My father wore the heaviest of his leather breeches, his thickest jacket, and a pair of high horsehide boots. It was gear for the wild country that lay between the Ranch of the Two Brothers and Blue Beach. He carried his best musket, his tinderbox, and his powder horn. I dressed accordingly, but carried no weapon except a knife.
There were four horses saddled and waiting for us. I rode my stallion, Tiburón, and I rode astride.
The river would still be running a torrent. It was much easier to cross close to the ranch and go down the south bank, but we had no desire to get soaked so early on the journey.
Accordingly, we chose the north bank and followed it through heavy chaparral and patches of cactus until we had ridden for two hours.
Where the river widened and ran knee-deep, we crossed to the south bank. It was still a good hour's ride from the Blue Beach. But it was here that we took the first precaution.
My father and I had been coming to Blue Beach for two years. On the three journeys we had made, we had always been followed. Sometimes by one or two Indians, sometimes by more. But to this day, no one had followed us farther than this west crossing. Here we had managed to elude them.
One thing that helped was that we never told anyone our secret—the story of the Blue Beach.
We told none of the vaqueros or the mayordomo. Nor Rosario, though Rosario could be trusted. Nor my sister, who could not be. Nor even Doña Dolores, whom we could trust most of all. Dolores you could hang by her thumbs and still not hear one word that she did not wish to speak.
There was no way to find the Blue Beach except by following the river, either down from the mountains or up from the sea. From the sea no one would ever find it because of a series of lagoons. From the direction of the mountains you would need to be very lucky, as lucky as we had been in the beginning.
The river at this point, where it fanned out into the deep lagoons, ran narrow, between two sheer walls of granite, where even a mountain goat would be lost. At the bottom of these cliffs were two beaches, one facing the other across a distance of a hundred steps.
The beaches were strips of fine sand, finer than the sand you find on the sea beach itself. Both had a bluish cast, like pebbles you see through clear-running water. But they also had another color, a lighter blue that had a look of metal, as if there were copper deposits in the cliffs that had been washed down by the river and the rain and had mixed with the lighter color.
Someone might call the beaches green or the color of turquoise, but to us they were blue and this is what we called them—the Blue Beaches, more often, the Blue Beach.
On this day, as on the three other journeys we had made to the Blue Beach, we tied our horses and climbed up from the stream to a towering rock. This was where we took our second precaution, for from this high place we could survey the trails, one coming along the river, and one from the sea.
"What do you see?" my father said. He liked to test my eyesight. "Are we followed?"
"I see nothing on the trail," I said, "either from the river or from the sea."
"What is the brown spot among the oaks?"
"Where?"
"Up the river about a hundred varas."
"I see nothing."
"Look once more."
"Judge for yourself. But first you need to find it."
I looked hard and at last made out the brown spot among the oaks. "It is a cow grazing," I said.
"There are two, and one is not a cow but a yearling fawn. What do you hear?"
"The stream."
"What else?"
"A crow somewhere."
"Is that all?"
"Yes."
"Listen."
"A woodpecker behind us."
"Yes. And what else do you hear?"
"Nothing."
"Besides the stream and the surf at the mouth of the river and gulls fishing?"
"You have good ears."
"And you will have them someday."
"Never so good as yours."
"Better. Mucho mas."
Don Saturnino was silent for a while. Then he said, "Tomorrow is Carlos's birthday. He would have been eighteen had he lived."
"He would have liked these journeys," I answered.
"Perhaps. Perhaps not. Who knows? It is sufficient that you like them. You do like them, Carlota?"
"Everything, Father," I said. "Everything."
Here we sat for an hour, to make sure that we had not been followed.
When the sun was overhead, we crawled down from the pinnacle. We reached the Blue Beach and took off our boots and stepped out into the middle of the stream. We made our way for a distance of some fifty paces, leaving no tracks behind us. A clump of willows grew amidst a pile of driftwood and boulders at this place. Here the river divided and ran in two smaller streams on both sides of the willows.
The boulders could not be seen at high tide. But the tide was low now and they stuck up in two crescents, facing each other and leaving a clear space between them. The water was cold, both the sea water that met the river at this point and likewise the river water itself.
Stripped to my singlet, I splashed water on my legs, on my arms and chest. I had found that the best way to approach cold water was by small shivers, suffered one at a time.
Throwing out my arms, I took in a great gulp of air, held it for a minute, counting each second. Then I let out all the air in a quick whoosh. Then I raised my arms again and took in a greater gulp.
This air I held for two minutes, still counting the seconds in my mind—one second, two seconds, and so forth. I repeated this three times. The third time I counted up to four minutes.
It had taken me two years to build up to where I could hold my breath for this length of time. My father had heard of pearl divers in La Paz who could hold their breath for five minutes and even longer. I had tried this but had fainted.
Carefully we stepped into the wide pool between the two crescents of stone, beneath the canopy of willows. We inched our way to the center of the pool, cautious not to rile the sand.
As my foot touched a smooth slab of stone, I stooped down, lifted it with much care, and set it to one side. Beneath it was a rock-lined hole filled with water, the size of my body and twice its height.
At the bottom of this hole was something that, when we first saw it, seemed to be the trunk of a tree—a tree washed down from the mountains. Undoubtedly, it once had risen above the water, but over the years floods had worn it away to a worm-eaten stump.
It had been the mainmast of a ship, which my father said was some seventy feet in length. It had the wide beam, the high stern, of the galleons that two centuries before had sailed the seas between China and the coast of California and Mexico.
These ships, my father said, came on favorable winds and currents to northern California, then along the coast south to the ports of San Bias and Acapulco. They carried great treasures from the Indies, these galleons, so great that they became the prey of American and English pirates.
Some of these treasure ships had been captured. On some, their crews had died of scurvy. Others had run aground through careless navigation. Others were driven ashore by storms. Still others had sought refuge from their pursuers by hiding in lagoons such as the one at Blue Beach.
"This must have been a large lagoon at one time," my father said when we first discovered the galleon. "A good place to hide a ship. But when it was once inside, something happened to the ship and it never returned to the sea."
Hidden in the galleon's hold, near the stump of the mainmast, were two chests filled with coins. The coins were of pure gold. They showed three castles and the two flying doves that meant they had been struck in the mint at Lima, Peru. The date marked upon each coin that we carried away on the trips we had made was the year of Our Lord 1612.
The two chests—each made of hard wood banded with iron straps and sealed with a hasp that had rusted and fallen off—were well beneath the surface of the water, whether at low tide or in the summer, when the stream ran low. This was fortunate, for had the chests been exposed, some passing Indian or vaquero would have discovered them.