Authors: Edward Abbey
He took a sip of water from the canteen—his mouth seemed painfully dry. He knew quite well that he was
taking far too much time, that his pursuers were coming closer with his every pause and delay, that the man who had fired on him—who was down there on the other side?—might even now be stealing up from rock to rock toward the top of the ridge. He had a second swallow of water, screwed the lid back on the canteen and hung it to the saddlehorn.
There was the guitar. He lifted it from the saddle and looked at it and shook his head sadly. He strummed once on the loosened strings and they made a sound so grotesque, so harsh, that the mare jerked up her head and stepped aside, staring at him. Burns broke the back of the instrument over his knee and flung the remains down the hillside. He picked up the rifle and started off, leading the mare up the ridge under the thin screen of the pines toward the great fissured wall of the mountain.
He had no real hope of finding a way up over or through that towering barrier, either with or without the horse; even if he could climb to the run there would probably be men waiting for him when he got there. Then there was little rationality, anymore than hope, in his choice of direction—upward along the narrowing ridge to the granite cliffs—but he realized now that he had no other way to go, no other way to turn; it was the instinct of the hunted animal, as well as desperation, which drove him upward toward that final wall of rock.
Still far away in terms of time and effort: half a mile above over a rugged jumble of boulders, through jack-pine and cactus to the foot of the wall itself and the desiccated pinnacles and cliffs and grottoes that obscured the exact character of the barrier.
Burns marched slowly ahead, leading the mare carefully among the trees and tumbled rocks, around the rigid penetrating husks of yucca, over dusty slabs of sandstone marked delicately with the imprint of lizards. There was no reasonable trail but only a faint and wandering pattering of deer paths leading in all directions and over, through and under obstructions that no
horse could negotiate. Once they passed a shelf of rock different in no obvious way from many others; hut underneath the overhang, coiled in the sun, was a fat, warm, dust-colored, timber rattler, attentive and annoyed, watching them with its opaque, glittering eyes. The mare did not see it but when she heard the whirr of the rattlesnake’s vibrating tail she shied away violently, almost jerking the cowboy off his feet. He swore at her, and quieted her, and led her around through the trees well away from the snake. When they were safely past he left the mare for a moment and went back and lobbed a few small stones at the reptile, not to harm it but only to stir it up a little, in case others should pass this way after him.
They went on, horse and man, stopping infrequently and briefly to rest. Burns was having some difficulty with his feet: the boots he was wearing were old and worn, not designed for walking, quite unsuited for mountain climbing; one heel was loose, tending to give unexpectedly under his full weight. And both feet were swollen, and cold. He was also suffering from an odd, unfamiliar pain in the small of his back, near the kidneys, where Gutierrez had slugged and kicked him the night before last. This pain bothered and worried at him unceasingly, aggravated by the climb and his heavy breathing, and he was compelled to stop more often to ease the sharp ache of it.
Each time he stopped he studied the country behind him, the ridge and its slopes, the canyon on the north, the forested valley on the south. He had glimpses of his pursuers, including a pair on the south slope that must have been those who had nearly ambushed him earlier; he had no doubt that he in turn had been observed and was being followed not merely by trail but by sight There was little he could do but turn and trudge on.
The ridge ended in a labyrinth of boulders, grottoes, and wrinkled cliffs. Burns and the mare entered a rocky glen, surrounded on three sides by perpendicular walls which effectively hid them from view, and there they
stopped again to rest. From somewhere deep in the rocks came the sound of a slow secret drip of water; shrubs of greasewood on the floor of the glen and clinging to its walls spilled their yellow seed into the air, spontaneously it seemed, for the wind could not reach in here. Burns sat down and pushed the sweat from his forehead with a tired hand; he removed his hat, inspected the sweat-sodden band inside, and placed the hat upside down on the ground to dry. He looked up: the sky was blue-golden, a well of space beyond the walls of the mountain. He heard the dripping water, the intermittent uncertain twittering of a Mexican finch. He listened, still looking up at the sky;—the intense blue there seemed to pulsate in his vision, to advance and withdraw in waves with a throbbing rhythm; and strangely, the blue of this sky, despite its cold intensity, seemed less pure, or beyond purity: the blue was suffused with grains of blackness, a quality that deepened as the vision struck farther into the depths of the atmosphere; as though his human eyes were momentarily capable of seeing into the sky and through it to the absolute blackness beyond; —and still listening, heard the bird stop in its dull complaining, and then he heard nothing at all except the muted leak of drops of water. An unnecessary silence, he thought; he picked at his ears and wiped more sweat from his face, though he was already feeling the chill of the heights seep into his blood and bone.
He felt that he was being watched.
Not by human eyes. He sensed no immediate danger in his intuition, but without looking over his shoulder he felt and knew that he and the mare were not alone. For a moment he was troubled, not by fear, but by a sensation of utter desolation and rejection, as if he were alien not only to the cities of men but also to the rocks and trees and spirits of the wilderness. The sensation passed away and he was left with the uncanny awareness of another presence. Skin prickling, he waited for a few moments and then very slowly raised and turned
his head. He saw a huge, dark bird perched on the limb of a yellow pine, watching him; two tufts of feathers, like horns, stood up stiffly from the creature’s head; the enormous eyes, with lids that rose and fell like curtains, blinked at him once.
Burns smiled wearily and looked away; and then he became conscious of another one: silhouetted darkly against the sky, a second horned owl watched him from its roost on the top of a boulder near the entrance to the glen. And almost immediately he discovered the third—this one squatting on a ledge high up on the cliff to his left, peering fixedly, idiotically, down at him. The cowboy frowned uneasily and stood up, putting his hat back on. He looked around for more owls but there were only the three, sitting there watching him, eyes blinking and staring from the great horned heads.
Burns heard a man shout, a distant shout, far below; he heard the human voice arch and die, and then a long succession of echoes rolling from cliff to cliff on the mountainside.
He picked up Whisky’s reins and led her to the head of the glen, passing below the first silent owl. Expecting a dead end, he found instead a huge cleft in the rock, a natural tunnel formed by the faulting and slipping of a barn-sized block of granite. He took the horse through this opening, glad to leave the haunted glen behind, and came out on a steep talus slope of gravel and fragmented shale. Above the slope rose the sheer wall of the mountain. But it too was incomplete, faulted: a diagonal opening fifty yards wide ran from a corner of the talus slope up through a rift in the main wall to the series of horizontal stratifications that formed the rim of the mountain. Burns saw that he was within a thousand feet of the crest by line of sight, perhaps two or three times that far by foot. The route he would have to take slanted upward at fifty degrees over loose rock, through scrub oak and aspen, and up through the brush to the ledges and the rim and the sky and whatever was waiting for him up there.
This was better than he had thought he had any right to hope for. He stared up that avenue of possible escape, nerve and hope and mental vigor returning to him, and was able to shake off the spell of the cold glen and the three horned owls that brooded like specters over its silence.
There was first the problem of getting across the open area of the talus to the cover of the aspens without getting shot. From the shelter of the leaning rocks Burns surveyed the rim above—he saw no one nor any sparkle of metal or glass—and then the long canyon falling away beneath him. There he could see his pursuers still coming on, crawling it seemed, up that steep complex ascent to the backbone of the ridge: he saw two men far ahead of the rest, one pointing ahead with a stick, the other stooped and lethargic under a burden of some kind on his back; while the other men sat in the sunlight facing the west, one man among them lifting something to his mouth, then throwing it away, a light gleaming object that sailed through the air and down into the depths of the canyon. There were three others to account for but he could not see them—they were the ones he now feared.
But there was little advantage in waiting; fifty yards of target space to cross and then he would reach the comparative safety of the aspen thickets. He stepped forward, clucking at the mare. She followed willingly enough, shivering, eager to get out of the cold shade into the sunlight. He led her at a clumsy trot up and across the sliding broken treacherous rock; twice the mare slipped and fell to her knees, scrambling, snorting, panting after him. He talked quietly to her, urged her on, encouraged her, while the wind came at them, swirling the dust they were raising into their eyes and over their heads, attracting attention. He was halfway across, he and the mare, half-running, when somebody saw them.
Burns heard a wild shout, eager, almost hysterical; it seemed to come from his left, to the north. He didn’t
look; he tugged at the reins, cursing silently and bitterly—oh you damned pitiful bitch, you simple dumb crazy bitch of a horse, Whisky you stubborn murderous banshee—and kept trying to run to reach those sheltering trees. A bullet swerved toward him through the gulf of sunlit space; it hit and shattered a plate of sandstone a few feet ahead of him, ricocheted off the granite beneath and went whining away toward the south, a hot smashed wad of lead whose fluttering vibrations Burns could feel through the skin of his hands long after the sound was gone. He kept going; the trees were fifty feet away.
He heard the shout again. Stop! someone was shrieking at him—stop! stop!
Burns kept going; this time he felt the bullet coming at him, headed for his chest or belly. He was crouching forward, running and stumbling, the horse lunging after him; he was very much afraid he would be hit but the bullet passed smoothly and swiftly a few inches above his head, streaking by, transparent and innocent, to be lost in the space beyond. A second later he heard the sound of the shot, as futile and harmless as the shouting; he could not help laughing a little.
He was in the trees now, and the mare with him, and both of them alive and excited and eager, intoxicated by danger. He scrambled upward through the small perfect aspens, heedless of the film of sweat clouding his eyes, panting, gasping for breath, half dragging the horse and then nearly being run down as the horse leaped and halted, lunged and scrambled and fell and leaped forward again with him, after him, just behind him, her hot exhalations fanning his neck, her nose shoving at his shoulderblades, her front hooves clipping at his heels. The wind whipped the dust around them— he could smell rock salt and flint, the smoke of rotting fern, the pinetar from below—and lashed at the small trees and spangled them, horse and man, with small dry dead golden aspen leaves.
The slope was too steep to climb without aid; Burns
pulled himself up from tree to tree, like climbing a ladder. The mare thrashed and scrambled around behind him, then beside him, snorting and driveling at the lips, her eyes glaring, rolling furiously, mad with panic and fury and the wild happiness of violent effort. She leaped ahead and the cowboy held and belayed her when she stopped and while she struggled for new footing from which to leap again; he kept her from leaving the earth and rolling, falling, down into the canyon beneath them. Somehow he did it, though he knew it was ridiculous and impossible, an outrage of reason and common sense and justice and even natural law. It was all senseless and crazy, but nothing could stop them; both he and the horse were possessed by a mania for ascent.
Five hundred feet to the rim: they kept on going.
They were among and above the great pink cliffs; out of the corner of an eye, through the screen of leaves, Burns saw a hawk soaring over a lake of space a hundred fathoms deep. Yet the hawk was beneath him—he was looking down on it, seeing the stately motionless wings from above. He had a moment of giddiness before he turned his back on the hovering hawk and the blue depths of the canyon; his throat was burning and dry, his eyes tormented by his own dripping sweat, his lungs and heart cracking, expanding, collapsing, as if a vise of iron were closing in around his ribs, stifling his breath, seeming to threaten to break him—but he kept climbing, kept coaxing and dragging the mare and stumbling out of the way when she leaped after him, trampling on his broken heels. He didn’t think about what he was doing or why; he kept climbing. He couldn’t think: his brain seemed powerless, overwhelmed by the frenzy and passion of his whole body—fiery nerves, quivering muscle, the racing blood.
And then they came, suddenly, to a place where there could be no more climbing.
They stood on the lowest of the great horizontal escarpments, at the base of a sheer ledge forty feet high; the rock here was soft, white and rotten, and overhang
ing, impossible to climb. For a while Burns would not believe it. He stared angrily up at the rock, trying to see through his unsettled, unfocussed eyes; the mare stood beside him, shaking and jerking as if in a fit, her foamy flanks steaming in the cold air, the wind stirring her black mane and sweeping the ragged burr-tangled disorder of her tail. Burns glared at the powdery white rock, picked off a chunk of it and threw it to the ground.