The Pastures of Beyond (7 page)

Jack carefully gripped his rein where he had marked it. His toes found the stirrups. His eyes glanced out into the arena at the two cowboys, the mounted pickup men, who would help him from the horse at the end of the ride. “Let's have 'im,” he said, nodding to the gate man, and the chute gate shot open.

Blackhawk followed the gate out with a wild plunge that knocked Jack's hat off on the planks above the chute, then bucked high and wild, turning his body flat in the air in what is called a sunfish. For a moment it appeared the big horse would fall flat on his side, crushing the cowboy's leg, but Blackhawk caught himself and threw in a couple of crooked, jolting jumps. The crowd screamed as Jack Sherman came closer and closer to completing his ten-second ride.

A big woman lurched against old Sleepy, almost knocking the animal off its feet. “Jump high and fart loud!” she shouted, spilling her cup of beer all over my pant leg. But suddenly the big horse leaped high, hit hard, and sucked back beneath himself, sending Jack catapulting off. Jack lit on his shoulders in the dirt and rolled away from the horse's hooves. He lay for a moment watching Blackhawk buck on without him, empty stirrups hitting above the saddle, then got up slowly, a crooked grin on his lips, took a sack of Bull Durham tobacco from his shirt pocket, rolled a cigarette, lit it, and limped back to the chutes. Maybe it was just a little Indian rodeo at Beatty, but I sensed that rodeo didn't get much better than that.

That night, a full moon lit my way across the tablelands. Sleepy trotted on and on, following the slender ribbon of a road as it wandered through the pines. On my left I could make out the familiar landmark of Fuego Mountain; on my right I could see a gap in the trees formed by the steep rocky canyon of the Sycan River. As I rode up the ridge toward Taylor Butte, I could feel the icy pockets of cold air settling in the hollows. Ahead of me, a great gray owl caught a mouse and sat on a stump until my horse got too close, then flew off into the darkness with its prize.

Now and then I would see sudden flashes of lights towering skyward as a carload of Indians spotlighted deer. Sometimes the beam would illuminate me and old Sleepy, and the hunters would slam on their brakes and the lights would go out as they slipped on past and the rumble of their vehicle was lost in the pines.

It was after midnight when I finally made it back to the Yamsi barn. I groped about in the darkness to unsaddle Sleepy and then turned him out to roll in the corral. In the distance one of Sleepy's friends nickered to him, and the tired bay horse answered back. As I walked toward the bunkhouse, I heard the hollow drumming of his hooves crossing the plank bridge, and then splashing sounds as the horse trotted off across the wet meadow to join his friend.

Chapter Six

B
Y THE TIME I WAS SIXTEEN
, I had grown into a six-foot-five beanpole of a cowboy. Some folks claimed I kept my pockets full of rocks to keep from blowing away. Strangers would grin at me as I walked the streets of Klamath Falls and say, “Hey, how's the weather up there, Slim?” I longed to spit in their eyes and retort, “It's rainin' up here. How is it down there?”

But I didn't, of course. I just slouched on my way, hoping to duck around the next corner and disappear. I even daydreamed of becoming invisible. But invisibility was a tough trick to pull off on Main Street. In those days, I couldn't walk a block on Main Street without passing several Indians off the reservation, people who needed me as much as I needed them. They were my solace, for I could stop and talk to them about horses and rodeo, and they treated me like a friend rather than a freak. By stopping in at Charley Read's saddle shop, I could count on seeing some Indian friends like Buck Scott or Lee Hutchison, only a little older than I, who were already becoming pretty good saddle bronc riders.

Or I could go over to the Montgomery Ward saddle department, where Jerry Ambler, the reigning world champion saddle bronc rider, ran the department. Jerry was slender as a willow whip and rode by balance instead of brute strength. He sat the saddle on a space no bigger than a handkerchief, shoulders bowed, looking as though he were being towed along by his bucking rein. Of the balance riders I watched through the years, probably only the great South Dakotan Casey Tibbs, from Fort Pierre, was his equal. Maybe Jerry could sense my intense interest and knowledge of bucking horses, for he was always nice to me and would drive out of his way to pick me up at the ranch and take me to a rodeo.

In those days, before World War II, a great many rodeo contestants were ranch-raised kids who had grown up a-horseback and learned to ride bucking horses by breaking colts. Perhaps they rode the rough string and spoiled horses for a big outfit like the ZX over at Paisley. They might go to town for a Fourth of July rodeo and compete against other riders from other ranches, take home a little prize money, and go back to buckarooing on the ranches. If they were good enough, they made rodeos on weekends, paid their entrance fees, and hoped that the prize money they managed to win would exceed gas money, food, entrance fees, and doctor bills.

I read and reread the rodeo magazine
Hoofs and Horns
until the pages fell apart. My heroes were the bronc riders of the day — Bill McMackin, Doff Aber, Perry Ivory, Gene Rambo, to name a few. In my dreams I competed at Madison Square Garden, Pendleton, Calgary, and Salinas. I rode high, wide, and handsome until they opened the chute gate and my dream mount plunged bucking and kicking into the arena. There the dream always ended, for I could not fight reality and was suddenly snapped back to being a tall, gangly kid, a wannabe with no talent for riding the really tough horses.

My head was full of great bucking horses like Steamboat, Tipperary, Midnight, and Five Minutes Till Midnight, and the bunkhouse cowboys must have gotten sick of hearing about them.

Each of the cowboys at Yamsi had six horses on his string, one for each of the six working days. I was no exception and gloried in those that might buck a little. I had a big gray horse named Smoky that was cold-backed, meaning he would hump up and buck, in the morning when I got on. We were a pretty good team. Smoky liked to buck and I liked to ride. Without any encouragement on my part, Smoky would drop his head between his knees and buck in long, easy jumps. He leaped high, and made me feel more talented than I really was.

I wanted desperately to belong somewhere, to earn the respect of those I idolized, but I was still growing like a weed, and no matter how much I wanted to sign up as a contestant at each rodeo I went to, I ended up just hanging around the chutes, watching for any opportunity to help. There were lots of rodeos each summer, and I went to every one I could. Beyond the rodeo events, there were parades and dances. The towns filled up with local ranchers and cowboys, and for many of them it was their one trip to town for the year, the source of many a tale to be told again and again around the bunkhouse stoves.

One Sunday, I rode over to the Beatty Rodeo with Rose and her family. On the way, we passed Bart Shelley, driving a bunch of his horses across the vast sagebrush flats toward town. I was thrilled to see the big horse Blackhawk in the lead. I had brought a camera with me and couldn't wait to photograph Blackhawk coming out of the chute. He was ridden by a cowboy named Ed Donovan, who managed a tensecond ride. I took the film to a Klamath Falls drugstore for development and sweated out the results for nearly a week. With most of the bunkhouse cowboys gathered around me, I opened the envelope from the photo shop and found I had captured Blackhawk sunfishing high in the air. It was to be the first of thousands of rodeo photographs I would take through the years, and that gave me a niche in rodeo beyond being a mere spectator.

I had no formal training as a photographer but learned by doing. Most of my early attempts ranged from bad to awful, and it took several rodeos before I shot anything as good as the photograph of Ed Donovan on Blackhawk.

Soon I was sending off a flood of rodeo shots to Ma Hopkins, the editor of
Hoofs and Horns,
and it wasn't too hard to persuade her to give me a job as official photographer. She neglected to ask me my age and would have been aghast had she known I was only sixteen.

Without rodeos, Saturday nights at the ranch were lonely, and often I rode into town with some of the Yamsi Ranch crew and sat in the darkness outside houses known as Irene's or the Iron Door, as the cowboys sought out what they had come to town for. I would listen and wonder as music and laughter came from within. Sometimes a woman would come out to bring me a bottle of pop and sit in the cab of the truck, visiting me. I would marvel that these women seemed like any other women I ran into in town. They talked of families in towns I'd never heard of, and what they dreamed of doing with their lives once they got money. They called me “honey” and “sweetheart,” and their perfume lingered on long after they had gone back to the house.

On the ranch, on long days a-horseback, I did lots of listening, for I felt at my age I had few stories worth telling. What I was learning, in those days, was to be a good audience. I honored the storytellers by being attentive, by riding carefully abreast of them so as not to miss a single word.

Life on the ranch, of course, was not all stories of the past. Drama was a part of everyday life. One summer day Ern Morgan sent me off to help on the Marsh with an old cowboy named Roy. We shunned the roads and cut across country, both of us tired of the usual well-worn trails.

Roy was up in his seventies but fighting old age as though life had gone too fast and there were still places to go and things to do. I remember listening to the creak of him as we trotted along through towering virgin ponderosa pines, leaving a faint trail of pumice dust as we rode. I wasn't sure whether the creak came from his old bones or from his ancient Hamley saddle, which showed a lifetime of hard use. We were conscious, both of us, that one day these giant trees would be cut and hauled away, and we had best drink in the scenery before it was gone.

I had the usual pity of youth for the old, after seeing that Roy needed a pine stump to mount and having heard him groan as he settled into the saddle. But before the day was out I learned that the old man had plenty of life left in him.

That afternoon we were dropping down off the ridges to the edge of Klamath Marsh, along Big Wocus Bay, when the old man's horse stepped on a stick and began to limp. We still had miles to go, and there seemed to be little we could do but spend the night in the woods. But Roy had other ideas.

“Look,” he said, pointing to fresh tracks in the pumice and a faint haze of dust still hanging in the forest. “There's a band of wild horses just ahead of us heading down to water. Maybe I'll just get me another horse.”

We moved to a rim above Klamath Marsh, and sat and watched the horses from afar as they came out of the forest, crossed a meadow, and moved out toward the shine of water. The old cowboy crawled off his horse and tightened his cinch, motioning for me to tighten mine. “Can you rope, kid?” he asked.

“Just a little,” I replied. “Damn little, if you want to know the truth.”

Calmly, he took down his rawhide reata and shook out a loop so big it almost dragged the ground.

“Get ready to ride, boy. I'm about to catch me a fresh horse.”

He ignored my look of disbelief. “See that little peninsula that sticks out into the marsh? I reckon they'll head out there to drink, then we'll rush 'em. If it works, I might be able to get in a good throw as they try to break past us. Reckon they'll do that rather than chance getting stuck out there in that muck.”

I stared at the old man, thinking he was crazy, but suddenly we were out of the woods and the spooked horses were blasting on ahead, running right out on that narrow neck. The old lead mare reached the end, paused, looked back, then piled into the water, throwing up a spray that drenched the other animals. She panicked in the muck and lurched back out of the water onto firm ground.

“Get a loop built, kid!” Roy shouted. “Here they come!” Before we were ready, the wild horses saw the trap and charged for freedom. Suddenly they were all around us as they tried to escape. I threw a desperation loop at a young sorrel and caught a willow bush instead. I looked around just in time to see Roy drop a loop around the big, battle-scarred gray stud, jerk his slack, and take his dallies around his saddle horn. “Git around him, boy!” Roy shouted. The rubber covering on his saddle horn began to smoke and stink as he rendered slack in his rope. The stallion slowed and plunged, nearly jerking Roy's horse down. Giving in to the pressure of the rope, the desperate animal reared and fell over on his back.

As I galloped between the stud and the vanishing herd, I built another loop. The horse came to its feet, reared, and strained, trying to break the reata. Through flaring nostrils it gasped for air. I laid a loop in front of his hind feet as Roy dragged the horse into my trap. Stretched between two ropes, the stallion screamed in anger, then tumbled to the ground flat on its side. Keeping his reata tight, Roy rode around a small pine tree, stepping his horse across the rope three times. Then he slipped from his horse and tied the reata to the pine. “Ain't the hoss I throwed at,” Roy admitted, “but he'll do.

“Keep your rope tight!” he ordered as he unsaddled his horse.

Approaching the angry animal carefully, he took his tie rope by both ends and sawed it under the horse's girth, then, as the horse snapped at him with yellowed teeth, got his old Hamley. Tying one end of the tie rope to the cinch ring, he pulled the cinch and latigo underneath the horse until the saddle sat in place on the animal's back. Soon the saddle was cinched tight and ready for a rider.

The old man was out of breath. For a few minutes he sat on a log to catch his wind. I had the desperate fear that he was going to make me ride in his place.

“You think I'm going to ride that horse, you're crazy as hell,” I snapped.