“Snow water,” Bob Waters said. “Belly deep, anyway, and cold as you want, rolling stones on the bottom. One horse goes down and you can lose the outfit, horses scattered halfway back to town, while you can end up afoot, water in your boots, walking out like a half-drowned greenhorn. We'll set a tow rope.” He shook out a seagrass rope and tied it to the halter on his lead packhorse. “Once I get across,” he said, “I'll start towing them from the other side. You give that lead horse a kick in the ass and they'll come.” He eased into water over his stirrups, lifting his feet to stay dry. “They'll get the idea,” he shouted.
On the other side Bob Waters dallied down and the string of loaded horses followed, stumbling and floundering their way across. Then they did the deal with Rossie's string.
“No trick,” Bob Waters said. “We're over, bone dry, no water in our boots.”
They ate cold beefsteak sandwiches at noon, then camped before twilight. As Rossie unloaded the pack animals one by one, feeding them each a bait of grain as he tethered them, Bob Waters baked two big spuds and two thick-cut pork chops, then poured the pork grease over a mess of greens he'd gathered along the creek.
“Out here, you learn these plants,” he said. “There's every damned thing to eat out here in the summertime.”
“What do you call them?”
“Watercress. This pepper woman here spices up the meat, plus it's good for your system. Learned that from an Indian up at Jasper when I was a boy.”
After Rossie had scrubbed the tin plates in the creek, Bob Waters sent him to hang a burlap sack with their meat from a tree limb off about a hundred yards to avert the bears. Then Bob Waters poured them each three inches of whiskey in enameled cups and settled by the fire with his bedroll at his back. The twilight sky was lurid with incandescent clouds.
“I was never given to singing about fresh country,” he said. “But she's a better place than town. Unless you're horny. And then your martini drinkers love a town.”
“Shit,” Rossie muttered, and got busy unrolling his bed.
The next morning they turned up Pharaoh Creek, south between stone mountains where banks of icy snow endured into midsummer. The crossings were low water and easy. By noon they reached timber-line between barren rock cliffs near the Continental Divide at Redearth Pass. A wisp of waterfall fell from a cirque above them and trickled beneath the mosses. The evergreens were wind-stunted to stand only waist high.
“There's a little tarn up there,” Bob Waters said. “This time of summer you might hike up and look down on grizzly. They like to play in them high-country potholes of water and eat the ice. You'd want to take your rifle with you.”
“Think I'll pass,” Rossie said.
Bob Waters nodded. “We got no business up there. Your wild bear don't want a thing to do with us. We ought to stay down here in the sun and warm our brains. This is the best we're going to get.” Bob Waters was all at once very serious. “You get older,” he said, “you sometimes think this is the equal of pussy.”
“Did you ever pray to pussy?” Rossie asked.
But Bob Waters wasn't having any jokes. “Son of a bitch,” he said, “if that isn't some kid idea.” He stared at Rossie a long moment and let it drop as he started unwrapping their beefsteak sandwiches. “This is it for the meat we brought. Tomorrow we got to butcher a venison.”
The afternoon trail worked down through steep switchbacks. Even where the footing was solid, the talus slope fell off to a cliff over breathtaking emptiness, the creek meandering far below. Eternity beckoned if your horse went crazy. When they had worked their way down to the creek, they moved through groves of aspen into a meadow fenced with toppling jack-pine poles. Bob Waters had been setting his hunting camp there for eleven years.
“Camp wintered fine,” he said. “She'll be pristine with a week or so of work. In August we'll come up here for the grizzlies that gather on the berries, fattening up for winter. We set up on the ridges and catch them grizzly below us, kill three or four, depending on how many hunters. I got help to pack out the hides and heads right after they're killed. Then in the fall we go off north of Jasper for the sheep and come back here when that gets too bitter. Load up trash, whiskey bottles and cans, and get the last of them boys out of here before Christmas.” Bob Waters smiled. “Never seen you shoot that rifle. You ever kill anything with a rifle?”
“Nothing big,” Rossie said. The true answer was no, nothing at all.
“You go down the creek three or four miles. That way the bears feeding on guts don't get used to coming up around the camp. If you tether your horse and walk softly and set up with the wind at your back, the deer will come to water right out front of you. Don't kill nothing but a buck. The does are still trailing fawns so you leave those alone. When I hear shooting, I'll be along for the gutting and cutting, and then we'll hang it. You break in that rifle and I'll be along. Or we got no meat for supper.”
Moving soft-footed was a childhood trick Rossie had mostly lost, but he could sit quiet. He leaned his back against an aspen, with grasses from the previous summer tucked up around him and a breeze moving past from across a swale of meadow. A muley doe and spotted twin fawns eventually appeared, ears twitching as they moved among the aspen like shadows within shadows, skirting the edge of the meadow. For a little while Rossie watched without thought of shooting, before placing a cartridge in the firing chamber and switching the safety off. The first little buck, he'd kill it.
But the buck wasn't little. A four-point with horns in velvet, he eased along the meadow's edge, taking care that his new-grown rack didn't touch so much as a branch, and came out straightaway in front of Rossie without sign that he saw anything unusual. Slowly lifting the Model 54, Rossie centered the sights and breathed as Bignell Robinson had instructed him and pulled the trigger just as the buck turned back to see him before collapsing, instantly dead. Only as the silence echoed did Rossie know he'd shot.
The slug had penetrated the head just below the left ear, the entry hole neat and precise. One horn, soft in the velvet, had cracked when the animal fell and now hung obscenely. Rossie touched the back of the head where the slug had exited, leaving a sharp bloody cup of bone. With the blade of his white-handled knife he sliced the jugular. Blood flowed hot around his wrist, and he recalled a cowhand at the Neversweat who drank a household cup of blood each time they butchered. That unshaven old man would grin at Rossie, blood drying and caking on his lips. “Keeps your pecker blooming,” he'd say.
Bob Waters came along on horseback, equipped with skinning and butcher knives, a short axe, lengths of cotton rope, and canvas meat sacks. “Hell of a shot,” he said. “He's your animal. You get the heart and liver. Go after him.”
“Tell you something, you better do it. I never cut up a deer.”
“Same as butcher cows,” Bob Waters said, then turned to opening the belly, slicing around the penis and the testicles. “Don't want any piss in our dinner.” He opened the abdominal cavity and eased his arms in elbow deep. A steaming tangle of intestines spilled over his hands as he dragged them out on the grass. Then he split the breast bone and propped it open with a stick to reach in for the dark-red liver and the heart. Running another stick inside the tendons at the knees, he hung the carcass, got quickly through the skinning, disconnected the head, and split the long backbone with a few precise strokes of his hatchet. Together they loaded the quartered carcass into stained meat sacks, leaving behind the hide and head and the intestines. “For bears and big cats and varmints,” Bob Waters said. “Everybody gets to eat. One of the cats might be calling tonight. Sounds like a woman.”
The bulk of the meat was wrapped in cheesecloth to keep flies away and hung from ropes thrown over high limbs downslope a couple hundred yards from the camp. They cooked tenderloins and the liver on sharp willow sticks over the open fire, and later, sipping a cup of whiskey, Rossie tried to talk about the deer looking at him and then away, “like he didn't want to see me.”
“Indians up to Ja
sper used to talk about animals walking out to be shot, making themselves into gifts,” Bob Waters said. “It don't hurt to think about it that way. Sometimes it's like the animal is done wanting to be alive. Damned spooky, but it's real.”
“In this country it feels like I never grew up.”
“Damned right, in this country you are a boy who don't know anything. But you'll grow out of that sooner than you'll like. Don't get in any hurry.” The fire snapped and Bob Waters stoked it. “What's this pregnant woman?”
“Well, I like her plenty, but it's another fellow's baby,” Rossie said.
“So what do you care whose baby it is? Just be careful you don't end up without a steady woman. You go to bed with the same woman for months and you get used to the smell and sleep like a child, like you remember sleeping when you was little and smelling your mother.”
“You got a wife like that?”
“Not any more. She blew up, started going around in taverns saying I was queer for men since I was all my time in these camps. I hit her, a damnable thing. I asked her pardon and thought it was made up. Next time I come back, she was gone on the railroad to Vancouver, taking what money we had. Never heard a word of her since.”
“Queer for men?” Rossie said.
“She was too much alone is my guess. Or she wouldn't have talked such bitchery. I'm in the mountains five, six weeks at a time. Up in the snow with my hunters, she used to say. I see how she came to think what she said.” Bob Waters poured himself another slug of the whiskey. “Anybody is happy with some warm thing in their bed, and getting their nuts off,” he said. “I've found full-grown rich men bundled together.”
Rossie was seeing beyond the fire to a childhood Sunday morning in July with his friends in downtown Reno. A pale, bald man with a line of scabs across his forehead had been drunk and singing in a deep, ruined voice, a gravelly Irish lament. What Rossie saw was the man's bluish linen suit and his long fingernails as he gestured toward the boys, who were mocking him. Smiling like a cat, the man tucked his chin, beckoned with a terrible white hand, and said, “Why don't you strike me? Would you like to do that?” The oldest boy turned away and spat. “Fuck him,” he said, when they were down the block. “He's just a queer.”
Rossie had felt a run of shuddering that day on the sidewalk, and he was feeling it again here with Bob Waters. He'd taken his knife out and was trimming his fingernails.
“What I dream about,” Bob Waters said, speaking slowly, “is her. Black-haired woman. She was named Jerrine.”
“Are you telling me queer stories?” Rossie asked.
Bob Waters studied Rossie for a long moment. “No need for that knife,” he said, getting to his feet, and starting to lay his bedroll open. “So that's what I got to say about that. Except for one more thing. Nobody told you queer stories. I was telling you about my wife, and how I missed her, and you take it to be a story about how you might get fucked in the ass. You ought to be goddamned well ashamed of yourself. Do you know the word bigot? It means an asshole who can't see any side of things but his own. You ought to know there's nothing more sideways with two men in bed than with any other two people. Here we are in the tall timber with nothing but this fire and our rifles between us and the spooks. I'm thinking about how living out here has turned out to be my life, and I don't know why. And you worry about butt-fucking.”
Rossie slipped his knife back into his pocket. There was a faint trembling in his shoulders as he turned and put his backside to the fire.
“But fuck all,” Bob Waters said after a long moment. “You're just a kid. You don't understand a hell of a lot.” He sat on his bedroll and started kicking off his boots. “Shit, everybody is strange as cats in the barn. Waiting to hear an owl hoot. Some hide it better than others.”
“She, your wife, was she ever pregnant?” Rossie asked.
“Not that she told me. Sometimes I've wished she would've been. So there would be a kid and she'd stick around and I wouldn't be out here in this camp with nobody but you.”
“That woman I'm after, she's knocked up and all I know is there's some look about her. You wonder why a woman sticks in your head.”
“I told you. Maybe it's a smell, like your momma.” Bob Waters was standing in his longjohns, folding his trousers. “It can happen with horses. There's horses you can't get out of your head, even after you sold them. Got a different look around the eyes.”
“What she's like,” Rossie said, “is there's a field of horses, and one good one, and any damned fool can see the difference.”
Bob Waters tucked his trousers into the foot of his bedroll, where they would be warm in the morning, then pulled his blankets up over him. “A cunt that fits you. That's the Spanish Curse. Your freedom is over. That's the joke. It's few men who work out a life with no woman.”
The next morning they started putting the corral fences back into place. By the third afternoon they were working on tent-house frames, and by the fourth they'd unpacked the canvas tents, the cook stove, and the ice boxes, and set the tents.
“Tell you one thing,” Rossie said. “This kind of sweat work is why I took up a horseback life.”
“Right there, that's an ambition. The job is figuring out how to make things go your way. There's deep Christian people who say a good man lets the world go any way it wants. That's horseshit. A man with sense goes after what he wants.”
“You a secret preacher?”
“What I'm preaching is sweat. All day long. I'm making the world go my way.”
“Back in Banff, you going after a new woman?”
Bob Waters went on talking like Rossie hadn't spoke. “This fall it'll be coveralls and fur-lined gloves. We'll be in this country until heavy snow. That switchback trail will be nothing but ice.”
“I'll be way south,” Rossie said, “riding the flatlands.”
“Bet you will. You're the boy hunting a woman.”
“One of them quick-blooded kind.”
“There are times,” Bob Waters said, “when I think I could live up in this country with nothing but other men. I think men and women are too strange from one another. But it isn't true. There's no other side to life without the women, whether you love them or not. You dream about them and then maybe you find one who can stand you. It's something to keep thinking about.”
Three mornings later Rossie was up on Pinky, ready to go south through the mountains toward Montana.
“Be your own fella,” Bob Waters said. A balding man, hat in his hand there in the British Columbian highlands, he smiled and shook his head as if at some mystery.
Rossie slept that night in a meadow where the Verdant Creek swung south into what Bob Waters had told him was a run of wild country best avoided by a greenhorn. Deep in the dark hours there was screaming like a woman, a big cat not far off, and Rossie loaded the Model 54 and set it by his bed.
The next afternoon he made his way down a set of switchbacks off the Hawk Ridge into the valley of the Vermillion River, then over to the Kootenay Parkway. The narrow macadam rolled through timber-lands into Vermillion Crossing, a settlement where food and gasoline were sold out of a log-house store. When Rossie knocked, a thin man appeared in a sleeveless undershirt and no trousers, obviously drunk, and muttered, “Can't help you a lick,” before waving his hands softly and closing the door. So Rossie made his dinner on the last of the venison he'd brought and the next day got out before sunup.
For the next three days he traveled fast and hungry down trails near the roadway, which at last crossed through a rocky narrows and into a British settlement called Radium Hot Springs.
The wilderness abruptly ended. Behind a granite-wall dam men and women in bathing suits were swimming and soaking in a bright pool of steaming bluish water. Beyond were motor courts and paved streets, a café and bungalows with elaborate landscaping, and a stable with a loft above the horse stalls, where Rossie unrolled his bed and anticipated awakening in the night once again to the sounds of his horses shuffling and snorting.
Through the open hay-doors the man in charge of the stable pointed to a river and to an open valley beyond. That river, the man insisted, was the Columbia, near its headwaters, flowing north before turning south into Washington and on to the Pacific.
“Could be,” Rossie said. “Geography was never my main thing.”
“Me neither,” the man said, “but I know that much. I know a fella who floated the whole damned river in a canoe, then drowned when he tried to sail her into the Pacific. Used to know him. Crazy son of a bitch.”
“Plenty of those.”
“Kid, they's everwhere.”
In the café down the block, Rossie feasted on chicken-fried streak and biscuits and sausage gravy, and when the apple-cheeked waitress asked if he was a stranger in the country, Rossie told her he was and that he was going to Montana.
“You been up swimming in the hot pool?”
“Not me. There wasn't no water deep enough to swim in where I come from. I'd drown.” He thought she liked him so he told her about working for Bob Waters, and she said everybody in the country knew Bob Waters.
“If he isn't something,” she said. “Wish he would come and take me to the mountains.”
“He'd like to know that. You ought to ask him. You ought to send him a letter saying you talked to me. Tell him how you'd try the mountains. He might come down here looking for you.”
“You're pretty damned cute,” she said. “You got cute ideas.”
Rossie thought about asking her if they could get together after she was done with her working, but he didn't. Why was he so taken with that girl Eliza, feeling so goofy he'd duck his head and start eating and not grin at this girl? He'd turned into a fool who couldn't see much in his mind except for the gray complications, the distances and ferocity and decent humors in that Eliza's eyes.
The Willow Field Page 12
