by Robert Greer
When I was younger, I’d often wondered where the tenacity that allowed him to ford a river at high water on horseback or rope and subdue an angry stubborn bull came from. I’d been close to thirteen when an old navy buddy of his, a man who’d served alongside him in Korea, had shown up at the ranch and offered me lasting insight into my dad’s makeup. We were sitting around an early evening post-fly-fishing campfire in a swampy, subirrigated part of the ranch, near the spot where Willow Creek intersects the Bighorn River, when the man whispered to me, “Your old man’s a war hero, you know. Earned himself a Navy Cross one winter during the war by abandonin’ the safety of his road construction half-track, mannin’ a machine gun, and tendin’ to a wounded gunner’s mate. Your dad took out damn near a whole platoon of North Koreans and saved my bacon. He ever tell you about that?”
When I answered no, the man smiled. “Wouldn’ta expected that he would. Braggin’s not the kind of juice that’s ever fueled him.”
I’d never mentioned to my dad what his navy buddy had said about him, but sometimes when he looked tired, haggard, and a bit slumped in the saddle, I imagined him sprawled out, belly in the dirt, machine gun blazing, gritting his teeth and looking obstinate, determined to never give in.
Thoughts of my father faded as I continued to watch the horseman. I could see now that in addition to being dressed head to toe in gray, he was wearing a Civil War–style Johnny Reb cap. As the big black mare he was riding loped along the fence line, I could tell from the way horse and rider moved as one that the man in the saddle knew what he was doing. I wasn’t certain if he’d seen me or not, positioned as I was just behind the leading edge of that rock outcropping, but if he had, nothing about his manner suggested it.
When he pulled his horse to a halt and looked due east into the sun, my heart changed rhythm, but I couldn’t explain why since I’d seen Willard Johnson’s hired man ride the same stretch of land scores of times over the years. Generally I stopped to chat with Rawdy Themes, but today there was only the man in gray.
I followed the horseman’s trek along the fence line, never taking my eyes off him. He brought the horse to a halt, looked around as if he suddenly had the sense he was being watched, and then urged the mare quickly down a sage-covered hill. At the hill’s bottom he eased the horse up, dismounted, and led her around a cattle guard that separated our land from Johnson’s.
I briefly thought about riding down to tell him he’d crossed onto our property, but recalling my dad’s war buddy’s comments about his actions in Korea, I chose instead to hold my position.
The man in gray continued his encroachment, leading his mare toward a flat, square, marshy spit of land about three times the size of a big city intersection. It was rimmed on all sides by a wide thicket of parched brown grass and sagging barbed-wire fence that was surrounded by a dozen or so acres of land that had been in a grass fire years earlier. The fire had been started by my brother, Jimmy, and his best friend and current counselor for the Willow Creek Ranchers Coalition, Ricky Peterson.
The year before Jimmy had died, a month or so after he’d turned fifteen, he and Ricky had been out on horseback exploring the eastern edge of the ranch on a mission to eliminate as many Wyoming ground squirrels and plague-carrying western prairie dogs as they could. They’d both been packing .22 Winchesters. They’d come up on the area the horseman in gray now seemed so interested in and decided, according to my mom’s account, to check out the fenced-off marshy patch, with its concealing dry rim of grass, for the vermin they were after. They’d begun stomping down the area for rodents, as was their custom, and popping them with their .22s when Ricky spotted what he thought was a tunnel near the far northern edge of the parcel and jogged toward it. With Jimmy a good ten yards or so behind him, Ricky took out the cigarette lighter he always carried to try for a better look at what he could now see was a three-by-three-foot hole in the ground. That hole, which turned out to be just one of the surface fingers of our natural gas seep, erupted immediately in flame. By Jimmy’s account, Ricky was only trapped in the fire for seconds, but he sustained second- and third-degree burns to the upper half of his body that kept him hospitalized for weeks and in rehabilitation for months.
Days after the accident, my dad refenced off the patch of land and plugged up what he could of the seep’s natural gas, but he left the charred fence posts standing and planted a metal warning sign just beyond the eastern boundary of the fence. That sign, rusted from age and more burnt orange now than its original yellow, still read Danger.
When the horseman in gray walked his horse within a few feet of the sign, my mouth suddenly went dry. Slapping the horse on the neck and looping the reins around a charred post as if to say, This’ll only take a second, he jumped the fence and walked the gas seep’s inner perimeter. For the next few minutes he crisscrossed the seep, kicking over rocks, examining handfuls of dirt, and picking wildflowers as his horse browsed the dry marginal grasses. I had the feeling that he was about done with his exploration when he stooped down and started rooting around in the dirt with a stick he’d picked up. I wondered as I watched him if he might not be looking for the very tunnel that Ricky had found, but when he tossed the stick aside, I wasn’t so certain.
Seconds later he was back over the fence, and as agile as a gymnast he was quickly back on his horse. When the horse looked around and sniffed into the wind as if she’d caught a hint of something foreboding, the man in gray did the same. I leaned forward in my saddle and whispered, “Don’t you dare snort,” to my eight-year-old gelding, Dusty.
When both horse and rider seemed content that there was no immediate threat, they took off at a trot back up the hill they’d descended earlier. The trot soon turned into a gallop. When the big black mare jumped the cattle guard that separated Johnson’s property from ours, I mumbled, “Shit,” and when the horse made a sharp turn to the south, I saw something I either hadn’t noticed or hadn’t been able to see earlier. Poking out from a scabbard that ran diagonally across the horse’s left hindquarter was the stock of a rifle. Not the narrow stock of a .22, for dealing with pesky varmints, but the larger stock of what I suspected was a .30-’06, with firepower enough to take out a deer or elk, or even a man.
A ground-hugging trail of dust rose from behind the galloping rider as he moved farther away, and I wondered as he disappeared over a rise why on earth he’d been trespassing on both Willard Johnson’s land and ours, why he needed a high-powered rifle, and if he perhaps worked for Acota Energy and Ed Koffman. But most of all I wondered whether he was aware that the northern face of the bluffs that rose above the fenced-off natural gas seep, the very bluffs I’d been hiding in, were no more than the thin, rocky veneer over a flat-topped mountain of coal.
I was still pondering what I’d seen at our natural gas seep when I met up with Spoon several hours later. I’d decided not to tell him about the trespassing rider until we were home. We were heading across our thirteen-hundred-acre Marva pasture, named in honor of my mom, a pasture that always blossomed with a sea of buttercups in the late spring, when Dusty, aware that we were headed home, reared his head without instruction. When I thumped him hard on the neck with two fingers, exasperated that I’d never been able to break him of the bad habit, Spoon laughed. It wasn’t his usual booming laugh but one that seemed halfhearted.
“He knows there’s a brush-down and grain awaitin’. Besides, he knows every square foot of this place. He can spot the end of a work day quick as any human. They’re thinkers, not just beasts of burden, TJ.”
Spoon had plenty of proof to back him up. Months earlier when Duke, my dad’s blue heeler, had cornered a fence-jumping yearling steer that I’d been trying to vaccinate, holding the steer in place, trancelike and motionless, until Spoon appeared on horseback to rope him, I’d had the sense that Spoon understood animals on some plane that I couldn’t possibly appreciate.
“Them two animals are just talkin’ to one another,” he’d called out to me, taking up the slack in his
rope. “Problem is, we’re too dumb to understand their language.” He then let out a strange yelp as if to say to both horse and dog, Good show, dismounted, took the syringe out of my hand, and vaccinated the suddenly docile yearling.
We didn’t get back to headquarters until close to five o’clock. As Spoon dismounted, removed his sweat-stained Stetson, and swiped his brow with the cuff of his shirt, he looked tired. When he looped his horse’s reins around one of the iron-pipe hitching posts in front of our barn, I knew from the look on his face that he’d had trouble that day. I wondered if he’d also run across the trespassing man in gray and questioned whether holding back on my own sighting had been a mistake.
“Something the matter, Spoon?”
“Nope. Just had myself a bad day.”
“What happened?”
“Fell off my horse. Landed on my noggin. Sorta went cuckoo for a little bit.”
“How’d you do that?”
“Got to chasin’ one of them ornery Angus bulls of Willard Johnson’s who decided he’d come over on us. I was runnin’ him through a willow thicket back toward home when I didn’t take notice of a tree. Tree limb caught me in the neck and sent me spinnin’. Got my maker to thank for the patch of sandy soil I landed in, and of course my rock-hard noggin. Never did find out what happened to that bull. Guess he ran laughin’ back over to Johnson’s.” Spoon shook his head as if to rid himself of any lingering cobwebs. “How’d your day go? We got any fence problems out east?”
“Nothing but a few popped top wires. I fixed ’em. And just one stray. Took me a while, but I moved her back in with her sorority sisters.”
When Spoon finally moved close enough for me to see the massive welt above his right ear, I said, “That’s one hell of a knot you’ve got there,” suspecting now that he was trying his best to mask a concussion and considerable pain.
“Coulda been worse,” he said, unsaddling his horse while I moved to unsaddle Dusty.
He headed for the barn’s tack room, saddle on his left shoulder, as I slipped a halter on Dusty. When he came back he was holding grooming brushes in both hands. As we brushed the horses down, I said, “Something strange happened to me today too,” trying my best to sound matter of fact.
“You take a spill too?”
“Nope. Ran across a trespasser.”
The instant I said “trespasser,” Spoon’s eyes widened, curtains lifting on the opening act of a play. “Where was he?”
“Over by the fenced-off natural gas seep of ours that caught fire years ago,” I said.
Spoon’s next question wasn’t about the trespasser or how I’d spotted him, or even about what had happened after my sighting. Instead he asked, “Your pa come back from seein’ that lawyer in Billings yet?”
“Nope.”
“He tell you what time his appointment was?”
“No.”
“Wish he had.”
“You’re talking in riddles, Spoon. Am I missing something?”
Spoon simply smiled. The smile came slowly, as if for some reason, in the wake of his tumble, smiling made his head hurt. Finally he said, “Yep. You are. There’s a connection
between that natural gas seep, your pa bein’ gone all day, and that trespasser.”
When he realized from the confused look on my face that he’d left me adrift somewhere outside his prophetic world, he said, “I’ll explain things to you later. Right now why you don’t tell me about that trespasser, and don’t leave nothin’ out. I wanna hear about things exactly the way they happened.”
Eleven
For as long as I could remember, the rusted old hand-primed well pump inside our barn had been temperamental. One day it spewed water like Victoria Falls; the next it barely put out a stream. On days when my dad had a lot on his mind or when life seemed to simply be dogging him, he’d pull out the battered red metal case that held his plumbing tools and he’d go to work on that pump. My mom always claimed that the problem wasn’t with the pump, but with the well and that if he’d just drill a new well, the problem would solve itself. But Dad, his stubbornness always at its zenith when it came to that pump, would lay out his pipe wrenches, spirit cleaners, grease, copper snips, and pipe threaders and go at that pump, sometimes for hours, until in the end the pump would again, at least temporarily, gush water.
Fixing that pump was therapy for him, both mental and physical, and that was why neither my mom nor I belabored the issue of sinking a new well and why my dad never called for a drilling rig to come sink one.
Dad was down on his knees with the old pump housing, absent its handle, lying beside him when I approached him to tell him about our trespasser. It was just past dark, and the echoey, bat-infested, two-and-a-half-story, eighty-six-year-old barn, the oldest building on the ranch,
was creaking. The building’s lighting had been upgraded only once since my grandfather and his neighbors had built the double widow-peaked behemoth in a barn-raising marathon that had lasted less than seven days from start to finish. With its dozen livestock stalls, their wooden top rails chewed to the quick by horses, generous tack room, propane-fired warming room for newborn calves, and temperamental well, the barn was something of a conversation piece in the valley.
The rough-cut timbered supports and sawdust-covered floor had always given my sinuses fits, and within moments of stepping inside, I could guarantee a bout of sneezing. It never lasted for more than a few minutes before subsiding, and the half dozen doctors I’d seen for the problem since childhood had agreed that what I was most likely suffering from was an immediate but temporary sawdust allergy. Although the sneezing passed quickly, it was a nuisance that had always made me weary, if not a bit fearful, of the drafty old relic.
My first sneeze caught my dad off guard, and when his head snapped around toward me, he nearly dropped his pipe wrench. “TJ, you startled the hell out of me,” he said, regripping the wrench.
“Sorry.”
He quickly went back to assembling the pump handle, picking up a four-inch bolt and rolling it back and forth in the palm of one hand before inserting it into the pump handle’s throat support. Shaking his head, he said, “You know, your mom might be right. I’m thinkin’ we probably would be better off with a new well.” He eyed the reassembled
pump handle, then looked up at me for affirmation.
“Could be, but wells cost money, so if this old dog of ours can still hunt, I say we keep using it.”
Dad smiled, surprised by my use of one of his favorite sayings.
“That’s always been my take,” he said, tightening down the bolt.
I eyed the backs of his badly sunburned hands and his gnarled, twice-broken middle fingers, and found myself wondering if during his time in Korea he’d ever had to use his hands to kill someone, when suddenly he asked, “So what’s so important that it brings you out here for a bout of sneezin’?”
“Something I saw today while I was out riding fence,” I said, getting straight to the point. “A trespasser on horseback. He was riding a big black mare, dressed head to toe in gray, and believe it or not, he was sporting one of those Johnny Reb caps. He was on Willard Johnson’s place before he rode down onto ours. Watched him for a good half hour before he took off.”
“Where’d you see him?”
“Down by the natural gas seep where Ricky Peterson got burned.”
My dad’s half nod let me know he was only slightly surprised by my revelation. “What was he doing?”
“Checking things out. Taking in the lay of the land, for the most part. He didn’t see me, I’m certain of that.”
Dad stroked his chin. “And you don’t think he was one of Willard’s hired men?”
“No way.”
Dad eyed me quizzically. “So what’s your take?”
“I think he was from Acota. My guess is he works for Koffman.”
“Good instincts, TJ.”
“So what do we do?”
“Nothin’ right now except tell Willard.”
“That’s gonna get him real hot and bothered,” I said, concerned about Willard’s hair-trigger temper.
“No doubt, but he needs to know what you saw just the same.”
My dad’s response sounded calculated, as if he’d thought the Acota problem through, sized up the risk to us and the valley as a whole, and pegged exactly how to tackle it. He leaned over and began gathering his tools and pump parts into a semicircle. When he had them neatly arranged in front of him, he said, “I learned somethin’ I didn’t know that might help the coalition legally when I was in Billings today meetin’ with Ricky Peterson.” He seemed in no rush whatsoever to share that information. “And by the way, Ricky said to tell you hello and that in spite of being tied to that big leather lawyer’s chair of his most days, he can still out-fly-fish you.”
I forced back a truncated sneeze. “No way,” I said, but I wasn’t really certain. Ricky had been right-handed before the fire at the seep. He’d had to relearn to fly-fish as a lefty. In fact, he’d had to relearn how to do pretty much everything. Jimmy’s death soon after the fire had left him in a lingering funk until I’d been born, a latter-day replacement for his best friend. He was in his last year of college when he taught me to fly-fish. The sport became a steady source of our attachment and a reason for friendly competition until his law practice intervened.
I glanced around the dimly lit barn and found myself thinking about serendipity and coincidence and all the strange ghostly things that go bump in the night. Spoon’s earlier admonition that there was a connection between the seep and my dad’s trip to Billings threaded its way through my head. I couldn’t fathom how Spoon could possibly have known about Ricky’s accident at the gas seep. Looking puzzled, I asked, “Did you mention to Spoon that you were going into Billings to talk to Ricky?”
