Wolf Willow

  At noon, a little to the east of Jumbo’s Butte, they stopped to boil coffee and heat a kettle of beans. The thin snow did not cover the grass; the crust that had blazed in their eyes all morning was thawing in drops that clung to the curly prairie wool. On a tarpaulin spread by the wagon they sprawled and ate the beans that Jesse might just as well not have heated, for the cold tin plates congealed them again within seconds. But the coffee burned their mouths, and the tin cups were so hot to hold that they drank with their mittens on. The steam of their coffee-heated breath was a satisfaction; Rusty tried to blow rings with it.

  When he finished he lay on the tarp next to Panguingue. There was always, it seemed, room next to Panguingue: it was said of him that he took a bath every spring whether he needed it or not. In the cold, and so long as Panguingue wore a sheepskin and overshoes, Rusty did not mind. And anyway, since arriving he had seen no one take a bath, not even Buck, who was fastidious; certainly he had taken none himself. So he relaxed by Panguingue and felt the ground satisfyingly hard under the tarp, and let Panguingue thump him monotonously between the shoulder blades and dust cigarette ashes through his hair. Through half-closed eyes he heard the horses working on the curly grass all around, he saw a snowbird come boldly to pick at a scrap of salt pork by the edge of the tarp; his ears heard the sounds of ease, the scratchings, the crackle of a match; his nose smelled sour pipe, smelled Bull Durham, smelled Ray Henry’s sybaritic cigar. He loved every minute, every sensation, and when, just as they were rising to tighten cinches and move on, they heard the hysterical yapping of hounds, and saw Schulz’s pack, two miles away, pursue and run down a coyote, he climbed on the wagon and watched as eager as a spectator at a horse race. He thought of Schulz as belonging somehow with Jesse, the two of them survivors of an earlier stage of Plains life; he rather envied Schulz’s boy, brought up to lonely cabins, skimpy cowchip campfires on the prairies, familiarity with wild animals, the knack and habit of casual killing. From high on the wagon seat, bracing himself on Jesse’s shoulder, he watched Schulz ride in and scatter the hounds and dismount, while the boy gathered up the loose packhorse. He expected that the wolfers would come in and get something to eat, but he saw Schulz mount again and the three horses and the five dogs move out eastward. Even more than the cowboys, these were the wild ones; they had gone as far as it was possible to go back toward savagery. He regretted not seeing them ride in with the scalp of the coyote, the hounds bloody-muzzled from the kill. He hoped to get a chance to course a coyote or a wolf across such a marvelous plain as this on such a glorious day, when you could see for twenty miles. It was tremendous, every bit of it.

  During the afternoon the country roughened, broke into coulees that opened down toward the river. They rode, it seemed, endlessly, without a break and with little talk. Rusty stiffened in the saddle, he rode lounging, stood in the stirrups, hung his feet free while under him the shaggy little horse shuffled on. The sun went down the sky toward the Cypress Hills, now no more than a faint clean lifting of the horizon. They felt the thin warmth on their necks if their collars were down; their faces felt the cold.

  When they arrived at Stonepile the sun was already down. The sky back over the hills was red, the snow ahead of them lay rosy across the flats. Until they reached the coulee’s rim they would not have known it was there; as for the river, it was sunk among indistinguishable rough coulees to the north, but no more than a mile away. As they dipped downward toward the Stonepile buildings, once a Mounted Police patrol post, the valley was already full of violet shadow. Rusty creaked and eased himself, letting the horse pick his way. He was stiff and chilled, his face felt like sheet metal, his eyes watered and smarted from the day’s glare.

  They were not talkative as they unsaddled and turned the horses loose, or during the time while they lugged bedrolls and food into the old barracks. Two or three men would be stationed here later to feed to the calves the three hundred and fifty tons of wild hay stacked in the coulee; they had brought flour, rice, oatmeal, sugar, matches and prunes, tinned corn and syrup and jam and peas, dried apples and peaches, to stock the place. There was a good deal of tracking in and out from the cold blue dusk. Jesse had stuck two tallow dips in china holders that said Peerless Hotel. They were all in each other’s way in the narrow bunkhouse, and all in the way of Jesse, trying to get supper going. They bumped shoulders, growled. Rusty, who had thrown his bedroll forehandedly into one of the upper bunks, came in with a load later and found that Ed Spurlock had thrown it out and put his own in its place. There were only six bunks for the ten of them. In the end, Rusty spread his bed beside Panguingue’s on the floor, and the wolfers, coming in a half hour after them, looked in the door briefly and decided to sleep in the stable with the Clydes, the night horses, and the dogs.

  “Be careful them studs,” Jesse told Schulz. “It wouldn’t do if them and your lion got to mixing it.”

  The wolfer was a man, Rusty thought, to be noticed, perhaps to be watchful of. He still wore, in the warming barracks, a muskrat cap with earlaps. Under it his eyes were gray as agates, as sudden as an elbow in the solar plexus. His face was red, his mustache sandy. Between his eyes, even when he smiled, which was not often, he wore a deep vertical wrinkle. He had what Rusty thought of as a passionate taciturnity. He looked watchful and besieged, he would be quick to strike back, he was not a man you could make a joke with. In a low growling voice he said that he valued his hound too highly to let any forty-dollar horse kick him in the head.

  Jesse looked at him, holding a stove lid half off the smoking fire, and his silky mustaches moved as if a small animal had crawled under the thatch. He said, “If one of the Clydes hit him, that wouldn’t be no forty-dollar kick. That would be a genuine gold-plated eight-hundred-dollar kick guaranteed to last.”

  Schulz grunted and went out: Rusty told himself that he had been right in guessing him as a man with whom you did not joke. The boy, sullen-looking, with a drooping lip and eyes that looked always out their corners, went silently after him. They came back in for supper, cleaned their plates, and went out again for good.

  “What’s the matter with him?” Spurlock asked. “Don’t he like our company?”

  “Likes his dogs better,” Buck said. He reared his red turkey neck up and glared out into the jammed corridor between the bunks. From the end, where he sat braced against the wall fooling with the harmonica, Rusty saw the disgust on his skinned-looking face. “What about somebody that would sleep with a God damn dog?” Buck said.

  From the lower, talking around the dead cigar that poked upward from his face, Little Horn said gently, “We ain’t got any right to criticize. We all been sleepin’ with Panguingue for a year.”

  “B.S.,” Panguingue said. “My feet don’t smell no worse’n yours.”

  “Well for the love of God,” Jesse said, hanging the dishpan on the wall, “let’s not have any contests. There ain’t a man here would survive it.”

  Rusty took the slick metal of the harmonica from his mouth and ventured: his feelers, tentative always to estimate his own position as one of them, told him that now, while they were criticizing the unsociable wolfer, his own position was more solid; and yet he admired the wildness and the obvious competence of the wolfer, too. The very fact that he rode in moccasins and thick German socks gave him a distinction over the rest of them in their overshoes. Rusty said, “Do you suppose it’s only that he’s used to living out alone, don’t you know ... that he’s almost like a wild animal himself? He seems that way to me ... or is that only fancy?”

  They hooted at him, and he felt his ears grow red. “Aow, it’s only fawncy, p‘raps,” they told each other for the next minute or two. “Deah!” they said. “Rilly?” Rusty blew into the mouth organ. He heard Little Horn saying, “It’s natural enough. Yell at a dog, he minds. Yell at one of you sonsofbitches, what does he do? I don’t blame the guy. There’s no satisfaction in a cowpuncher’s company like there is in a dog’s.”

  Spurlock said, “Can his kid t
alk? I never heard him say a word yet.”

  “Probably all he knows is ”bow-wow,“ Buck said.

  Jesse pawed his yellow-white silky mustache and said with the look of foolery in his faded blue eyes, “Schulz don’t look to me like he’s got a steady conscience. I’d say mebbe he was a windigo.”

  Rusty waited, hoping someone else would take the bait, but resigning himself when no one spoke. And anyway, he was interested. “What’s a windigo?”

  “What the Crees used to call an Injun that had made use of man-meat,” Jesse said. “Most generally seemed to sort of drive a man wild, he wasn’t right afterwards. I recall hearing Bert Wil loughby tell about one the Mounties had to go get up on the Swift Current, back in the early days. His tribe got suspicious, he come out of a starvin’ winter lookin’ so fat and slick. Also his fambly was missin‘. So they collared this buck and he took ’em up to his winter camp on Bigstick Lake, and here was all these bones and skulls around, and he’d kick ‘em and laugh, and say, This one my wife, hee hee hee,’ and ‘That one my mother-in-law, ho ho,’ and ‘This one here my father, ha ha.’ He’d et the whole damn bunch, one after the other.”

  “Well,” Little Horn said. “I wonder if somebody is settin’ on-comfortable on old Schulzie’s stomach?”

  “Maybe we could get him to eat Panguingue before he gets too God damn high,” Spurlock said.

  Little Horn said regretfully, “I doubt if even a windigo would take a chance on Panguingue.”

  “B.S.,” Panguingue said.

  From the white cloud of cigar smoke that filled the enclosed space above his bunk, Ray Henry whispered, “You can all take it easy. Schulz and his boy will be stayin’ here or at Bates Camp all winter, while you boys is up to your ass in dried apple pies back at the ranch.”

  “Good,” Buck said.

  “Sure, Ray,” said Jesse, “I know that was the arrangement. But is it safe?”

  “Safe, how?”

  Jesse kicked the stove leg. “This-here my boy,” he said. “Hee hee hee.”

  They left Schulz and his silent boy behind them at the Stonepile camp and made a hard drive eastward to the Fifty-Mile Crossing of the Whitemud, on the eastern boundary of the range that, by mutual consent among all the outfits, was called the T-Down’s. Already, within a day, Rusty felt how circumstances had hardened, how what had been an adventure revealed itself as a job. He rose from his bed on the floor so stiff he hobbled like a rheumatic dog, and when he stumbled out of the foul barracks and took a breath of the morning air it was as if he had had an icicle rammed clear to his wishbone. Another cold day—colder than the one before by a good deal—and an even harder ride ahead. And leaving the Schulzes affected him unpleasantly: these two were being separated off to carry on a specific and essential duty, but no one was sorry to see them go. The outfit that he had thought of as ten was really only eight. If the others chose to find him as disagreeable as they found Schulz, it was only seven. He hung at their fringes, hoping to earn a place among them. He was painfully alert, trying to anticipate what was expected of him. What was expected was that he should climb in the saddle, on a new pony this morning—one with a trot like a springless wagon over cobblestones—and ride, and ride, and ride, straight into the blinding glare of the sun.

  The night before, he had entered in his journal information on how the open range from Wood Mountain on the east to Medicine Lodge Coulee on the west was run. From the Whitemud north to the Canadian Pacific tracks the Circle Diamond and the 76, both very large outfits, divided it. South of the river there were several. Between Wood Mountain and Fifty-Mile was the Turkey Track, running about 25,000 head. Then their own outfit, the T-Down Bar, running 10,000. Between the T-Down ranch house and the Cypress Hills the Z-X ran about 2000 purebred shorthorns and whitefaces, and through the Cypress Hills to Medicine Lodge Coulee an association of small ranchers called the Whitemud Pool ran their herds together. It seemed reasonable; it even seemed neat; but it seemed terribly large when you had to ride across it at the wagon’s pace.

  By noon the sky had hazed over. They blessed it because of their eyes and cursed it because the wind developed a sting. Then away out on the flats in the middle of a bleak afternoon they met the wagon and four riders from the Turkey Track, bound for a camp they had on the big coulee called the War Holes. They were on the same errand as the T-Down boys: combing parts of the range missed in the spring roundup, and separating out the calves and bulls to be wintered on hay in the sheltered bottoms. Their greeting was taciturn and numb. The T-Down boys looked to them exactly as they looked to the T-Down, probably: frostbitten, with swollen watery eyes, their backs humped to the cold wind, their ponies’ tails blowing between their legs as they waited out the fifteen minutes of meeting.

  It had not been made clear to Rusty Cullen, until then, that they were on a belated and half-desperate job. A green hand did not inquire too closely for fear of asking foolish questions; an experienced hand volunteered nothing. And so he was surprised by the gloominess of the Turkey Track boys and their predictions of heavy losses on the range. They quoted signs and omens. They ran mittened hands against the grain of their ponies’ winter hair, to show how much heavier it was than normal. They had seen muskrat houses built six feet high in the sloughs—and when the rats built high you could depend on a hard winter. Mounted Police freighters reported a steady drift of antelope from the north across the CPR tracks.

  The chinook winds, he gathered, should keep the range clear enough for the stronger animals to get feed, but calves didn’t winter well. Fortunately all the stock was fat: the summer range had been good. If they could get the calves in where there was feed, maybe there wouldn’t be too much loss. Having exchanged omens, predictions, reassurances, and invitations to Christmas blowouts, they raised their mitts to each other and ducked each his own way into or away from the wind, and the tracks that had briefly met crawled apart again across the snow.

  Somehow the brief, chilled, laconic encounter in the emptiness and cold of the flats left Rusty depressed. By the time they dragged in to camp in the willows of the river bottom at Fifty-Mile his eyes were swollen almost shut, and burned and smarted as if every little capillary and nerve in them had been twisted and tied in knots; he knew how streaked and bloodshot they were by looking at the eyes of the others. He was tired, stiff, cold; there was no immediate comfort in camp, but only more cold hard work, and the snow that was only a thin scum on the prairie was three inches deep down here. They shoveled off a space and got the tent set up in the blue dusk, and he looked it over and felt that their situation was gloomily naked and exposed. When he chopped through the river’s inch of ice and watched the water well up and overflow the hole it seemed like some dark force from the ancient heart of the earth that could at any time rise around them silently and obliterate their little human noises and tracks and restore the plain to its emptiness again.

  The wind dropped after sundown, the night came on clear and cold. Before turning in Rusty stepped outside and looked around. The other boys were all in their bedrolls, and the light in the tent had been blown out so that even that pale human efflorescence was gone; the tent was a misty pyramid, the wagon a shadow. Tied to the wheels, the blanketed night horses and the Clydes moved their feet uncomfortably and rustled for a last grain of oats in the seams of their nosebags.

  The earth showed him nothing; it lay pallid, the willows bare sticks, the snow touched with bluish luminescence. A horn of moon was declining toward the western horizon. But in the north the lights were beginning, casting out a pale band that trembled and stretched and fell back and stretched out again until it went from horizon to horizon. Out of it streaks and flares and streamers began to reach up toward the zenith and pale the stars there as if smoke were being blown across them.

  He had never felt so small, so lost, so inconsequential; his impulse was to sneak away. If anyone had asked his name and his business, inquiring what he was doing in the middle of that empty plain, he would have mumbled some
foolish and embarrassed answer. In his mind’s eye he saw the Turkey Track camp ten or fifteen or twenty miles out in the emptiness, the only other thing like themselves, a little lonesome spark that would soon go out and leave only the smudge of the wagon, the blur of the tent, under the cold flare of the Northern Lights. It was easy to doubt their very existence; it was easy to doubt his own.

  A night horse moved again, a halter ring clinked, a sound tiny and lost. He shuddered his shoulders, worked his stiffened face, stirred up his numbed brains and shook the swimming from his eyes. When the tent flap dropped behind him and he stooped to fumble the ties shut the shiver that went through him was exultant, as if he had just been brushed by a great danger and had escaped. The warmth and the rank human odors of the tent were mystically rich with life. He made such a loud, happy, unnecessary row about the smell of Panguingue’s feet when he crawled into his bedroll in their cramped head-to-foot sleeping space that three or four sleepy voices cursed him viciously and Panguingue kicked him a few good hard ones through his blankets and kicked the vapors out of him.

  Sometime during that roundup they may have had a day of decent weather, but it seemed to Rusty it was a procession of trials: icy nights, days when a bitter wind lashed and stung the face with a dry sand of snow, mornings when the crust flashed up a glare so blinding that they rode with eyes closed to slits and looked at the world through their eyelashes. There was one afternoon when the whole world was overwhelmed under a white freezing fog, when horses, cattle, clothes, wagon, grew a fur of hoar frost and the herd they had gathered had to be held together in spooky white darkness mainly by ear.

  On bright days they were all nearly blind, in spite of painting their cheekbones with charcoal and riding with hats pulled clear down; if they could see to work at all, they worked with tears leaking through swollen and smarting lids. Their faces grew black with sun and glare, their skin and lips cracked as crisp as the skin of a fried fish, and yet they froze. Every night the thermometer dropped near zero, and there was an almost continuous snake-tongue of wind licking out of the north or west.