Low Life in the High Desert

by David Hirst

  Iron Horse is but one of the attractions at Adam’s drum nights. In fact, drums, though common, are augmented by almost every musical instrument in existence — from the first, second, and third worlds — and it might be said that what is achieved is not so much music as something approaching a frenzy. A very loud one at that. This, combined with the leaping flames and leaping individuals, attracts the attention of the few hundred souls who can hear and see the show. That is, those within a few kilometres’ radius. As many are in attendance, this raises few problems.

  At Boulder House, we can’t see Adam’s place, but have no difficulty hearing the corroborees across eleven kilometres of yucca forest.

  The first night that Boo and I attended, Adam, in an experimental mood, picked up a bale of hay — meant for Smokey the horse, whom he was minding — and hurled it into the fiery furnace. The effect startled even Adam, as the hay, which had dried in the summer sun and was probably close to spontaneous combustion, exploded. Those sitting or dancing or playing their instruments were showered in burning vegetation, and, as many of them were semi- or totally naked, were rather inconvenienced. But Adam soon realised that no one had been gravely burnt, and assumed his merry mood. I don’t believe he has repeated the trick.

  Those who were seated at this pagan performance were incongruously sitting on old church pews that Adam had liberated at some stage of his illustrious career.

  Adam’s drum parties, at their best, are strange, indeed wondrous, sights. If one walks away into the yuccas to where the fire’s light no longer obstructs the stars, the scene is heathen: up to sixty people, aged from six to sixty-five, lost in a mesmerising mixture of an improvised interplay of instruments and dance around the bonfire. It is a beacon of brilliance in a world where the only other light comes from the moon and the stars.

  28

  Mike Bristow and I were having a beer one DILLIGAF afternoon when Ed Gibson arrived. I was about to leave, and Ed suggested I keep a watch out for a horseman with a packhorse on Pipes Canyon Road.

  ‘The horses look about shot,’ Ed said with faint disgust. Ed has, with the advance of years, been forced to give up riding, and he took a dim view of those who didn’t treat nags as they should. Ed took a dim view of a lot of things. In Ed’s opinion, things rarely went right, if at all. Ed would not be the right man to found an optimists’ club. He has a pessimistic view of most things, and can be judgemental.

  I had pretty much forgotten his comment when I hit Pipes, but was startled to see a wildly dressed individual astride a spent creature, which trudged through the simmering heat that rose from the asphalt. The packhorse looked in no better shape.

  I stopped the car and inspected the scene.

  ‘Those horses are in poor condition,’ I remarked, noticing that the rider was wearing red, white, and blue attire, complete with stars and bars.

  ‘They need water,’ the rider replied. I agreed.

  ‘Do you have any?’ the rider wondered.

  ‘I carry water, but not enough for two horses,’ I replied, considering any person expecting the driver of a sedan to have water enough for two horses to be one kangaroo short of a paddock.

  ‘I’m Captain America,’ the rider volunteered.

  I nodded. He’d need to be.

  ‘Where do you expect to find some?’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ Captain America said, ‘there is water at Big Bear. Do you know where it’s at?’

  The road to Big Bear doesn’t even warrant a name, and is little more than a watercourse that winds twenty-seven kilometres while climbing one thousand five hundred metres through the San Bernardino Mountains. I had once taken it to prove something to myself, and figured I just made it through. That, in the Ford 150 with wheels almost my height.

  Captain America was going to attempt it in the mid-afternoon, with the sun starting to make its point, and I didn’t like the chances of those horses making it alive — especially as Captain America didn’t know where the road started. In fact, I doubted Captain America would make it alive, but my concern was for the horses — not for the fool upon them.

  ‘You will have to bring them to my place. It’s back a piece. About half a mile. I expect they can make it that far.’

  My contempt seemed lost on Captain America. About an hour later, he led the weary beasts into the Boulder House compound. They were in terrible shape. He watched as I led them to a water trough and hosed them down.

  ‘See that mountain range,’ I said, pointing to the Little San Bernardino range about five kilometres off.

  Captain America nodded.

  ‘See the mountain range beyond that? See the one beyond that? Big Bear is on the other side of the third range.’

  Even Captain America figured his plan to ride so far might be ill considered.

  ‘Can I stay here the night?’ he asked.

  The lead horse, having consumed an amount that would have filled a small swimming pool, had finished drinking. It moved around the saddle horse and started nosing at one of the packs. The pack burst open, and half a bale of hay landed at their and our feet. The packhorse kept drinking while his mate commenced dinner.

  When the nags had drunk their fill and eaten what hay there was, I tethered them by the front door of Boulder House, and gave Captain America some food, telling him there was an outside bed down by the pool. We had plenty of beds inside, but I wasn’t in the mood to have in the house some clown who’d been determined to drive his horses to death.

  That night, the moon was full and bright. I went upstairs and tried to write, but the brilliant light formed incredible patterns on the rocks and on the yuccas, and I kept stopping work and eyeing the moon’s handiwork. It seemed stupid to be bent over a computer keyboard when a dazzling world stretched before me. Such sights had brought us to the desert, so I took them in. My eyes ranged from the rock crops before the house, then to the ridge where the Ten Years Ago Tree stood stark as stark can be, all twisted in death but without the sense to fall over, to the plain below and then the mountain ranges beyond.

  It was late. I watched for so long that the computer screen went blank. That’s better, I thought. The room was in complete darkness, save for the rays of the moon.

  I had forgotten the horses tethered below me. I couldn’t see them because of a balcony that lies in front of the computer room. A window at the side of the office complements the one directly in front of me — the one that comprises my view. The view to the side is blocked by a tall pine. The balcony runs all the way around past the kids’ room.

  The wind must have moved around, because I caught a smell from the horses and thought of taking a ride. Fuck Captain America. Then came a soft but heavy (if that is possible) thump to my right. I looked at the window, puzzled. A lion was looking around below. Looking at the horses. From there, it could see them. But I didn’t think of that at the time. The window was open, and a lion was a few feet from me.

  A calmer man, a National Geographic type, might have taken the opportunity to study the cougar, as the local lions are also called. It was, after all, only a few feet from me, and all that separated us was a thin, fraying flyscreen.

  ‘What in the fuck!’ I cried, jumping up and staring at the lion, which, in turn, took one look at me and jumped himself. Jumped head over heels, did a back flip, and was gone.

  Trembling with excitement and some fear, I rushed down to tell Boo. She was sleeping, but I shook her awake. She was a little peeved. I seemed to have all the luck in sighting animals. The western rattlesnake, the golden eagle, and now The Lion. Bill Lavender had seen the — or a — lion some ten years ago, but it was a way off, on the ridge.

  We discussed this remarkable occurrence. That a lion could come so close to the house was unthinkable. Lions stay clear of humans and their habitats — unless one threatens their food source. Lions do not go looking for humans. Sure, there have been people — kids
and women — taken in recent years, but the consensus of the park rangers was that these people had inadvertently come close to where the lion had hidden its next meal. The lion’s den, as it were. Some years back, a woman practising for the Olympiad cross-country skiing had been killed to the north, and another woman was taken to the southwest, in the mountains behind San Diego.

  Boo and I had studied a stuffed cougar taken in the Sierra Nevadas. We once found ourselves at the back of nowhere somewhere off the greatest of California’s highways — the 395. In a valley surrounded by granite bastions that soared six hundred metres above us, we came upon an old lodge that seemed deserted and, as usual, we decided to explore. The doors of the barn were ajar, and we slipped in to find two Latino workers busying themselves preparing various animals for display. Had the workers been Anglo they probably would have objected to a couple of strangers treating this outpost as their own, but instead we were treated as though we owned the place and our arrival had been expected. Through Boo’s mangled Spanish we learnt that the two were Northern Californian Mexicans. One was old, very old. He was in charge of a young man, his grandson, and was overseeing the stuffing of a golden eagle.

  Throughout the barn, various animals were in various stages of being stuffed in preparation for being displayed at the main house, which stood a few hundred yards away overlooking a vigorous stream. The animal that caught the eye — indeed gave us a momentary shock — was the lion. For a second, we thought it was alive, so close to perfection had the animal been presented. As it was rearing, it appeared about to attack. It was long dead, but perfectly stuffed. I thought of Lenin and Pizarro, the only humans I remembered being stuffed. Boo had seen the latter while in Peru, and was delighted to find the stuffing coming out of the tiny figure’s rear end. But he had at least been resting up in Lima’s National Museum for almost five hundred years, while poor old Lenin had stuffing coming out of his ass after sixty years.

  We stood there staring at the immaculately stuffed lion, and I thought of Lenin. If he had been better stuffed, perhaps the Soviet Union might have lasted another twenty years. After all, the failure to adequately stuff the founder of the great Soviet Empire suggested the empire would last about as long as the old stuffed coot. Which is precisely what happened. Entombed and disintegrating in the dead centre of Red Square, he can hardly have inspired the populace. If you can’t get Lenin properly stuffed, you can forget about Afghanistan. If this old Northern Californian Mexican had stuffed Lenin — and he looked old enough to have been around at the time — the worker’s paradise might have turned out to be just that.

  Boo, ignoring my digression to these arcane matters, asked the old gentleman (the master stuffer) if she could pat the mountain lion. Boo asked in Spanish, but the old man replied in appreciative English that she could. We both did. The animal was hard, and the golden hair was coarse. It was no African lion by any standards, but still a big and scary beast. Its fangs were particularly pronounced. The old man said the beast had weighed one hundred and sixty pounds.

  ‘About my weight,’ I observed.

  That night we made it to Lone Pine, where we visited Nels, a man who knows the wild better than most. Nels had plenty of time to reflect on mountain lions, as he moved cattle from the mountains to the low pastures in the autumn and back up to the alpine climes in spring. He’d lost stock to lions, and no cowboy or his boss is happy when $600-plus goes to sate a cougar’s blood lust. They are also hard to track, unless there is snow, and more dangerous than a bear, according to Nels.

  ‘You should remember their strength is pound for pound about eight times that of yours,’ Nels remarked.

  I pondered the figures. Their real fighting weight is nearly 1,600 pounds. They usually have the added advantage of height. All the people taken, to my knowledge, were jumped from an overhanging limb on a trail, hence their name ‘ghost cat’. You don’t know it’s there until it is upon you. The cougar’s ancestor, the sabre-toothed tiger, which once roamed the High Desert, would spring on the back of its prey — a woolly mammoth being a favourite dish — and plunge its sabres into the victim’s veins. It would ride the thrashing giant while draining its blood through vampire-like holes in its foot-long teeth. Some described the forebears of the wild animal that had paid us a visit that summer night as being ‘the greatest fighting machine nature has ever invented’.

  Perhaps. I’d like to see a sabre-tooth take out a big croc.

  ‘Why,’ I asked Nels, ‘if they are so powerful, don’t the cougars take men?’

  ‘They will if they have to,’ he replied. ‘But maybe they don’t know that we are weaklings compared to them.’

  But why, I wondered to Boo on the night I prematurely scared off our lion, would it come near enough to almost enter a large human dwelling?

  ‘The horses,’ Boo suggested.

  Indeed, we had forgotten about the horses. They had been pushed almost to death. A lion, roaming far and wide, would no doubt pick up the scent, and calculate that the animals were in bad shape. From the balcony, it could have pitched itself onto one of the horse’s backs and do what grandfather did to the woolly mammoths.

  ‘You’d better go and warn Captain America,’ Boo said, and I set off in the dark for the pool some fifty yards from the main house. It was a little unnerving, and I swung the torch around hoping I didn’t pick up on a huge set of eyes. But Captain America was sleeping in the open air, and there was a slim chance the lion would have a go at him. Which would suit me fine, as I might be able to claim the horses. Captain America didn’t strike me as having a large family, if any family at all.

  I woke him, informing him that a cougar was on the prowl and might be interested in his horses. But he wasn’t concerned. He muttered something about how he’d be fine, and returned to his slumbers.

  I returned to the house, wondering if I could kill him and make it look like the lion did it. I doubted I could.

  I raised the matter of big cats with the DILLIGAF sergeant at arms, Mike Bristow the following Friday at The Palace. We were sitting out in what would be a beer garden had there been anything green growing in it, and I told Mike about the incident.

  ‘I had a cougar as a pet for twelve years,’ Mike replied.

  Why, I inquired, had he spent twelve years with a mountain lion in the house? He rather disarmingly said that at the time mountain lion cubs were cheaper than cheetahs. He added that an unpleasant experience with an African lion had convinced him that he might be biting off more than he could chew. Mike didn’t get bit, but the African lion (which also enjoyed a career in the porn industry — I did not determine in what capacity) gave the owner a nasty nip after giving Mike and his wife, Mel, a few unpleasant moments. Mike’s description of the roar of the beast as it prepared to attack as ‘reverberating inside my brain’ put me off the idea of having an African lion around Boulder House for good.

  ‘We thought about bobcat kittens, but the bobs have an attitude problem,’ Mike added.

  ‘I bought the cougar off an animal trainer. He had half-a-dozen cougars, two bobs, and some bears. One of the cougars was related to the first Ford Lincoln Mercury Cougar. The sound they make isn’t like the sound in the ads.’

  Mike described the mountain lion’s roar as ‘a sort of a purr’, which presumably did not reverberate around his brain.

  ‘The guy had a box with two bobs and two cougar kittens, and I just put my hand in, and the cougar ran up my arm.

  ‘I paid $750 for her, bottle-fed her till weaned, and then started her on the same stuff the LA Zoo used — shredded horse meat. I’d buy it in fifty-pound lots. Fully grown, she’d eat two and a half pounds per week. She loved dogs, and would drag a neighbour’s dog to the ground and then start licking its ears. She just wanted to clean them.

  ‘I taught her to fight. At eleven weeks, my body looked like a railroad map.’

  As a tray of beers arrived, Mel remarked that
the big cat’s licking was a problem. ‘It was rough, like sandpaper. It would take layers of your skin off,’ she said.

  ‘Like a rasp,’ Mike added.

  ‘What happened to it?’ I wondered.

  ‘We had it for twelve years,’ Mike said, ‘but they wouldn’t let us keep it when we moved to San Bernardino County, so we put her on the Kitty Underground.’

  ‘The Kitty Underground?’

  ‘When you own a lion, you get to know a lot of people with big cats. You also get to know your neighbours pretty well.’

  Mel remarked that the main thing in having a lion is ‘never show fear’.

  ‘She’d pick up on it, and she’d bite. My cousin got bit on the leg. He passed out.’

  At that moment, a huge horse I mistakenly took for a Clydesdale was brought into a corral that ended a few yards from where we sat. It turned out to be a Belgian, and it proceeded to roll in the dust, sending up clouds. The breeze deposited the dust on the assembled DILLIGAF members, who happily watched the spectacle. When the dust settled and the draught horse regained his huge hooves, someone was talking about his great-great-uncle who apparently invented the telephone on 3 May 1884. Unfortunately, the man omitted to apply for a patent, and someone called Bell stole the show.

  A few days later, I ran into Horseshoe Freddie at the Joshua Tree Saloon. Horseshoe Freddie is the best and most respected of the remaining horsemen in these parts. He was raised on a ranch in Colorado and had come out to the High Desert in 1949, when there was a sizeable cattle industry. The cattle have been mostly phased out, but Freddie has retained a horseman’s life, and his nag can find its way home from The Club to Joshua Tree even if Freddie is asleep. That’s a good eleven kilometres over rough country. Freddie is a good-enough horseman to sleep astride his horse and still stay in the saddle. Naturally, he knew a little about Captain America, and nothing he had to say was good. He recounted that Captain America had ridden a horse to Palm Springs during a recent summer.