It was starting to cloud up, and Clay was free to come out into the open. He began to think he might be able to climb out of Nakai Canyon this day. He returned to the spring and drank again, then filled his canteens. Barely breaking the surface, Pal put her lips to the water and drank. Clay had never seen such a dainty drinker. “Let’s take a bath before we go,” he told his companions.
“Mighty nice,” he said, settling into the cool water. “All the comforts of home.” He inspected the shin with the bad bruise. It was sure enough ugly, but the swelling was going down.
Curly came close, and Clay reached out for him. The tiny dog’s nails dug for traction on the rock. “Come on in, Curly. Hey, you hardly weigh anything. C’mon, you could use a cool-down.”
He placed Curly in a shallow spot like a shelf in the tub. Curly stood still, wet up to his neck, and the brown patches above his eyes seemed to be asking forlornly, “Why are you doing this to me?” Clay scratched him behind his ears and along his back, then lifted him back onto the slickrock. With his white fur plastered against his sides and his tail so long and skinny, he looked more like a rat than anything. Clay couldn’t help laughing. “I guessed you were some kind of a poodle-cross. Now I know, what with!”
It wasn’t hard to see he’d robbed the little dog’s self-respect, and as soon as Curly was done shaking himself out, Clay apologized. It took some coaxing but at last the dog came to the edge of the pool and give Clay’s face a few licks. The heat of the desert quickly restored his curls and his dignity.
In an hour’s time Clay was standing once again at the horse ladder he’d discovered in the morning. Scanning the cliffs, he traced a route up through the ledges and onto Paiute Mesa. He hauled rocks and stacked them to make the ramp passable once again. Before he started up he thought to fold up his map and stick it in his shirt pocket along with his compass. Clay fished his survival kit out of the backpack and stuck it in his other shirt pocket. “Just in case,” he said aloud. After he’d slung one of his canteens around his neck, he was ready. “And Curly, I don’t think you should ride until we get to the top. I don’t want you to slide off—there’s a lot of cliffs up there.”
Pal scaled the horse ladder without hesitation and it was a marvelous thing to see. Then the burro began clawing her way up through the ledges with the confidence of a mountain goat.
Here and there they paused to rest. The clouds were boiling up right out of the turquoise sky, monumentally tall, and were starting to turn dark. “They might mean business,” Clay said. “I’m glad we aren’t way down there on the bottom of the canyon.”
Thunder began to rumble inside the clouds and the wind began to blow. After all the relentlessly hot days he’d seen since he first came to Monument Valley, it was pleasant to feel the wind on his cheek and to listen to thunder, to enjoy shade out in the open and watch the clouds begin to spill rain in tall columns. Even if the rain did separate into streamers and dry up before it hit the ground, it made a welcome sight and he’d take dry rain any day he could get it.
When at last Clay reached the top and the flat expanse of Paiute Mesa, he was pleased to find it grassy and sprinkled with piñon pines and junipers. Closer than ever, Navajo Mountain commanded a good piece of the sky, close enough he could make out individual trees along its skyline. Tall timber grew up there, and he could see why: the rain up there was falling wet instead of dry.
Pal deserved all the grazing she wanted, and it looked for now like she intended to eat up the whole mesa top. He fastened her hobbles exactly the way Weston had shown him, and let her graze. She couldn’t go far. Then he threw himself down on the rimrock and took a good rest with Curly by his side.
I’m getting close now, he thought. All I have to do is cross the mesa and drop into Paiute Creek. I’m a long way from Seattle, that’s for sure, and practically shouting distance from Uncle Clay. “Make me proud,” his mother had written. That’s exactly what I’m going to do, he thought.
When he woke from his nap the sun was dropping low and casting glory all around. On the far side of Nakai Canyon and tucked under the rimrock, a golden two-room ruin of the Ancient Ones caught his eye. In the eastern sky, like colossal Portuguese-men-of-war, boiling white and black thunderheads trailed streamers of evaporating rain lit up in pinks and oranges and reds, golds and lavenders and violets. Shafts of light pierced the lowest layers and illuminated the domes and towers of the redlands below. The mesas were glowing vividly purple.
The whole world seemed to drop off in front of him. He could see in the distance the shadow-casting buttes of Monument Valley and far, far beyond, a dark mountain range to the southeast. To the northeast the San Juan River ran in a winding green strip toward Mexican Hat. Set back from the river above a bulwark of tall cliffs, a forested plateau rose above the canyon of the San Juan and pitched up to mountains so high that a patch of snow still lingered above timberline.
All of it glowing and shifting and changing in a bath of colors—no two moments were the same and each, it seemed, would make a memory for a lifetime. This is why I’ve come, he thought. More than anything else, this is why.
If only I had someone to share it with.
Under way, walking into the evening, he let his mind drift. Pal stopped to graze where she found it to her liking and Clay didn’t care to hurry her along, although he did keep a death grip on her lead rope. He was thinking of all the things he had saved up to tell Marilyn the next time he wrote. As he walked into the gathering dusk he could almost see her. Well, he couldn’t remember her face exactly, only her hair. In fact he couldn’t remember her face at all and that bothered him. If he tried harder it would come back.
Suddenly though, he recalled her perfume. He could smell those intoxicating flowers as vividly as if she were walking alongside him. It was easy to picture himself taking her in his arms. As he walked alongside the burro, he saw himself doing just that. He would take her in his arms and then he would kiss her. How perfect everything would be if Marilyn were with him right now.
A great horned owl hooted in the moonlight two, three, four times, and then after a pause, four times again. Clay asked the little dog, riding the pack and bobbing at eye-level alongside, “What’s he saying, Curly? You can almost make it out. There, I’ve got it. ‘You, you-oo, you, you … Love you, you-oo, you, you.’”
He found himself crossing slickrock terraces rolling like ocean waves. Before long the slickrock was cratered with deep potholes, and in the deeper ones he found several feet of standing water. Not far away stood an old shelter made of poles and roofed with tree branches. A sheep camp! Surely, a sign of the main camp! He must be getting close!
Next to the shelter Clay found a small corral made of poles and he dragged Pal in there, very much against her wishes. Then he cooked up a big can of pork and beans and fried up some biscuits. Tomorrow would be the day! After supper he visited the corral and Pal swiveled one ear forward, then the other to have them scratched. While he scratched an ear, Clay was trying to pick out a tune on the Midnight Flyer—“Cast Your Fate to the Wind.”
Evidently Pal didn’t think the performance up to her standards. Hubcap Willie had probably been a virtuoso harmonica player “among other things.” The burro took Clay’s neckerchief by her teeth and took a step back. Clay felt himself losing his balance and took the harmonica in his mouth, bracing himself with both hands against the fence. He was eyeball-to-eyeball with Pal, and he thought he saw a glint in the burro’s eye. “Okay, Pal,” he said, the words turning into notes through the harmonica, “you can turn me loose now.”
The burro tugged a degree harder, and for the longest time Clay was suspended there, with one leg back in the air for balance like a ballet dancer. Finally Pal tugged a fraction more, and Clay felt the corral giving, and then giving way altogether as he fell down in a clatter of falling poles. The whole side of the corral was on the ground. “Okay, Pal, you win,” he said, as he dusted himself off. “Let’s not keep you in here tonight after all.”
Bound for Paiute Creek in the morning, Clay could feel his strength and his confidence in his muscles and his bones. It felt like he was taking ten-foot strides.
At the bottom of the creek he was faced with a decision. Turn up the canyon toward the plateau where it originated, or turn down the canyon toward the San Juan? Weston hadn’t known where exactly to find the camp; he hadn’t been in Paiute Creek for over fifty years.
To the river, Clay decided at last. The sheep must need water. The creekbed was dry. So where could you water sheep better than at a river?
The canyon soon widened out to a half mile or more, and here and there the water popped up from underground and flowed awhile on the streambed before disappearing in the gravels again. He sighted four hogans up ahead in the sandy flats below the cliffs and his heart began to drum wildly. For some reason he started singing “The Loco-Motion.” That didn’t seem right after a minute, and so he switched to “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”
Unfortunately the hogans were abandoned, and seemingly long ago. A shade-break no longer provided shade, and a few logs on the ground in a ring barely resembled a corral.
He could hear the river before he could see it, and he knew he must be approaching the sheep camp and the big moment with Uncle Clay.
Every step brought him closer to … disappointment, as it turned out. No sheep camp, no uncle, only a boulder field where the canyon dumped into the river, and the rapid roaring where the river spilled over the boulders.
“Well, guys,” Clay announced. “Nobody here. Stick with me, Wrong Turn Lancaster.”
He tied Pal up to a driftwood log, then unpacked her. Close to the river would be a good place to camp for the night. When he was done with the work, he stripped and walked out onto the sand beach. His toes felt good in the sand. Then he waded out into the river and swam with powerful strokes, playing in the sandy brown San Juan like an otter. Curly was barking all the while on the beach. “Perfect temperature!” Clay shouted. “Come on in, Curly!”
As Clay pulled on his clothes it occurred to him that there just might be fish in those sandy waters. Catfish maybe. “Fresh dinner tonight!” he shouted. “I’m a pretty good fisherman,” he confided to the dog and the burro. “Well, not pretty good, I mean awfully good. You should see the salmon and steelhead I’ve caught in my day.
“You may be wondering where I’ve been keeping my fishing pole. Well, an ace fisherman like me doesn’t need one. I’m pretty handy with a hand line, and I just happen to have some fifteen-pound-test, hooks, and sinkers in my survival kit right here in my pocket.
“I’m sure you won’t mind waiting a few minutes, Pal, while I catch us some supper. No comment? I bet you can’t even hear me over that rapid. We’re not talking about a can of beans, guys, we’re talking about fresh fish. Doesn’t that sound good?”
The dog seemed enthusiastic but the burro was baffled.
“Come to think of it, Pal, you don’t look like a big fish eater.”
From his supplies Clay broke out a long, rock-hard hunk of wine-soaked salami and sawed off a piece. It was his mother’s ceremonial gift to him and Mike, for their big trip, as she left for Guatemala. She’d presented them with one as they set out on backpack trips for as long as he could remember, and they’d always joked over who was going to have to carry the thing, it was so heavy. “Bait,” he explained to Curly, and sawed off a second hunk for himself, a third for Curly. “Don’t want to eat too much of this stuff, now—you might get drunk on it.”
For a long time Clay waited on the alert for a strike, but as the tall canyon walls started to provide shade, he thought he deserved a nap and he lay down on the beach.
He thought it might be fun—he’d never tried it before—to tie the line off to a big toe, and then just make himself comfortable and doze off, letting his big toe warn him if the salami found any takers. He was thinking about what a great fisherman his uncle was, and what a strong swimmer too. They were fishing from a canoe once out at Goose Lake when his uncle suddenly stripped down to his skivvies. “What’re you doing?” he’d asked his uncle.
“I want to see if I can nab that big turtle over there basking on that log,” Uncle Clay had said.
“How come?”
“I just thought it might be interesting.”
“You won’t get within fifty feet before he slides into the water, and they’re great swimmers. You know how they are.”
“I know,” his uncle had said as he lowered himself over the side of the canoe. “That’s what’ll make it interesting.”
Clay started to doze off. The sand sure felt good. He hadn’t known his body was so sore. The roar of the rapid seemed so restful as his memory drifted him back to Goose Lake. He could remember his uncle swimming so slowly toward that log, with only his nostrils stuck up into the air like a turtle himself, he’d begun to wonder if Uncle Clay had a chance. Maybe he’d get within thirty feet…. And now he pictured his uncle submerging with fifty feet anyway yet to swim before the log, and then he didn’t surface for what seemed too long a time, until finally Uncle Clay burst out of the water like a dolphin with arms. The turtle splashed into the water out of his reach and then Uncle Clay kicked and dived after it. He stayed under until he surfaced with a victory cry and held up that big turtle with both hands. The way that shout exploded from his lungs, you could have heard it from clear across the lake….
It was late afternoon when the alarm on his toe—something tugging hard—brought him out of a dream, a sweet dream in which Marilyn was trying on his Stetson just for fun. What a combination the black hat made with her blond hair. For a second as he woke up, he could almost remember her face but then it slipped away.
Anyway he had a fish on the line and there’s nothing in the world quite like having a fish on the line. There’s a current running through the line that connects you in that moment to everything that’s beautiful and mysterious and wonderful. In this case the current was running into him through his toe.
Clay took the line in his hand and gave it a couple of wraps. No time now to free his toe—he had a big fish on. Up and down the beach and out onto a sandbar he fought it, trying his best to ignore the fact that he had a piece of fishing line connecting his hand and his toe.
Working the fish up and down the sandbar, he was having a hard time trying to stay on his feet. That piece of line kept tripping him up, and twice he fell down in the water. But he’d seen the prize: a big silvery fish almost like a salmon, but with a smaller head and the fins different. Once he was onto a big fish, there was nothing in the world but him and the fish and victory or defeat. Clay could feel the world blurring away at the edges. There was only him and the fish in all the world and the current of the world was running through him.
Behind him, Curly was barking. Curly must be pretty excited about the fish too, Clay thought. Pal was snorting loudly. Even Pal was inspired by the battle. It isn’t easy to give and retrieve line when your hand is the fishing reel and the line’s cramping your palm and cutting your fingers.
Now’s the most critical time, he thought. He’s in the shallows and I haven’t got a net.
Twice Clay tried to wade in after the big fish to get close enough to grab it. But when the fish saw him coming it was off to the races. At last Clay saw no other way than to pull on the line hard enough to drag the fish into shallow water, and so that’s what he did. The big fish was coming onto the shallows. Clay thought he’d won the day when he heard that sickening ping, the distinctive sound he’d heard too many times in his life before with salmon or steelies on the line, the distinctive sound of fishing line under high tension snapping.
Seeing his long-fought prize heading for deeper water, Clay splashed in after it hoping to grab the fish somehow. But he forgot all about the length of line connecting his hand and his toe. He fell flat on his face in the river.
As he sat up, he replaced his hat on his head and turned around toward the shore. That’s when he discovered two Navajos, a man and a boy, dark-skinned and dark-eyed, mounted on spotted horses right there on the shore and just looking at him. No expression at all, unless there was a trace of amusement around their lips and eyes; it was hard to tell.
Curly was looking from Clay to the Navajos and back, and wagging his tail ever so faintly.
Clay was sitting in the river with only his head and shoulders out of the water. He knew somehow that they had been watching him for a long time. The man was big and barrel-chested, his face broad and heavily lined under a flat-brimmed, tall black Stetson. Hammered nickels ringed his hat and large silver conchos belted his waist, prominent against his vermilion shirt with the tails worn long. Large silver bracelets studded with turquoise adorned both wrists.
Clay couldn’t believe he’d had an audience for the worst fishing episode in his entire life.
Everything in the man’s appearance and demeanor spoke authority, and for an instant Clay was afraid that the man was hostile. But the glint of humor in the man now grew and spread across the broad face as the man said in English, “You horsed him.”
Now father and son, as he took them to be, broke out laughing, and Clay was laughing with them. He stood up and water streamed from his clothing.
Hatless, the Navajo boy wore a red headband and a string of red coral beads around his neck. His shaggy hair spilled over the back of his collar. The boy’s smile flashed as he said, “We were wondering why you have your fishing line tied from your hand to your toe.”
Clay shrugged and smiled back, and said, “Oh, just to make it interesting.”
Suddenly the boy became greatly animated. He pointed in Clay’s direction with his lips, then spoke rapidly to his father in Navajo. Among the boy’s words, Clay picked out these two: “Hosteen Clay.”