The moon turned the horses and mules silver with its magic. It gave the packer an unspoken pleasure to look back on a sinuous Sierra snake of eleven animals stretched in a flexible line nearly 150 feet long behind him. And he looked up, straight up on the peaks of Kearsarge where the snow fields always left behind shady patches of dirty white, up where the Inyo moon splashed them with a dream brush and made old secrets come to life.

* * * *

“You’ve heard of the ghost of Kearsarge,” the old man said. “Everyone knows about her.” The packers at the table at the ranch looked at each other.

“What ghost?” one asked.

“Just the old lady,” the man said, with laughter in his dark Paiute eyes. “She doesn’t hurt nothing, you know. Just sings a little.”

The evening was dark at the ranch, and the table lamp splashed shadows of the assembled weary cowboys on the kitchen walls as they sipped coffee. It was always good to hear the stories the old man told, coming over from his own small cabin here on the reservation.

“I never heard nothing about a ghost lady up Kearsarge,” said the cook.

“That’s what they say,” said the old man. “Ever since there was a town up there. Used to be the mine up there, you know. Big one. Then there was a big dance in town one Christmas time, it was. Long time ago. Before my time.

“Anyway, everybody went to to dance, you know, except the caretaker and his wife. Avalanche got ‘em. They were the only ones. Everybody else went to the dance. Can’t remember what year it was. That mine was working then, though.”

Nobody spoke while the old man sipped some coffee. “You boys ever hear her up there at night? You can hear her. That’s what they say, anyway. Avalanche took her head off, you know. Never did find it. They say she calls for her head at night when there’s a moon.”

“At Kearsarge?”

“Yeah, you know where those old foundations are? That’s where the little town used to be. Where the stock trail leaves the Onion Valley road. Looking for her head. That’s what they say. Looking for her head.”

* * * *

The first foundations of Kearsarge glowed in the moonlight, little more than deliberate rock piles and scattered timbers now. The packer steered Brownie around the first and left the little stretch of dirt road again to follow the creek up the canyon. More foundations glowed, their old stones like age-worn teeth, and the wind came down from the snow patches cool and quiet. The packer thought he heard something, once. Just once, but he wondered about it, anyway. Maybe it was a night bird. Maybe. Looking back, the cluster of lights that was had now shrunk to a small glowing nucleus in the moonscaped miles below.

He rested the stock on the first switchback above the old ghost town and pulled on his jacket. It helped.

* * * *

“Your granddad told us there was a spook up at old Kearsarge,” the packer said as they walked along the irrigation ditch that one night, a time back.

“Grandpa knows a lot,” she said, squeezing his hand. “It’s probably true.”

He saw her eyes then, in the glow of a nearby streetlight there in town, as they walked. The desert night warmed them and made them both think of things long past and yet to come.

“You don’t think he was just trying to b.s. us into being scared?”

“Not Grandpa. He knows a lot.”

“Umm,” the packer said.

“You like him?”

“Sure. Great guy.”

“He likes you, too. He likes you a lot, I know. So does my mom and dad.”

“Very nice people, your mom and dad.”

She smiled up at him and he could see the pretty eyes again, the ageless eyes that spoke so much of generations of desert and mountain people, despite her youth.

“You like kids?” she asked.

Brought to you by “The Long Dark” by Slim Randles. Online.