Showdown at Buffalo Jump

by Gary D. Svee

  The man hesitated, looking off toward the creek where the other men were wading in the cold, muddy water, and then he spoke. “There’s some who say he is to blame. He never was one to pay much attention to the boy.”

  Catherine was thinking about the towhead at the barn raising, trying so hard to be part of the children’s play without knowing how. So Joey had played with death, and now death had called him, and the little boy had followed the only real companion he had ever had.

  “Maybe the water just carried him downstream?”

  “We’ve been half a mile down, ma’am, watching both sides real careful. Not a sign of him. If he’s downstream, he’s probably halfway to North Dakota by now.”

  “I’m going downstream,” Catherine said.

  “Think I’ll go along,” Max said, and the two edged over to the creek bank.

  The men were wading the creek to find Joey’s body. The only hope of finding Joey alive was downstream.

  Catherine didn’t know if she expected to find the boy or just needed to flee from his dead-eyed father, terrified at the thought that she might have to watch Klaus’s face as the men placed Joey’s body in his arms.

  “They’re shunning him, aren’t they?” she asked as they rode away.

  “Maybe,” Max said. “Maybe he’s shunning himself.”

  The creek raged still, chocolate brown from chunks of soil torn from above. Most of the animals caught in the creek bottom were already dead, washed against some outcropping of plant or rock. But here or there a ground squirrel or a prairie dog shivered atop some high point, waiting to be dried by the sun and for the creek to go down.

  At one point, they came upon a bobcat so intent with the harvest of dead and near-dead animals along the creek that he didn’t notice Max and Catherine until they were directly behind him. He hissed and leaped into the flood, swimming expertly for the other side.

  They had long passed the half-mile mark where the other searchers had scuffed the earth with their heels before turning back, when Max pulled the stud to a halt. “Not much sense going beyond here. We aren’t going to find him downstream. Probably won’t find him at all until the water goes down. Best I can do now is go back with the other men wading the creek. Doesn’t take long in that water to shake the warm out.”

  “No!” Catherine said, her head canted and shaking. She looked at Max from the corner of her eye. “No! You go back if you want to. I’m going to find Joey.”

  Max reached out to touch Catherine’s shoulder, but pulled back. His voice was low and restrained: “It’s tough, but there’s nothing we can do about it. If you want to look, look, but stay back from the edge, and if you see him … in the water, let him go. Pulling him out isn’t worth dying for.”

  Catherine’s face was white, and she wouldn’t look at Max, her eyes fixed on Lady’s ears. She tried to speak, but her mouth moved soundlessly, and finally she turned Lady downstream and began her search.

  Max was walking the stud back to the Toomey place, torn between the need to pitch in—to give his mind and body a task to occupy them—and his need to watch over Catherine. He stopped and turned just in time to see Catherine and Lady disappear over the edge of the bank toward the flood.

  He wheeled the stud and kicked the horse into a gallop. They sped toward the edge, mud flying in chunks big as tea saucers.

  Max was a cautious man. But he wasn’t thinking about caution now: He was thinking about Catherine, and as he neared the creek bank, he touched his heels to the horse’s sides and the stud jumped. The two sailed over the edge, neither knowing what awaited them below.

  Catherine had been walking the horse along the bank, her eyes seeking some shape, some color that didn’t fit the edges and surface of the flood. She had stopped for a moment, tears blurring her vision, when she caught movement from the corner of her eye. She blinked until her eyes cleared. There was a raft of driftwood across the creek. And on the outside edge flickered a patch of white almost as pale as the bleached wood, but different somehow. And as Catherine watched, another patch of white swirled out of the water, and on the end of it was a sleeve!

  Catherine reined Lady toward the creek, and the two slid down the bank, the mare scrambling to find footing. They plunged into the flood, and Catherine gasped with the shock of the cold water.

  The mare was swimming across and down, and Catherine turned the animal’s nose more into the current, trying to make up the distance they were losing to the flood.

  They touched the bank on the other side below the driftwood and tried to climb up, but the bank was too steep and slick. Lady fought the bank and the water and her fear, and Catherine took those few desperate moments to kick her foot out of the stirrup on the down-stream side. She jerked her leg over the horse and jumped one-legged for the bank.

  She landed chest first, and the impact knocked the wind from her. She was sucking air, but her lungs came up empty, and she thought she would suffocate. And as she gasped for breath, the current pushed her legs toward the mare’s flailing hooves. Her wind caught about the same time her hand brushed through a patch of silver sage. She held on, her breath coming in sobs.

  Catherine pulled herself to her hands and knees and then stood, balancing precariously at the edge of the creek. Lady was scrambling wild-eyed to climb the bank, but Catherine knew the horse would die in the trying. She slipped off Lady’s bridle.

  “Git! Git!”

  Lady swung into the current and was gone. The banks were steep on both sides, and Catherine knew there was little chance the horse would find sanctuary before her strength gave out. Just as that reality was drumming into her mind, Max and the stud appeared in midair. They struck the creek, WHOOSH! Then the horse disappeared, leaving only Max’s head and shoulders visible before he vanished in a sheet of spray.

  When Catherine had blinked her eyes clear, Max was almost across the creek, the impetus of the jump giving the stud a better start than the mare. Above the drift pile, there was a rock ledge that poked hidden into the creek, and the stud clambered on top and stood knee deep in the water.

  Max climbed down slowly. He stood, talking softly until the stud’s eyes stopped rolling. Then Max stepped quietly away. As he approached Catherine, his eyes were as wild as the horse’s had been. “What the hell happened?”

  “He’s in the driftwood, there.”

  Max’s eyes searched the area where Catherine was pointing and came up empty. Then he saw the upper half of the boy’s face thrust up and back out of the water. Max had dreaded the prospect of finding the child’s body. He hated the thought of pulling Joey’s corpse from the water, carrying it back to Klaus, who was standing in a pool of guilt amidst his neighbors’ accusing eyes. Max hesitated a moment before stepping out on the driftwood.

  “Hurry!” Catherine cried.

  “No need. Won’t make any difference to him.”

  “He’s alive. I saw him raise his arm out of the water.”

  “Just the current. Makes him seem like he’s moving, but it’s just the current.”

  But as Max watched, Joey’s arm rose slowly from the water until it was extended nearly full length. It waved weakly for a moment, and then fell back with a splash.

  “I’ll be damned,” Max muttered as he edged out to the head of the driftwood. He reached under the water and grabbed Joey by the shoulders.

  Joey struggled weakly, but the boy was exhausted. The effort of holding his nose above water against the weight and cold of the flood had drained him of all the reserves stored in his little body. He was near death, but still he struggled.

  Max looked up. “I’ll need some help. Have to reach under to find what he’s caught on. You hold his head up in case something slips.”

  As Catherine crept toward the two, balancing on bits of driftwood thrust up from the pile, Max cautioned, “Easy. This is like standing on a bag of marbles, and if it slips we’re all gone.”

  But the warning wasn’t needed. A moment before, Catherine had stepped on a loose lo
g and slipped into water waist deep before finding solid footing. She was moving slowly and tentatively now.

  When Max felt her hands over his, he reached down, seeking the snag that held the boy tight. Joey’s left cuff was twisted into a broken branch, and Max tugged until the sleeve split, and Joey’s face bobbed free from the water. Still the driftwood held Joey in a grip tight as death.

  “Something deeper,” Max said, ducking under the water.

  Above water, the flood roared as though outraged at the limits imposed on it by rocks and banks and a little boy’s body. But below, the stream chattered at Max with the clicks and rattles of stones racing each other downstream. The flood seemed to be calling him to add his bones to the race, hungry for another life to spit up on the bank, and a chill ran through his body.

  Joey’s foot was pinched between two logs, and Max came out of the water gasping for breath.

  “He’s pinned. When I try to break him loose, the whole shebang could go and us with it.”

  Max scrambled up the drift toward the stud. When he returned a moment later, he handed Catherine one end of a rope. “Tie it around your waist. No slack or it might get tangled. If the driftwood lets go, hang on to Joey. The current should swing you into the bank.”

  Max didn’t tell Catherine that if the logs shifted the wrong way, Joey’s foot could be crushed or pinched off at the ankle. But there were no options. If he wasn’t released and soon, he would die. The boy was nearly comatose from the killing cold of the water. Already, Joey had hung to a tenuous thread of life longer than Max thought possible.

  He tugged a chokecherry pole thicker than his arm and taller than he was from the driftwood and ducked under again. The flood nagged at him as his hands explored Joey’s foot and the logs that imprisoned it, and finally Max was satisfied.

  “Pray for us, Catherine,” he said and hung his weight and strength and life on the end of the pole. Solid! The damn thing was solid! Those two logs were probably the foundation for the whole pile, buried under the weight of the other logs and the power of the flood.

  Max braced his feet and leaned again into the pole. The muscles of his shoulders and back and legs bulged under the pressure, and Catherine could read the strain on his face more clearly than a book. She grabbed Joey’s shirt with one hand, holding his lolling head above water with the other. Then she leaned into the pole, putting her fear and hope and strength into the effort, and slowly, inexorably, the logs in the pile began to move. Max could hear them groaning in protest, but they moved and the drift pile shifted just a bit … and Joey popped free.

  Catherine was holding Joey to her breast and sobbing, and her tears triggered Max’s own. The three of them made their way across the drift pile like that, Catherine sobbing and tears blurring Max’s vision. For the first time in his life, Max didn’t care if someone saw him cry.

  They stood for a moment on the bank, holding Joey between them, sharing the warmth of their bodies with the boy, arms encircling each other. Catherine looked up at Max, her tear-streaked face shining as though she had seen the rapture, and Max kissed her. Catherine kissed him back, and Max felt as though he could walk across the flood, carrying Catherine and Joey to safety.

  But that thought broke the mood: There was still more to be done. Joey’s lips and fingernails were blue with the cold; they had to get the boy back to the cabin or he would die. They couldn’t scramble up the rain-soaked bank above them, with the stud or without. The only hope lay downstream, and that hope was slim indeed. The creek might wind for miles between steep, slick banks. If they didn’t find a way out they would drown. But there was nothing to do but to trust fate.

  Max led Catherine to the stud, helping her into the saddle.

  “You take the boy. Give the horse his head unless he panics and heads for a bank he can’t climb. I’ll be behind you. Might be you could wait a minute to toss me the rope as I come by.”

  Catherine’s question was plain on her face.

  “Can’t swim,” Max said. He toppled a log off the driftwood and into the flood and plunged after it. The stud caught Max a few moments later, and Catherine reached for him from the saddle.

  Max waved her away. “That horse gets too close, he’ll kick me to death and spill you into the creek. This will work out. You take care of Joey. I’ll do fine.”

  They bobbed down the flood together for a few moments, a tiny flotilla of life on a thread of death snaking its way across the Montana prairie. And then the stud pulled away, swimming strongly. Catherine twisted in the saddle to watch Max, only his head showing behind the log. His eyes were focused on her as though he wanted to keep her image etched forever on his mind, and he waved good-bye as she disappeared behind the first curve in the creek.

  Catherine held Joey tight. There seemed to be only a spark of life left in the boy, and she fanned that with the warmth of her body. But she sought comfort in the embrace, too. As they moved down the creek, surrounded on both sides by high, insurmountable banks, Gentleman’s Promise was beginning to blow with the effort of swimming, and Catherine shuddered.

  But their only hope lay ahead, not behind, and on they went, the sky blue and clear above, the sun warm on their backs, and death waiting coldly below for the horse to finally tire and panic.

  Then Catherine saw the stud’s ears go forward, and he began swimming for the bank. She tried to pull the horse’s head downstream. But for the first time in his life, he fought the bridle, and Catherine panicked. If the stud reached the bank and tried to scramble up, she and Joey would die under his hooves or be thrown back to be claimed by the flood.

  So Catherine fought the stud silently, matching will to will and strength to strength, and then she heard a whinny over the roar of the creek. Perhaps one of the searchers had come looking for them. Perhaps death was not yet inevitable. So she hugged Joey even tighter and gave Gentleman’s Promise his head. She could feel the horse’s hooves churning faster as he swam toward the curve ahead and whatever lay beyond.

  Max’s body hung behind the log like a sea anchor. He felt weightless, borne by a cold, raging wind down a world defined by the high banks of Pishkin Creek and a ribbon of sky above. That wind was cold, and Max was shivering. Despite his weightlessness, his arms were tired with the strain of tying his body to the log, to life. He wanted to shift his grip, but his hands were numb, and he wasn’t sure he could will them to let go or to grasp again. He seemed to be sinking deeper, and the strain of holding his face above water made hard, stiff lines of the tendons of his neck. And finally, Max draped his arms over the log, flexing his hands to bring warm blood and strength to them, hoping the log wouldn’t roll and leave him to drown. And he fought his mind as he fought the cold. It would be so easy to let go. No one could blame him for that. But Max wouldn’t give up. Not yet.

  As they rounded the curve, Catherine could see a break in the bank marking the course of a smaller, feeder stream. There was a small meadow there half-covered by water, and at the head of the meadow stood Lady. She had been cropping grass beside the creek, but as the flood-runners appeared, the mare raised her head to nicker. The stud surged toward shore, carving a V into the water, and Catherine felt the horse’s hooves strike ground. As they neared shore, the current shifted, moving back upstream as though the flood were a child, anxious to take one more wild ride before moving on. A moment later, they were standing beside the mare, the stud’s sides heaving with exhaustion.

  It was warm in the meadow, cut off from the wind and open to the full weight of the sun. Catherine steadied Joey on the saddle and stepped down, lifting the boy from the horse. Joey was limp, and Catherine carried him, supporting his head with one hand as though he were an infant, to a rock that poked out of the bank on the northern edge of the meadow. She stripped him, and laid him on the warm rock, lifeless as a basket of wash hung out to dry.

  She was wringing the boy’s clothing when one of the horses nickered: Max had just rounded the curve. He had spotted the meadow and was trying to push the
log toward it, but the log had more substance than he, and he was swimming only weakly.

  Catherine dropped Joey’s clothes and ran to the stud. The horse shied, dancing until Catherine caught the reins. She jerked the rope free from the saddle and ran toward Max, copper water spraying silver from her feet. If she couldn’t put the rope in his hands, he would be swept downstream to die while she raced keening along the bank above, watching helplessly.

  She threw. Short! The rope snaked back to her in arm-length jerks. She twirled it over her head and let it fly again. It sailed past Max, but as it came full length, it jerked back and fell across the log. Max slipped the loop over his head and under one arm, and the rope tightened, and he was yanked off the log. Max had every nonswimmer’s fear of being in water over his head, and he kicked and slapped at the flood, fighting panic, fighting to keep his face above water.

  Catherine was pulled off her feet by Max’s weight and the power of the flood, and she was being drawn toward deep water and death. If she let go, she could save her own life and Joey’s, but she couldn’t do that. She had begun a litany of Holy Marys, and then she spotted a dead juniper sticking about six inches above the surface of the water. She pulled, kicked and swam to that pole and looped the rope around it. Max swung heavy on the end of the line, and the rope cut into his chest and neck until he thought he would be strangled. Odd, he thought, to hang yourself so you wouldn’t drown. But as he swung toward shore, his body was caught in the eddy drifting back upstream. Catherine could pull him along, then, taking in the slack with half hitches around the juniper stump, and finally he was there.

  Max’s arm came from the water, and he grabbed the juniper in the crook of his arm, embracing it as though it were life itself. They stood there, in chest-deep water, looking into each other’s eyes and gasping for breath.

  “Catherine O’Dowd,” Max said. “You’re one hell of a woman. If you weren’t married, I’d ask you to tie up with me.”