Grayfox

by Michael Phillips

We made our way back to the watering hole and our mules. Out of the marshy bog we cut a bunch of pollen spikes off the cattail plants to take back with us—they were just coming out now that summer was approaching. It had been a long trek for nothing, and all the rest of the day we never saw a sign of another animal of any kind.

  The day had tuckered me out and I was famished. The thought of cattail pancakes didn’t exactly make my mouth water, but by then I would have been happy for anything going into my mouth.

  Hawk ate the strangest things, but I reckon that anyone that wanted to stay alive out there had to eat what they could find. Besides the cattail pollen, earlier in the spring we’d eaten the inside shoots of new cattail growth. And Hawk had shown me where to find and how to eat all kinds of native desert plants—buckberries and rice grass, roots of many kinds, squaw cabbage (too bitter to even describe), red berries off the desert thorn, and mustard seeds. Hawk said the best food of all were the pine nuts, but they wouldn’t be ripe until August.

  When we got back to camp, we made a fire and mashed up the cattail pollen we’d gathered, making it into a paste with water, then mixing in a little cornmeal we still had from Hawk’s last ride to Desert Springs for supplies.

  Once the patties were made, we roasted them over the desert fire. It wasn’t exactly antelope stew, but at least it was warm and kept the hunger away for another day.

  Chapter 19

  A Talk Over Cattail Pancakes

  It hadn’t taken long with Hawk for me to grow curious about why a fellow like him would be so religious. That’s what I wondered at first.

  After a while I found myself asking the question differently: How did a man like him get so wise?

  It took me a long time to get around to asking him directly about it. It was one of those things I figured he’d tell me in his own time if he ever wanted to. But then all of a sudden, as we were sitting there roasting and eating our cattail pancakes, it just popped out without me even planning to say it.

  “How come you know so much about God?” I asked.

  Hawk thought a long time before he said anything.

  “Pretty big question, son,” he said finally.

  “Too big?” I asked.

  “No. No question’s too big. There’s no such thing as too big a question. Actually, it’s a good question. Just took me by surprise, that’s all.”

  “So what’s the answer?”

  Again Hawk thought for a long time. He wasn’t the kind of man to start talking before he’d thought about something long enough to know what he wanted to say. If he didn’t have something to say, he kept his mouth shut until he did.

  Maybe right there was one of the things that made him wise.

  But on this day, after a while, he did try to answer my question.

  “Well, I reckon after I got out here in this wilderness all by myself, it started with watching nature and animals. It didn’t take much to be able to see that there’s an order and plan to the world of nature. And animals survive out here—and plants for that matter—because they fall in with the order of things. The world is the way it is for them, and they have no choice other than to fall into harmony with the order of things. You see what I mean?”

  “I think so.”

  “I began to think about men, too,” Hawk went on. “I’ve known lots of people in all kinds of situations in my life. It seemed to me, the more I thought about it, that there were only two kinds of people I’d known—those who were content with their lot in life and those who weren’t. The first kind of people were happy, peaceful, and usually you enjoyed being around them. The second kind were discontent, struggling with everything that came along, at strife—both with themselves and with other folks. They were usually selfish, and weren’t usually what you’d call nice. It made me stop to think and to ask myself which of the two kinds of people I wanted to be.

  “When I thought of the animals again, I realized that men have a choice animals do not—whether to fall into harmony with the order of things in their world, just like the animals, or else not to. When they don’t they will be discontent and at odds with everything around them, like the second kind of people I was talking about.

  “I began to think further what that might mean. What did it mean to fall in with the natural order of how life was supposed to be? What is the natural order of our world?

  “That’s when I began to look into the hidden meanings of everything, and pretty soon I was thinking about who made it all and asking myself why. That’s really the most important question in all the universe—why.

  “Asking that question in a thousand different ways and about a thousand different things led me eventually into the discovery of who God is—what he’s all about. You see, that’s the answer to every why you can think of—that God made it or did it for a reason. The reason is nothing more than who God himself is.

  “Well, if God made everything there is, and for a reason—I figured the main reason must be to show himself and what kind of a person he was. Who is God, and what is he like? That’s got to be at the root of it all. That’s the hidden meaning part, the yolk part.

  “The second half of it must be for us to fall into the natural order of it all. He must have some reason why he made us, too. We mean something, just like the sky and everything.”

  “Now I’m afraid you lost me,” I said. “What do you mean, people oughta mean something.”

  “What do we mean?” Hawk repeated. “What’s our life supposed to be about? That’s what I’m getting at.”

  I nodded slowly, understanding a little, but not completely.

  “Then I remembered something I’d learned from when I was just a boy,” Hawk went on, “about being created in the image of God. It isn’t that I’d forgotten. I knew all about God. I was taught a lot about God when I was young. But then I found myself going down into the inside depths of the things I’d always known and asking myself what they really meant.

  “That’s how I found myself thinking about being created in the image of God. What did it really mean?”

  “Did you figure it out?”

  “The conclusion I came to was this—we’re supposed to be pictures of God too, just like everything else. That’s what we as people must mean. That’s our purpose. That is the natural harmony that we have to fall in with—to be pictures, reflections, images of God. That’s what we’ve got to accept, like the animals have to fall in with the way nature is. If we don’t, we won’t do any better than they. Life can’t be a good thing for anybody unless they go along with that purpose.

  “We’re supposed to learn to be like God ourselves. We can’t do that perfectly, of course. That’s what sinning is all about. But that’s still the purpose, the meaning of life—to be as much a small, little reflection of God as we can be in the midst of all the sin.”

  Hawk paused and took a deep breath.

  “I reckon that’s about the size of it,” he said. “How’s that for a long answer to your question? Never knew I was such a preacher, did you?” he added with a smile.

  “But how did you get to be such a thinker and philosopher?”

  He roared with laughter.

  “I ain’t no such thing.”

  “You sound like one to me.”

  “What—a thinker or philosopher?’

  “Both,” I said.

  Again Hawk laughed.

  “Most of the philosophers I’ve run into weren’t what I’d call thinkers. The two ain’t the same, if you ask me.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Everybody’s got the choice whether to be a thinker or not. Don’t need to be a philosopher to be a thinker, Zack. You just need to put your brain to use. Being a thinker doesn’t mean being a philosopher, just using the brain you’ve got.”

  “But a lot of folks don’t.”

  “Everybody is a thinker. Some people just don’t point their brains in directions that do them any good. They think about things that pass away, that are gone the next d
ay, like the smoke from one of our fires.”

  “Yeah, I guess I see what you mean.”

  “For myself, I decided a long time ago that if I was going to spend so much time alone, and that if I was going to live out here like this, with no companion but myself and my own thoughts, then I ought to spend my time thinking about things that matter, and that would help me understand the order of things a man is supposed to fall in with. So I read a lot in the only book I got out here with me—that’s the Bible—and I think about what’s in it. Animals have their instinct to help them. Man doesn’t have that. All he’s got is his brain, which he’s got to put to the best use he can, otherwise, life’s going to be a pretty miserable affair. Anyhow, that’s how I’ve come to see it.”

  “How come you’re out here all by yourself anyway?” I asked.

  Hawk got real quiet. I couldn’t tell if he was angry at me for what I’d asked, or thinking how to answer. But I never got a chance to find out, because even as I found myself getting nervous for prying, we were interrupted.

  It was while we were still sitting there around the fire that we heard the sound of a horse approaching.

  Chapter 20

  A Visitor

  Out in the middle of the high desert like we were, running into another human being, except for the Paiutes, of course, was an unusual enough occurrence to make us both stop what we were doing and look, first at each other in surprise, then toward the sound.

  As soon as the rider was visible, coming around a big boulder forty or fifty yards away, Hawk got up and walked to meet him. The fellow pulled up.

  “Howdy, stranger,” said Hawk. “You’re a long ways from the rest of the world.”

  The man didn’t speak at first, just eyed Hawk, then looked over at me with no change in his expression. It wasn’t a friendly expression either.

  He was a rough-looking man, and his squinting eyes were full of suspicion and mistrust. He seemed looking for something that we were hiding from him. I immediately felt like he was angry with us, even though none of us knew each other. He wore a gun on his hip, and a long rifle stuck up behind him out of a saddle holster.

  “We ain’t got much to offer you,” Hawk went on, “but you’re welcome to it.”

  “Coffee smells good,” the man said, speaking at last.

  “Then come on down off there and join us. Zack, pour the man a cup of coffee.”

  The rider got down off his horse, tied it to a shrub, and followed Hawk over to the fire. I handed him the cup. He took a sip, then sat down.

  “We’ve just been having some cattail cakes. Care for some?” said Hawk.

  “Got anything else?”

  “Nope, not here.”

  “What’re you two doing way out here?” the man questioned.

  “We live out here,” answered Hawk. “But what are you doing out here all by yourself? We don’t exactly get too many visitors passing through.”

  “You live where?” said the man, taking a drink of coffee and glancing around. “Here?”

  “All around,” said Hawk. “Not here exactly. We just happened to be here today and got hungry. We’re mostly in those hills west of here.” As he spoke he gave a nod with his head. “There’s caves we use, and everything we need to make a life of it.”

  “Don’t look like much of a life to me,” said the stranger. “That all you eat—weeds?”

  Hawk laughed. “We eat whatever we can. Almost had us an antelope earlier today.”

  “What happened?”

  “Paiutes beat us to it.”

  “You let ’em take it from you? How many were there?”

  “Only a half dozen. Yep, we let them take it. Having meat wasn’t worth getting killed for.”

  “That’s the kind of attitude what lets them Paiutes think they can do whatever they want,” he grumbled.

  Hawk said nothing.

  “And you say you ain’t seen no one else through here recently?” the man added, lifting the coffee cup to his lips but watching Hawk intently as he did.

  “No,” replied Hawk. “You’re the first since this strapping young man here crossed my path last winter,” he added, motioning toward me. “Should we have seen someone?”

  “Maybe . . . maybe not.”

  “You looking for somebody?”

  “I been tracking a half-breed.”

  “From where?”

  “Out of Carson.”

  “That’s a long ways.”

  “He’s got three thousand on his head.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Don’t know what the Indians call him. In Carson he’s only known as Redskin Tranter.”

  “Tranter his pa?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Stole some cattle, killed a rancher.”

  “What kind of half-breed?”

  “Paiute or Shoshone.”

  “You figure he’s coming this way?”

  “I tracked him till yesterday, straight toward here.”

  “We ain’t seen a soul, have we, Zack?”

  I shook my head.

  “Except those Indians a while ago,” Hawk added. “But they were all from the Squirrel tribe. You a lawman?” Hawk asked.

  The man shook his head.

  “What, then?”

  “Bounty hunter.”

  A brief silence followed.

  “Well, we haven’t seen the fellow you’re after,” said Hawk. “But you’re welcome to share our fire and our coffee. If you need a rest, you can share our cave for the night. I’ll make us up some stew when we get back there, and we can give you plenty of water. My name’s Hawk Trumbull. My friend’s Zack Hollister.”

  “Much obliged, I reckon I’ll take you up on your offer,” said the stranger.

  “Name’s Demming—Jack Demming.”

  Chapter 21

  A Guest at the Campfire

  Hawk and I didn’t have any time alone together the rest of that day. The man named Demming went back with us to the cave we were using, about an hour’s ride away on our mules, and bunked down for the night with us. I knew Hawk well enough by then, however, to see that he wasn’t altogether comfortable with the other man around, though he continued to be hospitable enough.

  Demming spent a lot of time questioning Hawk about the Indians, the area, the trails and the water holes, trying to figure how to get back on the scent of the outlaw he was chasing. I think he could tell how much Hawk knew of the Utah-Nevada territory, and from the glint in his eye as he listened I think he realized that Hawk knew more than he was telling.

  Whether he suspected Hawk of being friendly with the Paiutes I don’t know. The more we found out about him as the evening wore on, the more I could see why Hawk wouldn’t have wanted him to find out.

  “This ain’t bad, Trumbull,” Demming said, taking a second helping of the stew Hawk had made. “Better’n that stuff looked you was eating out on the plain. What’s in here, anyway?”

  “Sage hen, little quail I had left over.”

  “It’s the first fresh meat I’ve had since leaving Carson.”

  “I didn’t say it was fresh,” said Hawk. “The sage hen’s been frozen down in our snow cellar. The quail was smoked and dried.”

  “I ain’t particular,” Demming snorted.

  As he ate, every once in a while he’d throw me a look that seemed inquisitive, like he’d seen me before or something.

  “What’d you say your name was, kid?” he asked between bites.

  “Hollister,” I answered him, squirming a little.

  “Where you from?”

  “California.”

  The answer seemed to puzzle him. He thought about it a minute.

  “Where in California?”

  “North of Sacramento.”

  “Place got a name?”

  “Yeah—Miracle Springs,” I answered.

  Again the puzzled look came over his face. “Hmm . . . I might have heard of it,” he said after
a pause. “What’s your pa do?” he added.

  I bristled slightly. “He’s a miner.”

  “Yeah. What else would he be?”

  He paused and sent his eyes scanning all over me again, again with that look that I didn’t like.

  “Where’s your kin from, kid?” he asked.

  “East.”

  “Where?”

  “New York.”

  He seemed to take the information in with interest, though he hid his reaction well.

  “What’s your pa’s name?” he asked.

  At this point I was getting a little irritated by all his questions, and I suppose his bringing up Pa agitated me some.

  “I don’t see that my pa’s name is any affair of yours,” I answered, a little rudely, I’m afraid.

  He said nothing, just eyed me carefully once more, then turned toward Hawk, who had been listening intently to every word but hadn’t said anything.

  “Where’d you learn to live out here like this? From the Indians?” Demming asked, now halfway glaring at Hawk with a look that wasn’t any more friendly than the ones he had given me. Being around this man wasn’t making me like him any more than I had when he’d first ridden up earlier.

  “I’ve been out here a long time,” Hawk replied evasively.

  “Around the Indians much?”

  “Some.”

  “Get along with them, do you?”

  “Don’t have occasion to spend much time with them,” said Hawk. “The Paiutes don’t exactly welcome strangers, and the Shoshone aren’t much better. But I’ve learned to live with them and keep myself alive, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Ain’t exactly what I meant, Mister,” said Demming. “What I want to know is if you’re one of the kind who thinks the Indians is as good as we are?”

  “I don’t know if I’m what you call one of those kind or not,” Hawk said back to him. “The Indians are different than we are, that’s for sure. And with the Paiutes you’ve got to be careful—they’re a tough lot, and they don’t look too kindly to white folks these days. But I figure they’re human beings just like the rest of us.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Mister!” Demming shot back, and all of a sudden the fury in his voice was more than evident. “They ain’t human! They’re animals, and the sooner we’re rid of ’em off our land, the safer it’ll be for everyone.”