Sandi Ault - Wild Penance

“Everyone has to be on the phone all the time these days,” I muttered, as I put my Jeep in drive and proceeded toward the exit. Living and working in remote and mountainous terrain as I did, a cell phone wouldn’t even work most of the time. The world was changing in ways that I didn’t understand.

The drive from Santa Fe to Taos journeys through dramatically varied terrain. At one end, the Santa Fe Mountains rise up to the northeast and the City Different nestles in a seven-thousand-foot-high navel. From there, foothills roll away to the west as piñon- and juniper-covered slopes crowned with adobe palaces give way to red earth, purple mesas, and arid moonscapes marked by strange rock outcrop-pings formed centuries ago by spurts of planetary heartburn. Here, the highway travels through Tesuque, Nambé, and Pojoaque pueblos, and the descent into the Rio Grande Valley starts to level off. Wherever reservations meet the road, Indian gambling casinos sprout from the desert landscape-ranging from utilitarian temporary constructions to a mammoth casino-centered golf resort. And away to the west, high atop a precipice at the edge of the Jemez Mountains, Los Alamos stands like an android sentry, visible from as far as a hundred miles away in the clean, clear air of the cerulean New Mexico sky.

As I drove past the turnoff to Los Alamos, I glanced in the rearview mirror and realized that the car about a quarter of a mile behind me had been there for some time. I couldn’t make out what kind it was because the bright sun reflected off its hood like a mirror, but its shape was new looking, low profile, a light color, I thought.

I sped into Española, slowed enough to get through it without legal intervention, and then put the pedal down again across the flat land between Española and Velarde. I watched as the car behind me sped and slowed, too, always keeping the same distance between us.

In Velarde, where the road climbed a shelf overlooking the cultivated orchards of the bottomland and the river itself, the route began to twine and curl as it wound along parallel to the Rio Grande. The sky narrowed between towering bluffs armored with chiseled sheets of stone. In the twisting turns, I lost sight of the car behind me.

The canyon widened at Embudo and through the village of Rinconada. Chile ristras dangled from the low shed roof of a roadside fruit stand. Hand-painted signs along the road offered up a diverse menu of cultural charm: a taxidermist, home art galleries, a massage therapist, a winery, and bed-and-breakfasts. I kept checking the mirror and the shiny shadow car was always behind me in the distance, disappearing as I went around the curves and bends, reappearing on the straight stretches.

At Pilar, the Rio Grande and the road straight through to Taos kissed and parted, and a little county road followed the river, while the highway climbed hard and fast through the mountains. I pulled over at this junction and backed my Jeep in behind a little hut that served as a rafting company in the summer, making sure the nose of my car was all the way behind the structure, out of sight. I pulled out my field glasses and got ready.

In less than a minute, the tail sped past but the car was going too fast for me to read the plate. It was a Lexus, the same model and color as the one I’d seen in the library parking lot in Santa Fe.

It was almost dark when I started riding just north of Chimayo. Redhead, the paint mare I had chosen, was my favorite from the BLM stables. She had done trail riding all her life and was strong and sure-footed. Like most mares, she had a belligerent streak, but we usually got along.

Roy had been right: the backcountry was treacherous. Melting mountain snows had left the slopes muddy and the roads deeply rutted on each side, with perilous high rocks in the middle destined to wipe out even a high-riding vehicle’s oil pan. During the night, these ruts and puddles froze, making the raised earth ridges on either side of them as hard as concrete. We didn’t use horses that much anymore, not since four-wheel drive became the main means of transportation in the Southwest. But, unless one had the time to do it on foot, a horse was the only way to follow this fence line right now.

Riding was one of the reasons I took this job in the first place, one of the things about my work that nourished me. In the saddle, I was someone else-half horse and half human. On a horse, there were no clocks, no stoplights, none of the rigid constraints and limitations of civilization. Instead, I felt a sense of freedom, of rugged challenge, of rightness with the world.

My normal routine would have been to establish a base camp before dark fell and make planned forays from that point, doing the bulk of my range riding during daylight hours. In the remote country where I normally worked, I had few human interactions, and my greatest concern was survival in bad weather. In the areas I patrolled most, I buried caches of supplies and survival gear so that I could travel light. I chose the most beautiful spots for my camps because there was no reason to camp elsewhere. But for this assignment, I would try to cover the fence line first-all the way from one end to the other-so I knew the terrain. After that, I could determine where to place a base camp for the following night, in a spot where I felt it was most important to maintain an active presence. Tonight, I planned to ride just over five miles to meet the forest ranger at our appointed rendezvous site near Cañada de la Entranas, more than halfway to Cañoncito.

There were things only a night rider could discover and report. At least half of the illegal woodcutting went on after dark, for example. A crew of men would muscle four-wheel-drive trucks into a remote area where they wouldn’t be seen or heard at night. Using a generator to power work lights, they would put their chain saws to work and quickly denude a swath of pristine forest, piling their trucks full of cut logs and vamoosing out by daylight, before being discovered. And much of the vandalism and destruction of rock art, ruins, and even fences on public lands took place in the dark, fueled by cases of beer and a lack of respect for the earth’s beauty. Poachers came to take up their positions at watering holes at night so they would be ready to bag illegal prey at first light.

Redhead and I set out in the cold, and soon the sky became a dome of ebony pierced by the cold points of blue-white stars. A low bank of snow clouds in the east obscured the stars in that direction, while a weak quarter moon hid behind another patch of clouds directly above, leaving this isolated landscape as dark as pitch. The biting chill in the air promised to deepen as the night went on, and the dense, pungent smell of mountain sage hung like incense. There was no real trail along the fence, and occasionally a thick stand of brush or an outcropping of rock would force a wide detour from the fence line. The terrain was rugged and sloping. Surging upward to the east were the high peaks of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. The only evidence of civilization was the ever-present barbed wire barrier that separated Carson National Forest from the BLM land I now patrolled.

The quiet was broken only by Redhead’s steady plodding and blustering, as warm breath fogged from her nostrils and quickly vanished into the frigid, dry air. Wherever a rock outcropping sheltered the snow from the day’s sunlight, stands of drought-stunted piñon huddled together like wolves at a watering hole ready to drink the melt. Thin tendrils of white mountain sage reached out to touch Redhead’s legs, seeking to pollinate and thrive for another season.