Cowgirl Thrillers

by Barbara Neville

We hadn’t found much new other than the bullet when we picked up Headless’ corpse. That slick rock still had us stymied. So the next day Wolf and I each take one side of the rim rock above the canyon to see what we can find. Spud goes down the bottom again, working on foot and slow, so as not to miss any sign.

  I take the south rim and Lone Wolf the north. I find horse sign up top. The two shooters on that side had tied their mounts to a tall pine tree, then skittered down a steep arroyo into the canyon.

  Lone reports in a long while later covered with blood from various cuts and the spill; he looks like an honest to gods savage. He drops a dead body which he had slung across his lap.

  He says “The north side shooters, I never found sign of how they got in. Left their mounts on the rim too. But too much rock there too, no way to backtrack them.

  “The feller I fought with took to the creek, must have gone on down a mile or more, he still hadn’t come out ‘less I missed the sign under a bush.

  “So I circle back and find just that, a bush on a rock, but about ten feet out of the stream the brush ends and the bare rock is wet, then it’s just a matter of fast trackin’. Caught him takin’ a leak. I made sure it was his last leak.”

  “You okay, buddy?” I ask.

  “Injin too tough not to be.”

  “I see why they call you Wolf.”

  We once again meet up with Sir Jake and Spud at Sir Jacob’s hilltop barbeque pit, where he is cookin’ up some fine grass fed beef. After a drink to warm us up, Michael shows up and we get down to sharing info.

  We relate our experience, then Michael reports, “I found a few cows in the brush and on the way through the canyon they pulled the usual mass escape in that big thicket, which we oughta chop down in fact. Anyhoo, when I got in there, Buddy decided he was a might thirsty so I got off to quench my thirst too.”

  “Exciting report so far,” I intone.

  “Not to worry, here comes the punch line,” says Sir Jacob.

  “In fact you are right, here it comes, how did you know Sir Jacob?”

  “Educated guess.”

  “Don’t steal my thunder, handsome. I lean down to take a drink and notice a mighty bright shine there in the water. Low and behold, I pick up the shiner and it is a gold nugget or chispa as my people say. And I am staking my claim as I speak.” He passes the nugget to me.

  “Actually Michael, you may have that one, since it is only fist sized,” says Sir Jacob.

  “Only?” I heft it. “Must weigh two pounds easy, worth a barrelful a cash. It is yore country, fellas, and since Jacob already seems to know about it, are you willing to let us in on the secret?”

  “Ah, well, you see that is how I bankrolled my operation hereabouts. There is gold in the creek, I found it when we were building this wilderness. I placer mined. It started out just like the first fellers to find the American River in Californy. Those gentlemen were riding along the river, looked down and saw gold nuggets on a river bar. They had no gold pans, so they went to the Digger Injins and traded for baskets. They panned that gold with woven Digger baskets and made an intolerable amount in just a few days. Big gold nuggets right there next to the river, and likely more under the water. Ah, the Californy Gold Rush of 1849.

  “I thought that we had cleaned out all the surface gold, guess that storm the other day turned the rocks over and flushed another chunk out. Mayhaps the shooters found something of the kind. Gold does make a greedy person murderous. Just about any person gets greedy at the sight of it laying about free for the taking.”

  “Yep,” says Spud, “that’s why me, Jakey and Wolf are at each other’s throats. Don’t never turn yore back.”

  “Sheeit, we are willing to share, even with white folks,” Wolf says as he smiles at Michael and me. “We been through the wars with you two. I think there may be enough to go around.”

  “It ain’t rich no more. We done cleaned up the easy stuff years back. Now it’s more like work and with the wilderness rules we can only use hand tools. Lotta work. That first bunch of nuggets grubstaked us all up. But that windfall seems to be over,” adds Spud. “We are happy to ranch for a living now. Them cattle get in yore blood as you know, better to own them than just chouse ‘em around. I was just a cowhand like you two before the gold strike. Spending my paycheck to party. Livin’ from one to the next.

  “Plus with you two on board, that makes five of us to keep these bad guys off our land. If they found the gold? Even worse, if they talked to anyone else about it? We could be in deep shit.”

  “‘The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present’- Abraham Lincoln,” Sir Jacob reminds us.

  “Speaking of wilderness, you said some about building this wilderness. How do you build a wilderness, Sir Jacob?” I ask. “I thought they were born, not made.”

  “In fact this place was a lot less than wilderness in some areas. We came in with a huge crew, we blasted and bulldozed a veritable shitload of ruins, big ones. Picked up, cleaned out, then let nature take its course and make it wild again. The flora and fauna will out, we just speeded the process up for esthetic considerations. We reaped fantastic paychecks for remote and hazardous duty.

  “That is how I ended up living here, I found the cave, stuck my backhoe into the big room. Once it was out of sight I got provisions in by freight wagon and took up housekeeping. They never noticed that I didn’t clear out with the rest of the cleanup crew. They likely figured I was another MIA, I would imagine. Took a little planning, and well worth it.”

  “So yore dead?”

  “On a list somewhere, I suppose.”

  “And the gold?’

  “Found it later, myself and Spud, out hunting. Nice timing too, as we had been speaking of the unspeakable choice of leaving paradise to go to work or remain and live on roots and grubs,” adds Sir Jacob.

  “Yep, it was a question of if we could actually make it living off the land or have to go off planet and work for the Centrists. They have all the money ever’where these days, it seems,” Spud says.

  “With finding this gold grubstake it became a rich land and living off it was easy,” says Sir Jacob.

  “‘Course, no tellin’ if or when it’ll run out. No guarantees. We have certainly scooped the cream. Lot of hard work, not much gold last we tried,” Spud added.

  “But Michael’s nugget?”

  “Could be an anomaly,” says Sir Jacob, “could be the next big strike, also. Unfortunately, the odds are on anomaly.”

  “Given this discovery we maybe better leave open as a possibility the conclusion that they were together, found the gold and started argyin’. And shootin’ naturally follered that. Them fellers bein’ of a lesser moral stature than us truly, not that we are interested in sharing outside the inner circle ourselves. Let the world remain dumb,” says Spud. “So, we have the Sacred Injin Cave Ceremony, and now Gold Fever as our possible motives. Things are not panning down to one conclusion quite as easily as we had hoped.

  “And, almost forgot, beefleggers,” adds Spud.

  “Beefleggers are just cattle rustlers, right?” I ask.

  “True, beefleggin’ is often done by rustlers, they kinda own the name. They steal cows and sell them to the veggers. We, on the other hand, raise cattle. Ain’t thieves. Beef’s worth money, more steady, fingers crossed, than prospectin’. Keeps bread on our tables.”

  “But if everyone hereabouts is a vegger, who do you sell the cattle to?” I ask. “Ain’t it illegal to sell to veggers?”

  “At first we only had enough cows to feed the local town here, MadDog.

  “But as our herds grow we need new customers so we have expanded to some small outlaw colonies around the galaxy and, hell girl, we are beefleggers of a sort, too. We just raise cattle for the beef and then sell to the veggers, we’re not rustlers. We are the good guys. The Federals just don’t happen to agree that selling beef to veggers is legal. Meat is contraband.”

  “However,” adds Sir Jacob, “any crime agai
nst the federals is an act of revolution for our side. Extremism in defense of free choice is not wrong. ‘Tis not ‘til the war is over that history is written, thence the winner becomes the good guy and the loser the bad. Of course, only the winners agree with the history books, the losers remember the other side of the story.

  “Center claims people was always naturally vegger, but in the Hollywood stories they talk of sirloin steak, not soy steak. I think it’s a government line of bullshit myself. If they didn’t eat beef back then, why did they raise it? If they didn’t raise it why are there so many stories of ranchers and cowboys?”

  “And barbeques?” I add.

  “Now our herds are expanding, we gotta ship further. Shame to pass a planet without selling some cows, far apart as planets are. There is a market for meat even on the most dedicated vegger colonies. Some folks just like it,” Spud tells me.

  “Centrists were just about all veggers for a while. They kinda forget about meat ‘til they get a smell of bacon, then we get the converts. Many can overcome the desire because of their devotion to the vegger movement, much like a religion. However, others backslide. And we got their drug. Since it is illegal, they pay a premium price; in exchange we suffer the risk of gettin’ caught.”

  “But a matter of tripping lightly past the Centrist Bobbies,” reminds Sir Jacob. “They are mighty precocious Bobbies and armed, unlike their British predecessors. They joined up with the Aussies and armed themselves to the teeth.”

  “They got much the same armament that we do, only newer, more advanced, and have bottomless ammo budgets. As usual,” says Spud, “they ain’t the underdog. We is.”

  15 Snuck