On the River Styx: And Other Stories

by Peter Matthiessen

  NIGHT POWERS WERE incarnate in the Aguila wolf, which was known to have slaughtered sixty-five sheep in a single night and laid waste the stock in western Arizona for eight long years, fading back into the oblivion of time in 1924. One trapper in pursuit of it had disappeared without a trace, and Miller had always wondered if, at some point in that man’s last terrible day beneath the sun, the Aguila wolf had not passed nearby, pausing in its ceaseless round to scent the dry, man-tainted air before padding on about its age-old business. Somewhere its progeny still hunted, and he often thought that the black male that once circled his traps for thirteen months and dragged the one that finally caught it forty miles must have descended from the old Aguila.

  Most wolves gave him little trouble. Within a week or ten days of its raid, the usual animal would trot north out of Mexico again and, retracing its hunting route in a counterclockwise direction, investigate the scent posts, pausing at each to void itself and scratch the earth. At one of these, sooner or later, it would place its paw in a slight depression, the dirt would give way, and the steel jaws would snap on its foreleg. If its own bone was too heavy to gnaw through, and the trap well staked, it would finally lie down and wait. It would sense Miller’s coming and, if still strong enough, would stand. Though its hair would bristle, it rarely snarled. Invariably, Miller stood respectfully at a distance, as if trying to see in the animal’s flat gaze the secret of his own fascination. Then he would dispatch it carefully with a .38 revolver. But when the wolf lay inert at his feet, a hush seemed to fall in the mesquite and paloverde, as if the bright early-morning desert had died with the shot. The red sun, rising up, would whiten, and the faint smell of desert flowers fade, and the cactus wrens would still. In the carcass, already shrunken, lay the death of this land as it once was, and in the vast silence a reproach. The last time, Miller had broken his trap and sworn that he would never kill a wolf again.

  SOME YEARS PASSED before two animals, hunting together according to the reports, made kills all along the border, from Hidalgo County in New Mexico to Cochise and Santa Cruz counties in Arizona, with scattered raids as far west as Sonoita, in Sonora. They used the ancient runs and developed new ones, but their wide range and unpredictable behavior had defeated all efforts at trapping them. The ranchers complained to the federal agencies, which in turn sent for Will Miller.

  Miller at first refused to go. But he had read of the two wolves, and his restlessness overcame him. A few days later, he turned up in the regional wildlife office, a small, dark, well-made man of forty-eight in sweated khakis, with a green neckerchief and worn boots and a battered black felt hat held in both hands. Beneath a lank hood of ebony hair, his hawk face, hard and creased, was pleasant, and his step and manner quiet, unobtrusive. He had all his possessions with him. These included eight hundred dollars, a change of clothes, and the equipment of his profession in the sedan outside, as well as an indifferent education, a war medal, and the knowledge that, until this moment, he had never done anything in his life that had dishonored him. Placing his hat on the game agent’s desk, he picked restlessly through the reports. Then he asked questions. Angry with himself for being there, he hardly listened while the agent explained that the two wolves seemed immune to ordinary methods, which was why Will had been sent for. Miller ignored the patronizing use of the Indian’s first name as well as the compliment. Unsmiling, he asked if the two wolves were really so destructive that they couldn’t be left alone. The agent answered that Miller sounded scared of Canis lupus after all these years and, because Miller’s expression made him uneasy, laughed too loudly.

  “Them wolves was here before we come,” Miller said. “I’d like to know they was a few left when we go.”

  Miller went west to Ajo, where he got drunk and visited a woman and, before the evening was out, got drunk all over again. He was not an habitual drinker, and drank heavily only in the rueful certainty that he would be sick for days to come. Later he drove out into the desert and staggered among the huge shapes of the saguaros, shouting.

  “I’m comin after you, goddam you, I’m comin, you hear that?”

  And he shook his fist toward the distant mountains of Mexico. In doing so, he lost his balance and sat down hard, cutting his outstretched hand on a leaf of yucca. Glaring at the blood, black in the moonlight, he began to laugh. But a little later, awed and sobered by the hostile silhouettes of the desert night, he licked at the black patterns traced upon his hand and shivered. Then he lay down flat upon his back and stared at the eternity of stars.

  Toward dawn, closing his eyes at last, he sighed, and wondered if it could really be that he felt like crying. He jeered at himself instead. Unable to admit to loneliness, he told himself it was time he settled down, had children. He could decide who and how and where first thing in the morning. But a few hours later, getting up, he felt too sick to consider the idea. He cursed himself briefly and sincerely and headed south toward Sonoita, where the wolves had been reported last.

  The town of Sonoita lies just across the border from the organ-pipe cactus country of southern Arizona, on the road to Puerto Peñasco and the Gulf of California. Miller arrived there at mid-morning. The heat was searing, even for this land, as menacing in its still might as violent weather elsewhere. The Mexican border guards were apathetic, waving him through from beneath the shelter of their shed.

  Miller had a headache from the alcohol and desert glare. Making inquiries, he found no one who understood him. Finally, by dint of repeating “Lobo, lobo” into the round, rapt faces, he was led ceremonially to the parched remains of a steer outside the town. The carcass had been scavenged by the people, and a moping vulture flopped clumsily into the air. The trail was cold. Since Sonoita lay on the edge of the Gran Desierto, he did not believe that the wolves would wander farther west. From here, he would have to work back east, to New Mexico, if necessary.

  Yet the villagers picked insistently at his shoulder—Sst! Señor, sst!—and pointed westward. When he stared at them, then shook his head and pointed east, they murmured humbly among themselves, but one old man again extended a bony, implacable arm toward the desert. Like children, mouths slack, hands diffident behind their backs, the rest surrounded Miller, their black eyes bright as those of reptiles. Sí, amigo. Sí, sí. They gravitated closer, not quite touching. Sí, sí. Abruptly, he pushed through them and returned into the town.

  Clutching a beer glass in the cantina, encircled by his silent following, he knew he had not made a thorough search for wolf sign, and could not do so in his present state of mind. The prospect of long days ahead in the dry canyons, piecing out the faded trail, oppressed him so that he sat stupefied. He felt sick and uneasy and, in some way he could not define, afraid. He wanted to talk to someone, to flee from his forebodings, and he thought of a nice woman he knew in Yuma. But Yuma lay westward a hundred miles or more, via an old road across the mountain deserts to San Luis and Mexicali. He did not know the road, and he had heard tales of the violence of this desert, and he dreaded the journey through an unfamiliar land in his present condition, and in such heat. On the other hand, these people had directed him toward the west. How could they know? Considering this, he felt dizzy and his palms grew damp. Still, by way of San Luis, he could reach Yuma by mid-afternoon and come back, in better spirits, tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, the wolves might kill again in Sonoita, leaving fresh sign. And if he got drunk enough, he thought, he might even come back married.

  “To hell with it,” he told the nodding Mexicans. “I’ll go.”

  Outside, the heat struck him full in the face, stopping him short. His lungs squeezed the dry air for sustenance, and his nose pinched tight on the fine mist of alkali shrouding the town. In the shade, the natives and their animals squatted mute, awaiting the distant rains of summer. The town was inert, silent, in its dull awareness of Miller’s car.

  At the garage, Miller checked his oil and water carefully, knowing he should carry spare water with him, for the San Luis Road, stretching away into
the Gran Desierto, would be long and barren. But he could not locate a container of any kind, and his growing apprehension irritated him, and on impulse he left without the water, quitting the town in a swirl of dust and gravel. Once on the road, however, he felt foolish, and he was not out of sight of the last adobe hut when he caught himself glancing at the oil pressure and water temperature gauges. He did it again a few minutes later.

  THE ROAD RAN WEST through low, scorched hills before curving south into the open desert. At one point it ran north to Quitobaquito Springs, the only green place on the San Luis Road. Miller stopped the car. Across the springs, beneath a cottonwood, he saw a hut; a family of Papagos, two dogs, and a wild-maned horse gazed at him, motionless. The dogs were silent. In the treetops, two black, shiny phainopeplas fluttered briefly and were still.

  “How do,” Miller called. The Indians observed him, unblinking. It occurred to Miller that his was the only voice in this dead land, where people answered him, when they answered at all, with nods and grunts and soft, indecipherable hisses. He stood a moment, unwilling to think, then returned slowly to the sedan.

  For a mile or so beyond the springs, a gravel road detoured from a stretch of highway left long ago in half-repair. The detour was rutted and pocked with holes, and he could barely keep the toiling car in motion. He was easing it painfully onto the highway again when he heard a clear, animal cry. The sound was wild and shrill, and startled Miller. Braking the sedan, he stalled it. In the sudden silence, the cry was repeated, and a moment later he glimpsed a movement at the mouth of a hollow in a road bank. An animal the size of a large dog slipped from the hole. In the glare, he did not recognize it as a child until it stood and approached the car. This creature, a boy of indefinite age, was followed instantly by another, who paused on all fours at the cave entrance before joining the first.

  Already the first was at the window, fixing Miller with clear, flat eyes located high and to the side of his narrow face. His brother—for their features were almost identical—had brown hair rather than black, and his eyes were dull, reflecting everything and seeing nothing. Over the other’s shoulder, he looked past Miller rather than at him, and after a moment turned his head away, as if scenting the air. Then the first boy smiled, a reflexive smile that traveled straight back along his jaw instead of curling, and pointed his finger toward the west. When he lowered his hand, he placed it on the door handle.

  Miller could not make himself speak. He stared at the hole from which the two had crept, unable to believe they had really come out of it, unable to imagine what they were doing here at all. His first thought had been that these boys must belong to the Papago family at the springs, but one look at their faces told him this could not be so. These heads were sharp and clear-featured, reminiscent of something he could not recall, with a certain hardness about the mouth and nostrils. There was none of the blunt impassivity of the Papagos. There was nothing of poverty about them, either, and yet clearly they were homeless, without belongings of any kind. Still, they might be bandit children. He peered once again into the black eyes at the window, but his efforts to remember where he had seen that gaze were unsuccessful, and he shook his head to clear his dizziness.

  The boys watched him without expression. After a while, when he did nothing, the older one opened the door and slipped into the car, and the second followed.

  Miller felt oddly under duress. Moving the car forward onto the highway, he glanced uneasily at the gauges. It upset him that the Indians had not inquired as to where he was going. On the San Luis Road, one came and one went, but one made certain of a destination. It was as if, were he to drive his car off southward across the hard desert into oblivion, those two would accompany him with foreknowledge and without surprise.

  At last he said, in his poor Spanish: “En donde va? A San Luis? Mexicali?”

  The older boy smiled his curious smile and nodded, hissing briefly between white teeth. Miller took this to mean “Sí.”

  “San Luis?” Miller said.

  The boy nodded.

  “Mexicali?” Miller said, after a moment.

  The boy nodded. Either he did not understand, or the matter was of no importance to him. He raised his hand in a grotesque salute and smiled again. The eyes of the other boy switched back and forth, observing their expressions.

  Though the heat had grown, the day had darkened, and odd clouds, wild scudding blots of gray, swept up across the sallow sky from the remote Gulf. A wind came, fitfully at first, fanning sand across the highway. Miller, in a sort of trance, clung to the wheel. His car, which he knew he was driving too fast, was straining in the heat, and he sighed in the intensity of his relief when a large orange truck, the first sign of life in miles of thinning mesquite and saguaro, came at him out of the bleached distances ahead.

  He glanced at the two boys. They seemed to have sensed the coming of the truck long before Miller himself, for their eyes were fixed upon it, and the eyebrows of the elder were raised, alert.

  As the truck neared, an arm protruded from the cab and flagged Miller to a stop.

  The truck driver, lighting a brown cigarette, peered about him at the hostile desert before speaking, as if sharing the desolation with Miller. He then asked in Spanish the distance to Sonoita. Miller, who was now counting every mile of the hundred-odd to San Luis, knew the exact distance, and suspected the truck driver knew it, too. The chance meeting on the highway was, for both of them, a respite, a source of nourishment for the journey which, like the springs at Quitobaquito, was not to be passed up lightly. However, he could not think of the correct Spanish numeral, and when the other repeated the question, inclining his head slightly to peer past Miller at the Indians, Miller turned to them for help. Both boys stared straight ahead through the windshield. The Mexican driver repeated the question in what Miller took to be an Indian dialect, but still the boys sat mute. The older maintained his tense, alert expression, as if on the point of sudden movement.

  “Treinta-cinco,” Miller said at last, choosing an approximate round figure.

  The driver thanked him, glancing once again at the two boys. He exchanged a look with Miller, then shrugged, forcing his machine into gear as he did so. The truck moaned away down the empty road, and the outside world it represented became a fleeting speck of orange in the rearview mirror. When Miller could see it no longer, and the solitude closed around him, he inspected his temperature gauge once again. The red needle, which had climbed while the car was idling, returned slowly to a position just over normal, flickered, and was still.

  The road ran on among gravel ridges, which mounted endlessly and sloped away to nothing. Only stunted saguaros survived in this country, their ribs protruded with desiccation, and an abandoned hawk’s nest testified to the fact that life had somehow been sustained here. Miller, who had seen no sign of wildlife since leaving the springs, wondered why a swift creature like a hawk would linger in such a place when far less formidable terrains awaited it elsewhere. And of course it had not remained. The nest might be many years old, as Miller knew, and the hawk young, mummified, might still be in it. On this sere, stifled valley floor, a crude dwelling, forsaken and untended, would remain intact for decades, with only dry wind to eat at it, grain by grain. Not, he thought, that any man could survive here, or even the Mexican wolf. And he had convinced himself of this when, at a long bend in the road, an outcropping of rock he had seen from some miles away was transformed by the muted glare into a low building of adobe and gray wood.

  Removing his foot from the accelerator, he wiped his forehead with the back of a cold hand. The black sedan, still in gear, whined down across a gravel flat of dead saguaros.

  The cantina lay fetched up against a ridge just off the highway, as if uprooted elsewhere and set down again, like tumbleweed, by some ill wind. Around it the heat rose and fell in shimmers; he thought it abandoned until he saw the hot glitter of a trash heap to one side. There were no cars or horses. Beside him, the older boy stared straight ahead, but
he gave Miller the feeling that his vision encompassed the cantina, on one side, and Miller himself on the other. Both boys were pressed so close to the far window that there was a space between them and Miller on the narrow seat, and a tension as tight as heat filled the small compartment. Miller opened his door abruptly and got out. When the two turned to watch him, he pointed at the cantina and waited. After a moment, the dark boy reached across the younger one to the door handle, and both slipped out on the far side.

  By the doorway, Miller paused and touched a hide stretched inside out upon the wall, allowing the Indians to draw near him and trail him into the cantina. He could not put away his dread, and the idea of leaving them alone with the car and equipment made him uneasy. But although they had moved forward, the two boys paused when he paused, like stalking animals. Heads partly averted, squinting in the violent sun of noon, they followed his hand upon the pelt, as if his smallest move might have its meaning for them.

  For a moment, indecisive, he inspected the sun-cracked skin, through the old wounds of which the grizzled hair protruded. The wolf had been nailed long ago against the wall, and although most of the nails had fallen away, it maintained its tortured shape on the parched wood. With the tar paper and tin, the hide now served to patch the shack’s loose structure. One flank and shoulder shifted in the wind from the Gran Desierto, and the claws of the right forefoot, still intact, stirred restlessly, a small, insistent scratching which Miller stifled by bending the claws into the slats. In doing so, he freed a final nail, and the upper quarter of the hide sagged outward from the wall, revealing the scraggy fur. Miller stooped to retrieve the nail. Half-bent, he stopped, then straightened, glancing back at the mute boys. Their narrow eyes shone flat, unblinking. He turned and moved through the doorless opening, stumbling on the sill.