Blood Meridian: Chapter 17 Summary & Analysis

At dusk, the gang rides out of Tucson. With them are five new recruits, Cloyce and "the idiot", and also the barrel of whiskey stolen the night before, which Glanton promised to Mangas Colorado. The barrel has been drained, refashioned, and now holds only three quarts or so of liquor. Mangas and some Apaches ride out to meet the gang, and the whiskey is exchanged for gold and silver. Mangas seems dissatisfied with the trade, but Davy Brown assures a new recruit that the Apaches won’t follow in the night.

The gang rides west, past little towns and through a saguaro forest. They camp; Glanton stares thoughtfully into the fire. The narrator describes him as a man full of resources, equal to all challenges, even death. He does not weigh consequences, and even though he accepts that we cannot escape fate, he nonetheless claims agency and would drive the sun to its final darkness as if he ordered it at the beginning of time. Meanwhile, the Judge sits scribbling in his ledger, watching "the idiot" tirelessly.

Two days later, the gang encounters a legion of one hundred Sonoran troops led by Colonel Garcia. They are seeking a band of Apaches led by a man named Pablo. Glanton exchanges rudimentary civilities with Garcia but rides on, the gang in tow. The narrator says that it’s as though the place to the south from which Glanton has come and the place east to which he’s riding don’t have existence for him.

The next night, the gang is sitting around the fire, the Judge off on some mission. Someone asks Tobin if there used to be two moons in the sky, and he says it’s possible. He supposes that God, disturbed by the lunacy on the earth, could have extinguished the second moon, and left the first only because He could think of no other way to make it possible for birds to fly at night.

Someone else asks if there are humans or like creatures on other planets. The Judge has returned to the fire and answers in the negative. He says that the universe is infinitely various, and that the order we see in the universe is imposed by our own minds, not inherent in the thing itself. Davy Brown spits into the fire and dismisses this as crazy talk.

The Judge smiles and kneels beside Davy Brown with a coin in his hand. “Where is the coin,” he asks. The Judge throws the coin and it circles the campfire, being perhaps attached to horsehair, before returning to the Judge’s hand. He likens this to the orbiting of the moon and the fated lives of men. He then throws the coin again and it vanishes into the night, before returning after some time to his hand. Some of the men think that it’s merely a trick, and the Judge himself says that all coins are false coins.

The next day the gang is again on the move. Glanton’s dog (the one he tamed with jerky in Ch. 11) falls to the back of the column, and it doesn’t come when Glanton calls. Glanton drops back, finds the dog, hits it viciously and drives it before him.

Soon after, the gang rides past dead mules and ruined wagons, dead cattle and horses. They ride over a dry lake, and on past a crucified Apache. In this landscape, the narrator observes, men and rocks share a strange kinship.

While the gang camps one night, the Judge discourses on warfare. He says that what people think about war doesn’t matter, because war was always and will always be here. He calls war the ultimate trade, and says that it contains all other trades. War endures, he says, “because young men love it and old men love it in them.” He also says that men are born for nothing but games, and that war is the ultimate game because it involves the highest stakes. He concludes that, insofar as war is a battle of human wills within the will of the universe (that is, fate), war forces existence into a unity: “War is God.”

Davy Brown studies Judge Holden and dismisses him as crazy. Another gang member, Doc Irving, says that might doesn’t make right. The Judge responds that the weak invented morality to disenfranchise the strong, and observes that history subverts morality at every turn. He also observes that we can never test the quality of our moral judgments.

The Judge asks Tobin what he thinks. “The priest does not say,” Tobin replies. The Judge counters that the priest has already said by quitting the priesthood and becoming a warrior. Tobin says that he was never actually a priest, only a novitiate. The Judge observes that “men of god and men of war have strange affinities.” Tobin tells the Judge that he won’t contradict him and that the Judge should not ask that he do so; but the Judge responds that everything he could ask for the ex-priest has already given.

On the next day, the gang crosses a lakebed of lava and some granite hills. The next they find water, and the Judge finds a mysterious bone. Consequently, he gives a lecture on paleontology to some new recruits, answering their questions thoroughly. Nearby, "the idiot" is tethered near a campfire, where he sits with hands outheld as if yearning for the flames. The Judge drops the bone and tells those listening to him that, though they want to be told some mystery, “the mystery is that there is no mystery.” When the Judge raises and moves away, Tobin says that the Judge is himself a mystery.

After three more days of riding, the gang reaches the Colorado River. There they find a wagon train ravaged by cholera. Scouring through the wreckage are Yuma Indians, some ferrying livestock across the river. Glanton speaks to an old man, who tells him that his party aims to cross the river via a ferryboat, which charges a dollar per person. The ferry arrives, piloted by a doctor named Lincoln, whom Glanton introduces to the gang.

Later, Glanton, the Judge, and five men ride downriver to where the Yuma Indians are encamped. They are met by the group’s one-eyed leader, Caballo en Pelo, a lesser chief called Pascual, and another Indian named Pablo (presumably the leader of the band Colonel Garcia and his Sonoran soldiers were hunting). Davy Brown spits and Glanton calls the bunch “crazylookin,” but the Judge thinks that the Indians are more useful than they appear.