Wolf Willow

  The river bottom and the big rough coulees entering from the south held many cattle, and they soon collected a large herd. They were hard to move; if he had had a gun Rusty would have been tempted more than once to make immediate beef of them. The Canadian cattle, whiteface or whiteface-and-shorthorn cross, were impenetrably stupid and slow; their whole unswerving intention was to break past a rider and get back into the bottoms. The longhorns, most of which carried the Turkey Track or Circle Diamond brand and which had to be cut away from their own, were exactly the opposite: fast, agile, wicked, and smart. They could lead a man a wild chase, always in a direction he didn’t want to go; they hid among other cattle and couldn’t be cut out; they milled and stampeded the T-Down herd at every chance; all the boys had spills, chasing longhorns through rough country and across the icy flats; and they wore the horses, already weak and thin, to the bone.

  On the third day out from Fifty-Mile, Slip, Panguingue, and Rusty were cutting out a bunch of ten or fifteen Circle Diamond longhorns from a dozen T-Down whitefaces. They wanted the whitefaces up on the bench where they could turn them into the herd; the longhorns were welcome to the coulee. Of course the whitefaces hung onto the coulee and the longhorns stampeded up onto the flats. It was astonishing how fast those cattle could move and how much noise they made. Their horns cracked; their hoofs cracked; their joints cracked; it seemed as if even their tails snapped like bullwhips. In a wild clamor they went up the coulee bank, agile as goats, with Rusty after them.

  He came out onto the rim in a sting of snow and wind. The longhorns were well ahead of him, racing with their bag-of-bones clatter toward the wagon and the herd that Jesse and Spurlock were holding there. Rusty ducked his head and squinted back at Slip; he was waving and shouting: Rusty understood that he was to head the longhorns before they got too close to the herd.

  The cattle, very fast for a short distance, began to slack off. His dogged little horse came up on a roan haunch, then on a brindle, then past a set of wild horns, and finally up on the leader, so close the boy could have kicked his laboring shoulder or reached out and grabbed his thirty-inch horn. He lashed him with the rope across the face; still going hard, the steer ducked and began to turn.

  The next he knew, Rusty was over the pony’s head like a rock shot from a slingshot. It happened so fast he knew nothing about it until he was flying through the air frantically clawing at nothing, and lit sliding, and rolled. His wind and wits went out of him together; he sat up groggily, spitting blood and snow.

  And oh, how beautiful a thing it is to work with men who know their job! He sat up into a drama of danger and rescue. The steer had turned and was coming for him; Slip was riding in hard from the side to head him off. But he was too far back; Rusty saw it with the hardest sort of clarity, and he was up on hands and knees, into a crouch, his eyes estimating distances, watching the wide horns and the red eyes of the steer, noting even how the stiff ice-encased hairs sprayed back from his nostrils. While he crouched there laboring to get wind back into his lungs, Rusty saw Slip’s bay in the air with all four legs stiff, coming down to a braced landing. The wide loop came snaking in the air, Slip’s left hand was making a lightning dally around the horn. The timing was so close that the rope did not even sag before the steer’s rush took up the slack. It simply whistled out straight and was snapped tight and humming as the pony came down stiff-legged in the snow. The steer was yanked off his feet, the horse slipped, went nearly down, recovered, the air was full of hoofs and horns, and the longhorn crashed as if he had fallen from the sky. Liquid dung rolled from under his tail; Rusty thought he had broken his neck.

  Shakily he went toward the steer to unhook Slip’s rope for him, but Slip warned him sharply away. His horse stepped nervously, keeping the rope tight when the steer tried to rise. A little way off, Panguingue was reaching from his saddle to catch the trailing reins of Rusty’s pony. “Bust anythin‘?” Slip said.

  “No,” Rusty said. He had sense enough to swallow his gratitude. With his cracked and blackened face, Slip looked like a dwarfish Negro jockey on that big strong horse. He was watching the herd, and Rusty turned to look too, just as Panguingue rode up and handed him his reins. All three stood a moment looking toward the wagon and listening to the uproar of shouts and curses that came from Spurlock and Jesse.

  “God damn!” Panguingue said.

  The longhorns, bursting into the compact herd of whitefaces, were stirring them like a great spoon. Even as they watched, the milling movement spread, the edges scattered, the whole herd was on the run back toward the coulee. Slip shook off his rope and he and Panguingue started off at a lope without a glance at Rusty. The steer rose and stood spraddling, watching him with red eyes. Limping, cursing the treacherous icy hole pocked prairie, sorry for himself in his unregarded pain, Rusty reached his numb left arm up and took hold of the horn and mounted. Gritting his teeth, he spurred the pony into a trot, but that so agonized his arm and shoulder that in a moment he slowed to a walk. Then he swore and kicked him into a canter. He would show them. He would ride it out the whole mortal day, and they would never know until that night, after he had done without a complaint all the duty demanded of him, that he was really a stretcher case with a broken shoulder or collarbone or something. He knew he was going to be laid up, but he would stay in the saddle till he dropped. A grim campaigner, a man with the right stuff in him, he crippled along after Slip and Panguingue and the accursed cows.

  He managed to get through the rest of the day, but when he was unsaddling that night at the wagon, his face skinned, his left hand helpless and his right fumbling and clumsy, no one came around with help or sympathy. One or two of them gave him bleary glances and went on past as he picked at the latigo with one freezing unmittened hand. Perhaps he dropped a tear or two of rage and weakness and pain into the snow. When he finally got the saddle off and turned the pony loose, he stumbled into the tent and lay down and turned his back to them. He heard Jesse’s cooking noises, he smelled the smoke of frying meat, he felt the heat of the stove filling the canvas space. The boys talked a little, growling and monosyllabic. The wind puffed on the tent wall near his face; he cradled his aching arm the best he could and concentrated on stoicism.

  Panguingue came in, crawled into his bed to warm up, and kicked Rusty companionably to get his attention. The jar shook such pain through the boy that he rose up with gritted teeth. Panguingue’s astonished grin glimmered through his beard, and he said to the tent at large, “You should of seen old Rusty get piled today. How’d that feel, Rusty? You was up in the air long enough to grow feathers.”

  “It felt like hell, if you want to know. I think I broke my shoulder.”

  “Oh well,” Panguingue said. “Long as it wasn’t your neck.”

  His callousness absolutely enraged Rusty, but Spurlock enraged him more when he remarked from the other corner of the tent, “You sure chose a hell of a time to get piled, I’ll say that. You fall off and we lose the whole God damn herd.”

  “Fall off?” Rusty said shrilly. “Fall off? What do you do when your pony steps in a hole?”

  “Not what you did,” Spurlock said. In the light of the two candles Jesse had stuck onto his grub box, his bloodshot eyes moved restlessly, here, there, first on Rusty, then on one of the others, never still. There was a drooping, provocative smile on his face. Rusty pulled his anger in and stayed silent.

  Slippers said into the air from where he lay on his back next to Panguingue, “Rusty was doin’ all right. He was headin’ ‘em.”

  “When he see his horse was too slow, he took off and flew,” Panguingue said.

  In imbecile good nature his rough hand jarred out, half blow and half push, and Rusty fell awkwardly on the bad shoulder. “Look out, you silly bastardl” he screamed, so much like a hysterical schoolboy that he turned again, ashamed, and gave his back to them. He knew they were watching, speculatively and with expressions of calculated neutrality. Judgment was going on in their minds, and he hated what they
were thinking.

  In a few minutes Ray Henry came in, the last but one into camp.

  “Somebody’ll have to spell Buck in an hour,” he said. “After that we can take it in two-hour shifts. Little Horn, you take it first, then Panguingue, then Slip.” His inflamed eyes came around to Rusty, blinked at him across the stove and candles. “Rusty, you healthy? Was that you took a spill today?”

  “That was me.”

  “Hurt yourself?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t move my left arm.”

  The foreman picked his way between the bedrolls and squatted. “Roll over and let’s see.” Obediently, justified and finally vindicated, Rusty helped unbutton sheepskin and both flannel shirts he wore, and the thick hands probed and squeezed and punched around his shoulder and collarbone and down the arm. Rusty flattered himself that he did not wince.

  For a second or two Ray stayed squatting there, dark-faced, burly as a boulder, expressionless. “I don’t think she’s bust,” he said. “It don’t wiggle anywhere. I’ll take your shift tonight, and you better lay up with the wagon tomorrow and see how it goes.”

  “No,” Rusty said. “I can work.”

  “Excelsior,” said Spurlock from his corner.

  “What?” Ray said.

  Nobody said anything.

  That was always a bad time, that few minutes before supper, when they came in and lay around the tent waiting for food with their bones melting away with tiredness. But it didn’t last. They were cheerful enough afterward, lying in bed, smoking, and Spurlock even went to the length of rolling Rusty a cigarette and passing it across in silence. “Oh, I say,” Rusty said. “Thanks very much!” Spurlock threw his muzzle in the air and gave himself up to silent laughter, or to communion with his ironic gods, and shook his head in amused despair, but the edge was out of him, out of all of them.

  Buck came in, cold and morose, and fussily hunted up a pan and heated water in it and washed himself before he ate the supper Jesse had kept warm. Little Horn, groaning, hunched into his sheepskin and went out. They could hear him asking the sympathy of the horse as he saddled up.

  One by one the other boys made their way outside and in a few seconds came chattering in again. When it came Rusty’s turn he ducked out with his arm hugged against his chest. The cold froze his teeth clear to the roots at the first breath; he shuddered and shook. It is awkward enough for a man to button and unbutton his pants with his right hand at any time, but in that freezing circumstance he might as well have tried to do it with tongs. The big pale earth was around him, the big mottled sky arched over with a slice of very white moon shining on icy-looking clouds. It was so quiet he heard his own heart thudding. For a moment he stood taking it in, and then he opened his mouth and let out a very loud yell, simply to announce himself and to crack the silence. When he went back in, hissing and shaking, he found them all staring at him.

  “What in hell was that?” Buck said.

  “That was me,” Rusty said. “It was too quiet to suit me.”

  Jesse was paring a sliver of tobacco off a plug, working at it slowly and carefully as he might have peeled an apple. His faded eyes glinted up, his oxbow mustaches parted briefly. “You hadn’t ought to do a thing like that, son,” he said. “I reckon you don’t know, though.”

  “Know what?”

  “When it’s this cold,” Jesse said, “man has to be careful how loud he talks.”

  “What?” Rusty said. “Get too cold air into your lungs, you mean? Freeze your windpipe?”

  “Tell you,” Jesse said. “I used to know this feller name Dan Shields.”

  Rusty crept into his blankets, not willing to give any of them, even Jesse, a handle. “Anybody feel like a game of stud?” Spurlock said.

  “Too damn cold,” Panguinge said. “You’d freeze your hands.”

  “Down by where I used to work,” Jesse said, in his soft insisting voice, “down there by Sheridan, there’s this guy Dan Shields. He’s tellin’ me one time about some cold weather he seen. Said him and another guy was up on the mountain workin’ a gold mine one winter, and it chilled off considerable. Man walk along outside, he’d steam like a laundry. Wood froze so hard it’d last all night in the stove—they never had a bit of fuel trouble. Go to spit, you’d have to break yourself free before you could walk away. They figured seventy-five, eighty below. Couldn’t tell, the thermometer froze solid at sixty-five.”

  “I hope they had a steam-heated backhouse,” Panguingue said. “I had to break myself free out there just now.”

  “Better look close, Pan,” said Spurlock. “Man could make a serious mistake breakin’ too careless.”

  “B. S.,” Panguingue said. “Even broke off short I’ll match you.”

  “Said they had them a nice warm cabin and they made out fine,” Jesse said, “except the grub began to run low. One mornin’ they’re talkin’ about what they should do, and they step outside to sort of look at the weather. They’re standin’ there talkin‘, and it seems to Dan this other guy’s voice is sort of failin’ him. He gets squeakier and squeakier, and finally he pinches out. The fella looks surprised and clears his throat, and spits, and breaks himself loose, and tries again. Not a whisper.

  “ ‘Is your tonsils froze, or what?’ Dan says to him—and you know, he don’t break the silence any, either. He tries his lips, and they’re workin‘, and he wags his tongue, and it ain’t bogged down, and he takes a big breath and tries to rip off a cussword, and nothin’ happens at all.

  “His partner is lookin’ at him very queer. He says somethin’ that Dan don’t get. ‘By God,’ says Dan at the top of his voice, ‘there’s somethin’ almighty damn funny here!’ and all he hears is nothin‘, just nothin’. They turn their heads and listen, and there ain’t a sound.

  “Dan cusses some more, thinkin’ he may jar somethin’ loose the way you’d kick a jammed endgate. He can’t make a peep. Said he was beginnin’ to get scared. Said he looks across at his partner and the sweat was up on the guy’s forehead size of buckshot. The drops froze as fast as they popped out, and they roll off his face and hit the snow. You’d think they’d patter—sort of human hailstones. Not a speck, Dan says. They roll off his partner’s brow and hit the ground and he can see them bounce and they don’t make no more noise than feathers.

  “The partner begins to get excited. His mouth is goin’ like a stampmill, and yet it’s just as quiet as three o‘clock in the mornin’. His eyes bug out, and he makes these yellin’ motions, and all of a sudden he busts inside the cabin and throws his stuff together and takes off down the mountain.”

  “And never was seen again,” Spurlock said. “The end.”

  “Well, that relieves the grub situation, and after Dan has gone inside and warmed up he tries out his voice again and it works, so he stays on. The weather never lets up, though, not till way long in the spring. Then one mornin’ the sun comes up bright and first thing Dan notices the thermometer has thawed out and begun to slide down, and she’s only sixty below, and then a little later she’s fifty. She’s gettin’ so mild he sits down on the doorstep after breakfast and smokes a pipe. While he’s sitting there he hears his partner, somewhere a good ways away, but comin’ closer, sayin’ somethin’ like, ‘figger we could get down and back in three-four days if on’y it wasn’t so God damn cold.‘

  “Said it cheered him like anythin’ to hear a human voice again, and he raises up on the doorstep and looks down the trail, but ain’t a sign of anybody. He’s lookin’ all around when his partner says, quite close, ‘I don’t mind bein’ out of sugar, but I sure as hell don’t aim to stay long where they ain’t any Climax Plug.’

  “ ‘I see what you mean,’ Dan says conversationally. ‘I expect you get the bulk of your nourishment thataway,’ and then he looks very fast behind him and all around that front yard, because it ain’t him that’s said it, he ain’t moved his mouth or had any intention of sayin’ anything. It ain’t him but it’s his voice.

  “ ‘My notion is
we ought to go on down,’ the partner says, very clear and close, and then there is a good deal of hackin’ and spittin’ and clearin’ of the throat and the partner says, ‘What in the God damn hell is happenin’ to me?’ and Dan hears his own voice say, ‘Is your tonsils froze, or what?’ and then there is a very considerable duet of cussin’ and yellin‘, and more throat clearin’ and more yellin’ and a sound like a hailstorm patterin’ all around, and out of this big uproar the partner says, ’By God, I’m gettin’ out of here!‘ Well that’s just what Dan does. He ducks inside that cabin and leans against the door till all the fuss dies down outside, and when she’s quiet he gathers together his plunder and he hightails her off the mountain too.

  “He had it figured out by then, easy enough. It was so cold out there while they was talkin’ that their words froze right there in the air, froze up plumb solid and silent. Then when that quick thaw comes on they broke up all at once and come down on old Dan’s head like icicles off a roof. But Dan said he didn’t want to stay up there even after he figured it out. Said it made him uncomfortable to think that any time somebody might yell right in his ear three months ago. Said he never did learn to care for cold-storage conversation as well as the fresh article.”

  “Now ain’t it funny?” Buck said. “That ain’t my taste at all. I’d just as soon have everything you just said all froze up nice and solid so the coyotes could listen to it next spring and I could just lay here now with no noise going on and get some sleep.”

  “That’s the biggest pile of cold-storage bullshit I ever heard,” Spurlock said. “Jesse, you could chop that up and use it for cowchips for a month.”