The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  Out of bed before sunrise, Rossie carried his bedroll and gear down to where Louis Clair had a fire going and coffee steaming in a blue tin pot. Clifford Dufferena was hunched up over a cup, his rheumy eyes already sharp. “Thought you might sleep out the morning,” he said to Rossie.

  When they eventually drifted out toward the horse corral, a stocky boy in a floppy, gray hat was closing the gate on that day's saddle stock.

  “Angus Jackson,” Jap Hardy said. “One of them Scottish boys. He'll be with us all the way to Calgary. Scottish boys learn to work, so he'll be fine.”

  Angus Jackson eyed the world with no trace of expression. If Jap Hardy was making Scottish boys into dumb jokes, he wasn't having any. The crew carried bridles with snaffle—or Spanish bits or hack-amore woven of rawhide, depending on which horse they'd be riding—and spoke the names of the creatures they had in mind.

  Jap Hardy clearly knew which one was Whisp or Denio, Happy Hat or Tinkertoy or Lark. He not so much spun his riata as flipped it to hang and drop without fuss around the neck of one horse or another, never going for the wrong horse and never missing—a good sign that morning as a spiral of dust stirred counterclockwise by the horses lifted straight up to the pale cloudless sky. Each rider went down the rope to touch and soothe his horse for the day. They eased the saddle up, just trying it, cinched it tight and hard, checking to see if this boy was humped-up and cranky, liable to crowhop and buck.

  When Rossie called for Rock, Jap Hardy grinned. “Shit, kid, he's the only horse you got.”

  Turned into the rope, the big bay was wild-eyed, nostrils distended and snuffling, quivering but nowhere near panic, as Rossie made his way down to him. Rossie lifted the back of his left hand. “Smell it and stay nice,” he commanded as he lifted the headstall, and without much fuss got his snaffle-bit bridle in place.

  “Looks like Rock was broke for kids,” Jap Hardy said, coiling his riata while Rossie led the bay out the corral gate.

  “Broke to lead anyway,” Rossie said.

  “You ought to call him Rocking Horse,” Jap Hardy said.

  Nothing happened until the cinch was jerked up tight. Then old Rock squealed and set back on his hocks, rearing and twisting away, throwing his head, and jerking Rossie halfway off his feet. The others were watching, but nobody was saying a thing. Nothing to do but get it over with. Rossie eased his way up to the trembling horse, turned the stirrup, and got his toe into it, testing a little weight on it. Rock was steady enough, not rearing away, so Rossie swung up into the saddle, hoping he'd make it to the other stirrup before this big, old bay came unglued. But nothing. Rock was trembling and stock-still. Rossie touched him with the blunt spurs he wore for colts, and the horse stepped out and broke to a run before Rossie turned him, let him out into another run, and set him up. It was ragged, but nothing to it. He touched Rock with the spurs again. This time the charge was less avid.

  “Pretty cute,” Jap Hardy said. “Guess I was right. That big, old horse was broke for kids.”

  Rossie eased out of the saddle, waiting for some quick nonsense from Rock, but not a thing.

  “You got to be a lucky son of a bitch,” Jap Hardy said. “Some fellow did a good job with that boy. That horse is aiming to please.”

  Dufferena had come gimping down to the corrals to watch his crew and their horses. “Most of these horses come from along Cotton-wood Creek, out north of Red Bluff. That's where the best of these horses come from.”

  At breakfast they sat on rounds of firewood, balancing in their laps platters of eggs and sausage or thick, crisp bacon, then tossing the tin plates into a dishwashing pan for Angus Jackson. Each day was to begin with these ceremonies.

  “No running, and no stampeding,” Jap Hardy said. “Ease them along, let them get used to traveling. No rodeos.” He was looking at Bill Sweet and Rossie as he talked.

  They headed into sunrise to begin gathering, their horses’ hooves thudding softly on dry-sod ground. But out among the willow-lined islands, in a slough fenced off by six strands of barbed wire, they came to trouble. The fence, meant to keep animals from floundering into quicksand, had been torn through in the night. A big, blue roan, bloodied by wire cuts but not mortally, was deep in the murky water after a night of struggling and sinking. He'd likely got into a panic while running from the lightning.

  Jap Hardy was the first one there. For long moments he sat quiet on the black gelding he'd chosen that morning, folding his hands on the Spanish saddle horn before digging into his saddlebag for a pair of wire cutters, which he held out to Rossie. “Here you go, kid. Climb down and clear that barbed wire. That crazy son of a bitch just run straightaway through all that goddamned wire. There's always one crazy son of a bitch. So this is him.”

  The roan was belly deep. A couple of riders would have to lasso him by the head, turn their horses and spur them, and drag him out, watching as his neck stretched and hoping nothing inside him tore loose. Jap Hardy unstrapped a seagrass rope from the forks of his saddle and began uncoiling it, shaping a loop. Tarz Witzell took his own time, got down, tightened his cinch, then unlimbered his own seagrass, and tossed an effortless loop over the head of the blue roan. These men weren't carrying rawhide riatas, which were lovely and alive but too easy to strand and ruin when you were roping horses. Rossie was learning a thing or two. Get your hands on a seagrass rope.

  “Wake up, kid,” Jap Hardy said. “Get after that wire.”

  Rossie jerked wire loose from the wild roses that grew along the fence line, then folded it back. Jap Hardy dropped his loop on the blue roan and dallied down, and with Tarz Witzell, their horses farting and straining, dragged the roan out of the slough and onto the meadow grass. Slathered with gray mud, the roan was kicking, throwing his head, and banging it against dry, hard sod like a hammer. Rossie dodged in to crouch with a knee on the animal's muddy neck, putting all his weight there. The riders undid their dallies, Rossie jerked the ropes loose, and the roan came up wheezing and staggering. And lucky, Jap Hardy said. Though the wire cuts across his chest were seeping blood, they were shallow and didn't even need sewing up.

  Tarz Witzell coiled his seagrass, strapped it on the right-hand fork of his saddle, got down, and loosened his cinch as if nothing had happened. He smiled at Rossie, teeth yellow under his stained mustache. “Damned old horses. They got brains about as big as a pea.”

  As the sun warmed, mist lifted from standing water in the sloughs, and morning light shone through in rainbows. The horses streamed single-file across the meadows and gathered into a herd that could be counted out through a pole gate onto the fenced country road—two hundred and fifty-seven three-year-old geldings broke to ride, four private horses belonging to the other men, and the red-and-white-pinto bell mare for the lot to follow. The Model A Ford truck driven by Louis Clair was already loaded and gone down the road. “They'll have the cook tent set up north of Vya,” Jap Hardy had said. “Up toward Massacre Lake.” This was a short day, twenty miles, a shakedown day.

  Tarz Witzell and Dickie Wilson went off ahead to keep the leaders in check. While Rossie and Bill Sweet hazed the herd through the gate at a gentle trot, Clifford Dufferena and Jap Hardy set up alongside and counted out one final time. The bloodied blue roan was in the middle of the pack, moving without a limp.

  After a dozen-odd miles they passed the little Surprise Valley town of Cedarville, where they turned west toward Nevada, rounding a landlocked lake with a reach of white alkaline borderlands before stringing out along a dusty, unfenced road through gray hills. Mid-afternoon, after a day of eating pale dust, they turned the herd to graze through the night in a brushy pasture along the east side of the flat called Massacre Lake. By sundown they were bedded into a dry camp.

  Rossie woke deep in the night feeling sick with emptiness and lay there listening to the men in the tent snuffling and muttering as they slept. “Your own daddy,” he told himself, then recollected Mattie touching her tongue to her teeth. Oscar was probably on his way to the Neversweat,
intent on getting after her. Dust rose behind the Packard in Rossie's imagination, and he wondered if Mattie was already changed from the girl she had been to someone who might welcome Oscar. And why not? There it was, he thought, the why-for of this sadness, not a thing to it but the way he was thinking. Nothing to be done but breathe and eventually drift into sleep.

  The next day Jap Hardy caught Rossie another big, strong fellow, this time a horse Rossie had picked, stone black with white stocking feet. Rossie named him Blackie, and when he bucked under the saddle in a halfhearted way, Rossie rode him out with ease and was pleased to see the others paying no particular attention as they went to breakfast.

  Bill Sweet, the other youngster, smirked. “You been a bronc rider?”

  “You bet your ass,” Rossie lied.

  This day was a steady twelve-hour traipse, the pace slow and easy. Dickie Wilson stayed in the lead, followed by the bell mare, while Rossie and Bill Sweet brought along the trailers. A long day of back-land roads across Nevada and into the Oregon deserts followed, past sage-covered ridges with dark mahogany brush up where snows collected in winter drifts and not a house or a traveler or any other person until they reached Thousand Springs, where they found the Model A and their tents set up alongside a fenced but abandoned homestead field. Mallard drakes flew up as the horse herd jostled through a brokendown gateway to the water, the birds circling and then returning to the tiny weave of desert swamp.

  Jap Hardy dug out his fencing pliers and sent Rossie and Bill Sweet to ride the fence and patch it. “One horse in the wire and your asses are mud.”

  But the rusted fence was mostly up. They'd cantered half a turn around the field's perimeter before stopping the first time to hammer in a few staples. Bill Sweet pushed back his hat. “You don't say shit, do you? That how they teach you in Reno?” Scabby with sunburn, he was trying to be his own man.

  In later years Rossie would recall that Thousand Springs was the exact place where they started being friends. “Bill Sweet asked about girls like he'd never seen one up close, so I told him I'd never seen one bare-assed, which was a lie, and he said at least I had better sense than to bullshit him. After that we were onto one another, both of us liars, no trouble.”

  When they got back to the cook tent, the food was boiled beef— which Louis Clair had rustled up on a visit to the old IXL Ranch over in Guano Valley—along with mashed spuds and milk gravy, canned peas, and canned peaches for dessert. There were cases of peas and peaches in the truck.

  “In nineteen twenty-nine,” Tarz Witzell said, as he cleaned his dinner plate, “we camped right here with the MC. I waded into that swamp to wash off. Come out, my legs was covered with bleeding leeches.” He examined the cigarette he was rolling, wheezing as heavy-bellied men will, and went on about wintering at the MC buckaroo camp in a hayfield valley maybe fifty miles to the west when that ranch was selling its mother cows in order to send money to widows back east in Philadelphia. Their husbands had bought shares in establishments like the MC during rich times earlier in the 1920s.

  “Only money them old ladies had left coming to them,” Dickie Wilson said. “Otherwise they're goners. That's what you hear.”

  “What you kids need to know,” Tarz Witzell said, eyeing Rossie as he talked, “is the horses across this country, one ranch to another. You need to know them every one, one by one, by name and by disposition. Over at Rock Springs in the buttes, I quit the Seven-T over a horse they called Horace. Ernie Whitehead was the Seven-T cowboss. He took my Horace horse for himself. I had to quit, no choice. Horses is it.”

  Rossie knew the 7T had gone entirely out of business. Ernie Whitehead was dead of poisoning from whorehouse trouble in Elko.

  The next afternoon they went out across Catlow Valley, a fifty-mile swale where homesteaders, who'd come to the west in response to railroad promotions in the years before the First World War, had settled and plowed up 160-acre plots, and planted rye and failed. The valley was bare, no sign of the eleven post-office towns that had once been there, nor of any of the saw-lumber houses. Just rusting barbed wire snarled around fields going back to brush. Jap Hardy led them miles to the west along the flanks of the Beatys Butte in order to stay out of the wire.

  Camped beside a spring in a draw called East Road Gulch, Louis Clair killed three rattlesnakes as he set up the cook tent. He smiled for the first time Rossie had seen as he laid the snakes out on the table where he did his cutting and bread making. “You boys be careful,” he said to Rossie. “You might find snakes in your bed.”

  “You going to cook them sons a bitches?” Tarz Witzell asked.

  “I could. You want snake, I can cook snake. I've tasted snake. Sort of like rubber.” But he just cut off the rows of rattles, stowed them in the drawer with the knives and forks, and tossed the thick, limber bodies off into the brush.

  The ten-thousand-foot fault block of Steens Mountain, under snow in late April, glowed off east in the twilight. Dickie Wilson cleared his throat and told them about riding a bicycle a couple of hundred miles on desert roads north from Elko to hunt work as wrango for the Whitehorse Ranch, beyond the Steens, when he was sixteen. The Whitehorse cowhands told him German dogs came off the mountain at night—Donner und Blitzen, phantom dogs—and he had stayed awake listening for noises when they were all of them sleeping. “If them wasn't the damndest fellows,” Dickie Wilson said.

  Toward the foot of the Steens, they passed Blitzen, the last remnant of a town left in Catlow, comprised of collapsing shiplap houses and a store with a wall slumping in on itself. Three women and a man with braided red hair came out to see them pass. “They think we're going someplace,” Tarz Witzell said.

  Bill Sweet was hanging behind Witzell, as he liked to do, listening. “Compared to here, shit, we're going to heaven.”

  They led the pinto bell mare through a gate into meadows at Roaring Springs, a ranch belonging to the same Scottish land combine that owned the Neversweat. The cows had been sold off, with nobody there except for the man who'd overseen the selling, an old-time cowboss turned into a whiskery fellow in a food-stained shirt who kept the fences mended. They camped beside the Roaring Springs bunkhouse, where Jap Hardy had lived in years past.

  Tarz Witzell stood on the porch and began stripping out of his shirt. “Me,” he said, “I'm taking one of them baths.”

  Buck naked and pale, they gimped and tromped through skunk cabbage alongside the bunkhouse and splashed into snow-cold spring water bubbling into a sand-bottomed pool, where they soaped themselves and plunged their heads again and again before clambering out to dry off by the cast-iron stove Louis Clare had fired up in the bunkhouse bullpen.

  Into his dusty road clothes again, Jap Hardy favored Bill Sweet with a slap on the shoulder. “By God, kid. You got it right. This here is heaven. Damned sight colder and cleaner than Blitzen. I always figured heaven was cold and clean.”

  “Could be,” Tarz Witzell said, “that it's really slick and pink.”

  After loafing over breakfast the next morning, they went a dozen miles along the foothills of the mountain before cresting a lava ridge to sit looking down on the wide swampland valley and home fields of the old P Ranch. The valley was intricately cut by creek waters flowing from the Steens through a canyon that was three thousand feet deep, one of five such formations eroded into the mountain.

  “Cut into the rock by glaciers,” Tarz Witzell said. “Gospel truth. That's what schoolteachers say. If you believe them schoolteachers.”

  Peter French had set up the P Ranch in 1872 after driving cattle into the country from California, Jap Hardy explained. He reined in and sat looking. “There she is. French and his vaqueros, trailing cows all the way from Red Bluff. They didn't know this valley was here, and there it was, empty for the taking.”

  “French was twenty-three,” Tarz Witzell said. “You young fellows better get a hurry on.”

  Jap Hardy shook his head. “This whole country, it was dead empty. Now the federal government is buying t
he swamp for a bird refuge. That's what they say. Hard to think about. Birds.”

  “They was Indians,” Bill Sweet said in his know-it-all way. “They was always Indians. A lot of years before that Pete French. But French, he probably run them off.”

  The horses streamed past the Frenchglen Hotel, framed by Lom-bardy poplar and just like the one in Eagleville from its looks, and out a fenced lane to a small field where the main P Ranch house had burned down to nothing but chimneys in a grassy lot.

  “No money for hotels,” Jap Hardy said, once they had done with the evening meal. “But there's a dollar or two for beer. There is not going to be any women for you boys, but we ain't lost a horse and that's worth something. So we'll spend Dufferena's money on beer. You fellows think you could drink a beer?”

  Louis Clair claimed he didn't drink and that he was honor bound to be sure the Scottish wrango boy didn't either. “Promised his daddy.”

  “I could drink a dozen,” Bill Sweet said. “I'll drink yours.”

  “Two beers,” Jap Hardy said. “Two or three.”

  The gray-eyed woman running the hotel studied them, then nodded. “I got a case and a half. That's it.” She snapped caps off the bottles, handed them out, then stayed in her kitchen while they drank the first round.

  There was a ring on her finger but no sign of any husband. “Kinda shy, that woman,” Tarz Witzell said. “Don't blame her.”

  But when it was time for a second round she opened one for herself and came into the lobby where they were sitting quietly, nobody saying a thing.

  “Where you headed?” she asked.

  “Calgary,” Rossie said. But she wasn't asking him, didn't even look at him.

  “Who owns them horses?” she asked Jap Hardy.

  “Man named Dufferena, out of Reno. They're California horses, going to the Mounties in Canada.”

  “Rich man's horses. Why would the Mounties be buying California horses?”

  “Don't know about that. But they're mine until we get there.”