Gone to Ground (2 page)

In contrast, the smaller man with him looked uncomfortable with the situation. His uniform wasn’t as pristine, the creases less razor sharp. His face also looked softer and more worn, as though he’d seen too much and was unbelievably tired. Softer look aside, however, she had no doubt that if she resisted he would be more than willing to slap on the handcuffs and put her in the waiting car.

“Your area is assigned for concentration,” the tall man stated, handing her a sheaf of papers. “You have been assigned to the Phoenix Authorized Population Zone. You have two days to pack your property and report to the administrator.”

In a fog of unreality Maggie looked at the papers in her hand with her name, her son’s name and their address printed across the top. She had just gotten back from town in an attempt to purchase supplies. Luck hadn’t been with her that day, though, and all she had to show for her journey to the stores were two ten pound bags of rice.

One of the reasons the government gave for concentrating the people was so that they could more fairly and evenly distribute food, medicine and clothing. It made sense, but Maggie had heard from a few journalistic contacts that life in the APZs wasn’t easy, and that food and medicines were still in short supply and getting shorter considering that most of the farms were shut down until workers could be found and moved to the necessary areas. Her contacts told her about the gangs, and the crime waves. People were assigned jobs based on their skill levels and refusal to participate could result in cuts in rations or worse.

None of this information appeared in what news was available, of course. Freedom of the press was apparently in abeyance until such time that the government felt comfortable letting the people know what was happening.

That night, watching Mark sleep, his damp blond hair tousled on the pillow, she determined that she wouldn’t have him exposed to that type of life. She remembered a story she’d done several years before about one of the oldest ranches in northwestern Arizona, the S Lazy V. While interviewing the owner at his home, he showed her a number of pictures and maps from around the ranch. One of these was of an isolated camp that they called Hideaway.

The rancher, Bob Tompkins, laughed when he talked about it. “That is one of the loneliest places in all of Arizona,” he stated. “It’s on a piece of deeded land that’s in what we call a checkerboarded area; public and private lands all mixed up together. Somehow, it got mostly surrounded by a designated wilderness area, which meant that most of the roads, as bad as they were, couldn’t be used any longer for motor vehicles. The one road left is barely passable by a goat in good weather. You can take a helicopter in, but the wind shears pretty badly down that canyon, so you have to hit it on just the right day.

“The camp itself is in the middle of Adobe Canyon, in an area that widens out. The geologists say it was probably a lake at some time, but now it’s the prettiest little meadow you ever saw, a mile or so long, and a bit more than a mile across at the widest spot,” Mr. Tompkins went on. “The house was originally built by miners who were prospecting Adobe Creek; then cowboys upgraded it a bit, added a barn and a windmill, and made it into a camp.

Mr. Tompkins showed Maggie where Adobe Canyon lay on the map, a long jagged slash, starting in the Juniper Mountains in the north and running down toward the headwaters of the Verde River. “Another problem is that in bad weather it can become sealed off for weeks, sometimes more. Snow and rain, as well as the winds can make it impossible to get in or out, other than on horseback and not always even then.”

According to Tompkins, on the western edge of this meadow under an overhanging sweep of deep red sandstone was a house, built into the natural shelter of the cliff using the rocks found in the area, much as the ancient shelters of the Anasazi and Sinagua had been built into these types of declivities centuries earlier. In fact, a little further up the canyon were the ruins left by some of the earlier native inhabitants of the canyon. The floor of the house had many ancient pot sherds and arrowheads left by these people, concreted in alongside the sandstone and shale slabs, as well as a few mule and horse shoes for good measure.

“You just can’t keep that camp manned, though, these days,” Tompkins continued. “That place is so damned isolated. It was hard to find many single cowboys who wanted to live that far from anywhere for long, especially after the roads got shut down. And just forget it if there was a wife involved,” he laughed. “There weren’t many women who wanted to raise their kids that far from medical help, or any other kind of help, for that matter. So, we eventually just shut the camp down, leaving it provisioned for emergencies, but otherwise not using it.”

It became much easier to work the pastures from camps on the outside edges of the wilderness area. A cowboy could easily work from the outside in, instead of the inside out, so for the past thirty years the small, hidden camp called Hideaway had become a legend, not forgotten, but its existence not completely believed by those who hadn’t seen it, either.

During the research for her article the rancher gave Maggie copies of maps and pictures. However, he requested that she not make much mention of Hideaway since he didn’t want a herd of recreational hikers, riders and ATV drivers swarming his ranch looking for the place. Of course, he said, being a wilderness area, the ATVs weren’t allowed to cross, but that had never stopped them before and it was usually the rancher who incurred the expense of repairing the fences and waters that these people destroyed. Maggie respected his request and only made a brief mention of the various camps and the cowboys and families that manned them, leaving out the abandoned camp all together.

Gradually during the night the idea came to her that Hideaway was exactly the type of place where she and Mark could go. Even before the Enforcers began concentrating the population, Hideaway was a long way from any form of civilization. The only people who knew about it were the ranch owners, and the cowboys who worked the ranch. Considering the percentages, the odds were that either they’d died in the plague or been concentrated into one of the APZs.

Maggie figured that there was a chance she would run into someone at the camp, or one of the other nearby camps, but hopefully the independent, rebellious spirit of the cowboy would lead them to offer shelter and assistance until she could figure out where else she could go.

The next morning Maggie put her plan into motion. With Mark’s help she packed four suitcases and placed them in the middle of the living room to make it look as though they were prepared to head for the APZ. The papers she’d received gave them permission to bring two suitcases per person. The rest of their property was to be left in their locked home, waiting for their eventual return. The papers stated that since the population would be living within the APZs, there would be no problem with looters, and any that did manage to escape the net would be easily detectable.

In another part of the house she also packed all the portable foodstuff they had, as well as water, outdoor clothing, some tools and her small laptop with its solar charger into various bags and bundles.

Overcoming qualms of guilt, she broke into her neighbor’s house. These people were avid campers and she was able to gather many essential articles, such as warm sleeping bags, lanterns, and freeze dried foods, as well as many other helpful items such as a folding shovel, cooking utensils, a radio and two flashlights that worked by cranking or shaking.

Maggie also wanted to find a gun and ammunition. She hesitated before taking this last item, since she and Mike had always resisted getting a gun, especially since her husband saw so many gunshot wounds on his job. But, she thought, finally wrapping the rifle in a blanket, a gun could be the difference between life and death out in the wilderness. She tried not to think about what she’d do when the ammo ran out. Hopefully there would be abandoned ranches and camps not too far away where she could renew the supply. Actually, she thought, if they were lucky, the crisis would be over by then, and they would have returned home.

Finally, she and Mark went through their own house opening cabinets and drawers, throwing the contents on the ground in order to make it look as though someone had gone through the house looking for things to steal.

Ten years before, Maggie and Mike had bought an attractive redwood and granite home on the northern outskirts of Prescott, Arizona, only a short distance from public lands where they could hike on the weekends. Because their subdivision was in a semi-rural area, at least one of their neighbors, the Johnsons, kept horses. Maggie had been feeding them as well as the Johnsons’ two Australian shepherds since the family died from the influenza. Now she was glad she hadn’t just turned the animals out, as had so many others. Those four horses would be their passport to freedom.

Maggie figured she had a day, maybe two before the authorities realized that she and Mark were not going to show up at the shuttle to the APZ. Then hopefully, when officers checked the house, they would see the pile of suitcases as well as the disordered belongings and believe that looters had attacked while they were packing and either killed or kidnaped them. She hoped that the Enforcers wouldn’t spend too much time looking for the two of them, and that even if a search were instigated, the two or three day head start would be enough to erase the hoof prints that would indicate in which direction she and Mark had headed.

That night, under the soft light of the crescent moon, Maggie and Mark slipped over to the Johnson’s barn, caught and saddled the horses. The two dogs, Jack and Gypsy, danced around the humans, excited to go on what seemed to be a moonlight trail ride. Neither Maggie nor Mark had much experience with horses other than the few times they had been invited to go for a ride with the Johnson family. Each of those times, their mounts had been prepared for them and all they had to do was get on and steer. Saddling the creatures themselves was not as easy as it appeared, but with some fumbling and false starts they finally managed to get all four horses saddled, and their bundles distributed neatly.

With a final regretful look back at the house sitting silently in the shadows of the tall ponderosa pines, the small group eased quietly down the road heading for the gate into the forest on the west side of the subdivision. 

Over the next five days, using maps, a compass and making liberal use of wire cutters, Maggie and Mark made their way out through the empty rangeland to where Maggie thought Adobe Canyon was located. A book on wilderness survival which she’d found at the neighbor’s became their bible, and time and time again Maggie proved that she was not a nature girl. Especially when she discovered that a small, golden-brown bull snake had curled up in her boot one night while they slept.

Much to Mark’s shock, and then amusement, Maggie promptly screamed, threw the boot into a cactus and climbed on top of a nearby rock. It took five minutes of concentrated effort on the boy’s part to convince his parent that the inhabitant of the boot wasn’t the Mojave green rattlesnake that had been prominent in the news lately, and that bull snakes were harmless.

Watching the growing expression of glee on her son’s face, Maggie climbed carefully down from her rock, a growing suspicion entering her mind. Was it possible that the small reptile had been given a hand climbing into her boot? She wasn’t positive, but just in case, she made sure that her boots were secure every night thereafter.

After nearly forty miles, five days of riding and three false starts down the wrong canyons, Maggie, Mark, their four horses and two dogs finally made their way between the towering red, yellow and white layered walls of Adobe Canyon and into the emerald green meadow of Hideaway. They were home.

Maggie and her small group of cows made their way into the home meadow, the name she and Mark had given the area around Hideaway, and she remembered her first sight only four short weeks ago. The brilliant green of the grass contrasted against the vibrant reds and aged yellows of the sandstone cliffs and the bright blue of the sky. It seemed too bright, too intense to be real. Upon first seeing the meadow a month ago, she was reminded of nothing so much as a painting touched by the brush of an artist with no taste for subtlety.

On that day, for the first time in five months, ever since the influenza stole her husband, Maggie felt a rush of relief cascade through her. For the first time the twanging tight strings of fear loosened their hold.

Maggie’s body remembered that feeling of release and echoed it today. Again, she was home.

3

After waiting until the woman
was well out of sight, heading deeper into the canyon toward Hideaway, the man followed her, picking his way through the thick oak brush and catclaw. He was wary of getting too close lest the horses give away his location through a hoof banging on a loose rock, or an ill timed whinny.

Pondering the question of the woman, he decided his best move would be to head down Adobe Canyon, away from Hideaway, to another small meadow he knew about. He could leave his four horses there, then make his way on foot to a concealed overlook that would give him a good view of the home pasture around the camp. He
needed
to know exactly what he was dealing with. The last thing he wanted was to walk into the middle of a group of armed ghosts, the name the Enforcers gave to those people who’d avoided concentration and were trying to live free of government “assistance.” He thought it darkly humorous that he, one of those who had been assigned to conjure and “exorcise” the ghosts, was now one himself.

He’d first spotted the woman two days ago, as he was making for Hideaway. Not sure of the situation, and unwilling to jump into deep water without backup, he began watching her from a distance. Questions loomed in his mind and he considered briefly heading off in another direction, avoiding confrontation all together. The security of Hideaway was too big of a prize to give up uncontested, however.

As he observed the woman riding through the pastures adjacent to Adobe Canyon, he came to the conclusion that, if she wasn’t alone, she also couldn’t be with a very well organized or skilled group of ghosts. He spotted the telltale signs of a person not familiar with riding the range. No rope, spurs or chaps, even in the thickest brush. Her horse, while it seemed a good type, didn’t strike him as being one used to the rough land in which it was working. The woman’s hesitation and fumbling to complete even the simple maneuvers needed to gather a small group of cows showed that she didn’t have that sense of what cows think that ranch kids learned from their earliest days.

Why on Earth,
he thought,
would someone with so little experience be alone out here?
It didn’t make sense. This wasn’t some dude ranch adventure. Making a mistake out here, especially with the way things were these days, could get you killed.

This was rough land, slashed and torn by washes and canyons, covered with coarse grasses, juniper thickets, pinion pine, oak brush, catclaw and numerous other plants that were as tough as the land they grew on. Even cowboys who spent their lives in the saddle, with rears as tough as leather, occasionally got lost or killed if new to this unforgiving corner of the high desert. You couldn’t spit without hitting a cactus or a rock, and the cattle had to be as agile as mountain goats to get around and make a living.

This was the land and the life he was born to, although it seemed he’d forgotten that for awhile. His father had been a cowboy on the S Lazy V Ranch and had been assigned to the Eagle Camp. His mother, a teacher, had been a rancher’s daughter and had expected to marry a cowboy from the moment she was old enough to dream about such things. Many people would have considered their family’s life at camp isolated and lonely, but he and his brother couldn’t imagine a better one.

Because of their distance from town for much of his childhood, his mother had home schooled her two children. Much of their days, when they weren’t doing their lessons, involved helping their father work the land he’d been assigned. Both he and his older brother, Jason, could hardly wait until they were old enough to go on the wagon, the two times of year when all the cowboys gathered, the chuck wagon was provisioned and they and the remuda - the ranch’s string of cow horses -  traveled around the vast ranch, branding and working the calves and their mothers. When the wagon rolled out, it was like the old west had come back to make a home in the 21
st
century and for two kids brought up on the stories of the cowboy life, even Christmas was second best.

He thought back to the picture that his mother had on their mantle for as long as he could remember. He and Jason, wearing their chaps and spurs, carrying their ropes and sitting tall in the saddles, even though their stirrups barely hit halfway down their horses’ sides. A real pair of cowpunchers in the making.

His mind flashed to another picture his mother had, one he begged her to destroy. She’d always refused, though, threatening to bring it out and display it for the world whenever she heard he was dating someone new. She never did, and he knew she was joking. At least he hoped she was. It was a picture of him as a two-year-old. His father had just ridden into the yard, and he was so excited that he went tearing out the door to meet him. The problem was, he was wearing nothing but his boots and spurs, his hat and his rope.

When he was a kid, his mother kept that picture locked up so that he couldn’t get to it. He’d lived in fear that on his wedding day his mother would bring it out and display it to all the guests.

She hadn’t, but you just never knew with her. After all, there was that time when he opened a large, ornately wrapped birthday gift only to find a box filled to the brim with dried horse poop. It wasn’t until he dug through the powdery manure that he found the small box encasing a coveted pocket knife. Things like that made birthdays and Christmases interesting at home, but they also sometimes made you wonder exactly how far she would go.

He’d grown up planning to become a cowboy just like his father, his grandfather, and his great grandfather before him. It wasn’t until he was fifteen, during that terrible fall wagon, that the idea of becoming a law enforcement officer entered his mind. Then, during the next five years, while living in town, the idea blossomed and grew until that was all he wanted to be.

That’s what he’d become too, for the next sixteen years. He probably still would be living that life if the flu and the reorganization hadn’t intervened. Now he found himself at the age of thirty-six horseback again and about to reenter the cowboy life, only in a way that no cowboy had lived for well over a century, if ever. Maybe it was more the life of the legendary mountain men who left the world, went off and lived in isolation for the majority of every year, only contacting civilization when they needed something that couldn’t be made off the land.

The man made his way down the canyon, listening to the soft tinkle and chuckle of the water running across the smooth black, pink and yellow stones lining the stream. The unusually abundant spring rains had caused the water to run on the surface of the creek for further than normal. For most of the year the water had a tendency to flow above ground for a hundred yards or so, sink out of sight, then suddenly reappear as if out of nowhere. It all depended on the type of land it was traveling through.

He remembered his high school science teacher talking about the porosity, or some such thing, of different minerals and rocks, but all it meant to him was that some years Adobe Creek would be in sight most of the way to the Verde River, and some years it would play coy, like some of the girls he’d admired in school. Only putting in an appearance occasionally, then disappearing again out of reach.

Nearly a mile down the canyon, a second wash carved its way down through the land to join the main canyon, creating a slightly larger gap between the vertical multicolored walls. Some long ago rancher had built a small catch pen at the opening to this wash using juniper staves and wire. He’d stretched it across the wash and the canyon, building easily replaceable sections at the water gaps for when the flood waters ran high and debris tore out everything in its path.

Gates opened in all three directions and were left open most of the time so that cattle traveling down the trail that followed the wash from the plateau could move through to get to water or travel through to other areas of the pasture. At other times, though, when a cowboy wanted to gather a small group of cows without taking them all the way back to the camp, he would close the main canyon gates, go gather his herd and push them down the wash and into the catch pen.

Now the man led his horses inside and closed all three gates. He pulled the saddle off his stocky buckskin gelding first, then turned to the other three horses, unloading the packs and setting the supplies outside the fence, then returned to remove the pack saddles themselves. With all the horses freed of their tack they began to wander the pen, heads down, looking for the ideal sandy spot to roll and scratch their sweaty, itchy backs. Then, having comforted the body, they began to fill their stomachs, grazing on grass that had sprouted inside the pen since it was last used, and that had grown to lushness unusual in this harsh land thanks to the creek’s abundant water.

The man leaned on the fence a few minutes watching the horses, then in a voice, scratchy with disuse, he bid them stay put, and he’d be back in a bit. The sound of his own voice startled him. Never what one would call a talkative man, over the days since he’d left the Laughlin Authorized Population Zone, he’d spoken less and less often, until he might go an entire day without uttering a sound. His ears had become accustomed to the quiet sounds of nature -  the susurration of the ceaseless wind,  the quail’s chip-churring, the eagle’s cry, the coyote at night, the occasional low of a cow, and the answering bawl of a calf - and the sound of his voice seemed harsh and out of place.

It amused him to think that most women mentioned the quality of his voice as one of the things that attracted them. He knew it was deeper, softer and huskier than average, but out here it just seemed loud and grating, and he felt the urge to look around and see where the strange sound had come from.

After leaving the horses in the catch pen, he made his way quietly back up stream, heading for the overlook that he and his brother discovered many years ago. It tickled the two boys that they could sit up on the cliff side, watching all the action in the pasture, yet no one knew they were there. They’d first found the overlook when they came to Hideaway with their father while checking the waters for the pasture. Even though the luck of the draw had surrounded this piece of deeded land with a designated wilderness, making the manning of the camp a thing of the past, the cows still had to be checked, and the waters maintained. His father, as the resident of Eagle Camp, held this pasture as part of his duties. Cowboying isn’t just a job, however, it’s a lifestyle and often when his father checked this remote pasture his wife and kids came along, especially if it was going to be a several day trip.

As the man drew near Hideaway, he moved slower, his scuffed brown leather boots making little sound on the hard packed dirt as he looked for the boulder that marked the narrow, water-eroded crack in the rock that led upward to a narrow trail. Finally, just as he’d begun to believe that past twenty-one years of weather and floods had rearranged the landscape to such a degree that the overlook was gone, he spotted the familiar rock formation on the left side of the canyon.

Squeezing between the boulder and the cliff side, he was surprised at how much smaller the cleft had become. Surely he couldn’t have grown so much since leaving the ranch to live in town. He began to worry that he would either become stuck, or emerge on the other side sans buttons. The horrifying image of having to call for help, then having to explain himself to the woman gave extra impetus to his squirming, and he emerged on the far side of the boulder on a trail carved between a chunk of sandstone that had split off from the main body, and the cliff wall itself.

Now,
he thought,
all he had to do was to get back through on the way out. At least he’d have gravity on his side in that direction.
He hoped that the trail was still intact after all these years. It didn’t bear thinking about that he would make it all the way up here, only to be faced with a blocked trail.

After a few minutes of slithering, scooting and crawling -
Damn, how the hell did this trail get so much smaller, and the wall become so much shorter -
he arrived at the low opening of a small cave eroded into the sandstone wall. These cliffs were filled with caves, some that meandered miles underground through the sandstone and limestone layers. There was actually a rumor that if you found the right connections, you could make it all the way to the Grand Canyon, just like the cave network that included the Grand Canyon Caverns. Tour guides told how smoke from a fire set in the Caverns could be seen emerging from caves in the Canyon itself. No one had actually tested
these
caves, but he and his brother had explored occasionally when staying at the camp, and had never come close to covering all the possible twists and turns.

His destination in this case was only a small, singular cave, not part of any interconnected labyrinth. It was roughly ten feet by six feet, and about ten feet high at the peak with a crack that extended upward even further, possibly even to the top of the plateau, and which channeled in the water that had formed the natural enclosure and the trail he’d just followed. It was a dead end, except that at the far side a triangular crack opened, allowing visual access to the pasture beyond. The man slid into the cave and made his way across the sandy floor to the gap where he crouched, looking out.

The view was just as he remembered it at least. He could see nearly all of the pasture, with the exception of the area just below, to the right and left of his position. He could make out the northern opening of the canyon, the gray, weathered barn and corrals, and a portion of the camp’s yellow and red granite and sandstone house with its nearby windmill. There was the woman’s horse, tied at the hitching rail outside the barn with its saddle off. In the pasture was the small group of cows she’d been pushing, as well as four or five others. A short distance from the cattle grazed three more horses.