Buffalo Summer

by Nadia Nichols

  The winter that followed had been long and dark, and Caleb had spent countless hours in this cabin on the edge of the Beartooth Wilderness reexamining his life. He had no regrets about being in this place. In spite of the loneliness that at times overwhelmed him, he never tired of this land and its many moods, the vast and palpable silence that dwarfed the imagination, the thundering wind that blew tirelessly, the crashing roar or the gentle murmur of the creek. He loved this old cabin, hewn of big-mountain cedar over a hundred years earlier. Caleb had never felt so much at home as he did here. In time, he supposed, he’d learn to live with the loneliness. He’d made some good friends. He counted Guthrie Sloane, his twenty-nine-year-old ranch manager and Jessie Weaver’s fiancé, as one, and of course Jessie herself. Steven Young Bear, café owner Bernie Portis, the old ranch hands Badger and Charlie…all good friends. A man could do much worse.

  Caleb’s lifelong dream of owning a ranch in the Rocky Mountain West had come true, but unfortunately the ranch hadn’t come with an operations manual, and his attempts to persuade Jessie Weaver to remain as manager were thwarted when she returned to veterinary school to finish her degree. It was Caleb’s great good luck that Guthrie Sloane, who had worked for the ranch and had loved Jessie Weaver since he was thirteen years old, had taken the job and was patiently teaching Caleb the ropes.

  Jessie and Guthrie’s long-awaited wedding would take place this coming September, and for months already it had been the topic of conversation in Katy Junction. Caleb could certainly understand all the buzz. It was reassuring to know that true love still existed.

  He rolled out of bed and walked barefoot into the kitchen, which was nothing more than a little nook off the living room. The cabin boasted three rooms: bedroom, bathroom and kitchen/living room. There was a sleeping loft above and a root cellar below. Though the place was simple and spartan, Caleb was very comfortable in these quarters and preferred living here than in the main ranch house. He put on a pot of coffee, threw a few sticks of firewood into the woodstove and opened the door to the porch. It was a few moments before sunrise, yet already he could feel the burgeoning energy of the season. The sounds and smells of springtime warmed his blood and charged his spirit.

  There was so much to do, and it was a solid, satisfying feeling to fill the days with activities that meant something. Just splitting firewood was a joy to him. He devoted an hour a day to the task, keeping his woodpile tidy and arranging the split wood by size so that he could easily grab what he needed when he needed it.

  But tending to his firewood was nothing compared to the daunting task of ripping down the cross fences that partitioned the land into separate pastures. The plan was to leave the pole corrals around the barns, the penning corrals and the boundary fences that would need to be strengthened to contain the small herd of buffalo that Pete Two Shirts had talked Caleb into buying last fall. All the rest of the barbed wire would be removed. The men would coil the wire as they took it down and reuse the newest of it to bolster boundary fences. Then they’d pull out the metal posts and cut the wooden fence posts off at ground level, so as to leave no holes for the animals to step in. It sounded simple, but there were over sixty miles of barbed-wire fence to deal with.

  The sharp fragrant smell of coffee tantalized him, and he returned to the snug warmth of the cabin, closing the door on the cool mid-May morning. He poured himself a cup and carried it with him to the chair beside the window. He opened his notebook and stared at the scrawl of figures on the page. Took a sip from his cup and felt himself frown as he studied his jottings. Lord, what a huge job he’d undertaken when he’d accepted Pete Two Shirts’s suggestion that they bring the buffalo back to their home range.

  Pete had assured him that the venture would be both environmentally beneficial and financially sound. But now that Pete had returned to his full-time job on the reservation managing the Crow buffalo herd, the project had suddenly become unwieldy. Huge. Almost terrifying. After all, Caleb was just a city boy—born and bred in the Chicago slums. What the hell did he know about two-thousand-pound animals that stood six feet high at the shoulder?

  Caleb lifted his mug of coffee for another appreciative sip. Maybe Guthrie would scare up someone who would be interested in teaching them how to manage the herd. After readily admitting his own ignorance in buffalo husbandry, Caleb’s ranch manager had put the word out, but so far there had been no applicants. Not a single one. Guthrie had cautioned him against impatience, but Caleb was beginning to wonder if this buffalo venture might not have been too ambitious for a greenhorn wanna-be rancher.

  Yet, as intimidating as the buffalo were, they had to remain. Somehow he had to make this plan work. There was bound to be some big, burly, ham-fisted, tobacco-chewing, burly buffalo-loving expert out there looking for a job in one of the prettiest spots in all of Montana.

  Bound to be…

  Caleb pushed out of his chair with a sigh and carried both the notebook and his cup of coffee as he left the warmth of his cabin and headed up to the main house.

  His cook and housekeeper, Ramalda, didn’t like it when he was late for breakfast.

  PONY CAUGHT her breath and hit the brake as the truck crested a rise. For a moment all she could do was stare as the sun’s first rays spilled over the rim of rugged mountains and laid their golden fingers across the valley floor. She’d learned about the history of the Bow and Arrow from Steven. The ranch had been around since the mid-1800s and was one of the longest surviving in Montana, an enduring testament to a Texan by the name of Weaver who had come here with a solid dream, a dream that had been good for the Crow. Weaver had been generous and had fed them in hard winters when the buffalo were gone. During the winter of starvation he had saved an entire village with his gift of cattle, and in return was given a young woman from that village to be his wife.

  So the Bow and Arrow had been founded by a white man from Texas who had taken a full-blooded Crow as his wife, and his son from this union had married a Blackfoot, the sworn enemy of the Crow. And so Jessie Weaver, who had sold the ranch to Caleb McCutcheon, was of three worlds. Crow, Blackfoot and white. Pony had never met her but had wondered at such a legacy, for to carry the blood of three such disparate worlds could surely only create confusion. Yet Pony had heard only good things of this strong young woman.

  Steven had told her how Jessie Weaver had lost the ranch to falling cattle prices and her father’s skyrocketing medical bills as cancer had slowly robbed him of life. How she had quit veterinary school in her third year to take care of her ailing father. And how, after her father’s death, Jessie could have sold the ranch to developers and made a tidy profit even after the debts had been paid, but instead chose to write conservation restrictions into the deed and sell the ranch to Caleb McCutcheon at a huge loss in land value. She’d sacrificed a great deal—including her long-term relationship with Guthrie Sloane—to protect the place she loved, and Pony could understand and sympathize. In the end, Guthrie Sloane had, too; he and Jessie Weaver had reunited and were getting married in the fall.

  Sitting here in her rusty old truck, looking down the valley at this historic place, Pony felt a sense of wonder. To live surrounded by such beauty would surely give grace to the spirit. The Crow had first cast their shadows in this valley long ago, in the good years when the sun still shone upon them, in the years before the buffalo were gone. Her great-great-grandfather might have set his horse in this very spot and looked upon this same valley and felt the same way she did now.

  She put the truck in gear and drove slowly, not wanting to miss anything. She parked briefly at the place where the road first paralleled the creek and stood on the banks, listening to the rush of cold mountain water—happy music rippling over the smooth rocks lining the shallows. The air was cool and sharp with the tang of the tall evergreens that grew here. When she climbed back into the truck she felt relaxed. The tension that had been building in her at the prospect of speaking to Caleb McCutcheon had mysteriously vanished, and as she drove
past the old cabin and headed toward the main ranch buildings, a curious calm settled over her.

  Maybe she would get the job. Maybe she wouldn’t. Whatever the outcome, she had made the journey, followed the path. She parked beside two other trucks, both Fords, both much newer than hers and she drew a steadying breath before climbing the porch steps of the weather-beaten ranch house. Hopefully Caleb McCutcheon himself would be available to speak with her. Pony knocked on the door.

  Which was opened almost immediately by a very fat old Mexican woman wearing a large and shapeless housedress and apron. A red bandanna covered most of her white hair.

  “Yes?” Her voice was gruff and her black eyes were not the least bit friendly.

  “I’ve come to speak with Mr. McCutcheon about the buffalo,” Pony said.

  The woman abruptly closed the door in her face. Pony waited, patient in the way she had learned to be. She looked down toward the pole barn and corrals. Horses grazed on piles of hay while curlews hopped amongst them on the ground, looking for something to eat. Below the barn, near the bend in the creek, she could see the roofline of the old cabin. Smoke curled lazily from the massive fieldstone chimney. Steven had told her that McCutcheon preferred to live in the original homestead but took his meals at the ranch house with the rest of them. She thought it was odd that he wouldn’t choose to live in the big house.

  The door opened, and Pony swung around. A man stood in the doorway, one hand on the doorknob, the other holding a notebook, eyebrows raised in a mute question. He was tall, lean and athletically built, with sandy-colored close-cropped hair, a neatly trimmed mustache and clear eyes the color of prairie flax with deep crow’s-feet etching the corners. His face was wind-burned, rugged and purely masculine. He was unexpectedly handsome, and she felt her heartbeat skip as she looked up at him and tried to remember why she was standing on his porch.

  “You’ll have to excuse Ramalda’s behavior,” he said, studying her with those keen blue eyes. “She doesn’t trust strangers, even small female ones.”

  “Mr. McCutcheon,” she said, her voice sounding tense because all of a sudden it mattered very much that she get this job. “I am sorry to bother you, but I had heard that you were looking for someone to help manage your buffalo.”

  “My buffalo?” If anything, her words seemed to confound him more than her presence on his porch.

  “Yes. Pete Two Shirts told me this. I worked for Pete on the reservation with the tribal herd.”

  His expression cleared somewhat at the mention of Pete’s name and he nodded. “Pete helped get me started with the buffalo,” he explained, “but when he returned to the reservation…” He paused for an awkward moment. “Well, to be honest, I guess I wasn’t expecting a woman. I mean, it’s just that…” He took stock of her again, his eyes narrowing in a critical squint. “Please,” he said, stepping aside and gesturing with the sheaf of papers. “Come inside.”

  Pony felt a flash of anger and shook her head. “If it’s a man you’re looking for, Mr. McCutcheon, I will not waste your time or mine.”

  She was surprised to see the color of McCutcheon’s face deepen. “I meant no offense,” he said.

  “It’s all right. I understand completely,” she said. “Of course you would prefer a man to manage your buffalo herd. A man is so much stronger than a woman, and strength is very important when dealing with the buffalo, especially when you wrestle them to the ground to brand them.”

  His forehead creased skeptically. “Brand them?”

  “And a man rides a horse so much better than a woman,” Pony continued, “because a man is so much stronger, and a horse truly appreciates brute strength.”

  “Now look…”

  “Mr. McCutcheon, if you talked to Pete Two Shirts, he would tell you that I know my stuff. And I would tell you this. I have five strong boys who would do your bidding for the summer. They would cost you nothing more than room and board. I was told you have a lot of work. If you have buffalo, you will need good boundary fences. Six strands of wire at least six feet high. Panels seven feet high would be even better, with wooden corner posts sunk into four feet of concrete. Putting up sturdy boundaries takes a lot of time and work, but without them, your herd might run clear to Saskatchewan.”

  “Look, why don’t you—”

  “And you’re right about the branding, Mr. McCutcheon. You don’t brand buffalo. But you do need a good set of corrals with an eight-foot-high fence and an indestructible chute of welded pipe, because even though they don’t get branded, they do need to be tested for brucellosis, tuberculosis and pregnancy. They need to be wormed and vaccinated. I know how to design such a set of corrals and a good chute. I know how big and how strong the buffalo are, Mr. McCutcheon, and how wild.”

  McCutcheon eyed her appraisingly. He ran the fingers of his free hand through his hair. “Please, come in and have a cup of coffee. We can talk—”

  “I don’t drink coffee,” she said. “Why don’t you call Pete and ask him about me?”

  He nodded. “Okay.” He hesitated. “Won’t you at least come inside while I call?”

  “I’ll wait out here, thank you,” she said, not wanting to run into the unfriendly old Mexican woman.

  He nodded again, clearly perplexed. “Who should I tell Pete I’m checking on?”

  “Steven Young Bear’s sister,” Pony said.

  McCutcheon’s blue gaze intensified. “That’s why you look so familiar. I’ll be damned! Why didn’t Steven tell me you were coming?”

  “I asked him not to. I’ll wait here while you call Pete.”

  McCutcheon shook his head with a faint grin. “I don’t need to call anybody. If you’re Steven’s sister, that’s good enough for me.”

  Pony’s heart leaped. “Does that mean you will consider me for the job?”

  “That means you’re hired, you and your five boys. There’s plenty of room for all of you here in the main house. When can you start?”

  “In three weeks.”

  “That long?” His face fell.

  “I’m a teacher and school lets out in three weeks.” Pony held her breath, her heart hammering. Please, oh please…

  McCutcheon nodded reluctantly. “All right. We’ve survived this long. I guess we can wait until mid-June. The job pays three-fifty a week, plus room and board.”

  She could hardly have hoped for as much, and struggled to maintain a neutral expression. “I can only work the summer.”

  “I’m hoping you can teach me and my ranch manager all we need to know in that time.”

  “I am sure that I can.”

  “Good. Then I guess I’ll see you in three weeks.” He put out his hand and took hers in a warm, firm handshake; a single up-and-down motion that made her fingers tingle curiously. She turned to descend the porch steps and was almost at her truck when his voice stopped her. “Ah…miss?” She turned and glanced up at him questioningly. “What’s your name?”

  “Oo-je-en-a-he-ha,” she said. She stood for a few moments, watching him mentally grapple with the impossibility of it, and then, with a barely suppressed smile, she said, “But you can call me Pony, if you’d rather.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “SHE HAS FIVE BOYS,” McCutcheon said, pulling the mug of coffee that Bernie Portis had just topped off closer to him and studying the whorls of steam rising from the strong black brew. It was midmorning of the following day and the Longhorn Cafe, the only eating establishment in Katy Junction, was enjoying a brief lull between breakfast and lunch.

  “Five?” Bernie paused, coffeepot in hand. Her friendly face split into a smile. “She’s been a busy gal. How old is she?”

  “Not old enough. At least, she didn’t look like the mother of five kids.” Too young and too beautiful, he thought.

  “How old?”

  McCutcheon lifted his shoulders. “Hard to say. Late twenties. Early thirties, maybe.”

  “Okay, so she started young. Say, eighteen years old. First baby. Second baby at twenty. Third
at twenty-two. But how much work are you expecting to get out of a bunch of little kids? And who’s going to wipe their noses and change their diapers while their mother is out herding buffalo? Ramalda?” Bernie gave him a teasing smile before making a run through the tiny restaurant, refilling customers’ coffee cups and pausing to chat briefly here and there. She was Guthrie Sloane’s big sister, and a sweeter, more generous soul did not exist west of the Rockies nor east of them, either.

  McCutcheon took a sip of his coffee and frowned. He hadn’t thought to ask Pony how old her children were. He had a sudden vision of a three-year-old boy in the saddle, reins in his teeth, horse running flat out, twirling a lariat better than a washed-up baseball player by the name of Caleb McCutcheon could. It wasn’t Caleb’s fault that Badger and Charlie hadn’t taught him how to throw a rope yet. They kept promising, and then one day slid into the next, one week followed another, and he was no closer to being a cowboy than he’d been the day he’d bought the ranch.

  Ramalda had already threatened to quit. “Indians!” she had muttered when he told her, as if the word itself were a bitter poison in her mouth. Her venom had surprised Caleb, but not Badger, who’d been sharing the table the way he and Charlie almost always did nowadays, at suppertime. Or any other time for that matter. The two old cowboys had sort of come with the ranch. “Now, Ramalda,” Badger said, smoothing his white mustache. “When I first laid eyes on you, I thought to myself, that there’s an Apache woman, sure as shootin’. How do you know you ain’t part Injun yourself? And what gave you such a sour take on things, anyhow? I thought you liked little ’uns.”

  Ramalda had turned her broad back to them with a string of heated Spanish that neither he nor Badger could make heads or tails of, banging pots and pans about and letting her feelings be known in no uncertain terms. “Six Indians here?” she exploded, brandishing a frying pan in one fat fist. “I queeet!”