THE MARBLE MINE
All of Rufus’s comings and goings were via New Marble Mine Road, which was passable even to ordinary cars once he had gone up and down the length of it and shoveled gravel into some big holes and removed a few rocks. These had tumbled down out of the high ground to either side. The road ran sometimes parallel to, sometimes right down the middle of, what was theoretically a watercourse. T.R. would have called it a stochastic river. In its upper reaches, within a mile of the mine itself, this was as dry and dead as any other part of the Chihuahuan Desert. Farther down, it was joined by a couple of other such arroyos in a flat pan that in any other part of the world might have been a pond, or at least a marsh. Here it was a stretch of low yellowed grass that apparently sunk roots deep enough to strike underground moisture. This was interspersed with cactus and other such plants. In a few deep crevices, actual standing water could be observed, especially as September gave way to October and the temperature dropped.
The only problem with this setup was that no vendor in the world would deliver packages to the minehead, and so almost every day he had to drive down the valley to High Noon to collect stuff he’d ordered online. One morning he was doing that, passing along right next to that low grassy patch, when two horses galloped across the road. It all happened fast. But he could have sworn that one of the horses was bloody.
He pulled up and got out to have a look around. Sure enough, there was blood on the grass next to the tracks that their unshod hooves had made in the dust. Unshod because, of course, the only horses you were going to see running around loose in a place like this were mustangs.
Then he heard an all too familiar noise: the squealing of a wild pig, not more than a hundred feet away.
His view was blocked by a swell in the ground, but when he vaulted up into the bed of his truck he was able to look over that and see another horse engaged in battle with a foe who was so low down that it could only be glimpsed through the grass and the thorny undergrowth. But Rufus knew what it was.
He jumped down into the cab and pulled the truck off the road and up onto that little rise. Then he took his rifle out from behind the seat, climbed up into the back of the truck again, and chambered a round. From this vantage point he could clearly see the wild boar, maneuvering around the mustang, trying to get one of its tusks into the horse’s leg. The horse, of course, was having none of that and kept rearing up to strike down with front hooves or spinning round to kick out with rear. Both animals were mud-spattered. It could be guessed that they were disputing possession of a water hole. This pig had probably been wallowing down in one of those hidden wet places when the horses had come upon it hoping to get a drink.
They had been conducting these hostilities for a while. Both animals were tired. From time to time they would just stop and watch each other. During one of those intervals, Rufus put a .30-caliber slug through the boar’s heart and dropped him like one of those stray boulders that sometimes peeled off the canyon wall. He might have expected the mustang to bolt at the sound of the gun. It startled, but it did not run. Rufus was able to get a good look at it through his scope and saw that it was a gelding. A very uncommon thing among wild horses, who generally were not big practitioners of surgical castration on the open range. Moreover, he was wearing a halter. Old, filthy, and tattered, but definitely a halter. And that was a shame because it could have got tangled on something and condemned this animal to a long slow death.
Rufus knew better than to try to approach it. Instead he got back in his truck and drove away. But to his list of errands he added a new item, which was that he made a detour to a part of the ranch where ordinary livestock operations were still underway and picked up some bales of hay. On his way back to the marble mine, he kicked one of these out of the truck and left it on the
road just near where he had shot the wild boar. The horses were not in evidence, but when he came back the next day he found that they had demolished it. So he left another bale a few hundred yards farther up the road, trusting them to find it, which at least one of them did.
A week of this led to a moment when Rufus and the gelding came in view of each other, just a short distance down the road from the marble mine. Rufus avoided making eye contact, which only would have ruined everything, but instead turned his back and went quietly about his business, letting the animal understand that Rufus and his truck were the source of this incredible bounty of fodder.
Within forty-eight hours of that moment, horse and man were quietly and peaceably co-occupying the cool shady refuge before the opening of the mine, and Rufus was trying to figure out how he was going to supply this animal with water. He was going to need a bigger tank.