Wanderer of the Wasteland

by Zane Grey

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The days passed, with ruddy sunrises, white, glaring, solemn noons, and golden sunsets. The simplicity and violence of life on the desert passed into Adam’s being. The greatness of stalking game came to him when the Indian chief took him to the heights after bighorn sheep; but it was not the hunting and killing of this wariest and finest of wild beasts, wonderful as it was, that constituted for Adam something great. It was the glory of the mountain heights. All his life he had dreamed of high places, those to which he could climb physically and those that he aspired to spiritually. Lost indeed were hopes of the latter, but of the former he had all-satisfying fulfillment. Adam dated his changed soul from the day he first conquered the heights. There, on top of the Chocolate range, his keen sight, guided by the desert eyes of the old Indian, ranged afar over the gray valleys and red ranges to the Rio Colorado, down the dim wandering line of which he gazed, to see at last Picacho, a dark, purple mass above the horizon. From the moment Adam espied this mountain he suffered a return of memory and a sleepless and eternal remorse. The terrible past came back to him; never again, he divined, to fade while life lasted. His repentance, his promise to Dismukes, his vow to himself, began there on the heights with the winds sweet and strong in his face and the dark blue of the sky over his head, and beneath the vast desert, illimitable on all sides, lonely and grand, the abode of silence.

The days passed into months. Far to the north the dominating peaks of San Jacinto and San Gorgonio took on the pure-white caps of snow, that slowly spread, as the days passed, down the rugged slopes. Winter abided up there. But on the tops of the Chocolate and Chuckwalla ranges no snow fell, although the winter wind sometimes blew cold and bleak. Adam loved the wind of the heights. How cold and pure, untainted by dust or life or use! He grew to have the stride of a mountaineer. And the days passed until that one came in which the old Indian chief let Adam hunt alone. “Go, Eagle!” he said, with sorrow for his years and pride in the youth of his white friend. “Go!” And the slow gestures of his long arms were as the sailing movement of the wings of an eagle.

The days passed, and few were they that did not see Adam go out in the sweet, cool dawn, when the east glowed like an opal, to climb the bronze slope, sure footed as a goat, up and up over the bare ridges and through the high ravines where the lichens grew and a strange, pale flower blossomed, on and on over the jumble of weathered rock to the heights. And there he would face the east with its glorious burst of golden fire, and spend the last of that poignant gaze on the sunrise-crowned glory of old Picacho. The look had the meaning of a prayer to Adam, yet it was like a blade in his heart. In that look he remembered his home, his mother, his brother, and the vivid days of play and love and hope, his fateful journey west, his fall and his crime and his ruin. Alone on the heights, he forced that memory to be ever more vivid and torturing. Hours he consecrated to remorse, to regret, to suffering, to punishment. He lashed his soul with bitter thoughts, lest he forget and find peace. Life and health and strength had returned to him in splendid growing measure which he must use to pay his debt.

But there were others hours. He was young. Red blood throbbed in his veins, and action sent that blood in a flame over his eager body. To stride along the rocky heights was something splendid. How free—alone! It connected Adam’s present hour with a remote past he could not comprehend. He loved it. He was proud that the Indians called him Eagle. For to watch the eagles in their magnificent flights became a passion with him. The great blue condors and the grisly vultures and the bow-winged eagles—all were one and the same to him, indistinguishable from one another as they sailed against the sky, sailing, sailing so wondrously, with never a movement of wings, or shooting across the heavens like thunderbolts, or circling around and upward to vanish in the deep blue. There were moments when he longed to change his life to that of an eagle, to find a mate and a nest on a lofty crag, and there, ringed by the azure world above and with the lonely barren below, live with the elements.

Here on the heights Adam was again visited by that strange sensation, inexplicable and illusive and fast fleeting, which had been born in him one lonely hour in the desert below. Dismukes had told him how men were lured by the desert and how they all had their convictions as to its cause, and how they missed the infinite truth.

“It will come to me!” cried Adam as he faced the cool winds.

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Stalking mountain sheep upon the mighty slopes was work to make a man. It was a wild and perilous region of jagged ridges and bare slants and loose slopes of weathered rocks. The eyes of the sheep that lived at this height were like telescopes; they had the keenest sight of all wild beasts. The marvelous organ of vision stood out on the head as if it were the half of a pear, so that there was hardly an angle of the compass toward which a sheep could not see. Like the antelope, mountain sheep were curious and could be lured by a bright color and thereby killed. But Adam learned to abhor this method. He pitted his sight and his strength and endurance against those of the sheep. In this way he magnified the game of hunting. His exhaustion and pain and peril he welcomed as lessons to the end that his knowledge and achievement must be in a measure what Dismukes might have respected. Failure to Adam was nothing but a spur to renewed endeavor. The long climb, the crumbling ledge, the slipping rock, the deceitful distance, the crawl over sharp rocks, the hours of waiting—these too he welcomed as one who had set himself limitless tasks. Then when he killed a ram and threw it over his shoulder to carry it down the mountain, he found labor which was harder even than the toil of the gold mill at Picacho. To stride erect with a rifle in one hand, and a hold upon a heavy sheep with the other, down the slippery ledges, across the sliding banks, over the cracked and rotten lava, from the sunset-lighted heights to the gloomy slopes below—this was how in his own estimation he must earn and keep the respect of the Indians. They had come to look up to the white man they called Eagle. He taught them things to do with their hands, work of white men which bettered their existence, and he impressed them the more by his mastery of some of their achievements.

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