To the Mountains

I

JULIO lay as quietly as he could. Only his eyes kept moving, turning toward the open door that led into the other room, as if by looking there he could hear better what the women were saying. His brother Luis was asleep beside him. The same blanket of catskins covered them both. Luis could sleep no matter what happened. The firelight on the walls and the ceiling was enough to keep Julio awake, even if his mother were not weeping in the next room. It was a silent night outside; like all the other nights in this place of home.

‘When the fire goes out I will go to sleep,’ thought Julio; his legs ached from holding them still. Four nights ago his mother had given birth to a baby girl. Josefina Martinez came nine miles from Bernalillo to assist. The father was in Mexico on a wagon train. The trade in the summer and autumn of 1800 was promising, and the weather very fortunate. Rosa’s baby came with no one there but her two sons and Josefina the midwife. They made a huge fire in the front room and left the door open so that the heat would wave silently through. The boys stayed outdoors and shuddered like horses under the November moon. From within came the wafting firelight and the nimble sounds of repeated sufferings.

Each boy felt like the deputy of his father. Luis was sixteen and Julio was thirteen. Luis was a stout boy — legs and arms like cottonwood branch, round and wieldy. Julio was slender and something like a half-grown cat in his physical ways. He was wary and respectful of life’s dangers. He had grown with caution, because fear slowly told him more as he grew up. Everything Luis did easily, because he was older, Julio had to learn to do because he was younger, and thus everything was harder for him. The boys had no one but each other for companions, mostly; for they lived in the Rio Grande Valley a way out from the village of Bernalillo. They sometimes went there on horseback, when their father could spare the animals from work in the fields. Once, riding to town, Julio’s horse had stamped and run wild, because a hunter in the tall saplings by the field near the river had shot his musket at a rising goose. Julio often dreamed of it, and the triumph of regaining the horse’s head.

The brothers slept and the firelight faded down.

In the back room, Rosa presently slept too, and Josefina sat watching her and the new baby.

Josefina was greatly girthed, with two circles of fat at her middle. She was heavy-faced and her eyes were kind, even when her tongue was sharp and filthy. Thus her character: good heart, from instinct; wicked mind, from dealings in the hard world.

The baby lay by its mother’s side.

‘The face of a piñón,’ thought Josefina, staring at the tiny brown head and the little open mouth that breathed so roundly.

The house was thick as a fortress, with adobe walls. It stood on a little screen flat of land above the fields, beyond which lay the Rio Grande. Over it went two mighty cottonwoods, planted by the grandfather of this house a long time ago, who himself had left the service of the Governor of New Spain to scratch his own land and yield it to his own sons. To the east the fields faded into mesa country, rising face of gravelly sand that held dusty bushes. The mesa rolled away and lifted hills where little pine trees grew. In morning, distant under the early sun, the pine trees seemed to exhale a blue air; and from the blue air rose the mountains, whose mighty trees looked, far away, like scratches upon the face of blue rock.

The mountains were miles away from the house of the family, and sometimes they were altogether hidden by weather: cloud, or rain, or wind alive with dust. At other times the mountains were momentously close, as if moved in golden light by the hand of God, and every cañon, every wind course and water hollow in the rock, stood clear to the eyes of the wondering brothers. Hardly a day of their lives failed to be somehow influenced by the mountains off there to the east.

Josefina came into the front room to kick some more wood on the dying fire; for cold was quick to get through her petulant flesh.

She woke Julio; but he lay with his eyes shut, identifying the noises she made, and the profane rumble of her musing. When she went back, he heard his mother speak sleepily; then the baby squeaked and began to cry, what sounded to him like a mortal utterance and farewell of that alien little life in his mother’s bed.

’Yes, if you all four of you get through the winter, that will be one of God’s little jokes,’ said Josefina, slapping her hands on her cold belly. ‘This house never gets warm; and nothing to cover with, those boys out there, freezing on the dirt floor with a dirty old catskin . . .’

‘My husband will bring back plenty of money and furs and clothes from Mexico,’ said Rosa. But she began to cry again, and mumble little sad doubts against the baby’s hot temple.

‘So, I will stay as long as I can,’ said Josefina. ‘ But you know that can’t be forever. Be quiet now. You will choke the baby. Here, I’ll take her, though God knows she may freeze to death. Get back to sleep. I will warm her.’

Josefina took the baby.

Julio leaned and crouched from his bed to see what they did. There was a coldly steady candle burning by the wooden saint in the corner of the bedroom. Josefina held the baby with one arm and with her other hand pulled her tight dress away in front, and her huge bosom lay open and cavernous with shadow. There, at her warmest and most copious being, she laid the baby and folded her breasts to it, and drew her dress together and held her arms like a cradle. Her cheeks quivered at the striving touch of the baby; some pleasure deepened in her being; and for no reason that she could recognize, out of her assortment of past events, — midwife, servant, thief, and harlot, — she began to blush.

Her eyes watered and she smiled and sighed.

Julio backed into his bed again. His brother Luis flinched and jerked like a dog that is tickled when it dozes. Julio held his breath for fear he would wake Luis. Yet he wanted to talk to him. He wanted to stir his brother into a fury of doing; to save this family; to prove that it was not a world for women — that it was their own little tiny sister who so blindly threatened their mother’s life and will, and who opened the disgusting bosom of a fat witch to lie there for warmth!

So his thoughts were confused and furious.

The fire was alive again in little flames like autumn leaves. He could not sleep.

He could not forget. He hated his fears. They were with him, vaguely enlivened by Josefina’s talk.

It was not long before winter.

In the broken darkness of firelight, Julio lay awake and prayed until he was answered by the same thing that always answered prayers, the earliest voice he had been taught to recognize, which no one else had to hear — the voice of God Himself in his own heart. Father Antonio made him know when he was a very little boy that the stronger a man was, the more he needed the guidance of God. So when he felt afraid and feeble alongside his mild strong brother, he had only to pray, and shut his eyes, and remember Jesus, who would presently come to him and say, ‘I see you, Julio Garcia; it is all right. What is it?’

‘The mountains, to the mountains,’ thought Julio in answer to his own prayer.

’Blessed is the fruit of thy womb: Jes us . . .’

‘What is in the mountains?’

‘. . . now and at the hour of our death.‘

‘There is much that my brother and I can do in the mountains, and as soon as he awakens I will tell him; we will take my father’s musket and go hunting; we will bring home skins to keep our little sister warm, and show our mother that this is a house of men, who do what is right, no matter how hard it is to do.‘

‘Amen.‘

II

Against the mica panes of the small deep window the early daylight showed like fog, silvery and chill. Luis jumped alive from sleep and went like a pale shadow to the dead fireplace, where he blew ashes off a few remote coals and, shivering in his bare skin, coaxed a fire alive. Then he found his clothes and got into them. He began to laugh at Julio, curled like a cat under the mountain-cat skins, waiting for warmth in the room. Then he thought with pleasure of the work to be done outside, in the marching dawn; cold mist over the river; the horses stirring; animals to feed and release. He went out, already owner of the day.

Julio was awake all that time; and he squinted at the fire, judging nicely just when it would need more wood, lest it go out; and just when the room would be comfortable. He was soon up, listening for sounds in the other room. Presently Josefina came to make breakfast. She felt tragic in the cold morning, and her face drooped with pity for her heart which was abused.

‘I am going home,’ said she.

‘No, you can’t do that,’ said the boy.

She looked at him with sad delight in his concern.

‘Why can’t I? What do I get around here for my pains? I was freezing all night.’

‘When my father comes home he will pay you plenty. Luis and I can — we will bring you a glorious piece of fur.’

‘Oh, indeed; and where from?’

‘We are going to the mountains.’

‘A pair of fool children like you? Another thing for your poor mama to worry about! If she lives through the winter it will be very surprising.’

‘What do you mean?’

She had nothing to mean, and so she made it more impressive by quivering her great throat, a ridiculous gesture of melancholy.

Julio ran outside and found his brother. They did not greet each other, but fell into tasks together.

The sky was coming pale blue over the river, and pale gold edges of light began to show around the far mountain rims. The house looked like a lovely toy in the defining light, its edges gilded, its shadows dancing.

‘Luis.’

‘What?’

‘I have an idea.’

‘Well?’

‘Did you feel cold all night?’

‘No, but you would not lie still.’

‘I am sorry. I heard Josefina talking to Mama.‘

‘The poor old cow.‘

‘Do you realize that we are so poor that we have n’t got enough things to keep us warm, especially with the new baby here? And an extra woman in the house? — She ought to stay with us until Mama is well again.‘

‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘You and I should take the musket and go to hunt cats in the mountains, and bring home enough furs to satisfy everybody.‘

‘Yes,’said Luis, without any surprise, ‘ I have thought of that, too.‘

‘Then I can go?’

‘ I suppose so — if you behave yourself. It’s no child’s errand, you know.‘

‘Of course not. Then will you tell Mama?’

‘ All right.‘

Now the smoke was thick and sweet above the house.

The light spread grandly over the whole valley.

Luis went to his mother’s bedside and leaned down. The baby was awake and obscurely busy against her mother’s side.

‘Mama.’

‘My little Luis.’

‘Julio and I are going to the mountains for a few days, to get some furs.’

‘No, no, you are both too young! That little Julio is just a baby. Now, Luis, don’t break my heart with any more troubles!’

‘What troubles? We have no troubles!’

‘ Your father is gone, we have no money, my children shiver all night long, that Josefina is a fat crow, Father Antonio has n’t been near us since the baby was born.’

She wept easily and weakly. Luis was full of guilt, and ideas of flight. He leaned and kissed her cool forehead and laughed like a big man.

‘You’ll see. My brother and I will come back like merchant princes.’

‘Then you are going?’

‘Yes, Mummie, we’ll go.’

She stared at him in a religious indignation. This was her son! So even sons grew up and went away and did what they wanted to do, in spite of all the things women could think of to keep them back!

Later Julio came to say good-bye, and she shamelessly wooed him to stay, with the name of God, and her love, and his pure dearness, and various coquetries. He felt a lump in his throat, so he shrugged, like his father, and went to the other room, where he paused and said, ‘Thank you, Josefina, for staying until my brother and I get back.’

‘The devil takes many odd forms,’said Josefina with a pout.

They had two horses and the musket which their father had left at home upon his last departure for Mexico. They had a rawhide pouch containing things to eat, loaves and chilies and dried meat. As soon as they were free of the little fields of home, Julio began to gallop; and Luis overtook him and, saying nothing, reached out for the halter and brought him down to a walk. Julio felt very much rebuked; he sat erect on his horse and squinted his eyes at the mountain rising so far ahead of them, and thought of himself as a relentless hunter.

The boys toiled over the land all morning.

They paused and looked back several times, touched by the change in the look of their farm, which lay now like a box or two on the floor of the valley; and they thought respectively, ‘When I have my farm, I shall want to be on higher ground,’ and ‘What if something dreadful has happened since we left home! If the baby choked to death, or a robber came, I should never forgive myself.’

The mountains looked strangely smaller as they advanced. The foothills raised the riders up, and from various slopes the mountain crowns seemed to lean back and diminish. The blue air in cañons and on the far faces of rock slides and broken mighty shoulders was like a breath of mystery over the familiar facts of memory.

‘Let me carry the musket now for a while.’

‘No, we might as well decide that now. I am to have it all the time.’

‘Why, that is n’t right!’

‘No, I have had more experience with it. It is our only arm. Now be sensible.’

‘Just because I am the younger, you always do this way. I tell you, I am an excellent shot.’

‘You may be. But I am nearly four years older, and — I just think it better this way.’

‘I wish I’d known before we started.’

‘Why don’t you go back, then?’

‘I will.’

But they rode on together. Easily triumphant, Luis could afford to be indulgent; later on he rode close to Julio and knocked him on the back and winked.

‘ You think I am not as much of a man as you are,’ said Julio bitterly.

‘ Well, you ’re not.’

‘ You ’ll see! I can show you! ’

The brothers’ love for each other was equally warm, but derived from different wells of feeling. Sometimes they felt only the love; at other times, only the difference.

Now in afternoon, riding on the windy November plain, and knowing that before nightfall they would be in the very shadow of the nearest mountain reach, they felt their littleness on that world. The air was lighter so high up above the river valley. They looked back: an empire of sand-colored earth, and there, in the far light, the river herself, furred with trees. They looked ahead, but in doing that had to look up.

It was a crazy giant land; a rock that looked like a pebble from here was higher than a tree when they got to it.

‘We must find a place to leave the horses.’

‘What?’

‘You idiot, we can’t expect horses to climb straight up cliffs like that over there!’

‘Sure, we’ll find a place to leave them.’

‘It must be nearly too late to go into the mountains to-night.’

‘We’ll make a fire here.’

‘If it is clear enough to-night, they could see our fire from home.’

‘They could?’

The thought made Julio shiver. But then it was already getting chill. The sun was going down.

III

They awoke the next morning under the cold mountains, and in their rested souls there was a mood of gods. They caught their horses and rode along the last little flat before the great rise, and before the sun was up over the rocky shoulder they had found a little box cañon where there was a growth of straw-colored grass, and through which there washed a small creek. Leading the horses, they walked far into the narrow shadowy cañon and at last Luis said, ‘There!’

‘What?’

‘Here is the place to leave the animals. We can make a little fence down here, and then be safe when we go off to hunt.’

‘What will you build your fence with ? ’

‘Some big rocks and then a lot of branches that will seem high to the horses.’

‘Where does that river come from, do you suppose?’

‘If you’ll stop talking long enough to get to work, we’ll go and find out.’

The light of builders came into their eyes, measuring, devising; after a few trials they had a system for their work; they moved harmoniously. Given need, materials, and imagination, nothing wanted. They grew warm, and threw down their coats. The sun quivered in watery brilliance high beyond the rocky crown.

When they were done, they untethered the horses and took up the food, the musket, the powder, balls, their knives, their tinder, and went up the cañon, following the creek. It led them into shadow; they had to wade; the rocks widened — sunlight ahead; then a miniature marsh with moss and creatures’ tracks; then a little waterfall, which they heard, a whisper in diamond sunlight, before they saw it; and under it a black pool plumbed by the sun to its still, sandy floor.

The fall came down from a rocky ledge halfway up the face of a gray stone cliff.

The forest shadows beyond it, which they saw looking up, were hazy with sunlight and noon blue.

‘We’ll swim!’

The boys took off their clothes and fell into the water; for a moment they hated the cold shock, and then they were happily claimed by the animal world. They were away from everything. They were let to their senses. They dived and splashed and bellowed, awakening the silences to echo, which only tempest and beast had awakened before them. This was a bath of a superman; not the idle, slow, muddy, warm current of the Rio Grande, which suggested cows and babies paddling and hot mud drugging boys who swam in summer.

They came out into the warmer air and slapped until they were dry; then they dressed.

‘ Up there — we ’ve got to get up there someway.‘

Luis pointed up to the higher world beyond the fall. There were gigantic pines standing in light-failing ranks; and behind them a great plane of rock shaggy with its own breakage.

So they retreated from the waterfall and went around it, climbing and clawing until they had gained the upper level. They stood to listen. Enormous and pressing, the quiet of the mountains surrounded them. Their eyes, so long limited to a tame river world, hunted ahead. They were explorers, so far as they knew. What no man has ever seen before! There was a mysterious sense of awe in the first eye that owned it.

As they passed in and out of shadow they felt alternately cold and warm.

As they went, they were often forced by the huge silence to stop and let their own sounds die away.

They would laugh at each other at such moments, and then go on.

In midafternoon they thought they must plan to go back, since it took them so long to come. The horses would need company and perhaps protection against beasts.

The sun -was yellower and cooler.

The way they had come no longer looked the same; coming, they had watched another face of it; now, retreating, they had to look back often to recognize their course. They lost it, or thought they had, when they came to a bench of gray stone in a spill of light through branches. They then looked aside, and saw the ledge curve and vanish in a stout hillside, and emerge a little farther on and there become the rocky shelf over which rustled their waterfall of the sunny noon.

‘It is made by Heaven for our purposes!’ said Luis.

‘Yes, it certainly is. — How do you mean ? ’

‘Well, the cats probably come and drink and lie here, and other animals. We could be here on this shelf, you see.’

‘And fire down on them?’

‘Sure. Come on.’

They started along the ledge and then shagged back and nearly fell down to the cañon floor below when a boom of air and shock arose and smote them from a few feet ahead. It was the thunder of a great bald eagle who beat his way off the rocks and straight up over them, his claws hanging down, his hot red eyes sparkling for one tiny second in the light of the sky. Then he wheeled and raised his claws and extended his head and drifted off in a long slanting line like the descent of the mountain edge over which he vanished.

The boys were breathless.

It scared them.

It also hushed them — the grandeur of that heavy bird leaving earth for air.

‘How I should love to get a bird like that!’

‘To kill him?’

‘Or at least get some of his feathers.’

‘Maybe he dropped some.’

Julio moved forward and then crouched and called for his brother.

‘Luis, look! Hurry! Here is what he had!’

They were looking at a partially picked mountain-lion cub, off which the eagle had been feeding.

‘Julio, you see, now? Here is where the big cats will come. They will roam until they find it, and they will watch. The eagle carried off the baby cat. He’ll come back, too!’

Julio acted like a very small boy. He kicked the carcass of the cub off the ledge into the shaly slide below.

‘What did you do that for?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It was wonderful bait! Now it’s gone!’

‘Well . . .‘

‘Oh, come on!’

The godlike temper and power of the day were gone for them both — Luis exasperated, Julio tired and guilty.

As they went down to the cañon where the waterfall seemed to stand, not fall, in a mist of blue shadow now that the sun was sinking, they looked up, and saw the eagle so high that he seemed like a spiraling leaf, and Luis shrugged and said, ‘Oh, cheer up! I suppose he would have come back anyway and carried his supper off! ’

But Luis, though he was again friendly, could not offset the chilling of the whole day; and the rocky clear cold cupping of night in those walled places closed over Julio and confirmed his hunger, his bitterness, his youthful rue at the turn of happiness into misery, like the turn of day into dusk.

All right, if everybody was older than he was, let them parade and give orders. If Luis felt so superior, Julio would show him some day.

They scampered down the cañon as fast as they could, for where they had left the horses was like a station of home to them.

When it was dark enough, they looked for stars, and saw some, but clouds had come, and a damp, warmish wind, and the cañon talked in wind, trees keening, and now and then an almost silent thunder of a wind-blow when it met a distant high rock mountain-face.

By the last light of their fire, Luis examined his musket, to see that the day’s toil over hard ground had n’t damaged it any.

‘Let me see it,’ said Julio.

‘What for?’

‘Oh, can’t I just see it?’

Luis handed it over.

Julio sighted along the barrel.

‘She’s a lovely one,’ he murmured. Then he gave it back, ready to go to sleep, chuckling with affection for Luis, who would be so surprised.

IV

Dawn came with a ghostly diffusion of misty light — the slow march of shapes.

Julio was ready.

He rolled with almost infinite slowness to the ground, free of the blankets, and left Luis slumbering like a mummy who knew the cold of centuries.

He crouched and slowly went around the other side of the bed, and took up the musket and ammunition from the side of his brother.

He sniffed the air and it was bittersweet with cold and some drifting new flavor.

He did n’t know, in his excitement and caution, that it was the presage of snow.

He went up the cañon chewing on a hank of jerked meat from his pocket.

He was abroad in his own wilderness, with his own gun; in effect, with his own destiny. He remembered yesterday’s trail very well, and he toiled while the light grew; yet, there being no sun, everything had a new look, though he had seen it before. He came after a long time to the pool and the waterfall. There he stopped and looked back. Now he realized how far it was; how many hours divided him from Luis, who must have been awake and wondering hours ago.

What would Luis do?

Would he kick the hard ground in fury, and halloo for him? Or would he set out in pursuit?

But which way would Luis decide to go?

Or perhaps he was weeping at the conviction that his beautiful young brother Julio had been carried off in the night by beasts of prey.

Then the image of a devouring lion shouldering a musket was too odd, and Julio laughed; then he smartly turned to see where another’s laugh came from; then he laughed again, at his echo in the rocky room with the sky roof.

The waterfall was like a wraith made of heavier air than the gray essence that filled the intimate little cañon.

‘The cats will come to the ledge,’ thought Julio, faithful to his brother’s wisdom, even though he outraged it.

He went around the long way, slowly going across the fat roll of the rocky hillside, and found himself then in the tall forest up there. He knew that a hunter must wait; so he settled himself to do so on a tiled shelf of moss, between two big boulders, lacy with fern and dark with shadow.

His stomach was clutched by doubts and partly whetted hunger. Hardest of all was to keep the silence of the mountains, lest he startle his game.

Many times he was ready to get up, relieve the ache of his set legs, go back to Luis and pretend that he had only wandered a few feet away from camp.

But he was afraid now. He was afraid of the way the sky looked, dark and soft, and wind very high up which pulled the clouds past the peaks as if tearing gray cloth on the sharp edges.

He was lost, really.

The musket was a heavy sin across his lap. It was loaded. Perhaps he should unload it and scamper back.

But then, if a mountain cat came to the ledge, he would be helpless.

Then he remembered for the first time that he might be in danger from the animals. It sent blood back through him, and he grew angry at such menace.

‘If they think they can hurt me, they are crazy, those wildcats!’

So he spent the early day and noon in thoughts of himself and his furies, while the peace of the forest was held, and the sky now came down in darkness and again blew upward in windy lets of silvery light.

And he stayed, watching.

He was so alone and silent that the first touch on his cheek out of the air startled him, and he turned his head quickly to look; but what had touched his cheek was the snow, shortly after noon.

It came down, dandled by the odd currents of airy wind in the irregular mountains, like white dust sifting through the ancient stand of trees up the mountainside.

Julio blinked at the spotty snow falling before his eyes, and he licked the delicious flakes that starred his lips.

The rocks were beginning to look white. The air was white, and the distance was white.

The distance was reduced. When he tried to peer as far as he would, his sight seemed to go so far and then turn black.

All suddenly, a most childish wave of lonesomeness broke over him, and he knew how far away he was, and how solitary; how subject to the mountains.

He got up.

Something else moved, too, in the whitening world.

He saw it, obscurely dark against the white stone shelf below him in line of sight. It was a mountain lion coming down the ledge with beautiful stillness and almost the touch of snow in its own paws.

Its heart-shaped nose was along the ground, smelling the fresh snow and whatever it covered.

Julio lifted the gun, which was as light as he wanted it in this moment, and watched, and licked the snow off his upper lip. Then, with his eyes wide-open and his cheeks blown up, he fired.

He could n’t hear the lion cry, or the echo of the amazing blast through the cañons and the aisles. He was deaf from it. But he sat down behind his rock and watched while he reloaded, and saw the cat spilling its blood on the snow; and then gradually he could hear it moaning as his head cleared. Then it suddenly died. The snow continued on it passively, cooling the blood, and making it pale, and finally thickening over it entirely.

After a long time Julio came down from his rock and touched his game.

He glanced around to see if any more cats happened to be there. There were none. He was exalted and indifferent. He rolled the heavy lion off the ledge down to the sloping hillside below it. There the snow was thinner. There he set to work to skin the cat, as he had watched his father skin animals at home, for leather, for fur, for rawhide.

V

His knife was so wet and cold that it tried to stick to his hands.

He was late in finishing. He felt proud.

Maybe Luis would be annoyed, but not for long. To bring home the first fur? He had a loving warm tender heart for all animals, now that he had conquered one of the greatest. He felt that animals must love men in return, and serve them humbly.

Done, then, he returned to thoughts of others, and then he could have groaned aloud when he really imagined what Luis might feel.

‘ Do you suppose my brother is in danger because I took away his gun ? What if he has been attacked? What if I had not had the gun when the lion came? It would be the same with him, without any protection! Oh, my Jesus and my God, help me to get back in a hurry, and have him safe when I get there!’

Now, with heavying snow and night beginning to fall, the hunter could not scramble fast enough to undo what his day had done.

He shouldered his new skin, which was freezing and heavy, and his gun and his supplies, and went down off the shaly hill. In the bottom of the chasm, where the waterfall entered the stream, it was dark. The black water of the creek alone was clearly visible. He stopped and called out, then turned to listen, but the spiraling flaky darkness was vastly quiet.

He hurried on and sobbed a few times, but he said to himself that it was simply that he was cold, not that he was sorely afraid and sorry.

‘Certainly I can see!’

But he paid for this lie when he struck a rock that cut his cheek and threw him down to the ground, where the soft copious snowfall went on secretly to change the mountains, to enrich stony hollows with soft concavities, to stand the bare ridges barer above snowy articulations.

He struggled to make a small fire, scratching twigs and needles and branches from the lee side of rocks, having to feel for his wants. At last he produced a flame, and his heart leaped up, the firelight on the snow was so lovely. In the light he saw where he was, and collected more branches, building craftily to bring up his flames, until the cañon was roaring with light and heat at that spot.

He sat, then lay on his new fur, with the raw side down.

The snowflakes made a tiny, fascinating little hiss of death when they fell into the fire.

‘Luis will be all right. I will get to him early in the morning; as soon as it is light I shall start out.’

He dozed and awoke, at last to see his fire gone. Then he knew he must stay awake.

What he knew next was so strange that he felt humble. In spite of trying not to, he had fallen asleep, and was then awakened afterward by wave after wave of sound, through the falling, falling snow which hushed everything but this clamor that had awakened him, the ringing of a bell. The bell clanged and stammered and changed with the wind; like the bell of the church at home, miles up the valley on a still hot summer Sunday morning.

‘But this is not — there can be no church in these mountains!’ he said in the blackest density of the snowfall that night. And he listened again, but now heard nothing — nothing beyond the faint sense of hushing in the air made by the falling snow.

The bell was gone; it had served to awaken him; somewhere beyond this cold separating fall, it had rung out for him — true, even if it came to him as a dream of security. He did not lie down again; but sat, marveling, and sick for home.

VI

The snow continued with daybreak.

He set out again as soon as he could see a few feet in front of him. As the light grew, so did his sense of folly. It was as if he had dreamed of the things that might happen to his brother Luis.

All his greatness of accomplishment disappeared. What good was this smelling and frozen catskin now? He threw it down by an icy rock and found that he could now run, trotting, without the awkward burden of the cat hide, which was stiff and slippery — with its frozen leggings of fur which stuck out, ragged

and indignant, the congealed ghost of the cat.

The snow died away as Julio hurried. The wind became capricious and bitter. It scratched in long sweeps down the cañon and bore out over the open plains, which Julio could begin to see as the day grew and he toiled farther down the shadowy chasm.

He kept staring ahead for sight of the spare pines which stood by their camp. He remembered seeing the pines against open sky the first night there — which meant that they were nearly out of the mountain’s fold.

He thought he saw the sentinel trees once; broke into a hard run; and then stopped, panting, when he saw that the gray light on a wall of rock had looked for a moment like a misty sky out there over the plain.

The musket was heavy and cold in his grasp. He had it still loaded. Perhaps he ought to shoot it off, a signal for his brother?

But he would call first.

He cried out, and stood to listen, his whole body turned sideways to hear an answer.

There was none.

Now he knew that the bell he had heard last night, waking him up during the snowstorm, was a miracle, sent to keep him from freezing to death in his sleep.

So he began to run again, and his heart nearly burst. He thought perhaps there would be another miracle, to keep Luis safe and bring Julio back to him right away.

The boy crawled over the rocks that seemed cold enough to crack in the weather; he waded where he had to in the glazed creek. Suddenly it was lighter; the sky lay before him as well as above him; and at last he looked down on the miniature meadow of the cañon mouth where the horses were fenced. There! Yes, there were the guardian pine trees.

‘Luis, Luis, I am back!’ he cried, but he choked and made only a sobbing sound. There was no fire burning at the camp, and Julio was thumped in the breast by fear again, as if Luis had gone back home with the two horses and left him as he deserved to be left, alone in the mountains.

He hurried and then saw the horses, far down the way.

Then he heard a voice, talking to him from a distance; no words; level, careful sounds; it sounded like Luis.

‘Luis, where are you?’

Julio came down farther.

He squinted around, and then upward.

‘I am glad to see you back. Stop where you are!’

‘Luis!’

‘Be careful.’

At the same moment, Julio heard how Luis spoke from the tree where he was hanging and he saw the wolf at the base of the tree, which sat staring upward, perfectly quiet and ready.

The wolf was huge and looked like a dog, except that he was gray, the color of rock — which was why Julio did n’t see him for the first little while.

The wolf must have heard him, for his ears were standing up and the fur on his spine was silvery and alive. Julio stood shocking-still and was perfectly sure that the wolf’s eyes were straining toward him as far as they could without the turn of the head; and the animal was ready to turn and attack him if necessary.

So there was a grotesque interval of calm and silence in the cañon.

Luis was hanging to the pine tree, which had a few tough fragments of branch about sixteen feet above the ground.

The sun tried to shine through the bitter and cloudy day.

Luis looked white and sick, halffrozen; his eyes were burning black in new hollow shadows.

‘Julio,’ said Luis, as lightly as possible, never taking his eyes off the wolf; indeed, as if he were addressing the wolf.

‘Yes, Luis,’ whispered Julio.

‘You have the gun there with you, have n’t you?’ asked the older brother, in an ingratiating and mollifying tone, to keep the wolf below him still intent upon his first design.

‘Yes, Luis.’

‘Well, Julio,’ said his brother with desperate charm, velvet-voiced and easy, ‘see if you can load it without making much disturbance, will you?’

‘It is loaded, Luis.’

‘Oh, that is fine. Then, Julio, pray Jesus you can manage to shoot the wolf. Julio, be easy and steady now . . . don’t — move — fast — or — make — any — noise — Julio — for — the — love — of— God.’

To Julio it was like coming back to the reward of his folly. He held his breath, to be quiet.

He thought Luis was going to fall from the tree — his face was so white and starving, his hands so bony and desperate where they clutched.

‘Why, of course I can shoot the terrible wolf,’ said Julio to himself; slowly, slowly bringing the musket around to the aim.

Luis, from his tree against the gray pale sky, went on talking in tones of enchantment and courtesy to the wolf, to keep alive the concentration, until Julio fancied the wolf might answer, as animals did in the tales of early childhood.

‘We shall see, my dear friend wolf, just sit there — one — more — minute

— if you please — until — my — brother gets the thing ready. . . . Are — you — ready — Julio . . .’

The answer was the shot.

The wolf lashed his hindquarters around so that he faced Julio, whence the sound had come.

He roared and spat; but he could not move. His back was broken. He sat and barked and snapped his teeth.

Julio ran a little way forward, then was cautious. He stopped and began to reload.

Luis fell to the ground. He had his knife ready.

But he could not move as quickly as he would. He was cold and stiff and cramped. He hacked his knife into the animal’s breast, but the stab was shy and glancing. The wolf made a crying effort and scrabbled its shattered body forward and took Luis by the leg.

’Now, Julio! Your knife!’

Julio dropped the musket and came down to them.

’Where, Luis?’

‘Under his left forearm!

‘Wolf!’ said Julio, and drove his knife.

VII

For a moment they all stayed where they were — the brothers panting; the animal dead, and slowly relaxing thus. The brothers sweated and could n’t speak, but hung their heads and spat dry spit and coughed and panted.

‘Did he bite you bad?’ asked Julio.

‘No, he could n’t bite very hard, not even like a dog — he was too hurt.’

‘Let me see.’

They peeled the cloth away from the leg just above the knee. The teeth had torn the cloth and the flesh. It did not hurt. It was numb. It bled very little. The skin was blue.

There was nothing to do to the leg except cover it again. They took as long as possible at it, but they had presently to come to the story of the young brother’s folly, and as soon as that was done they felt elated — the one penitent and grave, the other pardoning and aware that the terrors of the experience were more useful to his young brother than any words of rebuke.

‘. . . And I know right where I left the lion skin; we’ll get it later! We can get many more!’

Julio was ballooning with relief, now that it was all over and done with. He felt as he always felt after confession in church — airy and tall.

The physical misery in snow and wind and rocky mountain temper — this was their outer penalty. But the boys knew an inner joy at the further range of their doing. Simply being where they were, at odds with what menaced them — this was achievement; it was man’s doing done.

Late that day the sun did break through and a little while of golden light seemed to relieve the cold. It did n’t snow again that night. They kept their fire high. Luis was, oddly, too lame to walk. But he was glad to lie and watch the flames, and smile at Julio’s serious bearing, full of thoughtful play in his face which meant plans and intentions.

VIII

The day after the snowstorm the valley itself came back in a kind of golden resurge of autumn. The house at the little farm was soaked with melting snow; running lines of dark muddy thaw streaked from the round-worn edges of the roof to the walls and the ground.

The temper of the river was warmer than the mountain weather. The willows and cottonwoods lost their snow by noon. The mountains were visible again, after the day of the blind white blowing curtain over the plain.

Not many travelers were abroad; but Father Antonio came down the road shortly after noon, and Josefina saw him, his fat white mare, his robe tucked above his waist, his wool-colored homespun trousers, and his Mexican boots. She went to tell Rosa that the priest was coming at last, and to stop crying, if that was all she was crying for.

The priest dismounted in the yard and let his horse move.

Josefina tidied herself in honor of the visit, and he came in, catching her at wetting her eyebrows. She immediately felt like a fool, from the way he looked at her; and she bowed for his blessing, furious at his kind of power over and against women.

‘I did n’t get your message about the baby until two days ago, and then I said nothing could keep me from coming as soon as I could. Is n’t it fine! Where is he? Or is it a girl? I hope you have a girl. Already those bad boys of yours — where are they?’

Rosa felt as if authority had walked into her house and that she need have no further fear.

Father Antonio was a tall, very spare, bony man nearly fifty, with straw-colored hair, a pale wind-pinked face, and little blue eyes that shone speculatively as he gazed. He was awkward; he could n’t talk without slowly waving his great-knuckled hands in illustration of his mood; and he loved to talk, putting into words the great interest of his days. Everything suggested something else to him; he debated with himself as if he were two Jesuits, they said in Santa Fé, where he was not popular with the clergy because he preferred working in the open land among the scattered families of the river basin.

‘Where are the boys?’ he asked.

Rosa was at peace. Her cheeks dried and her heart seemed to grow strong. She felt a spell of calm strong breath in her breast. She was proud.

‘They have gone hunting. They have been gone several days now. In the mountains.’

Josefina lingered on the outside of a kind of sanctuary which the priest and the mother made, a spiritual confine which she could not enter, a profane and resentful woman. But she could toss her opinions into it.

‘They are little fools, a pair of chickenboned infants, crazy, going to the mountains! It snowed there for two days. They will never come back.’

Rosa watched the priest’s face, ready to be frightened or not, by his expression.

He glanced at Josefina, a mild blue fire.

‘They are probably all right.’

Josefina mumbled.

‘How will a man ever know what goes on,’ asked Father Antonio, ‘unless he goes out and looks at it?’

‘How long can you stay, Father?’ asked Rosa.

‘Till we christen the baby.’

‘But—’

‘I’ll wait till the brothers come back, so the baby will have a godfather.’

‘I — godmother,’ simpered Josefina on the outskirts, making a fat and radiant gesture of coquetry.

‘Why not?’ said the priest mildly, taking the sting out of her scandalous contempt.

It sobered her. She blushed.

‘When your husband comes back in the spring with the wagon train,’ said Father Antonio, ‘you can send some money to my church.’

‘Gladly,’ said Rosa.

‘Those must be big boys by now. I have n’t seen them for months. Luis? Julio? That’s right. When I was a boy I had all the desires to go and look at what was over the mountains. Then when I was away, there, in Mexico, at the seminary, the world on this side of the mountains was just as inviting and mysterious. Eh? When I came back to go to work, everybody bowed to me, and behaved properly as to a priest. But I always felt a little guilty for that, and went fishing or hunting. The animals had no respect for me, which was a relief, for they knew not of God, whose weight is something to carry, I can tell you!’

This was strange talk to the women.

‘Next to catching a sinner and taking away his sin, I like best to fetch a trout, or play a long game of war with a beaver in the river pools. So now I know why your two big brown babies went off to the mountains.’

‘Oh,’ thought the women. ‘That explains it.’

IX

Father Antonio stayed over a week. The boys were missing. The priest would go and look at the mountains in all times of day, to see if he could see anything, even in his mind, which might be played with as news for the distracted mother.

But all he saw were the momentous faces of the mountains; light or the absence of light; at dawn, a chalky black atmosphere quivering with quiet air; at noon, silvered by the sun, the great rock wrinkles shining and constant; at evening, the glow of rose, as if there were furnaces within the tumbled stone which heated the surface, until it came to glow for a few moments, then cooling to ashy black from the base upward until it joined the darkening sky like a low heavy cloud.

‘I have promised to stay for them, and I will,* said the priest.

He spent the days making Rosa agree to get strong; until she finally arose from her bed and ordered her house again. He did the tasks of the outdoors. There was no need for Josefina to stay now; but stay she did, touched in her vanity by the godmotherhood which had been mentioned once.

She came in one day, still holding her arm over her eyes, as if staring into the distance, the golden chill of the open winter.

‘I think I see them coming!’ she cried.

They all went outdoors.

‘You are crazy,’ said the priest.

They looked and looked.

The plain and the slow rise into the mountain-lift were swimming with sunlight. They searched with long looks until they had to blink for vision.

‘See! Like a couple of sheep, just barely moving?’ insisted Josefina, pointing vaguely at the mountains.

‘Where?‘

‘Yes, I do see! She is right! She must have Indian blood.’

The mother was the last to see and agree.

There was an infinitesimal movement far on the plain, hardly perceptible as movement; some energy of presence, a fall of light and cast of shadow, just alive enough to be convincing. It was the hunters, coming on their horses on the second day’s journey out of the mountains.

Late in the afternoon they arrived.

The marks of their toil were all over them.

To go and come back! This being the common mystery of all journeying, the mother could hardly wait for them to speak; to tell her everything.

She brought the baby and the boys kissed the tiny furred head.

The priest gave them his blessing and they bent their shaggy necks under it.

Josefina stared and then squinted at them, whispering something.

‘Luis, you are hurt!‘

‘Not. any more.’

‘But you were!’

‘I will tell you sometime.‘

‘Now, now!’

‘How long have we been away?’

‘Ten days!’

The boys talked, confirming each other with looks.

Luis and the wolf; the bite; the fever; the body as the residence of the devil, and the raving nights. Julio and his amazing skill as a marksman; his reckless courage; the two of them together after Luis’s recovery; shagging up and down rocky barriers, mountain sprites, and their bag of skins.

‘Look at that!‘

They got and opened out their two packs of furs, and there were cats, the wolf, a little deer, and a middle-sized brown bear.

‘Who got the bear?‘

‘Luis! It was wonderful! The bear was in a tree, watching us, and what made him nobody knows, but Luis looked up, and whang! and boo! Down fell the bear, and all it took was the one shot! ’

‘But you should have seen Julio the time he saved my life, when the wolf was waiting for me to fall down, I was so cold and weak! Up in my tree!’

The silence was full of worried love: what had they not done! But safe. Yes, but — what if — !

The brothers looked at each other.

Nothing would ever be said about the other thing. Nobody ever managed to grow up without being foolish at some time or other.

The priest thought, ‘The boy Julio looks taller. I suppose it is only natural; last time I was here he was —’

Luis took the baby sister to hold.

There was plenty of fur to keep her warm.

Julio sighed. It was a curiously contented and old man’s comment.

Father Antonio felt like laughing; but there was some nobility of bearing in Julio’s little mighty shoulders that did not deserve genial patronizing.

The priest glanced at Josefina. He knew his materials like a craftsman. He thought, ’Josefina sees — she even smells as a female — what has taken place in Julio. She stares at him and then squints and whispers to herself. How little is secret! How much makes a life!’

The mother’s arms were free of her infant. She went and hugged Julio, because, though she hardly thought it so clearly, she knew that he had gone and conquered the wilderness which was his brother’s by birth. She knew that — and what lay behind it — as only a child’s mother could know it; with defensive and pitying and pardoning love, so long as it might be needed.

X

‘I wish I could write, now,’ said Luis.

‘Why?’

‘Then I would write to my father about it.’

‘But he could not read it.’

‘No, but he could get somebody to read it to him.’

‘Should I write and tell him about it for you?’ asked Father Antonio.

‘Oh, if you would, Father!’

‘I’ll be glad to — the minute I get back to my house where I have pens and paper. You have told me the whole adventure.’

But when the priest did return home, and sit down to keep his promise to the delighted brothers, what they had told him seemed to him man’s story, and all he finally wrote was: —

DEAR GARCIA,
Your wife has had a dear baby girl, and both are well and happy, with God’s grace. Your two sons are proud of their family, and when you return, before hearing from their lips anything of their adventures during your absence, you will see that they are already proper men, for which God be praised in the perfection of His design for our mortal life.