the Lonesome Gods (1983)

by L'amour, Louis

  At daybreak I was up and dressed, going outside to saddle my horse before Jacob had started breakfast. Monte joined me, and the Indians were already trooping into the yard, bringing their packhorses to tie to the corral bars.

  As they rode, I followed, trailing behind. Glancing toward the store, I saw four saddled horses at the water trough.

  Whose horses? Why? It was unusual at this hour, and the sight of them disturbed me. The Indians, too, were noticing them and talking among themselves. As the last of them disappeared down the trail into another clump of mesquite, I glanced back again.

  A man had walked out from the store and was shading his eyes after us. It looked like Fletcher.

  My thoughts returned to Los Angeles, and I wondered where Miss Nesselrode was, and Aunt Elena.

  Aunt Elena, who had never been married, a strange, lonely, yet lovely woman, so tall, so remote, so very quiet.

  What did she think to herself when she was alone? What did she think of that brother who had kept her so? And Miss Nesselrode. Who was she? Had she ever been married? Was the story of a lost love and a broken heart true? What was it that drove her? And was it her loneliness that caused her to reach out to me?

  Whatever the reason, I was grateful. She had given me a home when I had none, had given me something of stability, of understanding, of sympathy, and of assurance, too. Just to see her standing alone, so quiet in her simple yet so elegant gowns, smiling gently. One would never suspect the iron that was in her soul, the cool efficiency of her mind.

  Shc had guided me a little, suggested a little, and had helped me to bridge that gap from being a boy to becoming a young man.

  What of her? What did she really want? Security, yes. No doubt of that. She had spoken to me of our being alike, of each being left alone, and there had been a hint of sadness, a hint of rejection, a hint that somewhere behind her there had been those who rejected her because of lack of money, of position, of whatever. This was supposition, but it was a possibility and might account for much.

  Whatever the reason, she had gambled her little money on a fast trip west, had come to California believing in it, determined to make a place for herself there.

  Was it because she had been known in the East? Had she come west to escape all that? To start anew where nobody could point a finger or demean her because of what she was or had been?

  Whatever else she was, she was certainly a woman of fine courage and of no uncommon ability.

  Riding along a desert trail gave one time to think, to consider. Talking became difficult because most of the trails were for riding single file, and talk also created thirst. So one rode and dreamed or thought or simply dozed.

  Overhead flew an optimistic buzzard. In the distance was a curious coyote, and far behind, barely visible against the sun-glaring sky, lay a dust trail.

  A very thin trail, hanging like a mute question mark against the sky.

  Francisco was leading now, and Jacob fell back, waiting for me to come up to him. I turned in my saddle and nodded toward the rear. "Lots of travel these days," I commented.

  "Hunters," he agreed. "I wonder what they expect to find?"

  The sun grew hotter, dust devils pirouetted across the desert, and the distance created enchanting blue lakes that lost themselves as we drew nearer.

  Sweat trickled down my face. I mopped my cheeks with a bandanna and wiped the sweatband of my hat.

  Far ahead, unbelievably tall in the blue water of a mirage, was a man on horseback.

  Francisco turned in his saddle and pointed toward the still black figure, so far off, yet so visible.

  "RamOn." he said. "You will see."

  Chapter 32

  What do you know of this RamOn?" I asked. "He is Ramon." Francisco added no comment for several steps and then he said, "He is a shaman, a man of magic." He paused again. "He is also a fine horseman."

  We drew closer. RamOn did not move, simply sat his horse, waiting. Was he young or old? I could not guess at a distance, but he sat very erect, and his sombrero was hanging from his saddle horn.

  "He will know where are the horses," Francisco said. As we approached, the mirage of blue lake retreated but Ramon remained where he was.

  "He knows you," Francisco said at last.

  Ram6n? I knew no Raman.

  He was slim and he looked tall. It was not until he dismounted that I saw he was not tall, but of less than medium height. He wore a shirt open at the neck and something suspended from a rawhide cord that was behind his shirt. He wore buckskin breeches and a wide leather belt. He had a knife in a scabbard at his hip, but no pistol. A rifle was in the scabbard made of fringed buckskin and beaded.

  "I am Ramon," he said.

  "And I am Johannes Verne," I replied. "This"--I turned in my saddle to indicate them--"is Jacob Finney and Monte McCalla. The others you know."

  "I do not."

  Surprised, I added, "This is Francisco. The others are Alejandro, Martin, Diego, Jaime, and Selmo."

  He looked from one to the other as I mentioned their names. His hair was nearly white, his eyes intensely black, his skin a smoky brown, more like East Indians my father had pointed out than our own Indians.

  It had become a custom for Indians to take Spanish names, although they had their own, often known only to their families. The custom had no doubt begun at the missions, when the fathers, for their own convenience, had given the Indians Spanish names.

  Ramon turned his horse about and rode away, leading us.

  Francisco came up beside me. "He does not look like a Cahuilla," I said.

  "He no Cahuilla. I said it. He is RamOn, and that is all."

  "I do not know him."

  Francisco eased himself in the saddle. "I did not say you know him. I said he knows you."

  It was a difference, of course, but how did he know me, and from where? From when?

  He stayed well ahead of us, riding a line-back dun with black mane and tail as well as black hairs around the hooves. The horse had a thicker neck than most horses I'd seen, and looked strong.

  Throughout the long afternoon we rode, and Ram6n did not stop until suddenly he turned from the trail and led the way into some tumbled boulders. There, in a small cove almost surrounded by giant rocks, was a small pool of water, and water trickling into it from among the rocks.

  He stepped down, drank from the spring, and watched us do likewise. When I got up and wiped the drops from my mouth, he was looking at me.

  "Johannes of the desert," he said.

  "Perhaps," I acknowledged, and then added dryly, "Let the desert say."

  We made camp, each tending to his own horse, Selmo preparing a meal.

  "The horses," RamOn said, "will be here." He drew a quick map in the earth, indicating where we were, where the horses would be, and the trail between. "Here"--he put a finger on a spot--"are mountains, and there is a pass, very narrow. A trail leads to the sea." He glanced at me. "To Los Angeles.

  "All this"--he gestured to the north--"is the valley of San Joaquin." He gestured to his right and east. "There is desert"--he glanced at me again--"the desert you crossed."

  He looked at me again. "How many horses?"

  "Four hundred, if possible. Four hundred of the best." "It is many."

  "We will need many. People will be coming, and they will need horses."

  "No doubt." He looked over at me. "You can read? You can read books?"

  "I can."

  "I have never seen a book," he said, a note of wistfulness in his tone.

  "The wilderness is a book," I said. "It has many pages." "Yes," he agreed, "but the pages are never quite the same."

  "You live near here?"

  "Wherever," he said. "My home is where I lay my head."

  "But your family? Your people?"

  "All gone. I am alone." After a moment, when the fire was crackling and a bit of smoke rising, he said, waving a hand toward the desert, "Out there was a city. When I was small, it was my home. There was a shaking of th
e earth. A small shake, then a very strong shake, and much came crashing down. There were other shocks. For days the earth shook. Some of us ran away to the mountains, my father among them, taking us.

  "The rains came, and the winds. The winter came, and the bitter cold. With my father I went to the ruins to find food, clothing, weapons. Others would not go, for they were afraid.

  "We had grain stored for the future. We took it. We returned to the mountains, and my father was killed for the food we had. My brother, my sister, and two others ran away and hid.

  "It was very cold. We found a small hollow among the hills where there were two springs. Below the hollow was a stream. We hid there and were not found. The winter was very cold, but we dug into the hill and built a shelter before it.

  "Sometimes when hunting for food we would see others, but we did not trust them, so we hid and watched them. They did not fare as well as we, for some of them had never hunted."

  "Indians?" I said. "Who did not hunt?"

  "They lived in the town," he said. "Do your people hunt who live in towns?

  "We built another place. It was up a narrow canyon among the trees, and there was the second spring. We did not go there, keeping it in reserve. There were nine of us. "In the spring, one was killed by a spotted cat, what you call a jaguar. There were many around here in those years. Now it has been years since I have seen even one. "Three of us went back to the town. The walls were of mud brick and they had fallen. Now they had returned to earth. Only a few were left. We picked around, but there was little to find.

  "The fields were gone, some washed away, others buried in dust.

  "When we came back, two more were dead and somebody had been there to kill them. The others had retreated to our other place and had hidden there."

  Food was passed around, and we ate. He ate sparingly, and spoke no more of those bygone years. How long ago? I did not know, but the more I saw of him, the older I believed him to be.

  On the second day after that first camp with Ram6n we came to where the horses were. We saw them out on the grassy plain, thousands of them, and for a time we sat our horses in the shade of trees along the mountainside and watched them. Our eyes picked out this one and that, judging, by the way they moved, their grace and speed.

  In droves of one hundred or even as many as two hundred they fled across the plain, wheeled, and turned back, manes and tails flowing. They would come charging across the plain and come within a hundred yards or less of us before pausing, heads up, studying us to see what we were, then wheeling and rushing away like the wind.

  It was a magnificent sight, and nothing I had seen equaled it. They seemed to flow across the plain like a varicolored wave, with often as many as a thousand horses within sight at one time, but each divided into smaller herds. A few of them stood out. One, a splendid black stallion with one white stocking, must have weighed a thousand pounds or more, whereas most of the horses were somewhat smaller.

  One particular herd, numbering well over a hundred, wheeled and darted about us several times, as though challenging us to a race, but we made no effort to accept the challenge or to draw near, wanting them to become accustomed to our presence. They showed no evidence of ever having been chased, although Selmo suddenly pointed at a fine-looking bay who wore a brand on his hip. The area through which we now rode, walking our horses and studying the land, was covered with grasses. Once, nearing the mountains, we saw a herd of elk that must have numbered nearly a thousand, and as they moved, it was a veritable sea of horns. Some of these seemed as large as the horses themselves. Toward nightfall, coming up to the place where we would camp, Monte killed one that would dress out to several hundred pounds of meat.

  We saw several wolves, not at all afraid, for they had not seen our like before. They seemed to be following the elk to pull down any calves they could find straying from the herd or lagging behind. They were big gray wolves, moving like ghosts along the flanks of the elk herd. RamOn led us again to our camp, this time beside a small but swift-running stream, several acres of grass and near the stream a spot of less than an acre surrounded by tall pines and a few scattered oak, although we were almost too high for the latter.

  We staked our horses on the grass after watering them, and went about preparing our own camp. With Ramon and Francisco I walked out to look over the area.

  After a minute, Jacob walked out to join us. "This is their watering place." RamOn pointed to a bunch of tules further along the stream. "The water spreads out and sinks into the ground over there."

  Jacob studied the long sweep of the valley, the trees, and the brush. "We could build our corral to straddle the stream so they'd have water, filling in with brush between the trees, and some poles to fence them in."

  We walked along, studying the lay of the ground. Our plan was to build a wide-mouthed funnel down which they would go to water, a funnel that would narrow at the corral itself and which we could close off once enough horses were gathered.

  "Take us a while," Jacob said finally, "but we can pull back to camp each night and let them come down to water if they like. And if they get thirsty enough, they will come.

  "They'll leave when they wish, and they will get over being scared. Finally, we'll just close them in. We should be able to get two, three hundred horses in there all to onct."

  It was not all that easy, but we didn't expect it to be. Going out there with axes, we cut brush and filled the spaces between the trees. Here and there it needed poles. We took our time, working steadily, pausing for coffee now and again or simply to tell stories. We could see the horses from time to time, and when evening began to come, we'd stop work so our movements and the ring of the axes wouldn't frighten the game.

  We were not thinking only of the horses, for in dry country water belongs to all living things, and we moved off from the creek to our own place, farther up. Then the horses would come in, moving along slowly but warily, alert for any movement. Along with them were a few elk and a deer or two.

  Sometimes, while it was still light, we'd lie up on a rock and watch them come. Wolves would come, too, and in the morning sometimes there would be bear tracks. Occasionally we killed an elk or a deer, but never close by. One of the boys, often it was me, would ride off a few miles and do our shooting there so as not to scare the game.

  It was hard work, but the air was clear, the sky blue, and the days went by like the drifting clouds, so we scarcely noticed they were gone. Finally our corral was ready, and the drift fence, too.

  We'd made a swinging gate of poles and brush that we swung wide to one side, and then we rode away up the valley. We wanted not only the horses that had been coming there, but a good many more.

  We started from ten miles up, the lot of us, spread out across the valley, and after we'd fixed ourselves a spot of grub and drunk some coffee we rode out across the country, turned and began to drift, walking our horses down toward our corral.

  This was wild stock, but we'd been moving around and not bothering them, so they hadn't, after the first day or so, paid us much mind.

  Now, spread out maybe a half-mile apart, we started drifting, and they moved ahead of us. After all, this was their country, and most of them had lived their lives here. Wild horses are, more than you'd believe, inclined to be homebodies. They didn't like to get too far from where they were born. They knew that country, and if driven away, would come back.

  Gradually the valley narrowed, and gradually we cowboys moved in closer together. Not so much as they'd notice at first, but by the end of the first hour we were only a hundred yards or so apart. Ahead of us the horses were bunching a little, and here and there some wild old stallion was beginning to be bothered by it.

  Once in a while one would stop, stand head-up looking around, but the way ahead was clear and we were coming along behind. We didn't seem to be anything to worry about, but they just didn't want us getting too close.

  At the last, just as he went through toward the water, that black stallion decide
d he didn't like that crowd of horses up ahead and wheeled. He made a dash for the opening, but Alejandro and Martin were already swinging the gate closed.

  It had been easy, just too easy. Later, when they had become wary of men, it would prove much harder, but we had them. We didn't know how many, but we guessed around three hundred horses.

  There was grass enough for a few days, and there was water.

  Chapter 33

  It will never be that easy again," Monte commented. "They just aren't used to people. Nobody's tried to catch them before."

  "And they always drink from that stream," Jacob agreed. We sat our horses, studying them. We would have to cull them, turn the rejects back to their freedom, and then start breaking the others.

  Watching them from where we were, we could see a few that could be turned out, but by and large they were in good shape, a well-built bunch of horses. "Give 'em a few years," Monte said, "and you'll look a long time to find any horses you want to keep. We'll cut this bunch for culls, and the next bunch, too. Then along will come some other wild-horse hunters, and they'll cut for the best stock, too. It won't be no time at all until all you find out there will be culls."

  "Do you suppose Miss Nesselrode was thinking of that?" I wondered.

  Jacob shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. I've given up trying to second-guess that woman. I just know that seven times out of ten she's right, and when she makes a mistake, she swallows it and never tries to blame anybody else." The quicker we could get rid of the culls, the better off we'd be, as there would be that much more grass for what remained. We stayed away, watching from a distance, letting them get settled down.

  "Funny thing about wild horses. Folks think it's the stallion who keeps them together. It's true that he herds them around, fights off varmints and any other stallions who want to take over, but there's something more going for them. Take away the stallion, and the others will fight to get back together.