The Brave Cowboy

by Edward Abbey

  Johnson made no answer. “What about the pilot?” the sergeant said.

  “What about him?”

  “Are you gonna bring him back to the Base?”

  “If he ever comes down outa those rocks,” Johnson said.

  “Well, we’re not waiting.” The sergeant and the Medic turned back and climbed into the cab of the ambulance, started the engine, turned noisily in the sand, motor roaring, and drove off down, the road. A pair of ragged tumbleweeds went rolling and flopping after them.

  “Well?” said the radio operator; the earphones had stopped vibrating on his lap.

  “Well what?” Johnson said.

  “Are we gonna give up and go home?”

  Johnson turned and gazed up the canyon toward the mountain. Fragments of cloud floated across the face of the cliffs, trailing blue shadows over the naked rock. Patches of snow glinted like glass along the crest Somewhere up there, among those pines and tumbled boulders, under the leaning crags.…

  “You think they might find him yet?” the operator said.

  “We’ll wait,” Johnson said. “We’ll wait till sundown at least.” He turned up the collar of his jacket against the singing wind. He looked around. “Let’s see if we can’t get this jeep a little farther up the wash, close to the wall. I’d like to get out of this wind before the sand chokes us to death.” This operator stared at him. Johnson said: “Okay? What’s the matter with you? Let’s go!”

  17

  BURNS CLIMBED UP THE SLOPE, CARRYING HIS CARBINE and leading the mare. His beaten black hat, now sprinkled with pine needles and a few dry juniper berries, was pushed far back on his head, revealing his tangled forelock and a brow smeared with dust and sweat. He was breathing heavily, panting—in the cool shade of the cliff his breath turned to a foggy vapor— but he climbed on at a steady rate, not pausing, his eyes and ears alert, scanning the ridge above him, the slope below, the high rim of the mountain.

  The mare slipped and stumbled after him, head and neck drooping, flanks shining with lather. She carried the guitar now, slung to the saddlehorn, and a load of venison stuffed and insulated inside the bedroll behind the cantle.

  He kept going until he was within a few yards of topping the ridge. Here, among the concealing yellow pine and piñon he tied the horse and went on alone, crouching a little, to the crest of the ridge. He stopped and made a careful survey in all directions. He saw the airplane to the north, cruising slowly up and down the canyon he had left an hour ago. Above him, on the east, were the red cliffs and the long horizontal strata of sedimentary rock that formed the rim and crest of the mountain: he knew that there was somebody up there looking for him; he had seen the glint of metal, and a flashing mirror communicating in Morse to his pursuers below. Now, however, he could see no one, no sign of man—except the two giant red and white television relay towers perched on the edge of the rim several miles to the northeast.

  He looked down into the valley to his south and for a long time could see no man, no enemy. There where the mountain formed a bend, like the inside of an elbow, the forest had crept down and thickened and flourished until the entire valley, or basin, perhaps two miles across at its widest point, was dark and carpeted with the dull drab green of pine and cedar. A man and horse could be tracked but not easily spotted once in there; Burns’ eyes were held, his mind and nerves hungering after those trees and that space of security. He removed his hat and pushed back his damp hair; he noticed the blue juniper berries rolling in the crown of the hat and ate them, filling his mouth with the sharp cooling familiar flavor—a little bitter, with the pungency of turpentine.

  As he chewed the berries he turned on his heels, squatting, and looked back and down, to the north and northwest and west. He saw two men coming slowly down the slope on the north, less than a mile away; he saw a group of men, five or six, trudging up the floor of the canyon, heads bent to the ground, their rifle barrels shining; he saw, far below at the fanning mouth of the canyon, the dull gleam of automobiles, the minute figures of men moving about; he saw the valley of the river far to the west, though river and city and the five volcanoes were all invisible under the pall of smoke and dust. He looked again at the bright silvery wreckage of the helicopter down on the opposite hillside—all that crumpled metal, that expensive mangled machinery—and wondered now where the third man was, the one with the rifle; the other two he had seen go limping homeward and knew he had nothing to fear from them but a distant ill-will.

  Finally he stood up, went back to Whisky and unwrapped the bridle reins from the branch of the piñon. Rubbing her nose, patting her wet flanks, he talked to her: “Okay, little girl, we better get a move on, we still got a few hundred miles to go.” He looked up through the black branches of the tree at the towers of granite hanging over them, the remote and silent monuments of an earlier world. “Maybe we’ll have to climb that old headwall yet, little girl.” He stared up at it while the mare nuzzled his chest, thrusting her snorting nose under his arm. A small fragile white butterfly twinkled within the influence of the tree, dipped and turned in the shafts of sunlight, rose up among the clean branches through the tree toward the bare rock beyond and was suddenly lost, extinguished, in that gulf of light and space and muted thunder. “Come on, girl,” Burns said, tugging gently at the reins; Whisky stepped forward and he turned ahead of her and led toward the ridge.

  They crossed over under the shade of the pines. Below, the earth fell away steeply, with little cover—boulders and yucca and cholla—toward the valley and the forest. Burns was about to start down when something hot and invisible struck past his cheek with an insane, furious velocity; he heard a metallic twang, the shattering of wood, and as he was falling to the ground, the clear definitive report of a rifle from somewhere down below. He hugged the earth like a lover, his toes digging in, his chin and mouth buried in the dry, fragrant tilth of needles and sand. The first thing he thought, while his gaze searched the brush and rocks below, was: My guitar!—the bastard!—he hit my guitar!

  At the moment he could see nothing in the shape of a man; he looked back at the mare, saw her standing alert and uncertain, eyes wide, nostrils flexing, testing the moving air. On the saddle hung the wounded guitar, smashed through bridge and box, a splintered ruin. Burns swore and stared again down the steep hillside, hunting among the boulders and chaparral for a sign of movement, for a shape, a shadow. There was nothing; he became aware of his own hands on the earth before him: brown, leathery, scarred by bark and cholla spines, a pair of complicated tools, impersonal, removed from him—under one hand lay the rifle. He cocked it with his thumb and waited for something to appear below. He waited for ten seconds, thirty, a full minute, while the light wind brushed the trees around him. The stillness was almost complete: he could hear the agitation of the pine boughs, the dry brittle clicking of a dying locust, his own hard breathing, but nothing more. He waited, uncomfortably conscious of his uncertainty, of the men—seven of them? eight?—approaching from the rear, of the restless mare shying back now, ready to drift off: the inevitable thought came, that he might be better off without the horse, might make the crest of the mountain easily, if alone, and lose himself in the forests on the east. He considered the proposition and rejected it.

  His senses functioned independently of his brain, still watching and waiting for a trace of the enemy somewhere below. Yet nothing moved but the black shadows of the boulders, the sun edging down through the sky to the yellow horizon of dust on the west. Burns made up his mind to retreat.

  He crawled backwards on his belly, groping behind him for the trailing reins of the bridle. He couldn’t find them; the mare backed away, slowly, one step at a time. Burns crawled back until the trunk of a pine gave him partial shelter on the front; he rose to his knees, turned and grabbed the dragging reins as Whisky stepped backward again. His nerves tingled, expecting another shot, the hot lash of a bullet in his neck or shoulder or ribs, as he pulled his body around to the safe side of the mare, and then led her ba
ck to the northern slope of the ridge. He leaned against her for a moment, resting his shaking limbs, breathing in as a kind of security and strength the warm powerful familiar stench of the sweating horse.

  He took a sip of water from the canteen—his mouth seemed painfully dry. He knew quite well that he was taking far too much time, that his pursuers were coming closer with his every pause and delay, that the man who had fired on him—who was down there on the other side?—might even now be stealing up from rock to rock toward the top of the ridge. He had a second swallow of water, screwed the lid back on the canteen and hung it to the saddlehorn.

  There was the guitar. He lifted it from the saddle and looked at it and shook his head sadly. He strummed once on the loosened strings and they made a sound so grotesque, so harsh, that the mare jerked up her head and stepped aside, staring at him. Burns broke the back of the instrument over his knee and flung the remains down the hillside. He picked up the rifle and started off, leading the mare up the ridge under the thin screen of the pines toward the great fissured wall of the mountain.

  He had no real hope of finding a way up over or through that towering barrier, either with or without the horse; even if he could climb to the run there would probably be men waiting for him when he got there. Then there was little rationality, anymore than hope, in his choice of direction—upward along the narrowing ridge to the granite cliffs—but he realized now that he had no other way to go, no other way to turn; it was the instinct of the hunted animal, as well as desperation, which drove him upward toward that final wall of rock.

  Still far away in terms of time and effort: half a mile above over a rugged jumble of boulders, through jack-pine and cactus to the foot of the wall itself and the desiccated pinnacles and cliffs and grottoes that obscured the exact character of the barrier.

  Burns marched slowly ahead, leading the mare carefully among the trees and tumbled rocks, around the rigid penetrating husks of yucca, over dusty slabs of sandstone marked delicately with the imprint of lizards. There was no reasonable trail but only a faint and wandering pattering of deer paths leading in all directions and over, through and under obstructions that no horse could negotiate. Once they passed a shelf of rock different in no obvious way from many others; hut underneath the overhang, coiled in the sun, was a fat, warm, dust-colored, timber rattler, attentive and annoyed, watching them with its opaque, glittering eyes. The mare did not see it but when she heard the whirr of the rattlesnake’s vibrating tail she shied away violently, almost jerking the cowboy off his feet. He swore at her, and quieted her, and led her around through the trees well away from the snake. When they were safely past he left the mare for a moment and went back and lobbed a few small stones at the reptile, not to harm it but only to stir it up a little, in case others should pass this way after him.

  They went on, horse and man, stopping infrequently and briefly to rest. Burns was having some difficulty with his feet: the boots he was wearing were old and worn, not designed for walking, quite unsuited for mountain climbing; one heel was loose, tending to give unexpectedly under his full weight. And both feet were swollen, and cold. He was also suffering from an odd, unfamiliar pain in the small of his back, near the kidneys, where Gutierrez had slugged and kicked him the night before last. This pain bothered and worried at him unceasingly, aggravated by the climb and his heavy breathing, and he was compelled to stop more often to ease the sharp ache of it.

  Each time he stopped he studied the country behind him, the ridge and its slopes, the canyon on the north, the forested valley on the south. He had glimpses of his pursuers, including a pair on the south slope that must have been those who had nearly ambushed him earlier; he had no doubt that he in turn had been observed and was being followed not merely by trail but by sight There was little he could do but turn and trudge on.

  The ridge ended in a labyrinth of boulders, grottoes, and wrinkled cliffs. Burns and the mare entered a rocky glen, surrounded on three sides by perpendicular walls which effectively hid them from view, and there they stopped again to rest. From somewhere deep in the rocks came the sound of a slow secret drip of water; shrubs of greasewood on the floor of the glen and clinging to its walls spilled their yellow seed into the air, spontaneously it seemed, for the wind could not reach in here. Burns sat down and pushed the sweat from his forehead with a tired hand; he removed his hat, inspected the sweat-sodden band inside, and placed the hat upside down on the ground to dry. He looked up: the sky was blue-golden, a well of space beyond the walls of the mountain. He heard the dripping water, the intermittent uncertain twittering of a Mexican finch. He listened, still looking up at the sky;—the intense blue there seemed to pulsate in his vision, to advance and withdraw in waves with a throbbing rhythm; and strangely, the blue of this sky, despite its cold intensity, seemed less pure, or beyond purity: the blue was suffused with grains of blackness, a quality that deepened as the vision struck farther into the depths of the atmosphere; as though his human eyes were momentarily capable of seeing into the sky and through it to the absolute blackness beyond; —and still listening, heard the bird stop in its dull complaining, and then he heard nothing at all except the muted leak of drops of water. An unnecessary silence, he thought; he picked at his ears and wiped more sweat from his face, though he was already feeling the chill of the heights seep into his blood and bone.

  He felt that he was being watched.

  Not by human eyes. He sensed no immediate danger in his intuition, but without looking over his shoulder he felt and knew that he and the mare were not alone. For a moment he was troubled, not by fear, but by a sensation of utter desolation and rejection, as if he were alien not only to the cities of men but also to the rocks and trees and spirits of the wilderness. The sensation passed away and he was left with the uncanny awareness of another presence. Skin prickling, he waited for a few moments and then very slowly raised and turned his head. He saw a huge, dark bird perched on the limb of a yellow pine, watching him; two tufts of feathers, like horns, stood up stiffly from the creature’s head; the enormous eyes, with lids that rose and fell like curtains, blinked at him once.

  Burns smiled wearily and looked away; and then he became conscious of another one: silhouetted darkly against the sky, a second horned owl watched him from its roost on the top of a boulder near the entrance to the glen. And almost immediately he discovered the third—this one squatting on a ledge high up on the cliff to his left, peering fixedly, idiotically, down at him. The cowboy frowned uneasily and stood up, putting his hat back on. He looked around for more owls but there were only the three, sitting there watching him, eyes blinking and staring from the great horned heads.

  Burns heard a man shout, a distant shout, far below; he heard the human voice arch and die, and then a long succession of echoes rolling from cliff to cliff on the mountainside.

  He picked up Whisky’s reins and led her to the head of the glen, passing below the first silent owl. Expecting a dead end, he found instead a huge cleft in the rock, a natural tunnel formed by the faulting and slipping of a barn-sized block of granite. He took the horse through this opening, glad to leave the haunted glen behind, and came out on a steep talus slope of gravel and fragmented shale. Above the slope rose the sheer wall of the mountain. But it too was incomplete, faulted: a diagonal opening fifty yards wide ran from a corner of the talus slope up through a rift in the main wall to the series of horizontal stratifications that formed the rim of the mountain. Burns saw that he was within a thousand feet of the crest by line of sight, perhaps two or three times that far by foot. The route he would have to take slanted upward at fifty degrees over loose rock, through scrub oak and aspen, and up through the brush to the ledges and the rim and the sky and whatever was waiting for him up there.

  This was better than he had thought he had any right to hope for. He stared up that avenue of possible escape, nerve and hope and mental vigor returning to him, and was able to shake off the spell of the cold glen and the three horned owls that brooded like
specters over its silence.

  There was first the problem of getting across the open area of the talus to the cover of the aspens without getting shot. From the shelter of the leaning rocks Burns surveyed the rim above—he saw no one nor any sparkle of metal or glass—and then the long canyon falling away beneath him. There he could see his pursuers still coming on, crawling it seemed, up that steep complex ascent to the backbone of the ridge: he saw two men far ahead of the rest, one pointing ahead with a stick, the other stooped and lethargic under a burden of some kind on his back; while the other men sat in the sunlight facing the west, one man among them lifting something to his mouth, then throwing it away, a light gleaming object that sailed through the air and down into the depths of the canyon. There were three others to account for but he could not see them—they were the ones he now feared.

  But there was little advantage in waiting; fifty yards of target space to cross and then he would reach the comparative safety of the aspen thickets. He stepped forward, clucking at the mare. She followed willingly enough, shivering, eager to get out of the cold shade into the sunlight. He led her at a clumsy trot up and across the sliding broken treacherous rock; twice the mare slipped and fell to her knees, scrambling, snorting, panting after him. He talked quietly to her, urged her on, encouraged her, while the wind came at them, swirling the dust they were raising into their eyes and over their heads, attracting attention. He was halfway across, he and the mare, half-running, when somebody saw them.

  Burns heard a wild shout, eager, almost hysterical; it seemed to come from his left, to the north. He didn’t look; he tugged at the reins, cursing silently and bitterly—oh you damned pitiful bitch, you simple dumb crazy bitch of a horse, Whisky you stubborn murderous banshee—and kept trying to run to reach those sheltering trees. A bullet swerved toward him through the gulf of sunlit space; it hit and shattered a plate of sandstone a few feet ahead of him, ricocheted off the granite beneath and went whining away toward the south, a hot smashed wad of lead whose fluttering vibrations Burns could feel through the skin of his hands long after the sound was gone. He kept going; the trees were fifty feet away.