Shortgrass Song (33 page)

“I know, since somethin' drug off your grub sack! Go on to the cabin and I'll give you somethin' to eat.”

Caleb hunted harder than he ever had that afternoon. He sat stone still in the snow for hours, though the cold felt like a thousand needles pricking his toes and fingers. When he moved, he paused a minute between each step, watching for deer or rabbits or mountain sheep or anything edible. Still, he had to trudge back to Burl's cabin empty-handed at dark.

“Did you see anything?” Burl asked.

“Just one wolf,” Caleb said.

“Well, where is he?”

“Sir?”

“You said you saw a wolf. Why didn't you shoot it?”

“You can't eat wolf,” Caleb said, collapsing on a couch of beaver pelts.

“The hell you can't! You can eat damn near anything that grows meat on its bones if you get hungry enough!”

“Well, he was too far away to shoot anyway,” Caleb said. “If I see him again, I'll shoot him.”

“You'll not likely see him again,” Burl grumbled. “Every critter with a brain's gone below.” He poured a meager helping of beans into a pot and cooked in silence for several minutes.

Caleb leaned against one of the roof poles, so filled with shame that he forgot his hunger. He hadn't meant to cause anyone trouble, but it looked as if he would half starve himself and old Burl before spring came. He almost wished he had stayed in the mountains alone to freeze to death. The night was hardly colder than the old man's words. He thought of spending every day of the long mountain winter with the old man's anger.

“Mr. Sandeen…” he said.

“What?” the gruff voice returned.

“If you'll allow me two days' rations, I'll go on down alone. I ain't got the right to make you suffer on account of what I've done.”

Burl didn't reply. In a few minutes, he laid out the beans and a little smoked meat and told Caleb to eat. They sat on the fur-carpeted floor, their legs straddling the sawed-off stumps they used as tables.

“You clean up the dishes,” Burl ordered when he had finished.

“Yes, sir.” At least it was some relief to be of service in the cabin.

Burl threw a limb on the fire. “Son, you ain't the only damn fool to ever make a mistake. It ain't worth freezin' yourself to death over. You'll stay here with me.”

Caleb was melting the snow to wash the tin plates with. “But what about food?”

“We'll ration what we've got and hunt every day we can. I'll make you some snowshoes. You play the fiddle, and I'll make the shoes.” He shuffled through some skins, looking for one he could cut into rawhide strips to lace the snowshoes with. “I've made it through tougher spots. We'll make do.”

The cabin was warm, and Caleb knew another couple of nights in the snow would likely kill him. Maybe Burl was right. It was like what Buster had once told him about the time the ridge log fell on his mother. He hadn't meant to do anything wrong. He was trying to do right. It just happened. No need to freeze to death over it.

THIRTY-SEVEN

It especially bothered Burl that he had to ration his whiskey on top of the food, but he would not deny Caleb a gut warmer after a cold day of hunting. After supper they would sip whiskey from tin cups as they played a few hands of poker, wagering with beaver pelts.

His first taste of Burl's whiskey reminded Caleb of his drunk in Milt Starling's saloon and almost made him gag. But after a few days he started looking forward to the nightly jigger. This was the proper way to use whiskey, he thought. One jigger a day.

“Where did you get that spotted horse of yours?” Burl asked one evening. He was sitting cross-legged on a mound of beaver pelts, dealing the cards.

“We breed 'em on our ranch,” Caleb answered.

“Where'd you get your brood stock?”

“From an old mountain man.”

“Cheyenne Dutch?”

Caleb looked up from his poker hand. “You knew him?”

“Knew him! Hell, I've fought with him and fought again' him. Me and Dutch saw some hard times and some good times together. What'll you bet?”

“A couple of pelts, I guess.”

“Well, don't guess. Make up your mind, then bet.”

“Two pelts then,” Caleb said, throwing his wager onto the pot.

“I heard some desperado shot old Dutch last year.”

“He killed my brother,” Caleb said, tossing three of his cards aside. “Our ranch manager shot him for it.”

“Ranch manager? I heard it was some outlaw.”

“He killed my brother,” Caleb repeated.

“I heard you. I guess old Dutch had it comin'. He was a careless soul. I went with him once to San Francisco back in the fifties. We'd made a good haul on hides together and went to blow it on women and whiskey. Dutch got drunk and had some tattoo artist put those spots on his butt. He put a lot of stock in those spots. Said they made him bulletproof. Anyway, he killed a Chinese girl in San Francisco, and we had to light out in the middle of the night. Never went back to California after that. I'll raise you another pelt.” He dragged three ovals of dried beaver skin onto the pot and tossed a card on top of the ones Caleb had thrown down.

“Was he your friend?” Caleb asked.

“In this country you run with whoever you have to to stay alive,” Burl said, dealing the new cards. “Dutch was good at stayin' alive before he got addlepated. Then he let that Indian magic get the better of his senses.”

Caleb had forgotten which cards he had thrown aside, so he reached for the discard pile to refresh his memory. Burl caught his wrist and clamped it down against the fur carpet.

“Don't monkey with the deadwood,” the old trapper warned.

“But, I was just…”

“I don't care what you were doin'. Once you throw them cards aside, you don't get another look. Some gamblers will cheat by peekin' at the deadwood. If you're to learn poker, you better learn it proper, or you'll get in trouble.”

“Yes, sir,” Caleb said.

He released the boy's wrist. “Your bet.”

Caleb threw in another pelt, and Burl raised him with three more.

“Sorry Dutch got your brother,” the old trapper said as he spread his winning hand across the fur.

*   *   *

They gave up hunting in the middle of the winter without having burned a grain of powder. Burl decided the exercise was draining too much energy and making them hungrier. He said they would lay up in the cabin until the weather broke again. They would keep the place warm and just lounge about like a couple of hibernating bears. The most exercise Caleb was allowed to get was sawing on the fiddle or blowing on the harmonica. Rations were so short he hardly had the energy for either. The pants he wore seem to have shed the stitches Burl had put in them to make them fit.

One night Caleb was playing “Don't You Marry Those Texan Boys” on the fiddle and singing what verses he could remember:

Missouri gals, come listen to my noise,

And don't go marry those Texan boys.

For if you do, your portion it'll be,

Johnnycakes and venison and sassafras tea,

Johnnycakes and venison and sassafras tea.

“I'm hungry,” he said, stopping in the middle of the song.

“Don't play them songs about food,” Burl replied, rolling over on the beaver pelts.

“I can't help it. I'm starvin'.”

Burl chuckled. “You don't know what starvin' is, son. You've had food in your mouth every day.”

“Not very much of it,” Caleb complained.

“Wait'll you go two weeks without a bite. Wait'll your gut's burnin' you for something to eat. You'll shit like a calf with the scutters and hump up with cramps like some poor ol' wormy dog. Then you'll know you're starvin'.”

Caleb put his fiddle down and slumped against the roof post. “Have you ever gone that long without food?”

“Yes, I have. That long and longer. In '471 went to Canada with some other fellows. Five of us started out. Me and Cheyenne Dutch was the only ones to come back alive. We ran smack out of grub before February. Got so hungry we ate all the fringes off our buckskins. Boiled 'em and ate 'em. We ate all the grease out of our guns, too. Had rawhide roofs on our cabins. We boiled that rawhide down so it looked like a pot of glue and ate that, too.”

“Did the other three starve to death?” Caleb asked.

“Two tried to walk out and didn't make it. The other one went huntin' and got lost. Me and Dutch followed his tracks when he didn't come back. He was goin' in circles. It like to have killed us draggin' him back to camp, but I thought we ought to bury him.”

“How did you and Dutch make it till spring?”

“I shot a white owl one night. Lined him up again' a full moon to draw my bead. We made that bird eat for three days. Ate everything but the feathers and beak. Cracked the bones and sucked out the marrow. The game started comin' back pretty soon after that, and we got strong enough to walk down.

“Things ain't near so bad for us, son. When you take to eatin' the catgut off that fiddle, you'll know you're starvin'. If we keep our rations down, we'll make it to spring. We might hunt some game up, too. We'll make out all right.”

Burl kept up the encouraging chatter but held his doubts to himself. Things were not going to work out as well as he had led Caleb to believe—not at the rate the food was disappearing. He knew now he should have butchered the spotted horse. Both of them could not survive on the amount of food left.

It was Burl's food. Caleb was the interloper.

The first day the temperature climbed above freezing, Burl sent Caleb out to hunt. “You head down a few miles. Maybe an elk will come up. Shoot anything.”

“What are you gonna do?” Caleb asked.

“I'll go up higher. Maybe I'll find an owl or somethin' up there. Now, git.”

Caleb strapped his snowshoes on over the fur moccasins Burl had made for him and crunched through the crust downhill. He stopped every couple of minutes to rest and watch for game. The frozen forest looked desolate as an alkaline desert, yet there was beauty in the way the sunlight shined through the ice and illuminated the thin veils of snow on the tree branches. He was so wanting for food that he wondered whether he would be able to make the climb back up to the cabin.

He wasn't sure he really wanted to go back uphill anyway. Something was bothering Burl. There was something odd in the way the old man had ordered him out to hunt. Caleb couldn't put his finger on it, but it was there. Had they simply been snowed in together too long, or was it something more than that?

He found a beaver pond below—a level field of unbroken snow. Not a single track of bird or beast marred it. He brushed the snow from a boulder and sat down. He had been shivering there for an hour when he heard Burl's Warner carbine speak—not up above the cabin, but a mere mile or less on his own back trail. The shot made Caleb's heart leap in his chest, and he cursed his own nerves for burning energy so.

Then he realized what the single shot meant. An old saying Javier had often used came to him: “One shot, meat; two shots, maybe; three shots, no good.” An old hand like Burl Sandeen could not have missed. The report was still echoing across the frozen ranges.

Caleb drew on his reserves of strength and mounted his own trail back toward the cabin. A mile up the mountain he found Burl's snowshoe tracks over the tops of his own. The trapper's trail turned away from Caleb's there and went across the mountainside.

Why had the old man followed him? He was supposed to be hunting up high. Had he lied or simply changed his mind? Caleb dug into a dime-sized hole in the snow and found the rimfire cartridge Burl's carbine had emptied of powder and lead.

As he closed the distance on the old man, he fought an irrational fear that told him Burl would eat all the meat before he could catch up. He wondered what kind of meat it would be. He pictured quartered carcasses of deer and elk—huge red chunks streaked with white tallow. He was tripping through the white forest, slinging frozen crust from his snowshoes, when he finally caught sight of the mountain man studying something between his feet.

“Did you shoot?” Caleb yelled.

Burl turned around, shushed Caleb, and waved for him to approach. “Keep your voice down,” he said when Caleb caught up. “Don't spook him any further than you have to.”

“What did you shoot at?”

“A big wolf.”

“Hit him?”

“Didn't you see the blood trail? Probably tramped on it, didn't you? Ain't much of a trail, but he's hit. Wolf's tough, though. Could go miles.”

Caleb watched Burl point out mere specks of crimson beside the trail of the wounded wolf. “That rifle should have ripped him clean open. You sure you hit him good?”

“Don't know. It was a runnin' shot, two hundred yards away. That wolf was quarterin' your trail, son. He meant to make a meal of you.”

They had trudged another hundred yards when Burl sank into the snow on his knees. “Look here, son.”

Caleb looked into a hole in the crust and saw a clot of blood about as big as the back of his hand.

“He's hit hard in the lights,” Burl said. “Coughed up a hunk of 'em with this blood.” The old man took out his knife and lifted the chilled hunk of blackened blood and lungs with the blade. Smashing the gore between the knife edge and the thumb of his mitten, he cut it in two and let half fall into Caleb's waiting palm. Without even wondering what he was to do with it, Caleb tossed it down his throat and swallowed, chasing it with a handful of snow.

A quarter mile farther on, the old trapper and the greenhorn found the wolf's nose buried in the snow where he had died running.

“Big old feller,” Burl said. “The other wolves will run an old one off. He probably came up here to die.”