by Edward Abbey
He heard the shout again. Stop! someone was shrieking at him—stop! stop!
Burns kept going; this time he felt the bullet coming at him, headed for his chest or belly. He was crouching forward, running and stumbling, the horse lunging after him; he was very much afraid he would be hit but the bullet passed smoothly and swiftly a few inches above his head, streaking by, transparent and innocent, to be lost in the space beyond. A second later he heard the sound of the shot, as futile and harmless as the shouting; he could not help laughing a little.
He was in the trees now, and the mare with him, and both of them alive and excited and eager, intoxicated by danger. He scrambled upward through the small perfect aspens, heedless of the film of sweat clouding his eyes, panting, gasping for breath, half dragging the horse and then nearly being run down as the horse leaped and halted, lunged and scrambled and fell and leaped forward again with him, after him, just behind him, her hot exhalations fanning his neck, her nose shoving at his shoulderblades, her front hooves clipping at his heels. The wind whipped the dust around them— he could smell rock salt and flint, the smoke of rotting fern, the pinetar from below—and lashed at the small trees and spangled them, horse and man, with small dry dead golden aspen leaves.
The slope was too steep to climb without aid; Burns pulled himself up from tree to tree, like climbing a ladder. The mare thrashed and scrambled around behind him, then beside him, snorting and driveling at the lips, her eyes glaring, rolling furiously, mad with panic and fury and the wild happiness of violent effort. She leaped ahead and the cowboy held and belayed her when she stopped and while she struggled for new footing from which to leap again; he kept her from leaving the earth and rolling, falling, down into the canyon beneath them. Somehow he did it, though he knew it was ridiculous and impossible, an outrage of reason and common sense and justice and even natural law. It was all senseless and crazy, but nothing could stop them; both he and the horse were possessed by a mania for ascent.
Five hundred feet to the rim: they kept on going.
They were among and above the great pink cliffs; out of the corner of an eye, through the screen of leaves, Burns saw a hawk soaring over a lake of space a hundred fathoms deep. Yet the hawk was beneath him—he was looking down on it, seeing the stately motionless wings from above. He had a moment of giddiness before he turned his back on the hovering hawk and the blue depths of the canyon; his throat was burning and dry, his eyes tormented by his own dripping sweat, his lungs and heart cracking, expanding, collapsing, as if a vise of iron were closing in around his ribs, stifling his breath, seeming to threaten to break him—but he kept climbing, kept coaxing and dragging the mare and stumbling out of the way when she leaped after him, trampling on his broken heels. He didn’t think about what he was doing or why; he kept climbing. He couldn’t think: his brain seemed powerless, overwhelmed by the frenzy and passion of his whole body—fiery nerves, quivering muscle, the racing blood.
And then they came, suddenly, to a place where there could be no more climbing.
They stood on the lowest of the great horizontal escarpments, at the base of a sheer ledge forty feet high; the rock here was soft, white and rotten, and overhanging, impossible to climb. For a while Burns would not believe it. He stared angrily up at the rock, trying to see through his unsettled, unfocussed eyes; the mare stood beside him, shaking and jerking as if in a fit, her foamy flanks steaming in the cold air, the wind stirring her black mane and sweeping the ragged burr-tangled disorder of her tail. Burns glared at the powdery white rock, picked off a chunk of it and threw it to the ground.
But at last he gave in and turned south, following the contour of the escarpment, which climbed slightly as he tended south but revealed no opening, ravine or less-than-vertical construction up which he might lead, drag or carry a horse. Gradually he regained his breathing powers, the vise around his chest weakened and faded, the climbing madness evaporated, and he found his senses recovering their alertness, his brain functioning again. They must know, he was thinking, they must know almost exactly where I am now. The ones up above must know. All of them. They’re waiting for me—when I climb that last ledge I’ll find a rifle bore staring at me.
He heard an airplane; not near yet but coming fast, straight toward him. He stopped where he was, deep in a jungle of harsh dry scrub oak which almost but not quite concealed him and the mare, and waited for the machine to roar over and past.
There was a rush of air, the smell of gasoline and hot metal—Burns saw the plane go by, in its wake the leaves of the scrub oak shaking, twisting, tearing free from their stems. At the same moment the mare whinnied, jerking at the reins, lunging backward, and slid several feet down the slope, dragging the cowboy with her. The overturned stones sparkled with hoarfrost.
“Damn you!” Burns cried; he lashed the mare once across the face with the reins. “Hold still or by God—” The mare stared at him with her brown blood-flecked eyes, shocked, frightened. Burns rose slowly to his feet, rubbing one knee, watching the yellow wings of the plane lift and turn among the crags to the south. “Take it easy, girl,” he said; “for chrissake take it easy.”
The airplane was coming back. Burns tore off a branch of the scrub oak and jammed the butt of it under the bedroll, partially camouflaging the saddle; he broke a second and laid it over the bedroll and saddlebags. He had no more time; the airplane was boring through the air toward him. He snubbed the bridle reins around the bole of a shrub, crouched down and waited.
Again the machine roared almost directly over him, trailing fumes and turbulent air. Burns brushed away a dead leaf that fell and hung from the brim of his hat. He swore silently, feeling indignant, humiliated, terribly exposed and insecure. He pulled back the hammer of the rifle and waited for the plane to return.
But it didn’t; he watched it soar northward, gaining altitude rapidly, then bank to the west, turn and fall away—a shining yellow phantasm now in all that blue space—toward the valley, the river, the dust-hazed obscurity of the city. Bums got to his feet, spitting, hauled at the reins and started himself and the mare on through the chaparral toward the south.
The sky was full of flying objects. He saw something come over the rim of the mountain in utter baffling silence, a flash of silvery metal moving so fast that light and distance betrayed the eye: the thing seemed to move in a series of thrusts, pulses, like a falling star. A jet plane: Burns watched it score westward in its immaculate geometrically-accurate flight; it was nearly gone before he heard the sound of its passage overhead—a thin metallic scream, demoniacal and tortured, like the wail of some Hellhound ghost.
He found himself shivering. He blinked the dust and surprise out of his eyes, wiped his nose, and stepped ahead again on the heavy dull sliding skin of the mountain, forcing his way through the thickets of oak, around yucca and Spanish bayonet and the erratic growths of prickly pear spawned by the rocks. He was thirsty again, and hungry, and chilled by his evaporating sweat.
A break in the ledge: here erosion had formed a passageway, a series of gradual setbacks, up through the first ledge to the pines and aspens crowded on the second. Burns led Whisky up this opening, a distance of fifty yards or so, and then continued his traverse on the next shelf of rock, proceeding parallel to and not much more than a hundred feet below the rim of the mountain. He followed the base of the cliff, going south: the rock wall rose up on his left, the slope fell away steeply to his right, ending on the brink of the ledge below. Now and then he paused to listen, to look back and into the canyons below and up to the skyline ahead. He saw no one, heard nothing except the cawing of a magpie somewhere in the pines below, the drone of remote airplanes, the persistent shrill keening of cicada.
His feet hurt him; the heel of one boot was gone, the bent nails gnawing at the hide of his heel. Occasionally something struck him in the small of the back—a hot aching surge of pain, fierce but brief; he learned to anticipate it and each time the pain hit him, was almost ready for it.
He
stopped under the sheltering gloom of a yellow pine, letting the reins fall, and took a few swallows of water from the canteen. The water sharpened his hunger: he loosened the rope around the bedroll, reached inside with his knife until he found the meat and sawed off a chunk of the round and ate it as it was, raw and bloody and cool. He wiped his hands clean on Whisky’s rump, after he had eaten, lashed the bedroll tight and secure, had another short drink, and was ready to go on. And then he heard a man’s voice above him, coming out of the sky:
“Floyd—come here!”
Burns ducked back under the overhanging wall. The mare watched him in surprise, the reins dangling to the ground in front of her. Very slowly and carefully, muffling the operation with his body as best he could, Burns cocked the rifle again. From the ledge above his head he heard a heavy body crashing and struggling through the brush, then a second voice:
“Whaddeya see?”
There was no immediate reply. Burns could imagine the first man putting a finger to his lips, then pointing below. There was silence, then the faint hiss of whispering. Burns strained to hear but could make out nothing but the repeated word “horse.” But that was enough. He pressed his body back against the dry, granular rock, waiting, his right forefinger on the trigger.
There was a silence again, the men above also waiting, thinking, planning. Finally, after several dead minutes had passed—the sun was now sinking far down into the sky on the west-southwest—Burns heard the second voice, loud but faintly uncertain:
“All right, you. Burns. We know you’re down there. You can’t get away. Put your hands up and step beside that horse.”
Burns smiled; looking up under his sagging hatbrim he could see the gray rock bending over him, the sky, the top of the pine tree. The mare was still watching him—pointing. She took one tentative step toward him and he scowled savagely at her. She stopped; he noticed for the first time that she was bleeding on the inside of her right foreleg—a dark slow-spreading stain of blood and dust.
The voice from above: “Come on, step out! We know you’re down there. Come on or we’ll come down after you.”
This made Burns smile again. He waited.
The men above went into another whispered consultation; presently one of them tramped away to the south—Burns could hear the popping and exploding of dead twigs and branches. The sounds died away gradually as he waited. Another spell of silence. He began to worry about the men below, the pursuers: they could not be far away now, unless they had given up. He had to doubt that, and yet he did not dare move. He had to wait, find out what these two fellows above were up to. Although it was not difficult to guess: one was waiting above, watching the horse; the second had gone on along the rim looking for him, or looking for a point from which he could see back and under the overhanging rock. This presented no immediate danger because the ledge curved to the east, away from the cowboy. Or perhaps the man was making for a point of descent, so as to be able to approach Burns on his own level. This gave him plenty to think about as he waited there, crouching under the rock and listening, staring below over the brink of the first ledge into the complex of pinnacles and ridges and canyons below.
Beyond the canyon mouths the long broad slope of earth sank toward the river; a yellow haze still obscured the city, and the sun, drifting down into dust and smoke, had assumed the complexion of raw bleeding flesh.
A stone fell, struck rock, shattered and flew into fragments into the branches of the pine. Whisky snorted, reared back a little, her eyes rolling, her breath smoky in the chill air. Burns glanced up and saw the legs and fundament of a man in khaki appearing over the edge of the cliff, a rope dangling below him. Burns stepped out a few feet, holding his rifle lightly and aiming from the hip. The man started to rappel down, letting the rope slide slowly between his legs, across his chest and over one shoulder. He descended about half the distance, a shotgun slung across his back, and then noticed Burns looking up at him.
The man hesitated, licking his lips, swinging slightly on the taut rope. He was twenty feet above the ground, fifty feet from Burns. He licked his lips again and grinned shyly.
“Come on down,” Burns said quietly. “And don’t let out a whimper or I’ll shoot.”
Still the man hesitated.
“Come on down,” Burns said.
The man came down, slowly, very slowly. He seemed to be having difficulty in handling the rope; several times it got caught among the rocks or in the yucca and greasewood growing in cracks in the wall. At last his feet touched the gravel slope at the base of the cliff. He was facing Burns.
“Put your hands behind your head and turn around,” Burns said. The man turned, still grinning foolishly. Burns considered for a moment. “Unsling that shotgun.” The man obeyed, lifting the canvas sling over his head and letting the gun fall to the ground. He was wearing a heavy moleskin mackinaw and beneath it, probably, a cartridge belt and holstered revolver. “Keep your hands on the back of your neck,” Burns said. He shifted the carbine to his left hand, holding it like a pistol, stepped forward lightly and picked up a short dead stub of pine. Involuntarily the man turned his head and saw Burns approaching him with the rifle in one hand and a club in the other.
“Hey!” he said; “hey—what do you think…?”
Burns swung at his head; the man went down awkwardly, trying to shield his face with his forearms— “Wait a minute, please,” he said. The club broke through his guard and smashed solidly onto the side of his skull, above the ear. He groaned and went down slowly, reaching for his head, then collapsing into stillness.
Burns went down with him, jerking open the coat, unbuckling the gun belt. “Goddamnit,” he said, “I’m sorry, fella,” He felt a little sick, uncertain, nervous. His victim groaned again, stirring feebly, while Burns pulled off the gun belt and fastened it around his own waist. He searched for handcuffs, found them in a pocket of the coat, dragged the man to a tree, put his arms around it and locked his wrists together. The man leaned forward against the trunk of the tree, moaning softly; a few bubbles of spittle oozed from his lips. Burns stared at him. “I’m sorry, fella,” he said; “I just can’t take any chances now.” The deputy had lost his hat; Burns recovered it for him and set it firmly on the blackhaired, sagging head. “There… so long.” He picked up his rifle and walked to the rope hanging from the cliff.
The mare, Whisky, was browsing among the oak leaves and pine needles. Burns took the rope in his hand and tugged at it, testing: it seemed well anchored. The mare raised her head and looked at him. Burns glared back at her. “You bitch,” he muttered, “you ain’t been nothin but trouble to me ever since I got you.” The mare raised her ears alertly, staring at him. “That’s right—nothin but trouble. You’re no damn good and you know it.” Burns looked up the rope, up over the gray rock and the brush, into the sky, into freedom. Above was the rim of the mountain, and on the other side a thousand miles of forest and wilderness reaching north into Canada and south into Mexico. He gave the rope another pull, feeling the eyes of the mare on him. He cursed again, and thought of his saddle, bedroll, venison, ammunition, all the rest of his gear—and of the horse. “What the hell.” He dropped the rope, went back to the mare, picked up her reins and led her off.
He started south, stopped, changed his mind and faced about, and marched northward back the way he had come. This was painful, retracing his journey—an extravagant waste of effort, perhaps. Yet it seemed like good tactics.
He fought his way through the clinging brush, making no attempt at stealth, and in less time than he expected—perhaps fifteen minutes—he reached the point where he had ascended from the ledge below. Here he resumed his usual caution, anticipating a sudden encounter with his pursuers, but no man appeared.
He did not descend; he left the old route and went on to the north, looking for another opening that would enable him to get himself and his horse and baggage up through or over the wall above him and up to the rim.
There was a tremor, an uncertai
nty, in the light;— Burns looked to the west and saw a thin film of cloud, ragged and windblown and ashy-gray, passing across the red sun. The city, the river and the valley remained hidden under a pall of dust; the horizon had disappeared in the general yellow murk. But overhead and to the south and east the sky was still clean and pure, a great dome of primary blue, icy and remote, with the delirious intensity of fire.
Burns stopped for a moment to knead his chilled hands; he craved another drink of water—something in the high piercing air of the mountain intensified his thirst—but he had to consider certain possibilities, ration his needs, conserve his supply. He went on, thinking about water, and in a well-shaded place under a Ponderosa pine he found a patch of glazed snow. He knelt down and scraped part of the surface clean, dug out a handful of the icy stuff and ate it, disregarding the black specks of pine bark distributed through it.
They trudged on, the man and his horse, over the rubble of sliding rock, through thickets of scrub oak, under aspens and scattered pines, until they came to a series of setbacks in the wall above which made it possible to ascend to the rim. Burns led the mare to a point just below the crest, tethered her there among the scrub, and went on up alone to reconnoiter.
He found another world: Instead of canyons, cliffs, boulders, cactus, and radical gulfs of space, he saw an extensive area of meadow and forest sloping gently to the east like the deck of a listing ship, extending for twenty miles downward over rolling foothills to the eastern plans. Here was the old and original surface of the earth, the appalachian country; the tremendous power that had thrust it all a mile into the sky had given it a new climate and different flora but left its basic topographic character unchanged.