Beardance

by Will Hobbs

  Cloyd blew on the coals and determined they were still alive. He was slow to answer as he began to lay wood on the fire. “A nugget in the creek,” he answered guardedly.

  “My nephew was right about you, Cloyd Atcitty. You’re a coyote, a Ute coyote. I see you coming and going around these mountains like a shadow yourself.”

  What did Sixto Loco know? Cloyd wondered. Did he know about the bears?

  The shepherd grinned, showing his broken teeth. His shaggy eyebrows, silver and black, rose as he asked a question. “You and Walter Landis were trying to find la Mina Perdida de la Ventana, no?”

  “Walter would’ve liked to find it,” Cloyd said truthfully, “but he didn’t.”

  Cloyd could hear bells now, the bells on the goats that were on the leading edge of the big sheep flock. They were returning to their bedding grounds.

  Sixto had melted two spoonfuls of lard. The man was always in motion. From inside his tent he brought out a sack of flour, and he rolled the edges of the sack down far enough to expose the flour. Into the sack he poured the melted lard and a cup of water. Cloyd couldn’t tell what he was doing. “What about you?” Sixto asked gruffly. “You didn’t want to find the mine?”

  “I don’t like mines,” Cloyd said. “I worked in Walter’s mine last summer in Snowslide Canyon. It’s dark in there, freezing cold….”

  “How come you stayed up here by yourself? Are you crazy?”

  “I … I like it up here.”

  Cloyd began to hope that he could borrow the rope, as long as he made no mention of the bears. He had to think of an excuse for why he needed it.

  Cloyd could see that those baleful eyes didn’t believe his reason for staying on in the high country alone. The old shepherd pointed with a gnarled finger up above them to the west. “See where the sun’s going down on that ridge, right behind the big tree? Yesterday it set in that little notch between that big tree and the dead one. From this campsite, the sun sets right there on a special day. Yesterday was exactly halfway between the longest day and the shortest day of the year. You know what that means, Coyote? Up here, winter’s coming soon. I have to take the sheep down pretty quick. After this, you have to be crazier than me to stay up here.”

  All the while, the spidery man was at work, yet he never seemed hurried. Sixto had five little cakes like thick tortillas frying in the skillet. “Gordas,” he said gruffly, pointing with his lips as his hands flattened out five more. “‘ Fat ones.’”

  The flock had drawn close. It was all familiar to Cloyd, the bleating of the sheep from down in their throats, the quicker, higher blats of the goats.

  Suddenly three of the sheepdogs appeared as if from nowhere, and they proceeded to sniff Cloyd cautiously, with their long tails slung low on the ground. The dogs were long-haired, of mixed colors, half wild. He could see the hackles rising on their necks and along their backs.

  “They smell something on you,” Sixto Archuleta observed as he was pulling the big pail off the coals. The bloodshot eyes fell on Cloyd. “Maybe some kind of animal,” the crazy man said with a knowing smile.

  Cloyd was so taken aback that he said nothing. He wasn’t even sure what Sixto Loco had said.

  Now the rest of the dogs were coming around and sniffing him. With a harsh word from Sixto, they scattered.

  Cloyd’s eyes were devouring those fat tortillas. He was about to reach when the shepherd signaled him to wait, and pried the lid off the pail. The delicious aroma of beans and mutton wafted Cloyd’s way. Sixto handed him a ladle. “Spread it on the fat ones,” he explained.

  Two of the goats had come right up to the campfire and were blatting impatiently. Cloyd could see they needed to be milked. Sixto grabbed one nanny goat by the hind leg and started to milk her. “It’s been thirty years since I lost a sheep to a bear,” he said proudly, and then he watched for Cloyd’s reaction.

  Cloyd allowed no emotion to show, and the man continued. “I sleep with one eye open, but really it’s the dogs. All six of my dogs, I put them on one of these nanny goats before they even opened their eyes. When they’re suckled to a nanny, they grow up thinking they’re part goat. They love these animals and they take care of them. They watch out for the sheep too, even though they don’t respect them, for often the sheep are stupid snivelers.”

  “I used to have a flock of sheep and goats,” Cloyd said. “A small one.” He wanted to milk the second goat himself. The man might offer him some milk. He grabbed her by the leg, as Sixto Archuleta had done. The grizzled shepherd handed him the pail.

  It had been a long time, but his fingers could remember.

  Sixto strained the milk and passed it to Cloyd. It tasted warm and good. “Now let’s eat,” the shepherd said.

  Cloyd had thought all the eating was done. Maybe Sixto could tell he was still hungry. The shepherd picked out a lamb from the flock and slaughtered it exactly the way Cloyd had learned from his grandmother, and he skinned it exactly the same way too. Sixto fried the blood they had caught, and then he made a stew with carrots and onions and potatoes and plenty of meat.

  This night wouldn’t be like the others, with his stomach aching when he went to sleep.

  Even the lamb’s head was set to cook in the coals, a delicacy for the morning. Sixto was like an Indian, Cloyd thought, using every part.

  It was the man’s eyes that made him look so mean, Cloyd thought, all red and bloodshot. The campfire smoke had made his eyes look that way. It wasn’t him. It was all the time he’d spent squatting by campfires.

  More gordas on the skillet. Sixto was throwing scraps of meat to the dogs. “We have a lot of eating to do, Coyote. You don’t have any fat on your ribs, I think.”

  The dogs were back: sniffing his legs again, this time four of them. Their snouts were wrinkled with suspicion, and their tails were down on the ground like the tails of coyotes.

  To Cloyd’s amazement, Sixto said, “They smell those bears on you. Now tell me what happened to my shebear and the cub that was almost black. Tell me who the woman was who was with you, who was part Indian but not Ute. Tell me how you come to be with those two cubs, and tell me where they are now.”

  Cloyd couldn’t mask his surprise. “You knew about that mother grizzly and you didn’t kill her?”

  The old shepherd heaved a sigh and said, “I used to see her boyfriend too once in a while, the one that was killed last summer. Why should I kill them? They’re old coyotes like me … like you. We’re the last of the breed.”

  Cloyd was trying to take this all in.

  “When I was young I killed too many bears,” Sixto said. “I was a tonto, a stupid. Everyone was young and stupid back then, even the old people.”

  “You’ve seen grizzlies up here, and never told anybody?”

  “There’s still a lot of tontos out there.”

  It was starting to get dark. The shepherd put out a flashing beacon where the flock had bedded down, and he filled a hollowed-out log with rock salt. Afterward, by the campfire, Cloyd told his story, from first seeing the cubs to the death of their mother to losing Brownie and Cocoa down a deep hole on that ridge facing Middle Ute Creek.

  “Ayeee,” Sixto Archuleta whistled, on hearing what had happened to the cubs.

  Cloyd could see the dread in the proud shepherd’s face. Something had spooked him, and it wasn’t the cubs’ predicament. At last Sixto said, “This is bad. I know that place. This is really bad.”

  The shepherd would say no more. Cloyd wondered if Sixto would help after all. He had to get help to those cubs soon.

  Above the Rio Grande Pyramid, clouds were scudding across the crescent moon. “Look at that,” Sixto cried, pointing a crooked finger. “The horns of the moon can’t hold any water,”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Weather coming”

  Cloyd slept warm with the little sheepherder stove only a few feet away. He hadn’t slept so warm since he’d left the farm. In the middle of the night the fire nearly burned out, but Sixto
got up and stoked it. The wind was giving the wall tent a bad buffeting, but this tent was so well staked out, it felt strong as a house.

  In the morning, the woolly backs of the sheep were covered with an inch or two of snow. The day dawned crisp and clear with five hundred animals all exhaling vapor clouds into the morning air, all huddled close for warmth and protection.

  Cloyd was sitting on a log, sharpening his pocket-knife with Sixto’s whetstone. There was something about the bears that he’d been thinking about for a long time; Sixto Archuleta might know something about this. “Have you ever seen a grizzly’s den? Is it very deep?”

  He hoped a den wouldn’t be very deep. He didn’t know how deep his cubs could dig, or if they would dig a den at all.

  “ ‘Course it’s deep,” Sixto answered. “I’ve seen a couple. They tunnel six, eight feet, then make a sleeping room about six feet across. Both of the ones I saw were dug under tree roots. You know what … you’d think they’d dig their dens on the slopes facing the sun, where it would be warmer, but they are smart and that would be stupid. They’d be waking up all winter if they did that. The earth keeps them warm enough. They den in the shadows, where the sun won’t disturb them until it’s spring.”

  Just then a light plane appeared and buzzed the camp. Its wings were white underneath and red on top. The plane carne in so low on the meadow that Cloyd could almost see the pilot. All of a sudden, the sheep were running, scattering, bleating hysterically. Lambs were getting separated from their mothers. It was hard to tell if the lambs or the ewes were more panicked.

  Sixto Archuleta’s eyes were on fire. Cloyd found out about the narrow sash around the shepherd’s waist: after the airplane’s second pass, Sixto started picking up stones, and he unleashed the sash from his waist and fitted a stone to it. A. sling! Whirling the weapon around and around, Sixto was ready when the plane came back the third time, and he let the stone fly with terrific velocity.

  The pilot must have wanted an especially good look, because he was flying even lower than before. The sheep were running recklessly in all directions.

  Cloyd couldn’t follow the flight of the stone, but he saw the plane coming right toward them, and he saw its windshield suddenly spiderweb all over with cracks as the stone struck.

  The boy turned with awe to the shepherd. “Was that a lucky shot?”

  Sixto gave him a broken-toothed smile. “I’ve had a lot of time to practice.”

  The old sheepherder was satisfied that he had traded trouble for trouble. “That ought to teach them some respect,” he said with a grin. Sixto made a circling motion for the dogs with his right hand, and they sprinted off to gather the flock. Sixto did his part too, keeping the sling whirring as he headed off sheep with stones placed barely in front of them.

  “What was that guy doing?” Cloyd asked, as finally the two of them set out after the cubs with rope, a flashlight, and a gas lantern.

  Sixto shrugged. “Asking for trouble, was all I could see.”

  Three hours brought them to the place where the cubs had fallen into the earth. The flashlight revealed a nearly vertical slope angling sharply down and away from the opening. There was no way to determine what was below. They listened for the cubs, but could hear nothing. Cloyd called to them with the smacking of the lips they knew, and he called with their names. Then he heard them whimpering, both of them

  “They’re alive,” he said to Sixto.

  “Yes, but it sounds like they’re a good way down in there. No way to get them out from here. If you went in there, you might go right over a drop-off.”

  “Those are the last grizzly bears in Colorado! It’s a mine shaft, isn’t it?”

  The shepherd’s eyes were greatly troubled. “For you,” he said, “I will tell what I think happened to them. Yes, they’ve fallen into an old mine.”

  “This? This is la Mina Perdida de la Ventana?”

  With a grimace, Sixto said, “I don’t know for sure. But I think it is. It’s not the entrance. It’s a place where they must have been working up from below, following a vein of gold or something. Or else they made it to bring air into the mine; I don’t know.”

  “There’s another entrance? You know the main entrance?”

  “This mine is an evil place.” The old sheepherder’s voice was full of hurt. “Dangerous too. You’d go in there after those bears?”

  Cloyd remembered how much he feared being inside a mountain. But he answered, as much to himself as to the shepherd, “I have to. I’ve kept them alive this far.”

  “Forty-five years ago,” Sixto said softly, “my brother died in there. Inside that mine is where he’s buried.”

  Hurt was welling in the shepherd’s tired eyes. “I’ve heard that people say I killed my brother… I’ve lived with that. With his last words, he made me promise two things: to close the mine, and never to go in there again. I have honored my promise.”

  “What were you doing in there?”

  “Digging, what you think? We were just starting to dig….”

  “I won’t do any digging,” Cloyd promised. “I won’t even touch the walls. I won’t ever tell anyone that I know about this mine. I’ll keep your secret. Just show me how to get in there. I have to try.”

  “I will show you,” Sixto said, and then his eyes flashed red and angry. “What about after I’m dead? You’ll tell, tontos will come to open up the mine….”

  “I can keep a secret,” Cloyd said, and he meant it.

  “Good,” Sixto said. “I trust you. But let me tell you something…You believe in ghosts?”

  “Maybe …” Cloyd admitted. He didn’t even want to talk about ghosts.

  “Good. I wouldn’t be the kind of ghost you would want to have angry with you, Coyote.”

  The shepherd led him around the ridge and onto a high ledge, until the Window loomed into view. “La Ventana on a good day,” Sixto reflected as they stopped to catch their breaths. “El Portal del Diablo on a bad one.”

  “La Ventana today,” Cloyd said uncertainly. He was filled with dread.

  Sixto’s tired eyes weren’t sure either. He was eyeing the fast-moving clouds above the Window and the Pyramid, and he didn’t seem to like the look of them. He disappeared behind a leaning slab of rock, and then Cloyd found him there removing a stone the shape of an axe-head from the wall. “This is it,” Sixto said. “We’ll open it up and set these rocks aside. Afterward I will seal it up again just as good as you see now.”

  They’d soon exposed the opening, no more than three feet across and six feet high. Cloyd called for the bears, again and again, but no sound came from the mine except the trickling of water. Sixto lit the lantern. Cloyd had to go now, before he lost his nerve.

  Sixto told him, “I’ll go back to the other side of the ridge, to where the bears are, and I’ll shout down that hole every two or three minutes. Maybe that will help you find where they are. Vaya con Dios, my Yuta amigo.”

  With the coil of rope over his head and across his chest, the lantern in one hand and the flashlight in his back pocket, Cloyd started into the Lost Mine of the Window. Down a short slope and barely into the tunnel beyond, his light fell on two gleaming skulls, their empty eye sockets looking right at him. Cloyd swallowed hard and walked closer. Two skeletons lay side by side, unburied from head to toe. A closer look revealed ancient arrows lying among the rib bones. Ute arrows, he realized. A quick movement startled him. His light caught a bushy-tailed wood rat scurrying into the darkness.

  The arrows brought to mind that story in Walter’s book, Lost Mines and Treasures of the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. This was the part of the story he’d read over and over again. Someone, he remembered, had discovered these two skeletons and had fled, never to return. Sixto and his brother should have run away too, Cloyd thought. I should run away.

  Walter Landis, Cloyd realized, would be amazed to learn that the story in his book was true—but Walter would never know.

  Step by step, he moved cautiously f
orward. The logs supporting the ceiling of the tunnel looked soft and spongy. Walter had always said that old mines with timberwork could cave in if you even looked crossways at them. Cloyd held his breath and kept going. If he lost his nerve … It was cold inside the mountain, not much above freezing, and the lantern gave off only a murky light. Following the tunnel’s twists and turns, he had to duck low in places.

  The ceiling was unsupported by timbers now. He knew that an all-rock tunnel was supposed to be safer, but he didn’t feel any safer. His breath came in short gulps. The mountain was squeezing the air out of him.

  The ceiling bristled with sharp rocks. At the end of a long straightaway, at a low turn, his head struck the ceiling. Suddenly dirt and rocks were showering down on him. His heart jumped; he expected the worst. He thought for sure he’d brought the mountain down on himself, but he was surprised to find, through the swirling, dusty light, that the roof had held. After a few moments, dead silence returned to the mine. He could quit holding his breath. Now he realized how badly his head hurt. Touching two fingers to the place on the top of his scalp, he brought them back to the light and saw the bright red of his blood.

  After a few minutes the pain dulled. Cloyd went on, but his fear was walking way out in front of him. A side tunnel led to a wide room, littered with boulders, that in turn led to an incline too steep to walk safely down. A twenty-foot ladder joined this level to the one below. He tested the first rung of the ladder with his foot. It crumbled with only a little pressure.

  Cloyd returned to the main tunnel, but it soon played out. The only way to continue was down the twenty-foot ladder. He went back and stood above the drop a long time, paralyzed. His throat felt like it was stuffed with wool. His fright had a smell to it, an ominous sour smell suddenly coming out of his skin. He turned and fled.

  Outside the mine, clouds had covered up the Window. The wind was blowing hard and cold. Winter was on its way. He told himself it was okay to give up. It was time to start back for the farm.