LITMIR.BIZ

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bow,” Havek called after him.

      “I broke my bow,” said South Boy.

      “Leave the gun, anyway,” said Havek. “It’s too heavy for traveling.”

      Thus to escape boredom, with no idea as yet of escaping the horns of his dilemma, South Boy set out on his fateful journey. When he got to the ranch he heard noises that told him the cook was again in the summer kitchen; so he stuck his head inside the screen door and told her he was going visiting and would be gone two or three nights. The cook began thanking the Virgin and the twelve apostles, naming them one by one.

      South Boy went to the house and crawled under the back gallery to the hole where the cat had her kittens. From it he took a fishing line with several hooks attached, wrapped around a stick. Then he began to dig in the soft dirt at the bottom of the hole, which was temporarily free of kittens. Three or four inches down he uncovered a bundle carefully wrapped in a greasy rag. He unwrapped the rag and there, well-swathed in axle grease, was a new nickel-plated revolver . . . a weapon that was very dear to him because it was forbidden.

      Six months ago he had sent his life’s savings to a Chicago mail-order house and in due course this treasure had been sent to him. No one knew about it, not even Havek. He broke the gun to see that it was loaded, a needless procedure because he knew he hadn’t used the last six cartridges he had left in the cylinder a couple of weeks before. He snapped it shut, tucked it under his belt inside his shirt, and backed out into the yard.

      Almost as an afterthought he went into the kitchen, took one small box of soda crackers from a shelf and three or four handfuls of black, salty strips of jerky from the meat bin. One of these he crammed into his mouth, sucking gratefully at the salt which his body craved after much sweating.

      Thus with a fishline, a box of crackers, a half pound of jerky, an old broken pocketknife, a little water-tight case full of sulphur matches (two items he was never without), and a belly-gun (the latter only a sort of talisman) South Boy felt himself equipped to go anywhere the Colorado flowed.

      His clothes were dry now, so that he found the return trip to the river very hot; but he was buoyed up by the prospect of spending the night at the “sing,” and by the tantalizing mystery of the hawk-dreaming.

      Why was Havek so excited about it?

      There was more excitement when he got to the river. He went down into the water to his knees, stooped to drink his fill, slopped water over his head till his half-long hair was dripping-wet, and climbed the bank.

      There stood Havek, leaning on his long bow. The seven hunting arrows were thrust into the back of his belt, and in his right hand he held a three-foot willow rod a little thicker than a man’s thumb. Bound to this were four carefully fletched arrows. Unlike the hunting arrows, unlike any ordinary Mojave arrows, these had iron points—small, longish, triangular, and quite sharp.

      “Apache arrows!” cried South Boy. He had never seen the like twice in his life.

      “There’s a war,” said Havek.

      “You go making war with those arrows and the agency police will jug you!” South Boy warned.

      “Far,” said Havek, jerking his chin toward the north. “Faraway war!”

      Then South Boy remembered he had twice heard mention of Piutes that day and he opened his mouth to ask Havek for talk, but Havek was already trotting away along the river bank.

      The sun was very low. The trees made much shade. Even when they had turned inland and had passed through the willows and the cottonwoods and were shuffling through the gourd vines in the wide spaces between the mesquite trees, there was still shade. And the wind continued to blow, making the heat bearable. They traveled at a little trot, like roaming dogs.

      Suddenly South Boy found himself very content and very comfortable. There was meat and water in his belly and there was salt in his mouth, for he was chewing another strip of jerky. The thoughts that came from the back of his head to worry him were gone entirely. He was a different person. He was his old self. He cared nothing for the future at all—not even for the answer to such tantalizing questions as “Why Apache arrows?” and “What means a hawk-dream?” He just felt good.

      He began chuckling to himself as he jogged along. Havek heard him and turned around, saw him chewing and reached back his hand. South Boy reached into his shirt and brought out a great handful of jerky which he thrust into Havek’s hand.

      When the rim of the sun sat down on the white scar where Beale’s Trail crossed the ridge of the Dead Mountains over in Nevada, they came to a place called Ahavelpah where the river bottom ended at the mesa’s cliff. Nobody lived there. There had been a rancheria there at one time, but someone had died and been cremated there, and his house and goods burned, of course; so it was a ghost place and would remain so for a generation—just a damp swale near the foot of the dun cliff where three big cottonwoods grew by a water hole.

      At the third cottonwood, Havek said, “Wait here,” and he climbed the face of the cliff and under the low branches of a mesquite that clung to it ten feet up. Directly, he came sliding down the gravelly face of the mesa carrying a five-pound salt bag bulging full.

      “Traveler’s rations,” he said, stuffing the bag into his shirt.

      Then South Boy knew for certain Havek was intending to travel far, for no one would bother carrying a bag of parched corn and pumpkin seeds if he were only going as far as the northern valley, just above the Fort.

      This he thought little of at the time. He was more impressed with the fact that Havek had disclosed the location of his secret cache. That was usually concealed from one’s closest friend, for it was a great honor to keep something cleverly concealed. South Boy hugged the gun against his belly and laughed to himself. He would show that to Havek some time and tell him triumphantly, “All this time I was traveling with you and you didn’t know I had it.”

      That would be a triumph indeed. Almost a Great Thing.

      They were jogging along at the foot of the cliff over ground made hard by the black alkali. Havek began to sing:

      “Name-traveling, I travel,

      Name-finding, a new name.”

      So he goes traveling with Apache arrows, thought South Boy. Well . . .

      It was likewise unusual for a Mojave boy to go traveling to find himself a man’s name before he was through school, that is if he went to school. Havek was setting out a year or two early. Havek hated his boy’s name, which was really a baby name. Because it was a joke name, it had stayed with him in his youth. It was such a good joke name that he was called Havek even by people who habitually spoke English and should have called him by his government name, which was Rutherford Hayes.

      The joke was Havek’s mother’s. She was a huge woman, always laughing. When she carried Havek, she grew so large she thought she was going to have twins. When Havek came alone, she laughed and laughed, and called him Havek, which means simply “Two.”

      Soon they came to a wide mouth of a wash, and Havek turned up the sandy bed of the arroyo that came out of it. He slowed his pace down to a walk, for the bed was sand and the going was heavy.

      South Boy stopped once to look back over his shoulder. The sun was gone, and the west was as red as a shirt of China silk. A lovely thing to see.

      This, he told himself, I’ll remember a long time. This is the night I was happy, after a bad day.

      He thought of something he heard an old man say: “The white man’s forehead is wrinkled because he is always asking, ‘Will tomorrow be bad?’ He never has time to smile because it is very good right now.”

      It is very good right now, thought South Boy. I’ll let tomorrow be.

      Up ahead Havek trudged on past a paloverde tree, green of trunk, branch, and stem, and very beautiful against the white sand of the wash. He was going slower because the sand pulled at his heels. He passed the first greasewood bush—a dozen gray-green stems springing out of

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