High Country : A Novel (36 page)

“Did most of it with Buck on his back.” Lars wiped at the bar. “Buck’s over two hundred pounds. Maybe more. Ty didn’t seem to notice.”
“Saw him tack a shoe on a rank mule one day.” Harvey sipped his beer, remembering. “Mule let Ty hold up a good half of him while he rested up for the next round.”
They went out into the sunlight and looked at the outhouse. It was settled back in its place at the edge of the lot.
“Near give us all a hernia gettin’ it back,” Lars said. “Still don’t know why Ty had to knock the whole thing over.”

And so Ty’s strength was settled in the minds of all those who knew the Deerlodge, which meant pretty much everyone, those not knowing it getting the story from those who did. The size of Knots Malloy grew in their minds too, partly because Knots was no longer around to prove anyone wrong. After the fight he took up work for a guest ranch in Arizona. It must have satisfied him. No one ever saw him in the valley again.

None of it meant much to Ty. He didn’t listen to the talk, and he tried not to think about Knots. He knew something had gone terribly wrong in him that night. He’d seen men get that way with mules, sometimes with horses. To him it was a sickness: no good for the man, a disaster for the animal.

It made him feel more alone than ever—though it might have seemed the opposite. People certainly paid more attention to him— they just began treating him differently, parting to make a place for him at the Deerlodge, wanting to buy his drinks, pay for his coffee. It was better in the mountains, but even there the rangers would stop by his camps for no reason, offer help he didn’t need. More and more he felt separate—growing more distant as the years slid by.

Higher roads, lighter gear, fast-talking environmentalists brought more and more hikers into the high country. The regulations that caused drove many of the old packers out, though somehow Ty’s business kept improving. Harvey Kittle realized it and pretty much let Ty run everything—despite how choosy Ty seemed to be getting.

Ty even gave up packing for the big Sierra Club trips. “Too damn many people,” he told Harvey. “Camping up under the cliffs so they can swing on their ropes. No feed up there for the mules. No room for all their stuff.” And if some of the guests brought too many amenities, Ty would back away. “Said I’d show you these mountains,” he’d say mildly, returning their deposits. “Not turn them into a trailer park.”

Harvey saw no reason to complain. No matter how many people Ty turned away, his pack strings were busy all summer and into the fall. The Haslam family would always take a long trip, sometimes with Jeb Walker, sometimes with others. Their friends seemed to come back too, arranging trips on their own schedules. And when some official from the Park Service or some politician in Washington wanted to see the Sierra, it was Ty they turned to, Ty who picked the routes and chose the horses, decided on the camps.

Angie arranged things on the outside, organized gear and food and people. And after Jasper went to the rest home, it was Angie who found the cooks—cooking herself if she had to or enlisting Nina, one of Nina’s friends, or one of the Haslam children—all of them wanting to work with Ty, spend their summers in the Sierra with Ty.

The winters went more slowly, though ranchers from Lone Pine all the way up to Bishop seemed to count on Ty for one thing or another. He knew how to doctor their cattle and straighten their fences and gentle their horses. He even had a way with their children—the boys listening as they could not to their fathers, the girls liking his way with animals. Their parents were different. They didn’t have much to say to Ty unless they were asking for help, advice about some problem with a horse or a lame mule or a sickness keeping weight off their cattle. And then they seemed shy about asking, as though they should know what to do themselves.

More and more Ty would find himself drinking too late in the Deerlodge. Many nights hardly talking at all, sometimes talking too much. “No need to tell him you heard that story before,” Buck would tell Lars, who was always partial to Montana stories. “It’s good for him to do some talkin’.”

Most of Ty’s stories were about Fenton and Spec. Sometimes they were about Cody Jo, the way she was with Fenton. Sometimes about Etta and Horace or Rosie and Dan Murphy. He didn’t need to talk about himself. Or Willie.

Lars was bothered by that, always wanting to learn more about Ty. But it was hard to do. He could only get hints from the secondary roles Ty played in his own stories, or from things Buck and Angie said, or Jasper—before Etta and Horace found him the rest home back in Missoula.

“Fenton knew one thing about that bear,” Ty told Lars one night. “To let him go his own way. That bear let Fenton go his too.” Ty finished his beer and looked at Lars. “But Spec was interested in more. Where that bear lived. What he needed and ate. Where he slept.”

“Jasper told me about Spec in the woods.” Lars mopped at his bar. Not mopping down the bar from one conversation to another but sticking with Ty, listening, hoping to get something new for the picture of Ty he carried around in his head.

“It wasn’t so much that Spec knew the woods.” Ty accepted another beer. “He was part of them. I think he watched that bear,” Ty looked across his beer at Lars, “to learn more about himself.”

He didn’t need to tell those stories in the summers. And he hardly ever drank too much in the summers. His trips were enough. And more often than not there were emergencies: tracking down horses, finding lost climbers, packing out the sick or the injured, sometimes the dead. They were glad to have Ty handle those things, until the helicopters came. Even then, it was Ty they called on when the weather closed in, when the busy planes couldn’t find their way over the passes and down into the canyons.

By then Gretta Haslam was cooking for Ty’s trips—had been since high school. She was the first of the Haslam children to work for Ty. And the best. A project at the university had delayed her this time. Nina’s friend—the singer Lilly Bird—had taken over until Gretta could cross the snow-choked passes to catch them at Junction Meadows.

“You reckon Gretta can handle that snow?” Buck and Ty were watching the roiling river, the runoff from the snowfields chewing under its banks. “No way we could get here but to ride up the Kern. The trail mostly underwater at that.”

That’s just how Norman Clyde had said it, too, Ty thought, missing the hard-bitten mountaineer. His winter cabin had become a ruin only months after he died. The windows broken, the books vandalized, the shade vines dead. It was just what Norman Clyde said would happen. Ty was sad to think he’d been right about that too.

“She’d better show up soon.” The amused voice of Lilly Bird startled them. Lilly looked mischievous and pretty all at once. “Singers aren’t cut out to be head cooks.”

Nina had befriended Lilly Bird in law school, Nina finally getting there after her own children were in school themselves. They’d met on the first day of classes, Nina more than ten years older but the two of them cut from the same cloth. In fact Lilly was so determined to get through law school herself that she’d enrolled before she had enough money, meaning she had to keep singing the old songs with her trio each night so she could study the new laws with Nina each day.

Ty knew Lilly was being funny. Cooking was hardly a chore on this trip. The Haslams did almost everything themselves, and Jeb Walker, still ramrod straight after ten years of retirement, was as considerate of Lilly as any man could be—and as ready to tell his stories to her as he’d once been to Jasper. The truth was that the general was as taken by Lilly Bird as the rest of them, amused that she was so determined to keep Ty in his place.

“You packers,” she’d scolded Ty the first morning. “Act like it’s a federal case just to find your silly horses.”
And she’d just laughed when he asked her to sing by the fire. “Don’t be silly. You don’t even know the songs I sing.” She’d turned away, giving everyone marshmallows and willow sticks, getting Jeb Walker to tell them more stories about the cavalry.

But Ty did know the songs she sang. What he didn’t know was how someone so young could sing them the way she did. He’d been won over by her singing the first night he’d heard her.

“Her soul certainly comes up through those lyrics,” Cody Jo had said after Lilly Bird’s first number. The two of them had driven all the way to Sacramento to listen to Nina’s friend sing at the club. “But how?” Ty wanted to know. “How does she make them hers?” “Family, maybe. Records around the house. In her blood somehow.”

“No.” Ty looked at Cody Jo. “No, they didn’t. They fought it. I believe I’m an apple that rolled.”
“Maybe.” Cody Jo watched Ty’s eyes go back to the singer. “You do love this music.” She smiled. “Or is it the girl?”
Ty wanted to say something to deflect that look on Cody Jo’s face. But he could only say what was true.
“I think it’s both. She
is
those words.”
Ty took Cody Jo’s hand and they went out onto the dance floor.
“Nice combination,” he said, the dancing relaxing them. “The girl and the songs.”
Lilly was singing “. . . another new day. The mist in the meadow starts fading away . . .” She watched them as she sang, wondering where a packer had learned to dance that way. Then she melted into the lyrics.

It surprised Ty that anyone whose songs came from so deep inside her could taunt him the way Lilly did in the mountains. But he enjoyed it almost as much as the general, liking how happy mocking him made her.

“Will you bring ’em back alive?” She watched him saddle up to look for his horses. “To admire you like we should?”
“Don’t want them to go to Siberian Basin and admire that. Thirty miles is a long ride to find out they like grass better than this grain.”
She’d laughed, her laughter still with him as he forded the deepening river to pick up tracks, finding them and following them upriver to his horses, comfortable in a little meadow, the grass good, snow holding them from going higher. He gave each some grain and left them— happy in the sun.
He rode back slowly, watching the Kern gather its power as it splashed down the canyon in steps, the mists rising and falling and rising again. He kept an eye out for Gretta as he rode, suspecting she’d be ahead of schedule—Gretta an accomplished mountaineer now, strong and rockwise and tireless. A mile above the ford he picked up her tracks, deciding he should haul her pack across the river, the ford deep and swift, big slick boulders the only footing to be had. He found her there, trying to boulder-hop her way across, poised on a tilted rock and looking wonderful—strong and resilient, her years in the Sierra giving her legs the layered muscles of a runner.
“Can’t cross without getting wet,” he called above the river’s rumble. “I’ll haul your pack.”
She couldn’t hear over the river. She brushed back her kerchief and cupped an ear, the movement pulling her off balance just enough to force her to jump for another rock. Ty saw her laugh as she gave up and pushed off, saw her foot land where the rock was slick from the foaming rapids, saw her go chest deep into an icy pool. He lost her for a moment as the current hit her pack, turning her and sweeping her into still faster water. He saw her slip down a slick between two boulders, the pack floating above as she fought it.
And then—just like that—she was gone.

Even as he whipped Nightmare across the meadow, Ty regretted the half-second he’d been frozen, watching her slide off the rock. He knew how fast the water would carry her now and didn’t skid Nightmare to a stop until they were at the water again, coming off as if he were after a roped calf, running into the water and wishing he’d had that rope, had anything that could hold them from the rapids. He saw the half-second he’d lost was the half-second he needed, reaching now for the pack, needing it to reach Gretta, knowing he had to lift both to free her from the weight of it. He lifted and pulled, felt his boot slide across a rock deep in the river. Then he was in the water with her, pushing the pack away to grasp her, trying to kick the pack free of her with his boots.

Buck had seen Ty bring Nightmare out of the ford, seen him push the mare hard across the meadow, dodging trees as he raced toward the rapids. Buck was running himself when he saw Ty fly from the saddle and splash into the river. By the time he got there Ty was sliding away, struggling with something.

Buck was in the river himself, chest deep and reaching out for Ty, who was clutching at a pack, something under it pulling everything toward the rapids. Buck reached farther and felt the current take him too, sweep him across slippery rocks toward the fast water before he felt a rope across his face. He grasped at it, was pulled by it, felt Thomas Haslam’s hand reaching out for him, pulling him now with Lilly pulling too, the two of them clinging to the rope wrapped around a leaning sapling, the three of them holding to one another to keep from being swept away.

They pulled Buck up and out and his legs were already running again, splashing him out of the water to go for the frightened mare. She spun away, left him to circle back to the water’s edge where Ty had disappeared. Buck cursed her as he ran back to the ford, ran waist deep through the river and turned down the trail to meet the river again. He was well below the lip of the meadow now, the river running fast and straight, its roar drowning out all sound—but Buck unaware of that, unaware of anything but what his eyes could tell him as he scanned across the river, stumbling up along the serrated and broken bank, crashing through brush and over deadfall as he sought out some sign of the pack, some clothes ripped and hanging from a branch, some signal that would tell him what he didn’t want to happen had not happened.

He came back to the ford at last, crossed it and came into camp. Exhausted. Bleeding.... Wild.
“We have to find him,” he said to Thomas Haslam. “He’s down there. In that river. Down there.”
“Them,” Thomas Haslam said. “It was Gretta . . .” He looked at Buck, his voice not working, his face disintegrating. Buck felt as though something inside Thomas Haslam had torn a hole through both of them.
“They’re gone.” Haslam had to suck in breath to say it, admit it. Because after he said it there was nothing more he could say.
Lilly reached out, touched him, touched Buck, tears filling her as she reached out for something that made sense.