Grayfox

by Michael Phillips

  “Where does the smoke go?” I asked him.

  “Little crack way up through the roof of the cave—twenty, thirty feet up there.”

  “Why doesn’t the snow drip in and get us all wet?”

  “Near as I can figure, the crack curves around and runs downhill for a spell, too, so whatever leaks down from outside doesn’t get all the way down inside the cave. Smoke’ll go up and down and all over the place long as there’s an air draft pulling it. Water only goes downhill.”

  “It’s so warm inside,” I said. “I can’t believe we’re surrounded by snow everywhere.”

  “No better insulation than the earth, Zack,” Hawk replied. “Once you get a good fire going, place like this’ll stay warm enough to live in all winter.”

  Well, anyway, the days did pass quick. The snow outside melted down enough so that Hawk could finish shoveling his way through it. And gradually, using the crutch he’d made me, I was able to get up and about on my splinted leg. There was still a thick pack of know everywhere when I finally did get out into the light of day, but breathing that fresh air sure felt good!

  After that, there wasn’t another big snowfall for quite a while, and we were able to start moving about outside. Already I’d almost forgotten my anxiousness to hurry back down to the valley and the Pony Express. I knew I couldn’t ride yet, and Hawk Trumbull was staring to grow on me.

  One day I woke up and Hawk was gone from the cave.

  I crawled to my feet and hobbled outside. It took me an hour to find him, though he was only a hundred yards away, up on top of the hill behind the mouth of the cave.

  I worked my way up to where he was sitting.

  “Morning,” I said.

  He didn’t reply. He just kept looking up at the sky. I was worn out from the climb, so I sat down a little ways off. Hawk just kept staring straight up into space. It was cold but bright and sunny, and the sky was a deep, deep blue.

  We must have sat that way for twenty or thirty minutes, neither of us making a sound.

  “Big, isn’t it?” Hawk finally said after a long time, still staring straight up.

  “You mean the sky?” I asked.

  “Yep—the sky. It’s the biggest thing there is.”

  That was a statement worth chewing on a while. And sure enough, Hawk didn’s say anything else till he knew I was through chewing on it.

  I’d always thought of things . . . well, as things—something you could touch or see. An object. If you’re going to call something “big,” I figured it ought to be something with thing-ness to it, something that’s real . . . like a horse or a big tree or a mountain or the ocean. If he’d have asked me, I reckon I’d have said the earth, or maybe the sun, was the biggest thing there was. I’d have never thought of the sky, cause the sky wasn’t a “thing.” It was just . . . air—empty. It was a nothing, not an object. So I had to chew Hawk’s statement all around for a while, and it still didn’t seem quite right to me when he spoke up again.

  “Yep,” he said, “everything’s bigger and deeper than you think, bigger and deeper than it looks at first. You’ve got to look past what you think is there.”

  “How?”

  “You’ve got to look past the shells, past the outside, so you can see inside.”

  It wasn’t that hard a statement to understand, but since I was still thinking about the sky, I was confused about what he meant.

  “It’s all about yolks and shells, son,” Hawk went on. That was always his way—after he got me looking at something long enough to wonder about it, once he had my attention, then he would talk to me about what I’d been looing at. “That’s it . . . yolks and shells. Everything’s got a yolk and a shell. Trouble is, most folks can only see the shells ’cause that’s what’s visible to their eyes. So they figure that white, hard, oval thing is the egg. Tell me, Zack, is the shell the egg?”

  “No, I don’t reckon so,” I answered, still not altogether sure what he was getting at.

  “’Course not. The shell’s just the shell. Ain’t no good for a thing. Well . . . nothing, that is, except protecting the yolk, and that’s mighty important in its own way. But what I’m trying to tell you is this: the life is in the yolk, not the shell. That’s what I mean about looking inside—finding where the life is. Because, you see, everything’s got a yolk—a place hidden away where the life is. Not just eggs. Everthing! That’s what life’s about, learning to see past the shells and into the yolks.”

  He stopped. Again we sat there for a long time. He always gave me plenty of time to think about what he said.

  “What does that have to do with the sky?” I said after a while.

  “It’s got everything to do with it,” he answered. “I said it was bigger and deeper than it seems at first. But you’ve got to look long and hard to see it . . . to see into it . . . into its yolk, into its meaning, into the why of it.”

  He stopped and gazed straight up again.

  “Look up at the sky,” he said. “Tell me, what do you see?”

  “Just blue,” I answered.

  “That’s all most folks see. You can’t see the deepness. But it’s the biggest thing in the universe. Though most folks see it every day, they can’t see how big it is . . . or what it means, what it’s supposed to be telling them. They look and look, but never see.”

  “What is it supposed to be telling them?”

  “I can’t tell you that, son,” he laughed. “I can’t make it too easy for you, or you won’t learn to train your own eyes.”

  “Can you give me a hint what it’s saying?”

  He laughed again. “I reckon that’s a fair request,” he said. He was quiet a while, then said, “It’s telling you something about whoever made it.”

  “You mean God?”

  “Yep. Everything that is got made by somebody. Everything got made for a reason. If you look at that thing long enough and learn to look past what it looks like into the inside of what is and what it means, it’ll start to tell you about the person who made it, even if you never met him, and what it was made for.”

  He paused thoughtfully, then went on.

  “A fellow could come into my cave and spend a week there,” he said. “Even if he never laid eyes on me, he’d start to know a lot about me—that is, if he knew how to look. Lots of folks don’t know how to look. But if you do, everything you set your eyes on has plenty to teach you.”

  “Like the sky?”

  “You’re getting it now, son,” replied Hawk. “I won’t tell you what the sky’s saying. But for sure it’s telling all who will listen about the One who made it. There’s got to be a reason why it’s so big, why it goes on forever, why it’s over us and around us even when we’re not aware of it or not thinking of it.

  “You see what I mean, Zack? The sky’s telling us about its Maker all the time. The only question is, who’s listening?”

  “I think I’m starting to see what you mean,” I said.

  “You keep on looking and trying to find out why the Maker made things like He did. You keep trying to see inside things to what they’re supposed to mean, and you’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Learn to see, Zack, my boy . . . learn to see.”

  Chapter 15

  The Lay of the Land

  Just about all of January and February we stayed inside. Hawk seemed to have most of what we needed, but every so often, when the weather let him, he’d go down to one of the trading posts for supplies, trading the skins we’d accumulated for what he needed. By the time my leg was well enough for me to walk normally, the winter was easing up and travel got easier.

  At first Hawk only had one mule, that he kept in a cave lower down, complete with feed and straw when he’d be gone himself for a spell. So mostly we walked everywhere. But returning from the trading post in the first week of March, I saw him pulling along a second mule he’d bought for me to ride.

  Nothing really changed too much after that, though. Riding that doggone stubborn mule was more wo
rk than walking! Every time I looked in its face I thought of Alkali Jones and his hardheaded beast! Leastwise, riding the mule, I was able to go out traveling with Hawk and find out more about this desert I’d ridden through so many times but never really seen.

  Most of Nevada, Hawk told me, had once been under water back when the continents and land and mountains and lakes and rivers were all different than now.

  All that came up one day when I asked him why there were so many caves around where we were, with such interesting twists and turns and pretty rock formations inside them. And why, too, you could still find so much water, even out in the desert, if you knew where the caves were, and why you even sometimes saw shells like Corrie’d brought back from San Francisco.

  “You ever hear of John Fremont?” Hawk asked me.

  “Sure,” I answered. “My sister knows his wife and worked on his campaign for President back in ’56.”

  “No foolin’!” exclaimed Hawk. “Your sister knows Jessie Fremont?”

  “Yep.”

  “If that ain’t something!”

  “So what’s John Fremont got to do with the caves?” I asked.

  “He was the first white man through this region. He and Kit Carson came through here back in ’43, looking for the Buenaventure.”

  “The what?”

  “Buenaventure—a legendary river that was supposed to flow all the way from the Rockies to the Pacific. They never found it, of course, ’cause there ain’t no such river. All they found was this.”

  Hawk stretched out his hand and swung it around in every direction.

  “Nothing here but a few scraggly rivers and a hundred streams that flow for a while and then vanish under the ground. Fremont called it the Great Basin because all the water disappeared like it was draining out of the bottom of a sink.

  “I don’t suppose Fremont does have much to do with the caves,” he added, chuckling. “I just thought of him exploring through here fifteen, twenty years ago. I read some of Fremont’s work. I don’t know about his politics, but the man was a first-rate explorer and cartographer.”

  “What’s a cartographer?”

  “Somebody who draws maps. Fremont’s travels back in the ’30s and ’40s gave people in the East a more accurate picture of what the West was like than Lewis and Clark’s stories did.

  “The Indians say that thousands of years ago this all used to be a huge lake, called Lake Lahontan. Some folks figure it might have even been part of the ocean once, on account of it being such a salty lake, like the one over in Utah. Anyhow, it kept the land green, and there were fish and water birds, and water flowed into it from the mountains all around.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “Everything changed. Gradually, of course. Seasons changed, it got hotter, quit raining as much, not so much snow in the mountains.”

  “When’d all that happen?”

  “Who knows how long it took? But after a few thousand years passed, this whole place where Lake Lahontan had been turned into a great big high desert with chains of mountain ranges and valleys stretching north and south all the way across it.”

  “Any of the old lake left?” I asked.

  “Only Pyramid Lake and Walker Lake—and a few little lakes scattered around. And the caves. Now I’m finally to the answer to your question, Zack.”

  “Yeah. This sure ain’t the kind of place where I’d expect them. I never saw a single cave when I was riding.”

  “You don’t see these kind. They were formed from the water of the lake going down. It found underground caverns to sink down into. The salt and minerals from the kind of lake it was, they were all left behind, making hard, crusty formations. That’s what’s kept these caverns from caving in like regular dirt would have. So that’s why there’s lots of caves around.”

  The longer I was with Hawk, the more of these caves I got to know. He used them for different purposes.

  “Some of them are large, some small, Zack,” Hawk told me after winter broke and we started our spring travels around the region. “Some’ve got plenty of water from underground springs, others are dry. In a couple of the higher ones—those that are dry—I bring in snow as long as it lasts to store in small hollows for summer. By the time you’ve been with me a while, son, there won’t be anyplace you can’t survive!”

  As spring advanced we moved from cave to cave, depending on whether we might be tracking ground squirrels, sage grouse, deer, jack rabbits, marmot, antelope, coots, or sage hens. Sometimes we fished in one of the rivers or lakes.

  “I don’t hunt except for food,” Hawk said, “though I’m always on the lookout for skins. That’s what we use out here for clothes, shoes, tools, and all kinds of things. The Paiutes’ll trade for them too. And pelts are how I trade for what supplies I might need down at the trading post at Desert Springs.”

  “What kind of skins?” I asked.

  “Oh, coyote, deer, and mountain sheep up in the high country. I even know a place or two where once in a while I can trap a beaver—if the Indians don’t beat me to it.”

  Traveling with Hawk as spring advanced to summer, I learned that water isn’t as much of a problem in the desert as you might think.

  “Springs are common, Zack,” Hawk told me, “if you know what to look for.”

  “You’ll show me?”

  “’Course I will. Hot springs bubble up out from cracks in the ground at the base of most of the mountain ranges, and higher up, clear cold fresh water can be found most places too.”

  The reason the water was so hard to find, Hawk told me, was that the desert began only a few feet from every river, every lake, every stream, and every spring. Whatever water there was eventually dried up or sank into the sand and the hard-baked clay. So you might be walking along the sandy, dusty ground between dried-up grass and sagebrush and wiry shrubs of greasewood and never know you were within sight of a spring.

  “You’ve got to learn the lay of the land,” Hawk told me. “God’s put everything you need right in front of you, you just have to learn how to see where it is. The Paiutes and Shoshone have survived in this land for generations, as barren as it looks.”

  Speaking of the Paiutes, Hawk gave me a real different picture of those Indians than I had gotten from the Pony Express. Hawk told me there were eight different bands of Indians who called themselves Paiute, which means “the People.” Their specific name depended on what they ate, which depended on the regions they roamed.

  “The Northern Paiutes—they’re called the rock-chuck eaters, the jack-rabbit eaters, the cui-ui eaters, and the ground-squirrel eaters,” Hawk explained.

  “What’s cui-ui?”

  “Fish—big, ugly suckers they get out of Pyramid Lake.”

  “What about the others?”

  “The Southern Paiutes are called the cattail eaters, the trout eaters, the grass-nut eaters, and the fish eaters.”

  “That everything they eat?”

  “No. All of them’ll eat whatever they can find. Around the lakes there’re rabbits and ducks. Those that live out further from water eat insects, rats, grasses and roots and nuts—anything they can get. They can gather enough pine nuts in late summer to last them for most of the winter.”

  “Were the Paiutes always so vicious toward whites?” I asked.

  “Not from how they tell it,” he replied. “At first they just watched from a distance as strangers began to cross their land. Gradually, as more came, they got curious and crept closer. The first meetings were friendly enough. Chief Winnemucca told me once that he rescued an early party of explorers. By making signs back and forth he was able to learn that the party was lost.”

  “What happened?”

  “The chief drew maps in the sand with a stick and pointed them in the direction they wanted to go. Same thing happened to Fremont later too. He wrote in his journal that the Paiutes treated him to a lavish feast of trout on the shore of Pyramid Lake. Then they gave him and his men directions they badly needed.”
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br />   “How, if they couldn’t speak to each other.”

  “Probably the same way that Winnemucca did with those other explorers—by making diagrams of mountains and lakes and using lots of sign language and pointing back and forth.”

  Hawk paused and let out a long sigh.

  “No, son,” he went on after a moment. “I’m afraid it was gold that brought the hatred and violence between the People and the white man. Thousands and thousands of white men came out West to find it. Many were friendly, but a lot others weren’t. The Paiutes were treated cruelly and shamefully. So they tell me, at least, and I ain’t sure I doubt it. I’ve seen enough with my own eyes to run my blood hot. The miners and the folks that followed after ruined hunting areas and spoiled rivers and took Indian women.

  “Then, after silver was discovered over near Carson two years ago, the whites began moving into the land of the Paiutes by the thousands. I’ve run into a few I didn’t like myself. They cut down the piñon pines so now you only find clumps of them here and there, and the Paiutes can’t exist without them. They brought herds of cattle to graze on the rice grass, and the deer and sage hen and rabbit got a lot scarcer since then.

  “That’s why last year, all the Paiute bands assembled and made war—to protect their lands. I reckon the army sees it a mite different. But anyway, that’s how it looks to me. That’s why your Pony Express was attacked so often.”

  “So they’re not really warlike,” I asked, “like everyone says?”

  “They used to be a very peaceful people. They only wanted to live at peace and be people, not warriors. But times change, and I’m afraid they can no longer be said to be a peaceful tribe.

  “Yeah, they’re warlike, Zack. But I don’t think they want to be.”

  Chapter 16

  Looking for Water

  It’s almost impossible to describe just what Hawk did for me in the months we spent together out in the wilderness—what he taught me, how he changed me. It was all the small experiences that added up to new ways of looking at everything.