High Country : A Novel (31 page)

“Pulled in here one night with two horses and two mules. Next morning had shoes on all four. Started on my mules next. Hardly said a word.” He shook his head to punctuate it. “Ain’t that the goddamndest?”

“Maybe you’ve got your man.” Harvey Kittle, Opie’s youngest son, watched as Ty caught up another. “Now you can move to Bishop like you had good sense.”

Harvey was a dentist. He’d crippled a leg when he was a boy, doing things with Opie Kittle’s mules he didn’t like doing in the first place, which had set him against mules once and for all. But with one brother gone in the war and the other dealing faro in Reno, he knew Opie was his responsibility. It just wasn’t easy, given his father’s devotion to his mules.

“Glad he found you.” Harvey Kittle watched Ty quiet a leggy mule who didn’t like the rasp on his hoof. Ty let the hoof down, rubbed the mule’s hock before turning to look at Harvey, who had the same scrunched-up features as his father. But his bow tie was so perfectly knotted and his shirt so perfectly white, he didn’t look like he belonged anywhere near Opie’s barn.

“Drove down from Bishop,” Harvey said. “See if I can keep him from throwin’ saddles on these mules and startin’ up a trail a sane man wouldn’t even salt. Not yet, leastways.”

It was all right with Ty that there was no introduction. They knew about one another already, and they both had a soft spot for Opie Kittle.
“So far he spends most of his time bringing me Cokes from the cooler.”
“That is restrained, for him. But it won’t last. He was best for so long he still believes he is.”
“Quit crabbin’.” Opie Kittle appeared. “Ty’s got everything under control.”
“Then let’s hop in the car and go. Got a root canal in the morning. Watchin’ you and these mules makes my hands shaky.”
“A beer won’t hurt your hands. Got things to show Ty.”
“Show him over the phone.”
“Never learned to point over the phone.”
Ty opened the cooler and got out the beer, handing them each one and cracking one himself. He was smiling. And he hadn’t smiled for a long time.

It was the work that made things better, he thought, that and listening to Opie Kittle talk about the Sierra. Looking up at the great range didn’t tell him a lot, but looking at the photographs spread around the little ranch house, hearing Kittle describe what was going on in them, did.

And he liked listening to Harvey and Opie talk, the dentist scrubbed and tidy but still his father’s son, still comfortable with his father’s language and eccentricities. People came to Harvey Kittle from up and down the valley, getting him to take care of their good teeth and pull their bad. And all of them asked about his father as soon as Harvey got his hands out of their mouth—what trips the old packer was taking, how many mules he was packing, what kind of help he was having trouble finding.

Opie Kittle was always having trouble finding help, the kind that did things the way he wanted. That’s why both Harvey and Opie were so happy to watch Ty move through a day’s work. In no time they were as comfortable with him as with each other. And when he talked, they didn’t just warm up their own arguments. They listened. Partly because it was a surprise to hear him talk at all but mostly because he said things about packing that even Opie had forgotten, if Opie had known them in the first place.

What worried them now was how to introduce Ty to the Sierra. They could take him up to their corrals at Goat Creek, but what then? How was he to know what was beyond the passes? Opie wanted against reason to be the one to show him, but with all his ailments that was out, which didn’t keep them from chewing at the idea anyway, arguing and swearing at each other and rooting around for a solution. It came the minute Sugar Zumaldi showed up and said he’d be happy to work a few trips—if Opie would haul his burros up to Goat Creek come August. That’s when Sugar planned to take his whole family and vanish into the Sierra, the mountain range he loved almost as he loved the family he took into it.

In two months’ time Ty would find out how true that was, be astonished at the little hanging valleys Sugar would slip into, where the feed was plentiful and the water good. Sugar seemed to find the same comfort in mountains that Spec found. He made Ty at home in them too—the mountains as much in Sugar’s blood as Ty’s mules were in his.

And there was reason. Sugar Zumaldi’s father was among the last of the Basques to run sheep in the Sierra, his father’s father one of the first. The sturdy drover shipped into a strange country to do what other men would not, knowing little of English but everything of animals and weather and mountains and learning the Sierra by seeking out every nook and cranny where there was grass. And each pass that led to more.

“Hoofed locusts,” John Muir had called them, “leaving nothing.” But the sheep of the Zumaldis always seemed to leave plenty, the Zumaldis more interested in what was on the other side of canyon walls, on the next bench, out of sight around the next reach of rock than in exhausting the feed where they stood. It was their legacy to Sugar, who found it in him as a hawk finds flight. Ty sensed it when they met, Sugar doing what needed to be done but his dark eyes on the great range—or on Apple, the little mare he took to as no other. Ty watched him favor her, brush her, give her treats, walk out to bring her in as quietly as Spec moving through woods—a Spec who liked horses and mules and packing in a way the real Spec did not.

Opie Kittle had moved up to Bishop by then, giving Ty the ranch house, Sugar sleeping in the bunk room where Ty had started out. But Opie was back with them more often than not, enjoying watching Ty and Sugar as he enjoyed nothing else—except his mules.

“Why call him Sugar?” Ty watched as the Basque brushed Apple. “Had a mule named Sugar once. Good one too.”
Opie looked to see if Ty was serious. “Don’t know about your mule. But watch Sugar with his burros and you’ll know. He’ll call and them rascals come runnin’ and fartin’ just to get close. He don’t pack feed, just sugar lumps.”
Ty watched Sugar Zumaldi go on with his brushing.
“Well, you can get some farther with sugar than with vinegar.”
“With a colt too?” Opie Kittle liked knowing what was going on in his new packer’s head. “A mustang?”
“With most everything,” Ty said, “that you got to live with.”

Two weeks later they herded all their stock up the twisting road to Goat Creek. The road dusty and hot until they reached the cool of the timber, climbing still higher to corrals perched by the tumbling stream, shaded from the late sun by the looming Sierra crest.

“We’re higher than the peaks in the Swan.” Ty saw the trail threading its way still higher along the canyon wall. “And we still got three thousand feet before the pass.”

“That’s why it’s Goat Pass,” Sugar said. “Grandfather claimed goats is the only ones not to get dizzy when they cross.”
“I crossed once without gettin’ dizzy.” Opie Kittle had trucked up a load of hay, inching along so slowly he’d only then caught up with them.
“I believe I was drunk.” He hunched into his coat, the cold coming in now. “Or hung over. I forget which.”
“One’s more fun,” Ty said. “But harder to remember. You sure Sugar’s girl can handle the cooking? We’ll have our hands full with all this stock.”
“Sugar’s kids can do anything. And Nina’s his best. It’s when they leave that’s got me worried. Once he gathers his family with them burros, he just disappears.”
“Nina’s a fine cook.” Sugar tied Apple to the hitch rack and unsaddled. He’d led her most of the way, liking to walk more than ride. He looked so fresh to Ty he seemed ready to go another ten miles.
“The Basques eat good, so they work good.” Sugar stacked Apple’s saddle on the hitch rack. “Know how to live in the mountains.”
“That’s the trouble, you damn bandit. You ain’t stayin’ long enough to teach Ty. How’s he gonna eat well
and
work good when he’s alone?”
Ty looked at the trail climbing away above them, crossing raw cliffs to wind high above the plunging stream.
“I got an idea.” He looked at Opie Kittle. “If Sugar’ll show me that country, maybe I know who can take care of the rest.”
“Better be a smart idea. Don’t want that desert trash again ...or them drunk boys from Olancha.”
“It’ll seem a smart idea on some days,” Ty said. “Not so smart on others. But it’ll sure keep things lively.”
That night, after they’d set up the wall tent and Opie had gone back to Bishop, Ty lit the lantern and sat down to write Angie and Buck.

They loose-herded the stock over the pass to cross the Sierra and pick up the first party. Sugar and the girl pushed the mules behind Ty as he let Smoky feel her way up the headwall. A chill went up his spine when they crested. He pivoted and pulled his hat tight, watching the mules gather themselves in the hard wind, noses to the impossibly narrow trail. Behind he saw the purplish gray of Owens Valley, ahead cliffs spilling their talus into blue lakes. Beyond the lakes the green of meadows, darkening pods of forests dropping into canyons. It swept him up like a leaf. He couldn’t believe what they’d crossed to get here, what they found when they were here.

“I seen that look before.” Sugar rode Apple up beside him as they skirted the first lake. “It ain’t always this good.”
“It’s this country. It opens up so . . . it opens me up.”
“It can close you down too. I wanted a good day. For you. But not this good. Ain’t so pretty when it’s lightning. Snow.”
“But you come back.You can’t stay away.”
“Hard to stay away from a beautiful woman too. It might mean trouble, but it don’t matter. Moth and a flame.You keep coming back.” Sugar dropped back again. “ Yo u’ll see. This country ain’t so different.”
They camped in the first timber, wind-battered trees edging their way up into a tilting meadow. Ty saw they had crossed the crest even above a great bank of snow that melted to start the first rivulets on their run west, becoming the stream they camped on before cascading down to join the Kings. Across the meadow his horses moved higher with the sun. He marked the place as darkness fell, wanting tracks in the morning.
The girl was busy before light. Ty and Sugar crossed the frost to follow the tracks high, then higher still to the horses—quiet as rocks, waiting for the sun. Ty was warm from the climb, winded. But he was ready for the morning, pleased with the slanting light of the new day.
He led Smoky in, the rest following, bells clanging as Sugar clucked and whistled them in behind. Ty picked his way down shallow cliffs, seeing now why Sugar so often chose to walk. The country seemed to come up through his legs as he skirted granite slabs, chose sandy fissures widened by winters into grassy steps. Sky pilot and rock fringe hugged boulders, purple-blue heads opening to the sun. It was as though a gardener had readied it: rocks perfectly placed, flowers lifting, a scrim of dew from the frost melt, the stream rippling past.
They were moving by seven, Ty so busy looking over the country he could hardly keep track of the trace. They merged with a main route, and he gave Smoky her head. He couldn’t get over the way they threaded through it. The mules lined out behind Cottontail as they climbed north, up past lakes and tarns into raw rock, a line of quartz halving it as they closed on another divide, this one dropping them into the north fork of the Kings.
The mules crossed over with no hesitation, the trail carved through talus that left nowhere to go but forward. Wind blowing hard until they reached the quiet of switchbacks, a snowfield, the crunch of hooves the only sound—and Smoky blowing as she nosed across.
Ty was even more taken by this country: the canyons seemed deeper, the peaks higher, the cliffs more sheer. Down and down Smoky took him, the slender trail threading across cliffs golden in the late light, down into a canyon where Sugar moved ahead, looking for something, finally turning back to say:
“Been watching that Smoky mare. The old sayin’ don’t hold for her.”
“What saying?”
“This trail jackassable; for horses impassable.” Sugar smiled at Ty’s confusion. “I think your mare
can
go where my burros go.”
Without another word he was off Apple, leading her through willows and onto a slanting game trail climbing the timbered canyon wall. Ty was thankful his mules were separated, the trail steep enough to scare a deer. He heard Sugar laugh as he dismounted onto ground higher than Smoky. He led her then, the packless mules scrambling, Smoky sometimes lunging but willing, going where Ty took her.
And then they were up, crossing the lip of a tidy U-shaped valley, the middle of it a sparkling meadow. Sugar made his way across, fording a stream and disappearing. Ty followed him into the timber only to find him on a perfect flat, too hidden for anyone to come on by chance.
“I’ll show you all over these mountains, Hardin.” Sugar tied Apple to a tree and began catching up mules. “They like you.”
“More the other way around.” Ty pulled the saddle from Smoky, checked to see if she’d cut her legs on the rocks.
“That too.” Sugar stacked saddles on a barkless deadfall. “Nina and me seen it when you come over Goat Pass.” He spread a manty over the saddles, tucked it against the wind.
“What is it you saw?” Ty was already freeing the animals.
“That you was smitten.” Sugar shooed the mules out of camp, watched them nosing the sand for a warm roll. “Seen it happen before.” Sugar spoke matter-of-factly. “Mostly to Basque.”

They sat with coffee, looking east over the deep canyon they’d left, shadows creeping up the soaring peaks.
“The Palisades.” Sugar watched the sun linger on them. “Used to take our sheep into the basins below. Now it’s just climbers.”
“Have you gone back? With your burros?”
“Too rocky. Not like this.” Sugar looked around, taking in the girl, composed across the fire, the kitchen put away, beds laid out, everything in its place. The only sounds were the busy stream, the bells of the mares out in the meadow.
“It’s beautiful,” Ty said finally.
“Men die climbing into it. Too many.”
“Have you climbed over there?”
“Some.”
“He’s climbed most of them,” Nina said, hugging her knees against the cold. “With that man Clyde. Grandfather thought they were crazy. ‘Is there grass up there?’ he would ask. ‘Water? What is up there that you need?’”
“He was right.” Sugar held Ty with his dark eyes. “I thought I’d be able to see more. Saw farther. Not more.”
He stood, threw away the last of his coffee. “ Yo u’ll see what I mean. Norman Clyde, he’s still smote. Like you. But you’ll learn. See everything you need from a place like this.”
“That’s what grandfather always said.” The girl stood too. “ Yo u’ve made it your saying now.”
“Yes. And if we do right it’ll be Ty’s too.”
Ty stayed by the fire, wishing Spec were there to listen to Sugar Zumaldi.
A coyote called. Another answered, clear and haunting. Ty knew they were calling from those rocky basins Sugar used before his climbs into the Palisades.

After that Sugar rode in front with Ty, or walked—leading Apple as he told Ty about the country. It was clear Opie Kittle was right: No one else could know as much—where there was water and grass, where cliffs would stop you, how to get around them when they did.

Sugar was like a cat, burying everything he did, sometimes even walking the rocks beside the trail to leave no sign. He would use no fire rings, scooping out a place and taking the ashes away in the morning, kicking away droppings, sweeping away tracks.

They rode north, leaving the Kings drainage to cross a pass wild and high. They rode for miles along treeless lakes and meadows before dropping through broken rock to reclaim the forest in a canyon rich with the names of philosophers and wise men: Huxley and Darwin and Lamarck. Sugar seemed even wiser, pointing out this hidden route and that. Each night he would pull out a map, point to a hidden place where some prospector had made a scratchy start, mark the map to show Ty places no one thought stock could reach, pools you could dive into from warm granite: hidden places where water and feed and wood were as plentiful as the glade was secret.

They rode down the canyon of the philosophers, camping in lush meadows before dropping from its lip to meet another stream, follow it west toward its source to camp high, the grass sweet enough to hold the horses while Sugar told Ty more, helped him bring the country into his bones.

The next morning Sugar took them up the canyon wall along a trace sometimes invisible, climbing along shelf after shelf of grassy ledges, some narrowing to granite as they worked their way up and up the steepening canyon wall until Smoky seemed to be going straight up, just a chute ahead of them, rocky and forbidding—a danger Ty didn’t like.

“Hell for sure on the animals.” Ty stopped to give Smoky a breather before pushing her up it.
“That’s what they call it.” Sugar had led Apple up.
“Call what?” Ty looked back to see if his mules were rested.
“This pass,” Sugar said. “It’s hell for the stock and hell for the people. But it don’t seem like ‘Hell for Sure’ to me. Seems like God fixed it. Made all them shelves to help us climb.”
“You must have a different God. Mine’s not that generous.”
Sugar shook his head. It bothered him that Ty smiled that tight smile whenever Sugar talked of God.
Smoky went up the chute like a goat, the mules pitching and scrambling behind. Just across the pass stood a lone tree, its bark torn away by fierce winters, leaving a strip that spiraled up and brought life to a second trunk flourishing high above them.
“Foxtail,” Sugar said. “Toughest tree we got. You had a strip of bark like that, you might survive the winters up here yourself.”
“Must be thousands of years old.” Ty was stopped by so much health emerging from such a narrow band of life.
“Been through some times.” Sugar started down, this side not so steep.
“Might be older than that God of yours,” Ty said.
But Sugar didn’t answer. He was too busy negotiating his way down from Hell for Sure Pass.

A day later they met their party, businessmen from Fresno. They were pleased to be above the heat, pleased with the packers and the horses; pleased with the pretty girl who fed them and spoke about becoming a lawyer, a doctor, saying there were new opportunities for Basque women, ones she intended to know.

They brought a letter from Opie Kittle saying Opie would meet them at Tuolumne Meadows, that they had to haul the stock south to take the next party into the Whitney country. “Lucky it’s the Haslams,” Opie wrote. “They won’t mind when you’re lost. Better learn all you can from Sugar about where to go. The man dogtrots up cliffs that would lame a goat. Keep up. Ask questions.You’ll need answers.”

At the end he said Buck had called saying he was coming. Then he’d added a P.S.: “Hope your friends work out. Don’t want to be up shit creek again this year.”

They took a main trail north, the guests riding ahead with Nina as Sugar told Ty about the country. Each day they would pass one or two hikers, but they saw only one packer, a huge man with a high-crowned hat and a gaudy kerchief, his pants tucked into high boots. He looked too big for his horse to Ty.

“You Kittle’s new man?” He spit, wiped his mouth with the bright kerchief. “You must like that ass-packer as much as Old Man Kittle.”
“Sugar sure knows the country.” Ty moved his mules off the trail so the man could pass. “I learn from him.”
“That girl’s about ready.” The man watched Nina as she rode on. “The ass-man done good.”
Ty pulled his string back on the trail, knowing that Sugar didn’t like the remark any more than he had. Nina registered nothing, but Ty thought she’d heard. He liked that even less.

“Call him Knots Malloy,” Sugar said. “Tightened his knots so absolute once they had to cut rope.” He looked at Ty. “Too strong to get things right, if you ask me.”

They were bathing in a tarn just above Thousand Island Lake. Ty was lying out on a slab of granite, drying in the sun.
“Something about that man,” Sugar dried himself with his shirt, “runs against the grain.”
Ty knew Knots Malloy troubled Sugar. Knew Sugar didn’t want to give Knots any importance by admitting it. That was all right with Ty, but he knew it was hard to ignore people like Knots. He’d seen men try in the army—seen bad things happen when they failed.
A day later they crossed Donohue Pass and saw the big glacier filling the north cirque of Mount Lyell. Below them the Lyell Fork of the Tuolumne wound through broad meadows, stands of timber spotted in them as though placed by the gods.
“That Josiah Whitney said the glaciers had nothin’ to do with all this,” Sugar said. “I doubt he looked.”
“Fenton would have seen it right off.” Ty seemed to be talking to the country itself. “He’d enjoy this. How it opens up. No rain at night.”
Sugar laughed, his spirits back. “Don’t you count on that, Ty Hardin. We been lucky.You wait. It can be like God pissed.”

That night they made do with a camp that had been used often. A fat bear came sniffing along as Nina got dinner ready. He rose, sniffed the air, came down and began pacing, working his way closer. Sugar banged some pots and shouted, but the bear paid no attention, pacing still closer, his fur loose over his big body like clothes that didn’t fit. Sugar hit him with a rock. The bear hardly noticed, pacing still closer.

Ty had never seen a bear so bold. He had his Colt in his saddlebag, but he knew you weren’t supposed to shoot these bears. And there was something comical about Sugar and Nina shouting and the bear paying no attention. He went to the fire and got a burning log, waved it. The bear ignored him, moving so close to the kitchen Ty had to throw the log, the flaming end hitting the bear in the side. He grunted, rose up and turned toward Ty, who was ready with still another log. They considered each other for a long minute before the bear came down and trotted away, stopping once to lick where the log had hit him.

“Persistent bastard.” Sugar turned to Ty. “But you knew. Looks like you’ve had trouble with bears before.”
“A different kind.” Ty retrieved the log, put it back on the fire. “Wouldn’t have bothered us like that.” He sat on a rock by the fire. “Wouldn’t have left us like that either.”
“You mean grizzlies? Ain’t they a whole different matter?”
“Yes, but I believe we’re the ones cause them the trouble.”
“We’ve ruined these. Find a road and they want a handout.”
“Handouts aren’t what interests my bears.”
“What does? What do they want?”
“What you want, I guess.” Ty felt awkward saying it. “A place to be alone.” He got the buckets and started for the stream. “What we all want.”
Sugar watched him go, thinking a place to be alone
wasn’t
what everyone wanted. But it was what Ty wanted, wanted more than any man he knew. Even Nina saw it....It was a worry to them both.