by Laura Bell
One night as I read by lamplight, I heard the crunch of boots on snow, a light knock on the side of the sheepwagon, and a man’s soft voice. “Hello? Are you there?” He appeared at the open door, flakes of new snow sifting down and lighting on his hat, his shoulders. “I hope I’m not bothering you.”
“No, not at all. Come in.”
But he wouldn’t, said only that he’d been up and thought he’d check to see if I needed help with anything. And that he’d just finished a book, essays by William Kittredge; did I want to read them?
I said yes and took the paper grocery bag he offered me, folded around the hard kernel of the book. “Well, goodnight,” he said, and was gone into the sifting snow.
He had come to the ranch that fall, with my friends Gretel and Press, as part of the crew come to help gather cattle from the mountain pasture and trail them to the deeded ground at White Creek. I was told that he’d lost his wife just six months before in a horse accident down in the Texas Panhandle and that his daughters, then only six months and three and a half, were living with her mother and father up in Minnesota. He’d followed them up there and tried his hand at logging in the dark north woods to be with them, but something had broken, and he’d come west to be with his old friend Press here in Wyoming. Most of what I knew about him, I’d heard from someone else.
He’d fit right in and was good help, working behind the cattle quietly, respectfully. He laughed at other people’s jokes but held himself apart, taking up little space. When it seemed he might stay awhile, Stan and Mary offered him a bed in the cookhouse behind the main house, and in return he rode colts, fixed fence, did odd jobs. He had little with him in this stopover of his life: a new Chevy pickup and horse trailer, a saddle, photographs of his wife and daughters, a substantial shelf of books. I discovered that he read widely and deeply, had studied literature in college. More here, I thought, than meets the eye.
Evenings, the pickup would head out the lane for town and would arrive back in the early-morning hours, parked askew. Mornings, he would appear at the ranch breakfast table early for coffee, quiet and polite, cleaning his wire-rimmed glasses on a shirtsleeve with no words about the night before.
One full-mooned night down at the corrals, I stood looking out across the silvered pasture where the heifers were turned out during the day, several acres between the corrals and the house, the long side on the banks of Shell Creek sheltered by bare-branched old cottonwoods. I stood in the perfect stillness of night and imagined walking across that empty field in the moonlight to enter the cookhouse quietly, like a thief, and go to the bed of the sleeping man whose daylight face was smooth as a still pond. Bare skin, the ripples of grief. I could have sliced in and out like a knife, and in the dark of night it would be as though it had never happened.
Morning. Every season is different, every year the same. At dawn, I saddle a young bay gelding called Tuck who’s been known to leap sideways through the air when a cow turns on him. He has fancy Doc O Dynamite breeding, which makes him quick and athletic, but he appears to be afraid of cattle. Tim, Stan and Mary’s elder son, has turned him over to me for these long, hard trots through the willows at dawn and dusk, checking for new calves, hoping that the miles and cattle will help him outgrow it. I check my coat pocket for notepad and pencil, my saddlebags for scour pills and penicillin, and pull myself up into the saddle, burdened with the layers of early morning.
We skitter across frozen ground at a dicey trot, then line out through the snow at a steady pace as we warm up to each other and the job at hand. We move past the house and out through the field to the east past the old sheep sheds and slow to a walk as we fall off the slope into Shell Creek.
The willows plume in frost-rimmed clumps along the meadows on the far side of the creek. Hidden among them, scattered, are the mixed-breed cows of the grade herd, older, seasoned, able to calve on their own given any shelter from wind and snow. I ride them dawn and dusk. When they’re calving heavy, I ride them at noon as well, looking for new calves, making sure they’ve sucked, writing down the mother’s number to make the calf’s tag, looking for illness, for cows on the wrong side of the fence, for trouble. This morning a skiff of new snow brightens the ragged remains of the last storm. At a long trot we snake through paths in the brush, making our intricate circle of the most hidden places, the backsides of willow clumps, the long narrow irrigation ditch that could trap a cow on her back during labor or keep a calf from climbing out.
I’d come to the Diamond Tail fresh from the sheep ranges and knowing nothing about cattle, so everything I learned over six years was thanks to Stan and Mary, from being asked the hard questions day after day, stitching the threads between birth and death. “Didn’t you see her bag was swollen? Couldn’t you tell she’d dropped a calf? You have to pay attention. Don’t you see that cow off in the corner looking out into the hills? Can’t you see that there’s something just wrong there? Pay attention.”
Last night’s squall has brought new calves. A black baldy calf up and suckling its mother. The cow licks the calf’s hind end furiously, possessively, then swings her head up high in defiance of me. Tuck trembles and shifts his weight from foot to foot, bunching his weight on his hindquarters and looking for an escape from the cow’s glare. Pulling out my notebook and pen, I huddle over the saddle horn, holding him in place long enough to write the number of the mother cow, the sex of the calf and that he’s sucked. Through the willows and along the fence, five new calves are wobbling bright eyed in the snow.
Trotting around the upper fence between the pasture and the sagebrush hills beyond, I notice a cow watching me from the corner above the haystack. Her look says she has something to hide, so we pull the hill at a trot, Tuck’s breathing now almost a snort, a slight vapor of heat rising up off his body. I’m warming up, too, in the pale sun under all these clothes, the ragged silk scarf wound around my neck smelling of stale breath and sweat. As the light spreads across the sage, I’m suddenly tired and want only to be done with this round, the uncertainty behind every bush.
She is a black Angus and stands facing us as we approach. At her feet is a calf sprawled in the shape of birth, the mucous and afterbirth covering its nose indicating that it never breathed. The ground around the calf is trampled, the snow and frozen earth chopped up with worry. The cow lowers her head to the calf, billowing her nostrils toward us and switching her tail in defiance. Her tongue shoots out and roughs the flank of the stillborn calf as though urging it once more to get up, get up. She swings her head back at us, her eyes dark, fierce pools, then lifts it and bellows up into the air.
I unwrap the lariat strapped to my saddle horn and slide to the ground, asking myself all the questions that I know I’ll hear. Hadn’t you noticed her? What was she doing last night when you rode? Was she off by herself? Goddamn, another calf.
I pick the loop off the end of the coil and shake out a little rope. Behind me Tuck’s pulling back against the reins and in front of me the cow’s snorting, stomping, switching her tail angrily. “Hey, Momma,” I say softly, “hey hey hey. You lost your sweet baby.” The words come out a croon, like a love song, and I hope she doesn’t knock me over. “Hey, Momma, we’ll find you another baby; yes we will.” With my free hand I lift the calf’s hind legs and with the toe of my boot work the loop of rope over the raised back hooves and down around its hind end, then lift the hind feet higher and let the loop drop around the stiff flanks of the dead calf. I pull the loop snug and back away, paying the rope out in front of me.
“Hey, pretty pretty.” Now I’m talking to Tuck, hoping that he’ll let me mount him again with the rope in my hand. “This is no big deal pretty, pretty boy, and you can do the right thing here. Easy easy easy.” I have the reins in one hand and the rope in the other. If he’ll stand firm, we can do this, but instead he jumps as I get on, and the rope pulls from my hand and drops to the ground. I slide back off, pick it up, and drape it as high as I can in a clump of greasewood brush. I lead Tuck some distan
ce away from the cow and turn him to face her, then climb up in the saddle as he stands, trembling. “Easy easy easy. This is no big deal, baby.” I trick him back to where I can lean down and pick the rope out of the greasewood, holding it loosely away from me in case he jumps. With my thumb straight up and out of the way, I take two quick dallies around the horn, and when Tuck lurches forward, the calf bumps behind us on the end of the rope.
The cow lets out a deep bellow and charges after her calf, frantically licking at its head, stepping on its front legs dragging stiffly behind, and when she does, the rope catches and jerks us back. The cow whirls and leaves us for the spot where she birthed her calf, as though he might still be there and maybe this time rise up on wobbly legs to butt at her side. We wait, Tuck trembling and in a lather. I raise my voice into a keen, “Whah-whah-whah,” like a calf crying out, until she finds us again and covers the carcass with her rough tongue. The reins loosen. Then there’s the thud of hooves on snow, the creak of leather, the rope stretching slightly as it tightens. We head back for the barn, across the frozen creek, across the snowy fields, the dead calf’s body shushing and bumping behind us, the bellowing cries of the mother announcing our return.
I met Joe’s daughters in 1983 in that season between winter and spring when the ranch was old snow, bare trees, and dead grass. Jenny was a year and three months old, Amy was four and a half. Their Norwegian grandparents and their mother’s older sister had brought them from Minnesota, all scrubbed and loved, to the ranch to see their dad, who was enduring the time of his mourning in tight-lipped stoicism. As Stan and Mary and I introduced ourselves, the sense of loss felt fresh, as though a wave had just washed over them and taken their skins. It had only been nine months, and the grandmother’s hair had fallen out with grief, her head now wrapped in a scarf. I noticed her swollen eyes and eyebrows arched as if in perpetual surprise at what life had brought to her door. I thought about a stone skipping across water, about lives touching down. I shook hands with the grandmother, her hands only bone. Nine months is the time it takes to grow a baby, but how much time does it take to lose a child?
They’d been there less than an hour when I followed them down the rutted lane to the small round corral behind the barn where Joe wanted to show the girls a baby calf. Jenny, who hadn’t strayed more than a few feet from her grandmother since their arrival, was hitched up in her arms, an exact image of pictures I’d seen of her mother, olive skin and dark wispy hair poking out from beneath a pink knit cap. Amy stayed beside her father, her hand up in his, and I noticed she walked just like him, as tall as she could make herself and with a tough little stride, determined to keep up. Her grandmother had braided her long blonde hair tightly, which seemed to pull her face into something wide open and bright, hopeful when she turned to look up at her dad.
I still believed then that I could hold myself apart and simply watch. That love was reasonable, something that could be chosen. What I didn’t know was that these girls would be my gift.
The Sunday before, Joe had pulled up in front of my house with a horse in his trailer. “He’s fast, bred for it. They’re racing up by the Greybull airport this afternoon. Come ride him.” Simple as that, I said yes and loaded my saddle in the back of the pickup, adding that I’d have to be back for the evening rounds. “I’ll get you back,” he said, and we were gone.
The track was a quarter-mile stretch marked off alongside the airport runway, fifteen miles west of the ranch. At one end was a starting gate with six stalls, even though these were stock-saddle races, casual and Western, for anybody with a horse and the ten-dollar entry fee. Next to the track there were bleachers with people, kids, and dogs milling around and a table where wagers were being made. The day was raw, the wind up. Clouds sailed past the face of the Big Horns. Across the basin sixty miles to the west, the Absarokas lay covered in snow.
Joe helped shorten my stirrups and gave me a leg up onto the tall bay gelding, and I set off at a trot to warm him up and get the feel of him. Away from the crowd, I let him out into a canter and felt a slow smile creep to my face. The bright wind, the long-legged horse, the thoughtful attention of another person doing something to make me happy. By the time we’d stepped into the starting gate and felt it close behind us, my heart was pounding in my ears and I hoped I wouldn’t fall off. I held the saddle horn with one hand and with the other grabbed a handful of mane and waited. The last horse loaded, the gates flew open and we were off in a wild thunder down the track, clods of dirt pelting my face.
We placed fourth out of six, but the exhilaration of the ride spread into my arms and my heart and opened up a place for the man who so quietly had seen to this happiness. Adjusting stirrups, a leg up, what are these things to make a space for tenderness? When we stopped at the bar for a drink, I looked him full in the face for the first time since we’d met six months before.
Back at the ranch barely by dusk and almost too late, he helped me back on the long-legged horse with the short racing stirrups for my evening ride across the creek, my skin warm with alcohol and his attentions. I rode the circle nearly in the dark, peering into the brush, happily splashing back through the creek at a trot. When I returned in the dark, in the deepening cold, I found that he’d waited and fixed me a plate of food. After I ate, he held my hand and asked, “Have you ever thought about getting married?” I shook my head, and then he asked softly, “If you ever do, would you think about me?”
GATHERING
There was a time in my life when I thought I lived at the center of the universe—would, in fact, say that I did—because I thought everything I needed was within arm’s reach: friends, horses, family, a sense of place, and a job to do. It didn’t last for long. Likely, it’s never meant.
It’s all about quiet when the diesel pickups are shut off and the horses are unloaded and we’re horseback in the dim morning light, sent out to follow a bare ridge to its end. Riders and horses have been dropped off along the road, and those that remain are sent in a scatter from the trailers to ride the first part of the morning alone. Meadowlarks are singing down in the draws and the range smells sweet and damp with morning. My horse feels good and fresh, but I hold him to a careful trot so he can cover the miles to where I’ll begin to pick up cattle. Though I can’t feel it yet, I know that when the sun rises, the day will turn scorching hot, and it’s my job to help him last through to dark.
As daylight comes, I see the shapes of riders and dogs in the distance, sometimes only dots on the horizon, and I’m not sure who’s on what ridge, but I know they’ll find the cattle they’re meant to find and bring them on.
I imagine that in their solitude they might be singing to themselves as I sometimes do, softly, because my voice is not good and because the morning’s quiet is large. And because it’s large, they might be considering their lives as I sometimes do when I’m riding alone. When I look up again, they’ve disappeared from the horizon, fallen below into draws and hidden pockets to begin the gather. I reach the top end of my country and find cattle there, a handful of pairs bedded down in a green swale. A sleepy calf raises its head, blinking in surprise to see the strange creature of me, but the cows know it’s time. They’ve been waiting. They gather their calves up, bawling softly, and head down the trail.
It’s still black-dark morning, four o’clock in the Shell Valley, late June, and just enough rain’s spitting from the sky to muddy the windshields. We pull across the highway onto the Red Gulch road with two gooseneck trailers and an old Suburban with a four-horse behind, all loaded heavy with saddle horses and gear. Packed into these outfits are the dozen or so hands and help from both ranches, the Diamond Tail and the G-O, whose cattle run in common in the hills and up on the forest reserve. We pull to the roadside and watch, bleary-eyed, as the headlights of Steve’s rig approach, coming the highway from Shell. In the crush of bodies and slickers in the backseat, I check my jeans pocket for lip balm and hope my chaps and bridle made it into the back of the pickup, somewhere beneath the four
dogs and the pile of lunch coolers. It is 1985, my last full summer as a hand on the Diamond Tail Ranch.
By the time Steve pulls alongside, the rain’s coming down in earnest and the wind has picked up. The passenger window gets rolled down by one of his kids, and he leans across them, smoking, to the window. “Morning,” he says.
“Morning.” There’s a pause, Stan chewing on a toothpick.
“You see cattle at Split Ear yesterday?”
“Three pair. Kicked ’em on down to Sulphur with another little package. Got ’em through the gate, so Sulphur should be clean.”
There is another long pause in which it suddenly seems that we have all the time in the world. For all the early-morning urgency of scrambling and loading in the dark, we’re now lollygagging at the highway as though having a casual afternoon chat. Now it’s the rain that appears to be in question. Lord knows, it’s not us they’re worried about getting wet but the roads. Spring roundup depends on getting the rigs shuttled around miles and miles of dirt roads, all of which can turn to gumbo under a good soaking.
“May as well try for the top of Red Mountain and wait for daylight. See what this day looks like.”
“Might pass over. We aren’t meant to get it.”
“May as well give ’er a try.”
We pull all four outfits back onto the dirt road and begin the long washboard haul through the hills, chancing that we’re under a cloud and not a storm. We doze these dark miles, past Dutch Springs and up the long, steady grade of Red Mountain. There, from on top and the high ridges beyond it, we’ll scatter across the badlands to gather the cattle to Trapper Creek and start them up Black Mountain, the first step toward their summer on the Big Horns.
