As she continued toward me, I saw movement off to her right. It was a Mojave Green rattlesnake coiling to strike.
“Stop!” I yelled.
As I yelled, the Green rattled.
An alarmed look came over her face. I was afraid she would move out of fear and be struck, but to her credit she didn’t panic. She stood perfectly still.
“Okay, don’t move. Don’t even turn your head. The rattler is off to your right. He may be close enough to strike.”
I dropped the water bag in the dirt.
When working in the heat, I wore long-sleeved, khaki shirts because they were actually cooler than T-shirts. I quickly unbuttoned my shirt and moved off to the right of the snake.
The ominous rattling stopped as the snake turned its head toward me and considered its options.
I talked as I walked and removed the shirt.
“It may seem like its safe now, but it’s not. The snake is looking at me because I’m moving, but it can turn and strike faster than you can blink. Please, stay where you are.”
As I approached the green, it began to rattle again, its tongue flicking in and out to pick up my scent.
“In a minute, I’m going to throw my shirt at it. When I do, run to your left.”
With both hands, I pitched the shirt underhanded. The rattler struck at it. The Asian woman moved.
The shirt settled over the snake. It didn’t like it one bit. It slithered out from under the shirt and began to move toward some rocks.
I picked up a stone and threw it.
The snake stopped, coiled, and rattled again.
“Get me a long-handled spade. Hurry!”
The woman headed off toward the barn at a run.
Two more times the snake started toward the rocks, and two more times I threw stones at it, making it coil and rattle. I was determined it would not get away.
The woman came running back with a spade. She gave the snake a wide berth.
I took the spade from her and closed the distance between the snake and me.
When I pushed the spade forward, the snake struck it twice so fast I couldn’t actually see the strikes – only feel them.
I pulled the spade back. The venom showed white against the rusty metal.
I got between the rocks and the snake and began to herd it away from the pile. It gave ground reluctantly, buzzing angrily.
When I got it out on flat ground, I swung the spade high over my head and brought it down on the snake’s body. Even injured, it still tried to strike, but it was stretched out now, and from a safe distance I smashed its head and then cut it off with the edge of the spade.
The woman and I stood looking at the remains of the snake. Even without its head, the body continued to writhe and twist in the dirt. She seemed to be badly shaken by what had just happened, so her next words surprised me.
“Did you have to kill it?”
“Yes ma’am. I usually don’t kill rattlers; just let them go on their way while I go mine. But this one is way too close to the house. Even if I drove it away, it would be back. It probably lives in those rocks over there and hunts wood rats in the barn.
If it had struck you, you would have died.”
She gave a small shudder.
“Really? I’ve heard people can survive rattlesnake bites.”
Depends. The venom from most rattlers attacks muscles and organs. Adults can survive it. Mojave Greens are different. Their venom attacks your respiratory system. You go into seizures and stop breathing.”
“Isn’t there anti-venom?”
“In Smoke Tree. Anyone struck way out here would die before they could get to the hospital.”
We stood for a moment while she absorbed what I had told her.
“You’re shook up. Maybe you should sit down.”
She shook her head.
“No, I’ll be fine.”
We stood there a few minutes longer before I broke the silence.
“Ma’am, I’m from Smoke Tree Hardware and Building Supply. The stuff on the truck is for Mr. Stonebridge. Is he around?”
“He was expecting you quite a bit earlier. When you didn’t show up by two o’clock, he thought you probably weren’t coming today.”
“I know I’m late. I stopped to help someone.”
She held out her small hand.
“I’m Kiko. And I’m being rude. I was inviting you in for something cold to drink before you saved my life.”
I took her hand.
“I’m Aeden. Everyone just calls me Ade.
I don’t think I saved your life. You would have stopped on your own when you heard the rattle. Even people who have never heard that sound understand it’s bad news.
“Well, Ade, I’m pleased to meet you. And if it’s not too much trouble, do you think I could have my hand back?”
I dropped her hand as if it had burned me.
She smiled again.
“My goodness, I’ve made you blush? I didn’t know that was possible under all that tan.
Now, come on up to the house for that cold drink.”
I followed her across the yard. Her gait was athletic, her stride energetic.
I followed her into the adobe. It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dimmer light inside. We walked through the front part of the house and into the kitchen where Kiko gestured at a table.
“Sit down, Ade.”
She opened the door to a small, propane refrigerator. From where I was sitting, I could see bottles lying flat on the bottom shelf. When Kiko bent over to see what was there, her Levi’s stretched tight. I had to force myself to look away. If she had turned and caught me staring at her body, I probably would have died of embarrassment.
She straightened and turned to me.
“We have Coors, Pepsi and Nehi grape.”
“A grape drink, please.”
She bent over and pulled two bottles out of the refrigerator. Once again, I had to force myself to look away.
She came to the table with two bottles of Nehi grape and a bottle opener. She snapped the caps off, put one in front of me and sat down facing me. I took a huge swallow.
“So, Ade, you need to find John.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“I’m not a ‘ma’am,’ Ade. I’m a Kiko, and I’m not much older than you. So let’s drop the ma’am thing.”
“All right.
Kiko, I thought maybe Mr. Stonebridge or one of the hands could help me get the stuff off the back of the truck. And I have to have Mr. Stonebridge sign for it.”
“John and the hands went over to Bathtub Springs. They took the jeep and the pickup. If you want to go get him, you’ll have to take your truck.”
“I’d have to go through Watson’s Wash. With the truck so loaded, I don’t think I could get through. I know the spring. I’ll take a hike over the hill.”
“You know this area that well?”
“I spend a lot of weekends at Lee’s Camp up in the New Yorks.”
“I don’t know where that is.”
“As the crow flies, about twenty miles. A lot farther by road.
I’m know the springs because I hunt there in the fall.”
Kiko wrinkled her nose in distaste.
“You shoot animals?”
“Yes.”
“That’s disgusting.”
I finished my drink and stood up.
“Well, I’m sure some people agree with you.
But if you’ll excuse me, I’d better get started.”
I was dying to know where she had come from and why she was at a desert ranch on the side of the Pinto Mountain, but I didn’t want to pry. I also didn’t want to have any more discussions about hunting.
She followed me as I walked out of the house.
In the yard, I turned to her.
“Nice to meet you, Kiko.”
“Likewise, Ade. And thanks again for saving me from the snake.”
“Well, you’re the first person I’ve ever met who likes snakes.�
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“Like snakes? I hate them. They scare me to death.”
“But you didn’t want me to kill it.”
“I don’t like it when people kill animals. They’re just trying to live their lives. They have as much right to be here as we do.”
“I see.
Well, I’m off.”
I turned and walked around the house and along the hillside. I came to a steep draw choked with pinyon pine, juniper and yucca. Staying on the east side of the draw was easier than walking through the bottom of it. Safer too. With the draw so overgrown and filled with rocks, it was a great place to run into rattlers beginning to hunt now that the tilting sun had put the bottom of the gully in shadow.
Because the desert mountains of the Eastern Mojave had received unusual rains in the late spring, I could see the tiny, bright red blossoms of hummingbird bush. Farther down the slope a lot of lavender verbena was still blooming. There was white thistle in the disturbed soil ahead of me. As I climbed, the orange blossoms of desert mallow appeared. There was desert holly in the rocks. The rain had turned the plants a deep green.
I watched the ground in front of me for snakes. I couldn’t get the picture of the coiled Mojave Green or the sound of its rattle out of my head. It didn’t help that there was a big crop of brown, desert grasshoppers. Every time one of them whirred off the ground it front of me, it sounded for an instant like a rattler.
The mountainside was steep. I was sweating heavily when I reached the top of the ridge. The ground leveled out, and there were more pinyons than junipers. I found a big rock half embedded in the ground and surrounded by the bright green of Mormon tea and the purple blossoms of paper bag bush. After checking all around it for snakes, I sat down to catch my breath and take in the view of the Pinto Valley stretching out below me.
As I sat there, I thought about the woman back at the Box S.
Who was she? What was she doing at the Box S? How did she get there? She was like no one I had ever met. Like all the other teenage boys in Smoke Tree, I had fallen in love with Nancy Kwan in The World of Suzy Wong, but this was a living, breathing, real person. It seemed impossible such a woman would be out here in the middle of nowhere.
I got off the rock and went on.
The north flank of the mountain fell steeply away below me, and walking through the badly eroded, unstable scree created a series of small emergencies as I tried to keep my feet. I scrambled down the steep mountainside in a series of cautious zigzags. I was careful not to step on any of the basketball-size rocks. They were unstable ankle turners that could easily send me pinwheeling down the side of the mountain. When I finally reached the bottom, I turned toward the narrow, west end of the valley and Bathtub Springs.
Bathtub Springs got its name from an actual bathtub. The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 required ranchers who grazed cattle on public lands to improve multiple water sources, so a rancher with a sense of humor hitched a porcelain bathtub to his horse and dragged it to the bottom of the shallow draw. Then he rigged up a series of pipes to feed water to the tub from the artesian spring on the hillside.
I walked past the ranch pickup and a jeep. As I got closer to the springs, the area above and below the tub was full of catclaw acacia, desert willow and seep willow. There was water on the ground, enough to grow algae. Very unusual for a place where above-ground water was rarely seen. The bush muhly, indigo bush and arrowweed looked healthy next to the tiny flow, and Mojave asters bloomed in the shade close to the willows. There were wild honey bees buzzing through the blossoms and working the edges of the seep. I saw John Stonebridge and his hired hands, Chaco Hermosillo and Phil Fernald, farther up the draw.
Mr. Stonebridge turned when he heard me coming. He was fair-skinned, with sandy hair and the gray eyes of a sharpshooter. He was tall and very thin. The belt holding up his faded Levi’s was tightened to the last notch, and the dangling end trailed down the front of his pants, but he was still in danger of having his jeans slide over his narrow hips. He had on both a long-sleeved, cowboy shirt buttoned to his neck and a broad-brimmed cowboy hat to protect his fair complexion from the desert sun. In spite of that, his face bore the tiny scars of surgeries to remove skin cancers.
“Hello, Mr. Stonebridge.”
“Hello, Ade. Thought maybe you weren’t coming today.”
“I know I’m late. I stopped to help Mr. Stanton at Arrowhead Junction. I was driving by and saw him laying on the ground in front of the station.”
“What was wrong?”
“Turned out, Mr. Stanton had a stroke. I got him inside and called the sheriff’s department. Horse asked me to stay until help got there. Horse and the deputy took him to the hospital in Smoke Tree.”
“That’s too bad. Sure hope he’s going to be okay.”
“Me too.
Horse told me he thought the stroke was a mild one.”
“Good. Known Mr. Stanton since I was a young man. Always like to stop and visit with him.”
Mr. Hermosillo and Mr. Fernald had joined us during the conversation.
“You know the hands, right?”
“Yessir.”
I addressed the two men: “Mr. Hermosillo, Mr. Fernald.”
Both men nodded.
“Ade, didn’t you just finish high school down in Smoke Tree?”
“Yessir.”
“Well then, I think it’s time you stopped calling all of us ‘mister.’
I’m John. This is Chaco and that’s Phil.”
“All right sir, but that will be hard for me to get used to. I’ll probably forget now and then.”
“John, not ‘sir’.”
“Yessir.”
“I didn’t hear a vehicle. How’d you get here?”
“Walked. Truck’s over at the ranch.”
“Well, let’s go over and take a look.
Chaco, Phil, I’m going to go back to the house with Ade. Bury the new pipe down here in the wash.”
“Got it, boss.”
As we walked down the hill to the vehicles, I asked John what had happened to the old pipes.
“Vandalism. Some idiot shot them full of holes. We’re seeing more and more of that kind of thing. It was a .22. Probably some kid. I never thought I’d see the day we had to bury irrigation pipe, but I guess we have to.
We got in the jeep. There was no road in the west end of the valley, so we drove off over the rugged terrain in first gear and four-wheel-drive.
After we had been grinding along the valley floor for a few minutes, he turned to me.
“Go ahead and ask, Ade.”
“Sir?”
“John, remember.”
“Sorry. Ask what, John?”
“About the Japanese woman at the ranch.
You met her, right?”
“I did.”
“So you know her name is Kiko.”
“Yes.
“Don’t you want to know where she came from?”
“I don’t want to pry.
“I met her in Baker.”
“She lives in Baker?”
“No, she’s from Salinas.”
“Where’s that?”
“Up the coast near Monterey.”
“How’d she come to be in Baker?”
“I was over there on a Friday night in March to get a part coming in on the late bus from L.A. After I got the part, I went down the street to the Bun Boy to get something to eat before heading home.
Kiko was sitting in a booth. I couldn’t help noticing her. She was dressed in a black, evening dress. It was cold that night, and she didn’t even have a jacket.
She’s beautiful, isn’t she Ade?”
“She really is.”
“Anyway, she was trying to eat a burger, but some college boys, at least they looked like college boys, fraternity or football types, were bothering her.
Seems they were on their way to Vegas and had decided she should go with them. She told them politely she didn’t want to go, but these boys had been drinking an
d wouldn’t take no for an answer.
She got more emphatic in her refusals, but they wouldn’t leave it alone. She got up and walked out.
They followed her out the door. I thought I’d better go see if she needed help.
Their car was parked pretty close to my truck, and when I got to it, one of them had her by the arm and was trying to drag her to the car.
I yelled at them to leave off.
They didn’t take kindly to it. One of them called me “pops,” and the one holding her called me something much less pleasant.
While he was distracted, Kiko bit him on the hand, hard.”
Mr. Stonebridge smiled at the memory.
“He hollered and let go of her. She ran toward me with those boys after her, the big boy she bit leading the pack.”
“What did you do?”
“I reached in the truck and pulled my .30-.30 off the rack.
It’s astounding how the sound of a cartridge being levered into a carbine brings everything to a halt. Those boys stopped cold. I swear, one of them slammed on his brakes so hard he skidded in the dirt and almost fell down.
Anyway, they fussed and blustered a bit, but they did it while they were retreating toward their car. In a minute they were gone.
Sure raised a cloud of dust when they shot out of there.
I asked her if her car was in the lot. She said she didn’t have a car.
She told me she had spent the last of her money on that hamburger she didn’t get to eat.
I told her I was going to go inside and get some burgers and fries to go, and she was welcome to wait in the truck for me or go on her way.
When I came back out a bit later, she was still in the truck, leaned up against the door, fast asleep.
She woke up when I opened the door, and we talked a bit.”
“How did she get to Baker?”
“She was not forthcoming on that, and I didn’t push her. She was pretty shook up, and I don’t think it was just because of those college boys, so I let it be.
I told her Baker wasn’t a very good place for a young lady with no money in her pocket, and she agreed.
I invited her to come home with me to the ranch.”
“She asked a lot of questions about the place. I had the feeling she was afraid someone was going to show up in Baker looking for her. When she understood how far off the beaten path the ranch was, it was like she weighed everything in her mind and decided that even though she didn’t know me from Adam, it couldn’t be worse that whoever might be coming for her.
Mojave Desert Sanctuary Page 11