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Short Stories & Tall Tales
Dead Canyon Hideout
Tom Sheehan
His horse went down at last; the great, friendly and courageous beast with his last breath had taken him into the canyon and dropped dead. “You even saved me a bullet, Red,” Burt Clanwood said, as he piled what loose rocks he could find atop the corpse of Red Herman, his mount for almost 7 of his 25 years, in the hole he had died in.
A tear in his eye found a small place in his cheek to start a roll. One tear. “Not a lot, Red, but I’m not a crying man. You know that, horse. You know that.”
He patted the last stone in place, a round, weighty stone that might hold off the scavengers for a few days. Or, he thought, until the sun got to it and the heat and the stink drew all kinds of carrion hunters, from spiders and ants right up to the high flyers. He looked overhead to see if any of the big wings had spotted Red Henry’s site yet.
Clanwood, standing tall after his task, almost 6 feet, good looking and tanned a decent light brown on his face and arms, turned his back and walked deeper into the canyon. A wide Stetson sat on his head, a gray shirt and a black vest on his torso, heavy-looking pants below, and spurs on tall boots. He had his rifle, his saddlebag, his sidearm, but the saddle was still on his horse. There was no way he could have gotten it out of the hole with the posse somewhere near. He had no idea where he was or what was going on in the turmoil that was his life also on the trail behind him.
He figured he didn’t know much at the time.
Except, he knew this was Wyoming, or Idaho. Except he knew it was July, or pretty close. Except there was at least a remnant of a posse on his trail. Except he had nothing to show him the way to someplace else. Except he was thirsty and hungry and could sleep for two weeks or two months.
The strange, funny, totally ridiculous part of the whole thing was he had committed no crime. His spit hadn’t even missed the spittoon in the last saloon he’d been in. He was clean of crime, and even the thought of it.
In the innards of a small crevice, at least six feet up off the ground, he had managed to lie down. Squeezing up and squeezing in, drawing a knee and an elbow as tight and as close to his body as he could, he squeezed up and in. The metal of his spurs made tinkling sounds, scraping sounds, lively sounds. Breathing was possible, pleasurable. He sucked on one finger until he thought he had generated enough saliva to wet his throat. He thought of the spittoon again. He thought of spitting again. One leg was burning with an unseen fire. Maybe the spot where a bullet had nicked him, maybe a muscle was just plain sore. Hell, he was sore all over. How would he ever sleep?
He didn’t even count himself alive. No visions. No images. Not a single face to disturb any sleep. He just slept. He did not say his name. Made no pleas. Said no jokes. Counted his breaths until they were no longer countable. Slept.
Burt Clanwood slept. Without Red Henry as much a watchdog as any mutt, he slept.
It could have been hours, days, minutes.
At length, something called attention, came intelligible.
The slight, scratching sound woke him. He smelt something that was alive. Not cooked, but could be.
The sound came again. From below him. From Red Henry’s last place on earth.
The rifle sat behind him, pointed the wrong way. Straining one arm, drawing it along his waist, he touched the butt of his pistol in its holster, a holster he had managed to slide onto his waist as he had crept to this tight chamber. The pistol came away in his hand, a delicate, balanced, sense of weight that teased him. He hoped he had a round in the chamber. One round.
With one eye he spotted a snake at Red Henry’s site; a rattler whose body gleamed in the setting; bright sunlight lingered on the creature. He saw brown and red and green markings.
With aggravated silence and pain, he aimed the pistol, squeezed the trigger, and killed the snake. The gunshot echoed in the rocks like a base drum was beating in his ears.
Soon he would eat.
The fire started easily from dry tinder and brush, flared up quickly, and the rattler, after high heat was reached, went into a sizzle that also sounded in the canyon like a small echo. The aroma rose with the sound too, a not unpleasant smell he had known before a number of times. Once it had been with Charlie Two Swords at the edge of the Tetons. He had no idea how far away The Tetons were, and could only guess northerly, direct northerly from where he chewed on his meal. Charlie Two Swords said a rattler had to be cut in small chunks and cooked for a long time. “Don’t rush the snake, ever, and he won’t rush you,” Charlie had said, and he smiled when he said those words, hoping his intention was understood.
The meat was chewy but tasty with a sprinkle of salt from his saddle bag. It was all he had along with a small pouch of coffee.
Thinking of coffee had a problem attached to it. His canteen was under Red Henry, most likely crushed with the added weight of the piled rocks. He again argued with himself that they’d been no time to grasp any more than his rifle and saddle bag.
With a bit of gusto he finished off most of his meal, before he realized the cooking odor had obviously climbed the walls of the canyon, and was going where any breath of air might take it.
That’s when Clanwood heard a thin, distant sound coming from somewhere inside the canyon. Quickly he set the remnants of the snake meal on a flat rock, grabbed his rifle and saddlebag and crept back up into the fissure where he had spent the night. Hiding was preferable to a face-off or stand-up fight, if those were the options.
Decision time told him that waiting out was preferable to scouting around. He’d lay low and wait for developments; the snake had come to him, so maybe coffee would, in some fashion or another. It made for a pleasant but long wait. The sun passed overhead and disappeared as an object behind a rock wall.
It was the mad singing that made its way to him, somewhat boisterous, not really tuneful, but human music. He did not know how far away it was coming, from what area of the canyon or the walls of the canyon, there were so many hollows such as the one in which he had made his bed for one night.
And it was not one voice he heard. It was harmony; two voices singing in the bowels of the canyon, uproarious happy voices. The words, at first, were unintelligible, but they rounded themselves into shape in quick order. He pictured the voices coming around the corner of some huge rock or a wall of stone sheared off the face of the canyon thousands of years ago and found itself planted just for this duet, this duo, not drunk, but hilariously happy in their singing.
Then their conversational talk sounded in the canyon, the first spoken words he had heard in days.
“Hey, Willie,” one of the voices said, thick, guttural, mountain-like, “you smell what I smell? Someone’s been cookin’ snake and left some for us. Lookie here. A rattler, or what’s left o’ him, rolled and burnt good enough for tastin’. Whatdya think of that, Willie? Whatdya think of that?”
Clanwood expected to hear hands clapping, a back being slapped vivaciously.
“Well, Mort,” a second voice replied, “he’s got to be hidin’ from us, right here in these here rocky places. Couldn’t get too far from here, could he you think?”
Clanwood, intrigued now, thankful for hearing friendly talk from friendly folk, inched himself forward in the tight crevice. He was above the two men and had a good look at them, the singing duet. He almost laughed at the thought. Their age was a mystery to him, them being so well-bearded. They could be in their late forties or their early sixties, he thought. Their stances and erect postures gave him no clue except that they were not too old for life in the mountains. But, above all, they weren’t posse, but were mountain men who did not much like town life, except for an occasional supply run and a wetting down.
“If he ain’t disappeared himself an’ still hangin’ around here, I hope he got some coffee, but I ain’t smelled any yet.”
Clanwood, able to satisfy someone’s wish, and knowing for a fact they weren’t posse, yelled out from his high hiding place, “Wait there, gents. I’ll be right down, and I got some coffee in my kit. Long as you ain’t part of that posse that’s been chasing me for something I didn’t do.”
There was a flurry of excitement down below Clanwood, “You hear that, Mort, some strange dude’s got coffee, real coffee, ‘n’ more than that burnt-wood coffee you been throwin’ my way.” He paused and said, “Mort, we’re havin’ a party with real coffee. We got jerky and sourdough biscuit for soft’ning.” He threw his head back and said to the heavens, “Well, what else has this day brung us?”
Getting free from cramped quarters, dragging and hauling his gear with him, Clanwood managed to scramble down to meet the two mountain men. They were a rugged, bearded pair looking to be strong as a pair of oxen, with blue eyes on both like night stars in a dark sky. Fur caps sat on their heads and they wore a lot of fur about their torsos and on the legs. One of them wore store boots and the other wore thick moccasins of a dark brown color.
Their tongues were hanging out.
“I’m Burt Clanwood running ahead of a posse for something I didn’t do. My horse ran himself to death and just fell down in a hole back there and I had to pile up some rock to keep him from critters of all kinds. My canteen was under him and I couldn’t make coffee but I sure will be glad to get some in me now. You got water?”
“Sure do, son,” one said. “I’m Mort Bonney and this ugly dude’s my pard. His name is Willie Plaistow.”
Clanwood laughed and said to Willie Plaistow, “I heard you say that your friend here has been making burnt-wood coffee for you. What’s that?”
“Well, son, it sure ain’t burnt and it sure ain’t wood and it sure ain’t coffee, but long’s we got meat or biscuits for soft’ning, it’s tolerable for a while.” With a quizzical look still on Clanwood’s face, he added, “Mort has some favorite growth he soaks in tarn water and dries in the sun with some other stuff he’s handy with and crushes it to make a kind of dust when it’s dried up and calls it burnt-wood coffee.
Bonney said, “What sheriff is pushing after you, Burt? Is it Charlie Max?”
“That’s him,” said a surprised Clanwood. “You know him?”
“Know enough about him to know he ain’t comin’ up in here to Dead Canyon. Charlie Two Swords told him way back he was goin’ to get hisself kilt up here chasin’ the wrong customer if he knowed it was the wrong customer an’ him often runnin’ off at the mouth about who could be guilty, an’ not always who would be guilty.”
“You know Charlie Two Swords?” The further surprise was in Clanwood’s voice as he loosened a rawhide string on a pouch of coffee and the aroma filled the air as if it had swept in on the wind.
“Hell, son,” Bonney said, “anybody up in these mountains knows Charlie Two Swords. Where’d you meet him? He ever doctor you? That man can fix everythin’ ‘ceptin’ broken hearts an’ broken toes.” His eyes lit up. “Smell that coffee, Willie. The party’s gonna start.” He did a quick little jig with his booted feet.
Plaistow piled some more wood on the fire and whipped a coffee pot that most likely had been through several skirmishes and several wars. He filled it with water from a canteen and measured out seven caps of coffee from Clanwood’s coffee bag and poured each one into the coffee pot like he was in the kitchen. When the pot was settled in place, he tied the thong on the coffee bag, looked at Clanwood imploringly, and smiled when Clanwood nodded. He stuck the bag inside his fur wrap of sorts, like a gold deposit had been made.
The coffee aroma heightened its delicious grasp on the men, and they shared a few quiet moments sharing the brew. Hard biscuits softened in the second cup, and dried meat, heated on the fire, made up the balance of their meal. Moments of silence hung about the three men.
Clanwood, his hunger and thirst about bated, finally said, “Tell me more about Charlie Two Swords. Why is he like he is, doing what he does, like he works on both sides of the wire.”
“Charlie knows times are achangin’ an’ does his best to treat any man the way he likes himself treated. He ain’t no uppity injun lookin’ for a way out. More like a way in, if you get my drift on it. Says his god up there on the mountain top is the same god for any man whether he looks up there or not.”
“What tribe’s he from?”
Plaistow replied, “He ain’t never said. He’s just plain good old Indian you can count on when times get itchy. We been there some, aye Mort?”
There were nods and another silence, as if things said needed to be soaked in, dwelt on, owned. And young Clanwood suddenly knew some new intelligence had entered his life. He said nothing until Bonney, after a long spell of looking off into the canyon, said, “We’ll get your saddle out from under your horse. You’ll need a saddle when we get you a horse.”
“Where’ll we get horses up in here?” Clanwood said, another surprise loose on him.
“We got a couple of ladies over in the next canyon keepin’ mind on a few horses an’ a couple of meat cows. They’re good ladies an’ never stole nothin’ from us. But we’ll need your saddle. We’ll tend that soon’s coffee’s gone. We ain’t got but two saddles.”
“I’m not about to go down into one of those towns where Charlie Max hangs around.”
“Don’t worry none about him, son. We’ll find out what’s happenin’ with him. You stay up here with the ladies. We run out of coffee two days ago and it’s near time we went to town, so we’ll get a taste o’ things down there.”
In a few hours the three men had the saddle removed from Red Henry’s body, the canteen indeed crushed, the carrion hunters already at work. They piled the rocks back on top of the horse, and went on their way, into the next canyon, where a grassy area ran wide until the walls narrowed, a fence of brush and split poles ran side to side, animals roamed inside, and two Indian maidens, as young as Clanwood, waved at them as they passed through a rough gate.
“Them ladies are our daughters, Burt. That’s what keeps us friends. Their mothers was kilt by a renegade whose name ain’t important no more an’ we strung him on the face of the canyon for three days ‘fore he died one miserable death he was owed. So be careful with their hearts. Like I said, Charlie Two Swords can fix most anythin’ ‘ceptin’ broken toes and broken hearts. Tall one’s name is Blue Leaf and the other is Dove Calling. They ain’t never seen nothin’ like you, son, so don’t make no mistakes.”
So they had a good meal that evening, with steak and potatoes and corn and another two pots of coffee, great coffee, and Burt Clanwood, the loner, began to fall in love. It came with nightfall, sly as a whisper, easy as a soft solution on the skin, an elixir as fine as any that one could imagine.
But the poor lad, new to love, didn’t know which one it was, Blue Leaf or Dove Calling. The dilemma was thoroughly enjoyable for a young man so recently on the run, who had lost his grand horse, and who had squeezed himself into a rocky place in a dead canyon to sleep away one night.
He found himself looking with great favor on both maidens for the three days that their fathers, Bonney and PIaistow, were away being “citified for a small duration.”
Both of the maidens were lovely, wholesomely lovely, with hair as black and as shiny as a night sky, slender the way prairie flowers sat in a soft breeze, sweet in the face as a whole hive of honey. But one began to wend her way into his heart. He tried to measure the whats and hows, but was unable to distinguish the differences at first. At length it proved to be unsaid words on the corner of one of their mouths, the way her hips moved with unsaid words, how her hands, without words, could tell him a story he fully understood. He could feel the luck he never had come into his mind.
And the dread that such luck might propose in its acceptance.
Blue leaf was the first to notice the drama floating around her, and when their fathers came back from their “due visitation” she said, “Dove Calling has a husband in sight. I believe they love each other, but they may not know it yet.”
Bonney nodded his understanding and said, “There’s a doctor in town, a nice man, who needs the wisdom you have. We’ll visit soon. An’ we can tell young Burt the sheriff, Charlie Max, got shot an’ killed by the man he should have been chasin’. That part of his life is over. I think he’s gonna be a mountain man now.”
His smile was wide and good and he said, “The new part can begin as soon as they want.”
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