Grayfox (12 page)

Three or four days after Demming left us, Hawk said to me from out of nowhere, “What are you angry about, Zack?”

“I ain't angry,” I said.

“Sure you are,” laughed Hawk, treating it in a matter-of-fact way, even though after we got to talking about it, the conversation grew more and more serious.

“Why do you think I'm angry?”

“It's written all over you,” replied Hawk. “I don't mean angry at me, or angry about some certain thing that happened. I mean that you're just generally angry down deep inside. It's not all that hard to see if you know what you're looking for. In your own way, you're carrying grudges from the past just like Demming.”

“You can see it in me, huh?” I said, more like a grunt than anything else. I wasn't sure I liked what Hawk was saying.

“I'm practiced at seeing what's going on down underneath the surface, remember? People's got more things going on down under the surface than creek beds and hillsides, that's for certain.”

“What makes you such an expert on it?” I said, the tone of my voice probably confirming exactly what he'd said. “What makes you think you know what's going on inside other people so well when you're just out here all alone by yourself?”

“Because I been spending all these years doing the best kind of learning a fellow can do.”

“What's that?”

“Getting to know what's going on inside
me,
” Hawk replied.

“So what do you figure I'm angry at?” I said, still with a cocky, halfway defiant tone.

It wasn't usually Hawk's way to say something to me that I didn't ask for or that he didn't figure I wanted to hear. But for some reason, on this particular day, even though it was obvious my attitude wasn't the best, he kept boring right on toward me. I guess he knew I needed
to hear what he had to say, and I'm glad he told me, though it wasn't too pleasant at the time.

“Most anger comes from folks figuring life's just not going like they'd like it to. From all you told me about your pa and your family, it sounds to me that you think you've had a pretty tough time all these years, not having your pa around and all.”

I was glad enough that I never had a chance to reply.

Later on, when I was looking back on those days, I asked myself why it never seemed to occur to me to go back and warn Pa about Demming. I don't even know how to answer my own question, except that I suppose I didn't really think Pa was in any immediate danger because Demming was still after the half-breed. If I'm really honest, I guess I was still trying so hard not to think about Pa that I couldn't let myself admit the danger was real. You get so accustomed to thinking your folks can take care of themselves and don't need anyone's help that it hardly crosses your mind that they might
need
your help.

Our conversation was interrupted when suddenly we happened upon the half-Paiute Tranter that Demming was tracking.

If I thought the bounty hunter had a mean streak, this young fella had a temper that was a whole lot worse. He carried a look in his eye that made me sure he would have killed us for three cents. When we stumbled across him, though, he was in no condition to kill anybody, being half dead himself. Even though we did our best to help him, he had a malicious look in his eye that seemed to hate us even more for trying to help him.

We found him laying alone on the ground, no sign of a horse, unconscious, with a bloody gash along one side of his chest. It was obvious from one look at him that he was part Indian. His hair was black, his skin dark and tanned from the sun but somehow pale and lifeless at the same time. He wore a big knife at his side but didn't seem to have anything else with him.

“Oh no!” exclaimed Hawk the instant we saw him. “What have we got here?”

Hawk ran to him and knelt down. For all I could tell he was dead. Hawk put his ear to the man's chest.

“He's still alive,” said Hawk, “though barely.”

“You think he's the guy Demming's after?” I asked.

“No doubt about it.”

“Looks like he already found him,” I said.

“No,” said Hawk, standing up. “The way I read our friend Demming is that if he found him, this poor fellow would be either dead or on his way back to Carson City in chains by now—probably both.”

“But it looks like he's been wounded pretty bad.”

“That blood's been dried a while. He and Demming probably tangled sometime earlier. Looks like a knife wound. The sun and loss of blood probably got too much for him. He's pale. Come on, help me get him onto the back of my mule.”

“Is it safe to move him?” I asked as I stooped down to pick up the man's feet.

“We got no choice. He'll be dead inside of two hours out here. If the sun don't see to it, the vultures will.”

Unconsciously I glanced up into the sky. The big, ugly birds were already starting to gather.

“Why don't we take him to the Paiutes? He'd be safe there, and they could worry about him.”

“If we could find them, they'd probably kill us before letting us explain that we didn't do this to him. Who knows if they'd even want him in the first place? Indians aren't much more fond of half-breeds than whites. I think I'd rather take my chances with just one wounded half-Indian than with the whole tribe of healthy full-bloods.”

Hawk took off his shirt, washed the man's face and chest and the wound with cold water from his canteen, doused some whiskey over the wound, and tried to get him—even though he was still unconscious—to sip some whiskey and water mixed together.

Then we managed to hoist him onto the back of the mule, and within a couple of hours we had him in the shade inside the cave we were nearest to.

Eventually he began to come around a little, though when he did he was none too pleased to find us staring at him. Almost the same instant that his eyes opened into two thin slits, one of his hands reached straight toward his knife.

He didn't find it. We'd learned our lesson with Demming.

Besides, if there was one thing Hawk knew as well as the desert, it was Paiutes, so he'd taken the knife out of the man's belt and hid it.

We didn't need to have worried about Tranter, though.

He was in bad shape and was back asleep again in less than five minutes. He'd lost a lot of water and a fair amount of blood. Luckily for him, Hawk managed to get him to drink two or three gulps of water before he lost consciousness again.

Hawk made some stuff out of weeds and water and the inside pulp from a desert cactus bush, and he put the salve on the man's wounds. Then he sat up with him most of the night so that any time he so much as stirred, Hawk lifted up the Paiute's head gently, put a cup of water to his lips, and tried to get him to drink.

A sip or two at a time, he managed to get enough water into Tranter to start bringing color back to his cheeks.

Hawk mashed up some other plants and herbs with some cattail pollen to mix with the water so that as he took to drinking a little more he got some nourishment along with it.

I don't know where Hawk learned so much about medicine, but not much he did surprised me by now. I don't think the half-breed would have been any better tended to in a regular Eastern hospital.

Tranter was with us several days. I don't know how badly infected the wound was, but whatever Hawk put on it seemed to make the swelling and redness start to go down by the second day.

That first night, Tranter was delirious on and off, saying some of the most dreadful things, sometimes calling out, sometimes shouting angrily, sometimes almost weeping like a child.

“He's done some bad things, Zack,” Hawk said. “Been some places no man oughta go. Near as I can tell, his father was one of the first whites in these parts, probably from Fremont's time or even earlier. Took an Indian woman—might have raped her for all I know—and had this son that he wound up hating because he was half Indian. No wonder this poor feller's so filled with venom toward both red and white.”

“That don't make sense,” I said, “if he's half white.”

“Nothing about bitterness holds up to reason, Zack,” said Hawk sadly. “One of his kind is never accepted in either world, so he winds up hating both—and deep down, hating himself most of all.”

“But why would his own father hate him?”

“Hate's got no more reason than bitterness. Nothing about it'll make sense if you try to analyze it. Fathers and sons been in the business of hating each other ever since sin came into the world. It must be about the most terrible grief to God there is.”

We were both quiet a few minutes. It was dark and late. The fire was burning low, and I didn't want to keep talking in that direction for fear the talk would get too close to my own situation again.

“Must be a terrible thing to hate yourself,” I said after a spell.

“Most awful thing in the world,” replied Hawk. “If a feller's in a fix like that and he doesn't know that God's his father, then there ain't nothing for him to do but lash out in hatred toward everybody else.”

A cry suddenly went up from where our injured guest was laying.

“ . . . kill you, Tranter . . . if I get my hands on you . . . never be no good. . . . vile blood in you . . .”

He breathed in and out several times, laboring, head moving back and forth like he was trying to wake up, the muscles of his face contorting into grotesque shapes.

Then he shouted out again, this time almost in the pleading voice of a child.

“ . . . please . . . let me stay. . . . Get out. . . . You disgrace to Weeping Feather. . . . No longer your tribe. . . . Please . . . cause no more trouble . . . mother, please help . . . try to be good . . .”

More labored breathing, more moaning. Then suddenly a deep and angry voice of hostility broke from his lips.

“ . . . never get away . . . get my clutches on you . . . ain't never acted like a pa . . .”

I shivered just to hear the words. They were too much like the words I had said to Pa when I left home a year earlier.

———

On the third day Tranter woke up, clearly much improved in body, if not in temper.

Looking Hawk and me over as if seeing us for the first time, he took Hawk's offer of food and water. But when Hawk tried to talk he said nothing.

Tranter lay still for another several minutes, then all of a sudden he rose, turned his back on us, and wandered off into the desert without a word. Hawk sprang after him, tried to get him to take some food or at least some water.

He kept going without a word, refusing Hawk's offer.

Finally Hawk hurried back to where I was standing, got the man's knife that he'd kept hidden, then ran back and handed it to him.

Tranter took it, almost looked like he was thinking about using it on Hawk right then, but turned and continued on until he was out of sight.

He was too weak to get far. I don't know where he was figuring to go. Hawk walked back slowly. I knew he was worried about him.

But there wasn't much more we could do.

A day or two later we were walking along a particularly desolate stretch of ground. There was scrub brush growing and some desert grasses. Here and there some scraggly kind of tree was trying to survive.

“What do you figure is under the ground here, Zack?” Hawk asked me.

“Nothing much,” I replied. “Just rocks and dirt.”

Hawk stopped, knelt down, stuck his fist into the ground, and dug down with his fingers, scooping out the dirt to make a little hole.

“Get down on your knees and look in here,” he said. “Tell me what you see.”

I did like he said.

“You mean the little roots?” I asked.

“Yes, that's what I mean. I can't believe after all this time I'd ask you what's under the surface and you'd say
nothing much
!”

I laughed. One thing I
had
learned by now was to feel the fun in Hawk's voice, even when he kidded me by pretending to be gruff.

“Sorry,” I said. “I'm still learning to see under and inside things, like you're showing me. But half the time my eyes still see the old way. It's just going to take more practice, I reckon.”

“Well, you reckon right, Hollister,” groused Hawk, still pretending to be sore, but just giving me a bad time. “Practice is exactly what it takes.
Training's
more what I call it—training your eyes to see, just like if you was training your eye and arm and finger to shoot a rifle or training your legs to stick tight to a horse or training your muscles for some kind of contest.
Training
—that's what it is. Inner-eyesight training, the most important kind of self-training a man can do.”

“So were you going to tell me about the roots?” I reminded him.

Hawk reached down again, and this time he wrapped his big hand around a medium-sized desert shrub about a foot high. He yanked
it up and pulled it out of the ground. Hanging down all around it were more strands of roots than you could count.

“You see, Zack, there's more of the plant
under
the ground and hidden from view than there is on top. That's where the life is. All around out here—”

As he spoke, Hawk swung his hand wide all about him.

“—everywhere, if you dug under the surface, you would find this big, huge system of roots all tangled and twisted about each other. Everywhere—under every foot, maybe even every inch of the desert. Do you know what that means?”

I shook my head.

“It means there's hidden life and meaning and growth going on under
everything,
no matter how desolate it might look on top.”

He paused a moment.

“People are just like all these plants,” he added. “You pull them up, and you scratch and dig around the ground under them, and you'll find their roots too. Nothing can live without roots.
All
living things get their life from their roots. If you want to know why some plants grow tall and straight and others grow low and crooked, you got to look at the roots. If you want to find out why some plants produce pretty blooms and others make thorns instead, you got to look at the roots of the kind of plants they are. If you want to find out why some plants are pleasant and pleasing and others are poison, you got to look at the roots. If you want to find out why some plants produce food that gives a body energy and others don't seem to make anything that's any good for anybody, you got to look at the roots.

“The roots are everything. The roots are what make a plant what it is—where the roots go, where they come from, what kind of soil they go down into, and what they do with that soil. And it's all underground. Your eyes can't see it, but it's happening all the time regardless, even in what looks like a desert like this. Now do you see what I mean?”

“Some, I reckon,” I said. “But you seem mighty interested in plants and roots. Why are they so important?”

“It's not the plants themselves. They're just pictures of how people are. You look down underneath men and women, and they got just as many roots growing down and out as plants. That's one of the reasons why folks all turn out so different, on account of their roots going
in different directions and getting different kinds of nourishment out of the ground.”

“I should have known that's what you were getting at,” I smiled.

“Everything in life is not what it looks,” Hawk added. “Everything's upside down in importance from how most folks see them. The way to get ahead is to put other people ahead of you. Backwards. There's more than just looking inside. You gotta learn to see the upside-downness of everything too. You have to train your eyes not just to look inside, down, under, and at roots, but to turn everything over from the world's way of looking at it.

“Is something highly thought of in the world? Chances are it's of low importance in God's way of looking at it.

“Is something despised in the world's eyes, like trying to be a servant to someone else or help people like we did Tranter? That kind of thing's nothing in his eyes or a man like Demming's. But it's of great importance in God's sight.”

I nodded, taking it all in.

“It's just like the roots,” Hawk went on. “Everything in life is upside down from what it seems. Life is hidden. A tree looks like it's above ground, but it draws its nourishment from the dirt which is invisible.”

Hawk paused.

“There's one big difference between plant roots and people roots, though,” he added.

“What's that?”

“People roots can go in any direction they want.”

“How so?”

“Doesn't matter if you compare people to a stew or to a growing plant. Either way it's the same. We put the ingredients into our own stew and it winds up tasting like how we made it. If you're talking about people plants, we decide ourselves where our roots are going to go and what kind of soil we're gonna let them draw nourishment from.”

“Aren't a person's roots his own folks?” I asked.

“Yep. Everybody's got roots from their own kin and past, and you can't change that. But everybody sends his own roots out too. Those you decide for yourself how they're going to grow and in which directions. You can't really change what comes into you, but you can choose what to do with it once it's there.

“Those two fellers we just met had some pretty nasty roots coming into them, but they could have found some good soil if they'd wanted. There's good soil around for anybody to grow in. But instead, those two've let their roots grow down into bitterness and hatred and vengeance. It's not hard to see that the plants they've grown into aren't too pleasant.”

“I see what you mean. Not a good-tasting stew.”

Hawk smiled kind of sadly.

“Not too good,” he repeated.

The conversation fell silent.

I wasn't sure I understood all of what Hawk had been saying and hinting at. But I had the feeling there was more to it than I realized right at that moment.