Beardance

by Will Hobbs

  They heard the sound of horseshoes on stone and looked up to see a rider approaching with six packhorses behind.

  Cloyd recognized the young man who’d come twice to the farm this summer to buy hay. It was Tony Archuleta, who was always joking, with the flashing smile and the thick black mustache, his hair black as Cloyd’s and nearly as long. Cloyd remembered how much Tony Archuleta’s eyes had approved of the hay, but Tony had never said it was good hay until he was done bargaining. Cloyd had handled all the sales of the hay; the old man had wanted him to learn. Cloyd knew he’d done well when the man had said in his English that sounded like Spanish, “You’re an old coyote.”

  Tony looked good riding down the Rincon La Osa on his buckskin horse, with his beaten felt hat and his denim jacket and the ancient leather chaps on his legs. His face was dark, at least half as dark as a Ute’s. “Walter Landis,” the young man sang out, “and his Yuta coyote!”

  Cloyd liked that, being called a Ute coyote.

  Frustrated at being held up on the march to the barn, Tony’s buckskin horse was yanking down on the reins, fighting the bit. The handsome rider’s eyes went to the picks and shovels on the packhorses, and he pointed to them with his lips like an Indian. A knowing grin was spreading across his face. “Looking for treasure, eh?”

  Walter Landis, who’d known this young man since he was a baby, and his parents and grandparents too on their place fifteen miles down the Piedra, replied with his best poker face, “Just seein’ the country, Tony, just seein’ the country.”

  Cloyd added, “We dig a lot of worms for fishing.”

  Tbny Archuleta’s thick black eyebrows rose, and he said, “Goldfish, no?”

  Cloyd liked this man.

  “The direction you’re heading, let me guess … maybe you’re going to dig some worms up at la Ventana?”

  The old man laughed through his nose, snorting like a horse.

  Tony Archuleta leaned forward, cupped his lips, and spoke in a hoarse stage whisper. “You know the old Spanish sheepherders called the Window el Portal del Diablo—‘the Devil’s Gateway.’ Lot of bad storms up there, lots of unusual things that have happened to people looking for that treasure. You be careful, now….”

  Walter Landis winked and promised, “We’ll be careful.”

  “You won’t find Spanish treasure up there,” Tony added good-naturedly. “Sixto Loco found it a long time ago, that’s what I think.”

  “You just resupply your uncle?” the old man asked.

  “I’ll be back at least two more times. Well, I gotta go—and don’t let Sixto see those picks and shovels. He’s crankier than ever and he’s a dead shot. The old people say he knows everything that goes on in the mountains. Some still call him la Sombra—‘the Shadow.’”

  They watched Tony go. Just before he crossed the creek, he turned and called back, “Hey, Yuta coyote! I told Sixto Loco about the hay I got for him! I told him he’d probably want to eat with his sheep this winter! Too bad I robbed you on the price!”

  Cloyd was grinning, and he was repeating the name, “Sixto Loco.”

  “I never met him,” Walter said, “but I’ll sure enough take Tony’s warning to heart. Sixto Archuleta’s reputation was made a long, long time ago. His brother disappeared in the mountains when they were both young men … some say Sixto killed his brother and buried him somewhere in the wilderness. I’ve heard that story too about him finding treasure—they say he killed his brother over gold.”

  “And he’s a sheepherder?”

  “Only one left in the mountains. The market’s been poor for years and years, and nobody wants the life of a high-country shepherd—too lonely, too cold, too dangerous. A few of the families keep sheep on their home places, but nothing like the numbers they used to winter in New Mexico and summer up in the San Juans. Sixto’s the only one left. Lives alone in the winter, with just his dogs, at his place along the San Juan River. Near the ghost town of Gato as I recollect; I’ve driven by it now and again. It’s just a shotgun shack off the side of the old railroad bed, with pelts nailed over the cracks in the walls. Saw him once splitting wood out in his yard—there’s no denying the man has a baleful look in his eye…. Year after year, he takes his flock back above the timberline … that man’s been out in the wind and the cold more than any in the country, I’m sure.”

  “If he found the treasure, he would’ve built a better house.”

  The old man stood up to go, and limped on the leg that had been broken. “I’d agree with you, but people have an explanation for that. They say he’s just too ornery to change his ways. There’s a story I heard about him … every three or four years he decides to drive his old pickup into town—it’s supposed to be about as old as its 1939 license plates. He’ll drive into town with it, and when he gets pulled over for expired plates, he’ll say, ‘Throw me in jail! It’s nice and warm in there, and you’ll have to feed me!’”

  In the night Walter had a coughing fit. He coughed so hard, he couldn’t stop until he got out of his bedroll and went outside to get a drink of water. Cloyd was alarmed. Walter had to be eighty years old, and he was sick. The thin air was hard on him, and tonight they were camping at 11,600 feet, just below the tree line in the Rincon La Osa. The map showed the Window at 12,857 feet. Where the old man wanted to look for the lost mine, the storms would be fierce and the air even thinner than here. Should they be heading for “the Devil’s Gateway”?

  “Should’ve brought some water into the tent with me,” Walter said when he came back inside. “I’ll remember next time.”

  “Maybe we should turn back,” Cloyd said. “Maybe it’s too high up here.”

  “We’ll rest up here another day. If I can’t do it, I won’t. This’ll pass. I feel like a fat pony in high oats up here. You’ll see.”

  The “fat pony” felt better in the morning, even better the next day. Early in the morning they started for the Continental Divide, and when they reached it the sky was bursting with peaks, hundreds of them. The old man said he’d better sit down or he was going to fly away like a kite, and so they got off their horses. Cloyd pointed out the Needles, a riot of peaks close at hand to the west, all rock and sky and straight up and down. He pointed south to the mesas of New Mexico, and southwest to the vague shapes of the Chuska Mountains of Arizona.

  Then they looked east along the Divide. The old man’s eyes were moist. Cloyd couldn’t tell if it wasn’t only from the wind. Walter had his eye on a lone giant of a mountain only a few miles away. “That’s got to be el Cerro de la Piramide, as the book calls it, but where the heck is la Ventana?”

  “In the ridge between us and the Pyramid,” Cloyd said. “We can’t see the Window because we’re lined straight up with that ridge. But look over here.”

  Cloyd was looking at an immense spur off the Divide that stuck out to the north in the direction of the Rio Grande. He pointed it out to the old man. “Prom there you’d be looking straight across to the Window. Remember how it said in the book, you could see the Window from the mine?”

  They made their camp a thousand feet down off the Divide on the Rio Grande side, fifteen minutes’ ride below the timberline and at the head of East Ute Creek’s long meadow. They pitched their sheepherder tent at the edge of the meadow, with the forest at their back and a splendid view of the Rio Grande Pyramid towering above all the big country. “Only thing this camp’s lacking is a view of the Window,” the old man said. “I know it’s up there somewhere.”

  By their campfire the old man brought out his treasure book and began to read from the chapter called “La Mina Perdida de la Ventana.”

  “‘To the Spaniards adventuring north from Santa Fe and Taos,’” the old man began, “‘the San Juan Mountains in the Continental Divide’s east-west bend must have taken on the appearance of a majestic wall spiked with hundreds of towering peaks, clad in a forbidding mantle of white much of the year.’”

  The old man paused for breath. His eyes were sparkling with excitemen
t in the reflected light of the fire. Cloyd liked the way he read. He liked the way the old man’s voice trembled not so much with the thin air, though that was part of it, as with the effects of his gold fever, all stirred up by the closeness of the legendary mine.

  “‘The Spanish of the 1700s knew from two hundred years’ experience in the New World that such a range was likely to contain fabulous lodes of gold and silver. Of all the landmarks in these mountains, none rivaled the combination of one lone peak with the appearance of a pyramid, and the massive notch in the ridge to its west. The mountain they named el Cerro de la Pyramide, the notch la Ventana.’”

  Cloyd knew this passage by heart, and so did the old man. But here, with the Pyramid itself looming above them, the words seemed to reverberate with power, as if it might really be true that the Spanish had toiled somewhere very close to here and left a fabulous treasure behind.

  Walter handed the book over for Cloyd’s turn, saying “I just wish we’d caught a glimpse of that Window even once today.”

  Cloyd said, “Now we’re too close underneath it.”

  “‘The Spanish had been in nearby New Mexico since Cor-o-na-do’s conquest of 1540,’” Cloyd began. Once he’d caught on to reading, he could pronounce almost anything. But he had to go slow. “‘By the early 1700s they were bringing gold secretly out of southwestern Colorado’s Ute frontier. The Spanish operated in secret to avoid paying “the king’s fifth.”’”

  Cloyd stopped reading and let his eyes show that he didn’t understand the meaning.

  “One-fifth of all treasure from the New World went right back to the king in Spain,” Walter explained. “No wonder they were mining on the sly.”

  “‘They also operated in secret,’” Cloyd read, “‘because they feared the Utes.’” This part always brought a smile to his face. “‘It was known to the Utes that the Spanish made a practice of taking slaves among the Navajos and the pueblo peoples, mostly women and children to work in their households.’”

  “Now you,” Cloyd said, and showed the place to the old man.

  “Let’s remember to pay close attention,” Walter said. “Listen hard for clues. It says, ‘group of six Spaniards and Frenchmen discovered a lode of high-grade gold ore in 1750 and worked their mine over the span of twenty summers. The ore was carried on mule trains toward Taos or Santa Fe, but before it was carried out each fall it was hidden in three mayor caches and a number of minor caches in the district around the mine. Two of the minor caches have been found by treasure hunters, one on West Ute Creek in the summer of 1936, the other on Middle Ute Creek in 1937. The ore from both proved amazingly rich; both caches had been marked by an intricate pattern of tree blazes and rock cairns. The mine itself was located west of the Window—’”

  “Wait a minute,” Cloyd said. “What pattern? Why doesn’t it say?”

  “Just doesn’t,” Walter said with a shrug, and threw a few more sticks onto the fire. “Maybe if the writer knew, he would’ve found the treasure instead of only spending years looking for it.”

  Cloyd’s old doubts were coming back. Maybe it’s just a story, he thought, but he didn’t say so.

  As convinced as ever, Walter continued, his voice eager with excitement: “‘The mine itself was located west of the Window, which could be seen from the entrance of the mine. Over a period of twenty years the original miners made themselves rich and also made enemies of the Utes. When the Utes surprised them and the end came—’”

  “It doesn’t say what they did to make enemies of the Utes,” Cloyd interrupted. “It should’ve said that.”

  “You’re right, it should have told about that. Probably never got written down anywhere. Anyhow, we’re just getting to this part here where you’ve been reading it so careful, your eyes almost wore the print off the page.”

  “Where?”

  “Look, right here.”

  “That’s just a smudge.”

  “Spooked me too,” the old man said with a wink. “It’s about Aguilar and the skeletons: ‘Some of the miners died and others escaped, but none ever returned. The mine itself was never rediscovered, except perhaps by a Spanish sheepherder named Doneciano Aguilar in 1908. A teller of tales, one night he told his fellows at camp of spying two skeletons through an opening in a ledge at the foot of a cliff, in the vicinity of the Window. He said he hadn’t gone in to investigate because of the darkness and his fear of “los espiritus de los antiguos—the spirits of the ancients.” When Aguilar was laughed at, he resolved never to tell the location of the mine. Convicted of a murder the following year, he was sent to the state penitentiary in Santa Fe to serve a life sentence.’”

  Walter closed the book. The fire had burned low once again. “Cloyd, do you realize,” the old man said slowly, emphasizing every word, “no one has ever searched for those three major caches with a metal detector the caliber of ours.”

  Cloyd nodded agreeably, acknowledging the old man’s faith in his secret piece of equipment.

  “This Cachefinder of ours is stuffed full of microchips and all that new computer technology! Scans deeper than any metal detector ever made, anywhere in the world!”

  Cloyd stretched and smiled, and shivered with the night cold. At least Walter didn’t have any doubts.

  The next morning the old man studied the lay of the mountains and pored over the maps, thinking it all out. “We know the mine should be up behind us somewhere,” he said. “It should be on that slope of the ridge above us, facing the Window. We can’t see the tailings because they would have dropped them over a ledge, mixed them into a rockslide to disguise the location of the mine. But we’re not looking for the mine so much as for the caches of high-grade ore, the ones they left behind when the survivors skedaddled for Santa Fe. Now where would you look for those caches, Cloyd?”

  Cloyd had been thinking about it. “If I was them, I wouldn’t want to try to hide anything up on that ridge—too much rock. It would be easier to hide the ore down in the trees. The digging would be a lot easier.”

  “Same thing I’m thinking. Maybe you’ve got a nose for treasure after all.”

  “Besides,” Cloyd added, “the book said there were markings on rocks and markings on trees.”

  “We’ll keep our eyes out for those grizzlies too,” Walter declared. “That mother and her three cubs.”

  “Brown, cocoa, and gray-black,” Cloyd remembered.

  “Grizzlies and gold,” the old man sang, “that’s you and me, Cloyd. Grizzlies and gold.”

  Cloyd was glad they weren’t going to have to comb the high, steep slopes above for treasure. They couldn’t camp up there. The horses had no pasture up there. Walter would never survive trying to cling to those elk trails up on the ledges.

  Mostly, Cloyd thought, Walter needs to nurse that cough. Down in the trees we’ll be protected from the weather.

  Every morning Walter took off with his Cachefinder, scanning the forest floor back from the meadow. For several days Cloyd went with him, and then he started to stray in search of old Spanish blazes or piles of rocks that might mark one of the caches the old man was looking for. But really, he didn’t believe in the gold. Even if the story was true, two hundred and more years was a long time for a tree to heal an axe wound. The marked trees might have even died and returned to the soil. Two hundred years provided plenty of time for a little pile of rocks to fall down.

  His eyes were searching tree bark for high claw marks that might have been left by a grizzly, and searching the ground for tracks with claws far forward of the footpad.

  On an aspen, as high as his hand could reach, he found the claw marks of a bear. These marks didn’t prove anything. A black bear, he knew, could reach that high or higher.

  But when he found a pile of bear scat, full of seeds, bits of bone, and strands of hair, Cloyd had to wonder. Could a black bear leave this big a dropping? He kept a segment in a plastic bag and brought it back to show to Walter.

  “Wish I could tell you,” Walter said. “I j
ust don’t know.”

  It began to rain every day, by two in the afternoon at the latest. Sometimes they were both back in camp, and through the fold in the door of the sheepherder tent, they would watch the hail dance. Other times the weather would catch them away from camp, and they would each wait it out before returning. The temperature could drop thirty degrees in less than thirty minutes, but Cloyd was ready for it. His cold-weather clothing and his rain gear were so much better than what he’d had the year before. The old man had taken him to the Pine Needle Mountaineering store in Durango and had written a big check. His red rain shell with both top and trousers wouldn’t allow any moisture in, even though it would let his sweat out. His clothes were staying dry.

  Later in the afternoon the sun would come back out, and they would dry their wet things on the big boulder, knee-high and fiat like a table, out in the meadow halfway to the creek.

  Five days had passed in their camp, and Walter had worked the trees on both sides as far as he could reach downstream. They’d dug a few holes where the old man had heard a hopeful signal, and then they filled the holes back in. “Let’s move downstream a mile or so,” the old man suggested. “Those caches must be just out of our reach.”

  Cloyd liked the new camp better. It was closer to the fishing. In the late afternoons after the thunderstorms died down, he rode Blueboy a few miles down the creek to the beaver ponds to find fish for dinner.

  Every night it was freezing now, and the tundra grasses and flowers were turning red and gold.

  Mornings he rose early, and his breath spouted jets of vapor. It was never long before the old man hooked the Cachefinder’s sending and receiving unit to his belt, adjusted the headphones, and started out in search of treasure. Every day was a new adventure for the old man, mint-full of promise. With Walter Landis, the harder he searched, the more the search possessed him, and the more he became convinced that the moment of discovery was imminent. From a distance, you couldn’t tell that he was keeping the circular search coil slightly above the ground. It looked like he was out vacuuming the meadow or the mountainsides.