The Canyon Jack Schaefer

by Les Weil

  The timeless sun shone into the canyon, holding back the edge of autumn. It shone warm on the dark straight hair of Little Bear as he sat cross-legged on the ground making a bow out of pieces of horn. He fastened them together with a warm jelly-like glue made of rawhide chips boiled in water that would set firm when it cooled and hardened. He wrapped them with strips of sinew, moistened by long soaking so that they would shrink tighter when they dried. This would be a better bow than the one of juniper wood that lay beside him. He finished and laid the new bow on the ground to dry. He stood up and stretched. His right leg was healed. There was a slight ridge around the bone where the break had been that he could feel through the flesh with his fingers. But the leg bore his weight well and full strength was returning to the muscles long cramped by the splint of short sticks. He wore a new shirt and new leggings and new moccasins, double thickness on the bottoms. He did not need the clothing yet for protection against the weather but it was still new and he was proud of it. He looked out over his canyon. It was a good place. Berries were ripe on the bushes, late raspberries and some currants and many sarvissberries, enough for good eating now and for drying for good eating later. The wild grapes and two trees of wild plums would be ripe in a few weeks. Farther down the canyon the buffalo grazed, the young bull, the five cows, and three calves. The fourth calf he had taken. Its skin, softer and finer than that of the old bull, was in the new shirt and the leggings. He counted those remaining. Nine. They were his buffalo. It was a good place. Why was he restless in the warm afternoon sun?

  He walked toward the upper corner of the canyon to the left of the waterfall where the raspberry bushes grew among many stones thrusting up above the soil. He limped a little, favoring his right leg. He moved slowly, eating the biggest of the berries, the choicest and ripest. He came around a clump of bushes and saw the badger. Its short-legged, broad body was stretched out on a low flat stone. It was sleeping in the sun.

  That was very strange. There had been no badger in the canyon and no sign of one. Rabbits, yes, and field mice and a few rock squirrels. But no badger. Perhaps it had fallen over the high rock edge and survived the falling, for a badger was the hardiest of all animals and could be beaten many times with a big club and still live and still try to fight the one beating. Perhaps it had come there by some magic of its own, for a badger had many powers and strong medicine. Little Bear stood still and bowed his head once in respect. Badgers were sometimes friendly with the Cheyenne people. They were wise and knew much. They had been known to talk to men and tell them what to do and how to live. He would not offend the sleeping one.

  Quietly he sat down cross-legged on the ground. Time passed and the badger opened its eyes. It saw him. It did not leap up startled. It looked at him with its black shining eyes. "Oh badger," he said. "Speak to me." It jumped from the stone and was gone.

  He sat still and thought long about this. He had been wrong. A man should not speak to a badger. It knew what was in his mind without his speaking. He should wait for it to speak. And this badger seemed to be very thin. It seemed to be very tired. Perhaps it would not like being in the canyon and would go as it had come. Meat was its food, the gophers and prairie dogs and other small animals which it could overtake in their burrows, digging much faster than they could with its great claws on its powerful forefeet. There were no gophers or prairie dogs in the canyon. The few field mice would not be much for such a badger and they had many rock cracks in which to hide.

  He rose and went back to his camp by the stream where it emerged from the pool under the waterfall. He went to his storehouse, the big crack in the base of the rock wall to the right that extended in nearly six feet. He moved the stones away from the opening. He took a piece of dried meat out of the container made of the heavy bull rawhide. He went again among the raspberry bushes and the upthrust rocks. He laid the piece of meat on the low flat stone.

  In the morning it was gone.

  Each day for three days he put a piece of meat on the stone and waited a long time. Each morning following each day the meat was gone. But he did not see the badger. That was not strange. Badgers were not seen often even when there were many about. They kept to themselves. They could hide where another animal might think there was no place to hide. They could dig themselves out of sight in the ground so fast that they were gone before they were seen.

  On the fourth day he laid a piece of meat on the stone and waited. He sat cross-legged twenty feet away and watched the stone. Time passed. The dark brown head of the badger with its long white stripe down the middle to the nose appeared over the stone. The badger saw him. it looked at him for many moments. It moved and the whole of the wide grizzled gray-brown body appeared on the stone. It ate the meat. It watched him while it ate and when it was finished eating it lay stretched out on the stone and watched him. He was very still.

  The sun was warm on Little Bear and the badger watching each other. His mind was filled with many thoughts and many questions but he did not speak. He sat still and the movements of his mind slowed and the sun was warm on him and his head dropped forward in drowsiness. The badger looked at him and its eyes became very bright. It spoke. "Big brother," it said, "why do you feel that this canyon is a cage?" The eyes of the badger dimmed and closed and after a time they opened again and were very bright. "All men live in cages," it said. "They are shut in on all sides by rock walls of custom and the desire for the good opinion of their neighbors. They are bound by the need to provide food for their families." The eyes of the badger dimmed and its head rose and the eyes were very bright. It stood up on its short bowed legs and turned to go. It swung its head back for a last look at him. "There is a way," it said. "Stones piled upon stones rise upward. Rock striking on rock chips away small pieces. ..."

  Little Bear walked along the base of the near rock wall looking upward. He saw the place that he had not seen before. He saw the place where successive ledges topped each other at fifteen- to twenty-foot intervals. There were four, each wide enough for a man to find firm foothold upon it. On the ground at the base all around were many stones. Some were very big. Others were small enough for a man to lift and carry them. He began to pile the stones one upon another in a solid heap that leaned against the rock wall and sloped upward toward the first ledge twenty feet above the ground. ..

  The sun shone into the canyon. It shone bravely but it could not hold back the edge of autumn. The air was chill. The rock was cold under the hands of Little Bear. He was pressed close against the rock wall above the first ledge. His feet were firm on a niche cut into the rock. His body was tight against the wall. His left hand gripped the edge of another niche a little below his shoulder height. His right hand held a piece of the hard flint stone that was found at the lower end of the canyon near the stream fissure where the freezings and thawings of endless seasons had split chunks off a vein of it running through the other rock. A pile of other pieces of the flint stone lay ready on the ledge below him. He reached with his right hand and struck the piece it held against the rock wall above him. He struck again and again and the tiny chips danced.

  His right arm was tired. He leaned tighter against the wall and shifted his hands. His right hand now gripped the niche below his shoulder. His left hand held the piece of flint stone and struck at the rock above him.

  Warning twinges ran down the backs of his legs, the first signs of the cramps that could come. He dropped the flint stone to the pile of others on the ledge. He climbed down and sat quietly on the ledge with his feet hanging over and his back against the rock wall. He rested. The strength of good meat was in him. He rose and climbed again to the niches. Again the flint stone struck against the rock wall.

  Three days the storm lasted. Three days the snow fell, sometimes thick and big-flaked, sometimes light and floating in the air. Winds of winter whistled over the plateau and out over the open space of the canyon. They swept across and did not drop to the canyon floor, but they whipped the snow over the far rock edge and piled it in
a twenty-foot drift along the base of the wall.

  There was no more snow to fall. The sky cleared and the sun peered through the running clouds and smiled on the white shining beauty of the canyon.

  Little Bear sat in his shelter that was built as he had heard old men say his people built their shelters when they lived in villages along the big river. His was small but it was built the same way, of poles close-set in the ground with their tops brought together and the space between filled with bunches of twisted long grasses woven in and out and a layer of rooted sod over all. A hole in the top center let out the smoke of the fire of buffalo chips and wood that burned all day and smoldered through the night. A flap of skin covered the small outside opening through which he crawled to come in or to go out. The covering could be fastened tight when the wind blew the wrong way. The shelter was not like a neat rising buffalo-skin lodge. But it was warm. It was his lodge.

  In such weather he could not work on the niches in the rock wall which were up past the third ledge now. That did not trouble him. There was always much to be done. It was pleasant working in his shelter when a storm strode over the land.

  He was finishing a pair of snowshoes. They were of willow wood bent into shape and tied and laced criss­cross with rawhide strips. They had thongs to fasten them to his feet. He noticed that the light coming through the smoke hole was brighter. No more snow­flakes drifted through to be met by the warmth of the fire and driven back out in the form of vapor. He loosened the small door covering and stooped to peer out and saw the white beauty of the snow.

  He crawled through the doorway. He pulled the ankle flaps of his new winter moccasins up and tied them tightly. He fastened the thongs of the snow­shoes firmly around his toes and around his ankles. he moved out on the snow with wide swinging steps and flapped his arms to make his blood flow fast and warm. It was good to be out in the open again, not just to push to the stream for water or to the storehouse for food, but out in the open and free to swing anywhere throughout his canyon. Already some of his neighbors were about. Where the snow was thin on top of a stone a bird had landed and walked around. Each tiny footprint was clear and precise. Nearby were signs that a rabbit had left its storm hole and ventured into the new white world. Foolish rabbit. The snow was still light and unpacked. The natural snowshoes of the rabbit were not broad enough. His own snowshoes sank six or eight inches before they held. The rabbit had floundered even where the snow was not deep. The print of its belly was plain over the prints of its feet. The tracks stopped in deeper snow. The rabbit had burrowed down through the whiteness to wait in a cozy pocket warmed by its body heat until the snow would be better packed and a light crust formed.

  A foolish rabbit. Very foolish. Rabbit fur was soft and had many uses. It made excellent mittens. He jumped headlong into the snow, diving into it, and his hands found the soft furry body. He struggled to his feet on the clumsy snowshoes. He held the rabbit by the ears with his left hand and with the edge of his right hand struck it at the base of the skull on the neck and it hung limp and lifeless. "Oh rabbit," he said. "I grieve for you, but I need your fur." He shook the snow out of his hair and swung on his new snowshoes over where the upthrust rocks marked the summer raspberry patch.

  He found the flat stone under the snow. He brushed away the white covering and the piece of meat put there four days ago was still there. That was not strange. The badger slept most of the winter in some secret place deep in the ground. It came out only when there was a stretch of fairly warm days. It would not be out in weather like this. "Oh badger," he said to the rocks around, "food is here. It is waiting."

  He moved along by the near rock wall past the place where the rough slanting walkway of piled stones led up to the first ledge and the niches above. He did not look up. He was looking toward the lower end of the canyon. The buffalo were there. They were working out of the pocket-corner where they waited patiently with heads down through the worst of the storms. They were pawing down through the snow to the clumps of winter-cured grass. They were chewing on the smaller shoots of the aspen along the lower stretch of the stream. He counted them: the young bull, the three growing calves, and four cows. Eight in all. He had taken the fifth cow when the first winds of winter gave warning. Her skin was his sleeping robe. Her meat, some dried and some smoked, was in his storehouse. There was plenty of meat in the storehouse. Even some of the meat of the old bull was still there, and the meat of the calf. Perhaps he should not have taken the cow too. But he needed her hide.

  This was a good place for the buffalo. They had fine food in summer. They had enough food in winter. They had water always near. It was running water and never froze over completely. They had bushy brier thickets in which to scrape away the gnats in summer. They had the high closing-in, overhanging rock walls of the corner-pocket to protect them from the storms in winter. It was a good place for them.

  Already the dusk shadows were creeping forth. He returned to his shelter and skinned the rabbit. The fresh meat, not full of strength but savory, was very good. He ate all of it at the one meal. His stomach bulged over the breechclout string. That was a good feeling. He lay wrapped in the robe of the skin of the fifth cow and watched the smoke of the smoldering fire spiral upward and out through the roof hole. The canyon was a good place for him too.

  Winds of winter night whistled over the high plateau. They did not drop down to disturb the peace of the canyon. And the Maiyun of the rock walls were there, riding the winds and laughing to themselves. They looked down as they raced high above. "Little brother. Are you warm? Are you well fed?"

  In the wilderness all that has life must fight for that life. The rule is unchanging and eternal.

  Dark shapes moved in the night on the plateau by the far side of the canyon. A small herd of wapiti had come down from the high ridges, a seven-point bull and six cows, creatures of the mountain forests and the up­land glades. They seemed taller than buffalo because they carried their heads arching up when they moved, but they were smaller in bulk, finer-limbed, lighter in weight. They sought the open level of the plateau now where the winds had whipped the snow along leaving almost bare patches between the drifts. They did not often seek food here or in the night hours when darkness could cloak danger. Usually they fed in the early morning and in the late afternoon. But the storm had lasted a long time. They were very hungry.

  Another dark shape moved in the night, creeping belly to the ground, using the drifts for cover; a great cat, a puma, the lion of the mountains. It was an old male, nearly eight feet from the blunted nose to the black tail tip, two hundred pounds of lean hunger. It crept close to the wapiti, upwind, silent and immaterial as a shadow in the half-light of the lonely stars on the snow. One of the cows moved near. The puma flowed forward and leaped for the neck, for the staggering impact of its weight on the head and the great crunching power of its jaws on the vertebrae just back of the skull.

  The snow was soft. The footing was insecure. The puma missed its mark by inches and struck on the shoulder of the cow. Its claws sank through the hide and it clung, reaching now with its fanged jaws for the underside of the neck and the big vein pulsing there. The cow leaped ahead in terror. It drove through the drifts in great bounds. It saw the blackness of open space ahead and wrenched sideways to turn and the puma was torn loose and thrown scrambling and sliding into the snow on the edge of the high rock wall. Its claws bit down through the snow and into the sod but the soil was thin and the claws ripped through. It fell into the blackness, plummeting down and down and into the twenty-foot depth of the big drift below. ...

  It was the bellowing that woke Little Bear. He slept late because his stomach had been full of the good fresh meat of the rabbit. The sun was already more than an hour high when he started awake at the hoarse terrified bellowing from the lower end of the canyon. He sat up and listened and there was no sound. Then he heard the buffalo moving outside, close by, breathing heavily and floundering in the snow. He scrambled to the doorway and lifted the sk
in-flap and crawled through. The buffalo were running along the base of the near rock wall. They leaped and struggled where the snow was deep and drove on. They ran in among the upthrust rocks where the summer raspberry bushes grew and reached the wall of the upper end of the canyon and stopped. They stood in a compact bunch and stared back down the way they had come and their muscles jumped and twitched with a fear. It was very strange.

  He put on his snowshoes and went toward them. They were afraid of him. They had been afraid of him since the killing of the old bull. Always they ran from him. But now they did not run. They pushed back until their rumps were against the rock wall and stared at him and stared past him down the canyon and their muscles twitched in a terror. He stopped. He counted them. Seven. One was not there. One of the growing calves was not with them. The young bull stood out in front of the others. It pawed the snow under its front feet. It lowered its big head and blew through its nostrils. It might rush at him. He turned and swung swiftly on the snowshoes down the canyon. He did not go far before he saw the tracks.

  They were almost round tracks more than four inches across. Each had the imprint of the pad and of the four toes and the marks of the tips of the sheathed claws too were plain in the snow.

  That could not be. The puma, the blood-drinking one that moved as a shadow no hunter could overtake and that killed horses in the dark of the night, could not be in his canyon. It was not there yesterday when he caught the rabbit. It was not there any of the days stretching back before. Yet the tracks were plain and there were many of them. Some evil spirit had taken its form and come to rob him of his buffalo. His own muscles twitched in a strange fear.

  He hurried back to his shelter. He hung his quiver of bullhide on his left side with the carrying band over his right shoulder. He took his five arrows and rubbed their flint-stone points with a leaf of the white sage from the small pile of the leaves in a corner of the shelter. He did this to purify them and to remove any bad omens that might be clinging to them. He put the arrows in the quiver and took the bow of buffalo horn and strung it with the bowstring made from the great shoulder tendon of the old bull. He took the knife from the sheath fastened to his leggings on his right thigh and rubbed the blade with another leaf of the white sage and put it again in the sheath. He was sad now that he had not made a stout tomahawk or strong stone axe. He started down the canyon with wide swinging steps on the snowshoes.