Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing

In two days he struck a wagonroad passing east and west across the sierras. The woods were green with ilex and madrono, the road seemed little used. In a day's travel he passed no soul. He crossed through a high pass where the way was so narrow that the rocks bore old scars of wagonhubs and below the pass were scattered stone cairns, the mojoneras de muerte of that country where travelers had been slain by Indians years before. The country seemed depopulate and barren and he saw no game and saw no birds and there was nothing about but the wind and the silence.

At the eastern escarpment he dismounted and led the horse along a shelf of gray rock. The scrub juniper that grew along the rim leaned in a wind that had long since passed. Along the face of the stone bluffs were old pictographs of men and animals and suns and moons as well as other representations that seemed to have no referent in the world although they once may have. He sat in the sun and looked out over the country to the east, the broad barranca of the Bavispe and the ensuing Carretas Plain that was once a seafloor and the small pieced fields and the new corn greening in the old lands of the Chichimeca where the priests had passed and soldiers passed and the missions fallen into mud and the ranges of mountains beyond the plain range on range in pales of blue where the terrain lay clawed open north and south, canyon and range, sierra and barranca, all of it waiting like a dream for the world to come to be, world to pass. He saw a single vulture hanging motionless in some high vector that the wind had chosen for it. He saw the smoke of a locomotive passing slowly downcountry over the plain forty miles away.

He took a handful of pinon nuts from one tattered pocket and spread them on a rock and cracked them with a handstone. He'd taken to talking to the horse and he talked to it now as he cracked the nuts and when he had them free of their hulls he scooped them up and held them out. The horse looked at him and looked at the pinon nuts and shuffled forward two steps and placed its rubbery mouth in his palm.

He wiped the slobber from his hand on the leg of his trousers and sat cracking and eating the rest of the nuts himself while the horse watched. Then he stood and walked to the edge of the escarpment and threw the handstone. It sailed out turning andfell and fell and vanished in the silence. He stood listening. From far below the faint clatter of stone on stone. He walked back and stretched out on the warm rock shelving and cradled his head in the crook of his arm and stared into the dark of his hatcrown. His home had come to seem remote and dreamlike. There were times he could not call to mind his father's face.

He slept and in his sleep he dreamt of wild men who came to him with clubs and their teeth were filed to points and they gathered round him and warned him of their work before they even set about it. He woke and lay listening. As if they might yet be there just beyond the darkness of his hat. Squatting among the rocks. Chiseling in stone with stones those semblances of the living world they'd have endure and the world dead at their hands. He lifted his hat and placed it on his chest and looked at the blue sky. He sat up and looked for the horse but the horse was only a few feet away standing waiting for him. He rose and rolled the stiffness out of his shoulders and put on his hat and took up the trailing reins and ran his hand down the horse's foreleg till it lifted its foot and he cradled the hoof between his knees and looked at it. The horse had long since shed its shoes and the hooves were long and broomed and he took out his pocketknife and pared back the hoof wall where the edges were splayed and then let down the horse's foot and walked around the animal inspecting and paring the other hooves in turn. The constant currying of the brush and greenwood in the mountains had carried off all trace of the stable and the horse gave off a warm and rooty smell. The horse had dark hooves with heavy hoof walls and the horse had in him enough grullo blood to make a mountain horse by both conformation and inclination and as the boy had grown up where talk of horses was more or less continual he knew that where the blood carries the shape of a hock or the breadth of a face it carries also an inner being of a certain design and no other and the wilder their life became in the mountains the more he felt the horse subtly at war with itself. He didnt think the horse would quit him but he was sure the horse had thought about it. He pared the last hind hoof and led the animal back out to the narrow track and mounted up and turned and started down into the gorge.

The road descended the granite face of the sierra like a hairspring. He was amazed that wagons could have negotiated those narrow switchbacks. There were caveouts along the edges of the road where he dismounted and led the horse and there were rocks in the road no man could move. The way descended down out of the pine forests through oak and juniper. A wild and jumbled terrain. Everywhere the green spring invasive in the barrancas. In the evening light a trembling celadon. He was at the descent some seven hours, the last of them in darkness.

He slept that night in a wash in the river sand with the cane and willow thick about him and in the morning he rode north along the river track until he came to a ford. Shored up on the red alluvial plain on the far side of the river were the ruins of a town slumping back into the mud out of which it had been raised. A single smoke stood in the blue air. He put the horse into the ford and halted to let the animal drink and he leaned down from the saddle and raised a palmful of water and passed it over his face and raised another to drink. The water was cold and clear. Upriver swifts or swallows were circling and flaring low over the water and the morning sun was warm on his face. He pressed the heels of his boots into the horse's flank and the horse raised its dripping mouth out of the river and waded slowly out into the ford. Midstream he halted again and slid the bow from his shoulder and let it go in the river. It turned and jostled in the riffles and floated out into the pool below. A crescent of pale wood, turning and drifting, lost in the sun on the water. Legacy of some drowned archer, musician, maker of fire. He rode on through the ford and up through the shore willows and carrizal and into the town.

Most of those buildings still standing were at the farther end of the town and toward these he rode. He passed the wreckage of an ancient coach half crushed in a zaguan where the doors were fallen in. He passed a mud horno in a yard from within which the eyes of some animal watched and he passed the ruins of a huge adobe church whose roofbeams lay in the rubble. The man who stood in the doorway at the rear of the church was paler of skin than even he and had sandy hair and pale blue eyes and the man called out to him first in Spanish and then in english.

He told him to get down and to come in. He left the horse at the door of the church and followed the man into a small room where a fire burned in a homemade sheetiron stove. The room. contained a small bed or cot and a long pine table with turned legs and several ladderback chairs such as were made by the Mennonites of that country. A number of cats of every color lay about the room. The man gestured at the cats vaguely as if they were to be excused in some way and then motioned for the boy to take a chair. The boy pulled the blanket from about his shoulders and stood holding it. The room was very warm and yet the man had bent and opened the stove door and was at chunking in more wood. On top of the stove stood an iron skillet and a kettle and a few blackened pans together with a clawfooted silver teapot deeply dented and dark with tarnish that sorted oddly with the other housewares. He rose and shut the stove door with his foot and reached and took down a pair of china cups and saucers and set them on the table. One of the cats got up and walked down the table and looked into each of the cups in turn and then sat. The man took the teapot from the stove and poured the cups and put the pot back and looked at the boy.