Wolf Willow

  “Christ a‘mighty!” Slip said abruptly, and snapped nimble as a monkey out of his bed. He was stepping in his slippers across Ray Henry’s tarp when the flap opened and Ray and Jesse stooped in on a flurry of snow. Slippers sat quietly down again on his blankets. His leathery, deeply lined, big-nosed face said nothing. Neither did any of the other smudged and whiskered faces around the tent. But they were all sitting up or half propped on their elbows; the concern that had moved Slip had been a fear in all of them. In silence they watched Ray throw down beside the cold stove three or four round cake-like chunks of ice. Rusty reached across and picked up a frozen cowchip.

  “Are we burning ice now?”

  With a wipe of a bare hand around on his wet, beef-red face, the foreman said, “We may be lucky to have that to burn, it’s drifting pretty deep all over.”

  “Still from the northwest?” Buck asked.

  “Oh dear,” said Little Horn. “All those poor little calves and their mamas. They’ll be clear the hell and gone down to Wood Mountain.”

  “Or else they’ll be piled up in some draw,” Ray said.

  “You think it’s pretty bad, then,” Rusty said—a small, inconsequent, intrusive voice of ignorance and greenness that he himself heard with shame and dismay.

  “Yes, kid,” Ray said. “I think it’s pretty bad.”

  They ebbed away into silence. With only a few sticks of wood left Jesse gave them no more for supper than warm gravy poured over frozen biscuits; not even coffee. Part of the stove, while the gravy was warming, held two of the cowchips that Ray had kicked up from under the snow, and the smell of wetted and baking manure flavored their supper. But at least the cakes dried out enough so that Jesse could use them for the breakfast fire.

  The single candle gave a blotted light. When they were all still Rusty saw the humps of bedrolls fuming like a geyser basin with their eight breaths, until Little Horn said, “Well, nighty night, kids,” and blew out the candle. The wind seemed to come down on their sudden darkness with such violence that in the cold tent they lay tensely, afraid something would give. Both Slip and Little Horn had pulled their goatskin chaps over their beds for extra cover. Rusty’s icy hands were folded into his armpits; he wore all his clothes except sheepskin and boots. He blew his breath into the air, moved his sore shoulder experimentally, smelled his own stale nest, thinking Holy Mother, if my people could see me now! There was a brief, vivid picture of rescuers in the spring reverently uncovering eight huddled figures, identifying each one, folding the tarp back over the frozen face. His head was full of vague heroisms related to Commodore Peary and the North Pole.

  Once the thought popped whole and astonishing into his head: I might, except for one or two decisions made in excitement and stuck to through tears and argument, be sleeping in my old room right now, and if I opened my eyes I would see the model of the Kraken hanging from the ceiling like a ship of thanksgiving in a Danish church. Except for the excitement that his father thought wild whimsy and his mother thought heartlessness, he might be getting his exercise these days pushing a punt up and down the Cher, disturbing the swans (Swans! From here they sounded fabulous as gryphons), or drinking too much port with sporty undergraduates from his college, or sitting on some cricket pitch, or (assuming he hadn’t chosen Oxford and the family’s program) he might be guiding the tiller of the yawl with his backside while he shouted questions, jeers, comments, or other conversation at sailors leaning over the stern rails of old rustpots anchored in the stream off Spithead.

  The fact that he was here in a tent on the freezing Saskatchewan plains, that one decision rashly made and stubbornly stuck to had taken him not only out of the university, out of home, out of England, but out of a whole life and culture that had been assumed for him, left him dazed. A good job he didn’t have much chance to think, or he might funk it yet, and run straight home with his tail tucked. He was appalled at the effectiveness of his own will.

  A numbness like freezing to death stole through him gradually, Panguingue restored him to wakefulness with a kick in the head, and he cursed Panguingue with a freedom he would not have adopted toward anyone else in the outfit. Sometime during or just after the flurry of profane protest he fell asleep.

  Solitary flutes, songs from the Vienna woods, chirpings and twit terings so that he opened his eyes thinking Birds? and heard the awakening sounds of the outfit, and old Jesse whistling with loose lips while he stood over the stove. He lifted a can and tipped it in a quick gesture; the tent filled with the smell of kerosene. Jesse hobbled about in his boots like an old crone. His right knee crooked upward, there was a swoop and a snap, and a match popped into flame across his tight seat. The stove whoofed out a puff of smoke. The lids clanged on. Fire gleamed through the cracks in the ash door and Jesse shoved the coffee pot against the stovepipe. Looking, Rusty saw that Ray, Slip, and Buck were missing.

  He sat up. “I sayl The wind’s died!”

  “You say, hey?” Jesse said.

  Rusty hustled to the door and looked out. Deep tracks went through the drift that curved all around them; the sky was palest blue, absolutely clear. Ray was trotting the Clydes up and down a fifty-foot trampled space, getting them warm. Their breasts and rumps and legs were completely coated in ice. Buck and Slip already had saddles on the night ponies. Whatever had been brown in the landscape had disappeared. There were no scraggly patches of bare grass in the snow waves, but packed, rippled white ran off into the southeast where the sun was just rising. He could almost see the plain move as if a current ran strongly toward where the sun squatted on the rim and sent its dazzle skipping across the million little wave crests into his eyes. Spurlock, looking over his shoulder, swore foully. “Here goes for some more God damn snowblindness.” He stepped past Rusty and blew his nose with his fingers, first one nostril, then the other. Rusty shouted over to Ray, “Working weather!”

  “Yeah.” He laughed his dry laugh through his nose. “Come here and curry some of the ice out of these studs.”

  “Uh-huh!” Spurlock said behind Rusty, with I-told-you-so emphasis. The boy stared at him. “Working weather!” Spurlock said. “Jesus Christ! I guess.”

  His guess was right. Within minutes of the time Rusty woke he was working; they paused only long enough to bolt a steak and gulp scalding coffee and warm their hands over the fire; their last wood and all the cowchips had gone into it. Before they had more than spread their palms to the beautiful heat, Slip and Buck came in with the horse herd.

  “Jesse,” Ray said, “you better tear down here and get loaded and beat it on a beeline for Horse Camp. If we ain’t there when you get there, which we won’t be, you can improve your time and warm your blood gettin’ in wood, and there ain’t any such thing as too much. The rest of you is goin’ to round up every cow within fifteen miles downwind, and we’re going to put them all in the corrals at Horse Camp before we sleep any more. So pick you a pony with some bottom.”

  They looked at the shaggy, scrawny, long-maned and long-tailed herd picking at the wisps of a few forkfuls of hay that the boys had thrown out. There was not a pony among them whose ribs did not show plainly under the rough winter hair. Here and there one stood spraddled, head hanging, done in, ready to fall.

  “Boneracks,” Little Horn said. “Some of them ponies ain’t go-in’ to make it, Boss.”

  “Then we got to leave them,” Ray said. “They can maybe make out, poor as they are, but unless we get a chinook this is starvin’ time for cattle.”

  They saddled and rode out, Ray, Slip, Panguingue, and Rusty to the southeast, straight into the sun, Spurlock and Buck and Little Horn to the northeast. They would pinch everything in to the middle and then swing and bring them back. The tent was already coming down as they rode off.

  They rode a long way before they raised any cattle. When they did, down in a draw, they were humped in the deep snow, making no effort to get out. They stood and bellowed; they moved as if their blood had frozen thick, and they had among them range stee
rs, including a few longhorns, which the boys did not want at all but had no time to cut out. They threw them all into a bunch, and attended by an intensely black and unlikely looking crow, rode on into the diamond glitter, gradually swinging eastward so that they could get some relief by ducking their heads and pulling their hats clear down on the sun side. Ray kept them pushing hard through the difficult going, knee high sometimes, hock high the next moment, crusted just enough to hold the horse’s weight for a split second before he broke down through. It was hard enough in the saddle; it must have been a good deal worse under it.

  “Got to hustle,” Ray said. “For some reason I’m gettin’ so I don’t trust the damn weather.” They fanned out, riding wide. Far north, across a spread of flats and one or two shallow coulees whose depressions could hardly be seen in the even glare, the black dots that were Spurlock and Little Horn and Buck were strung out across a mile or so of snow. They headed in toward the center of their loop every sad whiteface whose red hide showed. The cattle bellowed, blinking white eyelashes, and they moved reluctantly, but they moved. The crow flapped over, following companionably, flying off on some investigation of his own and returning after a few minutes to coast over and cock his wise eye down and caw with laughter to hear them talk.

  About noon, far to the south and east of where they had camped, they came to the river, angling down from the northwest in its shallow valley. The willows along the banks looked thin as a Chinaman’s whiskers, hardly more than weeds, but they held a surprising number of cattle, which the outfit flushed out by the dozens and scores and hazed, plunging and ducking and blindly swinging back until a horse blocked them or a rope cut across their noses, up onto the flats. They had everything in that herd: whiteface, shorthorn, longhorn, all sorts of crosses; steers, cows, bulls, calves; T-Down, Circle Diamond, Turkey Track. Ray pointed some out to Rusty when they rested their ponies for a minute on the flat and let Slip chase a half-dozen whiteface yearlings back into the bottoms. “The Seventy-Six,” he said. “Their range is way up by Gull Lake, on the CPR. They’ve drifted twenty-five miles.”

  Whatever they were, whoever they belonged to, if they could not be easily cut out the riders swept them in and drove them westward, pushing them without a pause toward Horse Camp. The afternoon changed from blue-white to lavender. The crow had left them—disgusted, Rusty thought, that they never stopped to eat and threw away no scraps. The trampled waste of snow bloomed for a minute or two a pure untroubled rose, and the sun was gone as if it had stepped in a hole. Gray-blue dusk, grateful to their seared eyes, lay in every slightest hollow; the snowplain was broken with unexpected irregularities. The “drag” of cows and calves slowed, poked along, stopped and had to be cursed and flogged into starting. Their ponies, poor boneracks, plodded gamely, and if a cow tried to break away or swing back they had to gather themselves like a tired swimmer taking one last stroke. Their breath was frozen all over them, stirrups and overshoes were enameled in ice; Rusty could hear his pony wheezing in his pipes, and his skinny ewe neck was down. He stumbled in the trodden snow.

  It grew dark, and they went on, following Jesse’s track, or whatever track it was that Ray kept, or no track at all, but only his wild-animal’s sense of direction. The faint eruption of color in the west was gone; and then as the sky darkened, the stars were there, big and frosty and glittering, bright as lamps, and Rusty found the Dipper and Cassiopeia and the Pole Star, his total astronomy. He moved in his saddle, lame and numb, his face stiff, his shoulder aching clear down across his collarbone into his chest. Ahead of him, a moving blur on the snow, the herd stumbled and clicked and mooed, the joints of their random longhorns cracked, the traveling steam went up. Off to his right he heard Buck trying to sing—a sound so strange, revelatory, and forlorn that he had to laugh, and startled himself with the voiceless croak he produced.

  How much farther? Up above, the sky was pure; the Northern Lights were beginning to flare and stretch. He heard his old friend the wolf hunting down the river valleys and coulees of his ordained home and speaking his wolfish mind to the indifferent stars. Lord God, how much longer? They had been in the saddle since six, had eaten nothing since then. Neither horse nor rider could take much more of this. But nobody said, We can stop now. Nobody said, We’ll camp here. They couldn‘t, obviously. Jesse had taken their bubble of shelter God knew how many more empty miles to Horse Camp. He thought to himself, with a qualm of panic, My God, this is desperate. What if we don’t find him? What if a horse should give clear out?

  He gave his pony clumsy mittened pats; he enlisted its loyalty with words; it plodded and stumbled on.

  Eventually there was a soft orange bloom of light, and shouts cut through the luminous murk, and as he stopped, confused, Ray Henry came riding from his left and they crowded the cattle into a tighter mass. Over their moving backs and the sounds of their distress and irritation he heard poles rattle; someone ki-yi-ed. Ray pushed his horse against the rear cattle and in his almost-gone whisper drove and urged them on. They moved, they broke aside, they were turned back; the mass crawled ahead, tedious, interminable, a toss and seethe of heads and horns, until suddenly it had shrunk and dwindled and was gone, and Panguingue was down in the snow, ramming gate poles home. The whole world smelled of cow.

  They sat there all together, stupid with cold and fatigue; they dismounted like skeletons tied together with wire. Ray croaked, “Let’s see if Jesse ain’t got a spare oat or two for these ponies,” and they walked toward the wagon and the bloom of the tent. The air, which had been bright at sunset and in the first hour of dark, was blurred as if a fog were rising from the snow; beyond the tent the faint shadow of the coulee fell away, but the other side was misted out. Rusty’s eyes were so longingly on Jesse’s shadow as he hopped around the stove, obviously cooking, that he fell over the pile of willows stacked by the wagon: Jesse had not wasted his time; there was cooking wood for a week.

  “Dad,” Ray called, “you got any oats? These ponies are about done.” The white head appeared in the flap, a hand with a fork in it held the canvas back, the soft old voice said, “I got a couple-three bushel left, I guess. That has to hold the Clydes and the night horses till we get back to the ranch.”

  “They’ll have to get along,” Ray said. “I’m afraid we’re going to lose some ponies anyway. They just don’t have the flesh for this kind of a job.”

  Rusty stood with the reins in his hand, letting Jesse and Ray heave the oat bag out of the wagon. The tent with its bloom of light and its smell of frying was a paradise he yearned for as he had never yearned for anything, but he had to stand there and care for the horse first, and he hated the poor beast for its dependence. It was no tireder than he was. Nevertheless Ray’s was an inescapable example. He unsaddled and threw the saddle into the wagon; he tramped a little hollow in the snow and poured out a quart or two of oats and pulled his pony’s bridle and let him drop his head to them. One after the other the outfit did the same. After what seemed an hour Rusty found the tent flap and crept in. The little stove was red hot; the air was full of smoke. Jesse had unrolled their beds for them. Rusty stepped over Buck and fell full length and shut his eyes. What little strength he had left flowed out of him and was soaked up; his bones and veins and skin held nothing but tiredness and pain.

  Jesse hopped around, juggling pans, going on cheerfully. He had thought by God they were never going to get in. Chopped wood till he like to bust his back. (Yeah, said somebody, you did a day’s work!) Horse herd come all the way with him, right along behind the pilot. Those few scraps of hay the other day made tame ponies of the whole bunch. Looks like you guys got a pretty good herd of calves, considering. Anybody like a cup of coffee now?

  “By God,” he said after a short silence, “you fellers look beat.”

  And after another little silence in which nobody spoke, but somebody groaned or grunted, Jesse said, “Here, I don’t reckon coffee has got enough nourishment for the occasion.”

  Beside Rusty, Buck rolled ove
r. Rusty opened his eyes. Slip and Little Horn had rolled over too. Ray was sitting on his bed, holding a quart of whisky, shaking his head. “Jesse,” he said, “by God, remind me to raise your wages.”

  Their common emotion while Ray worked on the cork was reverence. They sat or lay around in a ring, as bleary a crew as ever ate with its fingers or blew its nose with the same all-purpose tool, and they watched each motion of his thick wrist and big dirty hand. None of them had shaved for more than two weeks; they had all, except possibly Buck, lost any right to browbeat Panguingue about his filthiness. They felt—or at least Rusty did—that they had endured much and labored incredibly. He wondered, as the greenest hand there, how well he had done, and hoped he had done at least passably, and knew with unaccustomed humility that he could not have done more. Considering everything, the three hundred odd cattle they had finally brought to the Horse Camp corrals were an achievement. The work still to be done, the separating and weaning, and the driving of calves and bulls to the home ranch, could only be trifling after what they had been through.

  The stove’s heat beat on their bearded red faces, the candles gleamed in their bloodshot eyes. They watched Ray Henry’s thick hands, and when the cork slipped out of the neck with a soft pok some of them smiled involuntarily, and Panguingue giggled, a high, falsetto sound that set off another round of smiles and made Jesse say, “Listen at old Pan, he sounds like a jack after a mare.”

  Ray held the bottle to the light and looked through it; he shook it and watched the bead rise. He was like a priest before an altar. He would not hurry this. “Well,” he said at last, “here’s looking at you, boys,” and tipped the bottle to his blackened mouth. They watched the contents gurgle around the spark of candle that lived inside the amber bottle. He let the bottle down. “Whah!” he said. “Kee-rist!” and wiped the neck politely with the heel of his palm and passed it to Slip, whose bed lay beside his next to the wall. The smell of whisky cut through the smoke of the tent; they sat like Indians in the medicine lodge and passed the ceremonial vessel around, and each, as he finished, wiped the neck carefully with his palm. Slip to Jesse, Jesse to Little Horn, Little Horn to Spurlock, Spurlock to Panguingue. Panguingue drank and shook his head and wiped the neck once and started to pass the bottle and then, as if not satisfied, wiped it again. Rusty loved him for it, he loved them all; he felt that he had never known so mannerly a group of men. Buck took the bottle from Panguingue, and from Buck it came to the greenhorn, its neck flavored with all their seven mouths and hands. He raised it to his mouth and let its fire wash down his throat and felt it sting in his cracked lips. His eyes watered. He lowered the bottle and choked down a cough, and as he passed the bottle back to Ray and talk broke out all at once, he took advantage of the noise and cleared his throat and so was not shamed.