Jim Kane - J P S Brown (34 page)

Juan Vogel and Jim Kane were horseback in the Sierra
Madre of Chihuahua. They had a big circle to make. They had three
bunches of cattle to see. The first bunch was at a camp of Vogel's
called Gilaremo. They were on their way to Gilaremo and noon caught
them by a camp called Guasaremo. They left the trail and rode until
they came to a small stream. They followed this stream up a trail
through a brushy canyon. They bent over their horses' necks to ride
through a low tunnel of
vainoro
.
The
vainoro
filled the
canyon. Its branches were long and supple with thorns that resembled
the curved, hooked blade of a scimitar. When they straightened up
they were in a hidden draw where the
mezcal
was being made.

Juan Vogel's uncle, Don Pepe, was a small man who did
not smile when he saw his visitors. He was adjusting a long canal of
bamboo halves that brought clear water from a spring to the copper
dome of the still. He was fixing the angle of one section of the
canal so that the cool water would drip at precisely the rate he
needed on the dome.

A young Indian was carrying newly cooked heads of
lechuguilla
from a
deep pit. The heads were brown and heavy. The swordlike leaves of the
lechuguilla maguey
had
been hacked off and the heads resembled pineapples. Another Indian
was pounding the heads flat with a heavy green club and carrying the
pulp to a stone vat for fermenting. The young Indian, his face
childlike under the black bangs on his forehead, laid the heads down
and began chewing on a meaty piece of the pulp while he watched Vogel
and Kane. Vogel traded for two five-gallon
garrafones
of the
mezcal
from
the uncle.

The uncle caught a cupful of the wine as it dripped
from the bung of the still. He handed it to Vogel, who sipped it
carefully and passed it on to Kane. The stuff was warm and syrupy and
did not have the tight, green kick of the cooled
lechuguilla
Kane knew. It made his jaws and ear canals ache
slightly.

"
You should sip only slowly. The warm stuff will
hurt your throat," Vogel said.

The winemaker caught another cupful and handed it to
Vogel and he and Kane drank again.

"
Victorio, take the two
garrafones
to Gilaremo this evening on your burro,"
Vogel told the young Indian. The Indian barely nodded his head to
show he understood.

When Kane and Vogel rode into the camp at Gilaremo
the
vaqueros
were
finished with their work for the day. The poles on the gate of a
stone corral were tied with rawhide. Several cows and calves were in
the corral. The
vaqueros
were
butchering a
javalina
doe
on her hide. A
ramada
served
as a cookshack for the camp and a young girl was cooking supper.

Kane and Vogel and Vogel's
mayordomo
,
a rosy-cheeked young
vaquero
,
rode into a pasture above the camp to look at the rodeo steers that
had been gathered and put aside there for Kane's inspection.

Very little fencing contained the steep pasture. A
high cliff bounded one side; a miles-long escarpment of high
precipices another; a ravine another. An old stone wall about a
quarter of a mile long fenced the only natural access to the pasture
near the camp. Kane saw the
corrientes
with horns good for rodeo in the pasture.

Kane and Vogel were at the
cookshack drinking coffee when the young Indian, Victorio, drove his
burro into camp. He unloaded the demijohns, set them under the
ramada
, poked his
burro with a stick, and left the camp. That evening by the campfire
Juan Vogel told the story of the Indian Victorio.

Victorio was a Guarigío, a tribe that is almost
extinct. Every year in March Don Pepe Schmidt would go to the canyon
at Guasaremo and use the spring to make
mezcal
and the variant of
mazcal,
lechuguilla
.

Victorio and his cousin Cayetano worked as peons for
Don Pepe at the distillery. Victorio had a way, almost an oriental
way, of hiding so that a stranger wouldn't notice him even when he
was working three feet away. He bobbed his hair in a straight line
all around his head. It hung below his ears and he had a straight
bang, black and shining, across his forehead. Victorio and Cayetano
hunted the mountains for the ripe
maguey
and
lechuguilla
palms.
When they found a ripe plant they would slice off the bladelike
leaves around the thick head. They would then drive a peeled pine
stick into the top of the head. The sticks they used had branch stubs
on each end that served as hooks. The hook in the top of the fruit
kept it from slipping off the stick and the hook on the opposite end
would be fastened to a burro's pack saddle. The maguey heads are
heavy with a strong acidic juice that could peel the hide off a burro
or the skin off a man's hand. The hooked sticks kept the heads away
from the burro's sides.

At the
vinata
the
heads would be piled into big holes in which fires had been laid for
long hours. The holes were lined with rocks that would be white hot
when the heads were piled in. Then the Indians would lay date palm
branches in several layers on top of the
maguey
heads and fill the holes to the top with mud. In this
way the heads would cook in their own juice for twenty-four hours.
Then Victorio would dig back down through the layers of mud and
branches and throw the smoking rocks out of the hole until they came
to the heads cooked light brown, their juice no longer harmful to the
skin, their sections smarting, jaw-aching sweet. As they worked they
would tear out large, soft and meaty sections, chew all the sweetness
out of them, and spit out the tough fiber.

They would take the heads and beat them with clubs
until the pulp lay out flat. They would place this pulp, sopping with
juice, in vats partly filled with spring water and leave it there to
ferment. When the odor of wine could be traced to a vat the juice
would be drained from it and placed under a copper-domed distiller. A
long wooden aqueduct from the spring would bring a steady drip of
cool water to splash on the top of the dome. Inside, the vapor would
run around the curved dome to the ducts and out the spout into a big
five-gallon demijohn. It would drip out warm and sweet as a hot punch
on Christmas Eve but if you drank too much of it that way it would
anesthetize you. When you woke up you would find the stuff had
braised your throat so you couldn't swallow and everything you tried
to get down would stick in close in your gullet and quiver there for
a bad while.

Victorio didn't drink
mezcal
.
He had seen it make Cayetano crazy. He liked to take a small bottle
home sometimes to his mother. Don Pepe would discount it from his
wages. His
mother liked a small swallow in
the mornings.

In the evenings at the
vinata
when the fires were out and the last clear shiny drop of
mezcal
had splashed
into a thousand pearls in the demijohn and the holes with fresh heads
cooking had been well covered, he would load a burro with
tasol
,
cornstalk fodder, or leña, firewood, and drive him up the trail to
his mother's house. As he drove his burro, he would rest. His strong
legs would rejoice with every tired stretch of muscle. He would
anticipate each old wonder around each bend of the trail that was so
like his mother's face. Then he would see his mothers lamp where she
had hung it under a beam on the porch and he would know she was
waiting for him. She was always so happy if he brought her a bottle
of the good
mezcal
, of
the
fuerte
, the
strong, she called it.

Victorio had one great vice. He was crazy for the
dark honey of the
panal
,
the wild bee hive. In the seasons when honey was plentiful he spent
more time hunting
panelas
than
he did working for Don Pepe. He would risk his life for honey. He
often became so absorbed in the search and acquisition of a hive and
finally the eating of the honey that he wouldn't get home at all in
the evening. Often he would just stay out and eat the honey and lie
down and sleep, full as a bear, under a rock. When he stayed out all
night because he had gone too far in the high Sierras to be able to
find his way safely home in the dark he would eat all the honey and
forget to take any home to his mother. Then his mother, besides being
nearly lunatic with worry for Victorio, would become angry with him
for not bringing the
panal
home
with him. She was an old one and he knew she had few pleasures. He
often resented the vice in him that made him crave honey so much that
because of it he denied his mother something she also enjoyed.

One evening after work at the
vinata
Victorio turned his burro loose on the field of
tasol
at Guasaremo and hurried away. He went up the trail
exhilarated by the knowledge that he soon would be tearing open a
panal
and, unmindful
of the defending bees, even loving them too, he would be feeding on
the dark honey. For that morning on his way to the
vinata
he had seen a bee in the purposeful line of flight that
told Victorio he was headed to the hive. Victorio had followed the
bee and with the finest of happy lucks had traced its flight to a
sheer cliff. He had stood directly under the cliff for a while until
he had been able to locate the panal. It was fat, gray, and
untouched. It hung from the tip of a branch on a withered bush near
the top of the cliff

Victorio climbed an easy slope that reached the top
of the cliff. He saw the panal on the face about 30 feet below him.
He carried several peeled pine hooks with him. He cut fronds from
leafy short palms that grew around where he stood. He braided these
narrow palm strips together for a rope and tied it around a jutting
rock on the brink of the cliff He made several more of the short
ropes and put them in his mouth. He hooked one of the pine sticks
into the rope tied on the rock and lowered himself over the brink.
When his hands reached the bottom of the stick he hooked onto it with
another stick and braced with his feet against the face of the cliff.
He held on with one hand and deftly looped two half-hitches of palm
rope around the hooks where they joined, binding the sticks together.
In this way he lowered himself to within five feet of the panal bush
before he ran out of sticks. He was just able to stand on the roots
of the old bush. When he put his weight on the roots, the old bush
quivered, the
panal
swung
precariously. Victorio saw with satisfaction that it was very heavy.
A bee struck him a piercing sting on the sole of his bare foot.
Victorio laughed joyously. "Ah, no, little animal," he
said.