The Pastures of Beyond (6 page)

Someone lit a lantern as the enraged man, covered with blood, charged about the room in his underwear, ready to do violence with whoever had flung that boot. I was the one with only one boot under my cot. He seemed ready to blame the old chore man in the cot next to mine, however, before I spoke up. “I did it!” I said. “I threw that boot. You were keeping the whole damn bunkhouse awake with your snores.”

There was a long silence, as though the man was remembering that this was the insolent pup who had taken a shine to Rose. He took a lantern, lit it with a big kitchen match, and walked to the mirror to inspect the damage. Suddenly he began to laugh, and the tension in the bunkhouse melted like butter. “Dang!” he said. “Dang if the kid didn't improve my looks.”

The next day it rained too hard to hay, and the foreman paired me with the ex-convict to take out a wagonload of livestock salt to the cattle. For a time the man's face was frozen as though it hurt him to smile. I kept both hands on the Jacob's staff, a notched upright on the front of the bed where the teamster ties his reins when leaving the wagon. I was ready to hurl myself off and run should he make a move.

It wasn't long, however, before I forgot my fears. I kept watching the man's hands on the lines and how well the horses read his wishes, as though some mysterious thought process traveled down those leather ribbons. My uncle was right. The man had a great way with a team.

“Sure wish I could handle horses like that,” I said.

For a long moment the man stared at me, and then he grinned. “I reckon there ain't no better time than this to learn,” he said. Handing over the lines, he stepped into the air and headed back to camp.

Chapter Five

T
HE ONLY THING THAT COULD INTERRUPT
a haying operation was broken machinery or rain. If rain fell on our hayfields and not the neighbor's, we went to help them, but if the rain was general, we got the day off to heal.

One morning, I was awakened early by the roar of a heavy mountain rainstorm pounding the shingles of the ranch house roof and knew that it was too wet for haying. I could have slept the clock around, but hunger gnawed at my stomach, and I dressed and slipped down to the kitchen. The old lady was off traveling, and my uncle was sitting at the kitchen table reading
Time
magazine. He wore his favorite wool cardigan with leather patches on both elbows and seemed to sense my presence without even glancing my way. “Yeah,” he grunted by way of greeting, and went on reading.

He got up from his seat, went to the stove, and poured a cup of tea. I guessed it was for himself, but he set it before me, gave me a pat on my shoulder, and resumed his reading. That one little gesture brought tears to my eyes. Underneath that solemn exterior, he cared! Not being able to hear, maybe he compensated. Instead of conversations, he spoke in monologues, and when you were with him you listened rather than try to interrupt. Maybe, I thought, maybe he really likes kids but with his hearing problems doesn't know how to talk to them.

I fried myself a couple of eggs, made an egg sandwich with a cold biscuit, and sat down at the table. “Uncle,” I said, putting my hand on his arm for attention. “My mom said you were the best trout fisherman to come out of Michigan. If I really tried hard to learn, would you teach me?”

My uncle did not smile or comment. Instead he rose from his chair, left the kitchen, and returned with a couple of rods, one of which he handed me, and we were off in the rain to fish the river.

The old man had a strange way of fishing. He used a long cane pole and a short line to which was attached a tiny silver spinner. He never cast more than three times in any of the deep holes at the bends of the meandering stream but moved off, restless to be on. Soon he was out of sight in the mists, leaving me to my own solitary ways. It was almost dark when I saw him again. He had traveled north fifteen miles and had only a couple of trout to show for it. I had stayed at the first bend of the river and caught twenty.

That night we feasted on Yamsi trout, dipped in cornmeal and fried in butter. From that day on I never again saw him fish, but he took me often, and sat quietly on the bank and watched as I reeled them in.

For the next week, storm after storm swept in over the Cascades and kept us from putting up hay. One rainy day, as I rode BK Heavy past Rose's tent, she happened out on her way to the outhouse.

She looked at me and smiled shyly. “Hey,” she said. “You want to go over to the Sycan River with us to catch floppers?” Her long black hair wasn't braided yet this morning. Half fell over her right breast, and the rest cascaded down over her shoulders. Raindrops glistened like diamonds on the strands.

“Sure,” I said. “Let me put this old horse away and get on a dry shirt.” I had no idea what floppers were, but I was burning up with excitement at spending some time with her.

A half hour later I was crowded into the back of an old pickup truck with a dozen half-drowned Indian kids, bouncing up over the ridges of Taylor Butte toward the Sycan River drainage. It turned out that floppers were young ducks that had grown to full size but had not yet acquired the power of flight.

The sloughs and potholes along the Sycan River were full of them, and we scampered shivering through the raindrenched sloughs in water up to our hips, catching the largest of the ducks and loading them into the pickup until we had enough for several good meals. I was a little bit disappointed. Even though Rose had asked me to go along, she ignored me to hunt with the girls, while I was surrounded by boys.

This was reservation land, and Indians could hunt and fish as they pleased without worrying about legal methods or seasons. I was conscious that I was a white kid, and kept looking back over my shoulder expecting that any moment now a federal warden would cart me off to jail.

On the way back to the ranch the woman who was driving slammed on the brakes and stopped the pickup. Grabbing a rifle from the window rack, she shot a big buck that had crossed the road in front of her. The antlers of the deer were covered with velvet, and it was fat and sleek. The woman made short work of gutting out the animal and piled the entrails alongside the road as a signal to other Indians that hunting had been good here.

“We'll make some good jerky,” Rose said, addressing me for the first time in an hour. “You like jerky?”

I shrugged with the indifference of a teenager. I was paying her back for ignoring me.

We ended up at a deer camp just outside my uncle's fence at the head of the Williamson River. There were pickup trucks everywhere, all equipped with what was standard equipment for the Indian, a spotlight atop the cab for night hunting and a rack of rifles in the back window. Most of the men had been hunting all night and were sleeping, but there were several sitting around the campfire drinking beer.

They watched with mild interest as the old woman who had shot the deer slid it from the pickup and skinned out the animal on the ground. No one made any effort to help. The woman worked swiftly and soon had rendered the whole carcass into thin strips, which she draped over drying racks of poultry netting stretched over the fire.

She nodded to Rose, and said a few words in the Klamath language. Rose dragged the fresh hide over to my uncle's fence and draped it raw side up over the barbed wire to dry. There were at least a hundred other hides hanging there; some were so tiny they obviously had come from small fawns.

Smoke rose from the willow fires and bathed the drying venison, but there were bluebottle flies buzzing everywhere, flying through the smoke to lay their eggs on the meat.

Rose helped the woman scatter pepper on the jerky strips, then took a piece off the rack, shook off a couple of bluebottle flies, and offered it to me. I shook my head. I was dying to try some, but the flies made my stomach squirm. Rose had no such qualms. Her cheek bulged as though she were storing a chaw of tobacco, but it didn't interfere with her speech. “You goin' to the rodeo tomorrow in Beatty?” she asked.

“Where's Beatty?”

“On the Res. 'Bout twenty miles south of here.”

“That far? I guess not. I got no way to get there. And if it's dry enough I'll have to work in the hay.”

“Your uncle won't have a crew,” Rose said. “All us Indians are going to the rodeo. They say Jack Sherman's going to make an exhibition ride on Blackhawk. I tell you that old black horse can buck up a storm.”

She moved the wad of jerky to the other cheek. “You could ride over with us,” she said.

I was so mesmerized by the pretty roundness of her face and the dark mystery of her eyes that I scarcely heard her.

“You could ride over with us,” she repeated.

That night I could hardly sleep for thinking about going to the rodeo with Rose. But in the morning, Buck woke me early and insisted that I ride along with him to open gates. As we left to drive down through the ranch, I saw Rose and her family loading up for the rodeo. I sat hunkered in the front seat, overwhelmed with self-pity, hoping that the raindrops misting my uncle's windshield would turn into a deluge, hoping he would get stuck in the mud, that he would run out of gas, that the engine would fail to start.

We had gone less than a mile when the old man thought of something he had forgotten to do in town and made a U-turn, dumping me back at the house. The old lady was there and calling my name. Not wanting to get caught up in housework, I stayed outside in the shelter of an overhang until I heard the distant sound of his Chrysler as he sped up the first hill. I was too late to catch a ride with Rose, so I fled to the corrals, captured old Sleepy, and was soon trotting south over the hills toward Beatty, twenty-three miles away.

Sleepy had one redeeming feature in that he would rather trot than walk. He moved out eagerly, singing his groaning complaint but eating up the miles. I rode standing in the stirrups, looking out for the black-and-white signs with which the Indian Agency marked the roads. I soon left the timber behind, and passed over miles of rocky flats covered with mountain mahogany and small groves of aspen. Five miles from town, as I crossed a vastness of sagebrush, I began to see clouds of dust from the south and knew that the rodeo had already started.

The arena lay just south of town. The surrounding fence was pretty primitive, but it was buffered by cars parked fender to fender and crowds of people. Here and there Indian women sat on blankets, legs extended, playing at gambling games, hiding pieces of painted bones in their hands. The cowboys in the arena were mostly Indian with a sprinkling of whites. Behind the parked cars were hordes of children riding horses, galloping back and forth, raising more dust than the cowboys. They all seemed to be riding with one hand on the reins, the other with a death grip on a bottle of pop, and were much more interested in each other than in what was happening in the arena.

Rose spotted me from afar and came running, vaulting up behind me on Sleepy's back as the old horse threatened to dump us both. He crow-hopped a few jumps then settled down to a walk. Now and then I felt Rose's breasts bump my shoulder blades and I was in heaven.

We found a place along the fence not far from the bucking chutes and sat astride Sleepy watching the rodeo from our vantage point. I had missed the bareback riding event, but the saddle broncs would come later. In the arena was a confusion of ropers of all sizes, shapes, ages, and degrees of inebriation. Some of them fell off their horses before they caught up with the animals they were trying to rope.

“That's my uncle,” Rose said as a plump Indian fell off his horse and lay still. Another rider roped the man by the feet and dragged him out of the arena to laughter all around.

“Why do they drink so much?” I asked Rose.

She shrugged. “I guess they just like being drunk,” she replied. There was a loud clatter from the bucking chutes as the Indians began to fill the chutes with big, stout horses.

“Those are the saddle broncs,” Rose whispered in awe. “The big black horse in chute number one is Blackhawk.

Dally Givons says he's the best there is. Jack Sherman's going to try to ride him. Bart Shelley owns him, an' every rodeo contractor in the country would like to buy him but old Bart won't sell.”

In an effort to see around me, Rose put her cheek close to mine and a lock of raven hair fell down over my chest. “See,” she said. “There's Jack now over by the chutes, sitting on his saddle on the ground, getting his stirrups set for his ride.”

Jack was a tall, angular cowboy, with sandy hair, gray eyes, and a crooked smile. He was a natural athlete and, though I didn't know it at the time, was one of the great bronc riders of the forties. I began to worship Jack as a hero before I ever saw him ride.

Jack climbed the chute beside the big horse and lowered his bronc saddle on its back, then used a long wire with a hook to draw up the cinch beneath the animal's belly. Blackhawk snorted as the cinch came up tight and hammered the planks of the chute behind him with jagged hooves. I watched mesmerized as the big man strapped a braided rein to Blackhawk's halter, drew it back to the swells of the saddle, and marked a place on the rein with a wisp plucked from Blackhawk's mane.

“What's he doing that for?” I asked Rose.

“He's marking a place to hold the rein. Too short and the horse will duck his head and jerk the cowboy forward out of the saddle. Too long and the rider can't keep his seat.”

“You think he can ride him?” I asked, a charge of excitement running up my spine.

“Who knows?” she replied. “On a good day, Dally Givons says, Jack Sherman can ride anything with hair.”

The crowd went utterly silent as Jack climbed the slats of the chute and settled down on Blackhawk's back. The big black turned his head around as though to see who dared to try him. His black eyes snapped in anger as he waited for the side of the chute to open.

“Watch closely,” Rose hissed. “To make a qualified ride, Jack has to keep his spurs in the horse's neck through the first jump and ride for ten seconds.”