This is the butte that they call the Elephant.
Below this butte the Service was building a dam. It was a huge undertaking. When finished the dam would be as high as a twenty-story building and as long as two city blocks. It would block the river, turning it into a lake forty miles long, that would be a perpetual water supply to over a hundred thousand acres of land in the Rio del Norte valley.
The borders of the Rio del Norte have been cultivated for centuries. Long before the Puritans landed in New England, the Spanish who followed Coronado planted grape vines on the brown river's banks. The Spanish found Pueblo Indians irrigating little hard-won fields here. The irrigation ditches these Indians used were of dateless antiquity and yet there were traces left of still older ditches used by a people who had gone, leaving behind them only these pitiful dumb traces of heroic human effort. After the Spanish came the Americans, patrolling their ditches with guns lest the Apaches devastate their fields.
Spanish, Indians, Americans all fought to bring the treacherous Rio del Norte under control, but failure came so often that at last they united in begging the Reclamation Service for aid. It was to help these people and to open up the untouched lands of the valley as well, that the dam was being built. And the building of it was Jim's job.
Jim jumped off the bobtailed train that obligingly stopped for him at a lone shed in the wide desert. In the shed was the adobe splashed automobile which Jim had left there on his trip out. He threw his suit case into the tonneau, cranked the engine and was off over the rough trail that led to the Project Road.
A few miles out he met four hoboes. They turned out for the machine and Jim stopped.
"What are the chances?" asked one of the group.
"Fine! Get in! I'm engineer up there. You're hired."
With broad grins the three clambered aboard. The man who sat beside Jim said: "We heard flood season was coming on and thought you'd like extra help. Us boys rode the bumpers up from Cabillo."
Jim grunted. Labor-getting continued to be a constant problem for all the valuable nucleus formed by the Park. Experts and the offscourings of the earth drifted to the great government camp and Jim and all his assistants exercised a constant and rigid sifting process. He did not talk much to his new help. His eyes were keen to catch the first glimpse of the river. The men caught his strain and none of them spoke again. Cottontails quivered out of sight as the automobile rushed on. An occasional coyote, silhouetted against the sky, disappeared as if by magic. Swooping buzzards hung motionless to see, then swept on into the heavens.
