“Thanks,” he said, and stuck the letter in his shirt pocket beside the Bull Durham sack. The dog knew we were talking about him, so he got up and came over and stood by us, ready to be obedient.
Bill was taking only five horses back with him, counting his own saddle horse, Big Moose, and all but one of them, a pack horse, were saddled. I went into the warehouse and got the blanket and saddle and I spent an extra amount of time smoothing the blanket on the horse's back. Finally I said, “She is real nice,” and pointed at his shirt pocket.
Bill looked over the saddle and down at me. “She's just a kid,” he said. “Why don't you take her out?”
He evidently thought I was wasting time fussing around with the blanket. He picked up the saddle which I had dropped at my feet and he put it on the horse himself.
“How many horses are you packing on the way back?” I asked. He said, “They're all going empty but the ‘original.’” I knew then he was going to go fast.
“The original” was a big iron-gray that was faster and tougher than any of the mules. And meaner. Everybody said the reason they called him an original was that one of his testicles had been missed when he was castrated so he wasn't either a gelding or a stallion. You would have thought, though, that he had two or three complete sets. He started chasing mares the moment you took the saddle off him at night, and it didn't seem to make much difference if you hobbled him. He was the only horse I ever saw that could catch and screw a mare with two front feet tied together and only one testicle. After he finished with the mares, he started chasing the geldings. If you were the one to wrangle the horses in the morning, you had to start long before daybreak, because by then you would be lucky to find even one of your string in the state of Idaho.
I went slowly to the warehouse to haul out his packs. I went slowly because I wished I were going back with Bill. Here on the valley floor it was late summer and hot noon. Tonight, they would camp on the divide at Big Sand where it would be deep in autunn. There the needles of the tamaracks had already turned yellow. A delicacy of ice would fringe the lake in the morning. I would be willing to get up and wrangle the horses myself, provided Bill had let me picket the original to a two-ton log the night before. If so, perhaps I might hear again the most beautiful sound that comes through darkness—the sound of a bell mare. Perhaps, too, at daybreak I might see my four-gaited moose steaming beside a lilypad. It is certain that for an hour or two in life I would again be higher than the mountain goats and above nearly all men. And it is certain that, if I weren't dehydrated, I would piss on the state line and wonder where in the world I had flowed.
I set a pack on each side of the original. I don't care what anybody says, it is a great advantage to be a big man if you are a packer. I admit I have seen some fine packers who were middle-sized and some even who were small, but a big man picks up a pack and just pushes it away from him and it's about where he wants it on the saddle and he can work with everything in plain view in front of him. At seventeen I was probably about five foot nine, and had to hoist the pack up on my shoulders and work from underneath, sometimes not seeing the hitches I was tying and also sometimes not finishing my sentences.
“The cook…,” I said, and the pack slipped as I tried to hoist it up on the saddle, and besides I didn't know how to go on.
“He didn't look good this morning,” I said, even though I hadn't got a good hold on the pack yet.
“What was the matter?” Bill asked. Bill didn't look too good himself. When he leaned his head back to push the pack up, I could see dried blood in his nose, and his hands were swollen and we packed slowly.
“They rolled him and beat hell out of him,” I said. “Did they get all his dough?” Bill asked. “I had to give him money to get to Butte,” I told him.
The dog figured we weren't talking about him anymore, so he went back to watching the horses.
“Seven dollars and twenty cents,” I said. You could almost hear Bill from the other side of the horse multiplying 170 miles by three cents. “That's enough,” he said.
I wanted bad to say one more thing about the cook, but the dog was uncomfortable and got up and circled stiffly and then lay down again. He looked a lot older than when I had seen him last spring. Besides the open cut near his eyes, he had several fresh scars that were also close to his eyes. I thought to myself, “What can you expect if you fight coyotes for a living?” so I didn't say this other thing about the cook for fear I might end up in the same trouble as the dog.
Although Bill was putting a light load on the original, we started to tie it tight together with a diamond hitch, because clearly he was going to travel fast. Bill threw the canvas manty over the load and each of us smoothed out his side of it. Bill asked, tossing the cinch to me under the horse, “What'r you going to do next summer?” Until I heard my answer tremble, I did not know how long I had been waiting for the question. “Nothing yet,” I answered.
“Let's tie a double diamond on this last load,” he suggested. “Fine,” I said. “How would you like to work for me next summer?” he asked.
I went looking for words like “privilege” and “honor” and ended with, “It's a deal.”
“It's a deal,” he replied. “I'll write you early in the spring.”
“When I get here next spring,” I said, hidden by my side of the horse, “I'll date that girl with all the freckles.”
“She's nice,” he said, “real nice.”
“I know,” I said.
Suddenly I realized I had been scared for a long time, because suddenly I wasn't scared any more. I had been scared ever since I had started getting in trouble with Bill, but didn't dare admit it to myself. I don't believe I was ever afraid he would take a punch at me, because I don't believe I ever thought he would. I was scared because I had to lose something I wanted to be like and yet wanted to keep when the trouble was over.
On our last load of the summer, we threw the double diamond, and Bill was ready to go. He didn't tie his string together—he had picked his best horses, and they would trail each other.
We stood beside Big Moose, his giant saddle horse. We stood close together and never said a word. Then he turned slightly, twisted his stirrup, and with his back to me started a 180-degree swing into the saddle. When he completed his semicircle, he was looking down at me from the sky. From my angle below I could see right up the barrel of his .45 and up his nostrils rimmed with dry blood.
“I'll be seein’ you,” he said.
“Me, too,” I answered, but didn't quite know what I meant.
I let down the bars of the corral, and the moment the outfit was on the road each assumed his own character and collectively all became Bill's string. Big Moose immediately hit his five-mile-an-hour stride; dark brown and mooselike, with head thrown back, he coasted on slipperlike feet. You wouldn't realize he was covering five miles an hour until you noticed that the other horses, except the original, would drop behind when they walked and every now and then had to trot to catch up. The original kicked a horse that got too close. The dog trotted to one side, stopping now and then with raised paw and in his mind clearly protecting the string from all possible attack and any combination of coyotes.
Bill sat twisted in his saddle like the Egyptian bas-relief.
Collectively, Bill's outfit—Bill himself, his favorite saddle horse, his favorite pack horse, and his dog—were about the finest the early Forest Service had to offer.
For a while the road went mostly down the valley and only slightly toward the mountains, and then it took a sudden turn to the left and headed nearly straight for Blodgett Canyon. Bill studied his horses almost to the turn. Then he must have stood up in his stirrups, for suddenly he took off his hat and gave me a big wave, and I stood on the middle rail of the corral and gave him a big wave back. He must have been feeling great. Why not? Maybe for the first time in years the Ranger had got out of a card game while he was still ahead—by $7.20. Although I still was not well, I felt great, too.
&nb
sp; I had the promise that I could work for him again. I was only seventeen, and I hoped more than ever that someday I would become a packer.
Then the string swung to the left and trotted in a line toward Blodgett Canyon, with a speck of a dog to the side faithfully keeping always the same distance from the horses. Gradually, the trotting dog and horses became generalized into creeping animals and the one to the side became a speck and those in a line became just a line. Slowly the line disintegrated into pieces and everything floated up and away in dust and all that settled out was one dot, like Morse code. The dot must have been Morse code for a broad back and a black hat. After a while, the sunlight itself became disembodied. There was just nothing at all to sunlight, and the mouth of Blodgett Canyon was just nothing but a gigantic hole in the sky.
“The Big Sky,” as we say in Montana.
Although I had no way of knowing it at the time, I was never to cross the Bitterroot Mountains again. When early spring came, I was offered a job for the summer with the engineering department of the Forest Service on a mapping crew that was going to work in the Kootenai Forest. For a long time I wondered why by the spring of 1920 it seemed to me that having a different and more professional job in a different part of the woods was better than working again for Bill Bell, and I think the answer has something to do about my becoming eighteen. I was very conscious of becoming eighteen.
So I was never to see Bill Bell or any of the other men again. Or the girl my age from Darby. When the dot of Morse code disappeared into the sky, another Summer Crew of the United States Forest Service had come and gone forever.
Everything that was to happen had happened and everything that was to be seen had gone. It was now one of those moments when nothing remains but an opening in the sky and a story—and maybe something of a poem. Anyway, as you possibly remember, there are these lines in front of the story:
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose…
These words are now part of the story.
Table of Contents
Start
A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition Page 25
