by Jon E. Lewis
Ranching was a business with Cowper and Hamp, not a way of life.
Just at dawn the wind died. The day cleared. An hour later, as they were riding, armed with shovels, into the blanket of squirming hoppers to shovel tons of them into the wagons and dozers, a strong wind rose. It was coming from the north, a warm, vigorous breeze that seemed to animate the grasshoppers. Little clouds of them rose and flew a few hundred yards and fell again. And slowly the earth began to shed them, the sky absorbed their rattling weight and they moved in a low cloud toward the hills. Soon the land was almost clean. Where they had passed in their crawling advance, the earth was naked, with only a few clumps of brush and skeletal trees left.
Urban leaned on the swell of his saddle by both elbows. He swallowed a few times. Then he said softly, like a man confessing a sin, “I prayed last night, Will. I prayed all night.”
“Then figure this as the first installment on an answer. But this is grasshopper weather. They’re coming out of the earth by the million. Men are going to be ruined if they come back out of the brush, and if the wind changes, they will. Don’t turn down that poison if it comes.”
That day Starrett rode into Antelope. From the station master he learned that Tim Urban’s poison had not come. A wire had come instead, saying that the poison had proved too dangerous to handle and suggesting that Urban try Epsom salts. Starrett bought all the Epsom salts he could find – a hundred pounds. Then he bought a ton of rock salt and ordered it dumped along the county road at the south-west border of his land.
He had just ridden out of the hot, shallow canyon of the town and turned down toward the river when he saw a flash of color on the bridge, among the elms. He came down the dusty slope to see a girl in green standing at the rail. She stood turning her parasol as she watched him drop the bridle-reins and come toward her.
“Imagine!” Lynn smiled. “Two grown men fighting over grasshoppers!”
Will held her hand, warm and small in the fragile net of her glove. “Well, not exactly. We were really fighting over foremen. Hamp puts some of the dangedest ideas in Tom’s head.”
“The way I heard it some ideas were needed last night.”
“Not that kind. Hamp was going to ram ruination down Urban’s throat.”
“You have more tact than I thought,” she told him. “It’s nice of you to keep saying, ‘Hamp.’ But isn’t that the same as saying ‘Tom Cowper?’ ”
He watched the creek dimple in the rain of sunlight through the leaves. “I’ve been hoping it wouldn’t be much longer. I could name a dozen men who’d make less fuss and get more done than Hamp. If Urban had made the same suggestion to your father, Hamp would have whipped him.”
She frowned. “But if Urban had had the courage, he’d have suggested firing himself, wouldn’t he? Was there any other way to protect the rest of us?”
“I don’t think he was as much concerned about the rest of us as about himself. You’ve never seen wildfire, have you? I’ve watched it travel forty miles an hour. July grass is pure tinder. If we’d set fires last night, Tim would have been out of business this morning. And of course the hardest thing to replace would have been his last fifteen years.”
“I know,” she said. But he knew she didn’t. She’d have an instinctive sympathy for Urban, he realized. She was that kind of woman. But she hadn’t struggled with the land. She couldn’t know what the loss of Urban’s place would have meant to him.
“They won’t come back, will they?” she asked.
He watched a rider slope unhurriedly down the hill toward them. “If they do, and hit me first, I hope to be ready for them. Or maybe they’ll pass me up and land on Tom . . . Or both of us. Why try to figure it?”
She collapsed the parasol and put her hands out to him. “Will – try to understand us, won’t you? Dad doesn’t want to be a rebel, but if he makes more fuss than you like it’s only because he’s feeling his way. He’s never had a ranch resist him the way this one has. Of course, he bought it just at the start of a drought, and it hasn’t really broken yet.”
“I’ll make you a bargain.” Will smiled. “ I’ll try to understand the Cowpers if they’ll do the same for me.”
She looked up at him earnestly. “I do understand you – in most things. But then something happens like last night and I wonder if I understand you any better than I do some Comanche brave.”
“Some Comanches,” he said, “like their squaws blonde. That’s the only resemblance I know of.”
The horseman on the road came past a peninsula of cottonwoods and they saw it was Bill Hamp. Hamp’s wide mouth pulled into a stiff line when he saw Starrett. He hauled his horse around, shifting his glance to Lynn. “Your father’s looking all over town for you, Miss Lynn.”
She smiled. “ Isn’t he always? Thanks, Bill.” She opened the parasol and laid it back over her shoulder. “Think about it, Will. He can be handled, but not with a spade bit.”
She started up the hill. Hamp lingered to roll a cigarette. He said, “ One place he can’t be handled is where she’s concerned.”
“He hasn’t kicked up much fuss so far,” said Starrett.
Hamp glanced at him, making an effort, Starrett thought, to hold the reasonless fury out of his eyes. “If you want peace with him as a neighbor, don’t try to make a father-in-law out of him.”
Starrett said, “ Is this him talking, or you, Bill?”
“It’s me that’s giving the advice, yes,” Hamp snapped. “I’d hate to ram it down your throat, but if you keep him riled up with your moonshining around . . .”
Starrett hitched his jeans up slowly, his eyes on the ramrod.
Lynn had stopped on the road to call to Hamp, and Hamp stared wordlessly at Will and turned to ride after her.
As he returned to the ranch, Starrett thought, If there’s any danger in him, it’s because of her.
Starrett spread the salt in a wide belt along the foothills. Every morning he studied the sky, but the low, dark cloud did not reappear. Once he and Cowper met in town and rather sheepishly had a drink. But Bill Hamp drank a little farther down the bar and did not look at Starrett.
Starrett rode home that evening feeling better. Well, you did not live at the standpoint of crisis, and it was not often that something as dramatic as a grasshopper invasion occurred to set neighbors at each other’s throats. He felt almost calm, and had so thoroughly deceived himself that when he reached the cutoff and saw the dark smoke of locusts sifting down upon the foothills in the green afterlight he stared a full ten seconds without believing his eyes.
He turned his horse and rode at a lope to his home place. He shouted at the first puncher he saw, “Ride to Urban’s for the dozers!” and sent the other three to the nearest ranches for help. Then he threw some food in a sack and, harnessing a team, drove toward the hills.
There was little they could do that night, other than prepare for the next day. The hoppers had landed in a broad and irregular mass like a pear-shaped birthmark on the earth, lapping into the foothills, touching the road, spreading across a curving mileand-a half front over the corner of Will Starrett’s land.
By morning, eighteen men had gathered, a futile breast-plate to break the hoppers’ spearhead. Over the undulating grassland spread the plague of Mormon crickets. They had already crossed the little area of salt Starrett had spread. If they had eaten it, it had not hurt them. They flowed on, crawling, briefly flying, swarming over trees to devour the leaves in a matter of moments, to break the branches by sheer weight and strip the bark away.
The men tied cords about the bottoms of their jeans, buttoned their shirt collars, and went out to shovel and curse. Fires were started in coulees. The dozers lumbered to them with their brown-bleeding loads of locusts. Wagon-loads groaned up to the bank and punchers shoveled the squirming masses into the gully. Tom Cowper was there with Hamp and a few others.
He said tersely, “We’ll lick them, Will.” He was gray as weathered board.
But they all knew t
his was just a prelude to something else. That was as far as their knowledge went. They knew an army could not stop the grasshoppers. Only a comprehensive thing like fire could do that . . .
They fought all day and until darkness slowed the hoppers’ advance. Night brought them all to their knees. They slept, stifled by the smoke of grasshoppers sizzling in the coulees. In the morning Starrett kicked the campfire coals and threw on wood. Then he looked around.
They were still there. Only a high wind that was bringing a scud of rain clouds gave him hope. Rain might stop the hoppers until they could be raked and burned. But this rain might hold off for a week, or a wind might tear the clouds to rags.
There was rage in him. He wanted to fight them physically, to hurt these filthy invaders raping his land.
When he turned to harness his team, he saw Bill Hamp bending over the coffee pot, dumping in grounds. Hamp set the pot in the flames and looked up with a taunt in his eyes. Starrett had to discipline his anger to keep it from swerving foolishly against the ramrod.
The wind settled against the earth and the hoppers began to move more rapidly. The fighters lost a half-mile in two hours. They were becoming panicky now, fearing the locusts would fly again and cover the whole valley.
At noon they gathered briefly. Starrett heard Hamp talking to a puncher. He heard the word “gangplows” before the man turned and mounted his horse. He went over to Hamp. “What do we want with gangplows?”
“We might as well be prepared.” Hamp spoke flatly.
“For what?” Cowper frowned.
“In case you decide to fire, Mr Starrett,” said Hamp, “and it gets out of hand.”
“Shall we put it to a vote?” Starrett asked. An irrational fury was mounting through him, shaking his voice.
“Whenever you say.” Hamp drew on his cigarette, enjoying both the smoke and the situation.
Starrett suddenly stepped into him, slugging him in the face. Hamp went down and turned over, reaching for his gun. Starrett knelt quickly with a knee in the middle of his back and wrenched the gun away. He moved back, and as the foreman came up he sank a hard blow into his belly. Hamp went down and lay writhing.
“If you’ve got anything to say, say it plain!” Starrett shouted. “Don’t be campaigning against me the way you did Tim Urban! Don’t be talking them into quitting before we’ve started.”
He was ashamed then, and stared angrily about him at the faces of the other men. Tim Urban did not meet his eyes. “We’ve pretty well started, Will,” he said. “You’ve had our patience for thirty-six hours, and it’s yours as long as you need it.”
Cowper looked puzzled. He stood regarding Hamp with dismay.
After a moment Starrett turned away. “Let’s go,” he said.
Cowper said, “ How long are we going to keep it up? Do you think we’re getting anywhere?”
Starrett climbed to the wagon seat. “I’ll make up my mind without help, Tom. When I do I’ll let you know.”
The sky was lighter than it had been in the morning, the floating continents of cloud leveled to an even gray. It was the last hope Starrett had had, and it was gone. But for the rest of the afternoon he worked and saw to it that everyone else worked. There was something miraculous in blind, headlong labor. It had built railroads and republics, had saved them from ruin, and perhaps it might work a miracle once more.
But by night the hoppers had advanced through their lines. The men headed forward to get out of the stinking mass. Driving his wagon, Starrett was the last to go. He drove his squirming load of hoppers to the coulee and dumped it. Then he mounted to the seat of the wagon once more and sat there with the lines slack in his hands, looking across the hills. He was finished. The plague had advanced to the point from which a sudden strong wind could drive the hoppers onto Cowper’s land before even fire could stop them.
He turned the wagon and drove to the new campfire blazing in the dusk. As he drove up, he heard an angry voice in staccato harangue. Hamp stood with a blazing juniper branch in his hand, confronting the other men. He had his back to Starrett and did not hear him at first.
“It’s your land, but my living is tied to it just as much as yours. This has got to stop somewhere, and right here is as good a piece as any! He can’t buck all of you.”
Starrett swung down. “We’re licked,” he said. “I’m obliged to all of you for the help. Go home and get ready for your own fights.”
Hamp tilted the torch down so that the flames came up greedily toward his hand. “I’m saying it plain this time,” he said slowly. “We start firing here – not tomorrow, but now!”
“Put that torch down,” Starrett said.
“Drop it, Bill!” Tom Cowper commanded.
Hamp thrust the branch closer. “Catch hold, Mr Starrett. Maybe you’d like to toss the first torch.”
Starrett said, “I’m saying that none of you is going to set fire to my land. None of you! And you’ve got just ten seconds to throw that into the fire!”
Bill Hamp watched him, smiled, and walked past the wagons into the uncleared field, into the golden bunchgrass. His arm went back and he flung the torch. In the same movement he pivoted and was ready for the man who had come out behind him. The flames came up behind Hamp like an explosion. They made a sound like a sigh. They outlined the foreman’s hunched body and poured a liquid spark along the barrel of his gun.
Will Starrett felt a sharp fear as Hamp’s gun roared. He heard a loud smack beside him and felt the wheel stir. Then his arm took the recoil of his own gun and he was blinded for an instant by the gun-flash. His vision cleared and he saw Hamp on his hands and knees. The man slumped after a moment and lay on his back.
Starrett walked back to the fire. The men stood exactly where they had a moment before, bearded, dirty, expressionless. Taking a length of limb-wood, he thrust it into the flames and roasted it until it burned strongly.Then he strode back, stopped by Hamp’s body, and flung the burning brand out into the deep grass, beyond the area of flame where Hamp’s branch had fallen.
He came back. “Load my wagon with the rest of this wood,” he said, “and get out. I’ll take care of the rest of it. Cowper, another of our customs out here is that employers bury their own dead.”
Halfway home, he looked back and saw the flames burst across another ridge. He saw little winking lights in the air that looked like fireflies. The hoppers were ending their feast in a pagan fire-revel. There would not be enough of them in the morning to damage Lynn Cowper’s kitchen garden.
He unsaddled. Physically and spiritually exhausted, he leaned his head against a corral bar and closed his eyes. It had been the only thing left to do, for a man who loved the land as he did. But it was the last sacrifice he could make, and no gun-proud bunch-grasser like Hamp could make it look like a punishment and a humiliation.
Standing there, he felt moisture strike his hand and angrily straightened. Tears! Was he that far gone?
Starting toward the house, he felt the drops on his face. Another drop struck, and another. Then the flood let loose and there was no telling where one drop ended and the other began, as the July storm fell from the sky.
Starrett ran back to the corral. A crazy mixture of emotions was in his head – fear that the rain had come too soon; joy that it came at all. He rode out to catch the others and enlist their aid in raking the hoppers into heaps and cremating them with rock-oil before they were able to move again.
He had not gone over a mile when the rain changed to hail. He pulled up under a tree to wait it out. He sat, a hurting in his throat. The hopper hadn’t crawled out of the earth that could stand that kind of pelting. In its way, it was as miraculous as seagulls.
Another rider appeared from the darkness and pulled a winded, skittish horse into the shelter of the elm. It was Tom Cowper.
“Will!” he said. “This – this does it, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” Starrett replied.
Cowper said, “ Have you got a dry smoke on you?”
“Starrett,” he said, “I’ll be damned if I’ll ever understand a man like you. You shot Hamp to keep him from setting fire to your grass – no, he’s not dead – and then you turned right around and did it yourself. Now, what was the difference?”
Starrett smiled. “I could explain it, but it would take about twenty years, and by that time you wouldn’t need it. But it’s something about burying your own dead, I suppose.”
Cowper thought about it. “Maybe you have something,” he said. “Well, if I were a preacher I’d be shouting at the top of my voice now.”
“ I’m shouting,” Starrett admitted, “ but I’ll bet you can’t hear me.”
After a while, Cowper said, “Why don’t you come along with me, when the hail stops? Lynn and her mother will be up. There’ll be something to eat, and we can have a talk. That wouldn’t be violating one of your customs, would it?”
“It would be downright neighborly,” Starrett said.
WALLACE STEGNER
The Colt
WALLACE STEGNER (1909–1993) was born in Lake Mills, Iowa. Over a 60 year career he wrote 30 books, of which the novels The Big Rock Candy Mountain, 1943 and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose, 1972, are the best known. The “dean of Western writers” was for many years the head of the Stanford Creative Writing Program, where his students included Edward Abbey and Ken Kesey. As well as writing about the West, Stegner was conscious of the need to preserve it. His famous Wilderness Letter of 1960 helped birth the National Wilderness Preservation System. Stegner also served as assistant to the Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall, during the Kennedy administration, working on the expansion of the national parks.
It was the swift coming of spring that let things happen. It was spring, and the opening of the roads, that took his father out of town. It was spring that clogged the river with floodwater and ice pans, sent the dogs racing in wild aimless packs, ripped the railroad bridge out and scattered it down the river for exuberant townspeople to fish out piecemeal. It was spring that drove the whole town to the river bank with pike poles and coffeepots and boxes of sandwiches for an impromptu picnic, lifting their sober responsibilities out of them and making them whoop blessings on the C.P.R. for a winter’s fire-wood. Nothing might have gone wrong except for the coming of spring. Some of the neighbors might have noticed and let them know; Bruce might not have forgotten; his mother might have remembered and sent him out again after dark.
