by Gary Paulsen
The mountains and rain.
It was still louder, a crashing sound to it, and he knew suddenly what it was, what was coming, what was already here.
A flash flood.
The heavy rain had moved on up the canyon, but it had kept raining, up into the higher canyons still.
And they all fed this one. This canyon that he was in with the sheep formed a giant bowl to catch water, not just from rain but from other canyons as well, washing down the slopes of the valleys and canyons, filling small streams and all of it, all of the streams, emptied into this one main stream.
Going by right next to the wagon.
He was sitting up and as he reached for the zipper on the bag the first wall of water tore past the wagon.
For a moment he felt relief. The wagon was above the cut bank of the streambed—it stood four or five feet high. And from the sound of it all the water seemed to be roaring past well inside the streambed, easily contained.
But the wagon was on the outside edge of a curve, a curve made of soft dirt and gravel, and the wall of water hit it, bounced off and away to the side, with tremendous force.
He was up, out of the bag, and opened the small door, caught one glimpse of the water foaming downstream in the starlight, turned to see if the sheep were all right—the dogs had them well up and away from the streambed—when the water cut the dirt away and the bank gave way beneath the wagon.
There was at first a small lurch and John actually looked down at the floor by his feet, as if expecting to see the reason, and then it was gone. The part of the bank supporting the two right wheels of the wagon gave way completely.
The wagon fell sideways, rolling as it went, and landed on its side in the water. John had not completely unloaded the wagon yet and boxes of canned goods tumbled over to the side, making the down-side heavier. The wagon didn’t slow when it hit the surface but continued over and down until it was three-fourths of the way over to upside down.
The end wall on the front of the wagon was made up of canvas to keep out wind and rain. It was nothing to a six-foot rip of current moving at thirty miles an hour and popped loose almost instantly.
The giving of the canvas probably saved John’s life—although he didn’t have time to feel grateful.
When the wagon had tumbled the door-opening end had kicked slightly up and knocked John back into the wagon.
He had time to suck just one breath and he was covered with cans of beef stew and pork and beans and chili and close to a ton of water that had come swirling in around the canvas when the top started under.
He would have drowned there, tangled in his own bedding and food, except that when the surge blew in the end of the wagon it turned the whole inside into something close to a tube.
With the door already open because he had been looking outside there was nothing to stop the water and it blew through the wagon with a large whushing sound—John later thought it must have been like getting flushed down a giant toilet—carrying everything that was inside the trailer out the back end.
Including John.
He shot out through the door at nearly current speed—from a dead stop to thirty miles an hour in eight or nine feet—and roared downstream like a runaway train.
As he went through the door his head hit the top—which was now the side—and it momentarily stunned him. This added to the confusion of being suddenly tumbled and he was for a few seconds overcome by vertigo. He had no idea which way was up and he kept pulling and pulling trying to get to the surface only to finally realize that he was swimming down, not up.
The water was not deep and there were no boulders, but there were hundreds of other objects caught in the water. Logs and limbs from trees and gear from the wagon—all his gear from the wagon. He kept hitting things, coming up under them. Once he thought he was breaking free only to find that his face was coming up inside heavy, wet cloth and realized he was under his sleeping bag.
He broke loose, caught a breath and then another and was immediately slammed sideways into a bank as the stream curved.
“Ooofff!”
The blow knocked the wind out of him and was followed by another hit as a floating pine snag ran into him and smashed him once more into the bank.
“Get away!” He screamed and kicked at the dead tree as if it were an enemy. The branches tangled around him and he fought savagely for two or three seconds, then realized he could simply push it away. As soon as he drew free of the snag the current took him again and he moved downstream two hundred yards before his clawing hands found an aspen trunk along the edge and he stopped himself.
He hung for a moment getting his breath and strength back, then pulled up onto the bank and dragged himself well away from the rushing water. He felt pummeled, beaten, and he sat curled in a ball with his face on his knees, dazed, still confused.
Something came next to him and he opened one eye to see Jenny standing there. He could just see her face in the darkness and she studied his eyes.
“All right,” he mumbled. “I’m all right.”
But it was a lie and he knew it and so did Jenny. He wasn’t hurt bad physically—bruises and some scratches—but was most definitely not all right.
Jenny sat next to him, leaned against his leg, propped her head on his arm and whined.
“It’s all right,” he repeated, dropping his hand to her head and neck and petting her. “Just a little rest now and it’ll be all right.…”
He closed his eyes.
Chapter Fifteen
HE DID NOT sleep but a kind of rest took him. Sometime later, still before daylight, he heard/felt the water going down again and raised his eyes to see that it dropped almost as fast as it had risen. In seeming minutes it was back to a small, peaceful, meandering stream moving through a meadow in a high mountain park.
Like a snake, he thought—raise and hit and gone. He tried to see his watch but it had been smashed when he blew out of the wagon and didn’t work.
It didn’t matter. Time didn’t matter. Nothing much mattered any longer. He was done—the day had whipped him. One day. The old man had come into this country with two horses and a gun and his own father had taken the herd all summer when he was a boy and John made one day.
One day and he had a dead sheep, an injured dog, and his camp gone. Not just wrecked, but gone somewhere downstream.
Daylight came slowly. John sat and watched the eastern sky over the canyon mouth grow faintly gray, then a little more, then brighter until he could see around him.
He thought of leaving. He thought his saddle must still be where it had been. The wagon had tipped off but the saddle had been sitting on the ground and might still be there. He could saddle Speck or Spud and say to hell with it and ride home.
It would take a long day or a little more and he’d be in his room in dry clothes and everything would be all right.
Except the sheep and the dogs.
Yes, he thought—there was that, wasn’t there? He couldn’t leave and he couldn’t stay and he couldn’t do anything right.…
When it was light enough to see where he was walking so he wouldn’t step on a snake he stood, like a rusty hinge opening, and started to make his way barefoot and half naked—he was wearing his pants, which he’d been sleeping in, but no shirt—back to the campsite.
Or where the campsite had been.
The wreckage was complete. His saddle was still there, along with the bridle and rope—and the box of medicine for the dogs and sheep. There were also two boxes of gear and a soaked bag of dog food that he’d taken out of the wagon.
He couldn’t even see the wagon at first, not until he’d walked almost to the edge of the stream.
“Ahhh …” He thought of about six choice words that Cawley or his dad would have used and wondered why he didn’t swear.
The wagon was on its side in the stream, but the streambed was deeper than it had been before. When the flash flood came down it gouged and raked away the bottom and bank to deepen the bed and the wagon h
ad settled over on its side until the top was angled downward and the wheels stuck up in the air.
It looked hopeless.
The stream had dropped back to five or six inches, rambling through a gravel bed, and it seemed that a garbage truck had dumped its load along the bed.
Cans of food, parts of the bedding, paper—the paper seemed incredible, scattered bits by the hundreds and he couldn’t think how he could have brought so much paper until he saw that all the cans had lost their labels. The water had washed off all the paper labels and scattered them along the streambed.
Junk, he thought—it just looked like junk. Trash.
My trash.
“And it’s all I’ve got,” he said to Jenny. “My own private trash.…”
He went to the saddle. It was wet, as were the saddle blanket and bridle but the sun was well up now and it looked to be a clear day and the things would dry fast. Maybe too fast. He worried that the leather in the saddle would crack if it dried too fast and he pulled it into the shade of the willows.
He picked a flat place near the same willows, out in the sun, and started gathering all that he could find.
The force of water had not only pushed him out of the wagon but virtually everything else.
He crawled inside the overturned wagon and fished out what was left. The harnesses for Speck and Spud were still there. They had tangled on their hooks and had been held in place. But the collars—the thick, padded collars that went around the horses’ necks and took the strain of the load—were both gone.
He put the harnesses—they were very old and well oiled but were made of leather—back in the willows with the saddle to dry slowly.
He found one boot almost immediately, just downstream from the wagon.
“At least,” he said to Jenny, “I can hop around.”
In a short time he found there was some logic to the destruction. At first look the current had seemed just to flush everything away. But the stream wound severely as it moved through the flat of the meadow and at each turn it had to cut into a bank.
As it cut and was forced to turn the water had dropped much of what it was carrying. The part of each turn where the water surged and was forced around proved to be a treasure trove.
He found most of his lost canned goods and the other boot on the second turn down from the wagon. There was also one sack of dog food. The paper of the bag was soaked through and he feared the dog food would be ruined but the manufacturer had thought to put in a plastic liner and it had not been torn.
His pile grew steadily.
He found two boxes of ammunition but could not find the rifle. It didn’t seem possible that the steel of the .30-.30 would let it be taken downstream very far but he combed the streambed for it without success.
The rest of his canned goods—or so it seemed, he couldn’t be sure—he found in the second and third bends and the dog food sacks were there as well. One of them had been slashed open by a snag and the dog food that hadn’t spilled was soaked.
He carried it carefully to the pile. They could eat it first, wet, and maybe that way he wouldn’t lose so much.
The search for food took most of the day. In the middle of the afternoon he stopped to eat. He had found his spoon, but couldn’t find the can opener. Still, he had his pocketknife and he went to the pile of canned goods.
Without labels it was a gamble. He picked a short, stout can that he thought would have beef stew—there were many beef stews—and he wound up having a spaghetti and meatball lunch. For dessert he opened a can he thought would have fruit cocktail and it proved to contain stewed tomatoes. He didn’t remember packing stewed tomatoes, he didn’t even like stewed tomatoes, but he ate them and tried without much luck to make believe they tasted like fruit cocktail.
He worked until dark and by then he thought he had everything. Or at least everything there was to find. He’d even found the horse collars, not twenty yards apart hung on snags.
The rifle still eluded him, and the wagon was still in the stream, but there wasn’t much else missing. He had a stroke of luck. A tree limb snag had jammed across the streambed a quarter of a mile below the wagon and the branches had formed a mesh net across the flow of water.
His sack of extra clothing and the sleeping bag hung up on the mesh. Had they not caught there, floating as they did, he figured they could have gone to Casper, a couple of hundred miles away.
At dark he set up a crude camp. He had found the plastic bag of matches—Tink had taught him that—and he made a fire. His sleeping bag was still wet but his jacket was dry, as were his clothes, which he’d hung over the willows, and he lay next to the fire and settled back to spend the second night, leaning forward now and then to feed a piece of wood to the fire to keep it going.
He had remembered about the horse—about keeping a horse to hand—and he had Speck tethered to the long rope. She could graze and reach water but she was also close if he needed her.
Spud didn’t want to be too far from her so he stayed near camp as well and John listened to them rumble and chew and thought that it must not have been so different when the old man had come with his two horses.
I wonder if he had dogs, John thought dreamily, on the edge of sleep. Nobody ever said if he had a dog with him. Maybe he had a dog or two and maybe he camped right here, right on this spot.
He let sleep take him in fits and starts, dreaming about his father and the old man and two horses and the fire, all mixed together, not really hard sleeping.
At two in the morning, with a sliver of moon starting to show, the coyotes hit the herd.
Chapter Sixteen
HE KNEW EXACTLY what it was, what the scream-yips meant, and he was on his feet and pulling his still-damp boots on before coming fully awake.
They seemed to be everywhere. They had come to the herd in silence but began “talking” to each other as soon as they were in position and John sorely missed the rifle.
There was a time—John had heard stories—when coyotes ran alone for the most part. They had been trapped and poisoned down to a small number and there were so few of them that it was very unusual to see more than one. But poisoning had been disallowed because it killed eagles and other birds and trapping wasn’t very effective in the open prairies.
The end result was that coyotes, for as long as John’s life and longer, had been packing up. It wasn’t two or three of them here and there, but large packs that formed with other packs into whole social orders and when they came upon something to eat—sheep, calves, game, anything—it was gone.
John knew of a cattle rancher in eastern Wyoming who had stood on a hill with binoculars and watched a single group of over forty coyotes—he estimated forty-seven and a man with him thought fifty-two—killing his calves. He had a gun and would shoot but it was half a mile away and the coyotes would just move a bit and start tearing at the calves again. One or two of them would snap at the cow to keep her busy while others took the calf and when one calf was dead they took another and another.
They were worse with sheep. Sheep were not as tough as cattle and they would rip an ear off a sheep or tear the nose open on a lamb and they would die of shock. The coyotes’ favorite place to hit was the rear end, especially the udders on the ewes, and they would tear and go, tear and go, all night or until stopped.
John bridled Speck as fast as he could, untied her, and threw a leg over her without a blanket or the saddle. There was very little time and almost nothing he could do without a gun.
He had heard all the arguments on both sides—for the coyotes and against them. All the ranchers had. And in a way John liked them. They were so smart and had learned to live with man so easily that he had to respect them. But the truth was a pack of coyotes hitting a sheep herd didn’t know anything about all the arguments. The sheep were there, they were handy, they were slow and tasted good and that was that. It was a slaughter.
Once a pack had come down to the ranch and hit the herd during lambing—right in bac
k of the lambing barn.
It had been a disaster. There couldn’t have been five coyotes in the pack but they tore and chewed and killed forty-one sheep, all ewes waiting to have lambs, in less than two hours at night. They ate none, just hit and ran, tearing and biting and killing them by shock.
John gave Speck heels and she tore off across the meadow around the sheep. The dogs were trying to defend the herd, and could to an extent save them. But when a pack hit they came from different directions and the dogs couldn’t stop them all.
The yipping and screaming grew louder, more intense. It sounded like a dozen or more but John knew it could be as few as three or four. Their noise was deceptive.
His eyes were already accustomed to the darkness and he could see the gray field of sheep backs easily, see the disturbances on the off-side of the herd, and he aimed Speck for the first spot.
Sheep were milling and running away and he saw Pete running across sheep to get to the same place and he felt Speck lock on as she saw where he wanted to go.
She ran low and along the ground, smoothly, and before they’d gone fifty yards he saw the coyotes.
There were two of them, both pulling at the rear of a young ewe. She was blatting and going down backward and John ran over them.
Or tried to—they saw the horse coming well ahead of any danger and both of them vanished like fog into the night.
Still farther around the herd he saw another place. There was no time to check on the ewe. He heeled Speck and aimed her and she tore off again, this time with such force he had to hang on to her mane to keep from sliding off over her rump.
Two more coyotes had another ewe. This time she was old and they’d torn her ears off and one of them had her by the nose and Speck nearly got that one because he didn’t want to let go. The little mare picked up speed as she approached and the coyote missed getting crushed by less than a foot. Billy had come in from the other side and he got a mouthful of fur as the coyote went by.
Then they were gone.
And except for the milling of the frightened sheep and the sound of the wounded one bleating in pain there was nothing.
