Grayfox (9 page)

We got on the trail of a small group of pronghorn antelope across the desert. It was early June sometime, and I'd been gone from home almost a year.

All we had was our two mules, and matching a pronghorn with a mule was like putting a snail up against a racehorse. So we had to use stealth and cunning, else we'd never catch it.

Finally we left the mules tied up by a watering hole and tracked the animal on foot.

It was about an hour later when suddenly Hawk stopped, looking straight up in the sky.

“What is it?” I said.

“I think there's Paiutes out,” he said, shielding his eyes from the sun.

“How can you tell . . . you hear something?” I asked.

“No,” he replied, “but you see those two eagles way up there?”

I looked but didn't see anything.

“No,” I answered.

“Keep looking,” said Hawk. “They're circling in a big lazy arc.”

“That mean something?”

“Maybe not. But I have the feeling it means the Paiutes are out, and not too far away.”

“How can you tell?”

“If you know how to read the eagles,” he said, “they can tell you all kinds of things. Sometimes the eagles are looking down on something ten miles away. So all you gotta do is figure out from their movements what they're gazing at.”

We kept on after the antelope, but I could tell that Hawk was being a little extra careful.

Twenty minutes later, after stalking up and down what seemed like a dozen rises and falls of the terrain, Hawk and I had managed to head the animal into a small box canyon. We were about a hundred
yards apart and it had disappeared from our sight. Hawk signaled to me to rejoin him, and we inched our way to the top of a small ridge over which the animal had disappeared. Hawk shouldered his gun, ready to get off a shot before the animal saw us and bolted up the opposite side of the canyon and away.

But the moment we stuck our heads up over the top of the incline, what met our shocked eyes instead of the trapped antelope was a small hunting party of six or eight Paiute braves standing over a dead antelope, an arrow sticking out of its chest.

They saw us the moment we appeared, and the next instant four arrows were poised in their bows, the tips aimed straight toward us. My heart started pounding so loud I was sure Hawk knew I was frightened out of my wits.

I felt his hand on my shoulder.

“Nothing to worry about, son,” he whispered. “These fellows have either strayed off the reservation, or else the antelope led us further west than I figured. You wait here.”

Then, without a word, he stood up and walked straight toward the group of Indians. My heart pounded louder than ever.

I couldn't hear anything of what went on, but gradually the arrows came down, although the fierce expressions on the Paiute faces never changed. Hawk talked to them a minute or two in a language I couldn't understand, with an occasional wave of one of the Indians' hands adding expression to the interchange. I watched in silent fear that any second one of them might suddenly kill him and then come after me. But after a couple minutes Hawk turned and walked back in my direction. He came over the ridge and just kept walking away, signaling me where I was still crouching down to follow him. He never looked back, and never said a word until we were fifty or more yards away.

“Looks like they'll be enjoying that antelope in their camp tonight,” he said finally, still walking. “I reckon you and me are going to be stuck with cattail pancakes.”

“Again!” I groaned. “Didn't you tell them it was our antelope?”

“Sure,” replied Hawk, “but they said they'd been following it all morning, and I didn't feel like fighting over it.”

“I thought you said you were their friend?”

“
Friend
would not exactly be the right word,” laughed Hawk. “They tolerate my presence is about as far as I'd say. I do them favors
and show them things and they let me stay alive. But they wouldn't think twice of killing me, either. Don't worry. We'll have our antelope stew—just not today.”

We made our way back to the watering hole and our mules. Out of the marshy bog we cut a bunch of pollen spikes off the cattail plants to take back with us—they were just coming out now that summer was approaching. It had been a long trek for nothing, and all the rest of the day we never saw a sign of another animal of any kind.

The day had tuckered me out and I was famished. The thought of cattail pancakes didn't exactly make my mouth water, but by then I would have been happy for anything going into my mouth.

Hawk ate the strangest things, but I reckon that anyone that wanted to stay alive out there had to eat what they could find. Besides the cattail pollen, earlier in the spring we'd eaten the inside shoots of new cattail growth. And Hawk had shown me where to find and how to eat all kinds of native desert plants—buckberries and rice grass, roots of many kinds, squaw cabbage (too bitter to even describe), red berries off the desert thorn, and mustard seeds. Hawk said the best food of all were the pine nuts, but they wouldn't be ripe until August.

When we got back to camp, we made a fire and mashed up the cattail pollen we'd gathered, making it into a paste with water, then mixing in a little cornmeal we still had from Hawk's last ride to Desert Springs for supplies.

Once the patties were made, we roasted them over the desert fire. It wasn't exactly antelope stew, but at least it was warm and kept the hunger away for another day.

It hadn't taken long with Hawk for me to grow curious about why a fellow like him would be so religious. That's what I wondered at first.

After a while I found myself asking the question differently: How did a man like him get so
wise
?

It took me a long time to get around to asking him directly about it. It was one of those things I figured he'd tell me in his own time if he ever wanted to. But then all of a sudden, as we were sitting there roasting and eating our cattail pancakes, it just popped out without me even planning to say it.

“How come you know so much about God?” I asked.

Hawk thought a long time before he said anything.

“Pretty big question, son,” he said finally.

“Too big?” I asked.

“No. No question's
too
big. There's no such thing as too big a question. Actually, it's a good question. Just took me by surprise, that's all.”

“So what's the answer?”

Again Hawk thought for a long time. He wasn't the kind of man to start talking before he'd thought about something long enough to know what he wanted to say. If he didn't have something to say, he kept his mouth shut until he did.

Maybe right there was one of the things that made him wise.

But on this day, after a while, he did try to answer my question.

“Well, I reckon after I got out here in this wilderness all by myself, it started with watching nature and animals. It didn't take much to be able to see that there's an order and plan to the world of nature. And animals survive out here—and plants for that matter—because they fall in with the order of things. The world is the way it is for them, and they have no choice other than to fall into harmony with the order of things. You see what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“I began to think about men, too,” Hawk went on. “I've known lots of people in all kinds of situations in my life. It seemed to me, the more I thought about it, that there were only two kinds of people I'd known—those who were content with their lot in life and those who weren't. The first kind of people were happy, peaceful, and usually you enjoyed being around them. The second kind were discontent, struggling with everything that came along, at strife—both with themselves and with other folks. They were usually selfish, and weren't usually what you'd call nice. It made me stop to think and to ask myself which of the two kinds of people I wanted to be.

“When I thought of the animals again, I realized that men have a choice animals do not—whether to fall into harmony with the order of things in their world, just like the animals, or else not to. When they don't they will be discontent and at odds with everything around them, like the second kind of people I was talking about.

“I began to think further what that might mean. What did it mean to fall in with the natural order of how life was supposed to be? What
is
the natural order of our world?

“That's when I began to look into the hidden meanings of everything, and pretty soon I was thinking about who made it all and asking myself why. That's really the most important question in all the universe—
why
.

“Asking that question in a thousand different ways and about a thousand different things led me eventually into the discovery of who God is—what he's all about. You see, that's the answer to every
why
you can think of—that God made it or did it for a reason. The reason is nothing more than who God himself is.

“Well, if God made everything there is, and for a reason—I figured the
main
reason must be to show himself and what kind of a person he was. Who is God, and what is he like? That's got to be at the root of it all. That's the hidden meaning part, the yolk part.

“The second half of it must be for us to fall into the natural order of it all. He must have some reason why he made us, too.
We
mean something, just like the sky and everything.”

“Now I'm afraid you lost me,” I said. “What do you mean, people oughta
mean
something.”

“What do we
mean
?” Hawk repeated. “What's our life supposed to be about? That's what I'm getting at.”

I nodded slowly, understanding a little, but not completely.

“Then I remembered something I'd learned from when I was just a boy,” Hawk went on, “about being created in the image of God. It isn't that I'd forgotten. I knew all about God. I was taught a lot about God when I was young. But then I found myself going down into the
inside
depths of the things I'd always known and asking myself what they
really
meant.

“That's how I found myself thinking about being created in the image of God. What did it really mean?”

“Did you figure it out?”

“The conclusion I came to was this—we're supposed to be pictures of God too, just like everything else. That's what we as people must
mean
. That's our purpose.
That
is the natural harmony that we have to fall in with—to be pictures, reflections, images of God. That's what we've got to accept, like the animals have to fall in with the way nature is. If we don't, we won't do any better than they. Life can't be a good thing for anybody unless they go along with that purpose.

“We're supposed to learn to be
like
God ourselves. We can't do that perfectly, of course. That's what sinning is all about. But that's still the purpose, the meaning of life—to be as much a small, little reflection of God as we can be in the midst of all the sin.”

Hawk paused and took a deep breath.

“I reckon that's about the size of it,” he said. “How's that for a long answer to your question? Never knew I was such a preacher, did you?” he added with a smile.

“But how did you get to be such a thinker and philosopher?”

He roared with laughter.

“I ain't no such thing.”

“You sound like one to me.”

“What—a thinker or philosopher?'

“Both,” I said.

Again Hawk laughed.

“Most of the philosophers I've run into weren't what I'd call thinkers. The two ain't the same, if you ask me.”

“I'm not sure I understand.”

“Everybody's got the choice whether to be a thinker or not. Don't need to be a philosopher to be a thinker, Zack. You just need to put your brain to use. Being a thinker doesn't mean being a philosopher, just using the brain you've got.”

“But a lot of folks don't.”

“Everybody
is
a thinker. Some people just don't point their brains in directions that do them any good. They think about things that pass away, that are gone the next day, like the smoke from one of our fires.”

“Yeah, I guess I see what you mean.”

“For myself, I decided a long time ago that if I was going to spend so much time alone, and that if I was going to live out here like this, with no companion but myself and my own thoughts, then I ought to spend my time thinking about things that matter, and that would help me understand the order of things a man is supposed to fall in with. So I read a lot in the only book I got out here with me—that's the Bible—and I think about what's in it. Animals have their instinct to help them. Man doesn't have that. All he's got is his brain, which he's got to put to the best use he can, otherwise, life's going to be a pretty miserable affair. Anyhow, that's how I've come to see it.”

“How come you're out here all by yourself anyway?” I asked.

Hawk got real quiet. I couldn't tell if he was angry at me for what I'd asked, or thinking how to answer. But I never got a chance to find out, because even as I found myself getting nervous for prying, we were interrupted.

It was while we were still sitting there around the fire that we heard the sound of a horse approaching.

Out in the middle of the high desert like we were, running into another human being, except for the Paiutes, of course, was an unusual enough occurrence to make us both stop what we were doing and look, first at each other in surprise, then toward the sound.

As soon as the rider was visible, coming around a big boulder forty or fifty yards away, Hawk got up and walked to meet him. The fellow pulled up.

“Howdy, stranger,” said Hawk. “You're a long ways from the rest of the world.”

The man didn't speak at first, just eyed Hawk, then looked over at me with no change in his expression. It wasn't a friendly expression either.

He was a rough-looking man, and his squinting eyes were full of suspicion and mistrust. He seemed looking for something that we were hiding from him. I immediately felt like he was angry with us, even though none of us knew each other. He wore a gun on his hip, and a long rifle stuck up behind him out of a saddle holster.

“We ain't got much to offer you,” Hawk went on, “but you're welcome to it.”

“Coffee smells good,” the man said, speaking at last.

“Then come on down off there and join us. Zack, pour the man a cup of coffee.”

The rider got down off his horse, tied it to a shrub, and followed Hawk over to the fire. I handed him the cup. He took a sip, then sat down.

“We've just been having some cattail cakes. Care for some?” said Hawk.

“Got anything else?”

“Nope, not here.”

“What're you two doing way out here?” the man questioned.

“We live out here,” answered Hawk. “But what are
you
doing out here all by yourself? We don't exactly get too many visitors passing through.”

“You live where?” said the man, taking a drink of coffee and glancing around. “Here?”

“All around,” said Hawk. “Not here exactly. We just happened to be here today and got hungry. We're mostly in those hills west of here.” As he spoke he gave a nod with his head. “There's caves we use, and everything we need to make a life of it.”

“Don't look like much of a life to me,” said the stranger. “That all you eat—weeds?”

Hawk laughed. “We eat whatever we can. Almost had us an antelope earlier today.”

“What happened?”

“Paiutes beat us to it.”

“You let 'em take it from you? How many were there?”

“Only a half dozen. Yep, we let them take it. Having meat wasn't worth getting killed for.”

“That's the kind of attitude what lets them Paiutes think they can do whatever they want,” he grumbled.

Hawk said nothing.

“And you say you ain't seen no one else through here recently?” the man added, lifting the coffee cup to his lips but watching Hawk intently as he did.

“No,” replied Hawk. “You're the first since this strapping young man here crossed my path last winter,” he added, motioning toward me. “
Should
we have seen someone?”

“Maybe . . . maybe not.”

“You looking for somebody?”

“I been tracking a half-breed.”

“From where?”

“Out of Carson.”

“That's a long ways.”

“He's got three thousand on his head.”

“What's his name?”

“Don't know what the Indians call him. In Carson he's only known as Redskin Tranter.”

“Tranter his pa?”

“That's right.”

“What did he do?”

“Stole some cattle, killed a rancher.”

“What kind of half-breed?”

“Paiute or Shoshone.”

“You figure he's coming this way?”

“I tracked him till yesterday, straight toward here.”

“We ain't seen a soul, have we, Zack?”

I shook my head.

“Except those Indians a while ago,” Hawk added. “But they were all from the Squirrel tribe. You a lawman?” Hawk asked.

The man shook his head.

“What, then?”

“Bounty hunter.”

A brief silence followed.

“Well, we haven't seen the fellow you're after,” said Hawk. “But you're welcome to share our fire and our coffee. If you need a rest, you can share our cave for the night. I'll make us up some stew when we get back there, and we can give you plenty of water. My name's Hawk Trumbull. My friend's Zack Hollister.”

“Much obliged, I reckon I'll take you up on your offer,” said the stranger.

“Name's Demming—Jack Demming.”