Wolf Willow, Page 21

  “Yes there is,” Jesse said. “Coffee.”

  His shape reared up against the graying canvas; when he opened the lid the glow from the stove illuminated his intent face with the white bristles on cheeks and chin, and the mustache drooping in a smooth oxbow. This, Rusty thought, was all familiar to Jesse. He must have done this same thing, camped in the same brutal kind of weather, a hundred times, with Indians, with métis hivernants, with hide hunters, with wagon trains hauling supplies into the Montana camps, with cattle outfits like this one. His relation to the country was almost as simple as that of the wolves; no matter how fast the province changed, it remained to Jesse merely a few known forms of hardship, a known violence of weather, one or two simple but irreplaceable skills. He had the air, standing ruminatively above his stove, of a man who could conceive of no evil that a cup of hot coffee or a beefsteak fried in flour would not cure.

  Daylight came as dusk and stayed that way. They dozed, and when the fire was up high for cooking they took advantage of the warmth to play poker or blackjack. When anyone had to go outside he took a look at the horses, which they had picketed to give them a little more chance to move around and keep warm, but which crowded close up against the wagon for the little shelter it gave them. Morning and evening someone hung on their noses a nosebag of their limited oat supply.

  Their wood was running low too; they had been depending on getting fuel from the willows in Horse Camp Coulee. After meals they had to let the fire die, and then if they played cards they passed around a lighted candle to warm their hands by. When even that got too cold they dug down under their blankets to sleep or think. Talk flared up like matches and went out again; they cocked their ears to the howl of the wind, remoter as the tent snowed in. Once or twice one of them went out and carefully cleared the worst of the snow off the roof while the rest, inside, watched with concern the sausage-tight canvas which a careless shovel might easily slit, leaving them exposed to the storm like an out-turned nest of mice. Every hour or so Ray Henry, taciturn and expressionless, took a look outside.

  When he had got his hands well warmed under the blankets, Rusty played the harmonica. There were more requests than he could gratify, with a heavy favoritism for old Red River tunes which they tried to teach him by whistling or humming. If he quit, with his hands too numb to feel the fingers and his chapped lips sore from the sliding of the little honeycomb back and forth across them, they urged him for a while, and then cursed him languidly and gave up. The afternoon waned; they yawned; they lay resting.

  Once the notebook in his shirt pocket crunched as Rusty turned over, and he took it out and amused himself for a while reading the journal entries he had made. There was nothing since his catalog of information about the Stonepile Camp, but before that there was a very windy and prize-essay series of notations. He had put them down in the first place as colorful items to be incorporated into letters home: they expected him not to write very often, and he would oblige them; but they expected him, when he did write, to fill pages with cowboys and Indians and wild game and the adventures and observations of a well-educated young gentleman in the North American wilderness. In this too he had set out to oblige them. He read what he had had to say about the ranch, and the thumbnail sketches he had made of some of the cowboys, and the lyrical flights he had gone into during the days of perfect Indian Summer hay-making weather that preceded the first storm—only the night before they had set out on this belated roundup. He could imagine the family all around his mother as she read, and he cocked an inner ear to the sound of his own prose describing the apelike Panguingue with his good nature and his total disregard for cleanliness, and wry little birdy Slippers with his sore feet, as if he had walked all the way from Texas; even on roundup he wore no boots like the rest of them but elastic-sided slippers under his overshoes. Rusty told them Slip was the best bronc rider in Saskatchewan, which may have been going it a bit strong, and about how Buck kept a row of tobacco tins on the two-by-four above his bunk, with all his smaller private effects filed away in them in neat and labeled order. He described, with the proper tone of sober appraisal and respect, Ray Henry and his new wife, whom he had brought from Malta, Montana, in a buckboard, a hundred and twenty miles across country, for a wedding trip. Rusty had loaded that part of the journal with data on the country, much of it, as he saw now, in error. It was the sort of stuff which, written as a letter, would surely set his younger brother to itching, and produce another emigration from the family, but it seemed false and shrilly enthusiastic and very, very young when he read it over in the tent, while a frozen guy rope outside, within three feet of his ear, hummed like a great struck cable.

  “What you got there, Rusty?” Little Horn said. “Something to read?”

  “No,” he said. “Oh no, just an old notebook.”

  “Notebook?” Spurlock said.

  “Just ... notes, don’t you know,” Rusty said. He was frantic with the notion that they would sit on him and take it away from him and read in it what he had said about them. If they tried it he would die fighting. He put it in his shirt pocket and buttoned it down. “Things I wanted to remember to put in letters home,” he said.

  “All about the cow country and the cattle business, uh?” Little Horn said.

  “More or less.”

  “She’s a real good business,” Little Horn said. “You ought to think about her, Rusty.” Staring at the roof, his red nose one of a half dozen projecting toward the lashed and laboring canvas, he plucked a thread from the frayed edge of his blanket and drew it dreamily between his front teeth. “Young fella from the old country could do a lot worse,” he said. “There’s this Englishman over on Medicine Lodge Coulee, kind of a remittance-man colony they got over there, he was tellin’ me about cattle ranchin’ one time. He said there was millions in it. All you do, you just get some cows and a few bulls, and you turn ‘em out on the range. Say you start with a hundred cows. You get a hundred calves the first year, and fifty of them are cows and fifty you make into steers. Next year you got a hundred and fifty cows and they give you a hundred and fifty calves, and you make seventy-five steers and keep the seventy-five cows, and that builds your breeding herd to two hundred and twenty-five. That year you get two hundred and twenty-five calves, and by now you’re sellin’ your two-year-old and three-year-old steers, and your herd keeps growin’ and you keep sellin’ the bull calves, and that’s all they is to her. He had it all mapped out. You ought to talk to him, Rusty.”

  “I’ll look into it the first chance I get,” Rusty said. “I’ve been inquiring around for a good opportunity.”

  “You do that,” Little Horn said. “If I didn’t have me this job here with Ray, I’d do somethin’ about it myself. There ain’t a thing to her. Once you get your herd and start them cows to calfin‘, all you do is set back and count the dollars rollin’ in.

  “They’ll tell you: mange. Hell, they ain’t nothin’ to mange. All you got to do about that, you dip ‘em twice a year. You get yourself one of them steam boilers and a tank, and you lay in some sulphur and so on. And you dig yourself a big hole in the ground, maybe a hundred feet long, say, and thirty wide, and at one end you build a couple corrals, one big one to hold maybe a couple hundred head and the other a little one to take a dozen or so. From this little one you build a chute that leads down into the hole. At the other end of the hole you make a slatted slope out of planks for the cows to climb out on, and a couple drippin’ pens where the ones that has been dipped can stand, and under those pens you dig a ditch so the dip that runs off them can run back into the vat. It ain’t anything, hardly. If you got ten or fifteen hands around it’ll only take you a couple-three weeks’ hard work altogether to build this rig.

  “Then you bring your stock into the big corral, see, and feed ‘em out a few at a time into the little corral and on into the chute, and on both sides of the vat you put guys with long poles with a yoke onto them, and they get the yoke over these cattle as they come down the chute and duck
’em clear under. Then you prod ‘em on through the vat and up the slope and into the drippin’ pens and you’re done with that bunch.

  “They’ll tell you it’s lots of work. Shucks. You got, say, ten thousand head to dip, like we would on the T-Down, and you got maybe twelve men in the outfit. You can do a dozen ever’ twenty minutes, thirty-six an hour, three hundred and sixty in a ten-hour day, thirty-six hundred in ten days. You can get the whole herd through in three or four weeks, if you can get the inspector there when you want him. They’ll tell you it’s hell to catch the inspector, and hard to keep the herd together that long, and hard to keep the sulphur mixture strong enough and the right temperature, and a lot like that, but it ain’t nothing to bother a man. Some people would talk down anything.

  “Or they’ll tell you it’s dangerous. Shoot! Suppose one of them steers does get on the peck when he’s pushed under and gets his eyes full of sulphur, what can he do? He can thrash around in the vat, maybe, and drowned himself or some other steer, or maybe he climbs out and chases you up onto the barn, or he scrambles back into the corral and gets them to millin’ there till they break something down, but that ain’t only a little delay. Even if some old ringy longhorn catches you before you can climb out of the corral, what can he do to you? His horns is so wide he just rams you against the fence with his forehead and holds you there till somebody twists his tail or spits Bull Durham in his eye and pulls him off, and there you are good as ever, maybe bruised up some is all.

  “No, sir,” Little Horn said, pulling his thread back and forth, “it’s a mistake to listen to these calamity howlers about what a tough business the cow business is. Mange, that’s only a sample of how they exaggerate. They’ll tell you: wolves. Wolves! They won’t pick off more’n one calf in ten or twenty all winter long. Sure three or four of them will pull down a cow sometimes, get her by the hind leg and a flank and pull her over and pile on, but mostly it’s just calves. Say you start with two thousand head in the fall, you still got eighteen hundred in the spring. And if you want to, you can hire somebody like this Schulz to wolf your range.”

  “Schulz!” Buck said from down under. “I wonder if he’s et his boy yet?”

  “Only cost you ten dollars a scalp,” Little Horn said. “If he puts out poison baits, course you might lose a few dogs. Sure a wolf is hard to poison and he’s too smart to step in a trap or come within gunshot very often, but that don’t have to bother you. There’s other ways of handlin’ wolves. You just lay around and keep an eye open and when you catch one out on the flats you can run him down on a horse. I did it once myself. I had me a little old pony that could run, and I come right up on that old white wolf and run over him. I missed him that first time, somehow, and had to come over him again, and I missed him again, but I kep’ tryin‘. This wolf can’t get away—he’s down there under the pony’s feet somewhere duckin’ and snarlin’. I’d of had him sure if the pony hadn’t of stepped in a hole. The wolf run off then and I couldn’t chase him. I was out quite a few miles, and after I shot the horse I had me quite a walk carryin’ the saddle, but that experience taught me quite a bit about runnin’ down wolves, and I know how it’s done. I’ll show you sometime, if you want.”

  “Oh, I say, thanks,” Rusty said.

  “Old Rusty, I bet he figures just like your other Englishman,” Spurlock said. “Ain’t it the fact, Rusty? You come out here thinking you’d get yourself a few thousand acres and a herd of cows and be a lord of the manor like Dan Tenaille, uh?”

  “That’s right,” Rusty said. “Just now, I’m out here learning the business first hand from the experts.”

  “Or did you have to come out?” Spurlock said. “You’re a remittance man too, ain’t you? Tell us the story of how you happened to leave England. I bet it’d be interesting. Help pass the time, don’t you know.”

  “I’m afraid you’d find it a bit dull.”

  “A bit dull?” Spurlock said heartily. “Not at all, lad, not at all. Come on, give us your reasons for trailing out to the cow country.”

  They were not a talking bunch, and so far as he knew they had not discussed him. He was too common a phenomenon. Unless he took pains to prove himself otherwise, any young Englishman in that country was assumed to be the second son, third son, scapegrace son, of a baronet, a KCB, a shooting partner of Edward VII. Or he was a cashiered guardsman or disgraced country vicar. Rusty was none of those, but it seemed unnecessary to insist. He said only, “I’m afraid my reasons wouldn’t be as colorful as yours.”

  He put into his voice just the quantity of sneer that would make Spurlock rise up without realizing precisely where he was stung. Or perhaps the sneer did not do it at all, perhaps Spurlock was only bored, uncomfortable, irritable, ready to pluck any little thread that would ravel, quarrelsome out of no motive except tedium. If that was it, fine; let him come. And there he came, rearing up on one elbow and throwing across the tent a literary badman look as if he thought he was wearing black gloves and black guns like a villain in The Virginian. “What do you mean by that, exactly?”

  From the side, Ray Henry’s whisper said, “The kid’s not crowding you any, Ed.”

  “I can tell when I’m crowded,” Spurlock said.

  “Pull in your elbows,” Ray whispered, amused. “Then you’ll have more room.”

  Spurlock lay down again. “Little English punks,” he said. “Coming out pretending to be cowhands.”

  Rusty looked at Ray, but Ray only smiled. The boy said, fairly hotly, “The cows can’t tell the difference.”

  “No,” Spurlock said, “no, but a man sure can.”

  “I haven’t heard any men discussing it.”

  Once more he reared up on his elbow. “Is its little arm sore?” he said. “Got piled, did it?”

  “How are its little sore eyes?” Rusty said. Out of nothing, out of nowhere, as random and unprepared for as an August whirlwind kicking up a dust, Spurlock had produced the quarrel he evidently wanted. Rusty was angry enough to take him on, arm or no arm. He pretended to himself that he was annoyed with Ray when the foreman whispered equably, “In about a second I’m kickin’ both you quarrelsome bastards out in the snow.”

  Rusty lay ready, smoldering, waiting for Spurlock to say something else that could not be borne, or to rise and stalk outside where it would be necessary to go out and fight him. But Spurlock did not move or speak; he only breathed through his nose in so eloquent and contemptuous a way that Rusty had to hold himself back from springing over and smashing him. The wind slammed against their canvas roof in a furious gust. Against some rope or edge or corner it howled like a wolf, and then trailed off-to the steady whisper and rush again.

  “They’ll tell you,” Little Horn said dreamily, “they’ll say to you it’s terrible hard work. Why, God damn, now, you just can’t pay attention to that. How long we been on this-here roundup? Since first of May, more or less? And it’s only November now. And they’ll tell you it gets cold, but where would you find a nicer, more comfortable little tent than this one, if we only had some wood?”

  Jesse crawled out and stood stretching in the narrow space among the mussed beds. Rusty noticed that he was careful to stay clear of Ed Spurlock’s blankets. “Well,” he said, “time for a little grub?”

  Ray went past Jesse and pulled the flap aside and looked out. Beyond him the horizontal blast streaked with snow dipped and swirled; flakes settled and whirled away again; there was a curved drift building up at the tent corner. Ray’s back looked bulky and solid; he was a powerful man, single-minded and devoted. A little hollow in the solar plexus from the nearness of a fight, Rusty had a wry feeling that if Spurlock and he had started something, and the foreman wanted to interfere, he could have thrashed them both. But what his hunched back and his bent head reminded Rusty of really was the burden he bore. He was foreman, he wore responsibility for both men and cattle, and he had left his bride of less than a month at the ranch house with only a crippled handy man for company. Rusty did not envy Ray, bu
t he respected him a great deal. He wanted to do well for him; he was ashamed of having had to be reprimanded along with Spurlock. The foreman dropped the flap and came back and sat down.

  “They’ll tell you,” Little Horn said, endless and ironic and contemplative, “they’ll say, all that ridin’ and brandin’ and weanin’ and nuttin’ and chasin’ cows up and down the hills and dales. How else would you want a cowpuncher to spend his time? He don’t have any work to do, he just gets himself into trouble playin’ cyards and fightin’ and chasin’ women. Lots better for him to be out in a nice tent like this, camped out comfortable in some blizzard.”

  Sometime before the gray afternoon howled itself out, Ray Henry shouldered into his sheepskin and went outside. The rest lay in their blankets, which they had inhabited too long for their blankets’ good or their own, in their postures that were like the postures of men fallen in war. Panguingue sprawled with his drawn-up knees wide, his whiskered face glimmering a vacant grin straight upward. Little Horn and Buck were unexpected angles of arms and legs, Slip lay curled as if around a mortal body wound. Spurlock had locked his hands under the back of his head and crossed his knees under the covers. They listened to the undiminished wind. After what may have been ten minutes Jesse rose and said he guessed he’d take a look at the Clydes. He followed his jet of white breath outside, and they lay on.

  Their cloth house shook, and gave way, and shuddered stiff and tight again. They heard the whistle and scream go flying through and away, and in a lull Buck said, “This one’s the worst one yet.” They lay considering this for quite a long time. At last Rusty heard the sound of feet, and with a relief that astonished him he cried, “Here they are!”

  But no one entered. The wind pounded through and over and past. It had a curving sound; it dipped to the ear like telegraph wires to the eye. Everyone in the tent was listening for the steps Rusty had announced. At last Spurlock grumbled, “Just fawncy.” Panguingue blurted a laugh.