Wolf Willow

  “Well, Jesse,” Ray said, “what do you think? Want to save that little-bitty dab?”

  “Why, I can’t see it’d be much good from now on,” Jesse said.

  They passed it around again, and their tongues were loosened. They told each other how cold it had been and how hard they had worked. Jesse had made up a raisin-and-rice pudding, practically a pailful. It was pure ambrosia; they ate it all and scraped the kettle, and for a few minutes after supper Rusty even roused up enough strength to get out the harmonica. There was not the slightest remnant left of the irritability they had felt with one another in the snowed-in time; the boy could feel how they had been welded and riveted into a society of friends and brothers. Little Horn sang some filthy verses of “The Old Chisholm Trail.” Spurlock supplied some even filthier ones from “Johnny McGraw.” The whole bunch joined in a couple of songs.

  Then all at once they were done in again. The talk dropped away, Rusty put the harmonica in his pocket. They went outside and walked a few steps from the tent and stood in a row and made water, lifting their faces into the night air that was mistier than ever, and warmer than any night since they had left the ranch.

  “I don’t know,” Ray said, sniffing for wind. “I don’t quite like the looks of the sky.”

  “Oh but hell,” they said. “Feel how warm it is.”

  He gave in doubtfully to their optimism. The mild air might mean snow, but it also might mean a chinook coming in, and that was the best luck they could hope for. There was not enough grass bare, even out on the flats, to give the cattle a chance to feed. Rusty had never seen or felt a chinook, but he was so positive this was the birth of one that he offered to bet Little Horn and Panguingue a dollar each that it was a chinook coming. They refused, saying they did not want to hoodoo the weather. Ray remarked that such weather as they had had couldn’t be hoodooed any worse. They kicked the snow around, smelling the night air soft in their faces; it smelled like a thaw, though the snow underfoot was still as dry and granular as salt. Every minute or so a hungry calf bawled over in the corral.

  “Well,” Ray said, “maybe this is our break.”

  Rusty hardly heard him. His eyes were knotted, the nerves and veins snarled together, the lids heavy with sleep. Back inside the tent there was a brief flurry of movement as they crawled in. Somebody cursed somebody else feebly for throwing his chaps across him. He heard the fire settle in the stove; after a minute or two he was not sure whether it was the stove or the first whiffling of some sleeper. Then he was asleep too, one of the first.

  But not even his dead tiredness could lift from him the habits of the last ten days. In his dreams he struggled against winds, he felt the bite of cold, he heard the clamor of men and animals and he knew that he had a duty to perform, he had somehow to shout “Here!” as one did at a roll call, but he was far down under something, struggling in the dark to come up and to break his voice free. His own nightmared sounds told him he was dreaming, and moaning in his sleep, and still he could not break free into wakefulness and shove the dream aside. Things were falling on him from above; he sheltered his head with his arms, rolled, and with a wrench broke loose from tormented sleep and sat up.

  Panguingue was kicking him in the head through his blankets. He was freezing cold, with all his blankets wound around his neck and shoulders like shawls. By the light of a candle stuck on the cold stove lid he saw the rest all in the same state of confused, unbelieving awakening. There was a wild sound of wind; while he sat leaning away from Panguingue’s feet, stupidly groping for his wits, a screeching blast hit the tent so hard that old Jesse, standing by the flap, grabbed the pole and held it until the shuddering strain gave way a little and the screech died to a howl.

  Rusty saw the look of disbelief and outrage on every face; Panguingue‘s grin was a wolfish baring of teeth, his ordinary dull witted good nature shocked clear out of him. “What is it?” Rusty asked idiotically. “Is it a chinook?”

  “Chinookl” Buck said furiously.

  He yanked his stiff chaps on over his pants and groped chattering for his boots. They were all dressing as fast as their dazed minds and numbed fingers would let them. Jesse let go the tent pole to break some willow twigs in his hands and shove them into the stove. At that moment the wind swooped on them again and the tent came down.

  Half dressed, minus mittens, boots, mackinaws, hats, they struggled under the obliterating canvas. Somebody was swearing in an uninterrupted stream. Rusty stumbled over the fallen stovepipe and his nostrils were filled with soot. Then the smothering canvas lifted a couple of feet and somebody struck a match to expose them like bugs under a kicked log, dismayed and scuttling, glaring around for whatever article they needed. He saw Jesse and Ray bracing the front pole, and as the match died he jumped to the rear one; it was like holding a fishing rod with a thousand pound fish on: the whole sail-like mass of canvas flapped and caved and wanted to fly. One or two ropes on the windward side had broken loose and the wall plastered itself against his legs, and wind and snow poured like ice water across his stockinged feet. “Somebody get outside and tie us down,” Ray’s grating whisper said. Little Horn scrambled past, then Spurlock. Panguingue crawled toward the front flap on hands and knees, Slip and Buck followed him. Braced against the pole, old Jesse was laughing; he lit a match on his pants and got a candle going and stuck it in its own drip on the stove. The stovepipe lay in sooty sections across the beds.

  Ropes outside jerked; the wall came away from Rusty’s legs, the tent rose to nearly its proper position, the strain on the pole eased. Eventually it reached a wobbly equilibrium so that he could let go and locate his boots in the mess of his bed. The five outsiders came in gasping, beating their numbed hands. In the gray light of storm and morning, they all looked like old men; the blizzard had sown white age in their beards.

  “God A‘mighty!” Slip said, and wiped away an icicle from under his nose.

  “Cold, uh?” Ray whispered.

  “Must be thirty below.”

  “Will the tent hold?”

  “I dunno,” Slip said. “Comer ropes is onto the wheels, but one of the middle ones is pulled plumb out.”

  They stood a second or two, estimating the strain on the ropes, and as if to oblige their curiosity the wind lit on them and heeled them halfway over again. The whole middle of the windward wall bellied inward; the wind got under the side and for an instant they were a balloon; Rusty thought for certain they would go up in the air. He shut his eyes and hung on, and when he looked again three of the boys had grappled the uplifting skirt of the cloth and pinned it down.

  “We got to get in off these flats,” Jesse said.

  “I guess,” Ray said. “The question is how. It’s three-four miles to the river.”

  “We could keep the wind on our left and drift a little with it That’d bring us in somewhere below Bates Camp.”

  “Well,” Ray said, and looked at the rest of them, holding the tent down, “we haven’t got much choice. Slip, you reckon we could find any horses in this?”

  “I reckon we could try.”

  “No,” Ray said. “It’d be too risky. We couldn’t drive them against this wind if we found them.”

  “What about the cattle?” Buck said.

  “Yeah,” said Little Horn. “What about them?”

  “D‘you suppose,” Ray whispered, and a spasm like silent mirth moved his iron face, “after we get things ready to go, you boys could pull about three poles out of the corral gate?”

  “You mean turn‘em loose?”

  “I mean turn‘em loose.”

  Ed Spurlock said, “So after all this, we wind up without a single God damn calf?” and Ray said, “You rather have a corral full of dead ones?”

  Rusty leaned against the swaying pole while the furious wind whined and howled down out of the Arctic, and he listened to them with a bitterness that was personal and aggrieved. It seemed to him atrocious, a wrong against every principle and every expectation, that the devoted an
d herculean labors of eight good men should be thwarted by a blind force of nature, a meteorological freak, a mere condition of wind and cold.

  Now on with the boots over feet bruised and numb from walking stocking-footed on the frozen ground, and on with the overshoes, and stamp to get life going. Now button the sheepskin collar close and pull the fur cap down, earlaps and forehead piece, leaving exposed only the eyes, the chattering jaw, the agonized spuming of the breath, huh-huh-huh, huh-huh-huh-huh. Clumsy with clothing, beat mittened hands in armpits, stoop with the others to get the stovepipe together, the grub box packed, the beds rolled. “Keep out a blanket apiece,” Ray Henry says.

  The tent tugs and strains, wanting to be off. In the gray light, snow sifts dry as sand down through the open stovepipe thimble and onto the stove—a stove so useless that if anyone touched it with a bare hand he would freeze fast.

  As in a nightmare where everything is full of shock and terror and nothing is ever explained, Rusty looks around their numb huddle and sees only a glare of living eyes, and among them Panguingue’s eyes that roll whitely toward the tent roof to ask a question.

  “We’ll leave it up till we get set,” Ray says. “It ain’t a hell of a lot, but it’s something.”

  They duck outside, and shielding faces behind shoulders and collars, drive into the wind. The paralyzing wind hammers drift against eyelids, nose, and lips, and their breath comes in gasps and sobs as they throw things into the wagon. Jesse and Ray are harnessing the Clydes over their yellow blankets, Slip pounds ice off the blanket of the night pony getting ready to throw the saddle on. From their feet plumes of drift streak away southward. Beyond the figures in the squirming dusk the whole visible world moves—no sky, no horizon, no earth, no air, only this gray-white streaming, with a sound like a rush of water, across and through it other sounds like howling and shouting far off, high for a moment and lost again in the whistle and rush.

  The cheek Rusty has exposed feels scorched as if by flame. Back in the icy, half-cleared tent, the hollow of quiet amid the wind seems a most extravagant sanctuary, and he heaves a great breath as if he has been running. He does not need to be told that what moves them now is not caution, not good judgment, not anything over which they have any control, but desperation. The tent will not stand much more, and no tent means no fire. With no horses left but the Clydes and one night pony, they will have to walk, and to reach either of the possible shelters, either Stonepile or Bates Camp, they will have to go north and west, bucking the wind that just now, in the space of a dozen breaths, has seared his face like a blowtorch. He has a feeling outraged and self-pitying and yet remotely contemplating a deserved punishment, a predicted retribution, the sort of feeling that he used to have in childhood when something tempted him beyond all caution and all warnings and he brought himself to a caning in the iodine- and carbolic-smelling office where his father, the doctor, used to look him down into shame before laying the yardstick around his legs. They have got what they deserved for daring Authority; the country has warned them three separate times. Now the punishment.

  Into the wagon, jumbled any old way, goes everything the tent holds—grub box, saddles, stove, stovepipe, kerosene can, and again they gather in the still, icy hollow, strangely empty without the stove. Ray Henry has two lariats in his hands, Buck an axe, and Jesse a lighted lantern. The foreman wipes his nose on the back of his mitt and squints at old Jesse. “Dad, you sure you want to drive? It’ll be colder up there than walkin‘.”

  The old-timer shakes the lantern, and his eyes gleam and his square teeth gleam. “Lantern between m‘feet, buffler robe over the top,” he says, “I don’t care how cold I get upstairs if I’m warm from the tail down.”

  “Long as you don’t set yourself afire,” Ray says. “How about somebody ridin’ up there with you?”

  “Dee-lighted!” Jesse says, flashing his teeth like Teddy Roose velt, and they laugh as if they were all short of wind. The foreman’s gray thinking eyes go over them. When his look pauses on Rusty Cullen, the boy’s breath is held for a moment in sneaking hope, for he has never been so miserable or so cold; the thought of going out there and fighting across six miles of snowflats in the terrible wind has paralyzed his nerve. Also, he tells himself, he is the injured one; his arm still hurts him. The possibility pictures itself seductively before him: to ride, bundled under the buffalo robe and with the lantern’s warmth. Like a child pretending sleep when a night emergency arises and the rain beats in an open window or the wind has blown something loose, to sit snug beside old Jesse, relieved of responsibility, while the grownups take care of it ... He cannot read the foreman’s gray eyes; he feels his own wavering down. A crawl of shame moves in his guts, and he thinks, if he picks me it will be because I’m the weakest as well as the greenest.

  The thinking eye moves on. “Slip,” Ray says, “you ain’t got the feet for walkin‘. You can spell Dad with the lines. It’ll be bad on the hands.”

  To cover his relief Rusty is beating his hands rhythmically in his armpits and jiggling on nerveless feet. He watches Ray pass the lariats to Little Horn. “If you’re tied together, we won’t lose nobody.”

  “Where’ll you be?”

  “I’ll be ridin’ pilot.”

  They are all moving constantly, clumsily. Spurlock has wrapped a woolen muffler around his mouth so that only his restless eyes show. Buck and Panguingue already have hung blankets over their heads and shoulders. Little Horn pulls off a mitt to pat the chimney of Jesse’s lantern with a bare hand. “Well,” Ray says, “I guess it’s time she came down.”

  They lurch outside. Rusty, unsure of what to do, astonished at their instant obedience, finds himself standing stupidly while Buck with the butt of the axe knocks out one picket pin, then another, and chops off the ropes that tie the tent to the wheels. Jesse and Panguingue, at the ends, reach inside the flaps and lift and yank at the poles, and down it comes in a puddle of frozen canvas that they fall upon and grapple together and heave into the wagon. They curse and fight the wind, pushing and folding the tent down, throwing the poles and two saddles on it to hold it, hauling and lashing the wagon cover tight. Rusty looks back at where their shelter has been and his insides are pinched by cold panic. Drift is already streaking across the patch of thawed and refrozen grass; the little space their living warmth has thawed there in the midst of the waste looks as passionately and finally abandoned as the fresh earth of a grave.

  Little Horn is tying them together, using the rope to snug and hold the blankets they have wrapped around themselves, when out of the tattered edge of storm cattle appear, longhorns that swerve away at a stumbling half-trot. After them and among them, a streaming miserable horde, come the whiteface and shorthorns, cows and calves, some steers, a few bulls, with no noise except an occasional desperate blat from a calf, and the clicking of longhorn hoofs and joints carried headlong southward by the wind. Well fleshed and round-bellied no more than a week ago, they stream and flinch past, gaunt ghosts of themselves, and Rusty thinks sullenly, while Little Horn ties the rope tight around him and their four hands tuck the blanket under, that it has been human foolishness that has brought the cattle to this condition. Driven all day by cowboys, and every other night by blizzards, they have eaten hardly anything for days. Left alone, yarding up in the coulees and river bottoms, they could at least have gnawed willows.

  He is furious at their violent futile effort, and at Ray Henry for insisting upon it. Inhuman labor, desperate chances, the risk of death itself, for what? For a bunch of cattle who would be better off where their instinct told them to go, drifting with the storm until they found shelter. For owners off in Aberdeen or Toronto or Calgary or Butte who would never come out themselves and risk what they demanded of any cowboy for twenty dollars a month and found.

  The tip of his mitt is caught under the rope; he tears it loose, and for a moment Little Horn’s barely exposed eyes glint sideways, surprised. Out of the storm behind the last straggling cattle rides Ray Henry, already p
lastered white. He waves, somebody shouts, the wind tears the sound away and flings it across the prairie, the Clydes jerk sideways, the frozen wheels of the wagon crackle loose and crush through a crested foot-deep drift. The five walkers bunch up to get the protection of the wagon for their faces and upper bodies; the wind under the box and through the spokes tears at their legs as they swing half around and jolt off angling across the storm—northeast. Rusty judges, if the wind is northwest—following the stooped figure of the foreman on the horse. As they pass the corrals, Rusty sees the stained ground humped with carcasses already whitening under the blast of snow and wind.

  He huddles his blanket across his chest, clenching and unclenching his numb hands; he crowds close to the others, eager to conform; he plants his feet carefully, clumsily, in the exact footprints of Ed Spurlock, and he tries to keep the rope between them just slack enough so that it does not drag and trip him. His face, unless he carelessly falls behind, is out of the worst lash of the wind; with walking, he has begun to feel his feet again. It seems possible after all—they can walk under these conditions the necessary five or six miles to shelter. He is given confidence by the feel of the rope around his waist, and the occasional tug when Spurlock or someone else up ahead stumbles or lurches, or when he feels Little Horn coming behind. Beside his cheek the wheel pours dry snow, and every turning spoke is a few inches gained toward safety.