And then I walked Buck the little distance to our camp and got Shad aside to tell him privately. When I repeated Rostov’s kind of poetic line about blood and cement, Shad said in a low, fairly hard voice, “So? Tell me a thing, Levi. Do you think I owe him something back, for him sayin’ such a neat goddamned thing?”
“I don’t think he wants anything back, Shad.”
And it was just at that time that Slim and Old Keats spotted the wolves.
They’d just dismounted twenty feet or so away, where some of the others were bringing up wood for a campfire, and they were staring down at the flat plain sloping off below. “Hey!” Slim hollered over to us. “There’s two wolves way off down there!”
And then Shad did the goddamnedest thing. He did to them exactly what Rostov had done to Nick back along the trail. Without seeming to have even been looking, he said, “Three.”
And damned if he, and Rostov before, weren’t right.
We all looked down across the plain, and there was the pack leader of the wolves that had hit us some time back, that giant black bastard with the last half of his tail chewed off. He was far enough away to feel safe. But he’d evidently been circling us ever since that first disastrous attack. He’d probably picked up a rabbit or two along the way, but what he must have been really hoping for was for one of the cows or bulls, or maybe a calf, to get separated from the main herd so he could nail it and have a big supper for the whole pack.
The whole pack, what was left of it, consisted of one slightly smaller brown bitch and an about one-fourth-grown little wolf cub.
Seeing them out there on the plain, I could understand why most people had seen two wolves, and only Shad and Rostov had seen three. That little cub, lagging timidly behind, could have hidden himself with no trouble at all behind the one-half of a remaining tail that the big black still had on his husky butt.
I don’t know why he’d decided to be so bold, but he sure was, just standing there like a kind of a magnificent half-tailed nobleman among wolves, watching us wisely from a few yards beyond the range of a rifle shot.
Shad studied that tough old wolf on the plain far below for a long moment. Then he said, “You were tellin’ me, one time, that Rostov never actually saw anybody do any ropin’.”
“Yeah, he ain’t.”
“Well, hell, since he just said such a nice thing about my blood bein’ cement, let’s show ’im some Montana ropework.”
“Like what?”
“Like catchin’ that big wolf down there.”
“Jesus Christ, boss!” I said. “Don’t you never think a’ nothin’ easy t’ do?”
But he was already swinging back up onto Red. “Hey, Slim!” he called. “How’s your ropin’ arm?”
“Well, it ain’t broken.”
“Then let’s go snare ourselves that half-tailed lobo down there!”
“Shoot, that’s a good idea!” Slim quickly got back aboard Charlie. “I ain’t lassoed a wolf in a coon’s age!”
“You take the left point! Levi, when we’re ready you bust outta here!”
“Right!” I said with as much phony excitement as I could muster up. That kind of tricky, expert roping wasn’t exactly the strongest card in my deck, and I was frankly sort of concerned about the high possibility of making an ass of myself. I was a little surprised he’d told me to join in with them instead of somebody like Natcho, who could damnere ride out blindfolded and rope a jack rabbit. I guess his decision may have had something to do with me being his more or less official representative with the cossacks.
In any case, Slim to the left and Shad to the right, they spurred out at wide angles from the camp, both of them at a dead run. They both skirted the herd that was much nearer to us on the down-sloping plain, neither one of them seeming to have any interest in the wolves far beyond at all.
This way, when they got into position, there’d be three of us coming in on the wolves from three different directions, sort of like an inside-out triangle. Shad could have had five or six of us go along, but I knew he felt that only three of us would make it more of an impressive and sporting proposition. That is, if we managed to catch the wolf in the first place.
There was a five-dollar bounty on wolves back in Montana, which was nearly a week’s pay, so any wolf was just naturally always fair game for any cowboy. But sometimes instead of just shooting it, which was comparatively easy, we’d make a fairly rough sport out of it by trying to lasso it, and making bets on who’d be the first one, if any, to get a rope around its neck.
That big wolf was pretty smart. He was watching Shad and Slim as they galloped off on both sides of his flanks. But they were far away and not headed in his direction, so that it would seem to him that he was reasonably safe.
And we sure as hell had the attention of the cossacks. They were watching Shad and Slim, slightly puzzled, or possibly even thinking both men had suddenly gone crazy.
They reached their far-off points and turned their horses, so now it was my turn to act. I lunged Buck down the slope before me, straight toward the distant wolves, at the same time letting out a long, fierce yell. I’m not a great lassoer, but I’m a hell of a good yeller, and a lot of the cows I was now galloping by shied off nervously, thinking the end of the world was roaring past them.
The wolf started away in an easy, loping retreat, the bitch and pup following after him. And then for the first time that big black male began to realize he was in deep trouble.
From each of their points Shad and Slim were barreling toward him too, yelling their lungs out. All that hollering was supposed to scare and confuse a wolf, to panic him so he wouldn’t be quite as smart as usual, and it generally worked. But not with that tough, half-tailed big bastard. He stopped dead, seeing that he was kind of surrounded and sizing up the situation calmly.
He didn’t have a whole lot of time to think about it, because we were coming in like bats out of hell. Both Shad and Slim had their lariats out, and Slim was already twirling a loop in his right hand. I got my rope off the saddle and damnere dropped it as Buck leaped over a knee-high outcropping of rocks that appeared in our path.
And then the big wolf made its decision. It seemed to instinctively know that it was him we were after. And he gave some kind of a command to the bitch and the pup in whatever kind of talk wolves talk. Apropos of that wolf talk, I have been known to be wrong, but I do believe that animals do talk, even though they may have a pretty limited choice of words. Then he turned and raced in my general direction like a streak of greased lightning.
I sure as hell had to admire that damn wolf, for two reasons. First, he’d somehow unerringly picked the weakest of the three links, me, for an escape route. Second, and most important, was the fact that the bitch and the pup, following his orders, took off as fast as they could in exactly the opposite direction. That wolf, like any really good man would have done, was pulling us enemies off after him so that the other two weaker ones would have a better chance to live.
And his plan worked perfectly. Both Shad and Slim instantly veered in that slightly new direction, and with my legs I turned Buck just a little left to match the angle that it looked like the wolf was going. I had a loop going now, but Jesus the timing was going to be tough. I rode a train once that went sixty miles per hour, and that was kind of breathtaking. But estimating by that, at the rate that wolf was going and Buck was going, we’d pass each other at roughly goddamn near one thousand miles per minute.
At the very last instant, as he was streaking past me on my left, I threw that loop as hard and fast as a rock. From the swift move of my arm, he guessed that something bad was about to maybe happen. He was going too fast to change direction too much or too quickly, but in that split second he suddenly leaped nearly six feet straight up in the air.
My throw must have been terrible, because if he hadn’t leaped like that I’d have missed him by a mile. As it was, I accidentally caught his left hind leg while he was in mid-flight.
He must have we
ighed over a hundred pounds, and when his flying, lunging weight snapped violently tight on my right hand holding the other end of the rope, it felt like I’d lassoed a speeding mountain.
I hadn’t had time or even thought of taking a dolly around the saddle horn, so the whole force hit me instead of the saddle with Buck’s weight under it. Therefore, I was damnere jerked off onto the ground. I wound up with only my right knee across the saddle, clutching desperately to it with all the muscles in that leg, and for a while my head was so far down it was hitting the tall grass.
I’d have gone off altogether except that, luckily, the rope only stayed on the wolf’s leg for maybe a second. Then it slipped off as the wolf somersaulted down from its six-foot leap. He must have rolled over three or four times before he got his feet back under him again, running.
But that brief time he lost turned the tables against him. Shad and Slim sped past me as I tried to slow and turn Buck. And Shad tossed the first noose over the wolf’s neck while I was turning Buck. Caught, the big black struggled furiously for a moment, leaping against the rope. Then, finding he couldn’t jerk free, he turned and charged defiantly at Shad to do all the damage he could to both Shad and Red.
But Slim’s rope snaked out now, and this second noose snapped tight around the wolf’s neck from the other side, so that he was strung out between the two of them, unable to either attack or get away.
“Boy!” Slim muttered, dollying out a little rope so that the big, thrashing wolf wouldn’t strangle itself. “He surely is a monster.”
We could hear the cowboys, and maybe some of the cossacks, yelling and cheering from off in the distance.
I was rolling up my rope, making loops down from my thumb and around my elbow, and Shad said, “That was some hell of a throw, Levi, leg-catching him right in midair that way.”
I hung the lariat back on my saddle. “I was aimin’ for his neck.”
I guess he knew this in the first place because he just answered with one of those brief half-grins of his.
“Now we got ’im,” Slim said, “what we gonna do with ’im?”
“There’s only one courteous thing to do. We’ll give ’im to Rostov as a token of our affection.”
“Aw, c’mon, Shad,” I said.
“Yeah,” Slim agreed. “I doubt he’d take that as bein’ altogether friendly.”
Shad looked at me. “He told you once about puppies barkin’ and wolves bitin’.”
“Yeah, but—”
“C’mon.” Shad led off, Slim matching his pace so that the still-fighting wolf was dragged forcibly along between them.
As we approached the cossack camp, all of the cowboys from our camp nearby came over to get a better look at the giant wolf, and also to sort of see what was going on.
By now the sun was gone and it was only a short while until dark.
Shad and Slim came to a stop, with me just behind the wolf and a little off to one side.
Rostov stepped toward us, studying the savage-eyed but now motionless wolf.
Then he looked at Shad. “That was an interesting exhibition with your ropes. They’re very effective.”
“We brought this fella over t’ give t’ you,” Shad said quietly. Then he added, “It’s a Montana puppy.”
There was a whole lot being said there, and Rostov understood every word of it. Shad had put him in a tough, touchy spot to get out of.
Yet the way Shad had said it, he wasn’t being quite as mean as it might sound. It was more of a hard kind of a testing where the way a man responds can sometimes make a big difference in your judgment of him.
Right now it was up to Rostov to respond. But just how the hell do you respond upon being presented with a giant, killer wolf as a pet?
He looked at the big wolf and said, “I admire the way he protected the other two with him.”
“Admire!” Crab grunted from where the cowboys had gathered. “I think that’s the bastard that got my arm that night! Only one thing t’ do with that vicious sonofabitch! An’ that’s put a bullet through his head before he bites somebody else’s arm clean off, or tears their throat out!”
Rostov ignored Crab, and now did an amazing and downright terrifying thing, a thing that I’d never dream of doing in a hundred years.
He walked up to where the wolf was still strung out tight between the two lassos. He grabbed Slim’s rope with his left hand about two feet away from those savagely bared fangs and lifted the wolf up onto its hind legs by that rope on its neck. Then, as the wolf thrashed around violently, trying to get its teeth into Rostov anyplace it could, he grabbed it firmly by the neck with his right hand, so that its slashing fangs couldn’t quite get at his arm.
“Slack off your ropes,” he said.
Shad and Slim both gave him slack in their lariats, and he managed somehow to get the nooses quickly off the wolf’s neck with his left hand without losing it.
Then with his powerful right hand still around the wolf’s neck, he lifted it completely off the ground as it snapped and thrashed violently in that iron grip.
It was a damn impressive, and frightening, sight to see.
Holding the wolf up almost at eye level, its fangs flashing only a few inches from his face, he said, “I appreciate your gift, Mr. Northshield. In return I’m going to give this Montana puppy a gift he’ll appreciate too—his freedom.”
With this, he threw the heavy wolf away from him. It landed about six feet from where he stood, whirled and charged away with blinding speed.
On its way out it sped by Mushy Callahan and Mushy leaped aside so fast that he damnere fell over.
Crab, whose arm still wasn’t completely cured, might just possibly have been mad about what Rostov had done, but nobody else was.
Even Shad had a kind of a good look on his face as he watched that big black wolf race off toward the darkening horizon, that one-half of a tail of his sticking straight and level out behind him at the speed he was going.
Rostov turned toward Shad. “I think both gifts that were given were rather interesting, in their own ways.”
Shad nodded briefly, impassively. “They weren’t too bad, Rostov.”
And then, with most everyone somehow feeling sort of good, we rode back to our camp to start supper.
It was two days later that I saw my first Tartars.
Rostov and I were far ahead, as usual, and were approaching the top of a high bluff. I don’t know whether it was out of instinct or because of something he’d seen or heard that I hadn’t, but he pulled up before we were on the skyline.
We dismounted and went up cautiously, finally lying down at the top of the bluff. And ahead of us, maybe two miles away on the flats, were thirty or forty riders that you could just barely see in the distance. Rostov studied them through his little telescope and then, handing the scope grimly to me, he went back down the hill to signal his men behind us to stop.
Rostov hadn’t told me they were Tartars, but when I looked through his spyglass I realized that he hadn’t had to.
In that little round opening I was staring through, the horsemen were brought up pretty close. And they were a scary-looking bunch. A lot of them had long, braided hair hanging far down their backs, and they were dressed every which way, some of them with almost nothing on, and others with dirty and ragged but colorful voluminous shirts and pants, and even some old robes that looked like tucked-in nightgowns.
Most of their weapons weren’t modern, but they sure as hell looked like they were made for killing. Among them they were carrying swords, daggers, spears, bows and arrows and a few rifles and handguns. Some of them were wearing big earrings and other kinds of jewelry. And a lot of them had painted their horses. Some of them were painted in white-and-black stripes, like zebras, and others were designed with blue or red polka dots.
But what got to me most, watching them silently riding along in much the same direction we were going, was the feeling I had deep down in my bones, even from this distance, of intense, animal sava
gery about them. With that black half-tailed wolf still in the back of my mind, it occurred to me that I’d seen wolf packs that seemed friendly and civilized compared to those deadly-looking Tartars up ahead.
They finally disappeared, moving north by east.
We let them get a good, long head start on us, and we never did see those particular Tartars again.
But late the next day we came upon a dreadful thing they’d left in their wake.
It was a fair-sized cart that had been carrying supplies and probably seven or eight Russians who’d been on their way to somewhere.
You couldn’t tell whether it was seven or eight because of the way they’d left some of their bodies. I can’t remember the scene Rostov and I came upon too well because my mind just sort of blacked out. All I can remember, and I wish I couldn’t, was one little baby of about three years old. It had been nailed to a tree.
Rostov and his cossacks started to bury them, and a little while later Shad, knowing that something was wrong, came galloping up with Igor.
After a long moment Shad said in a quiet, husky voice, “I once saw what was left after a Shoshone attack. But”—it took him a minute to get his voice firmly back—“Christ, even that poor damn little kid!
Rostov looked at him and there was almost a camaraderie between them because of this tragedy that would hit any man hard.
“The Tartars go by a saying they have,” he said quietly. “‘Let there be no eye left open—to weep.’ ”
We finally left that sad place.
And three days later, from the top of a green, forest-covered mountain, we first saw Khabarovsk.
PART TWO
ARMED TRUCE AT KHABAROVSK
Diary Notes
DURING THESE parlous and often downright spooky times, the Slash-Diamond outfit discovers among other things that there are cossacks—and there are cossacks. You can’t lump them all together any more than you can lump all birds together and try to pretend that a crow and an eagle are exactly the same thing.
The Cowboy and the Cossack (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 12
