Venerable Lapdog

Down All the Days By Jay Bates
The mist hung over the hills, wafting in the cold wind blowing down the Diablo Range. We four humble beings hunkered around our screens washing the dirt from tailings, looking for the mythical gemstone Benitoite.
Some weeks before we had been there on a warm summer day basking in the sunny warmth and the aroma of the incense cedars searching for little electric blue crystals. It seemed much easier then to find the little rare blue gems to our mutual delight.
Now it seems they had all disappeared. Still we soldiered on for we knew not when we may return to these usually dusty hills in search of the stone for which we feared now could not be found.
The wash water ran out. So I put a hitch on the back of my battered Jeep and trailed the water tank trailer down to the dry river bottom to pump it full from an underground tank placed there to collect the oncoming rains. I crept up the hill , sliding on the muddy track in four-wheel drive. All for a tiny blue speck that resembled broken glass, not worth picking up off the ground.
Maybe Big Ernie was going to be kind after all, as a glint of sunlight pierced the mist. no, it wasn’t going to be, as again the mist closed in and we returned to our dreary screens. Slowly moving buckets of tailings from our coyote hole uphill to our screens and discarded screenings mound.
Dump, wash, swirl with numb fingers, and now squint with a hopeful eye for that electric blue vision. No none there, keep moving. Maybe the next bucketful will reward our flagging hope. All for naught on a cold misty drizzly slope.
These hills, wrought from the earth on sliding tectonic plates have always been the realm of the desperado, the wild beast; and a man there is always alone. Once it was where bears the size of today,s Kodiak bears roamed. It is still the home of the condor, wild boar, and mountain lions; and a man there is always alone.
But there still are a few of us who find solitude in the elfin forest, serpentine barrens, and the hot dry slopes of pines and cedars. Maybe with a little luck, on some future warm sunny day, we can find a glint of electric blue. But not today, you poor fools!

Remembering The Wind Mill By Jay E. Bates The bushings were busted. The brakes were worn to bare metal. Not what was expected by the frugal farmer who had hand- dug the well, down into the moist earth, laying rock to prevent a cave-in. Then he had proudly erected his new Aeromotor windmill. Is there not respect for what he did to provide water for the horses? I sometimes remember in my youth, the creaks and groans and high pitch screeches of that old windmill pumping water in the wind. I would climb to the top of that old windmill just because I could and I was free to do so. From the top I could see the milk cow pasture, the weeds behind the fence next to the failed silage pit, half full of cow-shit-brown water, and the nearby slough with the sporadic crowing cock pheasants trying to attract a mate.. In my teen years, a fierce wind blew over the high Colorado plains, the windmill shrieked, iron twisted, and the top third of the windmill wrenched over and down to spin no more. The horses were now gone and red barn had starting to collapse unto itself. Yet when the winter winds still blew the crippled windmill creaked to remind us of the frugal farmer and hard working horses of the past.Sometimes large carp came down the irrigation ditch, out onto the fields where we scooped them up and dumped them in the stock tank next to the windmill. They seemed fine there eating the algae on the insides of the wooden stock tank, until with angst it seemed, they would porpoise over the sides to their demise. In winter we would break the ice on the stock tank for the cows to drink. In summer we scooped up more carps from the field to replenish our stock tank aquarium. On hot summer nights we would sometimes go out into the fields near the main irrigation ditch, light a bonfire and listen to the coyotes howling in the distance. Once I told my younger brother to take a gunny sack and wait to catch snipes as I would go out and drive them toward the fire and the awaiting gunnysack. I am sure there are worse ways to spend a hot Colorado evening then sitting alone next to a bonfire with an empty gunnysack listening to the coyotes yip, and sorting random youthful thoughts.