The Cowboy and the Cossack (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) (15 page)

He thought about this for a moment. “Purple?”

“Well—” I hesitated. “Some of ’em, sort of—in a way.”

“Green?”

“Well—” He never asked an easy question in his life. “I guess I’ve seen a few of ’em that had kinda, more or less, greenish spots.”

He thought about that for a moment. Then he said, “They are colorful, but I think that old saying is an exaggeration.”

He let it go at that for a while, and we passed over the last, low rocky hills into a vast, level plain of high, waving grass. In the distance far before us there was a jagged range of steep, tough mountains that looked like they’d been shoved up abruptly by God’s fingers on an angry morning.

And, somehow, it was an absolutely magnificent view, with ten million miles of crystal-clear blue sky above it.

Maybe it was that view that kicked me off, but whatever the reason, as we were cantering along through the high grass, I asked Rostov without thinking much about it, “Say, sir, do you believe in God?”

“I beg your pardon?” he said in that faultless English that was so good I was beginning to wonder where the hell he ever learned it. And in his case, it wasn’t American, it was English.

Repeating that kind of dumb question, that I shouldn’t even have asked in the first place, was sort of embarrassing, but I was stuck with it. I said once more, “Do you believe in God?”

We rode on a few strides before he finally answered, “Yes—and no.”

He was looking far ahead, across that huge plain of yellow, gently waving grass, toward the jagged brown mountains and the immensity of cool blue sky above. I didn’t think he was going to say anything more about that, but after a time he said, rather factually, “I believe that people who are devoutly religious, within any specific religion, have no true respect for the ultimate vastness that is God.”

That was surely some kind of an answer, and there was just no way that I could come up with any kind of a reply to it.

And the subject never came up again.

We rode on to where those steep, jagged brown mountains started to slope up, and by then it was getting along toward evening. There wasn’t any water here, but we’d had plenty most every day on the trek so far and were well supplied. So Rostov decided this would be as good a place as any to camp.

The outriding cossacks, the herd-riding cowboys and the cattle were strung out on the big plain of grass about a mile behind us. By the time they got up to us on the rising slope, Rostov and I had scouted the top of the mountain and beyond.

Shad and the Slash-Diamond hands started to settle down near a large rock only about seventy feet away. Rostov’s men were building their camp near where he and I were sitting our
horses. That was a friendly, near distance, considering there was no water to share, or anything like that.

The day was close to over, and I was about to take off when Rostov said in a low, serious voice, “Will you do me a favor, Levi?”

“Sure.” I turned Buck back a little.

He hesitated thoughtfully. “Will you tell Shad, in your own way, that the blood he shed when he cut himself with Yuri’s saber seems to make excellent cement.”

I looked at him for a quiet moment. “If ya’ don’t mind, I’ll tell him in your way.”

And then I walked Buck the little distance to our camp and got Shad aside to tell him privately. When I repeated Rostov’s kind of poetic line about blood and cement, Shad said in a low, fairly hard voice, “So? Tell me a thing, Levi. Do you think I owe him something back, for him sayin’ such a neat goddamned thing?”

“I don’t think he wants anything back, Shad.”

And it was just at that time that Slim and Old Keats spotted the wolves.

They’d just dismounted twenty feet or so away, where some of the others were bringing up wood for a campfire, and they were staring down at the flat plain sloping off below. “Hey!” Slim hollered over to us. “There’s two wolves way off down there!”

And then Shad did the goddamnedest thing. He did to them exactly what Rostov had done to Nick back along the trail. Without seeming to have even been looking, he said, “Three.”

And damned if he, and Rostov before, weren’t right.

We all looked down across the plain, and there was the pack leader of the wolves that had hit us some time back, that giant black bastard with the last half of his tail chewed off. He was far enough away to feel safe. But he’d evidently been circling us ever since that first disastrous attack. He’d probably picked up a rabbit or two along the way, but what he must have been really hoping for was for one of the cows or bulls, or maybe a calf, to
get separated from the main herd so he could nail it and have a big supper for the whole pack.

The whole pack, what was left of it, consisted of one slightly smaller brown bitch and an about one-fourth-grown little wolf cub.

Seeing them out there on the plain, I could understand why most people had seen two wolves, and only Shad and Rostov had seen three. That little cub, lagging timidly behind, could have hidden himself with no trouble at all behind the one-half of a remaining tail that the big black still had on his husky butt.

I don’t know why he’d decided to be so bold, but he sure was, just standing there like a kind of a magnificent half-tailed nobleman among wolves, watching us wisely from a few yards beyond the range of a rifle shot.

Shad studied that tough old wolf on the plain far below for a long moment. Then he said, “You were tellin’ me, one time, that Rostov never actually saw anybody do any ropin’.”

“Yeah, he ain’t.”

“Well, hell, since he just said such a nice thing about my blood bein’ cement, let’s show ’im some Montana ropework.”

“Like what?”

“Like catchin’ that big wolf down there.”

“Jesus Christ, boss!” I said. “Don’t you never think a’ nothin’ easy t’ do?”

But he was already swinging back up onto Red. “Hey, Slim!” he called. “How’s your ropin’ arm?”

“Well, it ain’t broken.”

“Then let’s go snare ourselves that half-tailed lobo down there!”

“Shoot, that’s a good idea!” Slim quickly got back aboard Charlie. “I ain’t lassoed a wolf in a coon’s age!”

“You take the left point! Levi, when we’re ready you bust outta here!”

“Right!” I said with as much phony excitement as I could muster up. That kind of tricky, expert roping wasn’t exactly the
strongest card in my deck, and I was frankly sort of concerned about the high possibility of making an ass of myself. I was a little surprised he’d told me to join in with them instead of somebody like Natcho, who could damnere ride out blindfolded and rope a jack rabbit. I guess his decision may have had something to do with me being his more or less official representative with the cossacks.

In any case, Slim to the left and Shad to the right, they spurred out at wide angles from the camp, both of them at a dead run. They both skirted the herd that was much nearer to us on the down-sloping plain, neither one of them seeming to have any interest in the wolves far beyond at all.

This way, when they got into position, there’d be three of us coming in on the wolves from three different directions, sort of like an inside-out triangle. Shad could have had five or six of us go along, but I knew he felt that only three of us would make it more of an impressive and sporting proposition. That is,
if
we managed to catch the wolf in the first place.

There was a five-dollar bounty on wolves back in Montana, which was nearly a week’s pay, so any wolf was just naturally always fair game for any cowboy. But sometimes instead of just shooting it, which was comparatively easy, we’d make a fairly rough sport out of it by trying to lasso it, and making bets on who’d be the first one, if any, to get a rope around its neck.

That big wolf was pretty smart. He was watching Shad and Slim as they galloped off on both sides of his flanks. But they were far away and not headed in his direction, so that it would seem to him that he was reasonably safe.

And we sure as hell had the attention of the cossacks. They were watching Shad and Slim, slightly puzzled, or possibly even thinking both men had suddenly gone crazy.

They reached their far-off points and turned their horses, so now it was my turn to act. I lunged Buck down the slope before me, straight toward the distant wolves, at the same time letting out a long, fierce yell. I’m not a great lassoer, but I’m a hell of a
good yeller, and a lot of the cows I was now galloping by shied off nervously, thinking the end of the world was roaring past them.

The wolf started away in an easy, loping retreat, the bitch and pup following after him. And then for the first time that big black male began to realize he was in deep trouble.

From each of their points Shad and Slim were barreling toward him too, yelling their lungs out. All that hollering was supposed to scare and confuse a wolf, to panic him so he wouldn’t be quite as smart as usual, and it generally worked. But not with that tough, half-tailed big bastard. He stopped dead, seeing that he was kind of surrounded and sizing up the situation calmly.

He didn’t have a whole lot of time to think about it, because we were coming in like bats out of hell. Both Shad and Slim had their lariats out, and Slim was already twirling a loop in his right hand. I got my rope off the saddle and damnere dropped it as Buck leaped over a knee-high outcropping of rocks that appeared in our path.

And then the big wolf made its decision. It seemed to instinctively know that it was him we were after. And he gave some kind of a command to the bitch and the pup in whatever kind of talk wolves talk. Apropos of that wolf talk, I have been known to be wrong, but I do believe that animals do talk, even though they may have a pretty limited choice of words. Then he turned and raced in my general direction like a streak of greased lightning.

I sure as hell had to admire that damn wolf, for two reasons. First, he’d somehow unerringly picked the weakest of the three links, me, for an escape route. Second, and most important, was the fact that the bitch and the pup, following his orders, took off as fast as they could in exactly the opposite direction. That wolf, like any really good man would have done, was pulling us enemies off after him so that the other two weaker ones would have a better chance to live
.

And his plan worked perfectly. Both Shad and Slim instantly veered in that slightly new direction, and with my legs I turned
Buck just a little left to match the angle that it looked like the wolf was going. I had a loop going now, but Jesus the timing was going to be tough. I rode a train once that went sixty miles per hour, and that was kind of breathtaking. But estimating by that, at the rate that wolf was going and Buck was going, we’d pass each other at roughly goddamn near one thousand miles per minute.

At the very last instant, as he was streaking past me on my left, I threw that loop as hard and fast as a rock. From the swift move of my arm, he guessed that something bad was about to maybe happen. He was going too fast to change direction too much or too quickly, but in that split second he suddenly leaped nearly six feet straight up in the air.

My throw must have been terrible, because if he hadn’t leaped like that I’d have missed him by a mile. As it was, I accidentally caught his left hind leg while he was in mid-flight.

He must have weighed over a hundred pounds, and when his flying, lunging weight snapped violently tight on my right hand holding the other end of the rope, it felt like I’d lassoed a speeding mountain.

I hadn’t had time or even thought of taking a dolly around the saddle horn, so the whole force hit me instead of the saddle with Buck’s weight under it. Therefore, I was damnere jerked off onto the ground. I wound up with only my right knee across the saddle, clutching desperately to it with all the muscles in that leg, and for a while my head was so far down it was hitting the tall grass.

I’d have gone off altogether except that, luckily, the rope only stayed on the wolf’s leg for maybe a second. Then it slipped off as the wolf somersaulted down from its six-foot leap. He must have rolled over three or four times before he got his feet back under him again, running.

But that brief time he lost turned the tables against him. Shad and Slim sped past me as I tried to slow and turn Buck. And Shad tossed the first noose over the wolf’s neck while I was turning Buck. Caught, the big black struggled furiously for a
moment, leaping against the rope. Then, finding he couldn’t jerk free, he turned and charged defiantly at Shad to do all the damage he could to both Shad and Red.

But Slim’s rope snaked out now, and this second noose snapped tight around the wolf’s neck from the other side, so that he was strung out between the two of them, unable to either attack or get away.

“Boy!” Slim muttered, dollying out a little rope so that the big, thrashing wolf wouldn’t strangle itself. “He surely is a monster.”

We could hear the cowboys, and maybe some of the cossacks, yelling and cheering from off in the distance.

I was rolling up my rope, making loops down from my thumb and around my elbow, and Shad said, “That was some hell of a throw, Levi, leg-catching him right in midair that way.”

I hung the lariat back on my saddle. “I was aimin’ for his neck.”

I guess he knew this in the first place because he just answered with one of those brief half-grins of his.

“Now we got ’im,” Slim said, “what we gonna do with ’im?”

“There’s only one courteous thing to do. We’ll give ’im to Rostov as a token of our affection.”

“Aw, c’mon, Shad,” I said.

“Yeah,” Slim agreed. “I doubt he’d take that as bein’ altogether friendly.”

Shad looked at me. “He told you once about puppies barkin’ and wolves bitin’.”

“Yeah, but—”

“C’mon.” Shad led off, Slim matching his pace so that the still-fighting wolf was dragged forcibly along between them.

As we approached the cossack camp, all of the cowboys from our camp nearby came over to get a better look at the giant wolf, and also to sort of see what was going on.

By now the sun was gone and it was only a short while until dark.

Shad and Slim came to a stop, with me just behind the wolf and a little off to one side.