He longingly gazes at the clear water in the tank. No way! He refuses to accept the possibility it's poisoned.
He remembers the water filter in his pack. That's it! He'll use it to make the water drinkable. The thirst hammers back into his thoughts, head pounding, mouth dry, and body beginning to shake. He'll chance it.
Chapter 31 - The Ranch
The boy picks his way down the slope. Tricky footing, but not too steep. Because of his dehydration, he's forced to watch each hand and foot placement. Every few minutes, he glances at the ranch for any movement, ready to duck behind a boulder or bush if he has to.
The lower he goes, the more the animals come into focus. Now he can see how much they have rotted. A blanket of flies covers each carcass. They must have died days ago. But it's a guess only. When the breeze shifts, he reels at the stench coming from their bloated bodies.
Not thirty yards away from the bottom of the slope is a hand pump for a well, like from the old days. He knows about these old pumps from his history class at school. He remembers being impressed by the simple fact that moving a lever up and down would bring water up out of the ground, no electricity needed.
Crouching behind a large boulder, he scans the truck and across the back windows of the house. Still no movement. He decides to chance the pump. Has to. His thirst is unbearable, especially after the climb down. His body feels sore and sluggish, and he can feel he's losing his ability to focus. His thoughts are beginning to wander.
The boy moves into the yard of the house. Two steps, four steps forward across the level ground, he keeps his eye on the pump. Another step, and he crumples to the ground. On his hands and knees, he throws up. Dry heaves. Then, his ability to focus hazes over, and nausea and pain assault his abdomen, contracting his stomach. It feels like a kick in the gut!
Desperately, he scrambles back to the boulder. His back against the boulder, he stares back up the slope. Breathing is rapid, shallow.
What the hell was that?
It felt like he slammed into an invisible wall. More like the wall slammed into him!
He stares up the slope, concentrating on his breathing and willing the nausea to disappear. After a few moments, a feeling of normalcy returns. At least normal for someone dying of thirst. Maybe his thirst caused the reaction, he wonders. The nausea and pain are completely gone.
The boy stands, turns, and looks at the house. Nothing stirs, still. The silence is oppressive, but he has to do something. Once again, he walks towards the pump, more tentatively this time. Two steps. Four steps. He's slammed to the ground!
This time, the nausea is worse. His mind whirls in confusion, and his head spins with vertigo. The world goes hazy, and he's frozen in place on his knees.
Sickness. Awful sickness. That’s all he can think. Sickness and death!
Get Away. Now!
The words crash through his fog and confusion. Stumbling backwards, he moves away from the house, the only way left to him. He skirts the bottom of the mesa, keeping the house to his left. He puts as much distance between himself and the poisoned ranch as he can. With distance comes relief. The sickness quickly abates the further behind him the ranch falls. His focus is still hazy, but his stomach has recovered.
He is in worse shape now than when he first came into this valley. Exhausted and thirsty, he stumbles onto a dirt road. The road leads up and out of the valley. His thirst is crushing, yet getting out of this valley is the most important objective now.
Topping the rise where the road leaves the valley, he steals a glance back at the ranch. It looks tranquil in the late afternoon sun. With the sky-gloom beginning to build, the valley takes on an eerie beauty. But that beauty holds death. The thought of being caught in that valley after dark makes him shudder, even in his desperate condition.
He turns and walks. He has enough sense to veer off the road to his right to what he figures to be north. Northward away from this haunted place and back onto the trackless mesa. It almost feels like home, after the experience of the haunted valley. He keeps the sun to his left as best he can, but his awareness is beginning to fade.
Chapter 32 - Ghost
The afternoon wears on. In the torturous heat, the boy struggles to hang onto consciousness, but he's fading. His path becomes a faltering zigzag pattern.
Life is the pain of thirst. His tongue is swollen and blistered. Phantom water appears in places. He falls towards them, but the mirages fade and disappear. Always, he's left with a dry, hot, and burnt world. All that matters is he puts one foot in front of the other, moving forward, with painful steps.
Out of habit, the boy turns and looks at his back-trail, his sight unfocused. Is there something back there? The question seems to come from some far-away place in his mind. Is something moving at the edge of his sight? He's too far gone now to trust what he sees or be startled by what he thinks he sees. He keeps looking back, though, to watch and see if it's following him. The simple act of watching helps take his mind off the thirst.
It's getting closer. It is real. It's a horse!
No way! his mind reasons. No damn way is a horse out here. Then his delirious mind makes a jump to the dead horse at the poisoned ranch. It's that horse that follows him. The poison horse is coming to get him.
He panics and starts to run, which in his condition is more of a stumbling walk. He nearly falls. The horse is almost to him. The late afternoon gloom makes it look ghost-like.
His mind tries to rally his body to move. But his body gives up, defeated. His mind gives up next. He's going to die anyway. Let the poison horse have him. With that thought, he stops.
The boy turns and watches the horse approach, twenty yards and closing. It is clearer now. Its color is not dark like the poison horse. It is light.
It reaches him, and all he can do is stare. This ghost horse is big. Or is it his hazy mind that makes it big?
He freezes.
The ghost horse walks past him, slowly, steadily, as if in a dream. The boy turns as if tugged by the horse as it goes by, and he stumbles after it.
The horse didn't kill him or take his soul. Nothing to do now but follow, he decides in his haze. Not sure why.
Keeping up with the horse’s pace is a struggle, and the distance between them increases. Then it stops and waits, only to start walking again. All that matters now is to stay with the ghost horse.
Finally, the horse stops long enough for the boy to catch up. He almost walks into its flowing tail. The boy halts and stares at the tail, only a few inches from his nose. The tail flicks and hits him in the face. No reaction from the boy. He simply stares.
A shimmer flashes off the tail in the fading light of day. It flicks again and hits his face. The boy reaches out and grabs it with one hand. He does not think about this. He is moved by some force other than his will.
In this way, the ghost horse and the boy walk. The boy grips the tail like his life depends on it, and the pair travels into the deeper red of evening.
Sometime in the night, after moonset, the horse stops. Vaguely, from far away, the boy recognizes wetness. He comes back to himself. His feet are wet. He lets go of the tail and drops to his knees. He's in water, ankle-deep water.
He plunges his face in and drinks—too fast at first, and throws it back up. No matter. He drinks again, until he can hold it.
The horse stands motionless.
The boy drinks and drinks. When he can't any longer, he crawls out of the water onto sand and collapses into a deep sleep.
Chapter 33 - Fire
Once, after relocating west, the old man taught the boy about fire. They walked into the desert. The boy had just turned thirteen. They walked single file around small islands of desert plants. Grandfather stopped at a three-foot-tall bushy plant and looked down at it. Kneeling, he broke off a dead portion, unsheathed his knife, and started carving.
The boy watch
ed. The sun baked.
“This plant is sage. Remember it.”
The boy nodded and looked at other sage plants dotting the desert floor, most of them similar in size, making them easy to spot.
“This plant will make fire for you. Warm you. Heal you.”
Grandfather’s knife worked the soft wood. A flat piece, two inches wide and ten inches long with a squared edge, emerged. Another piece of a branch, six inches long, became pointed at both ends: a spindle.
He cut a third piece of wood to fit the palm of his hand. Putting these pieces down, Grandfather cut a longer branch, about two feet, and tied some paracord to it. The boy thought it looked like a small bow to shoot arrows.
Using the spindle, handhold, and bow, the old man quickly burned a small indent into the flat piece of wood. Then he carved a slice-of-pie cut, the wide part of the slice at the edge of the board, the apex touching the middle of the burned indent.
Next, he again twisted the six-inch spindle stick into the string of the bow with one end of the spindle fitted into the notched hole. The palm-sized handhold he put on top of the other end of the now-vertical spindle and pressed down.
Grandfather began scraping the bow back and forth, like playing a cello. The flat board smoked, the smoke curling up around the spindle. Fine dust filled the slice-of-pie notch, with smoke billowing out from where the spindle met the board. Suddenly, he stopped and tapped a glowing ball of dust onto a baseball-size bunch of fluffy tinder and deftly handed the fire kit to the boy.
Grandfather did not rush. He gently, quietly talked to the glowing coal.
“Always ask the coal to visit. And thank it when it does,” he said.
The boy watched. Said nothing.
Grandfather, with two hands, held the smoking ball up above his face and blew into it. Soon, smoke turned to flame. He gently put the flaming ball on the ground and, from what the boy saw in the old man’s eyes, lovingly stared at it.
“Life."
The boy looked up at Grandfather, then back at the little ball of flame, and echoed Grandfather's word: "Life."
Chapter 34 - Gratitude
Dappled sunlight falls through cottonwood leaves and dances across the boy’s face. He opens his eyes and blinks a couple times to orient himself. One side of his face is pressed against cool sand, his body curled up for warmth next to a massive cottonwood tree. He has no memory of crawling to the tree, no memory of anything after he fell asleep on the sand. He sits up and leans back against the tree.
He sees he is sitting on a small sandy beach inside what looks like a box canyon, which is filled with large cottonwoods, willows, and oak trees. A spring bubbles up not far from where he sits. It forms a pool about six by four feet wide. A shadowy picture enters his mind, a memory of kneeling in the water in darkness. A great thirst grips him at the memory, and he crawls to the edge of the pool and crouches down. He then stops, lips just above the water, and sees his reflection. Is the water safe?
He has drunk from this source, last night. Was it just last night? He has a small headache but does not feel sick. The water comes from underground, filters through the sand to the surface. He remembers how Grandfather made sure he approached water cautiously—so much contamination now. This source seems clean. He gently touches the water, cupping some in one palm. It's cool to the touch and crystal clear. He'll save the filter for when he really needs it.
Then he remembers the horse. He sits up, his thirst on hold. Grandfather stressed giving thanks first before taking from the earth. The horse brought him to water. He scans the interior of the small canyon. No sign of its presence. Had it been real? Real or not, he thanks the horse. Then he looks back at the water and thanks it for saving him. Touching the soft sand next to him, he thanks Earth Mother, as Grandfather called her. Part of him feels almost foolish with all this thanking. He leans forward and drinks. The water's cool and silky and soothing. Never has he tasted water so good.
After drinking his fill, the boy takes off his pack and places it next to the cottonwood where he slept. He is hungry, but this small canyon sanctuary grabs his curiosity. Eating can wait.
The small pool of spring water slips into a narrow channel at the far end, meanders twenty paces, then disappears back into the sand. He strolls past the spot where the water vanishes underground to the narrow opening of the canyon. His tracks and the horse's are clear just inside the opening, showing them entering. But scanning from side to side, he sees no tracks leading out. He walks through the opening, into the desert beyond. Dazzling sunlight. Blinking, using his right hand to shade his eyes, he scans the ground outside the opening. No horse tracks. No sign, even, of his own footprints. The ground's too hard.
The boy turns and studies the opening to the box canyon, a shaded area in the side of an enormous mesa wall. He moves further from the entrance. It's not obvious. And from his position, the trees hide the narrow entrance. He quietly thanks the horse a second time.
This place is safe for a few days. He can rest in the hidden canyon and calculate his next step. For now, the brilliance of the desert makes the memory of the haunted valley remote.
Another scan of the surrounding desert turns up nothing humanlike. No camps. No vehicles. The skirmish at the cottonwoods two days earlier imprinted on his brain the necessity of knowing what's around him. With no movement that he can see or danger he can hear, the boy walks back to the dark place in the mesa wall and enters. As he comes across his old tracks in the sand, he wonders again about the horse. Where did it go?
He holds this question as he walks around the interior wall of the small canyon. The walls go straight up to the mesa top a hundred feet or more.
Quiet. Hidden. Lush.
He works his way around the one side of the canyon, sees the back wall and goes across the floor to the other side. It's closed in, a true box canyon with only one exit, out the front. The boy continues exploring this wall and comes upon a narrow section that falls away, a cut of sorts in the sheer wall. It's dark inside, yet beckons him to enter. Once his eyes adjust, he sees that the ground slopes up and further into the rock. On the ground are tracks. He looks closer. Definitely horse prints. The mystery of the ghost horse is solved. They look fresh, the dirt firm to the touch, not dry and cracking like they would be after days or weeks. Feels good to have an answer to where the horse went. He follows them, searching for more.
The slope rises gently until near the top, where the climb becomes steep but still manageable. The soil consists of small stones and loose dirt, drier than the entrance to the cut. A sharp turn to the right, another thirty feet, and he's out on top of the mesa.
Late morning. The sky's murkiness is soft and muted, but still decidedly red. Though used to it by now, the boy still wonders how it came to be that way.
Scanning the mesa top, he half expects to see the horse, maybe grazing. Up here above the box canyon, the terrain is flat and open like the first mesa. But no horse. No sign of it anywhere.
Reconnecting with the horse's tracks, he only sees confusion on the ground where it would have exited from the up slope. Small rocks and hard packed dirt offer no visible sign of direction. One more look, then the boy turns and walks back down into the sanctuary.
As he descends, the boy wants an answer to the horse question, but there is none. As with everything now, he will move on. The horse is gone. His immediate concern is what's next.
The bottom of the canyon is lush and cool compared to the mesa top. At the base of the cut, he stops and evaluates this sanctuary. Temporary, but it will do.
The spring by the large cottonwood, his sleep tree, looks refreshing in the dappled sunlight. A movement catches his attention. A rabbit: not a jackrabbit, which are numerous on the desert. This is a cottontail, a big one. The boy's stomach growls.
Meat.
But his pack is by the spring, close to the rabbit. It doesn’t matter anyway, he
realizes. What's in his pack to kill the rabbit? No rifle. No primitive weapons. Then he remembers from his time with Grandfather: the throwing stick.
Grandfather always stressed picking up a throwing stick when first entering the wilderness, to be ready. He’d even shown the boy how to make a quick, crude one. He'd forgotten!
A quick scan of his immediate area shows the rabbit has not moved much. The boy is mesmerized by how the rabbit moves. Awkward, the longer hind legs lift its butt unusually high with each stride. It nibbles sweetgrass at the water’s edge.
Not far from where he stands, on the ground, the boy spies a cottonwood branch. It might work. It's about the size Grandfather recommended, armpit to the palm of the hand and a little less than a wrist thick. The boy guesses the distance to the rabbit is thirty paces. He'll need to get closer before throwing. He moves slowly, smoothly, imagines stalking like Grandfather the evening he was blindfolded.
In three steps, he's at the stick. Eyes stay on the rabbit as he bends to pick it up. After some finger searching on the ground to locate the weapon, he grips it. At that moment, the rabbit’s head comes up slightly. The boy freezes in place.
The rabbit is sideways to him, looking away. After a few moments, it drops its head and goes back to nibbling.
Careful and slow. These words repeat in his mind as he edges closer to the rabbit. Again, the rabbit lifts its head, chews sporadically, and returns to the ground. It walks forward to fresh grass, stops, and eats.
Finally, the distance is cut in half. Fifteen paces to the rabbit, stick at his side. He knows, before he throws, he has to raise it up over his shoulder to get power. Too much movement will spook the animal. He'll sidearm it, release it quicker this way, with less movement.
The rabbit looks up. The boy freezes. It glances towards him and bolts forward. The boy takes a step and sidearms a throw in front of the rabbit’s run. On target! But a stick end catches the ground and bounces over the bolting rabbit. The cottontail disappears out the canyon entrance.