CHAPTER IVLOST CANYON
FOR the next few seconds after that rifle shot, Sid was fully occupied. The black head, whatever it was, disappeared in the cloud of smoke from the rifle muzzle, and Sid heard a hoarse, ropy, animal snarl and a scramble in the bushes up on the cliff ledges. But Pinto had reared high in the air at the shot, and, with a whinny of terror and a frantic tug of his head, had broken the picket lariat. He dashed snorting across the ravine. Sid dropped his rifle and fell on the dangling lariat weaving like a snake through the grass. It whipped out from under him as he made a last snatch for it and a half hitch of it caught around his wrist.
Sid was yanked to his feet, hauling against the plunging horse, and was dragged across the chasm.Only its sheer wall stopped Pinto in his mad frenzy of backing. Sid snubbed the lariat around a stump and let Pinto buck. Gradually the horse grew quiet as Sid talked to him, and he finally was able to come up on the rope and soothe him. The pony shivered with terror, but slowly became more easy, pricking his ears and looking with alarmed eyes down the chasm every time the thought of that creature that had peered out at them recurred to his equine brain. Sid led him over to the grass swale, where he fell to grazing again. After a time the pony seemed to know that their visitor had gone, for, save for an occasional stoppage to look long and intently, he went on feeding.
But that was no guarantee that the prowler might not come back again, sometime during the night, reasoned Sid.
“Bear or cougar, what he wanted was horse flesh!” muttered the boy to himself as he started his fire. “Let’s see; the Navaho hogans are not so far from here, up near the head of the Canyon to the east. That’s about eight miles. Suppose this brute was that freak panther that we heard about at Hinchman’s? Of course, it was dark and Imighthave been fooled, but hewasblack, whatever the thingmight have been. It couldn’t have been black bear, or I’d have noted his ears. This thinghadno ears,—and it looked catty! By George—suppose itisthe Black Panther! The black leopards of the East are always larger and heavier than the spotted and clouded kinds, so this fellow must be an old Tom cougar, a lover of horse, deer and sheep. What’s to prevent him coming back and getting Pinto before I can wake up to shoot him?”
Sid puzzled a long while over what to do, as he squatted before his fire broiling a slab of venison from the haunch. He munched at it and then washed down a liberal help of pinole with brook water, still undecided. There did not seem to be any solution for this particular difficulty.
“Well, there’s one thing about it—Pinto’s as good as a watch dog,” said Sid to himself. “He’ll stay up all night, munching grass, if I know horses,” he laughed, “and he’d sense that cougar around long before I could.... I’ve got it!” he cried, slapping at his knee delightedly.
He pulled up the picket pin and drove it in again under the spruces beside the bed of dry needles among some rock hummocks that he had selected for a sleeping place for himself. Then he retiedthe lariat, so that there was a short length left over, and this he fastened to his bed roll.
“There!” he exclaimed. “If Sir Black Panther comes, Pinto’ll plunge and rear and pull out his pin, all in about one jump. Then the lariat will yank the bed out from under me—enough to wake up a dead man—and I ought to be up and shooting mighty sudden!” With that he leaned the rifle handy against a spruce and rolled up in his blankets on the needle bed. The last sound that drifted to his ears was the steady munching of Pinto, as unending as the murmur of the rill in the ravine.
Next morning Sid awoke with a sense of having missed something. Wasn’t there to have been a row with a cougar that was to come and take his horse? But there stood Pinto, grazing peacefully. Birds chirruped in the firs and spruces growing in the chasm; the sunlight streamed down through its silent cathedral walls; a water ousel was bathing himself in a pool of the brook and thanking God for the gift of another sunny day. All was peace in the glory of the morning. The uncanny visitor had not come, then! Sid lay lazily awake for some time, enjoying it all. The only sounds, save the soft soughing of the wind in the evergreens, were theceaseless runnel of the brook, the liquid notes of the birds, and the champing of Pinto’s teeth on the grass beside camp, clearly audible in this vast stillness. It recalled Sid’s thoughts to desire for breakfast. He was notquiteready for the frontiersman’s fare of straight venison and pinole! Coffee and bacon with it loomed up in his mind as much more savory and palatable. And that brought him to remembrance of his emergency ration. The boys never went abroad without it. Itoughtto be in a canvas pouch on the back of his belt, reflected Sid. Reaching around, he was surprised to find it still there, utterly forgotten and no doubt slept upon in the excitement and fatigues of the day before.
Sid unbuckled his belt and slipped it off. It was a home-made affair, merely an empty cocoa tin with two holes punched in its upper rim and a small bale wire packed inside with the grub. It held a half pint of water when filled. Out of it Sid took a package of coffee, lumps of sugar, a paraffin paper package of bacon slices, a small tin box of salt, and a cube of dried soup powder. The cover of the tin had a tack hole in one end, so that it would make a small frying pan by tacking the tin to the end of a stick. With a small fire going he soon had coffeebrewing in the can and four slices of bacon were crisped in the cover. Then washing down a spoonful of pinole, he was ready for further adventures. He was packing up the emergency kit and drowning the remnants of his fire with water carried from the brook, when to his surprise the soft duff under his feet gave way with a crackling of rotten twigs, and, before he could right himself, his boot was jammed down in a cleft of mossy bowlders whose humpy forms showed irregularly under the needle floor of the cove. Sid had spent considerable effort the night before in trying to find a level place to sleep on between those hummocks, wondering in a vague way how they came to be there. Laughing gayly at his own clumsiness, he now tugged his foot loose from the cleft and then peered down to see what might be in the hole, for nothing is insignificant to the woodsman. Down in the rubble of needles was—water! Quite a little pool of it. Evidently all the interstices between the hummocks were filled with it.
Sid watched the glistening surface for some time, for all the day was his, and he had no appointment with anything or anybody. Gradually a loose needle detached itself from the ring of them about the hole and floated slowlytowardthe brook! Sid’s interestat once arose mightily. He had assumed that this water was merely a backup from the brook, but that needle said, No! More of them detached and followed the pioneer across the water hole in the cleft.
Out of such small beginnings do great things grow, in the woods! There was evidently a current between the hummocks, flowing toward the brook. If so, where did it come from? Sid asked himself. A spring, back in the depths of the cove, most likely. He explored the little dent in which he had camped, carefully. The broken and jagged strata of the walls had met here, jammed together by some prehistoric movement of the earth’s crust. It wasnotthe real plateau wall. The trees had taken advantage of the jumble of interlocking slabs, for a giant fir had effected a lodgment in the fissure, filled as it was with pockets of soil that had accumulated there.
Sid eyed it with thrills of adventure and discovery running through him like wine. Therewasno spring! The water came from farther back—somewhere! He raced back and crossed the brook, climbing the stratified walls of the canyon as high as he could. Squatting on a ledge, he peered upwardto where the walls of the canyon towered into the cloudless blue far overhead. His eye followed the symmetrical column of the giant fir. The edges of the cove met and interlocked behind it, and for a considerable distance above its topmost spire. Then appeared a narrow cleft, a sort of fat man’s misery, extending to the top, and through it showed a thin seam of sky blue. The cove was a mere wall then, and something lay behind it—a blocked canyon perhaps.
On fire with adventure, Sid eyed it speculatively, seeking a way to climb up to that cleft. Every ruin in the main canyon was known, and had been explored and rifled of its relics by ethnologists and tourists. Two or three centuries ago they had been inhabited by tribes of pueblo Indians, but when the Navaho, the Dene (deer hunters), as they called themselves, came down from the Far North they had attacked these villages and driven out all the pueblos in their neighborhood. How the Navahogotdown, from the neighborhood of Great Slave Lake where their kinsmen, the Dene, still live,—through the Blackfeet, the Shoshones, the Cheyennes and the Utes,—was a whole mystery in itself, but here they were, and had been since the times of theSpaniard. It accounted for the deserted state of all the cliff dwellings in the San Juan and Chaco Valley and Canyon Cheyo regions.
Suppose, then, there should be a box canyon in back of that cleft that no white man had ever yet explored! thought Sid, as he searched the ledgy walls of the cove before him. “Lost Canyon!—andIdiscovered it! What a start in ethnology for me!—Gee-roo!” he crowed to himself happily, “there’s water coming from in behind there,somewhere!”
He climbed down and cached his saddle and rifle, on general principles. Pinto would not likely be molested, for the Black Panther would not hunt in the daytime. The pony would be perfectly content with the grass and water, which he had not ceased to sample since getting over his scare of the night before. Picketing him out with the full length of lariat, Sid swarmed up the fir, for he had noted where a ledge could be reached by climbing out on one of its higher branches. Once on the ledge he looked down, and some idea of his undertaking began to dawn on him. It was a fearsome climb, up above! He was already seventy feet above the floor of the canyon and the beginning of the cleft was stillat least a hundred feet above him. Luckily no slippery moss grew on the ledges up here!
It became more and more awful as he ascended from ledge to ledge. There were some that jutted out so that he climbed over them like a house eave, with his body hanging out in space and a frightful fall yawning below him if he failed to make it. And, all the time, the sense of vertical rise grew more and more uncomfortable. If only you could getsomeslope inward,—something less like a stone ladder of huge slabs!
After a time he grew used to the sense of height. The thing resolved itself into the immediate problem of getting over the next ledge above. Theyallshelved back—just a little—that was some comfort! But above him they came out again, in an enormous pediment, one of Nature’s own cornices, big as a whole Parthenon. Sid looked up, despairingly. If the cleft did not begin before that thing started out from the cliff wall, he was beaten! And he had no idea how he was ever comingdownthose ledges again, either!
But his route, planned out from below, turned out to be feasible. The narrow cleft started from the flat floor of a ledge twenty feet above him. Hemade it, with the help of some young spruces growing out of crevices in the rock. He had learned to depend on these, as they were firmly anchored by their twinelike roots. Sid at last stood on the ledge, looked down into the void below with a sigh of relief, and then looked up through the cleft with renewed hope.
“Fat Man’s Misery,” as he named the cleft, began with a steep slope of loose, dry earth. You could climb it with your elbows jammed into the rock on either side. Squirming and twisting, Sid wormed up through it, hanging on most of the time by the rocks, where a slip would have dropped him down like an avalanche, to land on Pinto’s pied back far below. Then the opposite downward slope began, just as steep. That ledged cliff was a mere wall—and he had climbed through it!
When he got down out of the cleft he found himself looking into a small valley choked full of tall spruces. Their tops rose out of the green below him. It was a small box canyon, sure enough, not over a mile to the head of it. Sid started down, his feet slipping and sliding in loose shale rock that refused to halt anywhere. Grabbing a sapling, he hung fast and listened to the shower of small stonesdropping down into the valley over some ledge below him.
No way down there! He grimaced to himself, shrugging his shoulders. All right!—down the flanks of the canyon, then! He started off, sloping down wherever possible, and little by little worked below. A last plunge through firs and thick needles, and he stood on the floor of the valley. It was filled with mossy bowlders, just like those under his camp, and down in between them were cool, clear wells of running water.
Sid drank, and then started up the valley, searching the cliff walls for some of the swallow-nest houses of the cliff dwellers. Then, in a widening of the valley floor, something attracted him. Thick-grown with weeds were clumps of bladed grasses that looked somehow familiar.
“Indian corn!—Wild maize,—I do believe!” he exclaimed, examining one of the stalks curiously. A small ear with a black tassel on it arrested his hand as it slipped up a stalk. Ripping open the husk, a tiny knot of blue and white kernels came to view. There were not over thirty of them all told.
“Corn!” cried Sid. “Relapsed back to Nature! This is what it looks like in its wild state—and thislittle flat must have been an Indian planting ground!”
A wild vine that ran thickly through the growth like a ground nut next confirmed it. It was a true bean, gone wild, all right! It did not need the stringy pod, filled with small red beans, to reassure him. And rambling profusely over the rocks in the sunlight was a large-leaved plant that he knew to be squash or gourd, he was not sure which. Looking further he discovered a rocky and ruined trail leading upward from the vegetable patch. Overgrown with briers and weeds, still it had that look of going somewhere that marks the human trail no matter how old. Sid ran out into the valley and peered upward, but could see nothing but ledges above, half hidden behind thick evergreens that were sprouting out of every crack and crevice in the walls. He climbed up the trail, often leaping to a spruce trunk and back again to avoid places where the rock was weathered and shelving. High up on the cliff he came at last to a great out-jutting wall of rock that stood out like a bare chimney from the cliff face. Rude stone steps led up through it, and over the cleft hung balanced a great bowlder, held up on its inner side by a stout, bare tree trunk. All the former cliff dwellers had to do was to knock away that trunk tolet the rock fall and seal up the entrance to their village forever.
Sid labored up the steps under it gingerly. Somethinggreatwas coming off! He was surely discovering a new ruin!
If so, it must have been abandoned within the memory of men now living, reasoned Sid, for a weatherworn pole ladder next came to view, leading up to the top of the first pueblo. As the boy mounted it, he examined the rock walls closely. They were not of ’dobe clay, but of stone, closely fitted, without mortar in the joints. This placed it as having been built by someone of the San Juan tribes, for they invariably used the flat stratified rock of the region to make their fine walls. Arrived at the top of the ladder, Sid looked about him with wonder. Overhead hung the immense smooth roof of a cave scoured by water action long ago. In it was a small pueblo, only four rooms, but they were cunningly built back from the edge of the ledge, so that it could not be seen from below nor, indeed, from anywhere but the opposite wall of the canyon. And it was a little gem, in a fine state of preservation, for the characteristic blue and red porous pottery water jars still stood cemented on the cornersof its roofs. The pueblo had manifestly never been attacked by hostile Navahos.
“Gorry, what a find!” ejaculated Sid to himself as he walked over the roof of the nearest trap door, out of which stuck the poles of a ladder. He looked down it, letting his eyes become adjusted to the semidarkness within. A faint, musty odor pervaded the place; somehow the very air seemed full of whispering ghosts, for the wind scoured through the vast cave and moaned in the empty windows of the houses. Gradually objects developed out of the gloom. Two large, gayly decorated granary baskets, filled with musty corn, sagged in the corners. Then he made out pottery jars, covered with black and white symbolical Indian designs. Festoons of dusty red and blue corn ears hung from the rafters, and rows of what looked like shriveled and dried red peppers. Over in one corner Sid finally made out the pottery oven, its sooty door still filled with the fragments of charcoal and sticks.
Then he drew back, with a quick start of surprise, for, huddled against the walls of the furnace he saw two figures, with ornamentally woven blankets fallen shapelessly around them. Sid whistled to himself, softly, as he glanced around with a shiver of superstitiousfear. Then he got a new grip on his courage and looked down again. Yes, they were there;—two human figures squatting in the gloom, hugging the heat of their pottery fire that had long since gone out. Sid looked, and then slowly descended. They were an old man and his squaw, shriveled and dry as mummies, their clothing tattered and fallen into decay.
Their whole story was here; pathetic, gripping the heart with its human appeal. Sid added a new item to his philosophy,—the sacredness of the word HOME. These old people had stuck to their home until the last, huddling up to their life-giving fire with the ultimate feebleness of old age. Their young folk had doubtless migrated to one of the populous pueblos now flourishing; these two had stayed by the homes their fathers had built, the squaw tending her few vegetables, the old buck killing rabbits or an occasional deer, the pair making pottery and blankets as their forefathers had done since time immemorial—the last, last survivors of a communal home, where once a happy people had lived and loved!
And the flower of their lives was here, the imperishable immortality of art; for these jars and baskets were beautiful, as beautiful in form anddecoration as any Greek or Etruscan vase. The story of their gods was there, just as on the Greek vases of two thousand years ago. One or both of these old folk had produced these, and left Beauty as their memorial.
Sid stood looking at them, reverently, and then stooped to examine the oven door, for the dull white of pottery decoration within had caught his eye. Raking out the sticks and charcoal, a great vase standing bottom upright within the oven came to view. Carefully he lifted it out and stood looking at it in wonder. It was tall and beautifully formed, with a swelling base and wide columnar neck that flared like a trumpet flower at the top. It was covered with black and white symbolic decorations,—rainbows, rain, clouds, lightnings, mountains, mesas, all in conventional figures that thrilled him with their mystic significance.
Now,whyshould these two have spent the last hours of life left to them in producing—this? ruminated Sid. Why, but the love of art, the worship of beauty that would not die within them so long as a spark of life remained! It was their monument, that immortal flowering of art,—the desire to make something beautiful that is bedded in the soul ofman, is in truth the wine of life to those who have it, rich and fertile, in their beings.
Sid at length climbed up the ladder, thoughtfully, and went along the roofs of the three other pueblos. They were deserted and empty, but outside in the sun against the Old People’s room was the empty wooden frame of their blanket loom.
“Thus we lived, and thus we died; mark and learn who will!” sighed the boy, philosophically, clapping his hands together abstractedly. “And now,—how am I going to get back to Pinto and the Canyon?” he asked himself briskly. The climb back down those frightful ledges to the fir tree was only to be considered as a last resort. As he had passed no way out of the box canyon in getting to the pueblo, Sid reasoned that the entrance the former dwellers used must be somewhere up near its head, where there would be a slope of some sort. He went forward along the roofs of the four houses, hoping to find a trail that would lead to this route.
As he approached the last end wall, a faint but noisome odor smote his nostrils. The boy hesitated and laid hand on his small .32-20 belt pistol, for this smell was of tainted meat, and it warned him that an animal lair of some kind was near him. Cautiouslyhe advanced and peered over the wall. Below him the ledge ended abruptly—the cliff men had built right to the end of it, so as to make it inaccessible from below at that end. Spruces grew out of the cliff wall and concealed it, but through their roots Sid thought he could detect worn spots where some creature had been in the habit of passing.
Then he turned his attention to the back of the high cave roof overhead whence came the odor. It shelved down behind the pueblo, and as he walked over to the inner walls, Sid could make out a black and dusty area in behind them, where the cave came down to the ledge floor. Here the shelf slabs were not three feet above the ledge floor, a slit of dense gloom, where water had once scoured out a soft stratum of rock. His eye gradually made out bones strewed on the soil under here, ribs, skulls, leg bones, all of sheep or deer; he could not say which.
“Phew!” he muttered, drawing back to the fresh air. “It’s either a cougar or a bear den—it can’t be the latter, unless it’s some small black bear, for nothing but a fly could come through those spruces on the cliff. Itisa cat! Cougar—perhaps the Black Panther himself!—Why not?” he declared, with growing conviction. “I’ll just bet it was him,last night! He hunts around here, or did, until he found that stealing the Indians’ sheep was free, to him! Gosh, the beggar might be paying rent and taxes!” sniffed Sid. “Of all the nerve! He’s got a pretty soft thing—I’ll say!—until someone of us gets a shot at him, out here. And that’ll be me, I hope.”
But then he remembered that he had not his rifle with him. Nothing but the little inadequate .32-20. The quicker he got back and came up here with that rifle, the better, for the Black Panther would be quite likely to revisit his lair, perhaps this very day.
Sid climbed down by the pueblo trail he had first discovered and worked up through the spruces up the valley, confident that he would soon find a way out and speculating on how to get down from the plateau above into the chasm where his camp was. But the rim walls of the box canyon offered him little encouragement. Three hundred feet above him they towered, with bare, stratified and perpendicular walls after the lower slopes of talus ended. The large spruces in the valley contented themselves with a root hold in the wet soil in its ravine. Nowhere did they come near enough to the cliffs to be of any use in climbing out.
Sid pushed through them, looking for the place where the cliff dwellers had come into and left the canyon, for, of course, a community of people could not have lived shut up in here. But, when he burst through the tree growth at the canyon head, already the high walls of a cliff, partly seen through the trees ahead, had given him a warning of his fate. This canyonhadno head slope! Instead, a giant wall of granite stretched before his troubled gaze, and in the center of it was the smooth, scoured trace of an ancient waterfall. A terrific granite slope filled up one corner, between it and the side walls, and there were cracks in it and what looked like the shallow cuttings of stone steps, but the lowest edge of this was utterly inaccessible from below. The cliff dwellers probably reached it by systems of long, notched tree trunks, which the vicissitudes of ice, snow, rain and weather had long since rotted and crumbled to dust.
For him there was no way out—save by the cleft, the ledges, and the fir tree up which he had come! Sid stood there, staring blankly, sickened by the thought of that awful climb down. He knew well that it was impossible.