Стивен Гулд: Bugs in the Arroyo

The second day after leaving the Rio Grande, on the downslope east of the Manzanos, Kimball pulled over the lip of a hill and found an argument in progress.

Mrs. Pedecaris, the mule drawing his cart, had apparently heard them first for her ears twitched forward well before the top of the hill. Kimball was not surprised. The trail they were following had become more of a road, well-defined wheel ruts with fresh tracks, and fresh horse manure just beginning to dry. Kimball had looped the reins over the brake lever while he was weaving the last bit of a wide-brimmed green cattail hat—and Mrs. Pedecaris slowed as she approached the cluster of vehicles just over the hill. There were five carts similar to Kimball’s, high-wheeled boxes with composite wheels and axles. Three were horse-drawn, one mule-drawn, and one cart had lowered shafts and a cross bar to be pulled by hand, like a Mormon cart. Then three freight wagons with six-horse teams stood in a row, and there were a couple of saddle horses in front of them.

Kimball took Mrs. Pedecaris off the edge of the road to where a tough patch of dry buffalo grass was doing all right in the shade of some low mesquite bushes. He pulled off her bridle so she could crop the grass and said, “Pull up a chair, Mrs. P.” The mule snorted and dipped her head into the grass. The road dipped sharply, into a cut leading down into a broad arroyo running down from the mountains. That’s where the cluster of people stood, crouched, or sat.

“—dehydration is really the issue.”

“Maybe we could throw a canteen?”

“Dammit, how many times do we gotta argue this? You crush a bug they’ll swarm her for sure. Us too.”

Kimball looked out beyond them and saw that the arroyo glittered copper and silver and crystalline blue. Out in the middle, on a large chunk of limestone, a small figure sat cross-legged and still.

“Oh,” he said aloud.

Several people turned and saw him.

“Afternoon,” Kimball said.

They looked at him blankly. A big man wearing a teamster’s emblem on his vest suddenly swore loudly.

“Who’s watchin’ the wagons? Marty, Richard! Get your lazy asses up there! Unhitch the teams and let ’em have a little water.”

A short, dark man in orange and maroon Buddhist robes turned around and Kimball blinked. It was Thây Hahn, a Buddhist priest of the Tiep Hien Order. Every December he led a Seshin , a meditation retreat, at the Dojo. Kimball had also stayed at his home in the territorial capital. Kimball shaded his eyes and looked harder at the figure out on the boulder. “Shit! Is that Thayet?” It was. True to form, she wasn’t just sitting cross-legged, she was in full lotus.

Thayet was Hahn’s twelve-year-old daughter.

“Kimball?”

Kimball bowed, his hands together. “ Thây Hahn. What happened?”

He stopped counting on his rosary and bowed back, his face calm. “There was a storm up in the Manzanos that sent a flash flood. It happened before we reached the arroyo but the water was still high when we reached here so we waited, filling our water barrels.”

“All of you?”

“Ah, no, Mr. Graham’s teamsters arrived only an hour ago. Some of the others came yesterday. At first it was just the Joffrey family’s two carts and us—we’ve been traveling the same road since we met near Isleta. The water slowed to a trickle on the far edge and the sand was starting to dry so Mr. Joffrey took an empty cart across to test the footing.”

A man with male pattern baldness was standing a bit further down where the road turned. He held a cloth hat in his hand and he was twisting it back and forth in his hands though the sun fell full upon his head. “I ran over a damn bug.”

Kimball squeezed his eyes shut for a moment.

“Was Thayet in your cart?”

The balding man shook his head. “Hell no. I heard that pop. It’s like nothing else, right? Once you’ve heard one and see what happens you know forever. I whipped up the horse and we bolted forward, but the damn thing sank up to its axel in some quicksand and I panicked. The bugs were already in the air and I just jumped up and ran for it.”

“Let me guess,” Kimball said. “Thayet went for the horse.”

Hahn nodded. “Just so. She got him unhitched and tried to ride him out but he bucked her off when a bug burned him.”

Mr. Joffrey added, “ He made it out. Stupid was grazing on the far ridge at sunset.”

“Sunset? How long has Thayet been out there?”

Hahn’s fingers clicked through his rosary automatically. It was not unlike Mr. Joffrey’s twisting hat. “The storm was two days ago. She’s been on that rock for two nights.”

Dehydration indeed.

Kimball looked over the wash. The cart was in pieces, riddled with bug holes, perhaps halfway across the wash. There were a couple of boulders also sticking above the moving sea of copper and steel but none of the bugs sat on them. “Iron rich sands?”

“I believe so,” said Hahn. “There were dark streaks.”

Not enough to attract the bugs in the first place, but enough to keep them here once they swarmed. A woman with a toddler asleep in her lap was sitting in the small bit of shade at the edge of the cut.

“Isn’t there something that can be done?”

One of the teamsters muttered, “Here we go again.”

Mr. Joffrey turned, anguish twisting across his face like the hat in his hands. “If it would just rain again…”

Bugs hated water. They’d abandon the arroyo while water covered it. Of course, it was the water that probably uncovered a piece of refined metal to attract that first bug, the one run over by the cart. The first rain was unlikely enough this time of year. No counting on a second storm.

“This won’t do,” Kimball said. “Anybody have a shovel?”

“What, you gonna tunnel to her?” the teamster boss, Graham, said. “That’s limestone under that sand. Might as well build a bridge above, as long as that would take.”

“Lend me a shovel and I’ll go get her.”

Graham, a big man going gray, stared at Kimball, slight and young. Kimball had even depilitated that morning so he looked his youngest. “Stupid to send one fool kid after another.”

“You want to just sit here and let her die of thirst?”

“All I see is two dead kids instead of one and a shovel rotten with bug holes. No gain in that.”