Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [213]
She stared with eyes stretched to their widest, and as she stared, the firmament rolled one dizzying half turn, so that she was looking not up, but down, into a canyon filled with brightness, on whose bottom the moon lay among silver pebbles, a penny flung for luck into a cosmic Serpentine.
“I wish . . .” she said, not knowing what she wished.
Her neck stiffened, her chin came up off her hands. She listened, caught by some sound. Then she heard it again, a musical, drawn-out howling downriver. It paused, broke into a kind of barking, lifted again into the howl.
The hair prickled on the back of her neck. She was familiar with the usual animals of their mountains and deserts, and she knew this was no mountain lion–a mountain lion mewled and complained like a distressed child. It was deeper and more thrilling than the yap and quaver of a coyote. A wolf, then. Even the sheepherders, who liked to dramatize the dangers of their life, admitted that wolves were getting scarce. Yet what else could this be? And if there was ever a night on which a wolf would want to tilt his muzzle to the moon and let out the sound of his wild heart, this was the night.
The sound was gone, diffused in sky, lost among canyon walls. Her straining ears picked up only a sort of ringing in the air, and that, she was sure, was not in the air at all, but in her own head. She put her chin back on her laced hands and brooded into the patterned shadows of the corral.
In a minute she heard the sound again, this time definitely closer. It had come around some obscuring corner; it was moving her way. In quick fear she took a step backward, estimating with her eye the distance to the hidden end of the bridge. But then she stopped and turned her head sideward to listen once more.
There was something un-wolfish about this wolf, something too human. He howled something too close to a tune, he barked something too reminiscent of words. In double relief she laughed aloud. It was Oliver, riding home in the midnight quiet, picking his way from shadow into moonlight and into shadow again, his hat off, maybe, his shirt open to the softness of night, and singing like a boy on a hayride.
Perception and inference were all but simultaneous. If he rode home singing, his long day must have had results. Someone must have put up the few thousand dollars he needed to dig his mile of the Susan Canal. Any potential investors sent out by General Tompkins in the spring might see water flowing around the contour at the canyon’s mouth, and a wheatfield on the sagebrush bench above the Olpens’.
Another corner; the sound came suddenly louder, enlarged by echoes.
How the old folks would enjo-o-o-o-oy it,
They would sit all ni-i-i-ght and lis-ten,
As we sa-a-a-a-ang
I-i-i-innnn the e-e-e-ev’-ning
By-y-y-y the moo-oo-oo-oonlight.
Alone, contented with himself and the world, he bellowed in a way to make her smile. As soon as he had sung the melody through, he instantly sang the same verse in the bass, as if trying to sing harmony with himself, and she was reminded of the guides Augusta had told her about, who sang two notes up into the ceiling of the baptistry at Pisa, and let the roof fuse them into a fat round chord.
He was as moon-mad as she was. She heard hoof-irons ring on stone-he was getting close. In a few seconds he would ride into the flat and into visibility. Impulsively she skipped into the shadow of the shed, and there, pressing her back against the rounding logs, she waited to surprise him.
The hoofs passed from rock to dust, came close, closer, stopped. “Hoo, boy,” Oliver said. The saddle creaked. She peeked around the corner of the shed and saw his long leg swing over the cantle and around, his body with its back to her jackknifed in the act of dismounting. Then there was a hard, angry grunt, and he was flat on his back in the dust.
She cried out, and sprang from her hiding place to help him. The mule shied sideways,