Black Mountain
Lady
Jay
Dyck
Diary of a Goatherder January 29, 1980

 Today Bob and I went to the livestock auction at Harbison Canyon. A nice Nubian buck with beautiful matched
horns went for fifty-eight dollars. Luke and Jacques may go that route.
 I finished setting up the hot line on the new pasture today. I ran an insulated wire under the driveway to connect
the two pastures. I moved the fence charger to a more distant corner where I can't hear it so well from my shack.
 It clouded up today. Seems like it might rain or snow.
Chapter Seventeen

BIRD'S EGG
A Nubian buck, eh? Anyone who knew goats would have known that, even though the long and
dangling ears said 'Nubian,' the pair of knifing arches that he carried above his ears said something
else.
* * *
Cat One peered morosely into the dangled crystal.
"What gruesome stuff you show me," she complained to Agnes Tawny, later, over a cup of tea. They were
seated on folded blankets near the entrance to the cave that Agnes had made her home, ever since the
cottage burned.
The fire had happened back when Catherine Dolan was being born. Before that it was Andrea Clare Devlin
who shared tea and crystal wanderings with the old witch. Now it was Cat who served in what had been her
mother's place as, what? Apprentice? Student? Novice? She was neither sure of the title, for she had no title,
nor the role, for the role varied from rock climbing, to herb gardening, to amateur philosophy, to crystal
gazing.
Crystal gazing. "I'm not showing you anything," Agnes would demur in response to Cat One's complaint.
She sipped her tea and went on in her gentle voice. Above and around them, the rocky core of Clark's Hill
thundered in silence, and, outside of the cave, the afternoon slipped into early evening.
"I am with you on these magic journeys, but I've never seen any of these visions before. More than that, I
never would have, were it not for you, because all of it is your creation, not mine."
"You mean it's not real?"
"Oh, it's real," said Agnes.
"But, you say I create it?" Cat ended with a question in her voice, appealing to the old lady whose laconic
reply had apparently been intended as a complete answer.
Agnes stirred the embers with a stick, added a couple of twigs, and watched as the flames blossomed. "Did I
not create this fire?" she asked, her eyes not lifting from their absent focus on the blazing manzanita.
"Sure, but …"
* * *
Johnny had discovered that goats can normally climb, with little trouble, a four foot high hogwire fence. This
time, with considerably more goats than before, he had rigged up the single strand of electric barbed wire
along the top of the pen. The charger he hooked to a six-volt dry-cell battery, since there was no hookup to
the power company yet up at Fugitive Creek Ranch.
The repetitive thump of the relay delivering the minisecond of amps, shock potential, the droning, night-long
cu-shook from the energy of the battery was what drove Johnny to move the fence-charger further from his
shack.
The shack itself was one layer of boards and plywood, airtight but thin. With its four shutters fastened it was
a defiant little room in the blast of a winter night, a silent pond of air in the roar of the wind. It was cold, and
lit by a kerosene lamp. Johnny would go there and ensconce himself in the sleeping bag, carefully tucked in
so that only his head was exposed to read the book, and the periodic fingers reached into the cold to turn the
page.
* * *
As the radius of her quest grew, Tawngness turned her attention back strictly to deer. The litter was old
enough to be left alone, at first for minutes, then hours, then days, if need be, while she drifted like silent,
hungry anxiety through the canyons. Then she would kill. Then she would drag the carcass to a private spot,
and then she would gorge.
And then she would return to the kittens, having covered the partially devoured deer with leaves. The
headless venison would ripen in its mantle of oak leaves, while she would relax in the den and suckle her
brood, and life would be peaceful and sweet.
Repeat as often as desired. Tawngness would return to gorge again, and maybe again, for the deer were not
large in Southern California. Then she would return to the hunt.
Those were golden times. To lie in full contentment, to watch her young bounce at their play, life never got
better than that for Tawngness. Wiser perhaps, but not better.
And that litter bounced away into life, and she was alone again. The quail and the rabbits returned to the
empty spaces, the rodents reoccupied the nooks and hollows. New generations picked up where the old had
been routed. The gnatcatchers sang for their return.
Tawngness' range grew to its maximum in times when she was free from the toils of motherhood. It took her
a full turn of the moon, and a few days more after that, to complete the fat figure eight that her trail
described across her territory. She scarcely made a mile or two in any one day, that plus the sum of
innumerable side excursions to explore canyons and springs. A kill would have her holed up for three days
while she grew fat and sleek. Then it would be another careless ramble, burning energy, growing ever more
rangy, lean and alert, storing thousands of kinetic memories of every inch of the beloved landscape that
padded beneath her paws.
Hunger would return, and it would be the urge to live itself, that hollow belly of nothing that guides all of life
with its fierce enthusiasm.
Eventually, Lightning returned. She had crossed his trail from time to time, as he had hers. They knew, each
of them, where to expect that particular fragrance. Down by Fugitive Creek, down by the big willow, her
northeastward path transected his route to the northwest. She was heading for the saddle with the four great
oaks that Johnny always thought of as "the family trees." Lightning was following the stream itself down to
its confluence with Boulder Creek.
Miles distant, he nosed at the dim reminder of her passing days earlier on the high sandstone ridge south of
the peak. They left messages for one another at each of these crossings, she on her way to the Green Valley
Falls, he following the ridge to hunt in the wild evergreen woods on the peak. It needs be resorted to the
basic Anglo-Saxonisms to properly tone the gist of these love notes. "Bitch snob!" echoes the direction of his
sentiment.
It reinforced her flippant, feline "Fuck off!"
This attitude mellowed at length, until one day it was enough to tempt Lightning away from his trail and on
to hers. The message left with her pheromones had been more of a challenge than an insult. Still it dripped
with untranslatable sarcasm. She was not long in being caught up with. She was nearly waiting, up Fugitive
Creek by the tall straight cedar, just upstream from the falls and the hollow that Johnny called "the grotto
of the virgin."
She was pleased to see Lightning again. She showed it with a hiss and a flare of claws that offered to open
him from tail to tongue.
This was still the same oaf who had sported with her two years earlier. But she would never see him again.
They didn't know that, and they didn't care. They held their hunger carefully at bay, letting it in only enough
to growl and to bite without puncturing, to wrestle and to rake without disemboweling one another in
ferocious hugs.
They finally disciplined themselves enough to perform the act, to be so unnervingly intimate, to allow such a
writhing bundle of muscle and claw and tooth to get in so close, to be so dependent.
It was like making love to a chainsaw.
* * *
At twenty-eight, Chela was already a widow. Her children's father had perished in a cross-fire in front of a
bank in Santa Fe, a few years back, when times had grown tough. They had gotten even tougher after that.
Rico had left her nothing, nothing but memories of his saying, "Hey, if things get bad enough, I can always
become a bank robber."
Chela would say, "Okay, Mr. Bank Robber," when she had determined that being down to tortillas and beans
and an empty gas tank was 'bad enough.' "How 'bout you put your money where your mouth is?" What she
meant was that it was time to put the bank's money where her and their children’s' mouths gaped like baby
robins.
Rico would say, "Hey, things aren't that desperate yet. Look. We got flour; we got beans. We got water.
We're not lying around naked in the desert. We got a roof over our heads. We got clothes on our bods."
"So get a job," she would plead, and sometimes he would, but it never would last. Sometimes there was some
beef (or jackrabbit) to mix with the beans; sometimes not.
Their clothing started out used and drifted to rags. The house was big and free, but there was never enough
money to pay for materials to fix the whole roof at once. Each time that it rained would be a new crisis and
new locations for buckets and cans to catch the drips from the newest leaks.
Chela's sister, Violeta, was the connection for free rent. The land on which their cabins stood was owned by
the paternal grandparents of her kids, but the old folks themselves lived in the east. Their son, Ivan, had
never married Violeta. He had spent his whole life working hard, unlike Rico, for instance. But he died
young anyway, trapped in a caved-in mine. He was only twenty-three.
His folks were lost in a limbo of proper tragedy. Unable to bring themselves to evict the grand-bastards and
their mother, they were equally paralyzed at prospects of communication, acceptance, support or
acknowledgement. So they ignored them and let them be, and that was fine with Violeta, thank you very
much, (and go fuck yourself in the neck!)
The old prudes had no other enterprises or projects happening on the tract of rolling hills. It was to have
been Ivan's when they were gone. Now, when Violeta said her prayers, she urged whatever cruel goddess
there might be looking out for her to see that they lived long. Even if old age proved to be a misery of poor
health and senility, let one of them at least hang on, she implored, at least till the kids are grown, if not
forever.
Or at least till they wrote a will and had it notarized, she might conclude. Something that guaranteed herself
and her extended family a home at the least, and preferably a clear title to some of the acres, she would
muse; then the old skinflints could both die and go to heaven, for all Violeta cared.
Most of the time, in reality, she never even gave them a thought. She was fond of saying, "I go with the
land." Any new owners would just have to deal with that.
Chela had much the same attitude, minus the righteous rancor. She was grateful to have the cabin, grateful
for close relatives and friendly neighbors, grateful for the beauty of the land, and for all the serendipity that
made her lifestyle possible.
She knew what some of the alternatives entailed, single motherhood and poverty in the city, welfare or work
and endless daycare, and all of the threats of the street.
No thank you. One way or another, they had continued to hang on. The wolf at the door, after all, was only a
hungry dog.
* * *
Vikor was told the tale of the wolf by each of his mothers, the real and the imaginary. Each of them told it
differently. His real mother, Cat One, relayed it to him as she had seen it in the gemish vision.
Diana repeated what had been passed down from her own mother, Carol, who had heard it from Diana's
father, Johnny.
And Johnny Stream? Where did he hear it? He heard it from the wind; he heard it in the corral gossip, in
the mumbling between rows of stacked grain sacks at the feed store, in the unrepentant whine of the tires
on Murphy's pickup as it sped down Border Road.
Johnny worked for the Murphy Ranch sometimes, just as he did for the Heinz spread, and Knebels', and
wherever there was use for a hand with a horse and a rope in the cattled valleys that radiated like spokes
from Black Mountain. It was nineteen forty-five, the wound in the hip that had brought him home from the
war two years early had healed, and Johnny Stream was twenty-five.
He finally heard the story from Murphy himself.
Clinton Murphy was one year past fifty on a day when he had several of the boys, including Bob Cabler and
Johnny Stream, working for him over in Gonzalez Canyon. Johnny and Bob usually preferred to work for
the Heinz ranch. Marilyn Heinz was Bob's aunt, being that she was his mother's half-sister. Old Mrs. Heinz
had brought her older daughter into the marriage with her. The identity of Bob's father was a mystery.
The Heinz family was resigned to knowing as little about such hijinks as possible, and to having as little to do
with that branch of Mrs. Heinz's past fertility as was convenient. But Marilyn Heinz had a soft heart, as was
mentioned earlier. Marilyn was the real decision-maker in the horse and cattle end of her father's operation.
Old Bill Heinz was content to stay on his tractor working alone as much as possible, and the beans and barley
that spread across the various little draws and valleys of the Heinz ranch were virtually to his credit alone.
To Marilyn had fallen, for a number of years, the responsibility to keep the horses and cattle out of the
crops. For this she needed to maintain all of the fences, and to see to it that all of the stock was adequately
fed or pastured as well. For this she needed hands, and Bob was the one who had the full-time, live down at
the stables position… when he wanted it.
Sometimes she needed only the one guy, and Johnny Stream would look elsewhere for work. Sometimes she
needed two, and that was when Johnny and Bob would re-ignite the partnership that had begun when Bob was
only thirteen. In that part of the country it was still a time when a fellow like Johnny Stream might live,
work and travel with only a horse and saddle for his main possessions. He had no car or truck. When
projects were completed and a ranch hand's pay was hard to justify for a spell, he could and did disappear,
horse and all.
Sometimes his disappearance coincided with his reappearance, with a few days of travel time in between,
back at the campsite high in the mountains where his family had owned acreage for generations. It was a
reappearance that went generally unnoted, however, by any but the hawks and the deer. The land was just
that, land, and though there were rumors of earlier settlers as well as native encampments at the place
called Fugitive Creek, there was little sign of it but for the series of metate holes in the flat rocks down by
the watercourse.
Which was just as well for Johnny Stream. He didn't ride to the high country to socialize. He went to hunt, to
fish, and to live out of the way of others. He camped at various spots. Sleep camps and cooking stops were
different for Johnny. It was nothing for him to rise in a high secluded meadow, catch his hobbled horse, and
ride several miles through the creeping mountain dawn, before breaking down again at any of several good
fire places.
There, after once more securing Bucko in a patch of grass, Johnny might take the time to put together a fire
and to bake cornbread. Another time he might be frying fish, or roasting a rabbit or a couple of quail. All of
the cook spots were located near water, either Fugitive Creek, Boulder Creek, Cedar Creek, King Creek or
even Cuyamaca or El Capitan reservoirs, located respectively at the high and the low ends of Boulder Creek.
At many of his other camps, the spots where he rolled out his bedroll and slept, he often made no fire at all.
He preferred the light of stars and moon, or even the steep, peaceful blackness of a cloudy night. Rain would
put him inside the army pup tent that he had brought home with him from the service, two shelter-halves
that buttoned in an overlap across the ridge.
Or it would put him in the mine. It was old then, and clean, and unused. Johnny would sleep in it, rejoice in
the natural warmth inside the rocky ambience, and leave it as untouched as he found it, a shelter, not a
home.
Oh, it was a shelter in his home alright, for the mountains were his home, maybe in some ways more than
Carmel Valley. He liked to think that Carmel Valley would some day come naturally to him as the past, for
by then that is what it would be, but that up here in the mountains would be the present. For now, Carmel
Valley was still the present. When he was up at Fugitive Creek, it was like he was stepping over into the
future. He lived in his dreams, and sometimes in beguiling and disturbing ways, his dreams lived in his life.
Johnny thought he saw visions, up on Fugitive Creek, but he thought he was faking these apparitions,
because he could see right through them. This is meant not just in the visual sense, the wispy, ghostly mist
kind of image, but in the whole routine. He could see through what he was doing; he could see that he was
making it up. He could see that were he to boast or complain of the short visits that commanded his
attention sometimes when wandering idly within hearing of the creek's gurgle, he would be faking it. His
imagination interspersed those occasional soprano harmonies into the mixture of water and wind, he knew.
And it was only how it would be, the slender white-garbed girl that stood on the moss like an angel or a
goddess. She wasn't there but that he made her there, held her with a spell of classical history and fond
reverence for religion he had never practiced, and even religion of which he had never heard.
Her dress could be silk, could be cotton, could be the white of raw fibers, or the blazing, bleached sheen of
mystic vestments. They could be linen; they could be woven yucca, thought Johnny, gazing in soft fixation,
until the lacy image faded away.
When it was over, it wasn't anymore clear to Johnny than that. But when in his imagination again, years
later, he heard Carol tell his daughter the story about the beating of the wolf, he sometimes had that same
flicker of recognition that had brought him time after time to a halt. Never had anyone hidden so well, as to
fox the quester into believing his revelation to be imaginary.
Such whimsicality did not prevent Johnny and Carol from serious providence regarding their daughter,
Diana. Telling one's youngster about an old rancher whose brutality had become legend was akin to pointing
out known locations of quicksand.
* * *
Johnny slapped a couple of sterile pads over the bullet holes and wrapped the whole mess with a couple of
yards of bandage. He staggered back outside and half walked, half crawled to the car. With what he imagined
to be great presence of mind, he brought along his bathrobe. Johnny was wearing his boots and his cutoff
jeans, nothing more. He was covered with dirt from digging a hole for a view privy. That is what he had been
doing just before he shot himself.
Being nothing more than a posthole with a scrap of plywood to cover it when not in use, "view privy" seemed
like an appropriate definition of the project. In nice weather, that is. Day or night it was splendid to crouch
and shit in the glory of towering peaks, flowers and trees, or twinkling stars. During other seasons, there
were times when freeze privy, or soak privy, may have been more descriptive. There were times when a
man's appreciation of the view from the spot where he was taking a dump could be strained.
Indeed, there were winter nights when the chamber pot was pressed into service inside the tiny trailer. But
Johnny quickly realized that each session with the porcelain bucket demanded a disgusting, additional chore,
later on, which involved water and filth. It got to where the current squall had to be pretty serious to prevent
our hero's going out into it anyhow to do his job and be done with it.
The simplest method, he discovered, was to remove all of his clothes and to go naked into the storm. It was
really no more unpleasant, and the return to the trailer required no more than a brisk toweling before
jumping back into clothes that were still warm and dry.
Michael had been using the same level of defecation technology, but when Bob's turn arrived to share
Fugitive Creek Ranch with Johnny, the former urged the latter to consider the problem from a different
point of view.
"We have to think about women, Johnny," said Bob, shortly after he settled. "No woman is going to want to
move up here if she has to go off into the brush every time she wants to take a crap. Even for pissing, I'm
telling you, they want a place to go that's more than a hole in the ground behind a manzanita. They want at
least an outhouse."
"At least an outhouse?"
"Well, they really want a nice warm bathroom with pictures on the wall, hot water, and a built-in hot tub."
"Well, maybe we can give them a picture on the wall," said Johnny.
So it was that Bob and Johnny put together an outhouse. It was more than an outhouse; it was also a
greenhouse, for they covered it with corrugated fiberglass rather than wood. They also included built-in
planters, and a section of shelf for Henrietta's aquarium, and even though it may not have had a picture
hung, it was a bright and cheerful place, and an enchantment in moonlight when all of the galvanized nail
heads twinkled in their varnish like silver stars.
After the wind knocked over the structure (and after Timothy got Henrietta), Johnny added a couple of
braces that angled into the ground on the leeward side. He liked the little outhouse, although he recalled
that he himself had succeeded in having two or three different woman spend the night there in the past with
nothing but the view for a toilet, and so had Michael.
But Bob was right. In the long run, it would take at least an outhouse to get a woman to stay. And maybe
more.
Johnny thought about his loves in the past. They all ended. But they all were good.
How shall he judge the next one? Has he learned what to look for? Any clues? They were all so different, he
mused.
They were all beautiful. They were cascades of blonde delight. They were bewitching in wild, dark tresses.
They were swirls of red curls.
They were country girls. They were wise in the maze of the city. They went barefoot and baked bread,
caressed the Earth and hung wind-chimes. They wore high heels and drove Volkswagens.
They loved to fuck. And that was it, Johnny believed. That was the thing he was looking for, and to be
practical, it was him they must love to fuck. And Johnny them.
His billy goats made no further distinctions. Why did Johnny? Why should Johnny have cared if she didn't
have the same philosophy of life as he did? If she was too young, or too old? If she didn't want to stay with
him forever? If she was going east while he was going west? Why should it matter, so long as they are both
here now?
Meanwhile, Johnny reminded himself again and again not to ask "why?" Why does he continue to do it?
Chalk up one more "why?"
Suppose Johnny asks why, simply in order to come up with excuses for what he does or does not do. Suppose
the real reason Johnny doesn't hustle that young lady is fear.
Good. Fear of failure or fear of success?
Very good. Failures pass easily. They are simple and rather pleasant. What a guy! Johnny just made a pass
at that girl! `Course, she said no; she had her reasons, but ain't he a randy old buck? Yeah!
* * *
"This is where I waylaid that cock-sucking wolf," was how Murphy began. Johnny and Bob Cabler exchanged
glances, having heard for years the rumor, sensitive perhaps of the rare, twisted opportunity that it was to
hear it straight from the hero himself.
The three men had dismounted right near the location of the execution twenty-three years earlier. This
followed half a morning of rounding up some strays. Over hand-rolled cigarettes, Murphy went on, unbidden.
"I knew I had the son of a bitch when I saw the dogs close around," he said. "We'd been chasin' the bastard
over half the section when we finally run him to ground. You shoulda seen us, lathered with sweat, dogs,
horses… meself.
"Wolf didn't know who he was fucking with when he pulled down ol' Blaze. You don't get to fuck with Clint
Murphy's horse, without Clint Murphy and his dogs gettin' to fuck with you."
Johnny and Bob listened in respectful silence. Johnny had trouble imagining the speaker, who was now fifty-
one, engaging in any kind of a wolf-chase that would last over half of anything bigger than a minute. Twenty-
three years is a long time, sure.
But Johnny had scampered after a few coyotes, and, dogs or no, it was amazing how well and how quickly
they were able to vanish in the denseness of the chaparral. He had the feeling, and he was right, that it was
dogs and luck alone that delivered Bird's Egg into the braggart's hands.