Painted Horses (17 page)

“That ain’t the issue.” Allen was rolling a cigarette, rolling it with one dexterous hand while he loafed in the saddle. “What you need to worry about is the ones you don’t see.”

“I’ll come with you,” said Miriam. “I know all about snakes.”

Jack Allen lit his cigarette with a Zippo lighter, the flame dancing in the mirrors across his eyes. “Even the big ones?” He snapped the Zippo closed, blew smoke in a burst at their backs.

Catherine saw a slight smile tug at Miriam’s mouth. To her credit she didn’t turn around. “There aren’t any big ones around here. You ought to know.”

They climbed through rounded and weather-scoured rocks to a sheltered depression with a layer of sand.

“This will do,” said Catherine. She undid her blue dungarees, the buttons stiff and tight with newness. Miriam climbed a little farther into the rocks and pretended to study the random geometry around them.

“So what is it we’re looking for exactly?”

Catherine felt ridiculous trying to answer with her pants around her ankles and the hiss of her own water in her ears. She finished and buttoned up, kicked loose dirt over the spot she’d made. “That’s what you’re supposed to tell me.”

Miriam looked down at her. “Do you know anything at all about Indians?”

Catherine shook her head. “Honestly? Nowhere near enough to be qualified for what I’m doing, not in a reasonable universe anyway. I’ve been reading as fast as I can to fix that, but before a few months ago? I’d barely given a thought to Indians, at least not beyond what you see in a cowboy movie.”

Miriam snorted. “Those aren’t Indians. They’re Italians. With war paint.”

Catherine scrambled up beside her. From Miriam’s vantage in the rocks they could look out and see the canyon both rising and plunging all around them, see the river like a strand of mercury far below. Sheer walls of pink corrugated rock across the chasm and downriver, beyond that an ominous black shadow where the river turned and cut the earth against the angle of the sun. “I look out at that and I think it’s spectacular, maybe even terrifying. But sacred—that’s the way this has been described to me, and that is something quite beyond my grasp.”

“Isn’t that the whole point?”

“Of course. But I don’t come from a background where people use that word anymore. Not in a real way. I mean, my parents have a notion that Englishness is somehow sacred. What they really mean is they love big manor houses and buy a lot of grotesque furniture and Wedgwood pottery. They’re Episcopalians, by default. It’s the closest thing to the English church in America.”

Miriam shook her head. “Catherine, you’re going to have to get something straight. I never lived in a tepee. I can barely stand to eat venison. I like Peggy Lee. I like Perry Como. I worry that boys won’t like me because of my glasses. I don’t know what Wedgwood pottery is, but I’m sure I’d love to own some. I’m, you know. Modern.”

Catherine took a deep breath. “I know that. I do. But someone who lives where you do, maybe right down the road from you, maybe in the same house as you, still thinks this place is worth keeping the way it is, for some reason that’s older and larger and maybe more enduring than cars or boats. Or Wedgwood.”

Miriam narrowed her eyes behind her glasses.

“What I need is a place to start. That’s why I found you. Tell me some stories. Give me something to work with.”

Miriam lowered her voice and gestured with her chin down the wash. “What about him?”

Catherine shrugged. “He thinks I’m a nuisance, and that’s okay.” She thought again of her mishap with the Dodge. “For the time being I need him along more than I can afford to do without him.”

“He is sort of awful, though.” This with a sort of forced earnestness.

Catherine didn’t fall for it. “Miriam. You’ve been flirting with him since we left the house this morning.”

Miriam wrinkled her nose like a pixie. “I can stop.”

“That’s not what I’m saying, necessarily. Just . . . consider the subject.”

They picked their way through the boulders, this time with Catherine out in front. Midway along something else occurred to her and she looked back. “Miriam? Don’t worry about your glasses. You’re pretty.”

This froze Miriam cold, her quick tongue flummoxed for the first time since Catherine had known her. Her eyes darted like panicked creatures, searching for a way to escape a trap. When none appeared they stopped on the blue window above. “Well. It’s nice of you to say so.”

“I’m not just saying so. I think it’s true.”

Miriam let out a humorless little laugh. “But you aren’t a boy.”

“Let’s go,” Allen bellowed. Catherine turned to look at him, dismounted now and glaring up from the trail. He was still beyond speaking distance.

She looked back at Miriam. “Neither is he.”

They reached the river before noon, the sun high over the canyon and downright hot for the first time since she’d arrived in Montana. The river had risen since she last saw it, racing in a brown roar that rose inside the canyon walls like the pitch in a crowded arena.

Jack Allen swung down from his horse and stretched. “Well, artifact girl,” he said. “Start looking.”

Catherine climbed down herself. She wobbled when she took a step but felt less crippled than she had earlier. “I intend to. Any suggestions?”

He shrugged. “How about the other side of the river.”

Catherine looked at him. “That’s not helpful.”

Miriam climbed down as well. She loosed the cinch on her saddle and moved forward to loosen Catherine’s. Both horses blew out with a rubbery snort, shaking their heads against the reins. “Ever spot any arrow points down here, chief?”

“Arrow points. Let’s see. Can’t say I have.”

“And wouldn’t tell me if you did. Well. We’re all going to look for some. On this side of the river. I have a good feeling about that little draw up there.” Miriam pointed upstream to the mouth of a ravine, pine trees climbing through the rocks and above those a narrow stand of pale-barked aspens. All one tree. Catherine watched insects drift in the sunlight, unmoored and random as motes.

“Knock yourself out. I’ll be up later.”

Miriam fished lunch out of a saddlebag. Catherine shouldered her pack. The two walked into the draw, perhaps three hundred yards wide where its mouth met the larger gape of the canyon. A narrow creek, swift and off-color with runoff, wound out of the floor of the draw and met the river, made her think of two tongues entwined. “Do you really think we’ll find arrow points?”

Miriam shook her head. “No idea. But it’s the one thing everybody recognizes.”

“What about less obvious things? Could you tell if something seemed, you know, not natural?”

Miriam pursed her lips. “I might,” she said slowly.

“Tepee rings, for example?”

Miriam looked at her. “You mean the rock rings, from the old camps?”

“I tried to school myself as best I could on what to look for out here. That jumped out at me.”

“I’m sure they must be everywhere, now that you bring it up. The ones I actually know about are right down above the river behind the barn. They’re sort of what you’d imagine—just some rocks in a circle, where they held the edge of a tepee. But there’s a bunch, once you start looking. Gosh, I could’ve showed them to you yesterday.”

“It’s OK. But you see what I’m driving at?”

“If we can find an old campground, we have a place to start.”

“Tepee rings, any sort of cave or overhang in a ledge . . . Who knows. But I don’t trust my own eye out here, at least not yet. It all just looks huge. And indistinguishable.”

Miriam’s lips remained pursed. She nodded. “You know what’s going to be tough about this?”

“Is it a trick question?”

“Right, it’s all tough, but one thing especially. The time it takes to get in and out of here on horseback every day. Doesn’t leave us much time to find anything.”

“That did occur to me.”

Miriam scanned the ridgetops far above, the tips of the pines thrusting into the sky. She began to shake her head, and Catherine could tell that the enormity of what lay before them was just beginning to settle.

They wandered the floor of the draw. The creek twisted through a cutaway channel in the earth, three feet deep and sheer sided, a miniature of the larger canyon around them. Gnarled trees rose here and there along the valley floor, some spindly branched and peeling and dead, others green with new leaves. Otherwise just sagebrush and raw stony earth.

Miriam moved in a way that reminded Catherine of a hunter. She walked slowly, studying the ground before her with roving eyes, then paused here and there and raised her head to take in the country around her. Catherine followed behind. They moved this way up the open floor of the draw.

Eventually they angled away from the creek and when they did Catherine thought she heard another sound within or above the rush of the water, intermittent warbling rising and falling on the sough of the breeze. She strained her ears and heard it no more and thought she must be imagining things.

She heard it again. A wobbling treble, like the watery chortles of sprites. Only mournful.

Miriam stood stock-still and Catherine knew she could hear it too. “What is that?”

“I know what it is,” said Miriam. “Come on.”

She broke into a leggy, reckless gallop, charging headlong through clawing sage and across loose stone that shifted and flew from her feet.

Catherine tried to keep up but her rucksack bounced on her back like a tourist on a camel. She thought of the expensive camera inside and reached around to hold the pack tightly to her body. Miriam began to outpace her.

The chortling became louder. Catherine heard it plainly, even above the jostle of her rucksack and her own exerted breathing. Up ahead the open floor of the draw appeared to bottleneck to a conclusion between two opposing mountainsides, dark and somber with pines, but this turned out to be a trick of perspective. Miriam ran around the broad base of the left incline and momentarily vanished behind the low hump of hilltop, and when Catherine rounded the same she saw that the narrow draw turned with the creek and opened into a wide lowland. Aspens shimmered in the distance. She looked overhead, to the source of what at this proximity had amplified to all-out racket.

A vortex of skeletal birds, hundreds of them, winding like a lazy cyclone in the sky. Miriam shielded her eyes from the sun. Catherine stepped up beside her, gasping for breath.

“Cranes,” said Miriam. “Migrating north to mate.”

For the first time in a while Catherine found herself spellbound, detached and delivered from the passage of time. She saw the birds the way an audience volunteer sees a hypnotist’s watch, saw their trailing legs and reptile feet, the prehistoric taper of their necks. They did not look as though they could be graceful, but they were.

Though the birds appeared to whirl in circles the mass of them nonetheless drifted cloud-like across the sky. A moment more and they would disappear behind the mountain. She peeled out of her rucksack and hurried to unbuckle the clasps. The noise the cranes made diminished, tapering to a sound like crickets in the grass on a summer night.

Catherine pulled the camera and popped the lens cover, wishing with a flare of annoyance she’d taken more time to learn the workings of the thing. She held it to her eye and found the last of the swirling birds in the viewfinder. She pressed the shutter button. Nothing happened. The cranes vanished.

“Damn,” she said. She lowered the camera. “Damn.”

Miriam turned. “That’s what I’ll miss,” she said. “If I ever do leave. That’s what I’ll miss.”

She started back and Catherine shouldered her pack and followed. She kept the camera uselessly in hand, its lanyard looped around her wrist. Tonight she would teach herself how it worked. No excuses.

They found Jack Allen in the creek bottom down the draw. He stood with his hands on his knees, studying something in the mud at his feet. He didn’t say whether he saw or heard the cranes but he did point to something else. Hoofprints, hundreds of them, pocked in the wet earth like piercings on the tin of an antique lamp.

“Unshod,” he said. “Every one of them.” He looked up and Catherine saw mirrored twins of herself, his own gaze inscrutable as ever behind the glasses. “I was all set to pass this whole thing off as a harebrained little pipe dream, darlin’. I don’t say this often but could be I was wrong. Could be this little treasure hunt of yours gets good and goddamn interesting. There’s a wild horse herd in here.”

Miriam squinted again at the sky.

“When Grandmother was young the soldiers called her Crane Girl. At Fort Fetterman. She was fourteen, fifteen years old. Her husband was an Absaroka scout for the US cavalry.” Miriam sat across the table in Catherine’s tiny kitchen, elbows on the Formica top and chin drooped onto the knuckles of her hands. She looked as exhausted as Catherine felt.

“Your grandmother,” said Catherine absently. She tried both to listen and decipher the movie camera at the same time, camera body and film reel and instruction manual arrayed on the table before her. The manual kept folding shut on its own and she’d pinned one corner with a beer bottle, two-thirds empty now but sweating a ring onto the page. Some local concoction called Highlander. She snapped to attention. “Your grandmother. The woman on the porch.”