Dancing at the Rascal Fair

by Ivan Doig

  His face, strained and wincing, told us before his words did. “I didn’t make it to the fence. Ran out of rope.”

  Rob swore feelingly. I tried to think. We needed more rope, more line of life, to explore again into that snow world, and we did not have more rope. We just had ourselves, the three of us.

  “Varick,” I began. “Can you stand another try at it?”

  “Floundering around out there isn’t really anything I want to make a career of,” he admitted, breathing as if he’d been in a race. “But yeah, I can do it again if I have to.”

  “Then this time I’ll go out with you, for however far he can still see me.” I jerked my head to indicate Rob. “You give us a yell when we’re just about out of sight, Rob. Then you go out beyond me, Varick, while I hold the rope for you. What do you think? It would gain us that much distance”—I nodded to the edge of visibility out there—“for looking, at least.”

  “That sounds as good as any,” Varick assented. Rob only bobbed his head once; we McCaskills could take it for yes if we wanted.

  Varick and I set out, the wind sending scythes of snow at us. The cold sawed at us through every seam in our clothing. Quickly we were up to our knees in a fresh drift. Varick broke the way and I thrashed after him. A drift atop a drift, this latest dune of snow would be. And other layers beneath that as we slogged. October snow. November on top of that. And December atop that, and January, and February . . . How many tiers of this winter could there be. This wasn’t a winter, it was geologic ages of snow. It was a storm planet building itself layer by layer. It was—

  Abruptly I stopped, and reaching a hand ahead to Varick’s shoulder brought him to a halt, too. When he turned, the apprehension in my manner made words unnecessary.

  We looked back. Nothingness. The white void of snow, the blizzard erasing all difference between earth and sky. No glimpse of Rob. No sound in the air but the wind.

  We stood like listening statues, our tracks already gone into the swirling snow we had come out of. Again, yet, no voice from the safety of there.

  The bastard.

  The utter betraying triple-slippery unforgiving bastard Rob had let us come too far. I ought to have killed him with my own hands, the day we fought there on Breed Butte, the day it all began. He was letting the blizzard eat us. Letting Varick and me vanish like two sparks into the whirl of this snow. Letting us—

  Then sounds that were not quite the wind’s.

  . . . arrr . . .

  . . . ough . . .

  The blizzard swirled in a new way, and the wraith figure of Rob was there, waving both arms over his head.

  “Far enough,” his voice faintly carried to us. “Far enough.”

  Varick’s heavy breathing was close to mine. “He always was one to press the luck, wasn’t he,” my son uttered. “Particularly when it’s somebody else’s.”

  We breathed together, marking the sight and sound of Rob into our senses, then turned ahead to squint for any sign of the fence-line. None.

  “You ready to go fishing?” asked Varick, and away he plunged again, the rope around his waist and in my mittened hands.

  Through my weariness I concentrated on the hemp in my hands. To see a world in a grain of sand . . . Would grains of snow do? By the dozens and hundreds they fell and fell, their whiteness coating my sleeves and mittens. . . . Hold infinity in the palm of your hand . . . Would mittened palms be deft enough, for that? I had to force my cold claw of a hand to keep making a fist around the moving line of rope. The rope paying out through my grip already had taken Varick from sight, into the snow cyclone. Thoughts swarmed to fill his absence. What if he stumbled out there, jerking the rope out of my stiff hands? Hold, Angus. Find a way to hold. I fumbled the end of the rope around my waist, clutching it tightly belted around me with my right hand while the left hand encircled the strand going out to Varick. If he fell I would fall, too, but nothing would make me let go of this rope. I would be Varick’s anchor. Such as I was, I would be that much. A splice knot caught in my grip an instant before I let it belly out and away. The knots. Rob’s knots. Lord of mercy, why hadn’t I done them myself? What if he hadn’t tied them firmly, what if just one began to slip loose? No. No, I could trust Rob’s hands even if I couldn’t trust him.

  Only a few feet of rope left. If Varick did not find the fenceline now, we never would. My heart thundered in me, as if the enormity of clothing around it was making it echo. A quiver of chill went through me each time the wind clasped around my body. If we couldn’t go on we would need to try to hide ourselves in caves of the hay, try to wait out the blizzard. But if this cold and wind went on through the night, our chances were slim. More likely they were none. If any one of us could live through, let it be Var—

  Tugs on the rope, like something heavy quivering at the end of the hempen line. Or something floundering after it had fallen.

  “VARICK!” I shouted as loud as I could. The wind took my words. I might as well have been yelling into a bale of that Dakota hay.

  The tugs continued. I swallowed, held firm, clutching the jerking rope around me. I resisted a hundred impulses to plunge forward and help Varick in his struggle. I resisted another hundred to whirl around in search of Rob, to see whether he still was there as our guidemark. The distance back to him and the hay sleds was the same as it ever had been, I had to recite to my bolting instincts, only the snow was in motion, not the white distance stretching itself as it gave every appearance of. Motion of another wild sort at the invisible end of this rope, the tugs continuing in a ragged rhythm that I hoped had to be—

  Varick suddenly coming hand over hand, materializing out of the whirl. A struggling upright slab of whiteness amid the coiling swirl of whiteness.

  He saved his breath until he was back to me, my arms helping to hold him up.

  “It’s there!” he panted. “The fenceline. It comes out of the drift about there”—carefully pointing an angle to our left, although everything in me would have guessed it had to be to our right. “The sleds are actually on the other side of the sonofabitch. We about went too far, Dad.”

  Fixing ourselves on the figure whose waves and shouts came and went through the blowing flakes, we fought snow with our feet until we were back beside Rob. Varick saved him the burden of asking. “We got ourselves a fence again, Unk.”

  Laboriously we retied the ropes across the hay loads, as well as men in our condition could. Then Varick turned his team to the left—they were glad enough to, suffering in the wind as they had been—and I reined Woodrow and Copenhagen around to follow them, and Rob and his grays swung in behind us. Once our procession was down off the mound of snow, the tops of fenceposts appeared and then the topmost single strand of barbwire, the three strands beneath it in the accumulated white depth. This white iron winter, with a brutal web in it. That single top strand, though. That was our tether to the creek, to survival. I had never known until then that I could be joyously glad to see barbed bramble.

  Now how far to the creek? We had to keep going, following the line of fence, no matter what distance it was. There was no knowing the hour of the day, either. The storm had made it all dusk. The complicated effort of trying to fumble out my pocket watch for a look, I couldn’t even consider. Slog was all we needed to know, really. But how far?

  Another laborious half-mile, mile. Who knew. This day’s distances had nothing to do with numbers.

  Then thin shadows stood in the snowy air.

  Trees, willows of the creek. Dim frieze that hung on the white wall of weather. But as much guidance as if it was all the direction posts on earth, every one of them pointing us to Gros Ventre and safety.

  A person is never too weary to feel victory. Blearily exultant, I stood and watched while Varick halted his sled and began to slog back to meet Rob and me. Now that we had the creek, consultation wasn’t really needed any more. But maybe he simply had to share success with us, maybe—then as I squinted at the treeline of the creek, something moved in the botto
m corner of my vision, there where the fence cornered into the creek.

  I blinked and the something still moved, slowly, barely. A lower clot of forms beneath the willow shadows: Double W cattle, white with the snow coated onto them, caught there in the fence corner.

  “The two of you go ahead and take your sleds across the creek, why not,” my son said as nonchalantly as if our day of struggle was already years into the past. “I’ll snip the fence for these cows and give them a shove out into the brush, then catch up with you.”

  “Man, why bother,” Rob spoke bitterly. He still wore that bleak look, as if being prodded along by the point of an invisible bayonet. “They’re goddamn Williamson’s.”

  “That isn’t their fault,” Varick gave him back. “Head on across, you two. I won’t be long.”

  I made my tired arms and tired legs climb atop the hay on the sled, then rattled the reins to start Copenhagen and Woodrow on their last few plodded miles to town, miles with the guarantee of the creek beside us. When we had crossed the narrow creek and made our turn toward Gros Ventre, Rob and his gray team copying behind us, I could hear faintly above the wind the grateful moans of the cattle Varick was freeing from the blizzard.

  • • •

  In the morning, our procession from Gros Ventre west toward home was a slow glide through white peace. New snow had freshened everything, and without the wind the country sat plump and calm.

  As we passed the knob ridge at the mouth of the North Fork valley, branchloads in the tops of its pine trees were dislodging and falling onto the lower branches, sending up snow like white dust. The all-but-silent plummets of snow in the pines and the sounds of our teams and sleds were the only things to be heard in Scotch Heaven.

  We went past the empty Duff homestead, and then the empty Erskine place, and what had been Archie Findlater’s homestead, and the silent buildings of Allan Frew’s. The lone soul anywhere here in the center of the valley was George Frew, feeding his sheep beside the creek. George’s wave to us was slow and thoughtful, as if he was wondering whether he, too, would soon be making such a journey as we had.

  And now we were around the final turn of the valley to my homestead, mine and Adair’s, and there on their feedground beside the North Fork were the sheep in their gray gather, and the broad bundled figure of Toussaint distributing dabs of hay. For a long minute he watched our tiny fleet of bale-laden sleds, Varick in the lead, next me, Rob at the tail. Then Toussaint gripped his pitchfork in the middle of the handle, hoisted it above his head and solemnly held it there as if making sure we could see what it was, as if showing us it was not an axe.

  • • •

  We had hay now, but we still had the winter, too.

  Each day was one more link in the chain of cold. For the first week after our Valier journey, Rob and I were men with smoke for breath as we fed the sheep in the frozen glistening weather.

  Memory takes a fix from landmarks as any other traveler will. That week of bright silver winter after our hay journey was a time when Scotch Heaven never looked better. The mountains stood up as white majesties in the blue and the sun. The long ridgelines wore scarves of fresh snow that made them seem gentle, content. Every tree of the timbered top of Breed Butte stood out like a proud black sprig. Sunshaft and shadow wove bold wild patterns amid the willows along the North Fork. Only an eyeblink of time ago Montana was at its worst, and here it was at its best.

  I would like to say that the clear weather and the Dakota hay and our survival of the blizzard made a poultice for the tension between Rob and me. That we put aside the winterlong wrangling—the yearslong enmity—and simply shouldered together toward spring. I would like to say that, but it would be farthest from the truth.

  Maybe Rob would have been able to hold himself in if sheep had not continued to die. We found a few every day, in stiffened collapse; weak from the long winter and the short ration of hay, they no longer could withstand the cold and simply laid down into it and died. You could look on the hay journey as having saved the great majority of the sheep, as I did. Or you could look on the fact that in spite of that journey and its expensive hay, some of the sheep still insisted on dying, as Rob did.

  It was about the third time he muttered something about “this Dakota hay of yours” that I rapped back, “What, you think we ought to have let the whole damn band just starve to death?”

  “Goddamn it, you didn’t hear me say that.”

  “If it wasn’t that, it was the next thing to it.”

  “Up a rope, why don’t you,” he snapped back. It occurred to me we really ought not be arguing while we had pitchforks in our hands.

  Wordlessly we shoveled the rest of the day’s hay, and wordlessly I headed home to Adair and he to Breed Butte. By now I was not in my best mood. Overnight the clear weather had faded and gone, today’s was a milky indecisive overcast, neither one thing nor another. The feedground wasn’t far behind me when I heard the KAPOW of Rob’s rifle as he blazed away, as he lately had begun doing, at some coyote attempting to dine on one of our dead sheep. The Winchester thunder rolled and rolled through the cold air, echoing around in the white day that had no horizon between earth and sky for it to escape through. Myself, I was not giving the coyotes any aggravation this winter. As long as they were eating the dead ones maybe they weren’t eating the live ones, was my wishful theory. But apparently Rob had to take his frustration out on something, and as a second KAPOW billowed through the winter air, the coyotes were the ones getting it at the moment.

  When I reached home with the hay sled, Varick’s horse was in the barn. These visits of his through all the deep-drifted country between here and Noon Creek were more than outings, they were major pilgrimages. For Adair’s sake, I was greatly glad that he came across the divide to us as often as he did. In full honesty, I was just as glad for my own sake.

  Stiff and weary and chilly to the bottom sides of my bones, I clomped into the house. My wife and my son were at the table keeping coffee cups company. “Easy life for some people,” I chattered out.

  Greatly casual, Varick remarked: “There’s news on Noon Creek. I been keeping this table warm for you until you could get here to hear it.”

  Hot coffee was all I wanted to hear of. Adair reached to the stove for the pot and poured me a cup as I thumped myself into a chair and began to unbuckle my overshoes. “If the news has winter in it,” I expelled tiredly to Varick, “I can stand not to hear it.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe winter had a little something to do with it.” Our son grinned all the grin a face could. “Beth’s going to have a baby.”

  Adair stood up. Her face spoke take care of her, while her voice was saying: “Varick, that’s fine!”

  “You’re ready to be grandma, are you?”

  She hugged him from behind and declared: “It’s bound to be easier than raising you ever was.”

  In her encircling arms our son turned his head to me. “If, ah, if he’s a he”—Varick laughed at his word tangle—“Beth and I are going to give him that Alexander someplace in his name. Both of us figure maybe we can stand that much of the old country in any son of ours.”

  A bit dizzily I said, “Thank you both,” which of course didn’t come within a million miles of saying it enough. Then from Adair: “And if it’s a girl?”

  Varick paused. “Then we’d name her after Beth’s mother.”

  There was nothing I could say. Not of Anna, not to this family of mine that had put itself through so much because of my love for her. It was Adair who moved us beyond the moment, put something major behind us. “That’s an apt name, too,” she said quietly to Varick. “You and Beth are honoring both families.”

  • • •

  The second week in March, the chinook at last came. It arrived in the night, as if guilty about how tardy it had been, and when I realized from the changed feel of the air that this was a warm gush of wind instead of yet another icy one, I slid out of bed and went to the window.

  Already ther
e were trickles of melt, like running tears, down through the frost pattern on the glass. The warm wind outside was a steady swoosh. I looked back to the bed and my sleeping wife. In a few hours, at her end of our shared night, Adair would wake up into spring.

  • • •

  That morning at the feeding, I wished Rob was still in hibernation somewhere.

  “Where the hell was this six weeks ago, when it would have saved our skins?” was his bitter welcome to the thaw.

  • • •

  His mood didn’t sweeten in the next few days of warmth, either. Now that there was melt and slop everywhere, he grumbled against the thaw’s mess as fervidly as he had against the snow it was dispelling. Maybe the chinook air itself was on his nerves—the change from winter coming so sudden that the atmosphere seemed charged, eerie. Or maybe this simply was the way Rob was anymore—resentful against the world.

  Whatever his case was, it was not easy to be around. Not far from where we had stacked the Dakota hay there was a pile of dead sheep we had skinned throughout the winter and I had dragged off the meadow when the chinook came, and the boldest of the coyotes sometimes came to eat away at those corpses now that they were thawing. Rob took to bringing the rifle with him on the hay sled, to cut loose a shot if he saw a flash of coyote color there at the dead pile. The first time he yelled at me to hold the team while he aimed and fired, I had all I could do to keep the workhorses under control.

  “Why don’t you give the artillery a furlough until we’re done feeding?” I tried on him. “The horses don’t like it, the sheep don’t like it, and I hereby make it unanimous.”

  He didn’t even deign to answer, unless you can call a cold scowl an answer. He simply hung the rifle by its sling, back onto the upright of the hay rack where he kept it while we pitched hay, in a way designed to tell me that he would resume combat with the coyotes whenever he damn well felt like it.