by Edward Abbey
He crept ahead over the stony slope, over dead limbs of piñon, under the low boughs of junipers and around the cholla and yucca near the canyon floor. There he sank down flat on his belly and inched his way forward, keeping his head and butt down, pulling the rifle along by his side, until he was within a hundred yards of the deer.
Only then did he estimate that he was close enough for a decent shot—considering the now-treacherous quality of the light. He peered around the righthand corner of a rock and stared into the clump of willows until he could make out clearly and with certainty the outline of two deer—the third was hidden, probably lying down in the grass. Very gently he pulled back the hammer of the rifle, pressing the breech against his chest to muffle the click of the gunlock. Even then one of the does seemed to hear it; she lifted her head quickly and faced toward him. He was not yet ready to aim and fire, the carbine on its side and partly underneath his body; he waited for the doe to forget the sound and lower its head again. He had to wait about five minutes before that happened; then he was able to slide the rifle forward a little more, get the butt into his shoulder and the stock under his cheek. He aimed.
Both deer raised their heads, alert and sniffing, and took a few steps toward the far slope. The third deer sprang up out of the grass and then all three began to move, not fast yet but with the tense electric grace of creatures about to break into sudden motion. Burns cursed in silent despair, unable in that gloom to follow his target over the sights; he rose to his knees, swearing quietly, and just as the deer were about to break and run, he shivered the silence of the canyon with a sharp whistle. Instantly they stopped, all three of them, and stared at him in mild surprise. He aimed at the nearest, at a point just behind its shoulder, and fired. The crash of the discharge rang through the air, shocking in its violence; at the same moment the doe leaped forward with spasmodic energy, going from sight behind a boulder, while the two others danced up the slope and vanished in seconds. Echoes of the shot were falling from every direction as Burns ran forward, rifle in his hands, ejecting the empty shell and reloading as he ran. He crossed the canyon floor near the thicket, panting a little, his boots crunching into the damp sand, and scrambled up among the rocks and cane cactus on the other side.
Behind the big rock, sprawled on its side and quite still, he found the doe—a small tan faded heap of hide and flesh and bone dropped carelessly on the ground. He uncocked the carbine and set it down, pulled the jackknife from his pocket, opened it and stepped close to the deer. Although certain it was dead, he approached it from above, away from the sharp little hooves. He knelt and raised the doe’s head with its big glazed bewildered eyes and pressed the point of his blade into the warmth and softness of its throat There he held it for a moment, not yet pushing through the skin.
“Sleep long, little sister,” he said softly, holding the warm head on his lap. “Don’t be mad at me—I’m gonna make real good use of you. Yes sir…” He forced the blade through the skin and cut straight across the throat; the warm bright blood came gushing out with alacrity, as though meant to spill on that barren ground. Burns placed his hand under the cut and caught a palmful of the blood and drank it; then he lowered the head and raised the hindquarters, speeding the drain.
When the flow of blood began to lessen he rolled the doe on its back and gutted it, making a straight incision from the ribs down to the pelvic bone, taking care not to puncture any of the internal organs. He laid the knife down, spread the cut hide apart, and carefully and tenderly removed the paunch—severing and setting aside the liver— and handling the slippery mass gingerly, like a paper bag bloated with water, he dragged it some distance away and covered it with brush. He went back to the carcass, squatted down, wiped some of the blood and slime from his hands onto the hide, and ate part of the raw, hot, smoking liver. When he had had enough he threw the rest up the hill and looked around for a tree to hang the carcass from. There was nothing around him now but boulders and cactus; he saw that he would have to pack the doe back across the canyon floor and up to one of the piñons on the other slope.
He got up and walked a few steps away and urinated, rubbing the back of his neck with his free hand and listening to the crickets down in the willows. The twilight had deepened into evening; a solution of dense violet light, like an intangible rain, filled the canyon from wall to wall.
Burns went back to the deer, lifted it over his shoulders, picked up his rifle and stumbled down the slope, across the sand and up the other side to the tallest of the nearby piñons. He opened his knife again and cut a stake about two feet long, sharpening each end, then spread apart the doe’s hind legs and braced them with the stake, piercing the shanks with the pointed tips. Now he could have used a piece of rope; since he had none he broke a branch from the limb he had chosen and hung the carcass to the stub. The limb bent slightly under the weight and the doe’s fore-hooves, swinging a little, grazed the black carpet of needles on the ground.
The cowboy built a small fire next, his mind on supper—he had eaten just enough of the liver to really rouse his appetite. He brushed off a level spot among the rocks, pulled up some dry bunch grass and crushed it into a ball, sprinkled with pine needles and shreds of bark and a handful of broken twigs, and added a flaming match. When the tinder caught fire, crackling brightly and sending up a thin gray fuse of smoke, he got up and prowled around for a while gathering fuel—dead juniper, a few skeletal stalks of cane cactus. He broke these into short lengths, set several on the flames and in a few minutes had a comfortable little squaw fire blazing away.
He was thirsty; for the first time in over an hour he discovered himself with nothing immediate and urgent to do, so he went down to the willow thicket and through it to the rock face. He found water dripping from fissures in the rock, filling a natural stone basin on the first ledge. He put one hand on the rock, still faintly warm from the sunlight, and bent down and drank, sparingly, and then went back to his fire and the deer, brushing drops of water out of his whiskers. As he approached, something black and awkward, like a ragged mop, rose out of the piñon tree and paddled slowly away down the canyon, each ponderous stroke of its wings accompanied by a swish of air. Burns cursed himself—tentatively—and hurried forward to examine the interior of the carcass. He was relieved to find no sign of the scavenger anywhere on the meat; he had returned in time to save the deer, not from much actual pillage, of course, but from what he considered a particularly odious kind of defilement.
The fire had burned down to a hot, incandescent heap of charcoal; Burns reached into the abdominal cavity of the deer with both hands and cut away a long tender roll of the loins and laid it on the fiery coals. While the meat seared and crackled, gracing the air with its fragrance, he went back to the carcass, cut out the heart, the lungs and the diaphragm, threw the latter two organs away and set the heart down on the edge of the fire, intending to roast it. He cut a chunk from the half-raw half-burnt sirloin and ate it while considering what to do next.
The evening thickened about him, a lavender fog of gloom; he began to think that there was not much time or light left for moving camp—that is, for loading his gear on the mare and leading her up the canyon. It would be quite dark by the time he could climb back down to the spring and the cottonwoods where he had left her; coming back up with only a few stars for light would be a difficult and exhausting task. On the other hand, to carry the deer down there was out of the question; he had no intention of jerking all that meat in a place where the smoke could be seen from miles away in several directions.
He ate some of the sirloin, leaving most of it still on the coals, got up off his heels and staggered down to the canyon floor. Working fast, he cut and broke off a big solid armful of greasewood, scrambled back up the steep slope to the piñon and packed his rough materials into the deer’s gaping bellycase, making it a firm, thorny, bristling mass that only a fly could penetrate. That done, he went back to the fire, squatted down and ate the rest of the seated meat, feeding himself s
teadily and seriously but not fast; he took his time.
The fire was low, a flicker and shimmer of red, blue, violet embers; he shoved the tough heart into the center of the fire and with a stick heaped coals over it. He added a few knots of juniper, then lay back on the ground, half-gorged, immensely satisfied, and sleepy. There was only one thing more that he desired: he searched through his pockets for tobacco, found the pipe and tobacco that Jerry had given him, and filled the pipe. He sat up again, leaned toward the fire, picked up a burning coal and dropped it on top of the bowl of the pipe. He puffed slowly, tasting the unfamiliar, highly aromatic tobacco with caution; he decided that he liked it, stretched out on the ground again, and smoked freely.
Looking up at the strip of sky between the canyon walls, he saw a faint blinking formation of stars that looked like the Seven Sisters—the Pleiades—and this reminded him that the night was coming on. He belched, lying on his back, and considered the possibility of not going down after the mare and his equipment. He would miss his sleepingbag a little, if he did not go down, but then it would not be the first time he had slept on the ground and covered himself with nothing but his shirt and his own back. But there were two serious disadvantages in leaving things as they were: first, the possibility that his horse or gear might be discovered by some Ranger or prowling police officer; second, the certainty that if he waited till dawn to get his outfit he would find the deer riddled with blowflies when he came back up the canyon.
Burns puffed again on the pipe, watching the gray smoke drift toward the stars, picked some fragments of meat out of his teeth, and then sat up, grunting. He straightened the hat on his head, picked up his Winchester and hauled himself heavily to his feet; he started down the canyon, weaving a little in the uncertain light, belching again and wiping his greasy mouth on his shirtsleeve. A locust, dry and brittle as glass, rattled out of the brush and struck him on the chest; he slapped at it in surprise, broke it and brushed it off, then shuffled on over the firm sand, following the narrow winding floor of the canyon. He came to the first big rock ledge and climbed, slid and jumped down the face of it, landing in greasewood and sand again; he marched past a stand of pampas grass, silvery and graceful, and around a bend in the canyon, and suddenly, unexpectedly, the view opened wide and the whole western world lay before him: the canyon dropping down step by step like an imperial stairway for gods, the gaunt purple foothills, the mesa rolling out for miles, the faint gleam of the river, the vast undulant spread of the city ten miles away, transformed by the evening dusk into something fantastic and grand and lovely, a rich constellation of jewels glimmering like the embers of a fire—and beyond the city and west mesa and the five volcanoes another spectacle, a garish and far more immense display of clouds and color and dust and light against a bottomless, velvet sky. Burns stopped for a moment to stare and admire, belched gently, and continued his descent.
Half an hour later he entered the deep gloom under the cottonwoods. He felt better: the city was now hidden from him by the banks of the arroyo, the great flare in the west had faded and died, his supper was partly digested—or at least well shaken down—and he could smell and hear his horse. Whisky greeted him with a complaining whinny. He walked close to her and patted her neck, while she nuzzled him in the chest “Glad to see me, old girl?” he said; “You think I forgot you? No sirree; you just take it easy now.” She snorted and tried to lick his face. “Easy, girl, easy; I’ll feed you right off.” He climbed out of the arroyo toward the slab of rock that sheltered his saddle and other belongings. He put the rifle in the scabbard, slung the guitar on his back, lifted the saddle to his shoulder and went back down to the mare. He filled his hat with a mixture of bran and barley from one of the saddlebags, about a peck, and set it in the sand before the mare. While she fed he threw on the saddle-pad and the saddle and cinched the latigo down tight. He checked off his equipment: bedroll, saddlebags, canteen, rifle, rope—only the bridle was missing. He thought of the twenty-five pounds of jerked venison he was going to add to that burden in about three days and reminded himself that he would never get far toward Sonora without a packhorse. Tomorrow night, perhaps, he would go look for one; tonight he was going to get some sleep. He went back to the boulder above the arroyo and looked for the bridle; he could not find it and did not remember where he had left it until he took a second look at the scrubby juniper near the rock.
He was sliding down the loose bank of the arroyo when he heard a noise that stopped him in his tracks: the slam of a car door. He stood frozen, listening, while his muscles tensed with the instinct to flee. He could hear nothing more, nothing but the whine of cicada and from somewhere down the wash the occasional zoom and groan of a striking bullbat. Quickly but carefully he stepped over the stretch of sand that separated him from the mare, put one hand over her nostrils to prevent a possible nicker and with the other, letting the bridle fall, reached up over the saddle and slid the rifle out of its smooth worn case. He laid the barrel across the saddlebow, leaving the action uncocked, and waited.
For what seemed like a long time, perhaps five minutes, he heard nothing unusual. He could see very little, with the high bank of the arroyo directly in front of him, and the night closing in. Although his cover was good there in the darkness under the trees and between the walls of the arroyo, he was also painfully aware that if he should be discovered he would be pretty well boxed in, with escape possible only by a run down the wash toward the mesa. And he had not even had a chance to bridle the mare. Balancing the rifle with his forearm, he started to untie the rope around Whisky’s neck that tethered her to the picket.
Then he saw and almost felt a beam of light that swung quickly through the air over his head, danced over the leaves of the cottonwoods and disappeared. A few seconds later he heard the crunch and scrape of gravel under heavy, slow feet. He heard no voices, however, and gratefully assumed that he probably had only one man to deal with. The footsteps approached the bank of the arroyo—while Burns stopped breathing, his thumb set firm on the hammer—and then halted, not coming to the edge. Burns listened; he watched the top of the bank but could see only the dark sky and the tall slender black silhouette of a yucca. From down the arroyo he heard the roar of a bullbat again.
Presently, after a minute or so, he heard the author of the footsteps tramping off, this time apparently in the direction of the old house. Listening intently, he heard the steps grow fainter, then the short crash of a dislodged rock, the rattle of a loose board. He lifted the carbine up from its rest on the saddlebow and wedged it between the cantle and the bedroll, and bent down and felt around on the sand for the bridle. He found it without trouble, disentangled the reins from the headstall, forced the bit into the mare’s mouth, slipped the stall over her ears, and buckled the throatlatch. He was ready now; he reached for the carbine again and waited and listened, breathing, slowly and quietly.
He heard nothing, nothing human, for another five minutes; then came the second slam of an automobile door and he breathed more freely. When he heard an engine starting he left the mare and struggled up the bank of the arroyo, and saw the car at once, a dull lustre of enamel and chrome backing and turning on the old wagon road below the ruin. He watched the car get turned around, start forward and go bouncing down the rutted, twisting road, rocks clanging on its fenders, brakelights flicking on and off, the headlights sweeping over a forlorn landscape of boulders and cactus and crouching juniper.
When the car was well on its way back to the city, Burns returned to the mare, replaced the rifle in the scabbard, coiled his rope and tied it to the swell, stowed the picket in the bedroll, had one more drink at the spring, and climbed at last into the saddle, a very considerable pleasure which he had been anticipating for the last two or three hours; he forebore to think of the canyon ahead, where he would have to walk and lead over at least half the distance.
“Hup, girl,” he said, and touched the mare with his heels. Fresh and eager, she started off as though bent on a free run through
woods and green fields, and he had to rein her in at once to keep her to a walk. He rode up and around the ledge behind the spring, recovered his spurs, rode on up to the head of the arroyo and up the bank there, and over the saddle of the hill and into the canyon. Above him leaned the canyon walls, and above them the mountain with its granite cliffs; far above and beyond the mountain the stars began to appear, one by one, the chill blue glittering stars of the autumn.
Burns felt tired, very tired, and cold.
Amarillo, Tex. 15
HINTON DRANK THE SCALDING COFFEE, GASPED, AND set the cup down. It had not been a bad night; he had managed to get some sleep, more than he usually did in a truckers’ bunkhouse. He drank the rest of the coffee, then sank his chin in his hands and gazed out the window at the vast flat uninspiring desolation of Texas. The wind, rather brisk the day before in Oklahoma, was howling freely here, whipping the over-grazed, over-planted earth into clouds of bitter dust.
