by Rod Miller
After listening patiently the whole time, Captain Clemmons pitched in. “Did you do anything to disabuse Mister Robinson of that notion, Major?”
The sheepish expression on Wayne’s face was concealed as he dipped his head like a child caught in a fib. “No, sir. I did not. I saw no reason to interfere with Robinson’s fictional construct of our expedition. In fact, his misguided and imaginary ideas supported our purposes.”
The major, confidence restored, stared intently into the captain’s eyes, then shifted his gaze to Rawhide Robinson. “Besides, as I said, I was only following orders.”
There seemed nothing more to say. But, for a man as loquacious as Rawhide Robinson, saying nothing was not on the menu. Still, it took some minutes of uncomfortable silence before he spoke.
“I don’t suppose it ever occurred to any of you army types that the only camels I ever saw was in a picture book. I ain’t never seen one in real life.”
Wayne said, “As a matter of fact, it did occur to us.”
“Then what on earth led you to believe I’d be any help?”
“Your reputation, Robinson. We were told, and you did not deny, that you were handy at handling livestock—a student of long experience breaking and training horses and handling cattle. There were even reports of your successfully herding cats, as I recall. The army figures that animals are animals, and your affinity for managing them would extend to dromedaries.”
“Animals is animals, for certain,” the cowboy said. “But horses ain’t hogs and cows ain’t crocodiles. And, sure as heck, camels ain’t kitty cats.”
“Surely a man of your talents can tame camels,” Captain Clemmons wondered.
“Maybe so. Maybe no. I’ve heard tell a camel is a fractious critter that stinks and spits and is so stubborn a mule would pay it homage.”
Major Wayne said, “And I have heard tell a camel can carry a significantly heavier burden than a mule or a horse, can endure heat more successfully, travel greater distances without water, thrive on less forage, and outpace the pack animals currently in service to our armed forces. Seems to me—and to certain of my superiors—to be an ideal candidate for supplying our outposts in the desert Southwest.”
“Hmmph,” said Rawhide Robinson.
“Be that as it may, our objective lies before us. It is our job to do and you, Mister Robinson, signed on to do it—albeit, I will admit, under circumstances some may deem dubious. But I fully expect you will, nevertheless, fulfill the obligation of your contract. For that is, I am given to understand,” the major said with a sly smile, “The Cowboy Way.”
And with that, Rawhide Robinson rose, grasped the front and rear of the wide brim of his thirteen-gallon hat, cinched it down firmly till it ever-so-slightly tipped the tops of his ears, and stomped out of the captain’s quarters. As he departed, he left behind a single word, spit out with a mixture of disdain, denial, dismissal, and despair:
“Camels.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
* * *
Rawhide Robinson was depressed. Demoralized and despondent. For days, he barely stirred from his hammock, content to sway slowly with the roll of the ship on the ocean waves. Unlike his previous bouts in bed, he was not suffering from seasickness.
But he was suffering.
In a way, he bemoaned his fate all the more.
Camels.
The prospect of wrangling camels subdued his spirit and quelled his enthusiasm. Try as he might, he could not imagine himself—a tried and true, through and through, true blue cowboy—casting aside horse and saddle for a humped ship of the desert. It was wrong. Just plain wrong.
Without a doubt, without fear of contradiction, with absolutely no question about it, Rawhide Robinson was in the doldrums.
Then, one morning as he awoke in his hammock, he noticed something strange. Or, to be more precise, he noticed nothing. No swinging. No swaying. No rocking. No rolling. No tipping. No listing.
Nothing but stillness.
The cowboy eased himself out of his hammock and stood carefully on the deck. It was as smooth and steady as the Llano Estacado, with no hint of motion in any direction. A yelp escaped his lips when he pinched himself sharply to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. He took a step. Hesitated. Then took another. And yet another until he reached the ladder, which he climbed through the hatch and onto the main deck.
No hint of a breeze greeted him. No swells or troughs troubled the sea. Sails hung slack in the still air. Like Rawhide Robinson, the ship was in the doldrums.
He made his way along the deck, his steps surprisingly unsteady, as his developing sea legs were unaccustomed to navigating a steady surface.
“What’s going on?” he asked his source of all knowledge of seas and ships, Ensign Ian Scott.
“The doldrums. The calms of Cancer. It happens now and again in the horse latitudes.”
With wrinkled brow, the cowboy said, “Horse latitudes? What’s a horse got to do with it?”
“It’s a sad story,” Ensign Scott said. “And especially so for a cowboy such as yourself whose very living depends on the horse. But, the story goes, when Spanish sailing ships en route to the New World became becalmed in these regions of subtropical high pressure, extending the length of the voyage and, subsequently, reducing the ship’s stores, sometimes the horses and other livestock in transit had to be jettisoned to conserve water for the officers and crew. Hence, the horse latitudes.”
“Too bad they wasn’t haulin’ camels,” Rawhide Robinson said.
Throughout the day, the sailors performed their usual tasks, although it seemed to Rawhide Robinson they worked as if slogging through waist-deep molasses. Every motion was slow, every movement restrained.
And so it was the next day, following a fitful, unrestful night of little sleep.
When the day ended and only the services of the few sailors on night watch were required, the crew gathered in small bunches on the stifling deck to sweat and stagnate and swear about the state of things.
“This cannot last forever,” one said.
“&*@#$!” said another.
“That’s right,” offered a third. “Besides, it don’t have to last forever. Just long enough for the water to run out.”
“Then, we shall surely dry up and blow away.”
“Nonsense,” said another. “That would require a wind. Of which there isn’t any, in case you haven’t noticed.”
Thinking to lighten things up before the entire crew became as dejected as he was, Rawhide Robinson built a metaphorical loop and tossed it into the conversation.
“You fellas really think we’ll run out of water?” he said.
“It could happen,” a sailor said.
“Has happened,” said another.
“There’s ghost ships floating becalmed all over these horse latitudes, manned by the skeletons of sailors who perished for want of water.”
“But,” the cowboy contradicted, “we’re surrounded by water. Don’t seem it can ever get all that dry, bein’s as we’re on an ocean and all.”
“Aye, but it’s salt water, matey. It ain’t fit to drink as well you know. Although many a man has tried it, only to hasten his own demise.”
“Right he is,” a sailor said. “You don’t know dry until you’ve been at sea with nothing in the water barrels but a memory.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Rawhide Robinson said. “I’ve been plenty dry before. Why, there was this one time when my horse pulled up lame out in the Mojave Desert. When I set out across that country, you see, I wasn’t too concerned on account of an old sourdough prospector told me they get twelve to fourteen inches of rain on a fairly regular basis.
“What I didn’t know was, when them desert rats say twelve to fourteen inches of rain, what they mean is twelve raindrops that land fourteen inches apart. Then that desert soaks them up so fast they don’t leave any trace.
“So, anyway, there I was afoot with a hobbling horse, two miles as the crow flies from the middle of nowhere.”<
br />
The telling of the story brought a thirst to the cowboy raconteur, so he treated himself to a dipper full from a handy water bucket. He sipped slowly, savoring the fluid as it flowed down his throat. He squatted again amongst the sailors, using the bib of his wild rag to mop the dribbles from lips and chin.
“Well?” said a sailor.
“What happened?” asked another.
“Finish your story,” demanded a third.
“Hold your horses,” Rawhide Robinson said. “Which is exactly what I had to do—as much as I was leading that lame horse, he was leading me. And now and again, we’d lean ag’in’ one another to keep from tipping over when we rested. But once we caught our breath, we’d try to outmaneuver one another for shade. Soon as I’d find a place to stand where that horse shaded me from the sun, he’d rotate right around me to reverse our positions, so I was shading him some. But no matter what, there wasn’t much shade to speak of and so we’d walk on.
“After a while of that hot sun and dry air—days and days after—I got to noticing I couldn’t tell where that horse’s hide ended and the leather of my saddle started. One was as dry and stiff as the other and there weren’t no telling them apart. I reckon I looked much the same, for I felt some stiff and brittle myself.
“Dry? You want to talk dry, boys? Why me and that horse both would have donated an arm and a leg—or, in the horse’s case, a leg and a leg—for the slightest sniff of water, even if it was an ocean. But it wasn’t to be and we maintained ownership of our limbs, even as they wrinkled and shrunk and dried out and turned to leather.”
Rawhide Robinson once again halted the tale in its tracks. He unknotted his silk kerchief and dabbed at his forehead, removed his thirteen-gallon hat and mopped the sweatband where brim met crown. He unfurled and refolded the wild rag then re-knotted it loosely around his throat.
All the while, anticipation among members of his audience built until boiling over in a string of demands to finish the story.
And so he did.
“Sometime later—can’t say how long, and can’t say how it happened, as I had long since succumbed to the blind staggers and let fate take me where it may—that horse and me stumbled into a small town that all but sprung up around us on account of a silver strike. For a long time we was nothing but a curiosity, what with folks wandering by to watch us stand there in the sand as they offered comments and observations on what we were and where we come from. I looked like a stick of buffalo jerky wearin’ boots and spurs and a hat, is what they mostly said.
“Anyway, a couple of kids—you know the kind, them as is always up to something—decided to play a prank and for reasons of their own or none at all hauled me down Main Street a piece and plopped me into a horse trough.
“I’ll tell you, boys, heaven holds no pleasure to compare to the relief I felt when I hit that water. Relief don’t begin to explain it. I was refreshed, rejuvenated, restored, reinvigorated, revived, and revitalized.
“And, as the local sawbones was to explain later, rehydrated. Which, he said, was a scientific term meaning replenished with the fluids a body needs to function. Swelled right up, I did, and filled out to look like my normal self again. Which, I’m sure you’ll agree, ain’t that much to look at. But it sure beats eyeballin’ a man who resembles a hunk of buffalo jerky dressed in cowboy attire.”
“What about the horse?” a chorus of wondering voices inquired.
“Sad to say, boys, he would have been better off cast off a ship in the horse latitudes, where a chance at rehydration might have been his. As it was, there wasn’t enough water in that desert town to immerse the critter so he stayed dry. Got even drier, for a fact. Then, when I fetched my saddle and outfit off his back, he met his demise. Seems my cinches and latigos was all that was holding him together, and when I unloosed them that horse crumbled into nothin’ but a puddle of dust at my feet. Too bad, too, for he had been a fine horse in his day.
“Anyway, boys, don’t get to thinkin’ you know what dry is, sittin’ as you are on a ship in the middle of an ocean with nothing but water as far as they eye can see in any and every direction.”
And with that, Rawhide Robinson descended the ladder to the crew quarters, unfurled his hammock and felt, for the first time in a long time, that rest awaited him in its web.
CHAPTER EIGHT
* * *
The ship was still in the doldrums when Rawhide Robinson next rolled out of then rolled up his hammock.
But he was not.
Being generally sanguine in temperament, little of what life threw his way could keep the cowboy down for long.
Even the prospect of babysitting a bunch—herd? horde? flock? drove? troop? bevy? mob? muster? gang? pack? string? caravan?—of camels, outlandish and outrageous though the very thought of it may be, was set aside, at least for now. Rawhide Robinson determined to deal with declining the distasteful duty at some future, indeterminate date.
He strolled the stifling and stagnant decks of the becalmed ship, noting a marked lack of enthusiasm among the officers and sailors. Most simply sat, squatted, sprawled, and slouched in neglect of their usual duties. Some engaged in listless card and dice contests. Others played sluggish games of mumblety-peg. Still others apathetically pitched pennies. One singularly dejected deckhand, settled somewhere out of sight, made mournful music with a mouth harp, whose woeful refrain wafted about the decks, further dampening the mood.
The USS Cordwood itself languished limp and lifeless like its cohort. Lank lines lolled. Slack sails sagged. The masts, yardarms, and spars themselves seemed to slump.
For as far as Rawhide Robinson’s sharp eyes could see, the sea in every direction looked as still and smooth as the surface of a shaving mirror on a shelf. Rays from the recently risen sun reflected off the water, intensifying the orb’s glare and escalating the temperature of the air—close, confining air; repressive, oppressive air reluctant to release its oxygen to the respiring, perspiring sailors.
It all changed in an instant.
At first, the ship’s company believed themselves under attack, unlikely though the possibility may be. But the whack, the thwack, the bang and boom, the rap and report that blasted them out of their lethargy resembled the concussion of an incoming cannon ball.
Officers sprung to their stations. Sailors scrambled to the rails to assess danger and damage. The lookout high above in the crow’s nest turned in circles seeking the source of the startling sound.
Then came a second strike, more explosive than the first.
“Whales!” a sailor shouted from the foredeck.
“Thar she blows!” yelled another from the quarterdeck.
“Cetaceans off the starboard bow!” came a call from the poop deck.
Soon, sailors were sighting whales and more whales, surrounding the ship. The mystified men watched as this leviathan then that one slapped the sea’s surface soundly with its flukes. This lobtailing, they realized, was the source of the original whack that awakened them—rudely—from their lethargy.
While some whales lobtailed, others breached, flinging themselves out of the water and crashing back into the sea. Still others rolled in the now roiled water, slapping the surface with sizeable pectoral fins. The more relaxed among them spyhopped—standing on their tails with heads out of the water, returning the stares of the goggle-eyed sailors.
Ever in search of enlightenment and new knowledge, Rawhide Robinson sought out the well-read Ensign Ian Scott, source of information all and sundry concerning the sea.
“Ensign Ian, what in tarnation is going on?”
“It’s a wonder. These are humpback whales. They seldom school like this. Sometimes, in summer, when feeding. But this is strange.”
“How’s that?”
“This time of year, their feeding time, they should be well north of here—way up in the low latitudes where it’s nice and cool. This is their winter range, you might say. They come to warmer waters in winter to mate and calve,” the wide-eye
d young officer reported.
The curious cowboy mulled all that over for a moment. “You reckon they’ll be leaving soon?”
“I shouldn’t be surprised, given the fact that they shouldn’t be here in the first place.”
“How far they likely to go when they do?”
“Who’s to say? Humpbacks are migratory, covering ten thousand miles and more in a year’s time.”
Rawhide Robinson tipped back his thirteen-gallon hat, pursed his lips, and furrowed his forehead. The ensign imagined he could hear whirring and clanking inside the cowboy’s cogitating cranium.
“Ian, follow me,” Rawhide Robinson said with a smile, then turned and hurried toward the ship’s bow. The ensign followed obediently.
“Hey, sailor, hand me that there coil of rope,” the cowboy said to a seaman.
The sailor hefted the coil from the deck and passed it to the cowboy as he hurried past. Rawhide stuck an arm through the coils and went to work on one end.
“See this here knot, Ian? It’s not likely one you use on a boat. We call it a honda, and it’s what turns a rope into lariat—a catch rope, in cowboy parlance.”
“So?”
“So what I’m gonna do is build me a loop and shinny out on that beam pokin’ out front of the boat and make me a heel catch on one of them humpbacks.” The cowboy grinned. “I’m gonna catch a whale by the tail!”
“And?” the shocked young officer said.
“I’ll need your help, or the help of one of these sailors that’s handy with a rope. When I jerk my slack, I’ll be needin’ one of you-all to take a dally on one of them little posts there on the rail.” Ensign Scott considered how the cowboy’s request would sound in nautical talk and issued orders to a nearby sailor he knew to be quick and capable.
