Lions

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Before coming West the Walkers were camped briefly in a northeast Atlantic state, in a small town with verdant rolling hills, clear lakes, moss-covered barns, and hardwood trees with wide, flat-leafed blades that grew big as wet green hands. There, each man at his turn sweated before a rock slab hearth, shaping and twisting red-hot steel with a four-pound hammer on a heavy cast anvil. Some thousands of years before that, they were watchmen gathered high on a windswept moor beneath a spray of stars, sitting late into the night around a fire hemmed in by a ring of stones. Long after the women and most of the men had gone to sleep, and the constellations had tilted above them, and all the nocturnal creatures and insects clicking and whirring in the brush had fallen silent, their bellies filled with blood and feather and bone, these old Walkers stared into the flames as minerals began to shine and liquify in the rock, and they knew just what to do. It was a discovery they would not have made had they not been sentinels of a kind, and each Walker in his time relayed the message to his son: the metalwork should ever afterward remind them of this duty. And so in the midst of the hundreds of wars that followed, and during years upon years as migrants among the hungry and hopeless, they would have learned that compassion is fearless and unthinking, or it’s not compassion.

Lamar Boggs was only a young man, they say, when his companions left him for dead. He was just starting out in the world, visiting his older brother who had been trading out West for a decade. There were many like him, eager for their chance at adventure and fortune. His party was a small group of neighbors and distant cousins, all of them hoping to find some measure of freedom they felt unavailable in their hometowns. They were doing as their own forefathers had done: helping themselves. It was a virtue. They traveled hundreds of miles together, became as brothers. Traded shoes and knives, boiled coffee, gutted antelope and sliced the meat thin enough to dry smoke on sticks around their campfires. Among them were a few young women, one of them an Elizabeth with strawberry blonde hair who cast Boggs long looks and smiled shyly. Once, he helped her into the wagon, taking her hand and the back of her arm. She smelled, he thought, like butterscotch. He’d had it once. No matter where he was in the group, a dozen miles ahead, or beside the wagon, or five miles behind, he knew exactly where he was in relation to her.

He would not be able to recall what happened late one afternoon that left him on his back, his vision dark, and the men he’d been riding with circling around him in the increasing snow, looking down, talking it over, their coats pulled tight to their throats. He looked up at them and felt the ground moving beneath him. It was as if a giant wheel had been set turning — everyone had set it turning, he had set it turning — and now it would have to spin itself out. The weather was bad, the fort seventeen miles farther on, and now — certainly he had been shot — there was reason to believe there were enemies afoot. Boggs knew there was none among them with room on their horses, and there was no room in the wagon. That his own horse must be down, too, or they would’ve strapped him to it. Surely they would have strapped him to it. One by one in the snow the men turned away. Perhaps they thought he was already dead. He could not speak or move in protest. He listened instead for the sound of the young woman’s protest, but it did not come. He knew he was bleeding into the snow. Many men and women as undeserving of the fate had bled into this same ground, he knew. He had not thought he’d be one of them. As his grandfather had once told him in his parlor in St. Louis, every empire has its price.

As everyone understood it, and as John Walker had himself once confirmed, the first Walker came West just after the Civil War. He was a quiet, dark-eyed man, as all the Walkers were, and knew almost nothing of hunting, especially not in this region. He was a metalworker and a wheelwright and had done only a little bird shooting for sport: doves, sage grouse, pheasant. The land would’ve been sparsely populated back then, and cold on the day in question. Nevertheless, he’d decide to head out across the plain looking for someone to trade with for meat. He had a wife and a son, and it would be their first winter there, and there were hundreds of pounds of red meat, he’d heard, in a single kill of moose or elk. Someone would trade him.

Say he turned off a narrow track that wound over a lace of fresh white snow along a river. This is just past the BLM road, ten, fifteen miles north, near Horses. You take the road off the highway about twelve miles, then east for three miles. Then north again. Way up there. That’s where he’d have been.

There would’ve been tracks of other carts. There wouldn’t have been any threats other than failing light and increasing cold. By this particular night in this particular winter, the country would have long been broken.

This Walker would not have been worried, as he traveled, and what he’d find is the kind of thing you find exactly when you are not worried, when you are relaxed and warm enough to believe that no real harm can come to you. Behind the clouds, the sun — or possibly the moon — was high over the rim of the plain. There, in the vast white page before him, he’d see a small heap that at first sight could have been an animal — possum or even polecat, some poor creature to eviscerate and fry up and eat.

Suddenly he’d rush in, racing over the frozen ground with his open coat flapping like wings. There was Boggs, bleeding in the snow, a red slush around him. He would not have been able to speak.

Walker would’ve dragged him home on his sled — a sick and dying man instead of meat for his family — and as he pulled the sled through a stand of homesteads, the people of Lions would’ve looked out at them both. Boggs would’ve been filthy, his hair dark and shaggy, rings around his eyes, and dressed as if from a different era. A horrible stench. Those passing by outside would’ve put their hands over their mouths and turned away.

Walker was bringing this man home, to his family?

To his wife and son?

What was the matter with the man? Tend him out here, set him up in the stable, for God’s sake. He could be sick. He’d get every last one of them sick.

In the weeks to come, no one would come for him, no one would claim him.

How was it that he had simply appeared in the snow like that?

And wounded like that?

He could only have been alone and running from something. No one would just leave him.

If they had, they weren’t good people.

And who would’ve traveled among such men?

He’d bring them all bad luck.

He was a drunk, or a thief, or worse.

Likely he was being pursued. Now his pursuers would bear down on Lions, on their own homes.

Give him some water, give him some bandages, and set him on his way.

They couldn’t have exactly said why this man gave them the horrors, but he did. After several weeks, Walker would finally have been convinced to take the poor man out of town to protect his own family — and to protect Boggs himself. The young man would’ve still been recovering, still weak. They’d have gone together on horseback up country and built a small hut of timber and earth with a floor of hardpacked dirt. For all its ruggedness, remarkably straight.

In all the years to come the young man who lived there would remain unchanged. He’d wear the same mended shirt and blackened rabbit skin leggings he’d coveted as rugged and wild when he first left St. Louis. He wouldn’t mind the cold, or the heat. Walker would bring him cloth, needles, thread, coffee and sugar, blankets, some flints and steel, and small tools and promise to return after a week or two with more food. When he did return, with rabbits and sage hens, the young man ate everything before him and wanted only to know that Walker would come again.

There’s a radiance to the edges of each blade of grass up there on that mesa. A hardness to every line. Wind jerks the stains of clouds over the ground like apparitions in a magic lantern slide, and if you were to pass by, you might see a pair of white hands pressed against the glass of the hut’s single window and the white circle of a face looking out, waiting.