Black Hills (9781101559116) (22 page)

Lop Ear and Horse didn't care for the idea, but Josh picked out a little brown mustang mare for him. Cormac soon learned what Josh had been talking about. “Your job,” Josh explained, “is to ride up and down the draws, in and out of the brush and anywhere else you might find any cattle. Run them into the pens and somebody else will take it from there for the branding. Try to keep a rough count of how many you bring in so we can double-check the cowboy's counts with the final tally every day.

The need for a quick cowpony soon became obvious. The first group Cormac found was five back in a draw. As he rode around to get behind them, they scattered in five different directions, and his horse took in after the closest one. Only a quick grab at the saddle horn and a lot of luck kept him on top of the horse as it went sideways, spun around, and burst forward; he was into top speed almost instantaneously.

The horse was little compared to Lop Ear and Horse but she was a lot of horse. She seemed to read the cattle's minds as they chased one after another to the pens, sometimes in singles and sometimes in groups. Groups were a lot of fun. That little horse ran her heart out. Two or three in a group would invariably try to go in two or three different directions at the same time. Cormac got in the habit of counting them when he first saw them. Once they started moving he would be far too busy, and sometimes just plain forgot about it.

Duffy had rolled his chuck wagon out to the branding site and by the time Josh had called break-time on the first day, Cormac was an experienced cowhand, at least at running reasonable cattle. He didn't know about a loco long-horned steer the men called old Mossy, a mean old son, they would tell him later.

He was glad when the dinner bell rang. He had just spotted a small group of cattle in a wash, and decided to run them in with him. Wrong idea. By the time he got them to the pen, there was nobody at the gate, and he had to open it and try to get his bunch in without letting the others out. It was a challenge, but he got it done and went eagerly to the chuck wagon. All that was left was a half plate of beans and a little coffee. He stood looking at his plate in dismay. That round-up stuff was making an appetite. And he was hungry. Dismally, he turned to locate a place to sit when everyone began laughing at him, and the cook called him back. “Here you go, boy,” he said. “We was just havin' some fun with ya. Here's your plate.” He handed Cormac a plate piled high with beans and beef. After eating, they relaxed, napped, or smoked, and were back in the saddle within the hour.

King Duffy's chuck wagon was designed and built by Duffy himself. On each side of the exterior rode a fifty-gallon water barrel while inside were two five-gallon water buckets for back-up, and storage cabinets with doors, drawers, and storage bins for potatoes and such laid out horseshoe-shaped around the front and sides leaving room for movement in the center or as a bed area for an injured cowboy on the trail, or for himself during the cold or rainy season.

Opening the tailgate would give him a kitchen counter with daily-usage cabinet and storage for his beloved Dutch ovens from which he produced delicious stews, sourdough biscuits and bread from his working base-stock, and occasionally a cake or some pies. All under the wagon hung a large drooping tarp into which he gathered firewood or dried cow-chips as they became available when on the trail. A shaving cabinet with mirror and needed shaving items was planned that would hang outside when on the trail for cowboys who wished to make use of it.

Cormac had been looking forward to an easy job of just riding a horse all day. By the end of the day, he had used up three horses and rounded up nearly three hundred head of cattle, and he was one tired farm boy. He was glad to climb back on his big, smooth-riding horse for the ride back to the ranch. So much for thinking a cowboy's life was an easy life.

He spent time with Lop Ear and Horse every morning and rode them back and forth to the ranch. The hands weren't expected to work late on Saturday night and not at all on Sunday, unless there was a need. Cormac took his horse-duo for long rides every Sunday morning that almost always turned into runs. Having learned that not only could they run, but loved doing it, was like found money.

Any little excuse found them flying over the flat prairie or sloping hills, jumping streams or logs, cutting up like the youngsters they all were. He kept working with them on kneeling and lying down on command and began teaching them to play hide-and-seek by following his scent. Whenever they found him, he gave them a carrot or an apple if he had one, sugar water if he didn't.

Within four days' time, Cormac was in and out of the brush like he had been born to it and hitting most rope throws successfully. He had been knocked off his horse twice, had his horse knocked down once with him on it, and had his hand mashed between the rope and the saddle horn. He never complained about any of it.

He got made fun of regularly, but only because someone else was usually around to see his tumbles and mistakes, and the fun-making was just that: all in fun. Cowboys worked hard and appreciated a good joke. As was his nature, Cormac jumped right in and was the first one in the saddle in the morning, and the last one to give it up of a night. The job was a good fit, and Cormac had made friends by the end of the second day.

The branding corrals were portable and had to be moved every three or four days. Cormac took his turn at roping and branding, getting the bumps, bruises, cuts, and rope burns that went with the territory—Josh had lost two fingers on his left hand and walked with a limp. Cormac twisted his leg throwing a large calf, burned the hip of his other leg when a steer bounced the iron out of his hands and it fell against his hip, with the red-hot iron sticking to his skin.

He learned to top off an unruly bronc feeling his oats on a cold morning. Some did love to buck first thing in the morning. Often they would stand half asleep while paying no attention to the saddling process, and as soon as a cowboy's bottom hit the saddle, they would stick their nose in the dirt and go to bucking. Cormac thought it a hell of way to start the morning. On day four, there were more cowboys than usual getting ready to go out, but Cormac didn't notice. Maddy, a young wrangler from Colorado, had Cormac's horse already saddled for him and tied outside of the corral. “She looks so much like mine, I had her roped and haltered before I realized she wasn't my horse and as long as I had her, I figured I would throw your saddle on for you.”

“Well, that's mighty nice of you, Maddy,” Cormac answered him as he swung into the saddle. He and the little brown mare had gotten used to each other, and a couple of crow-hops of a morning and she would settle right down. This morning, he wasn't really paying attention. “What part of Colorado you from?” he asked. “I was through Denver and Boulder a while . . .”

All hell broke loose when he hit the saddle. That little brown filly exploded into an untamed piece of wild bronc moving all directions at the same time, with a strong itch to dump him and head out for the wild places. Getting almost perpendicular on the first buck, she followed it up by going sideways, sunfished a few times with her belly to the sky, and hit perpendicular with her second try. Unexpecting and inexperienced, Cormac lost one stirrup on the first jump, his quick-grabbed grip on the saddle horn with the sunfishing, and the other stirrup and all contact with the saddle when she hit perpendicular. He hit the dirt upside down and hard about ten feet away with all the breath knocked out of him while the horse took off hell bent for leather.

Peals of laughter confused him as he fought for his breath and staggered to his feet. He stumbled to the rail-fence to sit down as the cowboys, still laughing, began mounting and moving out. “You all right?” asked Josh, walking up to him while choking back laughter.

“I reckon so, but what the hell is so all-fired funny about me getting bucked off? And I wonder what's wrong with my little mare? She and I was getting along right well, at least I thought so.”

“Before you try again, you better check under your saddle first. Somebody probably put a burr under your saddle blanket.”

“Why in the hell would they do that? I coulda broke my damn fool neck.”

“They were just having some fun with the new guy. Don't be too mad, you'll get your turn later with some other new guy.” Cormac looked up as Maddy rode by laughing at him. Cormac had to smile when he pictured himself sailing through the air upside down. “All right, Maddy,” he called. “You got me this time.”

When he got his breath back, catching his mare took some doing. She didn't want to go through that again. Sure enough, when he raised up the back of the saddle blanket, he found a big ole sharp cockle-burr. “You better rest her for a couple days,” Josh called to him. “Her back is going to be sore, and we don't want to make it worse.”

Josh taught him how to splice a broken rope or braid a new one. To Cormac, Josh seemed to be taking care to teach him about everything, and he was a willing student. He learned fast.

A month later, on the last day of the roundup, Josh figured most of the stock had been rounded up and had all the punchers looking harder and deeper back into the brush for any last holdouts. Cormac followed the tracks of fifteen or twenty head of cattle until they disappeared into a stream and he lost their sign. He figured they probably had already been brought back as there were horse tracks following them, brought to his attention by one having an odd-shaped hoof.

That was the day he met Old Mossy. Old Mossy was five years old, the biggest steer in the bunch, and had never been branded. He had been spotted a few years back, but escaped into the brush after knocking down a rider and managed to stay hidden for a couple of years.

On two other years' roundup, he was able to dodge the rope and again escape into the brush. Another year, Josh had gotten a rope on him, but the wiley old steer went sideways, pulling the horse over and pinning Josh's leg. Old Mossy spun back and only another rider turning him had saved Josh from getting gored, and probably killed.

Cormac had made it a habit of counting the cattle when he found them before running them in. On the last day of the roundup, after counting the thirty-six cattle he found in an arroyo, he left them to ride around and get behind them. While riding through another narrow boulder-strewn arroyo with nearly vertical sides of steep sand and broken rock with occasional young Ponderosa Pines and a few outcroppings, he came face-to-face with the elusive steer.

With murder in his heart, wild-eyed Old Mossy dropped one horn to a lance position and charged with about fifty feet between them and no room to turn around. Cormac's only chance was to try to make the impossible climb up the side. He turned the cowpony into the hill and used his reins as whip on her rump and, for the only time in his life, wished he were wearing spurs.

The little mustang was game and gave it her all, but the slope was impossible. Her hooves were digging a groove into the hill, causing a chain of events with a most unlikely conclusion. The dirt being pulled away caused a minor landslide that, in turn, caused some dirt and a rock on the lip of the ravine five feet above the ravine floor to fall. A rock that was lodged under the front of a twelve-inch boulder slipped, causing that boulder to then roll off the edge of the arroyo upon which it had been sitting and under which the steer was just passing. The boulder bounced off Old Mossy's head, knocking him colder than a Dakota icicle, as Cormac would tell it in later years.

“Well I'll be damned,” Cormac said to his pony. He could see from the steer's sides swelling regularly that it was still breathing. An idea for a little fun occurred to him. The steer had fallen to his side, leaving a small amount of room between itself and the arroyo wall.

Cormac urged the little pony forward to step over the steer's front legs, and then his back legs where the arroyo was slightly wider, just wide enough to get the horse turned around. Keeping a close eye on the steer, Cormac put his noose over the steer's horns and snugged it down tightly around their base, tied the other end of the rope to his saddle horn, picked up a handful of rocks and a large stick, poured some water from his canteen onto the steer's face, and waited behind Old Mossy for him to come out of it, which didn't take long.

The steer regained consciousness and staggered to its feet, standing head down and spraddle-legged until he regained his balance. Once he began showing signs that his mind was back in the game, Cormac hit it across the rump with the stick, yelled “Hiyah!” and then ran for his horse. The steer lunged forward and hit the end of the forty-foot rope as Cormac hit the saddle, and they all charged forward simultaneously.

Standing in the stirrups, Cormac yelled and kept yelling while throwing rocks at Mossy's rump, and they shot up and out of the arroyo at full speed. Running flat out, the steer was hightailing it straight at the branding corral where the men were working the irons in and out of the blazing fire.