Hawk Eyes

by David Althouse

  Then I thought ‘bout all those city folks and townies across the country workin’ like mad men to build somethin’ permanent-like. Maybe it’s a ranch. Maybe it’s their own name they’re wantin’ people to remember forever. Leastways, regardless of what it is, their work is all for naught, because we’re all goin’ to be dead and gone one day anyways.

  On that first night here in this high-mountain park, I figured I would spend the rest of my days out here in the deserts and high-up mountains of this great Southwest, leavin’ folks alone what didn’t pester me, and just mindin’ my own business.

  Well, I tried, but look at me now. Here I lay on the ground with my feet shackled to a beautiful aspen, facin’ my own end in a world that, years ago, offered beauty and hope beyond measure. Ain’t this the damnedest luck! I guess it’s kind of funny when you think ’bout it.

  All right, so I told you ’bout that first night here. Now, let me tell you ’bout the first full day. I awoke the next mornin’, some determined that I’d find that gulch Baker told me of, the openin’ in the side of the mountains where he’d found a good amount of color. I found the gulch, but the water wasn’t hellin’ out of it with quite the force Baker described. I chalked that up to the fact that it was later in the summer and a good amount of the snow up mountain had done melted and gushed down country. Baker must’ve seen this country earlier in the summer when there was still a lot of snow to be melted.

  Leastways, I spent the next few weeks all around that gulch, pickin’ gold from its cracks and crevices, and fishin’ placer stuff out of the river what snakes through it. Yes sir, I had me the damnedest time. There was no way I’d ever forget that spot, and so I made up my mind that I’d go back there time to time to get my plunder. I saw no reason to take it all to once. After all, there was still a lot of country to explore, and I meant to be gettin’ ’bout it.

  And that’s just what I did. This great southwestern country became my domain, and I was able to explore it from top to bottom well before the bulk of white folks got here. For that, I consider myself one of the lucky few. I’ve touched the rock faces, mesas, wind-torn ridges, and crags. I’ve looked it over high and low, and have loved every minute of it. They can kill me now and I’ll go out a happy man. I’ve had the love of a woman, evened my own scores, and answered to no man for most of that time. I’ve lived out my life the way I wanted.

  I’d no sooner find new haunts than I’d traverse brand new trails to my old ones. I’d go back to places where I’d turned up color and rack over the place again. Sometimes I’d find yellow again and sometimes I wouldn’t. Regardless, I was doin’ as I pleased.

  I hadn’t been to Baker’s Park in a year or so. I’d been traipsin’ all over that mountain country of northern New Mexico. I’d even made my way down to the Sacramento Mountains and white sand country nearer to the Mexican border. I started gettin’ a hankerin’ for the San Juans, as I always do when away from here for too long.

  Naturally, the first place I hit after gettin’ back here was Eureka Gulch. I wanted to go over it again. The first thing I saw there was a fellow workin’ the area for himself – picks, shovels, and gold pans nearby. I saw him and he saw me. He said he’d laid claim to the gulch and asked, with the voice of a killer, what in the hell was I doin’ there. I told the fellow to calm down, that I was peace abidin’, and that I would be on my way and he could have whatever gold he found in the gulch. Even though I’d been to the gulch many years before him, and considered the area my domain, I lit out. Evidently, there’s townies around here now, I thought, mappin’ out streets, lots, and talkin’ ’bout things such as legal minin’ claims, box socials and such. Far be it from me to break their laws.

  I hadn’t got one mile down the trail when one of my premonitions told me I was bein’ stalked. I tucked myself off in the aspens and waited for him to catch up, which he did in short order. I comes out of the aspen and asked what he was doin’, and he says he didn’t trust me not to come back and bushwhack him for the gold he was findin’ back at his claim. With that Henry aimed right at his brisket, I called him for a fool, tellin’ him that he’d best leave it alone, but he just couldn’t. He tries a quick pistol draw from his holster and that’s when I had to bore a hole in him, an act leavin’ me to feel none too good ’bout myself. I tried to redirect the greenhorn, but there’s some folks what don’t take redirectin’ very good. It was pure self-defense, but I took out of there sick to my stomach, leavin’ his dead body for the buzzards.

  A day later, fifteen of his minin’ friends stormed my camp down-trail and now, here I am, chained to a tree like a dog. When they caught me up, they took all the gold I had on me, my Henry and my Bowie. They tried to take my totem, but I pleaded with ’em not to. I told ’em I’d need the totem once I entered the spirit world after they hung me, which they said was my fate upon my capture. When I mentioned the spirit world, each of ’em looked at me like I was crazy. The leader of the bunch takes a close look at the unfamiliar Cherokee writin’ and symbols all over that chunk of leather, scratches his whiskers, and then gave his order.

  “Let’s give the heathen bastard his damn totem. He’s dead soon anyways – after we tie him to a tree for a couple of days to think ’bout it.”

  There you have it, boy. You’ve heard my story. I hope you will pass it along beside the campfires in memory of the chained man called Hawk Eyes. I lay tied here all day yesterday and all day today. They tell me I’m to be hanged tomorrow mornin’.

  But, you mark my words, boy: I’m tellin’ you right now I will fly away tonight, fly away like an un-caged bird. Whilst the sky is dark and the Big Dipper hangs over the anvil-shaped peak to the north, I will fly from these peaks and townies will never lay their hands on me again.

  11 Hawk Eyes Flies Away

  Sleep did not come that night after hearing the desperado’s account – not a single wink. For what seemed like a night that would never end, my eyes froze transfixed on the underside of the tent’s cream-colored canvas roof. Not far from me stood chained the wild-eyed desperado, awaiting his fate at the end of a rope, come daylight. At the outlaw’s request, I said not a word of him to my father. Insofar as Father knew, no words had ever flowed between his son and the mysterious man chained to the aspen on the banks of the Animas.

  As I lay awake, my mind flooded with images of the desperado flopping at the end of a rope, and my heart pounded with the fear he surely felt as he awaited his fate on this, his final night under the stars. Everything he must have felt at the time, I also felt on his behalf, and I knew that if these things seemed horrible to me, then his last night upon this earth was surely a living hell to him.

  To make matters worse, the quiet of night ended at around midnight with the onslaught of the booms and flashes of a high-mountain thunderstorm. Surely, the man shackled outside was entitled to better final moments than this, I thought at the time. My mind could not reconcile that a man destined for the hanging tree at daybreak must also endure the indignity of having to sleep in the rain and mud on his last night alive. Such were the realities of mining camp justice in those early days.

  Many images danced across the stage of my mind during that long night. I dreamed of Hawk Eyes facing down a bullying federal officer and then escaping from Fort Smith in the dark of night so many years before. I dreamed of him hiding out among his beloved Cherokees, eluding Federals, and meeting his beautiful Little Doe by the stickball field. My mind raced with images of him hunting throughout those Cherokee hills with Youngbird and Tickerneeskee, of him making overtures to an elusive Cherokee princess, and of him killing a wildcat with his bare hands to save her life.

  I thought of his time at Jesse Chisholm’s trading post, where he courted and eventually married Little Doe, and where he watched her die before his very eyes before setting out to kill Buffalo Skull and each member of his band, one by one.

  I tried to put myself in the shoes of Hawk Eyes when he first beheld those mesas and mountains on the westward horizon. I
tried to imagine his feeling of rebirth when he first laid eyes on this magnificent southwestern country. Images of him roaming and mining throughout the picturesque Rocky Mountains brought at least a dash of comfort to my heart that night, as those days represented a time of peace and freedom for a man seemingly destined to live a short life.

  My mind could not shake the many instances of his premonitions, of those many times when his world slowed to a crawl, and answers came to him from some mysterious place far away. A feeling came over me that maybe the outlaw had held something back when recounting his story, some unexplained secret that could somehow wake us from this horrible nightmare. His stories of repeated premonitions told me he often possessed knowledge and impulses of which others lived unaware. My guess was that he told few people, if anyone, of these episodes, and I wondered what he held back from me then.

  My mind kept returning to Little Doe, always to Little Doe. In my imagination, the raven-haired princess appeared as the most beautiful woman to have ever lived, and the thought of her death brought a sorrow to my heart that was surely a bee sting compared to the torture and despair he felt when losing her, the one great woman, and absolute love of his life.

  Only the hint of sunrise manifested itself to the east. The sun had not yet crested over the peak that men today call King Solomon Mountain, but the voices of the men making up the citizen’s committee bellowed loud as they made their way to the man chained to the aspen by the river. I arose from my cot in the tent, hurried out toward the river, and arrived at the aspen tree right alongside the men of the so-called citizen’s committee. My heart stopped and my eyes nearly popped out of my skull.

  The man called Hawk Eyes was nowhere in sight, and never had I seen a more disappointed lynch mob! Pandemonium set in amongst their ranks as they looked feverishly for clues explaining his getaway. It had rained most of the night, so whatever tracks the outlaw made in his escape had washed down mountain hours before. He had vanished like a puff of candle smoke in a hurricane. The only thing remaining was the long chain, still attached to the base of the aspen. The steel at the opposite end of the chain, filed through as clean and slick as any file job ever seen, told the obvious story of his escape. Still, in my mind, there was something more at play here. I could not wrap my mind around exactly what. Undoubtedly, the shackles still harnessed the outlaw’s ankles, but he was mobile and on his way to freedom, nevertheless.

  How Hawk Eyes had managed to lay hands on a file was beyond my comprehension, but I didn’t care. He had flown the coop!

  Pure elation swept over me. All the fear and anxiety of the preceding night disappeared in an instant. The man called Hawk Eyes was gone, and that made me the happiest person on earth.

  The fact that the lynch mob never found their intended prey served to perfect and complete the picture.

  That first day in Baker’s Park turned out to be the most memorable of my entire time there, and, indeed, one of the most unforgettable episodes in all my life.

  My father passed away after spending the next ten years in the San Juan Mountains, performing odd jobs to make ends meet, and avoiding creditors, just as he had done so effectively back in Tennessee. He never made his fortune mining for treasure, which made him a lot like the many other fortune hunters in Baker’s Park, who did not find their treasure either.

  A new century came to the West, and with it came the passing of the old ways and even the memories of the people who went before. Still, my memory of Hawk Eyes and his story never waned.

  Twenty-eight years passed before I discovered Hawk Eyes’ true fate, and this I did by pure accident. Never was there a day in all that time that I did not think about the mysterious outlaw. His story stayed close to my heart, and, in a sense, it became a part of my life.

  The year 1898 found me writing for a magazine based out of Denver. The magazine’s editors loved to assign me human interest stories concerned with art and artists, believing such were my forte. My charge was to travel by wagon to Taos, New Mexico, to interview a couple of artists by the name of Ernest Blumenschien and Bert Phillips. They had discovered Taos that same year when their wagon broke down in the vicinity. They loved the Taos area so much they decided to stay.

  Now, thanks to these men, more artists flocked to the old Spanish town, and a sort of art colony began to emerge. My task was to bring the story to our readership. Upon receiving the assignment, I recollected that Hawk Eyes spoke fondly of Taos, saying the town would always call his name.

  Immediately upon arrival in Taos, I found the place to be everything Hawk Eyes described. Unusual adobe structures abounded in a little town populated by people from a rainbow of different cultures – Spanish, Anglos, and Indians from various tribes. My mind recalled that Hawk Eyes had mentioned the dark-eyed señoritas who adorned the landscape. He had not understated their ability to be noticed. The ages-old plaza stood framed by equally ancient cottonwoods. It was, and is, the pretty picture Hawk Eyes painted for me so many years before.

  One day, as I walked across Taos Plaza, my eyes noticed a man who appeared vaguely familiar. He had just left the hotel owned by Long John Dunn, and had made his way to the south end of the plaza where he rested on a bench. His long gray hair, partly braided, flowed from underneath a black Stetson. Fringed buckskin clothing – shirt, pants, and beaded knee-high moccasins – covered his body. For a man who appeared to be nearly sixty years of age, he cast an imposing figure, walking with a purposeful stride, and sporting a tall frame coupled with broad shoulders. Immensely interested, I seated myself on the opposite side of the plaza in order to continue watching a man who appeared larger-than-life.

  He sat on the south side of the plaza with his eyes trained on the nearby cottonwoods, occasionally glancing in the direction of the surrounding mountains and faraway mesas. The keen look of interest expressed on his face suggested that he absorbed from his surroundings what others did not. He seemed to see the world with a kind of detail most men could not recognize. That he relished this ability was obvious in the way he focused at length on one scene.

  He devoted nearly ten minutes to carefully observing a crow perched atop an adobe building nearby. His eyes averted only after discerning every possible detail from the seemingly insignificant spectacle.

  From across the plaza, he turned his eyes upon me. Goose pimples covered my body as I felt the stare of his eyes from underneath his black hat. He continued this gaze for only a moment before standing up and walking in a northeast direction out of town.

  From a distance well behind, I followed him along the eastern edge of the pueblo, and eastward along the creek near Frijoles Canyon and Burnt Ridge. He lost me after making a bend in the trail, so I stopped, looked in every direction, and then stooped low to the ground to ascertain any available tracks.

  In an instant, I froze, my sides clutched by a set of strong knees, my neck chilled by the cold steel of a gigantic Bowie knife.

  “You make a habit of followin’ men unawares?”

  There was no mistaking the voice. It belonged to Hawk Eyes. His was a voice I heard in my mind every day for the last twenty-eight years.

  “I’m Benson Sadler. You told me your story so many years ago.”

  The old frontiersman pulled away the knife, relaxed his legs, and allowed me up.

  “I know who you are. I noticed you back at the plaza. I knew you were on my trail way back at the south end of the pueblo. Someone should teach you better stalkin’. Were I Buffalo Skull, you’d be layin’ there dead without your noggin. How the hell have you been?”

  The next few minutes were spent catching him up on the details of my life after Baker’s Park.

  “So, you’re a writer man now, huh? Well, ain’t that just fine! You were a scrub of a kid the last time I saw you! Of course, I’ve come a long ways myself since that day in Baker’s Park where I lay chained to a tree. I reckon we can both pat ourselves on the back for comin’ as far as we have! Come on up the trail with me to my cabin and we’ll roast some
venison and chew the fat.”

  Hawk Eyes’ cabin was set in amongst a pine tree cluster at the center of a small meadow. Adjacent to the cabin, stood a small corral for two horses. A picture of neatness awaited us on the inside of Hawk Eyes’ abode. The floor, albeit of dirt, was tightly packed and swept clean as a whistle. Tightly situated logs made up each of the four cabin walls, each chinked as tight as any ever seen. Hand-made log storage shelves, bolted to a tree trunk situated at the center of the one room, housed an assortment of items, mostly canned goods. The tree had grown there naturally, with the cabin built around it.

  Throughout that entire night, and part of the next day, Hawk Eyes entertained me with delicious roasted venison and a multitude of colorful stories from the last twenty-eight years of his life. I sat enthralled while he recounted a life history paralleling the story of the West from about 1870 to 1898. It seemed that Hawk Eyes was incapable of ever being part of a dull moment.

  He had made efforts at finding happiness with other women after Baker’s Park, but each of these excursions came to naught, and only proved he was incapable of loving anyone but Little Doe.

  “I finally gave women up. I thought I might find me someone out there, but never could. No one will ever measure up to her.”