The Early Lafferty, page 1
02-04-2023
The Early
Lafferty
ump
Contents
Rain Mountain
~ previously unpublished
The Wagons
~ originally printed in the New Mexico Quarterly Review, Spring 1959
The Other Side of The Moon
~ originally printed in Husk Magazine, March 1960
Long Teeth
~ originally printed in Keyhole Mystery Magazine, August 1960
Saturday You Die
~ originally printed in Artesian Magazine, Spring 1960
Task Force Fifty-Eight and One Half
~ previously unpublished
‘The Early Lafferty’,is Copyright 1988 by R.A.Lafferty
ALL RIGHTS ARE RESERVED
This booklet is number of an edition limited to
500 copies. In addition to being numbered; copies 1 through 150
are also signed by the author.
Published by UNITED MYTHOLOGIES PRESS, P.O. Box 390, Station ‘A’
Weston, Ontario, CANADA, M9N-3N1
ISBN 0-921322-00-3
Signed Edition ISBN 0-921322-01-1
Rain Mountain
Atorrante was a four-year-old male, of the colour and texture of pale moonlight. One who knew lions would have guessed him at two hundred and twenty pounds, yet he moved as though he were without weight; and a great part of the time he was invisible against the evening background.
His head was large, and he wore a black mask; distinct markings about the eyes and muzzle. His three brothers had all been marked in the same way at birth, but their markings had faded. It is quite unusual to keep the markings into adulthood.
For Atorrante looked like the Black Panther of the stories, though there is an argument never settled whether there is such a thing as a black panther, and whether the panther and the mountain lion are the same thing.
Atorrante had lately lost his mate, and had himself been shoulder-shot. Yet he now moved one hundred and eighty miles in forty-eight hours. Nobody has yet found the reason why the Mountain Lion will travel. But once he begins—he will move till he dies. He may go a thousand miles in three weeks. And a traveler does not act right. He will go till he is killed.
Atorrante crossed water, cleared brush, and disappeared into the flanks of Rain Mountain.
Rain Mountain is of blue granite, and it slept now in hazy pink twilight. It is not the highest, it is not the steepest, it was not the largest of the near mountains. But it was the wildest, the most brambled and overgrown; it was just plain the lonest mountain in that hundred miles between Medicine Park and Haystack Mountain. It was a desolate blue mountain rising from the tangled banks of one of the little Reds. For the Red River itself disappears here into it’s squabbling branches, and there is no main river: only the Prairie Bog, Town Fork, the Salt Fork, the North Fork, the Deep Red Run, and the Cache Creek Run of the Red. This was the Deep Red Run, as shabby and wild a creek as Rain Mountain was a wild and shabby mountain.
Old Rain was often uninhabited. Johnny Blue Stone had a shack there, but Johnny might be gone for months at a time. He had only to hear the whistle of the train thirteen miles away, or to smell cut-off timber burning, or to watch wheat yellow the far horizon, and he would be off somewhere, anywhere.
And on old Rain Mountain was a dug-out style rock hut that had once been the mining claim of J.T.Gilford, and then had been a sheep herders’ haven in the years when there had been sheep on Rain Mountain; and had later been lived in by an Indian named Charley Coldstream.
Charley Coldstream had now been dead for seven years; yet there were nights when he came back, and his fire could be seen in the old rock hut.
Or that is what the boys in the Panther Patrol told each other.
For the third habitation on Rain Mountain was the cabin of the Panther Patrol.
There were seven boys in the Panther Patrol, and six of them came up onto Rain Mountain together that evening, the first Monday in June: Terry McGuire, Tommy Tipton, Dionigi Manovello, and Conrad Crain, all of a size and the same age, twelve; and Hayden Flood and Stanely Ridgepole, two boys several years older. These six came up the five miles from the Tipton farm where they had assembled, and moved their gear into the Panther cabin at sunset. The seventh member of the patrol, Carl Cornhouse, had not been able to come with them.
“Get wood, before it’s dark, quite a lot of wood,” said Hayden, “and water. Fill everything.” For the Panther Patrol cabin was on almost the highest point of Rain Mountain and high above both wood and water. For, though it was a mountain full of water, yet the highest spring broke out nearly two hundred feet below them; and the top of the last pine was a long leap down from Panther Ridge.
The cabin itself was hardly walled. It had a fitted rock floor, six piers of cemented stone, and a good rough rafter and shingle roof with quite an overhang. Well drained, it was almost rainproof except in the most driving wind. But it was not really walled. Yet the rock floor was always a high dry place for the sleeping bags, and the rafters gave storage for a number of things that had been carried up there, high lashed on bags or on poles, animal-safe and dry.
And the campfire was built half in half out, under the western overhang in a low rock-walled oven or hearth.
“My father says not to worry whatever they pull,” said Terry McGuire. “He says the first night in the Panther Patrol cabin on the mountain is an initiation. They’ll try to scare us. They’ll tell us wild stories.
And then in the night they’ll make a noise or a disturbance. But we are not to let them scare us. The Panther Patrol was started a long time ago.
He said that if all the boys that had been scared on the mountain were laid end to end they’d reach all the way to Lone Wolf.”
“We don’t want those branches,” said Tommy Tipton. “They’re to hard to carry up through the bushes and brambles. Let’s just chop up this old fall into two-foot lengths and carry them up. My father says there’s no such thing as a panther. There’s no such animal. A leopard was called a panther once, and a tiger was called a panther. And in America the mountain lion is called the panther. But Panther is a Greek word, and it means ’all the animals’. It was made up of a tiger’s head, and a leopard’s body, and a bear’s paws, and a lion’s tail. It was only a storybook animal. And there isn’t any such thing as a black panther. It’s only something to scare you with.”
They carried the wood up from White Mule draw to the top of Rain Mountain. There used to be a white mule in White Mule Draw. He had lived there yet when the father of Terry McGuire had been in the Panther Patrol.
He had been forty years old when he died, the oldest mule in the county.
He had been a mine mule from the time that J.T.Gilford had mined here.
Dionigi Manovello laid and built the fire. Dionigi, though one of the youngest, could lay the neatest fire of any boy in the Panther Patrol. And he was an expert on all manner of woodcraft. This was because, he told them, he was an Indian, a member of the old Anadarko tribe. He was the darkest of them, and he seemed to look like an Indian, unless you happened to think what an Indian really looked like. For he had told them so often that he was an Indian that they had come to believe it, even the older boys; even if they remembered when he had first come there, and that his father had been an Italian railroad worker. But let him be an Indian if he wanted to be. Dionigi made a good Indian.
The old iron skillet was brought down from the rafters, and the boys made spits. The skillet had not been brought up from the valley; the skillet had been on the mountain for years. It had been found in the hut of Charley Coldstream. It may have been there when the sheep herders were there. It may have been there when the mine was there.
“But it was a zinc mine,” said Conrad Crain.
“There may have been iron there, too,” said Stanely Ridgepole. “Just look at the old rocks in the morning. You’ll see that some of them are iron rocks.”
They spitted sausages and wieners, and toasted burnt buns and bread.
They made coffee and cocoa. Then they spread their sleeping bags; and Stanely Ridgepole strummed his guitar with a sort of background music while Hayden Flood talked sleepily.
“This is a pretty safe place, as safe as you can get on the mountain. There’s only two bears been seen all spring, and Mr. Mobley says they’re both down in the bottoms now. Besides, they’re only half grown and not bothersome, and a fire will almost always keep a bear away. The rattlesnakes never come above the ridge. The weasels will come in when your asleep sometimes and make a little hole in your throat and drink your blood, and they do it so quiet that you never know it’s happened except that you feel tired in the morning. But at this time of the year they’re so fat on prairie chicken that they won’t be up here bothering for blood.
“And the Black Panther hasn’t been here for seven years. It’s as safe here as it can ever be on the mountain. Of course it’s never on the
Mountain.”
“My father says there’s no such thing as the Black Panther,” said Tommy Tipton. “He says it’s just a legend.”
“Your family hasn’t been in this part of the country as long as some of the others,” said Hayden. “But wasn’t it just seven years ago tonight that the black panther killed and partly ate Charley Coldstream? And didn’t the doctor open his eyes and shine one of those little lights in? And wasn’t the black panther printed on his eyes, the last thing he saw before it killed him? But it went away before the men could hunt it down.
“It’s just a story they made up,” whispered Terry McGuire to Tommy Tipton. “It’s part of the initiation.”
“He didn’t make up the part about the black panther being printed on Charley Coldstream’s eyeballs,” said Tommy. “I heard Mr. Mauser tell that in the barber shop.”
“I don’t believe it,though,” said Terry. “I don’t believe that the last thing you see before you die is printed on your eyes.”
“If your an Indian, then it is,” said Tommy. “The last thing an Indian sees before he dies is printed on his eyeballs.”
“That’s right. I forgot that Charley Coldstream was an Indian.”
And a little after nine-thirty that night Carl Cornhouse started up Rain Mountain, only he started up the west face. He was the oldest of the boys and he knew the mountain best.
“They say that the ghost of Charley Coldstream comes back,” said Stanely Ridgepole, “but I never believed in ghosts. They say he will come
to warn of the Black Panther if it ever returns. He will come and light a fire in his old rock hut as a signal to all the people that the Black Panther is back. His rock hut is the highest thing on Rain Mountain and people everywhere will be able to see the fire.”
“When did you say the panther killed the Indian?” asked Dionigi.
“Just seven years ago tonight,” said Hayden Flood.
“And how often is he supposed to come back?”
“They say every seven years, isn’t that right, Stanley?”
“That’s right, every seven years.”
“Then he could come tonight?” asked Dionigi.
“That’s right. I never thought of it. But we all have clubs and Hayden Flood is going to stay awake to watch.”
Atorrante, the black-muzzled puma, now settled down in White Mule Draw. But he would rest only a few hours. He never rested long since he had become a wanderer. He was restless and feverish in sleep.
Now everything on Rain Mountain was asleep except Carl Cornhouse who slowly made his way up the west face and had almost reached the crest.
The crickets were four hundred feet below them on the slope. The owls hooted as though under water, and flew far below their feet. And a calf could be heard bawling so far down that it sounded as though it were in the bottom of a well.
Terry McGuire gripped Tommy tightly by the wrist and Tommy started up in terror.
“Oh! It’s only you. I thought it was a big snake that had me.”
“Tommy, I said it was only stories to scare us. I said it would only be an initiation. But they are all lying there asleep. Count them. You can see them all here. And out there is the fire.”
“Our fire? It’s still glowing. Why shouldn’t it be?”
“No. I mean on the very top of the mountain. Look, it’s a fire at Charley Coldstream’s hut.”
“How could there be? There isn’t anybody to light it.”
“But you can see it burning. It didn’t light itself. Tommy, I’m scared.”
“Do you think he came back?”
“Yes, the dead Indian came back to light the bonfire. He came back to warn people that the Black Panther is back on Rain Mountain.”
“We got—got to wake up the rest. Tell them it’s the black—black panther. I can’t holler. You holler.”
“I can’t talk more than a whisper. It’s like a dream where you try to holler and wake yourself up. And you open your mouth and you can’t make a sound. Tommy, we (lave to wake them up. I’m too scared to move. I can’t even get up to run. If we’re too scared to holler, then the panther will come and eat us all.”
They both tried to cry out, but they were so paralized with fright that they could only croak. They opened their mouths and strained in terror to break the spell with a cry.
Then the terrifying scream of the Panther sounded from the west wall of the Mountain; and it’s sound echoed among them like cascades of horrible lightning.
Carl Cornhouse had spent many hours practicing his panther scream. He lived on the other side of the mountain from the other boys and had often practiced it around home. It was chilling, made out of broken sobs and stranglings and a curdling series of ascending screams. It scared his dogs, it scared the crows, that scream would scare almost anyone. But even he had no idea what a wild thing it would seem heard on top of Rain Mountain at night.
After he had climbed the west face of the mountain he had lit the fire at Charley Coldstream’s hut. Then he had shied rocks at the cabin of the Panther Patrol until he saw that two of the younger boys had stirred and had seen the fire. Hayden and Stanley would have been awake anyhow but pretending sleep, for they were in on it. this is the way that boys were initiated into the Panther Patrol, with this scare at night on the mountain. But there had never been anyone who could give the panther scream as well as Carl Cornhouse.
And once more he gave it, and it was as though ice crystals formed in the blood of those who heard it and the hair raised clear off the head.
And now was the time to cinch it.
“Panther,” howled Hayden Flood. “Run, run.”
“Panther,” cried Stanley Ridgepole. “Run for your lives.”
And the four young boys, and the two who were a little older, tore out of the Panther Patrol cabin into the mountaintop darkness.
Atorrante stretched and rose, grumbling and cranky, in White Mule Draw. As the scream came again he bounded like a ghost to the mountaintop.
He came almost on top of one boy who stumbled, fell, crawled, clawed, and ran stumbling. “Panther, panther!” cried Carl Cornhouse.
Then Hayden and Stanley were laughing. “Here is your panther,” Hayden said. “Now you all belong to the Panther Patrol. Carl didn’t come with us. But he came up the other side of the mountain later and lit the fire at Charley Coldstream’s hut so you would think the dead Indian had come back to warn you. So Carl is your panther.”
“Panther,” sobbed Carl. “Panther!”
“It’s over with now,” said Hayden. “Don’t act it so much. I’ve already told them. But you really can give that panther scream.”
Then it came again. It wasn’t as loud or fancy as the panther scream of Carl Cornhouse. It hadn’t that sobbing effect and that strangle in it.
But it had something else. It was solider. There was hair on this panther and you could smell him.
Atorrante came with a sort of grumbling rush, and the seven boys fell flat with terror. And the big puma cleared them all with one leap and went over the side and down the mountain in the dark. Atorrante would find a more peaceful mountain elsewhere.
And one thing is pretty sure: on the eyes of seven boys there would be imprinted forever that Black Panther as he began his leap against the bonfire by the dead Indians hut.
The Panther Patrol still exists. And a great many boys have been initiated into it and grown out of it since that time. And there have been other experts of the panther scream, and they tell the story better than they used to. There is more of it to tell. And if all the boys who have been scared on that mountain were put in one line they would reach all the way to Elk City. But since that time it has been nothing but initiations.
But this year could be different. For it has been seven years again since Carl Cornhouse gave the panther scream, and was answered by Atorrante on top of Rain Mountain.
And the Black Panther commonly returns every seven years.
The Wagons
“But when did they have them first? Did they always have them? Who were the first ones to have them?”
