From the Improvement Era, 1938-39 –

The Native Blood

By Albert R. Lyman

Chapter 1

The black stallion plunged over the broken rim of the mesa and the wild band followed in a thundering stream after him. They raced down the slope; they leaped rocks and brush and gullies, beating and plowing the earth with their flinty hoofs. They are gone, their cloud of dust drifts away on the wind and the roar of their flying feet dies on the desert silence. When they have crossed the low hills at the bottom, they become a comet-like disturbance in the haze of that distant ridge.

And down the slope from the broken rim, intent and eager on the deep-cut trail, comes Yoinsnez and his stripling son — raised quirts — full speed — their mustangs a-puff and flecked with hot lather. They reach the low hill with fagging bound — they dwindle to a trot, to a walk, to a dead stop on a low ridge.

Oh, the mysterious endurance of that black horse! “Shi dobahttsen!” (I can’t understand it) panted Yoinsnez, knitting his retreating brow.

The chase is lost to Yoinsnez and his son, but not yet lost to their rival, Husteele, Away over yonder in the misty distance Husteele is waiting on his fleet black mare, eager to tread on the heels of the desperate band when they are dropping with exhaustion.

As they approach his lookout on the hilltop, he hurries cautiously down expecting to surprise them at a certain rocky point, to ride through the staggering procession and lasso king of the mesa when his breath is. spent from his long run.

Before Husteele reaches that rocky point, the black horse makes a surprise turn down a ravine to the left, leading his panting herd away over a spread of dangerous rocks. Husteele rides eagerly after them — quirt raised — top speed. Surely he will overtake them; they are weary, so he whips forward, nursing big hopes.

He finds a colt sprawled in the rocks from exhaustion; he finds a mare with blood on her labored breath — she has burst a lung trying to keep pace with her black king. Husteele’s mare responds less and less to the fierce quirt, until he has to relent, for her heart is pounding as if about to break. But what difference, supposing he had a fresh horse right now, the black stallion would leave one after another of his band spent or dead behind him, but the stallion himself would pierce the distance alone, secure from all pursuit.

Moping to the top of a sandhill, Husteele scans the distance behind him, wondering whether his rivals have detected his fruitless effort to profit at their loss.

*****

The gods of the desert nurse their children with hardship and want. With stern hands they develop endurance and strength by killing the weak and the unfit, and they bring forth a breed of men and animals to laugh at weariness and defy death.

It is alleged that Ishmael, Hagar’s son of Bible fame, by some unusual stroke of fortune, concentrated in one mare the stamina of all the good horses in that part of the world. That mare’s foal was the invincible Arabian who fought his way westward through persistent generations over the deserts of the Barbary countries and northward with the Moors into Spain. From there he went with the old conquerors into Mexico and fought his way northward again among inferior breeds to appear at frequent intervals as a mysterious freak with the mustangs.

Hidden for generations in the wondrous possibilities of desert cayuse stock, he appeared again as a miracle individual in a wild band on Huskaniny Mesa of the Navajo country on the line between Utah and Arizona. According to the Navajos he was a full grown horse when he first appeared. At all events, he had reached his magnificent maturity when they discovered him among the wild horses of the desert, and that discovery started the sharp rivalry between Yoinsnez and Husteele.

The pronounced tendencies of the black horse, dating from forced response to hard embargoes long ago in Arabia and in the Barbary states, found native relish for the desert demands of the reservation. By some magic of nature he had reverted to the invincible Arabian of ancient countries far away.

And now in this modern desert, as in those deserts of the past, this Arabian horse found a race of men inured to privation and hardship, a tribe selected through ages of biting difficulty and want as the fittest to survive. And the fittest among these desert men had an instinctive desire to share the glory of the black stallion’s survival, to ride with matchless honor on his back and be thus kingly among men, as the stallion was kingly among horses.

To them he was Beleeh thlizhen ( Blackhorse), and they competed determinedly for his capture. It was all in vain— Blackhorse maintained his freedom and snorted his exultation of defiance in the solitude. He grew more lithe of body and more cunning of mind with every experience. He plunged down over dangers where no broke horse could be induced to follow, and he leaped up where none could follow, however much he tried.

He would disappear for weeks at a time, and all their hunting failed to reveal his hiding place or his tracks. When they withdrew from his retreat in the wilderness and stayed away long enough, he returned to his band as mysteriously as he had come.

He was a phantom. He made tracks in the dust; he could be seen and heard, but no man had been able to touch him. He was the kind of creature that appeared nowhere but in the enchanted remoteness of the extreme far-away. Yet wild admiration impelled Yoinsnez and Husteele to race after him, to lay snares and make blind corrals in his trail, and then to admire with astonishment when he steered clear of every one of them.

Yoinsnez and his son waited under cover of trees and brush along the rim for days at a time. They rode their cayuses to a frazzle over hill and canyon, determined to have the magnificent wild creature, no matter how many ordinary horses they rode to death on his trail. But he went always where they figured he would not go, and he mocked them in the captivating game where horses match wits with men. The minute they made sure he was captured, they found only his deep-cut tracks or saw a mocking little dust drifting away on the wind.

In Husteele’s blood from vigorous generations, ran the eager passion of the race-track. His most precious asset was the fleet black mare, next to her his bay mare and then his white mare. He cherished a scheme for an extraordinary relay chase by which he hoped to exhaust and capture the wild stallion or decoy him into a trap. But the mesa-king entrusted by nature with the one supreme task of preserving his own liberty, seemed to travel in his thoughts two full jumps ahead of men and their cunning plots against him.

Every time he proved he could not only run faster but think faster than the Navajos, they became just that much more crazy to have him for their own. The eager rivalry became all-absorbing — Beleeh thlizhen! Surely he had some supernatural power and their admiration amounted to little less than worship.

They caught glimpses of his black figure in the distance, always in the distance, his coat shining like polished metal. He loved the uplands of Huskaniny Mesa, but he could slip easily from it to the far-away, and sometimes he took his course among the mysterious buttes of Monument Valley, where two of those buttes called “The Mittens,” reached up like ponderous hands against the sky-line.

Weird shapes and deceiving mirages hovered over the monuments and over the magnificent stretches of yucca and prickly-pear between them. Enchantment of distance gave fanciful profiles to rocks and mountains far away, all of them confirming fabulous stories of the invincible black horse. He was alleged to be in league with the ghosts of the mirage, and the ghosts told him when to fly and where.

A plague of influenza rode the winds over the reservation. It prostrated Yoinsnez and every one in his hogan — it crushed the life from his stripling son and hung grimly on his little daughter, Eltceesie. While they lay helpless and sorrowing on their blankets, Husteele and his little son, Peejo, went hunting again on the mesa. Tormented with his utter helplessness to follow cautiously on their tracks, Yoinsnez contrived to make sure that they did not bring with them the mesa king. They returned under cover of night, but daylight showed their horses sleek and full, proving they had not been in any recent chase. That meant they had not found Blackhorse; he had not yet returned from another mysterious vacation; and Yoinsnez could still be first to pursue him when he came back.

Two days later the plague struck fiercely at Husteele and his household. With no help nor even a visit from their stricken neighbors, they fought the monster through ten terrible days, maintaining a more and more feeble resistance till they lay still in death or agony around the fire in the center of the hogan. Only one, fittest of the family, the eleven-year-old Peejo, was still alive when Yoinsnez mustered strength to ride a mile and peer in through the doorway.

(To be continued)