by Will Hobbs
“We won’t be able to start our apple orchard,” Ma continued, “but there’ll be a market for all the strawberries, potatoes, and other produce we can raise if we’re able to plow in the spring. Everything depends on that.”
“As for cash, we’ll need to buy a headgate so we can let creek water into the ditches.”
“We’ll need to buy all sorts of things,” she said soberly.
“Where does that leave us?”
Ma dispelled the tension with a smile. “I hear your father saying, ‘Seize time by the forelock, it hath no hindlock.’”
With that, we decided to take old Joe’s advice. We better not sit and wait for the law to recover our mules. I’d be leaving in the morning.
6
Tracking the Skunk
SOMETHING IN MY rucksack was jabbing me in the back, but I wasn’t attending to it. I was only a couple miles up the Hermosa Trail and trying to make time. I kept looking over my shoulder, half expecting to see Till.
My pack was heavy enough without the tinned fish and some other stuff I’d added at the Hermosa Store. Mostly what I stopped for was that map of the trails and wagon roads of the San Juan Mountains and some parting advice from Joe Buckland.
Till had made my leaving ugly. Most of his ruckus he directed at Ma, which was nothing new. I once heard Pa remark that Till came into the world feet first, fists clenched, and hollering at his mother. He woke earlier than usual, before dawn, to the sight of Ma and me tiptoeing around like church mice. I was gathering my things and Ma was lighting a fire in the cookstove. Somehow, during Till’s sleep, he’d figured out that Ma was sending me on my own in search of Hercules and Peaches, and soon. It had taken no more than a creaking floorboard to rouse him. Till bolted upright and declared, “Owen and me can ride double on Queenie!”
“Owen’s going on foot,” Ma explained, trying to act unruffled. “Joe Buckland said it could be done, and I don’t want Owen catching up to that man with the gun. We just need to figure out where he took Hercules and Peaches and let the law take it from there.”
“Well, I’m going with Owen.”
“No, you’re not. You’re staying with me. Sorry, Till, but you’re too young for the mountains, and I need you here. I need your help.”
“Like how?”
“For one, rigging Queenie to the buggy so we can get around.”
Till said she didn’t need his help, gave me a hard look, and went into a sulk. He knew I wasn’t going to take his side.
“Till, don’t forget,” Ma said over breakfast, “you were going to ‘radicate’ the prairie dogs with your squirrel gun before they go down for the winter.”
Mention of his .22 rifle, a gift from Pa, was meant to soften Till some. “Don’t care,” he replied. He was biting that lower lip, never a good sign.
Ma pulled out the heavy artillery. “Well then, if you aren’t going to make yourself useful like we talked about, you might as well start school tomorrow instead of after Christmas.”
“They’ll coop me up like a chicken!” Till wailed. With a bitter look in my direction, he shoved off from the breakfast table. When it came time for me to say goodbye, he was nowhere in sight. I hoped he was taking out his frustration on the prairie dogs. They were akin to the pestiferous ground squirrels on our Kansas farm and ten times as numerous. Their colony was smack on our best ground for growing crops.
I was maybe three miles up the trail and thinking Till had more sense than to chase after me. Whenever the locals talked about bears and mountain lions—we hadn’t seen any as yet—he got very uneasy.
Minutes later, from behind me, I heard the sound of someone blowing like a horse galloped too long. I skittered into the forest and peeked from behind the trunk of an immense ponderosa.
Squirrel gun in hand, here came Till, his face wrought with a number of strong emotions. His clothes were wet from a fall in one of the creek crossings. I stifled the urge to call his name and let him run on by.
What was he thinking? He didn’t have a pack and wasn’t dressed for the mountains. It wasn’t like I had an extra coat and bedroll for him.
Just as I was about to lose sight of Till, he came panting to a stop. He threw back his head and called, “O-wen! Ohh-wen! Ohhhh-wen!”
This wasn’t easy. Little brother was ripping my guts out by the root.
A minute later, his breath collected, Till turned around and headed for home. I exhaled a sigh of relief. I was looking forward to being free of him for a change.
I figured I might as well repack. The culprit turned out to be the sharp corner of a book, Behold the Dinosaur. It was a gift from Pa, my squirrel gun in a manner of speaking. He was always encouraging my scientific bent, as he called it.
Noon by Pa’s pocket watch, I was at the site of my encounter with the miscreant. I opened a tin of sardines as I sat on the log next to the ruins of his campfire. Back in the trees I found droppings where Hercules and Peaches had been tied. A nudge from my boot and I was looking at bits of the carrots I’d fed them from my own hand. I wondered what our mules must be thinking and hoped they weren’t being mistreated. I swore I’d get revenge if they were.
As the trail climbed I left the ponderosas behind and entered the realm of aspen, fir, and spruce. A warm breeze was blowing golden leaves onto tracks of shod horses and unshod mules. Given all the muddy spots in the trail, they were easy enough to spot. I saw some older tracks but they were faint and few. The trail was seldom used, like Buckland had said. The peaks above me were painterly white with early snow against a sky “blue enough to knock you down,” as my uncle had written. Here was a piece of luck at last, perfect fall weather as I hoofed it into his “shining mountains.”
Eight or so miles up the trail, the prints of the outlaw’s two horses and our two mules still obvious, I reached the intersection of the Hermosa Trail and the abandoned wagon road from Rockwood, a railroad stop on the way to Silverton. The wagon road was headed for Rico, a silver town gone bust on the headwaters of the Dolores River.
This had to be the road the old man talked about. Baby trees were taking it over, some knee-high. “Look careful,” Buckland had said. “Your thief might’ve turned west up that old road. It goes over the shoulder of the La Plata Mountains to Rico. If that’s what he did, he’s likely headed to Telluride by way of Lizard Head Pass. If he continued north up the Hermosa Trail, you won’t know whether it’s Telluride or Silverton he’s aiming for.”
It was plain to see he hadn’t taken the old wagon road. The tracks continued north on the Hermosa Trail. I came across droppings, “horse apples” as Till liked to call them, a day or two old.
“If you follow your rustler north into the high San Juans,” Joe had added, “be careful once you leave the trees behind. That high up you got no cover, and the weather can get ugly in a hurry.”
Six in the evening, footsore and weary, I camped at the edge of a meadow that flanked the creek. My spot had a little fire ring just back in the trees with a fine view of the meadow and the peaks above. I heated some stew and chewed on some jerky as the shadows grew long. The prolonged and eerie calling of an animal pierced the silence and sent a thrill through me. The bugle of an elk, I realized.
Darkness fell and the moon rose, still close to full. That elk sounded close. The bugling came every few minutes, such a strange love song. I wished they would come out of the woods.
I built up my campfire to keep the freezing night air at bay, and I fell to brooding. What was Ma thinking when she took most of what we made from selling the farm and paid off the Hermosa forty? Without even asking me if I saw my future in farming?
Back in Kansas I’d done what I had to do, but I wasn’t looking forward to more of the same, even if I had accepted it as my lot. I was no man of the soil like my father, though he was much more than that. Pa reveled in all the new inventions and discoveries, and he encouraged me to “follow my curiosity into the twentieth century.” That’s why he was always giving me books.
Ma avoided any such encouragement. My eight years of schooling was behind me, and that was as much as most farm boys ever got. With Pa sick and unable, it was up to me to take the reins, and that’s what I had done his last couple years. Farming was all Ma knew, and now more than ever our survival depended on it.
I added fuel to my campfire, and here it came—that sorrowful day we left home back in Kansas. I’d been blocking that memory, but now I couldn’t stop it. Queenie was pulling the buggy and I was doing the driving. At the bend in the road where we were about to lose sight of the farm, Ma said, “Don’t look back, boys.”
Till didn’t, but I looked over my shoulder, fighting tears, and my blurry vision burned a sentimental painting into my memory. The old Hollowell place was a model of what a farm should be.
From home it was seven miles into the town of Lawrence, Kansas, where Hercules and Peaches were waiting for us at the livery stable by the train yard. All the kit and caboodle we were taking with us, even the riding plow, had been loaded aboard boxcars the previous day. A couple miles short of town Ma told me to pull over by the cemetery gate. She said, “Let’s stop and say goodbye to your father, boys.”
On the buggy bench between us, Till recoiled like a slug showered with salt. He hated the cemetery, always stayed in the buggy. Till hadn’t returned to the grave since that awful day we buried Pa.
“C’mon, son, it’s your last chance.”
“You said he wasn’t there!”
“That’s right, just his remains. He’s in our hearts.”
“So what’s the point?” Till wailed.
Ma started crying, pulled out her handkerchief. “Please, Till, keep me and Owen company. This is a time for us to stand together.”
We climbed out and made our way to the grave, Ma on my arm, Till walking behind.
The marker was in place, the mound had settled, and the sod had grown in thick and green. Till hung back but within earshot. The last time he’d been here, he was looking down on the coffin and wouldn’t drop the clod of black dirt from his hand.
“Aaron,” Ma began. “It’s Mary and your boys. We’re off to a new adventure. Your brother died and left us his forty in Colorado. Remember him waxing poetic about the rich volcanic soils? How good the market for produce was if only he could get to growing it? Wish us luck, darling. You’d be so proud of your boys. They’re going to flourish in that dry mountain air, grow up healthy and strong. I know you’re happy about that, with us safe. Don’t fret, we’re taking Hercules and Peaches along for the heavy pulling. You’ll always be with us until the time when there are no more days.”
Fighting my tears was useless. “Help me out, Owen,” Ma said. “Say something.”
“Pa,” I managed. “Don’t worry about us. We’re going to do fine in the mountains. I’ll help Ma and watch out for Till the best I can. We miss you something awful.”
Behind me Till was sobbing. He was much too young for all of this.
To my surprise I found him stepping to my side. “Pa,” he said, “I’m gonna take my squirrel gun!”
Ma brightened with a smile. “We’ve got a train to catch, boys.”
The bugling of the elk brought me back to the present. Lost in my sorrowful reverie, I hadn’t noticed them gathering on the meadow right in front of me. Much bigger than deer, all bathed in moonlight, they were something to see—two dozen or so cows with their calves and one huge bull with a mighty rack of branching antlers.
7
Too Late to Turn Back Now
NO MATTER MY bedroll and coat, sleep wouldn’t come on the cold, hard ground. Finally I couldn’t take it any longer. The moon had risen; by Pa’s watch it was two in the morning. I crawled out from under the tarp, got my fire going again, and warmed up. I felt puny, plumb alone, and scared. After an hour by the fire, I tried to sleep but failed all over again. I couldn’t quiet my mind for thinking what Hercules and Peaches were going through, what cruelties awaited them.
At last, first light. I had something to eat and took off hiking with a vengeance. The tracks of horses and mules were still obvious in the soft, wet ground. By midafternoon, with Hermosa Peak over my left shoulder, I reached the headwaters of Hermosa Creek. Every bit of climbing in that thin air had me gasping for breath. I huffed my way above the tree line and onto the alpine tundra, golden brown after weeks of heavy frost. Bolam Pass was in my sights. As I approached the pass, more and more peaks to the north raised their jagged, snowy heads.
Approaching Bolam Pass and looking for a fork in the trail, I had my map out. I was hoping the outlaw went west there, down through the forest to the Dolores River upstream of Rico. In that case, Telluride was his likely destination, by way of Lizard Head Pass. If he steered north, I would have to follow him into the treeless heights of the San Juan Mountains, presumably to Silverton.
My luck being what it was, the stinker’s trail led north from Bolam Pass into the high San Juans. The map said RICO-SILVERTON WAGON ROAD, but that left me scratching my head. If ever it was a road, time and the elements had rubbed most of it out. A remote trail was what it had become, all the more attractive to a criminal making himself scarce. Horse apples on the tundra, not that old, told me I was still on his track. It looked like he was headed for Silverton.
Passing under Sliderock Ridge, I managed in the last of the daylight to reach a bit of cover under a cluster of stunted spruce trees. No stars appeared. I knew enough to figure that a cloudy night didn’t bode well for the next few days. I slept in fits out of pure exhaustion.
Day three of my trek dawned cloudy gray with the wind picking up. The nice weather was done and gone. Encircled by mountain peaks, the route stayed amazingly high, where my lungs couldn’t get enough air, where trees couldn’t grow. The trail flanked Grizzly Peak and Rolling Mountain and finally, with the wind roaring, dropped into the headwaters of South Mineral Creek.
I spent the night in a spruce thicket that provided firewood and a windbreak. I put Pa’s hatchet to use and made a bed of spruce tips.
When I set out in the morning of day four, I figured I’d be in Silverton in a couple of hours and talking to the marshal there. But when I reached the main flow of Mineral Creek and waded it, the tracks weren’t headed downstream toward Silverton. The skunk had gone upstream, toward Red Mountain Pass.
I took out my map. The mining towns of Silverton, Telluride, and Ouray lay in a triangle with legs of fifteen to twenty miles as the crow flies, but each was separated from the others by indescribably rugged mountains. Our devious rustler had made it look like he was heading for Silverton, but that was a ruse. It might be Telluride, like Joe Buckland had guessed, but it might even be Ouray.
The tracks joined the wagon road alongside the bed of the spur railroad out of Silverton. This route had seen quite a bit of recent use, deep wagon ruts and all, and I couldn’t tell the tracks of the scoundrel’s animals and ours from all the others. The clouds were beginning to spit snow. I thought about Silverton and heated buildings. If I turned around, I’d be there in a few hours, safely checked into a hotel. What then, if it snowed all night?
After all I’d been through, I couldn’t give in. I kept climbing as the clouds dropped and shrouded the peaks.
High on the mountain I came across deserted shacks and tailings and tunnels into the iron-red slopes, but no miners, nobody to tell me, “He went thataway.” I didn’t know it at the time, but the mining flurry on Red Mountain was history.
Up on the pass, next to some rusted machinery, I came across a marker: RED MOUNTAIN PASS 11,018 FEET ABOVE SEA LEVEL.
At the sign, the tracks of a small number of mules and horses left the wagon road onto an unmarked trail heading west. My map showed a trail west to Telluride from where I stood.
If I stayed on the wagon road, I would end up in Ouray.
I couldn’t be sure that the horses and mules that left the road here were the outlaw’s and ours. It seemed likely, though, in which case Joe Buckland was right after all. The thief was aiming t
o sell Hercules and Peaches in Telluride.
Our graybeard’s last shouted advice came to mind. “Whatever you do, don’t get caught up high in the weather!”
I didn’t think long or well. Underneath, it was fear that drove me, the looming ruin of our hopes and dreams. The wind blew wild and cold, I had a nosebleed, and my feet were freezing. I flipped up the collar of my mackinaw and plunged ahead as flakes big as quarters began to fall. An hour or more later, gasping for breath, I wiped the snow off a leaning trail sign that said BLACK BEAR PASS 12,840 FEET. In the clouds, I couldn’t see farther than I might’ve thrown a rock.
This is crazy, I thought as I started down the other side. I was able to keep to the trail a couple more miles but lost it descending another slope. The snow came in gusts, heavy and wet. I took to sliding down the slick mountainside on my hindquarters. When I paused to rest, movement caught my eye. Below me, half a dozen bighorn sheep were moving from right to left and abruptly out of sight.
Before long my descent became almost impossibly steep. Heavy as the snow was coming down, I had no chance of spotting the trail. On the verge of falling into the abyss, I came across fresh tracks of the wild sheep. Their tracks led onto a narrow ledge. Too late to turn back now, I thought, and I started across the cliff. Good thing Till isn’t along.
Shivering and shaking, I walked the slippery ledge one cautious step at a time. No more than half a hundred yards away, like an apparition in the cloud, the sheep appeared. They were huddled on a steep slope, standing on the switchbacks of the trail I had lost.
My ledge was heading for a dark cleft in the cliff. I had no idea what to expect there, and was shocked when the ledge came to a sudden end at a nearly vertical chute that ran down from above. I read the tracks in the snow. The sheep had jumped the chute to a ledge maybe six feet away and a foot lower than the one I was standing on.
On first glance I thought I could make the jump. I also knew I was more than half frozen and not in my right mind. A fall would be the end of me, but I had to get off of this mountain and soon.
