Wolf Willow, Page 27

  Around him he heard the hiss of air drawn between clenched teeth, he saw the careful, excruciating slowness of hands and feet being moved in search of more comfortable positions, he saw and smelled and felt how he was indistinguishable from the other seven. His greenness did not show, was perhaps not quite so green as it had been. And he did not take it ill, but understood it as a muffled acceptance of acknowledgment, when Spurlock sniffed thickly and said to the sagging springs above his nose, “Is that coffee I smell, Jesse, or is it only fawncy?”

  3

  Carrion Spring

  Often in Saskatchewan a man awakens on a winter night hearing a great wind, and his heart sinks at the prospect of more shut-in days, more cold, difficulty, discomfort, and danger. But one time in ten, something keeps him from burrowing back under his blankets, something keeps him suspiciously on his elbow, straining his ears for the sounds of hope. Repudiating his hope even while he indulges it, he may leave the warmth of bed and go to the door, bracing himself for the needles of thirty below. And one time in ten, when he opens door and storm door against the grab and bluster of the wind, the air rushes in his face as warm as milk, all but smelling of orange blossoms, and he dances a caper on his cold floor and goes back to bed knowing that in the two or three days that the chinook blows it will gulp all the snow except the heaviest drifts and leave the prairie dry enough to sit down on. Dozing off, he hears the crescendo of drip, the slump of heavied snow on the roof, the crash of loosened icicles under the eaves.

  Several times every winter the harsh Saskatchewan weather is relieved by that beautiful mild wind that can raise the temperature in a half hour from zero to fifty above. It is the chinook that makes Saskatchewan bearable in winter, the chinook that clears the prairies periodically and allows cattle to feed. It was a chinook that the cattle outfits on the Whitemud waited for in vain during the winter of 1906-07.

  In vain, or nearly. November, December, January, brought them only blizzards, cold snaps, freezing fogs, snow. A forkful at a time, the T-Down boys fed the hay they had stacked at Bates and Stonepile. They broke down their ponies trying to drag clear patches of hillside where the cattle could feed, only to see new snow cover their work, or the cattle flinching back from the wind to gnaw willows and starve in the snowy bottoms. Not until the end of January did the punchers at Bates and Stonepile feel on their faces that soft and strengthening blast from the southwest. They went to bed drunk on it, assured that though hundreds of cattle were dead along the river, something could be saved. When they awoke in the morning the air was still, the abortive chinook had died, the snow that had been thawed mushy was frozen hard again, the prairie was sheathed in four inches of solid ice, and cattle that had lain down in the snow were frozen in, unable to move. They dragged free as many as they could reach, threw open the gates on whatever scraps of hay were left, and retreated to the ranch, which was hoarding its few stacks for the ultimate emergency. The emergency arrived, or rather continued. Storm and cold through February; then a chinook that gave the scarecrow survivors a few days of relief; then more blizzards and cold that locked them in ice until May. During the last six weeks they could do nothing but skin out the dead.

  Their story goes on too long; it is nothing but unrelieved hardship, failure, death, gloom. Even the wolfer Schulz, who had no concern about cattle, shared the ruin of that winter. The wolves that he would ordinarily have run down with his hounds on the flats were all down in the deep snow of the bottoms, where the cattle were and where their big pads would let them run while a hound floundered. They sat just out of rifle range and laughed; they were so well fed and so smart they never went near the traps Schulz set. In February, furious and frustrated, without a single wolf to show for months of effort, Schulz locked up his hounds in the Stonepile stable and poisoned a dozen carcasses up and down the river. But his great staghound, Puma, was too much of a pet to stay locked in. He broke out one afternoon when Schulz was gone, followed his master’s tracks several miles upriver, stopped on the way to feed on one of the poisoned carcasses, and came upon Schulz in the middle of a white-out, a dense freezing fog, where the wolfer had built a fire on the ice to keep warm until he could get his bearings. For an hour or two the hound padded back and forth with the man as he walked to keep from freezing around the little fire of willows. Then the dog began acting strange, rolling, gaping; and at some moment during the night, lost in the whiteness of that lost river, sick and furious at his winter’s failure, the wolfer looked up and saw the hound coming for him. He jumped to his gun, stuck butt down in the snow, and killed the dog with one shot in the mouth.

  No one saw Schulz again. He simply vanished, disappointed or crazy or fed up. Several months later the T-Down boys, conducting their pitiful spring roundup of survivors, heard how he drowned swimming his horse across the Milk River in the spring break-up.

  A casualty, a wild man defeated by the wild. But the civilized did no better. And especially Molly Henry, who on her wedding day in late October had said goodby to whatever civilization was offered by her home town of Malta, Montana, and who except for the Christmas blowout had enjoyed neither fun nor the company of another woman since. She was a tough and competent little body; she believed in work as a cure for the doldrums, and she had married with the full intention of being a good wife to a cattleman. Among the things she and Ray had talked about on their buckboard honeymoon were the future settlement of that country and the opportunities open to the young and industrious.

  But six months is a long time to be shut in, too long a stretch of desperate work and hardship and shortages and unmitigated failure. The brief dream of Indian Summer would not have lasted through all that disastrous winter. In spite of the work she used as therapy, hope would have festered in her. When the long agony finally broke, and the thaw began, and the sun that had seemed gone forever came back in spells of unbelievable warmth, she would have greeted release with a tight mouth, determined to take her man and her marriage back where there was a chance for both.

  The moment she came to the door she could smell it, not really rotten and not coming from any particular direction, but sweetish, faintly sickening, sourceless, filling the whole air the way a river’s water can taste of weeds—the carrion smell of a whole country breathing out in the first warmth across hundreds of square miles.

  Three days of chinook had uncovered everything that had been under snow since November. The yard lay discolored and ugly, gray ashpile, rusted cans, spilled lignite, bones. The clinkers that had given them winter footing to privy and stable lay in raised gray wavers across the mud; the strung lariats they had used for lifelines in blizzardy weather had dried out and sagged to the ground. Muck was knee deep down in the corrals by the sod-roofed stable, the whitewashed logs were yellowed at the corners from dogs lifting their legs against them. Sunken drifts around the hay yard were a reminder of how many times the boys had had to shovel out there to keep the calves from walking into the stacks across the top of them. Across the wan and disheveled yard the willows were bare, and beyond them the floodplain hill was brown. The sky was roiled with gray cloud.

  Matted, filthy, lifeless, littered, the place of her winter imprisonment was exposed, ugly enough to put gooseflesh up her backbone, and with the carrion smell over all of it. It was like a bad and disgusting wound, infected wire cut or proud flesh or the gangrene of frostbite, with the bandage off. With her packed trunk and her telescope bag and two loaded grain sacks behind her, she stood in the door waiting for Ray to come with the buckboard, and she was sick to be gone.

  Yet when he did come, with the boys all slopping through the mud behind him, and they threw her trunk and telescope and bags into the buckboard and tied the tarp down and there was nothing left to do but go, she faced them with a sudden, desolating desire to cry. She laughed, and caught her lower lip under her teeth and bit down hard on it, and went around to shake one hoof-like hand after the other, staring into each face in turn and seeing in each something that made it all the harde
r to say something easy: Goodbye. Red-bearded, black-bearded, gray-bristled, clean-shaven (for her?), two of them with puckered sunken scars on the cheekbones, all of them seedy, matted-haired, weathered and cracked as old lumber left out for years, they looked sheepish, or sober, or cheerful, and said things like, “Well, Molly, have you a nice trip, now,” or “See you in Malta maybe.” They had been her family. She had looked after them, fed them, patched their clothes, unraveled old socks to knit them new ones, cut their hair, lanced their boils, tended their wounds. Now it was like the gathered-in family parting at the graveside after someone’s funeral.

  She had begun quite openly to cry. She pulled her cheeks down, opened her mouth, dabbed at her eyes with her knuckles, laughed. “Now you all take care,” she said. “And come see us, you hear? Jesse? Rusty? Slip? Buck, when you come I’ll fix you a better patch on your pants than that one. Goodbye, Panguingue, you were the best man I had on the coal scuttle. Don’t you forget me. Little Horn, I’m sorry we ran out of pie fixings. When you come to Malta I’ll make you a peach pie a yard across.”

  She could not have helped speaking their names, as if to name them were to insure their permanence. But she knew that though she might see them, or most of them, when Ray brought the drive in to Malta in July, these were friends who would soon be lost for good. They had already got the word: sweep the range and sell everything—steers, bulls, calves, cows—for whatever it would bring. Put a For Sale sign on the ranch, or simply abandon it. The country had rubbed its lesson in. Like half the outfits between the Milk and the CPR, the T-Down was quitting. As for her, she was quitting first.

  She saw Ray slumping, glooming down from the buckboard seat with the reins wrapped around one gloved hand. Dude and Dinger were hipshot in the harness. As Rusty and Little Horn gave Molly a hand up to climb the wheel, Dude raised his tail and dropped an oaty bundle of dung on the singletree, but she did not even bother to make a face or say something provoked and joking. She was watching Ray, looking right into his gray eyes and his somber dark face and seeing all at once what the winter of disaster had done to him. His cheek, like Ed’s and Rusty‘s, was puckered with frost scars; frost had nibbled at the lobes of his ears; she could see the strain of bone-cracking labor, the bitterness of failure, in the lines from his nose to the comers of his mouth. Making room for her, he did not smile. With her back momentarily to the others, speaking only for him, she said through her tight teeth, “Let’s gitl”

  Promptly-he was always prompt and ready—he plucked whip from whipsocket. The tip snapped on Dinger’s haunch, the lurch of the buggy threw her so that she could cling and not have to turn to reveal her face. “Goodbye!” she cried, more into the collar of her mackinaw than to them, throwing the words over her shoulder like a flower or a coin, and tossed her left hand in the air and shook it. The single burst of their voices chopped off into silence. She heard only the grate of the tires in gravel; beside her the wheel poured yellow drip. She concentrated on it, fighting her lips that wanted to blubber.

  “This could be bad for a minute,” Ray said. She looked up. Obediently she clamped thumb and finger over her nose. To their right, filling half of Frying Pan Flat, was the boneyard, two acres of carcasses scattered where the boys had dragged them after skinning them out when they found them dead in the brush. It did not seem that off there they could smell, for the chinook was blowing out in light airs from the west. But when she let go her nose she smelled it rich and rotten, as if it rolled upwind the way water runs upstream in an eddy.

  Beside her Ray was silent. The horses were trotting now in the soft sand of the patrol trail. On both sides the willows were gnawed down to stubs, broken and mouthed and gummed off by starving cattle. There was floodwater in the low spots, and the sound of running water under the drifts of every side coulee.

  Once Ray said, “Harry Willis says a railroad survey’s coming right up the Whitemud valley this summer. S‘pose thatll mean homesteaders in here, maybe a town.”

  “I s‘pose.”

  “Make it a little easier when you run out of prunes, if there was a store at Whitemud.”

  “Well,” she said, “we won’t be here to run out,” and then immediately, as she caught a whiff that gagged her, “Pee-you! Hurry up!”

  Ray did not touch up the team. “What for?” he said. “To get to the next one quicker?”

  She appraised the surliness of his voice, and judged that some of it was general disgust and some of it was aimed at her. But what did he want? Every time she made a suggestion of some outfit around Malta or Chinook where he might get a job he humped his back and looked inpenetrable. What did he want? To come back here and take another licking? When there wasn’t even a cattle outfit left, except maybe the little ones like the Z-X and the Lazy-S? And where one winter could kill you, as it had just killed the T-Down? She felt like yelling at him, “Look at your face. Look at your hands—you can’t open them even halfway, for calluses. For what? Maybe three thousand cattle left out of ten thousand, and them skin and bone. Why wouldn’t I be glad to get out? Who cares if there’s a store at Whitemud? You’re just like an old bulldog with his teeth clinched in somebody’s behind, and it’ll take a pry-bar to make you unclinch!” She said nothing; she forced herself to breathe evenly the tainted air.

  Floodwater forced them out of the bottoms and up onto the second floodplain. Below them Molly saw the river astonishingly wide, pushing across willow bars and pressing deep into the cutbank bends. She could hear it, when the wheels went quietly—a hushed roar like wind. Cattle were balloonily afloat in the brush where they had died. She saw a brindle longhorn waltz around the deep water of a bend with his legs in the air, and farther on a whiteface that stranded momentarily among flooded rosebushes, and rotated free, and stranded again.

  Their bench was cut by a side coulee, and they tipped and rocked down, the rumps of the horses back against the dashboard, Ray’s hand on the brake, the shoes screeching mud from the tires. There was brush in the bottom, and stained drifts still unmelted. Their wheels sank in slush, she hung to the seat rail, they righted, the lines cracked across the muscling rumps as the team dug in and lifted them out of the cold, snowbank breath of the draw. Then abruptly, in a hollow on the right, dead eyeballs stared at her from between spraddled legs, horns and tails and legs were tangled in a starved mass of bone and hide not yet, in that cold bottom, puffing with the gases of decay. They must have been three deep—piled on one another, she supposed, while drifting before some one of the winter’s blizzards.

  A little later, accosted by a stench so overpowering that she breathed it in deeply as if to sample the worst, she looked to the left and saw a longhorn, its belly blown up ready to pop, hanging by neck and horns from a tight clump of alder and black birch where the snow had left him. She saw the wind make catspaws in the heavy winter hair.

  “Jesus,” Ray said, “when you find ‘em in trees!”

  His boots, worn and whitened by many wettings, were braced against the dash. From the corner of her eye Molly could see his glove, its wrist-lace open. His wrist looked as wide as a doubletree, the sleeve of his Levi jacket was tight with forearm. The very sight of his strength made her hate the tone of defeat and outrage in his voice. Yet she appraised the tone cunningly, for she did not want him somehow butting his bullheaded way back into it. There were better things they could do than break their backs and hearts in a hopeless country a hundred miles from anywhere.

  With narrowed eyes, caught in an instant vision, she saw the lilac bushes by the front porch of her father’s house, heard the screen door bang behind her brother Charley (screen doors!), saw people passing, women in dresses, maybe all going to a picnic or a ballgame down in the park by the river. She passed the front of McCabe’s General Store and through the window saw the counters and shelves: dried apples, dried peaches, prunes, tapioca, Karo syrup, everything they had done without for six weeks; and new white-stitched overalls, yellow horsehide gloves, varnished axe handles, barrels of flour and
bags of sugar, shiny boots and workshoes, counters full of calico and flowered voile and crepe de chine and curtain net, whole stacks of flypaper stuck sheet to sheet, jars of peppermints and striped candy and hore hound ... She giggled.

  “What?” Ray’s neck and shoulders were so stiff with muscle that he all but creaked when he turned his head.

  “I was just thinking. Remember the night I used our last sugar to make that batch of divinity, and dragged all the boys in after bedtime to eat it?”

  “Kind of saved the day,” Ray said. “Took the edge off ever‘- body.”

  “Kind of left us starving for sugar, too. I can still see them picking up those little bitty dabs of fluff with their fingers like tongs, and stuffing them in among their whiskers and making faces, yum yum, and wondering what on earth had got into me.”

  “Nothing got into you. You was just fed up. We all was.”

  “Remember when Slip picked up that pincushion I was tatting a cover for, and I got sort of hysterical and asked him if he knew what it was? Remember what he said? ‘It a doll piller, ain’t it, Molly?’ I thought I’d die.”

  She shook her head angrily. Ray was looking sideward at her in alarm. She turned her face away and stared down across the water that spread nearly a half-mile wide in the bottoms. Dirty foam and brush circled in the eddies. She saw a slab cave from an almost drowned cutbank and sink bubbling. From where they drove, between the water and the outer slope that rolled up to the high prairie, the Cypress Hills made a snow-patched, tree-darkened dome across the west. The wind came off them mild as milk. Poisoned! she told herself, and dragged it deep into her lungs.