by Will Hobbs
Daytimes passed with me working like a dervish in between naps, hoeing, fertilizing, running off the ravens who were as mischievous as ever. Crops didn’t have to be ripe to attract their interest; those gluttons would be happy to ruin them anytime.
My father still hadn’t noticed what was happening to the squashes. As for the college students, I didn’t have to worry about them. They’d taken off on a week’s field trip to a farm down in the desert in Arizona that was also growing exotic vegetables for seeds and starting their own catalog. Almost all the late planting was done.
Even though it had been six weeks since it had rained, all our dry-land crops were holding their own, barely growing while waiting for moisture in order to make their big jump toward putting on size and going to seed.
One day we got some more bad news from the BLM. The ranger drove in and reported that he thought our pothunters were still in the area—that in fact they’d never left. A couple of other sites had been bombed, and maybe some that hadn’t been noticed yet. All were on public land, out in the sagebrush country, sites that only a trained archeologist or an experienced pothunter could have detected in the first place.
These guys were making me mad.
As soon as the BLM ranger drove out, my father went out behind the cabin and started smashing cans with his Megamasher, which is an invention of his. I think Duke and Rodney Bishop were making him crazy too. I wanted to help him smash those sleazy cans. I started setting them up as he’d haul on his block-and-tackle, roping that big stone fifteen feet up into the air to the peak of his tripod. It felt good watching the stone fall. The Megamasher may not be the most efficient can smasher ever devised, but it does smash them awfully flat.
10
The day was bound to come, and it didn’t take long, when my father noticed. Something had been into the Hopi blue corn, shredding the tiny husks to get at the baby ears inside. “I think it’s a rat,” he reported one morning at breakfast. “Probably that same one that was in the house. I think he’s working the field now.”
I felt so ashamed. “Maybe Ringo will get him,” I said.
“As long as he isn’t coming back in the house, why don’t we leave him be?” my mother suggested. “Think what the ravens have done to us. The coyotes get in the corn…. Think what a deer has done in one night.”
My mother likes to think of us as sharing the valley with all the animals, and so does my father—to a degree. With the exception of deer mice lately, we’d never poisoned anything, and my father didn’t even own a gun. When the aphids would get out of hand, he’d order five or ten thousand ladybugs.
“Dusty’s good at keeping the deer off,” my father replied. “I don’t worry about the deer. But it doesn’t appear that Dusty’s taking care of this rat.”
There you’re mistaken, I thought. But what I said to my dad was, “This rat is cool! He’s got a bushy tail, you know.”
My father wagged his head. “A rat is a rat is a rat. And you can bet there’s more where he came from. Mama rats, baby rats …”
“Maybe not,” I countered. “Maybe he’s a loner.”
My mother got a chuckle out of that. I forged ahead, pleading my case. “Think about all the enemies he has in life. Weasels, skunks, foxes, badgers, coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions, gopher snakes, not to mention Ringo.” I was making myself sick with this list. “Owls, too,” I added.
My father stopped and stroked his smooth chin. “Tep, I’m surprised. You’ve always been the best scarecrow I’ve got. You feel pretty strongly about this rat, don’t you?”
“Maybe there’s some good that this rat does around here, and we don’t even know about it.”
My father was interested. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
I thought wildly for a line of argument that might sway him. “Some chili seeds need to pass through the gut of a bird,” I began slowly, pausing for a breath and more time to think. “You taught me that. The seed couldn’t sprout without the help of the digestive system of the bird.”
“Sure thing,” my father agreed, proud that I’d remembered.
“Well, rats must help some seeds out, too,” I continued. “Maybe in a number of ways. When a packrat moves pinyon nuts around, sometimes he’ll drop a nut and pick up something else. Maybe he’ll drop that nut in a place where it will sprout and become a pine tree. So he has a valuable place in nature.”
“Good point,” my father said. “Go on.”
“Well, what else … Packrats eat insects—I read that in Mom’s field guide. For all we know, that rat had a sweet tooth for the Luperini beetles in the gourds. We might lose some squash—corn, I guess you said it was—and a few other things, but the rat might be helping us out in ways you don’t even know about!”
My mother was beaming as she put her arm around my shoulder. “That’s my boy,” she said. “And don’t forget, that rat might help make science possible for someone like me forty thousand years from now.”
My father couldn’t help laughing. “You guys almost have me rooting for the rat!”
“Try to think of him more like a rabbit,” my mother suggested. “He’s just as adorable, maybe more so. Rabbits have caused us a lot more grief than packrats.”
My dad went out to work and my mother started mixing up some bread dough. Twice a week she bakes outside in the adobe oven my father and I built, and those days are extra special. I watched as she kneaded the bread. She’s small, but she has a lot of power in her arms. “Tell me what I was like in the incubator,” I said.
My mother looked up, a little surprised.
“No joking around,” I said. “I really want to know.”
“You fought for every breath,” she said. “It would have been so easy for you to just give up.”
“How long was I in there?”
“Months.”
I snagged a little raw dough, pretending I had to snatch it fast. “How much exactly did I weigh at first?”
“Two and a quarter pounds.”
“I really wasn’t supposed to live?”
“They told us the chances were ten to one against, maybe worse.”
I was standing there wishing she’d say more. Somehow she knew what I was most needing to hear. “You were born with incredible willpower, Tep. You’ve always had it. You’re tenacious about anything worth fighting for. You always have been.”
She set the dough to rise. In the heat of a summer morning like this, it would rise quickly. After it rose the first time, she’d punch it down, shape it into loaves, and let it rise again. I went out to get the fire going in the beehive adobe oven. I like to use a combination of scrub oak and juniper. The oak coals burn long and even, and the juniper adds a little flavor. As my fire caught, I was trying to catch fire with the idea that I could control the rat. I had to stop raiding our fields, that’s all there was to it. I repeated to myself the words my mother had said: “You were born with incredible willpower, Tep. You’ve always had it. You’re tenacious about anything worth fighting for. You always have been.”
I can do it, I told myself, if only I’d summon the willpower. No more squashes, no baby corn. None. None!
I missed my room. I’d take a little nap there. It was still morning, and the upstairs hadn’t heated up yet.
As I woke from my nap, hungry as ever, the delicious smell of fresh-baked bread filled the house. Through the register in the floor, I heard my parents talking about me. “Tep’s sleeping a lot,” my father was saying. “And he seems to have a lot on his mind.”
After a long pause, my mother said, “I think he’s just going through a phase.”
Right then and there, I decided that I had to take charge of the rat, and tonight would be the night. When I’d accomplished that, I could go back to working on the riddle of what had happened to me. Maybe I could return to Picture House. Maybe I could find that flute.
I took the old fruitcake tin in my hands, and I popped the lid. Here were treasures I couldn’t possibly let the rat have:
my father’s first tepary beans and the ancient corn from Picture House that I would plant soon. For these treasures I would fight the rat with everything in me. If I could prevail, I could start to get my life back. If I lost…
I set the lid aside, and I placed the open tin on my desk.
Out of habit, the rat started down for the field that night. I turned him back by picturing the seeds in that fruitcake tin: the little plastic bag of teparies, the bag of corn.
Moments away from the showdown I had staged for myself, I climbed the side of the cabin to Ringo’s entry spot, up under the eaves above the second story. Dusty was watching from below. Once inside, I crawled down the rough-hewn log walls and jumped onto my bed. The rat nosed all around the room where the floor met the walls, and then he jumped onto the chair. Now his hands were up on the desk, and he was peering inside the tin.
I could see the seeds now, and so could the rat. In my gut, I could feel the craving. I only wanted to tear at those bags, devour the prize. But from the back of my mind I screamed in my own voice. “Not those beans! Not that corn!”
I attacked. I fought with all my willpower, but with a spring the rat was on top of the desk tearing at the seeds. No! I screamed, and I fought with everything I had. Not my father’s tepary beans. Not my Picture House corn.
Tep! I yelled. Fight him! Fight for your life, Tep!
My attack was met by a furious onslaught that shook me through and through with waves of convulsions. I got mad, I kept fighting, I counterattacked. In the end, I beat him. I thrashed him. Now it was the rat that would have to look out through that tiny window, and I could decide what I would and wouldn’t do.
I started up the walls toward the hole under the beam, knowing I shouldn’t wait any longer before getting back to Dusty. As my bad luck would have it, Ringo appeared suddenly above, making his high-pitched hunting cry like crackling static. He had me trapped and he knew it. How did this happen? I wondered. Where had Dusty been?
The ringtail rushed to the attack. We tumbled across the room, and I fought with teeth and claws as he did the same. He seemed much stronger than the first time we’d met, and I was quickly wearing out—I knew I had to get away. The chance arrived when I bit him on one of his oversize ears. As fast as I could, I scurried up the wall and through the hole next to the beam.
I’d made it outside, but now he had me by the tail. As I swung around to try to get at him, my claws lost their hold on the logs, and I was falling.
It’s a long way to the ground from the beams above the second story. I spread my limbs wide to try to slow myself down. The world was flying by and not so slowly. Still, I might have been all right if I hadn’t landed with a splash in the rain barrel we keep by the porch.
11
I came to the surface paddling hard. The rim of the barrel loomed high, high above me. The barrel was less than half full. It hadn’t been raining, and this time of the year the only water we had in it was the rinse water from our dishes that we used to water the geraniums around the porch.
Scratch though I might for a hold on the sides of the metal barrel, there was nothing to hold onto and I was tiring fast. The cold was seeping into me and robbing what strength I had.
Slow down, Tep, I told myself. Don’t paddle so hard. Slow down and think!
I heard something above me and looked up to see the white rings around Ringo’s eyes and the white rings on his bushy tail. He was balancing up there, staring down at me. All the while I kept paddling. After some time Ringo disappeared and I saw only an empty circle of dark sky above the pitch-black walls of the barrel.
I was growing more exhausted all the while. Where was Dusty? She was my only chance. But apparently she couldn’t hear my frantic squeaks from inside that barrel or hear me scratching on the walls.
Keep paddling, I told myself, just keep paddling. And so I did, far into the night. I thought about my parents, I thought about that word “tenacious” my mother had used, I thought about the long tenacious root of the tepary bean. I drew on everything I had. I wasn’t going to give up, I wasn’t going to let go. My struggle took me far beyond thinking. Toward the end, it must have been a reflex coming from flesh and bone.
In her search for me, Dusty must have peered at last over the rim of the barrel. At first I felt the barrel being jostled, one, two, three times, and then I managed to look up and dimly recognized the shape of her head above. Again and again, the barrel was rocked as she threw her weight against it, or tried to tip it over with her paws. She couldn’t tip it. There must have been just enough water inside that she couldn’t manage it no matter how hard she tried.
Dusty rarely barks, but did she ever send up a clamor now, barking like there was no tomorrow. I kept paddling, though my limbs felt like lead.
Suddenly I was blinded by light, and I heard my father’s voice saying, “So what have we here? A nearly drowned rat! It’s our bushy-tailed woodrat! I knew you’d come back!”
The blinding beam of his flashlight left me for a second and I was looking up at the silhouette of the enormous head of my father.
Then the light was back on me, blinding me once more. I heard him say, “Your tail’s not so cute when it’s wet.”
Dusty barked again, two, three times. My father hesitated, keeping the light on me but saying nothing.
“He’s trying so hard, Dusty,” my father said at last. “He’s just trying so hard, you have to hand it to him. I wonder how long he’s been in there.”
Moments later the world turned on its axis as the barrel tipped over and I came flooding out onto the ground. Terrified of what my dad might do, I tried to get up and run away. After taking two or three steps, I keeled over on my side. I was completely spent.
The light blinded me once again. I closed my eyes. I was still gasping for breath. “Good luck, little fellow,” I heard my father say. “I hope you revive. You’ve got a lot of courage.” Then the beam of light was gone, and after that the screen door closed.
Dusty reappeared and licked the life back into me, starting my circulation again. In the cool hours approaching dawn, she lay beside me and I snuggled into the warmth of her fur. At last I was able to feel four feet again, and make them work, and I dragged myself back up to the rimrock.
That day I worked closely with my father, and our two rakes sang side by side. Off and on, I found myself starting to sniffle, I was so proud to be his son. He looked at me closely a couple of times that day. I already knew he understood that I “was just going through a phase.”
When night came I was determined not to let myself get separated from Dusty again. As for raiding the fields, I was no longer tempted. From now on I would protect them. I owed my father that and more.
It occurred to me that it would be simple enough to hide food during the day that I’d be able to count on during the night. Diced apples covered with peanut butter, a bag of sunflower seeds, whatever I wanted. How could I have been so stupid not to have thought of that before?
I also realized that it might be possible to ride on Dusty’s back, where I’d be a lot safer. When night came I tried it out. It was easy, given her long fur, to pull myself up on her back. I knew immediately where I wanted to go, now that I had long-distance transportation. I had to return to Picture House to see if I could find that magic flute.
In place on Dusty’s shoulders, I couldn’t get her to go straight ahead. She’d walk around in a circle or simply stand still and look back at me. This wasn’t going to get us anywhere fast. It was hard for her to catch on to me leading from behind. I realized we needed some kind of a system.
I soon taught her turns with a tug on the left or right ear. Squeaking simply meant “Go!” Before long we’d crossed the road and were headed up and out of the valley. Once she realized we were headed for Picture House, she didn’t need directions. No moon lit the way, but that didn’t matter: she knew her way by heart.
I started wondering, when the dim outline of the big cave first came in sight, if the BLM ra
nger still 77 had anyone posted at Picture House. I tasted the night breeze cautiously, and we looked all around. No one was there—except for the packrats, that is, scurrying around on their errands.
Picture House is an eerie place in the dark of the moon. The owl never hooted, but I knew she must still be there, so I clung tight to Dusty’s back. It didn’t seem there’d been any more digging; I guessed that the pothunters hadn’t returned. Had the pueblo elders come for the ancient medicine man and taken him away to hide him in a new grave? I made myself go and look, in the room by the picture wall.
The corpse was gone.
I’d come to find the flute that had started all this. Where should I begin?
I knew my mother’s rule, that a packrat ranges up to two hundred feet from its nest. I concluded that the packrat that dropped the matchbook and picked up the flute must have been within two hundred feet of its nest when it took the flute from the albino’s fingers. The nest couldn’t be very far away.
I looked all around, and had convinced myself there weren’t any packrats living close to this end of the ruin. The one who had taken the flute must have been breaking my mother’s distance rule, wandering at some distance from home.
But then, as I was double-checking the rubble at the end of the picture wall, a packrat appeared. A single bushy-tailed woodrat. At first I assumed that the rat would be hostile, and I prepared to run. But it approached slowly and, it seemed, peacefully, so I froze, waiting to see what it would do. I was thinking, This rat might lead me to the flute. When we were eye to eye, the rat began licking my face and lips. Dusty watched this from a distance. Shuddering, I waited. Suddenly the rat disappeared behind a large rock slab that leaned up against the cliff. I gathered what courage I had. I knew this was my chance; I followed.
Behind the slab was a conglomeration of sticks. The fractures between the rocks were all jammed full of sticks and cactus segments.
I found an entrance. Once inside, I was shaking again. This was crazy. I could never hope to find the flute in all of Picture House! I forced myself forward a little more. I heard nothing. The narrow passage led me deeper into the maze. Then came the drumming of packrat feet up ahead, pounding out that warning I’d heard once before. With my supersensitive hearing, it sounded like I was inside a thunderstorm.
