Lonesome Dove 孤鸽镇

“Have you been up here before?” he asked. The old cook’s wanderings had been a subject of much speculation among the men. Po Campo was always letting slip tantalizing bits of information. Once, for example, he had described the great gorge of the Columbia River. Again, he had casually mentioned Jim Bridger.

“No,” Po Campo said. “I don’t know this country. But I’ll tell you this, it is dry. Water your horse before you leave.” Call thought the old man rather patronizing—he knew enough to water a horse before setting off into a desert.

“Don’t wait supper,” he said.

All day he rode west, and the country around him grew more bleak. Not fit for sheep, Call thought. Not hardly fit for lizards—in fact, a small gray lizard was the only life he saw all day. That night he made a dry camp in sandy country where the dirt was light-colored, almost white. He supposed he had come some sixty miles and could not imagine that the herd would make it that far, although the Hell Bitch seemed unaffected. He slept for a few hours and went on, arriving just after sunup on the banks of Salt Creek. It was not running, but there was adequate water in scattered shallow pools. The water was not good, but it was water. The trouble was, the herd was nearly eighty miles back—a four-day drive under normal conditions; and in this case the miles were entirely waterless, which wouldn’t make for normal conditions.

Call rested the mare and let her have a good roll. Then he started back and rode almost straight through, only stopping once for two hours’ rest. He arrived in camp at midmorning to find most of the hands still playing cards.

When he unsaddled the mare, one of Augustus’s pigs grunted at him. Both of them were lying under the wagon, sharing the shade with Lippy, who was sound asleep. The shoat was a large pig now, but travel had kept him thin. Call felt it was slightly absurd having pigs along on a cattle drive, but they had proven good foragers as well as good swimmers. They got across the rivers without any help.

Augustus was oiling his rifle. “How far did you ride that horse?” he asked.

“To the next water and back,” Call said. “Did you ever see a horse like her? She ain’t even tired.” “How far is it to water?” Augustus asked.

“About eighty miles,” Call said. “What do you think?” “I ain’t give it no thought at all, so far,” Augustus said.“We can’t just sit here,” Call said.

“Oh, we could,” Augustus said. “We could have stopped pretty much anywhere along the way. It’s only your stubbornness kept us going this long. I guess it’ll be interesting to see if it can get us the next eighty miles.” Call got a plate and ate a big meal. He expected Po Campo to say something about their predicament, but the old cook merely dished out the food and said nothing. Deets was helping Pea Eye trim one of his horse’s feet, a task Pea Eye had never been good at.

“Find the water, Captain?” Deets asked, smiling.

“I found it, ’bout eighty miles away,” Call said.

“That’s far,” Pea Eye said.

They had stopped the cattle at the last stream that Deets had found, and now Call walked down it a way to think things over. He saw a gray wolf. It seemed to him to be the same wolf they had seen in Nebraska, after the picnic, but he told himself that was foolish speculation. A gray wolf wouldn’t follow a cattle herd.

Deets finished trimming the horse’s hooves and wiped the sweat off his face with his shirtsleeve. Pea Eye stood silently nearby. Though the two of them had soldiered together for most of their fives, they had never really had a conversation.

It had seemed unnecessary. They exchanged information, and that was about it. Pea, indeed, had always been a little doubtful of the propriety of talking to Negroes, although he liked and respected Deets and was grateful to him now for trimming the horse’s feet. He knew Deets was a great deal more competent than he was in many areas—tracking, for example. He knew that if it had not been for Deets’s skill in finding water they might have all starved years before in campaigns on the llano. He knew, too, that Deets had risked his life a number of times to save his, and yet, standing there side by side, the only thing he could think of to talk about was the Captain’s great love for the Hell Bitch.

“Well, he’s mighty fond of that horse,” he said. “And she might kill him yet.” “She ain’t gonna kill the Captain,” Deets said. He had the sad sense that things were not right. It seemed they were going to go north forever, and he couldn’t think why. Life had been orderly and peaceful in Texas. He himself had particularly enjoyed his periodic trips to San Antonio to deposit money. Texas had always been their country, and it was a puzzle to him why they were going to a country that would probably be so wild there wouldn’t even be banks to take money to.

“We way up here and it ain’t our country,” he said, looking at Pea. That was the heart of it—best to stay in your own country and not go wandering off where you didn’t know the rivers or the water holes.

“Now up here, it’s gonna be cold,” he added, as if that were proof enough of the folly of their trip.

“Well, I hope we get there before the rivers start icing,” Pea said. “I always worry about that thin ice.” With that he turned away, and the lengthy conversation was over.

By midafternoon Call came back from his walk and decided they would go ahead. It was go ahead or go back, and he didn’t mean to go back. It wasn’t rational to think of driving cattle over eighty waterless miles, but he had learned in his years of tracking Indians that things which seemed impossible often weren’t. They only became so if one thought about them too much so that fear took over. The thing to do was go. Some of the cattle might not make it, but then, he had never expected to reach Montana with every head.

He told the cowboys to push the cattle and horses onto water and hold them there.

Without saying a word, Augustus walked over, took off his clothes, and had a long bath in the little stream. The cowboys holding the herd could see him sitting in the shallow water, now and then splashing some of his long white hair.

“Sometimes I think Gus is crazy,” Soupy Jones said. “Why is he sitting in the water?” “Maybe he’s fishing,” Dish Boggett said facetiously. He had no opinion of Soupy Jones and saw no reason why Gus shouldn’t bathe if he wanted to.

Augustus came walking back to the wagon with his hair dripping.