The Big Wander

by Will Hobbs

  When he started up again in the late afternoon, Clay thought he’d try saving Curly all those thousands of steps, and set him in the little hollow in the tarp atop Pal’s load. Curly could see the advantages right away. He never even thought about jumping off.

  Clay walked on as the late light erased the midday glare and brought out the true and vivid colors of Copper Canyon: blue-green, gray-blue, purple even, with a brilliant scarlet red glowing in the highest formations. “Vermilion” he’d once heard that shade of red called. He passed through the gap between No Man’s Mesa and Nakai Mesa and started down into Nakai Canyon in the dusk, searching the bottoms of the gullies for water. The July day held on and the dusk lingered, but he found no water. The canyon was dry.

  When darkness all but caught him he had to quit the search. “Dry camp,” he announced to his companions. “The good part is, we’re almost halfway to Paiute Creek. We’re making good time.”

  Clay lifted Curly down from the burro. Faster than Clay could even register on what was happening and reach for the lead rope, Pal took off clattering down the canyon.

  “No!” Clay yelled after the burro. “Pal, no, what are you doing?”

  He was so angry at the burro. He scrambled after her as fast as he could. Panic ripped him as he realized how fast Pal was disappearing into the night. Pal had everything! The last bit of water, all the food, the map, the survival kit inside the backpack—everything.

  “Pal!” he called as he ran. “Pal, come back!” He was running blindly toward the sound of her hoofs. Suddenly, his shin struck a rock and he was lying in pain on the hard, dry creek bottom.

  It took long minutes before the pain would clear. That ball of white was licking his face. “I just hope I haven’t broken my leg,” he told the dog. “What if I’ve broken my leg?”

  He was breathing hard and shaking through and through. He thought of his brother, but he’d put himself beyond Mike’s help and beyond all help.

  He knew the night couldn’t be this cold. He was going to scare himself to death. “Calm down,” he told himself. “Just calm down.”

  At last he could try the leg. It was going to be okay.

  I’m still in bad trouble, he thought. Why’d you get so angry? Why’d you act so stupid? Settle down. Don’t panic and do something even worse. What were you doing running around in the dark?

  Think about the morning. Think about what you’re going to do if you can’t find the burro. How long can you last without water?

  He sat back down and the dog nestled into his lap.

  You’re going to have to find water, Clay told himself. Where can you find it for sure? Think of the map. You studied it enough you should know it by heart.

  The San Juan River. All these canyons between Oljeto and Navajo Mountain flow north into the San Juan River, on its way to join the Colorado River. The San Juan’s the river you and Mike crossed upstream on that suspension bridge at Mexican Hat.

  If only Hubcap Willie had got off at Mexican Hat the way he was supposed to, he never would have ended up taking the truck. None of this would have happened.

  Why didn’t I just go home with Mike?

  What if I can’t find the burro?

  Clay had all night to try to fight back his fear, to regret and shiver and think. If the days are long the nights have to be short, he kept telling himself. I’ll drink my fill at the river, then head back for Oljeto when the sun’s starting down. Jog in the dusk, go slowly by starlight if possible. Jog through dawn into the morning.

  He couldn’t sleep for shivering, and he couldn’t talk the fear out of his bones. The night went on and on and on.

  At first light Clay started moving down the bottom of the canyon. At least he was moving. He scanned the slopes on the sides so he wouldn’t pass by Pal accidentally.

  All slickrock, the canyon bottom showed no hoofprints. He could only hope Pal had come this way, hadn’t somehow doubled back. At any rate he was closing some of the distance between himself and the San Juan River before the sun started broiling again. Why hadn’t he thought more about how hot it would be? It had all seemed so simple back in Oljeto.

  He stopped to look at a curious structure on the left-hand side, a stairway of sorts leading from the canyon bottom up to the first ledge. It was made of piled-up rocks and a couple of bleached juniper logs. It hadn’t been used in some time, but he thought it must have been built for burros or mules or horses.

  He walked briskly now. He had to get to the river as soon as he could. How many miles?

  Down the canyon, droppings. A pile of droppings on the slickrock. Pal droppings, fresh ones! A pile of dung never looked so beautiful.

  At first he thought he’d heard a raven, but he listened again. A frog croaking, wasn’t it? The brown question marks above Curly’s eyes rose as he listened also, to the intermittent and eerily amplified croaking of a single frog. Clay broke into a run. Two bends down the canyon he spied a long line of greenery on the left side, about man-high on a ledge. Grasses and ferns grew above the water-stained slickrock. “Water!” he yelled to Curly.

  The seam dripped water all along that ledge. He could drink it one drop at a time if he had to. Along the canyon’s slickrock floor it didn’t run deep enough that you could collect it.

  Still running, he turned a corner and found his burro, fully packed, standing beside a pothole the size of a bathtub with water flowing in and out of it. Pal was browsing on a patch of grass that grew in a sandy spot, and she had a long red wildflower between her lips. Her tail was switching and her long ears swiveling. Those lustrous brown eyes and white eyebrows seemed to be saying, “Welcome to paradise. Where have you been?”

  Clay grabbed her lead rope, then threw himself down on the slickrock and began to drink. Looking into the pothole, he could see diving beetles, the kind with one oar on either side. They were stroking their way down toward the bottom. Pal’s face was reflected in the water—a beautiful sight. He felt so thankful. The water sure tasted good. Curly was lapping away right next to him.

  Clay took an extra wrap on that lead rope as he stood up. From here on out he would never let it go unless Pal was tied or hobbled. He began to scratch the insides of the burro’s ears the way she liked. “So you lost confidence in me, is that what happened? Well thanks for finding the water, Pal.”

  He found an alcove for the heat of the day, a room-size shady spot under a roof of stone. He unpacked the burro and opened some Vienna sausages, broke out some crackers. “Turn back or go ahead?” he asked the dog. Then he spread out the map again. He already knew the answer.

  11

  It was starting to cloud up, and Clay was free to come out into the open. He began to think he might be able to climb out of Nakai Canyon this day. He returned to the spring and drank again, then filled his canteens. Barely breaking the surface, Pal put her lips to the water and drank. Clay had never seen such a dainty drinker. “Let’s take a bath before we go,” he told his companions.

  “Mighty nice,” he said, settling into the cool water. “All the comforts of home.” He inspected the shin with the bad bruise. It was sure enough ugly, but the swelling was going down.

  Curly came close, and Clay reached out for him. The tiny dog’s nails dug for traction on the rock. “Come on in, Curly. Hey, you hardly weigh anything. C’mon, you could use a cool-down.”

  He placed Curly in a shallow spot like a shelf in the tub. Curly stood still, wet up to his neck, and the brown patches above his eyes seemed to be asking forlornly, “Why are you doing this to me?” Clay scratched him behind his ears and along his back, then lifted him back onto the slickrock. With his white fur plastered against his sides and his tail so long and skinny, he looked more like a rat than anything. Clay couldn’t help laughing. “I guessed you were some kind of a poodle-cross. Now I know, what with!”

  It wasn’t hard to see he’d robbed the little dog’s self-respect, and as soon as Curly was done shaking himself out, Clay apologized. It took some coaxing but at l
ast the dog came to the edge of the pool and give Clay’s face a few licks. The heat of the desert quickly restored his curls and his dignity.

  In an hour’s time Clay was standing once again at the horse ladder he’d discovered in the morning. Scanning the cliffs, he traced a route up through the ledges and onto Paiute Mesa. He hauled rocks and stacked them to make the ramp passable once again. Before he started up he thought to fold up his map and stick it in his shirt pocket along with his compass. Clay fished his survival kit out of the backpack and stuck it in his other shirt pocket. “Just in case,” he said aloud. After he’d slung one of his canteens around his neck, he was ready. “And Curly, I don’t think you should ride until we get to the top. I don’t want you to slide off—there’s a lot of cliffs up there.”

  Pal scaled the horse ladder without hesitation and it was a marvelous thing to see. Then the burro began clawing her way up through the ledges with the confidence of a mountain goat.

  Here and there they paused to rest. The clouds were boiling up right out of the turquoise sky, monumentally tall, and were starting to turn dark. “They might mean business,” Clay said. “I’m glad we aren’t way down there on the bottom of the canyon.”

  Thunder began to rumble inside the clouds and the wind began to blow. After all the relentlessly hot days he’d seen since he first came to Monument Valley, it was pleasant to feel the wind on his cheek and to listen to thunder, to enjoy shade out in the open and watch the clouds begin to spill rain in tall columns. Even if the rain did separate into streamers and dry up before it hit the ground, it made a welcome sight and he’d take dry rain any day he could get it.

  When at last Clay reached the top and the flat expanse of Paiute Mesa, he was pleased to find it grassy and sprinkled with piñon pines and junipers. Closer than ever, Navajo Mountain commanded a good piece of the sky, close enough he could make out individual trees along its skyline. Tall timber grew up there, and he could see why: the rain up there was falling wet instead of dry.

  Pal deserved all the grazing she wanted, and it looked for now like she intended to eat up the whole mesa top. He fastened her hobbles exactly the way Weston had shown him, and let her graze. She couldn’t go far. Then he threw himself down on the rimrock and took a good rest with Curly by his side.

  I’m getting close now, he thought. All I have to do is cross the mesa and drop into Paiute Creek. I’m a long way from Seattle, that’s for sure, and practically shouting distance from Uncle Clay. “Make me proud,” his mother had written. That’s exactly what I’m going to do, he thought.

  When he woke from his nap the sun was dropping low and casting glory all around. On the far side of Nakai Canyon and tucked under the rimrock, a golden two-room ruin of the Ancient Ones caught his eye. In the eastern sky, like colossal Portuguese-men-of-war, boiling white and black thunderheads trailed streamers of evaporating rain lit up in pinks and oranges and reds, golds and lavenders and violets. Shafts of light pierced the lowest layers and illuminated the domes and towers of the redlands below. The mesas were glowing vividly purple.

  The whole world seemed to drop off in front of him. He could see in the distance the shadow-casting buttes of Monument Valley and far, far beyond, a dark mountain range to the southeast. To the northeast the San Juan River ran in a winding green strip toward Mexican Hat. Set back from the river above a bulwark of tall cliffs, a forested plateau rose above the canyon of the San Juan and pitched up to mountains so high that a patch of snow still lingered above timberline.

  All of it glowing and shifting and changing in a bath of colors—no two moments were the same and each, it seemed, would make a memory for a lifetime. This is why I’ve come, he thought. More than anything else, this is why.

  If only I had someone to share it with.

  Under way, walking into the evening, he let his mind drift. Pal stopped to graze where she found it to her liking and Clay didn’t care to hurry her along, although he did keep a death grip on her lead rope. He was thinking of all the things he had saved up to tell Marilyn the next time he wrote. As he walked into the gathering dusk he could almost see her. Well, he couldn’t remember her face exactly, only her hair. In fact he couldn’t remember her face at all and that bothered him. If he tried harder it would come back.

  Suddenly though, he recalled her perfume. He could smell those intoxicating flowers as vividly as if she were walking alongside him. It was easy to picture himself taking her in his arms. As he walked alongside the burro, he saw himself doing just that. He would take her in his arms and then he would kiss her. How perfect everything would be if Marilyn were with him right now.

  A great horned owl hooted in the moonlight two, three, four times, and then after a pause, four times again. Clay asked the little dog, riding the pack and bobbing at eye-level alongside, “What’s he saying, Curly? You can almost make it out. There, I’ve got it. ‘You, you-oo, you, you … Love you, you-oo, you, you.’”

  He found himself crossing slickrock terraces rolling like ocean waves. Before long the slickrock was cratered with deep potholes, and in the deeper ones he found several feet of standing water. Not far away stood an old shelter made of poles and roofed with tree branches. A sheep camp! Surely, a sign of the main camp! He must be getting close!

  Next to the shelter Clay found a small corral made of poles and he dragged Pal in there, very much against her wishes. Then he cooked up a big can of pork and beans and fried up some biscuits. Tomorrow would be the day! After supper he visited the corral and Pal swiveled one ear forward, then the other to have them scratched. While he scratched an ear, Clay was trying to pick out a tune on the Midnight Flyer—“Cast Your Fate to the Wind.”

  Evidently Pal didn’t think the performance up to her standards. Hubcap Willie had probably been a virtuoso harmonica player “among other things.” The burro took Clay’s neckerchief by her teeth and took a step back. Clay felt himself losing his balance and took the harmonica in his mouth, bracing himself with both hands against the fence. He was eyeball-to-eyeball with Pal, and he thought he saw a glint in the burro’s eye. “Okay, Pal,” he said, the words turning into notes through the harmonica, “you can turn me loose now.”

  The burro tugged a degree harder, and for the longest time Clay was suspended there, with one leg back in the air for balance like a ballet dancer. Finally Pal tugged a fraction more, and Clay felt the corral giving, and then giving way altogether as he fell down in a clatter of falling poles. The whole side of the corral was on the ground. “Okay, Pal, you win,” he said, as he dusted himself off. “Let’s not keep you in here tonight after all.”

  * * *

  Bound for Paiute Creek in the morning, Clay could feel his strength and his confidence in his muscles and his bones. It felt like he was taking ten-foot strides.

  At the bottom of the creek he was faced with a decision. Turn up the canyon toward the plateau where it originated, or turn down the canyon toward the San Juan? Weston hadn’t known where exactly to find the camp; he hadn’t been in Paiute Creek for over fifty years.

  To the river, Clay decided at last. The sheep must need water. The creekbed was dry. So where could you water sheep better than at a river?

  The canyon soon widened out to a half mile or more, and here and there the water popped up from underground and flowed awhile on the streambed before disappearing in the gravels again. He sighted four hogans up ahead in the sandy flats below the cliffs and his heart began to drum wildly. For some reason he started singing “The Loco-Motion.” That didn’t seem right after a minute, and so he switched to “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

  Unfortunately the hogans were abandoned, and seemingly long ago. A shade-break no longer provided shade, and a few logs on the ground in a ring barely resembled a corral.

  He could hear the river before he could see it, and he knew he must be approaching the sheep camp and the big moment with Uncle Clay.

  Every step brought him closer to … disappointment, as it turned out. No sheep camp, no u
ncle, only a boulder field where the canyon dumped into the river, and the rapid roaring where the river spilled over the boulders.

  “Well, guys,” Clay announced. “Nobody here. Stick with me, Wrong Turn Lancaster.”

  He tied Pal up to a driftwood log, then unpacked her. Close to the river would be a good place to camp for the night. When he was done with the work, he stripped and walked out onto the sand beach. His toes felt good in the sand. Then he waded out into the river and swam with powerful strokes, playing in the sandy brown San Juan like an otter. Curly was barking all the while on the beach. “Perfect temperature!” Clay shouted. “Come on in, Curly!”

  As Clay pulled on his clothes it occurred to him that there just might be fish in those sandy waters. Catfish maybe. “Fresh dinner tonight!” he shouted. “I’m a pretty good fisherman,” he confided to the dog and the burro. “Well, not pretty good, I mean awfully good. You should see the salmon and steelhead I’ve caught in my day.

  “You may be wondering where I’ve been keeping my fishing pole. Well, an ace fisherman like me doesn’t need one. I’m pretty handy with a hand line, and I just happen to have some fifteen-pound-test, hooks, and sinkers in my survival kit right here in my pocket.

  “I’m sure you won’t mind waiting a few minutes, Pal, while I catch us some supper. No comment? I bet you can’t even hear me over that rapid. We’re not talking about a can of beans, guys, we’re talking about fresh fish. Doesn’t that sound good?”

  The dog seemed enthusiastic but the burro was baffled.

  “Come to think of it, Pal, you don’t look like a big fish eater.”

  From his supplies Clay broke out a long, rock-hard hunk of wine-soaked salami and sawed off a piece. It was his mother’s ceremonial gift to him and Mike, for their big trip, as she left for Guatemala. She’d presented them with one as they set out on backpack trips for as long as he could remember, and they’d always joked over who was going to have to carry the thing, it was so heavy. “Bait,” he explained to Curly, and sawed off a second hunk for himself, a third for Curly. “Don’t want to eat too much of this stuff, now—you might get drunk on it.”