The Crossing(48)

In two days he struck a wagonroad passing east and west across the sierras. The woods were green with ilex and madroño, the road seemed little used. In a day’s travel he passed no soul. He crossed through a high pass where the way was so narrow that the rocks bore old scars of wagonhubs and below the pass were scattered stone cairns, the mojoneras de muerte of that country where travelers had been slain by Indians years before. The country seemed depopulate and barren and he saw no game and saw no birds and there was nothing about but the wind and the silence.

At the eastern escarpment he dismounted and led the horse along a shelf of gray rock. The scrub juniper that grew along the rim leaned in a wind that had long since passed. Along the face of the stone bluffs were old pictographs of men and animals and suns and moons as well as other representations that seemed to have no referent in the world although they once may have. He sat in the sun and looked out over the country to the east, the broad barranca of the Bavispe and the ensuing Carretas Plain that was once a seafloor and the small pieced fields and the new corn greening in the old lands of the Chichimeca where the priests had passed and soldiers passed and the missions fallen into mud and the ranges of mountains beyond the plain range on range in pales of blue where the terrain lay clawed open north and south, canyon and range, sierra and barranca, all of it waiting like a dream for the world to come to be, world to pass. He saw a single vulture hanging motionless in some high vector that the wind had chosen for it. He saw the smoke of a locomotive passing slowly downcountry over the plain forty miles away.

He took a handful of piñon nuts from one tattered pocket and spread them on a rock and cracked them with a handstone. He’d taken to talking to the horse and he talked to it now as he cracked the nuts and when he had them free of their hulls he scooped them up and held them out. The horse looked at him and looked at the piñon nuts and shuffled forward two steps and placed its rubbery mouth in his palm.

He wiped the slobber from his hand on the leg of his trousers and sat cracking and eating the rest of the nuts himself while the horse watched. Then he stood and walked to the edge of the escarpment and threw the handstone. It sailed out turning andfell and fell and vanished in the silence. He stood listening. From far below the faint clatter of stone on stone. He walked back and stretched out on the warm rock shelving and cradled his head in the crook of his arm and stared into the dark of his hatcrown. His home had come to seem remote and dreamlike. There were times he could not call to mind his father’s face.

He slept and in his sleep he dreamt of wild men who came to him with clubs and their teeth were filed to points and they gathered round him and warned him of their work before they even set about it. He woke and lay listening. As if they might yet be there just beyond the darkness of his hat. Squatting among the rocks. Chiseling in stone with stones those semblances of the living world they’d have endure and the world dead at their hands. He lifted his hat and placed it on his chest and looked at the blue sky. He sat up and looked for the horse but the horse was only a few feet away standing waiting for him. He rose and rolled the stiffness out of his shoulders and put on his hat and took up the trailing reins and ran his hand down the horse’s foreleg till it lifted its foot and he cradled the hoof between his knees and looked at it. The horse had long since shed its shoes and the hooves were long and broomed and he took out his pocketknife and pared back the hoof wall where the edges were splayed and then let down the horse’s foot and walked around the animal inspecting and paring the other hooves in turn. The constant currying of the brush and greenwood in the mountains had carried off all trace of the stable and the horse gave off a warm and rooty smell. The horse had dark hooves with heavy hoof walls and the horse had in him enough grullo blood to make a mountain horse by both conformation and inclination and as the boy had grown up where talk of horses was more or less continual he knew that where the blood carries the shape of a hock or the breadth of a face it carries also an inner being of a certain design and no other and the wilder their life became in the mountains the more he felt the horse subtly at war with itself. He didnt think the horse would quit him but he was sure the horse had thought about it. He pared the last hind hoof and led the animal back out to the narrow track and mounted up and turned and started down into the gorge.

The road descended the granite face of the sierra like a hairspring. He was amazed that wagons could have negotiated those narrow switchbacks. There were caveouts along the edges of the road where he dismounted and led the horse and there were rocks in the road no man could move. The way descended down out of the pine forests through oak and juniper. A wild and jumbled terrain. Everywhere the green spring invasive in the barrancas. In the evening light a trembling celadon. He was at the descent some seven hours, the last of them in darkness.