Paul wears a decade-old Resistol (a workingman’s Stetson), rolled and stained and salty as all get-out, and sewed to its inside are two pieces of red bandanna that he can tie under his chin to keep his ears warm and his hat on in the wind. He calls the strips ear floppers. He has on a knocked-about denim jacket. If you’ve seen Glenn Ford in the western Jubal, you have a notion of what Paul is like: the outfit, the courteous manner, the reticence. He says of his hat, It’s lost its shape, but that’s no worse than me, and I say it has plenty of shape, just not the factory shape, and he says, Like me. Under his lip is a pinch of Red Man so small that I don’t notice it for an hour, and he never spits. He began chewing to control his thirst when he was a teenager picking up hay on a go-devil in July.
In 1932, when he was fifteen, with seven dollars in his pocket, he jumped a freight train at Strong City and rode to Trinidad, Colorado, to look for ranch work but didn’t find any, so he climbed a tram back toward home. During the warm days, he’d take off his belt and strap himself to the top of a boxcar and doze; one afternoon, as he slept, a hobo lifted his last three dollars and his souvenir postcards. At night, to escape the cold, he’d climb down into an empty freight car and pull two big, conical banana-baskets together and sleep inside like a larva, warm and hidden. When he got home a week later, nobody had noticed he was gone. Unless you count his navy days, that was the only thing like a vacation he’s ever taken. (During the war, he wrote Leola from the Pacific: Get all the going out of your system before I get home—once I get back to Chase County, I’m not leaving there again. She told me, He’s nearly kept his threat.)
Now we’re bouncing over the hills, and Paul explains: in the county there used to be coyote and jackrabbit roundups, often organized by a Sunday-school class; men would form four two-mile-long lines in a loose square and walk toward the center, driving animals before them, and, as the perimeter tightened, the shotguns would begin blasting and the clubs thrashing. Paul rode behind with dogs on a long lead and would turn them on jacks or coyotes that slipped the lines, and, after the square closed, there might be half a dozen dead coyotes and a hundred rabbits. Now the hares are gone and the coyotes much diminished, and people are too lazy (he guesses) to walk that far, and maybe it’s just as well, since the whole thing was more extermination than sport.
Paul went on his first hunt with one of his father’s farmhands, who drove a Model T roadster with his pair of sight dogs (they hunt visually) perched atop each front fender like chrome ornaments. The quarry was jackrabbits, and the method was to leave at dusk and drive the pastures until the headlamps picked up the reflection of eyes, and then off the hounds would go. Paul was seven and liked the chase, but there were so few coyotes in those times he didn’t see his first one until he was fifteen. As they increased after the “wolf” drives declined, he began to dog-hunt them from horseback and later from a 1934 Ford with a hound box in the trunk cavity. Only once did his father go along, and, of the violent ride that comes with sighting a coyote, he said, At first I was so damn afraid we wouldn’t see one, and after we saw one I was so damn afraid we’d see another. Following their marriage, little Leola usually joined Paul and one time even went off alone on horseback and brought back a pair of coyotes hanging from her saddle horn.
Now: we ride a ridge, then edge down, the truck tilting laterally, a bit precariously I think, cross a pond dam, climb again, then down, make a zigzag course across creeks I’d have thought impassable, rise again to hit an eroded and invisible cattle trail that slams the wheels hard, stop for me to open a gate, and on, another gate, and all the time I marvel at Paul’s navigation over this grassland that to a novice carries the sameness of face as a sea. He has no compass: on a cloudy day, he takes his direction from the wind and gets lost only with an abrupt shift of the blowing or on a foggy day when there is no wind. The frost has disappeared except in the shadows so that humps of limestone cast long, white umbras, and soon those too are gone, and the tawniness returns to the grass and the coyotes will be harder to see. The odometer on the old truck shows fifty-five thousand miles. Paul believes no more than six thousand have come on roads and that he rides about five thousand miles a year in the pastures; in a half century of hauling the dogs over the hills, he’s traveled a quarter of a million roadless miles inside one county. I ask how many coyotes that equals, and he says without having to figure it, Sixteen hundred and sixty-five.
The dogs: they are greyhounds crossbred with heavier staghounds (that name bespeaks their medieval origin, although the most famous American staghound was General Custer’s pet killed with him at the Little Big Horn); the lighter animals give speed to the strength and aggressive temper of the larger dogs. A pure greyhound will often merely chase a coyote, but a thick-hided, big-chested staghound will go for a kill. Usually, the younger and faster crossbreeds catch the quarry and turn it to fight as the older ones, the throat dogs, close in to pin it and finish things off. The first time I walked into the Evanses’ yard and past two big hounds, I did so with trepidation, but their disposition was that of a beagle; yet to a running quadruped of almost any sort they are deadly, and if a stray mutt happens to wander into a chase, it’s likely done for, but a fleeing child they would ignore. Paul’s dogs, the males weighing up to eighty pounds and capable of running nearly forty miles an hour for a couple of minutes, are faster over broken ground than greyhounds, and if Paul can get the truck within three hundred yards of the quarry, the dogs usually will close the distance to make the kill. If coyotes dispensed with their habit of continually slowing to look back and, instead, kept on the dead run, more of them would escape, since their stamina and awareness of the terrain are superior to the hounds’. As it is, the dogs miss only one of ten, and that one escapes usually by getting into bottom timber or a pond. A single dog against a lone coyote, typically weighing less than half the hound, could not likely kill it; although Paul has never lost a dog in a fight, they all soon end up with scarred faces. He carries a roll of duct tape to bind slashed flesh and lacerated feet and dew claws torn by the rocky hills, but not long ago, when a dog ripped its tongue running through a barbed-wire fence, he could do nothing but let its suffering heal it.
Paul hunts only from mid-October to mid-March when transient cattle are out of the pastures and coyote pups are grown, and he hunts not because of a fascination with coyotes or their beauty or the loveliness of their loping but because he likes to see the hounds run. He says that when he gets too old to ride the hills, he guesses he’ll drive up to Abilene, the self-styled “Greyhound Capital of the World,” to watch the dogs chase mechanical rabbits. In the county, there is only one other sight-dog hunter left; Paul says, Things are harder now. Every year more locked gates, more cow-calf operations so the pastures don’t empty. And if you’re not as old as I am, you even need a license these days. He’s watched the coyote population go from absence to abundance to decline, and in the early eighties he saw his first case of mange. Each year it’s increased. He’s seen the bounty system disappear and the value of pelts rise and fall, and he knows how a trapper using scent can clean out an area. The market was high in the forties and fifties when the Russians were buying pelts to use in army coats: Ice won’t stick to coyote fur. Even when the market was up he never trapped or dug pups out of a den, and he’s never poisoned a coyote. There is no gun in the truck: if he needs to administer the coup de grâce to a coyote, he does it with a tap from a little hammer. One time the dogs tore open a female and he found three pups alive in the womb, and he wrapped them and took them home for Leola to nurse with an eyedropper, but Harry, Larry, and Mary didn’t live long. Several years ago he was moved when he saw a male coyote drag its belly along the ground to distract the dogs, to give itself up while its mate ran to cover.
We ride up on a north-facing slope, a place on this day of southeasterlies where a coyote can get out of the wind, where it can smell trouble from one direction and see it in the other. The morning is nearly gone, and the coyotes will soon cease moving
unless they feel the vibration from the truck, but the slope is empty and Paul says, We should’ve jumped one by now, and my relief balances my disappointed curiosity.
Now, coyote: yipping, ululating, singing, freely, freely, night-flute coyote, long leggedness through blackness, (moonless), silent, pausing, yipping, far responding, quick legs, freely, padded feet, coyote feet, pausing, silent padding, pissing, running, swinging head, pausing, back-looking, (tallgrasses frozen, frosted), cold fur erected, coyote singing, sings-long-dog, coyote, coyote, golden-eyes-coyote, canine, climbing, singing, sweetness, song dog, breathing darkness, (hiding darkness), yip-yipping, nose-to-sky-coyote, singing, sweet-throat-beast, coyote jaw, coyote teeth, looking-always-coyote, running, singing the darkness, long-song-dog call, coyote, coyote belly, waiting, watching, wanting, coyote eyes, eye this, that, this scent, scenting, sending, sensing, pausing, pissing, breathing, smelling, sniffing, snooping, nosing, silent-feet-coyote, earth-feel-under-foot-coyote, nose to wind, canid, canid, coming something, belly, belly, belly, passing, pausing, halting, creeping, softly, soft, tricking, thumping, coyote heart, pushing, pumping, pulsing, coyote blood, beating-beating, pouncing! snapping! Rodent!—belly, belly—trots-along-coyote, and: (going night, going cover, going, sky rising), ridge-line-coyote, runs-far-song-dog, thin, thin, muscle-bone, (and this, coyote, this: now, they come):
West of the Z Bar Ranch we ride onto an expanse rising westward, and Paul says only and quietly, There, and lets me find the distant, gray loping, and he steps on the accelerator, and we take off in axle-crashing pursuit to close the gap, and the coyote keeps moving in alert nonchalance, pausing to watch our progress, and Paul says, I can see the shine on the skin—it’s got the mange. We gain ground in a tumult of barking as the hounds see the coyote, the lunch pails are in the air and my hands are on the ceiling of the cab to keep me from cracking my skull, and my heart is in my throat as if I were the quarry, and Paul reaches up and pulls the jerk rope as if to request a trolley stop, the barking ceases, and, in prodigious leaps, long catapults, the hounds hit the prairie, become linear blurs and in an instant they are thirty yards away, and the coyote’s tail is straight out and it’s streaking now to no cover we can see, and the dogs terrify a deer into leaping a fence and running toward us, and then Paul says, Oh no, and two stray dogs have come from nowhere but the hounds this time are not distracted, and from the still prairie, suddenly, racing in four directions, there are five hounds, two dogs, one coyote, a deer, and a pair of men in a truck.
A fence cuts us off, the chase drops into a draw, we can see nothing, and we get out and try to listen. Only the wind. We wait. Our pulses calm, and then Ferd, a young white dog, comes up, its chops bloody, and Paul says, They got it, and Ferd nuzzles my pant leg and smears me with coyote blood to initiate me, mark me with evidence, and then Ribbon, a white female, trots up, chops red, and both dogs draw their snouts through the grass to clean them. They are breathing too hard to drink yet, their hot vapor visible in the cold air. Then we see Jack in the distance, and we crawl under a fence, walk down the draw, and there by three lone elms lies the lead dog, the old master of the kill, Red, tongue hanging, rib cage rising and falling heavily, seeming pleased like a terrier that gets the rat, just a good old dog that wants its belly scratched, and before him, so blending with the grass that I almost step on it, lies the coyote, its limbs stretched fore and aft as if still trying to outrace the hounds, its maddened lip curled to show a tusk, its head mangled but the skull not opened, and in its side is a long, fierce rent, like a rip in an old shirt, and there are punctures in its thighs, but the worst is the mange that has left its back half hairless. This one would not have survived the winter. Paul says, I’d guess Red got to it first, hit it in the hams and flipped it, then bit it behind the head, then the other dogs got on the back legs and stretched it out. That was it. And I say, sixteen hundred and sixty-six.
I ask whether coyotes yelp during the fight, and he says he never heard it, and I ask if the mange keeps the dogs from eating on the animal, and, no, they won’t touch it once it’s dead—they won’t even eat coyote meat out of their feed pans. We walk back to the truck, and it’s noon, and Paul, thinking of the stuffed lunch pails Leola made up, says, Eating out here’s the next best thing to the race. Sometimes we build a fire and set a can of chili in it. I have to ask, at last, have you ever eaten coyote, and he says, no, he never has.
Above the Crystalline Basement
Underneath eastern Kansas lies a range, the Nemaha Mountains, and just now I am walking up what would be the foothills of its steep eastern face. I’m near the western edge of Fox Creek quadrangle and following a ridge track above Cannon Branch that I hope will lead to an oil well, this one a dry hole drilled years ago. In my pack is a hefty wrench that I plan to use to uncap the pipe and open a little window, a porthole, onto the old buried mountains, ones from the time of the Ozarks and the Black Hills. When the Rockies were still prostrate, one theory holds, the Nemahas rose and then eroded as the Appalachians reared up to relieve the crustal pressure, the birth of one being the death of the other. (A geologist told me he thought the tourist bureau should erect signs where highways enter Kansas that would say: MOUNTAIN BURIAL PROJECT NOW COMPLETE.) Although I’ll be looking at their crests, I’ll be peeping into a deep corner of the county basement, and I realize I’ll no more see the Nemahas than a man in total darkness his hand, but I want to see at them, three thousand feet down, and I plan to sniff the vapors rising from them and drop a small stone down, count seconds until I imagine I hear the pebble bounce onto the granite ridge, that old igneous exudate from the earth’s first time. The Nemahas disappeared from view four hundred million years ago when the continents lay as one, and animate life had gone only so far as to cover itself with scales and free itself from the necessity of returning to the ocean to remake its generations; these mountains were already old when life began going from a legless world to a footed one, when lungs were something new.
It was well-drillers who found the Nemahas, and the only men to have seen them are those who pulled up the cuttings that penetrated the granite. In Chase County, of the nearly four hundred gas and oil wells drilled, only a couple of dozen reached the Precambrian rock of the Nemaha Ridge, the crest today six hundred feet below sea level and much eroded from what it once was. A Kansas geologist a half century ago said the Nemahas must have been originally one of the great ranges of mountains of the earth. With their nearly vertical eastern flank and their much less precipitous western exposure, I imagine them in their first days looking like the Tetons. Kansans, whose name almost means flatlanders in the minds of their countrymen, are not surprised at living atop a four-hundred-mile-long cordillera, since they have always understood that unexpected Kansas must be sought in its remoteness, a place you find only with effort. Yet I haven’t told even one of them that I am out to “see” the great subterranean mountains of Kansas at the bottom of a half-mile-long, six-inch pipe. What’s more, since there is no granite in the county except that in the Nemahas, I hope to identify a few bits of them around the well, and I’d like to walk out of here with a little piece of mountain in my pocket, a granite nubbin whose age is reckoned not in millions of years but in billions; in my pocket will be some of the raw material elsewhere broken down to become the bones of this place of Prairyerths.
In front of you imagine on the floor a thick book, like an encyclopedia, and atop it seven slender books; push the books to your left so they slide down to overlap like shingles on a roof: the encyclopedia is the Precambrian crystalline core, here thrust up into a mountainous fold, and the books atop it are the seven periods of the Paleozoic era that describe Chase County; all of this is to say that on top of the antediluvian granite rest the marine-made layers of sedimentary rock, mostly successions of shale and limestone, old sea floors that have since been slightly tilted. The leaves of these volumes of rock are the individual strata that compose the county, here rubble-strewn, there fertile, arable here, only grazable there. O
nce, probably, three additional volumes lay atop this slipped stack, but water and wind have sent them eastward.
The uppermost of the seven books represents fifty million years of sediments settling to the bottom of a sea that came and left again and again like a quarreling lover. The history here is this: a sea transgressing, regressing, transgressing, in and out, up and down, higher, lower, always advancing, withdrawing always, and always leaving something behind, the sea conceiving stone, and the rock bearing living things that turn mineral solutions—calcium carbonates—into shell and bone, and bone becoming stone again, and that too waiting to become again; and everywhere cycles, and cycles within cycles, and the sea laying down strata like shrouds over the old life, and then the corrupting winds and waters coming to resurrect it. The Nemahas rose, were partly eroded, subsided, and were buried, all of this happening in the Eastern Hemisphere; and then, slowly and passively like a casket, the range got carried into the Western world to come here—to what appears a permanent resting place—where the thirty-eighth parallel crosses the ninety-sixth meridian; so, in this way, Chase County, Kansas, migrated from the far other side just as its human inhabitants were to do. In the half century since I was born, this hill has moved at about the rate a fingernail grows, some four feet farther west—about the distance from my heel to my hip—as has everything else around it, the Cottonwood, the courthouse, the brass bedsteads.
PrairyErth Page 17
