Chapter 16. Vision Quest (pt.1)

The next morning I went to Brian’s place at the Pueblo where he welcomed me. Brian wasn’t happy about the whole situation but I was surprised to find him remorseful for his reaction to Billy last night because I thought Billy deserved whatever he got from anyone. A kerosene lamp flickered, adding eeriness to the scene with a one foot square window set in the deep adobe on one side and with bookshelves covering an entire wall on the other. I paid close attention when he spoke slowly, and deliberately, in the darkness of his small den.

“When we left California, we were visited several times like this. We had gone up there to Mahayana Ranch hoping to get away from the hassles of the city. It all broke loose a few years ago... you know, the summer of ’67. Trouble followed.”

“You think it will get worse then?” I asked.

“It brought back the memory… the headlines... of Goldberg telling the County clerks that he’d turned over his deed to the ranch to God.... then came eviction notices... court battles... of marshals and sheriffs.... of bulldozers tearing down what had been built. I’m hoping things would settle once we got ourselves established. If we do it right, we can be taken seriously. But Risingstar has always been a magnet for run-a-ways and some shady characters.” He laughed at what he’d just said, “Look at me. I should talk. I was going to fight Billy last night… all the booze and...”

“Yeah, I’m not that proud of myself either. I came out here to escape that crap,” I said. It could have been the peyote but I cared deeply about Brian’s contrition.

Brian became fatherly. “I haven’t had much opportunity to get to know you, Max. I hope you find what you came here for.”

Brian pulled a book out from his shelves and opened it. I could see it was well worn and it was a valuable text of some sort. He read aloud a verse in what sounded like Sanskrit. Then he recited in English for me… something about change and, ‘When all is over, everything having appeared and having disappeared, being and extinction both transcended and that is blissful peace’.

“What’s that from?” I was honored to be sitting in this dark room with this mysterious and helpful man. I had been starving for something like that “blissful peace” of the text but had very little idea how it was attained.

“That is from the Diamond Sutra… a Buddhist text,” Brian said without pretense.

I confessed, “You know, the reason that incident last night between you and Billy got to me was...” I hesitated before throwing caution to the wind, “I quit drinking a while back and now I’m drinking again… not too much different from Billy when I get going. I don’t want to drink and it seems I can’t get away from it.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. I have been around all kinds of abusive drunks in my life. My dad was bad but you’d never know it. He was a professor of English lit. He had a secret life that only his family saw.”

Brian hung his head, rolling it from side to side, and continued, “I swore I would never drink like him but, every once in a while, like you, I drink and I can’t tell what will happen next.”

I told him about my first acid trip in Waikiki and how I’d stayed away from drinking for three or four months after that.

 “I thought I saw that in you. You ought to go on a vision quest.”

“I’ve heard of vision quests. What would I do?”

Brian gave me a small leather pouch filled with dried peyote, saying, “Go on a fast and take this medicine pouch. Head up the arroyo to the wilderness area. When hunger hits you… take a bite or two from one of these.”

“Yeah, how long do I go?”

“Go until you have a vision.”

I had a feeling that what Brian was talking about wasn’t just some more hippy bull-shit. He was talking about a vision… a real vision and it seemed that if anything would make that happen perhaps peyote might. I wondered aloud, “I’ve seen some pretty amazing things… like at the Peyote Ceremony and all… all the coincidences on the way here, but visions? I can only admit to a calm and serene love… You know, a love was at-one with other people... Shit, I was at one with the prickly pear cactus and the sage… and, of course, the goats. You mean something more tangible than that?”

 Brian was slightly rotund in physique and he possessed an intrinsically mischievous elfish quality about him whenever his face took on a sly smirk like it did then, “There is only one way to find out, eh?”

I went back to the goat pasture with my pouch of medicine. I figured I ought to get the booze and the acid out of my system a few days before doing anything as serious as a vision quest. I was about a day into a fast when, in the morning just before sunrise, a commotion with the goats broke out. There was bleating and some rather furious noises that could have only come from a cat… a big cat. I went out to where I’d heard the ado and saw the evidence of tracks, fur on the ground and a little blood blotted into clumps by the dust here and there. Charlie had some deep gashes between his horns but he escorted me to the spot where I put two and two together. I didn’t like the idea that a cat could take one of my kids. I did a count and one was missing.

Having no rifle, I sorely needed one now. I figured Mason might have one because I’d seen a deer hide stretched out for tanning at his place on the island.

Smoke coming from the chimney of Mason’s place told me he was home... or nearby. I knocked on his door frame because there was no door. A heavy rug of an eight-pointed Morningstar pattern hung in its place.

I was peeking inside when Mason called out from a rock above the cabin behind me, “Howdy, stranger!”

Startled, I spun around to see him coming down off the rock.

I called out to him, “I need to ask you something kinda irregular,” and watched this wild-man bounce gingerly down from boulder to crag towards me.

He crossed over the creek and spread his arms to embrace me, “I’ve been waiting for you to show up. We need to sit down and smoke a bowl over it then.”

Mason went inside and came out with what looked like a classic Indian peace pipe, beaded and adorned with feathers... like in the movies. The pipe was packed with Bull Durham tobacco, herbs and sage, but no pot. We smoked and passed the pipe between us prayerfully before I brought up the goat and the cat.

“What do you want to do about the cat?” Mason asked.

“Huh?” How did he know? “I was wondering if you have a rifle.”

“I know. You want to kill the cat?”

“Yeah, I can’t see letting the goats get picked off one by one.”

Leaning towards me like he wanted to keep a secret, he whispered, “You know anything about cats?”

“Not really. Just that one of ‘em is eating my kids.”

Holding a forefinger to his lips like a librarian shushing, “Shhh, didn’t we eat one the other day?”

I respected Mason’s judgment and took his whispering as a rejection of my request for the rifle. I admitted, “Yeah, we did.”

 I was afraid he was mocking the whole idea and was ready to spring for the door.

“If you gotta do it….” Mason paused a few minutes as though he were weighing my character. “Big cats, they kill in the hour before and the hour after sunset before the deer lay down. The other period is and the hour before and after sunrise when they rise again.”

“Very well, then all I have to do is stay up an hour after sundown and get up an hour before sunrise… maybe throw rocks or sticks at ‘em if they go for any of my goats?”

“It is likely it is only one, probably a female cat this time of the year. Rocks and sticks? Wouldn’t you rather have a rifle?”

“Yeah.”

“You know how to use one?” he asked earnestly. I liked the idea that he asked. It was one of those things I have about guns. I’d been raised using them and learned to respect and use them safely.

“You know the rifle that Angelo came into the Peyote Ceremony with?”

“Winchester .44, lever action, I thought it looked like it was old enough to be at Little Big Horn.”

Mason went inside and came out with the rifle. I wondered if Mason knew Angelo would show up the way he did at the ceremony. He handed me the rifle and a box of ammo holding only five rounds. I checked out the rifle’s lever action to see if the chamber was empty and was pleased to see it was well maintained, oiled and wiped clean. I found the date with on the plate in front of the trigger guard where1886 was stamped. I said, “It looks like this rifle could’ve been handed down from Custer’s Last Stand.”

“If it was there this rifle would be almost a Vatican relic to the Human Beings but The Battle of the Greasy Grass was in ‘76. It sure wouldn’t be in my hands if it was there,” Mason snorted.

“Never heard of that. I was talking about Little Big Horn.”

“That’s what I said, The Greasy Grass. We have other names for it.”  

“Oh, I see.”

He continued, “Now, cats have a range of seventy or eighty miles. But they will carry their kill only as far away as their den. You probably won’t find her anyway.”

Mason went back inside his cabin and turned to say, “Go do what you have to and nothing more.”

Thinking of Barney and his bullet, I said, “With five rounds… I’m pretty safe on that account.”

Going back to the pasture, I put together a small kit. The vision quest would be combined with the hunt. I had to get going while the trail was still fresh. Not all that sure I was good enough at tracking to find and follow it, I set out anyway. My coat and good Army Surplus boots as well as a warm flannel shirt and jeans with a small day-pack I’d sewn together with some scrap canvass was all I needed.