Painted Horses (24 page)

The mare broke from the burn onto the bald face of a knob and leaped forward at the open expanse but he reined her back and stood again, looked again for the red horse below. Not a sign. The mare snorted and stamped, yanked hard with her head against the tightened reins.

A mile ahead the leafy crown of an aspen grove rose beyond the curve of the knob. A rock shelf jutted from the sidehill above like the remains of a battlement, corrugated with age and impassable yet. John H kicked loose of the stirrups and left the saddle in a launch.

He led the mare downhill at an angle. Meadowlarks jumped from the grass, yellow bellies flashing. He moved as quickly as he could and he stumbled once from the incline but caught himself and kept on.

They reached a game path and he hoisted back to the saddle and the mare flew like a coursing bunny down through the contours and then up again and they burst over the hump of the mountain into an elk herd, the animals starting in alarm and lifting their ears and some rising up out of the grass, but the horse and the man sailed past in a blur, into the aspens and gone. Dust lazy in the air. The elk looked around.

John H let the mare fathom the trees as quickly as she could, leaned low across her mane and felt the skim and slap of branches. He saw the glare of sunlight at the edge of the grove and the trail climbed and they were free, out of the green shade at the edge of a table. Ahead of him the canyon doubled back around a broad bend of the river, a mile-long oxbow, and with the trees at her back the mare stretched out her neck and galloped. He reined her at the terminus of the flat and fished the glasses out of his shirt.

The colt finished his pell-mell flight and only plodded now, blood slick on his neck and flanks lathered with sweat. John H watched him work through a maze of slab rock along the river, saw him rouse a coyote, which skirted warily away.

He turned the mare and rode her down the grade in a halting pigeon step through patches of dry crumbling clay and clumps of bitterbrush, down through a narrow drainage to the river bottom. He found a crossing and brought the mare up dripping on the opposite bank. He felt the breeze wander the canyon like a wraith, no more than a zephyr but enough.

He tethered the mare to a dead limb and climbed onto a long spit of land, some ancient bluff of the river or remnant of glacial moraine on its own long melt, and he bellied over the top and spied the colt a hundred yards down, looking back in the direction he’d come. John H knew he’d try to return to his kind, knew as well the stallion would either run him out again or kill him.

The colt lowered his head to water. John H scrambled back and loosed the mare and led her onto the narrow bluff. She saw the colt.

She blared like a trumpet. John H held to the ground in a crouch and at the sound of her call he watched the head of the colt rise, saw his ears point to the sky. The mare neighed again and the colt took a step forward. John H ducked down the incline, pulling the reluctant mare around. The colt answered from below.

He scrambled down the slope as quickly as he could, the horse pulling back at first and then heaving alongside in a fan of skittering dry clay and then striding past him altogether near the bottom, and when he planted his heels into the shifting powder to stop himself the mare’s rump swung wide in a circle as though he were a spar and the horse and reins the long accelerating swing of a boom. He’d forgotten his knee altogether now and he tossed the reins over her head and seized the horn and swung with one motion to her back.

He dug his heels and she thundered upriver, gravel flying from her hooves and then the hooves knocking like knuckles across hardpan. He wheeled her in a burst of dust and held her with the reins and waited.

The red colt appeared above the crown of land. He stopped with his head up and he spied the dust and he stamped. His whinny spiraled in the air like the whistle of a rocket, piercing and shrill. The mare neighed back and the colt came on, a blur of red motion.

John H turned the mare into the breeze and held himself across her back and ran her upriver another stretch and stopped again. To the west a black smudge of cloud. Spring storm a-coming. He steered the mare in a buttonhook turn and crouched along her neck and watched the colt run. The wind rustled a screen of willows, tickled the creaking dead limbs of an alder. The colt stopped, tested the same wind with his dilating nose. He brayed with a different sort of voice now, tail aloft like a setter’s and John H knew the colt had scented the mare and scented as well the peak of her cycle, and he had the red horse dead to rights.

He let the mare warble back once through the bottled air of the canyon and though she wanted to step out toward the colt John H forced her to turn and run upriver again. The wind had risen now and he squinted his eyes against the whip of the air and pulled the brim of the doughboy lower across his brow, saw ripples ridge the surface of the river like the scales of a carp. He knew the mare’s scent worked like a drug on the other horse’s brain, his own predator’s smell crouched behind nothing more than a floating curl of smoke.

The first drops fell. He looked across the river and found the thin bands of two-track, winding off the side of the mountain. His eye jumped to the wash, the unnatural gouges still present from the crush and crash of the heavy Dodge ambulance.

He’d thought of her since. Catherine Lemay, plainly not from around here. Despite the French name he caught vestiges of a proper British lilt to her speech, or parts of it at least. Words such as
ought
and
been
. He wondered at this. English parentage maybe, diplomats or professors transferred across the pond. He knew the second he’d ridden up on her in the trees she was the same girl he’d startled along the river in Miles City.

In Paris after the war he’d known acolytes of Jung, painters and café intellectuals who welcomed him into their fold as a kind of noble primitive, a notion they all seemed highly enamored with. They saw archetypal images in his paintings and assumed he tapped some conduit to the primeval soul. John H went ahead and let them think so.

They talked about the eerie synchronicity of coincidence. Encounter an odd word in print and an hour later someone else speaks the word in conversation. Though oftentimes they blathered in vague philosophical abstractions, tossing around difficult ideas made more difficult by his less-than-perfect French, the sensation of synchronicity he understood, perhaps better than any of them. The fact they’d christened it with a name was enough. He had a feeling he’d see her yet again.

She did something with Harris Power and Light. A part of him had already acknowledged, half in jest, that his own interests might better be served had he left her to hike out on her own. Except she clearly had no idea what she was doing and never should have been sent here. Not by herself, anyway.

Later with the clouds dumping buckets of rain he saw the stone flutes rising in the mist, his marker toward home. The mare pushed through the willows and entered the seam, the red horse trailing by barely a hundred yards. John H sat up straighter in the saddle for the first time in an hour. He’d ache for three days after this one. Then again, so would the mare.

The walls angled pink and sheer on either side, the sky thin as a crack overhead. The gorge snaked and sidled like the forces of wind and water that carved it, twisting this way and that, its sandy floor littered with rocks calved loose and toppled from above. Along its many miles the stem of the canyon connected with any number of smaller branches, channels that once held mighty volumes of water and likely would again. Only this time, not by the random whims of nature and weather and river.

One final curve and the aperture of the gorge opened to a bowl bored deep into the ring of red cliffs, a natural cirque a quarter mile across with grass in the bottom and a cluster of trees at one side where water burbled from the ground. The low stone house slouched like a feature of the rock itself, all but invisible against the base of the cliff, like a game bird melting into habitat.

John H shucked the rifle and reined the mare and was already dismounting before she’d pranced to a stop. He whacked her wet rump with the gun barrel and h’ya’d to send her on and she jumped forward into the grass with her ribs heaving and her ears up, head turned back to the gorge. She was drenched from rain, looked less horse than drowned rat.

The red colt appeared and John H held motionless, splayed tight to the wall not four feet away. The colt paused like a wary deer, testing the wet air with his nose and nickering at the mare. The mare nickered back. The colt took two steps forward. John H moved from the wall and though the horse caught this as nothing more than a flicker at the edge of an eye he jumped forward in a shock of fear, tucking his croup and humping his back like a dog startled up with a kick. The red horse wheeled and got his first hard look at a man. He bolted headlong across the cirque.

John H dragged the strung wires of a poor-man’s gate across the mouth of the gorge. He braced the gatepost against one shoulder and leaned into the wire to stretch it taut, then dropped a chain set in the stone down over the top of the post.

He took up his rifle and turned back to the bowl. The red horse ran along the base of the far rock wall. He traced a steady line around the perimeter and reached the alien symmetry of the pole corral and the barn and shied anew, running back along the wall the way he’d come.

The mare watched the red horse dart around but made no move to follow. John H stepped up and took her bridle. “Seems he’s forgotten all about you,” he told her. “For the moment.” The noise of his voice seemed to vex her and she shook her head against the grip of his hand, a wet corona blasting from her skull. He led her across the bowl toward home.

2

One evening in the middle of June Catherine glanced at herself in the bathroom mirror and felt her breath catch at the stranger she saw: green eyes glittering between lashes bleached nearly white by the sun, face burned brown as a nut, oily blonde hair plastered to her head and pulled into a ragged ponytail. The hard features of the ground she’d scanned and scoured and crawled across these last days had stamped a mark upon her. Her face had itself become a mirror.

After a series of frustrating day-trips she began to suspect Jack Allen of something not unlike subterfuge. He seemed to apply neither rhyme nor reason to whatever location he chose for the day, and Catherine’s sense of direction was so skewed by the gulches and gullies and endless mountains of stone that it took awhile to understand how erratic he actually was.

Finally in the evenings she and Miriam began to retrace each day’s route on a map. After a few days they had a sense of things.

“Yesterday we rode in on this trail, over on the reservation side,” Miriam said. “Remember those benches across the river, the ones you said looked like elephants’ backs? Those are these wider lines here. Now today we went in clear over on this side.” She ran her finger along a series of hashes on a different fold of the map. “That’s like, ten miles away. It’s been that way every day. There are huge gaps of ground we never see at all.”

Catherine had just realized something else, something sort of marvelous. Her thighs and bottom and back no longer ached from the days in the saddle. She hadn’t noticed before.

“Catherine, are you hearing me? I think he’s wasting a lot of time for you here.”

She came back to herself. She felt very calm, as though she’d swallowed a sedative that eased her mood but somehow sharpened her mind. “I hear you fine.” She leaned closer to Miriam across the map, studying the endless ridges and whorls of elevation, also the colloquial appellations scrawled across peaks and valleys and streambeds. Some were totally outrageous by modern standards—Bloody Dick Peak, or Boner Knob, which Miriam could really go on and on about. And far upriver, a swatch of ground where names and prior knowledge fell away altogether, a wide brown blotch labeled simply Unexplored Territory.

She looked at Miriam. “It’s still pretty hard just to know where to begin, isn’t it. No wonder we can’t come up with anything.”

“Do you remember what Mr. Caldwell said in the cave that day? About campsites?”

“Vaguely. Say it again?”

“He just sort of threw it out, that a good place to camp today was probably a good place a thousand years ago, or something to that effect.”

“Miriam, I’m an idiot. You’re right; it’s staring us in the face. You would know good places to camp, I guess?”

Miriam wrinkled her nose. “Not necessarily. But I bet we can think of someone who does.”

“We’ll manipulate him right back. Right under his own nose.”

“I can hardly wait.”

They crossed their bottles like sabers.

“Camping. With the two of you.” He reined the gray in the middle of the narrow trail and in one fluid motion turned the dappled horse to face her. He did have a flair for the dramatic. Catherine’s own horse shuffled to a confused stop, and Miriam’s behind her. “No bathtub, no toilet, hot curlers, and so on. This is what you think you want.”

“I’ve never used a hot curler in my life.” Not true, but Jack Allen certainly didn’t need to know it.

“Pocahontas back there, that I can picture. She’s only one generation out of the wigwam anyway.”

“Three, actually,” said Miriam. “And it’s tepee. Get it right.”

Allen ignored her. He looked at the setting sun. “A whole week? You positive? Because if I go to the trouble for that sort of shindig, I’m not liable to tolerate any whining, griping, or otherwise calling it quits early.”