High Hunt

by Eddings, David

  They led the horse over to the pickup and put a cumbersome-looking packsaddle on him. Then they tied him to a sapling and went back to the stock-truck. They unloaded three more packhorses, one by one.

  "We could get by with just a couple," Miller explained, "but we'll need this many to bring out the deer."

  Then they began bringing out the saddle horses. Jack's horse came out first. After he'd been saddled and bridled, Miller told Jack to mount and walk him up and down the road a ways to loosen him up. I could see that Jack was getting a kick out of it. That baseball cap of his made him look like a kid.

  McKlearey's horse was next, and Lou took off at a gallop.

  "Hey!" Miller said sharply as Lou came back up the road. "I said to walk him! That horse plays out on you, and you're gonna be afoot." Lou reined in and did as he was told. I thought that was a good sign. I began to have hopes that Miller might just be able to keep McKlearey in line.

  They brought out Ned next, and my stomach tightened up. He looked meaner than ever. I particularly didn't like the way he kind of set himself when Clint threw the saddle on him. I walked up to the horse slowly. He laid his ears back and watched me. I pulled off my quilted red jacket and red felt hat. No point in messing up my hunting gear. Skin heals. Clothes don't.

  Clint held the stirrup for me while Miller held the horse's head. They hadn't done that for anybody else, and that sure didn't help my nerves any. I got up into the saddle and got my feet arranged in the stirrups.

  "You all set?" Miller asked, with the faintest hint of a smite under his mustache.

  "I guess."

  Miller nodded sharply, and both he and Clint jumped back out of the way. Now, that really makes you feel good. Ned stood perfectly still for a minute. I could feel him wound up like a spring under me.

  "Give 'im a boot in the ribs," Miller said. I nudged the horse gently with my heels. Nothing happened. I looked around for a soft place to land.

  "Kick 'im," Miller said, grinning openly now.

  I gritted my teeth and really socked the horse in the ribs. His front feet came up off the ground. If old Clint hadn't warned me, I think I'd have been dumped right then. That big gray horse pranced around on his hind feet for a minute, righting to get some slack in the reins so he could get his head down. Then he dropped down again, still fighting. I was hanging onto the reins with one hand and the saddle horn with the other. He jumped a couple times and spun around.

  "Kick 'im again, Dan!" Clint shouted, laughing. "Stay with 'im, boy!" I kicked the horse in the ribs again, and he reared just as he had the first time. This time I wasn't so surprised, so I let go of the saddle horn and swung the reins at his ears the way Clint had told me to. Then he twisted around and tried to bite my leg. I whacked him in the nose with the reins, and that seemed to settle him a little. He humped a couple more times, shivered, and took off down the road at a trot.

  "Better run that horse a little," Miller called. "Others don't need it, but Old Ned's a bit frisky."

  "Right," I said, and nudged the horse into a lope. I kicked him a little harder. "The man says run," I explained to horse.

  McKlearey scowled at me as I barreled on past him.

  The wind whistled by my ears, and I could feel the easy roll of Ned's muscles as he ran. I slowed him up and turned him about a half mile down the road. Then I opened him up to a dead run. I was laughing out loud when I pulled up by the trucks. I couldn't help it. I hadn't had so much fun in years. Ned pranced around a little, blowing and tossing his head. I think he was getting a kick out of it, too.

  "Hey, cowboy," Jack yelled, "where'd you learn to ride like that?"

  "Beginner's luck," I said. I looked over to where Miller and Clint were saddling Stan's horse. "OK to walk him now?" I asked.

  "Yeah, he looks to be settled a bit," Miller said, still grinning.

  I pulled Ned in beside Jack's horse, and the two of us rode on back down the road.

  "You looked pretty fancy there, little brother," he said.

  "I picked the wrong horse," I told him. "That little exhibition back there was all his idea."

  "How the hell'd you manage to stay on?"

  "Clint warned me about this knothead in the truck on the way up. I was ready for him. You might not have noticed, but I had a pretty firm grip on this saddlehorn."

  Jack laughed. "You two didn't slow down long enough for me to see that part of it."

  I gingerly felt my rump. "I sure hope he doesn't feel he has to go through this every time we start out."

  Jack laughed again, and we plodded down the road.

  "How's this Miller strike you?" I asked him.

  "I don't think I'd want to cross him."

  "Amen to mat, buddy," I agreed.

  "'He sure as hell acts like he knows what he's doin'," my brother said.

  "He's an old-time Marine," I said. "Him and Clint both."

  "McKlearey'll cash in on that," Jack said, unbuttoning his quilted hunting vest.

  "Wouldn't doubt it."

  "How's Clint? He seemed pretty grouchy back at the house."

  "That's mostly bark," I said. "We talked quite a bit on the way up. Like I told you, he was the one that warned me about this horse and his little habits."

  "Yeah," Jack said. "I noticed that he was callin' you by name when you guys got down from the truck."

  We turned around and rode back on up to the others. Stan and Sloane were mounted now and were starting off down the road. Sloane seemed to be puffing pretty hard. Maybe his horse had him a little spooked, or maybe his down-filled parka was a little too warm.

  Jack and I got down and helped Miller and Clint load up the packhorses. Then Miller called in the others.

  "Now here's how we'll go," he said after they had dismounted. "I'll lead out and Clint'll bring up the rear with the packhorses. Don't try nothin' fancy along the trail. Let the horse do all the work and most of the thinkin'. Just set easy and watch the scenery go by. The horses know what they're doin', so trust 'em."

  He showed us how to tie our rifles to the saddle where they'd be out of the way. His own gun case was lashed to the back of one of the packhorses, and Clint's .30-30 was tucked in beside it.

  I think we all saw the quick glance that passed between Miller and Clint when we hauled our pistol belts out of McKlearey's car.

  "Bears," Sloane explained, almost apologetically.

  "Bears!" Clint snorted. "Ain't no damn bears up that high."

  "Oh," Sloane said meekly. "We thought there might be."

  Miller scratched his mustache dubiously. "Can't leave 'em here," he said finally. "Somebody might come along and steal 'em. I guess you'll have to bring the damn things along. They might be some good for signalin' and the like." He shook his head and walked off a ways by himself, his fists jammed down into the pockets of his sheepskin coat and that big hat pulled down low over his eyes.

  We all looked at each other shamefacedly and slowly strapped on our hardware.

  "Looks like the goddamn Tijuana National Guard," Clint muttered in disgust.

  We stood around like a bunch of kids who'd been caught stealing apples until Miller came back.

  "All right," he said shortly, "get on your horses and let's get goin'."

  We climbed on our horses — Ned didn't even twitch this time — and followed Miller on up to the end of the road and onto the saddle trail that took off from there. The trail moved up along the side of a ridge. Once we got up a ways, the pines thinned out and we could see out for miles across the heavily timbered foothills. The horizon ahead of us was a ragged line of snow-covered peaks; to the east, behind us, it faded off into blue, hazy distance. The grass up here was yellow and knee-high, waving gently in the slight wind that followed us up the ridge. I could see little swirls and patterns on top of the grass as gusts brushed here and there.

  It was absolutely quiet, except for the horses and the sound of the wind. I felt good — I felt damned good.

  At the top of the ridge we stopped.


  "Better let the horses blow a bit," Miller said. "Always a good idea to let 'em settle into it easy." He seemed to have gotten his temper back.

  "Do we have quite a bit farther to go?" Sloane asked, breathing deeply. He looked pretty rough. I guessed that he was feeling the lack of sleep.

  "We're just gettin' started," Miller said. "We'll cut on up across that saddleback there and then down into the next valley. We stay to the valley a piece and then go up to the top of the other ridge. Then on into the next hollow. 'Bout another twelve miles or so."

  Sloane shook his head and took another deep breath. "I think I've got this damned belt too tight," he said. He opened the parka, undid his gun belt, looped it a couple times around the saddle horn and buckled it. He eased off on his pants belt a couple notches. "That's better," he said.

  "I told you your beer-drinkin' habit would catch up to you someday, Calvin," Jack said laughing.

  "Doe!" Miller said suddenly, pointing up the ridge at a deer that had stopped about a quarter of a mile away and was watching us nervously.

  Sloane pulled a pair of small binoculars out of his coat pocket and glassed the ridge. "Where?" he demanded.

  "See that big pine off to the left of that patch of gray rock?"

  "Back in the shade a bit," I said.

  "I don't — oh, yeah, now I see her."

  We watched the doe step delicately on over the ridge and go down into the brush on the other side.

  "There's a big game trail up there," Miller said. "I followed it down last winter during the big snow. It was the only place I could be sure of the footing."

  "On horseback?" Stan asked.

  "I was leadin' 'im," Miller said. "He'd gone lame on me up the ridge a ways. I had to hunker down under a ledge for two days till the snow eased up."

  Stan shook his head. "That would scare me into convulsions," he admitted. "Did you ever think you weren't going to make it?"

  "Oh, it give me a few nervous minutes," Miller said. A stray gust of wind ruffled that white mustache of his. He squinted up the ridge, his face more like rock than ever.

  McKlearey came up. He'd been hanging back, riding about halfway between the rest of us and Clint, who was a ways back with the packhorses. Maybe he was ashamed of himself because Miller'd had to speak to him about running the horse. He reined in a little way from the rest of us and sat waiting, watching us and rubbing at his bandaged hand.

  "It's good country up here," Miller was saying. "Ain't nobody around, and things are nice and simple. Air's clean, and a man can see a ways. Good country."

  I reached out and scratched Ned's ears. He seemed to like it. My eyes were a little sandy from lack of sleep, but Miller was right — you could see a ways up here — a long ways.

  17

  About three thirty that afternoon we crossed the second ridge and dropped down into a little basin on the far side. There were several small springs in the bottom, all feeding into a little creek that had been dammed a couple times by beavers. There were several old corrals down there — poles lashed to trees with baling wire — and a half dozen or so tent frames back under the trees. You wouldn't have expected to find a place like this up on the mountainside.

  "Old sheep camp," Miller said as we rode down into the basin. "Herders are all down now, so I figured it'd be about right."

  "Looks good," Jack said.

  "Got water, shelter, and firewood — and the corrals, of course," Miller said. "And the deer huntin' up on that ridge is about as good as any you'll find." He nodded to a ridge that swelled on up out of the scrubby timber into the open meadows between us and the rockfalls just below the snow line.

  We reined up in the camp area and climbed down off the horses. My legs ached, and I was a little unsteady on my feet. We tied our horses to the top rail on one of the corrals and walked around a bit, looking it over.

  The six tent frames were in a kind of semicircle at the edge of the trees, facing a large stone fire pit and looking out over the grassy floor of the basin and the largest of the beaver ponds out in the middle. Out beyond the pond, the draw rose sharply in a series of steeply slanted meadows. Directly overhead, almost as if it were leaning over the little basin, the bulky white mass of Glacier Peak rose ponderously, so huge as to be almost unbelievable.

  There was a rocked-up spring behind the last tent frame, a sandy-bottomed pocket of icy water about two feet deep and perhaps three feet across. The outflow trickled off along the edge of the trees toward the horse corrals at the lower end of the camp.

  None of the trees in the little grove were much more than fifteen feet tall, and they were brushy — spruce mostly. We were within a quarter of a mile of the timberline. There were a lot of low shrubs — heather, Miller said — lying in under the trees, and moss in the open spaces. I noticed a lot of sticks and downed trees lying around.

  "Beaver," Miller said. "Greatest firewood collectors around."

  McKlearey rode on in and climbed down off his horse. He still kept off to himself.

  "Clint'll be along in a few minutes," Miller said. "Let's get a fire goin' so we can have some coffee."

  We all moved around picking up firewood, and Miller scraped the debris out of the fire pit. The wood was bone dry, and it only took a few minutes for a good blaze to get started.

  Then Clint came in with the pack-string, and we started to unpack. The two-gallon coffee pot and a big iron grill that looked like a chunk of sidewalk grating were the first things to come off. Clint filled the pot from the spring behind the tent frames while Miller piled several big rocks in close to the fire to set the grill on.

  "A man can cook with just a fire if he's of a mind," he said, "but this makes things a whole lot simpler." He set the grill in place while Clint dumped several fistfuls of grounds into the water in the pot.

  "Don't you use the basket?" Stan asked.

  "Lost it a couple years ago," Clint said. "Don't do no good up this high anyway. Water boils at about a hundred and seventy up here. You gotta get the grounds down close to the fire and kinda fry the juice out. Gives you somethin' to chew on in your coffee with them grounds floatin' loose, but that never hurt nobody."

  He rummaged around in one of the packs and came up with a sack of salt and dumped a couple pinches in. Then he did something that still makes my hair stand on end. He fished out a dozen eggs, took one and cracked it neatly on a rock. Then he drank it, right out of the shell. I heard Sloane gag slightly. Clint paid no attention to us but crumbled the shell in his fist and dropped it in the pot. Then he clamped on the lid and put the pot down on the grill over the fire.

  "I've heard of the salt before, Clint," I said when my stomach settled back down, "but why the eggshell?"

  "Damn if I know," he said. "Only thing is, I never tasted coffee fit to drink without it had some eggshell in it."

  I didn't ask him why he'd drunk the raw egg. I was pretty sure I didn't want to know.

  "We'll have some jerky and cold biscuits with our coffee," Miller said. "That'll tide us till we get camp set up and Clint can fix a real meal."

  We all sat around the fire on logs and stumps waiting for the coffee to boil. It boiled over, hissing into the fire with a pungent smell, three times. Each time Clint doused cold water into the pot and let it boil again. Then, the fourth time, he decided it was ready to drink. I'll have to admit that it was damned good coffee. The strips of beef-jerky chewed a bit like old harness leather, but they were good, too, and the cold biscuits with honey set things off just right. I don't think I'd realized just how hungry I was.

  Miller brushed the crumbs out of his mustache and filled his coffee mug again. "First thing is to check out the corrals," he said. "We'll need two good ones anyway — that way we won't be stirrin' up the pack animals ever'time we want a saddle horse. Way we'll do it is this: Go around those nearest two corrals and yank real hard on ever' place that's wired. Any place that comes loose, we'll rewire. Balin' wire is looped around that dead tree by the spring. Soon as we get tha
t done, we can unsaddle the stock and turn 'em loose in the corrals. We brought some oats for 'em, but we'll have to picket 'em out to graze in the daytime while you men are up on the ridge. After we get the horses tended to, we'll set up the tents."

  "Couldn't some of us start on the tents while the others work on the corrals?" Sloane asked, puffing slightly again.

  "I suppose we could," Miller said, "but we'll do 'er the way I said before. Me'n old Clint there was in the Horse-Marines when we was pups, and the first thing we learned was to see to the stock first. Up here a man without a horse is in real trouble. She's a long damn walk back down."

  "I see what you mean," Cal said, breathing heavily. He was used to making the decisions, but Miller was in charge, and now we all knew it.

  It only took us about fifteen minutes to check out the corrals. Most of the lashings were still tight. Then we unsaddled the horses and turned them into the corrals, laying the saddles over the top rail of a corral we weren't using. Miller dumped oats from a burlap sack into a manger that opened onto both corrals. The horses nuzzled at him and he moved among them. He spoke to them, his voice curiously gentle as he did.

  Then we all went up to the fire and had another cup of coffee. The sun was sliding down toward the tops of the peaks above us, and the air was taking on a decided chill. We stood looking at the welter of packs, sleeping bags, and rolled-up tenting that lay in a heap under the tent frames.

  "Take a week to get all that squared away," Jack said.

  "Hour on the outside," Clint disagreed.

  First we put up the tents. They were little six-by-eight jobs that fit neatly over the frames. Miller and Clint showed us how to set them up and pull them tight. We set up five tents and then piled all the packs in the end one.