Catfantastic: Nine Lives and Fifteen Tales Part 2

People say the dam would never have been completed without that cat. The truth is, not only would Black Canyon have remained incomplete, it would have broken when the reservoir was still filling. There's a plaque at the dam site telling about Tonochpa and the cable she pulled through a conduit too small far a man to crawl through. That's what it says on the bra.s.s inscription, but I know better. What that little wildcat hauled through the tunnel was more than a bundle of wires.

The reason I got involved in the whole thing was because the government contract said that the dam would not be considered technically complete unless it was instrumented. The Feds wanted all kinds of measurement devices such as strain gauges, contraction joint meters, thermometers and so forth installed in the dam and monitored during construction. Now all these instruments had to be wired to a power source and remote chart recorder. In the hustle and bustle to build the dam (Black Canyon went up in record time), certain details got overlooked. The concrete jockeys were pouring so fast that they didn't think about laying access tunnels or conduits for instrumentation wiring.

A few weeks after I got hired and figured out the situation, I swore at them under my breath and laid temporary cables along the downstream face of the dam to my monitoring shack. We had to have the output from those instruments to tell whether the dam was undergoing any unusual stress or strain that might foretell a collapse. My arrangement worked, but I knew that it would never satisfy the federal inspectors. Those guys had a tendency to follow the letter of the law, not the intent. The contract specified that the monitoring installation had to be permanently installed in conduits that ran inside the dam. I was tearing out what remained of my hair over this problem when I met Mike and Tonochpa.

Actually I met Tonochpa before I met Mike. About a minute before. I don't think either she or I will ever forget that introduction. And neither will a certain pair of pants, though I kept them as a memento of the occasion.

It was the summer of '34, a few months after I had been hired. At that time the crews had finished most of the blasting, but high-scalers still worked the canyon walls upriver from the dam itself. Some days it seemed as though more dust than air hung above the construction site. The deep canyon blocked any breeze from the surrounding desert country and the black basalt sucked up the sun until it was hot as a griddle and you could literally fry flapjacks on the boulders if you didn't mind grit.

To get from the trailer that housed the company field office (all plastered over with the blue NRA eagle like everything else in sight) to the chart-recorder shack, I had to cross an open area in front of the cement mixing plant.

Back in those days, we didn't have the kind of cement trucks with the rotary mixers you see now. We used flatbed diesels with eight-foot wheels, equipped with huge bins bolted to their flatbeds. Those trucks were built like huge hay wagons, with a buckboard seat and no cab over the top. The wet cement would start hardening when it hit the bins so the trucks lined up to load and go as fast as they could. This encouraged some unique driving styles.

One fellow used to stand up on the seat, facing backward so he could watch his bins fill from the overhead hopper. The stream of wet portland cement shot out so fast that he didn't have to stop his truck. The monster ground forward at low throttle while he steered by way of one muddy boot on the wheel. Others soon picked up that cowboy trick from him and the loading area soon resembled a rodeo arena.

With my hard hat banging my gla.s.ses down on the bridge of my nose and my clipboard tucked underneath my arm, I played the daily game of dodging the cement haulers. I was nearly in the clear when I saw something shooting up the slope that led to the construction site. I caught a glimpse of blurred legs and long ears. We often spook jackrabbits on the site, so I didn't think much of it until I spotted another animal pelting along behind the rabbit. It moved so fast and churned up so much dust that I couldn't tell what it was. A rope or leash whipped back and forth in the dirt behind the animal. I could tell the critter was after the jackrabbit and not paying attention to much else. Trouble was that the jackrabbit was making a run for the trucks.

I knew the rabbit would make it; I've seen them dash right between those rolling tires. But its pursuer looked like someone's pet and with the handicap of a dragging leasha.

I can't say I'm much of an animal lover, but I hate the job of peeling flattened carca.s.ses out of the dirt. As the rattling diesel of the nearest truck battered my ears, I lunged and stamped hard on the trailing rope as the creature shot past me.

I nearly lost my footing as something heavy and furry rebounded against my shins. I heard a strangled caterwaul, then claws began shredding my pants leg so fast I didn't even feel the pain. Twelve pounds of desert bobcat raked my knee and was heading up for strategic territory by the time I unfroze and tried to grab the beast.

"Tonochpa, no!"

The Indian's voice was a lilting tenor and his accent different from that of the Navajo workers. His hands got to the bobcat before mine and I'm probably lucky they did, since I might not have kept all my fingers. I doubted that he would keep all his either, but the bobcat didn't put one scratch on those dark-skinned hands. He spoke a few words of a language I didn't understand, but the bobcat did. She loosed her hold on me and climbed into his arms. I stood up and found myself facing a short stocky young man dressed in Ben Davis overalls, no shirt, and a dented hard hat.

The cement truck added insult to injury with a derisive blat from its power horn that sent the young Indian scrambling downslope toward the construction site, clutching his bobcat. Not knowing what I intended to do, I followed him. My knee stung like it had been dragged through a patch of mesquite, my pants had two-foot long rents in the left leg and my disposition was out of joint.

When I caught up with the guy, I saw him cradling the bobcat. Something seemed to be wrong with her; she gulped and her breathing sounded wheezy. I felt a pang of guilt for stamping on the rope even though it probably saved her life. I could see the worry in the young man's face as he tried to soothe the animal. I tapped the Indian's bare shoulder and pointed to the recorder shack on the other side of the canyon bottom.

When we reached the shack, he put his pet on a rough-hewn workbench and felt in the fur around her neck. She balanced on her long legs with her little tail flicking up and down, leaning against him and watching me warily. She coughed once or twice, shook her wiry fur, then seemed okay. I imagine that yank on the collar gave her a whack on the windpipe and she just needed a little time to recover.

Which gave me time to wonder what the h.e.l.l she was doing here in the first place. A stinging and tickling sensation on my left leg reminded me that she was not the only casualty of the incident. I caught her master's eye and inflated myself, ready to act the part of the aggrieved white, irritated by the careless ways of the Indian worker. But somehow he and I didn't fit those roles. Perhaps the reason was the bobcat.

She was small for a bobcat, judging from the size of the skins I'd seen tacked on plyboard after some friends of mine had been out varmint-hunting. Her build was heavier than a housecat's, her head larger in proportion to her body. That and her legginess gave her a kittenish look.

The Indian bent over her and whispered a few words of his language. She lifted her nose and prrruped back at him.

"She gives you apology," he said in a soft sandy voice that seemed to match the tone of his skin and hair. "I, too. My name here is Mike. I call her Tonochpa."

"Curtis," I said, trying to keep my voice gruff, but without much success. "Dale Curtis. Pleased to meetcha both, I guess."

Tonochpa swiveled her head, p.r.i.c.king black-tufted ears toward me. Tiger-stripes marked her face, with black bands running out into wide muttonchop whiskers. The rest of her was tawny with black spots that smeared out into bands encircling her legs.

When I moved closer and she didn't spit or hump her back in cat-fashion, I decided she might be in a good mood. She pivoted to face me, leaning forward and hunching up her shoulders. I felt Mike's hand on my elbow, drawing me back.

"What's wrong?" I asked. "She didn't give me the Halloween cat treatment."

Mike shook his head. "Bobcats aren't like your pet cats, Mr. Curtis. Tonochpa won't arch her back to warn you. Instead she'll face you and hump her shoulders to make herself look bigger." He clucked to get the bobcat's attention, then stroked her. "I have learned her language. She is saying that she will get used to you, but she needs time."

He smiled shyly, then looked solemn. "Bobcat scratches can fester, Mr. Curtis. Sit and I will heal the wounds."

I was already reaching for my battered, metal first aid kit. I sat down on a nearby orange crate with the kit on my lap. Mike dug in the side pouch of a knapsack he carried.

"Don't you need anything from here? Alcohol? Iodine? Merthiolate?"

He shook his head. The only items he would accept were a clean rag and the little bottle of alcohol. Once he had rolled up my pants leg and dabbed the wounds clean, he took what looked like the fleshy leaf of an agave, broke it, dusted the gel oozing from the leaf with powder and smeared the resulting concoction on the gashes. I stiffened, expecting the fierce burning you get with iodine or other antiseptics, but all I felt was a soothing coolness that gradually subdued the pain.

I expected him to bind up the wound with the rag, but he only smeared more of the agave on my leg and told me to keep still until it dried, forming a thick film.

"Indian bandage," he said. "Sticks by itself until scab forms, then falls off."

I eyed him. Somehow, in that gentle way of his, the young Indian had dissolved the barrier of cla.s.s and color that should have separated him from me. I felt almost as if I should try to reestablish it. But I had no pigeonholes, no places to put him; since I knew almost nothing about him. Two things were obvious; he was trained as a healer, but for some reason, he was working construction.

"Who's your foreman?" I asked. "Isn't he going to be missing you?"

He named someone I'd never heard of.

"And what are you doing with a pet bobcat at a construction site?" I said, trying to rea.s.sert my status above him in the hierarchy.

He scooped up Tonochpa, let her climb up his shoulder. "She is my partner," he said, as if it were perfectly obvious. I watched as he clipped the end of her tether to a metal ring riveted to his overalls. He made a clucking noise with his tongue. The bobcat clawed open the flap of his pack and crawled in. The packflap lifted briefly to show two agate-colored eyes.

Mike told me he worked as a "cherry-picker" or high-scaler. Each day he lowered himself in a flimsy bosun's chair from the canyon rim, with rock drill, crowbar and sometimes a load of dynamite. Though most of the loose rock had been blasted and chipped from the walls of Black Canyon, scalers were still hewing out the foundations for the inlet gate towers that would stand behind the dam.

That explained a lot about him. High-scalers were an ornery and independent lot, valued for their skills and their disregard of danger. They could do pretty much as they pleased within certain limits and the bosses looked the other way. Even if it came to having your own mascot along, I suppose.

"Do you really take her with you up there?" I asked, thinking I was reasonable in believing that hanging from a cable in the midst of noise, blasting and confusion would be sheer h.e.l.l for any creature, let alone such a nervous and timid animal as a wild cat.

"She is my partner," he said again. "We trust each other."

She is my partner. It sounded so simple, so obvious and yet so strange to this white man's way of thinking. My face must have betrayed my skepticism.

"Tonochpa keeps me from harm. Other high-scalers, they have accidents. Falls. Blow fingers, eyes, out with explosives. Not me."

I'd done some reading on Indian anthropology. "Is Tonochpa your totem?"

Mike's smile was just a twitch at the corners of his mouth. He eyed me in that odd, indirect way. "Because you try to understand, even if it is for the white man's purpose and in the white man's way, I will share a secret with you."

He motioned me toward the bobcat, who seemed willing to accept my presence now. I approached, still aware of my ragged trouser leg and the drying agave gel pulling my leg hairs. He chucked the cat under the chin, making her raise her head. In the buff and gray fur at her throat, I saw a pair of oddly curved short stripes, each with their ends nested in the concavity of the other's arc.

Mike ruffled the fur with a square, blunt thumbnail. "She had this marking when I found her as a halfdrowned kitten after a flash flood. This symbol is the nakwatch, the sign of brotherhood among my people."

I peered at the nakwatch marking, amused that the Indian would take such a thing so seriously.

"Touch it," he said. "You have earned the right." The right to make a d.a.m.ned fool of myself, I thought, wondering why I didn't have the guts to send him on his way. I thanked my own version of a guardian spirit that no one else was around the recording shack. I made a tentative poke at the bobcat, fearing she would retaliate, but she only eyed me steadily with pupil slits that seemed to pulse to my heartbeat. When I withdrew my finger, she ducked her head and washed the marking as if she took pride in it.

"Are you a hatathli?" I asked Mike, drawing on my book-learned wisdom.

His smile became tolerant. "Hatathli is Navajo. A medicine man who heals with sand paintings. I am a healer of the Hopi tribe."

I felt vaguely embarra.s.sed. The little reading I had done said no love was lost between the Hopi and Navajo tribes. To mistake one for the other was a typical outsider's blunder. I took refuge in skepticism.

"Do you really take the cat on the high-wire act with you?"

"I would not go there without her. If you doubt, come visit us at the north inlet tower site." His smile became a grin, covering his wide face. "I must go now, Mr. Curtis," he added, gathering up the knapsack and Tonochpa.

I wasn't ready for his departure. We had some unfinished business, namely the state of my pants. He read my face, then followed my gaze down to the rents the bobcat had made.

"You bring that pair of pants when you come up to the tower site." He winked. "I am good at mending the holes Tonochpa makes."

I refrained from asking how many holes the wildcat had made and who she'd made them in. I watched the two of them leave, scratching my incipient bald patch beneath the band of my hard hat. I decided to pay a visit to the high-scalers on the north tower site even if it meant skipping some day's lunch. The young Indian who called himself Mike and his guardian spirit disguised as a bobcat intrigued the h.e.l.l out of me. I had to know whether he was pulling my leg or not. I stashed a pair of field gla.s.ses in the recorder shack and waited for a piece of slack time long enough for a trip up the canyon wall.

Several days later, I rode old truck-shuttle number 160 from the workers' tract city to the dam site early enough to slip in a visit to the tower site before work. Because the foundations for the inlet tower were being hacked from the canyon wall, the only way to reach it was the inclined tramway we dubbed the Monkeyslide. I got on with the last group of first shift stragglers and clung to the welded pipe railing as the Monkeyslide ratcheted its way up.

My fellow riders watched me from the corners of their eyes while they told tales of the previous night's carousing in nearby Glitter Gulch. They spat from the tramcar and rolled cigarettes from pipe-tin tobacco. Feeling as out of place as an oyster in the desert, I searched among the press of bodies, tormented by the unreasonable fear that Mike had decided to skip work that day, had been taken ill, or had been fired.

With its gears clashing and groaning, the Monkeyslide lurched to a halt, the. guard chain fell aside, and everyone piled out onto a plank catwalk overlooking the black basalt ledge forming the inlet gate tower foundation. The "cherry-pickers" around me all seemed to become alpine spiders, for they disdained the plankwalk to clamber away over the rocks and lower themselves on cables to their places below. Soon I was alone on the catwalk except for the clinking of chisels and the tearing rattle of rock-drills.

I tiptoed as close to the edge of the unguarded plankwalk as I dared and peered over. I found it hard to look down without breaking into a cold sweat. I don't have much trouble with heights; I've clambered about on enough bridges and girders to know that part of myself. But knowing that a misstep meant a fall through half a mile worth of nothing gave me a new respect for gravity. The planks underfoot seemed to take delight in sagging in such a way as to tip me while the grit slithered my feet toward the treacherous edge.

I finally found a secure perch and scanned for Mike with my field gla.s.ses. There he was, a tiny figure in overalls, hard hat and knapsack, whaling away at the fissured rock from the end of a long line. He looked too distant to see my wave. I decided it would be better not to distract him, so I just watched. I saw no sign of Tonochpa.

He scaled away the rock loosened by previous blasting then drilled holes for new charges. After drilling a square grid of holes, he paused, planted both boots against the cliff face and leaned out over empty air as if he were relaxing on a sofa. As if that was a signal, I saw the packflap stir, then the bobcat emerged.

She climbed over his shoulder and onto his chest, nestling beneath his chin. He fed her bits of flattened baloney sandwich from an overall pocket. I could see that she wore a makeshift safety harness and a tether shackled to Mike's cable. Even so, I thought, a short fall would still have a nasty jolt at the end of it. But my criticism was lost in fascination as I kept my gla.s.ses trained on the two. It was an amazing picture of man and animal in precarious balance against the panorama of cliff, sky and canyon.

Bursts of noise from other scalers drilling on either side didn't appear to bother the bobcat in the least. She sat on Mike's chest, kneading the front of. his overalls as if she were a household moggy sitting on someone's knee before a cozy fire. When another scaler flipped a cigarette b.u.t.t at Mike, telling him to quit fooling with the cat and get back to work, Tonochpa only yawned derisively and crawled back into the knapsack.

I watched from overhead as Mike packed explosive into the holes he drilled, set the charges, then jerked the line as a signal for someone to haul him up before the stuff blew. It was close. I glimpsed his feet disappearing out of my view field only a breath before the rockface puffed out and a rumbling growl shook the cliff.

I picked my way along the plankwalk, arriving just as the other men hauled him up. His face was masked in gray from sweat and rockdust, making him look as though he were wearing pancake makeup. He spat grit, then grinned as he saw me.

"You saw us, Dale Curtis? Tonochpa and me at the end of the long line? Now you believe, hey?"

"I believe," I said.

"You got the pants she ripped?"

I handed over the bundle wrapped in brown paper. Flinging one hand behind him, Mike flipped up the knapsack flap and let the bobcat scramble out. Perched on his shoulder, she appraised me. I expected that she might be slightly ruffled by the nearness of the blast Mike had just set, but not one hair was awry. Mike stroked her with rough affection. "I'm not afraid, she's not afraid," he announced proudly. "Best team on the high walls."

A whistle shrilled from the canyon floor, echoing between the walls. It reminded me that my own work hours would soon begin. I had to catch the Monkeyslide on its return trip.

"You come see me again," Mike said as I took my leave of him, "you get your pants back. Fixed. Deal?" He clucked his tongue at Tonochpa, who returned to the knapsack.

"Deal," I agreed. I didn't even wince when he shoved my parcel in with the bobcat.

I braved the Monkeyslide to retrieve my pants and then a few times more just to watch Mike and Tonochpa. Mike did a good job with the pants. They couldn't be made good as new, but he'd sewed up the rents with small strong st.i.tches that would probably outlast the cloth itself. The repair on my leg proved equally, successful. The wound healed rapidly and the dried agave peeled off by itself, just as Mike said it would.

My problem with the instrument cabling remained, though my temporary wiring functioned well enough to postpone the final version. Each day I monitored the health of the growing dam via the signals sent from a network of strain gauges and joint contraction meters. From these instruments, I could tell if the concrete was hardening to design strength and whether stress was concentrating at vulnerable points or distributing evenly throughout the structure.

The wiggling traces of the Beckman strip chart recorder pens formed patterns, first on the paper, then in my notebook and ultimately in my mind. For me, the dam was an interconnected web of signals, all making up an ent.i.ty that seemed almost alive. I could watch the great structure "breathe" slowly over intervals of several hours. I could see it expand and contract from the effects of temperature and shift to accommodate itself to the ma.s.s of new concrete pours. To me it was a great concrete beast, expanding, waking, and gathering strength for the task of holding back the river.

The multiple channels of information coming from my instruments had their own ranges of variation between parameters I had established by experience. The recorder pens wandered on the chart grids, but always remained within the bounds I expected and returned to the averages I had calculated.

One morning, about three weeks after I first visited Mike and Tonochpa, I noticed one of my strain gauge readings had drifted up overnight. Not beyond limits, but enough to be noticeable. I checked the channel for electrical problems, then the instrument's calibration. Everything came out clean.

Over the next few days I watched the trace closely, ready to call the construction engineers if the strain gauge should indicate a problem. I'd installed this one near a recent concrete pour and counted on it to give warning if the cement was going rotten. Its reading stabilized, staying rock steady at the new set point. I was about to relax my watch when a second gauge, located in the same sector, showed an upward drift.

I called Nelson, the construction engineer and had him out to the sector to probe the hardening cement and do chemical tests. Everything indicated that the pour was hardening as it should within the forms. Nelson suggested, none too diplomatically, that I should recheck my instruments.

I scratched my thinning hair beneath my hard hat. Should I be alarmed about such slight deviations? The instrument readings had kept to their expected levels ever since I'd installed the first strain gauge in the rising foundations of the dam. Why should they change now?

I spoke first to another engineer who'd had training in the new technology of instrumenting construction projects such as this one. He only scratched his head beneath his hard hat and said that my readings were within acceptable bounds. My boss looked at the traces and said I worried too much. The concrete engineers told me to have faitha"after all, it was they who were building Black Canyon.

I'm a guy who knows when worrying is counterproductive, so I shrugged my shoulders and quit sweating. I started reading the paper again during lunch instead of spending the time trying to a.n.a.lyze my data. I didn't expect much out of the local scandal sheet, but I was surprised to find an interesting column by a guy who bylined himself Ernie Pyle. His writing was terse and to the point, not high-flown or fancy. It seemed he had taken a few years off to roam around the Southwest, describing his experiences in little squibs that he sent to the syndicate. They were refreshing to read after all the bad news about Europe and the threat of impending war.

Other guys on the site took to reading Pyle and I remember my boss saying that this fellow would make a good war correspondent, if it came down to that. The writer really made himself popular with our crew when he did his "Dambuilders" column, describing his impressions of the men at another construction site just north of Black Canyon. I thought that if Ernie had been impressed with the hard hat he'd seen who rode the cable hook from gorge to rim without giving the trip a second thought, what might flow from his pen on meeting not only an Indian worker with a similar disregard for the hazards of height, but a bobcat who shared his att.i.tude and his place on the end of a high-scaler's line?

Well, Ernie went on to the other end of the state to write about rutted roads and Navajos and Mike's Tonochpa never found immortality in the lines of his column. Ernie did serve one purpose and that was to get me thinking I hadn't paid the two a visit lately.

By that time, the tower crew had nearly finished the inlet gate foundations. They rerouted the Monkeyslide to stop at the rock ledge instead of the overhead plankwalk. When I got off, I found Mike with a gang of other high-scalers, amusing them with the bobcat. Mike put her at one end of a coolant pipe that seemed impossibly small for her and took bets on whether she'd make it through.

I'd seen housecats pull some amazing contortions in getting themselves in and out of tight spots, but this bobcat put them all to shame. Although two or three times the size of a regular cat, she could shinny in and out of the tiniest places. She seemed to be able to elongate herself into a big furry caterpillar, for no sooner had her stub tail disappeared down one end than her whiskers appeared at the other. Mike was raking in a pile when I sauntered up.

"Aren't you afraid she'll get stuck?" I asked him.

He grinned and shook his head, his eyes glinting in his dark face beneath the battered steel hard hat. "She knows. If she can't get through, she won't go. Never got stuck yet."

He shooed the other men away, picked up Tonochpa and went with me to the shade cast by a boulder. There we could sit and look out over the rising dam. Mike's mood seemed to change, becoming pensive. He asked me what work I did, what all the equipment in the recorder shack was for. Carefully I explained the study of stresses and strains within the structure and how they must be monitored to ensure the strength of the completed dam.

He looked at me piercingly from beneath the rim of his hard hat. "I did not know that you are a medicine man."

I blinked and shook my head, taken completely aback by his remark.

"You do not know it yourself? Think about what it is you do. You guard the wholeness of this thing, this big dam we build. You use your white man's magic to seek out weakness or bad influences and you tell others how to cure these things."

I didn't know whether to burst out laughing or take him seriously. It was a strange way to characterize my profession, but in a way, he was right.

"And so," he said, picking up Tonochpa and stroking her, "is this dam whole and strong?"

He did not look directly into my eyes, but I felt as if he could read the story of the wandering traces, the subtle shifts in balance within the structure that might be early warnings of trouble.

I don't know why, but I spilled it all to him. The strange readings, the uncertainties, the attempts to convince my boss and the construction engineers that something just might be wrong.

"The thing is, I don't have any real indications. Just these strange little shifts in my equipment and my bad feelings." I concluded.

"Feelings," said Mike. "That is what's important and what you must trust. The others are not wise to ignore their own medicine man. I also have bad feelings about the dam. I will show you why."