Black Mountain
Lady
Jay
Dyck
Diary of a Goatherder January 30, 1980

The first kids came today, two tiny bucks out of Amy. They arrived about 10 A.M., and everything went smoothly.
They are so cute!
Cathy came out around noon. We cut and split some firewood for her. She brought gasoline, 2-cycle oil and
chain oil. After a bang up-chicken dinner we played Yahtzee.
We finished the second pasture this morning and turned the herd into it for the afternoon, except for Amy and
the kids.
All day it was misty, and tonight it seems like rain. What a start in life, January, in the mountains, in the rain.
Chapter Eighteen

Glow
Johnny Dolan woke up and got up at five thirty that morning. He made a fire in the stove. He sat and looked
out the window as the coffee got hot. Out the window was a tree, a truck, a dirt road, a cold wind.
In a while he fired up the truck and rolled off down the dirt road, shifting gears slowly, like thoughts. Life was
bleak. But he had work. The motor coughed and warmed.
By seven he was warm from work. Closer to eight the Devlins pulled into the yard. Right behind them Johnny's
sister, Glow, bounced in the dust. She turned her old sedan to park next to the scrap heap. Hank Devlin drove
his old truck on up and stopped it between the house and the garage.
Gloria Dolan walked to where Johnny had set his saw horses. He stopped work and smiled. "What are you
doing here?" he asked, pleased, but puzzled to see his sister at the jobsite.
Tom Devlin came around the corner then carrying a ladder. When he saw Glow he blushed. Johnny didn't
notice, but Glow did, and she swung her hips and cooed, "Hello, Tommy."
Tom grinned and looked down as he lugged the ladder past. Glow was nineteen. Tom Devlin thought she was
the most beautiful girl in the world.
This most beautiful girl turned back to her brother. "Johnny, my adorable brother," she began. "What are you
doing this afternoon?"
Johnny thought about that. Probably Glow wanted a favor. This porch rail wouldn't take him all day to finish. It
was the last thing. He and Old Fargo and Uncle Bill had been working on this house since late spring. Now,
today, Fargo and Bill were over in Dove Springs, looking at an empty lot, a possible job site. So he would be free
this afternoon. Uncle Bill and Old Fargo would be a long time in Dove Springs.
"Nothing," he said.
"How would you like to let me buy you lunch in Dove Springs?"
"What? It's fifty miles to Dove Springs. I won't be done here till noon."
"A late lunch?" she grinned hopefully.
"Why do you want to go there? Why didn't you go with Uncle Bill and Old Fargo?"
"No, 'cause I gotta take my car to Red Casey's and leave it."
"So you need a ride back."
"Yeah."
"So ride back with them."
"I didn't know they were going. Come on; I really wanted to take you to lunch."
So that was how Johnny Dolan ended up taking a fall drive along the road from Collin's Cove to Dove Springs.
"Going to Dove Springs?" asked Hank Devlin. He and the boys, paint covered, were sitting down to their
sandwiches. Johnny was loading his tools into the truck. The porch rail had turned out well. Old Fargo had let
him design it himself. The master carpenter was starting to like Johnny's work.
Johnny set the box of nails in last and closed the tailgate. "Yeah. Glow has to leave her car at a mechanic's."
"Must be Red Casey," said Hank.
"That's right," said Johnny, surprised. "How did you know?"
"He helps me with this old heap," he nodded toward his truck that sat patiently battered and covered with
paint. "Our place is just this side of Dove Springs," he went on. "You'll go right by it."
Johnny smiled and looked up to see that Glow was back. He waved as the car bounced into the yard. Johnny
was ready to leave. Hank set his sandwich down and got up. "Did you want to see what we're painting your
railing with?"
"I heard it was blue," replied Johnny.
"Yeah, take a look, before you go," said Hank, chewing as he walked. He knelt over and opened a can of paint.
Hank Devlin loved paint, good paint. This house had been a colorful dream. The blue rail would set it off.
"It's nice," said Johnny, sincerely. "I'll be back to see it when it's all done."
"You do nice work," said Hank.
"Thanks," Johnny smiled.
* * *
Joe listened quietly as Diana continued her account of all that she believed the moon had told her. A part of
him realized that most folk would dismiss her words as the babble of a lunatic. He grinned to himself, taking a
last drag from a cigarette. Maybe that is where the word comes from, he suggested to himself.
Luna. Lunatic.
Part of him concurred with the crowd; she was making this up, indulging her madness with tall tales and
outright lies.
But part of him listened and swelled like a jimson bud, absorbing the condensation of the night in preparation
to bud at hot morning. Made up or not, Diana's words had the spell of truth. Crazy truth, to be sure, but wasn't
the world? He lit another cigarette, and the prophetess rambled on.
* * *
Another two years passed, and it was Lightning once more, but succession had made him young. Tawngness
recognized him. Both of the young males had played under the title "Lightning," when all three had
scrambled in real mimicry of every permutation of cat dominance. Even the girl played "Lightning;" each
kitten shone strongly with the urge to be the big, bad, mountain lion.
Lightning. If ever a big, bad, mountain lion there was, he was one. His range was huge. His circuit of seventy-
one or seventy-two days was more than six hundred miles of convolution. It stretched from the mountains
clear to the coast. It wound its loop from the San Dieguito river valley, through the hills to the south,
Gonzalez Canyon, Carmel Valley, Del Mar Mesa, Sorrento Valley, Torrey Pines, Peňasquitos and back past
Black Mountain and on east, through Poway, to the mountains. It lake-hopped from San Vicente to El
Capitan, then up Boulder Creek to Cuyamaca and the deep, green pines of the higher altitude. Circling from
there north to east to south, around the lake and the cluster of peaks and forest to the south, then back to
the west, up the slopes of Cuyamaca Peak itself, over the Arroyo Seco ridge and down across the western
slope, sometimes in the blaze of red sunset bouncing from the Pacific Ocean in the distance.
Lightning's range had to be relearned or rediscovered by each new Lightning. This was not hard to do, as the
heir had usually been on the scene already, stalking the boss cat, following his trail, but at enmity, stealing
his tricks.
On a good range, the master cat trail, when properly learned, keeps the mountain lion invisible. It has been
there for hundreds of thousands of years, and it has to be found. Separate males varied widely in their
success at doing so. And they were killed off in droves.
* * *
Johnny no longer thought of Cathy at all. Sometimes people really know what they're doing when they make
their rejections. Back when Johnny was first considering her as a potential mate, probably in a
non-procreative arrangement, they had had fun together, of a social nature.
She had been introduced to him by neighbors. They had been neighbors in the sense that they were in a
sequence of people who had owned the parcel of ten acres kitty-corner from Grant's in the forty that had
been partitioned. These were match-makers, people who saw their friend Catherine growing old as a single,
and here was this man they had found whose content with his own lot had grown old.
So they had partied together some. She had her own place down in Jamul, a cute rented cottage on some
land. There was room for big outdoor gatherings with volleyball and barbecues, and pot lucks.
Other times she came to the ranch, in her VW bus. Sometimes she slept over, to be on hand for the coffee
and pancakes of the following morning.
"I think," said Johnny one morning, "that we find it too easy to keep our hands off of one another."
Johnny and Cathy agreed that they each were drawing a blank as far as succeeding in any search for a
desirable sex partner, but that each was very pleased to have met the other, just the same.
Johnny was still not over some of his successes. His imagination returned him to Carmel Valley, but before
he knew it, old man Murphy had once again muscled into his reverie. It gave him a queasy feeling, to hear
the cruel liar brag.
* * *
No, thought Vikor, and his thought was echoed in the mind of Chela. No, this is not just a pick up, not just
an 'I love you; let's fuck.'
No, this spark was special enough to ruin his whole day. Before he knew it, he found himself nursing it like
the morning after embers of a wood fire.
"I'm afraid I have soaked your handkerchief," she said. Her voice was sweet and apologetic, and their eyes
still danced with one another.
"Keep it," he offered, and he smiled, and she smiled, and the musty-modern confines of the airliner turned
to blue skies and robins' eggs.
"Thank you," she said, not hiding her delight. The hanky was wringing wet; she preferred to keep it. "I did
have one of my own," she confessed without shame after a tiny moment had passed. She dug quickly into
her purse before he could raise a protest, and relieved to be distracted from the immediacy of this eye to eye
business.
She had more than one of her own. Her hand emerged from the depths of her travel pouch. The square of
cloth that she held, folded into a compact triangle, was clean but faded. She offered it to him now.
"Here," she suggested. "We'll trade."
Vikor reached out and accepted it. It wasn't a pure, white businessman's hanky that he held, but a big, old
blue bandanna, the kind that might be found around the neck of a cowboy, or on the head of a savage in the
mountains of New Mexico, or on the streets of San Diego. It had a white filigree of flower petals and tapered
leaves, with a deeper, almost invisible accent of purple shadows, centers and stems.
He had owned one like it, a few years earlier, during his desert stint, but he would have been stumped if
asked if his old neckerchief had purple accents.
He saw them on this one. He also saw the pretty, brown fingers that passed it to him, and the pretty, brown
wrist with its own accents of silver and turquoise. His eyes continued up the pretty, brown arms, past the puff
of white lace that guarded her pretty, brown shoulders. In a second they were once again exploring one
another's eyes. Her pretty, brown throat and her pretty, brown face gave way to pools of magical blue.
Vikor's eyes were also blue, his from his mother and her cruel prince. Chela's had come to her through
Point Loma, from Portugal and before that the Pyrenees. Earlier than that, who knew? But, somewhere in
the ancient depths of the old continent, their ancestors had bid one another adieu and Godspeed, siblings
setting off to settle the earth.
More than blue eyes rejoiced at reunion. The precious genetic packages that hoisted banners in greeting,
plunging in the cerulean seas, were responsible for more than just the color of their lookouts. That was the
least of the gifts holding hands on the adventure through time. They slipped into hiding, whenever host or
hostess might mate with ol' brown eyes. Nor did all blue eyes come with the murderous mutation, not by a
long shot.
* * *
Johnny had the feeling that, had it been himself, he would never have confessed. Not to the gang at the
roadhouse in the flush of triumph. Not by nailing the battered hide of the wolf to the back of the barn. Not by
reviving old shame best let lie to entertain simple cowboys a generation later, simple cowboys who later
would ask themselves and one another, as had the generation itself, "How did he know it was that wolf that
savaged his colt?"
More than that, why be so doggoned mean about it? Both of the boys… that's what Marilyn Wells nee Heinz
always called them, "the boys"… both of them had run once or twice into the unavoidable necessity of
shooting old dogs, or puppies. Both of them prided themselves on such duty's being discharged with an
absence of pain, or threat, or terror.
A nice day, a nice walk, two going out and one coming back… that's how it always was…
Murphy's voice would break in on their dismay with new reminders of the depth of his cruelty. It was the one
part he didn't exaggerate in the sordid tale. "I whipped that son of a bitch… “he would wax in a few crude,
repetitious phrases.”… howling like a stuck pig… feel them ribs mashin' like toothpicks… jerk him up tight
and lay into him ag'in…"
Murphy didn't know what he sounded like, the rare times he would froth over his ancient deed. He claimed
to have pinned the skin of the unfortunate wolf to the back of his barn, and he didn't know that the
community, such as it was, laughed at him, pitied Bird's Egg, and nodded in knowing sorrow when less than a
year after the bitter debacle, and after a couple of more horses had been similarly mauled, like Blaze, and a
determined group of riders, including the young Marilyn Heinz, had made a sweep of the big pasture just east
of the Murphy boundaries one moonlit night with shotguns, netting three dead, domestic dogs from Rancho
Santa Fe.
The dogs' subsequent crucifixion alongside Border Road, strung up three in a row on the Murphy barbed
wire, insured that Rancho Santa Fe's canine population remained firmly penned at night-time, forever.
And Clinton Murphy's cowardly injustice shone from then on as a beacon of macho supremacy only in his
own twisted heart.
For everyone else it stood like a pinnacle of dung on the wayside, an example for children of sad waste and
shame.
* * *
In the hospital Johnny had clean sheets and pretty nurses.
It was very luxurious compared with his living standard on the mountain. Luxury is tasteless institution food
served to him in bed, and cold. At home Johnny had to pull fresh veggies from his garden and cook them
himself.
Luxury is hot running water. Pig that Johnny was, he preferred to wallow in the cool, crystal waters of
Fugitive Creek.
Luxury is having pretty girls in blue, white or candy stripes looking in on him every few minutes, taking his
pulse and giving him dope, peeking at his wound.
Well, up in the woods Johnny could jack off any time he wanted.