by Laura Bell
When the lambs had suckled, the pairs—which sometimes included twin lambs—would be turned out into slightly larger pens holding four pairs, then eight. When the relationships passed muster, they’d get sorted outside the lambing shed into pens of twenty, then a hundred, moving in orderly fashion toward the bands of roughly a thousand pairs that would summer together on the high reaches of the Big Horns.
In my first season, my sheepwagon was parked under the cottonwoods behind the Whistle Creek tenant house, along with five others parked in a row for hired hands and herders. The wagons were set so their Dutch doors opened to the east, to the morning sun and acres of hayfields that stretched out toward the sagebrush hills. At the far end of the wagons was an outhouse, ancient and foul.
As the spring nights warmed, I slept with the Dutch doors open to the night and to the sounds of coyotes and owls. One night I woke to find the wagon lurching with the stumbling weight of someone coming through the door and across the tiny floor. It was Antone, the Basque night-drop man, and then he was at my bed, his tongue in my face, his weight on top of me with his stale sheep smell, his words slurred and stinking of alcohol. From within the protection of my sleeping bag, I yelled and knuckled his head and bit at his lips until he spit on me and finally left, cursing and muttering that he hadn’t meant any harm.
It was my first experience with what alcohol could do to a person. Among the herders, I would see it again and again. Someone fastidiously proud of his cooking or leatherwork one day could be barking like a dog or peeing in his pants the next.
I learned to be disappointed, my head down and my coveralls zipped around me. I began fastening the hook on my door and thinking of the hills and longing for the quiet, empty space of them.
COON CREEK CAMP
From beneath a clump of sage outside the sheepwagon door, Lady watches, a short-haired heeler dog, red and speckled and slimmer than most. Her liquid eyes watch me now and claim me as her own. Every morning in the hour before daylight I have cooked for her magnificent, pleading feasts on the woodstove: bacon carved from the slab, eggs scrambled with chunks of Velveeta, Bisquick hotcakes with syrup, all served into a pie tin at the edge of camp, beyond the lantern’s light.
I’d come to the ranch wanting to herd sheep, a band of my own out in the hills in all the space and silence, an odd woman’s vision of romantic life. I’d made it clear what I wanted, but John just said, “We’ll see.” And when the spring bands were made up and branded, disappearing into the greening hills with their herders, I was left behind to farm.
Days later, Sterling appeared at the edge of my field, arms flapping nervously to flag me down from the tractor. “If you still want to herd, pack your wagon and I’ll pick you up in an hour,” he blurted unceremoniously. “Larson’s sick, and I’ve brought him to town.” The old herder’s mind had come unraveled, and when Sterling appeared in the morning to tend his camp, he’d found him muttering loosely to the sky.
“She can herd them all by herself,” he’d said of Lady when he hauled me out from the ranch to these broken sagebrush hills where a thousand ewes and lambs had scattered for days on their own. But when he deposited me and my camp alongside Coon Creek and hauled the other wagon away, the herder’s little red dog followed it almost to the highway, then fell back to the ridge above camp to howl long, thin notes for her lost friend, her one and only. My outstretched hands only pushed her deeper into the sage, so when I rode out on Willy at a nervous trot, she didn’t follow.
Instead, I had Mike, a bully of a blue heeler that one of the farmers had given to me. Mike was tough and dense but hardly worth his dog food as a herder. He followed devotedly at my horse’s heels, head to the ground and stuck like a tick to the thud of hooves, as though this were the safest place on earth. Bred to work sheep and cattle, he had spent his days instead growling at strangers from the back of a pickup. Faced with his ancestral calling, he wanted nothing to do with it, and like some sullen teenager, his eyes refused to meet mine, as if to say, This ain’t my problem.
I had imagined making a big circle at an easy trot, giving loud whoops that would send the dogs racing and the sheep raining down off the ridges. I had imagined them collected and bleating in a tidy pool of wool alongside my camp below. But there was no above and no below, only mile after mile of crumpled, broken country with gullies and ridges splayed in all directions and sheep in twos and threes flung like pale rocks across it all.
I rode and rode as Sterling told me to do. In a late afternoon turning to evening, I rode as far as I could see sheep and kept riding because there was no end to the sheep until it was dark, and then I gave up.
The clouds that gathered low across the badlands all that afternoon had bunched against the mountains, erasing the eastern horizon and making the darkness total. My throat was raw from yelling at sheep who wouldn’t move, and Willy’s sideways prance had long since turned deliberate. So we moved slowly and silently through the darkness, his hooves knocking loose the bitter smell of sage as we headed home. It was several hours before I knew for sure that we were lost and that what pulled at Willy and made his step sure wasn’t the sheep camp with its barrel of oats but his home ranch at Whistle Creek, eight or ten miles to the east of us.
I slept that night between saddle blankets, my face weighted into the fleece lining of my saddle, turned on its side and curved pulpitlike over my head. Around my palm I’d wrapped Willy’s reins to hold him through the night, his muzzle dropped to my shoulder with what seemed to be resignation, maybe disgust. The dog I’d smitten with curses all through the afternoon and evening was curled into the hollow behind my knees, and I was grateful beyond words for that.
Through the frame of Willy’s legs, I could see lights along the highway, miles distant, curving in the great silent arc of night. I imagined that each one was coming in search of me and watched for it to slow and waver from its path. None did, and I knew there was no reason that anyone would until morning. I thought of lovers long asleep in their beds. I thought about rattlesnakes. I thought of my family eighteen hundred miles away and wished that they knew to worry for me. I thought of Lady howling her sorrow into the night sky on the ridge above camp and thought her brave, or at least true, and envied her for knowing so surely what it is that she loves.
During the night, a light rain fell, little more than a mist that settled on the blankets. I woke often, without moving or disturbing the shape of us, to listen to the sound of our breathing, and when first light appeared, we were up and gone, easily finding our bearings and the two-track road that led us back to camp.
Sterling was waiting for me as I rode into camp, moving toward us with his brittle, choppy gait as though his feet never quite knew where they would find the ground. A foolish grin was spread across his face as he said, “Well, kid, thought I’d catch you in bed, but looks like you’ve already been hard at it.” When I confessed I was only coming home from yesterday’s ride, I hoped for some sign of sympathy, but all he said was, “Don’t worry, kid, I won’t tell a soul.”
As his offering to our calamity, he fashioned for me a “canned dog” out of aluminum cans strung together loosely along a stiff wire and fastened into a circle like a tambourine. With words that smelled faintly of morning beer, he instructed me to shake it at the sheep while hanging on to my horse. Handing it over, he wished me luck and headed back to town in his rattletrap pickup.
We watched him go until his dust had settled on the far ridge, the tips of Lady’s ears visible above the sage, following the sound of his leaving. I was tired and discouraged and wanted to go home but too proud to say so. And there was no one left to say it to. I imagined for a moment climbing back up in the saddle and heading for the highway a free woman in search of a real job, then considered Lady alone in the sage and couldn’t.
Instead, I began to cook. In a camp smelling of spilled kerosene and desolation, I began to cook for us all in the middle of miles of nothing. As if a full belly could make us powerful and a full plate co
uld bring Lady over to us. Scraping at the pans on the stove, I noticed her ears had moved around through the sage to where she could see me work. She disappeared as I tiptoed a plate of meat and grease out into the brush for her but licked it clean when my back was turned. I courted her wholeheartedly with every trick up my sleeve, from Vienna sausages to Oreo cookies, and when I woke yesterday morning, I found her curled up in the dirt at the wagon door, her big eyes watching me without fear.
MCCULLOUGH PEAKS
Morning. Streams of pale light spill across the ridges like paint tipped over and flush from the sage the cries of small birds. From a ragged spine of rock, my knot of a thousand sheep begins to loosen as, one by one, the ewes and lambs trickle off the edges in search of fresh feed. The air is awake, alive with movement. It’s May, spring in northern Wyoming, and I’m camped on the high benches of the McCullough Peaks.
At the edge of camp, Lady and Louise sit on their haunches and lean out into the morning with a working dog’s earnest air of responsibility. Louise is a blue merle Aussie shepherd, a pup who has followed at Lady’s heels and taken to the sheep in my second season of herding. She has one blue eye that speaks of righteousness. Today it says, Sheep are leaving the bedground and your horse isn’t saddled. We’re ready. Send us. Their faces turn in quick attention from sheep to Willy to me, coffee still in hand.
Picketed in a small clearing off from camp, Willy stands with his nose shoved deep into his bucket of oats. I gather my saddle up from underneath the sheepwagon and pack it to him, heaving it onto his back with a grunt. In my next life I’ll be tall, I think, pulling the cinch up loose under his belly. Abruptly, his head swings up through the air, startled at some intrusion into the landscape. He stands frozen, watching so intently that for a moment he forgets to chew.
It’s the horses that he sees. They slip down along the rim of the narrow canyon that falls from the peaks, widening and softening to spill into green feed below our camp. It’s the bay stallion’s band, one of three feral herds that range in the McCullough Peaks and whose paths we cross from time to time, sharing, as we do, the neighborhood.
They step lightly down the rim, coming closer to our camp and the sheep now streaming off the hill. There are seven mares, mostly bays and sorrels, two spring colts and the stallion, traveling off to the side but clearly in their lead. Among them, there is not one animal I’d call beautiful. They are small and dense and rough, the shape of their bones buried under coats still ragged with winter. Like the gnarled firs leaning from the winds at timberline, these horses are carved by the elements in which they live, not by any breeder’s idea of perfection.
Still, you should see them move. All grace and ease, they move with full attention, like dancers seasoned side by side, their noses weaving the air to catch our scent. Together, their tough bodies express a single elegance, their effort one chord of survival.
I have watched them bear a storm. With butts turned windward and heads hung low, they shift their warm weight into one another and stand through whatever the skies pour down on them. From the comfort of my sheepwagon stove, I’ve felt my pity grow to envy of their loyalty, of their dependence on each other, of the sureness it allows them in a landscape that offers so little shelter.
This morning they stop just above camp, not fifty yards from us, at the edge of the hungry wave of bleating sheep. The stallion stands with his head high, studying Willy. The mares have an air both wary and curious, almost playful. One colt minces forward to sniff a woolly fleece, then leaps back from the surprise of it, stirring the mares into a ripple of snorts and skittering bucks. The stallion ducks his head, too, then shakes it in our direction like a dare. Unbearably tempted, Willy charges the end of his picket chain with a squeal.
A year ago they had taken him, calling him away with whatever power their freedom holds. On a wild, blustery morning with winds gusting against the flimsy tin of my sheepwagon roof, I had woken to see him, white eyed and snorting, straining against the picket line snaked in a tangle through the brush, and followed his eyes to the low hills above camp. Three wild bands had gathered in the coming storm to show out for one another, to strut in the electrical currents of air sweeping in from the north. The stallions had bunched their mares into three tight knots that circled and swung, finally slowing into a still point with only the wind howling and the stallions themselves moving between.
From a quarter mile away, Willy was charged by the tension and wanted to be gone into the middle of it. I did, too, so I’d been careful as I saddled him and pulled the bridle over his halter. I led him away from camp to climb on, but he reared and ducked his head, and the loose sheepherder bridle slid from his head to the ground. For a moment he stood between two worlds, his eyes to the hills, one ear twitching slightly to the rattle of the oat bucket and the grain sifting through my fingers.
I crooned to him. I groveled. You can have all the oats, anything you want. But his head swung around high to the horses on the hill, and knowing he was loose he moved away from us with the stiff-legged staccato movements of exhilaration. Then he was gone, bucking, twisting, stirrups flapping like wings, into the hills. The bands began to shift in the distance, the stallions confused by his presence, circling around their mares, the bands circling around each other, and all disappearing from my view in a roiling wave.
I remember standing for a long time watching the empty hills with the reins in my hand, the bit in the dirt at my feet, awed that my life could change so suddenly. There was no phone to call for help, no neighbor to flag down. Only a spidery track of dusty road whose miles would soon be impassable with the storm. I remember looking at my dogs and wondering if it were possible for them, too, to be drawn away from me by some experience more primally dog. I thought not, and wondered at the difference in Willy that took him away.
That year I celebrated my twenty-fourth birthday on foot in the rain, tearing a soggy tuna fish sandwich into pieces for Lady and Louise. For six days it had rained, and on the seventh, John chugged into camp at dawn, his truck chained up on all four tires to get through the mud, worried about what he might find when he got there. Willy had been found out by the highway, lonesome and cut up and looking for oats. As a gelding, he’d had no place with the wild horses and had been fought out of the bands by the stallions. Having gotten the news through the back-range grapevine, John showed up at first light with a spare horse loaded in the stock rack of his pickup and an aging birthday cake decorated with plastic flowers on the front seat beside him.
Now, a year later, if Willy has memories of the beating he’d suffered, they are paled by the sparks and snorts flying across the distance this morning. Heads are up, eyes are bright. In an air charged with invitation, I hang my weight into his head to draw him down, my own memories all too present.
I turn to the horses up the hill, their spirits like bright lights beckoning, and realize that I, too, want to be gone away. More than the caution of my isolation and more than the wisdom of my losses, I want to shake my head back at them. I want to dare.
I fasten the bridle over his head and pull the cinch tight around his belly. Cheeking his head around to me, I dance his dance, one foot in the stirrup and one foot touching the ground, until I pull myself into the saddle. Do we dare? In a sideways prance we step gingerly into the sage, and the horses’ heads fly high, their ragged manes catching the wind.
How can we not run on a spring morning with our hearts stretched wide? And so I lean only slightly, shifting my weight to give him his head, and we’re both gone now, hard and fast and wild through the sage, the horses already bolted and bucking up the hill. One hand a clutch of mane and reins, the other anchored to the horn, I pledge myself on for the ride, the dogs yipping madly through the brush behind us.
Below us the ground falls away unevenly and leaves us stumbling through the air over sage and rock and the holes of prairie dogs. I lose my sight to wind and tears and close my body around the center of what there is to trust and trust it.
For long moments we ride their wake of dust and drumming hooves, suspended in a balance of fear and grace as hooves meet earth and the earth holds us up, following until our lungs and hearts can stand no more. Glittering and heaving, we fall to a stop and watch them take the ridge. They snort and jump and stamp their feet at us, disappearing over the top with necks snaking and heads shaking in triumph.
Turning back, the morning is spread before us, raw and brilliant, tumbling for miles into the desert basin below. The sheep are fanned in a great pale arc through the sage, and the birds cry out their morning songs. With corks popped off our sedated hearts, we turn down from the slope, changed, and pick our trail back to camp and the quiet rituals of our day.
TRAILING
When summer heat comes to the basin, birds sing early and go quiet under a leaf of shade. Spring grass crisps beneath the midday sun, and the sheep go thick and logy in the still air. The pond below camp warms and shrinks, leaving behind a shelf of mud pocked with sheep tracks, urine, and flies, but since it’s the only water for miles we use it. When the sun settles high and unforgiving, I send the dogs off to circle the lead, crying, “Way round, way round” into the dry air, and the far sheep turn back to camp, nearly running, their heads low, to sip at the fouled water and clump around its edges. Here they suffer the day, their heads tucked into the scant shade of one another’s bellies, until the slanting light releases them back into the hills in search of grass.
