I helped Rapp open the wooden shutters and sweep out the cabin. We put clean blankets on the bunks, and stowed away bacon and coffee and canned stuff on the shelves behind the cookstove. I confess I looked forward to cooking on an iron stove with four holes. Rapp explained to me that Blake and I wouldn’t be able to enjoy all this luxury together for a time. He wanted the herd kept some distance to the north as long as the grass held out up there, and Roddy and I could take turn about, one camping near the cattle and one sleeping in a bed.
“There’s not pasture enough down here to take them through a long winter,” he said, “and it’s safest to keep them grazing up north while you can. Besides, if you bring them down here while the weather’s so warm, they get skittish, and that mesa over there makes trouble. They swim the river and bolt into the mesa, and that’s the last you ever see of them. We’ve lost a lot of critters that way. The mesa has been populated by runaways from our herd, till now there’s a fine bunch of wild cattle up there. When the wind’s right, our cows over here get the scent of them and make a break for the river. You’ll have to watch ’em close when you bring ’em down.”
I asked him whether nobody had ever gone over to get the lost cattle out.
Rapp glared at me. “Out of that mesa? Nobody has ever got into it yet. The cliffs are like the base of a monument, all the way round. The only way into it is through that deep canyon that opens on the water level, just where the river makes the bend. You can’t get in by that, because the river’s too deep to ford and too swift to swim. Oh, I suppose a horse could swim it, if cattle can, but I don’t want to be the man to try.”
I remarked that I had had my eye on the mesa all summer and meant to climb it.
“Not while you’re working for the Sitwell Company, you don’t! If you boys try any nonsense of that sort, I’ll fire you quick. You’d break your bones and lose the herd for us. You have to watch them close to keep them from going over, I tell you. If it wasn’t for that mesa, this would be the best winter range in all New Mexico.”
After the foreman left us, we settled down to easy living and fine weather; blue and gold days, and clear, frosty nights. We kept the cattle off to the north and east and alternated in taking charge of them. One man was with the herd while the other got his sleep and did the cooking at the cabin. The mesa was our only neighbour, and the closer we got to it, the more tantalizing it was. It was no longer a blue, featureless lump, as it had been from a distance. Its skyline was like the profile of a big beast lying down; the head to the north, higher than the flanks around which the river curved. The north end we could easily believe impassable—sheer cliffs that fell from the summit to the plain, more than a thousand feet. But the south flank, just across the river from us, looked accessible by way of the deep canyon that split the bulk in two, from the top rim to the river, then wound back into the solid cube so that it was invisible at a distance, like a mouse track winding into a big cheese. This canyon didn’t break the solid outline of the mesa, and you had to be close to see that it was there at all. We faced the mesa on its shortest side; it was only about three miles long from north to south, but east and west it measured nearly twice that distance. Whether the top was wooded we couldn’t see—it was too high above us; but the cliffs and canyon on the river side were fringed with beautiful growth, groves of quaking asps and piñons and a few dark cedars, perched up in the air like the hanging gardens of Babylon. At certain hours of the day, those cedars, growing so far up on the rocks, took on the bluish tint of the cliffs themselves.
It was light up there long before it was with us. When I got up at daybreak and went down to the river to get water, our camp would be cold and grey, but the mesa top would be red with sunrise, and all the slim cedars along the rocks would be gold—metallic, like tarnished gold-foil. Some mornings it would loom up above the dark river like a blazing volcanic mountain. It shortened our days, too, considerably. The sun got behind it early in the afternoon, and then our camp would lie in its shadow. After a while the sunset colour would begin to stream up from behind it. Then the mesa was like one great ink-black rock against a sky on fire.
No wonder the thing bothered us and tempted us; it was always before us, and was always changing. Black thunderstorms used to roll up from behind it and pounce on us like a panther without warning. The lightning would
