by Gary Paulsen
And he’d never see her again.
Chapter Nine
JOHN WAS WRONG.
They did not get to the haymeadow the next day at noon. It was closer to seven, almost dark, when they finally pulled into the west end of the meadow.
It was more than a meadow. More than just hay. It was a wide, shallow valley between two rows of peaks. The haymeadow itself was four sections, but the whole valley was close to four miles across and nearly eight miles long and so beautiful, John thought, that it almost took his breath away.
And it was a complete surprise. In the middle a stream moved down through the whole length of the canyon. It ran nearly straight and here and there a stand of aspens grew along the edge. The stream left the valley through a narrow cut between two hills—small mountains, really—and then worked its way down into the prairies ten and more miles below.
It was impossible to see the valley, to know that it was there until passing through the cut between the hills and it must have been a shock the first time the old man had seen it.
It was a perfect summer pasture. The evening cool kept the flies from being a problem for the stock, and the water and daylight sun kept the grass growing so that it came to John’s knees when he walked.
“Something, ain’t it?” Cawley said as they followed the sheep through the entry between the hills. “Sure wished I owned it.…”
We did, John thought. The Barrons did own it. And lost it.
Most of the sheep knew where they were, knew that the drive was done, and they spread out and started to eat.
“Got to push them a bit more,” Cawley said, popping his rope at the rear of the herd. “Get these ones in the rear up into the good grass and near water. If they don’t get to water some of them won’t make it.”
They had come all day without water and John knew that sheep had a way of dying with little or no reason.
The dogs also knew where they were but sensed Cawley’s urgency and ripped into the trailing end of the herd with a vengeance, snapping and barking and spitting wool until all of them, even the lambs, were up in good grass and had easy access to the stream.
Every year they pulled the wagon approximately up to the center of the valley where a small patch of aspens provided a windbreak and some shade. It was where Tink liked to be and John decided he might as well do the same.
It took him almost an hour more to get there and by then it was totally dark. Cawley lighted the lantern and hung it from the wagon and they began to unload in the dark. The wagon had a small set of stairs—two steps—and the third time Cawley hung a foot in a step and tripped coming down in the dark he swore and they decided to wait until daylight to finish setting up the camp.
“Before I break my neck,” he said.
So they made the bedrolls and tarp ready, set up dog food and water, heated up two cans of stew and ate and went to bed and asleep without saying ten more words.
There was something, John thought just before sleep took him—something about the valley that kept you from saying much and made you talk quietly when you did talk.
John opened his eyes.
The smell of coffee made his mouth water. He hated coffee but loved the smell of it brewing and he sat up to see Cawley up, dressed and with a fire going.
“I’ve got to bust out,” Cawley said. “I can make it in a long day and a short one if I keep moving. I thought you needed sleep so I let you be. You did some rambling about that girl in the car and I thought maybe you wanted to dream a little more.…”
“I did not.”
Cawley smiled. “Well, you don’t really know, do you?”
He rolled his bedroll into a tube and tied it, stood. In the background John saw that the big red was already saddled and waiting patiently.
Cawley stopped, looked once more down at John. “Any questions?”
“I …”
He was going to say a hundred things. I don’t know anything. I don’t think I can do this. I can’t, I can’t … it isn’t fair to leave me here alone. I don’t know what I’m doing—and in the end that’s what came out. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Cawley laughed. “Well, hell, none of us do, do we?”
“But I mean it. It’s not a joke. I’ll try this ’cause Pa said to try it but I don’t, Cawley—I don’t know what to do.”
Cawley nodded. “I understand—but the dogs and sheep will tell you how it’s done. You know what they used to say, back when the old man was running the spread?”
John shook his head.
“Keep a horse to hand.”
He turned and walked to the red, tied his bedroll across in back of the saddle, swung up and mounted, and set off at a pacing walk without looking back or waving or saying another word.
And John sat in his sleeping bag and watched him leave, watched him ride until he was a small dot at the end of the valley, a dot that disappeared in the cut between the hills. John watched even when he was gone, watched the place between the hills and found himself wishing, hoping, praying that everything would reverse and a dot would reappear and grow larger and it would be Cawley coming back to tell him it was a joke.
But it did not. The dot stayed gone and John flopped back in the bag and looked up at the underside of the tarp.
I am the only person in the valley, he thought, and then he said it aloud. “I am the only person here.”
It just didn’t seem possible that his pa would drop him up here with six thousand sheep for the summer. Not like this. Not alone.
He started to feel sorry for himself, then remembered the old man. Four, five years older than John and he claimed the whole place—alone.
John pulled his boots on and rolled his bedroll. It was high morning and he had a lot of work to do—unload the wagon, get camp squared away, get settled for the first night alone with the herd.
But the coffee on the fire still smelled good. He stopped work for a moment and poured some in the tin cup he’d used for drinking water and took a sip, hoping that he would like it. It tasted bitter and he spit it out and turned back to the bedroll.
Just as he finished rolling the bedroll and was reaching for the tie cord to tie it he heard one of the dogs barking and the bleating of sheep and over it all the high-pitched rattle of a snake, almost a buzz-hissing sound.
He dropped everything and ran for the horses.
Chapter Ten
THEY WEREN’T THERE.
The night before, he’d turned them loose so they could graze and shake and roll. Cawley hadn’t said anything so he hadn’t retied them. They would stay around the sheep herd, or nearby, and Speck always came when he called.
Except they weren’t nearby. They were over a quarter mile up the valley, along the river. He could see them and he yelled for Speck. She raised her head, looked at him, and started walking toward him and Spud followed. But she wasn’t hurrying, stopping to take a bite of the fresh green grass next to the stream now and then, and she would be fifteen minutes getting to him.
He looked the other way, to the herd, and saw that on the side along the creek there was a cleared area—a round spot in the middle of the gray backs. Peg was there, dancing around something on the ground, bouncing on her front feet, getting close to it and away. He saw Billy coming across the herd from the far side to help her.
John looked back to Speck. Too far. He started running toward the herd.
Keep a horse to hand, he thought—each step pounding it into him. A horse to hand, a horse to hand, a horse to hand …
It was probably not three hundred yards to run but the altitude caught him. They had climbed for two days and were close to nine thousand feet—up from six thousand or so. In fifty yards he was winded and could not run faster.
He did not see the snake until he was thirty or forty paces away.
It wasn’t huge—perhaps two or two and a half feet. It was past coiling and raised in the powerful S shape they used just before striking, the S up and back so that only a third of
the snake was on the ground and the rest of it was in the air and free to strike.
“Peg, back—get back!” The snake struck at her but she was dancing backward as it flew out and the snake missed by almost nothing. A tiny gap.
He caught Peg’s collar and held her back and when she realized he was holding her she sat quietly and watched the snake.
Billy had come by this time and was circling warily, his nose almost to the ground, well out and away from the snake.
All right, John thought. It’s controlled. It’s all controlled.
With all the activity around it calmed a bit, the snake lowered itself into a coil again, the rattles—John counted ten—buzzing now and then in short spurts as Billy moved or it sensed John.
“Anybody hit?” John asked. Peg seemed to be fine and Billy was holding well back.
He’d have to kill the snake. He didn’t particularly want to—not like most people out here, he thought. Some would drive five miles extra to run over one. He had always thought that if they left him alone he’d leave them alone and he almost liked their attitude.
But that was just it—the snake wouldn’t leave them alone. It was where the sheep had to pasture and if he didn’t kill it they’d run into it again and again.
He picked up a large rock from the streambed, so heavy he had to lift it over his head with both hands, and brought it down on the snake as hard and as fast as he could.
There were several more buzzes as the snake’s nerves wiggled the tail but it was dead and he turned to go back to the wagon.
Billy came in close and smelled the snake, jumped back when the tail wiggled, then went back to the herd. Pete and Jenny were working together and had never left their positions on the far edge of the sheep.
Peggy watched John walk away, sitting still.
“What?” He turned. She was still sitting there, watching him, not moving to get back to the sheep.
“What’s the matter now?”
Then he saw the lamb.
The sheep had cleared a circle around the snake—thirty, forty feet across. They had gone back to grazing almost immediately, heads down, many not even watching as John killed the snake.
Directly across the cleared area from John a lamb was biting at its side, chewing at the wool and drooling.
“Oh, no …”
Peg had known. The lamb was hit. It must have come on the snake first and been struck in the side and Peg was waiting for him to do something.
He ran across the clear area. The sheep jumped at the sudden movement and ran away a short distance—all except the lamb and its mother. She stayed near him, making worried bleating sounds as the lamb twisted in short circles trying to reach its side.
John caught it by wool on the back and held it to the ground with his knee. It struggled for a moment, then lay still.
“Where is it? Where …” The wool was half an inch thick and very tight and he thought for a moment that he wouldn’t be able to find it or that the snake hadn’t been able to get through the wool.
He dug with his fingers, pushing the wool sideways—it was wet with spit where the lamb had been chewing—and finally he saw where the snake had hit.
Low on the side, just in back of the shoulder there were two small wounds, slightly swollen, one a little bigger than the other.
What did he do?
What could he do?
In school in biology they’d had a full day on snakes and how they bit, what the venom did, and he somehow couldn’t remember any of it.
The lamb struggled against his hands and the mother came in to lean down and smell it. She looked up at John with frightened eyes.
She can’t know, John thought. “It ain’t good.…” he said aloud, then realized he was talking to sheep.
Tink, he thought—he must have talked to the sheep all the time. What would Tink do? What would his pa or Cawley do? What would the old man have done? And he knew.
They would shoot the lamb.
All of them would shoot the lamb.
Chapter Eleven
“NO,” HE SAID. “I don’t think they’re right.…”
He stood and picked the lamb up. It did not want to come and fought against his hold, bleating. Peg came running back, brought by the disturbance, and tried to herd the mother—who was following John and bleating anxiously at the lamb—back to the herd.
“Peg, leave it be—she can come.”
The dog stopped, caught by the tone in his voice more than any command, and John pointed with his chin because his arms were holding the lamb. “Back—herd. Get ’em.”
She knew that, knew the command to “get ’em,” and she turned back to the main part of the herd, pushing them farther and farther away from the dead snake.
“We’re going to try to help him,” he said—and realized once more that he was talking to a sheep. Well, why not. “We’ll try.…”
At the trailer he tied the lamb to a wheel with the end of the rope that held the tarp and rummaged in the boxes inside until he found the box of medicines for the sheep.
Mostly it was salve—Corona. Balm to put on scrapes and minor wounds. And cans of pine tar to put on cuts to keep the flies off. There was nothing for snakebites.
“I’ll have to cut it.” He remembered from biology that there was some argument over whether or not to cut and suck a snakebite wound. Some said it helped, others said it didn’t, and in either case it was dangerous because taking the venom in your mouth could be bad if there was a small cut or cavity. But if he cut it—he couldn’t bring himself to suck the wound—it might help, might allow some of the venom to drain.
He took the folding knife out of the case on his belt. In the box there were several bottles of disinfectant and he poured some strong-smelling purple fluid from one of the bottles onto his knife blade. He’d seen his father do the same before digging a staple out of a horse’s hoof.
He held the lamb down with his knee, pushed the wool away from the bite mark with his finger, and pushed with the knife.
A tiny hole appeared and the lamb blatted and the mother came closer, looking down on the lamb and John.
It wasn’t enough.
He’d have to cut it really deep. Across both fang marks and then down vertically across each of them in turn—that’s what they’d said in biology. The teacher—Mr. Fender. It’s always so neat in a classroom, John thought suddenly. This and that, just so. A wound. You cut or you didn’t cut. But here—the side of a sheep that’s kicking all the time, wool all over the wound, dirt, flies.
He took a breath, held it, and slashed across the two bites, then down vertically across each of them.
The lamb kicked and bucked sideways, lunging up against his knee and blood welled instantly into the wool, dripping on the ground and against John’s leg where it pushed the lamb down.
So much blood.
It seemed to be endless and he wondered if he’d cut an artery by accident but didn’t think there would be an artery running down the side of the lamb and then realized that he hadn’t the slightest idea of where a lamb’s arteries did run.
He stood back and away, the knife hanging at his side, and the lamb jumped up, twisted, and tried to bite at its side again.
In a moment the blood seemed to lessen and not long after that, while he was watching, it slowed to a stop.
Pine tar, he thought. They always put pine tar on cuts to keep the flies out. But if the pine tar was there, would the venom still come out? His father told him that back in the old days, before they used rubber bands to castrate the lambs, they used a knife and they would dab pine tar on the wound to keep the flies out.
He dug through the medicine box and found the pine tar—a can with a Pop Top. He probed at the lid with his knife and it finally came open.
Inside was a thick black tar. He used a stick to remove a clump and smeared it on the side of the lamb, getting some in his hair and on his face and clothes as he worked.
When he was done he threw the stick
aside and stood and looked down on the lamb. It was on its feet, goobered in tar—during the struggle much of the tar had gone astray and there were dark marks all along the side of the lamb.
“There.”
All of this had taken twenty or thirty minutes—it was, he thought, maybe forty minutes altogether since he got up—and he looked at the morning sun, just coming into the cut between the two hills at the entrance to the canyon, and wished he hadn’t come.
I could’ve said no, he thought. I could have. But he knew he couldn’t. Saying no just didn’t come into it. His father would not have sent him up here if he hadn’t thought John could do it. And then there was the old man—the old, old man. He would have done it, and more.
First morning, first hour, and look at it, he thought—I’ve got one lamb hurt, a mess, and I haven’t even unpacked the trailer.
He turned to start unpacking but as his eyes moved off the lamb it went down—as if hit with a hammer. It lay on its side, raising and lowering its head in jerky movements.
John kneeled next to it again but there was nothing he could do.
The lamb’s legs and feet made running motions, it bleated low—the ewe came forward and smelled the wound on the lamb’s side, snorted—and the lamb curved up at each end, obviously in great pain, and then it died.
It was very fast. Half a breath came in, went out, and the lamb was gone.
The ewe nudged it, pushed at it, tried to get it up and then stood next to it, guarding it.
“Ahh …” John rubbed the back of his neck. “Ahh, hell.”
He picked the lamb up and waded across the stream away from the camp, the ewe following. There was a thick stand of willows and he went inside them, found some rocks and laid the lamb down and made a small pile of rocks over it.
He did not know why he did this. He had seen many lambs die. During lambing when they came fast sometimes eight or ten would die almost at once and they had a pile of dead sheep and lambs in back of the lambing pens every spring that Cawley used the tractor to load and haul out to a gulley for the coyotes and buzzards to clean up.
