Читать книгу Spirit Walk - Jay Treiber - Страница 10

Three

The ocotillo become all but invisible to anyone who lives in the southeastern corner of Arizona. From a distance, their shape is subtle, their limbs twisting from the ground like the legs of an upended octopus. But for anyone who leaves a roadway, walks over a rise or into a canyon, they become a formidable presence, any dense stand of them almost impossible to negotiate. Even these many years later, Kevin’s skin remembered their thorns. Tangled and gray, the ocotillos on that November morning were not in bloom.

Two canyons north of where they’d started their hunt, Kevin and Mondy cut the tracks of a large cat. They had encountered the prints—three of them, pressed deep in the mud along the bank of a rock spring—half an hour before, shortly after lunch, and still they could not agree on what kind of animal had made them. In the midday hours they tended to work lower in the canyons, hoping to push up bedded game, and had crossed the spring bottom when Mondy stopped and raised one hand. He stared down at the ground. The prints were undoubtedly feline, but Kevin found no reason for it to be any other than a lion, perhaps a mature tom. Armando Luna, though, would not be moved, his argument planted as the mountain they stood on. “This is Pete’s track, man. I know for sure.” Old Pete, El Tigre, a black jaguar the Mexicans sometimes called El Sombro, came from the south at intervals over the last ten years to ravage game and livestock, international borders and paid-for cattle and colts be damned.

“It’s probably just a cougar,” Kevin said.

Mondy was patient. “Cougar track is smaller and more square.”

“How do you know that?” Kevin regretted the question the moment it came. Tracking was Mondy’s one solid skill.

Mondy looked off toward the valley, the grassy flat stark under the afternoon light. “We’ve had this argument before.”

Two hours later, John Monahan squatted on his haunches before the same set of tracks. Forty-six years old, he was a third-generation area rancher, and his outfit encompassed a good part of the San Bernardino Valley along the New Mexico border. The Monahan family had hunted big cats as long as they had ranched and had gained national attention for their prowess.

Local lore had it that John harbored a personal vendetta against the cat in question. For the last five years, Pete walked on only three paws, for which the rancher himself, as the story went, could take personal credit. Having woken one morning to the sound of a screaming filly, Monahan, in bedclothes and slippers, caught the old tom—a surreal silhouette of black—just as he was dragging the mare’s dead week-old colt out of the corral. The rancher had picked up the Mini 14 instead of the .270—the two rifles stood side-by-side in the entry-room closet—and the cat, no more than a hundred feet from the house, had slowed for the dragging of the colt. The telescopic sight of the deer rifle would have gathered enough dawn light for a good shot, but Monahan had instead blazed out 22 caliber bullets, emptying the entire clip, never able see the pins on the open sights of the little carbine well enough to fire a killing round. And it was only after sunrise that he had found the few spots of blood. He’d fed the dogs, saddled the good mule, and set out knowing full well he’d waste a day—though he had to try—as Pete, lame though he was, would fly like a spirit back into Mexico. Kevin, though, had never heard this story from Monahan himself—nor was he inclined to enquire about it now, as he and Mondy watched the rancher examine the tracks.

John looked up where the sun had moved toward the horizon and stood a fist and a half above the Perilla Hills. “It’ll be getting on dark in an hour or two.” It took only a beat for him to make his decision. “My dogs’re about used up today. And Pete’s not going anywhere, not too fast, anyway—we’ll wait till morning.”

“It’s him then,” Mondy said.

Monahan thought before answering. “Magoffins over in Guadalupe canyon are missing two colts.” He nodded down at the tracks. “And a three-footed animal could have made those. I think it’s him.”

Mondy might have glanced at Kevin, some sign of his triumph, but he didn’t.

“Your dad and O.D. come with you?” Monahan asked Kevin.

“They were drawn for the December hunt,” Mondy answered, sensing that he and Kevin might be in trouble with the rancher. “We came alone today. I told this kid to start further north, more toward Cottonwood, but he didn’t listen.”

“Well,” Monahan said, his pauses uncomfortably long. “I’m not sure it’s good idea for anybody to be out here, especially near the border—damn dope runners sometimes get out this way.” He shook his head, looked sideways from under his winter Stetson at Kevin. “I don’t know that I’d even be out this way but that I have to look after my cows.”

At six o’clock the next morning, horse trailer in tow, they crossed the cattle guard and pulled up to the main house of the Cinder Knoll ranch. Thomas McNally, Kevin’s father, and his long-time hunting partner, O.D. Hallot, had come with them, unable to resist the chance of getting a glimpse of the big cat. The two men had ridden comfortably in the front of the King Cab Ford, while Kevin and Mondy had been stuffed into the back along with rifles, glasses, scopes, and ammo. Kevin and his friend had by turns accused each other of farting, hogging precious space, and stealing the last bit of coffee in the thermos, until O.D. had spoken up.

“Tom, slow this thing down to about forty.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’ll give these guys a better chance of survival when I throw their sorry asses out.”

The last half hour of the drive had been quiet.

A single flood lamp burned by the Quonset hut and corrals. John Monahan was loading four bridled and saddled mules into a well-used stock trailer. The last one had spooked slightly at the lights of the truck and Monahan had since calmed the animal and slapped it on the rump and it clumped into the trailer with the rest.

“Gentlemen,” was his greeting when the last of them, Kevin, had emerged from the truck.

They shook hands all around and had to speak above the dogs. Kevin counted six, who bayed from their pens for the excitement of the hunt. Tom gestured at the stock trailer. “Looks like we have more animals than people. I brought my two geldings.”

“No,” Monahan said, “Amanda’s got a deer tag. I just loaded up that damn sorrel mule she likes so much.”

Amanda Monahan, the rancher’s petite fifteen-year-old daughter, with whom Kevin had a speaking acquaintance at school. A cold tingle moiled at the bottom of his belly as he tried to recall whether he’d combed his hair and how well he’d brushed his teeth that morning. The girl was two years behind him (he a senior and she a sophomore) and had blossomed the last six months. Their slim relationship was based on a single conversation they’d had a year before about James Harriot’s All Creatures series which both had read.

The girl had slipped unnoticed into the cab of her father’s pickup, where she fired the ignition, grinding the diesel engine to a start, an impatient signal that she wanted to get this enterprise under way.

“Well,” Monahan said. “Looks like we’ll get out of here before noon, anyhow.”

To Kevin’s chagrin, though, his father had asked the rancher if the two-hundred-fifty pound Armando Luna could ride in his truck and the girl in the king cab to make better use of space. The passenger switch decided, Kevin’s heart rate rose, and he hated himself for it. He’d thought about arguing for another plan but knew it would only cause his clueless father confusion, making the situation worse.

Mondy, rifle slung in the crook of his elbow, stood at the passenger door of Monahan’s truck and waited as the girl slid out, smiled up at him bright and quick, then headed for the king cab. She swung open the passenger’s side door and greeted Kevin with a nonchalant “Hi,” and enough of a smile to raise a dimple in her right cheek, then tossed her braided rope of honey-colored hair and deftly scooted her slight rear end behind the front seat and between rifles.

The thirty-minute drive to the Escrobarra was uncomfortable, the two teenagers silent and squeezed as far as possible into their respective corners.

“You hear that, Tom?” O.D. said suddenly.

“Hear what?”

“Why, them smooching noises coming from the back seat.”

Hallot’s mocking tone was lost on Kevin’s father. “What the hell noises are you talking about?”

“That kissing.” Hallot was delighted, reveling in the stew of confusion and discomfort he’d created. “I think them two kids is making out in the back seat.”

“Oh, okay,” Tom said, getting it.

“For Christ’s sake O.D.” Kevin said, his face ablaze. “Quit it.”

But Hallot was unable to resist. “Don’t worry, Kev, I won’t look.”

Kevin saw his father’s eyes sweep him in the rearview mirror. And he knew well the smile he couldn’t quite see—the one that came when his old man was finally enlightened and included.

“Please, Dad, make him stop.”

A look, not even a glance, really, from Tom to O.D., mouth turned down and a slight wag of the head. It was a code between them Kevin had learned to read, and now understood he would be hectored no more. Still the humiliation of it stood thick as cedar smoke between him and the girl. This was one of many of O.D. Hallot’s capers that Kevin would find, even after three decades, hard to forgive.

They took the Starvation road south through Three-Mile Flat then made the winding climb up the first bald ridge on the southwest side of the Escrobarra, parking the trucks and trailers at an ancient and dilapidated corrals and loading shoot, hewn of rough-cut lumber. Monahan climbed out of his Chevy and clanked open the tailgate. The dogs jumped in pairs from their pens and scooted around the horse trailer, greedily taking in their freedom. They milled about, licking at themselves and one another and whining as they snuffed the morning ground. All were Blue Tick but for one heeler mix, a house pet named Bonny whose nose was reputedly as good or better than any of the full-breed hounds.

The party mounted up and broke trail, moving some five hundred yards along a fence line, then cut a good game path and began the long climb up the ridge to the cat track. Kevin was unsettled as he rode an unfamiliar and belligerent roan mule named Sally. The less experienced Mondy rode Turk, Kevin’s gentle one-eyed gelding he’d had since childhood. Sally’s rough, jaunting gait made him feel like a sack of rocks in the saddle, and he muttered and cussed under his breath.

The dogs had scattered, some of them fanning out and flanking the group, others trotting along some fifty yards ahead, snouts low and working to pick up a scent in the brush and grama grass. Out on point now, as the trail had gone gentle after the first steep climb, Monahan raised his bay mule to a molly trot, and Amanda, just behind him, followed course.

When they crested the first rise to a narrow brush-choked canyon, Monahan stopped his mule and raised his binoculars, only looking a moment before turning to his daughter and motioning her to halt. He raised the glasses again, and again only glanced, then signaled Amanda off her mule. Kevin, closest to them, dismounted, pulling his rifle from the saddle scabbard and creeping up quietly to sit beside John.

“That little clearing,” the rancher whispered, pointing down canyon some two hundred yards at a grassy patch in the chaparral.

The two bucks, both respectable, stood dead still, their shiny nostrils curling out steam into the dawn light. Amanda, having already chambered a shell, had slung off her fanny pack and bunched it into a rifle rest and now lay prone, aiming at the deer. The muzzle blast from her 6-millimeter caught Kevin full force, like a wave on the side of his body. The larger buck dropped from the field of Kevin’s scope, attempted vainly to stand, then crumpled into death throes.

“That took care of him,” the rancher said, his voice, though quiet, rife with pride and excitement. “Good shot, Mandi.”

Kevin had framed the other deer, now at a dead run, in his scope, and pressed his finger down on the trigger when John spoke up.

“Don’t shoot,” he said.

And now he could hear his father behind him, just above a whisper. “Hold fire, Kevin, don’t shoot.”

And now he was conscious, lifted from primal impulse into something like reason: not being able to recover a wounded animal was the most shameful of errors, and Kevin, even at his age, had already a profound sense of this code. He was to remember, many years later, even beyond the imprinted images of high desert landscape, even beyond the smells and sounds—of gun oil, and the metallic snick of a chambered shell—this code: you cannot call a bullet back, the trajectory fixed and damage done with the pulling of the trigger.

Kevin offered to drop down canyon with the girl and help recover the buck while the rest continued up ridge to the track site. Normally, the entire hunting party would have gone to inspect Amanda’s kill, but today old Pete’s trail was cooling fast. John had expressed some worry about leaving his daughter alone, and Kevin told him he would see her to the vehicles.

“Why don’t you two just unhitch the trailer, drive that deer back to the house, then come back with the truck.”

Kevin agreed. They would meet up later that day, two miles higher at a designated horse gate. John knew they had started far enough north to be out of the way of any recent smuggling activity. The teenagers stood more in danger of being thrown by one of those cantankerous mules than anything else.

It took the two little time to find the fallen animal. Amanda, excited and proud, pushing her red mule, Dunk, through brush and over rocks which Sally seemed reluctant to negotiate. The little heeler mix, Bonny, bounced along happily at Dunk’s heels.

“Slow down,” Kevin said. “Sally doesn’t love me like Dunk loves you.”

This earned him a sweet, green-eyed glance and quick smile over the girl’s shoulder. Amanda’s beauty, in large measure, could be credited to the genes of her stunning Hispanic mother, Yolanda. The woman’s pairing with the fair-skinned John had resulted in a lovely combination of blonde hair and Latin features. Both Kevin and the girl spoke fluent Spanish, but for some reason felt comfortable—in the limited exchanges they had had, at least—speaking only English.

When they’d reached the clearing where the deer lay, Amanda lifted her right leg over the saddle horn and hopped from the mule with no more thought than a cat. She picked up the buck’s head by the antlers for general appraisal and looked up at Kevin as he sat on Sally. Kevin noticed the dimple on her left cheek was more pronounced than that on the right.

“Good buck,” he said. “Hell of a shot, too. I’m damn jealous. I wish I’d have done it, but I didn’t.” This was true, as this three-by-three buck was bigger and more mature than the one he had taken the year before.

“You’ll get your chance,” the girl said. Another smile.

Kevin had offered to help field dress, hang, skin, and bone out the deer, but by the time he’d mentioned it, the girl had already snapped open her buck knife, made the long incision in the belly, pulled out the stomach and liver, and was elbow deep in the opened animal. Kevin was even more envious and painfully attracted, his turmoil made worse by the girl’s ambiguous signals. She told him, and he believed her, that she could take care of the animal by herself and that he should catch up with the men, but Kevin lingered, watching her field dress the deer. “I told your dad I’d stay with you.”

Bonny licked at the entrails and Amanda shooed her away. The dog moved off some ten yards and lay panting in a patch of sun. The girl stood up from her work, cut a glance Kevin’s way. “No need,” she said.

Kevin felt a slight pinch of rejection, not so much in her words but in that glance. He struggled for something to say.

Finally: “That damn dog doesn’t hang with the rest,” more a question than a statement, and the second ill-placed use of the word “damn” was embarrassing, but the girl pretended to take no notice of it. She’d rolled the sleeves of her canvas camouflage shirt up to the elbows, and the blood had come to that point but no further, a trick Kevin could never manage.

Done with the gutting, Amanda drew a cotton rope from her fanny pack, tossed it over a mesquite limb, passed it through the deer’s opened hocks, and tied it off then dallied the other end to her saddle horn. “Bonny’s kind of a loner,” she said, “but she’ll stay on a cat trail just as well as the others.”

This, Kevin did not believe. If so, the dog would have gone with the others.

The girl clicked her tongue and Dunk stepped forward, raising the carcass to where the nose was about a foot from the ground. Amanda half hitched the dallied end of the rope around her hand, walked to the mesquite, keeping the rope taut, and tied it off around the trunk in no more than forty-five seconds.

“What if the others strike a trail?” Kevin asked.

From her pack, Amanda had taken out a sharpening steel, over which she stropped her knife blade with half a dozen quick, chirping passes. She looked up at Kevin, squinting for the sunlight at his back. “She’ll hear them baying and catch up after a while.”

Kevin didn’t believe this either but didn’t want to say it. He wanted to stay longer, but knew, and understood the girl knew, his lingering was useless toward any purpose either of them could think of. The embarrassment of Hallot’s earlier teasing still hung on the air about them, and Kevin suddenly became anxious to leave. “You’re taking the deer home?”

“I think so,” the girl said. “Then I’ll come back.”

But she glanced toward the ground when she said this, a signal, to Kevin’s thinking, that she was not comfortable spending too much time alone with him. He both wanted her to stay and wanted her to go, those conflicted feelings pulling at him. This was a moment, in years to come, he would recall and regret many times.

He nodded, clicked his mule to a start and turned to go, when the girl called out to him.

“Hey, Kevin.”

He had never heard her use his name before and was surprised by the strange warmth it sent through his chest. He stopped his mule and waited, the girl’s pauses as unnervingly long as her father’s.

“Tell my dad not to worry,” she said. “I’ll catch up.”

“I don’t think anybody’s worried for you, Mandi.”

She smiled, brightest one of the day, perhaps for the sound of her name on Kevin’s voice, perhaps for the comment itself. “Why’s that?” she asked.

Kevin nudged Sally to a start and turned her up canyon. “Looks like you can take care of yourself.”