Fire on the Mountain Read Free

of town, where the old man bought some flour and beans, we drove south to the turnoff and headed west over the twenty miles of hard-riding dirt road that led to the ranch.
    The landscape before me was much the same as that in the mural on the wall of the Wagon Wheel Bar. To the west rose the broken tooth of Thieves’ Mountain, the peak ten thousand feet above sea level, adorned with a feather of cloud. North were the San Andres Mountains, with the white dunes of gypsum flowing for fifty miles along the base of the range, and to thesouth were the Organ Mountains, tapering off into the dimness and emptiness of the borderland and Old Mexico. Even the buzzards were present, two of them, hovering high in the blue, meditating on space, but the savage eyes missing nothing that stirred in the desert below—belly, beak and claws taut with hunger and desire. Next turn around, I thought, if we get the choice, I too want to be a long-winged, evil-minded predatory bird.
    We came to the boundary and then to the gateway of my grandfather’s little kingdom. He stopped the truck, I got out, slid back the drawbar of the gate and swung it open. Above my head, hanging from the cross-pole of the gate frame, a weather-silvered board inscribed with the Box V brand creaked on its iron rings. The old man drove the pickup through, I closed and latched the gate, and climbed back to my seat.
    We drove on across the salt fiats of an ancient lakebed, where the heat shimmered up in palpable waves. Through the layers of heat and light I watched the dislocated outlines of the mountain ranges flow together, floating on a yellow sea of haze. In that country, fantasy and mirage were always present.
    After the lakebed we passed clay hills with the shape of giant beehives, turrets and ledges of sandstone, and a wild garden of yuccas with stems ten feet tall. The road slipped into a broad wash, we churned through the soft hot sand and up the other side through thickets of willow and tamarisk, where a group of the old man’s bald-faced Herefords lay shaded up, waiting for the sun to sink before they’d rise and resume the search for something to eat. The cab of the truck filled with fine dust, a layer of it coating the dashboard, where I wrote my name with my finger: BILLY VOGELIN STARR .
    We didn’t try to talk much during the drive, with the truck bouncing like a bronco, the motor roaring, the bitter alkali getting in our eyes and teeth. Grandfather stared straight ahead from under the brim ofhis grimy hat and clutched at the bucking wheel; I kept looking all around, feeding my eyes and mind and heart on the beauty of that grim landscape. Hard country, the people call it. A cow might walk half a mile for a mouthful of grass, and five miles for a drink of water. If the ranch had been mine I’d have sold the cattle and stocked the place with wild horses and buffalo, coyotes and wolves, and let the beef industry go to ruin.
    We topped the final rise and won our first view of the ranch headquarters, a mile ahead and a thousand feet below. There was the grove of cottonwood trees surrounding the ranch-house, the windmill and water tank, and the cluster of sheds, corrals, barn, bunkhouse and other outbuildings nearby, all spread out on a bench of land above the arid bed of what was called the Salado River, where a trickle of hard water meandered from one bank to the other.
    Grandfather stopped the truck, shut off the motor, and sat for a while staring down at his home, a sad and perplexed expression on his wind-burned leathery face.
    “Everything looks the same as ever, Grandfather,” I said. “Like it did last year and the year before. The way it should.”
    He stirred, champed on the cigar, reached over and put his big hand, his gripping machine of bone and muscle and hide, on my shoulder. “I’m mighty glad you’re here, Billy. Stay awhile this time.”
    At that moment I was ready to forsake my other home, forsake my mother and father and little sister