“Shut up,” Spanish said. “You save your breath to cool your porridge.”
“I never been to the Sierra Madres,” John J. said. “Any place I ain’t been I got
to see.”
We put up some dust and headed south, with me riding up front. The trail was
used … there was always some riding down toward Kitchen’s ranch.
You might think that on a traveled trail you’d be safe, but there was nowhere in
this corner of Arizona where a body was safe, one moment to the next. Pete
Kitchen had men on watch all hours of the day, and everybody went armed,
expecting trouble, so after a while the Apaches kind of fought shy of the
Kitchen outfit.
There’s been a lot of talk of the rights and wrongs of the Indian wars, and
there was wrong on both sides. There were mighty few Indians holding down land
in this country when the white man came, and most of them never held to any one
spot. They just drifted from place to place, living off the wild game and the
plants. The white men came hunting living space, and a place for a home. Instead
of roaming as the Indians had done, they settled down to farm the land and build
houses.
Some of the white men wanted to live in peace with the red man, and some of the
red men wanted to live in peace, too, but some on both sides didn’t want
anything of the kind. The young bucks wanted to take scalps and steal horses
because that made them big men with the squaws, and it was often easier to take
them from white men than from other Indians, as they had always done. And
whenever the wise old Indians and the wiser and kinder of the white men wanted
to make peace, there was always some drunken white man or wild-haired Indian
ready to make trouble.
When an Indian made war he made war on women and children as well as on men, and
even the friendly white men found it hard to be friendly when they came home and
found their cabins burned, their women and children killed. On the other hand,
the politically appointed Indian agents and the white men who wanted Indian land
or horses would rob, cheat, and murder Indians.
It was no one-sided argument, and I knew it. But now the Apaches had stolen some
children and taken them into Mexico, and we were going after them.
We rode through the last of the afternoon and into the cool of the evening. We
camped that night in some ruins, half sheltered by adobe walls, and at daybreak
we rode out.
On the second night we stayed at Pete Kitchen’s ranch.
Chapter 5
We rode south for a few miles after leaving Pete Kitchen’s place, then turned
off the main trail toward the east. Now, a man who leaves a trail in the desert
had best know exactly where he is going, for his life is at stake.
Travel in the desert cannot be haphazard. Every step a man takes in desert
country has to be taken with water in mind. He is either heading for water, or
figuring how far he will be from it if he gets off the trail. The margin of
safety is narrow.
All of us had been south of the border, but it was Tampico Rocca who knew most
about it, with me coming second, I suppose. Like everybody else, we had to
depend on waterholes, and no matter what route we chose, sooner or later we had
to wind up at those watering places. This was just as true for the Apaches.
The desert has known waterholes, but it also has other waterholes not generally
known, usually of limited capacity and usually difficult to find. Birds and
animals know of those places, and so do the Apaches in most cases. If you did
not know of them you had to know how to find them, and that was something that
did not come easy.
A man living in wild country has to be aware of everything around him. He has to
keep his eyes looking, his ears listening, his every sense alert. And that
doesn’t mean because of Apaches, but because of the desert itself. You can’t
fight the desert … you have to ride with it.
The desert is not all hot sun and sand, there’s the rocks too. Miles of them
sometimes, scattered over the desert floor, great heaps of them now and again,
or those great broken ridges of dull red or black rock like the broken spines of
huge animals. They shove up through the sand, and the sand is trying hard to
bury them again.
In much of the southwestern desert there’s even a lot of green, although the
playas, or dry lake beds, are dead white. Some of the desert plants hold back
until there’s a rain, then they leaf out suddenly and blossom quickly, to take
advantage of that water. But much of the greenness of desert plants doesn’t mean
that rain has fallen, for many of the plants have stored water in their pulpy
tissues to save against drought, others have developed hard-surfaced leaves that
reflect sunlight and give off no moisture to the sun.
Plants and animals have learned to live with the desert, and so have the
Apaches. And we, the four of us, we were like Apaches in that regard.
The desert is the enemy of the careless. Neither time, nor trails, nor equipment
will ever change that. A man must stay alert to choose the easiest routes, he
travels slow to save himself, he keeps his eyes open to see those signs which
indicate where water might be found. The flight of bees or birds, the tracks of
small animals, the land of plants he sees — these things he must notice, for
certain plants are indications of ground water, and some birds and animals never
live far from water. Others drink little, or rarely, getting the moisture they
need from the plants they eat or the animals they kill.
We rode until the sun was two hours in the sky, and then we turned off into a
narrow canyon and hunted shade to wait through the hottest hours. We unsaddled,
let the horses roll, then watered them at a little seep Rocca knew of. After
that, with one man to watch, we stretched out on the sand to catch some rest.
There always had to be a man on watch, because the Apaches were great horse
thieves, though not a patch on the Comanches, who could steal a horse from under
you whilst you sat in the saddle. You either kept watch or you found yourself
afoot, and in the desert, unless you’re almighty canny, that means you’re dead.
First off, when we rode into that canyon we studied the opening for sign. A man
in wild country soon gets so he can read the trail sign as easy as most folks
read a newspaper, and often it’s even more interesting.
You not only read what sign you see on the ground, but you learn to read dust in
the distant air — how many riders there are under that dust, and where they’re
headed.
The droppings left by horses also have a story to tell, whether that horse has
been grain-fed, whether he has been grazing off country grass or desert plants.
And no two horses leave the same track. Each is a mite different, and their
gaits are different. Their hoofs do not strike with the same impact, and
sometimes there’s a difference in the way they are shod.
We could tell that nobody had been in that canyon for weeks. We knew, too, that
most of the time during the months of June, July, and August in Sonora you’ll
get some rain. Sudden showers that may be gone as quickly as they come, but
enough to settle the dust and to fill some of the “tanks” in the desert
mountains.
Among those desert ridges such tanks are frequent, pits hollowed in the rock
over the centuries by driving rain, or shaped by run-off water. During heavy
rains these tanks collect water and hold it for weeks, or even for months. We’d
had some rain, so the better water-holes and tanks were holding water now.
Shortly before sundown, rested by our nap in the shade, we saddled up again.
This time I took the lead.
There were clusters of cholla and ocotillo, and we took advantage of them as
much as possible to shield our movements. The route we used was an ancient one
rarely traveled in these days, but from time to time we’d pull up near a clump
of brush where the outlines of our horses and ourselves would merge into the
growth, and there we’d set, studying the country around us.
You might think that out in such open country, with no good cover anywhere, a