The Canoe and the Saddle: A Critical Edition

10. Treachery

10. Treachery People cloddish, stagnant, and mundane, such as most of us are, pretend to prefer sunset to sunrise, just as we fancy the past greater than the present, and repose nobler than action. Few are radical enough in thought to perceive the great equalities of beauty and goodness in phenomena of nature or conditions of life. Now I saw a sunrise after my night by the Nachchese, which, on the side of sunrise , it is my duty to mention. Having therefore put in my fact, that on a morning of August, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, sunrise did its duty with splendor, I have also done my duty as an observer. The simple statement of a fact is enough for the imaginative, who will reproduce it for themselves, according to their experience; the docile unimaginative will buy alarm-clocks and study dawns. Yet I give a few coarse details as a work of supererogation. If I had slept but faintly, the cobble-stones had purveyed me a substitute for sleep by hammering me senseless; so that when the Treachery 137 chill before dawn smote me, and I became conscious, I felt that I needed consolation. Consolation came. I saw over against me, across the river, a hill blue as hope, and seemingly far away in the gray distance. Light flushed upward from the horizon, meeting no obstacles of cloud, to be kindled and burnt away into white ashiness . Light came up the valley over the dark, surging hills. Full in the teeth of the gale it came, strong in its delicacy, surely victorious, as a fine scymitar against a blundering bludgeon. Where light and wind met on the crest of an earth-billow, there the grass shook like glittering spray. Meanwhile the hill opposite was drawing nearer, and all the while taking a fuller blue. Blue passed into deep scintillating purple, rich as the gold-powdered robe of an Eastern queen. As daylight grew older, it was strong enough to paint detail without sacrificing effect; the hill took its place of neighborhood, upright and bold, a precipitous front of warm, brown basalt, with long cavities , freshly cleft, where prisms had fallen, striping the brown with yellow. First upon the summit of this cliff the sunbeams alighted. Thence they pounced upon the river, and were whirled along upon its breakers, carrying light down to flood the valley. In the vigorous atmosphere of so brilliant a daybreak I divined none of the dif- ficulties that were before sunset to befall me. By this we were in the saddle, following the sunlight rush of the stream. Stiffish, after passing the night hobbled, were the steeds, as bruised after boulder beds were the cavaliers. But Loolowcan, the unimpassioned, was now aroused. Here was the range of his nomad life. Anywhere hereabouts he might have had his first practice -lessons in horse-stealing. His foot was on his native bunchgrass . Those ridges far away to the northeast must be passed to reach Weenas. Beyond those heights, to the far south, is Atinam Treachery 138 and “Le Play House,” the mission.1 Thus far time and place have made good the description of the eloquent Owhhigh. Presently in a small plain appeared a horse, hobbled and lone as a loon on a lake. Have we acquired another masterless estray? Not so. Loolowcan uttered a peculiar trilobated yelp,2 and forth from an ambush, where he had dodged, crept the shabbiest man in the world. Shabby are old-clo’ men in the slums of Brummagem;3 shabbier yet are Mormons at the tail of an emigration. But among the seediest ragamuffins in the most unsavory-corners I have known, I find no object that can compare with this root-digging Klickatat, as at Loolowcan’s signal-yelp he crept from his lair among the willows. His attire merits attention as the worst in the world. The moccasins of Shabbiest had been long ago another’s, probably many another Klickatat’s. Many a cayote had appropriated them after they were thrown away as defunct, and, after gnawing them in selfish solitude, every cayote had turned away unsatisfied with their flavor. Then shabbiest stepped forward, and claimed the treasuretrove . He must have had a decayed ingenuity; otherwise how with thongs, with willow twigs, with wisps of grass and persistent gripe of toe, did he compel those tattered footpads...