by Gary Paulsen
When he was done he cleaned the crumbs and dumped them in a small cardboard box he used for a wastebasket and started back out of the room but stopped and looked at the poster on the wall.
There were four pictures of his great-grandfather made during his entire life—that’s all. Four. And John had made blowups of them and had a photographic studio in Cheyenne make a large poster with the four pictures on it, and he could not come into the room without stopping to look at them.
It was like looking at himself.
The resemblance was more than striking—it was uncanny. Even John’s father noted it. At the same studio in Cheyenne—more as a joke than anything else—John had ordered an old-time photograph of himself, done with a floppy old cowboy hat and a broken Winchester the photographer had there for props. The picture was shot in black and white with a slightly fuzzy focus and he had taped it on the wall next to the poster.
It looked exactly the same. The same slight droop to the left eyelid, the same straight nose, the same set to the shoulders and eyes that looked dead out into the camera. He could have put it in any of the pictures on the poster and it would have fit perfectly except that his great-grandfather had been older in the pictures and had some marks of age—weathered lines in his face and scruffier, torn clothes.
And the gun.
In every picture he was wearing a gun, an old Colt single-action .45-caliber with smooth wooden grips in a worn, oiled cartridge belt and holster. John did not carry a gun but he had seen the gun owned by his great-grandfather. John’s father had it in a wooden box, along with the old man’s chaps—scarred and ripped—and a pair of his work gloves. They had the ends of the fingers cut off so he could feel the rope or use the gun easily.
It was heavy, the gun, and it didn’t look heavy in any of the pictures. John had picked it up, hefted it, aimed it and it must have weighed close to four pounds, maybe five with the cartridge belt full of shells and the holster. Five pounds on one hip his whole life and yet except to go to bed he was said never to take it off and when he finally grew so old—he made ninety-two, if the records were accurate—that they had to put him in a nursing home he took the gun with him. And kept it. They were nervous about it in the home and removed the firing pin but he kept the gun and it was hanging next to his head the night he died in 1954.
John had studied the poster so long he’d memorized everything on it and yet he stopped every time he came into the room and looked at it and wondered what it would have been like if he had lived then and somehow had known the old man when he was young and had only the gun and two horses and all that land before the eastern corporations took it.…
He shook his head and left the room. There was work to do still and he put his hat on and went outside, was walking across the open space leading to the barn when he saw the dust.
From the yard and house area, which was on a slight rise, it was possible to see the mile and a half to the main road—it was low, rolling hills of grass with small rocky outcroppings—and he saw that a vehicle had turned off the main road and was coming toward the ranch. It left a plume of dust and for a moment he couldn’t recognize it. Then it crested a rise and he saw the dark blue of the ranch pickup.
“They’re coming back early,” Cawley called. He’d seen the dust as well and was leaning on the rail of the corral. “I’ll bet he didn’t get the plugs and belt.…”
John shrugged. “I don’t know.” It was strange for his father to come back early. The trip to town took close to an hour and a half, one way, and he didn’t like to waste it. Usually he did it once and stayed all day rather than have to make another trip soon.
He watched the truck and when it was still over a quarter-mile away he saw that his father was alone.
“Where’s Tink?” Cawley asked. “Your old man is alone.”
John said nothing but stood and waited while his father drove into the yard and stopped the truck next to him. Cawley had come from the corral and the dust cloud that followed the truck settled over them.
John’s father stepped from the truck.
“Where’s Tink?” Cawley asked.
John’s father spit and looked past the barn to the lambing pens but he wasn’t seeing anything. They were empty—all the sheep and lambs were off on the west side of the ranch in a four-hundred-acre pasture. Being held so they could be more easily started on the drive to the mountains.
“Tink’s not coming back,” he said after a moment.
“Not coming back?” John asked. “Why?”
“He’s got a cancer. They’ve got to do more tests on him but the doc told me he thought it was all through him and the tests would just confirm it.” He was still looking at the lambing pens, as if something very important were out there. “I’ve got to go back. They’re going to try some different ways to fix it and I should be there. It don’t look so good.”
“Damn.” Cawley rubbed his neck. “Old Tink … damn.”
“I don’t know how long I’ll be. I’ll stay with him until … well, until it doesn’t matter. The doc says if the therapy doesn’t work it will go fast but it might be two weeks or a month or even longer before it ends. I can come home now and again but I should be there as much as I can.”
“But what about the drive up to the haymeadow?” Cawley asked. John was thinking about Tinckner. How he did things—the way he looked putting snoose in his lower lip. The way he smiled. Gone.
“Tink worked here man and boy,” John’s father said. “He worked with my father, John’s grandfather, and knew his great-grandfather. We’re his family and I can’t let him rot alone.”
Rot, John thought—he was going to rot. Old Tink. God.
“I know,” Cawley said. “I wasn’t arguing with you. I just meant what about it?”
“You and the boy.” John’s father looked at him. “You and John take them up—you can do it. Then you come back down and John stays with the sheep.”
“Me?” John said. “Alone?”
“No. You’ll have the dogs.”
Yes, John thought, and the sheep and the mountains and the coyotes and the bears and and and. “I don’t know what to do—how to do it.” He wouldn’t do it, he thought—not the old man. It slipped in. A quick thought.
“There’s nothing to know. You take the dogs and you take care of the sheep. I did it when I was fifteen and you can do it. Cawley has to be here to run the ranch—the folks from back east are coming and we have to be ready for them—and I have to spend time with Tink.”
“I’ll take him up there,” Cawley said. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll talk as we go and he’ll be fine—hell, you were, weren’t you? He’s as good as you.”
The two men smiled and John’s father left them, went into the house and was out in three minutes with his shaving kit and a paper sack with magazines.
“Tink likes the stockman magazines,” he said, dumping the sack and the kit on the seat of the truck.
“What he really likes is Playboy,” Cawley said.
“Not in the hospital.” John’s father climbed into the truck. “In the hospital he likes the stockman magazines.…”
He nodded to John and wheeled the truck and drove away—not fifteen minutes had passed since he arrived—and John watched him drive away until it was just the dust out by the main road. He watched until even the dust was gone, settling back, then he turned toward the barn.
Well, he thought.
You wanted a change.
Chapter Four
HE SAT in his room that night and started a list:
Gun
Food
Sleeping gear
Four pairs of socks
Four pairs of underwear
Two shirts
Three pairs of jeans
Toothbrush
Three months
The last thing on the list seemed to write itself.
Three months. He was going to be alone with the sheep for the rest of June, July, and August, until the first week in Se
ptember.
I’ll go crazy, he thought. Nuts. I don’t even know what to do, how to do anything. How can Cawley teach me? Seven, eight days and he’s supposed to teach me how to take care of six thousand sheep for three months?
He threw the pencil down, looked out the window at the mountains. It wasn’t the range he could see but the next one, the next one over where they had to take the sheep, but he visualized it in his mind.
The large meadow, huge, surrounded by peaks, and in all the vastness the small trailer and him. Just him.
And the dogs, of course.
And the sheep.
And the mountains.
The day had started wrong, with the sad news about Tink, and it hadn’t seemed to get better.
John’s father had gone back to town promising to come back to the ranch with plugs and belt and to pick up the list for provisions the next morning. John had to have the list ready by then.
After that he and Cawley had gone to work on the wagon. It wintered next to the old granary—a building made of logs hand-hewn by John’s great-grandfather. The wagon sat there without moving so that the tires had gone flat and needed pumping with the hand pump and then Cawley decided they should grease the bearings, which meant pulling each wheel and repacking it with the thick wheel-bearing grease they kept in a bucket hanging in the granary and by three o’clock John was grease to his eyeballs.
Then they had to restretch and retie the canvas top to the wagon and clean the stove—a small wood-burning stove in the corner of the trailer—and while they were cleaning the stove Cawley went to the barn for something and John was left alone in the trailer.
He had been in it before, of course, many times. But never to stay.
Never to stay for three months and he looked at it differently now. It was tiny—six feet wide, twelve feet long, with a bunk and wooden boxes nailed sideways to the wooden side to make shelves and a Coleman lantern hanging from the center bow that held the canvas up.
Tiny.
The mattress smelled, well, like Tink and on his best day Tink didn’t smell good. Even if they aired it out the smell would be there and the thought of three months sleeping in the little wagon on the stinky bed.…
On the side of the wagon, just below where the canvas top started up, there was a calendar sheet nailed up, the kind with all the months laid out in squares and next to the calendar there was a stub of a wooden pencil tied hanging on a string. The three months for last year—when Tink had done it last—were marked off a day at a time, each day with a small X and each month with lines through the X’s to mark the end of the month.
So Tink hadn’t liked it that much either, or why would he have kept track of each day?
They had worked on the trailer all day and the thought of summering in at the haymeadow with the sheep didn’t seem to get any easier to handle.
They stripped it out, aired the mattress, used a hose to clean the box of the wagon until it was fresh and new, and when they were done Cawley shook his head.
“Let’s let her dry until tomorrow, then we’ll start loading her up.”
They had eaten canned chili and crackers for dinner and John had come up to his room to do the list while Cawley sat down below in the living room watching reruns of Bonanza, which he loved.
Dog food.
God, he’d almost forgotten dog food. Let’s see, four dogs, a pound a dog a day, four pounds a day, say thirty pounds a week, a hundred and twenty pounds a month, three hundred and sixty pounds of dog food.
Three hundred and sixty pounds of dog food. Where would he keep it?
He went back to the list.
Dog food
Batteries (for the flashlight)
First-aid kit
First-aid kit for the dogs
Feed for the horse
He stopped writing and leaned back. Downstairs he heard the phone ring and thought it was his father, but Cawley got it and didn’t call him down so it was probably some corporation business.
His eyes fell on the poster and some of the stories came to his mind.
Stories about the old man, the first John Barron. About how mean he was, how tough he was—none of the stories talked about humor or anything happy. Only about mean and tough.
There was a bad man who came to the territory at one point, just bad. He killed a rancher and made off with his wife and when he was done killed her and they’d gone after the man with a posse—more a group of ranchers—but hadn’t caught him. John Barron the first declined to ride with the posse and they made fun of him for that, thinking he was afraid but it wasn’t that.
He went alone and he found the man and killed him and skinned some of him and kept the head and used the skin for a vest and part of the skull for a button bowl and the vest and bowl were on display in a museum in Cheyenne if anybody doubted it.
Mean. Nobody ever found the rest of the body because he dragged it out in a gully and let the coyotes have it.
He used that gun, John thought, looking at the poster. He killed the man with the gun I held and then skinned him with those same hands that are holding the reins of the horse in that picture.
He thought suddenly of Tink. He’d known John Barron the first—known him and spoke to him and knew more about him than anybody else. John had always meant to sit down with Tink and ask him, talk to him, find out more about his great-grandfather but Tink had never been close to anybody—not even John’s father. He slept alone in the old bunkhouse, even though Cawley slept in the house with John and his father.
Had slept, John thought. Tink had slept in the bunkhouse.
He felt a sadness about the old man, about Tink, but he had never really known him. Just seen him working, or sitting, or tending sheep. There never seemed a right time to sit and ask him anything, and now it was too late.
He shook his head and stood. It was early yet, just getting dark, but he had to get up early and he stripped for bed and dropped his clothes on the chair by the desk under the window.
With the light out he could see the glow from the moon and he opened the window and lay on the bed without covers, letting the cool evening come over him.
Outside, one of the dogs barked—he couldn’t tell which one—and he heard several coyotes answer it.
Sleep came slowly, and all the way down he thought of Tink and how he had missed the chance to talk to him.
Chapter Five
JOHN AWAKENED slowly, opening his eyes last, when the rest of him was full awake. There was just a smoky bit of light coming in the window. Dawn. It must be about four-thirty. And quiet outside. They had had chickens for a while, and a rooster that crowed them awake, but the dogs herded anything they could—sometimes tried to turn birds flying over the yard or water running out the overflow on the stock tank—and they kept herding the chickens into a small group, worrying them and pushing them around the yard until a couple of them died and his father got rid of the rest.
But as he shoved his legs down into the cold tube of his jeans he heard a meadowlark sing, then another answered him and then he heard Cawley come out on the porch and hawk and spit and he knew another day had started. He smiled, thinking of Cawley. He’d made fun of Tink once for staying in the old bunkhouse when he could have a had a room in the main house. But after they’d put in a septic and had running water and a good bathroom Cawley still went outside to spit.
“You spit in dirt,” he’d said to John’s father. “Not in some bowl of water in a special room in the house. Besides, it wasn’t any part of hiring on, you telling me where to spit.…”
Two days had passed since John’s father had come home with the news about Tink.
John pulled his socks and the pointed-toe boots on and went downstairs with his shirt on but still open. He splashed water in his face, dried on the towel that had been hanging in the bathroom for going on a month, and went into the kitchen.
Cawley had opened two cans of corned beef hash, emptied each one on a separate plate and was frying eggs in l
ard on the stove. When the eggs were crinkled and starting to burn he dropped two of them—the yolks still runny with the whites not quite cooked on top—on each pile of cold hash.
“Eat. We start up today and we won’t have much for lunch. This will stick to you.”
John looked at his plate. The uncooked egg white looked just like the boogers that were always hanging out of little Davey Haller’s nose on the bus.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” Maybe, he thought, if I jam it all down into the hash and eat it without looking or thinking about it. He used his fork to mash the eggs down and mix them in with the hash and then tried a mouthful. The hash was cold and at least half grease and the lard on the eggs turned hard when it hit the cold hash and he ate without looking. Just take a mouthful and swallow, he thought, then another. It’ll go down. He thought of the day before while he was eating.
It had been one of those disasters that maybe turned out for the better. Cawley had decided to start the old GMC even though he didn’t have new plugs and belts, just to see if it would run, and it promptly threw a rod and started hammering and bouncing.
“Well,” he’d said. “That tears it.”
“What about using the ranch pickup?” John had asked.
“Your dad needs it. No, we’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way.”
John had thought the old GMC was the old-fashioned way. It was the only way he’d ever seen them pull the wagon up.
But Cawley showed him a long piece of wood with a bolt hole through one end out by the side of the barn. It had been there as long as John had known things but he just thought it was an old piece of wood.
“Wagon tongue,” Cawley said. “White oak—lasts forever.” He went to a pile of junk in the granary and found other pieces of wood and bolts and chains and then, from the wall of the granary, harnesses.
“You’re going to pull the wagon all the way up there with horses?”
Cawley had looked at him in surprise. “Sure. That’s how we always did it. Trucks is a new idea.…”
“But we don’t have workhorses,” John said. “We just have riding horses.”
