by Will Hobbs
The hint of a smile played on Walter’s weathered features. “Never seen it myself, you understand. I was born and bred on the Pine before I made my big move to the next stream over, the Piedra. According to my father, that West Virginia country was so steep, all a fellow had to do to bring in his apples was to give the trees in his backyard a shake, an’ the fruit would run right down into his cellar.”
“That’s pretty steep,” Cloyd agreed, keeping his face blank as any poker player’s.
“So steep they developed a breed of cattle with legs shorter on one side for easier grazing. Even the cornfields were steep. They planted corn by firing the seed out of a gun into the opposite hillside.”
Cloyd was trying as hard as he could to keep from smiling. “Did you believe him?”
The old man’s ears were turning a little red, and the veins in his forehead and temples were standing up high. “Why, of course I believed him,” Walter protested. “I asked my dad once how come his teeth were worn down so bad, like an old horse’s. He explained that level ground was so scarce back where he grew up, chimneys crowded the hillsides and gravel was always falling into the pot of beans set to cook in the fireplace. We think we’ve got steep and narrow in our mountains…. Back there the dogs had to wag their tails up and down, and you’d have to lie down and look straight up to see the sky.”
Cloyd glanced away, stifling his laughter. He wanted to make the old man laugh first. For his part, Walter was trying hard to keep a straight face. It was easy to see that the old man wasn’t going to last long. “Is that true?” Cloyd insisted.
“Yes sir,” Walter mused. “It was so narrow back there, the moonshine had to be wheelbarrowed out every morning, and daylight wheelbarrowed in.”
Now it was raining hard. The horses’ rumps and the tarps over their loads were streaming wet. “Did it rain a lot?”
“Why, no,” Walter said quickly. “The way I remember hearing it, that was a country so dry, if a drop of water were to hit a man, they had to throw a couple buckets of dirt on his face to bring him to….”
Cloyd couldn’t help it anymore and started laughing. Then the old man was laughing too, and his face above his thick white whiskers was all red, and his ears were turning red.
The storm passed, and the horses climbed once more. Finally Cloyd saw the first of the Pine’s upper meadows, miles of meadow green and wide and long, with the spruce-covered mountainsides standing back at a distances. And there was the river, winding its way toward them in gentle oxbows.
“ ‘He maketh me to lie down in green pastures,’” the old man said reverently.
Cloyd said nothing, only gave Blueboy a pat on his withers and ran his eyes up the valley, up the dark slopes studded with massive granite outcrops. The last creek on the left, another nine or ten miles up the valley and immediately under the Pyramid—that’s where Rusty had seen the grizzly and cubs, if indeed he had.
It was important to Cloyd to see those grizzlies, even if it was just as unlikely as finding Spanish treasure. He’d found everything in the school library on grizzlies. He remembered that a grizzly would cover thirty, fifty, even a hundred square miles in its territory. At least Spanish gold didn’t move around every day.
Still, he might have some luck left, some bear luck. More than anything, he wanted to see those grizzlies for himself.
“Fresh fish tonight,” Walter said. “Fried in cornmeal blankets. If my Ute guide can still produce, that is.”
“I can produce,” Cloyd assured him. “I’ve even got flies and lures, and I can always dig worms.”
Cloyd came back into camp with six orange-jawed, orange-bellied cutthroats on his willow stringer. The old man had the old sheepherder tent set up and was limping around the fire. “Let’s stay a couple of days,” Walter suggested. “It’d be a good idea for me to get used to the altitude before we go on up high.”
“Gonna try out your metal detector?” Cloyd asked.
“Do you walk to school or carry your lunch?” the old man replied mysteriously. “Wouldn’t think of it, Cloyd, not with hikers around. Let’s keep the Cachefinder hid away in its case. There’s no percentage in advertising what we’re really up to. When it comes to gold, people get … peculiar.”
The old man understood Cloyd’s need to roam in search of those bears. A glimpse would satisfy him, just a glimpse to verify Rusty’s words. With only his daypack on his back, Cloyd roamed away from the trail, into the deep woods, across the rockslides, up the grassy avalanche chutes, and into a high basin that had no name on the map.
A little higher, Cloyd thought, and he might be able to glimpse the Rio Grande Pyramid. But he’d spent the day climbing, and now it was time to start down. Heading back for that old man always made him feel good, whether it was on the long bus ride home from school in Durango or charging down off a mountain.
The second day of Walter’s rest-up on the Pine, Cloyd said good-bye and set out more deliberately. Again he would leave the trail and go places that hikers would never see, but this time he would go slowly, using his eyes and his ears and his feel for the unseen. He practiced moving like a shadow and pausing for five, ten minutes behind trees without moving at all, just watching and listening.
Cloyd even tried to employ his nose, though he knew that a bear’s sense of smell was a hundred times better than his. He watched squirrels caching seeds under the roots of the trees. He crept up so close on a marmot in a boulder field that the so-called whistle pig didn’t sound its screeching alarm until Cloyd could have almost yanked the big rodent’s tail.
In the afternoon he stayed in one place and watched a shallow pond in a clearing in the trees five hundred or so feet below the tree line. Someone might come to drink at this pond, he thought. Deer or elk or maybe even bears.
His hands found themselves whittling on a piece of spruce. He made a stick that was about a foot long, straight and smooth. It reminded him of the rubbing stick the singers had used at the Bear Dance he had gone to in May at the Southern Ute Reservation down in Ignacio, only thirty miles south and west of the old man’s farm.
Cloyd looked around for material to make the second stick, the notched one. The singers had used axe handles, long and hard and perfect for holding deep notches.
By the pond grew a cluster of chokecherry bushes. They would be perfect, if he could find a dead limb. In his favorite class at school, Living in the Southwest, Mr. Pendleton had said that the Utes used to make their bows out of juniper or especially chokecherry. No juniper grew this high, but here was chokecherry. If it would make a good bow, why not growler sticks?
Two bull elk with wide, branching antlers, all in velvet, came out of the woods and approached the pond before their eyes caught the motion he was making. Cloyd never saw them, he was so intent on his whittling. The chips were flying, and a growler stick was taking form.
When Cloyd tried the smooth stick across the notched growler, he was satisfied with the sound. He wasn’t worried about scaring off any bears that might be close. Maybe this rasping would attract them! It was this thunder, this scratching and growling of bears, that called to the bears in the mountains all the way from the brush corral at the Bear Dance in Ignacio. This sound called them out of their big sleep with the first spring thunder into a world that was coming to life again for bears and people—kin to each other, as his grandmother often said.
In the earliest times, his grandmother had said, a person could become an animal if he wanted to and an animal could become a person. His grandmother had told him that when he was little, and it had stuck in his mind. As he grew older he realized it was only a story, even if his grandmother didn’t think of it as a story. But it was a story he’d always wanted to be true.
When the first people and the animals crossed back and forth, his grandmother said, it made no difference whether they started out as person or animal. Everyone spoke the same language. Back then, words were magical. A word spoken by accident could result in strange consequences. Thoughts s
poken could come to life, and what people wished to happen could happen—all you had to do was say the words. Nobody could explain why this was the way it was, his grandmother said. That’s the way it was in the earliest times.
When he was little, these stories had been just as real for him as they were for his grandmother. They were still good stories, he thought.
Cloyd kept up the rhythm, the rasping, scratching, growling rhythm of the smooth stick over the growler. It was too bad he lacked the big drum dug into the earth. Eight men rasping over that long, metal-covered drum could create a powerful thunder that ran through the earth. He could remember it coming up through his feet and running through his spine.
The more Cloyd rasped, the more it took him back to May and the Bear Dance. When Walter dropped him off in Ignacio that Friday morning at the Bear Dance and he saw the brush corral, ten feet high and a hundred feet across with the one opening to the east, he realized he’d seen it before. Once, when he was little, his grandmother had taken him from White Mesa in Utah all the way to Ignacio, Colorado, for the Bear Dance. That was back when she used to call him “honey paws” or “short tail.” She had told him that the brush corral was round like the inside of a bear den is round.
That first day of the dance had also been the last day of school. At school, Mr. Pendleton was going to show everybody how to make fire with a bow drill. Everyone had failed the day before, with their own homemade bow drills, including Cloyd. One kid had said, “Cloyd can’t even do it and he’s an Indian.”
Cloyd had wanted to go back for the last day and learn the secret of the bow drill. But even more, he didn’t want to miss any of the Bear Dance. He’d been looking forward to it all winter, for himself and for the bear who had been killed.
By the pond in the forest, high above the Pine River in the back country of the Weminuche Wilderness, Cloyd began to dance the bear dance as the clouds darkened above him and thunder began to reverberate among the peaks. Three steps forward, three steps back—like a bear dancing to a scratching-tree—as he kept up the rasping of his growler sticks. His dancing took him back to that first day of the Bear Dance, and the thunder took him back to the second, to the unforgettable thunder of that May night with eight men working over that long resonating drum.
He remembered that there had been a storm blowing in that last night of the Bear Dance. It was well after midnight. The storm was close, with lightning displaying in wide, intricate webs and thunder rumbling. The last dance was about to begin, the endurance dance. The Cat Man was advising people to have someone ready to relieve them. Cloyd didn’t think he would. There was no way he was going to quit now that the Bear Dance was almost over. He had almost made it, almost danced the whole thing.
He remembered that he was so tired, he didn’t feel connected to his feet anymore. He hadn’t eaten anything since the dance had started Friday morning. His grandmother had told him once, that was the way they did it in the old days. No eating until the feast, until the Bear Dance was all over.
Keep going, he’d told himself. Keep dancing. Three springing steps forward, three back. The singers were chanting and he felt their growler sticks reverberating up and down his spine, speaking thunder and the scratching and growling of bears. He was exhausted, utterly exhausted. Yet he kept dancing without even knowing that he was dancing.
What happened next he’d never recalled before this moment by this pond. Now that time came back so vividly, his exhaustion seemed to return full force, and he was at the Bear Dance again. This memory had lain deep in his mind, as if at the bottom of a lake. While his body was dancing, his spirit was rising above. That’s what it was, that’s what had happened.
It was an odd sensation, rising up into the air, but not unpleasant. He didn’t fight it, but let his spirit drift up, up, until he was high above the Bear Dance, looking down at the wide brush corral and all the dancers and the singers working their growler sticks over the long resonator. Through spirit eyes he looked down at the fire at the center of the dance, the sparks flying into the night, himself in the line of male dancers. And all around, panels of lightning were lighting up the purple clouds.
He could see one of the dancers pawing the air as he danced, just like a standing bear. He could see the woman across from that dancer, in surprise, losing the beat for a moment, and pausing before she continued.
That dancer so much like a bear, he realized from high above, was himself.
Suddenly he was back in his body and in the line of male dancers again. His legs kept moving despite their weariness, three steps forward, three steps back. His hands were pawing the air; he heard himself woof with a bear’s voice. Still his legs had that spring in them. He’d danced so long and so hard, he’d danced himself deep into the mountains. He had the sensation that he was moving on four legs. When he looked around behind him, he noticed his tracks, and they were bear tracks!
Cloyd shook himself out of his dreaming and stood up. Shade was overtaking the pond, and it was time to go. It had amazed him, what he’d remembered from the Bear Dance that he had never remembered before. He knew what his grandmother would have said about what happened there. She’d always said that everyone has a “traveling soul” that could leave the body and travel in the spirit world.
He’d always thought that such things could never happen again, that they only happened a long time ago to the old Indians who were all dead now. The spirit world his grandmother had always talked about—he had never really believed in it, at least for him. Only the old people could really believe in spirit people and spirit bears who lived in a spirit world.
But now he knew that for a brief time, he had traveled in the spirit world. And now he wondered if the spirit world was the world of that earliest time his grandmother had talked about, when there was no difference between the people and the animals and they could cross back and forth. Could it have been possible, that he’d really been in the spirit world when he’d looked over his shoulder and seen only bear tracks?
He missed the bearstone. When he’d had the turquoise grizzly in his pocket, he’d felt like one of the old Utes.
It was time to be heading back to the old man, to the camp on the Pine. The bearstone was back at the farm on Walter’s nightstand. It had been a good thing to do when he’d given the bearstone away to the old man. Walter got his strength back then, after the terrible accident at the mine. It was the best gift Cloyd had ever given.
“Live in a good way,” his grandmother liked to say. “Give something back.”
In a few days the horses were rested, and so were the boy and the old man. They proceeded up the meadows of the Pine, separated every mile or two by hills to climb where the trees reached the river and the whitewater cascaded from one meadow down to the next.
Cloyd was in the lead when they came to the spot where Snowslide Creek flowed in from the northeast. He reined in Blueboy and asked over his shoulder, “You want to go up to the mine, just to see it?”
The old man ran his hand through the bristles of his beard. He was thinking about it one way, and then the other. “I don’t think so, Cloyd. The Pride of the West is a closed chapter. Point me toward la Mina Perdida de la Ventana. I’ve grown fond of the idea of just collecting that high-grade ore that’s already been brought out of the mountain.”
Cloyd steered them west up the next drainage, up the steep trail that led into the Rincon La Osa.
At last they broke out into the meadow he remembered so well. They made camp, and then he led the old man to the spot along the Rincon stream where he’d fished the big cutthroat out with his bare hands. All winter he’d thought about what had happened next. “This is where it happened,” he told the old man. “This is where I first saw the bear. The bear was over there at the edge of the trees, standing up and sort of squinting at me.”
Walter Landis took off his hat and scratched his head, and then he settled himself down on the remains of a spruce, bleached for years by the sun, that had almost been reclaimed by
the meadow. “You can’t unscramble eggs,” the old man said softly. “There’s three things that return never: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life.”
Walter picked a shoot of grass from a clump growing out of the log and began to chew on it. The words he’d spoken seemed for both of them to hang in the air and take shape and power, perhaps more than he had intended.
Return never, Cloyd thought, and he could see the arrow flying off Rusty’s bow.
He hated feeling sorry for himself. It reminded him of that year in the group home in Durango when he was angry all the time, when he failed all his classes on purpose, when he bullied kids out of dimes and quarters.
He used to be like that.
He used to be like that before he found the bearstone in the cave high above the old man’s farm, before he dreamed of visiting the wilderness named after his own band of Utes. Before he’d worked for Walter, and before Walter had taken him into the mountains.
The loneliness and anger was still inside him, like a poisonous desert plant waiting for a big rain. He could keep it from growing if he didn’t feed it. Taking care of the old man and the farm hadn’t left any time for feeling sorry for himself. He’d driven the tractor in winter and summer, plowed snow and cut hay. He’d hand-shoveled the deep snow from the walks around the old farmhouse. Every day in winter, he’d taken the axe and chopped the ice to keep the hole in the pond open for Blueboy and the other horses to drink. He’d brought in the firewood all winter and irrigated the fields in the summer and done a hundred other chores. It was a good feeling, to work that hard for someone you cared about.
And here he was, back in the Rincon La Osa, the Corner of the Bear.
Blueboy had grazed close and wasn’t ten feet away. The blue roan never strayed far. With his eye on Cloyd he ripped a clump of grass free, then raised his head and began to draw the long shoots across his molars, grinding noisily. The old man had chewed up his own piece of grass, just like a horse.