Falling From Horses (32 page)

“Will I have to go there? I don't want to.”

“You wouldn't want to ride the bus to Burns either. It takes too long.”

“Aren't you lonesome? Don't you miss Tony? And Mom and Dad?”

His sister had put her arms around him, and when she spoke he felt her breath tickling the back of his neck. He looked over at the house and the barn and the line of willow brush where the creek ran along the edge of the pasture. It was overcast that day, and a cold fog obscured the timbered ridges where the Ochocos rose up behind the house.

At the boarding school he had felt lonesome much of the time. He had, in the beginning, told himself it was because of the flat, dry landscape around Hart—he had told himself “homesick” meant he was missing the mountains and the sloughs around Echol Creek, missing the ranch house that was the only home he knew, and the place he felt safest. He had not thought it meant he was missing his parents and his sister.

“Well, I'm used to it now,” he said.

 

Mrs. Dickerson had a maid who did most of the cooking, and their house didn't seem to have many chores that needed doing. In the fall Bud and Dean raked the leaves that piled up under the elm tree in the front yard and the apple tree in the back. In the winter they stoked the sawdust furnace and shoveled snow off the steps and the paved walk from the porch to the street. In the spring they took turns pushing a lawn mower through the new green grass. But otherwise they were free to spend the weekends however they liked.

Dean had a bicycle, and Bud learned to ride double with him, straddling the rear fender and resting his feet on the axle rods, with his hands gripping the back of the seat. In good weather they rode everywhere around town, up and down the graveled residential streets and the three paved business blocks, out to the lumber yard and the gravel pit, and often to the railroad yard, where they hung around watching the men load freight and the switchman coupling and uncoupling cars and switching the rails to shuffle them back and forth. There were stock pens behind the depot, and sometimes they were lucky enough to watch a crew on horseback loading cattle, driving steers up the alley between the pens and the rail cars. On the eastern edge of town Hart Creek ran through willows and cottonwoods, and Bud and Dean rode the bicycle out a bumpy dirt path to the creek to catch crawdads or go fishing for chub. After the weather turned cold they spent their Saturday afternoons at the matinee show at the movie theater.

No money ever changed hands between the Frazers and the Dickersons, but Henry saw to it that a steer was butchered and delivered to the Dickerson house. And at the end of the school year, when Bud came home to the ranch, Dean came along and spent a couple of weeks with the Frazers, learning to cowboy.

Martha put him on a gentle gelding named Pumpkin, and the two boys rode into the hills above the ranch and shot at tin cans with Bud's .22 rifle. They helped Henry blast out some stumps from a hay field and rode out with him when he was hauling salt up to the benches where cattle liked to graze in the early summer. They rode up to the fire lookout at the top of Rough Butte, where a cabin had been built in the twenties, with the lookout perched on wooden stilts about fifteen feet high. They climbed the ladder to talk with the ranger, Ferris Cantlin, and they looked out over the vastness of the country, miles of canyons and forest, through Ferris's good binoculars. Ferris could name just about every creek drainage and summit in every direction, clear to the horizon.

Once, with Mary Claudine, they made the long ride to Burns to see
Charge of the Light Brigade
, and when they were crossing the sagebrush flats east of Foy, an airplane buzzed them and set all their horses bucking. Dean went off on the first buck and bloodied an elbow when he landed hard on the rocky ground. Before Mary Claudine could quit laughing and before Bud could get over to help him up, Dean had taken hold of Pumpkin, remounted, and headed off as if nothing had happened. He had caught on to the cowboy code. That fall, when school started up again, he strolled in wearing boots and Levi's and affecting a bowlegged walk.

 

The Frazers rode for cattle every spring and fall. In spring it was to gather the new calves, get them branded and castrated, and then move cows and calves up into the reserve, where they'd be on summer pasture; in fall it was to collect them from the high canyons and benches, bring them down to the ranch, and then wean the calves, sort out calves and dry cows for market, and herd them down to a holding pasture in the valley, where they'd be sold and shipped out. Everything they did all year led up to those roundups.

When Henry was foreman for the Woodruff sisters over in Elwha County, the sisters hired four or five extra cowboys, a cook, and a cook's flunky to help out for the roundups. The Echol place wasn't anywhere near as big as the Woodruff ranch, but the reserve, where the cows spent the summer, was rough country, cut through with ridges and canyons, and Henry was always grateful to have Arlo or one of his boys pitch in, in trade for Henry lending a hand at the Gantz roundup. And as soon as Bud and then Mary Claudine got to be more help than trouble—six or seven years old—they began to ride for cattle with their parents.

On a lot of ranches the size of theirs, the wife would have cooked for roundup, but Martha wasn't one of those wives, and even after Bud became a pretty good cook Henry felt that his son was more help to him gathering livestock than standing over a stove, so Henry paid a neighbor woman to do the cooking. Mrs. Stanich was a homesteader's wife living in the foothills just west of them. She would walk to the house every day to cook and serve the noonday dinner and wash the dishes, and then before she walked home again she built a pile of roast beef sandwiches and left a fresh pie in the kitchen for when they came dragging in at sundown.

For roundup they got up early every morning—by three or three-thirty. Martha had to prod the children awake while Henry went out to the corral to saddle the horses by lantern light. Mrs. Stanich wouldn't be at the house until after sunup, so Bud and his sister moved about the kitchen, heavy-eyed and silent, putting together the breakfast, and Martha made gallons of coffee, enough for breakfast and to portion into canteens and jars to carry along and keep them going until noon or one o'clock, when they went back to the house for dinner.

They ate in silence, all of them half asleep and trancelike, and it was still dark, barely four-thirty, quarter of five, when they finished up and headed out.

In a country without fences, it was hard to know where your cattle were. The most you could hope was an intelligent guess. In general, the cattle ranged within an hour or so of water or salt, so in March and April Henry hauled salt up to the reserve and left it on certain hillsides and ridge points, and after the spring roundup he dropped off cows and calves near the salt and near springs where ponds had formed. Then in the fall, searching a different part of the allotment every day, they worked inward toward one of those salt blocks or ponds, collecting the cattle they found in that area. They brought them down in pairs and small bunches, counting as they went, and when they had enough to handle, took them to whatever place had been agreed upon that day, where they could be held or corralled for a few hours until everybody had come in. Then they drove that morning's gather—a couple of dozen pairs on an average day—down to the fenced pastures at the home place, where the herd grew bigger day by day.

When they sat down in their dusty clothes to eat Mrs. Stanich's dinner, they hardly spoke except to ask for a plate to be passed. Afterward they saddled fresh horses and headed out again to comb for cows around another salt cairn.

Fall roundup was twelve or fifteen sleep-starved, backbreaking days.

 

The Echol place had always had water flowing in the creek, water in the wetlands at the lower end of the property, and half a dozen springs that never failed, but in the thirties a string of dry years hit everywhere in the West. The Frazers had more water than many of their neighbors: a couple of springs that kept trickling, and water in the upper reaches of the creek, enough to keep the livestock watered and the kitchen faucet running. So they gave away what they felt they could spare, to ranchers down on the arid flats who were trying to save well water for their cattle and to nearby homesteaders whose springs had dried up. All through the dry summers of 1934 and 1935, neighbors came and went, driving up the canyon with a team and wagon or a motor truck and hauling back water in buckets to keep their kitchen garden going and maybe wash clothes every other week. But late in the summer of 1936, with no rain to speak of since March, the wetlands below the house shrunk until they were mostly mud beds. Echol Creek in places became a necklace of still puddles. That year the cows ran out of grass in July and began shedding pounds, so Henry and Martha started the fall roundup in early August, a good month sooner than usual.

Sandy Gantz, the youngest of Arlo's boys, was helping them that year, and Bud's friend Dean Dickerson had come over from Hart to help out. He wasn't much of a hand—Henry was afraid he would make more work for them all—but the boy was eager to prove himself a cowboy, and Bud had spent so much time at the Dickerson house over the last couple of years that Henry felt obliged to let him try.

Every morning Sandy, who was twenty that year, came into the yard on a motorbike with his saddle tied onto the back of the seat, and then they all sat down to eat. Bud and Dean and Mary Claudine had been up since three, cooking biscuits and sausage gravy, stewed prunes, bacon, pancakes.

Even in August the early mornings had a bite of frost, so when they rode out around four-thirty they were bundled in coats and scarves they would shed when the heat built up later in the day. There had been fires in the valley all through that summer—the grass had dried up so early in the season it took no more than a cigarette butt tossed out along the highway or a horseshoe striking a spark against a rock to get hundreds of acres burning black. The night sky was a starless smudge, and the air smelled faintly of ash and charcoal. The only sound was leather squeaking and bits jingling and the horses sometimes huffing breath.

On the fourth day of roundup that year, they were still working the highest part of the allotment, sweeping the ridges and ravines around Shoestring Canyon, a rocky place about eight miles long, with mountains rising steeply above the canyon bed. Two side canyons fed into it, Crow Canyon from the east and Lost Sheep Canyon from the southwest, and the gathering place was at the outlet of Crow Canyon, where there were some old corrals. They planned to be working cows down the side hills into Crow in the morning, and Lost Sheep in the afternoon.

It was six o'clock when they got up to the corrals, the sky overhead lightening to pearl gray but the sun not yet risen high enough to clear the eastern ridge. This was country so rough and wild that even Henry had sometimes wandered around up there without knowing for sure where he was, so he wanted them working in pairs: Sandy and Martha together, and Dean with Bud, who was charged with keeping his friend out of trouble, though nobody said so. Henry, who had been rounding up cattle for more years than any of them, would get along with just the dog, Quinn. He told Mary Claudine, “I want you to wait right here and help run in the cows as they come down to the canyon bottom.”

Mary Claudine gave Henry a glance of wounded outrage. She was ten that year, old enough in her view to be riding for cattle on her own, and she was waiting every day for her dad to say so. It was hours of boredom, hanging around the corrals until the first cows were brought down, and it was her opinion that her brother's friend knew less about the work than she did—that it should have been Dean made to sit at the bottom and wait. She sent a beseeching look to her mother, but Martha merely shook her head.
Don't argue with your dad.
It was Martha's own opinion that Mary Claudine could chase cows better than Dean, but she knew Henry had made up his mind to let the boy play at being a cowboy.

They talked about how to split up the terrain, and then they rode up Crow Canyon and scattered up the side hills out of sight, leaving Mary Claudine alone with a long time to wait. She was riding Goldy that morning, a chestnut mare with one floppy ear. Goldy was too tall for her to climb on without a stump or rock or some other high place to mount from; earlier that week she'd had to stay in the saddle all morning. But at Crow Canyon she had the corrals to climb on, and she was too cold and bored to sit on the horse for long. There was sunlight at the top of the ridge, so she slipped off the horse, took out the book she had carried in the saddlebag with her jar of coffee, and hiked up the steep side of the ridge.

Mary Claudine, like her mother, had a great love of books and reading. She had learned to read at four, and by six had worked her way through several of the books that were her mother's favorites—
Black Beauty
,
Call of the Wild
,
A Dog of Flanders.
She had begun
The Dark Frigate
at the start of roundup. When she reached the top of the ridge, she sat on the ground in the warming sunlight, opened the book, and found where she'd left off reading.

She didn't have any way to measure the passage of time. Every so often she looked up at the sun in the great bare sky, then went back to reading about the
Rose of Devon
taken over by pirates, and the orphaned Philip forced to join their crew. But she wanted to be ready when the first cows came down to the canyon floor, and when she began to worry that she had spent too much time with the frigate, she hiked back down the steep hill and climbed onto Goldy. She forgot to piddle before getting back on the horse, and before long she desperately needed to. She dithered, not wanting any of the others to show up while she was squatting by a rock with her bottom hanging out of her overalls. But finally she got down and crouched a short way off and relieved herself on the dirt, then boosted herself onto Goldy again, in such a hurry that she was on the horse before she finished doing up her shoulder buttons.