Guestward Ho! (20 page)

2.
If you are wildly pro anything, all well and good. We
like enthusiasm. State what it is that you're for
once
and then spare us any further details.

3.
If you are violently anti anything, don't say a word
about it. You will probably offend a nicer guest
than you are and the management will undoubtedly
throw you out into the night.

4.
If you expect Rancho del Monte to be restricted
against those whose beliefs are different from yours,
don't come at all. Because the place is only restricted against people like you.

But it's pleasant to be able to say that no such precau
tions were ever necessary. We were blessed with our guests
and never again was the evil voice of bigotry heard in out
house.

Our guests went right on voting Republican and Demo
cratic and went right on talking government. They
mourned the passage of Taft or they cursed McCarthy or
they eulogized Truman or damned Roosevelt, but they did it without any help from us. Bill and I are conscientious
voters, but when we go to the polls we close the curtain, cast our votes, and keep our mouths shut. After all, that's
what the secret ballot is for.

During our first fall in New Mexico, Lucy Putnam was
directed to the ranch. She had sinus trouble and asked
nothing except a quiet, comfortable place where she wasn't
expected to do anything other than sit peacefully with the
sun beating down on the top of her head. She couldn't have chosen a better establishment than ours and
we
couldn't have chosen a more ideal guest than Mrs. Put
nam. We took one look at one another and clicked.

The love feast lasted for better than a week, but as Lucy
was getting better and better, I was getting worse and
worse. The doctor diagnosed my ailment as a strep throat and I was tossed into dry dock, so to speak, at the hospital
in Santa Fe for the next four or five days.

When I came back to the ranch, Lucy had been joined
by a dog, a private airplane, and a husband. His name
was Carleton Putnam, he was six feet six, chairman of the
board of the airline he had started as a very young man,
and a thing of pure delight.

Bill and I had always entertained the dark suspicion
that chairmen of boards were either superannuated go-
getters who had dedicated every moment of their lives to
Razzle Dazzle Light Bulbs or whatever, and knew nothing
about anything else, or that they were retired statesmen,
generals, or assorted celebrities who had been rock
eted up to industrial pre-eminence to serve only as figure
heads and didn't even know about Razzle Dazzle Light
Bulbs. How wrong we were in the case of Carleton Put
nam. Naturally he knew everything there was to be known
about planes and flying, but he was also up on the world
picture. He had made a thorough study of Theodore
Roosevelt and was at work on a five-volume biography of
his life. In addition, he had committed to memory thou
sands of lines of poetry and could quote marvelously al
most any poet you cared to mention.

Being both a businessman and a scientist, Carleton had
a certain exactitude of thought and speech not shared by
Lucy or by Bill and me. The three of us preferred fiction
to fact and were prone to wild bursts of exaggeration that
used to drive Carleton nearly out of his mind. But with
the patience of a terrier at a gopher hole, Carleton could
always trim us down to size. For example, if we'd come
back from a luncheon at Frenchy's La Dona Luz in Taos,,
pleasantly dazed by the superb food and wine, we'd burst
in upon Carleton babbling our usual sweeping statements.

barbara
: You should have come with us, Carleton,
Frenchy's was divine. There were at least a million people
having lunch there.

carleton
: A
million
people, Barbara?

lucy
: Oh, you know what we mean, Carleton. It was simply jammed. There were literally thousands of people.

carleton
: Thousands? It must be a much larger establishment than I remember.

bill
: Well, Carleton, maybe not thousands, but it was thronged. There must have been hundreds there.

carleton
: Since the capacity there is seventy, Bill,
how were they all seated—on each other's laps?

barbara
: Well, actually, Carleton, there were about
thirty.

lucy
: Twenty-eight. I counted.

carleton
: Thank you.

As a rule, people with literal minds irritate me just as
much as I irritate them, but not so Carleton Putnam. The
four of us hit it off beautifully, and together we took lots
of sight-seeing trips—but this time with a difference, be
cause we did our rubbernecking by air. Carleton's plane
was a lovely big, two-motored Aero-Commander. By that
time Bill and I knew the territory pretty well, but only
from the ground. With the Putnams we saw much more
than even Bill and I had ever dreamed existed. We would
fly low over our own mountains, vivid with their brightest
colors, and then above the Rio Grande to Taos. We flew over to the Grand Canyon on a thrilling stormy day
when the Canyon was just too dramatic for words. We flew
off again to Monument Valley, which is just magnificent,
and saw sights we never could have seen from the ground
without spending days or weeks of solid plodding on bur
ros. And once Carleton let Joe Vigil take the controls as
they flew over the Tesuque Pueblo. None of the Tesuque
Indians has ever forgotten
that
thrill. Then Carleton and
Bill and Joe gained altitude and went over the hills to scout out the territory for their big mountain lion hunt.

When a couple of our bird-watching guests came ex
citedly back to the ranch house and reported that, instead
of the great auk, they had spotted a mountain lion through
their binoculars, I didn't pay much attention. I secretly,
suspected the bird watchers were just
trying
to find some
thing exciting in our quiet bills, and if they'd told me
that they'd sighted the Loch Ness Monster or the Snowman of the Himalayas I couldn't have scoffed any more
airily. "You should concentrate on your birds," I said
rather patronizingly, "and not on mountain lions that simply haven't existed around these parts for hundreds of
centuries." Then I caught Carleton Putnam's accusatory
eye and said, "At least, not for quite a few years."

About a week later Sylvia Shaw, the sculptress, and her
husband, Clay Judson, returned from a ride and also reported seeing a mountain lion. This time I was a lot less skeptical and a bit worried. In the first place, I wouldn't
have recognized a mountain lion if we'd met on the street.
I didn't even know what a mountain lion looked like, but
I somehow got the picture of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Trademark wearing a lynx jacket and I felt rather unsettled
about it. That night the dogs—ours, the cook's, and the Putnams'—set up such a howling that everyone was
awakened. Armed with flashlights, all the guests set out
in their dressing gowns to see what caused the commotion,
and, sure enough, there were paw prints about the size
of dinner plates in the gravel leading up to the swimming
pool. For the next four nights the beast was a constant
guest, coming up to lap water from our swimming pool while those four brave watchdogs wailed and cowered at the kitchen door, limp with fear. The mountain lion be
came known locally as The Killer, and for days Carleton
peered through the telescopic sight of his rifle without
spotting so much as a polecat. It was then that the big hunt was organized.

Not only did Bill and Carleton plan to bring back The
Killer—who really had only dropped in for a nightcap a
few times and done nothing more offensive to us than
scare the dogs—but there was also talk of deer and bear
and wild turkey. Joe Vigil, who was to guide them and
who was the only one who had ever had any hunting ex
perience to speak of, was fairly pessimistic about what they'd bag. So was I, at first, but as the plans got under
way I began to envision myself smartly enveloped in a
stole of mountain lion (whatever mountain lion fur looked
like) and I got my mouth set for a winter of rich venison
dishes. (Bear, I knew, was like eating an inner sole and wild turkey lean, tough, gamey, and not nearly as good as the kind you get at the supermarket.)

Admiral Byrd's expedition to Little America couldn't
have required the preparation necessary for this hunting
trip. Countless trips to Santa Fe Western Wear were made
and poor Mark Campbell must have despaired of ever
digging up long underwear that would fit a man who was
six and a half feet tall. Dear little knitted caps that tied
under the chin were pronounced essential for sleeping out.
°
They may have been useful, but Bill looked just like
Baby Bunting in
his.
Boots for day, shoes for night, sleep
ing socks, walking socks—well, I can't even begin to list the wardrobes that went along with Bill and Carleton, but it was enough to last Lucius Beebe for a month.

As for food, every meal was planned. Carleton was
afraid of too much starch in the diet. "You've got to have
protein," he kept saying.

I had rather assumed that they were going to
shoot
their own proteins, but I didn't say anything.

When they set out in their cute little red hunting caps
they were toting enough junk to keep them for a year.
Five minutes later they were back. They'd forgotten their
blankets. Then they were off for good, and Lucy and I
had no definite expectations of
ever
seeing our husbands
again after tangling with The Killer.

We needn't have worried. Three days later they were
home, red-eyed, bearded, miserable-looking, and ab
solutely empty-handed; Only Joe Vigil, who had set out with just a blanket roll and a toothbrush, looked as he did
at the beginning. There was no mountain lion, no deer
lashed to the front fender; no bear and no wild turkey.

Still, Bill and Carleton swore up and down that they wouldn't have missed the hunt for a million dollars.

I wonder.

But as a consolation prize for the gameless game hunt,
Joe Vigil invited us all to the Feast Day at the Tesuque
Pueblo. And it really
was
a deeply touching and flattering
tribute to be invited.

By and large, the American red man resents the Amer
ican white man and not without good and sufficient rea
son. I'll be happy to outline just a few of them here.

First of all, the Indians took a terrible pushing around from the minute the first white man set foot upon the continental United States. Indians were cheated, hood
winked, dragged back to Europe as freaks or slaves, forced
into religious conversions they didn't want, raped and terrorized, and finally driven from lands that had been theirs
for unknown generations.

When they attempted a retaliation, which would seem
only natural, more than two hundred years of bloody,
sporadic wars ensued until the poor Indians were driven out of their fertile hunting grounds, stripped of the vast
majority of their finest young men in battles that were one-sided
and unfair to begin with, and finally thrust out onto
barren lands to live or die.

What little consideration the Indians did get was usually
a fairly calculated kind of charity. If they happened to
wind up on reservations that proved to be arable, and if a gang of white settlers took a fancy to the land, the
chances were pretty good that the Indians would be moved
on to a bit of real estate so eroded that nothing more than
sand would grow on it. I get an enormous thrill every
time some miserable tribe strikes oil or discovers uranium
out in the middle of the gravelly reservation to which they've been shunted, but that happens only once in a blue moon.

The Indians around Santa Fe have fared a good deal
better than some of their brothers. They are not forced
to live in pueblos unless they wish to. They can vote, buy
liquor any day except Sunday (when nobody can), send their children to public, private, or parochial schools.

True, most of them are not well off, and many Indians exist solely on the sale of souvenirs to tourists. Much of
the merchandise—such as the pottery of San Ildefonso,
the antique fetishes, the silver and turquoise jewelry—is valuable, exquisite, and accordingly expensive. The rest
is just about what you'd expect. But since it keeps right on
selling, there must be a healthy demand for it. As small businessmen, dependent on migratory and seasonal trade, the Indians are anxious to please the tourists. But are the tourists always as considerate of the sensibilities of the
Indians? I think not.

Most of the New Mexico Indians are either Catholic or
Presbyterian, but numbers of them set a great store by their native traditions and still observe them seriously.
Now, when tourists are invited to tribal ceremonies, they
are warned that these are
religious
rites. And how do great bunches of them act? Like children at the circus. We were
very strict with our guests, and if any of them had so
much as whispered, I would have cracked him with a ruler
like a schoolmarm. After all, they were never forced to
attend. But many tourists behaved abominably, and I couldn't help wondering how they would have felt if a pack of Indians in shorts and sport shirts had shown up
at a Christmas Eve cathedral service armed with Coca-
Cola and popcorn, snapping pictures, walking out noisily
in the middle of the ceremony, and calling out things like
"Yoo-hoo, Laughing Eyes, meet me back at the car as soon as this thing is over."