17.

The day we entered the canyon, my terror of the Indians was completely overtaking my psychology.

Two ragged dogs followed along with us; they seemed to think they might get some food out of it, and they were right. My father told me not to waste food by giving them any; but once the dogs had twice found us water (which we pumped through a filter, and then put iodine in) he said they ought to be rewarded with some food. I told him that the dogs had only been following their instincts when they found us water, and if we give them food, we ought to do it because we feel sorry for them; not because of any decisions they made to help us, since dogs aren’t capable of decisions. Anyway, we were in agreement that they should be given some food.

When we came to an empty Indian house with a caved roof, I was sure the Indians were watching us, were tracking us, were going to kill us if we offended them too deeply. I could see inside the Indian house through the caved roof, and saw some farming equipment, some dried corncobs, and bits and pieces of a life that was mysterious to me. The rest of my party began to take pictures and walk inside. I was horrified at the idea—didn’t my father say these Indians didn’t like having their pictures taken? Weren’t we foolishly offending them by going inside, in their very home country, where they would have every advantage were they to decide to murder us? The rest of my party only talked about silly observations and things they knew—the Tarahumaras grew corn in the spring, and would occupy this house then; for now, they had moved to other parts of the canyon, in order to subsist on their goats and other means. I told them we were deeply offending the Tarahumaras, that we were invading their homes, and they were certain to murder us. My stepmother said, "Relax. They wouldn’t want to kill us, and even if they wanted to, they probably couldn’t, or would have a very hard time doing it." I thought this was nonsense. Who ever thought that Indians couldn’t kill white men and women in Indian country, when they set their minds to do it? We were in terrible danger here, and my party didn’t even realize it.

I kept thinking of all the plans I had for my future—I would become a writer, I would one day write my masterpiece, I had important things in my life to accomplish. I knew my writing at the time wasn’t as good as it would be in the future. Now I was going to die, and miss out on all that, and for what? Just this silliness, the silliness of coming here, the silliness of my father and stepmother who didn’t see the danger we were in. I was going to die because of silliness, like a soldier, who all his life prepares to die in glory, and then dies from an infected cat scratch.

The descent into this canyon was a long process. We would follow the trails along the narrow plateaus, until they showed us a way down the cliffs that separated the plateaus from the plateaus. When we got to the plateau we would camp at, this one was very narrow: on one side was a cliff that went up, and about twenty feet in the other direction, dropping off at varying degrees of sheerness, was a cliff that went down into the abyss. The plateau itself wasn’t quite a plateau, but was angled slightly downward, so that the farther one went to the right (from the direction of facing into the canyon), the lower one would go. When we got to this plateau, off to the left was a herd of goats surrounding an old woman, who sat on a rock, apparently doing nothing but watching the goats. The goats didn’t seem to be grazing, as there was only rock there, but they were making quite a bit of noise: bah, bah, bah, in a great chorus that drifted in and out of presenting me with any discernable tone.

We made our way first to the old woman, though purely because she was interesting to the rest of my party, and not because we wanted to (or could) communicate with her. When we got to her, she stared straight ahead with entranced eyes, not looking directly at any of us. The rest of my party began commenting on how interesting she and her goats were, and I and Paul said to her, "Hola," and other phrases of Spanish greeting. She didn’t give our greetings any regard; and though it was obvious we found her exceedingly interesting, she didn’t seem to find us interesting, but only somehow distressing. Her face was a maze of deep wrinkles on weather-beaten, rough flesh. Her eyes still stared directly forward, their lids having relaxed and settled halfway over their tops, and she didn’t seem to even use them to see anything. Her thick body remained perfectly still on the rock.

She began to moan in a low, deep voice—not moaning words, but only a consistent, anguished tone. I had been all along frantically telling the rest of my party we ought to leave her be, and once she started to moan, they finally agreed with me.

We camped not far from her, maybe 200 yards from her in the direction in which the trail descended. There was a little waterspout coming out of the rock of the cliff wall there, from which water came if one turned a knob. The cliff we were on top of was such that our campground was surrounded on three sides by downward slopes that gradually grew more steep, until it became a sheer drop at some point I wasn’t about to go and look at. From a little farther down the trail, my father and I looked at our campsite from a little below it, so that we could see the cliff that fell off not far from our tents. The sight of that cliff was overwhelming to my senses. I was overcome by giddiness in looking at it. "How long of a drop is that, do you think?" I asked my father. "Somewhere around a thousand feet, just as a guess," he said. The side of the cliff was red rock that had pronounced vertical lines all along the length of it, until it dropped out of view.

My stepmother, when we went back to our campsite, began wandering down a slope which, I knew, got quickly steeper and steeper until it became that cliff. She often will walk and stand right at the edge of cliffs whenever she is hiking in mountains or canyons, just for the thrill. What she was doing was deeply disturbing to me. She was, after all, so low I couldn’t see her, and it was hard to see exactly where the cliff dropped straight down. "Don’t do that!" I called to her. "Come back up!" "Don’t be silly," she said. "I won’t fall." She’s acting like a child, I thought, with no conception of danger in the world. "Come back up!" I said. Then I said to her, "It affects me." She finally came up, if only because she didn’t want to disturb my mental state further.

That night, I said to my father, "I’m not going farther into the canyon. You can go if you want. I’ll stay here and watch the camp." I thought for certain they would go on stupidly offending the Indians, and if they didn’t have any idea of the danger we were in, I didn’t want to be around them. They would certainly only get me killed.

My father thought it was a good idea. "It sounds like a good plan," he said. "You can watch the tents, and that way we won’t have to carry them with us." He could tell I would rather not be there, and wouldn’t mind missing out on seeing all those things he found so interesting that lay lower down the trail.

I looked to the dogs, which were near to me, and reached out to pet one of them. He was a yellow mutt with medium-length, matted hair. He was very friendly. "I hope you stay with me tomorrow to keep me company," I said.