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

all.… A canyon wren was singing there; one always is. They love high rocks above water, and the wild falling song itself is like a cascade.
    For want of other level ground, I made camp on a high yellow sand bank under the oaks and the cliff, and built a big drift-hardwood fire against a boulder to drive back the chill damp and to dry my wet feet a little. Before dark I crossed the creek to look for the stones of a little circular Indian rock shelter I remembered there, but couldn’t findthem; in their place was a great hump of gelatinous silt piled up by the springtime floods.
    I ate creamed chipped beef on the last of my store bread and drank coffee laced with whisky and honey and slept hard despite an old chariey horse’s digging under my shoulder, the pup an established bedfellow now. What old man had it been, somewhere in books, who’d slept with a dog to cure his aches? I couldn’t remember. The passenger cured none of mine.
    In the morning it was raining again, with thunder. I waited it out in the tent, and when it had stopped I ate, washed, and loaded, cursing sore hands and slick riverside mud and the cumbersome boxes and bags, though still without knowing how I’d have managed with less gear at that time of year or how, having what I had, I could handle it more easily. In summer or a drouthy fall, when the river is low and you know it is going to stay that way, you can camp on low bars almost beside the boat and can reduce lifting and staggering and sliding to a minimum, but not with the big water running and two-foot rises and falls commonplace.
    The big water scooted us on down—I know the “us” is an anthropomorphism, but in the absence of other company a dog makes a plural, and not a bad one either—and through a fine, pounding rapids above the Boy Scout Ranch at Kyle Mountain. I wanted to go there as a kid, but for some reason never made it. Maybe it was the smoking; most of us started that when we were thirteen or fourteen and felt morally obliged to give up Scouting with its insistence on physical rectitude.
    After that a quick sweeping shower wetted us. Chilled, we passed under the east face of the Chick Bend mountain, where they once bushwhacked an old warrior at dawn whilehe stood guard for his companions, and to the right around the Dalton Bend, named for Marcus Dalton, who settled there. This region was thick with cattlemen in the old days; they had brought the craft with them from the south of the state, where their fathers had learned it from the Mexican vaqueros. Many of their families moved west and north with the frontier and the cattle trails, and their names are familiar all the way to Canada now—Reynolds, Goodnight, Loving, Slaughter, Waggoner.… Once after the War, not for the first time, Marcus Dalton took a herd to Kansas and sold it. When he was back in his own county again, headed home (home for him now was up the river a way) in a wagon with two friends, the Comanches killed them and scalped them and looted their baggage, but overlooked $11,000 in cash in the toe of a boot. Dalton’s little dog that had gone all the way to Kansas and back with him (sleeping in his bed roll as they camped?) was still alive to yap at the whites who found the mess.
    Just below the Dalton country old George Slaughter lived, a book in himself if you wanted to write it—a Mississippian who reached Texas in time to fight the Mexicans and, they say, deliver a message to Travis at the Alamo before it fell, and moved to the frontier when he was nearly fifty to preach Baptist hellfire and fight Indians and punch cattle and found a range dynasty. In Andy Adams’s book, it was a Brazos-bred Slaughter who showed the stopped trail herds how to get across a flooded river. The Slaughters showed lots of people lots of things.
    It showered yet again. I knew that around the next curve, a mile and a half below, I’d be able to see the Dark Valley bridge, and knew too that that was the place to quit. But the