by Mike Blakely
Caleb squealed and bucked like a wild bronco as Marta climbed on behind her brother. Angry as she was, Marisol couldn’t help smiling at them. The baby was jumping in her arms, excited by the laughter of her older siblings.
After they ate supper, the children went into the front room to eat their candy. Caleb tilted a pine-and-rawhide chair against the adobe wall and watched Marisol clean up the kitchen. When she had finished, he grabbed her, pulled her onto his lap, and kissed her. He pressed a roll of cash into her hands. Her eyes bulged as she peeled off the bills for counting.
“Now you squirrel some of that away,” he ordered. “Don’t blow it all on fiesta stuff like you usually do. Use some to buy Angelo a horse, and get the girls some new dresses or something.”
“Angelo doesn’t need a horse,” she said. “There is nobody around to teach him to ride when the weather is warm enough.”
“Javier will teach him. I promised the boy a horse—now don’t make a liar out of me.”
“It’s better to have a fiesta for the whole village,” she said. “Angelo would like that as much as a horse.”
“Don’t argue with me, just get the boy a horse. I’ll teach him some ridin’ before I go up to the huntin’ cabin.”
She tore his arms away from her and jumped off of his lap. “You’re not going to that cabin again!”
“Well, honey, why do you think me and Javier built the dang cabin in the first place? If you want to blow that wad of cash on a fiesta, we’d better go kill some meat.”
“You have only been here an hour and already you are talking about going away to the mountains with Javier!”
Caleb got up and tried to embrace her, but she avoided him. “I must have told you a hundred times,” he said, “that if you want to be with me so bad, you can come with us.”
She put her hands on her hips. “I don’t want to go with a bunch of stinking borrachos and sit around a dirty cabin and sing songs and tell nasty stories!”
“Oh, it ain’t that bad. Besides, you know it’ll take Javier two weeks to get the hunt organized. That’s two weeks for just you and me.” He trapped her in a corner. He was the only man he knew of who could still chase his woman around after six years. It made sense to stay gone three out of four seasons, he thought. It made them yearn for each other when they came together.
Marisol was wishing Caleb would settle down and live like Javier, who came home to his wife every night. If they lived together all the time, maybe he would learn to behave himself in his own house.
“Why don’t you take the children over to your grandma’s house,” Caleb suggested. “I’ll drop in on Javier and let him know I’m back.” He raked her neck with his mustache.
She moaned, half in protest, half in surrender. “I’ll take the children,” she said. “Just let me out of this corner.”
She carried Elena and herded Marta and Angelo down the lane to her grandmother’s house. The old lady was not overjoyed to see her great-grandchildren arrive at such an hour, but she dutifully took them in.
Marisol stopped at her house to brush her hair a hundred strokes. There was no hurry. Caleb would stay awhile with Javier. She only hoped they didn’t pick up their infernal guitars. She freshened up, put on a clean dress, and stepped out into the cool November night. Crossing the footbridge, she saw lights on in the casa consistorial.
When she cracked the doors, a group of young men burst into laughter. Javier had a guitar on his thigh and was smiling at Caleb, with one hand stroking the hand-some crease in his chin. Caleb had a fiddle, but they were between songs.
“… And after that,” Caleb said, “I headed west of San Antonio and fell in with a fellow named Halsey who was a tax assessor. He went around tellin’ people how much their land and stuff was worth so he could tax ’em for it. Well, we came on an old Mexican on the Devil’s River, and he had him a house made out of crossties. Halsey looked it over and says, ‘Francisco, I’m gonna assess this place of yours at three thousand dollars.’ Well, Francisco like to have throwed a fit and says, ‘This house is not worth that much!’ But Halsey says, ‘Damned if it ain’t, Francisco. You’ve got about a thousand crossties in this place, and they sell for three dollars apiece, conservative!’ And Francisco says, ‘God damnit, Halsey, you know I didn’t pay no three dollars apiece for them crossties. You know I stole every damn one of them from the Texas Pacific Railroad!’”
The listeners roared with laughter. Sylvia shrieked and wrapped her arms around Javier’s neck.
As she watched through the crack between the double doors, Marisol had to smile. Caleb told a fine story and loved a crowd around him. Sadly, she closed the laughter inside, turned away, and went home to wait.
SIXTY-SEVEN
Buster rose in the dark of early morning. He needed no more than five hours of sleep a night and always got up well before sunrise. Gently, he lifted Gloria’s arm and slipped out from under it. He slithered out of the bed as if he might wake her, but he knew better. In their one month of marriage, he had learned that nothing short of artillery fire could rouse her before eight o’clock in the morning.
He shivered as he stood in his long underwear at the window of the Cincinnati house. For a ready-made structure that had been won in a poker game, the little frame home was built amazingly well, but was hard to keep warm. It had no fireplace, just a single woodstove in the lean-to kitchen that jutted out from the back. A bedroom and a parlor completed the floor plan. It was a nice little honeymoon shack, but Buster knew he would have to add on soon. He intended to raise a family.
Through the bedroom window, he looked out on his grove of young pines, bathed in the light of a full moon hanging over the Rampart Range. He turned to look at Gloria’s face, benign and restful on her pillow. It amused him to think of how different she had looked the first day he saw her.
Amelia had brought Gloria to the ranch after her honeymoon with Pete in Denver. There was no way Amelia, by herself, could have kept a house as big as the one Pete had built for her, so she had employed Gloria as a cook and housekeeper. The day Pete and Amelia returned from their honeymoon, Buster drove to the station to pick them up in Amelia’s surrey, a wedding gift from Captain Dubois.
When Gloria appeared and started putting luggage in the surrey, Buster stared as if he had never seen a black woman in his entire life. In fact, he had seen pitifully few women of his own race since coming to Colorado, and of the few he had seen, Gloria fetched his attention quicker than any. She was ten years younger than he was, comely, and buxom. He simply sat in the driver’s seat and ogled her as she loaded the baggage.
“What’re you lookin’ at?” Gloria said, scowling under the brim of a floppy straw hat.
“Didn’t mean to stare,” Buster said, tipping his hat.
“Get down off that seat and help me get Miss Amelia’s bags in there.”
Buster almost followed her orders but caught himself. “That’s your job. I don’t work for Miss Amelia. I’m just being neighborly.” He met her glare with a smile.
After Gloria got over her first meeting with Buster, and found out that he was as well-off as any homesteader in the county, she stopped ignoring his attempts to call on her. Then, in a matter of weeks, she agreed to marry him.
For the first time since coming west, Buster felt civilized. He had a farm, a house, a wife, good neighbors, and respect—even among white people. The country had never looked better to him than it did in the morning moonlight. He could gaze from the window of his Cincinnati house, look through the pine trees he and Pete and Caleb had planted seven years before, and see his old cabin near the irrigation ditches. It was still one of his favorite places, and he used it as a private retreat, storing his wildflower seeds and other specimens there and designing new implements he could build to use on his farm.
Turning his eyes from his old burlap-carpeted cabin, he looked upstream, across the barn and bunkhouse, past the old Holcomb cabin, toward Pete’s two-story stone mansion above the irrigation re
servoir. Amelia fed pet ducks and swans there and planned to landscape the creek bank all the way from the pond to the mansion. Upper branches of cottonwoods that Pete had planted around the site years before the home was built were approaching the second-story windows in height.
The house had cylindrical towers at all four corners. Many Colorado Springs residents had criticized Pete for attempting to upstage General Palmer’s mansion, Glen Eyrie, built along the order of a castle near the Garden of the Gods. Pete and Amelia mused secretly. Only they knew that the ancient cliff dwellings above Manitou held the true inspiration for their home.
Just when he got ready to turn from the window and start a fire in the stove, Buster saw a light come up in the kitchen of Pete’s house. Rarely did any of his neighbors rise as early as he did. He was intrigued but determined not to let his curiosity turn into nosiness. He pulled the curtains together and went to start the fire, taking his clothes and boots with him so he could dress by the warmth of the stove.
With his overalls and flannel shirt buttoned, and the stove lids warming, he could not resist taking another look at Pete’s mansion through the kitchen window. Just as he peeked through the curtains, Pete’s door cracked open and Pete came out, carrying a lantern, and walking quickly toward the barn. Buster was overcome with curiosity. He grabbed his scarf, a felt hat, and a sheepskin coat and went to see what Pete could possibly be up to so early on such a winter morning.
The clean freshness of the cold air filled him with vigor, and he covered the frosty ground in long strides, the dead and frozen stalks of grass crunching under his heels. A half-Durham, half-longhorn heifer saw him from the middle of the barbwire pasture and let out a plaintive moan, begging for hay. He glanced back and saw her breath rising against the dark sky, a gray cloud in the moonlight.
Leaving the pines behind him, he marched toward the barn, where he could see Pete’s lantern shining between the planks. Ab’s house was silent and dark in the distance, the nearby bunkhouse merely dark: He could hear the snores of the cowboys rasping through the board-and-batten walls.
He looked in through the large doorway of the barn where, years before, Allegheny had hung in a sling, convalescing. He saw Pete throwing his saddle over a high-strung three-year-old stallion called Whiplash, a classic Nez Perce pony, black with a white “blanket” on his rump and black spots on the blanket.
“Where are you goin’?” Buster asked.
Pete almost jumped over the horse, and the horse almost pulled the barn down by the bridle reins, which were looped around a post. “Dang, Buster! You know better than to sneak up on a man in the dark like that!” Pete said, calming the stallion.
Buster laughed. “You’re the one sneakin’ around. What’re you doin’ up so early?”
“I’m tryin’ to get up in the mountains before the boys get out of bed and see where I’m goin’.” He pulled the fork of the saddle back onto Whiplash’s withers.
“You must be goin’ after that buck,” Buster said.
Pete’s buck had been the source of rampant speculation among the cowhands since spring. In May he had found a shed antler somewhere up in the Rampart Range—the right-hand antler from a huge black-tailed buck. It was no typical antler. It didn’t follow the orderly lines of most deer horns. Instead of branching cleanly into a few slender, graceful tines, it bristled with at least a dozen points—heavy, gnarled appendages protruding at random angles.
Sam Dugan had accidentally given name to the originator of the antler. He had burned cedar brakes in Texas and, later, pulled the charred stumps out by the roots. He said the antler Pete had found reminded him of a twisted mass of cedar root. Thus, the buck who had shed the antler became known as Ol’ Cedar Root.
There was much argument as to whether the single antler sported twelve, thirteen, or fourteen points. Piggin’ String McCoy insisted that a point was anything a watch could be hung on by its chain, and he found ways to hang his watch from fourteen points. Dan Brooks insisted that a point had to measure one inch from its base to its apex. He could only find twelve tines that met up to his measurements. Every man agreed, however, that Ol’ Cedar Root would be the kill of a lifetime for any hunter.
Pete refused to say where he had found the antler. He didn’t want any of the boys beating him to the trophy or spooking the buck out of its home range. One night in September, however, he let it slip that he had actually seen Cedar Root on the hoof, from only a couple of hundred yards away, sporting his new set of hardened antlers.
“What’s the left-hand horn look like?” Sam Dugan asked anxiously.
“I just got a glimpse of him,” Pete replied. “I couldn’t tell exactly what he looked like. But I’d say String could hang as many watches on that left horn as he could on the right one.”
All through the summer and fall the cowhands had pestered Pete for some clue as to where the big buck hid out, but he wouldn’t give up so much as a hint. Now that the high-country snows had claimed much of the old monarch’s range, and restricted him to his lower haunts, Pete knew it was time to hunt him down.
“Yep, I’ve got his range figured,” he said to Buster as he tied a thick roll of blankets and canvas behind the cantle. “He doesn’t move far south in the winter—he just comes down low. I think I know just where I’ll find him.” He chuckled as he stuffed his saddlebags with biscuits and bacon.
“What’s so funny?” Buster asked.
“Oh, I was just thinkin’ about Sam. You remember in August, when me and him went up into the mountains to hunt that Hereford bull that got through the fence? Well, we found the bull in a canyon and was drivin’ him back home when that big buck ran across the bottom of the canyon not two hundred yards in front of us, and Sam never saw him. He was rollin’ a smoke. My eyes dang near bugged out of my head, but I didn’t say anything to Sam.”
“Is that where you’re headin’ to find him today?”
“Yes, but don’t let on to the boys, or they’ll come along and spoil my hunt.”
“I won’t tell ’em,” Buster said. “How long you gonna stay out after him?”
Pete slipped his Winchester model 1876 into his saddle scabbard. It chambered a .45-caliber cartridge with a 350-grain bullet. It was a lot of gun for a deer, but Ol’ Cedar Root was a lot of deer, and Pete anticipated having to shoot at some distance. Buster had helped him attach an extra rear sight on the wooden stock behind the hammer—an adjustable sliding leaf sight for long-range shooting. He had been practicing for months and could hit a pie plate eight out of ten times at four hundred yards with a firm rest.
“I’ve got bacon to last four days,” he said. “I’ll be back Saturday night unless I get him before then. I have to give my scripture lesson to the boys on Sunday morning. That reminds me,” he said, pulling on his gloves, “can you play ‘Rounded Up in Glory’ on the fiddle or the guitar or somethin’?”
“Sure,” Buster said. “What’s the scripture lesson gonna be about?”
“Thou shalt not covet anything that is your neighbor’s,” Pete said. “I figure the boys will need remindin’ of that when I bring in Ol’ Cedar Root.” He grinned and led his stallion to the doorway of the barn. “Amelia’s a little rankled at me for goin’ huntin’ when her mare’s about to foal. I told her you and the boys would be around if the old girl needed any help.”
“How close is she?” Buster asked.
“She’s got milk drippin’ from her bag.”
“Could be any time, then. Don’t worry about her. I’ll look after her.”
“Thanks, Buster.” He pulled himself up into the saddle seat and held a tight rein. Whiplash wanted to run. “I better get goin’ before the boys wake up and see me. Put that lantern out for me, will you?”
“Sure. Good luck.”
Somewhere out on the prairie a pack of coyotes greeted the new day with a weird vocal fanfare that sounded like the echoes of ancient war cries. Pete pulled his scarf up under his chin and held the stallion to a walk until his hoofbeats were bey
ond earshot of the bunkhouse. Then he let Whiplash trot across Monument Creek, lope up the bald hill, and gallop down the other side, taking the old Arapaho Trail into the Rampart Range.
SIXTY-EIGHT
By noon, dark roiling clouds were catching on the mountaintops. Pete looked up at them with gratitude. He knew he was in for miserable weather, but there was nothing like a norther to get the deer moving. Animals could sense coming changes in the weather—even domesticated animals. Whiplash knew the norther was coming. He tossed his head and flared his nostrils, hoping to get a whiff of crisp arctic air.
Pete stopped a moment to figure his strategy. Ol’ Cedar Root’s canyon was just over the next ridge. With rough weather coming, the buck would almost surely be there already, seeking shelter. The trail Pete was riding would bring him to the south rim, which, like the north rim, dropped at sheer angles to the canyon floor. There were only a few trails where a horse could get down into the canyon. A mountain deer, on the other hand, could come or go by any one of a hundred routes.
Pete decided that, once he reached the south rim, he would turn east, toward the mouth of the canyon, and ride along the rim until he found a trail to the bottom. He would set up a camp at the mouth of the canyon and spend the next few days hunting for the buck of a lifetime. If he succeeded in killing Ol’ Cedar Root, not even Caleb would be able to match the story.
When he reached the south rim, blue clouds were boiling down the mountainsides, shooting blasts of frigid air into the canyon and up the sheer face of the south wall, whipping sleet and snowflakes over the brink. He paused to survey what he could see of the canyon. It wound a good three miles from its mouth to its head, flanked by cliffs along its entire length. The north rim was visible through the frozen mist, five hundred yards away. It would take days of hunting to sneak up on the wily old buck in there. A silent bolt of lightning struck a distant mountainside.
He turned eastward along the south rim of the canyon and looked into it as he rode, searching for a trail that would take him safely down. Only a few wind-whipped piñon pines clung to the rim of the canyon, but dense stands of white firs, quaking aspens, and ponderosa pines mottled the canyon floor. The buck wouldn’t be as easy to find among them as the Hereford bull had been in August. It would take plenty of luck to hang those freak antlers on the parlor wall.