Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) by John Graves Read Free Book Online

decided rathercheerfully that if the weather didn’t change, I’d pull out at the Dark Valley bridge and telephone home for a ride.
    It was that simple. I went back to sleep.

    M ORNING CAME damp and dark with a low fog and ducks calling as they flew half hidden in mist overhead. The rain had stopped, but the dark green weeds around the tent were dripping and quickly soaked the passenger and my boots, socks, and pants. The rapids’ sound was muted; what water I could see lay like murky glass. My gathered wood was saturated; I gave up frontiersmanship and used a dollop of my scant lantern gasoline to start a big roarer for warmth and coffee and stewed fruit.
    The fog had a fine privacy. In a jacket pocket I found a little rosined bird squeaker that someone had given me, and tried it, and called up a wintering house wren that sat in a scrub hackberry and scolded me much like a chickadee. Then I walked up a hillside behind camp, wooded with mesquites and elms and drouth-dead stubs. Birds were thick there, feeding and moving about with the want of fear that quiet foggy air, like brush, seems always to give them. I picked out two kinds of flickers, Mexican and red-bellied woodpeckers, lark sparrows, cardinals, and more wrens, and sat for a time trying to see specific distinguishing marks on a flock of streak-breasted finches that flitted about singing a clear little finch song. But I’m not a meticulous enough student to keep the less flamboyant Fringillidæ straight in my mind, and finally gave it up.…
    Before leaving, I paddled up Ioni to the crossing where Jesse Veale died. It is still there, though dozed out wider for present ranch use; I looked for the old double elm’s stump, not remembering whether I’d actually seen it when youngor only had seen a photograph, but however that may have been, it was no longer there. Mesquites stand thick on the flat above the crossing now, though probably in the old days they didn’t; like cedar, they move onto overused land. Except for a few birds, it was a silent place.
    Across the creek the black bulk of Crawford Mountain grayed upward into the overcast; the Comanches went there after the fight at the crossing, and the next day a big mob of avengers swarmed out from Palo Pinto and trailed them up among the cedar and the rocks, and found a dead one wearing Jesse Veale’s hat.… Live ones were waiting, too, slowed down probably by wounds, since they rarely stuck around to fight after a raid—not in ’73, not that long after the old arrogant days when they stormed Durango and San Antone. They winged a couple of citizens before being run into a cave under a high cliff. The Palo Pintans besieged them there all night, using up a lot of ammunition on the cave’s dark entrance, and in the morning, fired with rage and maybe other stimulants, Jesse Veale’s brothers ran in with pistols in one hand and knives in the other. But the Indians had slipped free during the night; later someone found their signs up near Shut-in, where they had passed on their way out to Oklahoma.…
    That had been a long time ago, but the place was eerie in the fog with a little of the held-over eeriness of my nightmare. Feeling it, the passenger got back into the canoe and sat on top of the tarp and barked, scattering ghosts with sharp sound.
    If any were there to scatter …

CHAPTER FIVE

     

     
    THAT afternoon I got only to Eagle Creek, still probing uncourageously against weather’s ire. Rounded gray-stone cliffs stand beside the creek mouth; in the river itself massive, split-away, rhombic blocks twist and slow the green current of a long pool. Big oaks gone red, and yellowed ashes rose precariously from slanted alluvial soil beneath the cliffs, piles of drift against their boles in prophecy of their own fate; it is on the outside tip of a bend, and in those places the river lays down rich sediment for maybe centuries and then in a fit of angry spate cuts under it and carries it away, trees and