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 8

Over the next two weeks, Williams and Gerald trap their way steadily up the Red River. As they move higher, the temperatures drop a little more each night. The cottonwoods and the heart-shaped foliage of the white-barked aspens turn ever more golden.

Then snow falls for the first time. Williams stands by the morning campfire and studies the sides of the canyon. Its sharp rocks are outlined in white. The trapper swings his head toward the stream and the fingers of ice that edge its banks. Then he nods eastward, up the canyon.

“I reckon it’s about time for us to head on to greener pastures,” he says. “We’re not going to spy much more beaver up this creek. From here on, it’s too narrow and steep for them to have much chance at damming it solid. And anything dammable that runs into it is gonna be froze over anyway. We’re high up enough now that the snow’s likely to be nothing but serious from now until March. I reckon we’d better head on across Bobcat before it really sets in.”

“Bobcat?”

Old Bill jerks his head to the southeast. “There’s a pass thataway. It’ll drop us down into the prettiest little valley you ever saw.” He grins. “Well, not so little. But it’s a sight.” He swings toward his mule. “We’d best get to moving though, if we want to get over it before nightfall.”

The trail to Bobcat Pass is a steady climb up a rocky path dominated by snow-dusted ponderosas and other pine that cling improbably to almost perpendicular slopes. Gerald feels the upward incline in his ears. First a dull pressure, than a sharp pain until he sets himself to yawning and swallowing air. How high are they climbing, anyway?

High enough to be above the river, which slices through a steep sided and heavily treed ravine below. The actual pass itself is more grass than trees. The snow is thick, but drifted enough that the dried herbage is still evident. The men pause to let the mules blow and browse for a few minutes. They pull jerky for themselves from their packs, then begin the descent, into the trees again, on a slant almost as steep as the one they’ve just scaled. Elk lift their heads from pocket meadows too small even for beaver as the trappers and their animals move down the mountainside.

They drop into a narrow defile and follow it east and south below slopes dotted with twisted brown scrub oak and green-black pine. The snow hasn’t reached this side of the mountains yet and a small stream, not yet frozen, trickles merrily through narrow meadows thick with willow and drying grass. Just ahead, a flock of perhaps twenty wild turkeys moves silently away from the other side of the stream and weaves uphill through the trees. None of the birds turn their heads toward the men and mules, but they’re clearly moving away from the foreign presence.

Gerald takes a deep breath, breathing in the cold pine-scented air. Though the tree-covered slopes are almost close enough touch, the sky to the east feels more open, somehow. He suddenly realizes how closed in he’s felt in the last few weeks in the Red River’s canyon.

They reach the valley early the next morning, just as the sun is rising behind the massive snow-dusted rock abutment that Williams calls Baldy Mountain. As they move south beside the creek in the valley’s center, Williams gestures to the west. Gerald turns his head. The snow-clad peaks opposite Baldy glow pink, reflecting the sunrise.

Gerald shakes his head, bemused. The sun rises in all directions in this valley. In fact, the way the sunlight glints from the dew on the brown grasses makes it feel as if the light rises from the ground itself. The grass is long and healthy. It sweeps from the bushes scattered along Baldy’s slopes down into the valley floor and then west over the foothills to the edge of the pine-covered and pink-topped mountains. It’s thickest along the creek bank. Gerald’s farmer heart twinges with desire.

Old Bill and his mule drop back to walk beside Gerald. “This little bit of a stream’s called the Moreno River,” he says.

The younger man grins. The strip of water is so narrow he could jump across it, but they call it a river.

“Here in nuevo mexico, if it flows all year, then it’s a river. It don’t rightly matter how much water actually runs in it,” Williams adds.

“Doesn’t Moreno mean black?” Gerald asks. The water isn’t black, but the soil the stream cuts through certainly is. Dark and loamy. Inside his buckskin gloves, his fingers twitch, wanting to know how such a soil might respond to the touch. It looks as healthy as the grasses that weave their roots into its heart. He glances toward Baldy again and blinks. What he’d taken for bushes on the lower slopes have resolved into a scattered herd of feeding elk. Involuntarily, he wonders what Suzanna Peabody would say to such a sight.

But Williams is talking again, his voice high and querulous, a sure sign that he’s about to launch into a story. “First time I saw this valley, there was a foot of snow on the ground and a group of Utes camping just yonder, under that stony outcrop.”

He points to the right, where a mass of stone juts from the side of a flat-topped grassy hill. “I’d just pushed over Bobcat Pass in snow so deep the mules could barely plow through it. I’d been walkin’ three days. I figured if I stopped, I’d just righteously freeze to death.”

Old Bill shakes his head. “I tell you, I was mighty pleased to see that little camp of Utes down there and even gladder when I realized its chief was a friend of mine. They welcomed me well enough, but he wouldn’t tell me a righteous lick about what they were doin’ up here in that kind of weather. They should of been down Cimarron Canyon feeding their families and waitin’ out the winter like sensible men. Instead, they were laying here, waiting on something they probably weren’t supposed to be tanglin’ with. Mexicano soldiers, most likely. I got myself thawed out a little, then I hightailed it outta there with just my rifle, one beaver trap, and the clothes on my back.”

Williams shrugs. “Old Three Hands got two good mules for feeding me a couple of days, but I got out of tanglin’ in a fight that was none of my business. So I reckon it washed clean, although I sure did miss the use of those mules. I just hope they didn’t get turned into stew meat when those damn fools stopped waitin’ for a fight and headed for home.”

He pauses. Gerald knows he’s expected to prod the story forward. “You never got your mules back?” he asks.

“Nope, I never did. And the next time I saw Three Hands, he didn’t recall having seen me at all that whole winter.” Old Bill grins. “It turns out they’d had a bit of a scrap with the Mexican soldiers. He didn’t have much to say about that, neither. Those government troops seem to have got the better of them . Old Three Hands sure didn’t want to put his jaw to talking about anything that happened that season.” Williams chuckles. “The Utes ain’t ones for dwellin’ on their defeats.”

“Like most men.”

Williams snorts in agreement and points ahead, to a cluster of ponderosas in the curve of the stream. “We’ll stop there to noon. That’ll give the mules a chance to feed up. This grass may be brown, but it’s still tasty.” He nods southward. “If you’re thinkin’ this is pretty, wait’ll you see the south part.”

“There’s more?”

“You could say that.” Old Bill chuckles. “You might just be able to say that.”

The mules are reluctant to leave the long grasses, but once the men have eaten, Williams seems eager to push on. They follow the stream through a mile-long passageway that winds between the hills. The ground is thick with grass and spotted with thick-trunked ponderosas. Then the trees end and the land opens before them. Williams halts, grins at Gerald, and waves a proud hand at the view. “Now that’s something, ain’t it?” he says.

They’re standing at the top of a broad slope that angles gently down to a grassy basin that’s perhaps a mile wide and extends south toward haze-covered blue peaks. The valley is bisected by a series of low grass-covered ridges that block his view of the valley floor, but Gerald suspects the grass continues right to the edge of those southern mountains. If it’s anything like the growth at his feet, this is a rich valley indeed.

Elk are scattered across the hillside to his right. At its base, a stream narrower than the Moreno slips from the west and joins the Moreno, then snakes slowly southeast. Gerald’s gaze lifts and moves along the mountains that line the valley, east and west. He squints, puzzled. There’s something familiar about this place.

Williams gestures toward a low point in the peaks to the left, south of Baldy and a flat-topped ridge that bulks beyond it. “Those streams are headin’ there, where the Cimarron starts,” he says. “There’s a crag above the marsh there that the Injuns favor for gatherin’ eagle feathers. There were three big scraggly nests perched up in there the last time I come through. There’s likely more further up the slopes.”

He waves his hand at the grassland. “That there’s prime eagle hunting grounds for keeping their young fed up, what with the smaller birds and le petite chien.”

Gerald lifts an eyebrow. “Prairie dogs? The more the eagles eat, the better. They’d wipe out the grasses with their mounds. And that’s prime hay meadow, from the looks of it.”

Williams chuckles. “Prime elk browse, at any rate. Even the occasional buffalo.” He clucks at his pack mule. “This valley gets a mite windy and cold this time of year. We need to get a move on and get under the lee of one of those ridges before nightfall. I’m lookin’ to scout east along the Cimarron tomorrow and see if there’s any beaver come in since I was here two seasons back.”

Gerald follows the trapper down the broad slope, but his mind isn’t on beaver. The broad grassland and small streams move his thoughts inevitably to cattle and farming. The length and thickness of the grass here tell him there’s water available pretty much year-round.

And there are no people. No farmers, at any rate. The Indians apparently come through to hunt and even camp. Do they stay long? How would they feel about a man who wanted to actually put roots down here, build a house? Put in a garden? Grow a family along with it?

Suzanna Peabody’s straightforward black eyes rise before him and Gerald shakes his head. That’s presuming too much. But wouldn’t it be something if she should decide— He forces his mind back to the more plausible daydream of ranch, house, hay, and cattle.

 “Does anybody actually live up here year-round?” he asks that night as he and Williams crouch next to a fire at the base of Eagle’s Nest rock. The canyon wall soars above them, black in the darkness. They’re right up against it, out of the way of the cattail-strewn marsh that absorbs the waters of the Moreno River. Gerald can hear it trickling from the marsh into the intermittent stream that runs through the canyon they’ll enter tomorrow. Cimarron Creek, Williams calls it. “Cimarron” because it’s as wild and unpredictable as the mountain sheep also called “cimarron.” “Creek” because it doesn’t flow year-round.

“This here valley’s too cold for perching in durin’ the winter months,” Williams says. “It’s a righteously beautiful place in the summer, once summer finally makes it this high up. It takes a mite longer than most places to warm up and the cold comes in earlier, too.” He shrugs. “It ain’t good for beaver though. Not enough trees and willow to make it worth their while.”

“I was thinking about how it would be to farm,” Gerald says casually. “But from what you say, it sounds like the growing season’s a bit short.”

Williams snorts. “The growin’ season’s short and the winter season’s long,” he says. “I surely wouldn’t try it. But then I ain’t a farming man.” He points to the rock abutment overhead. “I’d rather be on top of that rock, seein’ what I can see, lookin’ for new trails to blaze. Not cramped up in a cabin with nothin’ to do.” He shrugs. “But if a man was goin’ to venture livin’ up here, he could always run cattle. There’s grass enough. Though you’d have to fight the elk for the range and the wolves and the cougars for the calves.”

“And watch out for prairie dogs,” Gerald says wryly.

Williams nods. “And then you’d have to get those cows down to market.” He pushes back his hat. “I hear tell some of the Taos folk run their goats and sheep up here in the summer. Between them, the Injuns, the elk, and the weather, it’d be a contest who’d wear you out soonest.”

Gerald nods, gazing into the dark toward the marsh, his mind drifting toward the richness of the soil in the valley beyond.

“And you’d have a tough time findin’ a woman who’d be willin’ to live this far from nowhere.” Williams grins mischievously at Gerald. “Even Suzanna Peabody.”

Gerald’s head jerks toward Old Bill in spite of himself.

Williams stretches his legs toward the fire. “You ain’t the only one who’s dreamed that particular notion, you know. We’ve all had that idea, one time or the other.”

Gerald feels a tight fist of disgust in his belly and fights to keep it from showing on his face.

Williams shakes his head at the fire, a rueful smile on his lips. “Not that any of us’d touch her. She’s that fine a lady.” He nods at Gerald companionably. “But she does make you think of what it’d be like to settle with a girl like herself, don’t she now? Educated like that. Smart as a whip. Not takin’ sass off a soul, not even her daddy. But not mean like. It’s just she can talk him so sweet he don’t even know he’s been twisted around her little finger.” He chuckles. “’Course, that might be a reason for some of us to think twice about a gal of her caliber.”

Gerald permits himself a small smile. To think of another man thinking of Suzanna Peabody in that way makes his stomach clench, but he does like that Old Bill admires her qualities, knows what she’s worth.

Not that he himself really knows the girl, Gerald reminds himself. But what Williams says of her fits what Gerald instinctively feels. The true heart of her. The strength. As to her taking no sass off anybody, he knows that isn’t quite true. He’s seen her frightened, though not cowed. And he’s very glad that he happened around the corner of that narrow street where Enoch Jones had her cornered against that adobe wall.

Not that his intervention lays any obligation upon her, he reminds himself later, as he spreads his bedroll on the rocky ground beneath the cliff. Or means she’s special to him in any way. He would do the same for any woman in such a predicament.

Yet, as he dozes off, Gerald’s mind drifts to the image of black eyes looking straight into his, slim brown hands offering him a plate of food.

Copyright © 2018 Loretta Miles Tollefson

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