by Betsy Byars
“Are they rattlers?” Charles asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “There’s nothing to worry about though. They haven’t even started getting away from the den. They’re still sleepy and sluggish from hibernation.”
“Are you going to do anything about them?”
“Well, I’ll probably get some dynamite later and blow up the den. One thing we don’t need around here is a bunch of rattlesnakes.”
“Rattlers are very dangerous,” Charles said.
“Yeah.”
I thought he was going to give me some facts and information about the life and habits of rattlesnakes, but instead he shuddered. “You know, these are the first snakes I’ve seen in my whole life except in books.”
“Well, it’s a bunch of them.” I rested in my saddle, leaning forward. I was thinking that with today’s prices, those snakes might be worth about $349. I didn’t feel much like collecting them and turning them in though. “We’ll come back this afternoon, and you bring your camera and get some pictures before I blow it up.”
The horses were still nervous, moving sideways and backwards, every way but forward where the snakes were. Charles and I kept looking. It was a real strange sight.
Just about this time I glanced up and saw Alado. I had forgotten about him because of the snakes, and when I looked up he was running straight toward us. Sometimes a yearling will run as if he’s in the greatest race of his life, and that was the way Alado was running. The only trouble was that the snakes were between us.
I turned my horse quickly and started around the snakes to head him off. I waved my hat and shouted, but this only made things worse, because Alado moved closer to the butte.
“Back, Alado,” I shouted. The only way I could stop him now was to move right across those rattlers, and that was something I wasn’t about to do. Rattlers can be sluggish, but they would liven up if a horse was trampling them.
“Alado, no, no!” Charles hollered. He tried to start Clay forward. I could see he was willing to ride right through the rattlers.
“Charles, get back!”
He heard me, but he kept urging his horse forward. I couldn’t move for a moment, and then I shouted, “Stop, Clay, back!” Clay had been trampling the earth nervously, but he stopped at my command. “Back!” He turned, made a tight circle, and ran fifty yards in the opposite direction.
“Alado!” Charles cried. He was yanking the reins and doing everything he knew to get Clay turned around, only nothing worked.
Alado was coming so fast that he was on the snakes before he saw them. He had known something was wrong from the way Charles and I were acting. He had gotten nervous and skittish, and the fact that he didn’t know what was wrong made him run faster. He was at top speed when he saw the snakes.
For a minute Alado acted like he was going to rear. He threw his head back, whinnied, and then he made a lunge forward as if he was trying to jump over the snakes, to clear them. He leaped into the air.
His eyes were wild. His mane was whipping the air. Everything in the world seemed to have stopped except this frenzied animal.
“Alado!” I cried. His wings came out then and beat down one stroke. Then there was another and another. “Alado!” I cried again, choking on the word. Alado was flying.
Flight
I’VE SEEN SOME TERRIBLE-looking things in my life. There’s a beauty in a stunt that goes right—no matter how frightening it seems—and a sickening awfulness when one goes wrong.
That’s what Alado’s flight reminded me of, a stunt gone wrong, because I never saw anything wilder or more unnatural-looking in my life. I thought at the time that he would never get back to the ground alive.
His legs were moving in a sort of awkward, galloping motion, and then one of his wings brushed the side of the butte. This caused him to lose what balance he had, and his left wing dipped toward the ground.
Now he was fighting not only gravity, but being off balance. His wings beat harder, wild uneven strokes, and he rose a few feet. His hoofs were pawing the air with a certain desperation, as if it were a matter of climbing the air rather than flying through it.
Then it was over. In the last moment before his hoofs touched the ground, his body straightened. His wings stretched out. And he landed on all four hoofs, hard, like a bucking horse.
I was yelling at him by this time, yelling so loud my throat hurt, but he started running. It was as if he was being pursued.
I started after him. I wasn’t trying to catch him, just keep him heading in the direction of the ranch, but we went for the best part of an hour before he slowed down. Then it took me another half hour to catch him and get a rope on him. He was just plain worn out then and I was too. After we rested he followed me home, gentle as a lamb.
I was with him in the corral, rubbing him down and talking to him when Charles rode up an hour later. Charles was so tired and saddle sore he could hardly get off his horse. I knew what a struggle he’d had trying to keep up with Alado and me because just ordinary riding wasn’t easy for him.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He came running over. “Alado!”
“He’s all right.”
“I thought he was going to be killed!”
“Yeah, me too.”
The struggle came into my mind, and the unnaturalness of what I had seen stunned me all over again. When you’re training an animal, teaching him to do something unnatural like fall, you have to do it slowly. You have to build up to it. The difficulty here was that there had been no way to train Alado to fly. Flight was against his nature, and the whole experience had been one desperate attempt to get safely back to the ground.
Charles rubbed Alado’s neck. After a minute he glanced over at me. “You shouldn’t have tried to stop me,” he said. He turned his face away and laid his cheek against the colt’s neck.
“What?” I hadn’t heard him good because his face was half-buried in the horse’s mane.
He lifted his head. “You shouldn’t have tried to stop me.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have tried to go through those rattlers. You talk about stupid things—now that was stupid. You could have been killed.”
He didn’t look at me. It was the first stirring of something, like the brewing of a storm, a change in the air. I wanted to smooth things over because both of us were tired and upset. “I’m going in,” I said. I patted Alado on the rump and started for the house.
Charles said, “If you didn’t want to save him—that’s your business. Only you shouldn’t have stopped me.”
I turned around. “Is that what’s wrong? You think I could have saved him?”
He looked at me. “If you’d cared enough.”
I stood there for a minute. I didn’t know what to say. There’s not a man who has loved horses better than me. The first thing I ever loved was a horse. The first tears I ever remember shedding were over a horse and dried on a horse’s neck. There have been a time or two in my life when a horse was the only friend I had in the world. I thought of Cotton. I realized suddenly I was rubbing the scar on my cheek. It had been a while since I’d done that. I looked at the mountains in the distance. Then I looked at Charles. His eyes were burning in his dusty face.
I still didn’t know what to say. Suddenly everything was confused, beyond what I could understand. I said, “Just because a horse has wings, Charles, you can’t—” I stopped in the middle because I realized that wasn’t what I wanted to say at all.
“It isn’t the wings,” he said. “You don’t understand anything. If he was a plain ordinary horse it would be the same to me.”
The colt was quiet now, standing between us, letting Charles rub his neck. Charles was still looking at me. He wanted something from me, I knew that, but I didn’t know what. Maybe he wanted a promise that the horse would always be safe. Maybe he wanted me to be the great, wonderful hero he had always thought I was.
We waited, standing there, and finally I said, “Just don�
��t let yourself care too much about the colt. That’s all.” I turned away then and went into the house.
Late that afternoon I rode out with dynamite and blew up the rattlesnake den. I told Charles he could come along, because I figured he would never have a chance to see something like that again, but he said he was too tired and wanted to stay home with Alado. I waited, taking a long time getting started because I thought he might want to change his mind. He didn’t, though, and in the end I rode out by myself.
It was just as well he didn’t come, I guess, because there wasn’t much to see. There was just a dusty explosion and a lot of dead snakes. I rode around for a while to see if I could see any alive and wiggling, but I couldn’t. Then I headed for home.
As I rode I found myself thinking of something Mrs. Minney had told me the other day. She told me she had been up in the mountains, and she’d found an old Indian grave. There was a skeleton curled up in it and the dust of some possessions—a bow and arrows, a blanket. No telling how long it had been there and no one knew about it. For some reason thinking about that brought my troubles down to size.
By the time I got back to the ranch I had started telling myself that Charles and I had just had a little quarrel, which was natural enough under the circumstances. I decided to forget it.
Charles and Alado were in the corral along with the dog when I got there. I said to the dog, “Well, where were you when we needed you?”
Charles grinned a little. “I think he was more scared than any of us. Did you kill the rattlers, Uncle Coot?”
I nodded. “Yeah, I got them all.”
“Well, we shouldn’t have any more trouble then, should we?” Charles asked. He asked it in such a hopeful way that I told him what he wanted to hear.
“No, we shouldn’t have any more trouble.”
More in the Sky Than Hawks
IN THIS PART OF the country anything seems possible in the summer. The colors are brighter than any you ever saw and the bare mountains against the sky look like their names—Cathedral Point and Weeping Women and Devil’s Back. A desert arroyo, dry for years, rushes with water after a rain, and the Marfa light burns in the desert and no one can find it. A winged colt doesn’t seem strange at all in the Texas summer.
June started slow and easy. Charles was out of school now and spending most of his time with Alado. Mr. and Mrs. Minney had gone back East for a visit, leaving with us a painting of Alado flying off the roof of their house that night last September. We set the picture on the mantel, but neither Charles nor I liked to look at it. It showed too plainly what could happen. It made Alado’s desperation, the danger of his flying very real, and most of the time we avoided it. Occasionally, however, I would come into the room and find Charles standing there staring at the picture, and occasionally he would come in and find me doing the same thing. We worried a lot in silence.
On this particular day Charles decided to take Alado to the mesa, which was about two miles behind the house. A mesa, which means “table” in Spanish, is just a flat-topped piece of land with steep sides. It used to be a hill, I guess, only the sides washed away and the top wore smooth, leaving a piece of land like a platform. There was a stream that ran by the mesa after a rain, and that was why Charles had decided to go.
Charles and Alado set out and right away the dog came crawling out from under the porch and started after them. He never liked Alado to go off without him.
The dog was still not much more than a skeleton. We had fed him enough for two dogs; we had given him better than we ate. Still he was bones, and that’s what Charles called him. When Bones lay down on the porch it sounded like someone had dropped kindling wood.
At three o’clock I was outside working on the truck, and I happened to glance up and see a glider flying overhead. The glider was low, circling about a mile north of the corral. I straightened up quick.
“Hey, Charles!” I called, in case he had come home without my seeing him. “Charles!” I wanted him to see the glider because that was all he had been talking about since Sunday, when we had gone into Marfa. The National Gliding Championship was being held there, and since these were the first gliders Charles had ever seen, he couldn’t quit talking about them.
A glider, in case you never saw one either, is an airplane that flies without an engine. These gliders have races and distance tasks, and when the contest is going on, you can see gliders and glider trailers everywhere you look.
Charles and I had gone to the airport on Sunday, and it was an awesome sight. Seventy gliders were all stretched out on the ramp, waiting to be towed up by airplanes. Later it was even more awesome to see them in the sky, seventeen or eighteen of them together, circling beneath the clouds.
A glider, I learned that afternoon, is a lot prettier than an airplane. The wings are real long and slender, and I reckon it comes closer than anything I ever saw to being a bird.
Well, we had gotten into the truck finally and started for home, but Charles couldn’t talk about anything but gliders. He knew the name of every glider he’d seen—the Libelle and the Kestrel—and he knew that gliders go up by getting lift from air currents, and he knew what some of the altitude and distance records were. He told me that one of the gliders we saw had flown nonstop for six hundred miles.
Every day since then Charles had spent most of his time outside squinting up at the sky, watching for gliders. He claimed a couple of times that he had seen one over the mountain peaks in the distance, but it had looked more like a hawk to me.
“Charles!” I called again. I knew he was going to be disappointed. After all that watching here was a glider practically over the corral, and he wasn’t around to see it. There was a chance he’d seen it from the mesa, I thought, because the glider had come from that direction, but I wasn’t sure.
I watched the glider and, from what Charles had told me, I figured that the pilot wasn’t doing too well. He had gotten low and was moving from one place to another trying to find some lift so he could get high enough to finish the race.
I watched for a while, but it didn’t look like he was getting any higher to me. The glider moved on toward the road. It was almost overhead.
I was getting excited now. In this part of Texas there aren’t many places to land a glider because most of the land has yucca and mesquite on it. So sometimes—Charles had learned this at the airport—the pilots land their gliders on the road.
By now the glider was even lower and so close overhead I could hear a funny eerie noise as it passed, a whistling sound. The pilot moved closer to the road. He was really low now, and I got in my truck and drove as fast as I could. I got to the main road just in time to see the glider land.
I went over and helped the pilot pull his glider to the side of the road, and then I looked it over. The pilot leaned in the cockpit and did something to his instruments. Then he glanced at me. I was standing at the back of the glider, by the T-shaped tail.
“You own that ranch over there?” he asked.
I nodded. “What is this for?” I asked, pointing to a metal thing that was sticking out of the tail. And then the pilot asked something that stopped me cold.
He said, “What was that thing I saw flying back there at the mesa?”
“What?” I asked. My hand dropped to my side.
“Back there behind your place. I couldn’t get a good look at what it was because I was trying to find some lift, but it was flying. It looked as big as a horse. I don’t suppose you folks raise flying horses around here.” He laughed.
I got a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. I said quickly, “Look, if there’s nothing I can do for you here, I better get back to the ranch.” I knew that Charles was in trouble.
He said, “Sure, here comes my crew now.” We looked up the road at a car pulling a long white trailer.
I said again, “I better get going.”
I got in the truck and drove back to the ranch as fast as I could. I jumped out and saw Bones coming toward the house. He was ju
st a streak he was going so fast, and his tail was between his legs and his ears were flattened against his head. He ran around the house and went under the steps. I heard him work his way back under the porch where there was a break in the stones. He was wheezing and panting as if his lungs would burst.
“Come here, Bones.”
The wheezing and panting stopped. Even the breathing seemed to have stopped.
“Come here, Bones, come.”
As soon as the pilot had mentioned seeing something fly back at the mesa I had known something was wrong. It was confirmed now. Unless something had happened to frighten him badly, the dog would never have left Alado.
Clay was already saddled. I started out as fast as I could in the direction Charles and Alado had taken. I rode all the way to the mesa without seeing a trace of them.
“Charles! Charles!”
There was no answer. I turned Clay and rode to the right. I had the feeling that something had happened to Charles, and I suddenly got a sickness in my stomach. It was like that time with Cotton, only worse. I thought I might fall out of the saddle.
I rode, stopped, and called again. “Charles, where are you?” I threw back my head and bellowed, “Charles!”
I waited a minute, and then I heard his voice in the distance. I rode around the mesa.
“Here I am,” he called.
I looked up and saw Charles clinging to the side of the mesa. He hadn’t gotten far, and he appeared to be stuck.
“What are you doing up there?” The relief of seeing him safe made me yell louder than was necessary.
“Uncle Coot?” He hadn’t been crying, but he was stammering so badly I could hardly recognize my own name.
“What happened?”
“Uncle Coot?”
“What happened?” He swallowed and I said, “Now, come on, Charles, what are you doing up there? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know exactly,” he said, still stuttering a little.
“Well, try to tell me what happened. Start at the beginning.”
