The Barefoot Doctrine

He came down through the rimrock in the late afternoon with his instruments strapped to a government mule and the light falling in slabs across the canyon wall like something poured from a height. The mule’s shoes struck sparks off the rhyolite and the sparks died in the dry air.

The guide was already at the canyon floor. He squatted on a shelf of sandstone with his back against the wall and his feet bare on the rock. He had removed his boots somewhere above, on a switchback the cartographer hadn’t noticed, and set them on a ledge. He watched the cartographer’s descent with the attention of a man counting something.

Lieutenant Harlan Oakes. Twenty-six. Graduate of the Military Academy at West Point where he had studied engineering and surveying and a particular form of confidence that confused precision with understanding. He had been sent to map the Peloncillo range and the canyon system that ran through it like cracks in a plate dropped from a great height. The Army’s charts showed the area as blank. Not unknown but undrawn. A white space on the territorial survey that troubled certain men in Washington.

The guide’s name was Nantahe. He had served the Army as a scout for four years and in that service had led soldiers to camps where his own people slept and done things in those camps that had no place in any language he knew. The Army had given him boots and a rifle and a name they could pronounce and he had given back the rifle when Geronimo surrendered and kept the name because names cost nothing to carry. The boots he had discarded this morning. He had not explained why.

You Oakes said.

Nantahe looked up.

How far to the narrows.

Nantahe pointed with his chin. A gesture the cartographer had learned to read in the weeks since Fort Bowie. It meant the direction was not reducible to a word.

They had been in the field for eleven days. The first week was open country, bajada and creosote flat. Oakes had worked well there. His theodolite stood on its tripod and he sighted along its brass eye and took his angles and wrote them in a leather-bound book that smelled of neat’s-foot oil and government. Each evening he plotted the day’s readings on a sheet of rag paper and the landscape took shape beneath his pen. Azimuth and bearing. Declination and datum. The country translated into coordinates that could be telegraphed to Washington and printed in an atlas and shelved in a library where no one who read them would ever feel the heat that shimmered above the ground when he took his noon sighting.

The narrows changed things.

The canyon walls rose on either side, close enough that the mule’s packs scraped stone in places. The sky became a ribbon. The light came down at angles that shifted through the day so that a wall face that was visible at noon vanished by two o’clock and a feature that seemed to jut from the eastern wall in the morning proved by afternoon to be a shadow with no corresponding mass. Oakes set up his theodolite at the first wide point and discovered that he could not establish a baseline. Triangulation requires distance. Two known points separated by enough space to form a triangle with the target. In the narrows there was no distance. The walls pressed in and the geometry collapsed.

He wrote in his book: Canyon too narrow for triangulation. Walls approximately 40 ft apart. Will attempt compass traverse.

The compass was the second failure. He set it on a flat stone and watched the needle swing and settle and swing again. It pointed east. He moved ten paces upstream and set it again. It pointed south-southeast. He checked the instrument for damage, found none, and took a third reading that disagreed with both.

Nantahe was sitting on his heels upstream, eating dried meat. He watched the cartographer’s work the way a man watches a child trying to open a jar.

What’s wrong with this compass, Oakes said.

Iron, Nantahe said.

Oakes looked at the canyon walls. In the slanting light he could see bands of dark stone running through the sandstone like veins in a wrist. Hematite. Magnetite perhaps. The iron-bearing minerals would create local magnetic anomalies, pulling the needle off true north. He had read about this phenomenon. He had not expected to encounter it.

He wrote: Magnetic deviation severe. Iron deposits in canyon walls render compass unreliable. Will attempt to navigate by solar observation and pace count.

But the sun entered the narrows only in the middle hours and the walls were too high and too close together for a reliable solar bearing and the pace count was complicated by the uneven floor and by the fact that the canyon did not travel in straight lines but curved and doubled back in ways that made his plotted traverse look like the path of a man who was lost.

He was not lost. Nantahe walked ahead of him and he followed Nantahe. But the map he was making bore less and less resemblance to the ground he was crossing.

On the third night in the narrows Nantahe built a fire against the canyon wall in a hollow where the smoke drew upward through a crack in the rock. Oakes sat across from him and wrote by firelight, trying to reconcile the day’s measurements. The numbers did not reconcile. He had two azimuths for the same feature and they disagreed by fourteen degrees and fourteen degrees in this country was the difference between a water source and a dead end.

How do you know where you are in here, Oakes said.

Nantahe did not answer immediately. He fed the fire a piece of juniper that popped and sent a column of sparks into the dark slot of sky above them.

I know where my feet are.

That’s not the same thing.

Nantahe looked at him. In the firelight his face had the quality of the canyon walls themselves, layered and unreadable. He lay down with his back to the fire and one hand resting flat on the stone floor and slept or appeared to sleep.

Oakes closed his book. The fire made shadows on the walls that moved like water. Somewhere above them the heat was leaving the ground in waves that bent the stars.

In the morning he woke to find Nantahe gone. The fire was ash. The canteens were full, which meant the guide had found water in the dark and carried it back while Oakes slept. He sat and waited.

Nantahe returned an hour later carrying a sage grouse he had killed with a thrown stone. He gutted it on the canyon floor without speaking and roasted it over a fire he built from scrub he had gathered on his walk. The meat was dark and stringy and tasted of the sage the bird had eaten. Oakes ate and watched the guide’s bare feet on the rock. The mission was proceeding. They were moving through the canyon. They were fed and watered and alive. And the map was failing.

He thought about the men in Washington who had ordered the survey and the chain of decisions that connected their desks to this floor of stone where he sat chewing sage grouse and staring at a leather book full of numbers that meant less the deeper he went. He wondered if those men had ever stood in a place where their instruments didn’t work.

They went deeper. The canyon forked and Nantahe chose the left branch without hesitation. Oakes noted the fork in his book and sketched both branches from memory because there was no point in the junction wide enough for the theodolite. He marked the left branch with a cairn of three stones and walked on. That evening he found that the compass, which had been erratic for days, now spun freely without settling at all. He held it level and watched the needle turn and turn like a weathervane in a wind that was not blowing.

He packed the compass away.

The rag paper was half full of readings that contradicted one another. Lines that should have connected did not. Distances that should have closed left gaps. The iron in the stone. The narrowness of the walls. The way the canyon turned at angles that no traverse could follow cleanly.

That night the mule balked at a pour-off where the canyon floor dropped four feet into a lower chamber. Nantahe coaxed it down with a hand on its nose and a sound in his throat that was not a word. Oakes watched the guide’s feet find the edge of the pour-off in the dark, the toes curling over the lip of stone, testing the drop the way a tongue tests a tooth. The mule came down and its shoes rang on the lower floor and the ring echoed up the walls and came back changed, deeper, as if the canyon had heard the sound and answered in its own register.

They camped below the pour-off. Oakes tried to write by starlight but the stars were few and far between the walls and what light they gave was not enough. He lay on his bedroll and listened to the canyon. It was not silent. Water moved somewhere below them, beneath the floor, a sound so faint it could have been blood in his own ears. The stone ticked and popped as it cooled. Something moved in the scrub upstream — a fox perhaps, or a coati, or nothing at all, just the desert breathing in the particular way it breathes when it believes no one is listening.

On the fourth day he stopped checking his compass. He told himself this was economy, not surrender.

Nantahe knew all of this. He had known it before they entered the canyon. He had known it when he accepted the assignment at Fort Bowie, when the lieutenant colonel had spread a territorial map on his desk and pointed to the white space and said We need this filled in and Nantahe had looked at the white space with an expression the lieutenant colonel read as understanding but which was in fact something else entirely.

He had agreed to guide the cartographer because the alternative was to let them send the cartographer in alone or with a different guide. A different guide might have found routes where the theodolite could work. Might have led them to the wide places, the overlooks, the points where the canyon opened enough for triangulation. Nantahe led them instead through the narrows, the deepest channels, the places where the iron sang in the stone and the walls leaned in like men sharing a secret.

He did this without appearing to do it. This was the skill he had learned in four years of scouting for the Army — not how to track or shoot or navigate, all of which he had known since childhood, but how to serve two purposes in the body of one man.

On the fifth day Oakes stopped mapping.

He did not announce this. He sat on a boulder at the base of a dry fall and looked at his book and closed it. The rag paper with its contradictory traverse folded inside. The theodolite still on the mule. The compass in its case like a small dead eye.

He said: This canyon can’t be mapped from inside it.

Nantahe was upstream filling their canteens from a seep in the wall. Water came through the sandstone in a film so thin it was more suggestion than flow. He filled each canteen with the patience of a man who had never known water to hurry.

You’d have to map it from above, Oakes said. From the rim. Establish your baselines on the plateau and sight down into it.

Nantahe carried the canteens back. He set them in the shade of the mule’s shadow without speaking.

Why didn’t you tell me, Oakes said.

Nantahe looked at him.

You knew. You’ve been in these canyons before. You knew the instruments wouldn’t work down here. You knew about the iron.

I know this country.

That’s not what I asked.

Nantahe squatted and drew a line in the dust with his finger. Then another line crossing it. He looked at the lines the way a man looks at a lie he’s decided to tell the truth about.

The Army ask me to bring you in. I bring you in.

Into country you knew I couldn’t map.

Into this country.

Oakes stood. He was taller than the guide by half a foot and the height gave him nothing.

I’ll report this, he said.

Nantahe nodded. He picked up a pebble from the canyon floor and turned it in his fingers. It was dark with iron, heavy for its size, and he held it the way a man holds a coin from a country he used to live in.

I’ll tell them the route you chose was deliberately unworkable.

Nantahe set the pebble down. He placed it where he had found it. He nodded again, and in the second nod there was nothing Oakes could report.

They’ll send someone else, Oakes said.

Yes.

With a better route. From the rim.

Yes.

And they’ll map it.

Nantahe did not nod this time. He looked at the canyon walls, at the iron-dark bands in the sandstone, at the ribbon of sky above them.

They will try, he said.

Oakes heard the word and did not know what to do with it.

They started back the next morning. The canyon was different in reverse, the way all country is different when you face the direction you came from. Features Oakes had noted on the way in now appeared at unfamiliar angles. The cairn he’d built at the fork was gone — kicked apart by an animal or by rain or by the patient shifting of stone that happens on a timescale men don’t notice. He did not know which fork was which. He looked at Nantahe and Nantahe took the right branch without slowing.

On the second day of the return Oakes took out the compass and opened its case. The needle swung and pointed. He checked it against the angle of the light. True north. They were leaving the iron country. The instruments were recovering their authority.

He held the compass and looked at it and put it away.

He wrote in his book that evening: Narrows section unmappable from ground level due to magnetic interference and insufficient baseline distance. Recommend aerial survey from canyon rim. Guide performed adequately.

He crossed out the last sentence and wrote instead: Guide’s knowledge of terrain invaluable.

He crossed that out too. He left the space blank.

The last night before the rim Nantahe killed a rabbit in the scrub at the canyon’s mouth and roasted it on a fire of creosote branches. They ate without speaking. The meat was lean and tasted of the desert the animal had eaten.

Oakes said: What did you do with your boots.

Nantahe chewed and swallowed. Left them.

Where.

In the canyon.

Why.

Nantahe put another piece of rabbit in his mouth and chewed slowly.

They slept by the fire. In the early morning, before light, Oakes woke and saw that Nantahe was already awake, sitting upright with his bare feet flat on the ground and his hands on his knees. He was facing east, where the sky was beginning to separate from the land.

They reached Fort Bowie on a Tuesday. Oakes delivered his book and his rag paper and his report to the lieutenant colonel and the lieutenant colonel read the report and looked at the blank section at the bottom where the assessment of the guide should have been.

What happened here, the lieutenant colonel said.

Oakes looked at the blank space.

I couldn’t get a reading, he said.

The lieutenant colonel filed the book and the rag paper in a cabinet with the other incomplete surveys.

Nantahe walked out of the fort that afternoon. No one stopped him. He walked south along the road and then off the road into the scrub and then out of the scrub into country that had no road.

His feet were bare on the ground. The ground was warm in the late afternoon. He could feel the iron in the stone beneath the sand, the deep pull of it.

Behind him the fort. Ahead the canyons. He walked toward them. The light was failing and the narrows were dark already and he went into the dark.