Wanderer Of the Wasteland (1982) (17 page)

In those wonderful autumn days Adam learned that the antelope could go long without water, that nature had endowed it with great speed to escape the wolves and cats of the desert, that from its prominent eyes it could see in any direction, that its colouring was the protective grey of the sage plains.

He learned that the lizard could change its colour like the chameleon, adapting itself to the colour of the rock upon which it basked in the sun, that it could dart across the sands almost too swiftly for the eye to follow.

He learned that the grey desert wolf was a king of wolves, living high in the mountains and coming down to the flats; and there, by reason of his wonderfully developed strength and speed, chasing and killing his prey in the open.

He learned that the coyote was an eater of carrion, of rabbits and rats, of birds' eggs, of mesquite beans, of anything that happened to come its way--a grey, skulking, cunning beast, cowardly as the wolf was brave, able like the antelope and the jack rabbit, to live without water, and best adapted of all beasts to the desert.

He learned that the jack rabbit survived through the abnormal development of his ears and legs--the first extraordinarily large organs built to catch sounds, and the latter long, strong members that enabled him to run with ease away from his foes. And he learned that the cottontail rabbit lived in thickets near holes into which he could pop, and that his fecundity in reproducing his kind saved his species from extinction.

Adam learned about the desert ants, the kangaroo rats, the trade rats, the horned toads, the lizards, the snakes, the spiders, the bees, the wasps--the way they lived and what they lived upon. How marvellously nature adapted them to their desert environment, each perfect, each in its place, each fierce and self-sufficient, each fulfilling its mysterious destiny of sacrificing its individual life to the survival of its species! How cruel nature was to the individual--how devoted to the species!

Adam learned that the same fierce life of all desert creatures was likewise manifested in the life of the plants. By thorns and poison sap and leafless branches, and by roots penetrating far and deep, and by organs developed to catch and store water, so the plants of the desert outwitted the beasts and endured the blasting sun and drought. How beyond human comprehension was the fact that a cactus developed a fluted structure less exposed to heat--that a tree developed a leaf that never presented its broad surface to the sun!

The days passed, with ruddy sunrises, white, glaring, solemn noons, and golden sunsets. The simplicity and violence of life on the desert passed into Adam's being. The greatness of stalking game came to him when the Indian chief took him to the heights after bighorn sheep but it was not the hunting and killing of this wariest and finest of wild beasts, wonderful as it was, that constituted for Adam something great. It was the glory of the mountain heights. All his life he had dreamed of high places, those to which he could climb physically and those that he aspired to spiritually. Lost indeed were hopes of the latter, but of the former he had all-satisfying fulfilment. Adam dated his changed soul from the day he first conquered the heights. There, on top of the Chocolate range, his keen sight, guided by the desert eyes of the old Indian, ranged afar over the grey valleys and red ranges to the Rio Colorado, down the dim wandering line of which he gazed, to see at last Picacho, a dark, purple mass above the horizon. From the moment Adam espied this mountain he suffered a return of memory and a sleepless and eternal remorse. The terrible past came back to him: never again, he divined, to fade while life lasted. His repentance, his promise to Dismukes, his vow to himself, began there on the heights with the winds sweet and strong in his face and the dark blue of the sky over his head, and beneath the vast desert, illimitable on all sides, lonely and grand, the abode of silence.

The days passed into months. Far to the north the dominating peaks of San Jacinto and San Gorgonio took on the pure-white caps of snow, that slowly spread as the days passed, down the rugged slopes. Winter abided up there. But on the tops of the Chocolate and Chuckwalla ranges no snow fell, although the winter wind sometimes blew cold and bleak. Adam loved the wind of the heights. How cold and pure, untainted by dust or life or use! He grew to have the stride of the mountaineer. And the days passed until that one came in which the old Indian chief let Adam hunt alone. "Go, Eagle!" he said, with sorrow for his years and pride in the youth of his white friend. "Go!" And the slow gestures of his long arms were as the sailing movement of the wings of an eagle.

The days passed, and few were they that did not see Adam go out in the sweet, cool dawn, when the east glowed like an opal, to climb the bronze slope, sure footed as a goat, up and up over the bare ridges and through the high ravines where the lichens grew and a strange, pale flower blossomed, on and on over the jumble of weathered rock to the heights. And there he would face the east with its glorious burst of golden fire, and spend the last of that poignant gaze on the sunrise-crowned glory of old Picacho. The look had the meaning of a prayer to Adam, yet it was like a blade in his heart. In that look he remembered his home, his mother, his brother, and the vivid days of play and love and hope, his fateful journey west, his fall and his crime and his ruin. Alone on the heights, he forced that memory to be ever more vivid and torturing. Hours he consecrated to remorse, to regret, to suffering, to punishment. He lashed his soul with bitter thoughts, lest he forget and find peace. Life and health and strength had returned to him in splendid growing measure which he must use to pay his debt.

But there were other hours. He was young. Red blood throbbed in his veins, and action sent that blood in a flame over his eager body. To stride along the rocky heights was something splendid. How free--alone! It connected Adam's present hour with a remote past he could not comprehend. He loved it. He was proud that the Indians called him Eagle. For to watch the eagles in their magnificent flights became a passion with him. The great blue condors and the grisly vultures and the bow-winged eagles--all were one and the same to him, indistinguishable from one another as they sailed against the sky, sailing, sailing so wondrously, with never a movement of wings, or shooting across the heavens like thunderbolts, or circling around and upward to vanish in the deep blue. There were moments when he longed to change his life to that of an eagle, to find a mate and a nest on a lofty crag, and there, ringed by the azure world above and with the lonely barren below, live with the elements.

Here on the heights Adam was again visited by that strange sensation, inexplicable and illusive and fast fleeting, which had been born in him one lonely hour in the desert below. Dismukes had told him how men were lured by the desert and how they all had their convictions as to its cause, and how they missed the infinite truth.

"It will come to me!" cried Adam as he faced the cool winds.

Stalking mountain sheep upon the mighty slopes was work to make a man. It was a wild and perilous region of jagged ridges and hare slants and loose slopes of weathered rocks. The eyes of the sheep that lived at this height were like telescopes; they had the keenest sight of all wild beasts. The marvellous organ of vision stood out on the head as if it were the half of a pear, so that there was hardly an angle of the compass toward which a sheep could not see. Like the antelope, mountain sheep were curious and could be lured by a bright colour and thereby killed. But Adam learned to abhor this method. He pitted his sight and his strength and endurance against those of the sheep. In this way he magnified the game of hunting. His exhaustion and pain and peril he welcomed as lessons to the end that his knowledge and achievement must be in a measure what Dismukes might have respected. Failure to Adam was nothing but a spur to renewed endeavour. The long climb, the crumbling ledge, the slipping rock, the deceitful distance, the crawl over sharp rocks, the hours of waiting--these too he welcomed as one who had set himself limitless tasks. Then when he killed a ram and threw it over his shoulder to carry it down the mountain, he found labour which was harder even than the toil of the gold mill at Picacho. To stride erect with a rifle in one hand, and a hold upon a heavy sheep with the other, down the slippery ledges, across the sliding hanks, over the cracked and rotten lava, from the sunset-lighted heights to the gloomy slopes below--this was how in his own estimation he must earn and keep the respect of the Indians. They had come to look up to the white man they 'called' Eagle. He taught them things to do with their hands, work of white men which bettered their existence, and he impressed them the more by his mastery of some of their achievements.

The days passed into months. Summer came again and the vast oval bowl of desert glowed in the rosy sunrise, glared in the white noon hours, and burned at sunset. The moving heat veils smoked in rippling clouds over the Salton Sink; the pale wavering line of the Superstition Mountains changed mysteriously with each day; the fog clouds from the Pacific rolled over to lodge against the fringed peaks. Time did not mean anything to the desert, though it worked so patiently and ceaselessly in its infinite details. The desert might have worked for eternity. Its moments were but the months that were growing into years of Adam's life. Again he saw San Jacinto and San Gorgonio crowned with snow that gleamed so white against the blue.

Once Charley Jim showed Adam a hole in the gravel and sand of a gulley, where Dismukes had dug out a pocket of gold. Adam gathered that the Indian had brought Dismukes here, "White man gold mad," said the chief. "No happy, little gold. Want dig all--heap hog--dam' fool!"

So Charley Jim characterised Dismukes. Evidently there had been some just cause, which he did not explain, for his bringing Dismukes into this hidden canyon. And also there was some significance in his bringing Adam there. Many had been the rewards of Charley Jim and his family for saving and succouring Adam.

"Indian show Eagle heap gold," said Charley Jim, and led him to another gully opening down into the canyon. In the dry sand and gravel of this wash Adam found gold. The discovery gave him a wonderful thrill. But it did not drive him mad. Adam divined in the dark, impassive face of his guide, something of the Indian's contempt for a white man's frenzy over gold.

Then the chief said in his own tongue that the Indian paid his debt to friend and foe, good for good and evil for evil--that there were white men to whom he could trust the secret treasures of the desert.

The day came when something appeared to stimulate the wandering spirit of the Coahuila chief. Taking his family and Adam, he began a nomadic quest for change of scene and work and idleness. The life suited Adam, for he knew Charley Jim did not frequent the trails of white men.

No time so swiftly fleeting as days and nights out in new and strange places of the desert! Adam kept track of time by the coming and going of the white crowns of snow on the peaks, and by the green and gold and then barren grey of the cottonwoods.

Like coming home was it to get back to the oasis in the canyon of the Chocolate range. Adam loved the scene of his torture. Every stone, every tree, was a familiar friend, and seemed to whisper welcome to him. Here also had passed the long, long months of mental anguish. On this flat rock he had sat a whole day in hopeless pain. In this sandy-floored aisle of palms he had walked hour by hour, through many weary days, possessed by the demon of remorse.

Best of all, out there reached the grey, endless expanse of desert, so lonely and melancholy and familiar, extending away to the infinitude of purple distance; and there loomed the lofty, bare heights of rock which, when he scaled them as an Indian climbing to meet his spirits, seemed to welcome him with sweet, cold winds in his face. How he thrilled at sight of the winding gleam of the Rio Colorado! What a shudder, as keen and new a pang as ever, wrenched him at sight of Picacho! It did not change. Had he expected that? It towered there in the dim lilac colours of the desert horizon, colossal and commanding, immutable and everlasting, like the sin he had committed in its shadow.

Somewhere in the shadow of that domed and turreted peak lay the grave of his brother Guerd.

"I'll go back some day!" whispered Adam, and the spoken words seemed the birth of a long-germinating idea. Picacho haunted him. If called him. It was the place that had given the grey colour and life to his destiny. And suddenly into his memory flashed an image of Margarita. Poor, frail, dusky-eyed girl! She had been but the instrument of his doom. He held her guiltless--long ago he had forgiven her. But memory of her hurt. Had she not spoken so lightly of what he meant to hold sacred? "Ah, senor--so long ago and far away!" Faithless, mindless, soulless! Adam would never forget. Never a sight of a green palo verde but a pang struck through his breast!

At sunset the old chief came to Adam, sombre and grave, but with dignity and kindness tempering the seriousness of his aspect. He spoke the language of his people.

"White man, you are of the brood of the eagle. Your heart is the heart of an Indian. Take my daughter Oella as your wife."

Long had Adam feared this blow, and now it had fallen. He had tried to pay his debt, but it could not be paid.

"No, chief, the white man cannot marry Oella. He has blood upon his hands--a price on his head. Some day--he might have to hang for his crime. He cannot be dishonest with the Indian girl who saved him."

Perhaps the chief had expected that reply, but his inscrutable face showed no feeling. He made one of his slow, impressive gestures--a wave of his hand, indicating great distance and time; and it meant that Adam was to go.