THE WEIGHT OF A FEATHER
1.
When they quit the highway at Variadero, the countryside opened and the old Ford yawed on the graded washboard, sending ravens flapping and squawking before their rattling dustcloud.
A half hour later, their progress metered by stunted cedars and silted arroyos, by chollas and cattleguards and glimpses of the distant river, they reached a gate.
“Bell Ranch,” the driver explained, mopping his face with a shirtsleeve.
He turned to the Indian, impassive in his tweed coat and polished brogans.
“I’ll get it.”
Beyond the gate, the ranch road straightened, parting a low, rolling landscape of blanched hardpan and telescopic mesas. They passed the remnants of a cattle chute, shipwrecked and listing, and a creaking windmill in whose shadow cows had gathered to loll in flickering somnolence.
When they topped the next rise, the driver braked the car and leaned and spat through the settling dust.
“There she is.”
The Indian straightened. Below them lay a canyon. A jagged suture of cottonwoods. New buildings, clustered in a clearing.
“What do you think about all of this?” he asked the driver.
“What, the feather?”
“No, not the feather. The dam.”
The driver was a young cowhand with sharp sideburns. He thumbed his hatbrim, scratching absently at his scalp.
“Well sir, I don’t rightly know. Jobs is jobs, I reckon. And Lord knows, we need the jobs.”
2.
It was several hours before the expedition returned. The Indian heard a truck engine grinding and shifting long before the horses appeared single-file through the broken hogback. He rose stiffly to retrieve his jacket and briefcase, and he crossed the dusty quadrangle to the shade of the livery.
The truck was first to arrive, and with it a tall Anglo of middle years unfolding himself from the passenger seat.
“Welcome! You must be Professor . . . Elk?”
“John.”
“John. Good to meet you. I’m Jack Montgomery. I’m the –”
“I know. We use your textbook at the University.”
“So you’re the ones.” They shook hands, the tall man smiling at his own joke. “I’ll have you know I’ve been reading Birds of the First Americans. And not for the first time, I might add.”
By now the riders were straggling into camp. Both men watched as the lathered horses were unsaddled and flank-slapped and passed off to the waiting hands.
“You received the photograph?”
“I did.”
“And what do you make of it?”
But before the Indian could respond, a voice like a poleax split the evening air.
“Well, looky here! Don’t tell me you gone and hired yourself a tracker, Montgomery. Christ almighty, we got archeologists and anthropologists and ornithologists. I was just today sayin we need ourselves a goddamn medicine man to make a full circus.”
The face behind the voice was broad and pink beneath a sweated hatbrim.
“John Swimming Elk, this is Jim Bob Hewitt from the Corps of Engineers. As you can see, Jim Bob has a habit of saying whatever he’s thinking. Even when he isn’t.”
