Читать книгу Ranchero - Stewart Edward White - Страница 8

Table of Contents

Nevertheless, even to Andy it was a queer country. Its conditions were strange to him. The sky was clear and deeply blue. The sun was strong. The air was hot. But the strength of the sun had no oppressive weight. It poured down like a golden flood. Every tissue in Andy’s body expanded to absorb it. Its very fire was grateful. The air rose in shimmers like the blast from an open furnace. Its heat bit his nostrils. But his skin was dry and his vigor unimpaired. The sagebrush of the bottomlands and the low hills crackled with the brittleness of desiccation as he moved through it. Its odor rose pungent to his nostrils. The earth was baked to an iron hardness. On its surface lingered a few dried sparse patches of the grasses of a former season, thin and fragile, without virtue.

It seemed an inhospitable land. The water was cold and clear. The man and his animals quenched their thirst. But that was all. Andy went hunting. There were no deer, though plenty of tracks petrified in what had been mud many months before. The horses nuzzled the grass, then turned away. But shortly Andy noticed them eagerly licking the apparently bare ground. Examining closely he found it covered with small oily seeds, the fruit of the burr clover. After an incredibly brief time the beasts retired to the shade, stood on three legs, and snoozed. They were satisfyingly fed. On the side hill, among the small vales, he heard a snuffling, and saw the great brown body of a grizzly eating the acorns beneath the trees. Like most sensible mountain men, he had always avoided when possible an encounter with these animals, having found that they were in general harmless when undisturbed, but formidable in combat, especially to a man in command of but a single small bullet. But the jerked meat was exhausted, and there seemed no other game but quail, on which Andy was reluctant to expend his precious ammunition. So without haste he went into war, delivering his shot coolly, springing into the branches of an oak when the beast charged, awaiting there in confidence the effect of his carefully delivered heart shot.

That night he feasted on bear steak. The next morning he caught up his horses, already filling out their gauntness, tied the bear’s paws to his saddle, and rode to the west.

All day he moved in and out of diminishing hills. Live oaks were spaced on their slopes and crests as though planted for a park. The sagebrush ended. The dry brown grass thickened, grew tall. Just before sunset he eased himself in his saddle and looked abroad over the plains of the great valley.

The sun was in his eyes, its rim just touching gold-powdered mountains far and low to the west. The heat of the day was lifting. From the snows of the Sierra breathed an air. The plains were like a great brown sea. Under a breath of breeze all its surface rippled. With a heavier puff of wind it broke into waves which ran away and away until lost in the horizon haze. A herd of elk grazed in the middle distance; a long patterned flight of wild fowl cut the lucent green of the western sky. In the air was a deep humming undertone of bees, a calling of small birds, a liquid, checked half-song of a meadowlark remembering spring. A released fragrance of ripe grasses clung to the last of the day’s warmth. From cottonwoods at the stream’s edge floated the mourning of doves.

Andy straightened in his saddle with a deep sigh. It seemed to him, for the moment, at least, that he had at last found the peace for which he had journeyed so far. The cloud of frustration, of tragedy, of loss of those he held most dear, of gathering bitterness and strife, had broken against the serenity of those distant peaks turning rose in the sunset. He had escaped—into the Lovely Land.