They were strung out on the south slope of a round lava rock hill, moving west along the fence line. He watched them disappear over a ridge, and in a few minutes he saw the lead cow reappear on the far slope, still following the fence line. They had worn a path into the ground along the south boundary fence, walking relentlessly back and forth from east to west, as if waiting for some chance to escape, for some big pine to blow down in the wind and tear open a gate to the south. South: the direction was lodged deep in their bones.
He moved quickly; his hands were shaking. The mare snorted and shied away from the sudden motions. He held the reins tight and moved closer to her, slowly, speaking softly. He patted her neck until she was calm again. He looked at the hill where the cattle had disappeared, and fumbled untying the saddle strings; he pulled the bedroll loose and reached into the folds of the blankets. Next to a rope the most important tool a rider carried was a pair of fencing pliers. Hundreds of miles of barbed-wire fence marked boundaries and kept the cattle and horses from wandering. Josiah taught him to watch for loose strands of wire and breaks in the fence; he taught Tayo how to mend them before any livestock strayed off reservation land. He helped Tayo stitch a leather holster for the pliers one evening after supper, and he reminded him that you never knew when you might be traveling some place and a fence might get in your way. Josiah had nodded toward Mount Taylor when he said it.
He pulled on his work gloves, and he cut through four strands of heavy steel wire before he realized he was standing where anyone might see him. He looked around quickly for a fence rider on horseback or a patrol in a pickup truck. His heart was pounding, and he remembered the hide-and-go-seek games of a long time ago, when he had lain flat on the ground, trying hard not to pee in his pants. He threw down the pliers and pulled off the gloves. He could think more clearly after he pissed. There was no reason to hurry. The cattle would be easy to find because they stayed close to the south boundary fence. In a few hours it would be dark, and he could go after them. It would be simple. There was no reason to hurry or make foolish mistakes.
He tied the mare in a clearing surrounded by a thicket of scrub oak. He sat under a scrub oak and picked up acorns from the ground around him. The oak leaves were already fading from dark green to light yellow, and within the week they would turn gold and bright red. The acorns were losing their green color too, and the hulls were beginning to dry out. By the time the leaves fell and the acorns dropped, he would be home with the cattle.
The sun was hanging low in the branches of the pines at the top of the ridge; the thicket and clearing were in deep shadow. The wind rustled the oak leaves, and the mare’s shit sent steam into the cold air. He crouched down with his hands in his pockets and the collar of his jacket pulled up to his ears. Up here, winter was already close. He ate another piece of jerky and a handful of parched corn, waiting for the dark. He swallowed water from the canteen and watched the sky for the autumn evening stars to appear.
He fed the mare a handful of parched corn and lifted her unshod hooves to check for damage from the sharp lava rock. He didn’t know how well she could run at night over this rocky, unfamiliar country. The dry lake flats and scrub-oak ridges could be confusing. The rolling hills scattered with lava rock and the pine ridges between clearings were almost indistinguishable from one another. He had been fooled by them before when he had gone hunting with Rocky and Robert and Josiah. They had left the truck parked in plain view, at the edge of a pine ridge. But at the end of the day, when he and Rocky had started walking back, they expected to see the old green truck parked on every ridge that came into sight. They weren’t lost, because they knew where they were, but the green truck was lost. They kept hiking across dry lake flats and over oak- and pine-covered ridges, saying to each other, “This time, this will be the place,” until finally Josiah and Robert came bouncing over the rocky flats in the green truck and picked them up.
Tayo rode the mare slowly along the fence, looking for a place that could be easily located, even at night. He would have only one chance to drive the cattle through the hole in the fence, and while he searched desperately for the opening, they could scatter in every direction. He stopped by a dead pine. Lightning had split it down the middle, and around the charred core, where the bark had peeled away, the tree had weathered silver. Behind it there was an outcrop of lava that made a knob on top of the ridge. He dismounted and went to work on the wire.
The strands of wire were four inches apart and a quarter of an inch thick. He had to stop to shake the muscle cramps from his hands. The moon was rising early. He worked on his knees, cutting away the wire at ground level, where it continued under the surface six inches deep to discourage coyotes and wolves from digging under it. He tried to clear a place to kneel, but the ground was almost solid with pebbles and rocks. After the first ten feet of cutting and bending back the wire, his knees went numb; he felt cold air on his skin and knew that his Levis were worn through at both knees. He was thinking about the cattle and how they had ended up on Floyd Lee’s land. If he had seen the cattle on land-grant land or in some Acoma’s corral, he wouldn’t have hesitated to say “stolen.” But something inside him made him hesitate to say it now that the cattle were on a white man’s ranch. He had a crazy desire to believe that there had been some mistake, that Floyd Lee had gotten them innocently, maybe buying them from the real thieves. Why did he hesitate to accuse a white man of stealing but not a Mexican or an Indian? He took off his gloves and stuck his hands inside his jacket to wipe the broken blisters on his shirt. Sweat made the raw skin sting all the way up both arms, leaving his shoulders with a dull ache. He knew then he had learned the lie by heart — the lie which they had wanted him to learn: only brown-skinned people were thieves; white people didn’t steal, because they always had the money to buy whatever they wanted.
The lie. He cut into the wire as if cutting away at the lie inside himself. The liars had fooled everyone, white people and Indians alike; as long as people believed the lies, they would never be able to see what had been done to them or what they were doing to each other. He wiped the sweat off his face onto the sleeve of his jacket. He stood back and looked at the gaping cut in the wire. If the white people never looked beyond the lie, to see that theirs was a nation built on stolen land, then they would never be able to understand how they had been used by the witchery; they would never know that they were still being manipulated by those who knew how to stir the ingredients together: white thievery and injustice boiling up the anger and hatred that would finally destroy the world: the starving against the fat, the colored against the white. The destroyers had only to set it into motion, and sit back to count the casualties. But it was more than a body count; the lies devoured white hearts, and for more than two hundred years white people had worked to fill their emptiness; they tried to glut the hollowness with patriotic wars and with great technology and the wealth it brought. And always they had been fooling themselves, and they knew it.
The cut in the fence was a good twenty feet wide, large enough for the cattle to find. He walked back to the horse and put away the pliers. He poured water over the raw skin on his hands and drank what was left in the canteen; he pissed one more time.
The moon was bright, and the rolling hills and dry lake flats reflected a silvery light illusion that everything was as visible as if seen in broad daylight. But the mare stumbled and threw him hard against the saddle horn, and he realized how deceptive the moonlight was; exposed root tips and dark rocks waited in deep shadows cast by the moon. Their lies would destroy this world.