Yell Yell Canyon and the Skinwalkers

There's this huge ranch over to the west of us that contains over eleven sections of grassland; that's over 7000 acres. A long time ago, before I came out here to live, its owner got permission from the County to block off the five section line roads that ran across it . Since then no one I know has ever seen more than a couple of hundred yards past the fence, and no one has ever seen the people who presumably live there.

Because of the blocked section lines, if we want to go west from where I live we have to drive 5 or 6 miles out of our way to get around the damned place. There are signs all along the barbed wire fence that read "No Trespassing - Survivors Will Be Prosecuted". That is a not-so-veiled threat and it makes people angry; it also implies that we don't know any better than to go on private property without permission.

The original owner of the ranch, someone named Garth, died a long time ago and no one seems to know who operates the place nowadays, not even Oral Crookshank, the local bank president. Someone must run cows on the place because the fences are all kept in good repair. There's a big steel gate at the south-east corner with an Oklahoma Cattleman's Association sign and a no-trespassing sign, but no mailbox. Now and then I see loaded cattle trucks passing my place coming from that direction. They have to be from that ranch because there's no other cattle operation over in that way.

One time back in August five or six of those trucks came by and after they had passed I noticed that the last one in line had pulled over onto the side of the road about a mile up to the northeast. He sat there for so long that I figured he had engine trouble or a flat so I drove over to ask him if he needed any help. When I got there the truck cab was empty but the motor was idling. The cows crowded in back were hot and without water and wouldn't have lasted that way for long. I looked all around for the driver, including in back of the truck and under it, but he was not around. Other than me and a big crow perched on a fence post down a ways, there wasn't a living thing within miles in any direction. This is dead flat country without a tree or bush or even a rock to hide behind so I figured someone had to have picked him up while I wasn't looking. I drove back to the house to call the sheriff to help rescue the cows, but when I pulled up at my gate I looked back and the truck was gone, and so was the crow.

The center of the ranch lies about 4 miles straight west of my place and on still summer evenings I can sometimes hear faint laughter coming from that direction. Or perhaps its just the sound of coyotes packed up; coyotes will bunch up after the sun goes down and have a pow-wow. They don't always howl, sometimes they sort of sing and yip-yip and the sound they make can sound a lot like laughter. Evening sounds are hard to pin down so I can't say for sure these were coming from that ranch, but they have often sounded like they were.

Cattle rustling is not unheard of around here, so we rural types are very curious as to who drives along our section lines, but in thirty years I have never seen a truck or car that I could say for sure belonged to that ranch. Whoever those people are, they must fly off the place to go to Dallas or Oklahoma City when they need something because, as I said, no one in town knows them either. Bruce says they wouldn't need an airplane because they are probably skinwalkers. A skinwalker, he says, is a Navajo witch who can change into a crow, an owl or an eagle and fly anywhere he wants to. He says skinwalkers can also turn into bears, wolves, or cougars, but their favorite shape of all is the coyote.

Bruce won't go any closer to the mysterious ranch than my house and he'll only come here in the daytime. I am tempted to kid him about it, but I have to remind myself that Navajos take their skinwalkers seriously. As a matter of fact, Navaho tribal law, under the heading of wearing apparel, dictates that no Navajo alive may wear a bear, wolf, cougar or coyote skin; only sheepskin or buckskin.

I bought a very detailed U.S. Geological Survey map—1 to 24,000 scale—that includes the mystery ranch. These maps are marvelous; they show every little draw, road, trail, dry gulch, creek, pond and lake. Mine shows a tiny black dot for my house and a crooked line for the road that leads from the section line to it, but it shows no structures or roads at all within the boundaries of that ranch. What it does show at about the center of it is Yell Yell Canyon. Bruce says he has heard from the Old People that if you stand off and yell into Yell Yell Canyon in the daytime nothing happens, but if you do it just after the sun drops below the horizon, the canyon will yell back. They also say that if you drop a rock from the top of the cliff overlooking it you'll never hear it hit bottom. I mentioned to him that there would be a full moon tonight and said why don't we climb through the fence and go see if the stories are true. He just looked at me and turned pale, and for a Navajo isn't easy. I should have admitted to him I was kidding and that I wouldn't go there on a bet, but the truth is that I am curious about the place and am not certain I wouldn't go...not dead certain anyway.

West of Ahloso, May 8, 2007 (rev. 11/11/08)

Alex Coyle

Bruce Yells-At-Crows and His Propane Engine

Most people who live as far from town as I do have acquired the habit of saving leftover bits and pieces of just about everything. I will throw a funny looking screw into a coffee can full of other funny looking screws and say to myself: "That’ll save me a trip to town some day", and now and then it will. But, when it comes to making do with what's on hand, my friend Bruce Yells-At-Crows puts the rest of us in the shade.

Not long ago Bruce appeared at my house in his 1956 Chevy pickup to show me how he had converted it to run on propane. My first thought was that a conversion job like that costs several hundred dollars; more money than Bruce can usually lay his hands on, so I was curious to see how he had improvised. "Impossible; it won’t work" I said after looking the thing over, but there the pickup sat, purring like a cat. I worked the throttle linkage and jumped back as the engine responded with a roar. It was obvious that it did work, and also that the job hadn't cost Bruce much more than his labor and a few pieces of recycled scrap. He had borrowed a propane cylinder off an old brush burner and anchored it to the bed of the truck; then he had run a copper tube from the cylinder through the back of the cab under the floorboards and up to a little brass valve—his only cash purchase—bolted to the dashboard. From the valve he had run another copper tube through the firewall and down into the top of the engine's air-cleaner through a hole drilled in it's lid. All you had to do to make the truck go was open the valve, hurry and turn the engine over with the starter before too much raw propane accumulated under the hood, and, when it caught, drive away. The regular foot-throttle on the car worked fine once you got going. You needed to tune the fuel valve a little now and then—too much fuel and she'd backfire; too little and she'd overheat.

"It won't work" I said again, but there it was, working. After some thought, I realized that of course it would work. Propane liquid from the cylinder under high pressure would vaporize as it crossed the valve; then the vapor would flow through the tube into the air cleaner and from there, being heavier than air, down into the carburetor. If you got the valve set just right so as to provide a slightly rich propane-air mixture in the carburetor, and yet not too rich, it should work—a bit touchy, but it should work.

Bruce said he was going to get a better looking valve for the dashboard when he got time. Time! Bruce has nothing but time. He belongs to a multitude of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews and cousins who all have nothing but time. The word “time” is probably the least used word in the Navajo's English vocabulary, and sometimes I wonder if it exists at all in the Navajo vocabulary.

"It's probably a good idea to get the truck rolling as soon as you start her up. That way the air can blow across the engine and blow away the excess gas that’s accumulated under the hood. Otherwise you could have an explosion," I said, smelling propane and standing clear. I didn't feel safe until Bruce was fading from sight down the road and even then I was half expecting to hear the sound of an explosion.

He's wasting a lot of gas, and sooner or later he might get nuked by his creation, but Bruce isn't afraid of horse or man, or anything else for that matter; except owls. He won't stay long at my place anymore and never after sundown because one time when we were fishing down on Lake Nadapescada just at twilight a big barred owl landed on a limb over our heads. Bruce mumbled something about skinwalkers, gathered up his stuff and was gone before I could say goodbye. He hasn't been back here since except in the middle of the day.

I was reading one of Tony Hillermans novels—one about Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee—and I came across a part about Navajo witches; skinwalkers. Well, Bruce is a displaced Navajo with thousands of years of tribal lore still intact in his DNA so it's no wonder he believes in skinwalkers. I say displaced because this part of Oklahoma is the home of the Chickasaws, not the Navajos. Bruce's real home is near Mexican Hat, Utah. His mother and father farm up there on the Chinlee Wash near Glenn Canyon. Bruce said it got too cold for him in the wintertime so he came south to Oklahoma to stay with his aunt Vera and uncle Joseph Two Bears on their farm down near Stonewell.

Anyway, Bruce believes there really are skinwalkers. In the Navajo language they are called the yee nadlooshii. They are were-people, shape shifters, who come after sundown in the guise of an animal such as a wolf, a coyote or an owl and do great evil. He believes that the owl we saw when we were fishing was really a skinwalker because when he got home after sundown that evening his aunt Vera told him that a man had come to the farm looking for him. After she told the man he was not home she had peeked through the curtains to see if the man had left and there was nothing outside but an owl perched on a limb over the porch.

I wish Bruce hadn’t ever seen the owl at the fish pond, and I wish he hadn’t told me all that stuff about skinwalkers because when I'm out doing chores after sundown and I hear something strange it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

It has been at least a year since the day Bruce showed me his propane driven pickup. He hasn't been back since, but the other day I saw him driving down Main Street in Ada with a full load of Indians. The engine hasn’t blown up yet, and it looks like the skinwalker hasn't got Bruce yet either. On the other hand maybe he has; maby he has turned Bruce into a skinwalker too.

Alex Coyle
Ahloso
3/21/07 (rev. 11/17/08)

Postcard from Ahloso - March 31, 2003

Greetings,

No rain now for nearly two months. This must be what Mars, or maybe Hell, looks like. The wind's blowing at 40 miles an hour and the thermometer reads 40 degrees. We have red skies in the mornings, even before the wind starts to blow.

As I write this my room and the fields beyond and the clouds are bathed in an eerie red light caused by the sunlight passing through dust high in the air and where its mixed with the smoke from grass fires burning out of control way off to the south. These fires happen often during a long dry and windy spring, and folks around here have learned to fear them—they'll reduce a farm in their path to a few smoking fence posts in no time at all.

The "chicken lights" on my farm and the farms off in the distance are turning on prematurely because they "think" it's sundown.

A roadrunner, a big bird with dark blue tail-feathers and a spot of red on his crown, has taken up residence here in the yard to be near the water put out for the dogs. Wind is about to blow the feathers off him and the hair off both dogs if it keeps up—and it'll sand blast the paint off the cars if it gets any worse. And the poor old bovines; they just turn their tails into it and suffer.

Red dirt and tumbleweed from eastern New Mexico passing overhead. No television; Channels 10 and 12 always go out when the wind blows like this and they're the only channels we normally can get. Missed seeing Rudy Dockray and his 'Farm and "Raynch" Report' this morning. Fire hazard warnings on the radio. I guess they're worried about one of those dust explosions.

Great monster of a billy-goat outside my kitchen window last night. About the size of a buffalo. White with a brown face, big laid back horns and a mean look in his eye. He infuriated Beetle, our spaniel, and she chased him over the hill toward Lake Nada Pescada. She came back after a while looking triumphant; as they say "It ain't the size of the dog in the fight, etc." Called Swede Cushing (he leases the surface and runs a few cows) and he says "THAT GOAT'S BEEN HERE ON THE PLACE FOR THREE YEARS NOW AND HOW COME YOU'RE JUST NOW NOTICING HIM?" Swede always yells because he's hard of hearing; he says the goat belongs to Landers (the farmer across the section-line east). Landers says "the damn goat don't want to stay home, and I'm not much of a mind to insist." Says we can shoot "the son-of-a-bitch" for all he cares. Some people! We won't shoot him. Swede and I have decided he can't eat much except a few tin cans and some barbed-wire, and besides, he fits right in with the jackass (Cactus Jack) and his missus (Ms. Cactus is expecting), and the emu. Beetle's pretty grumpy about him though. She'll get over it, but that will take a while; she ain't gettin' any nicer as she gets older.

There's talk about getting one of the tribes it do a rain dance, but the last time they did that we got a tornado. I think all we can do is sit and wait; but 70 years ago this same country went for eight years with less rain than they had in Arabia and the result was the famous "Dust Bowl", so its hard to know what to do.

If you haven't decided on where to take your vacation this year, consider Oklahoma "where the wind comes whippin' 'cross the plain."

Alex Coyle

The Bible Belt

This evening our local television station showed us another painfully familiar, and all too frequent, one-minute broadcast from the studio of our electronic spook and God connection, Pastor Dwayne Sherriff, proprietor of the Faith Christian School. Faith Christian is a small, private, non-denominational church-school (an "academy" according to Pastor Dwayne); a part of the sprawling Dwayne Sherriff Ministries.

"We offer classes for pre-kindergarten to the eighth grade. After students graduate from our eighth grade they may attend a school of their own choosing or they may stay at Victory Life Academy through high school."

Pastor Dwayne, who has bangs and wears white suits that look to be of his own design, told us this evening that abortion and homosexuality were sins against God. He quoted a few lines from the Scriptures as proof of his claim and then told us that the lines he had just quoted were PRO-found.

We have a fondness in these parts for emphasizing the first syllables of multi-syllable words. We complain about government BEW-rocracies and the HEW-midity, we call a nearby town DOO-rant and pastor Sheriff is affectionately known by all in his congregation as DEE-wayne.

That may sound tacky to you Harvard grads but our citizens have made a contribution to English pronunciation that has gained national acceptance. That's the countrified word "DEE-fense" used by sportscasters, players and coaches all over America.

I have only lived in this county for thirty-one years so have not yet been afflicted by the misplaced emphasis bug; to my PRO-found DEE-light.

West of Ahloso
11/11/06 (rev. 11/17/08)
Alex Coyle

Men Who Hunt at Night

The 'Coon Hunters

I am an ex-hunter myself so I have no beef with game bird hunters who hunt for the pot. There seems very little difference between what they do than, say, fishing, although I'll admit that quail and dove probably have more distinct personalities than fish—if that counts for anything. Until about 10 years ago I was an enthusiastic hunter of game birds: dove, quail, pheasants, and my guns—a 20 gauge Eig double, a 20 gauge Ithica Featherlite pump, a .22 Remington Nylon for copperheads, and a Remington .243 which isn't good for anything but coyotes (who were killing my dogs before I bought it)—still hang, oiled and functional, on the wall behind me. I quit hunting with the shotgun because I finally got it through my head that the little feathered creatures were just trying to stay alive and get by from one year to the next like the rest of us. I miss the sport of wing-shooting—it takes skill—and wish I had never gone soft in the head about the little fellows, but, there it is. I can't shoot them any more.

But, there are other kinds of hunters.
It has been my observation that the men who hunt raccoons, and I have encountered a few, are, to put it bluntly, genetic throwbacks. Any one of those with whom I have crossed paths could have played the part of the guy with the banjo in James Dickey's _Deliverance_. They don't hunt for the pot; they hunt for the raccoons bushy tails so they can tie them to their belts and show off. They throw the rest of him away. And they don't shoot a raccoon unless they have to; instead they try to shake the terrified animal out of his tree so they can watch their dogs tear him to pieces. I once saw a spread in Life magazine showing some "sportsmen" in Louisiana who chained a raccoon to a floating log and then watched as their dog swam out to try to tear him off the log; usually the dog won, but now and then the raccoon did and the dog drowned. Those people's characters must have been bent in that direction by too many generations of keeping it all in the family.

Let me repeat the words of one local raccoon hunter. He said to me as I was ushering him off my land at two-o'clock in the morning:
—"Don' no 'coon know anithin' 'bout fences and propity lines. Ol' 'coon, he go wheah he want when he want, and so do I."

If you are pleased that the trespasser got his comeuppance by being ejected, I must add that the episode turned out to be very costly. The next afternoon I found my old pal Jessie, my valiant black Lab, down by the mailbox breathing her last breath. Alvin, the vet, said that she had not been run over, as I thought, but had been beaten with a club. My stomach churned as I got a mental picture of old friendly Jessie approaching the man, all a-wag-tail, only to be beaten to the earth with a club. What kind of man is it that would do a thing like that? After I told Alvin that I suspected she had been killed by a raccoon hunter (whose name I did not know), he said that sounded about right. He said that, being in the dog business, he had had many experiences with 'coon hunters and advised me that it would be smart if I left the score where it stood; minus one black Lab.
—"Mess with those people and they'll burn your barn, or your house," he said. "They are not used to being thrown off anybody's property. They've been hunting where they please around here for generations and they do not pay attention to fences and they do not respect the idea of private land. Most landowners don't want to mess with them. Even the game wardens leave them alone. You cannot prove that it was a 'coon hunter that killed Jesse. The very last thing you want to do is start it up with them; you are too civilized, so just let it be."

Well, I have followed Al's advice and let it be, but it will be a long time before I forget wonderful old Jesse—and although it was dark that night, it was not so dark that I can't remember that son-of-a-bitchin 'coon hunter's face.

Alex Coyle
11/11/06

Biography of Roo the Cat

Roo the cat, came here to live on a cold, rain drenched night when he was just a kitten. I had seen him, a black and taupe tabby, over in the north barn where he and his siblings had been born. He had to swim a rain-swollen creek and travel a half-mile through thick woods to get here. Then he parked himself outside the back door, waiting patiently, wet and shivering, until I fetched him inside. It was as if he had always known about this house. From that moment I was his cat-god, my dog Clem was his best friend, and this was his warm, dry, home for life. A month later he suffered a severe stroke. It has been over a year now and he's as well as he is ever going to get. He has to find his food bowl by trial and error, and he can't hear thunder. He often falls down...the sight of a cat falling down is almost too much to bear. His rear-end doesn't always go where his front-end does and he can't jump. In spite of all that he is a very good cat and tries hard to understand and obey the house rules. It can be aggravating at times to live with a cat like Roo, but I guess its aggravating all of the time to be a cat like Roo.

West of Ahloso
Friday, November 11, 2005

Burning

The leaves are coming down in bushels around here, all yellow, red and brown. Autumn has finally crept into southern Oklahoma.

The returning harrier (a.k.a. marsh hawk) arrived yesterday, right on schedule, and this morning she was busy wheeling and diving across the pasture in front of my house, looking for mice in the boot-high brown grass. This is a big, gorgeous, lady-hawk; mostly gray with white feathers on her underside and black feathers on her top, and a perfect white ring around her fuselage like the Red Baron had. I sat on the fence and watched her through my old WW2 Japanese field glasses for the better part of an hour and never saw her land to take a breather. That's strenuous flying she does; fast up-wind, wings pumping hard, and then wheeling to go speeding lickety-split down-wind, three feet above the grass; then turning suddenly back into the wind to hover with beating wings less than a foot off the ground for a closer look. Poor old bre'r mouse. Then away again, down-wind like a loose kite.

Around here a few of the citizens still burn off their fields at summer's end, the way the farmers in Europe did centuries ago. I once read an essay written by Ben Franklin condemning the practice. Yesterday evening; with clear skies, no wind, and Mars, Venus and a gibbous Moon all hanging in the sky like fires, the moment must have seemed auspicious because everywhere I looked there was smoke in the cool layered air over the low spots in the meadows, from fires deliberately set and tended to by the good nesters—my neighbors. I saddled up Button and rode down the section line between my farm and the place to the south of me, to mingle with the crowd. The people had gathered along the right-of-way, abandoning their usual reticence by turning fire watching into a kind of country social. It looked for all the world like a Brueghel painting; smoke, fires and busy, laughing, people.

Henry Day and his daughter Aeriel (she spells it with an "e") came up to say hello, wearing black faces and carrying wet gunnysacks that everyone was using to beat the flames. They looked more like possums dressed up like people than real people. Henry owns a ranch a mile and a half up to the north and he and Aeriel run it. They had come over to help with the burning. The attraction, for them and lots of others, including me, was meeting people we hadn’t seen in a while, but they were also here in self defense; an out of control grass fire can be very bad news on these dry prairies and there was a south breeze. Aeriel tossed me a wet sack and laughed as Button, who does not like having gunnysacks waived in her face, sat back on her tail. I declined the invitation to join the black-gang, saying that she had made my horse too antsy to leave tied to a fence. Some excuse, but it was better than nothing.

Lou Heinemann and John Flemming were there; friends from the feed store crowd. They had been over at Norman all day attending a livestock seminar at O.U. and were on their way back to Stonewell in John’s two-seater biplane. When they flew over and saw the fires the fools landed on the road to see what all the activity was about. Their plane was parked on the side of the road a couple of city blocks away and there they were, black faces and all, helping out.

They planned to take off in the dark later and fly home. John said he could follow the lights on the highway.
"You could call Fern and tell her when she hears us to come out and shine her car lights on the strip for me to land by."
I asked him how he was going to know, dark as it would be by then, which direction was which and he mumbled something or other so then I asked him if he thought he knew what he was doing. He mumbled again and sniggered; that was when I realized that John and Lou were both drunk. I told John it would be safer if he and Lou doubled up on Button and rode her the rest of the way down to Stonewell; that way they could be home by morning and nobody around here would bother the plane, except maybe me. I even offered to trade him Button for the airplane, even up, but he said no-thanks. It was just as well; Button had won a couple of quarter-horse races in her time and was worth a good deal more than that clapped out old Stearman.

Finally I said: "How about let's go back to my place and have a drink. You two can have something to eat and then you can sleep in the kids' old double bunk and fly home in the morning. That way Ella C. and Fern won't have to know anything about how you both been flyin' around the state sloppy-ass drunk all day long.
“Who’s drunk?” John said.
"What you got to drink?" Lou said.
"I got Jack Daniel and Jose Cuervo, and about three fingers of squirrel."
John said: "Sh-ee-it. I'd rather stay here and fight fires than drink that sheep dip."
And so, on and on. You know how it is with drunks.

The last I saw of them they were lifting off with 2 feet to spare over the treetops. They swung back around and flew over us at about 100 feet wobbling their wings, and whoever was in the back seat was waiving a bottle over his head. Then they turned south and crossed in front of the big yellow moon. Somebody said it looked just like a picture postcard.

I borrowed a cell phone from Jesus Chavez and he showed me how to use it. Stonewell has a population of less than 1000 and they have a private phone company with a PBX operator named Laverne; she has the board in her living room. I never met her, but I have talked to her; she sounds a lot like Lily Tomlin did as Ernestine in Laugh In. You don’t need to know phone numbers in Stonewell; you just tell Laverne who you want to talk to and she’ll run them down, no matter where they are. Or you can give her a message to pass on; its real handy. I called Laverne and asked her to let Fern know that her fly-boys had just taken off and about the car lights, and to call me back if they weren’t home in about a half hour so we could start looking for the remains.

I guess you could call this year's burning of the fields a success, but it wasn't one entirely. They burned up one line shack and a couple of pastures that didn’t belong to them, and they burned up the old Studebaker Champion Harry Ryan had put up on blocks years ago for his chickens. I'm probably lucky that what little breeze there was blew the fires away from my place.

Mr. Fixmer stepped on a sharp bois d’arc stob and it put a hole in his foot. Those little spikes are like steel and will go right through a shoe sole, or a tire. Mr. Fixmer owns the feed store in Stonewell. He is the widow Biddy's youngest brother. Her field was one of the ones they were burning off and he came up to help her out. She said she would put some stuff she'd made up on his foot. I hope he survives it.

These are resourceful, capable, people and they rely on the idea of community. I won't say that "never is heard a discouraging word"; there are a few disagreements from time to time. There have even been a couple of barn burnings that I know of, and a really great fist fight over a basket-full of catfish, between Henry Day and a turd named Jack Redland; but by and large they depend on one-another to get a lot of things done that other people expect the government to do for them. All things considered, I'm glad I came here to live. It beats hell out of the big city where the cops would come if you tried to burn your grass.

And the smell of that smoke in the evening reminds me of something in the past; I wish I could remember what it was.

Alex Coyle