The Canyon Jack Schaefer

by Les Weil

  From small springs in the high hills the water came, a legacy of winter snows on the heights. Their tiny trickles mingled and flowed downward and others joined in the long descent. The water was clear and cold. It was constantly freshened in the clean air by the play and tumbling of rapids and swift swooping circuits among rocks. It flowed downward and emerged onto the plateau. Slowing there, it moved lazily and built and rebuilt and ever changed small rippled sandbars between its sodded banks and slipped smoothly over the lip of the canyon to fall into the pool below. Out of the pool it ran in gently curving swirls across the canyon floor to drop into its fissure at the wide lower end. Fresh and clear and cold, the water washed around and over the right leg of Little Bear and moved on and the corruption of the flesh went with it. ...

  Three days Little Bear remained there close by the stream. He was very weak. He drank of the clear running water. He ate of the small heap of food. He slept much. He washed his right leg often in the cold freshness of the stream and saw the healing begin. He studied the whole expanse of the canyon around him. He saw the rock walls rising everywhere.

  It was early on the first of these days that he saw the buffalo, shaggy humped shapes among the low bushes and tree clumps at the wide lower end of the canyon where the grasses grew best. He counted them. There was an old bull and a young bull, five cows and four calves, eleven in all. His heart leaped high with a hope when he saw them. As soon as he was stronger, he would follow their trails and they would show him the way out of the canyon. But by the evening of the third of these days a worry fretted in him. They were always there, always the same number, always the same buffalo. They moved about at the lower end of the canyon. They wandered up along the stream close to where he was and when he shouted and waved his arms they snorted and moved away. But they were always there.

  On the morning of the fourth day he unbound his right leg and reset the short sticks and rebound them. He took other thin strips of the leather and knotted them into a thin rope. He made a small loop at one end of this to go around his right ankle and a big loop at the other end to go around his chest over his left shouder and under his right armpit. When he stood up with the aid of a stout pole as tall as himself, the rope held his right foot from the ground. He held firmly to the stout pole with both hands and reached forward with it and leaned his weight on it and hopped on his left foot. He made strange tracks on the edge of the stream, a moccasin print then a small round hole in the soft ground and then a mocassin print and then again a small round hole. But he did not drag along low to the ground. He was upright as a man should be.

  Straight to the near rock wall he went and began to move along its base in a circuit of the canyon. All day that took him. He moved slowly and rested often. He chewed on the roots he had taken with him. The buffalo stared at him and watched him and grazed again and kept a distance from him. They were not frightened and they were not angry. They were wary of a new strange thing. He came on the fissure where the stream disappeared. It was small and the stream almost filled it. A man stepping in the water could force his body only a few feet in and the rock would press upon him.

  He came to the pool and the waterfall at the upper end of the canyon. The water fell straight from the high lip of rock. It made a mist in the air and rainbows floated in this. It was very beautiful. But the rock behind and beside it was as smooth and sheer as the other walls.

  He finished the full circuit. Nowhere was there a trail leading up to the high plateau. Nowhere was there a place where a man, even a man with two strong legs, could climb upward to the tall rock edge. There was no way out.

  Little Bear sat on the flattened top of a boulder by the pool and waterfall that lifted him enough above the ground so that he could see across the entire canyon floor. His right leg itched and the itching was good. It meant that the leg was healing fast. He wore only his breechclout and the manhood string about the waist on which the breechclout hung. The summer sun was warm on his body. He had food. The gooseberries had passed and the shoots of the wild licorice were no longer good because they had leafed out. But the pommes blanches were bigger and softer and better than before. There were plenty of tapering thistles whose stalks, when the thorny skin was peeled, were soft and sweet. He had these and he had fish from the stream, taken as boys took them, by thrusting sticks into the bottom mud in a semicircle downstream from side to side so close that the fish could not pass between them and driving the fish down into the semicircle and scooping some out with quick hand-flips before they all could escape back upstream and away. He even had a tea made from leaves of the elk mint which he boiled in water over a fire in a kettle fashioned from the bag that had held the pemmican. He had all these and once a rabbit that he snared and still a proper strength would not return to his muscles.

  It would not return because he did not have the real food of a man. He did not have strong meat. He did not have the stored-up strength of a strong animal to be transformed within him into his own strength. And there, captive in the same canyon with him, meat walked and grazed and stared curiously at him and was beyond him.

  He watched the meat moving about, an old bull and a young bull and five cows and four growing calves. He saw the strong limbs that could outrun any man no matter how long his legs. He saw the power that, aroused to anger, could sweep a man down like a weed stem snapping and trample him into a red muddy smudge on the ground. He saw the sharp horns that could thrust into the body of a man like a lance entering and toss him lifeless twenty feet away.

  He gathered all of his leather, what remained of his leggings with the widening flap down the sides that had waved as he walked and of his tattered shirt that had reached halfway to his knees and had a big double piece across the back over the shoulders and hanging down. He sliced all of this leather into thin strips. Knotted and braided together, these strips would make a good rope, a rough and bumpy rope but a strong one.

  All day he worked on the rope. He saved the last strips for another purpose. With them he lashed the knife by its handle to the end of his stout walking stick, pulling them very tight and knotting and reknotting them so that they would not slip. By time the dusk shadows came he had a rope nearly forty feet long, three thicknesses braided, and he had a lance taller than himself, pointed and edged with an iron blade.

  In the morning he went downstream, hopping with aid of the lance and carrying the rope coiled about his waist. Midway down the canyon he stopped. He knew the place. He had watched the buffalo many days from his boulder top and knew their habits. They slept by the rock wall at the lower end of the canyon. In the morning hours they grazed slowly up in the open of the canyon floor. Near noontime they collected by the stream to drink and wade into the water where many bushes ringed a pool deep enough for them to splash the coolness over them. They had a path through the bushes to pool. They had another leading out to the grasses again and farther up. When they were finished at the pond they came along this second path. Where this second path emerged into open land the bushes were thick and arched over so that it was like a tunnel opening and there was a good tree close by.

  That was where Little Bear stopped. He made a very small loop in one end of his rope and passed the other end through it. He had a running slip noose. Carefully he hung the noose in the tunnel bushes so that it framed the opening. Carefully he set the rope so that leaves hid it on the sides and over the top and he heaped dust over it where it ran across the path on the ground. Carefully he led the loose end away through the bushes and tied it around the base of the tree. Carefully he laid hinself down behind the tree and a little to one side so that he could see past it. He was hidden from the path by the bushes. He could see the tunnel opening and a few feet down it and that was all but that was enough. He lay still and the iron-pointed lance lay beside him.

  He was very patient. He waited and the morning passed and the sun was high overhead. He heard the buffalo going to the water. He heard them on the other path, first one, then another, then more. He heard
them splashing in the pool. He waited and he heard them coming up the second path. The old bull would be first, then the young bull, then the four cows with their calves. They would come single file because of the bushes. They would pass right through the loop. The one cow with no calf would be last, lingering behind the others. He would wait for her.

  They stopped. One after another down the line they stopped and stood motionless. He could not see them through the bushes and he could hear no sound. He waited. He did not hear but sensed movement and the head and forequarters of the old bull appeared in the bush-tunnel opening. He saw the massive head with its wide snout and long chin hairs like a beard shading back into mane and small eyes and sharp horns and the thick short neck that was hardly a neck at all and the beginning of the great humped shoulders behind. The bull stood still, searching the open grassland ahead. It smelled the man-scent where there had been no man­scent before and was troubled. That did not mean danger to it, not an enemy to flee or to fight, not yet, but it was cautious and would not move forward. It took a step backward. Another and it would be out of the noose. Once turned away it would not lead its small herd along that path again.

  Little Bear dared not wait any longer. Swiftly he reached past the tree trunk and took hold of the rope and pulled back and up and the noose ripped out of the bushes and up from the path and was a loose circlet about the massive head back of the horns above and under the chin below. The old bull leaped crashing in the bushes to swing around and away and the rope tightened and slid to grip around the short neck and Little Bear seized his lance and rolled over and over on the ground away from the tree heedless of the bushes tearing at him. He heard the other buffalo stampeding through the brush and splashing through the stream in headlong rush toward the far side of the canyon. He stopped rolling and pushed up onto his left leg, holding to the walking stick that was his lance.

  Beyond the tree the old bull battered the bushes into the ground. It strugled back and the rope tightened around its thick neck. It leaped and plunged sideways and with each leap and plunge the rope worked deeper through the coarse hair of its mane and closed tighter, pressing upon the windpipe. It pawed furrows in the ground and its bellowing was a fearful sound. The rope was taut as a stretched bowstring and the noose bit deep into the neck. The bellowing died away to a hoarse gurgling in the throat. The small eyes, bloodshot and red-rimmed, glazed over. The bull fell to its knees, stumbling forward and to the ground. But as the weight eased forward in this way, the noose released. The great ribs heaved and breath whistled in through the nostrils. The bull staggered to its feet and stood with head swaying and breath whistled in and out of the lungs. The eyes brightened and it reared upward and struggled back and leaped and plunged from side to side again and the noose bit deep.

  Little Bear watched. He felt a fear. It was not the fear that sometimes came upon a hunter and made him turn aside f rom the chase. It was a fear that the rope would not endure such repeated battles. Hopping with the aid of his lance, he circled around until he was behind the bull. He waited until it stood again with head swaying and breath whistling past the slightly eased noose. He hopped forward swiftly and a little to one side. When he was close and his weight was on his left loot and swinging ahead, he shifted his hands on the lance to lift and point it forward and held it firm and drove it into the side of the bull just back of the big houlder with all of his weight bearing solidly upon it. The bull reared in one great shuddering movement and the rope snapped and Little Bear was flung into the air clinging to the lance and his grasp broke and he fell and rolled and the thought of the hard hooves and the sharp horns burned in his mind.

  There were no hooves trampling him. There were no horns thrusting into his body. He sat up and looked. The old bull lay on the ground and a bloody froth bubbled from its nostrils. He had planted the lance as a good hunter should, firmly and deep in the flesh. When the rope snapped suddenly, the bull, rearing high, had fallen back and sideways and the end of the lance had hit on the ground and the bull with its own weight had driven the edged point tearing deeper inward.

  The fire was a brave brightness. It threw its light upward into the darkness in flickering happy flames. The carcass of the bull was a black humped shape on the ground. Little Bear sat between the fire and the carcass and watched the flames rising. He was very full. His right leg held an ache from the strains upon it, but the short bound sticks had held firm and he was very full. His stomach bulged with the strong food of a man. He had feasted on the first of the delicacies, the tongue and the nose. He sat in the firelight and his head nodded in drowsiness and the fire threw its light upward in joy at its own feasting on old dry wood.

  Winds of night wandered over the plateau. They sent their exploring streamers through the cracks along the rock-wall rim and these chuckled one to the other with their hollow sounding. And the Maiyun of the canyon rocks floated out like a mist in the night. They took no form and they floated above the firelight and they laughed. They filled the upper air with their presence and they laughed but they did not mock him. Their laughter was a soft sound and pleasant in the hearing. "This is the one," they said, "who has killed the mighty buffalo. With one leg of bone and one leg of wood he fought. With the cunning of his mind and the courage of his heart he killed the leader of the herd." They floated higher and drifted away down the canyon and the echo of their laughter came back faint and fading. "Little brother. Live well. Live long. ..:'

  THE CARCASS of a full-grown buffalo contains nearly two thousand pounds of bone and flesh and hide and entrails. It seems smaller in bulk now that it lies on the ground and the strength and power of movement are gone. The senses are stilled. The intricate workings of the living organism have ceased. Already, following fast on the fact of death, the subtle degeneration of decay is beginning in some of the once vital organs. A man can kick it, cut it, climb over it, do what he wills with it, but it cannot retaliate. It is a heap of carrion lying on the earth from which all that is in it once came.

  No. It is life and a way of life.

  It is food. If a man knows how to prepare and to cook it, every part can be eaten except the bones and the hooves and even these, crushed and boiled during a hard winter of privation, will yield a grease that can sustain him. The blood, cooked until it is a hard jelly, is very good. The lungs, dried and roasted, have a delicate flavor. The liver is well liked, especially when sprinkled with gall. The small intestine, filled with chopped meat, makes a fine sausage to be boiled or roasted. The hide, cooked long with proper application of green leaves, is tender and good. The flesh-meat and the fat, when fresh, are excellent. Cut into strips and smoked or sun-dried, they will keep for a long time. All of the animal is food.

  It is clothing. The hide, scraped clean and tanned with a mixture of the brains and liver and bone grease and the easily found soapweed, makes a fine leather, tough and durable. It can be left thick for warm wrapping, ropes, and long-wearing moccasins or chipped to a more flexible thinness for breechclouts and leggings and hunting shirts. For extra warmth in winter the hair can be left on and the hair-side turned inward.

  It is shelter. The tanned skin, stretched over lodge poles, makes a habitation for any weather. It is water­proof. It is windproof. It sheds the rain and the wind and the sun. In summer, when the lodge flap is open, the air moves in and up and out through the smoke hole at the top and the lodge is cooled. In winter, when the flap is closed and the fire burns, the warmth is held by the circling and sloping sides.

  It is many things. The hair of the head and mane can be twisted into very strong rope. The great sinews lying either side of the dorsal spines, dried and split into strands, provide excellent threads for sewing. Water skins can be made from the bladder and heart sac. Cups and pots and kettles can be fashioned from the strong lining of the paunch. Knives and root diggers and hide scrapers and awls for punching holes in sewing and many other tools come from the many-shaped bones. Spoons and ladles come from the horns, steamed soft and bent into shape and
dried. A single horn, hollowed and plugged with a tiny air hole left, can carry fire from place to place and for many hours and even days in the form of smoldering punk. Straight pieces of horn, glued together and wrapped with sinew, form a stout bow. The big tendon found under the shoulder blade is a bowstring that the strongest arm cannot break. The shoulder blade itself has a natural hole that can be used in softening the freshly tanned hide. The hide is pulled through again and again and the hole edges break the stiffness and a smooth softness develops. Drums can be made of the sounding rawhide, best from the neck where it is thickest, and rattles of skin bags with stones in them, and flutes from the marrow­bones.

  It is all these things and many more. It is a basis for a way of life for a man, a tribe, a people. That is what Little Bear had.

  He is there with the carcass of an old bull buffalo in his canyon in the high border country. His leg is healing. He has food. He has material with which he can fashion for himself clothing and shelter and tools and weapons. He has long hours in which to work and to think and to dream while the days and the nights of summer drift over the hills. ...