by Elmer Kelton
Coolly she asked, “Isn’t anybody roping down at the arena tonight?”
“I didn’t go by. Just came to see you, Bess.” She continued to stare at him. He held up the candy. “They tell me if pretty talk don’t do the job, try bribery.”
Usually it didn’t take much to bring a glow to Bess’s eyes. The ice was never so thick that he could not melt it with a smile.
Bess pushed the screen open. “It isn’t locked.” Her eyes were brittle. Tom caught her chin and started to kiss her. She stepped backward and nodded gravely toward the open front door. “Tom, the neighbors.”
“What do we care about the neighbors?”
“What do you care about anybody?”
Tom’s eyes narrowed. Going to be one of those nights, looked like. Good thing he had brought the candy. He pushed it forward. “Where do you want me to put this?”
Bess shook her head resentfully. “Eat it yourself, or pass it out among your calf-roper friends.”
“I’ll bet your mother’ll eat it. Where is she?”
“Had to make a trip to San Angelo. She won’t be back till late.”
Late. That was fine, provided he could weather the chill. “Look, Bess, I’m sorry about last night. If I’d known the dance meant that much to you ...”
“It wasn’t the dance. It’s just that you never even asked me. You took me out to that arena and left me sitting there by myself. You never came over and said as much as hello all night. Not till you got through playing that game. Then you thought I ought to be ready and eager to play another game, to finish up a fine evening for you. I don’t mean any more to you than that gray horse of yours. Use me, feed me a few oats, and turn me into the corral.”
Tom said, “Look, Bess, I came to apologize. Now, what more can I say?”
She had no answer. She simply bit her lip.
In the bedroom, the unplugged iron was crackling as the heat drew out of it. Tom glanced in that direction, speculating. Putting the squeeze on me, that’s what she’s doing. Well, I’ll call her on it. He stared at her, wanting her but not wanting to put himself in the position of giving in to her. He set the candy on a bookshelf and turned back toward the door. “I’m sorry it’s this way, Bess. Good night.” He pushed the screen door open and started out, slowly and deliberately. Bess watched, her hands lifting and clasping above her breasts. “Tom, where are you going?”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t make much difference. I’m not wanted here.”
She took a long breath and crushed her hands together, color rising in her face, a tremor in her throat. “Tom,” she spoke thickly, “come back here.”
Chapter Five
NOTHING MORE THAN AN OCCASIONAL TEASING RAIN-shower found Charlie Flagg’s Brushy Top ranch, hardly enough to wet a man in his shirtsleeves. The sun would steal the scant moisture almost before Charlie could ride out to see how deeply it had penetrated in the pastures, probing with a pocketknife blade the way he would plug a watermelon.
Sometime late that fall the coyotes came in. Best anyone could tell by their sign they were a pair—a male and a female. Sheepmen had cleared this region of coyotes long ago, but always they continued to breed up on the fringes of sheep country, on the big open cow ranches to the west and north. Coyotes seldom bothered cattle except occasionally a small calf. The straight cowman paid little attention unless they depredated his chicken-house; that got him sore. The coyote was in no danger of extinction or even serious depletion, for he mated joyously and reproduced in bountiful numbers outside the netwire boundaries that marked the sheep lands. And he was always pacing those perimeter fences, pressing tirelessly for entrance, digging under, climbing over, a powerful instinct drawing him to ancestral denning grounds.
To a sheepman, the presence of a coyote is like a sliver of ice pressed against his spine. Uncommonly intelligent, the coyote is often hard to kill. Some of the wiser ones range over a given area for years, slaughtering sheep with impunity and cleverly eluding everything from traps and cyanide to airborne hunters sent against them in desperation. In time a coyote’s slashing teeth can run up a staggering death toll, his ravenous appetite driving the marginal operator to the brink of bankruptcy. A killer coyote preys mercilessly on a sheepman’s mind, ruins his sleep, and makes him a hard man to live with.
Lupe found the first dead ewe. “The government’s got trappers, Mister Charlie,” he said. “Maybeso we better call the government.”
Charlie said, “They’re my sheep.”
He telephoned an old trapper he knew. In the three days before the man got there, Charlie and Lupe found more dead animals. Gravely studying the dried-crimson sign, the trapper said, “You’re right, it’s coyotes. See yonder? They bit through the jugular vein and licked up the blood. Then they tore into the flank and ate the fat out from around the kidneys. Sheep probably wasn’t plumb dead yet. Male and a bitch, I’d call it. Could be passin’ through, and again they might be lookin’ for a likely place to den up this winter. Liable to be hell to catch, Charlie. See that track? The old male’s got a bad limp. Missin’ part of his right forefoot. Lost it in a trap, would be my guess. He’ll be trap-wise now.”
Charlie ground his teeth together in useless anger as he stared at the torn body and glazed eye of what had been a good yearling ewe. “Why should they come in on us now? Been years since I had any coyote trouble.”
The old trapper, who hadn’t shaved in a week, shrugged his shoulders. It was a warm afternoon, and he unbuttoned his coat. Soon as he did, Charlie knew he hadn’t bathed in a week either. “Who knows why a coyote travels? Maybe he’s smarter than people. Maybe he knows it’s a hard winter comin’ and he’s lookin’ for a place where they’ll find enough to eat. Animals has got an instinct about such things. People don’t. All people know is what they see in the papers, and half of that is damn lies.”
Charlie rubbed his fist. “Do whatever you have to. I want them two varmints caught or run off.”
“I’ll do the best I can. But you better be ready to catch a little hell over it.”
Charlie stared at him in wonder. “What kind of hell?”
“People get funny notions. The other day I had a woman walk up to me on the street and call me a murderer. Damn near swallowed my tobacco, it surprised me so. She said I was a murderer, catchin’ and poisonin’ coyotes like I do. I tried to tell her about the way they kill sheep and chickens and calves and such, but she wasn’t interested in none of that. She said it was murder to trap and kill a coyote. I asked her if she ever set a mousetrap or sprayed flies, but she said I was just tryin’ to change the subject on her. I wonder what makes people act that way?”
Charlie shrugged. “Coyote’s a romantic animal, I reckon, if you ain’t had to contend with it. There’s lovable animals, and there’s unlovable animals. Hell, I always liked a coyote myself, in his proper place. But his proper place ain’t in my sheep pasture. People that never saw one of their own lambs with its guts ripped out don’t know how unlovable a coyote can be. I guess everybody sees what he wants to and overlooks what he don’t care to see. Other people look at the dead coyote and pity him. Me, I look at the dead sheep.”
Through the next weeks the trapper tried everything in that unwritten book of tricks the old-time varmint man keeps in the back of his head. He used it all, from steel traps to the new cyanide guns with a .45-caliber poison pellet that fires into the coyote’s throat as he opens his mouth to take the bait. All these guns ever killed for Charlie was time and a pair of stray dogs that had no business in a sheep pasture anyway. The wily coyotes seemed to know the lures for what they were and go out of their way to leave them alone.
One day the trapper came to Charlie’s house, the staggering odor of spoiled meat and coyote-urine bait clinging to him like some foul old coat.
“Charlie, I got somethin’ to show you. It happened to me once before, years ago. If I was to tell you, you wouldn’t believe it.”
The trapper’s pickup had an air that was overwhelming. Cha
rlie sat near the door, the window rolled down all the way as the trapper drove him out to a trapline he had laid near a brushy watering place. The sign was plain. Tracks showed where the limping male had walked down the line, pausing to sniff suspiciously at each bait, then moving on without touching it. Finally at the last trap the coyote had stopped long enough to leave the unmistakable testament of his contempt on top of the bait.
In spite of himself, Charlie grinned. He felt a momentary admiration for the wise old killer, much as he wanted to see him dead.
The trapper asked, “You ever see a coyote laugh?”
“Can’t say as I ever did.”
“Bet you a hundred dollars to a Mexican peso this one was laughin’ to bust his ribs.”
Charlie’s sheep kept dying by ones and twos and threes. Traps and poisons wouldn’t get these coyotes. He knew he had to try something else.
Chewing warmed-over mutton at the supper table, he stared vacantly across the room and out the open windows where wind was kicking up dust in the ranch yard. At length he mused aloud to Mary and Tom, “Some people say we ought to let the coyote alone, that we got to have them for the balance of Nature. But most of those people live in the cities, where they threw Nature out years ago. They ain’t goin’ to give up their automobiles and paved streets and sewer systems to get Nature back, but they’re damn sure free with advice on what the other man ought to do.” He looked around for response and received none. “I say man has got to be considered a part of Nature’s balance, too. You can’t raise coyotes and sheep together any more than you can have paved streets and coyotes together. You can’t eat a coyote or wear his fur.
“I been thinkin’ what to do, and I’ve decided we’ll throw an old-fashioned wolf drive—call all our friends and neighbors in. We’ll show them a good time—give the boys somethin’ to think about besides dry weather. And we might catch them coyotes.”
Actually, a coyote was not the same thing as a wolf, but the Texas sheepman customarily called him that anyway. It was a natural shortening of the old term “prairie wolf.” This part of the country hadn’t seen a real wolf in fifty years.
Wolf drives had been one of the means used to clear the region of coyotes a long time ago.
Looking across the table at Tom, Charlie saw anticipation kindling in his son’s eyes. This was a thing that would appeal to Tom’s cowboy instincts. A wolf drive could be muy bravo—horsemen, pickups, and jeeps strung out in a ragged line, moving across the pasture like African beaters in a lion hunt. Once a coyote jumped up, everybody took after him hell-bent for leather. Many a tough cowboy had tried one such drive and had sworn off for life.
The first thing Charlie did was to telephone Page Mauldin and invite him. Page was silent so long that Charlie thought the connection had been broken. He started to hang up and ring Central, but Page spoke.
“I’m gettin’ old for that sort of thing, Charlie. So are you, for that matter.”
“It could be a right smart of fun.”
“I remember that kind of fun all too well. I remember settin’ ol’ Jase Ivy’s leg in camp and tyin’ a splint to it after a horse fell on him in ’32. There’s folks that think a sheepman is a quiet, timid soul, but they’ve never seen him chase a coyote. The wildest old-time cowpuncher—drunk or sober—never rode like a sheepman does when he spies a wolf. He’ll tear through mottes and thickets, over fences, across a prairie-dog town—it don’t make a particle of difference. I’ve seen a sheepman go off the bank of a washout, spurrin’ all the way down.”
“Then you ain’t comin’?”
“I didn’t say that. I’ll be there.”
Page volunteered to share the cost with Charlie to hire a flying hunter from out west at Fort Stockton. Rounder Pike and a couple of other neighbors did likewise. The flyer would increase the odds. The neighbors knew that if the two marauders should move away from Charlie an adjoining ranch’s sheep had to be the next to suffer.
A simple thing in its first conception, the drive grew into something far larger than Charlie anticipated. Fall shearing season was over, so he hunted up Teofilo Garcia’s old camp cook, Mike Noriega, and hired him to be in charge of the fixings. The day before the drive they set up a chuckbox in the customary live-oak thicket and dug pits for the barbecue. Lupe Flores and the cook slaughtered several Spanish kid goats while Charlie cranked the telephone and reminded his friends what he had in store for them—a big feed and a chance to run a wolf.
Tom brought out his two compadres of the rodeo circuit, chunky Shorty Magee and lean Chuck Dunn. At the supper table Charlie couldn’t get a word in edgewise. The boys kept talking of rodeos they had been to, especially the ones where they had won big money. Charlie noticed these were mostly a safe distance from home, where no one was likely to check on their stories. After supper he stretched in his easy chair and propped up his sock feet. The boys started playing some of his dusty 1920s records on the old windup phonograph that still held a place in the corner of the living room, though it was seldom used any more. They played the blue yodels of the original Jimmie Rodgers and sentimental old country tunes by Vernon Dalhart, songs like “The Death of Floyd Collins,” “The Dream of a Miner’s Child,” and “A Handful of Earth from Mother’s Grave.”
Shorty was a fair hand with a harmonica, and Tom fetched his guitar. The boys played and sang along with the records while Charlie leaned back and enjoyed it, his eyes closed, his toes twitching to the rhythm. It took him a while to realize the boys were poking fun at the sobbing old songs.
Sourly Charlie arose, picked up his boots and tromped off to bed, muttering to himself. Buttons these days, they never listened to anything but honkytonk stuff. They didn’t know what good music was.
Garcia’s cook crawled out of the blankets in the dark hours after midnight to start the barbecue. He burned big piles of live-oak wood down to coals, then set the goat meat above them on wire grills to cook slowly in the rising heat. Periodically he swabbed the meat with a sauce he claimed was an old Noriega family secret. Charlie knew it was made up mainly of a commercial mixture from the grocery store, plus some ground-up jalapeños and other Mexican peppers to give it authority.
Before good daylight, fifty or sixty horsemen and a dozen or more pickups and jeeps stood ready at Charlie’s barn. Some of the horsemen paced restlessly, eager to be on the go. Others filled plates with scrambled eggs and bacon or steak, gravy and hot Dutch-oven biscuits, then squatted near the pleasant warmth of the campfire or the barbecue pits, laughing and talking. Charlie had told Mary to stay in bed—he would eat with the company at the chuckbox—but he had clomped around and made so much noise that she had gotten up anyway. She did not go outside, where the presence of a woman might inhibit the conversation. Charlie stood with plate in hand, savoring the aroma of outdoor food, enjoying the drift of good-natured talk. It was reminiscent of old times out on the Pecos River, when he had followed a roundup wagon on a cow outfit, times whose pleasures he fondly remembered and whose hardships he had conveniently chosen to forget.
The air was crisp, the sky open and turning orange with dawn. This, he felt, was going to be a great day, the weather perfect, the crowd cheerful. Some sheepmen had come from as far away as the next county. There was more to it than simply the pleasure of a chase. If the coyotes should leave Brushy Top, who could say where they might take a notion to locate next?
It was well that Mary had arisen, for a few men brought their womenfolks, and more women would arrive as the day wore along. Charlie thought Mary ought to hear enough gossip today to spend a month digesting it all, the way a cow coughs up a cud to chew and digest it in her leisure.
Page Mauldin was there early, bringing Diego Escamillo and three other Mexican ranchhands to help. He said sternly, “I reckon you know, Charlie, I ought to be in Fort Worth today for a bank meetin’. It’s costin’ me a right smart to be here.”
“Then go on,” Charlie replied, trying to sound just as stern. “But leave Diego. He’s a better hand than
you ever was.”
Charlie meant well, but Diego grinned self-consciously, embarrassed at being placed in the middle.
Page shook his head. “I better stay. You’re apt to need a keen mind before the day is over to get you-all out of trouble.”
Charlie nodded. “That’s why I’m tickled that you brought Diego.”
Diego turned away to see after the horses.
Halfway across the yard Charlie could hear the loud, happy laugh of little Rounder Pike. Rounder had a chuck-ling crowd gathered around him—he usually did—and was spinning them a windy. “So the boss phones up ol’ Son one day and says, ‘Them coyotes botherin’ you any, Son?’ and ol’ Son he says, ‘No sir, they ain’t botherin’ me none, but they’re sure givin’ your sheep hell!”
Nearer at hand, Yancy Pike was frowning. They were brothers—Rounder and Yancy—but different as molasses and vinegar. If you wanted hard-headed business advice with a Puritan conservatism, you went to Yancy. If you wanted pleasant company for a fishing trip or a buck-buying junket, Rounder was your man. Yancy Pike was tied to his ranch like a miser to his gold. He never came to town except when groceries ran low or there was business to transact. He had a hard time keeping hired help because he didn’t believe in wearing out bedding by overuse or paying a wage that would put too much money in a working man’s pockets and perhaps endanger his morals. He didn’t believe in letting grass “go to waste”; he stocked his land to the hilt. When a sprig of grass came up, a sheep was standing over it waiting to nip it off. This conservation crap was all right for a rich rancher, he claimed, but a poor man couldn’t afford it.
Rounder Pike was a little man with a big voice, a cud of chewing tobacco and a deep-creased face split by a perpetual sly grin that made him look as if he had just heard a dirty joke, or told one; likely as not, he had. When you wanted to talk to Rounder you never phoned his ranch except in last resort, for you probably wouldn’t find him there anyway. You tried a dozen places in town first—the domino hall, the drugstore, the coffee shop, the wool warehouse. While Yancy made work a fetish, Rounder did not believe in doing it to excess. He was not afraid of work, however. When he had to he would dig in and labor like a Trojan, taking solace in the knowledge that when he finished there would be a six-pack of cold Bud waiting in the icebox.
