High Country : A Novel

by Willard Wyman

  38

  Milestones

  Ty liked heading back for the Western Divide. The Haslams’ friends could hardly be nicer, but he let them ride with Jasper and Buck so he could watch the country—imagining how it was fashioned, the benches so orderly, the meadows so green.

  On the fourth day they climbed to a long lake, the trail clinging to granite swept by ancient ice. Above it the sparse timber gave way to a snowmelt meadow fed by a snowfield. They crossed it, the sun cups deep but the pitch shallow, and scrambled into talus, the scratchy trail winding up steeper and ever tighter switchbacks, on and off snow until onto the pass at last. Ty watched the others come onto the divide, the Kings River behind them, the Kern ahead, Jasper clutching his saddle horn, his eyes closed against the heart-stopping drop back to that field of snow, tiny now, a thousand feet below them.

  They looked east, looking across the giant trough of the Kern from the other side now, Whitney there beyond it—massive and regal. The jagged peaks of the Kaweahs leaned over the Kern, declaring themselves, and there was the Kaweah shelf again, even more inviting now. The cliffs fell away in sheer granite to isolate it from the north as abruptly as from the Kern, the soaring Kaweahs patrolling the rest of it—guardians assigned by some god.

  “Your Elysian field, isn’t it?” Thomas Haslam watched Ty, knowing well what held him there. “Bet it’s just as elusive too.”

  “Looks pretty, that country,” Ty said. “Everything you want.”

  “Things seem that way. Until a man gets them.” Haslam was looking at the shelf himself now, his voice gentle. “I guess the cure is to have our dreams come true. Get appointed to some job and find yourself stopped by the ones who did the appointing.” He smiled. “Find yourself loved by a woman and learn she loves what you will be—not who you are.”

  Ty liked thinking of Willie and Cody Jo up here—or out there on that shelf. But he knew Thomas Haslam had a point. They might not like it at all.

  “I’m not much good at figuring what women want,” Ty said.

  “But you yearn for something. What is it?”

  “Not much.” Ty felt awkward saying it. “A safe place. It looks peaceful over there. Feed and water. Wood. The Kaweahs above. The Kern below. Whitney to catch the late sun. You could watch the colors at sunset.”

  “Probably just rock over there. Or swamp. Might be no flat for a camp—or bogs everywhere. No place to sleep. You can have illusions, you know.” Thomas Haslam looked out at the dazzling expanse of peaks and canyons, the waterfalls dropping into the valley they would follow to the Kern. “Even in country like this.”

  Ty was surprised. It sounded a little like Spec’s reservations about packing. Only Spec would have sworn a lot. Thomas Haslam just seemed resigned.

  They dropped into the treeless U of a high valley, following the course of an old glacier that made room for lupine and gentian—wild onion edging the stream. To the north Ty could see the profile of Milestone, looking like a tombstone. It jutted from the knife-edge ridge as though chiseled, closing this side off from the basin beyond— cutting anyone off but some Norman Clyde, some lonely climber who had it in him to challenge places like that.

  In an hour they were down into timber, the trees hard-bitten and scruffy as their trace dropped steeply down a moraine. At the bottom another glacier had intersected theirs, the bigger U of that valley open and inviting, lifting back toward the high pyramid of Triple Divide, the peak that separated all the places Ty had been: the Kern, the Kings, the Kaweah.

  It came to him then that they’d been circling this mountain, not the Kaweahs he’d watched so closely. Camping on waters separated by this mountain—even though it was the Kaweahs he’d used as his compass.

  Fenton would enjoy that, he thought. Thomas Haslam too. Even Spec. His going all that way with his eye on the wrong thing. Sugar Zumaldi would see it differently. He’d claim the Kaweahs had seduced him, promised him the things the way a beautiful woman might.

  Thinking of Sugar, he led his string away from the faint trail toward another of Sugar’s camps, riding toward Triple Divide Peak until the timber grew sparse. He forded the stream and rode back down the other side to camp under big lodgepoles. It was everything Sugar had promised: the timber open, wildflowers edging the rocks, the stream alive with pools and shallows before dropping into the canyon below. Ty wouldn’t have to worry about his mules either, the grass in the U- shaped valley sweet, the benches sandy.

  They laid over, giving the mules a chance to recruit; Ty a chance to search out a route to his shelf. He left early, walking along open benches for over an hour, the final one diminishing into a ledge not even Sugar’s burros could handle. He worked along it carefully, finding it led to another, then another, each way linking as they narrowed, broke, became giant stairs angling down toward the Kern. Finally he was stopped entirely. A feeder stream pouring from above had split the granite like a cleaver, the chasm dark and slick—walls smooth as marble. Cool lifted from it, a mist veiling sheer walls beyond. The shelf remained above him, its meadows and lakes less visible from here than from the pass—just as Sugar had predicted.

  Below him the canyon narrowed, the glacial U giving way to a steep V as the stream cut down toward the Kern. He could see why it was the Kern-Kaweah, the waters rising here, racing for the Kern down a route carved just for them. All of it arranged perfectly, protecting the Kaweah shelf from the steady pull of seasons.

  The next day they rode down that canyon, crossing meadows where lakes had been, the timbered lips of moraines, then down once again into meadows. The canyon walls closed as they dropped, and Ty saw the waterfall bursting from the cliffs across the canyon, its spray lifting in misty clouds that offered no hint of the abyss behind them—the rock split by water.

  Again they camped on the Kern, sheltered by a stand of Jeffrey pine. The river was swollen from melting snowfields, but in the chill night it lowered and in the morning they forded easily, riding up the the river along falls and tumbling rapids toward its headwaters. At midday they recrossed it, an infant river now, its waters running shallow across granite before starting their run down the great Kern gorge.

  They traced up the feeder stream draining Milestone Basin until they were stopped by a rock face. Ty led them away from it to find short rock ledges offering just enough purchase for the mules to gather themselves to push up, push up again until they were into the basin itself, which was wide and gentle with big slabs of granite tilting down smoothly into the grassy bottom.

  Ty tied his mules in a stand of lodgepole, let Buck see to the unpacking while he rode alone up the basin, listening for the bells of Sugar’s burros. He was as anxious to see Sugar and Nina as he was to look at Milestone Mountain high above him. It still looked like a tombstone to him, quarried square by some quirk of nature, turned on end to become a ghostly marker above the ragged range.

  The scattered timber gave way to alpine lakes and high rocky benches, but Sugar was not to be found. Ty returned to the others to find Sugar and Nina by the fire, enjoying Jasper, who had his sherry out and was offering it in hopes someone had something stronger to offer him. To Ty it was as though the world had been put back together, right there in Milestone Basin.

  The next morning Nina and Sugar took him to Maria and the rest of the Zumaldis, crossing the creek below Ty’s camp and making their way toward a granite fin. Ty had taken it to be one side of the basin itself, but Sugar crossed still another granite slab to make his way around the fin into a smaller bowl. They climbed along a pine-needled game trail to a woodland lake, circled it and went up a granite crevice onto the grassy banks of the loveliest lake Ty had yet seen. The Zumaldi children were already wading, immune to the cold as they fished the freezing water. And Maria was there, lovely and welcoming, completely at home in Sugar’s hidden camp.

  “What do you call this place?” Ty was feeding Sugar’s burros, who had rushed down from some sunny hideaway, sunfishing and farting in their excitement. “I doubt anyone knows
it’s here.”

  Sugar was calling each burro by name, making sure each got some sugar. “Because it’s not,” Sugar said. “At least not on that map of yours. They got the elevation wrong on that fin we come around, missed some of these lakes too, made it look like you got to fly to get here.”

  “Can I get here again?”

  “You can. Buck told me where you been.”

  “He’s not sure where he’s been,” Ty said. “But where am I? If I come back, I’ll need to know.”

  “Ain’t got a name. Just a good place for my burros.”

  “And for me. If I can find it.”

  “You can. Look from here?” Sugar pointed up, the big slab of Milestone. “Your marker.”

  Ty saw. It didn’t look at all like a tombstone from here.

  “A milestone ...I see it now.”

  “More clear from here,” Sugar said, feeding his last cube to a jenny who nosed at him. He looked at the lake, his sons cleaning fish, Nina getting water from the outlet stream. “Most everything is.”

  “Let’s eat,” he said, starting for his camp. “Maria cooked special. Just for you.”

  In its own way, that day established the pattern of Ty’s life in the Sierra. He could almost measure the years by the times he saw the milestone from Sugar’s basin. But he also came to see that his life was somehow turned on end. He felt at home in mountains only the most daring could visit; he became a visitor in places that were homes to everyone else. Not that he didn’t try to bridge that gap. He sought out Norman Clyde in the Valley, finding the old climber as lonely and awkward outside the mountains as he was comfortable in them. He spent time in the Deerlodge, too often drinking more than he should. He taught Otis Johnson’s boy to pack, but that part was easy; everything he taught the boy, he taught him in the mountains.

  Opie Kittle saw how it was after that first season. And until he died he did what he could to make a place for Ty in the Valley. After that Ty managed as best he could: gentling colts, building fence, doctoring other people’s stock.

  People liked him. He was always reliable, always on time. They trusted him with any task; it was just that he never seemed happy with any task not in the mountains. If it hadn’t been for Angie and Buck— and Cody Jo after Bliss Holliwell died—his winters would have been even more spare, his nights lonelier.

  There were women of course. He still loved the dances Cody Jo had taught him. But too often he’d find himself waking with someone who’d only seemed to dance well the night before. The singer didn’t come until later. And though everyone knew she was different, few could understand what that difference began to mean to Ty.

  But always there was Cody Jo, or the idea of Cody Jo, in his life. They never made love again, but she was part of him always: the way she thought, the music she loved, the concerns that troubled her. After Holliwell was gone she would drive to see him from the retirement community Bliss had joined near Los Angeles. They would talk, go dancing, have dinner with Angie and Buck and Jasper at the Deerlodge. She made sure things stayed alive in him: their times at the pack station; Fenton’s unpredictable ways, Horace and Etta Adams—Willie. Cody Jo had a gift for keeping Willie alive in him. And some nights, when the music was just so, the drinks good, and the dancing right, the old Cody Jo would come alive in him as well.

  They never talked about their night together. There was no way to talk about it. And no need. They lived with it, each wanting the best for the other. It might even have been a more steady part of her life than Ty’s. Certainly she was the one who most wanted something to come of his time with the singer. And certainly she was the one who worried most about his lonely winters, his narrow escapes in the mountains, the times he drank too much.

  When the fight with Knots Malloy finally came, it was as much a surprise to her as to the rest of them—its suddenness, its brutality. But what stunned her most was finding she could be the trigger for such terrible violence.

  39

  Knots

  It wasn’t that it was over so fast that confused people. It was that what happened was so different from what usually happened when there was a fight in the Deerlodge. There were no threats, hardly any talk at all. It was a Friday night—some people dancing, some gathered around the bowling machine watching a cowboy have a good run. Most of them didn’t even know there was a problem until the jukebox went over, the music becoming a screech before the crash. At first everyone thought it was Buck and Ty having the disagreement, not Ty and Knots Malloy. Knots, big as he was, was partly out of sight behind the overturned jukebox, records spilled across him like cards.

  It started innocently enough. Ty and Buck had brought a late trip out over Taboose Pass in the big October storm, fighting high drifts to reach the pass then dropping and dropping along the rocky trail until the snow turned to hail, then rain—not letting up until they unpacked. Looking back, they were thankful they’d made it at all, a purple and scarlet sky bleeding into black on the Sierra crest. The blizzard still howling on the pass, six thousand feet above them and under four feet of snow.

  They took care of Jasper first, Jasper cold and sore from all that downhill. Everyone knew he was getting too old to be taking trips, but he still found reasons to go. This time he regretted it, his hands so stiff and cold he couldn’t unpack his kitchen. They took him to Opie Kittle’s with the first load of mules, firing up the stove so he could warm. Ty had taken it over entirely since Opie died, using the barns to store the gear, the pastures to winter the stock.

  They hauled the rest back through the night, making three runs— and then still another, the last to get Sugar’s burros. Sugar had brought his family out over Goat Pass in the same storm and they knew he was having a harder time than they were—the rain there turning to sleet in the night. Ty went for him as soon as he got word, more worried about Maria than the children, all of them big and strong now and as much help as Sugar could want.

  By three in the morning Ty had them all at Opie’s. He gave Sugar and Maria his bed and let them settle the kids in the house. He was happy to throw down some saddle pads and sleep out in the barn with Jasper and Buck, happy to let the tension drain away. He knew how lucky they’d been to get everyone out—no frozen fingers or toes; no frostbitten ears.

  That morning a foot had already fallen by the time they wrangled the horses. They packed under a high tarp set up to keep off the snow. It was coming hard and getting worse, and they all knew the South Fork of the Kings was no place to be when the snows fell. No way down the canyon at all; the only way out the high passes.

  Ty was afraid even the broad saddle of Taboose would be closed when he finally got everything moving, thinking he might have to turn back right there, drop down into the timber, make camp and hope for a melt. The drifts were already deeper than he liked, but the snow was dry, no weight to it. When he hit the first big drift he went right at it, wishing he had Smoky Girl under him again.

  Smoky Girl had been long retired by then, the rocky passes too much for her legs. He’d put her into the pastures back of Opie’s barns, using different horses until he’d found the black filly—escaped from somewhere to run loose on the desert. It was easy to see she had good blood—easy to see she was wilder than the mustangs she ran with too—until Ty began to work with her, ducking her hooves and naming her Nightmare and running her with his mules until they made her theirs. Calming her until he made her his, his and no one else’s—at least according to Buck and Jasper.

  She was tough enough, Ty knew that, but he was never sure how desert horses would handle big drifts like these. He was still missing Smoky Girl when Nightmare pushed her way into the drift, hardly hesitating, going at it with such force she almost swam through it, touching down now and then to kick up and plunge ahead, lifting herself above the drift again and then again—finally all the way through it, her legs trembling as she regained the rocky trail, the wind blowing everything off into the drifts still ahead. They came down like that, the mules following Nightmare
through, the first few struggling but soon providing passage for the rest. And then they just fought the cold, the trail barely visible, the wind gusting snow into smaller and smaller drifts. And lower down, the hail. The wet.

  “Thought we might become a Blue Plate Special up there.” Buck closed the lantern down. “You got any of those Donner Party recipes, Jasper?” He laughed as he got into his sleeping bag. “Hell, you’re so skinny I doubt you’d be tasty.”

  “Wish you hadn’t drank up all that sherry,” Jasper said. “My bones could stand a warm.”

  “We made it.” Ty turned over to get comfortable. “I don’t want to try that again. We pushed our luck.”

  “Might have,” Buck said. “But we come through. We’re here.”

  Ty was going to answer, but he heard Buck’s breathing even out.

  Buck had never complained, Ty thought. Neither had Jasper. But Ty knew how close he’d taken them, how much they’d counted on him. He lay there thinking about that until he couldn’t think at all, everything in him folding into his own exhaustion.

  Cody Jo had written saying she would meet them after Ty’s last trip. But he was surprised to find Cody Jo and Angie already there, making breakfast, helping them find clean clothes, deciding with all of them to have a big dinner that night at the Deerlodge.

  By late afternoon they had things organized: the tack under cover and feed out for the stock. They were all excited about going to the Deerlodge, excited about Jasper teaming up with Lars to do the cooking. Ty and Sugar were looking forward to a good drink and a chance to compare notes. They counted on that each year after the weather closed down the country they both loved so much.

  Lars couldn’t have been happier to see them, the big storm being all the news. “Lucky you got down safe, Ty. You deserve a drink. I’ll sure buy the first.” He pulled tables together and went off to cook with Jasper, liking Jasper’s stories about Montana—about Ty’s friends, Spec and Fenton; about things that happened at a place called The Bar of Justice.