Canyons (5 page)

Short of tying them down—and he wished he’d brought rope—he couldn’t control them at all. They were in his pack, in his bag where he’d spread it by the fire pit, throwing his gear around.

But after a time he noticed that as darkness came into the canyon, dropping like a black sheet down over them, the
boys stayed more in the area of the fire. They didn’t act afraid, but they didn’t want to leave the glow of the fire either and that gave Brennan an idea.

He moved his sleeping bag farther and farther from the fire until he was nestled beneath a large boulder sticking up out of the ground, back under the overhang. There was a small sheltered area here, only large enough for one bag, and he spread it out on the dried grass and began to make himself comfortable.

“What are you doing?”

His mother had walked up in back of him while he was spreading his bag.

“Don’t you want to be around the fire?”

“Mom …” He started to say something about the kids but let it go. She was so happy, or seemed to be happy with this Bill character, that he didn’t want to do anything to ruin it for her. “This just looked like a neat place to set up.”

She nodded—the glow from the fire lighted her cheek and it looked golden. Something about her face looked young, very young. “I know why you’re up here—they’re horrible, aren’t they?”

“God,” he said. “Like animals.”

“Maybe they’ll sleep pretty soon.”

Brennan smiled. “Not unless you drive wooden stakes through their hearts.…”

She laughed and he’d somehow never felt closer to her. “But he’s nice, isn’t he? Bill, I mean.”

Brennan nodded. “Yes. He is. I can’t believe what he takes from them and never gets mad.”

“I like him. A lot.”

“That’s nice—really.”

“A lot.”

She turned and walked back to the fire and he watched her go and felt a kind of sadness. There had been others that she had liked. A lot. And they somehow all came to nothing and she wanted somebody so badly, needed someone so badly that Brennan almost wept for her sometimes.

He rose from the bag and moved toward the fire. What the heck, maybe if he took the kids for a while Bill and his mother would get a little time to know each other. What would it hurt?

He sat by the fire. “Who knows a story?”

And it worked. They all settled in around him, sitting by the fire in the yellow glow, their faces looking up at him. It couldn’t be, he thought, it couldn’t be the same group of wild things that just a few minutes ago were tearing each other apart.

“I said,” he repeated, “who knows a story?”

They all looked at each other and shook their heads. None of them knew a story.

Bill and Brennan’s mother sat next to each other across the fire from Brennan. Bill coughed.

“I know a story,” he said, “or not a story so much as some information about these canyons.”

Brennan could see that it wasn’t exactly what the kids were expecting, but they held still and waited.

“There are four or five of these canyons along this big ridge,” Bill said, pointing up over his shoulder where the cliffs rose into the mountains. “And some called it the last stronghold of the Apache nation.”

That got them. It also got Brennan. “What do you mean?”

“I’m kind of fuzzy on it, but north of here there is a canyon called Dog Canyon that also has a spring in it. I guess the Apaches would raid down south and then run back to these canyons to hide and the army would come after them.”

“Were there battles?” one of the small kids asked. “With shooting and blood and guts and stuff?”

Bill nodded.

“All
right
!”

“There were several fights in Dog Canyon and there might have been some others in this canyon, in all the canyons along this ridge line. Soldiers and Apaches were both killed and …” here he paused and looked at Brennan and hid a wink “… they say that in the night sometimes you can hear the sounds of battle and that the ghosts of the dead warriors and soldiers walk in the darkness.”

He stopped talking and there was silence around the fire. Far away a nightbird called and the sound seemed almost human—close enough so the boys drew together.

“I don’t think I would run around too much at
night,” Brennan said, taking advantage of the situation. “You know, out away from the fire.”

But he hadn’t needed to say it. Two of the boys, a set of twins named Glockens, said they weren’t afraid of any old ghosts but they didn’t stray more than ten feet from the fire and were very happy to toast marshmallows and drink hot chocolate made by Brennan’s mother and Bill.

Bill told some more stories—plain ghost stories—and the children sat still, listening, and finally it was time for bed.

Brennan nodded good night to his mother and Bill and headed up to his bed beneath the rock, carrying a cup of hot chocolate. There was a light dew condensing on his bag and he shook it off before crawling inside. Then he sat up, the bag around him, and looked down at the fire below as the rest of the group crawled inside their bags, sipping his hot chocolate.

It wasn’t so bad, this trip, he thought. The kids had finally settled down and his mother was right, Bill was a good guy. He hoped well for his mother.

The fire died quickly and he could hear the kids mumbling and talking for a short time, then it was quiet and still he sat.

He felt strange. The chocolate grew cold in his hand and he sat and let the canyon come in around him. There was no moon, but enough light came from the stars so that when his eyes grew used to the darkness he could see the canyon walls moving up into the sky.

Somewhere far away something screamed a faint cry
—almost like a woman or child screaming—and he started, then remembered reading somewhere that mountain lions screamed that way and thought it must be a cougar somewhere way off. There were mountains and more mountains up over the ridges and there must be mountain lions up there in the peaks.

I have lived so close to this, he thought, and never been here, never seen this beautiful place. He had been in the mountains close to El Paso but they were dry, dead, hot and baked airless peaks—not like this. Not with cool breezes and springs and cottonwoods and birds and lions, if it was a lion. He wondered for a moment if he should be frightened of the lion, then decided against it. From what he’d read they didn’t bother people at all and it must have been miles away. The sleepers below him hadn’t even heard it.

He put the cup down and lay back but still sleep wouldn’t come.

Something was there, some strange thing that bothered him. He had felt it before when they first came into the end of the canyon and it was still there, the feeling. He couldn’t shake it.

An unease, a restlessness that wouldn’t go away. He closed his eyes and thought of things to make him sleep, boring things, but even that didn’t work. In the end he sat up again, staring out across the canyons over the sleepers below him, a strange uneasiness in his heart that would not go away.

And the night came down.

Oh yes, it had been something, the raid, Coyote Runs thought, holding tight to the pony with his legs. It had been a thing to see.

They had ridden through part of the night, spitting water into their horses’ mouths until they arrived at the river where the horses could drink, just at dawn, and had found the large horse herd before the sun had risen completely above the line of land to the east.

Sancta had motioned to Coyote Runs to ride up to him and he had done so.

“Stay here with the extra horses. We will ride amongst them and take many horses and come back this way. Let us go by, then come in at the rear of the herd to help move them.”

Coyote Runs wanted to shake his head, wanted
to say that he wished to ride amongst the Mexicans who were watching the horses to prove that he was a man, ride amongst them and fight but he did not. Sancta had given an order and that was the way things would be.

But he could see the horse herd, or part of it. Sancta and the others left him on the back side of a small rise but as soon as they rode off toward the Mexicans Coyote Runs moved forward and up onto the rise slightly so he could see some of it.

There were so many horses that they stretched as far as he could see into the mesquite and gullies. Many, most of them, were large and brown, as the bluebellies liked them, but many were of other colors and Coyote Runs saw a large horse the color of straw that he would have liked to take for his own. Indeed, his hands moved on the reins of the pony and his knees closed before he remembered that he must stay.

He saw one Mexican rider, a tiny figure on the other side of the herd, but the rider did not see him and in any event it made no difference. At that moment when he saw the Mexican rider there was a commotion to the right and a group of horses that had been down in a low swale suddenly broke into a run, heading straight for the river.

For a moment Coyote Runs could see no Apaches, then he saw heads above the dust and knew that Sancta and the others had cut the smaller herd
away from the main body and were bringing them north.

They were not coming straight toward him but off to the side a bit, so he yelled and slapped the horses around him to get them moving to meet the others.

Dust and noise were everywhere. There was little wind in the morning, so when the horses raised dust it simply hung where it came up, and was added to by other dust until it was impossible to see anything and the hooves of the running horses—Coyote Runs thought that Sancta and the others must have cut out over a hundred of them—were like thunder.

Coyote Runs was confused for a time and actually drove the waiting horses that he was in charge of the wrong way, headed them south. In the dirt and noise it was easy to be wrong.

And there he could have died, he found, because he rode straight into a group of four Mexican riders. His small herd turned and started north, going right around him, as if sensing they were going the wrong way when they saw the Mexican vaqueros.

It was impossible to tell who was more surprised. He pulled his pony up, staring at them, and they pulled up, staring at him. Then two of them started shooting at him with their horse pistols that made clouds of smoke to mix with the dust and he wheeled his brown pony and followed the herd back to the north.

There was no sense to anything.

Because he had initially wound up going the wrong way, when he started back to the north he found himself to the rear of the main body of Mexican riders who were chasing Sancta and the others toward the river.

He did not know this at once, but suddenly found himself riding next to a Mexican man who looked sideways at him, drew a pistol from his belt, and aimed at Coyote Runs and shot.

Coyote Runs winced, waiting for the bullet to take him, but the Mexican did not aim well and it went wide and he veered away in the dirt clouds.

He passed others, driving the extra mounts north, passed two more and then three, all riding hard after Sancta but none of them shot at him and he thought he must have been given special power, special medicine to go through them like smoke so they could not see him, though he rode right next to them and had horses in front of him.

Suddenly he found himself running in water, the little pony almost going down when it hit the river. It was impossible to see anything, to know anything, and he merely hung on and hoped he would make it across the river.

Still noise, the pounding of hooves, and dust, even over the water dust that blew off the banks, but he believed in himself now, and his new medicine, so he
drummed his heels into the brown pony and screamed at the horses in front of him and drove them across the water and up the bank and kept driving them.

North.

If he kept pushing them north he would catch up to Sancta and the others.

So he followed the dust and knew that he was a man now, knew that he was a man with large medicine who had passed the test, for had the Mexican not shot at him, shot directly where he was and the bullet had not hit him? And he had not been afraid. He had tightened his stomach to take the bullet, had waited for the shock of it, but had not been afraid and was not afraid now.

He drove them, slapping at the horses with the end of his bridle rope, keeping them driving in an easy lope ahead of him, following the dust for a mile, then another mile, and was on the edge of wondering if he would ever see the others when he ran into Magpie.

Who was aiming his old buffalo shooting rifle at him.

“Wait!” Coyote Runs said, pulling up. “It is me.”

Magpie lowered the rifle and smiled. His face was so covered with dust that it seemed to crack when his lips moved. “Sancta heard hooves back here and thought it was some Mexicans still riding after us and sent me back to slow them down. It is lucky you called. I had begun to tighten the trigger.”

It would not have mattered, Coyote Runs thought, because the bullet would not have been able to get through my new medicine, the medicine that protects me, but he said nothing.

“How far are they ahead?” he asked. He must look as Magpie did, with dust thick on his face and sweat streaks cutting through it, but the band of red cloth around his head kept the sweat from his eyes.