Sea to Shining Sea

by Michael Phillips

  We were all laughing so hard by now we could hardly stop. Rev. Rutledge and Harriet had tears in their eyes—they were laughing hardest of all. Alkali Jones’s hee, hee, hee! was nearly one continuous cackle!

  “I even tried what you said you couldn’t do. I stopped laughing long enough to close my eyes and count to ten. I thought that just maybe they would go away, that it was a dream, a winter’s mirage. It was so cold last December that I thought maybe my brain was frostbit. But when I opened my eyes again, they were still there. And I still had to do what you said in your sermon—either go through them or go around them. But I gotta tell you, Rev. Rutledge, I found myself wishing I’d paid better attention that day, because I thought maybe you had said something else that I just couldn’t remember!”

  “No, that was it, Zack, my boy,” said Rev. Rutledge, wiping his eyes. “Through them or around them, that’s all I said.” He was still chuckling even as he spoke.

  “Well, I’d heard of Pony Bob riding through the band of Paiutes. But for all I knew, this might be the same band! And even if it wasn’t, they were sure to have heard about the incident just as sure as I had. And they certainly weren’t about to let themselves be suckered into just sitting there and letting through a lone horseback-riding kid a second time! No, I figured my chances were about zero in a thousand of coming out the other side alive if I tried to tackle this problem head-on. This looked to me like a clear case of needing to go around the problem!”

  “What did you do, Zack?” asked Almeda. She was sitting on the edge of her chair as if she was afraid for him all over again.

  “It was in a mountainous area of some pretty nasty terrain. Spread out to my right was a huge flat plain, broken up by gulches and creek beds, and little ravines, mostly invisible from looking across the top from where we were. On the other side of the trail, it turned rocky and steep immediately, working its way up to a high plateau that ran parallel to the road below. So what I figured to do was hightail it out across the plain like I was trying to outrun my way clean around them. I figured they’d light out on an angle to cut me off as I started my swing around to outflank them. So my plan was to ride out into the plain a ways, then dip into a wash suddenly and get out of their line of view. I hoped that they would keep riding toward the plain and that I could double back, maybe staying low in a creek bed or wash, and get back to the road and head back up the other side and lose myself in the huge boulders of the hillside without them spotting me. Then I could work my way all the way up to the top of the ridge and ride along until I was out of danger, and then find my way back down to the trail.

  “It worked perfectly at first. I lashed my horse off to the right. They took out after me at an angle across toward the plain. I rode for thirty or forty seconds, then dipped into a creek bed, stopped, and waited. I got off the horse, and crouching down crept up to the edge. There went the band of Paiutes off into the plain, expecting me to appear again any minute still riding in the same direction. I crept back down, remounted my horse, and doubled back, staying in the lows and hollows and washes until I was almost back to the trail. Then I climbed up and out and galloped quickly across the trail and up into the mountainous terrain on the other side. Within another minute I was out of sight and safe. But I still had to work my way up to the top and around back on to the trail or else I’d run into the war party again.

  “Up I went. It got steeper and steeper, more rocky and treacherous. The footing was bad. There was loose shale here and there, and wet because it had been trying to snow. I was still frightened and so was pushing the horse pretty hard, which was probably my mistake. By now I was so far away from the Indians I probably would have been safe, but I kept pushing. Both my horse and me were exhausted. And that’s how the trouble came. I was just too tired. I’d already been riding six hours that day, and it was another three hours to the next station.

  “I was three-quarters of the way up to the plateau, and I came to a little ledge that dropped off steep on one side but was flat enough for a trot along its surface. But it was narrow, only about a foot wide. I urged the horse into a trot, but it was so narrow, and with the cliff on one side I could tell she was spooked. It was stupid of me, but I lashed her on instead of paying attention to what she was trying to tell me. We got moving again pretty good, but then all of a sudden the ridge gave way right in front of us.

  “It was only a jump of maybe four feet across to where it picked up again. On the flat at full gallop she’d have taken it so easily in stride I wouldn’t even have felt a bump in my saddle. But she was tired. I urged her over it. She hesitated, then reared and stopped dead in her tracks. I was so tired I was barely hanging on, though I didn’t realize how shaky I was in the saddle.

  “Off her back I toppled, and I landed sideways on my leg. I felt the pain instantly, but I didn’t have time to think about anything, because I’d fallen to the right, and I just kept falling, away down the slope off the ridge, over and over, banging against rocks, sliding down the moving shale. It was a long fall, I knew that, though I didn’t know much else. I was only conscious of spinning and crunching and bouncing . . . and pain. Pretty soon, even as I was still rolling and falling, everything drifted into blackness, and my senses just faded away. I thought I was dead.”

  He stopped and took a deep breath, reliving the whole incident for the first time. Even just telling it had shaken him all over again. Little beads of perspiration were on his forehead. The rest of us were still. It was pretty late by now, and dark and quiet outside—all except for the crickets and an occasional owl somewhere.

  “When next I knew anything it was still black. I woke up real slow, you know how you do sometimes, faint images, blurry sensations that don’t mean anything. That’s how it was. It was dark, and all I was aware of was an odor, faint at first, but something I recognized, and a sound that I couldn’t figure out.

  “I tried to make sense out of things. I tried to remember. Then the fall came back to me, and how I had faded out of consciousness while falling down . . . down . . . down.

  “Suddenly I knew the smell. It was smoke! And the sound—it was the crackling of a fire. That was it—a fire and smoke!

  “I was coming back into consciousness, but only slowly, and I was still half-dazed and confused. My first thought was, That’s it, I really did die . . . and I’m in hell! I’m in hell because of what I said to Pa, and how I left home!”

  I looked over toward Pa as Zack was talking. He was hanging on every word, as if he was living every moment of it with his son. I could tell these last words smote his heart. He winced slightly, but kept looking straight at Zack, waiting for him to continue.

  “Then suddenly I felt the sharp pain in my leg. I don’t know how I could have a rational thought in the state I was in, but I remember thinking, I can’t be in hell if my leg hurts, because if I was dead my body would still be lying in that ravine back there where I fell. Then gradually my eyes started to focus, and I saw some light from the low flickering of the flames. Everything else was black. I couldn’t see anything except the red orange of the flames.

  “I struggled a little, then tried to sit up. ‘Lay still, son,’ a voice said out of the night.

  “My eyes shot wide open in terror at the sound. I couldn’t see who had spoken, but I know my eyes were big as a horse’s! It wasn’t a nice or a gentle voice, very deep, almost gravelly. And it had plenty of authority. It wasn’t the kind of voice you disobeyed. Again the thought flitted through my brain about being in the fiery place. I didn’t even want to ask myself who the voice might belong to!

  “I did what the voice said and lay still for a long time, wondering what would happen next.

  “‘What’s your name, son?’ said the voice again.

  “‘Uh, Zack . . . Zack Hollister,’ I answered. It was nice to find out my voice still worked. ‘Where am I?’

  “‘You’re safe, that’s where. You had a bad fall back there.’

  “Now things were starting to come back
to me. I remembered the Indians, the climb up the hill, and the fall. Now I knew why my leg hurt.

  “‘But . . . my horse . . . the mail,’ I said. ‘I gotta get the mail through. Where’s the horse?’

  “The next thing I knew, the voice was laughing. If I thought it had been gravelly before, the laugh was a rockslide. If your cackle is mountain water tinkling over pebbles, Alkali,” said Zack, turning to Mr. Jones with a grin, “then the laugh I heard out of the blackness was made out of boulders rumbling down the mountain after an earthquake. I never heard such a deep voice or such a throaty laugh.

  “‘That horse and whatever mail was on it is long gone, boy,’ the voice said. ‘We’re miles and miles from where you fell, and your horse was miles away before I got to you, anyway.’

  “‘The Paiutes . . . did the Paiutes get her?’ I said in alarm.

  “‘Can’t tell you, son. I wasn’t looking for your horse. I had my hands full just dragging you back up out of that crevice you got yourself into. As for the Paiutes, they know better than to bother me. I saved enough of their lives to keep me in their good graces for fifty years to come.

  “‘But . . . but where am I?’ I asked.

  “‘Like I said, miles from where you fell. You’re safe, that’s all you need to know.’

  “‘But I gotta get back . . . back to my route. They’ll be worried about me. I gotta see about the mail.’

  “Again the deep laughter came out of the dark.

  “‘Son,’ the man said, ‘You’re not going anywhere. Your leg’s broken in two places. You’re miles from the Express line. And even if you had a horse and were healthy, we’re snowed in.’

  “‘Snowed in! Where are we? Why is it so warm?’

  “‘It’ll all make sense in the morning. You hungry? You oughta be—you been out for two days.’

  “‘Two days! What have I been doing, just lying here?’

  “‘That’s right. I dragged you up here, splinted your leg, made you as comfortable as I could, and then just waited. I could tell you were a strong little rascal, and that you’d wake up. So—you hungry?’

  “‘Yeah, I reckon I am,’ I said.

  “He handed me something in a bowl. I could hardly see, but it smelled good. I picked out some chunks of meat in a kind of gravy and started eating it. I didn’t realize how hungry I was until the smell of that stew hit my nostrils and I tasted the meat. The bowl was empty inside of a minute.

  “‘More?’ said the man.

  “‘Yeah,’ I answered, handing him the bowl. ‘What is it?’

  “‘Rattlesnake.’

  “I gagged and turned away.

  “I heard the laugh again from the other side of the fire. ‘What’s the matter, son? You never eaten snake before?’

  “‘No, and I got no intention of eating it again!’ I said.

  “‘You’ll die if you don’t. It’s about all I eat most winters up here, so you better get used to it.’

  “‘Where do you get them?’ I asked. ‘Ain’t no snakes in winter.’

  “‘Ah, you just have to know where to look. And I do. I find them hibernating in their dens. They’re sleepy and cold. I kill ten, maybe twenty of them if I go out and spend a morning at it. Skin and gut them, cut up the meat, stash it in the snow to freeze it. Keeps me in meat all winter long. Just take out and cook whatever I need.’

  “‘That’s all you eat, and you stay alive all winter? This is the high desert,’ I said. ‘No man can stay alive out here, in summer or winter.’

  “He laughed again. ‘You must figure I’m a ghost then,’ he said. ‘I’ve been living off the hills here for eight years. There’s food in the winter, water in the summer. Plenty for a man to live on—if the man knows how to find the provision the Maker put in the desert. No big secret to it.’

  “Well, we talked a while longer, and gradually I drifted back to sleep. When I woke up again it wasn’t black anymore. But it wasn’t light either. There was just an eerie glow coming from one direction, and total blackness from the other.

  “I shook myself awake, more quickly this time. My leg hurt, but I felt so much better. Despite how repulsed I had been at the thought of it, the snake meat had given me back some energy. I managed to pull myself up to a sitting position and look around. My host and rescuer, whoever he might be, was nowhere around.

  “It was obvious to me now that I was inside a huge cave, and I heard footsteps coming from the inside of the mountain. The instant I heard the footsteps I was terrified. If he’d wanted to kill me or eat me or skin me alive to put in his rattlesnake stew, he’d had two or three days already to do it, but I was scared anyway.

  “‘Sleep good, son?’ he said, coming toward me and sitting down opposite me on the other side of the fire. The sound of his voice reassured me. It sounded friendlier in the light of day, if this dreary half light could be called day. But when I set eyes on the man, my first impression did not make me feel good about my future safety. This man looked like the kind who might skin a kid like me and freeze my meat to go along with his rattlesnake stew.

  “His face was long and thin, with sunken cheeks and high cheekbones. His whole frame was slender, but not what I’d call skinny, and that’s how his face was too. No fat, just muscle and bone and hardiness. He looked strong and tough, like he’d been in a few tangles and probably had given the other fellow the worst of it. He had lots of hair, going in all directions, but not as bad or as gray as yours, Alkali, and a full beard. His beard was black. I couldn’t tell a bit how old he was. A beard always makes a man look older, but in the darkness of the cave, this fella could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty. He still had all his teeth, and every once in a while one of them would catch a shine from the flames.

  “He tossed a log on the fire, and sparks danced up from the disturbance.

  “‘Where do you get wood around here?’ I asked.

  “‘Spend my summers gathering wood for winter, spend my winters storing snow water down in the cave for summer. Everything you need’s out here, son.’

  “I looked in the other direction, toward the light. We were some thirty feet from the opening of the cave.

  “‘Why is the light so pale?’ I asked. ‘Is the sun just coming up?’

  “The deep laughter came again. ‘Don’t you know what you’re looking at there, son?’ he said. ‘That’s snow—solid snow! Only lets in a bit of light.’

  “‘Snow?’ I said. ‘But why is it there?’

  “‘We’re snowed in! I told you that last night. There’s twenty feet of snow over the whole mouth of the cave. You’re not looking at daylight, son, you’re looking at a snowbank . . . from the inside!’

  “Well, he was right. I didn’t see the real light of real day for two weeks, when we dug our way out after it had half melted down. But we got snowed in three more times before winter was over.”

  “We?” repeated Almeda. “How long did you stay with this man?”

  “All winter and spring. Until just three weeks ago, in fact,” answered Zack.

  “What did you do all that time, son?” asked Pa.

  “Mr. Trumbull—Hawk’s what he goes by. It’s a name the Paiutes gave him when he first made friends with them. Hawk Trumbull’s his name.

  “He never did tell me his real first name. Anyway, Hawk taught me everything he knows. He took care of me, fed me, did everything for me until I could get back on my feet, babied me like a mother hen, making sure my leg healed proper, fixing new splints for it all the time. Then when I could walk again he took me out and showed me how he lives, how to survive, where the food and water was. He taught me all about animals and the weather and the mountains, showed me where the water comes and goes above ground and below ground, showed me all his caves—”

  “How many does he have?” asked Tad in astonishment.

  “I don’t know. I don’t suppose I ever stopped to count. Eight or ten, maybe. We’d store different things in different places, use them at different times—that is, i
f a bear wasn’t occupying one.”

  “Zack!” exclaimed Almeda.

  “It only happened once,” he laughed.

  “What did you do, shoot it?” asked Harriet.

  “No. Hawk doesn’t like to kill unless he has to, unless it’s life or death. No, that time we took sort of a backwards approach to your husband’s advice. We stood out of the way and let the problem go past us!”

  “Sounds like you owe the man your life, Zack,” said Pa.

  “I owe Hawk more than my life.”

  “How do you mean?” asked Reverend Rutledge.

  “He taught me how to live, how to survive, how to see things most people never have a chance to see, and never would see even if it was stuck right in front of their noses. He’s more than just a mountain man. After a while I came to realize he was almost a rough wilderness poet at heart. He was always trying to get me to look past the obvious, to look beyond what things seemed to be on the surface. That was true when we went looking for water that had disappeared into a sink somewhere. It was true when we would watch the movement of eagles up in the sky and try to detect from them what might be going on ten miles away on the ground. He was always looking into things, he said. Everybody had two eyes, he said, but to really live you needed four—two outside and two inside.”

  “A remarkable sounding man,” said Almeda.

  “Best friend I ever had,” said Zack.

  The house fell quiet. It had been an amazing story.

  “Actually, I reckon that ain’t quite true,” Zack said. “He’s the one who helped me see I had an even better friend than him, and had for a long time.”

  “Who, Zack?” asked Becky.

  Zack didn’t answer her directly, but just went on talking about Trumbull.

  “Once he began to find out about my background, and I began to tell him about you and Miracle Springs and what my life had been before he picked me off the mountainside, he started trying to make me use my extra set of eyes to see inside myself. He helped me see a lot of things I never saw before, things about all of us, this family of ours, and—”