Dancing at the Rascal Fair

by Ivan Doig

  “What happened with them?”

  Lucas stroked his beard with a forearm. “That is not just entirely clear. Williamson out at the Double W might know, or Thad Wain-wright”—owners of big cattle ranches north of town, I had heard. “Or maybe even Ninian Duff.” Evidently another lord of cattle, though this one I hadn’t heard of before.

  “And man three?”

  “What would you say to a glass of buttermilk?” Lucas busily began to pour himself one. “It’s good for all known ailments, and—”

  “Lucas, I’m swimming in the stuff. The particular ailment we’re talking about is man number three’s.”

  “That one, now.” A major gulp of buttermilk went down him. “That one, I do have to say was ill luck.”

  When nothing further seemed forthcoming from Lucas except continued attention to his buttermilk, I persisted: “Dying generally is ill luck, we can agree on that. But I still haven’t heard the man’s ailment.”

  “He was shot in an argument over cards.”

  “What, in here?”

  “Don’t be pure ridiculous, lad. In Wingo’s, of course.” Lucas looked at me with extreme reproach, but I held gaze with him. After a bit he glanced away. “Well, you may have a point. It would have happened in here if it hadn’t been the gambler’s week there instead. But after that, Wingo and I talked it over and we’ve given gamblers the bye. Pleasant games among local folk, now. A coming town like this has its good name to think of, you know.”

  • • •

  Was it in spite of Gros Ventre’s fresh reputation for excitement that the two of us the very next day let pass the chance to go on a freight wagon retracing our route toward Augusta and Helena? Or in hope of it? Either case, the notion grew on me now that maybe I might as well go ahead and try a bit of land-looking between intervals of helping Lucas in the saloon, just to be sure we weren’t missing some undisclosed reason for hope here in Gros Ventre’s neighborhood.

  This supposition met no objection from Rob. He was staying in demand with Fain for as much wheelwork and other repair as any pair of hands could do, so there was sound sense in him earning while I scouted about. “It could be you’ll find a Great Maybe for us,” he said, though not within Lucas’s hearing. “Have at it, McAngus, why not. I’ll keep Gros Ventre in tune while you’re out and around.”

  • • •

  Lucas of course was several thousand percent in favor of my intention. “By Jesus, Angus, now you’re talking. The best part of the world is right out there waiting for you and Robbie. Tell you what, I’ll even make a contribution to your exploring. Follow me.” I tracked after him to the shed room behind the saloon.

  “There now,” he plucked the peg from the door hasp with his stubs and grandly pushed the door open, “choose your choice.”

  Saddles were piled on other saddles, and the walls were hung with bridles as if it was raining leather. Seeing my puzzlement, Lucas spelled the matter out:

  “Collateral. These cattle outfits seem to specialize in hiring men who are thirstier than they have money for. I’m not running the Medicine Lodge as a charity, and so my borrowers put up these, ay? Go ahead, have your pick.”

  Several of the saddles were larger than the others, large enough that they looked as if they would house a horse from his withers to his tail. “What’re these big ones?”

  “Lad, do you even need to ask? Those are Texas saddles.”

  Since Nethermuir, the progression had been train, steamship, stagecoach, freight wagon, and shoe leather, and to it I now added the plump little pinto mare named Patch, rented to me by the half-day by Dantley and saddled maximally with my new Texican saddle. The pony’s gaily splotched colors made me feel as if I was riding forth into the country around Gros Ventre in warpaint, but I suppose the actuality is that I sallied out looking as purely green as I was.

  The earth was mine to joggle over aboard Patch, at least until each midday. (Lucas was strict that he wanted me to continue my saloonkeeping afternoons so he could take care of what he termed “business at the house.”) Now the question was the homestead-seeker’s eternal one, where best to seek?

  Whatever compass is in me said south first. Not south as a general direction of hope, for as Rob and I tramped through those steep treeless benchlands in the wake of Herbert’s freight wagon ten days before, we had plenty of time to agree that living there would be like dwelling on top of a table. But south a mile or so from Gros Ventre, to the pass where Herbert had halted the wagon to give us our unforgettable first glimpse into the Two Medicine country, was where I felt I needed to start, up for a deeper look at it all.

  Everything was in place. The continent’s flange of mountain range along the west. The dark far butte called Heart and the nearer slow-sloping one like an aft sail. The grass plateaus beyond Gros Ventre and its cottonwood creek. The soft rumple of plains toward the Sweetgrass Hills and where the sun came from. Enough country that a century of Robs and Anguses would never fill it. As I sat awhile on Patch, above to my right a hawk hung on the wind, correcting, correcting. I let myself wish that I had that higher view, that skill to soar to wherever I ought to be. Then I reined Patch east, the hawk’s direction.

  • • •

  Three mornings in a row I rode different tracts eastward of Gros Ventre, following along the creek and its fringe of willow and cottonwood until the land opened into leveler prairie, flattening and fanning into an even horizon which Lucas’s maps showed were incised by the big rivers, the Marias, the Milk, and ultimately the Missouri. This prairie before the rivers, though, had no habitation nor showed much sign it wanted any. In that trio of mornings I met only one other human being, a rider named Andy Cratt who was another of the Seven Block ranch’s Texans or Tex-icans or whatever they called themselves. He was suspiciously interested in the origin of my saddle until I invoked Lucas. When Cratt and I parted, it took the next half hour for his moving horseback figure to entirely dwindle from my over-the-shoulder looks. Noble enough country, this eastward prairie—Toussaint told me it had been thick with buffalo when he first came—but so broad, so open, so exposed, that I felt like a field mouse under the eye of the hawk out there.

  • • •

  North needed only a single morning. North was red cattle on buff hills, north was ranch after ranch already built along a twisty stream called Noon Creek—Thad Wainwright’s large Rocking T, Pat Egan’s sizable Circle Dot, three or four smaller enterprises upstream toward the mountains, and most of all, Warren Williamson’s huge Double W, which held fully half of that Noon Creek country. General opinion I had overheard in the Medicine Lodge was that you could rake hell from corner to corner and not find a nastier item than Warren Williamson. Or, as was supposedly replied to a traveler who innocently wondered what the cattle brand WW stood for, Wampus Cat Williamson. I’d only glimpsed Williamson when he stepped into the Medicine Lodge to summon a couple of his riders, a thickset impatient man several shades paler than his weather-browned cowboys. Evidently those white-handed men of money were here as in Scotland, those whose gilt family crests properly translated would read something like, Formerly robbers, now thieves. There where the road ran along the benchland between Gros Ventre and Noon Creek, I gazed down at the fortlike cluster of Double W ranch buildings and wondered whether Rob and I would ever possess a fraction as much roof over us.

  • • •

  “You’re becoming a regular jockey,” Rob tossed cheerily as he came out from dinner and I rode up to grab a bite before spelling Lucas at the saloon.

  “You’re missing all the thrill of exploration,” I replied as I climbed off Patch and stiffly tottered toward the house.

  That evening in the Medicine Lodge I mentioned to Lucas that I thought I might ride west the next day by following the creek up from town toward the area that lay nestled under the mountains.

  Lucas had not remarked much on my land-looking, maybe on the basis that he figured I ought to see plenty before making my mind up. But now he said:

&n
bsp; “That’ll be worth doing. That North Fork is pure handsome prospect. Plan to spend the full day at it, there are a lot of miles in that country up there.” To my surprised look, Lucas cleared his throat and allowed: “Business at the house can rest for an afternoon.”

  “That’s more than generous of you,” I said with what I hoped was a straight face.

  “Angus, here’s a pregnant thought for you. While you’re about it tomorrow, pay a visit to Ninian Duff. His is the first place up the North Fork, just there after the creek divides.”

  Here was a name Lucas had mentioned in connection with the vanishment of cattle rustlers. When I reminded him so, Lucas gave me one of his long perusals and instructed, “You’ll remember, lad, I only said maybe. But you might do well to stay away from the man’s cows.”

  Lucas paused, then added: “Don’t particularly tell Ninian you’re working here in the saloon with me. He and I are not each other’s favorite, in that regard.”

  I thought that over. “If I’m to meet the man, I could stand to know something more about that, Lucas.”

  “Angus, you’re one who’d want to know which way the rain falls from. I’ve nothing against Ninian Duff. It’s just that he and his are more churchly folk.”

  Orthodox, orthodox/who believe in John Knox./Their sighing canting grace-proud faces/their three-mile prayers and half-mile graces. I knew the breed. Maybe I would pay a visit to some old holy howler and maybe I wouldn’t, too.

  • • •

  Wind was my guide west, early the next morning. It met me face-first as soon as I rode around the creek bend where the big cottonwoods sheltered Gros Ventre. The stiff breeze required me to clamp my hat down tight and crinkle my eyes, but no cloud showed itself anywhere there in the Rockies where the wind was flowing from, and the first sunshine made a promise of comfort on my back. Who knew, maybe this was simply how a Two Medicine day whistled.

  The road today wasn’t honestly one, just twin prints of wheel marks such as those Herbert’s freight wagon had tracked to Gros Ventre. Yet this was peopled land along the main creek, homesteads inserted into each of the best four or five meadows of wild hay. Here was handsome, with the steady line of grassed benchland backing the creek and the convenient hedge of willows and sturdy trees giving shelter all along the water. The long-sloped promontory butte with its timber top poked companionably just into sight over the far end of this valley of homesteaders, but beyond that butte where the tiers of mountains and forest began to show, it looked like tangled country. This was the best land I’d yet seen: any one of these established homesteads down here I would gladly own. Were Rob and I already latecomers?

  The mare Patch of course decided to drink when we came to a crossing of the creek, and as usual in those first days of my horsemanship I of course forgot to climb off and have myself one before she waded in and muddied the water. Today, though, the stream-bed was thoroughly gravel, several-colored and bright under the swift clean flow as a spill of marbles, so Patch didn’t roil the drinking site. I rode her on across before getting down and drinking the fresh brisk water from my hands.

  Now that I was on that side of the crossing I could see past the willows to another creekline, coiling its way as if climbing leisurely, between the benchland I had followed all the distance from town and a knobby little pine ridge directly in front of me. Here I was, wherever I was: by Lucas’s description that other water had to be the North Fork, this the South. To me the natural thing was to point Patch toward the top of the knob, for a scan around. Patch did not necessarily agree, but plodded us up the slope anyway.

  You would imagine, as I did, that this climb to see the new country would bring anticipation, curiosity. And there you’d be as wrong as I was. For what I began to feel was a growing sense of familiarity. Of something known, making itself recognized. The cause of the feeling, though, I kept trying to place but couldn’t. The wind, yes, that. Smell of new grass, which I had been among for several days of riding by now. A glimpse of a few grazing cattle below near that north creek branch, like stray red specks from the Double W’s cow hundreds. Cold whiff from where a snowbank lay hidden in some north-facing coulee. All those but something more.

  At the knob top, I saw. The earth’s restless alteration of itself here. The quickening swells of plains into foothills and then the abrupt upward spill of the mountains. While Rob and I were aboard the stagecoach between Craig and Augusta we had watched this, the entire interior of America soaring through its change of mood. That same radical mood of terrain I was feeling here—the climb of the continent to its divide, higher, greater, more sudden than seemed possible; like a running leap of the land.

  Here was magnificent. And here, just below me, one single calm green wrinkle amid the surrounding rumpus of surging buttes and tall timbered ridges and stone cliff skyline, lay the valley of the North Fork.

  To say the truth, it was the water winding its way through that still valley—its heartstream, so to speak—that captured me then and there. When the summitline up along these mountains, the Continental Divide, halved the moisture of America’s sky, the share beyond went west to the Pacific Ocean while that of this slope was destined to the Atlantic. Are you telling me, Rob shipboard, we’re already on water from Montana, out here? Aye, yes and yea, Rob. This supple little creek below me, this North Fork, was the start of that water which eventually touched into the Atlantic. This was the first flowing root of that pattern of waves I watched and watched from the deck of the emigrant ship. But greatly more than that, too, this quiet creek. Here at last was water in its proper dose for me. Plentiful fluid fuel for grass and hay, according to the browsing cows and the green pockets of meadow between the creek’s twists. Shelter from the wind and whatever rode it in winter stood in thick evidence, creekbank growth of big willows and frequent groves of quaking ash. The occasional ponds behind beaver dams meant trout, a gospel according to Lucas. And by its thin glitter down there and the glassy shallowness of the main creek back where the mare and I crossed, not any of this North Fork ran deep enough to drown more of me than my knees.

  I sat transfixed in the saddle and slowly tutored myself about the join of this tremendous western attic to the rest of the Two Medicine country. No human sign was anywhere around, except for the tiny pair of homesteads just above the mouth of the North Fork, one of them undoubtedly that of the old Bible-banger Whoo-jamadinger whom Lucas mentioned to me. Other than those, wherever I looked was pure planet. There from the knob I could see eastward down the creek to where Gros Ventre was tucked away; for that matter, I could see all the way to the Sweetgrass Hills, what, more than eighty miles distant, that Herbert had pointed out to Rob and me. By the holy, this was as if stepping up onto the hill above the Greenock dock and being magically able to gaze across all of Scotland to Edinburgh. My eyes reluctant to leave one direction for the next, nonetheless I twisted to scan each of them over and over: north, the broad patient benchland and the landmark butte that lifted itself to meet it; southward, the throng of big dry-grass ridges shouldering between this creek branch and the South Fork . . .

  West. West, the mountains as steady as a sea wall. The most eminent of them in fact was one of the gray-rock palisades that lay like reefs in the surge of the Rockies, a straight up-and-down cliff perhaps the majority of a mile high and, what, three or more miles long. A stone partition between ground and sky, even-rimmed as though it had been built by hand, countless weathers ago. That rimming mountain stood nearest over the valley of the North Fork. A loftier darkly timbered peak loomed behind the northernmost end of the cliff rim, and between the pair a smaller mountain topped with an odd cockscomb rock formation fitted itself in. Close as I was now to these promontories, which was still far, for the first time since Rob and I came to Gros Ventre these seemed to me local mountains. They were my guide now, even the wind fell from mind in their favor. Seeing them carving their canyons of stone into the sky edge, scarps and peaks deep up into the blue, a person could have no doubt where he wa
s. The poor old rest of the earth could hold to whatever habit of axis it wished, but this Two Medicine country answered to a West Pole, its own magnetic world top here along its wildest horizon.

  Someway in the midst of all my gawking I began to feel watched myself. Maybe by someone at either of the homesteads along the creek, but no one was in view. By the cows then? No, they seemed all to have their noses down in their daydream fashion of eating. Nothing else, nobody, anywhere that I could find.

  As much as I tried to dismiss the feeling, though, the touch of eyes would not leave me. Who knew, probably these seven-league mountains were capable of gazing back at me. Nonetheless I cast a glance behind me for surety’s sake.

  On a blood bay horse not much farther away than a strong spit sat a colossally bearded figure.

  He was loose-made—tall, thin, mostly legs and elbows, a stick man. And that beard was a dark-brown feedbag of whiskers halfway down his chest. He also had one of those alarming foreheads you sometimes see on the most Scottish of Scots, a kind of sheer stark cliff from the eyes up. As if the skull was making itself known under there.

  All of this was regarding me in a blinkless way. I gaped back at the whiskers and forehead, only gradually noticing that the horseman’s hands were either side of his saddle horn, holding another lengthy stick of some sort across there and pointing it mostly towards me. Then I realized that stick was a rifle.

  “You have business here, do you?” this apparition asked.

  “I hope to,” I answered, more carefully than I had ever said anything before. From the looks of him, the lightest wrong word and I was a gone geezer. “I’m, I’m looking for homestead land to take up.”

  “Ay, every man who can walk, crawl or ride is looking for that. But not many of them find here.”

  “That’s their loss, I would say. This country”—I nodded my head cautiously to the North Fork and the butte—“is the picture of what I’d hoped for.”