A Boy And His Dog And The Snow

When I posted the other day about truths that Tucker the Big Dog reminds me about, I could've added the personal one of "Don't forget to go hiking every now and then".

That's something else I've let slide since going deep into the Arizona books. But two days ago, with snow on the ground and more coming down, I found I couldn't resist (and I didn't exactly have to twist Tucker's leg to get him behind the idea). I originally only meant to take him for some poking around in the woods behind our house, then we went just a bit farther up into the woods behind the house next door (the one I'm trying to buy), and then a bit farther, and then I thought "It's been a long time since I've taken pictures of Tucker in the snow". So we ended up tromping through another hundred or so snow-filled forest acres.

A happy Tucker spots the mostly-forgotten logging road heading up the mountain and realizes what I'm about.

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Geronimo's Penultimate Final Surrender

For some reason I had a bit of a hard time getting started with today's batch of writing...

...but when I finally got down to plunking the keyboard I managed a fair amount. Along with my normal writerly impulses I was driven forward by two things: One, realizing that if I'm diligent I might have Copper Heart finished by next weekend. And two, next weekend we're supposedly going to get somewhere between 11-14 inches of snow, and if I'm done with the book I won't feel at all guilty about going out and enjoying the deluge.

Anyway, yesterday and today I've been writing about Geronimo's so-called "Final Surrender", which really wasn't. Despite Geronimo's original offer of surrender--in which he gave the speech that included his famous quote "Once I moved like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all"--he bolted immediately afterward and rampaged through the Southwest and northern Mexico for another six months. This led to the resignation of General George Crook and the ultimate surrender as negotiated primarily by Lieutenant Charles Gatewood, who met Geronimo with only a handful of men rather than an army at his back.

And I've been writing about Geronimo for two books now, introducing him when he was four years old. He will be gone from my Arizona books after he leaves on his prison train to Saint Augustine, Florida, since he never returned to Arizona, and after all that time it's going to feel quite strange for him to be gone.

PROGRESS REPORT FOR 1/29 AND 1/30/14

New Words: 3750 (750 / 3000) on what is now chapter 4 ("The Renegades, 1885") of Copper Heart. I didn't just start a new chapter, exactly. I decided that my original chapter 3 was too long and broke off the last third for chapter 4. "The Renegades" doesn't refer solely to the Apache.

Total Words: 147,700.

Book Year: 1886.

Reason For Stopping: Getting ready for work.

Mammalian Assistance: See above picture for Hayes the Baby Cat's help. Vegas also came in to guard his box pile (and repeatedly grab my right hand) towards the end of the writing day.

Exercise: Walked to work and back yesterday; just a bit of poking around the woods with Tucker today.

Stimulants: None.

Today's Opening Passage:

Yesterday: There were many things you could say about General George Crook, Gus thought. But today it was that he got right to the point.

Today: Gus’ latest meeting with Geronimo came in a peaceful, almost idyllic spot south of the border. Water rippled through a ravine filled with cottonwoods and willows and other lush, almost tropical plants. There alone, or with a girl—not that Gus had a girl, he flushed briefly to remember—it would have been magnificent. But then the Apache arrived decked out with gun belts and colorful blankets Gus guessed had been stolen from Mexicans since the attack that killed Captain Crawford, and suddenly the ravine was more choking than paradise.

It also wasn’t lost on Gus that the name of the spot where they were having the parlay was the Canon de los Embudos: the Canyon of the Tricksters.

Darling Du Jour: The white man’s name was C.S. Fly, and he was from a town called Tombstone — although Kaywaykla had no idea why the White Eyes would be so reckless as to name one of their towns after the site of a grave. It was like they were asking spirits and evil to come down on them. He just relegated that to the back of his mind as yet another thing he would never understand about the whites.

But he did understand their obsession with taking photographs. He knew whites and Mexicans didn’t have minds as good as the Dineh; they couldn’t remember the stories their people told through the generations, and so found other ways to record them, like writing. He hadn’t been surprised that Captain Bourke was writing down everything everyone said; that was the only way the whites would remember it. Kaywaykla almost felt sorry for them.

Their photographs were another thing they used to remember. So he wasn’t surprised when one of them brought a camera and asked permission to take pictures of the Dineh, including sitting down with the soldiers. ...

Many of the soldiers looked horrified — Kaywaykla noticed with hidden amusement — as Fly told Goyakla and the others how he wanted them to look. Whatever the newspapers might do with the pictures, though, Fly was not making the Dineh tell bad stories about themselves. They posed on their horses. They posed holding rifles and wearing their gun belts. They posed alone or lined up with the canyon walls behind them. They posed with their families — Goyakla even stood in the center of one with his son beside him, and the son holding Goyakla’s baby grandson. Kaywaykla admitted to himself that while the posing felt strange, something about it also felt good, with a rightness to it.

At once he knew that even if they all surrendered tomorrow and never saw their land again, they would never be forgotten.

Non-Research / Review Books In Progress: None; right now it's all research and review.