by Will Hobbs
Instantly, he could imagine one. Hung up high on a talus slope that fanned out from the base of the cliffs, a long white log was perched. Formerly a cottonwood tree, he realized, stripped of its branches and bleached out by the sun. Left there by ebbing floodwater. At exactly the same level, on the other side of the canyon and ahead, other logs testified to the same conclusion: this canyon could rage in a flash flood, and when it did, anything walking up its bed would be flushed out into the Colorado on a high-speed jet.
Clay passed the second canyon on his left. It might lead him up and out, but probably not. These canyons were so monumentally deep and narrow, most of them would likely cascade down to the Escalante in a series of pour-offs.
The wind blew harder still. The burro’s ears were swiveling faster than Clay had ever seen them, and Curly there in the little hollow on top of the load was yawning with anxiety.
“Let’s keep movin’,” Clay said. “Nothing else we can do. Getting scared won’t help. Try to think about something else.”
I haven’t named this horse yet, he thought. Russell said he’d never named him either, that I could give him whatever name I wanted. “Starbuck,” Clay said aloud. “After the little town where my mother and my uncle grew up. Steer us out of here, Starbuck. Take us up high where you came from, to the Escalante Mountains. But hurry if you please.”
The drops began to fall. They splashed sporadically in the shallow river with unlikely force, as if stones were being cast into the water. Several hit Clay’s hat, and one his face. That was a raindrop? It seemed about like a liquid baseball!
Lightning tore down between the walls with a whine like an incoming artillery shell in a war movie and he heard a Craack! that sounded like it should have been produced by the canyon wall itself splitting open. This is no movie, he told himself. This is not a movie.
Curly was running around under Starbuck’s feet, splashing in the shallow stream. The thunder must have rumbled him right off his perch. Clay dismounted and swept Curly up, got back on the horse with Curly in his lap.
There was the narrow opening of the third canyon, up ahead on the left. He knew it would lead him up onto the top. But how quickly? Should I take it or should I stay with the Escalante?
As yet the storm hadn’t broken. Keep scouring the sides of the Escalante for places to get up. Where? Where?
Now he stood at the mouth of the third canyon. It had a dirt bottom and a tiny creek flowing out of it. Box elder trees and cottonwoods. Didn’t he have to try it? How many side canyons could dump into the Escalante in fifty miles? All their waters would be combined this close to the Colorado. Wouldn’t he have a better chance in one smaller canyon, especially if he could go fast and get up and out? Sam Yazzie mentioned a cliff ruin up this canyon. How far? Could he climb to it? Could he reach it in time? Could the burro and the horse?
Don’t think anymore. Thunder’s rumbling, lightning’s snapping. Go. Go as fast as you can.
The rope back to Pal tightened. Pal was planting her feet. Now’s not the time! He kicked the mustang forward and dragged the burro on.
Pal wasn’t breathing right. She was wheezing and her sides were bellowing in and out. What could be wrong?
A half mile up the canyon, the sky broke loose with heavy, stabbing rain and the cliffs spouted waterfalls within a minute. The bottom of this narrow, narrow canyon was running a rich, muddy red.
Wrong choice, Clay realized. You don’t leave a wider canyon for a narrower one. The water’s going to come through here deep and fast real quick, and I don’t have time to get back to the river, or do I?
He turned them around, and that’s when he saw it through sheets of rain. The cliff dwelling hadn’t been visible from downcanyon. Safe haven if he could reach it! His eyes traced a possible route up through the ledges to the delicate cluster of cliff houses nested under an arching stone roof.
He heard a roar and saw a surging wall of water coming their way. Starbuck was already climbing.
With agility to rival the burro’s, the mustang scrambled and clawed his way up and out of reach of the floodwater now raging below them.
Up, up, up. At last they gained the safe, dry, chalky floor of the alcove. Trembling, Clay got off his horse and set the tiny dog down. Curly shook himself out and looked around. Clay spun as he realized Pal was lying down with her pack fully loaded. She’d hadn’t done that since the second day. “What’s wrong, Pal? We won’t go any farther today, okay? We should be safe here.”
The creek was racing, flooding, rising. Walls of red water overtook previous walls of red water. This was the sort of rain that carves these canyons, Clay realized. Higher and closer toward them the red waters rose. He pulled Pal back to her feet and unloaded her. The canyon walls reverberated with thunder and the rain slashed at the wall across from them for another half hour. It was strange to see the bright foliage of trees in the red torrent. Every few minutes entire trees would come floating by, and underneath them you could hear an ominous grinding as boulders walked their way down down to the Escalante. Even though his mind told him they were safe where they were, his heart pounded with terror and excitement.
The rain quit suddenly. Still, the waters rose until finally they crested safely below the ruin. For a thousand years this place had remained intact. A thousand years and an afternoon. Thank you, Ancient Ones.
He could breathe easily now, he could look around.
Clay crawled into the little rooms and looked out the keyhole-shaped doorways to the flooding creek. Suddenly he felt himself back in time, and a chill ran through him. Others had sheltered in this same place a thousand years before and survived floods like the one he’d just witnessed.
At the rear of the alcove he found pictures left by those long-vanished cliff dwellers painted in white pigment on the rock. Handprints, trapezoidal human figures with antennas like spacemen, animal drawings that looked like deer or maybe sheep. He found spirals chipped into the stone.
Pal was lying down again. She was breathing heavily, panting. Obviously she was sick—it must have been all that clover she ate. She’d always seemed fat, but now she looked bloated like those cows you hear about that get into feed that’s too rich and then bloat up with gas until they burst and die. The only thing you could do was lance them with a knife, if you knew how, and let the gas out. But he wouldn’t know where to begin!
Curly was sniffing around Pal’s backside, and now Clay could see that Pal had one of those back legs up in the air and was kicking the air with it. Her sides were heaving and she was breathing harder, groaning. She was going to die in a minute! He pulled out his pocket knife—what was he going to do?
Curly seemed awful excited there, by Pal’s tail, and Clay took a look.
“Holy cow,” he whispered. A little burro face and two little hoofs were coming his way out Pal’s backside, all wrapped up in a filmy sack, alive and wide-eyed.
16
By morning the baby burro was on its feet frisking around. He would leap suddenly into the air, then come down in a whole other direction and gallop off. Clay grabbed him to keep him from prancing over the edge. His long ears and huge head seemed all out of proportion to his body and gave him a comical appearance. Mike, have I got some news for you, Clay was telling himself. Guess what Hubcap Willie didn’t tell us about Pal, maybe didn’t even know. There can’t be a cuter baby animal in all of creation. You should see the white rings around his eyes, his white mouth, his little hoofs.
Curly was licking the baby burro’s face, freshly wet with milk.
“I just had an idea,” Clay announced. “Ito means ‘little one’ in Spanish. Let’s call you Burrito! Little burro!”
Below, the creek still ran red, but had subsided nearly to its normal trickle. But the going would be more difficult now. Not all of the rubble had been swept downcanyon. He wanted to find his way out of this canyon and up onto that open country above. That wasn’t going to be easy, especially with the baby burro. Burrito didn’t seem to be able
to predict which way his legs were going to go.
The backpack! I’ll bet he’d fit in the backpack!
When Clay was all set to go, he tried it. Sure enough, Burrito made a perfect fit. Clay shouldered the pack; it was quite a sensation to look out of the corner of your eye and see that face and those ears. Burrito’s legs were held so snugly, he didn’t even bother to kick.
Less than a mile up the canyon, where the top of a talus slope met the slickrock, Clay found a horse ladder angling up to a trail that clearly led out of the canyon. He walked his string of horse and burro up it, and within an hour he found himself on a sea of rolling white slickrock on top of the canyons.
When the footing was good, Clay could give Burrito his legs and let him frolic his way toward Escalante, nursing along the way. The first day, the baby burro tired easily, and Clay mostly carried him in the backpack. The second day Clay was able to ride his pony half the time while Burrito walked, and by the third day, when they had to be nearing Escalante at last, Burrito had complete command of his legs and had no trouble keeping up. As if for his own pride, and just to be with the little burro, Curly had taken to his feet as well.
The whole while Clay had been paralleling the road that led from Escalante down to the Hole-in-the Rock crossing, where Sam Yazzie had told about the Mormons lowering wagons down to the river a long time ago. Occasionally he could see the plumes of dust from the pickups. But he didn’t want to follow a dusty road into Escalante. He wanted to come into town reading the contours of the land.
He was following a wash upstream that was leading him out of the slickrock country and into the grassy valley he had glimpsed ahead at the foot of the mountains. A couple of big-eyed yearling cows watched him go by, then clattered downstream.
Clay’s spirits soared as he imagined himself meeting his uncle after all this time. He sat up a little straighter in the saddle and tugged at his worn black hat. Funny, he’d even forgotten about it. The hat had become a part of him. Now it was ringed with the hammered nickels, the silver buffaloes. At his neck, the red coral; on his wrist, the beautiful bracelet. Riding toward Escalante on his painted pony with the many-colored saddle blanket and the silver bridle, he felt like he was riding on clouds. “Bik’é hozhoni,” he said aloud.
After all the miles he’d come, and all the turns in all the canyons, nothing could have prepared him for the suddenness, the shock of turning a bend in the wash and meeting, right there, a girl on horseback.
Clay reined in Starbuck. Curly too stopped in his tracks, just as dumbfounded. Right in front of him, a girl on a palomino horse. Under a gray Stetson, a girl with a single long braid down her back. A girl in a western shirt and jeans with an open, pretty face and brown eyes, and a smile on that face quickly replacing her surprise.
Suddenly three black-and-white Border collies came racing down the wash from behind her, barking protectively and enthusiastically as if to make up for having been off chasing a rabbit when they should have been out in front. She called them off and they went about the business of getting acquainted with Curly, who being no fool, had quickly shown his belly in the presence of a superior force. Along Burrito’s spine, the hairs were all standing straight on end.
The girl’s eyes took in the painted pony underneath him, the packed burro, the baby burro, and looked back at him inquisitively.
“Where you headed?” she asked, and let her horse take a few steps closer, until there was almost no distance between them.
“Esca—” He tried to say Escalante, but the word tripped over itself in his dry throat and fell short. “Escalante,” Clay said, clearing his throat. He glimpsed her face again, those eyes, and he saw clouds and mesas, stars, the desert fresh after a rain, a girl riding a rainbow over all of it…. His heart was beating madly in his chest, and he knew if he tried to speak again he wouldn’t be able to speak at all. He couldn’t stand it. If only he’d had a little warning. Anything he was going to say would be wrong, he knew it. Alarms were sounding in his head: you’re about to make a fool of yourself, you’re about to make a fool of yourself, you’re about to make a fool of yourself….
She sensed his extreme reticence, and her eyes went back to the packed burro and the baby burro.
Clay was grasping at straws, and it suddenly occurred to him that his best chance of survival was in playing a man of few words.
“You’ve come a long way?” she asked.
“Yep.”
“I guess you’ve already told me where you’re heading.” She seemed to be saying she knew the code, you don’t ask a man of few words much when you meet him by chance on the trail.
Her dogs were looking up at her, wondering what next.
“You haven’t by any chance seen some steers?” she asked him.
“Yep,” he said. “Two.” If he would have thought of it he could have said where, but he was responding so cautiously it was hard to get that many words out without checking each one first to see if wasn’t going to turn on him.
Her eyebrows lifted under that gray Stetson. Dark eyebrows, dark crescent moons lying down. “We’re missing two. I’ve been searching all morning—I’ve been searching for a couple of days.”
Clay swallowed, and guessed he could manage a few words. “Two’s what I seen.”
He’d surprised himself with “I seen.” He never talked like that. Now she was looking at him again. He shouldn’t have said anything. He should’ve held up two fingers.
She seemed to be waiting for him to speak again, and so did Curly, who was looking at him oddly as well, curious perhaps about his grammar. Suddenly it hit him that she was waiting for more about the steers, and he hiked his thumb back over his shoulder. “Down this wash,” he managed. “Just a few minutes ago.”
Her eyes lingered. It felt like she was looking at his hatband and the Navajo bracelet on his wrist. He couldn’t tell. Barely a glimpse of her and he was lost in clouds and mesas and canyons.
“Much obliged,” she said, and with a hand signal to her dogs that sent them running on the scout downstream, she gave him a smile and clucked to her horse, and was passing him by.
“Same here,” Clay replied; then as soon as he said it, he knew it sounded stupid. What was he obliged for? As he clucked to his own horse, he thought, I don’t even cluck right. I sounded like I’m calling a chicken, and I only hope she didn’t hear that. When he thought he might be safely out of sight he held up and glanced back, and sure enough she was gone. Now he knew what he was obliged for. He was obliged for the opportunity to make a fool of himself, which he’d managed despite all odds. How difficult would it have been to have a simple conversation with her?
Clay rode along not even noticing that the wash was giving way to open lands and ranch houses here and there, corrals and barns, or even that he was following a dirt road now. He could have asked her name for starters. When she asked if he’d come a long way, he could have answered “Monument Valley” and it would have been a whole lot to say in just two words. Then she would have started to ask him about his trip and he could have told her some. He could have told her about Burrito being born, she would have liked that.
Then he remembered the first thing he should have asked her. He needn’t have worried about talking about himself. He should have asked about his uncle. Probably she’d heard of him. She lived around here!
Where she lived, he’d never know. He didn’t even know her name. Mike would have learned her name. Mike would have had a conversation with her. If Mike had seen what had just happened, Mike would have razzed him no end. Well, Mike wasn’t here. Good thing.
When Escalante came into sight, his heart soared despite himself. Forget her! What about Uncle Clay? The very idea, after all the places he’d been, that Uncle Clay might be right here, right now … He could feel his uncle’s presence.
Probably he couldn’t even remember her face. No, there it was, clear as a bell. Tanned from being out in the sun, bright smile, brown eyes tinged with yellow, dark eyebrows almo
st black.
Forget her! Think about Uncle Clay! Well, maybe she hadn’t thought he was a complete fool. What had he actually said? Very little … He smiled to himself, and then his smile turned into a grimace as he heard himself saying “Yep … Yep … Yep …”
As he entered the town through back streets, Clay had the feeling something about it was different from any town he’d seen before. What was it? It had the look of an old town, lots of old brick, two-story houses, but that wasn’t it. The streets looked much wider than regular city streets. It was the width of the streets and the size of the lots. That was it, and the huge gardens and chicken coops in the backyards. You couldn’t really call them yards. Each lot was more like a miniature farm. Goats here, a milk cow there, rabbits in cages, sheds everywhere with lumber and hay and coils of wire fencing and all kinds of who-knows-what. There were lots of little kids around, and some of them stopped playing to watch him and his animals go by.
When he reached the last house before the paved street that ran through town, he asked a pair of legs that were sticking out from under the front end of an old truck if he might get some directions.
A bald head streaked with engine grease swung out by a wheel, and said “Shoot.”
Clay said, “I’m lookin’ for a man name of Clay Jenkins. Can you tell me where he is?”
A funny expression came over the man’s face, and he said, “Clay Jenkins, rodeo star?”
“That’s the man.”
For some reason, the man thought this was amusing. He had a stupid grin on his face as he got up from under the truck and wiped his hands on his overalls. “See that big building over yonder?”
“On the main street?”
“No, the biggest one in town, two streets back. That’s where he lives.” As he spoke, he looked Burrito over, and the packed burro and Curly, and he thought something was terribly amusing.
“Do you know if he’s there now?”
“Yes sir, I believe he is.”
“Much obliged,” Clay said abruptly, and left the man standing there enjoying his chuckle.