Canyons

by Gary Paulsen

  “Brennan,” his mother said, “I’d like you to meet Bill Halverson.”

  Brennan nodded. “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  And that was it, or he thought it was. Brennan went into his room and changed quickly and threw on a T-shirt and made his way back outside to jog down to Stoney’s place to ride in his old pickup out to mow lawns.

  Later he would think back on this time; later when he had begun to try to find his spirit and see the dance of the sun, later when his life was torn to pieces and he was trying to make it whole again, he would look back on this moment, this exact moment when it started, and wonder how it could be.

  How anything so big could come from something so small and simple.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  And it changed his whole life.

  ALSO AVAILABLE IN LAUREL-LEAF BOOKS:

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  THE WINTER ROOM, Gary Paulsen

  THE CAR, Gary Paulsen

  THE NIGHT THE WHITE DEER DIED, Gary Paulsen

  THE ISLAND, Gary Paulsen

  THE CROSSING, Gary Paulsen

  AFTER THE FIRST DEATH, Robert Cormier

  EIGHT PLUS ONE, Robert Cormier

  THE CHOCOLATE WAR, Robert Cormier

  I AM THE CHEESE, Robert Cormier

  TENDERNESS, Robert Cormier

  Published by

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers

  a division of

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  Copyright © 1990 by Gary Paulsen

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address Delacorte Press, New York, New York 10036.

  The trademark Laurel-Leaf Library® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80425-9

  RL: 5.2

  Reprinted by arrangement with Delacorte Press

  v3.1

  To Angenette

  and James Wright—with deep gratitude,

  true love, and gentle respect

  for the joy

  of their life

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - Quickening

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3 - Dust Spirits

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5 - Nightride

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7 - Visions

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9 - The Raid

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  1

  Quickening

  Soon he would be a man.

  Not after months, or years, as it had been, but in a day. In a day Coyote Runs would be a man and take the new name which only he would know because finally after fourteen summers they were taking him on a raid.

  He had difficulty believing it. For this summer and two summers past he had gone time and time again to the old place, the medicine place, the ancient place in another canyon only he knew about, and prayed for manhood—all for nothing. For the whole of this summer and two summers past he had been ignored, thought of as still a boy.

  And now it was upon him.

  In the morning he had risen early and walked away from the camp before the fires yet smoked and gone to the stream to rinse his mouth and take a cool drink and nothing seemed different.

  He had gone to the ponies and looked at them and thought how it would be someday to own a pony, two of them, many of them, when he was a man and could go on raids to take horses and a Mexican saddle with silver on it like Magpie had done when he became a man and who could now walk with his neck swollen.

  All someday. That’s how he thought then, in the morning, it would all come someday. He would be an Apache warrior and ride down past the bluebellies’ fort across the dirty little river into Mexico and prove that he was a man.

  Someday.

  After he had watched the pony herd for a time he walked back to the huts in the early morning sun and saw that his mother was making a fire to heat a pot of stew made from a fat steer they had taken from Carnigan’s ranch. The rancher had many such steers and did not mind when the village took one. He liked to watch his mother make fire. She was round and her face shone in the sun and her hands were so sure when she piled the sticks and struck the white man’s lucifer stick to make the fire that he thought of her as not just his mother but the mother of the fire. As she was the mother of the stew and the wood and the sand and the hut and Coyote Runs. The mother of all things.

  Then Magpie had come out of his hut where he slept with his family though he was a man because he did not have his own wife yet. He saw Coyote Runs sitting near his mother and came to him and squatted next to him in the dirt.

  “It is a fine morning,” he said, which caused Coyote Runs to look at him because his voice was light and teasing. “A fine morning to be a man.…

  Coyote Runs said nothing but had a sour taste in his mouth. It was not like Magpie to make fun of him or to be proud so that it showed in a teasing voice.

  “I have heard stories,” Magpie said, and now Coyote Runs could tell that he was teasing openly. But he was smiling and his eyes were not mean.

  “What kind of stories?”

  “I have heard stories of a new raid to where the silver saddles are. A raid which will leave tomorrow. A raid which will have all the warriors on it.”

  Coyote Runs felt it now, the small excitement that came from surprises.

  “All the warriors and men there are. Tell me, warrior, do you have a pony?”

  “I’m going?” Coyote Runs tried to keep his voice even.

  Magpie smiled wider and nodded. “It is thought that you could come to hold the horses and see how it is to be on a raid. Sancta said it, said you could come by name.”

  Coyote Runs thrilled inside but tried to remain cool, not show it, as was proper. For a man. As a man should act. Sancta was a scarred old man who could not be touched by arrows or bullets who had led all the raids since Coyote Runs knew there were raids; Sancta decided who would go and who would stay. And he had decided. “I do not have a proper pony for war but it is perhaps true that I have a friend with a pony.” He looked pointedly at Magpie. “Do I have such a friend?”

  Magpie nodded. “I will loan you that small brown pony with the white eye. Until you can get your own.”

  “Until I can get my own.”

  Magpie stood. “I think I will go down to the stream now and clean myself.”

  Coyote Runs nodded but did not stand. Inside he was ready to explode but he remained cool. “Yes. The water was good this morning.”

  And he thought I am to be a man. I am going on a raid and I am to be a man.

  There was much to do. He must ready himself and his bow and check his arrows; he must make certain that everything was the best that it could be.

  I am to be a man.

  There was much to do.

  2

  Brennan Cole lived in El Paso
, Texas, and each afternoon after school he ran. He did not run from anything and did not run to anything, did not run for track nor did he run to stay in shape and lose weight.

  He ran to be with himself.

  He was tall and thin and healthy with brown hair that grew thick and had to be cut often and because he ran in shorts with no shirt and wearing a headband instead of a cap and because El Paso sits at the base of Mount Franklin and burns in the hot sun for most of the year he was the color of rich, burnt leather.

  He did not know his father. He lived alone with his mother and when he was home—which was less and less as he approached fifteen and his mother spent more and more time working to live, working to be, working to feed and clothe her only son—the two of them existed in a kind of quiet tolerance.

  She did not dislike him so much as resent the burden she thought he was; and he did not dislike her so much as want to relieve her of the burden.

  He was still too young for fast-food jobs but he mowed lawns for a lawn care service, working for an old man named Stoney Romero, who paid him in cash and did not ask questions nor give answers except to aim Brennan at yards with a mower. Brennan did not make much, but he fed himself and bought clothes for school and special shoes.

  For his running, he thought now, turning on Yandell Street headed for the apartment over the house where he and his mother lived. I need money only for shoes for running.

  It is all I need to do—to run is all there is. When I am running it is all, everything. Nothing matters. Not the father that I do not know or the mother that does not know me or the school that I hate or money or not money—all of that disappears when I run.

  When I float. When I run and float. God, he thought, his legs felt like they belonged to somebody else, somebody who never became tired, and when he looked down at them pumping, driving, moving him forward they marveled him. From all the running, from the daily running in the streets and up the hills they had become so strong he didn’t know them.

  There was traffic but he keyed his steps and ran across the street at an angle, picking up speed as he passed in front of an army pickup from Fort Bliss. I can run for all of time, run forever.

  It was May and very hot, close to ninety in the shade. But dry heat—always dry heat in the desert—and it didn’t take him down. Nothing took him down.

  Except being home.

  There was that, he thought, turning up the block and seeing their apartment and his mother’s old Volkswagen, knowing that he would not be able to be with himself any longer. Only home took him down.

  She had company.

  She belonged to one of those parents-without-husbands groups or whatever they were and from time to time she would bring different people around and he would have to meet them. He tried to be nice to them, but they always looked at him with open pity and he didn’t feel that he should be pitied simply because he didn’t know his father, had never met him, didn’t know who he was, or any of the other ways they put it. The truth was he had never really had a father and so it didn’t matter.

  But she went to these meetings and she told everything about herself at the meetings, which included him, and everything about him, and so these people he didn’t know knew all about him and would come to the house with her sometimes and sit and pity him.

  They all wanted to “share,” and “care,” and “get in touch with their feelings,” and on and on. The first few times they had come and met with his mother in their kitchen he had thought it might be all right and that his mother might get out of herself. But after a time, and many, many meetings, it just seemed that she was spending all her time messing with herself and not trying to really fix anything.

  And I have to go in, he thought. I have to work for Stoney and that means I have to change clothes and get jeans on to go to work and that means I have to go inside. If it were not for that, he would run past the apartment and keep running for a half hour or so, until the company was gone.

  Maybe if he just whipped in and changed, he could get away before he got nailed.

  But it didn’t work that way.

  He ran up the back steps and into the kitchen, where his mother was sitting with a man.

  He was pleasant enough. Tall, slightly heavy, with short hair.

  “Brennan,” his mother said, “I’d like you to meet Bill Halverson.”

  Brennan nodded. “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  And that was it, or he thought it was. Brennan went into his room and changed quickly and threw on a T-shirt and made his way back outside to jog down to Stoney’s place to ride in his old pickup out to mow lawns.

  Later he would think back on this time; later when he had begun to try to find his spirit and see the dance of the sun, later when his life was torn to pieces and he was trying to make it whole again, he would look back on this moment, this exact moment when it started, and wonder how it could be.

  How anything so big could come from something so small and simple.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  And it changed his whole life.

  3

  Dust Spirits

  Coyote Runs let the small brown pony pick its way down the side of a dry wash and thought that it was as his spirits, the spirits of the dust, had told him—everything was perfect.

  The afternoon before they left on the ride south to Mexico he had gone to the ancient medicine place, the secret place, and had spoken to his spirits to ask for guidance and bravery to have a thick neck and be a man. He had waited for a long time and nothing came and he was beginning to worry that it was all wrong, that there would not be a sign, when it came:

  Out below him to the east in a dry lake bed the wind swirled and picked up a column of dust and carried it heavenward, carried it to the spirits, carried his wishes high and away, as high and away as the hawk, as the dust, and he knew it would be all right. Would be perfect.

  He painted the pony with one circle around one eye so that it could see well if they had to run at night and put tobacco on its hooves to make them fast, to show the spirits where he needed help.

  Each arrow he placed tobacco on, using tobacco from a round metal tin that Magpie had found in an old shed at the Quaker school when the two of them had gone to the school to learn how it was to be white. They learned nothing except some symbols on a black stone written with a piece of white dirt; symbols that meant their names in white man’s words that the Quaker lady taught them which did them no good because nobody else could read them. But Magpie found the round tin with the lid in the shed so it was not all for nothing.

  He did not have a gun. Some of the men had guns and all the soldiers had guns but he did not have a gun and would have to use the bow and the arrows and when he had put tobacco on each arrow he did the same for the bow, each time asking for the dust spirits to make them fly, make them shoot in the proper manner.

  All afternoon he prepared himself and when the men sat that night and talked of the raid outside one of the huts he stood to the rear and listened. He thought for a moment that Magpie had been teasing him because two of the men looked at him. But when they did not tell him to leave he knew that he was to go on the raid, that Magpie had been telling him the truth, and his heart was full of joy.

  It was the first time he had heard them talk of a raid when he was not sneaking and he saw other boys who were still too young hiding round the back of the firelight in the dark and felt pride that he was at last allowed to be with the men. He listened carefully, quietly, with great courtesy and said nothing.

  “We will take extra horses in case there is an injury and ride to that place on the river where the land cuts low so the bluebellies cannot see us cross when we go or when we come back,” Sancta said. He was wrinkled and had scars from many battles. There was a line across his forehead which was said to have come from the long knife of a bluebelly who had tried to cut the top of his head off and let the light into his brains.

  And the men grunted and nodded and smoked
in silence, spitting on the fire from time to time.

  “We will stay tight in together until we get to that place below the cut on the river where the Mexican ranchers keep that big herd of horses for selling to the bluebellies.”

  More grunts and nods.

  “There we will leave Coyote Runs with the extra horses and hit the herd and take as many horses as we can get running.”

  Now there were open exclamations and Coyote Runs felt a thrill of pride that he had been named by name as going on the raid. He turned to see if any of the hiding boys had heard but he could not see their faces, just shapes in the brush and darkness.

  It did not matter, he thought then and thought now as his pony followed the rest of the men and extra horses. All that mattered was that the dust spirits were with him and had heard his request and that he was on the raid.

  It would take three days riding out and around to get to the river that the white men used as a boundary and part of another day to ride south to where the Mexicans kept the big herd of horses and then two days to ride back driving the horses ahead of them. Six days, Coyote Runs thought, riding easily.

  Six days to test himself and prove he was a man.

  Surely there would be many ways for him to be a man in a week.

  He used his heels to goad the brown pony up and out of a gully Sancta had led them to; ahead Magpie caught the sun and his long black hair shone like a raven’s wing in the light and Coyote Runs smiled at the beauty of it.

  Six whole days, Coyote Runs repeated. Six days to be a man.

  4

  “You must come in closer on the flower beds or there is too much for me to use the string on.”

  Stoney Romero gave him instructions the way he did all his other talking—his voice like gravel rattling around in a garbage can. He smoked cigarettes which he rolled from tobacco in a small plastic bag he carried because “tailormades” cost too much and he spent most of his time coughing and hacking.

  “If the mower gets too close I’ll take out the beds,” Brennan explained. “And then you’ll get chewed out and I’ll get chewed out.”