The Last of the Plainsmen
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Zane Grey >> The Last of the Plainsmen
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"No, lad, not a lake," said old Jim, smiling at me; "that's what
haunts the desert traveler. It's only mirage!"
So I awoke to the realization of that illusive thing, the mirage,
a beautiful lie, false as stairs of sand. Far northward a clear
rippling lake sparkled in the sunshine. Tall, stately trees, with
waving green foliage, bordered the water. For a long moment it
lay there, smiling in the sun, a thing almost tangible; and then
it faded. I felt a sense of actual loss. So real had been the
illusion that I could not believe I was not soon to drink and
wade and dabble in the cool waters. Disappointment was keen. This
is what maddens the prospector or sheep-herder lost in the
desert. Was it not a terrible thing to be dying of thirst, to see
sparkling water, almost to smell it and then realize suddenly
that all was only a lying track of the desert, a lure, a
delusion? I ceased to wonder at the Mormons, and their search for
water, their talk of water. But I had not realized its true
significance. I had not known what water was. I had never
appreciated it. So it was my destiny to learn that water is the
greatest thing on earth. I hung over a three-foot hole in a dry
stream-bed, and watched it ooze and seep through the sand, and
fill up--oh, so slowly; and I felt it loosen my parched tongue,
and steal through all my dry body with strength and life. Water
is said to constitute three fourths of the universe. However that
may be, on the desert it is the whole world, and all of life.
Two days passed by, all hot sand and wind and glare. The Mormons
sang no more at evening; Jones was silent; the dogs were limp as
rags.
At Moncaupie Wash we ran into a sandstorm. The horses turned
their backs to it, and bowed their heads patiently. The Mormons
covered themselves. I wrapped a blanket round my head and hid
behind a sage bush. The wind, carrying the sand, made a strange
hollow roar. All was enveloped in a weird yellow opacity. The
sand seeped through the sage bush and swept by with a soft,
rustling sound, not unlike the wind in the rye. From time to time
I raised a corner of my blanket and peeped out. Where my feet had
stretched was an enormous mound of sand. I felt the blanket,
weighted down, slowly settle over me.
Suddenly as it had come, the sandstorm passed. It left a changed
world for us. The trail was covered; the wheels hub-deep in sand;
the horses, walking sand dunes. I could not close my teeth
without grating harshly on sand.
We journeyed onward, and passed long lines of petrified trees,
some a hundred feet in length, lying as they had fallen,
thousands of years before. White ants crawled among the ruins.
Slowly climbing the sandy trail, we circled a great red bluff
with jagged peaks, that had seemed an interminable obstacle. A
scant growth of cedar and sage again made its appearance. Here we
halted to pass another night. Under a cedar I heard the
plaintive, piteous bleat of an animal. I searched, and presently
found a little black and white lamb, scarcely able to stand. It
came readily to me, and I carried it to the wagon.
"That's a Navajo lamb," said Emmett. "It's lost. There are Navajo
Indians close by."
"Away in the desert we heard its cry," quoted one of the Mormons.
Jones and I climbed the red mesa near camp to see the sunset. All
the western world was ablaze in golden glory. Shafts of light
shot toward the zenith, and bands of paler gold, tinging to rose,
circled away from the fiery, sinking globe. Suddenly the sun
sank, the gold changed to gray, then to purple, and shadows
formed in the deep gorge at our feet. So sudden was the
transformation that soon it was night, the solemn, impressive
night of the desert. A stillness that seemed too sacred to break
clasped the place; it was infinite; it held the bygone ages, and
eternity.
More days, and miles, miles, miles! The last day's ride to the
Big Colorado was unforgettable. We rode toward the head of a
gigantic red cliff pocket, a veritable inferno, immeasurably hot,
glaring, awful. It towered higher and higher above us. When we
reached a point of this red barrier, we heard the dull rumbling
roar of water, and we came out, at length, on a winding trail cut
in the face of a blue overhanging the Colorado River. The first
sight of most famous and much-heralded wonders of nature is often
disappointing; but never can this be said of the blood-hued Rio
Colorado. If it had beauty, it was beauty that appalled. So
riveted was my gaze that I could hardly turn it across the river,
where Emmett proudly pointed out his lonely home--an oasis set
down amidst beetling red cliffs. How grateful to the eye was the
green of alfalfa and cottonwood! Going round the bluff trail, the
wheels had only a foot of room to spare; and the sheer descent
into the red, turbid, congested river was terrifying.
I saw the constricted rapids, where the Colorado took its plunge
into the box-like head of the Grand Canyon of Arizona; and the
deep, reverberating boom of the river, at flood height, was a
fearful thing to hear. I could not repress a shudder at the
thought of crossing above that rapid.
The bronze walls widened as we proceeded, and we got down
presently to a level, where a long wire cable stretched across
the river. Under the cable ran a rope. On the other side was an
old scow moored to the bank.
"Are we going across in that?" I asked Emmett, pointing to the
boat.
"We'll all be on the other side before dark," he replied
cheerily.
I felt that I would rather start back alone over the desert than
trust myself in such a craft, on such a river. And it was all
because I had had experience with bad rivers, and thought I was a
judge of dangerous currents. The Colorado slid with a menacing
roar out of a giant split in the red wall, and whirled, eddied,
bulged on toward its confinement in the iron-ribbed canyon below.
In answer to shots fired, Emmett's man appeared on the other
side, and rode down to the ferry landing. Here he got into a
skiff, and rowed laboriously upstream for a long distance before
he started across, and then swung into the current. He swept down
rapidly, and twice the skiff whirled, and completely turned
round; but he reached our bank safely. Taking two men aboard he
rowed upstream again, close to the shore, and returned to the
opposite side in much the same manner in which he had come over.
The three men pushed out the scow, and grasping the rope
overhead, began to pull. The big craft ran easily. When the
current struck it, the wire cable sagged, the water boiled and
surged under it, raising one end, and then the other.
Nevertheless, five minutes were all that were required to pull
the boat over.
It was a rude, oblong affair, made of heavy planks loosely put
together, and it leaked. When Jones suggested that we get the
agony over as quickly as possible, I was with him, and we
embarked together. Jones said he did not like the looks of the
tackle; and when I thought of his by no means small mechanical
skill, I had not added a cheerful idea to my consciousness. The
horses of the first team had to be dragged upon the scow, and
once on, they reared and plunged.
When we started, four men pulled the rope, and Emmett sat in the
stern, with the tackle guys in hand. As the current hit us, he
let out the guys, which maneuver caused the boat to swing stern
downstream. When it pointed obliquely, he made fast the guys
again. I saw that this served two purposes: the current struck,
slid alongside, and over the stern, which mitigated the danger,
and at the same time helped the boat across.
To look at the river was to court terror, but I had to look. It
was an infernal thing. It roared in hollow, sullen voice, as a
monster growling. It had voice, this river, and one strangely
changeful. It moaned as if in pain--it whined, it cried. Then at
times it would seem strangely silent. The current as complex and
mutable as human life. It boiled, beat and bulged. The bulge
itself was an incompressible thing, like a roaring lift of the
waters from submarine explosion. Then it would smooth out, and
run like oil. It shifted from one channel to another, rushed to
the center of the river, then swung close to one shore or the
other. Again it swelled near the boat, in great, boiling, hissing
eddies.
"Look! See where it breaks through the mountain!" yelled Jones in
my ear.
I looked upstream to see the stupendous granite walls separated
in a gigantic split that must have been made by a terrible
seismic disturbance; and from this gap poured the dark, turgid,
mystic flood.
I was in a cold sweat when we touched shore, and I jumped long
before the boat was properly moored.
Emmett was wet to the waist where the water had surged over him.
As he sat rearranging some tackle I remarked to him that of
course he must be a splendid swimmer, or he would not take such
risks.
"No, I can't swim a stroke," he replied; "and it wouldn't be any
use if I could. Once in there a man's a goner."
"You've had bad accidents here?" I questioned.
"No, not bad. We only drowned two men last year. You see, we had
to tow the boat up the river, and row across, as then we hadn't
the wire. Just above, on this side, the boat hit a stone, and the
current washed over her, taking off the team and two men."
"Didn't you attempt to rescue them?" I asked, after waiting a
moment.
"No use. They never came up."
"Isn't the river high now?" I continued, shuddering as I glanced
out at the whirling logs and drifts.
"High, and coming up. If I don't get the other teams over to-day
I'll wait until she goes down. At this season she rises and
lowers every day or so, until June then comes the big flood, and
we don't cross for months."
I sat for three hours watching Emmett bring over the rest of his
party, which he did without accident, but at the expense of great
effort. And all the time in my ears dinned the roar, the boom,
the rumble of this singularly rapacious and purposeful river--a
river of silt, a red river of dark, sinister meaning, a river
with terrible work to perform, a river which never gave up its
dead.
CHAPTER 2. THE RANGE
After a much-needed rest at Emmett's, we bade good-by to him and
his hospitable family, and under the guidance of his man once
more took to the wind-swept trail. We pursued a southwesterly
course now, following the lead of the craggy red wall that
stretched on and on for hundreds of miles into Utah. The desert,
smoky and hot, fell away to the left, and in the foreground a
dark, irregular line marked the Grand Canyon cutting through the
plateau.
The wind whipped in from the vast, open expanse, and meeting an
obstacle in the red wall, turned north and raced past us. Jones's
hat blew off, stood on its rim, and rolled. It kept on rolling,
thirty miles an hour, more or less; so fast, at least, that we
were a long time catching up to it with a team of horses.
Possibly we never would have caught it had not a stone checked
its flight. Further manifestation of the power of the desert wind
surrounded us on all sides. It had hollowed out huge stones from
the cliffs, and tumbled them to the plain below; and then,
sweeping sand and gravel low across the desert floor, had cut
them deeply, until they rested on slender pedestals, thus
sculptoring grotesque and striking monuments to the marvelous
persistence of this element of nature.
Late that afternoon, as we reached the height of the plateau,
Jones woke up and shouted: "Ha! there's Buckskin!"
Far southward lay a long, black mountain, covered with patches of
shining snow. I could follow the zigzag line of the Grand Canyon
splitting the desert plateau, and saw it disappear in the haze
round the end of the mountain. From this I got my first clear
impression of the topography of the country surrounding our
objective point. Buckskin mountain ran its blunt end eastward to
the Canyon--in fact, formed a hundred miles of the north rim. As
it was nine thousand feet high it still held the snow, which had
occasioned our lengthy desert ride to get back of the mountain. I
could see the long slopes rising out of the desert to meet the
timber.
As we bowled merrily down grade I noticed that we were no longer
on stony ground, and that a little scant silvery grass had made
its appearance. Then little branches of green, with a blue
flower, smiled out of the clayish sand.
All of a sudden Jones stood up, and let out a wild Comanche yell.
I was more startled by the yell than by the great hand he smashed
down on my shoulder, and for the moment I was dazed.
"There! look! look! the buffalo! Hi! Hi! Hi!"
Below us, a few miles on a rising knoll, a big herd of buffalo
shone black in the gold of the evening sun. I had not Jones's
incentive, but I felt enthusiasm born of the wild and beautiful
picture, and added my yell to his. The huge, burly leader of the
herd lifted his head, and after regarding us for a few moments
calmly went on browsing.
The desert had fringed away into a grand rolling pastureland,
walled in by the red cliffs, the slopes of Buckskin, and further
isolated by the Canyon. Here was a range of twenty-four hundred
square miles without a foot of barb-wire, a pasture fenced in by
natural forces, with the splendid feature that the buffalo could
browse on the plain in winter, and go up into the cool foothills
of Buckskin in summer.
From another ridge we saw a cabin dotting the rolling plain, and
in half an hour we reached it. As we climbed down from the wagon
a brown and black dog came dashing out of the cabin, and promptly
jumped at Moze. His selection showed poor discrimination, for
Moze whipped him before I could separate them. Hearing Jones
heartily greeting some one, I turned in his direction, only to he
distracted by another dog fight. Don had tackled Moze for the
seventh time. Memory rankled in Don, and he needed a lot of
whipping, some of which he was getting when I rescued him.
Next moment I was shaking hands with Frank and Jim, Jones's
ranchmen. At a glance I liked them both. Frank was short and
wiry, and had a big, ferocious mustache, the effect of which was
softened by his kindly brown eyes. Jim was tall, a little
heavier; he had a careless, tidy look; his eyes were searching,
and though he appeared a young man, his hair was white.
"I shore am glad to see you all," said Jim, in slow, soft,
Southern accent.
"Get down, get down," was Frank's welcome--a typically Western
one, for we had already gotten down; "an' come in. You must be
worked out. Sure you've come a long way." He was quick of speech,
full of nervous energy, and beamed with hospitality.
The cabin was the rudest kind of log affair, with a huge stone
fireplace in one end, deer antlers and coyote skins on the wall,
saddles and cowboys' traps in a corner, a nice, large, promising
cupboard, and a table and chairs. Jim threw wood on a smoldering
fire, that soon blazed and crackled cheerily.
I sank down into a chair with a feeling of blessed relief. Ten
days of desert ride behind me! Promise of wonderful days before
me, with the last of the old plainsmen. No wonder a sweet sense
of ease stole over me, or that the fire seemed a live and
joyously welcoming thing, or that Jim's deft maneuvers in
preparation of supper roused in me a rapt admiration.
"Twenty calves this spring!" cried Jones, punching me in my sore
side. "Ten thousand dollars worth of calves!"
He was now altogether a changed man; he looked almost young; his
eyes danced, and he rubbed his big hands together while he plied
Frank with questions. In strange surroundings--that is, away from
his Native Wilds, Jones had been a silent man; it had been almost
impossible to get anything out of him. But now I saw that I
should come to know the real man. In a very few moments he had
talked more than on all the desert trip, and what he said, added
to the little I had already learned, put me in possession of some
interesting information as to his buffalo.
Some years before he had conceived the idea of hybridizing
buffalo with black Galloway cattle; and with the characteristic
determination and energy of the man, he at once set about finding
a suitable range. This was difficult, and took years of
searching. At last the wild north rim of the Grand Canyon, a
section unknown except to a few Indians and mustang hunters, was
settled upon. Then the gigantic task of transporting the herd of
buffalo by rail from Montana to Salt Lake was begun. The two
hundred and ninety miles of desert lying between the home of the
Mormons and Buckskin Mountain was an obstacle almost
insurmountable. The journey was undertaken and found even more
trying than had been expected. Buffalo after buffalo died on the
way. Then Frank, Jones's right-hand man, put into execution a
plan he had been thinking of--namely, to travel by night. It
succeeded. The buffalo rested in the day and traveled by easy
stages by night, with the result that the big herd was
transported to the ideal range.
Here, in an environment strange to their race, but peculiarly
adaptable, they thrived and multiplied. The hybrid of the
Galloway cow and buffalo proved a great success. Jones called the
new species "Cattalo." The cattalo took the hardiness of the
buffalo, and never required artificial food or shelter. He would
face the desert storm or blizzard and stand stock still in his
tracks until the weather cleared. He became quite domestic, could
be easily handled, and grew exceedingly fat on very little
provender. The folds of his stomach were so numerous that they
digested even the hardest and flintiest of corn. He had fourteen
ribs on each side, while domestic cattle had only thirteen; thus
he could endure rougher work and longer journeys to water. His
fur was so dense and glossy that it equaled that of the unplucked
beaver or otter, and was fully as valuable as the buffalo robe.
And not to be overlooked by any means was the fact that his meat
was delicious.
Jones had to hear every detail of all that had happened since his
absence in the East, and he was particularly inquisitive to learn
all about the twenty cattalo calves. He called different buffalo
by name; and designated the calves by descriptive terms, such as
"Whiteface" and "Crosspatch." He almost forgot to eat, and kept
Frank too busy to get anything into his own mouth. After supper
he calmed down.
"How about your other man--Mr. Wallace, I think you said?" asked
Frank.
"We expected to meet him at Grand Canyon Station, and then at
Flagstaff. But he didn't show up. Either he backed out or missed
us. I'm sorry; for when we get up on Buckskin, among the wild
horses and cougars, we'll be likely to need him."
"I reckon you'll need me, as well as Jim," said Frank dryly, with
a twinkle in his eye. "The buffs are in good shape an' can get
along without me for a while."
"That'll be fine. How about cougar sign on the mountain?"
"Plenty. I've got two spotted near Clark Spring. Comin' over two
weeks ago I tracked them in the snow along the trail for miles.
We'll ooze over that way, as it's goin' toward the Siwash. The
Siwash breaks of the Canyon--there's the place for lions. I met a
wild-horse wrangler not long back, an' he was tellin' me about
Old Tom an' the colts he'd killed this winter."
Naturally, I here expressed a desire to know more of Old Tom.
"He's the biggest cougar ever known of in these parts. His tracks
are bigger than a horse's, an' have been seen on Buckskin for
twelve years. This wrangler--his name is Clark--said he'd turned
his saddle horse out to graze near camp, an' Old Tom sneaked in
an' downed him. The lions over there are sure a bold bunch. Well,
why shouldn't they be? No one ever hunted them. You see, the
mountain is hard to get at. But now you're here, if it's big cats
you want we sure can find them. Only be easy, be easy. You've all
the time there is. An' any job on Buckskin will take time. We'll
look the calves over, an' you must ride the range to harden up.
Then we'll ooze over toward Oak. I expect it'll be boggy, an' I
hope the snow melts soon."
"The snow hadn't melted on Greenland point," replied Jones. "We
saw that with a glass from the El Tovar. We wanted to cross that
way, but Rust said Bright Angel Creek was breast high to a horse,
and that creek is the trail."
"There's four feet of snow on Greenland," said Frank. "It was too
early to come that way. There's only about three months in the
year the Canyon can be crossed at Greenland."
"I want to get in the snow," returned Jones. "This bunch of
long-eared canines I brought never smelled a lion track. Hounds
can't be trained quick without snow. You've got to see what
they're trailing, or you can't break them."
Frank looked dubious. "'Pears to me we'll have trouble gettin' a
lion without lion dogs. It takes a long time to break a hound off
of deer, once he's chased them. Buckskin is full of deer, wolves,
coyotes, and there's the wild horses. We couldn't go a hundred
feet without crossin' trails."
"How's the hound you and Jim fetched in las' year? Has he got a
good nose? Here he is--I like his head. Come here, Bowser--what's
his name?"
"Jim named him Sounder, because he sure has a voice. It's great
to hear him on a trail. Sounder has a nose that can't be fooled,
an' he'll trail anythin'; but I don't know if he ever got up a
lion."
Sounder wagged his bushy tail and looked up affectionately at
Frank. He had a fine head, great brown eyes, very long ears and
curly brownish-black hair. He was not demonstrative, looked
rather askance at Jones, and avoided the other dogs.
"That dog will make a great lion-chaser," said Jones, decisively,
after his study of Sounder. "He and Moze will keep us busy, once
they learn we want lions."
"I don't believe any dog-trainer could teach them short of six
months," replied Frank. "Sounder is no spring chicken; an' that
black and dirty white cross between a cayuse an' a barb-wire
fence is an old dog. You can't teach old dogs new tricks."
Jones smiled mysteriously, a smile of conscious superiority, but
said nothing.
"We'll shore hev a storm to-morrow," said Jim, relinquishing his
pipe long enough to speak. He had been silent, and now his
meditative gaze was on the west, through the cabin window, where
a dull afterglow faded under the heavy laden clouds of night and
left the horizon dark.
I was very tired when I lay down, but so full of excitement that
sleep did not soon visit my eyelids. The talk about buffalo,
wild-horse hunters, lions and dogs, the prospect of hard riding
and unusual adventure; the vision of Old Tom that had already
begun to haunt me, filled my mind with pictures and fancies. The
other fellows dropped off to sleep, and quiet reigned. Suddenly a
succession of queer, sharp barks came from the plain, close to
the cabin. Coyotes were paying us a call, and judging from the
chorus of yelps and howls from our dogs, it was not a welcome
visit. Above the medley rose one big, deep, full voice that I
knew at once belonged to Sounder. Then all was quiet again. Sleep
gradually benumbed my senses. Vague phrases dreamily drifted to
and fro in my mind: "Jones's wild range--Old Tom--Sounder--great
name--great voice--Sounder! Sounder! Sounder--"
Next morning I could hardly crawl out of my sleeping-bag. My
bones ached, my muscles protested excruciatingly, my lips burned
and bled, and the cold I had contracted on the desert clung to
me. A good brisk walk round the corrals, and then breakfast, made
me feel better.
"Of course you can ride?" queried Frank.
My answer was not given from an overwhelming desire to be
truthful. Frank frowned a little, as it wondering how a man could
have the nerve to start out on a jaunt with Buffalo Jones without
being a good horseman. To be unable to stick on the back of a
wild mustang, or a cayuse, was an unpardonable sin in Arizona. My
frank admission was made relatively, with my mind on what cowboys
held as a standard of horsemanship.
The mount Frank trotted out of the corral for me was a pure
white, beautiful mustang, nervous, sensitive, quivering. I
watched Frank put on the saddle, and when he called me I did not
fail to catch a covert twinkle in his merry brown eyes. Looking
away toward Buckskin Mountain, which was coincidentally in the
direction of home, I said to myself: "This may be where you get
on, but most certainly it is where you get off!"
Jones was already riding far beyond the corral, as I could see by
a cloud of dust; and I set off after him, with the painful
consciousness that I must have looked to Frank and Jim much as
Central Park equestrians had often looked to me. Frank shouted
after me that he would catch up with us out on the range. I was
not in any great hurry to overtake Jones, but evidently my
horse's inclinations differed from mine; at any rate, he made the
dust fly, and jumped the little sage bushes.
Jones, who had tarried to inspect one of the pools--formed of
running water from the corrals--greeted me as I came up with this
cheerful observation.
"What in thunder did Frank give you that white nag for? The
buffalo hate white horses--anything white. They're liable to
stampede off the range, or chase you into the canyon."
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