My Dog Willow

 My dog Willow

Glazing out the window of my two room cabin I watched another sunrise paint the morning sky with a wash of light purplish blues with pale reds and bright yellows while the early morning silence as broken by the sound of a far off church bell ringing in town about a half mile away. It was Sunday in the Kings Canyon, a small town in New Mexico with a population of just over a hundred or so and half of those were Indians and sadly most of them were often drunk. I was alone now with my wife Sara’s passing two years earlier to some unknown disease that took the life and breath completely out of her almost instantly one cold winter evening. Not blessed with children to carry on our families name I was the last of our kind destined to wither and die. Born William James Taylor I was sixty now in the year 1902 and I guess you tend to reflect when you reach this part of your life's journey. My old hide was tanned and scarred from a lifetime in the desert and my soul probably looked the same way to the almighty above. I was just ten years old when I came to this place brought here by my father who was to become an Indian agent for the government. Somewhere along the way my mother died and we buried her in a good place that overlooked a deep valley that ran as far as the eye could see. We marked it with a cross but later that same year flash floods washed the spot away never to be found again no matter how hard I tried. Sometimes I felt her hand brush across my face while I searched for her resting place but maybe it was just the wind after all playing a trick on me.

My Father blamed her death on the desert and especially the Jicarilla  Apache Nation until the day they helped him enter eternity with that story later to be told. He drastically changed with her passing from a man of kindness and God fearing to a broken man who lost his soul with his fiery red hair adding to his hatred to God and anyone else he felt beneath him including me. For the next eight years we lived on an army post with on more than twenty soldiers present and four of those being officers. I never really got to know any of them as they were continuously transferred in and out often never to return. With a natural spring being the only source of fresh water for miles it brought a lot of attention and some unwanted. The army was here to keep the peace and maintain law and order but it was more lawless with very little order. My father managed the local Indian affairs which included distribution of some beef and provisions as well as matters regarding the Indian reservation. But the Apache's hated the white man and had little regard for our presence and though of us as intruders on their land and weren't sly about letting us know their intentions. 

My father was harsh to the Apache people and would often accuse them of stealing army beef and once kicked a young brave in the stomach when he asked for something to eat. The Indian boy wasn't much older than I was and the army captain threatened to have my father removed from the post over the incident. I was ashamed of what he did and will never forget the look on the face of the young Apache after several Apache squaws carried him away and called my father, “ Gwii, Gwii”, their word for snake. I was forbidden to speak to or play with any of the Apache children who named me,”Gah” meaning rabbit. With no friends to speak of except a baby horned toad I raised in a wooden box and fed fire ants when I could catch them without being stung the soldiers taught me how to ride a horse and an officers wife took it upon herself to teach me to read and write. There never seemed to be a time where the Apache wasn't at war with us or somebody including themselves, and deep inside of me I believed they believed the were right.  My father called them less than human and his opinions became louder the more he drank which he often did. Captain Thompson who ran the outpost once had my father tied and detained in a store room after one of his many drunken outbursts and for swearing in front of a lady. And once I overheard the soldiers talking and they all agreed my father was more trouble than the Indians and hoped the Apache would have their way with him.