her choir." Glanton slowly stood and pointed his trembling rifle at the wheel of sound erupting about them. "Must be a hundred at least. Ain't no earthly Lobo pack that size." Yet howls kept multiplying and swept closer and closer. The other men backed up into an armed circle next to him. The noose of sound tightened around them, peppered with snarls, yips and barking.
Emerald Eyes howled and tried to leap to her feet. Her people were here to save her at last. She pulled and gnawed at her bindings. Her captor stumbled towards the exit. He felt her eyes on him and heard the low growl in her voice as she continued to gnaw her way to freedom. He couldn't get close to her for fear of her snapping jaws. "Stay back bitch!" He turned to run, tripped over the stones in the smoking fire and hit the ground hard. The world spun and the howling stopped.
Glanton and crew now huddled together in the center of a ring of golden eyes. Absolute silence wrapped them in a strangle hold. "They're watching us, toying with us," whimpered a feller aptly named "Crying Tom" Hitchcock. "Ain't natural. Them ain't natural lobos. Damned devils from the pit. What we gonna do, boss?"
Glanton tried to keep his trembling rifle steady and pointed at the wavering eyes. "We ain't going to be making any sudden moves, I can tell you that. Do NOT fire unless they charge us. If they do, then let 'er fly and devil take the hindmost." Cold sweat burned his eyes and salted his lips.
"HELP ME BOYS!" Emerald Eyes drank in his terror with relish. The fear in his own green eyes filled her with a feeling she'd never experienced before - glutted vengeance. Wolves never thought in those terms. She knew not what it was, but it went beyond pure self-defense. Her heart raced with the new feeling, experiencing the first euphoric taste of intoxication. She reveled in it. She tossed her mane back wildly and let loose a paean of victory that froze the marrow of all who heard. Her face was wild and beautiful and terrible in the silver lamplight of the goddess of the hunt, framed by dozens of dangling scalps.
"Mollie?" John Dent didn't have time to connect the dots before the face of his dead abandoned Mollie - stamped forever on the face of their daughter - sank her teeth into his throat and tore it out...
Emerald Eyes, face caked in the blood of her father, melted into the night with the rest of her pack. No scalp hunter fired a shot. They watched in terrified wonder as the darkness took the girl and her adopted tribe. They stayed awake, pressed back-to-back, till dawn broke pink as prickly pear over the desert hills. Then they collected their scalps and rode away. But not before adding Dent's scalp to their haul. His hair was black, so it would fit right in with the rest. They left the body as a peace offering for the wolves. The wolves never touched it. But the coyotes sure did.
The name of John Glanton soon became anathema all along the border. He eventually met his much-deserved end near Yuma, Arizona. Caught by surprise and surrounded by vengeful members of the Quechan tribe, his throat was slit from ear to ear, scalp shorn, belly gutted, and all remains burned in a great fire alongside a dog that had been tagging along with the gang.
Emerald Eyes, or the Lobo Girl of Devil's River as she came to be known in local legend, was never captured again. She had her belly full of mankind and never tracked them out of curiosity again. There were still sightings of her now and again for a decade or so before she vanished without a trace from the historical record. The wolf population of South Texas has disappeared as well, the last holdouts killed in the 1920's. The "civilization" they fought so long against eventually won out. The last time she was seen, a goatherd claimed to have happened upon her nursing wolf pups at the banks of Devil's River. Both humans fled the sight of the other. Some old timers spread talk about seeing wolves with faces that looked peculiarly human, as if man and beast had mated and born a child. Of course, that's physically impossible, but they still swore the most solemn oaths that they saw strange hybrid beasts out there in the wild places about Devil's River. "If man can bear the Mark of the Beast, cannot Beast bear the Mark of Man?" Either way, nothing more was seen of Mollie Dent's daughter or her supposed children. Yet for decades to come, goatherds and cowboys working along Devil's River spoke in terrified whispers of eldritch howling in the night that sounded unlike any other wolf - or wolves - in Texas.
The Truth of the Matter...
While the tale of Mollie Dent's daughter being raised by wolves may be nothing but legend, most of this tale is interwoven with fact.
There are numerous recorded cases of feral children raised by wolves, even all the way up to the end of the 20th century. Some children were mentally handicapped, abused, and "thrown to the wolves" by their horrid human family. They had not long lived with their new pack when rediscovered, yet they already mimicked their new brethren the best they could and believed themselves to be wolves. Other cases seem to involve children more like Kipling's Mowgli, living almost an entire childhood with their lupine rescuers. But no actual cases that I have come across in my research lived from birth to full grown adulthood with a pack, like Mollie's daughter supposedly did. I find it hard to believe that a wolf pack wouldn't eat a helpless newborn if they had just eaten her mother. Even more unbelievable to me is the idea that hungry wolves would raise her as one of their own instead. A human baby is not mobile enough to be taken care of by even the most indulgent wolf mother. A more realistic plot would have Mollie's daughter being found and adopted by a pack when she was in the toddler stage. Or even between the ages of five and ten. If the Dents existed, I would think that to be the more likely scenario. But feral children have indeed existed as long as mankind has lived at the edge of the Wild.
The Dolores Colony was a real colony set up in 1834 by American, English, German, and Spanish American immigrants, under the leadership of Englishman, John Charles Beales. It was indeed named "Dolores" for his Mexican wife. It also failed for the reasons mentioned in the tale. The colony's existence has long been forgotten and is known mostly only by residents in the area where the colony once stood and by Texas history professors. Most colonies that empresarios tried to set up with Mexico in Texas failed. That's why Stephen F. Austin is so well remembered today. He was the most successful colonizer of Texas by a huge margin. His colony and Green DeWitt's colony were about the only ones able to fulfill their contracts with Mexico.
Espantosa is a real lake and has a very haunted reputation to this day. Ask any local. And it did indeed have quite the gator population at one time.
John Glanton and his crew of scumbags, sadly, were also true characters from history. Glanton himself lead a haunted life, one that I would like to expand on more if I make this short story part of a longer novel. He doesn't appear to have been all bad in the beginning, and evidence seems to point to the deaths of loved ones helping to twist his soul into what it became. His first wife was raped, killed and scalped by Apache raiders, which lead to his deep hatred of that people. He was a scout for James Fannin and narrowly escaped execution at Goliad. Though he later married the daughter of famed Tejano patriot, Jose Antonio Menchaca, the death of their young son sent him spiraling into more intense acts of violence. He finally devolved into scalp hunting around 1849. Mexico also didn't like the Apache and their raiding, and the Chihuahuan government paid American scalp hunters for each scalp collected. Glanton and his gang did well for themselves at first but eventually the collecting became too difficult, and as mentioned in the above tale, the Glanton gang began to take Mexican scalps to masquerade as Apache scalps. But Mexican authorities found out and soon Glanton had a price put on his own scalp by the state of Chihuahua. Though his repugnant scalp hunting adventures became fodder for all sorts of dark western tales less than a year after his death, his widow remained loyal to his memory, never remarried and kept his last name. Samuel Chamberlain's alleged encounter with the Glanton gang, chronicled in his memoir "My Confession," inspired the book "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy. Scholars still fight over how accurate Chamberlain's memoir is, but the Glanton gang itself was not a literary invention.
The Devil's River is indeed a real river and still flows through the wilds of Southwest Texas. No one can make up their mind on how it got its name. So, one story is as good as another. It's now a state park and is a favorite destination for primitive campers and kayakers. It's not easy to access and a trip there involves a lot of hiking through rugged terrain or lots of paddling. If you decide to visit, you will get a hard workout but will see some truly epic scenery for your reward.
And maybe...juuuuust maybe...you might catch a fleeting glimpse of a feral Mollie Dent descendant, trying to figure out who these intruders to their hunting ground may be.
copyright Ben Friberg 2017
updated version copyright Ben Friberg 2023
