by Margo Catts
We splashed across the river, gravel crunching under the horses’ hooves, then wound our way through the trees on the far side and started working our way uphill, on a path made spongy by fallen needles and bark. I leaned forward, breathed in the warmth of the horse’s neck and the bright scent of pine. I let my mind rest on the slow beat of hooves, the crunch of a twig, the color of the sky, the twist of a leaf. I began to be profoundly glad I’d come.
We chatted easily as we rode—college trials, bad roommates, cooking disasters, getting by on a student budget. These horses were of a different caliber than the plodding trail horses I’d ridden as a child, and we moved up the trail quickly. I heard water again about fifteen minutes after the main river crossing, and soon the path widened and flattened to meet a small river spread less than a foot deep over a broad bed of stones.
“This is Hat Creek?” I asked.
“Yup.”
“I expected it to be bigger downstream. Not much for a whole town to be named after it.”
“Not much of a town.”
“True.”
The horses splashed across, then continued along the grassy shore. I inhaled deeply, smelled the warming grass and pine. The morning sun spread across the valley, sharpening the edges of trees and rocks and the ridgeline above. I was glad no one had ever felt it worthwhile to build a road here. I ducked my head as the trail led us into an aspen glade, then involuntarily pulled up.
“Whoa,” I said.
“You don’t need to say—” Leo started, then saw that I’d stopped moving and did the same. “Oh. You weren’t talking to the horse.”
The trees overhung the creek, which ran between ferns along the banks. They cast dappled shade on long grass, and a few sprays of blue columbine poked through the ferns.
“No. I just—wow. What a beautiful spot. I’ve never seen anything so lush around here before.”
“Pretty, isn’t it? People hike along here a lot, too.”
“They do? Isn’t it too far?”
“There’s an access road that starts you closer. There’s just no good place to leave a car for four days, so I had us start at the motel. Nice, though, huh?”
“Definitely.”
The creek chugged over the rocks. The contrast between shade and sun made the shaded grass look richer, the sunlit grass look brighter and greener. My horse thought well of it, too, and had taken advantage of my distraction to start grazing.
“Glad you came?”
I found Leo looking at me with eyebrows tilted and a knowing grin. So my earlier snark had not, in fact, gone unnoticed.
“Yeah.” I gave the reins a tug to pull my horse’s head out of the grass. “But only for this. Nothing else. Just this. The rest of the day has been terrible so far.”
“Nowhere to go but up,” he said, nudging his horse forward.
*
I lost track of how many times we crossed and recrossed the creek. As promised, the vistas, small and large, only multiplied as we climbed. We passed through pocket valleys and aspen woods, places where the creek ran wide and shining, others where it tucked under its banks and only the shush and rustle gave it away. Sometimes the path would open and reveal the bare slopes ahead, high above timberline. Other times I’d twist around in the saddle to look at the view behind: pine and rock etched against a china blue sky, white still icing the tops of the distant peaks. As the sun climbed, the warmth eased into my back.
Around noon, Leo reined in at the edge of a meadow in the center of an aspen grove. The creek murmured at its edge.
“You hungry?”
“Always.”
“Let’s stop here. I brought lunch.”
We dismounted, and he fastened strap cuffs around the horses’ forelegs as they plunged their heads into the grass.
“I probably don’t need to hobble them,” he said as he squatted by the pinto’s forelegs. “I don’t imagine they’d go far no matter what. But I’d rather not take chances. One day spent walking is enough to make you cautious.”
“Which you’ve done?”
“Which I’ve done. Nothing makes you feel more stupid than walking down the trail into a dude ranch. In front of all the guests, all the other hands, even your horse.”
He did the same for the brown horse, then got a pair of paper lunch sacks and a rolled-up sheet out of a saddlebag.
“Nothing fancy,” he said as he handed a bag to me.
I opened it to see a tuna fish sandwich on white bread, a bundle of crackers in plastic wrap, a greenish banana, and a pair of store-bought cookies. It looked like a lunch a third-grader would spread out on his desk.
I looked up at him.
“This is enough for you?” I asked.
“Well sure. You?”
His look of genuine concern made me laugh. “Oh, I’m fine. I just think of guys eating three sandwiches and a box of cookies and looking around for more.”
He grinned. “Ah—you should’ve seen breakfast.” He pointed to a flat spot in the shade a few yards away. “I’ll just spread this sheet out over there and we can sit and eat. If you want to go to the bathroom first”—he tilted his head toward a jumble of boulders some distance in the other direction—“that’s a good spot over there. You said you have toilet paper?”
Caught completely off guard, I had to laugh. He was as matter-of-fact as a child. I patted my back pocket. “Already got it ready.”
By the time I got back, he’d not only spread out the sheet but had unwrapped and arranged our lunches in two identical place settings. He lay on his back, boots crossed, looking up into the leaves with his arms folded under his head.
“Need a pillow?” I asked as I lowered myself to the ground.
“Just trying to prove I didn’t care how long you took.”
I laughed again. “You must have sisters,” I said as I reached for a sandwich.
“What makes you think so?”
“The whole bathroom business. Most guys would be uncomfortable.”
He nodded as he sat up and swung around on his hip to a face me. “Good guess. One sister.”
“Older?”
“Right again. With friends. Lots of inside intel on why girls think boys are stupid. She’s married now, to an idiot, which she deserved.”
“Brothers?”
“One.” He looked down and reached for another cracker. “Plus Dad, stepmom, Mom, and some flaky dude that lives with her when he runs out of money. The all-American family.”
“So you grew up here, right?”
“Whole life.”
“Your dad’s a miner?”
“Of course.”
I took a cracker between my fingers. I’d been putting off this question all day. But now I was a person who embraced what I feared, right? I put the cracker in my mouth and leaned back against my hands.
“So, growing up, did you ever hear ghost stories about a girl who disappeared up here?”
He looked surprised. “Yeah, sure—you know about that?”
“A little. Sarah said something about a ghost that would get you if you went in the woods. But she also said it could stop her stuffed animals from fighting over what to eat, so I might not have the details quite right.”
“Yeah, the stuffed animals part is new. It’s way scarier than that, or it was the first time I heard it. Scout campout. If it was meant to keep a bunch of stupid kids from wandering around after the adults went to sleep, it worked.” He picked up his banana and dug at the stem with his thumbnail, then pulled back a section of peel. “Okay, here goes. There was this girl who lived at one of the old mining camps with her dad. She had a dog that stayed with her no matter what, so he felt okay about leaving her alone all day while he worked in the mine. The dog was as big as a bear, and mean, and nobody ever caused trouble with that dog around. Bears, mountain lions, drunks—nobody.”
My father used to talk about the dogs they’d had when he was growing up. One had died when he was fairly young, and another had grown up with him
after that. Both were big, like Mac was now. It often came up as he was scoffing at some tiny creature he saw at the end of a rhinestone leash in Los Angeles. He disdained small dogs.
“Nice touch,” I said.
“Thank you.” He took a bite of banana. “Anyway, the girl loved the dog. It slept with her, and every night when she cooked dinner, the dog had the first plate. The girl was a real camp princess—always in a pretty dress, wearing a hair ribbon, smiling at everybody and dancing around with that dog.”
Sarah’s doll, in her dress and hair ribbons. Benencia in the pictures—simple as a child. Beautiful.
“What about the rest of the family?” I asked. “Mom? Any brothers or sisters?”
“It’s supposed to be a mining camp, you know. Not a lot of families up there.”
“So how come there’s a daughter?”
“Hey,” he said, putting his hands up. “I’m just telling it like I heard it. Isn’t that what you wanted? Or should I add seven dwarves?”
“Sorry. Go on.”
“Okay, one day the dog went missing. Just gone. And the girl went out to find it.”
“Where was her dad?” I asked.
“Work. When he came home she was gone.”
“So how does he know she’s gone after the dog?”
“Geez—do you want the story or not?”
“Sorry. Really.”
“So the dad calls together all the other men at the camp, and all the crazy old coots in the hills, and they all go out searching. Nobody goes to work for days—they’re all calling and looking. But nobody ever found anything. Not so much as a hair ribbon.”
He broke off another chunk of banana and put it in his mouth.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“That’s just the setup. Especially the hair ribbon—remember that. Now’s the part that keeps little boys in their tents.
“The search was finally abandoned, but the dad wouldn’t give up. Winter came, and he got caught out in a storm, still looking. Folks found him frozen to death with his lantern still in his hand. Years went by. People started to talk about other strange disappearances, but it’s the wilderness, so folks figure it’s just what happens sometimes. A couple of hunters that never came back. A geologist. Finally some old miner crawls out of the hills into town for supplies, gets drunk, and brags to some guys in a bar that he hated that girl’s dog and killed it.” Leo sliced a finger across his throat. “Like that. Then while he was burying it, the girl found them, and he killed her, too. Folks thought he was just talking, but he was never seen alive again. Somebody found him in his cabin a few weeks later, strangled with a blue ribbon. And all around the cabin were these giant paw prints in the dirt.”
He’d finished on a melodramatic flourish, voice lowered, slowing with each of the final words. But I was finding it harder to play along. The name had just come to me. Gus. The dog my father remembered them having when he was small. Big enough for him to ride, he would say, but too dignified to let him.
“Wow,” I managed, looking off somewhere over his shoulder.
Leo didn’t seem to notice anything but lowered his voice still further and leaned forward. “The girl and the dog still wander through the trees—right here.” He made a wide gesture with one hand to take in the circle of aspens around us. “Looking for each other, looking for revenge. The miner wasn’t enough, and nothing ever will be. Pity the soul that crosses their paths.”
The pinto snorted into the grass and shook its head, then stomped one foot and continued grazing. Leo leaned back again and returned to his normal voice. “You like that? Then the scout leader added some stuff about hearing the dog snuffing around in the leaves. Sealed the deal. Nobody left camp after that, but I think a few kids wet the bed ’cause they were afraid to go out to pee.”
It had been a mistake to ask. Maybe it was better to stay away from what you feared, after all. My family’s tragedy was now a grotesque ghost story used to frighten children and test teen bravado. Something for them to laugh at when they got older. I unfolded one leg, then wadded my wrappers and banana peel into my fist and shoved them into the brown bag.
“My leg’s going to sleep. Can we get going or walk around or something?”
A shadow of a smile, there and gone in the moment Leo looked at me. Then he stood and brushed his seat. He’d thought something, I could tell. Made some judgment. Oddly, it mattered to me that it not be wrong.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He extended one hand to help me up but pointed to the corner of his mouth with the other. “You got a little left over, there.”
10
After lunch, we ducked into a stand of lodgepole pine and climbed away from the creek, Leo still riding in front. The branches and needles knit themselves together high overhead to such an extent that the ground was free of undergrowth and I could detect no trail at all. Browning needles underfoot muffled the hoofbeats, and the silence rested on us like a blanket. We wove around the tree trunks and I fished for a new subject.
“So your family,” I said. “You don’t like your brother-in-law?”
“Nice guy,” he said. “Dumb as a box of rocks. I’m not sure how he comes out of the mine every day under his own power.”
“And your brother. You didn’t say what he’s doing.”
“Ah, my brother.” Leo shifted in his saddle. “He’s kinda messed up. Honestly, he’s crazy. Not weird crazy. Lunatic crazy.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“That’s how most folks around here know me—the crazy guy’s brother.”
I looked at his back for a moment, relaxed under a drape of faded chambray, curving and straightening in response to the horse’s gait.
“And I thought you were just Leo the Cowboy.”
“God, really? That? All the education, the great conversation, the cooking skills, the good looks, and that’s how you think of me?”
“First impressions stick.”
“Shoot.”
I smiled. “Where is he now? Your brother.”
A tilt of the head. “We don’t know. Colorado Springs, last we heard. It’s been a few weeks, so no telling for sure.”
“Was he always that way?”
“Nah, it started while he was in high school. Till then, he was a great guy. Super-smart. Great sense of humor. Then he started shutting down. Holing up in his room, staying up all night, talking to himself. He started having these outbursts at school, yelling at people out of the blue. After every weird thing he did he’d just say ‘I had to.’ He was hearing voices.”
“Is that why your parents split?”
He twisted in the saddle to look back at me, then turned back to the front. “Didn’t help. But that’s not how it works, you know. Trouble comes to everybody and a marriage that can’t handle it isn’t much to begin with.” He raised his wrist to his face, brushing his nose or the corner of his mouth. “I’ve seen folks weather worse.”
I elected not to answer. Anyone who’d grown up in a town like this one had certainly spent a lifetime in close proximity to the spectrum of human experience and reaction, choice and consequence. Let him think what he pleased. No point in arguing just because my own life had taught me something different about the power of a child in trouble to drive a wedge between parents.
Within a couple of hours we reached landscape I thought I started to recognize. Then—yes—through the trees a glint of old mine equipment. Steps later, the trees thinned, then ended. A dirt road cut across the stripped mountainside, around a brassy lake of poisoned water, toward the mine entrance. Uphill was a rusted crane, buckling as thinner supporting pieces oxidized and gave way. Narrow-gauge railroad tracks passed below it to the mine opening, now gated and padlocked. Like heaving sea waves and just as devoid of life, piles upon piles of rubble and tailings rolled away toward the line of trees just visible on the far side of the slope.
At some point when I did not yet fully grasp money and what constituted a lot or a little, I thought
Tuah must be unimaginably rich. My grandfather had mined gold, after all. Gold, wealth; they went together. I pictured vast quantities of gleaming metal spilling out of the ground. Nuggets the size of eggs. I no longer recall what I’d said or why I’d gotten this response, but I remember her laughing and saying no, my grandfather had worked for a paycheck just like anybody else. And what came out of the ground was measured in ounces, not tons or even pounds. I must have looked puzzled, because she showed me what she meant by ounces. She squatted in the dirt by the cabin porch, scooped some grit in her hands.
“That much,” she said. “That much gold would make a good day.”
Whenever I saw the colossal wreckage around the mine, I thought of those cupped hands. By itself, the scale of the destruction was tragic. But compared to the physical size of the reward, it was offensive. The imbalance insufferable.
We didn’t speak as the horses picked their steps over the railway ties, then followed the road up the slope, past the cabin knocked over by the mule skinner, and onto the level ground of Main Street. Given my feelings about the mine, I’d always been grateful for the topography that hid it from town. We rode side by side between empty windows that stared at each other across the street. General store. School. The paymaster’s office, where a blue flax blossom had worked its way up between the porch slats. Past the turnoff to Tuah’s cabin. I figured he had a reason and just rode alongside, little puffs of dust rising around the horses’ hooves.
“I love this place,” Leo said, looking from side to side. “I wish it could stay like this but I know it can’t. Things will fall down. People will find it and mess around. They’re talking about bringing trail ride groups over here from the ranch next summer.” He made a face. “Ghost town tour.”
I didn’t like to think about it. These places were mine.
I pointed to a house one street away from the main road, visible because of a vacant lot in front of it, where the roof had caved in under the combined weight of neglect and decades of snow. “My grandmother said the guy who lived there drew birds. Pencil drawings all over the walls so it felt like an aviary when you went inside.”