Authors: Ron Carlson
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Married people, #Literary, #Western Stories, #Westerns, #Marriage, #Ranchers, #Wyoming, #Ranchers' spouses
The Signal (2 page)
Plus, his father had spoken to him after the third summer. It was obvious the way the kids hung out by the rail fence when Mack was shoeing a horse or working the tack. They’d follow him around, the boys and the girls, and they wanted to know about him.
His father called him into the big house and they sat in the small front office that Sawyer Day used the two days a week he came out to do books, and his father swiveled the oak chair to Mack and they talked. The room was cloistered by the varnished pine shelves full of books, his father’s collection of Zane Grey and Jack London and western history and a beaten tin umbrella stand full of rolled maps.
“These kids look up to you,” his father said.
“I don’t know,” Mack said. He sat on the dark leather hassock, orphaned from its long-lost chair.
“Yes you do. They should look up to you. You’re a good hand; they’re not used to this. All they’ve got is their car and the junior prom. You’re an exotic item, Mack.”
“Okay,” the boy said.
“But what we are to these people is a sort of cliché. They come out here to taste this and it’s good for all of us. But these girls, some of them, are going to fall for you, you big strong cowboy.” His father tapped Mack’s knee with his two fingers. “Come on, you can look at me. I know you’re a good kid. Some of these gals from New York even come after your old man, a little fling out west for a week. You want to be a cliché?”
“No sir,” Mack said. “I don’t.”
“You need me to recount the history of Sheridan the race-horse?”
“No sir, please.”
His father smiled. “Have you recovered from that lesson?” He’d taken the boy to witness their only Thoroughbred, Sheridan, at stud when Mack was nine years old.
“No sir,” Mack said truly. “No one could.” Mack went on and repeated what his father had said that day, “That’s enough of the birds and bees for one boy.”
“Well, good,” his father said. “We won’t be clichés then. That’s all. I expect you know what to do. Talk the day with these kids and riding and horses and weather, and then send them back to supper. Don’t walk with them or have them out near the bunkhouse. My eyes are right here. I know you know what to do. I don’t want this business venture we’re in to hurt you, boy. I love you and I love this place. Do you know it?”
“Yes sir, I do.”
“Show me your hands.” Mack leaned and held his hands out and then turned them over. They’d always done this: a show of hands. His father looked him over: nails, cuticles, knuckles, palms. You could tell a good ranch hand by the number of nicks—the fewer, the better the ranch hand, and as the years passed, Mack’s hands cleared up. His father squeezed his hands now and said, “That’s enough of that. Quite a talk for the old homestead. You go, get to work.”
And he did the work on the long day ranch schedule. On Thursday nights he ran the one late-night campfire, all those chocolate crackers and then the spooky story. He had started it when he was thirteen, the story he’d heard part of from his own dad about Hiram, brokenhearted and half mad, who still roamed the woods near here, living in rotten logs and following campers in his search for a beating heart. At night when the fishermen’s campfires would shrink down to wavering coals, Hiram would sneak into the camps and reach into the tents and put his head against the campers’ chests to try to hear again the thumping of a heart. His own had stopped so long ago. Mack would let the big ranch fire dwindle and collapse and lower his voice as he told the episodes. Hiram’s heart had been broken by his own true love when one night he came calling and saw her through the lighted window in the arms of another man.
“A fisherman?” some kid would ask.
“Not much of one,” Mack would say, “but maybe. And Hiram turned and fled that place and went into the woods, these woods, forever.”
Half of the kids would already be in their pajamas and robes, sitting legs up and arms folded in the canvas camp chairs, listening. They’d all heard of Hiram from last week or from last summer, and his legend was part of the Box Creek Ranch lore now. Mack would hold out his hand like a claw and say how Hiram only wanted human contact. “His loneliness was larger than Wyoming. He only wanted then to hear a beating heart. But he was misunderstood and called a cannibal, though there was never any proof of that.”
“I think he was a cannibal,” some boy would say. “He ate the campers and cooked them over the fire. They never came back.”
Mack would let this remark hang in the air. “He’s out there,” Mack would say, indicating the circle of darkness around them all. “And now we know for sure he’s misunderstood.”
If the children got too frightened, which was why they came every week, Mack would back up and tell about Hiram’s younger days working with wild geese and his travels in the cities which did not agree with him. Then as the hour turned, Mack would stand and stir the fire pit and as the cinders schooled up red, he would say, “Hiram listens for a beating heart. Can you hear your beating heart?” The night would glow with silence and the popping of the fire. “Now scoot. We’re going to ride horses tomorrow, and I don’t want you falling asleep.”
It was a favorite time for him, watching the young people scurry back to the cabins’ lit porches. They tried not to run, but they sometimes ran. It was his first love, the ranch, and he loved it night and day.
Then came his second.
The year he was seventeen, Mack took the weekly ridge ride with all the kids, nine riders winding up the line shack trail to the aspen draws that led to the mountaintop. He rode his horse Copper Bob, the captain. There were two old log cabins along the way, slumped and fallen in, new trees thrusting through the collapsed roof beams. They always stopped and took stagey pictures with the young people pretending to knock at the doorway or looking out the ancient window frames. Sometimes they dug around for old cans or bottles, and they made up stories about the lonely men who lived here, how they had a dog or played cards all winter. One of the young riders would always say, Maybe this is where Hiram lived, and Mack would explain that he never slept in the same place twice. He was always wandering and without a home.
The cabins always sobered Mack, because he knew how hard such lives would have been. Over the years he’d found and kept purple medicine bottles and boot buckles from the old places. Vonnie was a good rider and Rusty knew her, and they liked to lead the train through the gloomy treeshade. The horses stepped quietly up the grassy slopes, past the wildflowers, along the faint trail they’d walked a hundred times, their tails swishing silently timed to the gait. Mack watched the girl float in her saddle at the top of the easy parade. This was the golden center of Mack’s life, all these fine animals geared right and taking the bobbing children up every step farther from home than they had ever been.
Mack saw a shadow in the hillside and knew what it was in a second; he sat up and snugged his reins from where he rode behind the children. When the bear sat up in the tall June grass at the top of the draw, Mack thought he saw him rub his eyes like a man might in disbelief. It was a luxurious black bear and he didn’t stand or look alarmed. He sat and looked into the face of the first horse. Mack had known moments like this and usually something happened very fast as the surprises doubled. Rusty stopped short without rearing, but Vonnie went over the front of her saddle and fell. Mack felt something open in him. All the horses stopped, veterans. Mack knew that when Rusty turned riderless, all the horses would turn and start stepping down. He loved it that they knew not to run. They never ran even on the last flat stretch near the ranch yard, even when the tourists urged them with their heels or reins or any cowboy moves they had seen in films for years on end.
Mack was moving; he clucked and Copper Bob eyed the bear and still approached. Vonnie was down and Mack had to get down and lift her with an arm and lead the horse to turn away. The bear hadn’t moved, watching the performance. At twenty paces Mack boosted the girl up into his saddle and walked surely down behind the children’s cavalcade which was now headed inexorably toward the ranch, two miles below. Those who had been at the rear and hadn’t seen the bear would be astonished and envious as they heard the story, but by supper they would have their own tales of the close call and the huge beast. As they passed below the cabin shambles and onto the open hillside, Mack whistled and Rusty stopped and the line of riders stopped.
“Are you okay?” Mack said.
“It was a bear,” Vonnie said. She was lit. They reached her horse and Mack helped her down.
“Let’s see.” She had skinned her wrist, and she pulled out her shirt and showed him where her waist was bruised, her belt full of dirt and grass.
“I’m okay. Can we go back and get a picture?” Everybody had a camera.
“Not today,” he said. “That bear doesn’t want his picture taken today.” He still had her arm and turned her in examination.
“Did he attack?” one of the kids said.
“No,” Mack said. “He was sleeping and we woke him up.”
“Hibernating,” one of the kids said.
“Not yet,” Mack said. “Let’s go down.” He held Rusty while Vonnie mounted. She was turned looking back up at the hill.
“That bear was hibernating. Bears hibernate,” the expert offered again.
“Go go,” Mack called and the line of horses and riders began the walk home.
It was the next morning that Mack had a problem. He woke to a face in his window: Copper Bob, and he pulled on his Levi’s and boots and stepped onto the porch to find the dozen ranch horses all standing in the bunkhouse dooryard. Above, he could see the corral gate open. With his boots unlaced and his shirt unbuttoned, he walked up there clucking for Copper Bob who led the others back into the enclosure. By the time he closed the rail gate, Mack knew that Rusty was gone. He saddled Copper Bob and rode over to the main house. Amarantha was in the kitchen and the whole place smelled like batter, her blueberry pancakes.
“Can you do the Dutch oven today?” he asked her. “I’ve got to go find a horse.”
“We can do that, Mack.” She had six cast-iron ovens and cooked with the young people a day or two every week over the fire pit behind the house.
“Save me some pancakes,” he said.
He knew what it was and trotted Copper Bob up the ranching road and into the trees, past the cabins. The dew was disturbed all the way, and he slowed in the aspen draw and saw where she had ridden up through and over the top. A bear chaser.
Above, he came out of the trees and ascended the ridgeline. There was a game trail that traced the spine of the broad hill and led to the mountains ahead. “Goddamnit,” he said and followed it up. He could see Rusty’s shoeprints in the clay trail periodically and horse manure as the trail dipped and rose again now into the pines. He was also looking for bear sign and there was none.
In the old days this was where the first ranchers had baited bear with horse carcasses, walking an old horse up to the top and then shooting it right at the wall of trees, someplace they could watch from across the canyon. Eighty years ago these pioneers had picnicked and waited with their rifles. There were still old constellations of horse skeletons drifting down a slope here and there. All the way to the horizon west and south was federal land and always had been, open to hunting in season. At the end of every summer Mack took four or five of the experienced riders out through the federal land and into the national forest, deadheading sometimes, learning the country. He liked being out beyond what he knew. Every year they came across butchered elk, chainsawed by poachers, the head and hindquarters taken months before the season. He hated these things, and he banked his hatred for such characters. He marked their trails when he could, but nothing came of his research.
One year his father had gone off two days with four rangers and the civil patrol raiding a poacher’s camp, and when his father returned, he unloaded his horse from the trailer and put away the tack without speaking. Mack wanted to know what had happened, but his father’s face told him not to ask. He later found out one of the men, a teamster from Hammond, had tried for his rifle and been shot dead.
Now Mack was in the pines, the trail narrow at points and moist, and still he saw where Rusty had tracked. He spent an hour like that in and out of the trees, breaking into the sage day, the hundred-mile vistas and then again into the green dark. “Goddamn girl,” he said. At the saddle near the summit, he stopped and whistled three times, the way he could, the sharpest loudest noise a human can make. Nothing. A little ahead he saw where Rusty had left the trail and begun to descend the far slope. Oh shit shit shit. It was noon, the day was gone. He should have brought the walkie-talkies, his rifle, a lunch. “Girl,” he called. “Rusty,” he called. She was off the trail now, sidehilling the sage to who knew where. The way was steep and there were shale outcroppings. At least it was clear and sunny, but the day was gone. They’d never lost a girl before. They’d had blisters and splinters and hangovers and one broken arm when a boy fell off the corral fence, but no one had been lost. No one had perished. On the shady side of the mountain fourteen bighorn sheep ascended in bursts up the sandy mountainside, tame as barngoats, and obliterated the girl’s trail. He rode out looking for the tracks and could not find them. She either went up or down and now it was three o’clock. To hell with you. Mack knew that Rusty would know when the sun hit four to head for home. If she was still aboard. To hell with you and your camera, lady. This far from the ranch there were three or four ways back, and Mack climbed up and over the summit and then just guessed the stream trail and struck for that, a mile and a half east. It was warm in the sun and fresh in the shadows, climbing down. He was deadheading it, but he had been gifted with directional skill that even his father remarked on. He hit the Box Creek and watered Copper Bob and then led him by the reins up to the log bridge he had built with his father ten years before, when he was seven. His father taught him the chainsaw and let him run it, bucking the thin logs into five-foot lengths for the flooring. All that green wood was now dried slate gray and appeared an artifact of the frontier.
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