NOT JUST ANY MAN – CHAPTER 25

The following material is an extract from NOT JUST ANY MAN, A Novel of Old New Mexico, Copyright © 2018 Loretta Miles Tollefson. Published by Palo Flechado Press, Santa Fe, NM

A Note about Spanish Terms: This novel is set in northern New Mexico and reflects as much as possible the local dialect at that time. Even today, Northern New Mexico Spanish is a unique combination of late 1500s Spanish, indigenous words from the First Peoples of the region and of Mexico, and terms that filtered in with the French and American trappers and traders. I’ve tried to represent the resulting mixture as faithfully as possible. My primary source of information was Rubén Cobos’ excellent work, A Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish (University of New Mexico Press, 2003). Any errors in spelling, usage, or definition are solely my responsibility.

CHAPTER 25

The reduction in Ewing Young’s forces shifts his group’s momentum once again. A smaller party makes better time and there’s more beaver to divide between the remaining men. Although there still aren’t many beaver overall. Milton Sublette shakes his head bitterly and Michel Robidoux looks anxious, but there’s little real grumbling until the canyon of the Colorado becomes so deep that its shadowed sides keep parts of the river in almost perpetual darkness. Granite walls tower above it and allow little space for travel along the river. The water churns around massive rocks in the riverbed and the trappers can hear the sullen roar of rapids upstream.

The men’s disquiet comes to a head the morning they wake to fog so thick they can’t see their own feet, much less the top of the canyon. They’re camped on the south bank, in a spot slightly wider than usual, where there’s browse for the animals beside the river. The water runs a little more quietly here, because the channel is wider. The fog has dropped heavily in the night, reaching from one granite wall to the other.

As Gerald opens his eyes and blinks in confusion, Milton Sublette and George Yount rise simultaneously from their blankets on opposite sides of the fog-muted campfire. They loom out of the whiteness like two young giants, hair on end and rifles at the ready. Their heads turn wildly. “I can’t see!” Sublette roars.

Overhead, a stone rumbles down an invisible slope. Then there’s a crunching sound on the upstream bank. Sublette whirls and aims into the fog.

“Hold your fire!” Ewing Young snaps. A mule’s head appears from the mist. Gerald, still in his blankets, suppresses a chuckle.

Sublette glares at Young. “How was I supposed to know?” He jerks his rifle barrel at the white dampness, which seems to be getting thicker by the minute. “Can’t see a damn thing.”

The figure of a man resolves itself from the fog, leading a mule with one hand and flailing the other as if trying to beat the mist into submission. It’s Michel Robidoux.

“Could of been a Mojave,” Sublette grumbles.

“That’s why you need to hold your fire,” Young says.

“And get killed!” Sublette snaps. But he lowers his rifle and turns away.

Robidoux moves to the fire. “Sacrebleu, it is impossible that we stay down here like this,” he grumbles.

The normally taciturn Richard Campbell speaks from his blankets. “Ach, there’s no beaver to speak of and it’s lookin’ like this canyon’s only goin’ to get deeper. We’ll be forced to go up top soon enough.”

“We need to get out now,” Sublette says flatly.

Young’s eyes narrow. “Who’s leadin’ this outfit?”

Sublette’s chin lifts. “I’m a free trapper.”

“Then go if you want to.” Young jerks his head down river. “Go and find Smith and LeDuc and them. Head on out on your own and see how far you get, just you and your mule. At least Smith had some idea of where he was going.”

“I ain’t that kind of fool,” Sublette growls. He turns to Robidoux. “Better watch goin’ off on your own in this fog. It ain’t likely you could find your way back.”

Robidoux shrugs and waves a hand at the canyon walls. “That I could stray far is also unlikely,” he says. “The canyon itself embraces us.”

“That’s for sure,” Sublette grumbles.

“I suppose the canyon and the fog provide as much protection as they do danger,” James Pattie says. He looks up, toward the invisible top of the mist-enshrouded granite walls. “No one up there can see us down here.”

“We can’t see them neither,” Sublette says. “And there ain’t no way out of here that I can see, except up.” He glares at Young, inviting a response. “Unless we follow this damn river to its source, wherever that is. Whether there’s any damn beaver on it or not.” He turns away in disgust. “Some trappin’ expedition this is turning out to be.”

Young doesn’t answer. He’s staring up at the cliffs, first one side, then the other. The fog is slowly lifting away from the water and the canyon walls. The rock overhang here is so deep that he can’t see more than fifty feet up. “I saw deer tracks last evening,” he says thoughtfully.

Gerald is out of his blankets now, rolling them into a compact bundle. Young turns toward him. “Come have a look,” he says. He turns and wades into the river, toward a shallow bar of gravel about a third of the way across.

Gerald follows him out of the shadow of the rock, fighting the current. The two men turn and look up, studying the face of the south cliff. The fog is dissipating rapidly now, though a few wisps still cling to the side of the cliff.

Young points at a seam in the rock face. “There, to the left of that crevice. Does that look to you like a path?”

Gerald examines the granite wall. “It does look like some kind of trail,” he says. “Although it could drop off at that big boulder there on the right.” His eyes swing left. Here and there, evergreens cling in impossible crevices. “What about there, by that cedar?”

Young studies the tree, then shakes his head. “If that’s a trail, only a mountain goat could climb it to the top. It breaks down halfway up, by that big outcrop.” He grimaces and nods downstream. “We passed what I’m looking for yesterday.” He points again. “See there?”

Gerald’s eyes track Young’s arm. There’s a shallow indentation in the almost-vertical rock, worn down by generations of game picking their way to the water below. The trace appears to extend to the top of the cliff. “That looks like it could work,” he says doubtfully.

Young chuckles and pats Gerald’s shoulder. “Only one way to find out,” he says.

It’s a hard climb, and dangerous. The horses roll their eyes as the men lead them upward and the pack mules balk and snort irritably when their loads scrape the granite cliff face. Gerald wants to balk himself, but the only other option is to remain beside the river. So he and the others coax the reluctant animals upward, into an unknown land.

When they finally negotiate the last twist in the narrow trail and scramble up and over the rim, they all stare in amazement. The land lies flat and wasted before them, the sun beating fiercely on scattered and dusty piñon and juniper scrub. Here and there, a single ponderosa breaks the monotony.

“Flatter’n hell and almost as hot,” Sublette mutters. “What is this, March? I ain’t never seen anything as bleak as this. Even that stretch of the Rio del Norte there north of Taos has more green to it.” Then he turns and looks back at the canyon. “Now ain’t that somethin’,” he says.

The others turn to follow his gaze into the ever-widening yawn of the canyon of the Colorado. From this vantage, the river appears to wind through a whole set of canyons, great gashes in the earth, some with entire mountains rising from their base. They’re mountains of sheer stone, jagged pyramids of rock, striped a muted red and dirty yellow, the only plant life an occasional tree that juts precariously from a stony cleft. The Colorado is lost in the depths of the maze and from here it’s impossible to tell which north-running gash it might descend from. The tremendous chasms that slice the earth at their feet seem to go on forever. Gerald’s mule snorts anxiously.

“Sacrebleu!” Robidoux swears.

“It is a grand sight,” George Yount says reverently.

“Indeed,” Richard Campbell says, a little grimly.

“This land up here may be wasted, but it’s better than being down there,” Sublette says.

Gerald feels himself shiver, in spite of the sun burning his shoulders. Who knows what might have laid in wait for them there?

But when he turns to face the landscape above the rim, another shiver runs through him.

The land here is not only flat and dry, with little cover, it holds no sign of recent rain. And, after the dim canyon, the bright March sun beats down mercilessly. He narrows his eyes against it and wishes for some of Old Bill’s charcoal.

But the lack of water is the worst of it. Gerald touches his tongue to his already-parched lips, sets his jaw grimly, and follows Ewing Young east along the edge of the immensity, with only the creak of mule harness and his own bleak thoughts to occupy him. No one speaks.

The trappers follow the canyon rim for five days, husbanding the water in their canteens, moving north and east in a country scorchingly inhospitable by day, bleakly beautiful in the late afternoon light, when a small breeze makes itself felt, and well below freezing at night. The juniper and piñon are too widely spaced and hug the ground too low to provide any real shade or night shelter. Even the ponderosas seem inhospitable, too dusty for their long needles to sparkle in the sharp sun.

There’s little to eat besides what the mules carry. The game that made the trail the trappers followed up the cliff side have made themselves scarce. But then, there’s no browse here, to speak of. And no morning dew to freshen it, if there had been.

To their left, the canyon grows deeper, wider, then deeper still. Great crevices seem to appear out of nowhere at the trappers’ feet, blocking their way forward, forcing them into circuitous routes that move the exhausted men farther south before they can proceed east again.

Gerald begins to feel as if the canyon is alive, is opening new cracks each freezing night in order to force them south into even hotter, dryer country and back to the Gila itself. At least there’s water on the Gila, he thinks deliriously. Perhaps Jones is there. Perhaps this is his punishment for the man’s death. They will meet here somewhere in this bleak land and their bones will mingle, killed and killer bleaching together in the sun.

Is there water in the afterlife? What he would give for just a touch of moisture on his lips. He looks enviously at the dusty trees. How do they survive in this dry land, this rocky soil? But then, they are evergreen. Nothing with a leaf could last long in this desert. And certainly nothing with blood in its veins. No wonder there was a game trail leading down the precipitous cliffs to the canyon. His carefully-husbanded canteen has been empty since yesterday morning and his tongue is swollen with thirst.

He tries to stop himself from biting it. The wet blood moistens his throat, but the biting only makes his tongue swell even more. But it’s difficult to force himself to do anything more than move blindly forward in the dryness, the haze of dust kicked up by his fellow trappers and the animals they lead. Even the thought of Suzanna Peabody has dried up, a mere wisp of a concept burnt out by the beating sun, the heat that rises from the crusted soil under his feet, the dust coating his tongue. Only Jones remains, chuckling grimly.

He can see Jones’ face in his mind, but not his companions. Only Jones’ face and his own feet, moving numbly forward. The other trappers are also silently delirious, throats too dry to waste on mere words, their focus limited to the ground directly before them. Only Milton Sublette’s eyes move, and then only toward Ewing Young, whom he glares at bitterly.

But Young has other things on his mind. Somehow he keeps them all heading in the same direction until, on the sixth day from their climb over the rim, they reach water again. Somehow, they’ve turned northeast and found their way down a gradual, rock-strewn slope into a canyon that’s almost as spectacular as the one they’ve escaped from, but much wider and not nearly as deep. The tops of its red and yellow-striped walls are visible from the stream at its base.

The trappers hardly notice the canyon’s side. They surge gleefully toward the water, then remember their animals. They approach cautiously, letting the gaunt horses and mules drink sparingly. They’ll make themselves sick if they drink as much as they’d like.

They camp one day and two nights, letting the animals adjust enough to drink their fill. They don’t dare stay longer. Now that they’ve all revived a little, the trappers see that the food supplies are astonishingly low. They bathe their dust-ridden heads, drink their own cautious fill, and reload their canteens, then head upriver. The canyon shallows steadily, but there’s little browse and still no game to speak of. An occasional snare-caught rabbit is the only supplement to the remnants of flour the camp keepers scrape from the sides of the remaining barrel.

Gerald loses all sense of the number of passing days. Time is a blur of pain as he hobbles painfully forward. Each morning, he forces himself from a stone-cold bed, moves to bring in the bony animals from their attempts to locate a little grass, then helps the camp keepers lift the cumbersome packs of beaver pelts onto the mules.

Then they set out again. The landscape is still stony and bleak and there’s less cover here than at the top of the Colorado’s canyon. Although the trappers are grateful for the water, the paucity of plant life means there’s no beaver. But it isn’t the pelts that Gerald longs for. It’s the meat underneath them. It’s hard to believe he once yearned for something besides beaver tail.

Finally, they reach the foothills of the Rockies. Mountains have never looked so beautiful, so inviting. The vegetation on the lower slopes is sparse, but more than what was available between the striated walls of the canyon behind them.

And there are meadows. Thin with grass, because it’s still spring, but still meadows. They not only provide grazing for the animals but the open spaces attract other browsers. James Pattie kills a mule deer and the trappers feast royally, not saving any for the coming days, confident that there’ll be more meat as they move farther into the hills. Ewing Young breaks out two bottles of whisky from a hidden stash and the jollity increases.

“If I was less footsore, I’d show you all a proper Scottish reel!” Richard Campbell laughs. He takes a healthy swig of liquor and passes the bottle to Gerald, who hands it on to Michel Robidoux.

“It is a day most marvelous,” Robidoux agrees. “My throat, it is content.” He pats his shrunken waistline. “And the gut, it is also content.”

“That was one hell of a long haul,” Milton Sublette says. He twists around to look at the fur packs on the ground under the scrub oak at the edge of the clearing. “Not much to show for it, neither.”

“It’ll pick up now,” Ewing Young says. “We’ll have so many furs we’ll need to build us a press.”

Copyright © 2018 Loretta Miles Tollefson

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