A Mating of Hawks (31 page)

They stopped near Papago Tanks and trudged up the wash till they had to scramble up boulders to find the natural cisterns. It was an oasis of trees and grass, a prime watering place for birds and animals. “That Sand Papago hermit picked about the only place to be,” Tracy decided as they munched trail mix and enjoyed chilled oranges and iced tea. She watched a hummingbird sip at a red chuperosa flower. “If Socorro and Shea had found a place like this, they might have just homesteaded rather than trying to walk out.”

“Enjoy it,” advised Shea. “This is the only Triple A on the tour.”

Past the forbidding Sierra Estraña—“The Strange Range,” Shea rhymed—the dunes appeared so close now that they dazzled, endless sweeps of that glowing rosy gold.

Moon Crater was almost silted to its rimmed circumference, but the reddish core in the center rose like a jagged crescent. There was breeze enough to inspire them to climb up the rugged sides to the top. From there they could see scattered ranges, isolated tracings of green growth along arroyos, and the sensuous tawny dunes to the south and east. White droppings showed that hawks and eagles had often perched here, too, surveying their vast and undisputed kingdom.

On the way back, they stopped for no reason that Tracy could discern. A bit grumpily, she followed Shea, who searched around a bit and then called triumphantly. “Papago Tanks is prettier but this place is air-conditioned!”

“So's the truck,” muttered Tracy, but she clambered up a small slope and gazed down into a large opening in the rocks. Ten feet below was a dirt floor and on either side there seemed to be a cavern.

Shea, already on the bottom, offered a shoulder for her to step down on till she could reach a pile of rocks. It was a good twenty degrees cooler, but Tracy sniffed and wrinkled her nose. “What's that musty smell?”

“Caves smell musty,” Shea teased, “But I suspect that aroma comes from bat guano!”

“Bat!”

“Well, sure,” he said reasonably. “If you were a bat, wouldn't you like it here?”

Wings brushed her cheek just then. She squeaked and almost stepped on one of several small corpses that her accommodating vision could now detect on the ground.

“I want out of here!”

“But, dear! If you were a Sand Papago—”

“Well, I'm not and if you don't boost me out
muy pronto
I'll put cactus in your bed!”

“I'd hoped for something nicer,” Shea sighed as he obediently stooped to hoist her out.

They camped among palo verde and ironwood trees in a broad wash beneath the rim of Sykes' Crater. Shea grilled steaks over ironwood coals, while Tracy put together a salad. With cold wine, nothing had ever tasted so delicious. After the few dishes were done and scraps thrown a good distance down the wash for some fortunate coyote, they sat in their camp chairs, holding hands and watching the stars as the embers blinked companionably.

“In spite of your bats, it's a lovely honeymoon,” Tracy murmured.

“Yes,” he said, and turned her face up for his kiss.

It was deliciously cool when, before dawn, they made a hearty breakfast and started up the side of the vast crater. It was hard going in the crumbly volcanic rubble. Tracy took off her light jacket and left it on a rock.

“Good idea,” approved Shea. “You won't need it again today.”

When they finally reached the 130-foot-high rim, the sun beamed its first light against the side of the immense crater, painted the reddish mountain to their left. Far below spread a small universe of arroyos, fallen boulders, grassy plains and trees.

“Can we get down there?” Tracy eyed the rugged rock walls with apprehension. “And if we do, can we get out?”

“I did it before,” he assured her. “And this time I've got ropes for the worst parts.”

“Water?”

He patted his daypack. “Two quarts.” He chuckled. “I've even got trail mix and one of those light emergency blankets in case you decide we ought to stay all night.”

She shuddered. “It looks a little too much like a penthouse of hell!” Lifting the brim of her hat, she turned to scan the region. Pinacate Peak lay below Papago Tanks and its lava flows spread across the lower country like a jaggedly cut mantle.

Dead volcanoes and cinder cones, eaten into strange silhouettes by wind, rain and time, showed black or red or blue-gray on the barren plain where the water courses marked the only bright threads of green. Up close, of course, the seemingly flat expanses were toothed with jagged lava and studded with limber bush, creosote and brittle bush, even white prickly poppies and orange globe mallow. But from here, Tracy gazed down at a relief map of some strange and awesome planet that seemed devoid of life. Beyond the Buried Range and the shining dunes sparkled the distant waters of the Gulf.

“Shall we?” Shea made a sweeping welcoming gesture as he got out his light nylon rope. “We don't really need this, but it'll make the first part of the going easier. These cinders at the top are darned slippery.”

They certainly were, even with the help of the rope Shea tied to a palo verde and attached to another tree farther down. “We'll leave it there,” he said. “We'll be mighty glad to have it on the way back.”

Tracy believed him. The fine black cinders were shifty as sand and already absorbing solar heat. It was a relief to reach the rock ledges and firmer footing, though even this could give way. “If you must grab something,” Shea warned, “try not to make it cholla.”

Cholla's many spines made prickly pear seem like a velvet cushion. Tracy had once spent an agonizing hour picking cholla out of a dog's tongue so she didn't need Shea's warning to avoid it here. Where soil was stable enough for the scant foothold they needed, stunted trees and shrubs grew on the descent. Working through outcroppings and eroded lava, Shea produced a shorter rope, tied it to the best tree he could find, and lowered himself to the next rock level, helping Tracy down. “We'll leave that rope, too,” he said.

They were about halfway down. Tracy shielded her eyes and looked up. It seemed an impossible climb. She looked down. It was a dizzying fall. She groaned a little.

“Drink up,” Shea said, handing her a canteen. “It's easy going from here.”

“You'd better not be lying!”

He wasn't. The angle became more gradual and there was real earth instead of cinders and rubble. The eastern rim shaded them now though it wouldn't be long till the sun reached the bottom of the crater.

They explored this little world, wandering through sizable boulders fallen from the sides, thickets of mesquite, following washes that ran only when the occasional rain filled them. A rabbit flashed through some yellow-flowered brittlebush. It was a strange thought, that it had been born here and would die here, knowing nothing of the region above.

Sun filled the central crater now. No breeze could stir the warming air and heat reflected from the sides would turn this into an oven. “We'll rest on the way up,” Shea decided. “The sooner we're out of here, the better.”

They rested in the shade of a small grotto near the ledge-climbing rope, sipped water and munched a mixture of chopped dried fruits, nuts and seeds.

“Why doesn't this crater have a Mexican name?” Tracy puzzled, sprinkled a few drops of water on the pulses of her wrists.

“Godfrey Sykes was an Englishman who came down here with William Hornaday in 1907 to explore and map the area,” Shea explained. “He's also the one who named the boojum trees out of Lewis Carroll's
The Hunting of the Snark
, but you have to go farther down the coast or over to Baja California to see them. They're like big upside-down carrots with a few roots waving in the air.” He chuckled. “Godfrey Sykes' sons, Glenton and Gilbert, still live in Tucson. I got to know them some when I was at the university. Glenton told me that on one expedition down here, everyone wanted something different to drink at breakfast—tea, coffee, chocolate. The cook got mad about it and just mixed all the stuff together, put it to brew, and quit.”

With a boost from Shea and the help of the rope, Tracy climbed to the upper ledge. That was where the sides got steeper and more treacherous with rubble. Though they stopped frequently, she was panting and had a stitch in her side by the time they reached the last rope.

It still seemed an impossible distance to the top. The cinders glittered like crumbled coal. Tracy looked down the dizzying way to the bottom and fought off a wave of vertigo.

“You go first,” Shea said. “I'll untie this end of the rope when I'm climbing up.”

She sank ankle-deep into the cinders but the rope let her stay upright rather than making her literally crawl up the shifting, unstable funnel. Catching her breath at the palo verde, she trudged on to the top and collapsed beneath the only tree big enough to offer any shade. In a moment Shea joined her. They emptied the canteens and polished off the trail mix.

“Only ten o'clock,” Shea grinned, glancing at his watch. “Want to do Pinacate today?”

“Absolutely not!” winced Tracy. “The only sensible thing to do is go lie under that big ironwood till the sun goes down!”

She felt better, though, by the time they got back to camp. They made a big chef's salad with hard-boiled eggs and cheese and consumed it along with quantities of iced lemon tea.

“We can siesta if you like,” Shea said. “But it'll be cooler in the truck with air conditioning on.”

“I'm surprised you'd stoop to having anything so decadent!” she teased. “But I'm glad you do! Maybe we can find Socorro's
tinaja.”

“It was probably a seasonal hole,” he said, “but we'll look.”

They visited several of the other
tinajas
and found what Shea said was a sleeping circle, a wall of rocks piled about two feet high, just enough to break the wind. “People who lived here were ace survivalists,” Shea mused. “But sometimes it's been too tough even for them. Julian Hayden, who lives in Tucson, knows this region better than anyone. From analyzing tools and desert varnishes, he feels sure people were here over twenty thousand years ago, vanished during a prolonged drouth of the kind that seems to be setting in now, and came back during a rainy period that lasted till about nine thousand years ago.” Shea paused, his tone ironically dreamy. “Man disappeared again but when the rains came about five thousand years ago, the ancestors of the Pimas and Papagos moved in.”

Tracy shook her head. “Padre Kino passed through here in the early 1700's, but those dates make him sound like a newcomer!”

Shea continued her thought. “So where does that leave us? Yet these volcanoes were old when the first humans drifted here.”

“It's eternity made visible,” she said slowly. “Imagine being here alone, on foot and without supplies, the way Socorro was.”

Shea caressed her cheek, the curve of her throat. “The saying in this country is, ‘It is not good to walk the Gran Desierto alone.' That goes for life, too. I'm glad you're with me.”

Their eyes met. Aching with loving him and with her unbelievable good fortune, Tracy was glad that they had made their wedding trip to this strange country where most things became irrelevant; but water, shelter, a companion, assumed tremendous importance.

They were in a broad field at the edge of the dunes. Shea located the track of an ancient river and followed it quite a distance into the dunes which rose above them in endless peaks or sensuous curves, shaded lavender and ruddy gold by the afternoon sun. Smoke trees grew thick in stretches of the wash. Many had died from lack of water but others were a glory of hazy purple bloom. The way was blocked at last by dunes that had moved across the archaic watercourse, closing off a sea of their own that undulated as far as the eye could reach to the south and east.

“The Deadly Desert,” said Tracy, remembering her Oz books.

“You've got that right. Guess it's time to start out anyway if we want to do Pinacate in the morning.” Shea turned the pickup and soon they were following the faint tracks that led out of this mysterious world.

From stories passed down in the family, they guessed that Socorro had been somewhere south of Pinacate, and they hunted for a time, taking game trails, following arroyos. They found several empty tanks, which had held water in some past seasons, but were now dry.

“Wherever she was, she brought her Irishman back to life and he walked her out of this,” Shea said.

Tracy's flesh prickled. “Do you think they know we're here?”

“Some of them is here in us.” Shea laughed and kissed her. “That's all I'm sure of, but that's enough.”

XXII

It was dark by the time they reached the highway and Shea drove slowly to find the turnoff. They camped beneath some big trees at a ranch abandoned because of the drouth and went to bed right after supper. Tracy didn't stir consciously till close to dawn, when she smelled coffee.

Stealing a blissful glance at Shea, still almost unable to believe her good luck, she snuggled into her pillow for one last delicious moment in this cool part of the day, when the warmth of a sleeping bag felt wonderful.

“Wake up, sleepy head.” Shea hunkered down by her, offering a big blue mug of steaming coffee ameliorated with creamer. “It won't be as hot on top of Pinacate as it was down in Sykes', but it'll be warm. We've got a lot of
mal pais
to cover before we even start up.”

After breakfast they drove toward the mountains and parked in a wash beneath a rock ledge. Hunters and woodcutters had been there before them. Rusty beer cans and other civilized jetsam littered the area, and there were the remains of many campfires.

They found a way up the ledge, crossed a small field and came out on a brown-black lava flow that spilled in a broad skirt of varying lengths around the base of the peaks. This lava wasn't silted over or softened with vegetation. It was hardened into sharp ferocity and, in the worst stretches, honeycombed with holes that seemed designed to entrap a foot.