Claiming Ground

by Laura Bell

  Red Mountain is an upturned slab of Chugwater Formation that rises, gradually and smoothly, out of the basin floor and ends in a high perch of red cliff from which a lot of country can be seen. It’s all windblown grass and sage, no trees, so when we park in the dark, our rigs are the tallest things around, and over their dim silhouettes we can see the horizon of mountains to the east. The wind’s blowing hard and the rain discouragingly steady. Mary pulls a thermos from the canvas bag at her feet and passes coffee around while we wait for first light.

  “Am I seeing things?” she finally asks. “What on earth is that on the top of Steve’s horse trailer?”

  From the backseat, we peer into the dark, but truly it seems too early to care.

  Mary is persistent. “It looks like … could it be—oh my gosh, I believe it’s a chicken! It must’ve been roosting this morning when Steve drove off! It’s come all the way from Trapper Creek on the horse trailer! In the rain!”

  This catches our attention and we unfold, rumpled, from our close quarters and pull on the slickers we’ve been clutching in our laps. Those in the other rigs notice our movement, and suddenly we’re all standing around Steve’s trailer pondering the miracle of the chicken still roosted on a crossbar.

  “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “That gal’s had quite the ride.”

  “Maybe we ought to check the highway this evenin’ for eggs.”

  “So what the heck do we do with her?”

  With all the commotion and scary yellow slickers circled around her, she bails off, squawking, and flaps to the ground. Stan and Steve and half the kids go for their ropes, and then a rodeo commences. We’re sliding and diving on the wet ground to catch that poor hen, who refuses to be roped, laughing to tears on a rainy mountaintop as daylight breaks.

  Devils Leap, Trapper Canyon, Red Mountain, Sulphur, the Mesa, Red Gulch, Black Mountain, the Mail Trail Gap. You don’t need to be a geologist to know this country is made from great slabs of earth punched and heaved up from below, then gouged into canyons and wrinkles from above. As though all this damage has just occurred, the slabs are scattered and tilted, their jagged edges exposed as cliff, with gray limestone up along the mountain face and the burnt red of the Chugwater Formation in the foothills below. Creased and broken, this is the country we are gathering. As morning comes, we look across it all and can see the storm is passing, that the day will come on clear and strong.

  We gather through the early morning from the far reaches and high corners of the Mesa, Sulphur and Red Mountain down into the dry bowl of Red Basin. As it grows hot, the herd begins to take shape with cattle spilling down trails and out of draws, lonesome horses nickering with the joining of riders.

  The pickups and trailers have been left down in the wide shallow basin alongside the dirt road where everyone will pass eventually. As we get close, we let the cattle drift and we go in search of cold water and hot coffee, maybe a candy bar from the cooler. The horses brighten to a trot, as though their day might be over, and for some it is. Stan, Tim, and Mary pull the saddles from their young colts, trading them for older, stouter horses who can take the hard work still ahead.

  Mary cinches up her horse and tells me over her shoulder, “You better have a sandwich, too. It’s a long ways to lunch.”

  Mary is a third-generation ranch woman who’d grown up one of three sisters on the Budd Ranch in the high, wide-open Big Piney country south of Jackson Hole. She claims that’s real ranch country, too high and cold to grow crops. “I never had a fresh tomato until I went to college,” she’d say when she asked me to make a salad. “I’m just much better with beef and beans and things in cans. When I married Stan and moved to Shell Valley, I wondered how in the world I ended up here in the middle of all these flatlander farmers. It took me a while to get used to the change.”

  She learned to work cattle with her sisters under the strict tutelage of her father, who believed that it was all to be done horseback and in only one way—quiet and smart.

  “When you ride into a field, you start working that cow as soon as you walk through the gate. She knows. You can start to work her where you want her from a good distance. You can get a lot out of her without ever dashing around at a gallop or acting a fool, as my father would say.”

  And because we lacked the strength to manhandle the cattle and the skill to rope at a high run, she taught me how to get the job done without them.

  “That number one sixty-one yellow-tag calf’s looking better, but he’s going to need another shot of penicillin. Let’s pick up this little bunch of cattle here under the cottonwoods and work them over towards the upper gate. See now, this little guy just falls to the back of the bunch, and it’s easy as pie to drop your rope on him. Just like this.”

  Mary is slight and wiry, with disturbingly blue eyes and a quick wit. For thirty years she has kept a daily journal of events—weather, cattle moves, visitors, geese coming back in the spring, notes about the kids, quotes from her poetry anthology on the shelf by the kitchen table.

  “Do you write personal things?” I once asked her. “You know, feelings about your life?”

  She laughed at the question but clearly had thought about the answer. “No.” She shook her head. “I can look back at any given day and read between the lines. But when I die, that will all go with me.”

  I hold the candy bar in my teeth and tie the ham sandwich, cinched up like a butterfly in a baggie, into the leather strings below my saddle horn. No one on the Diamond Tail uses saddle bags or carries water with them, no matter how long the prospect of the day. I’ve come to understand that you’re meant to be simply rider and horse, with as little extra flap as possible. When I first arrived at the ranch, Stan teased me about my sheepherder ways. He’d grin and say, “You got the goddamn kitchen sink tied on behind your saddle.” My saddlebags quietly got left behind in the tack shed, and I began to find pockets instead for scour pills, syringes, notebooks and penicillin. I wanted to be just horse and rider, a neat little package that could travel light and work well. I had people willing to teach me. I wanted to learn from them and wanted to fit in.

  The cattle are stringing out in the late morning, bound for the trails that lead to water down in the willows and sedges and lush grass of Red Gulch below us. It’s Kelly and me and the Flitner kids now plodding along together behind the drag in the heat.

  Kelly’s face looks puffy and beat up and, under the shade of his black cowboy hat, slightly gray. He grew up in Shell Valley and for years has wandered back and forth between oilfields and ranches for his paycheck, rodeoing and partying notoriously in between, and always with a smart quip. One night along the way, he’d lost his wife and baby son in a trailer-house fire that sprang up suddenly in the early hours. We all felt he was driven to his edges because of it.

  “Closed down the Outpost last night and tried my damndest to get one of those sassy fillies in the chute before closin’ time. Just an eight-second ride is all it woulda took. Eeehaaaa! I know I coulda rode ’er, rode ’er, rode ’er …”

  He’s nearly singing now, delighted with his words and swinging his rope out onto the backs of slow calves. He has a captive audience and is bent on shocking us, but we’re long used to him and don’t shock easily anyway. One summer Sunday, he’d appeared on the porch of the Flitners’ White Creek cow camp just as Father Camillus, a family friend and Benedictine priest, was about to conduct an informal outdoor mass before the day’s work. Kelly was wearing his garish long-fringed rodeo chaps and heading for the coffeepot inside, but Father Camillus, ever the gentleman, had extended a light-hearted welcome.

  “Is your spirit crying out for morning mass, Kelly? Would you give us the gift of your presence?”

  “My spirit’s cryin’ out for caffeine and bacon.”

  “Well, Kelly, you know you are most certainly welcome,” the priest said warmly, and then, with a twinkle in his eyes, “I’ve never seen a cowboy wearing … exactly what color would you call those chaps?”
/>
  Kelly stopped dead in his tracks, lit up and got his most earnest smile going. “Well, Father, guess I’d call ’em titty pink!” he roared, then ducked through the cabin door.

  “Ah, Kelly, you are a treasure of God.” Father Camillus just smiled and raised his hands to the rest of us, scattered among pine stumps and benches on the porch in the early-morning light, where we waited, spurs on our boots and coffee in hand, for a blessing.

  We tried hard to not let Kelly get our goat or embarrass us, but the other feeling he could inspire in us was awe.

  As the sun’s heat settled on us in earnest, he started off again with his head thrown back and his rope circling through the air after nothing in particular as he began to recite poetry.

  There are strange things done in the midnight sun

  By the men who moil for gold;

  The Arctic trails have their secret tales

  That would make your blood run cold;

  The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

  But the queerest they ever did see

  Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

  I cremated Sam McGee.

  He could quote page after page of Robert Service and often did during the slack times behind the cattle. There wasn’t one of us whose jaws didn’t drop in amazement at this side of him no matter how often we’d seen it. Regardless of how hard he’d partied the night before or how little sleep he’d gotten, he always showed up and always did his job. And, if we were lucky, we’d hear his poetry.

  By noon the cattle are bunched on the water below the Red Gulch corrals, where my sheepwagon’s parked. If this were our destination, we’d be done and it would’ve been a pretty fair day getting here, but this is only the first gathering point of several. We stand our horses around the cattle at an easy distance, letting cows and calves mother up for the hard push over the divide into the Trapper Creek drainage.

  Tim rides up and drops his horse down into the creek beside me to let him water. Now in his early twenties, he’s lanky and dark haired with his mother’s eyes. He sits his horses quietly and tends toward an intense and solemn reserve.

  Standing ankle-deep in the shallow, brackish water of Red Gulch, our horses drink their fill through the wiry sedges and horsetail that cover the bottom. Tim has just come back from taking one of his colts to a Ray Hunt clinic, so I ask him about it.

  “It’s all about making the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard. You let the horse make the decision to get himself into trouble or to get himself out of it. It’s up to him.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  “Well, take your reins and put just the slightest amount of pressure on his mouth, as little as you can.”

  I’m riding Chili, a solid-bred red roan quarter horse my husband had given me. He’s a four-year-old gelding with plenty of cow in him, but under my heavy hand he’s become a little stubborn. So I take the reins and barely squeeze the snaffle bit into the corners of his mouth. This irritates him, and he lets me know by tossing his head.

  “Stay steady. Keep the pressure slight and even. You’re making his world uncomfortable, and he’s got to figure out how to make it okay again.”

  Chili gives his head another shake and then shifts his weight back from the bit, not quite taking a step.

  “There! Give him slack now and rub his shoulder. You’ve got to pay attention and feel the slightest change in him, reward that little bit of give. Keep that in mind and you’ll have him backing across the arena with nothing but what you just gave him. Make the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard.”

  Tim and I had bonded early on in adversity. We’d been left in charge of the ranch on one of the rare occasions when Stan and Mary took a break to travel, usually after Christmas and before the crush of heifers calving in February. At the time, he was a skinny high school kid; I was eleven years older but still a green hand. We managed many things well, and I’m sure we were thanked and appreciated for it, but I remember best what went wrong.

  It was winter and must have been a Saturday or Sunday because Tim was there to help feed. A cow was lying on the feedground with her uterus prolapsed out onto the straw and frozen ground. We saddled horses and herded her and her young calf gently down the lane and back to the corrals. She seemed able to walk all right, though slowly, and occasionally would stop and strain as if wanting to push it all out. In the calving shed, we locked her head into the stanchion, gave her a heavy dose of penicillin in the muscle of her hip, and washed the prolapse with a bucket of warm antiseptic water. Using all four hands, we worked the mass of it back inside her and held our hands flat against her hind end while she strained to undo our work.

  “She needs sewed up,” he said.

  “Yes. Stan’ll be home tonight, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Should we call a vet?”

  We calculated the cost. This was the early eighties when interest was high and calf prices shockingly low, a time that many ranchers didn’t survive and the ones who did took in hunters, contracted fencing jobs, cut corners and let pickups and paint grow old. That winter, with a quiver in his lip, Stan had asked me to take a fifty-dollar monthly pay cut to help make ends meet, and I said yes. The line between making it and losing it was that close, and we weren’t about to call a vet frivolously. Smeared with blood and mucus, we leaned into her hind end and weighed our decision.

  “So this is just a prolapse, right?,” I ask. “We see it all the time on the mountain. A cow will have some of her uterus hanging out and it isn’t pretty, but she doesn’t die. Nobody gets too upset about it, do they?”

  “No, we just get her into a corral, then cleaned up, sewed up and shipped to town to the sale.”

  “Is this the same?”

  “It looks worse, maybe, but I think it’s the same.”

  “I do, too.” And after a long pause, I say, “All right, then. We’ll wait for Stan?”

  “Yeah, wait for Stan.”

  We broke a clean bale of straw for her and covered the stall with it. When we turned her loose, she lay down in it and pushed her uterus back out into the straw. When Stan got home that night and went to the barn to sew her up, she was already dead, her calf curled up in the straw at her side.

  For days Tim and I hardly spoke, even to each other. It’s hard to say which is the easier target for accumulated losses, the female hired hand or the eldest son. We both took it hard from Stan and held it heavy on our shoulders. Just for a couple of days, until it passed and the burden was shared once again among us all.

  The Red Gulch corrals are graceful and old-fashioned, their cedar posts and poles wildly uneven, bent and gnarled into a kind of rangeland sculpture, parts of it with woven-wire fence, a remnant of the ranch’s sheep days. This had been the site of what Joe and I called our “honeymoon” in the months before our July wedding. I’d pulled the ranch sheepwagon out to use as my spring camp, as I did every year in May when the cows first came out in the hills. It had been a special time for us, days horseback, evenings around a campfire, reading aloud to each other by flashlight in bed. Friends would brave the rough road from Trapper Creek on a Saturday night to share elk steaks and cold beer around the fire. Now, in the heat of summer, the camp looks forlorn and uninviting. By mid-July, both cattle and camp will move up to the forest permit at Granite Pass.

  In my first season of calving, I’d worked six solid weeks before Stan said I could have the Sunday off, “if you’ll just do chores and help us feed early.” I was planning to drive through the hills to Crystal Creek, where I had a boyfriend, stay the night and come back early the next morning. I’d done the corral chores in the dim light, harnessed the team and picked Stan and Mary up at the house in the wagon to get our feeding done. Once that was finished and the horses had their noses deep in their grain, Stan looked off at the horizon and said, to no one in particular, “Well, let’s just saddle up and bring those few pair down from the Bosch draw. Won’t take long, then we’ll get you outta
here.” I looked at my watch, and it was already eleven. I was tired and could feel the morning slipping away into afternoon, the tears gathering in pools behind my sunglasses. Stan took a long look, bewildered to see that his ranch hand was crying, then cleared his throat, struggled for the words to address this delicate situation, and asked, “Were you wanting the whole day off?”

  I learned what I did from Stan because he believed I should be able to do anything that he could. This had little to do with my merits. He just needed good help, and if he didn’t have it, he knew he had to make it. He expected the world from me, and only once in a great while did he ever get it.

  “When you ride up through those cattle,” he told me that morning, “you take a good long look over the whole outfit. If one of those cows is in trouble or hiding something, acting suspicious, you’re gonna be able to see it from a mile away. If you’re looking. You’ve gotta watch these cattle like they were your own.”

  Some lessons I learned all by myself, simply by making mistakes that could have killed me. The first summer at the Diamond Tail, my horse dragged me at the end of a lariat for a quarter mile at Granite Pass. I was camped at Big Springs, at the edge of the trees just off the highway to Sheridan and kept my horse on a picket line because there wasn’t a corral. I’d been using Blue, a rangy Appaloosa who belonged to Gretel. He was a stout and dependable mountain horse under saddle but had one very bad habit: if he thought he had a chance to quit me, he’d whirl around and gallop off to leave me standing afoot. In the daily transitions from picket chain to bridle and back again, he began looking for opportunity to outweigh me.