The last of Mocho Creek, the last of the afternoon light, up ahead I’ll be taking the junction east, and try and make it home before midnight. A bucket load of questions run through my head, most of them I don’t have answers for. Seeing that dead girl still vibrates around me like a brass gong, my perception is altered, time is tweaked, there’s a taste in my mouth, and thoughts drift in and out at random, almost like in a dream. Inevitably they come back to what I’m out here for, and the biggest question arises, whether Joaquin actually was killed at Cantua Creek, or if he lived, and it is the central question that motivated this entire journey, tryingto get to it, whether or what is true, a fact, verifiable, for it has long been my belief that in all mythology there is fact. So what part of the legend is true? This is a question I will increasingly entertain on the second leg of La Vereda del Monte – where Murrieta has grown his herd to two hundred head, and drives them up the San Antonio Valley toward Mississippi Lake, right down the center and through the most remote parts of the Mt. Diablo range