by Jim Wilsky
Off in the distance, he heard a mama cow lowing. This was the life he had chosen, and he had never looked back. It hadn’t been easy working for, and then with, his dad. They had gone back and forth on the best way to select the bulls and broncos they supplied for “rough stock” events at the rodeos in the Sandhills of western Nebraska. There was only one way for Dad. “You don’t have the feel for how much the bull don’t want rode,” his dad would say. But Sam had gone to school and studied twentieth-century methods of livestock rearing. For his dad it was a way of life; for Sam it was a business. Sam liked the numbers. He liked to narrow the odds by more than just a feeling. He had tried to show his dad the value in breeding techniques and genetic tracking in estimating the probability that a particular bull would do well in the arena. His dad would just laugh it off. “Show me the ornery gene,” his dad would laugh. “I’ll have five bulls picked before you decide on one.” But Sam knew his would be a better one than the five. He could prove the temperament of a bull before anyone tried to ride it. He had never convinced his dad. The ornery gene had been elusive, but not the genetic makeup of the ornery bulls. He had been right, and he had a genetically identifiable line of stock to prove it.
During his travels from his ranch outside of Laramie, Wyoming, Sam had been made aware of a genetic curiosity in one of the cattle he purchased in Colorado in the spring. Being off in the records would end up being off in the genetic makeup of the calves. There never was just one gene that made the difference. It was a matter of multiple generations. He had traced the lines that looked the most promising, and closely followed the leaders in the industry. Discovering that curiosity had led him into this part of the Sandhills of Nebraska. Talking about it at the bar had got him into an argument with the old cowboy, and listening to the old man had brought him to this particular spot.
“You’ll find what you’re looking for out there,” the old cowboy had said. “Then you’ll know I was telling you the truth.” Danielson switched the flashlight on and scanned the area around the cattle chute. He had let himself be convinced that the old man knew a thing or two about cattle breeding. What had surprised Danielson most was that the old man had known about the science behind modern breeding at all. The old cowboy looked more like he’d been “rode hard and put up wet” as his dad would have said: a man who had spent a hard life out in the sun and the rain and the snow. Danielson expected someone like that to know less about biogenetics and more about old school solutions. Like his dad.
The excitement the old cowboy had shown assured Danielson it would be worth his time to find out if he was headed in the right direction. But as he looked around the area, all he saw was a dump site for old batteries, tires, cook stoves, windmill parts, cans, bed springs, and used up corral panels. He saw nothing that would explain the old cowboy’s intensity. Now he was more curious to find out how the old cowboy would explain the genetic anomaly that he was so passionate about. It was one of those things his dad would say shouldn’t make a whole lot of difference in his deciding on a bull. It probably wasn’t all that important to breeders either. But he was curious, and keeping careful records was important to the integrity of breeding livestock. It was a necessary component in the breeding business and his business. He was hoping he could find some answers out here as he tried to piece together the puzzle. He was determined to take some time to track it down to the source and maybe be able to verify when and where the mistake was made.
He had tried to be low-key when he was asking questions, but the speed at which the old cowboy had raised his hackles this afternoon showed Danielson just how hard that was going to be. He had touched the wrong nerve on the first try. He wasn’t sure whether he had asked the wrong question or his question had been taken the wrong way. It took a couple of beers and a good bit of time getting the old man calmed down. When it finally got friendly again, the old cowboy had told him about the spot out here in the hills. He gave directions and said he’d meet him out there around nine that evening.
As he waited for the old cowboy to show up, Danielson kicked at a broken pitman, picked it up, and used it to move around some cans at the edge of the dump site. He wasn’t terribly interested in getting bitten by a rattlesnake or a rat. It was a half-hearted effort. He sniffed the air again and caught the scent of pine and cedar trees this time. The hills hadn’t changed much from when he was a kid except the cedar trees. They were becoming a weed out in the hills. He shoved a wooden box with the pitman, then threw the stick of wood back into the pile. It was altogether possible that the old cowboy had sent him out on a snipe hunt. It just as well be. There was nothing he’d seen so far that was tied to the cattle breeding. If it were here, it wasn’t something obvious. What galled him was that he could be looking right at it and still not see it. For that matter, there could be nothing to it.
A loud clap of thunder caused Danielson to look up at the sky. In the southwest the clouds were fast turning to an ugly black. He saw the lightning streak across the sky and started counting. He reached fifty-two and he heard the thunder again. The storm was only about ten miles away. He didn’t want to get caught in the storm, and he hadn’t found anything yet. It wouldn’t be the first time he had gone on a wild goose chase.
He walked over to the rear of the pickup, pulled out a can of chewing tobacco from his back pocket, and stuffed a pinch in the back of his cheek. He put the can back in his pocket and picked up an old spur that was in the pickup box. He turned it over in his hand as he walked over to the chute—just an old spur. The old cowboy had given it to him, along with some old rodeo flyers, claiming he’d known Danielson’s dad and had got it from him. His dad had never been a bull rider, so the spur didn’t belong to him. He didn’t know whether someone had given it to his dad or his dad had simply found it tearing down after one of the rodeos they had supplied the bulls and broncs for. It reminded him that he needed to go through his dad’s things, a clutter of boxes, something he’d put off for ten years after his dad died. He tossed the spur toward the pickup box but hit the fender instead, bouncing the spur at an odd angle forward of the pickup. He walked over toward the cattle chute and battery and pointed his flashlight in the direction the spur had bounced.
Danielson caught the flash of lightning in the corner of his eye, heard a pop from behind him, then felt a sledgehammer hit him in the middle of the back. The strength drained out of his legs. He felt a sharp pain spring out from where the hammer had hit that seemed to rush through his torso. His legs gave out and he hit the ground, knees first, and then fell on his face. The pain was now a hot, burning sensation from the place where the hammer had hit and his back felt wet. He thought he had been struck with lightning, cursing himself for miscalculating the distance of the storm. He tried to use his arms to push himself up, but he couldn’t gather the strength. He dropped back down. He could feel that his back was soaked, but it hadn’t started raining yet.
From off to his right, he heard something moving cans around. It wasn’t the wind. It was deliberate. No animal would do that either. A few moments later, he felt someone kick his side. He grunted involuntarily, and then tried to roll over. His legs were a dead weight. He twisted his face away from the pickup, but couldn’t see anything. “He shot me,” he whispered. He tried to raise himself with his arms, but was light-headed now. I can’t believe he shot me. A few moments later rain poured from the clouds, diluting the blood from his back and mingling it with the sand.
Chapter Two
Thursday, 7:30 a.m.
Travis Martin looked at the splice he’d made to the barbed wire, shook his head, then selected three staples from an old coffee can on the ground in front of him. He pulled the wire pliers from his back pocket and hammered the staples into the hedge post, one at a time, securing the three strands of wire. He braced the back of the post with his knee and was satisfied he’d tamped the wet sand firmly enough and that the splice he’d made would hold.
The rain, which had started as a downpour late
the night before, had continued as a heavy drizzle at daylight. Travis had hoped for a day off, but he had found himself a quarter-mile from the ranch house fixing fence. He hadn’t expected Buck Ellison to get him up at five in the morning, but he was learning that the work didn’t stop on his Aunt Sarah’s ranch. After breakfast, Buck had driven him out to where he was now and they had unloaded the pickup together—five fence posts, a post hole digger, some wire, a wire stretcher, a can of staples, and a pair of wire pliers. Travis had watched carefully as Buck had shown him how to splice and stretch the barbed wire. He had assured Buck he could drive a staple into a post, so Buck had driven off and left the job to Travis.
He had attacked the work with his best effort. The splice he was looking at was his third attempt, and it had passed the test of being tightened without slipping the splice. He put the wire pliers back into his pocket, grabbed the can of staples, and hoisted the post hole digger onto his right shoulder. He left the remaining hedge posts leaning against the fence, telling himself to remember to come back and get them once he had the pickup, and headed toward the house.
As he was walking toward the machine shed, he heard Diane Gibbons holler and, when he looked up, he saw her waving a white dish towel on the kitchen porch. He gladly changed directions and walked up to the house. A white towel generally meant food, and he was more than happy to take a break and dry up a little before he started greasing the equipment. He set the can of staples and post hole digger next to the stoop and walked into the kitchen. The lingering smells of the breakfast eggs and bacon together with the smell of hot cocoa, hot coffee, and baking bread made his mouth water. He took the wire pliers out of his back pocket, sat down at the kitchen table, and set the pliers next to his feet.
“And Travis,” Diane said, setting a cup of hot chocolate in front of him, “before you do whatever it is next on your list, Sarah wants you to do something first. Sheriff Lynch called her up and said someone had reported a stranger nosing around in the southern part of the property, near the river. She wants you to go down there and check the calves. Just in case. Get a count and make sure none are missing. Nobody had reported a stranger taking anything, but she wants to make sure that the calf crop is intact. It doesn’t take much to grab a calf or two, and it’s a whole lot easier than bringing a semi in and loading it up.”
Diane brought him a fresh-baked cinnamon roll, loaded with pecans and gooey melted sugar, butter, and cinnamon. Travis took a bite of the roll, opened his mouth, and waved his hand rapidly in front of it, shaking his head. “That’s hot,” he mumbled to Diane, but didn’t put the roll down. After a few moments, he looked up at Diane.
“Do you think I can do this?” he asked.
Diane laughed. “The calves or the cinnamon roll?”
Travis just scowled at her.
She explained to him that there wasn’t much to the job. Count the calves, maybe check the fences while he was there, check the windmill, those sorts of things. “Besides,” she said, “the junior rodeo is coming up in a week or so and bull riding in a month. So there could be any number of people showing up where they don’t belong.”
“And what am I supposed to do if I run into somebody? How am I supposed to know if I should know them or not?”
Diane laughed again. “You worry too much,” she said. “The sheriff did Sarah a favor by giving her a call. My dad always said that the growth rate on a missing calf is just as good as the growth rate on a dead one. Sarah is just being cautious. It’s probably nobody, and it’s probably nothing. But if anything comes up where you’re not sure what to do, give me a call on the radio. I’ll be here all morning cleaning up and getting dinner.”
At least I’ll be dry in the pickup, Travis thought to himself. He finished the roll in silence and drank another cup of cocoa. He depended a lot on Diane to point him in the right direction. She did the cleaning and cooking for Aunt Sarah during the summer and joked that she and Travis might even be related. They hit it off pretty good the first time they met because she was a sophomore at the university and he had just graduated from North Star High School in Lincoln. He had been struck with how different life was in Lincoln compared to out in the Sandhills. Here there was no place to go, nothing much to do but work, and seemed like there were more people on his block in Lincoln than there was out here. But Diane had done a pretty good job of making him feel welcome out here in the Sandhills of western Nebraska. That’s more than he could say for Buck. Buck was as serious a kind a person as Diane wasn’t. She would laugh about him too.
“Look at the bright side,” Diane said, following him to the door and handing him the pliers and a thermos of hot chocolate. “There’s an old dump site down there, you might find something of interest to you.” Travis took the pliers and smiled; exploring was one of the diversions he liked out in this desolate region of sand dunes, coyotes, and soap weeds. He put the post hole diggers, staples, and pliers back in the tool shed, went to his Aunt Sarah’s old Dodge pickup and got in. Maybe the calf count and checking fences could wait while he searched for some relics of the “Old West.”
He parked the pickup at the top of a sand bluff overlooking the Dismal River, poured himself some more hot chocolate from the thermos Diane had given him, thought about his Aunt Sarah, and looked down at the few trees and lush grass growing on the river banks. The lack of trees is what he noticed the most. Except where they had been planted in towns or ranch sites, the only place he ever saw many trees was along the river. Buck had said the cedars don’t count, they’re a weed and a nuisance. Travis followed the flow of the river toward where the South Fork and North Fork of the Dismal merged about a mile or so east from where he was sitting. There was a bridge built across the river for the only north-south paved road in the region. Behind him and beyond the river on either side were endless grass-covered sand dunes, each looking pretty much like the other. “They’re like the ocean,” his great Aunt Sarah had described them to him. “Endless frozen waves of sand.” Travis had never been to see an ocean, Atlantic or Pacific, but he took her word for it. And from pictures he had seen of the ocean, the leaden sky and drizzle did make it seem like an immense ocean. At least, today it did. It was what he thought the ocean to be, stretching as far as the eye could see in any direction, with only the waves to break up the horizon. He poured the last of the hot cocoa from the thermos Diane had given him and watched the steam fog up the driver-side window. Diane had told him it was the largest grass-stabilized sand dune region in the Western Hemisphere. He didn’t know exactly what that meant, but he was looking forward to Diane’s promise to show him where she grew up. She told him it was in the heart of the Sandhills, where the South Fork and North Fork of the Dismal River merged. Diane had told him the Dismal had an appropriate name. “There’s sink holes all over out there,” she had told him. “The river is spring fed and half the flow is suspended sand. Some of those sink holes are over hundred feet deep. If you fall into one of those, we’ll never find you again.”
His older brother Conrad had told him about the Dismal River. He had been out the summer before to canoe down the Dismal with a bunch of his friends. He had talked about the quicksand, the barbed wire across the river, and the falls. He had told Travis that it was hard to find a place to land or make camp for miles. And it was Conrad who had told him that they had relatives out here.
Travis finished his cup of cocoa as he tried to decide if he had made the right decision to come out here for the summer or if it had been a colossal mistake. That was a question he asked himself often. It had become apparent early on that broiling hamburgers and cleaning up after closing at Burger King hadn’t really prepared him for the hard labor that was involved in working on a ranch. His mother had been excited about his working for her Aunt Sarah. “Your grandmother simply didn’t like to talk about where she grew up and we never went to visit,” his mother had said. “She had come to Lincoln in the fifties, had graduated from the university, got married to a CPA, and had ne
ver looked back. I knew we had relatives out in the Sandhills, but I didn’t know who they were or if they were still alive. It’s sad really.” Half the reason Conrad had for coming out on the canoe trip was to see if there were any relatives left in the Sandhills. As he asked around, someone had told him about his great Aunt Sarah’s ranch in the southeastern part of Hooker County. He had found out that Sarah was his grandmother’s sister but not much else.
Conrad’s time had been limited because his buddies had come out for a canoe trip and not to track down lost relatives. So he hadn’t found out much other than they had a great aunt who owned a ranch. “So why don’t you see if you can get a job out there next summer,” he had urged Travis. “Just think,” he had argued, “you can find out what it’d be like to be a cowboy.” It had taken a little time to track down his great aunt and, when he first made contact, she was reluctant to do it. But after his mother had talked with her, she agreed to the arrangement.
When he had first arrived, Travis was excited. But after a short amount of time, he had discovered it was hard work and he was ill-prepared to do it. He hadn’t been expecting the wide-open spaces. Having grown up in the city of Lincoln, he was surprised at how depressing desolation could make him feel at times. And he was still a little miffed that he had to be working in the rain and drizzle; the rain had not stopped the work, it had just changed what jobs were at the top of the list and had been put off for rainy days. And he still hadn’t learned much from his great Aunt Sarah about his grandmother or her parents or anything about family.
