The Forests of the Night - J P S Brown

by J P S Brown

  The Forests of the Night

  J P S Brown

  1974

  This book is for Rafael Rosa

  The Onza

  Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

  In the forests of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  In what distant deeps or skies

  Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

  On what wings dare he aspire?

  What the hand dare seize the fire?

  And what shoulder, & what art,

  Could hoist the sinews of thy heart?

  And when thy heart began to beat,

  What dread hand? & what dread feet?

  What the hammer? what the chain,

  In what furnace was thy brain?

  What the anvil? what dread grasp

  Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

  When the stars threw down their spears,

  And waterd heaven with their tears,

  Did he smile his work to see?

  Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

  Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

  In the forests of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye

  Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

  "The Tyger,"

  by William Blake

  INTRODUCTION

  THE FORESTS OF THE NIGHT

  J.P.S. BROWN

  Over a period of two generations I rode the horseshoe trails into the Sierra Madre Occidental in Mexico with my partner Rafael Russo to buy cattle. His hacienda was our headquarters and we bought the cattle from his neighbors in the municipality of Chinipas, Chihuahua. Russo's vaqueros lived on his ranches with their families and worked al partido, for wages and a share of the cheeses, and calf, bean, and corn crops the ranches produced. Russo and l lived with those families during the work. Every evening, I recorded the stories of the day in calendar notebooks that fit in a chaps pocket.

  I came to know the crews and their families well and saw their sons and grandsons grow to join us in the work. I started my first book Jim Kane four years after I began the journals. Twelve years later I began this book, The Forests of the Night. Martinillo the hunter depicted in this book was a Russo vaquero in his middle 50s when I met him. He became my good friend. The story that he and his companions told about his ordeal with a jaguar who spoiled on his own power became the foundation for this book. His story is true, but I was not with him when it happened, so I filled the pages of this book with the truth of my notebooks.

  In the summer of 1971, I began to write this book at Kier Byerley's beach cottage on the Sea of Cortez at Camauiroa in southern Sonora. Kier was my model for Milligan in the book. The story took such a hold on me that one minute after I started writing it I found that I could not do anything else. My family and partners sent out search parties for me before I left Camauiroa. In the fall I had to stop work on it to ship cattle to the U.S. I didn't try to get back to it until after the cattle crossed and I was able to return to my home in Arizona.

  Because of the hold that Forests had on me I put out an inordinate amount of physical and mental labor on it. In those days I wrote first drafts in longhand and subsequent drafts on a portable typewriter. In the mornings, for exercise, I tried to get outside to cut fireplace wood and haul it in on my shoulder or a toboggan. The story would not allow me to leave it for more than two hours. Soon, I had to quit the woodcutting. I didn't stop work on the manuscript except to eat and sleep and could not sleep for more than two hours at a time. No matter how exhausted I was when I went to bed at a normal hour, the story always woke me at 2 a.m. I became the good horse that was being worked to death. I've always done words as a contribution to something I don't understand. It's too much hard work to do for myself. I'd be a fool to do it for myself. I like cowboying better. Writing takes too big of a hold on me, holds me down too long at a time and the pay is low and scarce. Cowboying has not paid near enough, either, but even that work has paid better than words have. At least, cowboying is fun and good for the constitution, most of the time.

  My fiction is based on experience and evolves through years of cogitation. I don't try to write the story until the original idea becomes a full grown truth that kicks at my heart to get out. Forests required 12 years of cogitation before I began the first paragraph, but I never stopped writing again until I finished it. At work in my home in Arizona, I didn't notice the coming and going of Thanksgiving or Christmas of 1971. I know I ate and slept, but I don't remember any of it.

  At sunup on New Years day, for the first time since I had returned home, I noticed that my wife and kids made noise. I learned to write in the city room of the El Paso Herald-Post, a daily newspaper. A reporter writes thousands of words every day no matter what else happens around him. If he had to wait for inspiration, or for writer's block to clear away, or for everybody around him to be quiet, he couldn't hold his job.

  However, that New Years Day, the sounds of my family all of a sudden drove me into a frenzy. I savaged my wife and kids, got in my airplane and flew to Navojoa, Sonora. I sent the airplane back home to cut all responsible ties and drove to San Bernardo at the foot of the Sierra Madre, then rode horseback seventeen hours to Kier Byerley's Rancho Quemado on the high, spiny border between Chihuahua and Sonora. Kier's caretaker Lico and his wife saw to my needs while I worked night and day on the manuscript. I finished the handwritten first draft in a month. I carried the manuscript in a black, cardboard satchel back to Navojoa, got in touch with my family, and began to run and play in celebration. My family contacted Charley Jones, another border cattle trader who partnered with me and needed my help to cross the border at Douglas, Arizona with another bunch of cattle . He flew the airplane back to Navojoa, joined my celebration for awhile, then flew us back to Douglas.

  I did not let go of the black satchel, even when half a dozen friends joined us and we ran and played through every joint in Douglas and Agua Prieta. I felt so good about the book that every now and then I had to open it up and read parts of it to myself. Any part was just line.

  Charley stayed two or three days, then flew home to take care of the business of our cattle. Ten days went by and one morning I woke up in my room in the Gadsden Hotel to read from the manuscript and couldn't find it. I was having too much fun to worry about it, but when Charley returned, I mentioned that I'd lost it. He did not take the news as lightly as I reported it. He had taken breaks in our running and playing to read it and it had hooked him. The only way I could get him out of the room after he started reading it had been to put it back in the satchel and head for the corrals or the saloons.

  "We have to find it, Joe," Charley said. "Where were you the last time you looked in the satchel?"

  "You know, Charley, I was going to ask you about that."

  "You still had it when I left."

  "Well, see, that narrows it down. When did you leave?"

  "Ten days ago."

  "There you have it. All we have to do is find out where I've been for the last ten days, a fact well known to everybody in this town, and we'll find it."

  "I'll round up the people who ran with us to look for it, but what if we don't find it? What are you going to do?"

  "Hell, I'll write another'n," I said.

  Charley left me at the B and P Palace Bar and rounded up Bill Brown, John Maher, Harry McRory, Betty Hunt and Arnoldo the Gadsden bartender and searched. I didn't go. In my celebratory state I thought I had better things to do than worry about lost words. I was not celebrating the finish of a first draft of a new book. I celebrated because I could now go home to my noble family which still loved me enough to take me back, sleep a whole nigh
t through, and ease my brain with cowboying again. I'd given it all up for too long and would probably never be able to sell the story, anyway. If it was lost I could write another one that was just as good as soon as I was ready to risk my life again, so I felt no urgent need to leave a comfortable stool in a fine old bar and get anxious about it.

  Charley and my other friends looked for the satchel in every corner of every bar and restaurant, talked to every waiter and bartender, waitress and musician who had seen me and some who had not, but found nothing.

  That evening the gang found me again in the B and P. Charley was ringing his tail, so I cautioned him against turning literary on us. After all, no bunch of words that I could write would ever make anyone want to keep me for a pet. I thought I had worked on Forests with all my might until I had it where I wanted it, but I didn't want anyone to think it was so precious they had to find it or die. Charley laughed with me about that, but didn't sit down with us.

  The B and P had a pool room in the back. Charley asked me if I had played pool that week. I couldn't remember. I think because he had become so ringy he needed to keep moving, he walked back to the pool room.

  After awhile he came up behind me and reached over my head with the satchel in both hands and laid it in front of me on the bar. Then he sat down and joined the celebration as though he had just saved the very most deathless prose of all time from perdition.

  A lot of good people who know literature like this book. It has been a special favorite of academics. All kinds of symbolism has been found in it, all attributed to the writer. However, now that everyone knows the story of its birth, and how it was abandoned like a foundling in the trash bin of a saloon, maybe people will finally know once and for all that it is only what it is, a story surrounded by a lot of other stories about hard living.

  I believe that nature governs the behavior of all species, no matter how they make a living. The jaguar kills and eats in his way and the man in his way, whether as an individual or a nation, nobly or ignominiously. They are measured by the way they use their nature and it's natural to use it any way they can. This story came as naturally to the cowboy who wrote it as the storied men and animals lived it, and as the cowboy says, "That's all they are to it."

  1

  The young duck dove under the surface of the pool as the hawk swooped at his head. The duck was tired. He could not hide from hawk eyes in the clear pool. The hawk hovered confidently, following him.

  A full-grown jaguar stopped at the edge of the stream to watch them, his eyes bracing, still, peculating over his chances for a meal. The hawk dove again, made a snatching splash, clung a moment and then beat his wings to keep from settling in the water. He caught the air and flew again to rest and wait. The jaguar walked across the stream cooling his feet and lapping a drink as he moved. His business was the unhurried pursuit of three small deer who had watered at the pool that morning. He broke into a relaxed lope. He warmed and began to function with more efficiency and control. Soon he was racing after the deer with every faculty at its keenest; without overrunning the track or scent he caught each instant in his direction. He ran quietly, listening for the deer. He slowed when he heard them close ahead. He was sure how far ahead they were. He could not make a mistake so serious that his prey would get away. He had made sure his scent was frightening the deer. He controlled their flight when they were afraid. He was certain to kill one of the three. This would be no slow and careful stalking, but a quick dispatch of the life he needed. He did not concern himself at all with his prey's talent for escape. He circled the deer and went high to wait on a boulder over the track they were taking to escape him. As they approached him, two looked up and saw him and immediately knew what he was. They wheeled and fled in separate directions. The youngest and smallest was a doe close between them, depending on her older companions for safety. When they sprang away she raised her head to see the cause of their scattering. She saw her enemy falling to take her last moment of life. His weight caught her on the shoulders and crumbled her legs. He took her in his embrace and held her. He paused, raised his head and looked around. He made a low sound of pleasure, almost of affection, for the doe. The doe reached impotently with her front feet to raise herself. The jaguar viciously made her be still. He licked her neck and ears. He licked her eyes. His odor made her frantic again. He trapped her throat in his jaws and jerked it out with a shake of his big head. While she was dying he carefully drank at the fountain of her blood, and when she was still he licked her neck and ears, nose and eyes again. He took her neck in his jaws and carried her up to a shelter of rock beneath a precipice where he could see all avenues to the spot. He feasted on her there.

  A man had seen the drama of the hawk, the duck and the jaguar. He had seen the jungle move in the form of the jaguar. When the animal had become distinguishable, all the brilliance of the forest concentrated in him. The man was sitting high on the top of a cliff in the Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico in the dark shade of an alien tree. He had been waiting for afternoon shade to cover the face of the cliff so he could climb down and pluck an enjambre, a wild beehive, from the face. The time was spring and the hives were full of honey, though the Sierra was dry. He did not see the jaguar catch the doe. He did not see the hawk fly away with the duck. He was not moved by their business. He felt akin to all who made their living in the Sierra. Tienen dererho, they have a right to do what they do, he felt.

  The man was tall and wiry. He was strong. He tied tire treads on the soles of his feet with leather thongs that cost him more than he could afford. These huaraches were all the protection he had ever used or needed for getting from one place to another. His name was Adán Martinillo and few people in the world knew him. He did not care or worry about being known by anyone. He was a calm man who waited, watched, and hoped for dark, high, heavy clouds to come, day or night, early or late, with rain. He was a man who was a friend of lightning, friend of the torrent and the flood, and an enemy of death. He was friend to beasts and growing corn. He was enemy to hunger, cruelty, devastation, wasted fat, oil, and wood, to raucous women and wooing.

  He built a fire in the shade of the aliso when the sun had turned to a cooler angle and was shining flatly over the top of the mountain. He put the ends of green aliso branches into the edge of the fire and the soft, powdery scale of the bark caught and began to smoke a thick white smoke. He bundled the branches when the ends were in ember. He tied his reata, his rawhide lariat, to the cool end of the bundle and lowered it over the face of the precipice to the enjambre. He squatted on the lip of the cliff and let the smoking bundle swing under the hive. He smiled. The loaf of hive was large enough to hold a kilo of honey. When the fierce black bees began to swarm from the hive, he sat back out of sight of them and waited for the bees to become discouraged and leave the hive or to become drunk with smoke so they would not be inclined to sting. He did not like their stings. He had always been susceptible to stinging bees. Some men of these mountains did not need smoke. These men took a hive and walked home eating honey while the bees were still leaving the hive and angrily stinging.

  He saw the bees had scattered crazily away from the hive in self-preservation and were not returning. He coiled his reata and smothered the bundle of coals. He wrapped the reata around the trunk of the aliso and secured it. He laid a long, thick pole of aliso along the brink of the cliff so rock would not cut the reata. The scale of the bark on the log was slick as talcum. He straddled the reata, wrapped it across his chest and over a shoulder, and backed off the cliff, letting the reata slide through one hand. He lay the reata across the pole for his descent. The thin, four-strand, braided rawhide of the reata bit into the side of his neck. He lowered himself slowly, painfully, for the cliff was sheer. He kept his feet braced against the face and leaned against the reata. When he reached the hive he threw half hitches over the reata in front of him and tied himself to the face. He picked the enjambre carefully from the face so the feltlike hive would not crumble. The hive was larger
than it had appeared to be from fifty feet above. The flimsy house was barely able to contain the honey once he had detached it from the rock and changed its balance. He rested the hive in a flour sack and tied the loose top of the sack to his belt. He swung to a place on the face which provided him with foot- and handholds for his ascent. The reata slipped across the pole on the brink without catching or burning. He caught his holds and climbed quickly to the top.

  The man walked away from the shade of the aliso toward his home. He decided he would use the rest of the afternoon to work on the trinchera, the rock wall he was building on the pasture around his house. He could be near his wife the rest of the afternoon. He looked at the sky and shook his head. He had been watching clouds build in the east when he had been distracted by the hawk and the jaguar on their relentless business. He had hoped for lightning and the signs of torment which would have meant rain and life to the Sierra Madre. Now he saw the clouds had proven to be small, coquettish, flirting clouds with no weight and no more promise.

  His wife Lucrecia was less than an hour away from him. Now, there was a coquettish torment. She was probably standing by her kitchen window, working and angrily watching for him. Lucrecia had already given him four children, so he felt she had a right to be angry any time she pleased. For a month she had refused to sleep with him. He laughed to himself. "No!" she growled when he bunched himself for her. "You are repugnant to me!" She was still a girl. What could he do about that? He could only kiss her from across the room, pursing and opening his lips to hit the only nerve he could touch in her these days. Those black eyes under those black brows of hers shone with anger for him as they at times shone softly with love or mirth when she thought he wasn't looking. Lucrecia wasn't always angry. Only when he bunched himself for her.

  She had black hair, shiny with health. She was young, fresh, and beautiful to him, whether she watched him angrily or fondly. Under her black hair she wore golden earrings that flashed against her rosy face. If Adán dared, she opposed. She was a girl. She slept with great ease no matter how unquiet Adán might feel at bedtime. She slept still, like a child, thank God. She was so much a girl she didn't know how to love him yet; a man forty years old, a girl twenty and bearing children. She still put paint on her fingernails at times, though. Why did she do that if she was angry with him?