Montana Dreaming

by Nadia Nichols

  “So,” Pete said, downshifting and easing the truck to the left to avoid a deep rut, “this girl—Jessie Weaver. You like her?”

  Steven gazed out the mud-spattered windshield and said nothing.

  “She likes you?” Pete said.

  Silence.

  “So. When we find the mares, will she like you better then?”

  “You talk too much,” Steven said.

  “And you don’t speak. That’s not like you. You must be in love.”

  Silence.

  “Once, we were like brothers,” Pete said. “You’d tell me stuff.”

  “I still tell you stuff.”

  Pete maneuvered the truck around a rock. “It’s not the same. You’ve gone on a long journey, took another name. You walk in the white man’s world now.” He shook his head. “You’ve changed.”

  Steven looked at his friend for a long moment before facing front. The truck was climbing the last knoll toward the Weaver ranch. He could see the old weathered ranch house. Jessie was standing on the porch, watching their approach. He felt something tighten inside him, as he caught sight of her. “I haven’t changed that much,” he told his friend.

  “Prove it,” Pete said as he pulled the truck to a gentle stop just below the porch and cut the engine.

  Steven wrenched open the door and jumped down. He looked up at Jessie and felt that painful twist of emotion again. “I brought my friend Pete Two Shirts and two good horses. We’d have gotten here sooner, but Pete’s son was sick—he had to take him to the clinic. But we’re here now, and we can find your mares.”

  Jessie stepped to the porch rail. A breeze flagged the end of her lopsided ponytail. She smiled faintly, revealing a hint of something good and gentle, and glanced toward the truck, where Pete sat waiting. “Thanks, but there’s no need for you to take another ride, Steven,” she said. “Guthrie’s gone up to bring the mares down. He left less than an hour ago.”

  Steven nodded, thumbs hooked in the rear pockets of his jeans. “Does he want help?”

  Jessie shook her head. “He’d be insulted if you offered it. Come inside. I’ll make a fresh pot of coffee.”

  Steven looked down at the ground, then shifted his gaze to where the mountains walled off the sky. “My name isn’t really Brown,” he said, studying the skyline. A long silence followed his words and he lifted his eyes to her face. She watched him and waited with a quiet patience that he greatly admired. “I changed it when I went to law school,” he said. “I didn’t want to deal with the prejudices, the old feelings. I thought Brown was a good name.”

  “Brown’s a fine name,” she said, “but it’s no better than your own, whatever that might be.”

  Steven studied the scuffed ground at his feet. He thought for a moment and then glanced up at her. “Young Bear,” he said. “Steven Young Bear, Crow Indian of the Wolf Clan, who doesn’t like riding horses too much but who very much admires a woman named Jessie Weaver.”

  His words brought color to her cheeks. Her eyes were dark and turbulent. She shook her head. “Steven, I…”

  He raised one hand. “That was not said to make you uncomfortable. You’re an extraordinary woman. I only pay you homage. If you ever need anything, I’m only a phone call away. You have the number. And remember, you said you wanted to see the buffalo herd. The bi’shee. I’ll show you any time you want.”

  Steven spun on his heel before she could respond and climbed into the passenger seat of Pete Two Shirts’s old pickup. Pete started the truck, backed it up skillfully with the trailer in tow and headed down the ranch road. A long time passed, long enough for them to reach the main road and turn north toward Bozeman. “Well,” Pete said, staring straight ahead as he drove, “you proved it, I guess.”

  GUTHRIE DIDN’T THINK he’d find Jessie’s mares the first day out. In fact, he kinda doubted he’d find them at all, especially since Fox had such a big head start and an active loathing of captivity. Given the choice between suffering through a harsh winter without promise of food or shelter and being offered a snug barn, a good bait of feed and fresh water, she’d choose the wild way every time. The odds were in her favor that she’d survive, too. But Jess liked having her broodmares down near the ranch when the bitter winds blew and the snow piled up, and he didn’t blame her. Fox might, but Fox was a wild horse, and some wild horses thought differently about certain matters of civilization.

  There was always the possibility that the horse Joe Nash had spotted at the grizzly’s kill site was Fox, and that nagged at him, for if the wily red mare was dead, her band might be scattered to hell and gone in the foothills.

  If Jessie’s prize stallion hadn’t been struck by lightning, none of this would have happened. The gray had brought the mares down each fall of his own volition, driving the stubborn reluctant Fox before him using his teeth and his hooves. He had kept his band safe from predators, holding them in the valley, close to the home ranch, close to Jessie. She had been inordinately fond of that intelligent, rugged horse, and he had trusted her enough to bring his band of mares to her willingly each fall.

  The fates seemed to have conspired against her—taking her father, taking her brave but gentle gray stallion, taking her ranch and her heritage, all within a year’s time. No wonder she was angry and raged against everything.

  “Whoa, now.” He drew rein and the bay mare flexed her graceful neck and blew. He rubbed a gloved hand over the crest of her neck and felt the tension in her ebb. “Easy, girl. Let’s stop for a breather.” He swung out of the saddle and loosened the cinch, then gave the saddle a shake to unglue it from her sweaty back. The climb up into the pass had been tough, but the young mare hadn’t shirked. It was past noon now, and they were at least an hour shy of where Jessie had found Blue. He thought he knew the place she’d been told of, but there were many side ravines angling down out of the pass, and pinpointing any one of them with certainty was hard. The only thing he was sure of was that it was on Montana Mountain.

  She hadn’t asked him to find the kill site. She hadn’t expressed any wish to learn which of her mares she had lost, but Guthrie knew she was wondering. Knew Jess wanted to know. Even if he never located her little band of broodmares, he had to at least bring her that information. Finding the place Joe had described from the air and Jess remembered from the ground was important for him. He wasn’t eager to have a run-in with the grizzly, especially so near a kill site, but the mare would give him ample warning if the big bruin was anywhere around.

  Horses were scared to death of grizzlies, and with good enough reason.

  Grizzlies could kill horses.

  MCCUTCHEON SAT on the porch of the old cabin and watched the sparkling waters rush past. He wondered if a girl like Jessie Weaver could ever care about a man like himself. He wondered if she could ever look at him in the same way she looked at the mountains, at the big blue dome of the sky, at the hawk that wheeled high above, at the horses that ran free across the face of land she loved. He wondered, idly, if his wife would ever give him a divorce.

  McCutcheon sighed wistfully, then laughed. “Old fool,” he said to himself. The little cow dog thumped her tail at his words. Blue had followed him back to the cabin after his conversation with Jessie earlier in the day. It was as if she needed to make sure he got where he was going, and then she needed to be sure he stayed where he was supposed to be. He wondered, again idly, if Jessie had charged Blue with baby-sitting him. Such a thing would not be beyond her or the dog.

  And then he wondered where Guthrie was, if he had reached the place that Jessie had lost her horse and had found Blue injured. Wondered if Jessie knew how painfully in love with her Guthrie Sloane still was. Wondered if Jessie realized that she was still in love with Guthrie, or if maybe her emotions were all tangled up with another good man, as well. Steven Brown, for all his quiet reserve, was plainly smitten with Jessie Weaver.

  McCutcheon shifted in his chair, arranged his injured ankle on the footstool and pondered the painful paths of love.
Had he ever truly trod them the way these three young people had? No. Love to him had meant something completely different, and he had chosen a different path. Perhaps chosen was not the word. Perhaps saying he had stumbled upon a different path and then groped his way along it as best he could would be better.

  In retrospect, it was not the way he would have chosen had he been given in the impulsive days of his youth the wisdom of his years. Nonetheless, it was the way he had chosen, and any regrets he had were of his own doing. After all, a man made his own bed, and hadn’t ought to complain about lying in it.

  JESSIE HUNG the painting just so and then stood back to contemplate the story it told, laid out in the spare but masterful strokes of an artist’s brush, bound in its gilt frame against the plain whitewashed walls of the ranch’s living room. She had grown up looking at this picture. How many hours had she spent gazing at it, letting herself be transported to another place, another time?

  She could hear the plaintive lowing of the cattle, the sounds of their hooves striking the dry earth and their long twisted horns clacking together. She could taste the dust that rose in the hot air, smell the killing drought that accompanied the dust, feel the torture of longstanding thirst, see the shimmering wall of mountains on the distant horizon above the bony backs of two thousand head of Texas longhorns—mountains that taunted with the promise of shade and clear, cool water but never came any closer as the days slowly passed.

  Llano Estacado. The Staked Plains. Home of the Comanche, and a harsh and hostile barrier that had to be crossed if a man was to bring a herd of cattle from a place called Texas to territory known as Montana.

  She had crossed it with her great-grandfather a thousand times and more, both in daydreams while entranced by the painting and again in the turbulent dreams that swept her up in the middle of the night and stampeded her into another time, another reality. She had been there. She had suffered, but she had survived, and she survived still, to stand in the great room of the old ranch and look upon the canvas that had been painted more than one hundred years ago in tribute to a man with a vision, a man whose blood ran in her veins.

  “There,” she said, speaking quietly to the ghosts who gently haunted the room. “I’ve put it back where it belongs.”

  Her anger at Guthrie had faded a little with each box she had laboriously unpacked, using her injured arm more than she should but unable to resist the urge to make the home place comfortable and familiar again. She had paused in midafternoon to drink a cup of hot coffee and soak up the warmth of the waning sunlight while sitting on the edge of the porch steps. He would be well up into the pass by now, perhaps near the place she had found Blue. Would he try to identify the dead horse? She hadn’t asked him to, yet she knew he would. When he came back he would be driving her mares into the valley before him, because she knew, also, that he wouldn’t return until he located them. No matter how long it took, Guthrie always got the job done.

  Once, when he was seventeen, he was gone for over a week on a three-day job out at the line camp on Piney Creek. He was checking fence, and he came upon a stretch that had been cut and ripped out to allow cattle from Bureau of Land Management grazing leases to stray onto Weaver land, which had far better grass. Not only had he meticulously repaired the long stretch of damaged fence, but he had driven the trespassing cattle, some 115 head, fifteen miles across country to their respective headquarters.

  Jessie smiled, remembering how he looked when he’d ridden up after that job. His lip was cut, his eye was swollen shut, his nose was broken and he could hardly climb down out of the saddle, but he hadn’t said two words to anyone about what happened. It took a trip to town to sift out the story, and Badger liked to tell it still, how Guthrie had driven that herd through Dick King’s yard, trampling his wife’s flower beds and ruining the vegetable garden to boot. He’d called Dick out and the two of them had at it there in the yard, right in front of King’s young wife. Jessie just assumed Guthrie had come out the poorer of the two, but Badger had set her straight. “Oh, our boy’s top dog—make no mistake. You think Guthrie looks bad you should see Dick King! I highly doubt his cows’ll be straying onto Weaver land any time soon.”

  Guthrie had never backed down from a fight. He didn’t go looking for trouble, but when it came to his door he faced up to it. The only fight he’d ever run from was the one with her, and then he’d run clear to Alaska to avoid it.

  Maybe they needed to start over again. Maybe Guthrie was right. Maybe friendship was the beginning they had to return to in order for their hearts to find their way back home.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  BADGER WAS ON a mission. He’d offered his services to both Bernie and Ben Comstock, and the mission Bernie was sending him on played neatly into his determination to keep a sharp eye on suspicious happenings in the valley. The more legwork he did, the greater his chances of helping the warden. Driving out to the Weaver ranch played right into his secret plans, though Bernie had cast doubt on just how secret they were when she handed him the cardboard box filled with tidily packaged home-cooked delights. “Take this out to Jessie, will you, Badger? And for heaven’s sake be discreet!” she’d advised.

  What had she meant by that exactly? Had she overheard the conversation between the warden and him? Was she warning him not to run afoul of Senator George Smith? Or were her words simply a gentle prod, a woman’s way of asking him to see how things were going between all parties involved and asking him to report back to her at his earliest convenience? He was not above doing both, knowing how Bernie wished for a happy resolution to Guthrie and Jessie’s estranged relationship, and how Comstock wanted to nail Senator George Smith and his side-kick, Joe Nash.

  Oh, yes, Badger could do both, and gladly enough, too. Nobody wanted Jessie and Guthrie to get back together more than he did. Hell, he’d been there the day that girl was born. He remembered it well enough even after all these years. How Jessie’s mother had taken it hard, hard enough so’s to make any man set back and think a bit before delving again into the mysteries of a woman. How the midwife, a woman of some fifty-eight years and countless births, had come out of the bedchamber as pale as the sheet that had swathed that quiet child, and how she had drawn back one corner of the bloodied cloth, and in the awful tension that was that night he had caught a glimpse of Jessie’s face, and that moment had stayed with him forever.

  He loved her in a way that was somehow more profound than her own father’s love, for he had stood on the family’s outer edge and seen the rise and fall of her empire; seen, too, the stuff that she was made of, this quiet but passionate child, as the hardships suffered over the years had shaped her into the strong young woman she had become.

  The same was true of Guthrie. The boy had come to this place and had changed it and been changed by it in many of the same ways Jessie had. Both of them were moving toward some as-yet-unknown future, but their futures must surely be bound to each other and to the land. Nothing would make sense otherwise. Badger believed that all things happened for a reason. His mother had told him that when he was knee high to a grasshopper and his mother had always been right.

  Badger drove his truck down the rutted ranch road, one hand on the wheel, the other steadying the cardboard box that rode in the passenger seat. Yessir, they’d eat well tonight. Maybe they’d eat together, Jessie and Guthrie and McCutcheon, and maybe they’d ask him to stay on and enjoy the feast. That’d be real nice, just like old times. Well, not quite, but he had fond memories of the meals he’d taken at that old kitchen table, hearty meals cooked by Ramalda, that big Mexican woman Drew Long had married. Jessie had helped her out some from time to time, but the love of standing over a hot kitchen cookstove did not abide in that girl. She’d far rather be out from dawn to dusk riding some half-wild mustang, chousin’ cows and chasing after her untamable dreams.

  At fourteen Jessie had been about as much a tomboy as a girl could be. “I don’t much care for housework, Badger,” she’d announced to him one day whils
t hurriedly saddling her horse. Ramalda was up on the porch, calling for her impatiently. It was laundry day, and Ramalda fully expected Jessie to pitch in, but the girl had other plans. “Housework is for married women and I don’t expect I’ll ever be married.”

  “You’ll break Guthrie’s heart if you tell him that,” he’d cautioned, stepping into the saddle. Jessie was already astride, impatient to make her escape before Ramalda caught her.

  “He already knows,” she’d said, snugging down her hat. “I told him flat out I was never gettin’ married.”

  “Oh? And what did he have to say about that?” Badger asked as they snuck around the corner of the pole barn and reined their horses down along the river.

  “He thinks I’ll change my mind, by and by. I guess he just doesn’t understand how it is. Face it, Badger. Why would anyone want to be married?”

  “Your parents were married.”

  “Yes, and look where that got my mother.”

  “Your mother didn’t die because she got married,” Badger said, knowing where this conversation was headed.

  “She died because she had me. She wouldn’t have had me if she hadn’t got married.”

  “She died long after she had you. You had nothin’ to do with your mother’s death. She died because she got sick.”

  “She got sick because I brought that sickness home from school with me.”

  “She got sick because she got sick, Jessie. And in a few years’ time you’ll be talkin’ different about marriage.”

  “Nope. Not me. It’ll never happen!”

  Badger chuckled, remembering how adamant she’d been, jogging along on her horse, chin uptilted in that stubborn way of hers. Of course, a few years later she was madly in love with Guthrie, wandering around all starry eyed, helping him build that cabin over on Bear Creek, counting the children they’d have together on both hands. She even had names picked for them all. She was so swept up in that boy that she nearly forgot about such a thing as college.