He learned silence.
He learned to decipher tracks like other boys read a book. He learned to recognize danger, to feel the weight of their gazes upon him. The earth did not hate him. It did not possess him. It did not mistreat him.
It simply demanded respect.
At fifteen, he had survived a rattlesnake sting by removing the venom from his leg himself. He had braved a freezing north wind that had caused the temperature to plummet by forty degrees in an hour. He had chased away a puma with a sharpened stick.
He had also killed.
The first man found him asleep in a cave. White. In rags. A knife in his hand. A rope coiled around his belt. A smile that said he was used to it.
Zacharie used a stone.
When it was over, the man was dead and Zacharie was holding the knife.
He felt nothing.
The second murder was easier. The third even easier.
Something was growing inside him, something sown on the day of his mother’s death and watered by all the cruelties he had suffered since.
The man who should never have existed
In the spring of 1863, half-dead from fever and hunger, Zachariah stumbled upon a camp in a canyon.
A small fire was burning. A rabbit was roasting on a stick. A rifle rested on a man’s knee.
The man was Mexican. Old. Grey hair. Scars. His gaze carried the weight of too many deaths.
“You look like death, boy,” said the man. “Do you plan to die in my camp?”
“I don’t intend to die just anywhere,” Zacharie murmured. “Not yet.”
The man smiled — a thin, knowing smile.
“Good. Dying is easy.”
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