“The cowboy was just tending to the giant woman’s wounds…but his hand slipped where it DIDN’T go…”
The giantess of the desert
In the scorching sands of the Sonoran Desert, in 1887, when the border between Mexico and the United States was still drawn in blood and gunpowder, rode a lone man. They called him the Texan, though he was born in Coahuila.
Tall, weathered, with a scar that crossed his left cheek like a dry riverbed, he had been on the run for two months from a group of rural police who were searching for him for killing a landowner’s son in defense of a Yaqui woman.
A Winchester rifle hung on his saddle, along with a satchel containing little food and even less hope.
That afternoon the sun was a bronze hammer. The saguaros looked like crosses for the dead. The Texan was guiding his skinny horse when he saw something that made him stop dead in his tracks.
A woman, but not just any woman.
She was gigantic.
Lying against a reddish rock, she easily measured three yards tall, perhaps more. Her legs, as long as mesquite trunks, stretched out across the sand. Her white dress, torn and stained with blood, barely covered her thighs.
Her arms, muscular like a blacksmith’s, lay limp. Her black hair fell to her waist like a waterfall of obsidian. Her eyes were closed, but her chest rose and fell with difficulty.
At his feet, two dead rattlesnakes, crushed by his own hands.
The Texan swallowed hard. He had heard legends of the ancient Tarahumara giants and the warrior women the Apaches called itsques, those who walk between two worlds. He thought it was a dream brought on by the heat, but the smell of blood was real.
He carefully dismounted. The woman opened her eyes, two black lakes that looked at him without fear.
“Water,” he whispered, in a mixture of archaic Spanish and Apache. “And then take these bites away before the poison kills me.”
The Texan approached, saw the wounds, two deep punctures in her right calf, swollen and purple. The skin around them burned. He took out his canteen and gave her a drink.
She drank like a camel and then rested her head against the rock.
“I am Tala,” she said, “daughter of Nana, the great Apache chief who fought with Victorio. I separated from my people three moons ago. The blue soldiers and the Mexican rurales are relentlessly pursuing us.”
The Texan nodded. He knew about the war. He himself had ridden with the Yaquis against the Rurales.
“I have to cut and suck out the poison,” he said.
“It hurts. I’ve given birth to two children in the desert without screaming,” she replied with a bitter smile. “Do it.”
He took out his Bowie knife, heated it over a small ocotillo fire, made a cross at each mark, and sucked hard. He spat the black blood onto the sand. Tala didn’t even flinch. She just stared at him with those deep eyes.
When he finished, he tore his own shirt and bandaged her leg. His hands, rough from years of lassoing and reining, brushed against the giantess’s soft, warm skin. She didn’t move. The silence was so profound that the beating of both their hearts could be heard
His hand, trembling with exhaustion and something else, slipped. It went too far. It grazed the flesh that becomes a secret.
Tala flinched, but not from pain. She looked at him. He froze, his hand still there, as if it had been burned. For an eternal second, neither of them spoke. Then she, in a voice as low as wind in a cannon: