Canyons

by Gary Paulsen

  Whatever else he is or isn’t, Brennan thought, watching Bill up ahead with the pack on his back and helping the small boys—he isn’t a wimp. Brennan was in good shape from running and he was soon breathing hard and his mother, who did not run or exercise very much, was almost staggering.

  It was the sort of place Brennan would have loved, had he not been with the rat pack, as he thought of them by this time. The canyon walls rose straight up into the late afternoon sky; towering red and yellow with dark streaks, one bluff feeding to another up into the mountains. To say it was beautiful, he thought, seeing them shoot up over him, was just not enough. The beauty seemed to come almost from inside his mind, so that he saw the cliffs and canyon walls as if he had almost painted them. Here and there a scraggly pine hung on to life and yucca plants and cactus in bloom made color spots that seemed to make the cliffs even more striking. Art, he thought—it was like art. The year before, he’d taken an art appreciation class—largely because he had to—and the teacher, a short woman named Mrs. Dixon, had spent many periods trying to get them to see the art.

  “See it,” she would say to them, holding up a picture of a painting by Rembrandt or van Gogh or Whistler. “Really see it, inside it—see the brushstrokes? See what the artist was trying to do?”

  And he tried that now, to really see the canyon, see what the artist was trying to do with it.

  God, he thought—that was the artist. What was God trying with this?

  Except that he was seeing the beauty with one eye while he was trying to watch ahead with the other and keep up with Bill and his mother and the kids, who were all over the place, sticking their fingers in cactus and screaming, throwing rocks down into the riverbed to hear them bounce, spitting off of boulders, hitting each other, jerking their pants down and mooning each other, throwing rocks at each other …

  It was hard to see the beauty.

  It took them almost two hours, until evening, to get up into a point where the canyon seemed to flatten out a bit and then another half hour of walking to get across a grassy area to a place where a trail dropped down into some small cottonwoods that were growing around a tiny pool of green, clear water.

  “Oh,” Brennan’s mother said. “Isn’t it pretty here?”

  Bill turned and smiled at them. “It’s like a calendar picture, isn’t it?”

  And it was almost sweet. Even the monsters stopped and were quiet for a moment or two. In the sudden silence Brennan heard birds singing and felt the sun on his neck. It had been hot but there was a coolness in the evening air that felt refreshing. Brennan lowered his pack and sleeping bag and two other bags and packs he’d been carrying for the younger boys.

  “Is this it?” he asked, looking up and around. They were in the end of a box canyon and the walls rose above them making a huge amphitheater. The kids had been yelling and whistling for half an hour, listening to the echoes, but in their silence Brennan could hear himself breathe.

  Without knowing quite why, he held his breath.

  And in that instant something about the place took him, came into him and held his thoughts. Something he couldn’t understand. Some pull, some reaching and pulling thing that made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

  He looked to see if any of the others felt it but they didn’t seem to. Bill was still holding his arms out and smiling, the kids were beginning to move again, and his mother was in the act of dropping her pack on the ground and blowing hair out of her eyes.

  He let his eyes move up and around the canyon again but could see nothing out of the ordinary. The rock cliffs towered over them, blocking the sun off so that now though it was still light they were in shade and it became almost cool.

  Birds flew across the canyon. High overhead an eagle caught a thermal and wheeled out of sight past the edge of the canyon wall.

  He shook his head. Strange, the feeling, he’d never had it before and now it was gone. Somebody was saying something and he looked down and saw Bill nodding.

  “Yes. This is where we spend the night, where we camp. Let’s get wood for a fire and make some dinner. I’m sure everyone is starved, aren’t we, boys?”

  The monsters started screaming and running in circles grabbing sticks and Brennan had to fight to keep from yelling at them.

  It was going to be a long, looong night.

  7

  Visions

  He did well.

  During the night they went past a camp of bluebellies who had stopped on one of their patrols and Coyote Runs did well.

  There were only eight of the bluebellies and they had a large fire as they always did to keep away the darkness so it was easy to see them and count them and would have been easy to kill them but Sancta shook his head.

  Not this time. They stood for a time not a long bowshot from the soldiers and their fire, pinching their horses’ muzzles so they would not make sounds to the soldiers’ horses, so close the glow from the fire lit their faces, and could have gone in amongst them. Coyote Runs had his bow ready, an arrow on the string, and knew he could hit one and maybe another soldier as they rode in, knew it in his heart but Sancta said no.

  Shaking his head once, a jerk from side to side that they could not miss and the old leader turned and led his horse back into the night.

  And Coyote Runs brought his pony around and led it silently in back of Magpie and did not shoot an arrow at the camp, as he wished, but held back though his neck was stiff and swollen with the need to go amongst the soldiers.

  They rode all night. There were no watering places for the horses but they had carried water in clay pots tied to their horses’ blankets and stopped to walk and moisten the horses’ mouths to keep them moving.

  Twice Coyote Runs’ pony seemed about to go down and he filled his mouth with water and spit it down the horse’s throat so it would not waste out the side of the horse’s mouth and the pony kept moving and he thought:

  I am doing it. I am doing well. I am a man.

  They rode all that night until the ridge led to a flat place with dead grass that seemed to go forever and here they stopped and made a cold camp.

  They did not stay more than three hours, enough to let the horses rest but not so long they would stiffen up, then Sancta started walking again, leading his mount, and they all followed him.

  Always south.

  Sancta trotted ahead of them like a hurrying bear and after a time Coyote Runs realized he was beginning to see things. There was gray light coming from the east, over his left shoulder, the beginning of the new day.

  Ahead he saw Sancta rolling along, his shoulders moving from side to side, his knee-high moccasins kicking up dust as he ran, his long black hair swaying from side to side and Coyote Runs knew he looked the same.

  Knew that he could run this way all day, all night, as long as Sancta would need him to run.

  Off to the right, many miles away, he could see the mountains that stood over the place the Mexicans called El Paso del Norte—the pass of the north—where the town lay, the white town and more, the fort where the bluebellies lived, Fort Bliss. That was there as well.

  Coyote Runs had never been south this way and so had never seen the fort but he had heard about it. Buildings made of dirt as the Pueblos and Mexicans made them, arranged in a square for protection.

  As if, he thought, as if the Apache would come against them in the fort. As if they would simply ride in against them in the fort and die.

  Ho! There was madness there. In the bluebellies. The same as they wore dark wool clothes in the summer, buttoned tight to the collar so the heat could not get away and heavy hats to keep the heat in their heads and rode their horses through the heat of the day—all crazy.

  But they fought well. He had never fought them but he heard stories, from Sancta and the others, sitting around the fire—stories of their fights with the bluebellies. They were not easy to kill.

  It was hard light now, the sun showing, and he could tell that Sancta was looking for something as
he ran, leading his horse.

  In moments he swung off to the left and brought the party to the edge of a depression in the desert, a low gully surrounded by mesquite that hung out over the edges. It was as far across as Coyote Runs could throw a rock and Sancta led them down into the bottom of it.

  “For the day,” he said to them. “We stop here. Where we can’t be seen by the bluebelly patrols. Sleep.”

  Coyote Runs led his pony beneath an overhang of mesquite so there was some small shade and lay on his back on the sand with the rein to the bridle tightly wrapped around his hand.

  Magpie settled in next to him so the two horses stood closely together and could use their tails to switch flies from one another.

  “Well, how do you like your first raid so far?” he asked.

  But Coyote Runs was already asleep.

  8

  Brennan had thought as soon as it was dark the children would settle down, or at least slow a bit in their behavior.

  He was wrong.

  If anything they became more hyper and while Bill—Brennan was starting to think perhaps he wasn’t really aware of things, like the world around him—while Bill took it well and no matter what they did seemed largely to ignore any of the problems, Brennan quickly became sick of them.

  Short of tying them down—and he wished he’d brought rope—he couldn’t control them at all. They were in his pack, in his bag where he’d spread it by the fire pit, throwing his gear around.

  But after a time he noticed that as darkness came into the canyon, dropping like a black sheet down over them, the boys stayed more in the area of the fire. They didn’t act afraid, but they didn’t want to leave the glow of the fire either and that gave Brennan an idea.

  He moved his sleeping bag farther and farther from the fire until he was nestled beneath a large boulder sticking up out of the ground, back under the overhang. There was a small sheltered area here, only large enough for one bag, and he spread it out on the dried grass and began to make himself comfortable.

  “What are you doing?”

  His mother had walked up in back of him while he was spreading his bag.

  “Don’t you want to be around the fire?”

  “Mom …” He started to say something about the kids but let it go. She was so happy, or seemed to be happy with this Bill character, that he didn’t want to do anything to ruin it for her. “This just looked like a neat place to set up.”

  She nodded—the glow from the fire lighted her cheek and it looked golden. Something about her face looked young, very young. “I know why you’re up here—they’re horrible, aren’t they?”

  “God,” he said. “Like animals.”

  “Maybe they’ll sleep pretty soon.”

  Brennan smiled. “Not unless you drive wooden stakes through their hearts.…”

  She laughed and he’d somehow never felt closer to her. “But he’s nice, isn’t he? Bill, I mean.”

  Brennan nodded. “Yes. He is. I can’t believe what he takes from them and never gets mad.”

  “I like him. A lot.”

  “That’s nice—really.”

  “A lot.”

  She turned and walked back to the fire and he watched her go and felt a kind of sadness. There had been others that she had liked. A lot. And they somehow all came to nothing and she wanted somebody so badly, needed someone so badly that Brennan almost wept for her sometimes.

  He rose from the bag and moved toward the fire. What the heck, maybe if he took the kids for a while Bill and his mother would get a little time to know each other. What would it hurt?

  He sat by the fire. “Who knows a story?”

  And it worked. They all settled in around him, sitting by the fire in the yellow glow, their faces looking up at him. It couldn’t be, he thought, it couldn’t be the same group of wild things that just a few minutes ago were tearing each other apart.

  “I said,” he repeated, “who knows a story?”

  They all looked at each other and shook their heads. None of them knew a story.

  Bill and Brennan’s mother sat next to each other across the fire from Brennan. Bill coughed.

  “I know a story,” he said, “or not a story so much as some information about these canyons.”

  Brennan could see that it wasn’t exactly what the kids were expecting, but they held still and waited.

  “There are four or five of these canyons along this big ridge,” Bill said, pointing up over his shoulder where the cliffs rose into the mountains. “And some called it the last stronghold of the Apache nation.”

  That got them. It also got Brennan. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m kind of fuzzy on it, but north of here there is a canyon called Dog Canyon that also has a spring in it. I guess the Apaches would raid down south and then run back to these canyons to hide and the army would come after them.”

  “Were there battles?” one of the small kids asked. “With shooting and blood and guts and stuff?”

  Bill nodded.

  “All right!”

  “There were several fights in Dog Canyon and there might have been some others in this canyon, in all the canyons along this ridge line. Soldiers and Apaches were both killed and …” here he paused and looked at Brennan and hid a wink “… they say that in the night sometimes you can hear the sounds of battle and that the ghosts of the dead warriors and soldiers walk in the darkness.”

  He stopped talking and there was silence around the fire. Far away a nightbird called and the sound seemed almost human—close enough so the boys drew together.

  “I don’t think I would run around too much at night,” Brennan said, taking advantage of the situation. “You know, out away from the fire.”

  But he hadn’t needed to say it. Two of the boys, a set of twins named Glockens, said they weren’t afraid of any old ghosts but they didn’t stray more than ten feet from the fire and were very happy to toast marshmallows and drink hot chocolate made by Brennan’s mother and Bill.

  Bill told some more stories—plain ghost stories—and the children sat still, listening, and finally it was time for bed.

  Brennan nodded good night to his mother and Bill and headed up to his bed beneath the rock, carrying a cup of hot chocolate. There was a light dew condensing on his bag and he shook it off before crawling inside. Then he sat up, the bag around him, and looked down at the fire below as the rest of the group crawled inside their bags, sipping his hot chocolate.

  It wasn’t so bad, this trip, he thought. The kids had finally settled down and his mother was right, Bill was a good guy. He hoped well for his mother.

  The fire died quickly and he could hear the kids mumbling and talking for a short time, then it was quiet and still he sat.

  He felt strange. The chocolate grew cold in his hand and he sat and let the canyon come in around him. There was no moon, but enough light came from the stars so that when his eyes grew used to the darkness he could see the canyon walls moving up into the sky.

  Somewhere far away something screamed a faint cry —almost like a woman or child screaming—and he started, then remembered reading somewhere that mountain lions screamed that way and thought it must be a cougar somewhere way off. There were mountains and more mountains up over the ridges and there must be mountain lions up there in the peaks.

  I have lived so close to this, he thought, and never been here, never seen this beautiful place. He had been in the mountains close to El Paso but they were dry, dead, hot and baked airless peaks—not like this. Not with cool breezes and springs and cottonwoods and birds and lions, if it was a lion. He wondered for a moment if he should be frightened of the lion, then decided against it. From what he’d read they didn’t bother people at all and it must have been miles away. The sleepers below him hadn’t even heard it.

  He put the cup down and lay back but still sleep wouldn’t come.

  Something was there, some strange thing that bothered him. He had felt it before when they first came into the end of t
he canyon and it was still there, the feeling. He couldn’t shake it.

  An unease, a restlessness that wouldn’t go away. He closed his eyes and thought of things to make him sleep, boring things, but even that didn’t work. In the end he sat up again, staring out across the canyons over the sleepers below him, a strange uneasiness in his heart that would not go away.

  And the night came down.

  9

  The Raid

  Oh yes, it had been something, the raid, Coyote Runs thought, holding tight to the pony with his legs. It had been a thing to see.

  They had ridden through part of the night, spitting water into their horses’ mouths until they arrived at the river where the horses could drink, just at dawn, and had found the large horse herd before the sun had risen completely above the line of land to the east.

  Sancta had motioned to Coyote Runs to ride up to him and he had done so.

  “Stay here with the extra horses. We will ride amongst them and take many horses and come back this way. Let us go by, then come in at the rear of the herd to help move them.”

  Coyote Runs wanted to shake his head, wanted to say that he wished to ride amongst the Mexicans who were watching the horses to prove that he was a man, ride amongst them and fight but he did not. Sancta had given an order and that was the way things would be.

  But he could see the horse herd, or part of it. Sancta and the others left him on the back side of a small rise but as soon as they rode off toward the Mexicans Coyote Runs moved forward and up onto the rise slightly so he could see some of it.

  There were so many horses that they stretched as far as he could see into the mesquite and gullies. Many, most of them, were large and brown, as the bluebellies liked them, but many were of other colors and Coyote Runs saw a large horse the color of straw that he would have liked to take for his own. Indeed, his hands moved on the reins of the pony and his knees closed before he remembered that he must stay.