THE cabin stood in a little grove of piñons, about thirty yards back
from the Cruzados river, facing south and sheltered on the north by a
low hill. The grama grass grew right up to the door-step, and the
rabbits were running about and the grasshoppers hitting the door when we
pulled up and looked at the place. There was no litter around, it was as
clean as a prairie-dog’s house. No outbuildings, except a shed for our
horses. The hill-side behind was sandy and covered with tall clumps of
deer-horn cactus, but there was nothing but grass to the south, with
streaks of bright yellow rabbit-brush. Along the river the cottonwoods
and quaking asps had already turned gold. Just across from us,
overhanging us, indeed, stood the mesa, a pile of purple rock, all
broken out with red sumach and yellow aspens up in the high crevices of
the cliffs. From the cabin, night and day, you could hear the river,
where it made a bend round the foot of the mesa and churned over the
rocks. It was the sort of place a man would like to stay in forever.
I helped Rapp open the wooden shutters and sweep out the cabin. We put
clean blankets on the bunks, and stowed away bacon and coffee and canned
stuff on the shelves behind the cook-stove. I confess I looked forward
to cooking on an iron stove with four holes. Rapp explained to me that
Blake and I wouldn’t be able to enjoy all this luxury together for a
time. He wanted the herd kept some distance to the north as long as the
grass held out up there, and Roddy and I could take turn about, one
camping near the cattle and one sleeping in a bed.
“There’s not pasture enough down here to take them through a long
winter,” he said, “and it’s safest to keep them grazing up north while
you can. Besides, if you bring them down here while the weather’s so
warm, they get skittish, and that mesa over there makes trouble. They
swim the river and bolt into the mesa, and that’s the last you ever see
of them. We’ve lost a lot of critters that way. The mesa has been
populated by run-aways from our herd, till now there’s a fine bunch of
wild cattle up there. When the wind’s right, our cows over here get the
scent of them and make a break for the river. You’ll have to watch ’em
close when you bring ’em down.”
I asked him whether nobody had ever gone over to get the lost cattle
out.
Rapp glared at me. “Out of that mesa? Nobody has ever got into it yet.
The cliffs are like the base of a monument, all the way round. The only
way into it is through that deep canyon that opens on the water level,
just where the river makes the bend. You can’t get in by that, because
the river’s too deep to ford and too swift to swim. Oh, I suppose a
horse could swim it, if cattle can, but I don’t want to be the man to
try.”
I remarked that I had had my eye on the mesa all summer and meant to
climb it.
“Not while you’re working for the Sitwell Company, you don’t! If you
boys try any nonsense of that sort, I’ll fire you quick. You’d break
your bones and lose the herd for us. You have to watch them close to
keep them from going over, I tell you. If it wasn’t for that mesa, this
would be the best winter range in all New Mexico.”
After the foreman left us, we settled down to easy living and fine
weather; blue and gold days, and clear, frosty nights. We kept the
cattle off to the north and east and alternated in taking charge of
them. One man was with the herd while the other got his sleep and did
the cooking at the cabin. The mesa was our only neighbour, and the
closer we got to it, the more tantalizing it was. It was no longer a
blue, featureless lump, as it had been from a distance. Its sky-line was
like the profile of a big beast lying down; the head to the north,
higher than the flanks around which the river curved. The north end we
could easily believe impassable--sheer cliffs that fell from the summit
to the plain, more than a thousand feet. But the south flank, just
across the river from us, looked accessible by way of the deep canyon
that split the bulk in two, from the top rim to the river, then wound
back into the solid cube so that it was invisible at a distance, like a
mouse track winding into a big cheese. This canyon didn’t break the
solid outline of the mesa, and you had to be close to see that it was
there at all. We faced the mesa on its shortest side; it was only about
three miles long from north to south, but east and west it measured
nearly twice that distance. Whether the top was wooded we couldn’t
see--it was too high above us; but the cliffs and canyon on the river
side were fringed with beautiful growth, groves of quaking asps and
piñons and a few dark cedars, perched up in the air like the hanging
gardens of Babylon. At certain hours of the day, those cedars, growing
so far up on the rocks, took on the bluish tint of the cliffs
themselves.
It was light up there long before it was with us. When I got up at
daybreak and went down to the river to get water, our camp would be cold
and grey, but the mesa top would be red with sunrise, and all the slim
cedars along the rocks would be gold--metallic, like tarnished
gold-foil. Some mornings it would loom up above the dark river like a
blazing volcanic mountain. It shortened our days, too, considerably. The
sun got behind it early in the afternoon, and then our camp would lie in
its shadow. After a while the sunset colour would begin to stream up
from behind it. Then the mesa was like one great ink-black rock against
a sky on fire.
No wonder the thing bothered us and tempted us; it was always before us,
and was always changing. Black thunder-storms used to roll up from
behind it and pounce on us like a panther without warning. The lightning
would play round it and jab into it so that we were always expecting it
would fire the brush. I’ve never heard thunder so loud as it was there.
The cliffs threw it back at us, and we thought the mesa itself, though
it seemed so solid, must be full of deep canyons and caverns, to account
for the prolonged growl and rumble that followed every crash of thunder.
After the burst in the sky was over, the mesa went on sounding like a
drum, and seemed itself to be muttering and making noises.
One afternoon I was out hunting turkeys. Just as the sun was getting
low, I came through a sea of rabbit-brush, still yellow, and the
horizontal rays of light, playing into it, brought out the contour of
the ground with great distinctness. I noticed a number of straight
mounds, like plough furrows, running from the river inland. It was too
late to examine them. I cut a scrub willow and stuck a stake into one of
the ridges, to mark it. The next day I took a spade down to the
plantation of rabbit-brush and dug around in the sandy soil. I came upon
an old irrigation main, unmistakable, lined with hard smooth cobbles and
’dobe cement, with sluices where the water had been let out into
trenches. Along these ditches I turned up some pieces of pottery, all of
it broken, and arrowheads, and a very neat, well-finished stone pick-ax.
That night I didn’t go back to the cabin, but took my specimens out to
Blake, who was still north with the cattle. Of course, we both knew
there had been Indians all over this country, but we felt sure that
Indians hadn’t used stone tools for a long while back. There must have
been a colony of pueblo Indians here in ancient times: fixed residents,
like the Taos Indians and the Hopis, not wanderers like the Navajos.
To people off alone, as we were, there is something stirring about
finding evidences of human labour and care in the soil of an empty
country. It comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel
differently about the ground you walk over every day. I liked the winter
range better than any place I’d ever been in. I never came out of the
cabin door in the morning to go after water that I didn’t feel fresh
delight in our snug quarters and the river and the old mesa up there,
with its top burning like a bonfire. I wanted to see what it was like on
the other side, and very soon I took a day off and forded the river
where it was wide and shallow, north of our camp. I rode clear around
the mesa, until I met the river again where it flowed under the south
flank.
On that ride I got a better idea of its actual structure. All the way
round were the same precipitous cliffs of hard blue rock, but in places
it was mixed with a much softer stone. In these soft streaks there were
deep dry watercourses which could certainly be climbed as far as they
went, but nowhere did they reach to the top of the mesa. The top seemed
to be one great slab of very hard rock, lying on the mixed mass of the
base like the top of an old-fashioned marble table. The channels worn
out by water ran for hundreds of feet up the cliffs, but always stopped
under this great rimrock, which projected out over the erosions like a
granite shelf. Evidently, it was because of this unbroken top layer that
the butte was inaccessible. I rode back to camp that night, convinced
that if we ever climbed it, we must take the route the cattle took,
through the river and up the one canyon that broke down to water-level.