Read Fire on the Mountain for Free Online

passed through; he closed the gate and drew up beside us as we rode through the willow and tamarisk bordering the wash.
El Rio Salado
. The salty river. We rode across the firm sand and gravel, coated with white alkali, to the narrow channel of water shining with motion on the far side. We stopped there for a few minutes, allowing the horses a final drink before heading into the desert and arid hills beyond.
    I watched a pair of sandpipers scamper on twinkling legs beside the water, upstream, and became aware of the quiet rustle of multitudes of leaves overhead. I stared up at the boughs of the cottonwoods on the bank above us, their leaves caught in a fantastic silvery predawn light and fluttering continuously, though I could scarcely feel the breeze. Alive, the trees whispered in soft excitement, enjoying the best hour of the day. The sun when it rose would force them into somnolence through the withering heat of forenoon and afternoon. I knew how they felt and how they could feel.
    “Kit fox,” Lee said.
    I looked hurriedly around, searching the high ground for a glimpse of a fox.
    “Down here,” he said, pointing to the mud near the water.
    I looked hard and discerned the tiny doglike tracks coming down to the stream.
    “I’m glad to know there’s still a few of them left,” Grandfather said. “They ain’t poisoned them all, yet.”
    The horses raised their heads. We jogged them forward, splashed through the shallow current, climbed the bank where it was broken down by the passage of many cattle, and moved through the grove of trees and up the gravel mounds beyond the river bed to the open, range. Ahead of us lay a five-mile expanse of sand, stone and cactus, then the foothills dotted with juniperand pinyon pine which led up to the mountains and the bald summit of Thieves’ Peak.
    The gramma grass, dried out to a tawney brown, grew in little circular clumps under the brush, among the boulders and sand dunes. There was no other grass. The cattle, who went everywhere, ate what they could find but did not and could not depend on this sparse growth for life. They browsed on the tough shrubbery of the desert—the black-brush, chamisa, cliffrose, ephedra, greasewood and mesquite. In hard times, in desperate times, the cattle would even eat the prickly-pear cactus, sometimes helped by the rancher who went before them with a flame-thrower and burnt off the thorns. If this was not enough the rancher would have to buy feed. If he went broke buying feed he could then sell his stock and wait for rain and a better year. If the rain delayed too long he sold his ranch or let the banks take it away. The smaller the ranch the greater the risk, and my Grandfather Vogelin was one of the few independent ranchers who somehow had survived the wheel of drouth and depression. He seldom broke even but he didn’t break.
    We rode beneath a giant yucca in full bloom, a kind of monstrous lily with a base of leaves as big, rigid and sharp as bayonets, a stalk twelve feet tall and a panicle of fat white waxy flowers. Scattered across the desert in all directions stood more of these solitary, flowering scarecrows.
    “Look at that thing,” Grandfather said. “You know, a man came out to see me one day, said he was from the Range Management Bureau. He saw these here yuccas and he asked what they were good for.”
    “What’d you tell him?” Lee said, grinning at me.
    “I’m a patient old fool,” Grandfather said. “I tried to humor this fella. I told him the Indians made baskets out of the leaf fibers, used the stalks for fences and shade, and made good medicine out of the flowers. Always saving plenty of yuccas for future use, of course. But the man said to me, We got paper andcellophane and cardboard now, who needs a basket? He said, You don’t need shade now, you go indoors and turn on the air conditioner when it’s hot. And he said, As for medicine, you get all you need in Juarez for five dollars a gallon.”
    “I think he had