The Black Panther of the Navaho

by Warren H. Miller

Up through a country of bear grass, sage and mesquite he rode, following a well-worn trail. Once over the divide, the way led all downhill. The junipers and pinyons thinned out; yuccas and century plants sprang up among the bear grass, and then, riding out from the last fringe of trees, a mighty red valley lay before him, stretching endlessly northward in yellow and blue and black parapets, with sage-strewn slopes of gravel slanting downwards from their walls. Sid let out a wild whoop of joy as his pony cantered down the winding trail. Free! He was as free as that eagle that soared high above him in the blue—so high as to be a mere wheeling speck in the sky! He was alone with himself and Nature.

The pony slowed down as he reached the hot depths of the valley. A dry scoured-out bed of a brook wandered below; here a scummy, shallow pool, yonder the glimpse of shining water where a deep hole in the rocks still held some. None of the thirst terrors of the desert would be his, reflected Sid, as he rode by them; nothing but this inspiring high horizon of a changeless land. Here was the seat of the Infinite, thought the boy, the same last year, the same last century,—the same since the great waters had left this basin bare back in geological time. Of what other place in our country could that be said? The forests and the Indians of the East were gone forever; the prairies and the buffalo of the West were gone. Millions of white men were toiling and struggling to make a living crowded in cities which dotted that land where once was the bounteous plenty of Nature. All the men he knew were fighting a grim battle with Life, just to keep fed and clothed and have a roof over their heads. All the boys he knew were training for that same battle. All of them were tired and weary, and none really enjoyed their lives. All of them would go to their graves with the bitter sense of not having lived at all. None of that for him!

And why? puzzled Sid. Well, their lives were all too complex, for one thing. A thousand distractions pressed in on everybody’s time. There was no margin to their lives; no time for ease, for reflection, for communing through books with the great spirits of the past. None at all for those revitalizing periods when man returns to Nature and is born anew. These people spent so much of their time trying to live that they did not live at all! Only worked.

What, then, was happiness? The happiest man Sid knew was a young fellow he had met out in Montana, who worked among the homesteaders out in the new red wheat lands, where there was not a school or a church in forty thousand square miles. Among those brave and cheerful folk he was giving his life with a rich enthusiasm, that their sons might have something of an education. And his idealism was so infectious, too, that he had persuaded a young medical student to go out there with him, so that there might be at least one doctor in all that territory.

Another fellow that he knew, quite as happy, was an outdoor artist who sought out and painted the wild beauty of this beautiful world in which we live. This fellow lived up in a log cabin on a Wisconsin reservation, painting the life of the forest. He knew animals, fish, game, birds, canoes, Indians, woodsmen; and he knew how to paint them so that one looked and was transported to his scene in the very spirit of it. In the fall he would shoot game and cure it, collect wild rice and Indian potato, and stay right there, painting the forest in winter when it was more beautiful than ever. One exhibition of his pictures a year was all he needed to provide for his simple wants. Thoreau loved to study; he was happiest when he had the leisure to read the Scriptures of the ancients in their original tongues, to search for great truths and sound philosophies and pass them on to his fellow men. To get the freedom to do this he had lived alone in the forest and raised from the soil what he needed to eat.

These men were not complex. They did not want a million things that people think are necessary to happiness. So long as they were free to keep on, they had all that they asked of life. It struck Sid that the master key of all this was for a man to find the work that he loved and then be free to do it. If the work itself was such that it set a high ideal before him, then that man would be happy. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else should matter. It was essential to bar out the distractions, the meaningless nothings that frittered away one’s time, money and energy. The men of the desert came out here to get away from all that, to devote their lives to some large, simple business, like raising cattle or making the desert bloom by systems of irrigation. And they found the grand peace of the desert good for the soul. Good enough to stay here forever—in what looked to a city man a hideous, iron-bound land—and never have a wish to go back where men spoiled everything in their mad scramble to stay alive.

Sid decided three things for himself during the miles that Pinto laid behind them with that tireless gait of the plains mustang. Happiness, for him, lay close to Nature. She was by far the grandest thing in the world, the one thing of which he never tired and of whose wonders there was no end. Others might prefer the intellectual life of cities, where the body was forever weary, forever crying for good, healthy, sweating exercise, even if the mind was kept occupied. To satisfy them both and be a whole man, happy all over with the thrill of good health of mind and body, a life in the open was the only surety. That other life would be surely a misery for his body, caged like a setter dog in a city flat—there would be absolutely no escaping it. For his mind it would mean simply an exchange of interests, working with live things as the raw material instead of with machinery or in spending his days dictating letters, which was the bulk of the “work” done by most of the men he knew. He shrank from such a life as from a plague. Far better to be just reasonably well off, or even poor, than exchange for a heaping measure of dollars everything that gave one joy in living. Life in the open, for him, could be agriculture or mining or ethnology. The human interest of the latter inclined him strongly toward it. It combined idealism with practical, useful work. To make others happy, to help the misunderstood and protect the unjustly treated—that would be a life that could appeal to Sid’s generous, open-handed nature!

He had arrived at that point in his reflections and his pony had rounded perhaps the fiftieth of the great red parapets and promontories that crisscrossed ahead of him in the winding valley, when two enormous red walls, flat as masonry and hundreds of feet high came to view across the dry bed of the stream.

Sid reined up his pony, looking up at them in wonder, and then at the dim distances beyond with a feeling of utter bewilderment. Surely this was a grim joke that Big John had played on him,—the merciless Arizona humor as practiced on the abysmal tenderfoot!

“This must be the Canyon Cheyo, and those huge walls are ‘Los Capitanos del Canyon,’ as the Spanish named them—but where is the entrance?” he asked himself, perplexedly. Then the truth burst upon him. That line of dim gray cliffs, apparently five miles down the valley was the other wall of the Canyon! The whole thing was its mighty gate!