Ranch Hands (10 page)

Stevie never minded work. She didn’t even mind taking risks, like going back up the hill and working with the stray cattle. What she did mind was humiliation, which she was sure she’d get a big dose of on this mission. It looked like more than a little bit of trouble. The worst part was that every single camper would have a perfect view of whatever stupid thing she did.

“Stevie, this way!” Eli said, bringing her out of her reverie. The only thing worse than making a fool of herself would be being too afraid to try. She had to go. She went.

She and Kate caught up with Eli and picked their way back up the hill very carefully, watching their balance, and keeping an eye on the strays.

Each one of the strays presented a different challenge. One had a hoof lodged under a rock. All they had to do there was to pull the hoof out without getting crushed by the beefy creature or kicked by any of his other three working feet. Another two were just huddling together behind a tree, looking downward fearfully. Mel convinced them to move forward, parallel to the hillside, until there was no tree to protect
them. Then they had no choice but to go downward. They did it and reached the bottom safely.

Another was a cow with a calf. There was nothing wrong with them except that the calf had decided this was the exact moment when he had to have lunch. While Eli, Kate, and Stevie watched, he finished nursing, and then he and his mother moved onward without any further prodding. Two of the strays needed to be talked down. Eli’s system for that was to put a rope around the animal’s neck and to get his horse to tug convincingly. Mel barked and snapped at the animal’s feet while Stevie and Kate stood behind it and yelled encouragingly. Eventually, the strays decided that moving forward and downward was less unpleasant than being yanked, barked at, and yelled at.

The thought that kept going through Stevie’s head as she and Kate worked with Eli was that there was no way in the world that she could have figured out how to do any of this without Eli there. Sure, she was staying on her horse, much to Larry’s dismay, but it wasn’t the same as really helping independently. Every time Eli figured out another way to solve the problems of the strays, Stevie felt dumber and more like a greenhorn dude.

Then, when the last stray was with the herd and they’d put that hill behind them and settled into a campsite for the night, Eli asked Stevie to build a camp fire. It was her final failure of the day. She could
put all the ingredients exactly the way she thought they ought to be, but she couldn’t get it to burn no matter what she did. Unfortunately, it was Lois who came to her rescue, adjusting the paper and the twigs until they were just so and then, with one match, got a roaring fire going.

Stevie and Kate didn’t even stick around for the marshmallow roast. They headed for their bedrolls, hoping for a decent night’s sleep on the hard cold ground. The other campers didn’t even seem to notice or care that they weren’t there. It was about what Stevie and Kate had come to expect.

S
TEVIE DIDN
’
T KNOW
where she was when she first opened her eyes. She squinted in the gray light of dawn, barely making out the fact that there were kids in sleeping bags all around her. What clued her into her actual locale was the gentle and constant lowing sounds of the cattle nearby. She was on a cattle drive, and ever since the first hill, nothing had gone right.

She pulled herself out of her tent and looked at the surroundings. In spite of all the awful things that had happened yesterday, the place was nothing short of spectacular. They were in a valley, completely surrounded by the Rocky Mountains whose jagged, snowcapped tips reached into a pale blue-and-pink dawn. Stevie wondered how she could have missed the beauty of the place and then remembered that she’d
had a few other things going on the previous day. She reminded herself to notice the beauty all day long today.

She stretched lazily, changed her clothes, washed up, and went in search of a way to be useful.

She found Eli laying a fire to cook breakfast. He asked her to finish doing it while he started closing up camp so they could get going quickly. Stevie laid the twigs, papers, and sticks out just the way she’d watched it being done before and put a match to the kindling. The kindling burned nicely, but the wood didn’t catch fire at all. She tried again. No luck.

By the time she was ready to do it a third time, Kate had joined her and Eli had come to see what the problem was. He suggested that Stevie’s talents would be better used getting the horses ready to be saddled up than smoldering kindling. Stevie wasn’t sure if he was teasing or serious. It didn’t improve her mood to start the day off with another failure.

“Be careful, though,” he warned her. “Those animals are all kind of edgy this morning. I think there must be a coyote around. Just keep them all calm, okay?”

“Okay,” Stevie and Kate agreed. The two of them walked together over to the temporary corral where their horses had been put for the night. The cattle milled around nearby, slightly restless as Eli had said they were.

When the girls got to the corral, they saw that the horses were a little restless, too. A couple of them had their ears laid way back on their heads, their eyes open so wide that they showed white.

“What’s going on here?” Stevie asked.

“Eli must be right about the coyote,” Kate said. “And nervousness is contagious. When one horse in a group gets edgy, all the others get it as well. Our best bet is just to show them we’re not nervous.”

“Great idea. The question is, how? Oh, I know!” Stevie was never happier than when she was being clever, and she’d come up with a clever idea to show she wasn’t nervous. She began singing as she opened the gate to enter the corral. Apparently, however, she’d chosen a song the horses didn’t much like. When she hit a high note and held it, one of the horses reared. The one next to it bucked, kicking another horse who bit the one who had reared. Every horse whose ears hadn’t flattened before now flattened its ears, and they all started whinnying and crying wildly.

Two more horses reared, and that was all the rest of the herd would take. They fled.

Stevie and Kate stood helplessly by the open gate while more than a dozen horses raced past them right into the middle of the herd of cattle.

The cattle, which had been just as restless as the horses, found this an ideal opportunity to run. Within
a matter of seconds it was clear to Stevie and Kate that they had a full-blown stampede on their hands.

“Eli!!!” Stevie shrieked, knowing then that making more noise couldn’t possibly frighten the animals any more than they already were. She didn’t really have to yell that loud, though. Eli had heard the frightened animals and was already on his way to help.

By the time he got there, the entire herd was in motion—a thousand animals running wildly through the valley. There wasn’t a second to waste.

“Stevie! Get the campers to safety. Kate, come with me.”

Stevie ran back to where the tents were pitched. For the moment, the herd was running away from the campsite, but she knew that could change on a second’s notice. She didn’t have to wake the campers up. The noise of the terrified herd had done that job for her. What she had to do was to keep them calm and get them to safety.

“As quickly as you can, put on your boots—don’t worry about clean clothes now—roll up your beds, and come with me.”

Lois came wandering out of her tent. “Help me comb my hair,” she demanded.

“Later,” Stevie said, firmly but kindly. “For now, just get ready to move.”

Lois started to protest. This was no time to get into a tangle with a L-ion, but Stevie understood that
sometimes, in a panic, people seem to feel the need to do very normal things, like combing their hair. “And be sure to bring your comb,” Stevie said. “We’ll do your hair as soon as we get resettled.”

That seemed to be all the assurance Lois needed. She emerged from her tent a few seconds later, holding her bedroll and her comb. She had her boots on. Stevie paused only a split second to congratulate herself on motivating Lois properly.

“This way,” she said, pointing to the hillside nearby. One thing the herd had learned yesterday was that they didn’t like hills—up or down. Stevie thought that probably meant that even in a panic they wouldn’t run up one. Also, that particular hillside had a couple of really good rocks on it that the kids could climb to safety where even the angriest steer would never follow.

“We’re going to have a rock-climbing contest,” Stevie said. “First one up to the top of that boulder gets a prize.”

Stevie knew she wasn’t fooling anyone with her ploy to get the campers to safety, but they all seemed reassured by the game.

“Last one up’s a rotten egg,” Larry said, leading the way. The kids scurried after him. No one wanted to let him win.

It took a lot of scrambling to get to the rock and a good deal more to get all the kids onto it. Stevie got
them to work together, forming a sort of human chain so that the bigger kids could help the smaller ones up. Eventually twelve kids were safe and sound on a large boulder overlooking a valley where a herd of cattle, mingled with horses, was running wildly. They were so proud of the way they’d gotten up that they even forgot to notice who the last one—the rotten egg—was. It was Stevie, of course. She had to be last to be sure that the kids were all safe before she joined them.

“Come on, Lois, let me comb your hair now,” Stevie said. Lois seemed surprised that Stevie was as good as her word, but she also seemed comforted to have the job done. Stevie made a French braid for Lois, and two other girls thought she’d done such a neat job of it that they wanted her to do it to their hair as well. Even the boys were impressed with Stevie’s skill and watched in rapt attention at her ministrations.

All the while, Stevie was acutely aware of the chaos in the valley below. As soon as the kids were totally calm, she could give Eli and Kate a hand.

She thought it was a good idea to give the campers something to occupy themselves. She explained that she was going to help Eli and Kate.

“Will you be safe?” Larry interrupted her. Stevie was touched by the obvious concern in his voice. Less than twelve hours earlier, he would have been de-
lighted if somebody had told him Stevie had drowned in a creek.

“I’ll be safe,” she assured him. “And Eli and Kate will be safer. They need me, too. So, while I’m gone, I want the twelve of you to play a game and make up a story.” She quickly explained the rules. “Okay here goes: A long time ago, there was a mean old hermit who lived under a boulder on a hillside overlooking a valley in the Rockies. He hated everybody. He
especially
hated children. And
then
 …”

She looked at Larry to take over. He began right away. “One day a little girl was skipping and hopping across the valley …”

Stevie knew the kids would be just fine. It was time for her to get to Kate and Eli. As the story progressed to the point at which the hermit sneaked an ugly toad in the basket the little girl was carrying, Stevie scrambled back down the rock and onto the valley floor where things were not so calm.

At first it was hard to see how Stevie could do anything to help. Then just the thing she needed arrived by her side: a horse.

Without a saddle and bridle, she might have some trouble controlling the animal, but the roan gelding was standing still near her, clearly relieved to have stopped running. Stevie thought that, like the children, he was really just waiting for somebody in authority to tell him what to do. Stevie grabbed a
handful of his mane and jumped upward onto his high back. It took two tries, but she was soon aboard, and the horse’s ears flicked alertly. He waited for instructions.

Stevie didn’t make him wait very long. She got him into a lope—what Western riders called cantering—and took him across the valley floor to where Eli and Kate, with the help of Mel, were trying to subdue the herd.

“Kids okay?” Eli asked when he saw Stevie. Both he and Kate were mounted bareback, without bridles, the same as Stevie. Three great minds with a single thought, she realized. They had to be on horseback, no matter what.

“Fine,” she said. “What about the cattle?”

“See for yourself.”

Stevie looked. The cattle were still running, but more slowly.

“They just get tired,” Eli said. “They slow down.”

“So it’s over?” she asked.

“Not yet,” said Eli. “The same thing that started them in the first place could start them all over again. And the only thing worse than panicked cattle running wild is tired, panicked cattle. They make even less sense.”

“The same thing won’t start them again,” Stevie assured him. “It was me, singing.”

Eli shook his head. Stevie felt the full weight of his
disappointment at her. It was hard to think that his disapproval could make her feel any worse than she already did, but it had that effect. She felt awful. Then Eli spoke.

“I don’t think so, Stevie. I’ve heard you sing and though it won’t get you into the Metropolitan Opera, it’s not all that scary. These creatures heard a coyote howl. You just didn’t hear it because you were singing.”