Brighty of the Grand Canyon Page 4

  Suddenly the lion turned and with a bound was up in the tree. She tried a second spring for the catch, and this time she landed on Brighty’s back. Down they both went on the floor of the cave, a snarling, grunting shadow in the moonlight. One moment they were almost in the pool, the next on the rim of the abyss with nothing but darkness and space below.

  The stars swam around Brighty and mixed with the moon, and his blood trickled darkly in the sand. He tried to shake free of the claws stabbing his shoulder, but they only dug deeper. Now the two figures grappled and came again to the pool, and they went spinning into the icy water. Still the lion would not let go. With a scream of pain Brighty rolled over on his back, pinning her beneath him in the water. For long minutes he held her there. Then gradually the claws eased, and at last they fell away.

  CURIOUS FIRST AID

  ALL THE next day Brighty lay in misery. He kept biting at his cuts, trying to quiet the throbbing, but the gashes only widened and the burning pain ran up his legs. He moaned tiredly, and from time to time sank into a half sleep. He was too weak to eat, and he would not go near the tainted pool to drink.

  Night came again with the whirring thunder of the doves. And then sunrise with hummingbirds drinking of the droplets as they fell. Out of the weary fog of his mind Brighty saw a spry-legged figure enter the cave, heard a familiar voice cry, “Brighty! Bright Angel!”

  A wave of memory swept over him. He tried to fix his eyes on the little man wearing a black hat, but the whole figure rippled like something under water. Even the voice had a tremble in it.

  “Brighty,” Uncle Jim was saying as he stared at the hoof marks and claw marks, “you must’ve had a mighty tussle!” In an instant he was on his knees, gently parting the blood-matted hairs, examining the wounds. “These rips is bad, feller, mighty bad, but I’ll pick us some globs o’ pine gum and make a quick salve. We’ll soon take the burn out o’ them angry cuts.”

  As he stood up, he looked for a moment into the pool. “Whillikers!” he whistled. “A big cougar! She’s six feet or more! ’Pears to me ye wrestled her into the water and drownded her. How’d ye do it, feller?”

  Brighty’s eyes watched the little man as he made a cup of his hands to catch the dripping water. It wasn’t a very good cup. It leaked. But still it held enough to feel cool as it went down Brighty’s throat. He closed his eyes while his ears flicked to remembered sounds—twigs being broken, and after a while fire crackling. Then came the pungent sharpness of pine tar in his nostrils.

  “Now, boy,” Uncle Jim explained while he poured the resin into Brighty’s cuts, “she may hurt a leetle, but I got to do ’er.”

  He bent over the burro and began working the salve into the open sores. “You had me uneasy as an old biddy hen,” he went on. “The warm rains come and the spring flowers, and I says to myself, ‘Bright Angel’ll be here next, any day now,’ but ye didn’t come and ye didn’t, and then I commences to fret and stew and finally I set out to hunt ye.”

  The thick, warm fluid did not hurt at all; it felt soothing. And the voice of Uncle Jim was something to hold to, like a rock in floodtime. Brighty let out a great sigh of relief and lifted his head a bit as if life were good again.

  Uncle Jim stood up, and suddenly he was regarding his overalls as if he had never noticed them before. “I’ve an idee!” he crowed, eyes twinkling in triumph. He took out his pocket-knife and pierced the denim just above one knee. Then he cut his way around the pants-leg and stepped out of it.

  “Y’see, boy,” he said, “if we hide yer cuts, ye can’t pick at ’em so easy and they’ll heal nice and clean.” He began cutting off his other trouser leg, chuckling to himself as he worked. He stepped out of that, too.

  “Lemme see now, what was invented afore buttons?” He thought a moment. “Why, pegs, o’ course!” He broke off several twigs and sharpened each to a fine point. “We’ll jest peg yer pants on!”

  Next he laid his own bright red suspenders on Brighty’s shoulders and slipped the pants-legs over the tiny hoofs and up the torn legs, taking great care to hold the cloth away from the wounds.

  “How about that!” he exclaimed, pegging the suspenders in place. He stood back, admiring the effect. “Now ye’ll feel better, boy. Just ye rest a bit whilst I see about what’s in the pool.”

  Brighty sniffed the old blue denim and felt a strange easing. He stretched his legs out stiffly and sat up on his haunches, watching as Uncle Jim hauled the heavy body of the lion from the pool. After he had removed the paws, he dragged the carcass to the lip of the cave and with great effort flung it into the chasm. From out of nowhere three ravens came cawing and swooping down after it.

  “The only good lion’s a dead ’un!” Uncle Jim said, scrubbing his hands with sand.

  He fastened the lion’s paws to the trunk of the dead tree, and painstakingly carved the name “Brighty” into the bark. “In all Arizona,” he said, “I figger there ain’t another li’l ole burro smart enough to kill a cougar. Ye deserve a marker.”

  • • •

  It was a strange-looking pair that left the cave and slow-footed toward Uncle Jimmy Owen’s cabin on the edge of the meadow. But there was no one to see the old man with his cut-off pants showing two white legs bowed as powder horns. And there was no one to see the shaggy burro limping along after him, his pants-legs swinging like a sailor’s bell-bottoms.

  No one to see? No human beings, that is. But everywhere wide, unblinking eyes stared—the eyes of deer and cottontail rabbits, and squirrels and grouse and jays.

  There was no visible tie rope between the man and the burro, but it was there all the same—a tie rope of such stuff as could never thin out and break apart.

  ON THE MEND

  WHILE BRIGHTY’S wounds healed, he grazed, stiff-legged, in Uncle Jimmy Owen’s meadow. He saw little of Uncle Jim during the day, for in all the Kaibab Forest no man was busier. Hunting parties came to Wiley’s Summer Camp nearby, rough and rugged men, eager to hunt mountain lion. And it was Uncle Jim who served as their guide. He fitted big men to big mules and little men to little mules. And besides hunting, he lent a hand when things needed doing at Wiley’s Camp.

  But nighttimes belonged to Brighty. Then he was the center of things and everything happened around him. Uncle Jim came home to him, came home riding a white mule with a train of riderless mules behind him, and a pack of yelping, footsore hounds.

  Brighty went limping each night to greet them, braying a lusty “Welcome home” as he went. When the mules had been fed and bedded down and the hounds cared for, he would nudge Uncle Jim toward the cabin.

  “Sure tickles me, Brighty,” Uncle Jim would laugh softly, “the way ye hustles me along. Seems like I’m yer critter, ’stead o’ the other way around.”

  While he prepared supper over the cookstove inside, Brighty waited outside in nervous eagerness, pawing and stomping the earth. Then after supper he tailed Uncle Jimmy from one Ponderosa pine to another as he gathered yellow lumps of resin.

  “You’ll make ’er!” Uncle Jimmy would say every night as he melted the gum and stirred it with his finger. “Yup!” he would nod, pouring the warm gum into each gash, “soon you’ll be going lickety-larrup again. What’s more, yer hair’ll grow long enough so’s hardly a scar’ll show.”

  Brighty always sat for this performance, his tail stretched along the ground behind him like a piece of rope. He enjoyed the whole business of having his wounds dressed. He even got into the habit of lifting one forefoot and then another, stepping into the pants-legs like a child trying to dress himself. As for the suspenders, he was growing used to them, too. They gave with every motion and rubbed pleasantly across his shoulders at an itchy spot he could never reach himself.

  “Git along with ye, Brighty!” Uncle Jim pronounced when his nursing was done each evening. “I got my cabin to tidy up.”

  Brighty loped off then to tend his own business. There was a big chunk of red salt inside the mule corral, and by poking his head between the r
ails he could get a good lick at it. He had worn a sizable trough, and always his tongue grooved the same place, licking, licking in slapping rhythm. Meanwhile, the white mule worked on the other side of the chunk as if trying to meet Brighty halfway. It was a routine they went through every night.

  Afterward Brighty walked all around the corral, cleaning up wisps of hay that the mules had let fall over the fence.

  Not since his fight with the cougar had he slept in his cave in the mountain. He was content to hug the meadow, where he could hear the mules snorting, and the comforting noises from the cabin—Uncle Jimmy singing cowboy songs and dumping the dishwater out the door, sometimes just missing him by a hair.

  One night, instead of cooking supper over his stove, Uncle Jim built a fire out-of-doors. Brighty watched big-eyed, watched the sour dough being pinched off into mouth-sized pieces and laid in a neat pattern in the Dutch oven.

  “Bet this minds ye of Old Timer, don’t it, Brighty?”

  The burro sidled closer, asking to have his back scratched. With a floury hand Uncle Jimmy obliged. “Lucky thing no womenfolk about,” he said. “They’d squeak like mice at my cookin’ and scratchin’ yer lousy li’l self all at the same time.”

  Brighty leaned his weight against his friend, enjoying the moment.

  “What women don’t know,” Uncle Jim confided, “is that a flea’d ruther cling to a passel o’ fur than a bald biscuit! Eh, Brighty?”

  A grunt came in reply.

  “Sometimes it ’pears to me I needs yer company a sight worser’n ye needs mine! Daytimes I’m too busy to mull about things, but when night comes my mind fastens on Old Timer and I gets a sad, pinched-up feeling.”

  He paused in his rubbing and took off Old Timer’s hat, looking at it as if he could see the white head of hair and the twinkling blue eyes it used to shade. “We ain’t forgot ye, Old Timer,” he said. “It’s just that yer killer’s so slippery. We know he’s hidin’ somewhere in the canyon—prob’ly just waitin’ to take over yer mine.” He turned now to Brighty, an angry light in his eyes. “But me and you’ll round ’im up if it’s the last thing we do!”

  A night moth settled on the black hat and Uncle Jim flipped it away. “Money don’t mean a tinker to us, Old Timer. A reward’s been offered fer the villain, but every cent’ll go to help little Mimi. Ye’ll see.”

  This night when supper was done, Uncle Jimmy did not go off gathering pine resin. He took out his knife and slit open Brighty’s frayed pants-legs. Then he threw them into the fire. A black smoke curled upward and the smell of pine gum filled the air.

  “Thar, partner!” Uncle Jimmy said, his voice suddenly grown husky. “Ye’re free! Free as that night bird wingin’ out over the canyon. Go on, feller, take off!”

  Brighty looked down at his bare legs with the new hairs covering his scars, and let out a wild braying! He struck off for the corral and high-stepped around it like some show pony. Then back he came at a gallop, sliding to a stop in front of Uncle Jim.

  The man laughed, and then he felt a little glow of pride rising in him. “How often,” he asked, his eyes on the fire and one hand working hard at his mustache, “how often do I got to tell ye, feller? I ain’t one to hang onto ye! Good-by, Brighty. Ye’re free!”

  But Brighty lingered. It seemed as if he wanted to square accounts for the long weeks of nursing. One early morning when Uncle Jim came out of the cabin carrying his water tins, Brighty blocked his path, almost asking to be put to work.

  Anyone else might have brushed the little fellow aside with a laugh: “Yeah, I know. Ye’ll run off with my tins and I’ll waste the hull day trackin’ ye.”

  But Uncle Jim thought a second and his eyes lit up with pleasure. He went into the cabin for a shoulder strap and then packed the tins on Brighty. He started up a path to a small spring on the hillside.

  While he trudged on ahead, he rummaged in his mind, trying to find some reason for the change in Brighty. “Mebbe,” he mused to himself, “it’s like what happened to that kid who had to have his hair shaved off. Straight as string it was. But when it growed back after the fever, I’ll be danged if it didn’t kink out all over his head—like tendrils on a morning-glory vine.

  “Mebbe,” he concluded, “some critters changes character after a sickness, ’stead o’ looks. Now ye take Brighty’s fight with the she-lion. Could it of been a settling influence on his character?”

  Uncle Jim faced around to make sure that Brighty was following. Yes, there he was, head bent to the climb as if fetching water was the prime thought of his life.

  The old man nodded, answering his own question. “That’s the way I see it.”

  He sighed a little as he took the tins from Brighty’s back and plunged one after another into the spring. “Feller,” he said, shaking his head, “I’m mighty obliged for the help, but don’t ye get too domesticated on me!”

  THE LION HUNT

  AS THE summer days passed, Brighty became Uncle Jim’s steady companion in all his work. By and by he actually went on lion hunts.

  One cool, bracing morning in late July the very air seemed charged with expectancy. A heavy dew had drenched the earth, and lion scent promised to be sharp and clean.

  Everyone was eager to be off, Uncle Jim and his hounds and Brighty and the mules. But most excited of all were the special guests, President Theodore Roosevelt and his tow-headed son, Quentin. They had come all the way from the capital city for Quentin’s first cougar hunt.

  Just as gray dawn gave way to sunrise, the party took off. Brighty alone wore a warning bell, as he was the only animal young and tender enough for lions to attack.

  “Ah!” the President exclaimed as the company jog-trotted out of Uncle Jim’s meadow. “This is the way to live. Close to earth and sky.” Then he chuckled. “With a dash of danger to give it spice!”

  There was no need for answer. Everyone was feeling the bigness of the morning—hounds whiffing and carrying their tails well up, pack mules stepping out on a slack rope, and Brighty capering in the dew, as if this were the morning of the world.

  For a mile or so they wound through the forest toward the canyon rim, and as the trees gave way to thicket the youngest hound began yipping and running in circles.

  Quentin cantered up alongside Uncle Jim. “Lion?”

  “Nope,” snorted Uncle Jim. “Rabbit!” Then he wheeled his mule, and with Brighty helping, drove the overeager pup back into the pack.

  Uncle Jim as he rode flung little pebbles that struck the earth a mere inch or so behind the hound. “Less’n I have a nosebag of li’l bitty stones,” he called to Quentin, “one o’ the youngsters goes kitin’ off on rabbits and upsets the hull pack.”

  With the pebbles to remind them, the hounds settled down to lion business in earnest, their noses lower than ever. They fanned out as they moved through the underbrush, scenting cold trails too old to puzzle out. And they came in again. And they scattered until Brighty was bewildered, not knowing which to tail.

  It was well toward noon when Old Bones, a bluetick hound, bayed the news that he had found fresh lion scent.

  “Hear ’im! Hear ’im!” Uncle Jim shouted to the pack.

  With a rush the others hit the line behind Bones and broke out in full cry. Their voices rang quivering in the air, and the very melody made Brighty’s blood quicken.

  Instantly he was on his toes, flying with the pack, pounding along the forest duff, dodging tree trunks, jumping fallen logs, galloping along the rim. He could hear Uncle Jim whooping and hollering behind, and the air gone wild with hound music and mules snorting and hoofs beating. And under his chin his own tinkly bell adding to the tumult.

  Suddenly in the rimrock ahead the tawny body of a full-grown lion leaped from a tree and disappeared over the rim into a tangle of scrub oak. The pack was after him, a screaming stream of bodies, diving into the cover.

  Although the brush was heavy in shadow, Brighty, trotting along the rim, could see their tails waving him on. Their cries, too, st
irred him with excitement. To him the hunt meant but two things—keeping pace with the hounds or, better still, setting pace! He saw ahead a notch in the rim and flew toward it. And now he was scrambling down the notch through spiny undergrowth, picking his way carefully. All the while the hounds were coming along toward him. Now to outsmart them!

  Breath snorting in his nostrils, he skidded down the steep red cliffs, almost sitting on his haunches. He landed on a little shelf of rock that ran along the wall several hundred yards.

  As he minced along this ledge, he was enjoying the three-way race—mules and men on the rim, hounds lower down thrashing through the cover, and lower still he, Brighty, tittuping along, sending little stones spitting into space.

  Meanwhile the mountain lion kept to cover, gliding through the close-growing oak on thickly padded feet. He ran with stealthy, flowing step, and the color of his fur was one with the sand and the shadows.

  Minutes passed, and more minutes, and just when the scent seemed hottest, the lion shot from cover, up the rock layer parallel with the hounds. For a few yards he dashed forward, then dropped again into the thicket.

  The hounds, baffled, broke out too, casting themselves in and out of the underbrush, trying to regain the scent. Up on the rim Uncle Jim cheered lustily, yelling to each by name. “You own him, Bones; go away with him! Hunt him up, Warbler! Try on, Possum! Go into ’im, Younker and Whiffet!”

  His cheering was magic. Old Bones pushed on and hit the line again. With a shrill cry he voiced his find to the rest of the hounds.

  Brighty had no thought but the fun of the race. He did not see the big cat now heading for a yellow pine in a hollow, now climbing up the trunk like a lineman up a telephone pole. He was conscious only of hound music, wild and shrill, and that he was leading the pack, dancing along his ledge loose and free, his bell sounding his own excitement and joy.