“Damn, but you kin climb out when you want to,” he said grudgingly, when we were safe at home.
Because I learned quickly and never forgot, Sloan held his hand from killing me in any of his outbursts of rage. At least a dozen times did he tie me fast to a snubbing-post and belabor my head and neck and ribs with a stout club, until I grew sick from pain and my glazing eyes warned him that he had touched the limit of my endurance. Then he would desist, for I was of value to him. These fits of frenzy were occasioned by the most trifling happenings. Perhaps when he came to drive in my mother and me, we did not move fast enough--she was growing very old--or she exhibited a too great fear. Then he would rope us and proceed to torture until his temper waned.
I come now to the time he killed my mother and I won a brief freedom. The weather had been murderously hot. From January to July no drop of rain fell and our hills grew sullenly naked and brown. Sloan’s spring ceased its flow. He did not discover that for two days, being stupefied, and we were terribly wasted when he turned us out to find water for ourselves.
There was no grass. The earth showed gray as the rocks and as bare, and the rocks gave back the heat in shimmering waves. Where the ground had cracked under the sun, giant fissures gaped for the feet of the unwary. Five miles from home we saw some cows stumbling hopelessly out of a cañon and learned that there, too, the water had failed. Their dried skins drew tight over their bones and the panic of desperation glared from their eyes. One prodded at my mother as we passed, refusing to give place as cattle do to horses, then sank weakly to the ground. Later she stretched out on her side, and we knew that the end was near.
Turkey buzzards strutted everywhere, gorged to apathy. They would cluster on a carcass, unwinking and insolent, and watch us nosing in quest of a bite to eat. Fires had ravaged the lower ridges, and trees and brush were stripped clean. To remain here meant slow death, and we fared higher.
We met with cattle on the upper slopes, spent and picking their path with care. A heifer slipped and rolled downward almost beneath our feet. There were many orphan calves, bawling impotently against echoing cañons’ walls, and carrion-crows hung soundlessly in flocks, their shadows flitting swiftly over the earth in front of us. We came on the body of a horse at a dried waterhole. He had plunged from a ledge in his exhaustion, to die helplessly in sight of the place he sought. Crows had torn out the eyes.
But I would not let my mother become disheartened. All these creatures were moving downward, and some propelling force has always driven me upward in time of stress. So I led her far among the peaks. It was desolate enough, of a certainty--so barren that my poor, tottering mother wanted to go back, though she knew well that the homeward stretch was beyond her strength--but I urged her forward.
We came at last to four peaks, away up in those mountains, and threading a defile, emerged into a cuplike draw among them; and there were mesquite in profusion and many green things. And more precious than all, a tiny spring bubbled behind a boulder at the north end. It would not water more than four head, but it sufficed, and we tarried on its edge all of one evening.
For forty days we stayed in our random home and gained in flesh and in strength. Then, one hot, sticky evening, great banks of mist surged upward and massed around our beloved peaks, and the rain broke from the press and drenched the hills. We turned our backs to the driving torrents, clamped our tails and let the cool water soak into our crackling hides.
What a difference in the land when the sun showed again, clear and warm! It was as a dead thing come to life. Tender shoots thrust their heads above the hard ground; the trees stopped their complaints, and nodded and rustled jauntily to a southwest breeze, for the sap stirred within them and soon they would put forth new leaves. A ground squirrel emerged from a hole, blinked impudently at us, and then dashed off across the rocks, reckless from sheer joy of being alive. We sniffed of the good, fresh wind and headed for the lower reaches, for there would be rare grazing now that the rains had washed the valleys. Thus we came to live close to our old home.