LOST 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 I _might_ have
been fooled, but he _was_ black, whatever the thing might have been.
It couldn’t have been black bear, or I’d have noted his ears. This
thing _had_ no ears,--and it looked catty! By George--suppose it _is_
the 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 retied the 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 the ceaseless 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 not _quite_ ready 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. It _ought_ to 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
coffee brewing 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 slowly _toward_ the brook! Sid’s interest at 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 was _not_ the 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. There _was_ no 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 upward to 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 Navaho _got_ down, 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 the Spaniard. 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!--and _I_ discovered
it! What a start in ethnology for me!--Gee-roo!” he crowed to himself
happily, “there’s water coming from in behind there, _some_where!”
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 still
at 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 get
_some_ slope 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.
They _all_ shelved 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 coming _down_
those 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. He made 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 stones dropping 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 this little 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 to let the rock fall and seal up the
entrance to their village forever.
Sid labored up the steps under it gingerly. Something _great_ was
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 corners of 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 superstitious fear. 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
and decoration 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, _why_ should 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
of man, 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. Cautiously he 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. It _is_ a 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 canyon _had_ no 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.