Azoguera

　

　

1.

Milton, the prospector, was walking with his old dog behind the Chinese buffet in Pagosa Springs. It was mid-April and the roar of the river flooding through the village was deafening. Expensive restaurants featuring Alpine fondue and wild game lined the watercourse, the concrete terraces where the "Golden Horde" of summertime visitors were invited to sit outside now half-drowned in the torrent. The Chinese buffet was a block uphill from the river, a building that had once been a pharmacy, and Milton sometimes found caches of empty soda pop and beer cans in the rear alley. The old dog cocked her ear and, then, skittishly approached the buffet’s dumpster. Something inside the garbage bin alarmed her and she danced back away from the big metal crate, tugging at Milton to lead her somewhere else. Milton set down his sack of cans and pried-open the dumpster. Two big crows exploded upward, black and feathery rockets momentarily darkening the air above him. The crows circled, thanking Milton with hoarse, high-pitched barks. The Labrador, startled by the birds, barked in response. And a block away the river flexed its muscle and roared over slabs of marble between marble boulders dragged down from the peaks by ancient floods.

After his second hospitalization for pneumonia, Milton spent winters in Pagosa Springs. His niece owned a trailer-house in a park a mile outside of town and, since she had been assigned active duty in Iraq, the place was vacant. He kept the plumbing from freezing in the winter months, but returned each May to his cabin in the mountains on the ridge between Blanca Peak and the Sangre de Cristo massif to the north. There was no plumbing in his cabin to be kept from freezing. He had fallen several times in the preceding autumn, a mishap that was uncharacteristic for him, and he was afraid that, if he slipped and hurt himself badly, he would be helpless. His other Labrador had died in September, knocked into a coma by a stroke, and, so, he thought it best to spend the icy and wet part of the year in town.

In the first week in May, Milton reckoned that the high ridges exposed to direct sunlight were sufficiently clear of snow that he could reach his cabin. He wondered how much damage the season’s snow-load had done to the old structure. His surviving dog was sick and, when he took her to the veterinarian, the doctor told him that the animal should be "put down." Milton wrapped the dog in a horse-blanket and brought her back to the trailer. In the late afternoon, he drove up toward Wolf Creek Pass, stopping near a particularly lovely overlook. He carried the dog down into a gorge filled with ferns and echoing with little cascades pitching themselves from the moist rim of the canyon – deadfall trees leaned against grey boulders or tilted overhead, spanning the gorge, and, in the tight stone-walled enclosure, the sound of his rifle-shot was deafening. He found a little muddy soil at the foot of a cliff and buried the dog there, still wrapped in the horse-blanket.

Back in town, Milton stocked his niece’s trailer-house with flour, sugar, coffee, and a couple of twelve-packs of Coors. He filled up her pantry with canned beans and vegetables. Then, he wrote a thank-you note on a sheet of paper and set it on the kitchen table – her deployment was supposed to end in August. He hid her key outside under the welcome mat and, then, drove his ATV up the ramp into the back of his pickup truck.

Milton drove over the pass, weeping a little when he passed the overlook and box-canyon where he had buried his dog. He rubbed vigorously at his eyes and accelerated, as if to go around an obstacle planted in his path, ascending upward to the shining mountain peaks. Mid-afternoon he was lurching up the crooked jeep trail toward his cabin. A mile below the ridge, the track dived under a white field of snow. Milton parked the four-wheel-drive pick up and, then, tried to cross over the great apron of snow hanging from the mountain on his ATV. The all-terrain vehicle sunk into the soft snow and couldn’t make it across to the eroded gravel slopes beyond. Milton lifted his sack of groceries and, then, plunged into the snow, sinking in, at first, hip-deep. He plowed a path through drifts up to the place where the jeep track re-emerged, trudging uphill toward the dilapidated head tower and sluices on the top of the ridge. The mine structures were mostly squashed flat against the stony hill, although here and there a big creosote-stained timber jutting up at the sky. Below the ridge, in a protected hollow, Milton found his cabin embedded in more snow, the conical peak of spoil nearby adorned and glittering with shards of fool’s gold. The lean-to attached to the cabin had collapsed but it would be a simple enough to rebuild that structure.

Four days later, Milton went down the hill and found his ATV high and dry, resting on a pavement of gravel and granite slabs. The ice-field had retreated several hundred yards up the mountain side, its pale skirts dribbling little fingers of cold, silvery water. Milton retrieved his pick-up and, with some difficulty, drove it over the steep ridge slippery with loose gravel to the hollow holding his cabin. He took a shovel and repaired some parts of the jeep-track. Then, on the weekend, Milton went into town, driving down to Mosca, to buy a couple hundred dollars worth of additional groceries.

For a few weeks, Milton explored the old mining trails and ruins north of his cabin, ultimately circling Crestone Peak and searching the high basins for signs of ore. He found some "float" in the pour-offs high on Crestone, but nothing significant. Several times, he slipped on wet stones and fell. When he landed on the hard rock, Milton called for his dogs and was confused for a few moments when they didn’t come to him. Once, at high altitude, driving his ATV on a ledge just below the summit on Crestone, his vision suddenly turned to shadows and he could make out forms but no detail. He stopped the ATV and hastily dismounted and, as he gazed down at the desolate little lakes in the stone basin below, the edges of things returned and their colors and the episode passed.

Milton thought that this would probably be his last season prospecting and, so, he decided to make one final search for Blanca Peak’s old Spanish mine.

　

　

2.

When his father was away at the War, Milton was very happy. He lived on a small ranch with his baby sister and mother, an acreage in the rolling foothills above Del Norte. Milton couldn’t recall his father, although there were pictures of a skinny grinning boy in an army uniform in the house. The ranch house was old but sturdy, warm in the winter and built behind trees that cast their shadow on its shingles in the summer. There were tame horses, baby sheep and foals and chicks, a disagreeable old rooster with a sharp beak, several dogs and innumerable cats. Next to his mother’s big bed with its tubular, tarnished brass frame, there was a framed wedding picture. Milton’s mother looked shy and serious in the picture. Milton’s father was next to invisible beside the bride, her cheeks and strawberry blonde hair hand-tinted, swirls of creamy white fabric enveloping her like the icing on a birthday cake.

Milton’s father was fighting in the Pacific and he sent cards from places with outlandish names. Milton imagined his father killing many Japs and he sometimes held a broom to his shoulder like a gun, shooting down Japs hiding around the ranch house and outbuildings. Then, one day, the war was over and Milton’s father returned from overseas. He was much bigger and broader in frame than the pictures showed and seemed to be very sad.

Milton’s father changed everything about their home. He put pigs in the barn instead of sheep and ponies and, once, when he was angry and drunk, shot one of the tom-cats that was stalking a bantam chicken. He quarreled with Milton’s mother and, sometimes, struck her. Milton feared and hated him and wished that there would be another war so that he would have to go away again.

But there was no war. Sometimes, Milton’s father took him hunting in the high mountains. He disliked the long hikes and the heavy packs, the uphill climbing that took away your breath and the long slippery slogs downslope that wracked your knees and joints. Sometimes, Milton hunted with his father in the snow and it was very cold – once, he had to go to the doctor because of frost-bite to his toes and the tips of his nose and ears.

When Milton was in High School, his father and mother separated. Milton enlisted in the army to show his father that he could be brave as well and fought in the snow in Korea. When he was overseas, Milton’s father shot himself in a roadside motel in Alamosa. Because he had been a soldier and a great outdoorsman, his death was determined to be accidental, some kind of hunting mishap when he was cleaning his guns.

After returning from his military service, Milton enrolled in the School of Mines in Golden, his tuition paid by the GI Bill. While he was a student, he married and was happy with his wife for a few years. After graduating from the School of Mines, Milton took a job as a mining engineer working on Baffin Island in northern Canada – his employer was cutting uranium out of the tundra. Milton’s wife moved into company housing near the mine but she couldn’t tolerate the cold and isolation. When a polar bear killed several dogs in the company town, Milton’s wife said that she was going to move back to Denver. She was pregnant at that time, but miscarried back in the States. When Milton completed his contract, he returned to Denver and found that his wife was living with another man. Milton wasn’t surprised. He didn’t bother with a formal divorce because the couple had no children – ten years, later, he was served with papers but ignored them without consequence.

Milton took a job in Saudi Arabia and, then, worked in northern Saskatchewan at nickel and copper mine. For a time, he lived with a native woman and had a child with her. But when his employment contract was concluded, Milton returned to Colorado and never saw the woman or his daughter after that time.

In the late sixties, Milton worked in a factory in Pueblo, smoked a lot of marijuana, and went into the mountains to prospect on the weekends. He found that during a good month, he could pan enough "float" gold and silver to buy groceries and keep gas in his pick-up truck. One weekend, Milton stumbled on the old mine site with the abandoned cabin on the saddle between Blanca Peak and the Sangre de Criston mountains to the north. The land was adjacent to a big ranch owned by a rich man, but located on Bureau of Land Management territory. Milton began to take long weekends, often missing work so that he could remodel the cabin and make it habitable. In the early seventies, he homesteaded the land and, even, acquired title to the place.

This tract of land was where Milton was living when Tetch’s foreman brought him to the big house to look at computer images of the dead Sasquatch. Tetch abandoned his mansion and moved back to Texas. Milton remained living behind the high windy ridge, next to the dome-shaped pinnacle of tailings glittering with quartzite crystals. He was old now and afraid of falling and spent his winters in the flat lands, at Pagosa Springs. His dogs died and Milton thought that he would not be able to live much longer at his cabin. He recalled the Spanish mine that he father had once shown him – at least, he believed he had memories about the place – and thought that it would make him very happy to find that mine before he became too old to ramble through the peaks and valleys. So, one morning, before dawn, he put some dried food in his backpack and set out to circumnavigate Blanca Peak.

　

　

3.

A scatter of stars decorated the sky and the white pebble of the moon clung to the arched back of the mountain. It was cool and a chilly wind blew down from the heights. Milton thought he would contour the mountain at the tree-line, a little below 12,000 feet, on its north, east, and west sides. Because of the escarpments overlooking the San Luis basin, he would have descend into the canyons slung over the sand dunes in order to traverse that part of the peak. At the tree-line, he wouldn’t have to either climb or descend and, so, could save time hiking around the peak. The scattered vegetation would provide him shelter if there were a storm and, also, a clear view up toward the summit, the best vantage he knew to look both up and down the mountain for the lost mine.

While it was still dark, Milton crossed the drainage between his ridge and Blanca. He hiked along the fence-line marking the rich investor’s land, following the wire and posts up through the cacti and aspen to a jagged dike where the terrain was broken and the fence ended. Just as the first grey light was rising behind him, Milton found a path through the dike with its steeple shaped pinnacles and, then, emerged on a stony terrace treeless because of overlapping slabs of pinkish granite. Another stand of aspen, smaller and more wind-bent, stood at the edge of a talus field a few hundred yards above him. He climbed to the aspen. Water was trickling down through the talus and he heard a thousand tiny streams drizzling through the tons of heaped rock. After another half-mile, Milton found a tree improbably growing sideways, its big trunk cantilevered about 18 inches off the pebbly ground. Milton knew the tree as a landmark, a sort of natural bench where he could sit and watch the sun rise. He was mostly carrying water, but wasn’t thirsty. Nonetheless, he knew that it was best to drink before prompted by thirst and so he took a deep draught from one of the jugs that he had packed.

His father had taken him elk-hunting on Blanca Peak when he was boy, perhaps, nine years old. The mountain was open, then, not posted against trespassing. They lurched uphill in his dad’s pickup until the road ended and, then, they bounced across meadows for another couple thousand feet, parking at last under a peculiar shaped knob extruding from the mountain, a black fluted column thrust up above the adjacent slope so that it looked like a preacher’s pulpit. His father gave a Spanish name to the feature that Milton didn’t understand and, then, they carried their guns and packs away from the truck and bushwhacked their way through some wet willows and marsh into the bare and tilted open country above. His father didn’t say anything and moved at a rapid pace and, since Milton’s gun was about his size and very heavy for him, he fell behind. Sometimes, his Dad sat on a tree-stump or a rock waiting for the boy to catch up. When Milton, huffing and puffing, caught up, his father, then, silently stood up and gestured higher on the peak, and so they continued upward, climbing and climbing until the little boy had tears in his eyes at the exertion. They stopped by a ribbon of water that slid down a face of stone. "In the islands," Milton’s dad said, "if you fell behind, the Japs killed you. You couldn’t ever fall behind. So don’t do that now." He chewed some tobacco, spit, and, then, lit a cigarette. "They didn’t just kill you," his father said, "they cut out your innards while you were watching them and roasted your guts on your chest." Milton blinked at him in the bright sunlight. "In those islands, I tell you," Milton’s father said. "I prayed and prayed that I could come back here where it’s cool and there’s plenty of cold, fresh water. It was so hot there and the water was like a hot bath and filled with bugs." Milton didn’t know what to say. He didn’t ever know what to say when his father told him about the war.

They climbed some more and, around noon, Milton’s father sighted an elk, a fat cow grazing among the flowers in the high meadow. They spent almost an hour crawling on their bellies around the elk, Milton’s father waving and gesturing to the boy where he should go. Then, his father took the shot and the elk crashed over on her side. Milton ran up to the animal and saw her sides trembling – he bent down and watched as the light went out of the elk’s eyes.

"Now comes the fun part," Milton’s father said. He took a knife and a small axe and hacked the elk into quarters. "I’m doing this gutless," Milton’s father said, "because we got to get the meat down and dressed before it spoils." Milton’s father hacked out the spine and cut the backstraps and tenderloin. He hurled the scraps of meat into pillow cases. Blood and yellow gobs of fat were scattered over the rocks and wild flowers. The meat was steamy to the touch, but it cooled very rapidly. A murder of crows gathered on the fallen timber and boulders around the kill. The crows called hoarsely to one another.

Milton’s father took three pillow cases, each containing a hooved quarter of the elk, and strapped them onto this back pack. He lifted the soggy sack filled with backstraps and other cuts of meat and slung it from his chest so that it hung down over his belly. The fourth quarter, Milton’s father, belted to his son’s back. He slashed through the elk’s throat bones and put the head of the animal atop Milton’s pack. "You’ve got the trophy," Milton’s father said.

They staggered slowly down the rocky slopes. Milton saw purplish spots before his eyes and fell down a couple times. The back side of his body was cold and wet with blood seeping from the pillow case holding the quarter that he was lugging. His father moaned and grunted with each step and it seemed that it took them a long time to drag the meat from the meadow down into a tangled warren of small notches and gorges cut into the side of the mountain.

At last, they stopped. Milton had fallen again and couldn’t go any farther. It was so difficult to carry the meat on their backs that Milton had turned his eyes to the ground, watching his father’s slow steps and trying to adjust his gait to put his foot where his father’s boot had been. For forty minutes, he had not looked above the height of his father’s knees and, so, he didn’t how they had come into the little cleft in the mountain where they were now resting.

A steep-walled ravine ran downhill between two symmetrical piles of broken rock. The chunks of rock glittered with quartz and fool’s gold and had been heaped about eight feet high. Beyond the stone piles, the ravine broadened a little and there was a low, fallen wall shaped like a figure-eight making an enclosure against one of the overhead cliffs. Milton’s father sat on a bundle of rotting timbers with his boots on what looked like a round mill-stone embedded in the gravel.

"An arrastre," Milton’s father said. He kicked a stone across the gully to another circular mill-stone with fragments of wood still lodged in a cleft in its center.

Milton’s father gestured uphill, toward the headwall of the little canyon. A black opening, like the mouth of cave, was cut into the stone. Milton could see rough-hewn timber beams, like pry-bars, holding open the incision into the mountain.

"Spanish mine," Milton’s father said, panting for breath.

Now as Milton remembered this, he was always a little unclear whether he had seen this place or dreamed the Spanish mine, or been told about it, or, maybe, even read about the workings in one of his textbooks when he was enrolled at the School of Mines. Parts of his memory were clear, but other things seemed vague. When he cast his eyes up to the cliff tops enclosing the excavation, Milton couldn’t tell if he saw trees there, pinon pine, perhaps, or aspen, or, even, spruce. This was an important detail because it would tell him whether the mine was at an elevation below the tree-line or higher up the slope of the mountain. He knew that black crows had dogged them every step of the way down the hill from the meadow where the elk’s blood and fat and bone were strewn about. So, as he recalled the place – if it were a place and not something that he had imagined – he looked up to the sides of the rocky gorge but couldn’t tell if there were trees above or merely the black shapes of the crows crying out at him.

Milton’s father lit a cigarette. He reached into his back pack and found an apple. The fruit was a little foul with blood, but he wiped it off with his handkerchief. He tossed the apple to Milton and scowled when the boy bobbled his catch.

"The Indians working this old mine were slaves," Milton’s father said. "The Spaniards worked them to death." He exhaled some blue smoke that made a globe around his red face.

"They set up a post here," Milton’s father said. "A high post downhill, by those corrals."

He gestured at the scatter of flat rocks arranged in a figure-eight shape.

"At the top of the post, the Spaniards stuck a big, old cross with the dead Jesus nailed onto it. The Indians were supposed to bow to this post, this image, I guess, and, if they didn’t bow, the Spaniard’s took a whip and lashed the culprit until he was dead. This kind of thing happened in the war too, all the time when the Japs took prisoners on those islands."

Milton nodded his head.

"One time, a big Comanche chief was brought all the way up here," Milton’s father said. "The chief and his little son were standing right in this gulch, right where we are now. The Chief didn’t pay any attention to the cross with Jesus nailed up there – he didn’t even look at it, and, when someone called out and pointed up at Jesus hanging up in the sky, the Chief just muttered something and spit on the ground. So the Spaniards dragged the Chief’s son over by that shaft and had him stand there with an apple sitting on his head. The mine overseer asked the Indian Chief if he thought that his hand was steady enough to shoot the apple off his son’s head. The Chief was very angry and his glare was like a sharp knife gouging at the cruel Spaniards and he said, "yes, yes, I will do it, I’ll fire an arrow that will rip that apple right off my son’s head." So the Spaniards stepped back and the little boy walked forty paces away by the mineshaft and stood there still as could be. The Indian Chief took careful aim and his hand was steady and it didn’t tremble in the slightest. And, then, was a terrible silence, a silence all the way from heaven come down to earth, and, not even, the leaf of a tree trembled..."

His father’s eyes glinted like a rare gemstone plucked from some dangerous height or depth.

"The Indian Chief drew back the bow and he took aim and, then, the air went flying as soundless as a thought and it caught the apple at its center and lofted it back away from the boy into the darkness of this ming. The Spaniard mine overseer stepped forth to commend the Indian and, even, extended his hand in congratulations and, then, he saw that the savage had another arrow clutched close to his belly and ready to be notched on bowstring. – What is that for? the Spaniard said. – For you, if I missed, the Indian chief said. It’s a true story. Do you think so?"

"Yes," Milton said.

"It happened right here, in this dry-gulch, round about four-hundred years ago. Do you believe me?"

"Yes," Milton said.

"Put that apple up on your head, balance it there, and, then, let me take a shot with my rifle," Milton’s father said.

Milton lifted up the apple and looked at it for a moment. Then, he set it on the tousle of hair over his eyes.

"You’d have to walk forty paces away, back up to that old mine shaft – that way, if’n I miss, I can just topple your dead body down into that hole," Milton’s father said.

Milton took a couple paces toward the mineshaft, but the apple was still on his head and it dropped on the ground and rolled slowly downhill.

"I’m just teasing you, son," Milton’s father said. "I’m just teasing. You think your pa would do something like that."

Milton shook his head. "Eat the apple, son," Milton’s father said. "You’ll need all your strength for the rest of this hike."

"Do you think there is still silver here?" Milton asked.

His father groaned a little. His pack was bearing down on him. "I don’t know," he said. "It depends on why they stopped operations here."

Milton didn’t recall much about the rest of the day. Somehow, they climbed out of the ravine containing the mine and, then, walked very slowly, pace by pace, down the mountain. Milton couldn’t recall any other times when they stopped to rest. It must have been agony, but mercifully enough, the pain hadn’t left any mark on his memory – he recalled the dead elk and the blood and fat on the meadow and, of course, the Spanish mine and, then, at last, they emerged from the mountain the way a man might emerge from a cavern or a battlefield. The pickup truck was a few hundred feet above them, perched on a stony shelf, and Milton thought that his father cried with rage, shaking his hot tears onto the rock beneath their boots. "It is one thing to walk down from the kill," his father said, "but, now, to walk uphill..."

That was the last thing that he remembered from that afternoon long ago – his father cursing and, then, saying that you always want to position your kill and your vehicle in a such a way that you carry the carcass down to the vehicle and not uphill.

Then, his father was gone and Milton was an old man sitting on a tree that the wind and blizzards had deformed so that the trunk didn’t grow upward but was parallel with the ground, an awful sort of deformation if you think about it. His knees and shoulders hurt but that was just the ordinary indignity of old age and, so, Milton set off again

While he was fresh from his rest, Milton climbed the side of the ridge, following the edge of the talus field and, then, zigzagged up the switchbacks of a game trail to a barren prominence where waist-high clumps of krummholz, like grazing sheep, formed a little exposure. Beyond there was a big cleft in the mountain, dark with shadow and echoing with falling water. A headwall of eroded snow stood at the top of the canyon, the ice melted into pinnacles that looked men squatting on the rocks wearing white dunce-caps. From this point, Milton could see down the whole south slope of the mountain. A choker of black green pines encircled the contour below and rock falls had cut channels in the forest, some of the heaps of stone coiled around little green lakes like eyes staring up at the sky. Beyond the forests, the slopes of the mountain were brown with chaparral and Milton could see the road rising up over the swell of land to the chateau where the rich man lived.

It took him an hour skidding and sliding in the loose rock to cross the cleft and, in the deepest part of the notch, a stream was battering itself against lichen-starred boulders. Green moss made pompadours on the loaf-sized rocks in the creek bed. Milton knew the moss was very slippery and, so, he avoided stepping on the rocks, immersing his bare feet to the knees in the pools next to the stones. Beyond the creek, he laced himself into his boots and climbed slowly out of the canyon. About midday, Milton reached a reddish knife-ridge above the drainage. This was the corner of the mountain where it turned toward the high, brittle-looking ramparts overlooking the rumpled badlands above the big sea of white, glittering sand to the west of the peak. He picked his way down the slope to meadows toppling into twisted, red-stone canyons. The stands of pine at the edge of the meadows were oozing sap in the heat of the day and the smell was heavy, buzzing with insects feeding on the sticky ribbons spiraling around the tree trunks. Milton was tired and had been walking for eight hours or more and, so, he decided to rest for awhile on the brown bed of decaying pine needles. Some juniper berries had fallen into the needles and he crushed them with his body, smelling the sweet gin smell rising like incense in the warm air. The trees reached up for the sky very straight, narrow columns forming ranks and corridors in a woods that was both shadowy and transparent – he could see for a long distance between the trees but the branches overhead hid the sky.

Milton drank some more water and, then, said to himself: "It’s getting downright warm." He positioned himself among the trees so that he could look up at the high escarpment crowned with snow above him. For a time, he watched tiny puff-ball clouds skate over the top of the cliff and, then, he fell asleep.



4.

The mule train came up the gorge. Bells tinkled and the pack animals snorted in the warmth of the afternoon. Where the hill had slumped down, a crystal flood of water slid across the rocks and the animals hooves splashed in the water.

"It is downright warm," someone said. Milton’s father sat on a boulder streaked with a lead-grey vein of argentite. He had taken off his long pants to inspect a wound just above his knee-cap, a deep, crooked gash that smelled strongly of spoiled meat.

A wooden sluice ran down hill from the mine’s adit, draining water into a patio reservoir sealed with bitumen. Two donkeys with raw rotting hooves staggered in circles in the reservoir, turning a sodden wooden paddle. Naked men carried sacks of ore on their backs, emerging from the entrance of the mine, blinking at the bright sun and, momentarily, blinded so that they lost their footing and slipped in the muck fanning out downhill from the mineshaft.

Milton’s father looked up from his gangrenous knee and said that the quickening agent had come, brought by mule train from the harbor at Panama or shipped oversea from Almaden in Spain, The leather pouches borne by the mules were imprinted with the royal insignia and the burro train was guarded at head and tail by men carrying long lances fitted with hook-shaped iron halberds. The soldiers wore breastplates like convex mirrors and the sunbeams shone on them and reflected against the naked rock walls overlooking the ravine.

"It is getting downright warm," Milton’s father said.

The Azoguera rode a delicate horse with sad intelligent eyes and a slender muzzle. He sat on the horse side-saddle like a girl and there was a parasol stabbed into his saddle to protect the womanish-looking man, very pale and emaciated, from the sun. Milton saw that the saddle was edged with fine silver in filigree, bit and bridle tinkling musically as the animal zigzagged up the switchbacks to the mine. Some soldiers limped up the ravine among the mules and a barefoot boy led the way.

"A quinto, or one-fifth, is due to the Crown," Milton’s father said.

"I know," Milton replied. "I read that in the books."

"And this is calculated on the consumption of quickening silver used in the amalgamation process," Milton’s father said. "The Crown has the patent on the quicksilver as well."

The mules train came to a halt next to the patio lagoon. The Azoguera or "Quicksilver Man," accompanied by a tiny and naked Indian boy, decanted quivering globules of mercury from the　steel womb-shaped matraces borne in the side-saddles of the mules. The donkeys with rotting hooves screamed like human babies when the mercury was poured into the sludge under their feet. At first, the ore in the Argentinite was asleep, eyes closed and snoring. Then, mercury infused its veins and the metal opened its eyes and came to life, sitting up in its granite bed. Snow fell as sleet, dampening the eyes and forehead of the silver. It was time for the miner’s to rest. The naked men smeared with red clay from the pit sat under a ramada made from interlocked willow branches and ate beans and chili rolled into corn tortillas. Night fell and the demons from the snow fields slouching between the peaks overhead descended to the mine in the gorge and killed some of the workers there. At dawn, the shadowy leaden darkness in the narrow canyon was adorned with small fires, red as rubies clutched in tight fists of furry-black smoke – the air was heavy and smoke did not diffuse. The dead were stretched naked and raw and stiff on slabs of stone glittering with quartzite and the crows and ravens came close to them. Some of Indians pitched pebbles at the crows to make them keep their distance. Milton looked down at the dead men and tried to read the mystery written in their eyes. Then, the corpses were bound up in cloth and carried somewhere. Milton thought that a priest clad in black feathers sang a mass for the dead over the larva-shaped corpses, but, perhaps, this was only a crow calling out indignantly overhead.

At the edges of the ravine, half-hidden behind the mounds of spoil, were a lean-tos propped against the boulders and fronted with a dwarf-wall of adobes. Men wearing leather waist-coats guarded the breaches in the adobe wall. The guards carried iron swords and it was their duty to kill or mutilate any Indian who dared enter the enclosure. The mine had been troubled by theft and the heads of several criminals were displayed on posts on the rim of the gulch. The Azoguera from la Real Villa de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asis emerged from a globe-shaped tent made from bison hide inflated around wicker. He spat and tried to piss against the adobe wall, but something was wrong with his genitals and he cursed and spat again and, then, the naked boy who was with him, led the man to a bench built into the clay-brick wall and spanned with a half-hewn log of cottonwood. The boy massaged the Azoguera’s ankles, kneading his feet where the feathered wings had been amputated, and, at last, the man stood up and roared at the sky and pissed in a mighty jet the color of the red clay that the Indians were hauling from the mine in wicker baskets crushing against their shoulders and mid-spine.

The captain ordered that the Azoguera be fed and the soldiers brought him a clay cup full of a stew made from pozole and dog meat mixed with a scrapings from a tenderloin cut from one of the mountain demons that had ventured too near the encampment and been shot with a bolt from a cross-bow. Without the Azoguera, the chrysopoeia – that is the transformation of base metal into noble ore – could not be accomplished. The Azoguera had learned his trade in Potosi itself, in the antipodes, and it was said that he had been tutored by John Dee and Maestro Lorenzo, the Dutchman himself, a man said to have learned the composition of the reagent, the magisterial, in Satan’s academy. No one knew the　Azoguera’s age, and he seemed to be one that was perpetually dying – his mouth black and empty except for a few charred-looking teeth, his eyes wild in their dark sockets, his belly and breasts swollen up and strangely similar to those of a pregnant woman, prone to fits of melancholy in which he howled like a wolf or barked like a dog. Under his protuberant guts, the man wore a silver pendant shaped like the emblem for the hydrargyyrum – the symbol quicksilver as a living being, a creature walking the earth and metamorphosing all that he encountered. The pendant diagrammed the landscape of the mine, itself, a cross rising from the cleft of two female buttocks symbolizing the foothills, then, the bulbous dome of the mountain reaching into the heavens, crowned like a bull-bison with a scimitar of horn.

The Azoguera walked unsteadily, leaning heavily on the little naked boy and his staff, a rod made from polished wood with its knob carved into the heads of two rattlesnakes. He approached the patio where the burros with their scabrous and rotting hooves where churning the brine and mud slurry. The little boy knelt and scooped up a morsel of the pasty mud and the Azoguera tasted it, his tongue darting back and forth behind his blackened lips. He ordered that more salt in the measure of a half-bushel be poured into the brine. Then, the boy cupped more of the brine in his hands and held them up for the Azoguera to lick again. Nigredo, the Azoguera said and some other words that no one understood, and, then, gesturing that the mine overseers and the Indian foremen look away, he squatted, to defecate in the paste. Then, the little boy helped him rise again and he inhaled the stink coming from the patio enclosure and called for one of the leathern saddle-bags to be opened, revealing an iron flask with long slender neck. Carrying the flask as if it were a precious idol, an overseer, half Spanish and half Indian, made his way through the entrenchments and mounds of spoil, carefully passing the flask to the Azoguera as if it were a flaming baton. The Azoguera measured out a cup of quicksilver and, then, poured it into the muck, the metal extruding itself like a glittering snake to vanish in the filth of the patio slurry.

The Azoguera said that he come down from the mountain top and that the hydrargyrum was the tablet of the law and that all world’s regulation was inscribed on it. The overseer who has half-Spanish shook his head and replied that the Azoguera had come from the valleys, along the royal road from Santa Fe and that their visitor was an emissary of the crown far away across the sea. The Azoguera shook his head in disagreement, and announced that he was come like Moses from the high places of the earth to celebrate the chymical wedding and that he would take the dead ore and raise it like Lazarus. He said that he had come from the moon where that wandering planet’s face weeps tears of quicksilver. He said that he had come up from the underground, winding his way upward through the dark passes that led from Hell to Earth. The Azoguera said that every night he died and went down to the dead and that they gave him their blood in the iron, long-throated flasks and that he, then, carried that substance to the surface of the world to make the vulgar metals come alive so that they could speak and gesture like living men.

The quicksilver, the Azoguera told the gathered men, was the child of sulphur and salt and the grand elixir that accorded immortality to all things bathed in it. He said that the quicksilver was a living creature and that it dwelt exactly between day and night, between heaven and earth, and between life and death. Then, the Azoguera asked the men to come forward so that he could roll a tiny globe of the silvery stuff onto each of their tongues so that this would give them strength and cure their ailments and the workers and overseers bowing to him formed a line so that he could anoint them in this way.

Then, the quicksilver man called for the little boy to go to the bison-hide tent and bring forth the casket of the magisterial, that is, the reagent that acted with quicksilver to give life to the precious ore. He made everyone depart from the patio and said that anyone who glimpsed the magisterial or the proportions with which it was mixed would be blinded because this was the arch-secret, the secret of secrets required to animate the silver and make it come forth from the womb of the earth. The men all backed away and many of them hid themselves in the mine and, then, the Azoguero crossed himself and dosed the patio and, having finished, the overseers and Indians surrounded him again and carried the quicksilver man back into one of the lean-to huts so that the King’s portion could be calculated from the amount of hydryangyrum and magisterial apportioned the slurry in the patio.

A mound of leather sacks filled a low crater cut into the mouth of the ravine and Indians squatted around the pit guarding the ore in chalky amalgam filling those bags. A half-dozen burros would be cut from the mule-train that had carried the mercury up to the mine with the Azoguera. The bags of ore would be sent down the mountain and over the camino real to Santa Fe – this would be accomplished each day until the Azoguera’s administration of the chymical wedding was complete and the cinnabar wed, at last, to its bridegroom of silver, and the ore-bearing stones crushed into powder by the arrastre mill-stones all expended. The mine was too high on the mountain to be operated year around and, once, the ore-bearing rock extracted from its depth had been amalgamated to silver, the soldiers and the overseers and the accountants with their leather-bound registers would withdraw from the heights and the naked Indians would return to their pueblos for the winter. This was the life of the mine, a periodic frenzy of activity, then, a season of ice and frost in which the workings were all buried in the snow.

The next morning, the Azoguera rose up from his bed of rabbit-fur and buffalo-robe. The little boy had vanished. Someone saw enormous foot-prints in the mud leading up to the balloon-like tent where the Azoguera and the boy had spent the night. The footprints were bipedal, not like a coyote or a wolf or mountain lion, and they led to the Azoguera’s tent and, then, away from it down the stony ravine where the path could not be followed. The Azoguera had no one to massage his wounded ankles and so he roared in pain like a wounded bear and could not piss. The Indians fanned out around the encampment and, around noon, found the boy half-eaten in a crude grotto made from stacked stones. The overseer and the mine foreman agreed that a snow-demon had entered the camp and stolen the child and eaten him. When the boy’s remains were borne back to the camp on a dog-travois, the Azoguera took an axe and killed several of the Indians and, then, ran uphill to fortify himself in the mine. When soldiers approached the adit, he sallied out and struck them down, infused with super-human strength. Since it was impossible to dislodge the madman from his retreat, the overseer said that the Indians should wall the Azoguera in the mountain so that he would not emerge in the darkness to attack them. Big rocks were rolled down from heights and piled in front of the mine shaft cut into the mountain.

After midnight, the soldiers heard the rocks by the mine entrance shifting and, then, they tumbled away from the opening and crashed in a landslide down the slope. The people in the camp were much afflicted with mercury-belly and mercury rot in their joints and teeth and, therefore, very weak. In the black melee, they ran amuck, stabbing and clubbing at one another, and, by dawn, half a dozen of the workers were sprawled dead in the poisonous mud. The Azoquera was found lying face up in the slurry of the patio, his belly split wide open and his guts, like a mass of venomous snakes, spilled out of his body. The dead man’s face was that of Milton’s father and his eyes were open so that the crows fled from the corpse and, then, snow fell as icy sleet and whitened the cinnabar-colored slurry and made the dead man’s brow seem to sweat.

Milton felt the touch of cold water on his face. A raindrop had burrowed through the pine trees surrounding his bower. He heard thunder and saw a pillar of black cloud standing overhead, about to throw itself onto the mountain. Very high above on the escarpment, there was a climber, someone embedded like a tick in one of the cracks in the cliff. The climber was clad in nylon, bright as a child’s balloon. The cloud smashed against the mountain and, for a while, rain fell very hard and there were flashes of lightning around peaks’s crescent-shaped summits. The climber was hidden by the storm-clouds and Milton pitied him on that slick, naked face of rock. Milton himself was soaked to the bone.

A half-mile from the evergreen bower where he had napped, Milton discovered a jeep parked among some house-sized boulders in a shallow canyon at the foot of the high western wall of the mountain. A light drizzle was falling and, so, Milton sat front-seat of the jeep – it was unlocked – for an hour, napped some more, and, then, was aroused by the late afternoon sunlight shining through the windshield and making the upholstery hot as an oven. He climbed out of the truck, stretched his limbs, and, then, began to climb the flanks of the mountain once more.

　

　

5.

Milton ascended a moraine spiky with cactus and angular, desert trees. It was slow-going because the trail was faint, sometimes beckoning him aside to overlooks where the footpath digressed into a tight place sealed-off by bald, hot boulders. The moraine was made of big shattered chunks of mountain and was so stony that there was very little shade over the steep footpath. The piles of rock were hot and radiated warmth like an oven and it was sweaty work to scramble up the path, crawling upward on hand and knee in some places where the trail faded into a ladder of hand-holds made from twisted roots and unsteady stone steps. At last, he reached the top of the moraine, some ribbons of water flowing over the stone rim and, then, darting like serpents into dark nooks and crannies in the rock-fall. The valley dammed by the moraine was occupied by a long, completely still lake, a sheet of silvery reflecting glass that led eerily uphill between barren ridges of rock. At intervals, aspen or pine stood in clefts in the ridges, little deltas of green at the base of the naked side walls overlooking the tub of silent water.

Behind him, the sand dunes glowed with pale phosphorescence, a tangle of glowing crumpled linen caught in the stone hoodoos and pinnacles at the base of the mountain. He knew that the way was level along the lake and that there would be another terminal moraine in a mile or so, another harsh ascent zigzagging up the pebbly dam trapping another lake higher on the mountain. Soon it would be dark and, although Milton could manage the path in the night, there were risks and so he looked around for a place to make a fire and rest for the night. Half-way up the steep stony rise to the second, higher lake, Milton found a narrow trail blazed over a stone shelf traversing the loose gravel escarpment and leading to a chute lined with twisted dwarf trees, each displayed as an exhibit in niches in the stone hollow lit by the white jet of a small cascade billowing down the dark shaft at the back of the notch. There was horse shit on the narrow path to the waterfall and more dung decaying into hay on the room sized slab next to the dark pit through which the water was ceaselessly falling. Milton took some light canvas from his pack and pitched a low shelter, angled to keep rain away from him if it stormed. He piled up some twigs and lit a fire, but it was only fitful, a bit of orange twitching in the immense night. On the tilted slabs of rock around him, there were thousands of wolf-spiders and they emerged from the crevasses to look at the fire. The sound of the falling water kept Milton awake – sometimes, he heard voices whispering in that noise, or rhythms like a heart-beat or the rustle of great wings folding and unfolding or, even, someone singing a sad song in Spanish. He was too close to the falling water to sleep and cursed the fact that he had made his camp in that place and the night wore on, alternately cold and feverishly hot and, then, at last, Milton saw a beam of yellow light embroidering the throat of the cascade, knitting a frayed white doily in the top of that jet of water.

Then, he fell asleep and, when he opened his eyes a few hours later, the wolf spiders remained immobile, each guarding its warm shard of rock, and the water fall was lit from base to rim like a candle.

Milton unstaked the canvas tarp protecting him and, packed his backpack. Then, he returned to the pack-animal trail up the rocky slope and, in a half hour, came to the level banks of the second lake, this one narrow and green and the color of milky powder, stone milled by the glaciers slumping down to dip their toes in the tarn. A couple of small, frigate-shaped ice-bergs, floated in icy, chilled water. Milton used a hook and bait to take some steelhead trout from the lake. He make another fire and roasted the fish. Some abstract tubular reeds adorned the edges of the lagoon. After eating, he hiked along the ledges above the lake, following knee-high conical cairns heaped at two-hundred yard intervals. Within a half-hour, he reached the pass, looking down to the sliver of lake below him. The big white mountain rose without proportion or measurement beside him – it was impossible to estimate distance because there was no distinction between large and small. The steepness of the naked slopes tilting into the basins glittering with webs and threads of draining water couldn’t be assessed either – were those hillsides level enough to walk across or would you have to scramble on hands and knees upward to make the ascent or was it a matter ropes and crampons or pitons?

From the cleft in the bare ridge, Milton looked down and could see the little hilltop above the morada, the spike of a thorny-looking cross set in crack between a pair of smooth upturned domes like a woman’s buttocks. A little to the north, he saw the pimple-shaped heap of spoil sheltering his cabin. He had completed the circuit and, after an knee-jarring descent, he would be back to the exact place that he had started.

"My life is a failure," Milton thought. "I am back where I began."

He looked down to the prairie and the intersections dark with imported trees and, beyond that, to the great white horizon where the sun was busy igniting the windows of little scattered house and the steel that made up grain elevators and casting its radiance along the long, slow fuse of the freeway running along the rim of the earth.

Overhead, the jet stream slowly shredded a couple of con-trails high overhead.

Milton thought that he had spent his life searching for something that could not be found, the Spanish mine lost in the crevasses and canyons of the white mountain.

He ambled down the gentle slope to where a tiny fountain billowed up between fist-sized stones. The cool wind poured into his eyes. It would be good, cool sleeping weather at his cabin. He sat on the earth and it was springy with moss and a little moist and there were blue columbine flowers all around him.

"I have wasted my life,’ Milton said.