Miss Pink Investigates- Part Four

by Gwen Moffat

  There was a drumming of hoofs and the sorrel lifted his head. A mile away a flash of white was moving fast through the Markow property and making for the slope: Pearl on her pinto pony. Miss Pink turned back to the pinyon but the owl had gone, quiet as a floating feather.

  Pearl arrived and stopped with a slither. The sorrel backed and filled. ‘You didn’t expect this on an evening ride,’ Pearl said.

  ‘It’s hard on the Markows. Did they get away all right? I saw a car leave.’

  ‘They’re fine. And I left Tammy helping Maxine prepare supper. My, that was some temper-tantrum, wasn’t it? Actually, Maxine says Jay went to town, probably felt like a drink with his pals. I guess he went on there after he saw Kristen in the village. Did you see any sign of Daryl yet?’

  ‘No. You don’t think he’s met with an accident?’

  ‘Not in this canyon. If he’d been thrown his horse would have come down. Don’t borrow trouble, as Thelma says. See what I mean about Tammy’s parents? Daddy spoils her rotten and Mom’s got a blind spot. Remember the red dress? Can you imagine anyone letting a kid go out in that? Tammy told me she got it in the thrift store.’

  They reached the top of the slope and traversed sideways above a wash that was the dry bed of Scorpion Creek. A horseman was coming down the wash. ‘Here’s Daryl,’ Pearl said. ‘You see, nothing happened to him.’

  Harper was a good-looking young fellow but not all that bright. He accepted the news of the family illness phlegmatically and showed no particular pleasure on learning that he wouldn’t have to do evening chores. No doubt he was thinking that with the boss gone there would be that much more work for the two hands. Nor did he seem bothered by the information that the Harpers had a house guest for an indeterminate period, and when they parted, unlike most Western men in the circumstances, he didn’t tell them to take care. He didn’t even watch them go.

  ‘Does he think we’re following him down?’ Miss Pink asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t attempt a guess at what Daryl thinks.’

  ‘He doesn’t tell us to be back before dark.’

  ‘Oh, cowboys: all they think about is one thing – well, two; the other one’s hunting. They’re all the same: Harper, Ramirez, Gafford. Next thing we know, Kristen’ll be pregnant.’

  ‘I wondered.’ They were pacing through the coarse sand. ‘Could it be,’ Miss Pink mused, ‘that Ada thinks the atmosphere at the Scotts’ is a little too heated for Tammy? That’s why she doesn’t want the child there, she feels she has to act in loco parentis.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Substituting for her mother. Her father too, for that matter. Would you say Ira is permissive or unworldly? He doesn’t seem bothered by the relationship between his man and Kristen.’

  ‘Why should he be? There’s nothing wrong with it. To hell with the age gap; girls grow up far more quickly than boys. Jay’s not taking advantage of that girl; she knows where she’s at.’

  ‘That’s not the way Clayton Scott looks at it.’

  ‘Fathers are all the same. Look at Ira and his little girl—’ Pearl stopped suddenly and Miss Pink, glancing sideways, saw that her face had darkened, although it could have been a trick of the light. For a moment Pearl closed her eyes under the scrutiny then, opening them, said coolly, ‘I would have chosen a good man for my kids—’ She grinned and now she was certainly flushed, but that could have been at the memory of a specific man. ‘I never found him,’ she went on, ‘so – no man, no kids. I like Michael Vosker,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘but that’s the story of my life, probably yours too: when you find the right guy it’s too late; someone else got there first. And I’m not into breaking up marriages; never was.’

  Miss Pink stared at her horse’s ears and wondered what was making Pearl garrulous. ‘Have you planned anything special for tomorrow?’ she asked casually.

  ‘I told Tammy I’d take her and Kristen to the fiesta in Palomares. Now I guess it’ll just be Tammy. Would you care to come?’

  ‘Thank you but I would like to do some birding. I’ve not had the change yet.’

  ‘That’s great.’ Pearl sounded relieved, making Miss Pink feel ancient, too old for a fiesta. ‘You can take the sorrel,’ she added, observing the other’s seat. ‘You have a good relationship with him. Where will you go?’

  ‘I shall go no further than Badblood and I shall keep to the trail.’

  ‘Right. So long as I know where you are. Not that there’s anything to worry about, but everyone has to come off some time, don’t they?’

  Chapter 7

  Early next morning, before Pearl was up, Miss Pink breakfasted, saddled her horse, and took the mesa trail to Badblood Wash. From there she crossed the higher ground to Rastus, climbed in and out of the canyon and followed the line up Midnight Mesa until she came to a jumble of rocks and junipers. She tied the sorrel to a tree, loosened the cinch and, putting a full canteen and sandwiches in her pack, she walked towards Slickrock Canyon.

  She came out on the rim a few hundred yards from the clump of alligator junipers. Below her the cottonwoods were brilliant in the sunshine and she could hear a chorus of birdsong from the trees and from rocks and gullies. Visibility was perfect, the peak of Angel’s Roost with its lone pinyon so clear that she realised she would have been visible had Kristen chanced to look that way three days ago. Now she saw, on the opposite side of the canyon, a break where small trees had rooted. That implied cracks and ledges, and she guessed that the route of descent would be there. She could see no cairns at the top but at this distance they would be indistinguishable from boulders. It was immaterial, she was here for the wildlife, not to discover how Jay Gafford reached Slickrock. It was Kristen’s route she was proposing to use – and in the knowledge that no one else would be on it today. From a flurry of telephoning last evening it transpired that Gafford and Kristen were going to the fiesta together, leaving Harper at the ranch. Maxine was in no shape to go to town and Tammy, evidently still sulking, had elected to stay with her. Miss Pink had Slickrock and its animals to herself.

  She came to the alligator junipers and looked over the edge, feeling all the trepidation of someone about to abseil from a Dolomite tower. In the event, the descent of the pink wall depended on route-finding, not on technical ability; what had appeared vertical from a distance was nothing more than a scramble, the handholds large and incut, and the pitches connected by slanting rakes. These diagonal stretches were quite wide and not nearly as exposed as she’d thought; there were pockets of gravel and prickly gardens of cacti, and wherever the sun’s rays touched the rock lizards sprawled with lifted heads trying to warm their blood and watch for hawks at the same time.

  Below her the cottonwoods thrummed like a distant city and there were movements in the canopy as birds flitted from tree to tree. She beamed with pleasure, felt a handhold crumble, and brought her mind back to essentials; one could meet disaster only a few feet above level ground. Even when she came to the bottom of the wall she kept a check on herself, alert for loose rocks underfoot. If she didn’t return to the village they would search for her first in Badblood Wash, and that was two miles away as the vulture flew.

  She paused on the talus slope outside the first trees and studied the ground. There were indentations in the loose surface and a tread-mark in firmer soil. She followed the tracks into the cottonwoods and found herself on a game trail where any human traces had been overlaid by the prints of deer. She took a closer look. The deer had fawns, one good print was little more than an inch in length. She pushed on, the vegetation forcing her to keep to the path, stooping stiffly under alder branches where Kristen would have ducked and the deer would have passed unhindered.

  She came to the creek, which was low but still running. She assumed that all the canyons had water in their upper reaches; it was when they reached permeable rock towards the escarpment that they disappeared underground to emerge in the line of springs along the foot of the cliffs. The water in Slickrock must support a host of anim
als. Those deer; if they were resident in a canyon no more than five miles long, how was it their population didn’t explode? There must be predators, and that meant lions. She followed the creek upstream, walking on its miniature sandspits, looking for the mark of big paws.

  Her excitement died when she found a boot-print; she’d be unlikely to see a lion where a man had been. It was the print of a small heel and a smooth sole and she should have been ready for it; she was convinced Gafford had been here three days ago. Damn, she thought, staring at the print, if there are lion they’re in the opposite direction, downstream. She became aware, above the chatter of water, of faint sounds that were different from what she was accustomed to in the wilderness. She held her breath, listening, sweat running into her eyes.

  The sounds intensified. They were the reverse of stealthy; whatever was making them wasn’t bothered about intruders. Vegetation rustled loudly, so loudly it sounded as if it were being trampled. Miss Pink’s eyes widened, her grip on reality slipping as the mind recalled images, of rhino, water buffalo: big dangerous beasts. It – they – snorted, slashed, screamed – no, not screamed … Out of the bushes: squealing, red-eyed, bristling, an animal came charging, a brute so startling it was a chimera. ‘Ho!’ shouted Miss Pink, her body galvanised with shock, waving her arms as if this were a charging bull: ‘Ho, ho, ho!’

  It stopped, pivoted and bolted back the way it had come. Frenetic squeals and the sound of a stampede told her that they had all gone, fleeing down the canyon. Her hands were pressed to her heart like a heroine in a melodrama. It was her first encounter with peccaries.

  When she recovered she left the creek to find out what they had been doing. There was a kind of glade where a tree had fallen leaving space for the sun to penetrate, and evidently something had been growing here which pigs enjoyed. It looked like a bed of catnip after cats have wallowed in it. The squashed plants had a strong smell, vaguely mint-like.

  An obvious trail led out of the glade and she found the print of the cowboy boot again. The path took her through a grove of willows to a crag of friable yellow rock with weeds at its base. For a moment she thought she had come to the end of the canyon but then she remembered that the headwall was a great amphitheatre with slabby rock and caves; this was merely an isolated outcrop.

  The path contoured the edge of the weeds to a pile of brushwood at the foot of the rock, a pile such as a packrat makes at the entrance to its nest. She prodded it with her toe and a clutch of twigs toppled and fell. She started back; there was a gleam in the depths. She listened for a rattle but heard only the bees in the willows. She looked for a stick, couldn’t see one, and stamped. The gleaming thing didn’t move. She kicked the brushwood aside to reveal a plastic bucket and a watering-can.

  She was utterly bemused. She picked them up, turned them over, studied the ground where they had been standing, but she could find no clue as to their purpose. She turned, blinking at the sunshine. What were watering-cans used for? You might use one to rinse off a car or a horse, but horses couldn’t be brought into Slickrock, or if they could she had seen no traces. What else, where else, how could a watering-can be used? She sat down, her elbows on her knees, and stared at nothing, her mind blank.

  Something caught her eye, something to do with the plants, but for a moment she couldn’t identify it and when she did she failed to grasp its significance. The plants were clones. In all the riotous growth in the bottom of the canyon, with its range of species and every gradation of age and size, this colony, no more than ten feet square, was not only uniform, it had eliminated every other species. It dawned on her that this was an alien plant, probably brought in by birds, and now she realised that another stand had been growing where the pigs had been feeding. The herd must have just discovered it and not yet reached this patch. A kind of mint, she’d thought, getting to her feet and crushing a leaf. It felt sticky and the plants were curiously tall. She stared at a growing point level with her eyes, or where the growing point should be; the main shoot was bent in a curve. And so were all the others, every one of them. She looked closer, parting the long green leaves – flowers appearing, she noticed: drab, like nettles. The growing shoot was fastened to the stem with a plastic tie: green, like the plant. She had stumbled on a marijuana garden.

  She replaced the bucket and watering-can and rebuilt the brushwood pile. Her tracks were distinctive: the cleated print of a walking boot. She pondered the difficulty of erasing every print without making more, and decided against it. The peccaries would probably discover the second plot before the growers returned, and the destruction of the crop, obviously by pigs, would outweigh other considerations. All the same she thought it prudent to leave the canyon without hanging about. This place, she recalled, was a box, and the discovery had induced in her a definite feeling of claustrophobia.

  She retraced her steps down the creek until her incoming track was obscured by a mass of those small cleft hoofprints which she had mistaken for those of fawns. The peccary herd had crossed the creek heading towards the opposite wall of the canyon, in fact towards that break which must provide access from the Markow property. She took to the bank which she had been following initially, found a game trail and continued down it, catching glimpses of that right-hand wall, brilliantly side-lit but, looking up it and with the pinyons throwing black shadows, no route was obvious. At least, she thought, there was no one on it, no one coming down to water his garden.

  She came to a marshy patch bright with red and yellow columbine. She’d seen no columbines on the way in. A hummingbird hung at her shoulder, attracted by her red neckerchief, then swooped away to a twig where its plumage caught the light, ruby and emerald. She strolled on happily and when her mind returned to the worrying subject of drugs, of the significance of this canyon, its remoteness, it occurred to her that she had been walking downstream for a long time.

  She left the trail and plunged through undergrowth towards the side of the canyon. The belt of woodland was less than a hundred yards wide but the under-storey was dense. She stumbled and sweated and tore her shirt, and emerged at the foot of the slope leading up to the wall – to find that the wall itself was a long way above, and the intervening space was occupied by extremely steep chutes and huge pinnacles of what looked like yellow clay. Some of the pinnacles had table-slabs tilted rakishly on their summits.

  She cast about in panic. She had seen no sign of this weird landscape from Angel’s Roost nor from the rim of the mesa. She recognised nothing. She was too low to see the flood-plain of the Rio Grande, even to see the mouth of the canyon. Angel’s Roost was hidden and the far wall of the canyon, the one on the Markow side: all obscured by the tall cottonwoods. Midnight’s rim was hidden by the nearest pinnacles, and what made the situation even more frightening was that the pale clay reflected the sun, and the heat was intense. She must have passed the foot of the exit route a long way back. There was nothing for it: she must return up the canyon until she intersected her tracks of the morning – and she must stay in the sun where she had a wider view of her surroundings.

  She found a stick and started the slow return. Soon her way was obstructed by a ragged reef with trees at its base. Now there were not only rocks and crevices to contend with but vegetation too, much of it thorny. She worked her way round the foot of the obstacle, parting plants with the stick, terrified of spraining an ankle. Several times, as she lowered herself carefully down the far side of a boulder, she heard scurrying and faint squeaks: rodent noises.

  A canyon wren burst into song, the notes fading on a dying fall; pigeons erupted from a tree and clattered downstream. Poised on a rock, Miss Pink followed their flight and became aware of a hole in the rock, and a tip below. It was an abandoned mine.

  There were baulks of timber scattered about, dried and splintery, but there were no tracks so far as she could see. She wasn’t tempted to explore; climbing down into an isolated canyon was a calculated risk but entering an old mine was madness; she knew her limitations. Besides,
she wasn’t interested in mines.

  She turned back to the canyon, glanced at the trees hoping for a game trail at the edge of the woodland, and saw more timber: upright and angled. The miner had built himself a cabin – and he would have cut a trail to provide access.

  There were brambles right up to the back wall of the cabin, which was in fairly good condition. There was an unglazed window looking down the canyon and a door facing upstream. The door was closed by a metal hook that fitted a staple on the jamb. She lifted the hook and the door swung inward silently.

  There was a bed under the window against the far wall. It was a double bed with a mattress. Straws protruded from holes in drab hessian. In the middle of the mattress, sunk heavily in a hollow, was a coiled snake. It was cream with black blotches like a leopard and it looked as big as a python. The head was towards her, the eyes open but the only movement was the delicate flick of the tongue.

  Miss Pink regarded the dark head and the thick neck – no bulging cheeks, so no venom sacs – and she stepped back carefully and waited.

  The snake uncoiled slowly and lowered itself to the floor, the length of it seeming to go on for ever, the tail flipping down to raise a spurt of dust, then sliding with infinite grace to vanish without haste into a large hole. She thought it was about eight feet long, decided that had to be an exaggeration but when she entered the cabin and saw the hollow in the mattress at close quarters and considered its weight she thought eight feet was probably correct after all.

  She explored the cabin. No rattler would remain in proximity to a gopher snake of those dimensions. She thought the place hadn’t been used by men for a long time. There were old rat droppings on the floor and the mattress and on top of shelves in a corner. On the shelves there were some open rusted cans, one containing nails and tacks, another something wrapped in rag which turned out to be a lump of hard putty. There was a cupboard with dusty mugs and plates and old-fashioned billy-cans, blackened with soot. There was a screw-top jar full of large kitchen matches. Behind the cupboard was a sheet of glass; the miner had been intending to glaze the window.