by Ivan Doig
Our own meal, this first cabin lunchtime, is Spam sandwiches, drawing the accusation from my father that it's a plot to send him directly out fishing. Berneta teases back that that sounds to her like the right idea.
But both stay sat, in the beginning of the afternoon, and quietly take in the cabin, the country outside, this first stairstep of summer. Our reward to ourselves after the Spam is Kool-Aid, the family passion for lime-flavor glinting green in our three tin cups. As if he's just thought of something, my father leans across the table toward the window to check the position of the sun, then compares the alignment of the cabin. "At least the place sits straight with the world," he verifies. What is it that arranged us this way in our thinking: the squares of a mile each that the land in the West was surveyed into, the section-line roads that rulered us wherever we drove in that country, the boxlike rural rooms fitting no other logic? Whatever ingrained edge it is, to this day I have some of the family unease with any house whose axis angles off from a compass reading of absolute north-south or east-west.
The cabin wasn't through with my father. He tips his chair back and aims his most studying look at where the door stands open, pleasant cool of noon breezing in. "But what the hell was he thinking of with a north door?" North is storm country, snow and blow waiting to swarm in any time you reach for the doorknob between November and April.
Berneta sends her gaze out the rickety screen door, down the lunge of gulch toward the Maudlow road. "Bet you a milkshake I can guess why," she mischievously arrives at. "He wanted a good long look at who was coming."
My father chuckles at her point about that other Charlie, the in-season-and-out homesteader Rung. "Like maybe a game warden, could be."
So, straight with the world or not, we've come to rest in notorious territory. Not simply in terms of the comatose old homestead's history of contraband venison, either. Where we are, this start of June, is the extremity of the Sixteen country. Under those horizon-bumping views from this meadow, Sixteenmile Creek scampers through the confused geography from every direction, the main channel twisting down from the Wall Mountain basins in the north and skewing west to its union with the Missouri River, joined midway by the Middle Fork shooting in from the east and the Ringling country through a sharp canyon. Then there is a last, orphan section of the creek springing from entirely different drainage, the sly tether of the Big Belts to the Bridger range. The stream streaking down our gulch is that off-shoot, the South Fork of Sixteenmile Creek. Behind us, Hatfield Mountain of the Bridgers sits like a mile-tall apartment building facing down on the rock alleys of the Big Belts. We are in for a climbing summer, the saddlehorses huffing constantly on the slopes behind the cabin, we know that much. But the meadows of the back of the lofty Bridgers are going to be worth it—such grass, this rain-fed early summer, that the sheep will fatten on it as if it were candied.
***
Dogs, we're rife with dogs again.
Sheepdogs, at least in theory; Flop with a wonderful half-mast ear that begs affection and Jack with the pale eyes, barely blue, of a born chaser.
Even my father can find no grounds to object to their instant conversion by Berneta into housedogs, because it just as fast becomes plain that only one or the other can be used on the sheep each day. When the two dogs are worked together, they add up to less than one. Jack sulks whenever Flop is sent around the sheep with him, Flop takes a yipping fit any time he is held back from a mission with Jack.
"Whoever invented dogs," my father appraised this nerved-up pair, "has a hell of a lot to answer for."
But perhaps our prima donna canines figured they were putting in their shifts just as much as anybody else. Charlie has been watching the sheep early in the morns. M late in the eves, while the herder gets his meals, ran Berneta's latest report to the Ault. The sheep deal had advanced to a phase known as tepee herding. Day-and-night sentry duty with the band of sheep because of coyotes and the tough terrain, it amounted to. Occupied enough with settling us in at the Rung place and trying to gauge Berneta's hardiness and readying for shearing and thinking over a big haying contract that was being dangled (Walter Donahoe wants us to put up the hay on the Loophole— back in the White Sulphur Springs country—again, but don't know whether we will be able to take that on), even my father couldn't find a second twenty-four hours in the day to spend with the sheep and was resorting to a hired herder. The one who came recommended didn't seem to be any whiz—"I wouldn't call him the greatest," Dad left it at—but he trooped through the day with the sheep as required and bedded down on the mountain with them every night without complaints. Except for those turns at sheepwatching while the herder fed himself, we had only to move the herder's tepee to a new bedground for each night and generally supervise.
"Pretty easy living," Dad has to admit as he and I bounce back into the cabin, day of our own yet ahead, after a morning shift with the sheep.
"About time you tried some," Berneta ratifies with a pleased look up from the letter she is writing.
This lasted an entire week and a half, until the morning my father and I found a lamb gut-eaten by a coyote practically at the doorfiap of the herder's tepee.
The instant the sheep shaded up at midday my father was sifting his way into them on a walkthrough count of the lambs. Tricky to do, step by ever so slow step, negotiating a route without roiling the sheep. Low at his hip, his right hand flicks its little stroke of arithmetic at each lamb he tallies, and every time a hundred is reached his left thumbnail gouges a mark in the soft wood of his pocket pencil.
His walkthrough marks out at twelve hundred lambs, thirty short of what we had handed over to the tepee herder just ten days ago. (At that rate we'd have to buy him another band of lambs ...) This herder is a scenery inspector, idling away under tree or tepee while the coyotes have been using the band as a meat market.
My father wheeled, strode over to the herder and snapped, "Roll your damned bed."
***
The next herder, escorted in by the Morgan camptender, my parents immediately dub Prince Al for his rapidfire consumption of Prince Albert tobacco. When he isn't smoking the twisty shreds from the red can, he chews the stuff. Brown parentheses of snoosejuice, apparently permanent, hang at the corners of his mouth, but what really catches attention are the tracks of his roll-your-own habit down the front of his shirt, the burn specks where dribbles of ash fall from his handmade cigarettes. My father is heard to mutter we'll be lucky if this one doesn't burn down the mountain and the sheep with it.
Dad and I are barely back from moving the herder's tepee the first morning when rifleshots break out on the mountain behind us. KuhWOW! KuhWOW-kuhWOW-kuhWOW.
Naturally I was all in favor of any form of bombardment, but my father the coyote marksman listens skeptically to the herder's fusillade. If you don't knock over a coyote with your first shot you're probably wasting your lead.
Berneta appears out of the cabin to cock an ear at the uproar. "Makes you wonder if the coyotes are shooting back at him, doesn't it."
When the three of us ride up that evening, we see that the sheep and Jack the dog are as jittery as if they, not the coyotes, have been under barrage all day. Not that any casualties can be counted among the coyotes. Prince Al, it develops, has the philosophy of touching off a shot whenever a stump or a shadow looks as if it conceivably might be a coyote. My father tells him that's an interesting theory, but how about saving his ammunition unless he's goddamn-good-and-sure about the target.
The next morning, Dad and I just reach the cabin when a new salvo of kuhWOWs thunders from the mountainside.
Very soon the Jack dog comes arcing across the meadow in a neurotic slink, belly to the ground as if begging us please don't blame me please I simply can't take any more of that commotion until ending up, inevitably, under Berneta's merciful petting hand.
She and I watch my father with apprehension.
He, though, seems downright gratified to see the deserter dog. "We'll just let Mister Prince Al
have a day of handling those sheep without a dog. See if that slows him up on the shooting."
By that evening, having chased after sheep over half the Bridger Mountains, the herder was the frazzled one and the cannonading was cured.
***
But a few more days into Prince Al's term of herding, on the fifteenth morning of June, my father comes into the cabin disgusted. Right there with him as usual, I'm excited, a bit traitorously, by this latest bulletin.
"Can ye believe it," he lays it out for Berneta, "that scissorbill of herder has to have a trip to town already. Compensation papers of some kind he needs to fix up."
She too is getting her fill of wartime sheep help. "Quite an imposition on these herders, isn't it, to ask them to actually herd."
My father steams out the choices. Deny Prince Al the trip and he'll most likely quit the job. Or much worse, sulk for several days of misbehavior with the sheep and then quit. Hang onto Prince Al until shearing if we can, is the least nasty conclusion. The only virtue evident in him is the one that counts, he isn't losing lambs left and right.
"I better take the sheep tomorrow," my father brings himself around to the necessary, "while you run him in to Bozenan, how about." She has done this endless times before, ferrying a hired man so that a toothache or a case of boils or, as now, a pesky piece of government paper could be taken care of; for any ranch wife, as usual as a can of coffee on a grocery list. A day away from the Rung place, medicine against monotony, it provides too.
My father is going on, "It'll give you your chance at the mail and some fresh goods, and while you're in there do something nice for yourself and shop for—"
He stops. Berneta is shaking her head.
I'll play sheepherder tomorrow.
"What, instead of making the trip to town? How'd ye get that in your head?"
I'd rather herd than to take him in. The roads in this country get my goat.
My father rethinks. A possibly slippery drive through the Maudlow mudholes, versus a horseback day with the sheep for her. "That's what you'd really rather, is it." Then the central concern: "You're sure ye feel up to that?"
"I can get by with the herding," she reassures him. "The horse and the dog will do the most of it. Don't worry none, I'm not about to walk myself to death chasing after fool sheep."
She cheerfully turns to the matter of me. "Which for you, Ivan? Playing sheepherder or into town?"
I blink. It had never occurred to me the town trip might not include me. By now I am practically the child gazetteer of towns, Phoenix to Maudlow. Later it dawns on me, too late, that going herding with her would have been an entire dreamday aboard my own horse. But instead I choose horsepower, the Ford, habit of journey and whatever obtains: "Town, I guess."
***
The next morning my father and I and Prince Al slewed our way first of all into Maudlow. Maudlow gumbo: a bum go, Maudlow. Whipping the Ford's steering wheel this way and that, my father comes up with the sarcastic theory that the only reason the railroad was routed through this country was because the mud is thick enough to float a train. Prince Al, chawing away, mutely doesn't get it.
Six miles of slip and slide, and we tromp into the tiny Maudlow post office to collect our backed-up mail. Wally is heard from, Winona, Anna and Joe, of course my grandmother (three of those envelopes), four or five other friends or relatives, the weekly paper from White Sulphur Springs and a batch of my comic books which I would have read before we were out of the post office if Dad had let me. Bemeta has hungered for these letters: haven't had the mail for 2 wks. Went down to get it Tues. but the road was washed out this side of Maudlow. Her letters in turn cascade into the Maudlow mail slot, away to the Ault goes her dispatch of us written just yesterday. We are all pretty well. Some days I don't feel too good but can't complain most of the time.
More mire, between us and Bozeman. The windshield keeps threatening to go blind from mudspots, so whenever my father guns the car through ruts of standing water he flips the wipers on after the splash. Dirty water to wash dirtier. The slap of the wipers sounds frantic, as if the Ford is trying to bat away the accumulating muck.
We smear our way past ranches now, fundamental sets of buildings, then the Morgans'workstained sheep-shed. The arched backs of the Bridger Mountains slowly file along beside us.
Eventually the road drops, and drops some more, into an eyelet of gap between farmed ridges, and the Gallatin Valley opens up prosperously for twenty miles ahead.
Downhill now, glide all the way to the long main street of Bozeman. My father points out a field where as a young man he worked in the grain harvest. (Land that later grew four lanes of freeway and a Holiday Inn.) Downtown in Bozeman, we let Prince Al out at the government office and tackle our own chores. First thing, fill the Ford with gas; rationing still rules. Then something I was distinctly not keen on; under orders from Berneta, what my father calls getting our ears lowered.
Normally our haircuts were homemade, and a barbershop's fuss and strangenesses spooked me. Green eye-shade worn by the hovering barber; why put lime color atop the eyes, why not skyblue? The barber chair with those corrugated arm-ends as if the chair was enough of a participant to tense its own knuckles. The mirrors on the walls both in front and back of the haircut victim, I actually could see the use of; ease of glance for the barber so that he wouldn't snip you lopsided. But the surplus of reflections echoing away, where do those bounces ever stop and why don't they?
Even my hair seemed to know it was in odd circumstances. The barber tucked the whispery cloth in around my collar and critically combed my flop of red shag across my head. Then asks, as though it might matter in how he proceeds: "Where you fellows from?"
Where indeed, given our road record since the Ford was loaded and aimed to Arizona last November. But my father flaps a wrinkle out of the newspaper he is reading and encompasses everything from the root years of the Doig homestead to the Morgan summer range of the moment. "We're out here on Sixteen—"
***
Sixteen kinds of weather a day this year, I can imagine Berneta saying to herself as she unties the yellow slicker from behind the saddle and slips it on. Knots the saddlestrings firmly down on the mackinaw jacket she'd been wearing since she left the cabin and climbs back on Duffy to ride through the sun shower, freshet of rain about the size of a sprinkler can's but thoroughly damp. Makes you wonder why June days need to be so unpredictable. Hour to hour there's the sense that summer is being invented over again, one sky after another.
She rides with a bit of deliberate jangle, from the ring of cans—empty condensed milk ones, strung on a loop of baling wire, which you shake for a clatter to make sheep hustle along—hung handy on her saddlehorn.
Ahead of her the trail zigs and zags up the mountain like a carpenter's rule unfolding. A quarter of the way up the mountainside, no, already more like a third of the way up, a mob of wool is expanding in many too many directions at once, helter-skelter. Say for Prince Al that he started the sheep out onto the big slope decently enough this morning, but their behavior is disintegrating in a hurry, and she and the horse and dog have to get right at it to head them off. She'd decided first thing to leave Jack leashed at the cabin and use Flop for the day, eagerness over temperament, and the bent-eared dog flirts sideways at her in gratitude as they travel the trail.
Ten minutes' hard climb by the saddlehorse carries Berneta through the rain climate—off with the slicker, back into the mackinaw—and up to where she feels she can start dealing with the herd situation. The sheep are full of run this morning. Every second minute, the lead ewes have to be turned, bent back from their abrupt mania to quit the country, stream out across the mountain just to be traveling. You'd think the fools had appointments somewhere. Here and there a bunchbreaker erupts, a solo sheep dithering off toward the tall timber with forty lambs following like a tail on a kite. The worst vagabond, a haughty high-headed ewe determined to stomp off back to the bedground, Berneta slings the ring of cans at and has
the satisfaction of clouting her in the rump and causing a panicked veer back to the protection of the herd. Don't dare do much of that, as it means the exertion of climbing off and on the horse to retrieve your noisemaker, but it shows the old biddies you mean business.
She uses the dog to take the run out of them, directing him with backhand sweeps of her arm as if clearing away a curtain of air. "Go around them, Flop. Around them, boy." The dog races ahead of the sheep in short arcs, stopping every fifty yards or so to give her an enough? look. Ewes still are stubbornly squirting off in tangents of their own on the other side of the band from the dog, so Berneta keeps sending him on his rainbow dashes until he's circled the entire band. Just as obstinately as they'd been scattering to the four winds, the sheep now keg up, huddle there in a half-acre knot of wool blinking at her and the dog.
She catches her breath and, ugly though a noneating band of sheep wrapped around itself is to any self-respecting herder, she waits. And waits some more, facing down the twenty-two hundred saturnine sheepheads. Let them grow tired of being bunched up, the lunatics weren't gaining any grass into themselves anyway cantering off across creation the way they'd been.
The sheep mill a little in an unruly circle, eyeing the dog problem. All at once the whole bunch catches the inspiration to mother up with their lambs. The epidemic now is ewes sniffing furiously to make sure the offspring is their own, lambs diving to their knees to suckle. After the session of this, the band of sheep begins to graze up the slope as polite as you please.
Even when sheep are on their best behavior you don't simply lollop across the countryside with a band of them, especially if the country is as mountainy as this. Eight thousand eight hundred hooves to control, in a more or less simultaneous pursuit of grass, while avoiding coyotes and bear and deadfall snags and poisonous weeds and any other assassins that shadow the travels of sheep. Berneta sheds the mackinaw—coat on, coat off, that kind of day—and takes stock. Today's grazing territory is from the gulch on up the flank of Hatfield Mountain toward the timberline, then down again. "Bring them into camp tonight, let's do," Charlie had formulated with her. "Halfway up along there is a great plenty for the day, then swing them back down. I ought to have that geezer of a herder back here by the time you head them down." Which will mean, for her, seeing to it that the band grazes as far up as the halfway point on the mountainslope before shading up, then easing them in a half-circle turn back down this afternoon, toward the upper end of the cabin meadow for the night. Getting sheep to do anything by halves goes against their nature, but she hired out to herd for all she's worth, didn't she.
