by AULT, SANDI
And then I stopped. The woods were silent. I rose to my feet. “Mountain? Mountain? Mountain!” My voice echoed against the ice. Then, stillness.
I dropped the ax on the ground and started for the last place I’d noticed the wolf rooting through the undergrowth. I called again, “Mountain? Mountain!”
Instead of the usual crashing of brush as the wolf responded to my call when he had wandered a little far, there was not a sound beyond my own breathing, and the pounding of my heart in my ears. “Mountain!”
I searched and called for the wolf for two hours. This had never happened before. Mountain might jog off after some critter, but he always returned within minutes, and never went far. There was not a sign of him anywhere. I returned to my cabin feeling like my gut had twisted over something as hard and cold as the ice over La Petaca. Fear and worry crowded my chest until I could barely breathe. With anxiety coursing through me, I forgot my fatigue and paced the floor of the one big room of my cabin, unable to sit or lie down.
It crossed my mind that the experience of spending such a cold and miserable night with a dead body may have upset Mountain almost as much as it had me. But this was so uncharacteristic of the wolf—wolves lived and traveled in packs, and I was Mountain’s pack! He had never left me before, and he never wanted me to leave him, for any reason. I had lost a lot of my personal belongings to his abandonment anxiety-driven rampages in my cabin when I’d tried leaving him for short periods of time. And now he had suddenly run off without regard for where I was or how he would get back to me!
When I finally forced myself to sit down in front of the fire, I soon dozed off. The sound of the wolf scratching at the door jarred me awake instantly and I shot to my feet and raced to open the door. But Mountain was not there. I shook my head to wake up, grabbed a flashlight off the kitchen counter, and walked outside. Ten yards away, Mountain stood over something, his ears up, his tail wagging wildly with excitement.
“Mountain!” I said, moving toward him. “Mountain, I’ve been so worried! Where have you been? Come here.”
The wolf lowered his head and grabbed at something with his teeth. Something big.
“Hey, buddy. What have you got there?” I lowered the light from the wolf’s face and shone it on the object on the ground, trying to discern what the unfamiliar shape could be. This thing was coated in dirt, matted with bits of duff and tiny twigs and thorns, brown and white, almost as large as Mountain, but flatter. Wide at one end, and narrowing to . . . a hoof! It was the leg, the entire hindquarter of a cow.
While this last registered, I heard the distant sound of a car engine. Then headlights shone like two eyes looking at us from afar, as the vehicle turned down my long dirt road, a drive leading only to my cabin. Mountain and I turned our heads in unison and watched the car approach.
There is at least one good thing, and probably more, about having a forest ranger boyfriend who works evenings and frequently stops by your cabin after he gets off work, often very late at night. Kerry got out of the truck and came to see what was illuminated in his headlamps. “He must have dragged that thing from wherever he got it. It probably weighs well over a hundred pounds, at least. Good-sized calf or mature beef, I would guess,” he said.
Mountain delighted in the attention his captured prize was attracting, and he pranced around the carrion, sniffing it and nudging it with his nose, as if to dare it to move.
I shook my head. “But where did he get it? He couldn’t bring down a cow by himself. He wouldn’t.”
“It doesn’t seem likely. For one thing, have you ever seen Mountain hunt?”
“Mice, sometimes, in a field or when we’re hiking.”
“Okay, so he’s no hunter.”
“He likes to play with coyotes and run around with them.”
“Yeah, but that’s play. He’s not hungry enough to want to hunt.”
“Not unless it’s something like a mouse—something that stimulates him with fun and excitement.”
“Well—fun and exciting—that’s not a cow. Probably the animal got sick and died. Or coyotes took it down if it was hurt or slow. Even coyotes wouldn’t be likely to take down a healthy steer.” Kerry bent down to give the remains a closer look. He waved a hand over it, scooping air toward his face, sniffing for signs of decay, then probed at it with a finger. “No, this cow didn’t die tonight. It’s been dead long enough for this meat to be frozen. It could have happened recently, since it’s been freezing for days, just not in the past few hours.”
The wolf wagged his tail and grabbed hold of a flap of hide on the thing. Tugging and jerking, he dragged it a foot or two, working hard to pull the heavy weight across the ground.
“It must have taken a ton of effort for him to drag that here,” I said.
With Kerry’s help, I got a lead on Mountain and forced him to leave his prize and come in the cabin. Once we got the wolf inside, Kerry gave me a hug. “I can’t stay. I just stopped by to tell you that I have training the next few days in Albuquerque,” he said. “I’ll be back late on Friday night.”
“I’ve got the weekend off,” I hinted, smiling.
“I’ll come see you on Saturday, then.”
“I’ll miss you,” I said, meaning it.
“I’ll miss you, too, babe.” He reached down and gave Mountain’s ears a tousle, but the wolf was too obsessed by the thought of the bovine booty outside. While I held Mountain by the collar, barely containing him as he struggled to escape, Kerry went out the door to put the carcass in the back of his truck and haul it away.
I tried to distract him, but Mountain was not fooled. He stood at the window looking out as if he could actually see from the light into the darkness, and he yipped and howled and paced from the window to the door for nearly twenty minutes. I tried to get him to come to me, and I even got down on the floor, prepared to snuggle him and sing to him, which was usually a comfort for both of us. I knew he was tired. He had to be tired. I was tired.
But the wolf was angry, and he pulled up in the corner farthest from me and lay down on the floor, his back to me. Within minutes, he curled into a wolf donut, his nose tucked under the thick fur of his tail, and went to sleep.
8
What It Means to Be Hungry
When I left my cabin in the morning, I drove to the first place where I could get cell phone coverage. I pulled over in my Jeep to call the power company on the new and unfamiliar device that I had decided to call “Screech Owl” because of its insistent, shrill ring. The receptionist left me on hold for a near-eternity, then transferred me to a voice-mail message system. I left a report that my power was out, the cell phone number, and a description of the location of my cabin. In northern New Mexico, there are still plenty of places without addresses. In fact, they haven’t entirely sorted out who owns all the land because of a complex tier of Spanish land grants that began in the 1500s. These grants have been redrawn and rewritten every time the territory of Nuevo México changed hands—and when it became a state, the mess got worse. It has created some complex real estate laws, and a few interesting loopholes as well. When a squatter started up an illegal homestead in an inaccessible place along the Rio Grande, he managed to evade legal action for so long that the BLM just let him have the place. His address became “Brown Trailer, Agua Azuela, NM,” because there were no roads on that side of the river to use for an address. When you go to someone’s house for the first time, your instructions might be, “Take the road by the house with seven windows, follow it to the big willow, and turn up the hill toward the bottle house,” because there are so many roads without names, and so many distinctive houses built without codes or covenants. My mailing address was a home carrier route number, followed by the number on a metal box at a unit of postal boxes up by the highway, over three miles away from my cabin. If anyone around there referred to my place, it was usually “that old cabin up near La Petaca.”
I left Mountain in the back of the Jeep when I went to the governor’s office at Tan
oah Pueblo. A tall man stood in front of a counter that nearly spanned the tiny entry room. He was wearing a tan blanket with pale mauve stripes, his long silver hair loosely plaited into two thick braids. He studied me before speaking. “May I help you?”
“I’m Jamaica Wild with the Bureau of Land Management. I’m liaison to the pueblo. I came to ask about setting a meat lure and some traps on Tanoah land in order to capture a wounded mountain lion and her cubs.”
The man drew up his chin and narrowed his eyes. “I cannot make any decision for the tribe, miss. I am just here for tourist.”
I looked out the open door at the empty, snow-patched, dirt plaza, the seldom-used aspen-log hide-drying racks, the closed blue and turquoise doors of the apartments in the mammoth adobe structure. “Do you have many tourists this time of year?”
“No,” the man said. “That is why they ask me to be here for this time. I am not good at talking much.” He broke into a wide smile. “I have seen you before.”
“You have? I don’t remember you, I’m sorry. I’d like to know your name.” I was careful not to ask for his name, as the Tanoah looked upon a question as a demand for information. The tribe spoke Tiwa, and their native tongue contained no direct way to say no. Instead of learning to speak against things, they had developed a complex and subtle system of civilities that made them a generally peaceful people. I had learned that their language was the strong seam that held the fabric of their culture together.
The old man looked at me approvingly, noting that a white girl—and a yellow-haired one, no less—had demonstrated a respectful manner. “My name Sevenguns.”
I smiled. “Sevenguns. I like that name.”
“Me, too,” he said, moving to the corner and picking up a long wooden pole, which he used to poke at the flaming embers in the kiva-style adobe fireplace. Even though it was cold outside, he seemed fine with leaving the door open, perhaps in order to welcome hoped-for tourists bringing a little revenue to the tribe’s coffers. His fire gave off a considerable amount of heat, and the thick adobe walls retained and reflected the warmth. He continued to tend the little blaze he had provoked and said, “I will talk with the governor about traps. The war council make all the decision about pueblo land. Maybe about a week, you come back and I will know.”
“I can’t wait that long. The she-lion was wounded by one of your shepherds. She’s thin and starving, and if she dies, her cubs will die. They don’t have a week. I’ll talk to the rancher up north; maybe he will let me put traps on his land.”
The old man stopped poking his fire and studied me. “Where you want to put a trap?”
“Out on the mesa where the reservation abuts the Pueblo Peña parcel, not far from where that old ruin sits on the rim of the canyon.”
The Indian searched my eyes as if he were studying a map. His expression never changed, but I felt as if he had taken a lightning-speed journey along some line of thought our conversation had evoked.
To be sure he knew where I meant, I went on: “There’s an old, abandoned Indian boarding school near there.”
Sevenguns began to nod his head slowly, and he kept nodding.
A long silence followed, and I knew better than to speak and break the fragile intimacy created by it. I stood still, slowed my breathing, kept my eyes respectfully somewhere around Sevenguns’s chin, and yet not averted. The old man continued to study my face, and though his nodding had slowed, his head still bobbed up and down ever so slightly.
“Lot of people this time do not know,” he finally said, “what it means to be hungry.”
I tipped my face to one side and looked directly into his eyes, encouraging him to go on.
“When I am a boy at that old school, I am always hungry. Always hungry. I still remember that in here.” He held one hand to his middle and began to rub in a circle as if his stomach still ached for food. The other hand held the long wooden pole that he had used to stir the embers of the fire. It reminded me of seeing a storyteller holding a staff at a ceremony the previous summer. Momma Anna had referred to the eloquent man at that event as being “good with talking stick.”
I knew better than to utter a word now that Sevenguns had opened a door into a tale from his past. I even tried to keep my breathing quiet so that I would not distract this grandfather who seemed poised to tell a story.
“They boil everything: potato, rice, vegetable. They boil meat, not enough meat to make good taste in a stew. One time my brother work in the kitchen, and he say they put a mouse in the soup, you know, say it is more meat and will boil until it is clean. I believe him.” Sevenguns’s eyes seemed to be looking off into the past and seeing all that he was describing. “I am so hungry that I look in my bowl for that mouse, but I eat the soup anyway. I eat everything I can get, and I am still empty here.” He patted his stomach. Then he looked at me, as if he expected me to make a comment.
I felt a dull aching in my own gut to hear this story. “I have been to that school,” I said. “I could tell it was an unhappy place.”
The old man nodded again. “Every day, we get up, and it is dark, you know, and the prefect make us stand on a cold floor while he walk around and look for wet bed. If someone wet the bed, he get a beating right there. We stand and wait, and my feet are so cold on that floor. We wash, we march to church for prayer, and my stomach is growling. Then we get breakfast: mush or bread. Mostly mush. Sometime we get a cup of milk, mostly on Saturday. They have a few chickens there, you know, but the priest and the prefect and the teachers eat all those eggs.
“We go to work next. We do all kind of work. Big boys, they work in the barn and they also blacksmith. They build the fence and they plaster the school wall with mud. In summer we tend garden and those priest they want to grow potato—but you know potato do not like to grow there and they only grow small and hard like a rock. Sometime we are so hungry we eat a hard little potato right out of the ground with dirt on it and then later we have stomachache from eating them raw. We also have some apple tree over on one side of the school and need to bring water up from the river in the wagon for those tree. That is a good job, go out in the wagon get water.
“They have bread and butter for lunch, sometime pickle or beet. Big boys steal butter from little boys. When I am a little boy, I still remember that bread my mother bake. She bake bread every morning, you know, and that bread is warm and soft and taste like the sun melt in my mouth. Not this bread. They have hard, cold bread, taste like bird dropping. If you don’t have your butter, you cannot eat it, the taste is so bad. Many times, I keep my butter but get a black eye or loose tooth from a big boy who want it.” The old man stirred the fire again, and added a small log.
Through the open door, I could smell the delicious scent of bread baking in the hornos, the beehive-shaped outdoor adobe ovens the Tanoah women still used every day. I wondered if this was what triggered Sevenguns’s memories of food, and of bread in particular.
The old man picked up a chunk of cottonwood root from under the counter. He stood the log on one end, pulled a small knife out of a sheath on his belt, and began carving the soft wood, his eyes focused intently on the work. “We have lesson in afternoon. I am lucky boy when I get bigger. I am very good at catching things, you know. I can figure out how to make a trap or hook. So they do not make me do lesson many times. I catch the rabbit in winter, catch the fish in summer, and also the walking bird. They get spoiled meat or sometimes canned meat or just bones from the government. They boil that in soup to make it kill the germs. But they do not kill all the germs. Lot of children get sick, many die. Some, they send home sick so they will not die there, but they still die, and we hear about it later, and we are sad to know it.
“The priest and the teachers, they do not eat the stew. They use the fresh meat that I catch, you know, and we can smell that meat roasting and they give us a cold potato for our supper. I go to bed dreaming of that meat with my belly gnawing on that little cold potato, and I am so hungry that I ache.”
&n
bsp; Toward the end of this tale, a Tanoah man wrapped in a sky blue blanket came through the door carrying a parcel, but Sevenguns was so engrossed in both his carving and his story that he did not notice. Beneath the hood made by this newcomer’s blanket, I could see a tobacco-colored face marked with deep lines from his nose to the corners of his mouth, and three furrows across his prominent, high forehead. I couldn’t tell whether he was pained or angry. He stood respectfully waiting for Sevenguns to finish speaking. But when Sevenguns came to the part of his tale about boiling spoiled meat and sick children dying, the man in the blue blanket grew agitated. He repositioned the package from one arm to the other. He threw the tail of his blanket over his shoulder, rearranging it around his face. He shifted his weight, rolling onto the balls of his buffalo moccasin soles as if he were preparing to sprint. He looked out the door, then back at Sevenguns, then at me, and quickly down to the floor when he saw that I was watching him.
Sevenguns, once his story was finished, looked up and noticed the new presence in the small room. He looked at me and said, “This guy name Rule Abeyta. He live on Winter side of pueblo, over there.” He pointed across the tiny río that ran through the village, dividing the old part of the pueblo into two main multistory structures, which were referred to as Summer for the south side, and Winter for the north.
Rule Abeyta nodded, but he did not speak.
“How do you do?” I said. “I’m Jamaica Wild. I work for the BLM.”
Before he could respond, an earsplitting clang boomed from the nearby bell tower. Rule Abeyta ducked his head as if to avoid a blow, nearly dropping the package he’d brought. The bell pealed again, heralding the daily morning mass. Abeyta quickly recovered, took three steps across the room, and shoved the package into Sevenguns’s hands. “They left this at the gate for the governor,” he said. He nodded in my direction as he turned to leave, his eyes cast down to avoid meeting my gaze as he walked full-speed out the door.
