Fire on the Mountain

by Edward Abbey

  Billy!

  I opened my eyes. Dark.

  Wake up, Billy.

  I poked my head out of the sleeping bag and for a moment thought I had not slept at all. Then I saw the blue streaks of dawn and the ashes of the fire. I looked toward the cabin and saw the old man already at work by lamplight, serving breakfast at the table inside the open door. I smelled coffee and bacon. He looked out and called me again: “Out of the sack! Let’s eat!”

  I struggled out into the chill mountain morning. Shivering, I pulled the cold stiff boots onto my feet, found my hat, and stood up. Lee was bringing in the horses. Blinking, rubbing my face, I hobbled toward him and helped tie all three near the cabin. My legs and back were so stiff and sore I thought the horses must have spent part of the night tramping on me to keep warm.

  “How do you feel today, Billy?” Lee Mackie grinned at me in the morning dusk; all those white teeth—no wonder he thought people would vote for him.

  “I feel pretty good,” I said. “Pretty damn good.”

  He laughed and slapped my back. “Come on, let’s eat.”

  The old man was banging on the skillet with a big spoon. “Get in here!” he hollered, “or I’ll throw it to the bluejays.”

  After breakfast we grained the horses and saddled up. Again somebody had to go after water: I volunteered. Wanted to prove something. I made two trips down to the spring, and the second time climbed the rocks to the place where the lion had been crouching. I could not see any tracks but thought I detected a strange odor in the air—a feline smell. No, something else: ozone and summer lightning.

  We closed up the cabin, climbed on our horses and moved out, starting down the ancient trail road toward the foothills. Grandfather and I planned to explore the territory between the mine road and the windmill. Lee would ride with us as far as the junction of the two roads.

  My bones felt like cast iron, my rear like one unanimous saddle sore, but once astride the bulk and power and restless life of Blue I didn’t care. The feel of the reins in my hand, the creak and squeak of leather, the big horse beneath me, gave me all the strength and confidence I needed. I felt like a lion: an aged, battered but still mighty lion. With joy in my heart and satisfaction in my mind I rode beside my friends and watched the shoals of green and yellow clouds spread out like burning islands on the sea of the eastern sky.

  “We’ll have rain today,” Grandfather said, squinting at the sky through his wise steel-rimmed spectacles. “Not much, naturally, just a thundershower. About one sixty-fourth of an inch of water and all the thunder and lightning we need.”

  “When?” Lee asked.

  “Oh, about one-thirty. Make it one forty-five.”

  “I’m going to check that prophecy with the Weather Bureau. If you’re wrong it’ll cost you one gallon of Bacardi. In a wickerwork basket.”

  “You’ve got yourself a bet, young fella. Shake.”

  They shook hands.

  The nighthawks soared and plunged against the light, aware of the imminent sun. A raven croaked like a witch from a dead pine down below, reminding the nighthawks that their time was almost up. Magpies appeared, hungry birds in academic black and white, who squawked and squawled like quarreling theologians as they gathered. A canyon wren woke up, singing her trickling-water song.

  “Is Heaven better than this place?” I asked.

  “The climate’s a little better here,” Grandfather answered.

  “Less humility,” Lee said.

  Three long switchbacks down through the woods brought us to the joining of the roads and the separation of our little band.

  “I’m sorry I can’t stick with you today,” Lee said to Grandfather and me. “But I wish you luck; I hope you find that invisible horse.”

  “I have a hunch that horse would be better off if he was invisible,” the old man said, scanning the ridges north and east.

  “You’ll find him,” Lee said. “Anyway, I’ll see you both in a couple of days.”

  “Bring Annie along next time.”

  “I’ll try. I’ll try to do that.” Smiling, he gave us a salute, turned his horse and rode down the trail, through the high hairy weeds and whiskery flowers thriving among the rocks and faded ruts of the road.

  I was sorry to see him ride away. Most of the magic I had felt during this expedition seemed to float away with him. I thought of our glorious victory on the day before and wondered if we’d ever have another like it. Certainly not today. Lee Mackie gave us a final wave and disappeared around the first bend below.

  “Let’s go, Billy.”

  I rode beside my grandfather over the same road Lee and I had taken. The old man apparently shared my mood. He was silent for a long time as we pushed our horses north.

  “I see we had a jeep in here not too long ago,” he finally said. “On a one-way trip. I know how they came in; I wonder how they went out.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I hope they found their way out all right. I mean, without coming across any of our livestock. Our gun-happy friends from the other side of the wire seem to have trouble, sometimes, in distinguishing a beef cow from a wild jack rabbit.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He looked at me. “You feel all right, Billy?”

  “Yes sir. I feel fine.”

  “You’re not tired, are you? I realize you had a rough day yesterday, all that mileage on a horse after nine months on your—at your schoolwork.”

  “Honest, Grandfather, I feel fine.” I sat up straighter and looked at things sharply, taking an interest. And almost at once I did feel better again.

  “That’s good. We have a lot of ground to cover today.”

  We covered a lot of ground. We left the old mine road and picked our way through the brush and cactus of the hills below it, following cattle trails, deer paths and no paths at all. It was hot, sweaty work, with the sun and humidity rising, the dust getting in my teeth and eyes, the juniper branches whipping in my face. All morning we scouted the hills and searched the canyons, working our way gradually downward until, close to noon, we came out on the desert not far from the gathering pen, the windmill and the big tank full of all that cool green water. Nothing ever smelled better to me as our tired brutes trotted toward it, picking up their pace. Nothing ever tasted sweeter. Faces dripping, the old man and I smiled at each other and dipped our heads for more. Rocky and Blue did the same and the flies buzzed happily over us all.

  Afterwards we rested in the latticed, inadequate shade of the windmill, chewing on the jerky which the old man brought from his saddlebags. The air was hot and still, the windmill static, though far off in the desert we could see the play of the whirlwinds, pillars of dust dancing like ghosts over the plain.

  While the dust-devils played on the lowlands the clouds were piling up on the crest of the mountains, great cumuli-nimbi charged with lightning and thunder, dark with power and possible rain.

  The clouds formed, the whirlwinds danced, but the air of the desert remained static as a sea of glass, full of heat and suspense, but inert. Inert—like us. We did not talk. I gazed at the sky and the clouds, and the old man, stretched on the ground with his hat over his face, snored softly in his slumber. I wanted to sleep myself but I couldn’t—a strange excitement kept my nerves alert, and I felt the rapid beating of my heart.

  Nothing would happen today. The sun would fall over the mountains, the clouds grumble and the buzzards soar, but nothing would happen. I knew that. And to me it seemed all so marvelous I liked it that way. I wanted no irrelevant event to mar or cut short the crystal stasis of the long deep desert afternoon. Tonight, perhaps. Or tomorrow. But not this day.

  The clouds spoke in a muted rumble over the barren mountains and a flicker of lightning, like an illuminated nerve, shot through the tallest of the thunderheads. The roll of thunder faded off and nothing happened.

  I rolled over and lay on my belly, pulled a stem of timothy from its casing, chewed on it and stared at the flies and ants and beet
les crawling sluggishly about in the shady weeds at the base of the water tank. A siender straw-colored scorpion emerged from a crevice beneath a stone, crawling toward a fly. The fly, unaware, was inspecting a fragment of cow dung with his nervous forelegs. The scorpion glided close, the tail with its poison bulb and red curved stinger arched above the head, the big crab claws reaching forward. The fly took off. I killed the scorpion. Not because he was a scorpion but because he was unlucky.

  The old man grunted, pushed back his hat and opened his red-rimmed eyes. He squinted at the sun, high in the western sky, and stood up. I heard the creak of his old joints. “Mount up, Billy. We’ll take one more look for that buckskin.”

  Blue stood with drooping neck and closed eyes in the same poor shade of the windmill, shaking his head, twitching his skin, brushing his tail at the idle flies. I saddled him and climbed aboard. With some reluctance the big horse allowed me to guide him after Grandfather, headed not for home but for the hills again.

  We took a different trail this time, one farther to the north and not so steep, that led toward the pass between Thieves’ Mountain and the San Andres. As we slowly climbed I was able to see more and more of the White Sands, that sea of milky dunes that stretched for fifty miles north and south between the desert ranges. Lost somewhere in the middle of that vastness were the new installations of the Proving Grounds.

  Giant yuccas loomed up in silhouette before the wild sky and the piled-up masses of clouds. We passed a dead pinyon pine, lightning-blasted, stripped of all its bark, the nude limbs gleaming like silver.

  Three ravens flopped off and lumbered away at our approach, squawking like housewives, alarming the pinyon jays higher on the hillside, who at once set up an answering clamor of their own which sounded like “Rain! rain! rain!”

  The thunderheads were closer now, as the trail led up toward the mountains. I saw another scribble of lightning pass through the chasms of the clouds and after a long pause heard the barrage of thunder. But the sun rode clear, the vibrant light blazed down. Higher and higher we rode until we reached the crest of a long ridge and the pinyon-juniper belt once more. Here the air was a few degrees cooler and I felt for the first time the stirring of the troubled air over the mountains.

  The old man shouted: “Over there!” He pointed toward the slope of the adjacent ridge, half a mile north. “There he is!” I looked hard but saw nothing alive, saw nothing move except a flight of black wings circling in the sky. My grandfather drew up his horse and waited for me. I stopped near him on the narrow trail and followed with my eyes the line of his arm and forefinger. “You see him, Billy?”

  I scrutinized the hillside, the tangle of mesquite, yucca and oak brush, the jumbled boulders dappled with cloud shadows. “No sir.”

  “Halfway up the hill. See that yellow outcrop,”

  I stared closely.

  “Just to the left and a little above it. There’s old Rascal.”

  Then I saw it, the yellowish shape of a horse spread motionless on the ground. “He’s down, Grandfather.”

  “He should be. He’s dead. Can’t you see, his belly’s torn open. Look, the birds are on him now.”

  I saw the black buzzards crawling like flies over the prone figure and saw three more buzzards descend. “What happened to him?”

  “Let’s find out.” Grandfather spurred Rocky forward. We rode further up the trail till we reached a point on a level with the dead horse, left the trail and made our way through juniper and chaparral around the head of the canyon to the farther ridge. We could no longer see Rascal but we were guided by the scavengers as they circled over him.

  We picked our way through the jungle of brush and rock, inventing a trail, until we came within sight and smell of our object. The stench was bad and the horse hardly recognizable as the one I’d known so well and ridden so much the summer before.

  We rode close; the vultures ascended in a cloud of black wings, rags of rotten flesh hanging from their beaks, and circled above the trees.

  The horse lay on his side, completely disembowled, the entrails strewn over the stones, the neck and flank ripped open, the eye sockets empty. The smell was so foul we had to ride around him and approach again from the upwind side. Grandfather studied the ground. “The lion was here,” he said. On a patch of dust he showed me the broad round print of the lion’s paw.

  “Maybe the lion killed him, Grandfather.”

  “I don’t think it likely.” The old man dismounted, letting his horse stand with dangling reins, and walked up to the carcass. I stayed where I was, ten feet away. For several minutes Grandfather stared down at the ruin of our horse. “Have a look at this, Billy.” He motioned to me to come closer.

  “I don’t feel very good.”

  “You feel sick?”

  “Yes sir.”

  He nodded, stayed a minute longer, then came back to his horse, stumbling a little on his high heels over the loose rock. He mounted, adjusted his hat, turned the horse and started back the way we had come. I had a glimpse of the dull bewildered fury in his eyes before he turned his back to me.

  Afraid to ask any questions, I followed in silence. We reached the trail and proceeded downhill toward home, the horses stepping a bit livelier now. Overhead the clouds boiled and thickened, obscuring the sun, and the thunder boomed louder and louder. I shivered, knotted my bandana around my neck and turned up my collar. Raindrops fell on the warm boulders beside the trail, spattering the stone with dark spots of moisture which faded as I watched and evaporated into nothing.

  We rode at a fast walk down the trail, followed closely by the forward fringe of the storm. Lightning barked in our rear, casting white flashes of light over the shaking boughs of the pinyons and junipers around us. When I saw Grandfather untie the poncho packed behind the cantle of his saddle I knew we were in for it and I untied mine too. Lightning struck again, so close that I cringed, and old Blue danced forward like a colt. We let our horses break into a trot. I stood up in the stirrups and supported myself with one hand on the saddlehorn. All the aches and pains I’d felt in the morning came back to me now with redoubled emphasis. I wished there weren’t so many miles still remaining between us and the ranch-house.

  I looked up. The sky was no longer in sight: instead of a sky we had a low ceiling of cloudmass, purple, swollen and turbulent. Far to the east, however, the sky was still clear and the desert below glowed in the sunlight.

  Another flurry of rain fell around us and this time the drops did not fade but multiplied and merged with one another until the surface of the rock gleamed with a uniform wetness. At the same time I realized my shirt was getting wet: I put on the rubber poncho.

  We reached the foot of the trail, trotted past the windmill and corral and headed east on the dirt road home. The golden plains extended before us clear to the Guadalupes, shining with light, but the edge of that light receded faster than our advance and a moment later the clouds burst open overhead and down it came, the deluge.

  Cold rain pelted my back and shoulders and a continuous stream of water poured off the forward brim of my hat onto Blue’s neck. The road softened beneath us, sand and earth changing into mud, and the horses’ hooves made a spongy sound. My new straw hat began to wilt as the water soaked through it into my hair. Water ran in icy strings down my neck and inside my shirt. I felt miserable—wet, cold, tired, hungry. I found myself hating the bellow of thunder, the lightning with its dazzling glare on the soaked shrubs and darkened earth around us.

  But five minutes later, abruptly, the rain stopped, the lightning ceased and the thunder rolled back to the mountaintops in a series of echoing reverberations from Thieves’ Mountain to the San Andres.

  The sun reappeared, burning through a gulf in the shrunken clouds, and blazed on our steaming backs. I took off the poncho and hung my soggy hat on the horn, reshaping it more to my fancy while it was in a malleable condition.

  We were nearly home. A mile ahead we could see the cottonwoods along the Salado, the group o
f ranch buildings, and the red barrancas beyond. Every detail of the landscape stood out clearly in the slanting amber evening light: I saw the ravens in the trees, Grandfather’s pickup truck parked in the wagonshed, the ranch-house windows aflame with the sun, the Peralta children playing by the windmill, the dogs shaking themselves on the porch, the folds and creases of the eroded clay banks on the far side of the buildings, the chamisa and greasewood glistening on the plain—things, appearances, surfaces vividly precise, dogmatically real, and all of it surmounted by a triumphal double rainbow.

  I thought I heard the roll of thunder again. Riding beside Grandfather, I saw him peering to the north, toward the upper reaches of the Salado River. The sound of thunder became continuous, a steady distant roar. “We better hurry,” he said, “the flood’s coming.” Our horses had slowed to a walk when the rain stopped; now we jogged them up again and trotted toward the wash.

  As we rode through the grove of cottonwoods under the leaves already dry and fluttering, we heard the roar of the approaching flood come round the bend, though the water itself was still out of sight. The sound now was like that of a railway train.

  We splashed through the stream of clear water and trotted over the sand, the riverbed dry and hot and bright under a clean sky. But before we reached the far side the forelip of the flash flood came rolling around the upstream turn and surged toward us.

  Inevitably surprised, I drew up Blue and stopped to watch. The horse fought the bit, stepping sideways. Grandfather turned. “Get outa there!” he shouted. “What’s the matter with you?” Unwillingly at first I gave in, letting the horse start ahead and lope on across the riverbed and up the bank to safety. There I stopped him again and watched the approach of the flood.

  Red-brown and thick with mud, splattered with scum and lacy jags of foam, tossing a broken tree on its crest, the flood poured like gravy down the sunny wash. The front of it advanced on a curve in a wall about a foot high, moving as fast as a tired man could run, and swirling out toward each side. Rainbows glittered in the spray, white-caps formed and disappeared and reformed on the roiling surface as the flood came down in greater strength, deepening, shaking the ground on which we stood, filling our ears with its tremendous rumble.