The Crossing

by Cormac McCarthy

  When they'd done eating they scraped their plates off into the ashes of the fire and wiped them clean with pieces of tortilla and ate the tortillas and packed the plates away in their mochilas. Then they tightened the latigos on their horses and mounted up. He shook out the grounds from the cup and wiped it out with his shirt and handed it up to the rider who'd given it to him.

  Adios compadrito, they said. Hasta la vista. They touched their hats and turned their horses and rode out and when they were gone he got his horse and mounted up and took the trail back west the way the wolf had gone.

  By evening she was back in the mountains. He followed afoot leading the horse. He studied places where she had dug but he could not tell what it was she was digging for. He measured the remaining day with his hand at arm's length under the sun and finally he stood up into the saddle and turned the horse up through the wet snow toward the pass and home.

  Because it was already dark he rode the horse past the kitchen window and leaned and tapped at the glass without stopping and then went on to the barn. At the dinner table he told them what he had seen. He told them about the heifer dead on the mountain.

  Where she crossed back goin towards Hog Canyon, said his father. Was that a cattletrail?

  No sir. It was not much of a trail of no kind.

  Could you make a set in it?

  Yessir. I would of had it not been gettin on late like it was.

  Did you pick up any of the sets?

  No sir.

  You want to go back up there tomorrow?

  Yessir. I'd like to.

  All right. Take up a couple of traps and make blind sets with em and I'll run the line with you on Sunday.

  I dont know how you think the Lord is goin to bless your efforts and you dont keep the Sabbath, their mother said.

  Well Mama we aint got a ox in the ditch but we sure got some heifers in one.

  I think it's a poor example for the boys.

  His father sat looking at his cup. He looked at the boy. We'll run it on Monday, he said.

  Lying in the cold dark of their bedroom they listened to the squalls of coyotes out in the pasture to the west of the house.

  You think you can catch her? said Boyd.

  I dont know.

  What are you goin to do with her if you do?

  What do you mean?

  I mean what will you do with her.

  Collect the bounty, I reckon.

  They lay in the dark. The coyotes yammered. After a while Boyd said: I meant how will you kill her.

  I guess you shoot em. I dont know no other way.

  I'd like to see her alive.

  Maybe Pap will bring you with him.

  What am I goin to ride?

  You could ride bareback.

  Yeah, Boyd said. I could ride bareback.

  They lay in the dark.

  He's goin to give you my saddle, Billy said.

  What are you goin to ride?

  He's gettin me one from Martel's.

  A new one?

  No. Hell, not a new one.

  Outside the dog had been barking and their father went out to the kitchen door and called the dog's name and it hushed instantly. The coyotes went on yapping.

  Billy?

  What.

  Did Pap write Mr Echols?

  Yeah.

  He never heard nothin though. Did he?

  Not yet he aint.

  Billy?

  What.

  I had this dream.

  What dream.

  I had it twice.

  Well what was it.

  There was this big fire out on the dry lake.

  There aint nothin to burn on a dry lake.

  I know it.

  What happened.

  These people were burnin. The lake was on fire and they was burnin up.

  It's probably somethin you ate.

  I had the same dream twice.

  Maybe you ate the same thing twice.

  I dont think so.

  It aint nothin. It's just a bad dream. Go to sleep.

  It was real as day. I could see it.

  People have dreams all the time. It dont mean nothin.

  Then what do they have em for?

  I dont know. Go to sleep.

  Billy?

  What.

  I had this feelin that somethin bad was goin to happen.

  There aint nothin bad goin to happen. You just had a bad dream is all. It dont mean somethin bad is goin to happen.

  What does it mean?

  It dont mean nothin. Go to sleep.

  IN THE WOODS on the southfacing slopes the snow was partly melted from the prior day's sun and it had frozen back in the night so that there was a thin crust on top. The crust was just hard enough for birds to walk on. Mice. In the trail he saw where the cows had come down. The traps in the mountains lay all undisturbed beneath the snow with their jaws agape like steel trolls silent and mindless and blind. He took up three of the sets, holding the cocked traps in his gloved hands and reaching under the jaw and tripping the pan with his thumb. The traps leapt mightily. The iron clang of the jaws slamming shut echoed in the cold. You could see nothing of their movement. Now the jaws were open. Now they were closed.

  He rode with the traps packed under the calfhide in the floor of the packbasket where they would not fall out as he rolled sideways in the saddle to duck low branches. When he came to the fork in the trail he followed the track she'd taken the evening before going west toward Hog Canyon. He made the sets in the trail and cut and placed stepping sticks and returned along a route of his own devising a mile to the south and continued down to the Cloverdale road to visit the last two sets on the line.

  There was still snow in the upper stretches of the road and there were tiretracks in the road and horsetracks and the tracks of deer. When he reached the spring he left the road and crossed through the pasture and dismounted and watered his horse. It was near noon by the sun and he intended to ride the four miles into Cloverdale and go back by way of the road.

  While the horse was drinking an old man in a Model A pickup truck pulled up out at the fence. Billy pulled the horse's head up and mounted and went back out to the road and sat the horse alongside the truck. The man leaned out the window and looked up at him. He looked at the packbasket.

  What are you trappin? he said.

  He was a rancher from the lower valley along the border and Billy knew him but didnt say his name. He knew the old man wanted to hear that he was trapping coyotes and he wouldnt lie, or wouldnt exactly lie.

  Well, he said. I seen a lot of coyote sign down here.

  I aint surprised, the old man said. They done everthing down at our place but come in and set at the table.

  He scanned the country with his pale eyes. As if the little jackal wolves might be afoot on the plain in broadest day. He took out a pack of readymade cigarettes and shucked one up and took it in his mouth and held up the pack.

  Smoke?

  No sir. Thank you.

  He put the pack away and took from his pocket a brass lighter that looked like something for soldering pipe, burning off paint. He struck it and a bluish ball of flame whooshed up. He lit the cigarette and snapped the lighter shut but it continued to burn anyway. He blew it out and dandled it in one hand to cool it. He looked at the boy.

  I had to quit usin the hightest, he said.

  Yessir.

  You married?

  No sir. I aint but sixteen.

  Dont get married. Women are crazy.

  Yessir.

  You'll think you've found one that aint but guess what?

  What?

  She will be too.

  Yessir.

  You got any big traps in there?

  Like how big?

  Number four, say.

  No sir. Truth to tell, I dont have none with me of no kind.

  What did you ask me how big for then?

  Sir?

  The old man nodded at the road. There was a mountain li
on crossed about a mile down here yesterday evenin.

  They're around, the boy said.

  My nephew's got some dogs. Got some blueticks out of the Lee Brothers' line. Pretty good dogs. He dont want em walkin in no steeltraps though.

  I'm back up here towards Hog Canyon, the boy said. And up towards Black Point.

  The old man smoked. The horse turned its head and sniffed at the truck and looked away again.

  You hear about the Texas lion and the New Mexico lion? the old man said.

  No sir. I dont believe so.

  There was this Texas lion and this New Mexico lion. They split up on the divide and went off to hunt. Agreed to meet up in the spring and see how they'd done and all and whenever they done it why the old lion been over in Texas looked just awful. Lion from New Mexico he looked at him and he said Lord son you look awful. Said what's happened to you. Lion been over in Texas said I dont know. Said I'm about starved out. Other old lion said well, said tell me what all you been doin. Said you might be doin somethin wrong.

  Well the Texas lion said I just been usin the old tried and true methods. Said I get up on a limb overlookin the trail and then whenever one of the Texans rides underneath it why I holler real big and then I jump out on top of him. And that's what I been a doin.

  Well, the old New Mexico lion looked at him and he said it's a wonder you aint dead. Said that's all wrong for your Texans and I dont see how you got through the winter atall. Said look here. First of all when you holler thataway it scares the shit out of em. Then when you jump on top of em thataway it knocks the wind out of em. Hell, son. You aint got nothin left but buckles and boots.

  The old man fell across the steering wheel wheezing. After a while he began to cough. He looked up and wiped his watery eyes with one finger and shook his head and looked up at the boy.

  You see the point? he said. Texans?

  Billy smiled. Yessir, he said.

  You aint from Texas are you?

  No sir.

  I didnt allow you was. Well. I better get on. You want to catch coyotes you come down to my place.

  All right.

  He didnt say where his place was. He put the truck in gear and pulled the sparklever down and pulled away down the road.

  WHEN THEY RAN the traps on Monday the snow had melted off everywhere save in the northfacing rincons or in the deeper woods below the north slope of the pass. She'd pulled out all the sets save for the ones in the Hog Canyon trail and she had taken to turning the traps over and springing them.

  They took the traps up and his father made two new sets with double traps, burying one trap under the other and the bottom trap upside down. Then he made blind sets in the perimeter about. He laid these two new sets and they returned home and when they ran the traps the next morning there was a coyote dead in the first set. They pulled this set entirely and Billy tied the coyote on behind the cantle of his saddle and they went on. The coyote's bladder leaked down the horse's flank and it smelled peculiar.

  What did the coyote die of? he said.

  I dont know, said his father. Sometimes things just die.

  The second set was dug out and all five traps sprung. His father sat looking at it for a long time.

  There was no word from Echols. He and Boyd rode the outlying pastures and began bringing the cattle in. They found two more calves dead. Then another heifer.

  Dont say nothin about this less he asks, Billy said.

  Why not?

  They sat their horses side by side, Boyd sitting Billy's old saddle and Billy in the mexican saddle his father had traded for. They studied the carnage in the woods. I wouldnt of thought about her pullin down a heifer that big, Billy said.

  Why not say nothin? said Boyd.

  What would be the use in worryin him over it?

  They turned to go.

  He might want to know about it anyways, Boyd said.

  When's the last time you heard bad news you were glad to get?

  What if he finds it himself?

  Then he'll find it.

  What are you goin to tell him then? That you didnt want to worry him?

  Damn. You're worse than Mama. I'm sorry I raised the question.

  He was left to run the traps on his own. He rode up to the SK Bar and got the key from Mr Sanders and went to Echols' cabin and studied the shelves in the little mudroom pharmacy. He found some more bottles in a crate in the floor. Dusty bottles with greasestained labels that said Lion, that said Cat. There were other bottles with curled and yellowed labels that bore only numbers and there were bottles made of purple glass dark near to blackness that had no label at all.

  He put some of the nameless bottles in his pocket and went back to the front room of the cabin and looked through Echols' little packingcrate library. He took down a book called Trapping North American Furbearers by S Stanley Hawbaker and sat in the floor studying it but Hawbaker was from Pennsylvania and he didnt have all that much to say about wolves. When he ran the traps the next day they were dug out as before.

  HE LEFT the next morning on the road to Animas and he was on the road seven hours getting there. He nooned at a spring in a glade of huge old cottonwoods and ate cold steak and biscuits and made a paper boat of the bag his lunch had come in and left it turning and darkening and sinking in the clear still of the spring.

  The house was on the plain south of the town and no road to it. There had been a track at one time and you could see where it ran like the trace of an old wagonroad and that was where he rode till he came to the cornerpost of the fence. He tied the horse and walked up to the door and knocked and stood looking out over the plains toward the mountains to the west. Four horses were walking along the final rise out there and they stopped and turned and looked his way. As if they'd heard his rapping at the door two miles distant. He turned to rap again but as he did the door opened and a woman stood looking at him. She was eating an apple but she didnt speak. He took off his hat.

  Buenas tardes, he said. El senor esta?

  She bit crisply into the apple with her big white teeth. She looked at him. El senor? she said.

  Don Arnulfo.

  She looked past him toward the horse tied to the fencepost and she looked at him again. She chewed. She watched him with her black eyes.

  El esta? he said.

  I'm thinking it over.

  What's there to think about? He's either here or he aint.

  Maybe.

  I aint got no money.

  She bit into the apple again. It made a loud cracking noise. He dont want your money, she said.

  He stood holding his hat in his hands. He looked out to where he'd seen the horses but they had disappeared over the rise.

  All right, she said.

  He looked at her.

  He's been sick. Maybe he wont say nothin to you.

  Well. He will or he wont.

  Maybe you like to come back some other time.

  I aint got some other time.

  She shrugged. Bueno, she said. Pasale.

  She held open the door and he stepped past into the low mud house. Gracias, he said.

  She gestured with her chin. Atras, she said.

  Gracias.

  The old man was in a dark cell of a room at the back of the house. The room smelled of woodsmoke and kerosene and sour bedding. The boy stood in the doorway and tried to make him out. He turned and looked back but the woman had gone on to the kitchen. He stepped down into the room. There was an iron bedstead in the corner. A figure small and dark prone upon it. The room smelled as well of dust or clay. As if it might be that which the old man smelled of. But then even the floor of the room was mud.

  He said the old man's name and the old man shifted in his bedding. Adelante, he wheezed.

  He stepped forward, still holding his hat. He passed like an apparition through the banded rhomboid light from the small window in the western wall. The routed dustmotes reeled. It was cold in the room and he could see the pale wisps of the old man's breath rise and v
anish in the cold. He could see the black eyes in a weathered face where the old man lay on the bare ticking of his pillow.

  Guero, he said. Habla espanol?

  Si senor.

  The old man's hand rose slightly on the bed and fell again. Tell me what you want, he said.

  I come to ask you about trappin wolves.

  Wolves.

  Yessir.

  Wolves, the old man said. Help me.

  Sir?

  Help me.

  He was holding up one hand. It hung trembling in the partial light, disembodied, a hand common to all or none. The boy reached and took it. It was cold and hard and bloodless. A thing of leather and bone. The old man struggled up.

  La almohada, he wheezed.

  The boy almost put his hat on the bed but he caught himself. The old man's grip suddenly tightened and the black eyes hardened but he said nothing. The boy put the hat on and reached behind the old man and got hold of the limp and greasy pillow and stood it against the iron bars of the bedstead and the old man clutched his other hand as well and then leaned back fearfully until he came to rest against the pillow. He looked up at the boy. He'd a strong grip for all his frailty and he seemed loath to release the boy's hands until he'd searched out his eyes.

  Gracias, he wheezed.

  Por nada.

  Bueno, the old man said. Bueno. He slacked his grip and Billy freed one hand and took off his hat again and held it by the brim.

  Sientate, the old man said.

  He sat gingerly on the edge of the thin pad that covered the springs of the bed. The old man did not turn loose of his hand.

  What is your name?

  Parham. Billy Parham.

  The old man said the name in silence to himself. Te conozco?

  No senor. Estamos a las Charcas.

  La Charca.

  Si.

  Hay una historia alla.

  Historia?

  Si, said the old man. He lay holding the boy's hand and staring up at the kindlingwood latillas of the ceiling. Una historia desgraciada. De obras desalmadas.

  The boy said that he did not know this history and that he would like to hear it but the old man said that it was as well he did not for out of some certain things no good could come and he thought this was one of them. His raspy breath had faded and the sound of it had faded and the faint whiteness of it also that had been briefly visible in the cold of the room. His grip on the boy's hand remained as before.

  Mr Sanders said you might have some scent I could buy off of you. He said I ought to ask.

  The old man didnt answer.

  He give me some that Mr Echols had but the wolf's took to diggin out the traps and springin em.

  Donde esta el senor Echols?