A Mating of Hawks Read Free

comforting physical presence of two men she’d known in childhood, but seeing again the purple marching mountains in every direction as they proceeded down the Santa Cruz Valley on the Nogales highway. The massive Santa Catalinas rose to the north above Tucson, the Rincons were east, and to the west, against the Tucson Mountains, gleamed the white walls of San Xavier del Bac on the Papago Reservation, one of Padre Kino’s missions. When Apaches had forced Christianized Pimas to flee their mission at Tumacacori farther south, the Indians had carried their saints and sacred vessels in their burden baskets to this White Dove of the Desert.
    A ribbon of green showed the track of the Santa Cruz River through the broad flat valley, defined by the Santa Ritas to the east and smaller, scattered ranges to the west.
    Except for that slim fringe along the river, the country looked parched and dead in spite of its being March. “Has it been a dry year?” she asked.
    â€œMighty dry. We’re a long way from that average eighteen inches at the ranch and of course Tucson’s under its average of eleven.”
    Spreading beneath the highway and sprawling in all directions stretched acres of white stuccos topped with what seemed from this perspective to be overlapping red tile roofs.
    â€œGreen Valley?” gasped Tracy. “It’s grown like crazy.”
    â€œCrazy is right,” Shea said grimly. “And getting more so. Some big pecan growers pumped lots of precious water to get groves established, but they’re selling to developers who’ll root out the trees and pack in all the fake Mediterranean villas they can on the acres they’ve gotten zoned for building. People use less water than agribusiness, of course, but I wonder what they’ll do when there isn’t any.”
    â€œWhat this place needs is a few good Apache raids,” Geronimo said. “Let me tell you, in the good old days, we were a damned efficient check on urban sprawl.”
    â€œWhich part of you’s bragging?” grinned Shea. “You psyched them out in the Army, Sanchez, but I happen to know you’re three-quarters respectable vaquero stock. And besides, I’m everything you are,” Shea reminded.
    â€œSure. But the proportions are a little different.” Geronimo squinted balefully at the flat-topped low ridges on their right. “Those damn mine tailings!”
    â€œDon’t bitch, Sanchez. Can’t you see Duval’s revegetating them?”
    â€œI’ve seen more sprouts on a bald man’s skull!”
    â€œMaybe someday they’ll use them to pave water catchments the way they’re doing up by Black Mesa on the Navajo Reservation.”
    â€œWe should live so long,” grunted Geronimo.
    The highway by-passed the old presidio of Tubac now, but Tracy glimpsed the adobes housing art galleries and craft shops, the steeple of the church. In Spanish, then Mexican days, the presidio’s tiny garrison, sometimes less than a dozen men, had tried to ward off Apache raiders, but the valley had been depopulated from the early 1820’s till the influx of American miners after the Gadsden Purchase of 1853. Tubac itself had been abandoned several times, its soldier-settlers and friendly Pimas refuging in Tucson, the region’s other military outpost.
    â€œWhat’s happening at Rio Rico?” she asked, nodding at the roads of the old Tumacacori Mission.
    â€œGAC Corp’s still pushing its Shangri-La.” Shea didn’t even glance at the roads. “Calabazas had its booms between its busts. First a visita for Jesuits, then a sheep and goat ranch run by a couple of Germans in partnership with the governor of Sonora. After the U.S. takeover, there was a camp there on and off, and a customs collector. Big building surge in the 1880’s with a classy hotel and such. Wonder how long Rio Rico will last?”
    â€œYou’re just full of