Shortgrass Song (32 page)

“My Lord!” Chamberlain shouted. “He'll kill the dogs!”

Pete jerked the coil of hemp from the leather tie on his saddle horn. “He won't kill 'em all!” As he spurred his gelding on, he swung the loop underhanded, letting a round play out of the coil with every revolution, building the loop until it was almost big enough to take in the whole pack of dogs.

“Stand clear!” Chamberlain shouted when he figured Pete's plan. “Stand aside, men!”

The hunters heard and made a path through which Pete could join the dog-and-bear fight. His loop cut the dust over his head as he made his first pass, but the bear presented a poor target, spinning to fight the foxhounds. Pete turned his prancing horse back to the fight and kept the loop swinging, waiting for a clean throw at the bear's head.

The old bruin whirled to swat a dog, and Pete threw the loop sidearmed, gathering in the head and one foreleg of the beast. The spotted gelding was taking up the slack even before the coils hit the ground. A dog straddling the rope went somersaulting over the plains when Pete's saddle horn snapped the sagging hemp straight.

The bear went over backward, roaring with rage, dredging a dust cloud behind him as the powerful gelding dragged him. Pete drew his revolver smoothly from the holster. He turned and aimed at the end of the rope stretched tight over his thigh. For a mere second, the dogs fell behind.

Far away on the hill, Amelia saw the blasts of smoke and heard the reports follow. The great black heap fell still behind Pete's horse, and the dogs milled around it in silence. A cheer rang from the spectators' hill.

Captain Dubois hurrahed among the loudest. “I hope you didn't bring young Chamberlain along to rival Pete,” he said. “If so, you seem to have achieved a reverse effect!”

Amelia only heaved in disgust. What was she going to do about Pete Holcomb? Whatever did she want with a ranchman? How could she ever bear a rural life on the plains?

THIRTY-SIX

Winter was going to come early to the Medicine Bow Range. Burl Sandeen didn't know how he could tell, but after forty years in the mountains he had learned to trust his instincts. He had hung up extra meat and ridden all the way out of North Park to Rawlins for more supplies than he thought he would need. Now he was anxious to get back to his cabin above the Michigan and get his wood chopped before the snow fell too deep. A blanket two inches thick already covered the ground, and the sky told him more was on the way.

As he led his mule up the trail, he noticed a wisp of smoke filtering through the trees in a coulee ahead. He tied the mule to a pine sapling, slipped his fifty-caliber Warner carbine from its scabbard, and stalked ahead to investigate. It was late in the year for Indians to be out hunting. He suspected a greenhorn looking for a mountain pass, but not even Burl Sandeen expected anyone quite as green as Caleb Holcomb.

Through the trees in the coulee, Burl saw a spotted mare and a young man holding a buffalo robe open to warm himself over a crackling fire. He could readily see that the kid was well muscled, for he was wearing a suit of buckskins that had shrunk to his knees and elbows and covered the rest of him like a second skin. As Burl crept silently through the powder, the spotted mare noticed him but the boy did not. The old mountain man eased up to Five Spot and scratched her on the rump. He rested his carbine over the spots on the mare's hip and aimed in Caleb's direction.

“Who are you?” he asked.

Caleb jumped all the way over the fire and ran three steps before he slid in the snow and turned with his hand on his pistol.

“Whoa,” Sandeen said, “don't get your hackles up.”

Caleb looked over what he could see of the man behind the horse. He wore a hat of beaver fur and hobnailed boots laced with leather thongs. A gray beard seemed to gush from the collar of his red wool coat. Black eyebrows thick as horses' manes hung over the old man's squinting eyes.

“Mister, you scared the hell out of me!” Caleb said.

Burl laughed.

“I thought you were a Ute,” the boy said.

“Ute wouldn't have asked you who you were. One white man is like another to them, with the exception of Burl Sandeen.” He jabbed himself in the chest with his thumb. “What happened to your britches?”

“I don't know. They got wet when I crossed the river yesterday, and they just kept gettin' tighter.”

“Where'd you get 'em?”

“Bought 'em from the Nez Perce.”

Burl laughed again and came out from behind the mare. “They took you for a fool, son. Them skins haven't been cured proper. Might just as well have wrapped yourself in rawhide. Better cut 'em off or they'll squeeze the liver out of you.”

“But I don't have anything else to wear except for my long handles.”

“I got duds I'll swap you. What do have to trade?”

“Nothin' much. I can't let go of my guns or saddle, or my coat.”

“What's in here?” Burl asked, tapping his rifle barrel on the fiddle case tied behind the cantle.

“My fiddle. But I can't trade that either.”

“I wouldn't know how to work it anyhow. Do me no more good than a steam calliope. But you can swap me some fiddle music this evenin' while I take up an outfit so's to fit you.”

Caleb finally took his hand away from his pistol grip. “I'd be obliged, sir. I'm Caleb Holcomb.” He waddled forward in his shrunken skins to shake hands.

The old man laughed at the sight. “We got two hours of light and three hours of ground. I suggest we git.”

They arrived at Sandeen's cabin after dark, unpacked the supplies from the mule, and put the animals in a pole corral. The cabin stood wide as a barn but only eight logs high at the ridge pole. The roof was braced to handle the heaviest snows. When Caleb followed his host in, he bumped his forehead on a rafter in the dark.

“Why do you live so high up?” Caleb asked as he cut his shrunken deerskins off.

Sandeen was stoking a fire to cook supper. “Because I like it up here, that's why. The stars up here shoot thick as white hairs on a roan horse. They don't look like that below.”

For furniture Sandeen had only a couple of sawed stumps that served as stools, or as dinner tables when the diner sat on the floor. Pegs sticking out of the walls snagged hats, snowshoes, ropes, traps, and other assorted possessions. The heavy rafters were at eye level, bolstered in the middle by posts sunk in the dirt floor. Layers of buffalo robes, bearskins, and beaver pelts made a regular carpet except for a semicircle around the fireplace where sparks tended to leap. Piles of hides made couches for sitting or sleeping.

“Don't you ever bump your head in here?” Caleb asked.

“I'd just as soon duck,” Sandeen answered. “A low roof means less air to heat.”

Caleb wrapped himself in a long buffalo robe and ate a roasted jackrabbit with the old man. After supper he opened his fiddle case as Sandeen produced a needle and thread to alter a pair of pants. The musician played as the old trapper tapped his toe and sewed.

“Do you know how to play ‘Careless Love'?” Sandeen asked.

“No, I never heard of that one,” Caleb admitted.

“Well, it's an old song. I can't carry a tune in a grass sack, but I'll tell you some of the words:

Love, oh love, oh, careless love,

Love, oh love, oh, careless love,

Love, oh love, oh, careless love,

You see what careless love has done.

I love my mama, and papa, too,

I love my mama, and papa, too,

I love my mama, and papa, too,

I'd leave them both for lovin' you.

“That was my Sary's favorite back in old Missouri,” Burl said, after reciting.

“Who was she?”

“Should have been my wife.” Sandeen pulled a few more stitches tight.

“Whatever happened to her?” Caleb asked.

“I guess she's still down there. Moved to Saint Jo last I heard. But that's been, oh, twenty-five years or so.”

“How long have you been up here?” Caleb asked.

“Goin' on forty years. I left Missouri in '32. Wasn't much older than you. I had courted Sary about a year by that time. She was a keeper, I tell you. Pretty as a button. Come from a good church-goin' family. Not at all disagreeable about marryin' me.”

“So how come you didn't marry her?”

“Oh, I got a idea to come out west, make a bundle in the fur trade. I asked her if she'd wait till I got back to marry me. She said if I left and went to the mountains, she wouldn't know if I was alive or stone dead. Said she wouldn't wait for me. Said she wouldn't be a widow before she was wed.”

Caleb stroked a chunk, of rosin against his fiddle bow. “I guess you came up here anyway, didn't you?”

“Well, that was the only way I knew of gittin' here, and I wasn't about to let no gal tell me where to go. At least not before we was married. I didn't believe her anyhow. I figured she'd wait at least a year before she took up with some other jack, and I knew I'd be back by that time.”

Burl looked up from his sewing. “Son, the beaver was thick as the hair on your head back then. I threw in with a party out of Saint Lou and we took in I don't know how many pelts along the Yellowstone. One of our boys lost his own pelt to the Blackfeet, but we made good on the long haul. I was satisfied that I'd seen the wilderness, so I went back to make Sary my wife.” He shook his head and let his hands fall still on the clothes he was taking up for Caleb.

“What did she say?” Caleb asked.

“What could she say? She'd married a fellow named Ludlow. That left me nowhere to go but back to the mountains. Now they call me a legend from Taos to Green River.” Burl chuckled and started sewing again.

“You never got married?” Caleb asked.

“Oh, I've had me a squaw or two, but that ain't the same thing. No, there won't never be one like Sary.” He massaged his black eyebrows a moment. “You haven't left you some pretty little gal down below, have you?”

“Me? No, sir.”

“Well, if you have, you better get back there or some other young buck will take up with her. Now, play a couple more, son, then we'd better turn in. You'll want to get started early in the morning.”

*   *   *

After breakfast, Burl advised Caleb to follow the North Platte out of North Park until he found the railroad, but Caleb shook his head. “I'm not goin' north, I'm goin' east over the mountains to winter in Denver. Where's the closest pass?”

“Now, listen here, son. You won't make it through any of them passes. Winter's comin' early this year. Don't try it or you'll get snowbound. You'd better get out of North Park in a week, or they won't find you till next spring.”

“But it don't make sense to head north with winter comin' on,” Caleb argued.

“It don't make sense to head up to high country. You do as I say.”

“Yes, sir,” Caleb said. But he had no intention of traveling north for days, when east was where he wanted to go. He was going to find himself a mountain pass. Hell, he could see a low spot in the divide as well as any old mountain man.

After the boy left, Burl took his ax down from a peg and spent the whole day cording wood, his breath turning to ice on his whiskers. The next morning snow began to fall and continued for two days. He knew it was time to let his mule wander down to the low country and winter in some canyon.

The morning he went to the corral to set the old mule free, he heard someone approaching through the woods below his cabin. It could only be the boy, he thought. No one else would be fool enough to travel this high up with winter on.

Caleb led Five Spot to Burl's cabin, slogging through drifts waist-deep. The mare was so exhausted that the boy was having to break the trail for her. When he got near enough for conversation, he looked at the old man's scowling face and said, “I didn't have nowhere else to go.”

“You tried to get through the mountains, didn't you?” Burl asked, looking at the layers of ice caked around the boy's feet.

“I tried to, but I never found a pass. I guess I should have gone north like you said.”

“You guess!”

“I got lost. The snow covered all the trails. Somethin' got all my food. Drug it off two nights ago.”

“Didn't you tie your grub sack up in a tree?”

His knees wobbled with the cold. “Didn't think of it. I haven't et in a day and a half.”

Burl took a pole down from the corral fence and threw it into the snow. “What do you expect me to do for you? It's too late for me to take you down now. Even if I did get you down, I'd never make it back up. And I don't have supplies enough to get both of us through the winter!”

“I'll go huntin',” Caleb said.

“Shit!” Burl threw another pole down. “Game's scarce. They got sense enough to go down below when winter comes on.” He walked into the corral, kicking snow at his mule. He knew the boy would starve or freeze to death if he tried to get out of the mountains alone. “Take your gear off that mare,” he grumbled.

“Sir?”

“Take your saddle and bridle off that mare, I say! Let her wander down below with old Katy.”

“How will I ever find her?”

“She'll follow Katy. I'll know where to find 'em in the spring, if that mare of yours don't die tomorrow. Now turn her loose before I decide to butcher her for stew meat!”

Caleb began stripping his tack from the horse, feeling utterly ashamed for the trouble he was causing the old man.

“As soon as you thaw your feet out, get your rifle and go huntin'. I doubt you'll find anything alive, but we'd better try. We'll have to start short rations if we're to make it through to spring.”

“Yes, sir,” Caleb said. “But could I start on my rations before I go huntin'? I haven't et since…”