Cloudmaker

by Malcolm Brooks

  A newspaperman happened to be in the area, reporting on the ongoing dustup between nesters and the established open-range cattle spreads. Roy proved enough of a distraction to merit an interview. His story and sketch made the Denver daily. Afterward, more often than not, the ladies in the ranch yards acted as though they’d actually been expecting him. Some kissed his cheeks upon arrival.

  He missed his father and thought a lot about him, had a lot of time to think about him, riding day after day with the big empty Sharps balanced across the horse. Roy’s mother did not long survive his birth, and his father had spoken of her often and with fondness, and of an evening now Roy would unwrap the gilt-framed wedding picture of the pair of them and study it. As with the Dixons, his father was a good bit the senior of the two.

  For the first time in his life he felt the weight of responsibility. Pa clearly never blamed him, though, never raised a hand or uttered an unkind word. But in the wedding portrait her hand lay upon his shoulder, and despite the formality of the pose, Roy had to consider that his old man looked happy.

  He rode up through Johnson County, Wyoming, into a town actually named Buffalo. Four years earlier an entire army of Texas mercenaries had descended on the place at the behest of powerful cattle interests, killing a number of homesteaders and igniting an all-out war. Roy recalled the episode well, as it had made national headlines. Tensions clearly still ran high.

  For weeks he’d seen nothing but cattle and sheep, and the occasional skittish band of pronghorn. Despite the namesake of this particular hamlet, no one had seen an actual live buffalo anywhere close in twelve or maybe fifteen years. An outfit from the Smithsonian Institution in the East had a hell of a time finding any for a taxidermy exhibit, and that was ten years ago already.

  There remained, however, at least a couple of dozen in the Yellowstone interior, as more than one local had actually witnessed. They told him he could book passage for himself and the horses on the new rail line out of Sheridan, thirty miles to the north, then catch a transfer to Livingston, Montana, and take the tourist train into the park. He could be at Fort Yellowstone by Wednesday. A few of them asked how he stood for money, offered to help with fare for the horses. He declined. Nobody treated him like a fool.

  In the end he did not catch the train in Sheridan but rode instead along the tracks north into Montana and then west to Livingston and beyond, this last through river-bottom ranchland in the lee of the most spectacular sawtooth cordillera he could imagine. Eight days after departing Buffalo, he rode down the tourist stage road and up the Gardner River to the fort.

  To his surprise and even disappointment, the installation was not a classically barricaded frontier outpost but rather a stately collection of wood-frame cottages and groomed grounds. He caught a tinge of sulfur on the warm air and spied curls of smoke along the bluff in the distance, and wondered despite the absence of audible gunfire whether he’d just missed regimental rifle practice.

  The two soldiers manning the guardhouse at the fort’s entry hardly knew what to make of him. In addition to the birthday gauntlets, he’d by now acquired from others along the way an entire outfit of castoff and hand-me-down regalia, including a fringed buckskin jacket and two-toned duck saddle trousers tucked at the moment to the inside of his boots. He looked like a dime-novel scout from the seventies, in miniature. And while the guardsmen were accustomed to checking visitors’ guns as a matter of course, this particular visitor with this particular piece of hardware was plainly a new one.

  “Well, dang it all, General Thumb,” said the taller of the pair, a real podunk despite his natty forager’s cap and smart blue tunic. His apple bulged in his throat like a frog in a bull snake. “That thing looks to be taller’n you are. Best hand ’er on down.”

  Roy sat his horse and kept Juno at rest. “What all you aim to do with her?”

  “Well, we got two choices. Check ’er here at the fort fer the duration of the sightseein’, or we can seal the trigger now ’til yer leaves for home. Depends on the itinerary.”

  “Seal her with what?”

  “A big ol’ fat gob of wax is just about exactly what.” He eyed the horses, the bedroll tied behind the cantle, and the minimal camping equipment lashed to the sawbuck on Pa’s black. He frowned. “Whereabouts is home, exactly? You ride up the valley from Living­ston or something?”

  “No, from Rainbow.”

  He looked at his partner, who shrugged. “Ain’t heard of it, but I only been here two months. How fur a piece is it?”

  Roy puzzled a moment. “Don’t really know, milewise. It’s down near the Brazos. In Texas.”

  Again it was their turn for puzzlement. Finally the shorter of the two spoke up, and Roy felt something not unlike the breath of a ghost at the nape of his neck. “Air we to ken ye correct, laddie? Ye clip-clopped all the way fro’ the state o’ Texas?”

  Roy nodded. After a bit of a search he found his voice. “Ain’t taken so long as I expected, neither. This here’s what, August?”

  They nodded too, all three of them, nodding as though they could at least agree on the month and the feat, and maybe those were enough. The tall one looked again to his fellow. “Reckon that would beat pedalin’ here on them dern bicycles—I wouldn’t trade places with them boys fer love or money.”

  “Air’ whiskey,” said the other.

  As it turned out, his unusual arrival coincided with another, equally notable event a day or so earlier. An experimental Army bicycle unit had rolled in from a fort somewhere farther west, after covering something like three hundred miles in a matter of days. Arduous ones, too, to hear these two tell it, with rain and mud and mechanical breakdowns galore.

  Roy was keen with interest. He and one other boy back home had their own bicycles, bought off a wizened old traveling peddler who’d himself acquired them on trade and seemed to regard them as mere novelty, if not an outright insult to the Texas character. He practically gave them away, even while letting them know he wasn’t at all sure he was doing the boys’ moral backbone any favors.

  But still, so long as there were decent roads to follow, the bicycles were almost unimaginably liberating. They were up-to-date safety models, with wheels of a uniform size and a chain drive to the rear. Roy and his buddy could be miles out of town in a matter of minutes, setting trotlines on the Brazos or potting squirrels out of a pecan grove with a gallery rifle. No saddling horses, no leisurely pace to and fro. Just on and away, fast as the legs could pump, fishing rod or rifle strapped to the handlebars.

  Then again, had he set out on that novel contraption instead of his trusty gray, he doubted he’d have made fifty miles before the chain broke or a tire burst. Rather than sitting his horse here in Mammoth, Montana, he might even now be gritting his teeth in the tedium of an orphanage.

  By this point the soldiers had coaxed out his mission, and they remarked on something at least as curious as the mere fact of bicycling soldiers.

  “Beats all to Christmas you done made yer ride tryin’ for some sorter truce with these buffs up here,” Podunk told him, “only to show right about the time this particular unit rolls in.”

  Roy failed to see the connection.

  “These fellers is Twenty-Fifth Infantry. Buffalo soldiers.”

  So nominated by the tribes, back about the time Pa plunked down the shekels for the Big Fifty. Roy knew of some colored cavalrymen down in Texas, but he never had yet witnessed any such himself. He still couldn’t quite see a clear pattern between his own paladin’s quest and this revelation, but something did indeed seem spooky about the timing. Pa always had a superstition about such things, a more than faint conviction that the world possessed mysteries wholly beyond any sphere of logic or chance.

  “Well,” he said, “I reckon that is a deuce of a thing.”

  A day later he rode with both rifles sealed out of the fort and east down the tourist road to the Lamar Valley, whe
re a group of bison had been summering. He was already agog at the spectacles encountered at the fort, mainly around the vaporous hot pools and otherworldly mineral formations on the slope.

  What he’d taken for gun smoke upon arrival turned out to be the steam of thermal cauldrons, bubbling and flowing out of rifts and pores in earth and stone. Weird water flowed and pooled in hues and shades he could not have predicted, blues like some inexplicable hot ice and greens deep as jewels, oranges and reds run together like blood through the yolk of an egg. And those oddly formed crystal terraces all around, like cataracts transmogrified into stone steps up into heaven. Or maybe down into hell, with its own steaming sulfur.

  Out on the tourist road he began to see animals. Dappled elk in small bands back in the shade of the trees, deer flaring out of the creek bottom with their tails flashing. A badger shimmied through the grass, stopping to look back at him at the edge of a stand of white-barked trees. He knew there were bears about and thought ruefully of the seal on the .32-20, hardly a realistic concern, as that particular rifle qualified more as a peashooter than reasonable bear medicine.

  He camped for the night at another Army station and stage stop, taking his meal in the mess for two bits and talking shyly with a pair of English girls on tour with their well-to-do parents. The soldiers at the guardhouse checked again the seals on his arms, made a notation in their ledger.

  In the morning he rode out again ahead of the tourist stage and within two hours came into the broad valley, a bowl of deep grass with dots of pale sage stretching off to the north and then rising into rolling foothills and rising again into a formidable mountain wall, steep slopes purple with pines.

  He topped a swell in the land and sat his horse over this view, so taken with the panorama he failed at first to spy the object of his long quest not seventy yards off in the river bottom. Then his little gray shied and jumped at the snootful she took on the breeze, and Pa’s normally unflappable black started to pull and shy, too. Roy nearly lost Juno off the saddle in the same instant the big brutes became manifest within his astonished mind.

  Four of them bedded in the grass, plus one gangly calf already on its feet. Its mother rose, too, looking squarely at him with eyes that appeared at once dully disinterested and utterly menacing within the broad hulk of her skull. The great hump atop her spine jutted like its own unassailable wall, akin to the permanent mountain behind her.

  Finally he goaded his rubber arms to move, reined the gray’s head around, and heeled the horse back over the rise and down below the line of sight. The horses had gone nervy as deer, and he felt his hands both wet and weak on the precarious Sharps and the slippery braided reins.

  He tied the horses off at the nearest grove of trees, a little better than shouting distance back up the road. He contemplated loosening the cinches, then thought better of it. If another of those imposing beasts showed up and spooked them, the last thing he needed was saddle or sawbuck swinging under their panicked bellies.

  He was suddenly uncertain what his plan should be exactly. He’d come all this way with no other thing in mind, and now here he was. He took the big empty Sharps and started back for the rise, and he’d barely moved ten steps before the horses began to stir and snort once more. He turned with his knees going weak all over again.

  He anticipated another jarringly close-in bison encounter but saw nothing. The horses craned their heads back down the road, ears trained forward, and after a moment Roy heard it, too. A metallic clatter, not exactly what he would describe as mechanical but certainly not the sound of a horse-drawn coach or wagon. He tried to put his finger on it as the din drew nearer.

  The bicycles emerged where the road wound back through the trees, two at first and then four more in loose formation and finally nine in total, their blue-bloused and campaign-hatted riders coasting and then pedaling and coasting again on the level grade. Bouncing a bit over the hardpan, too, their gear-laden cycles raucous with the jolts.

  The horses got even jumpier as the soldiers approached, and Roy found himself moving toward the animals and whoaing them with his voice. The lead rider lifted a hand at the sight of him and began to slow. The unit wheeled to a stop and dismounted up the road a spell. Roy steadied the horses.

  The lone white rider left his bike and approached on foot. He had a holstered revolver at his waist, while several of the others were armed with rifles. The horses calmed a bit with the clatter down.

  “You must be the Texican,” he said. “We heard about you at the fort yesterday.”

  Roy nodded.

  The soldier patted Pa’s black, introduced himself as Lieutenant Moss. He eyed Juno, at parade rest with the butt in the dirt and Roy’s grip on the barrel. “They tell me you rode all this way to get a look at a buffalo.”

  Roy nodded again.

  “You and me both, sir.” The lieutenant looked out across the valley, scanning the broad reaches to the slope of the foothills. He looked back to the boy, then down to the great rifle. He gave a gentle smile. “Guess you brought the right hardware for it, too. Twenty years late, of course.”

  Roy looked him dead in the eye. “I don’t intend to shoot any.”

  Still with that smile. “No, I didn’t gather. They even make shells for that cannon anymore?”

  “Not that I know of.” Roy took in the scenery himself, thought how odd it was that there were in fact three or four tons of heavily muscled bison alive and dangerous on the hoof not two hundred yards away, if totally invisible from this vantage.

  “Beginning to wonder if we’re going to see any at all at this point,” Moss told him.

  Roy turned his head back from the view. “I can show you some right now.”

  Five minutes later he and Moss and the entire retinue of soldiers crawled up over the rise and peered down on the unsuspecting beasts. All except one were on their feet now, the last kicking and rolling nearly onto its great back in a wild churn of earth. Finally it stood, too, loose dirt coloring its flank like cinnamon on a cake. Roy saw flies buzzing around the lot of them.

  “Ain’t it something,” breathed the soldier to Roy’s right. He looked over and grinned. “Just ain’t none left, and now here we are. Ain’t it something.”

  They stayed low on the rise, and the bison did not appear to be aware of them. Roy watched and kept his hand on the sun-warmed gun barrel. He imagined what it must have been like for his father to settle into a position like this and unleash the unified forces of chemistry and lead and rifled steel upon hide and muscle and bone. He wondered if the animals would flee at the first shot or dimly hear only thunder, dimly cast their eyes on the first to fall, then the second, and so on. He wondered if any would run before none were able to any longer. For a long time he watched with the others and simply wondered.

  Later he took lunch with the men back by the horses, watched the designated mechanic make minor services and repairs to the bicycles. He tightened chains, replaced a tire. His name was Findley. He kept his tools in a hard-sided metal box mounted ahead of his handlebars.

  He told Roy that he used to work in a bicycle factory in Chicago and that the devices were all the rage in the East. Even the ladies were climbing aboard and whizzing away, ditching their cumbersome bustles and dresses for knee socks and trim split bloomers. He said the bicycle was the way of the future. Even the Army seemed to think so.

  The soldiers’ rifles spoke to the future as well. Roy had read about the newer European arms designs in Forest and Stream, which Pa had delivered to the house. Patents by German or Austrian makers that relied on curious turn-bolt actions and newfangled smokeless gunpowder similar to what the very latest Winchesters used.

  “These rifles is Krags,” Findley informed him. He pincered a shell out of a cartridge belt and handed it over. It had the same sleek bottleneck shape as the new Winchester rounds, the same small-­diameter projectile. “From Denmark. Or they pattern is, anyway.
”

  He called for one of the others to unlimber a rifle and trot it over. Findley thumbed open the curious hinged magazine on the side of the receiver, spilled the shells into his hand. He opened the action and handed the rifle to the boy.

  Roy worked the bolt a few times, studied the way it and the receiver fit and functioned in slick unison, the one sliding into the other with no more friction than a bead of water down a windowpane. “So this front hub here locks it into battery? When you turn the bolt down?”

  Findley nodded. “Called a lug, though. Not a hub.”

  Roy eyed again the unusual stepped cartridge with its long projectile, considered the degree of technical sophistication required to mirror that shape with reamer and die inside the Krag’s chamber. Sixty years ago they were still igniting patched-ball long rifles with a hunk of flint clamped into the lock. This high-toned contraption left even the advancements of the Sharps cross-eyed in the dust.

  “There sure enough no smoke when these things go off?”

  Findley, for his part, had taken up Juno, studying the workings of the ladder sight mounted to the tang. “Barely any. Modern miracle. Smell ain’t the same, sound ain’t the same—more a crack than a hard boom. Like lightnin’ smackin’ a tree. Or lake ice comin’ apart. You know ’at sound?”

  Roy shook his head. “I know about ice-skating. Never seen a lake you could do it on, though. Shoot, I only seen snow once or twice, other than what’s up on the mountains while I been traveling.”

  Findley slid the notch to the top of the ladder, put the Sharps to his shoulder at that extreme cant. “They flat-shootin’, too, next to this ol’ boss—reach out three, four hundred yards, with hardly no lift. My, this thing’s a brute.”

  He lowered the Big Fifty and snapped the tang sight down, turned her over and traced the dish in the forearm. “You keep her ’crost the saddle, all ’at way?”

  Roy nodded. “Every step. How my pa used to pack her, too. The wear was already pretty far along.” He opened the bolt again on the Krag, felt again the smooth stroke of machined steel. Silk thread through a needle’s eye.