Damon Knight - Orbit 20

Serena Hendricks met Sam at the back door of the ranch house.

“Stranger! Your beard is a bush! Does Farley know you’re here?” She had the complexion of a Mexican, the bright blue eyes of her German mother.

Sam shook his head. “Where is he?”

“Out there. God knows. A hundred degrees! You know it’s a hundred degrees? Gin and tonic. Lots of ice. Come on.” She drew him into the house.

Serena’s parents had worked on the Chesterman ranch, her father the foreman, her mother the housekeeper. Serena and Farley had grown up together and, Sam thought, they should have married, but had missed the chance, the time, something. She had married one of the hands instead and her three children ran around the yard whooping and playing rodeo, while Farley remained single.

Sam followed her to the kitchen. The air in the spacious ranch house was twenty degrees cooler than outside.

“We expected you and your friends back in April,” Serena said as she sliced a lemon and added it to ice cubes in a glass. She pursed her lips, closed one eye and poured gin, nodded, added tonic, stirred, then tasted it.

“There were complications,” Sam said. Sometimes he almost wished he had asked Serena to marry him ten years ago, back when anything was still possible. Serena rolled her eyes, drew him to a chair at the table, dragged another one close to it and sat down by him, her hand on his arm. “That means a woman. Tell me about it.”

Sam laughed, gently put her hand on her own knee and stood up. “What I’m going to do is get my stuff from the camper, go upstairs and take a shower and a nap."

“Pig!” she yelled at his back. “You’re all alike! Inconsiderate pigs! All of you.”

When he brought his pack in she handed him a new drink. “Same room as usual. Supper’s at six. Sleep well, dream happy.”

Farley and Sam had been at U.C.L.A. together; they had climbed mountains together; they had lived through an August blizzard on Mt. Rainier together. Farley was slightly taller than Sam and leaner, and his hair was graying.

They sat on the wide porch drinking beer at midnight.

“You haven’t seen her since then?” Farley asked.

“I guess neither of us wanted to. She quit her job, moved. Got another job. Dropped just about everyone we both knew.” He finished the beer and put the can down. From far off there came a coyote’s sharp, almost human coughing, yapping cry. He waited. There was an answering call. Then another. They were very distant.

“She must have had a good scare,” Farley said. “There’s no Reuben in the territory, you know.”

“There’s nothing like she said.”

“There’s something, Sam boy. There is something. And I don’t know any way on God’s earth for her to have known it. We used to have a hand called Tamale. An old Mexican, one of Serena’s uncles. He died when I was five or six. It’s been that long. He’d tell us stories. Superstitious old bastard. He told me about Ghost River, scared me shitless. Haven’t heard that again since then. Until now when Reuben comes along and tells your friend the same thing.”

Sam felt prickles on his arms. “So there was someone. Who the hell was he?”

“Reuben,” Farley said. He stood up. “Can’t take these hours any more. Must be age. You want to ride out with me in the morning? I’m making the rounds of the wells. Lundy’s had bad water up the other side of Dog Mountain. I’m collecting samples to have tested.”

Water, Sam thought later, sitting at his window staring out at the black desert. Water was the only real worry out here. Dog Creek irrigated Farley’s wheat. Dog Creek determined if Farley would succeed or fail. Years when the snow did not come to the mountains, when the winds drove the sparse clouds over too fast to release their rain, when the summer started early, ended late, Farley watched Dog Creek, and the reservoir his father had dammed, like a woman watching a feverish child at the climax of a serious illness. The fear of drought accounted for the gray in Farley’s hair. There were a dozen deep wells on the ninety thousand acres of his ranch, most of them pumped by windmills, a few of them close enough to the power lines to use electricity. The water was pumped into troughs. If one of the wells started pumping bad water, or no water, if one of the troughs was shot by a hunter, sprang a leak in any way, that meant disaster. Days, weeks went by between checks of the troughs. In this country a lot of cattle could die in that time.

And she thought he would swallow that silly story about a cowboy and his dog!

They drove the jeep cross-country to inspect the wells, and Farley drove places where Sam would not have attempted to go. At one o’clock Farley stopped and they sat on the ground in the shade of an overhanging cliff to eat their lunch. There was a valley below them; on the other side were more cliffs. Suddenly Sam realized where they were: this was the same valley Victoria had talked about, viewed from the other side.

“See that fence?” Farley waved his beer can toward the opposite cliffs. “Three hundred acres fenced off. Tamale brought me out with him once, when I was five. I rode all the way, still remember. I asked him why this piece was fenced off and he told me about Ghost River. Said the cattle heard the water sometimes and went off the cliffs trying to get to it. I believed him. Never gave it another thought for years. Then I was home from school one summer and Dad had me come out here to fix one of the gates. I knew by then cattle don’t find water by sound, they smell it. I asked him about the three hundred acres. He said it always had been fenced because of the larkspurs that come up thick in there.” He looked at the other side of the valley thoughtfully. “They do, too,” he said after a moment. “Only thing is, they’re on both sides of the fence and always were.”

In the valley was a thick stand of bunchgrass, the sign of a well-managed range. No sage or gray rabbit grass had invaded there, no erosion scarred the land. No tracks flattened the grass, or made ruts in the earth. The valley was a cul-de-sac, a box canyon surrounded by cliffs. Where the valley narrowed, with a break in the cliffs, there was a drop-off of two hundred feet. The wire fence started at the gorge, crossed the ranch road, climbed the cliff, followed the jagged ridge around to the break. On the other side the fence resumed, still clinging to the crest, then turned, went down the cliffs again, recrossed the road and ended at the gorge, several hundred yards from the other section. The area enclosed was an irregular ellipse. The irregularities were caused by the terrain. Where heaps of boulders, or abrupt rises or falls, made detours necessary, the fence always skirted around to the outside.

Farley got back in the jeep. “Might as well finish,” he said, and drove along the fence on the crest, then started the descent down a rocky incline, bumping and lurching to the two-track ranch road and the first gate. He drove fast, but with care and skill; turned around at the second gate and made his way forward, as Victoria had done.

“Probably stopped along in here,” he said. “First curve out of sight of the road.” The gorge was nearby, and there should have been a hill to the right, but the hill was nothing less than another steep cliff. Farley studied it a moment, motioned to Sam and started to walk. Unerringly he turned and twisted and took them upward. They reached the top with little trouble.

“She could have done it,” Sam said, looking down at the valley again, across it to where they had been a short time before. He looked about until he saw the boulders she had mentioned, where she had sat down. They started toward them. They were on the ridge of an upthrust, picking their way over the weathered edges of crazily tilted basalt, which would remain when everything about it was turned to dust. In some places there was less than a foot of space between a sheer drop-off on one side and a slope almost that steep on the other.