The Deer Stalker

by Zane Grey

  Soon, dusk mantled the desert, obscuring all save the high points. At dark, Conroy reached the Gap trading post, which belonged to Mobray. It got its name from a huge gap in the red barrier wall that shut out the north. Mobray was out collecting more Indians for the drive, as most of those who had been gathered there had already left in disgust. His wife and the young missionary who helped the trader gave the travelers supper and lodgings.

  It was a lonely, wind-swept desert place, haunted by coyotes and visited by lean, dark-faced Navajos. Eburne made his bed out on the porch of the trading post; and found sweetness in the moan of the cold wind, and the white stars, and the bleating of the sheep.

  They got started next morning before sunrise. The road climbed, at length, out of the sand and gravel, up through foothills of clay to a cedared ridge. Here, at another trading post, they found one of McKay’s trucks broken down and empty. Eburne could not find out what had become of the driver and contents, but he assumed they had been taken along with the others. The incident, however, recalled his forebodings of disaster.

  For hours after that, the car bowled along, now slow and then fast, upgrade through a narrow valley dominated by the jagged Echo Cliffs towering on the north. It seemed an endless road to Eburne. When they climbed out, at length, to the uplands once more, he saw again what he considered the most wonderful scene in all that country.

  To the west, across the ridged ocean of bare, grassy desert, billowy and swelling, rose a horizon-long black and white plateau, standing up and out with most startling contrast to other landmarks. It was a vast cape, jutting out from the upflung red walls of Utah, and it extended far to the southward, breaking off abruptly in a wild and grand promontory that had been carved into the semblance of a riding saddle. The white was snow, the black was timber. In all the sweep of desert, these were the only colors not the stark, flaming ones of naked rock. How it thrilled Thad Eburne! For that black creeping escarpment, with its gleams and patches of white, was Buckskin Forest. If he could have turned abruptly to the left and traveled as a crow flies, he would have reached Buckskin Forest and the Saddle in an hour. But that was not possible. Somewhere in the rolling, deceiving desert between here and there yawned the upper reaches of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.

  From the northern end of Buckskin there swept and zigzagged, by mighty and mounting steps, the leagues and leagues of the Vermillion Cliffs. On Eburne’s right, the Echo Cliffs turned and notched the blue and ran for thirty miles to meet the opposite barrier, closing the apex of a triangle built as if for the gods of earth and sky. That triangle sloped toward the apex, descending first by sweeping undulations, grassy as a pasture, to grow wild with rocky steppes and at last be broken and bisected by a black wandering line—the Grand Canyon.

  It was a scene of unparalleled grandeur, having no counterpart in all that vast canyon country. As the car wound down the rough, tortuous road, the miles slowly fell behind this triangle of upland country, and the two sides of colossal walls magnified all their striking characteristics. Distance had lent a purple-hazed enchantment, but proximity lifted the unscalable ramparts and made clear the true proportions of that incredible notch at the apex and that wandering black line, which grew to be a walled chasm.

  All afternoon the car bumped down the road that seemed always about to end and yet appeared to be endless. And as the sun slanted behind, losing heat and brilliance, the vivid reds and golds and purples took on supernatural effulgence. Eburne found the scene in harmony with the thoughts that ran through his mind. He reveled in the sublimity of the natural wonders. But how puerile were they compared to the heights and depths of the new emotions that he had come to know in the last few months.

  Sunset found the car winding under the denuded red wall, around into the split where the Colorado River broke through. The river there and its environment were what might have been expected from the approach. Across the river, in an oval valley, nestled a ranch, strangely beautiful to the eye weary of desert reds and grays. This was Lee’s Ferry, famous for once having been the refuge of the noted Mormon, John D. Lee, instigator of the dread Mountain Meadow Massacre.

  The ferry was a huge scow, operated on a cable and moved by the current. The river was so low that a wide sand bar extended halfway across the channel. To reach the scow, the car had to plow through mud and sand. Once aboard, the muddy red water swirled and roared and bellowed around the boat. When Eburne stepped ashore on the far side, he turned to see other cars waiting, and still others creeping like snails down under the beetling bluff. As dusk fell they were still coming.

  The keeper of the ferry and an employee of the government lived at the edge of the oasis in flat stone houses. Here Eburne engaged meals for all, and what rooms were available. Most of the company of deer drivers would have to sleep outside on the ground.

  The last of the trucks did not cross until late at night. Thad was told that the horses for the picture people, which had been sent on ahead in charge of cowboys, could not be ferried over in the dark.

  All during Eburne’s waking hours, and it seemed his slumbers, too, he was conscious of the changing but incessant roar of the river, now full and clear, then sullen and low, murmuring, moaning, thundering, but always sinister and threatening. It was an evil river, a destroyer, a merciless stream of water and silt, pouring the turbid flood through the black great walls! White stars blazed like beacons on the lofty rims.

  Eburne, with a promise of reaching camp that night, urged all to an early start next morning. They crossed the peaceful oasis, a place to make travelers want to linger, and turned westward along the river bluff, then out on the lifting barren desert, on under the Vermillion Cliffs, creeping around the sharp curves, winding among grotesque monuments carved by wind and sand. It did not seem the same world that Eburne had faced the day before; but what the difference was he could not define. Now they were rounding stupendous corners of canyon wall, sky-high, cracked and seamed, with tottering ledges, vast sections of weathered talus, cliffs and caves, rims and crags, all rust-stained, gold-banded, dyed in vermilion hues.

  Noon found them turning the last vast jutting wall. Before them a gray bowl-shaped valley lay open and bare, dotted by lonesome cattle, drawing the eye to rising flats and slopes that soon took on a tinge of snow and spotted patches of verdure. Above, grand, glittering, black as basalt, stretched Buckskin Mountain.

  By three o’clock, Conroy had crossed the Valley. Looking back, Eburne could make out a dotted line of cars and trucks doggedly hanging on.

  A little farther on they encountered the second of McKay’s trucks. This one had lost a wheel. The bags of grain, bales of hay and wire, and boxes of supplies stood in a pile beside the trail. Two men were camped there on guard. They reported that the driver and his helper had gone on with others to fetch a truck back to pick up the supplies. Eburne could not get any more information out of them.

  “Where are you from, anyhow?” he queried impatiently. “You did not come with this outfit.”

  “We’re from Fredonia,” was the reply.

  “Where’s your car?”

  “Didn’t have no car. We was ridin’ hosses,” added the older of the two, waving a hand toward the desert.

  Thad thought this peculiar, to say the least. He did not see saddles in camp or horses out on the desert.

  “I’ll send a truck back for this stuff before dark,” he said briefly.

  “Them drivers said they’d have to go to Kanab for a truck.”

  Eburne pondered over this circumstance while his car climbed the last slope of the valley and turned west under the looming bulk of the black mountain. Here for miles the road was straight and level. Conroy made fast time. But soon there followed another gradual ascent, and then a beautiful sage flat, fragrant and purple, and after that gullies and ridges, until at last the cedars.

  In another hour Eburne was gazing up at the banded rims of the Cocks Combs, gold with the last rays of the setting sun. Then came thicker beds of sage and clu
mps of cedar and patches of buckbrush rising out of deer-tracked snow!

  The road ended at the head of a gulch, at a point that was known as Warm Springs, the site of the most remote ranger station on the preserve. There was a fine spring and pool of water. All about were signs of a large number of deer in the vicinity.

  The ranger chose a camping place for the motion picture people on top of the cedar ridge above the ranger cabins. It was an ideal place to camp, even in cold weather. The view on all sides was something calculated to still the voice and dim the eye. Behind the camp rose the long, graceful slope, dotted with cedars, white-aisled between, reaching to black foothills that stepped up to the foot of the gold-barred, black-fringed rim. Buckskin loomed there, beckoning but unscalable. The level rim stretched on under the sunset-flushed sky to the great gap called the Saddle. This was the break through which McKay expected to drive the deer.

  Like a colossal opened fan, the cedar ridges and slopes fell softly away from the mountain, spreading down and down to the level gray desert, in whose deceptive floor appeared a vast rent, as sharp and zigzagged as a streak of lightning. This rent was the Grand Canyon. It disappeared under the south point of Buckskin. Beyond, on three sides of the horizon, rose the dim purple walls, the cliffs of Utah to the north and the cliffs of Arizona to the east and south. The vast panorama made a noble setting for McKay’s deer drive—a wild and gigantic stage for the romantic drama which was soon to take place wherever man was to help nature undo some of the ills which man and nature together had brought upon the great herd of gentle creatures who lived there.

  Thad and Tine pitched Conroy’s tent in a sheltered place in the lee of a clump of cedars. Then they gathered wood for a campfire. By the time this work was done, darkness had set in. There was nothing else to do but wait for the cars and trucks. Eburne remembered that Blakener was to be at Kane. It would be necessary to send him word by one of the drivers in the morning.

  The cars arrived in fairly good time, but the trucks were late. The motion picture company had a cook and an abundance of supplies. When they sat down to a ten o’clock supper, they surely were a gay and hungry crowd. Eburne enjoyed eating with them. It was midnight before all of the tents were up and beds unrolled. As Eburne stretched out, weary and aching from the jolting car ride, he was too tired even to let his thoughts range as they were wont to do to a girl who had remained behind in Flagstaff because he had told her to.

  He seemed to shut his eyes only to open them at dawn. Rosy light shone into his tent. The day promised to be glorious. There was no frost, but the air had a keen nip in it and was redolent of sweet sage and cedar. He got up to begin his tasks, the most of which for the present would be waiting.

  After breakfast he went in search of McKay’s first truck, which had been ahead of the two that had broken down and should have reached Warm Springs yesterday. It had not arrived. Not a man there had seen any sign of a truck. This occasioned Eburne more reflection, and all the conclusion he could come to was that this truck had gone off the road somewhere to the north of Kane.

  “That truck is supposed to have two loads of supplies and four men from the trucks that broke down. Looks a bit fishy to me!” said Eburne to himself. “McKay surely hired a bunch of sapheads.”

  McKay and his party had been scheduled to arrive the day before from across the canyon. Thad had not really expected them. It would not surprise him if they were days late. The ranger was primed for disaster. This deer drive had as its incentive a tragedy; it had begun tragically, and so would it end. But as he reviewed the chain of blunders and disasters, he became all the more determined to see the venture through to the end.

  He walked around among the cedars adjacent to camp until he was tired. He saw numerous deer, and it struck him they were unusually wild for Buckskin deer. They were thin, too, and in poor condition. All the buckbrush he examined had been eaten bare, torn and stripped as high as a tall deer could reach. This variety of browse had been practically destroyed. Deer tracks were extraordinarily thick in the patches of snow throughout the cedars, but most of them were old. A large herd of deer evidently had been watering at Warm Springs until recently.

  The next day was much like the day before, but late in the afternoon McKay with his outfit arrived.

  “What a job!” he roared when he saw Eburne. “Two feet of snow on Tanner’s trail. We lost three horses an’ a lot of supplies. Had to relay across the river an’ up to the Saddle. Where are my trucks?”

  “Two broke down and the third seems to be lost,” reported Eburne and briefly told the particulars as he knew them.

  McKay cursed roundly, but in the main took the matter as a man to whom difficulties were omnipresent and who always came out of everything in the end. While his tired men pitched camp, he went over to try to induce the drivers of the motion picture company trucks to go back after his supplies and the Indians. They refused to start till morning.

  “My brother Bill is comin’ from Kanab with a truckload of stuff,” said McKay. “I sent him word to fetch somePiutes an’hoss wranglers. He ought to be here. An’ my son’s got another truck on the way, or was to be. If we had thet wire we could put it up in a few days. Reckon there’s some bad breaks I missed seein’ before. Wal, I’ll sure drive them deer, dinged if I don’t.”

  Eburne reflected sadly that poor old McKay had missed many things which had been plain as daylight to the deer stalker. He was a practical miner and oil driller, cattle man and horse dealer, yet visionary in the extreme when it came to details.

  Next day brought developments exasperating to McKay and more than ever indicative to Eburne. The supplies that had been guarded by the two men whom Eburne had accosted were gone. So were the men. It was impossible to tell that day whether or not McKay’s first truck had picked them up. But when it finally arrived at the camp, with the two drivers in charge unable to give any information about either the missing supplies or the other drivers, the situation began to look serious to McKay.

  Another day passed. That evening the truck that had gone to the Gap for the supplies and the Indians supposed to be there returned empty. The driver could not locate where the supplies had been taken, and Mobray would not be ready with the Indians for another day. So four wonderful calm and clear days passed by, utterly wasted. To Eburne it seemed to be tempting fate.

  Late that night the cowboys with the troop of horses for the motion picture people arrived, all footsore and hungry. McKay had assured these men that one of his trucks would stop to leave grain and food with them. Nothing of the kind had happened—the drivers had not even had such instructions—and but for the kindness of the people at Mobray’s, Lee’s Ferry, and Kane, the cowboys would never have been able to complete the journey. They were disgruntled and pessimistic about the whole affair. Somebody at Kane had informed them there would be no deer drive.

  Next morning, Thad was glad to see Blakener come riding in with Eburne’s outfit.

  “What made you so late, old-timer?” was the ranger’s greeting.

  “I was waitin’ for you at Kane,” replied Blakener with some irritation. “Some fellow in a car met Wilcox an’ said he’d seen you at the Gap. You were goin’ back to Flag. So I waited for some word.”

  Eburne threw up his hands. This might not be the last straw, but it was enough.

  “Blakener, there’s a lot of underhand work going on,” he declared. “It’s either just cussed maliciousness, or else it’s pretty cunning propaganda. Have you run into anything queer?”

  “Utah is against McKay’s drive,” replied Blakener. “The cattlemen are against it. All the loafin’ riders an’ horse hunters are against it. But I can’t put my finger on any deliberate proof of their hinderin’ it.”

  “Well, I’d gamble I can,” said Eburne shortly. “But what’s the use? You can’t get an idea into McKay’s thick head. Not to stay longer than you’re talking! I can do nothing but stick along and see what happens.”

  “Thad, there’ll be a lot of out
fits comin’ today to be on hand when the drive starts.”

  “They are in for disappointment.”

  “Wasn’t this the day McKay set?”

  “As far as I know it’s no different from December first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and so on. This is the tenth. McKay assured the picture people he’d absolutely start today. But the Indians aren’t here, the cowboys from Kanab are not here, the wire isn’t here.”

  “Well, Thad, don’t fret about it,” replied Blakener philosophically. “You’ve sure done your best for the deer herd.”

  “I’m terribly disappointed,” returned Thad. “I wanted to see this drive go through. We’ve had perfect weather. It can’t last.”

  “Accordin’ to the ache of my old bones there’s a storm makin’ now,” said Blakener.

  Eburne saddled his horse and, glad to be in the saddle once more, he rode out into the cedars on the scouting trip he had promised himself. First he headed down the slope toward the open sage flats. There were a few inches of snow covering most of the ground, and drifts in shady places. Tracks in snow were the same as printed words to him. There had been a considerable number of deer along this slope a week or ten days past. But they had moved. Thad found only a few fresh signs. Dead deer were numerous, most of which appeared to have starved to death. Some were bucks that had been gored to death in fighting.

  When he reached the edge of the cedars, the snow failed, making tracks difficult to see, except in soft, bare earth. Everywhere he rode, the buckbrush appeared to have received the brunt of the hungry deer attack. Eburne rode south a mile and then turned west, encountering practically the same evidence he had already noted, except that he espied more deer. They ran off as if they had recently been shot at. Soon after that he espied tracks of shod horses. They did not appear to be fresh, and at length he dismounted to make sure. Some that he examined were fully ten days old. This did not cause the ranger any concern until after about an hour or so he began to be convinced that they were too numerous to have been made by rangers. There were no cattle on this slope. The only cattle on that end of the preserve were a few wild steers on Saddle Mountain. Sometimes cowmen rode out there to get some fresh beef, but these tracks had not been made by cowmen.