The Best of Edward Abbey Read online

  I rounded the first bend in the canyon and stopped. Ahead was the typical scene of dry wash, saltbush and prickly pear, talus slopes at the foot of vertical canyon walls. No hint of animal life. Nothing but the silence, the stark suspension of all sound. I rode on. I was sure that Moon-Eye would not go far from water in this weather.

  At the third turn in the canyon, two miles onward, I found a pile of fresh droppings in the path. I slid from the saddle and led my pony to the east side of the nearest boulder and tied him. Late in the afternoon he’d get a little shade. It was the best I could do for him; nothing else was available.

  I pulled off the saddle and sat down on the ground to open a can of tomatoes. One o’clock by the sun and not a cloud in the sky: hot. I squatted under the belly of the horse and ate my lunch.

  When I was finished I got up, reluctantly, stuffed hackamore and rope inside my shirt, hung the canteen over my shoulder and started off. The pony watched me go, head hanging, the familiar look of dull misery in his eyes. I know how you feel, I thought, but by God you’re just going to have to stand there and suffer. If I can take it you can. The midday heat figured in my plan: I believed that in such heat the moon-eyed outlaw would be docile as a plow horse, amenable to reason. I thought I could amble close, slip the hackamore over his head and lead him home like a pet dog on a leash.

  A mile farther and I had to take refuge beneath a slight overhang in the canyon wall. I took off my hat to let the evaporation of my sweaty brow cool my brains. Tilted the canteen to my mouth. Already I was having visions of iced drinks, waterfalls, shade trees, clear deep emerald pools.

  Forward. I shuffled through the sand, over the rocks, around the prickly pear and the spiny hedgehog cactus. I found a yellowish pebble the size of a crab apple and put it in my mouth. Kept going, pushing through the heat.

  If you were really clever, I thought, you’d go back to MoonEye’s watering place on Salt Creek, wait for him there, catch him by starlight. But you’re not clever, you’re stupid, I reminded myself: stick to the plan. I stopped to swab the sweat from my face. The silence locked around me again like a sphere of glass. Even the noise I made unscrewing the cap from the canteen seemed harsh and exaggerated, a gross intrusion.

  I listened:

  Something breathing nearby—I was in the presence of a tree. On the slope above stood a giant old juniper with massive, twisted trunk, its boughs sprinkled with the pale-blue inedible berries. Hanging from one of the limbs was what looked at first glance like a pair of trousers that reached to the ground. Blinking the sweat out of my eyes I looked harder and saw the trousers transform themselves into the legs of a large animal. I focused my attention and distinguished through the obscurity of the branches and foliage the outline of a tall horse. A very tall horse.

  Gently I lowered my canteen to the ground.

  I touched the rope and hackamore bunched up inside my shirt. Still there. I took the pebble from my mouth, held it in my palm, and slowly and carefully and quietly stepped toward the tree. Out of the tree a gleaming eyeball watched me coming.

  I said, “That you, Moon-Eye?”

  Who else? The eyeball rolled, I saw the flash of white. The eye in the tree.

  I stepped closer. “What are you doing out here, you old fool?”

  The horse stood not under the tree—the juniper was not big enough for that—but within it, among its branches. There’d be an awful smashing and crashing of dry wood if he tried to drive out of there.

  “Eh? What do you think you’re up to anyway? Damned old idiot….” I showed him the yellowish stone in my hand, round as a little apple. “Why don’t you answer me, Moon-Eye? Forgotten how to talk?”

  Moving closer. The horse remained rigid, ears up. I could see both eyes now, the good one and the bad one—moonstruck, like a bloodshot cueball.

  “I’ve come to take you home, old horse. What do you think of that?”

  He was a giant about seventeen hands high, with a buckskin hide as faded as an old rug and a big ugly coffin-shaped head.

  “You’ve been out here in the wilderness long enough, old man. It’s time to go home.”

  He looked old, all right, he looked his years. He looked more than old—he looked like a spectre. Apocalyptic, a creature out of a bad dream.

  “You hear me, Moon-Eye? I’m coming closer….”

  His nineteen ribs jutted out like the rack of a skeleton and his neck, like a camel’s, seemed far too gaunt and long to carry that oversize head off the ground.

  “You old brute,” I murmured, “you hideous old gargoyle. You goddamned nightmare of a horse…. Moon-Eye, look at this. Look at this in my hand, Moon-Eye.”

  He watched me, watched my eyes. I was within twenty feet of him and except for the eyes he had yet to reveal a twitch of nerve or muscle; he might have been petrified. Mesmerized by sun and loneliness. He hadn’t seen a man for—how many years?

  “Moon-Eye,” I said, approaching slowly, one short step, a pause, another step, “how long since you’ve stuck that ugly face of yours into a bucket of barley and bran? Remember what alfalfa tastes like, old pardner? How about grass, Moon-Eye? Green sweet fresh succulent grass, Moon-Eye, what do you think of that, eh?”

  We were ten feet apart. Only the branches of the juniper tree separated us. Standing there watching the horse I could smell the odor of cedarwood, the fragrance of the tree.

  Another step. “Moon-Eye….”

  I hesitated; to get any closer I’d have to push through the branches or stoop underneath them. “Come on, Moon-Eye, I want to take you home. It’s time to go home, oldtimer.”

  We stared at each other, unmoving. If that animal was breathing I couldn’t hear it—the silence seemed absolute. Not a fly, not a single fly crawled over his arid skin or whined around his rheumy eyeballs. If it hadn’t been for the light of something like consciousness in his good eye I might have imagined I was talking to a scarecrow, a dried stuffed completely mummified horse. He didn’t even smell like a horse, didn’t seem to have any smell about him at all. Perhaps if I reached out and touched him he would crumble to a cloud of dust, vanish like a shadow.

  My head ached from the heat and glare and for a moment I wondered if this horselike shape in front of me was anything more than hallucination.

  “Moon-Eye….?” Keep talking.

  I couldn’t stand there all afternoon. I took another step forward, pressing against a branch. Got to keep talking.

  “Moon-Eye….”

  He lowered his head a couple of inches, the ears flattened back. Watch out. He was still alive after all. For the first time I felt a little fear. He was a big horse and that moon-glazed eye was not comforting. We watched each other intently through the branches of the tree. If I could only wait, only be patient, I might yet sweet-talk him into surrender. But it was too hot.

  “Look here, old horse, have a sniff of this.” I offered him the pebble with one hand and with the other unsnapped a button of my shirt, preparing to ease out the rope when the chance came. “Go on, have a look….”

  I was within six feet of the monster.

  “Now you just relax, Moon-Eye old boy. I’m coming in where you are now.” I started to push through the boughs of the juniper. “Easy boy, easy now….”

  He backed violently, jarring the whole tree. Loose twigs and berries rained around us. The good eye glared at me, the bad one shone like a boiled egg—monocular vision.

  “Take it easy, old buddy.” Speaking softly. I had one hand on the rope. I stepped forward again, pushing under the branches. Softly—”Easy, easy, don’t be scared—”

  Moon-Eye tried to back again but his retreat was blocked. Snorting like a truck he came forward, right at me, bursting through the branches. Dry wood snapped and popped, dust filled the air, and as I dove for the ground I had a glimpse of a lunatic horse expanding suddenly, growing bigger than all the world and soaring over me on wings that flapped like a bat’s and nearly tore the tree out of the earth.

  When I
opened my eyes a second later I was still alive and Moon-Eye was down in the wash fifty feet away, motionless as a statue, waiting. He stood with his ragged broomtail and his right-angled pelvic bones toward me but had that long neck and coffin head cranked around, watching me with the good eye, waiting to see what I would do next. He didn’t intend to exert himself unless he was forced to.

  The shade of the tree was pleasant and I made no hurry to get up. I sat against the trunk and checked for broken bones. Everything seemed all right except my hat a few feet away, crushed into the dirt by a mighty hoof. I was thirsty though and looked around for the canteen before remembering where I’d left it; I could see it down in the wash, near the horse.

  Moon-Eye didn’t move. He stood rigid as stone, conserving every drop of moisture in his body. But he was in the sun now and I was in the shade. Perhaps if I waited long enough he’d be forced to come back to the tree. I made myself comfortable and waited. The silence settled in again.

  But that horse wouldn’t come, though I waited a full hour by the sun. The horse moved only once in all that time, lowering his head for a sniff at a bush near his foreleg.

  The red cliffs rippled behind the veil of heat, radiant as hot iron. Thirst was getting to me. I stirred myself, got up painfully, and stepped out of the wreckage of the juniper. The horse made no move.

  “Moon-Eye,” I said—he listened carefully—”let’s get out of here. What do you say? Let’s go home, you miserable old bucket of guts. Okay?”

  I picked up my flattened hat, reformed it, put it on.

  “Well, what do you say?”

  I started down the slope. He raised his head, twitched one ear, watching me. “Are you crazy, old horse, standing out here in the heat? Don’t you have any sense at all?”

  I did not approach him directly this time but moved obliquely across the slope, hoping to head him down the canyon toward the creek and the trail to the corral. Moon-Eye saw my purpose and started up the canyon. I hurried; the horse moved faster. I slowed to a walk; he did the same. I stopped and he stopped.

  “Moon-Eye, let me tell you something. I can outrun you if I have to. These Utah cowboys would laugh themselves sick if I ever mentioned it out loud but it’s a fact and you ought to know it. Over the long haul, say twenty or thirty miles, it’s a known fact that a healthy man can outrun a horse.”

  Moon-Eye listened.

  “But my God, in this heat, Moon-Eye, do you think we should? Be sensible. Let’s not make fools of ourselves.”

  He waited. I squatted on my heels and passed my forefinger, like a windshield wiper, across my forehead, brushing off the streams of sweat. My head felt hot, damp, feverish.

  “What’s the matter with you, Moon-Eye?”

  The horse kept his good eye on me.

  “Are you crazy, maybe? You don’t want to die out here, do you, all alone like a hermit? In this awful place….” He watched me and listened. “Them turkey buzzards will get you, Moon-Eye. They’ll smell you dying, they’ll come flapping down on you like foul and dirty kites and roost on your neck and suck out your eyeballs while you’re still alive. Yes, they do that. And just before that good eye is punctured you’ll see those black wings shutting off the sky, shutting out the sun, you’ll see a crooked yellow beak and a red neck crawling with lice and a pair of insane eyes looking into yours. You won’t like that, old horse….”

  I paused. Moon-Eye was listening, he seemed attentive, but I sensed that he wasn’t really much interested in what I was saying. Perhaps it was all an old story to him. Maybe he didn’t care.

  I continued with the sermon. “And when the buzzards are through with you, Moon-Eye—and you’ll be glad when that’s over—why then a quiet little coyote will come loping down the canyon in the middle of the night under the moon, Moon-Eye, nosing out your soul. He’ll come to within fifty yards of you, old comrade, and sit for a few hours, thinking, and then he’ll circle around you a few times trying to smell out the hand of man. Pretty soon his belly will get the best of his caution—maybe he hasn’t eaten for two weeks and hasn’t had a chance at a dead horse for two years—and so he’ll come nosing close to you, tongue out and eyes bright with happiness, and all at once when you’re hardly expecting it he’ll pounce and hook his fangs into your scrawny old haunch and tear off a steak. Are you listening to me, Moon-Eye? And when he’s gorged himself sick he’ll retire for a few hours of peaceful digestion. In the meantime the ants and beetles and blowflies will go to work, excavating tunnels through your lungs, kidneys, stomach, windpipe, brains and entrails and whatever else the buzzards and the coyote leave.”

  Moon-Eye watched me as I spoke; I watched him. “And in a couple of weeks you won’t even stink anymore and after a couple of months there’ll be nothing left but your mangled hide and your separated bones and—get this, Moon-Eye get the picture—way out in eternity somewhere, on the far side of the sun, they’ll hang up a brass plaque with the image of your moon-eyed soul stamped on it. That’s about all. Years later some tired and dirty cowboy looking for a lost horse, some weary prospector looking for potash or beryllium will stumble up this way and come across your clean white rib cage, your immaculate skull, a few other bones….”

  I stopped talking. I was tired. Would that sun never go down beyond the canyon wall? Wasn’t there a cloud in the whole state of Utah?

  The horse stood motionless as a rock. He looked like part of that burnt-out landscape. He looked like the steed of Don Quixote carved out of wood by Giacometti. I could see the blue of the sky between his ribs, through the eyesockets of his skull. Dry, odorless, still and silent, he looked like the idea—without the substance—of a horse. Plato’s horse: pure horseness.

  My brain and eyes ached, my limbs felt hollow, I had to breathe deliberately, making a conscious effort. The thought of the long walk back to my saddle pony, the long ride back to the pickup truck, made my heart sink. I didn’t want to move. So I’d wait too, wait for sundown before starting the march home, the anabasis in retreat. I glanced toward the sun. About four o’clock. Another hour before that sun would reach the rim of the canyon. I crawled back to the spotted shade of the juniper and waited.

  We waited then, the horse and I, enduring the endless afternoon, the heartbreaking heat, and passed the time as best we could in one-sided conversation. I’d speak a sentence and wait about ten minutes for the next thought and speak again. Moon-Eye watched me all the time and made no move.

  At last the sun touched the skyline, merged with it for a moment in a final explosive blaze of light and heat and sank out of sight. The shadow of the canyon wall advanced across the canyon floor, included the horse, touched the rocks and brush on the far side. A wave of cooling relief like a breeze, like an actual movement of air, washed through the canyon. A rock wren sang, a few flies came out of hiding and droned around the juniper tree. I could almost see the leaves of the saltbush and blackbush relax a little, uncurling in the evening air.

  I stood up and emerged from the shelter of the broken tree. Old Moon-Eye took a few steps away from me, stopped. Still watching. We faced each other across some fifty feet of sand and rock. No doubt for the last time. I tried to think of something suitable to say but my mouth was so dry, my tongue so stiff, my lips so dried-out and cracked, I could barely utter a word.

  “You damned stupid harr….” I croaked, and gave it up.

  Moon-Eye blinked his good eye once, twitched his hide and kept watching me as all around us, along the wash and on the canyon walls and in the air the desert birds and desert bugs resumed their inexplicable careers. A whiptail lizard scurried past my feet. A primrose opened its petals a few inches above the still-hot sand. Knees shaking, I stepped toward the horse, pulled the ropy hackamore out of my shirt—to Moon-Eye it must have looked as if I were pulling out my intestines—and threw the thing with all the strength I had left straight at him. It slithered over his back like a hairy snake, scaring him into a few quick steps. Again he stopped, the eye on me.

  Enough
. I turned my back on that horse and went to the canteen, picked it up. The water was almost too hot to drink but I drank it. Drank it all, except a few drops which I poured on my fingers and dabbed on my aching forehead. Refusing to look again at the spectre horse, I slung the canteen over my shoulder and started homeward, trudging over the clashing stones and through the sand down-canyon toward my pony and Salt Creek.

  Once, twice, I thought I heard footsteps following me but when I looked back I saw nothing.

  Havasu

  One summer I started off to visit for the first time the city of Los Angeles. I was riding with some friends from the University of New Mexico. On the way we stopped off briefly to roll an old tire into the Grand Canyon. While watching the tire bounce over tall pine trees, tear hell out of a mule train and disappear with a final grand leap into the inner gorge, I overheard the park ranger standing nearby say a few words about a place called Havasu, or Havasupai. A branch, it seemed, of the Grand Canyon.

  What I heard made me think that I should see Havasu immediately, before something went wrong somewhere. My friends said they would wait. So I went down into Havasu—fourteen miles by trail—and looked things over. When I returned five weeks later I discovered that the others had gone on to Los Angeles without me.

  That was fifteen years ago. And still I have not seen the fabulous city on the Pacific shore. Perhaps I never will. There’s something in the prospect southwest from Barstow which makes one hesitate. Although recently, driving my own truck, I did succeed in penetrating as close as San Bernardino. But was hurled back by what appeared to be clouds of mustard gas rolling in from the west on a very broad front. Thus failed again. It may be however that Los Angeles will come to me. Will come to all of us, as it must (they say) to all men.

  But Havasu. Once down in there it’s hard to get out. The trail led across a stream wide, blue and deep, like the pure upper reaches of the River Jordan. Without a bridge. Dripping wet and making muddy tracks I entered the village of the Havasupai Indians where unshod ponies ambled down the only street and the children laughed, not maliciously, at the sight of the wet white man. I stayed the first night in the lodge the people keep for tourists, a rambling old bungalow with high ceilings, a screened verandah and large comfortable rooms. When the sun went down the village went dark except for kerosene lamps here and there, a few open fires, and a number of lightning bugs and dogs which drifted aimlessly up and down Main Street, looking for trouble.