I Married a Ranger | Page 7

I was glad to creep into bed. My kitten snuggled down close to the pillow and sang sleepy songs, but I couldn't seem to get to sleep. Only cheesecloth nailed over the windows stood between me and all sorts of animals I imagined prowled the surrounding forest. The cheesecloth couldn't keep the noises out, and the cry that I heard might just as well have been the killing scream of a cougar as a bed-time story of a tree frog. It made my heart beat just as fast. And although the rangers declared I never heard more than one coyote at a time, I knew that at least twenty howling voices swelled the chorus.
While I was trying to persuade myself that the noise I heard was just a pack rat, a puffing, blowing sound at the window took me tremblingly out to investigate. I knew some ferocious animal was about to devour me! But my precious flowers were the attraction. A great, gaunt cow had taken the last delectable bite from my pansy bed and was sticking out a greedy tongue to lap in the snapdragons. Throwing on my bathrobe, I grabbed the broom and attacked the invader. I whacked it fore and aft! I played a tune on its lank ribs! Taken completely by surprise, it hightailed clumsily up through the pines, with me and my trusty broom lending encouragement. When morning came, showing the havoc wrought on my despoiled posies, I was ready to weep.
Ranger Winess joined me on my way to breakfast.
"Don't get far from Headquarters today," he said. "Dollar Mark Bull is in here and he is a killer. I've been out on Tony after him, but he charged us and Tony bolted before I could shoot. When I got Tony down to brass tacks, Dollar Mark was hid."
I felt my knees knocking together.
"What's he look like?" I inquired, weakly.
"Big red fellow, with wide horns and white face. Branded with a Dollar Mark. He's at least twenty years old, and mean!"
My midnight visitor!
I sat down suddenly on a lumber pile. It was handy to have a lumber pile, for I felt limp all over. I told the ranger about chasing the old beast around with a broom. His eyes bulged out on stems.
Frequent appearances of "Dollar Mark" kept me from my daily tramps through the pines, and I spent more time on the Rim of the Canyon.
Strangely, the great yawning chasm itself held no fascination for me. I could appreciate its dizzy depths, its vastness, its marvelous color effects, and its weird contours. I could feel the immensity of it, and it repelled instead of attracted. I seemed to see its barrenness and desolation, the cruel deception of its poisonous springs, and its insurmountable walls. I could visualize its hapless victims wandering frantically about, trying to find the way out of some blind coulee, until, exhausted and thirst-crazed, they lay down to die under the sun's pitiless glare. Many skeletons, half buried in sand, have been found to tell of such tragedies.
It was only in the evenings, after the sun had gone down, that I could feel at ease with the Canyon. Then I loved to sit on the Rim and look down on the one living spot far below, where, almost a century ago, the Indians made their homes and raised their crops, watering the fields from the clear, cold spring that gushes out of the hillside. As the light faded, the soft mellow moon would swim into view, shrouding with tender light the stark, grim boulders. From the plateau, lost in the shadows, the harsh bray of wild burros, softened by distance, floated upward.
On a clear day I could see objects on the North Rim, thirteen miles away, and with a pair of strong field glasses I could bring the scene quite close. It looked like a fairyland over there, and I wanted to cross over and see what it was really like. White Mountain advanced the theory that if we were married we could go over there for our honeymoon! I had to give the matter careful consideration; but while I considered, the moon came up, and behind us in the Music Room someone began to play softly Schubert's "Serenade." I said, "All right. Next year we'll go!"

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Chapter III: "I DO!"
The Washington Office decided, by this time, that I was really going to stay, so they sent another girl out to work with me. The poor Superintendent was speechless! But his agony was short-lived. Another superintendent was sent to relieve him, which was also a relief to me!
My new girl was from Alabama and had never been west of that state. She was more of a tenderfoot than I, if possible. At first she insisted one had to have a bathtub or else