The Man Who Killed the Deer by Frank Waters

Author:Frank Waters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

Martiniano ran his hand a last time through his seed, lashed tight the bag, and lifted it into the wagon at the door.

“What fine seed!” he boasted. “I cannot wait to plant it. In new ground, too. I tell you our luck has changed!”

It was late afternoon, and Flowers Playing looked tired and worn. Since daybreak they had been up packing. Dishes, pots and pans, a few pieces of furniture, all were lashed securely in the old wagon. Flowers Playing in the morning would drive it up to their new summer hut. But Martiniano was going now, with a half bag of seed, to avoid wasting a day behind the plodding team. He really couldn’t wait.

“I shall have it all swept out when you come, the window unboarded. A fire too, to give it life and the clean smell of cedar. Then it will not seem so small, so shabby.”

He saddled his old mare, took up a light supper and rode off.

How happy he was after this dreadful winter! The trader had taken them on an automobile trip, had bought them seed. Up in the mountains, alone, on new land, they would start a fresh life. And in it he would find a new faith. It was a resurrection he experienced. The whole world sang with him as he rode along on his shabby, ill-breathed, stumbling mare.

The rough, rutty road curved upward and around the pueblo. The files of rheumatic old cottonwoods fell behind. Over the thickets of wild plum he could see men working in the stony fields, their thin cotton blankets or dirty white sheets wrapped round their heads like great turbans. Some were singing; deep male voices, in minor key, breaking against the jutting mountain slope. At the turn he paused. A small group was holding a simple ceremony to terminate their clearing out the ditch—the Mother Ditch, straight down from the mountains lifting Dawn Lake. Two old Mexicans watched them; it would be a good year, they knew.

Now, as Martiniano rode north beside the acequia, he was on the long virgin slope of sage rising steeply into piñon and scrub cedar, into pines. The whole valley lay below him. The pueblo at the base of the mountain, in the mouth of the cañon; La Oreja’s scatter of adobes farther out; the deep, dark cleft that marked the river gorge; and beyond, the tawny, sunlit desert stretching away tight as a drum skin over the plateau.

“We shall be like eagles in our nest!” he thought with pride. “No man and his wife have a higher summer house. No man has broken land so high!” And he began to sing the Eagle Song, a little brokenly, for he did not know it well. And he glanced down with fiercer pride at his palms, still cracked and blistered from uprooting the stubborn sage.

Abruptly he reined his panting mare. The song struck between his teeth. His face went dark and dead. There on the rolling sage slope lay the few acres he had cleared.

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