Louis L'Amour (7 page)

W
HEN I CAME out of the cabin in the freshness of daybreak it was right nippy. It was early for frost, but you could feel the coming of it in the air. Made a man feel glad he’d a snug place to hole up in, with winter coming on and all.

One thing I could say for Justin. He didn’t stint any on the grub. We had cases of tomatoes and peaches in cans, a sack of sugar, plenty of flour, beans, dried fruit, rice, and some big cans of Arbuckle.

When I’d rustled a fire I said to Eddie, “We can take turns cookin’ if you’re of a mind to, but after you taste mine you may feel you’d like to take over. I was never no hand to cook.”

“I don’t care if I do, on’y I want to punch cows and I’ll never learn how in this here cabin.”

“You any good at makin’ bear sign?”

“Never heard of it.”

“Bear sign is doughnuts … sinkers … crullers—whatever you’re of a mind to call them.”

“Man, I make the best doughnuts you ever ate.”

So, if I got shot, at least I would die happy.

But I wasn’t harboring any illusions. Nothing in life had given me cause for hopefulness. A man went ahead doing the best he could, but it always seemed there was more trouble lurking just around the bend of the road. I had seen some folks to whom nothing
ever happened, but that wasn’t the way it was with me.

One time I was telling some eastern folks about life on the range. The man of the house, he was a fat, comfortable man eating three big meals a day, he had a fine house and family, and he said to me that he wished he could live my adventurous life. Me, I just looked at him.

He should crawl out of bed on a chilly morning on a cattle drive, stagger half blind to the chuck wagon and gulp scalding coffee that would take the paint off a wall, and then saddle up a mean-minded bronc. Then he should get out with a stiff rope and try to do some roping. He should go tearing off down a hillside on a fast-moving cutting horse, and suddenly find a ditch ahead of him that’s maybe twenty feet wide and just as deep.…

He should work himself half dead with tiredness, and come dragging up to the mess wagon long after dark, eat food that he wouldn’t feed his dog, and then roll up in that same cold bed.

Eddie I could understand. He was a colored man and he would get a better shake out west than almost anywhere. He might find some folks a bit stand-offish … some people believe because a man looks different that he feels different; but out on the range a man is judged by how he does his job and stands up to trouble.

Me, I wasn’t going to do him no favors. If he did his job, well and good. I couldn’t care what color he was, or even if he had two heads—so long as both of them didn’t eat. I’d already seen him shape up on that
trip across country, and I liked the way he did things. He was a stand-up man with pride and strength.

That first day we rode out and around, getting acquainted with the country, moving a little stock. For most of that work we’d be riding out twenty miles or better, but now we were just getting the lay of the land. As we rode I talked to Eddie, telling him what being a cowhand was like.

“Winter is the time when a cowhand—if he isn’t out of a job and riding the grub line—is supposed to catch up on his sleep. I never got that lucky. Seems to me I always fall into jobs where I work harder than ever.

“Now, Justin put us out here to bring his stock through the winter, as much of it as we can. Mainly, we’ll have to keep holes open in the ice so the cattle can drink. A small hole is best, and make it long. You scatter leaves and truck on the ice so the cattle won’t slip and slide too much.”

Eddie was listening as I went on talking.

“The grass around here is mostly blue grama—and there’s nothing any better—mixed with buffalo grass. It’ll stand a lot of grazing, and it re-seeds itself. If the stock can get to the grass, it will do all right, even in winter.

“First, we’ll start swinging wide and moving the stock closer to home. There’s feed enough and we won’t have to ride so far. Pay attention to weak stuff first.

“But most of all, you never stop looking. You look for cattle in trouble, you look for Indians, and you’ll look for rustlers. You’ll look for anything different or out of the way—for strange tracks, or any movement of cattle in a bunch and on a straight line.

“Left to themselves no cow crittur will walk far in a straight line … they graze around here and yonder, or they lie down and chew their cud. If they move in a straight line for long, it means somebody is driving them. Going to water is an exception, sometimes, but you’ll soon learn to judge.”

All the time I talked I was busy looking. There was a big old grizzly in this country, I could tell … I’d seen his claw marks high up on scratch trees where he’d made his mark. Grizzlies do that to stake a claim to a piece of territory. If any other bears want to come in, they look at those scratch marks, and if they’re too high on the tree they turn around and heist out of there—if they’re smart.

I saw wolf tracks, too—tracks of a big lobo that I’d guess would weigh a hundred and fifty pounds … and few get that big. There was lots of deer, elk, and antelope too.

We rode up the Hanging Woman to Trail Creek, and then turned east toward the Otter. We found the trail of a travois … the two trailing poles on which Indians load their gear to drag it behind a horse or a dog … and a small party of Indians—two men and several squaws and youngsters. They were riding west toward the Big Horns. One of the horse tracks looked like something I’d seen before, but I couldn’t place it.

It was long after dark when we got back to the cabin, and we came up on it mighty slow and careful, but everything was as we’d left it. After I’d fed the stock in the corrals, I scouted around a bit.

Not that I was looking for anything special. I just wanted to get the feel of the place after nightfall.
Everything has a way of looking different at night, so I walked around sizing up the layout from all angles, studying the outlines of things against the sky, testing the night smells.

Something about those smells worried me. There was the smell of the pines, of the creek down below, of the horses in the corral, of smoke from the house, of fresh-cut wood … but there was another faint, hardly noticeable smell. Whatever it was brought a feeling of loneliness almost of homesickness, and that I couldn’t figure. I’d had no home in so many years that I—

Eddie stuck his head out of the door. “Come and get it,” he said, “before I throw it away.”

Whatever that smell was, it was like a flower, like some sort of flower had just opened up. And that didn’t make sense at this time of year.

F
OR THE NEXT five days we had no time to think of anything or anybody. We worked the country west toward the Rosebud, and north as far as the Muddy and Skully Creek, most of the time just starting cattle drifting back to the south and our line camp. It was early for snow, but in Montana a man never could be sure, so we made a quick, scattering sweep across the country to begin, with a view to making a more careful search later if time allowed.

Eddie Holt was a rider, no question about that, and he was a fair hand with a rope, so it took him no time at all to get the hang of it. Of course, knowing cattle comes with experience, and no man is going to
get that overnight, but I told him what I could, and the rest he’d have to learn.

The stock was in good shape, although it could stand culling. Some of the young stuff and cows carrying calves we started back toward the Hanging Woman, but we found no tracks that day except the tracks of cattle or wild life.

Along in the late afternoon we pulled up on a ridge near the head of Wolf Creek, and looked down the valley of the Tongue.

“It’s a fair land,” Eddie said softly, “a fair, wild land.”

“It is that,” I agreed.

The bright glare was gone, the shadows softening the distance, and the coolness of evening was coming on. Far off an eagle soared against the sky … soon he’d be going in, leaving the sky to the owls and the bats. I saw a gray wolf sloping along through the trees, head down, nose reaching out for the scent of game.

We sat motionless and not talking, just taking in the peace of eveningtime. Finally Eddie said, “It was no wonder they fought for it.”

“Yeah,” I said, “and they
fought
, too. Not many could beat a Sioux or a Cheyenne when it came right down to fighting.”

We turned our horses off the rise and headed back toward home.

“Out here,” Eddie said, “a man gets away from it all. I mean, out here he’s really free.”

“Fewer things to bother,” I said, “and fewer folks to bother you with them. But a man can’t get away.
You can run away, but you can’t hide. Things catch up with a man.”

Yet what he said worried at my mind. Was that why I was here? Was I running from something? But I’d nothing to run from. I wasn’t sore at anybody … even when I fought, I fought just for the hell of it, the way some men watch horse races or prize fights, or maybe pitch horseshoes. I just plain liked to fight, with no angry thoughts toward anybody … unless a man tried to use me mean. Funny thing … I had a whale of a temper, but I couldn’t remember when I’d been mad during a fight. They just didn’t affect me that way.

Maybe what I was avoiding was the need to try and better myself. That had never seemed so all-fired important. I’d heard a lot of talk about success, but I’d never seen a successful man—what folks called successful—who was happier than me, if as happy.

Eddie had a way of starting me to thinking. Like when he said I should have a place of my own. Well, he was right. I should have such a place.

I had cow savvy. I new range conditions, and had learned a lot from the men I worked for … and some of them could have learned a lot from me.

Bulls, now. A man in the cow business needed good bulls, and they would be finding it out soon. If a man had good bulls he had no cause to worry about his stock. It was time, these days, to start breeding for beef, not to think so much of owning so many head, but of owning good fat stock and good breeding stock. The old days on the range were gone, a man needed less range now, but he needed to care for it, needed to balance his grazing.

But where would I get the money for my own place? Or get the kind of bulls I knew were needed? A man could homestead, but that didn’t provide enough range to graze stock. He could homestead a good creek or water hole, and use public range—until folks crowded too close.

It was thoughts like these that were in my mind as we rode back, but a rifle shot broke in upon them.

There’s a lonesome sound to a rifle shot in the evening. It sounds, then sort of echoes away, and dies off somewhere against the hills.

We both drew up and sat there, listening to it dying out.

“That was close by,” Eddie said.

“They weren’t shooting at us, neither,” I said.

No answering shot came.

We sat listening for a minute or two, and then we started down the hills, riding slowly, for we didn’t know what might lay before us.

It might have been some Indian hunter killing a deer. I said that, and Eddie agreed, but neither of us believed it. From that moment I think we were sure of what had happened. Somebody, though we didn’t know who, had been killed.

And that somebody had been shot from ambush.

Reaching down, I slicked my Winchester from its scabbard; and Eddie, after a moment, did the same. We spread out a little, too, riding carefully down the slope among the trees, ready for what might await us.

During the last few days I’d felt a change taking place within myself. Not that it was unfamiliar, for I’d experienced it once before, a long time ago, and
I knew it was something that happens to men—perhaps not to all men—when danger impends.

My whole make-up, all my senses, every part of me was becoming more alert, more watchful … and more careful. Where before I might have hurried, might have brushed by a lot of things, now I was listening, I was watching, and every bit of me was wary of danger.

Part of it was the warnings from Justin, from Charley Brown back in Miles City, and from Chin Baker at the line camp. But it was more than that.

What alerted me, what changed me, and well I knew it, was a real feeling of death and danger in the air. I was never the contemplative type. I knew how to ride, rope, and shoot a rifle, and a few other things a man has to know to get along, but of course any man out alone in the world—a rider, a seaman, a fisherman, folks of that sort—any one of them is likely to become thoughtful. And sometimes I’ve wondered if danger doesn’t actually have an almost physical effect on the atmosphere.

I’ve little to explain such an idea. I’m a man with few words, and most of those picked up in reading whatever came to hand, but it seems to me it is true. There’s times when the air seems to fairly prickle with danger. This here was one of those times.

The ridges around were thick with pines, but only a few dotted the long slope toward the bottom of the valley. The descent was gradual, and only a couple of hundred feet in all.

The pines were black now except on the far side where the last of the sun was tipping them with fire.
The valley grass was taller, moving a mite in the wind, but everything else was still, and we rode in silence.