The Pastures of Beyond (19 page)

I was helping behind the chutes when it came time for Jack to ride. Directly above the bucking chutes was an extension of the grandstand, heavy fir planks that were now sagging with the weight of three very large ladies who had drunk more than their share of beer. Their bare thighs overflowed the planks and cause a giggle or two from us cowboys who were working beneath them.

“Look at that, will you,” Jack said with a grin. “I'd better come out on this old horse fast before those planks break.”

Jack had just started to climb down on his mount, and was measuring off the proper length of bucking rein, when Mac Barbour reached up with a couple of electric cattle prods and touched the ladies on their bare flesh.

With a horrendous scream, the ladies grabbed each other and lost control of their bladders. There was no stopping the flow. For the next minute, buckets of urine poured down over the chutes. Jack Sherman, his big black hat and rodeo shirt sopping wet, hit the ground in a towering rage. Mac Barbour took off down an alley as fast as his stubby little legs would carry him.

“Now Jack,” he pleaded. “Now Jack, be careful of me! I've got a real bad heart!”

When Jack came out of the chute a few moments later with a borrowed hat and shirt, he was still mad enough to make one hell of a ride.

Blackhawk had been drawn in the finals by a Washington State cowboy named Alex Dick, who was known to be a hard man for a horse to buck off. To Alex, the big black horse in the chute must have seemed like just another horse. He sat watching from his perch on the chute as Ross Dollarhide came out on a little bronc named War Paint. That feisty little paint horse reared and came over backward on Ross, but the big cowboy rolled away and escaped injury.

It was now Alex Dick's turn. The announcer described

Blackhawk as one of the greatest bucking horses ever to come out of Oregon. I looked over the top of the chute to see the horse's black eyes snapping with anger, then glanced at the brown features of Alex Dick, and saw the intensity of his concentration.

I was standing in the arena when the chute gate opened. On the first jump Blackhawk leaped so high I could see the face of one of the judges beneath his hooves. Alex Dick's neck snapped back as the animal hit the ground. On that next jump Blackhawk turned sideways in the air in the sunfish he was famous for, then, as his black hooves pounded the arena floor, he ducked back underneath himself and changed directions with a lurch that would have sent most cowboys flying. But still the Indian cowboy spurred from the shoulders of the horse to the cantle board of his saddle.

I scampered past one of the judges and kept pace with Blackhawk, screaming encouragement. If Alex Dick managed to hear me, he probably thought I was cheering him on. In reality, I was encouraging the horse.

Suddenly there was the whistle, and a pounding of hooves as the pickup man galloped past me and raced alongside Blackhawk. Alex Dick grabbed the man's shoulders and swung to the ground. The crowd was on its feet, cheering, and I stood stock-still in the middle of the arena as Alex walked back to the chutes in triumph.

That evening, I sat with Blackhawk and the other saddle broncs behind the chutes. The big horse stood calmly munching some grass hay as though the afternoon had never happened. I cupped one hand over one of Blackhawk's sweaty eyelids and scratched him, while the animal raised his nose in ecstasy. I could not know that I would never see him alive again.

On the way back to Klamath Falls from Pendleton, Mac Barbour's big livestock truck, driven by my friend Jackie Houston, tipped over, and Blackhawk had to be destroyed.

I was back at Yamsi when I learned about Blackhawk's accident. I loved that animal and always dreamed that someday I'd make a ride on him. Now it would never happen. Something went out of me with his death, as though a family doctor had told me I'd never ride a horse again. Bart Shelley never did the horse a favor by owning him so long. At twenty-two, Blackhawk was past his prime when he got his chance to prove himself at a major rodeo, but some of us will always tout him as one of the great bucking horses of his day.

In the late fifties, my uncle died, and I felt depressed. It was the end of a great era at Yamsi, and the place would never be the same without him. Often, when I came into the Yamsi kitchen, I would expect to see him sitting at the breakfast table reading the
Saturday Evening Post,
but he wasn't there anymore.

The morning I picked up his ashes at a funeral home in Klamath Falls, it was twenty-five degrees below zero. I was driving home to Yamsi and was just passing the Chiloquin airport when I saw a rancher friend, Bert Stanley, working at thawing his little single-engine airplane, trying to get it to run. I had been missing some cows on the range west of the ranch, and stopped to see if Bert would fly over the frozen countryside with me and help me locate the cattle. It would also be a good time to give Buck's ashes a good scatter over the land he loved.

Bert had finally gotten the engine to turn over despite the cold, and was letting it warm up when I asked him to fly me over the range. Bert was missing a few cows on his Hog Creek ranch and agreed to take me flying.

“Do you mind if my uncle goes along?” I asked. “Not at all. Where is he?”

“He's in this box under my arm.”

The idea took several minutes and a pint of coffee to get used to, but eventually Bert agreed.

We located three of Bert's cows on Wocus Bay, then flew over Skellock Draw, crossing the long snowbound ridges to the valley of the upper Williamson River. There in the upper reaches of Haystack Draw, we saw some of my cattle grazing on bitterbrush in the pines.

As we gained elevation to fly back to Chiloquin, I shouted to Bert above the roar of the small engine. “Would you mind?” I asked. “Would you mind flying over the ranch so I can give Uncle Buck's ashes a scatter?”

Bert's tanned features turned a little white at the suggestion. I could see he was bothered, but I kept on. “He was a historical character in these parts,” I said. “You and I both owe him something.”

The little plane climbed higher and higher over Yamsay Mountain, until the ranch was only a long white ribbon of snow amongst the pines. We were now higher than it was safe to fly, and we were both getting a little giddy from the cold and lack of oxygen.

Soon Bert began to grin. “I used to be a pilot in the war,” he said. “Tell you what. I'll put her into a dive over the ranch, and when I holler bombs away, you get your size fourteens in the door and give the old gentleman a scatter.”

Suddenly we were in a screaming dive toward the ranch, which was swiftly getting bigger and bigger. “Bombs away!” Bert shouted above the din.

I had already pried open the top of the wooden box and opened the thin cardboard container within. It took all my strength to open the door against the rush of wind, but I managed to get my cowboot wedged in the door and emptied the box into the slipstream.

“We're running into a cloud bank!” Bert shouted. “Cloud bank, hell,” I shouted back. “That's Uncle Buck!” Half of the ashes had been swept back into the plane, and now we were blinded and choking to death as Bert tried to see out the window.

Just in time, he pulled the plane out of its dive.
Snick, snick, snick
went the tops of pine trees as the landing gear cut them off.

Bert was as pale as though he had grown up under a rock as we roared up over the ranch. Far below, I could see my hired hand, Al Shadley, driving the team and wagon with a load of hay out over frozen meadows dotted with cattle. I still had the wooden box and half the ashes left. “One more time,” I pleaded, sweeping up all the ashes I could reach in the cockpit.

We made one more run, and this time I threw out the whole wooden box, ashes and all. I tried to watch as the yellow cube hurtled down toward the meadows, but lost sight of it behind the plane.

Two hours later, I was back at the ranch cooking venison over a roaring fire in the stove when Al came in for lunch. For a long time he was silent, brooding into the steam arising from his coffee, and then he said, “You know? The damnedest thing happened to that Jersey cow your uncle thought so much of. I was feedin' the cattle an' found her layin' dead out on the feed ground. Wasn't a thing I could see wrong with her except a pile of boards fell out of the sky and hit her right smack between her horns.”

After Buck's death we still cooked in the kitchen of the big house, but when cold weather came, I grew tired of keeping fires burning in the kitchen just for me. The bunkhouse had an ancient box stove that took a pretty good log, and I soon moved in both to stay warm and share company with Al, who never seemed to run out of stories.

That stove had a personality of its own. It was forever either getting hotter or cooling down, and the monotonous tick it made as the temperature fluctuated paced the flow of cowboy conversation like a metronome. Sometimes pockets of gas in the pine logs would explode and startle us into thoughtful silence; sometimes amidst the crackle and pop of a healthy fire, moisture would ooze from the logs and spit and hiss as it boiled away in the heat. Sometimes the stove rumbled and shook as the logs collapsed into coals. The old castiron stove was held together with a couple of bad welds where some forgotten cowboy had attempted to mend the cracks. Firelight danced upon the rough boards of the floor, and a sudden downdraft in the night could cover the cots and tables with gray ash. Cigarette smoke hung in ghostly layers in the superheated air, and the talk in these postwar years was often desultory. Except for Al and myself, there was seldom anyone there with a sense of local history, or with much experience with cattle and horses.

Often Al and I talked of the old days when cowboys looking for jobs traveled light, arriving at a ranch with little more than their saddle, bedroll, and, rolled in the blankets of the bedroll, a change or two of clothes. If they wanted a chair in which to sit before an evening fire, they picked up a couple of old boards around the ranch and, without benefit of nails, whittled a crude chair which could either be left behind or knocked down, wrapped in a bedroll, and taken to a new job.

Until World War II, these cowboy chairs were a common item in line camps and bunkhouses throughout the West, along with orange crates and apple boxes which were handy for storing rain gear, spare socks, western novels, and other necessaries. After the war, these chairs were the first traditions to be lost and, most likely, made a ready source of kindling for winter stoves.

Lost along with the crude chairs was the art of storytelling, once kept alive by old cowboys who could spout a verbal history of each ranch around the bunkhouse stoves. Often, as I sat around the bunkhouse waiting for bedtime, I would glance about at empty cowboy chairs and try to remember old friends who had sat there spinning magic tales.

One favorite of mine was a cowboy named Dick Blue. Dick's ancestors were eastern Indians who had migrated west and settled in Washington State at the turn of the century. They homesteaded a small ranch along the Columbia River, not far from the Canadian border.

Dick would add a log to the bunkhouse stove and talk about his relatives as the fire began to roar. “I was never sure who my real grandma was,” Dick told me. “The old man always had plenty of women around to do the work and never seemed to show much affection for any of them. I remember one day about noon, one of the women came in sniffling, holding on to her arm.

“ ‘What's wrong with you, woman?' the old man snapped. “ ‘I was out chopping wood and got bit by a rattlesnake,' the woman whimpered.

“ ‘When do we eat?' the old man demanded.”

After lunch, the old man harnessed a team and drove the woman out to the highway, where she could hitch a ride into town. It was months before Dick saw the woman again.

Dick finally settled on one of the women as his grandmother, mainly because she was nicer to him than the rest. To show affection for the woman, Dick and his brother saved up and bought her a gasoline-powered washing machine. To start the engine, there was a big foot crank. She still had to pack water from the river, but the job of doing the old man's wash was now lots easier. One stroke of the crank and the engine would shoot blue doughnuts of exhaust and start puttputting away, and the drum containing the clothes would turn round and round until the wash was done. The boys, pleased that they had done something nice, headed home.

Just about that time, the old man traded some horses for a battered 1930 Model A Ford pickup. It wasn't running too well, so he borrowed the spark plug out of his wife's new washing machine. The pickup still didn't run very well, but the woman discovered that the washing machine didn't run at all. But she noticed that every time she mashed down on the foot pedal, the barrel of the washer would turn around one quarter turn. From then on, that is how she powered the washing machine, pushing down on the cranking pedal with her foot until the washing was done.

Dick's grandfather was a good enough worker, but he had a real resistance toward planning a job ahead of time. Whenever Dick would suggest that the old man plan his projects better, he would reply, “When you build a roun' corral, it don't matter a damn which post you set first.”

Dick's partner, Claude, was taking a pack trip into the Washington Cascades. He and his brother were packing with horses miles away from civilization when the brother began complaining about a pain in his heart. They were just breaking camp when the brother said “Claude! I think I'm having a heart attack!”

Claude said, “You see that pine log over there? Go drape your body over it with your head hanging down.”

“Will that help my heart attack?” the brother asked. “Well, no,” Claude admitted, “but if you die, it will sure as hell make it easier to pack you out of here.”

Chapter Nineteen

T
HERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT RODEOS
— the dust, the roar of the gaily shirted crowd, the camaraderie between contestants who travel together and help each other, the near-death experiences, the all-night drives from one town to another, the great horses, the hoofbeats of charging bulls and the clanking of brass cowbells hanging from bull ropes as the bulls buck, the friendships with bull riders whose life you've saved while risking your own. The hospitality of folks in rodeo towns and the adoration of fans. But in the life of every rodeo athlete there comes a time to retire.