“But he never interested me, Dad,” he went on. “I lit out from that place when I was thirteen years old, and I ain’t stopped yet. I didn’t care one way or the other for Dad. I just seen that horses and hounds would get boring if you tried to make ’em a life. I ’spect I’d have wrecked every marriage in the county if I’d stayed in Tennessee. Or else have got killed in a duel.” Newt knew Mr. Gus was trying to be kind, but he wasn’t listening. Much of his life he had wondered who his father was and where he might be. He felt it would be a relief to know. But now he knew, and it wasn’t a relief. There was something in it that thrilled him—he was Captain Call’s son—but more that felt sad. He was glad when Mr. Gus put the horses in a lope—he didn’t have to think as much. They loped along over the grassy plains toward the cattle in the far distance. The cattle looked tiny as ants.THE MEN BEGAN TO TALK of the Yellowstone River as if it were the place where the world ended—or, at least, the place where the drive would end. In their thinking it had taken on a magical quality, partly because no one really knew anything about it. Jasper Fant had somehow picked up the rumor that the Yellowstone was the size of the Mississippi, and as deep.
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With Deets dead, Augustus and Call alternated the scouting duties. One day Augustus asked Newt to ride along with him, much to Newt’s surprise. In the morning they saw a grizzly, but the bear was far upwind and didn’t scent them. It was a beautiful day—no clouds in the sky. Augustus rode with his big rifle propped across the saddle—he was in the highest of spirits. They rode ahead of the herd some fifteen miles or more, and yet when they stopped to look back they could still see the cattle, tiny black dots in the middle of the plain, with the southern horizon still far behind them.
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The sun came out just then and shone so brightly on the white plains that some of the men had to shield their eyes. Newt finally got a place by the fire, but by then the Captain was anxious to move on and he didn’t get to dry his socks. He tried to pull his boots on but had no luck until Po Campo noticed his difficulty and came over with a little flour, which he sprinkled in the boots.“This will help,” he said, and he was right, though getting the boots on still wasn’t easy.
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“I guess I am now.” “No, you’re a fighter,” Augustus said. “We should have left these damn cows down in Texas. You used them as an excuse to come up here, when you ain’t interested in them and didn’t need an excuse anyway. I think we oughta just give them to the Indians when the Indians show up.” “Give the Indians three thousand cattle?” Call said, amazed at the notions his friend had. “Why do that?” “Because then we’d be shut of them,” Augustus said. “We could follow our noses, for a change, instead of following their asses. Ain’t you bored?” “I don’t think like you do,” Call said. “They’re ours. We got ’em. I don’t plan on giving them to anybody.” “I miss Texas and I miss whiskey,” Augustus said. “Now here we are in Montana and there’s no telling what will become of us.” “Miles City’s up here somewhere,” Call said. “You can buy whiskey.” “Yes, but I’ll have to drink it indoors,” Augustus complained. “It’s cool up here.” As if to confirm his remark, the very next day an early storm blew out of the Bighorns. An icy wind came up and snow fell in the night. The men on night herd wrapped blankets around themselves to keep warm. A thin snow covered the plains in the morning, to the amazement of everyone. The Spettle boy was so astonished to wake and see it that he refused to come out of his blankets at first, afraid of what might happen. He lay wide-eyed, looking at the whiteness. Only when he saw the other hands tramping in it without ill effect did he get up.
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Call had scarcely spoken since the death of Deets, but the beauty of the high prairies, the abundance of game, the coolness of the mornings finally raised his spirits. It was plain that Jake Spoon, who had been wrong about most things, had been right about Montana. It was a cattleman’s paradise, and they were the only cattlemen in it. The grassy plains seemed limitless, stretching north. It was strange that they had seen no Indians, though. Often he mentioned this to Augustus.
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The cowboys had lived for months under the great bowl of the sky, and yet the Montana skies seemed deeper than the skies of Texas or Nebraska. Their depth and blueness robbed even the sun of its harsh force—it seemed smaller, in the vastness, and the whole sky no longer turned white at noon as it had in the lower plains. Always, somewhere to the north, there was a swath of blueness, with white clouds floating in it like petals in a pond.
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The coolness of the air seemed to improve the men’s eyesight—they fell to speculating about how many miles they could see. The plains stretched north before them. They saw plenty of game, mainly deer and antelope. Once they saw a large herd of elk, and twice small groups of buffalo. They saw no more bears, but bears were seldom far from then-thoughts.
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AS THE HERD and the Hat Creek outfit slowly rode into Montana out of the barren Wyoming plain, it seemed to all of them that they were leaving behind not only heat and drought, but ugliness and danger too. Instead of being chalky and covered with tough sage, the rolling plains were covered with tall grass and a sprinkling of yellow flowers. The roll of the plains got longer; the heat shimmers they had looked through all summer gave way to cool air, crisp in the mornings and cold at night. They rode for days beside the Bighorn Mountains, whose peaks were sometimes hidden in cloud.
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“I didn’t want to either,” Allen O’Brien admitted. “If we had gone in the trees we might not have come out.” The mules had run three miles before stopping, but because the plain was fairly smooth, the wagon was undamaged. The same could not be said for Lippy, who had bounced so hard at one point that he had bitten his tongue nearly in two. The tongue bled for hours, little streams of blood spilling over his long lip. The remuda was eventually rounded up, as well as the cattle.
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“Go after him on what?” Augustus asked. “Have you gone daft, Soupy? You want to chase a grizzly bear on foot, after what you’ve seen? You wouldn’t even make one good bite for that bear.” The bear had crossed the stream and was ambling along lazily across the open plain.Despite Augustus’s cautions, as soon as the men could catch their horses, five of them, including Dish Boggett, Soupy, Bert, the Irishman and Needle Nelson, raced after the bear, still visible though a mile or more away. They began to fire long before they were in range, and the bear loped toward the mountains. An hour later the men returned, their horses run down, but with no bear trophies.
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The discussions around the campfire began to focus mainly on storms. Many of the hands had experienced plains northers and the occasional ice storm, but they were south Texas cowhands and had seldom seen snow. A few talked of loping over to the mountains to examine the snow at close range and see what it was like.
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“I guess these ain’t the mighty plains Indians we’ve been hearing about,” Augustus said. The whole little tribe was almost silent, each person concentrating on eating. They were all thin. Two old women were cutting meat off the haunch, meaning to dry it, and two young men, probably the ones who had stolen the horses, had caught another and were preparing to cut its throat. To prevent this, Call drew his pistol and fired into the air.
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Allen O’Brien looked at him angrily. “I need to cry, but I’ve got no tears,” he said. “This goddamn country has burned up my tears.” Call had been awake for over three days, and he began to feel confused himself. He knew water couldn’t be much farther, but, all the same, fatigue made him doubtful. Perhaps it had been a hundred miles rather than eighty. They would never make it, if so. He tried to remember, searching his mind for details that would suggest how far the river might be, butthere were precious few landmarks on the dry plain, and the harder he concentrated the more his mind seemed to slip.
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Through the late afternoon and far into the night the cattle stumbled over the plain, the weaker cattle falling farther and farther behind. By daybreak the herd was strung out to a distance of more than five miles, most of the men plodding along as listlessly as the cattle. The day was as hot as any they remembered from south Texas—the distances that had spawned yesterday’s wind refused to yield even a breeze, and it seemed to the men that the last moisture in their bodies was pouring out as sweat. They all yearned for evening and looked at the sun constantly, but the sun seemed as immobile as if suspended by a wire.
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Finally at noon Call stopped. The effort to move the drags was wearing out the horses. When the cowboys got to the wagon, most of them took a cup of water and dropped sound asleep on the ground, not bothering with bedrolls or even saddle blankets. Po Campo rationed the water carefully, giving each man only three swallows. Newt felt that he could have drunk a thousand swallows. He had never tasted anything so delicious. He had never supposed plain water could be so desirable. He remembered all the times he had carelessly drunk his fill. If he ever got another chance, he meant to enjoy it more.
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Deets alone brought back most of the strayed bunches, none of which had strayed very far. The plain was so vast and flat that the cattle were visible for miles, at least to Augustus and Deets, the eyesight champions.
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Augustus rode through the storm with a certain indifference, thinking of the two women he had just left. He took no interest in the straying cattle. That was Call’s affair. He felt he himself deserved to be in the middle of a sandstorm on the Wyoming plain for being such a fool as to leave the women. Not a man to feel guilty, he was merely annoyed at himself for what he considered a misjudgment.
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Newt, with the Rainey boys, was holding the drags, as usual. The wind howled across the flat plain, and the sand seemed to sing as it skimmed the ground. Newt found that looking into the wind blinded him almost instantly. He mostly ducked his head and kept his eyes shut. The horses didn’t like the sand either. They began to duck and jump around, irritated at being forced into such a wind.
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When Deets returned it was to report that there was no water to the north. “No antelope, Captain,” he said. The plains of western Nebraska had been spotted with them.
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The plain ahead was white with heat. Of course, the cattle could make twenty miles, though it would be better to wait a day and drive them at night.
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“Have you cheered up because I left Lorie behind?” Augustus asked as they were riding together one morning. Far to the south they saw a black line of mountains. To the north there was only the dusty plain.
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Though confident that he had done the right thing in leaving Lorena, Augustus soon found that he missed her more than he had expected to. He missed Clara, too, and for a few days was in a surly mood. He had grown accustomed to sleeping late and sitting outside the tent with Lorena in the mornings. Alone on the long plain, with no cowboys to disturb her, she was a beautiful companion, whereas the cowboys who gathered around Po Campo’s cookfire every morning were far from beautiful, in his view.
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Lorena sat at the kitchen table with the girls, playing draughts. July watched, but could not be persuaded to take part in the game. Even Betsey, his favorite, couldn’t persuade him, and Betsey could usually get July to do anything she wanted him to do. Lorena’s presence made him shy. He enjoyed sitting and looking at her in the lamplight, though. It seemed to him he had never seen anyone so beautiful. He had only seen her before on that dreadful morning on the plains when he had had to bury Roscoe, Joe and Janey, and had been too stricken to notice her. Then she had been bruised and thin from her treatment by Blue Duck and the Kiowas. Now she was neither bruised nor thin.
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“I thought you, went to her,” she said. “I didn’t believe you went to town.” “Ain’t the moon beautiful?” he said. “These plains seem like fine country under a full moon.” Lorena didn’t look up. She wasn’t interested in the moon. She only wanted it to be settled about the woman. If Gus was going to leave, she wanted to know it, although she couldn’t imagine a life if that happened.
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The leader of the troop was a small man with a gray mustache, who wore a Captain’s bars. He seemed irritated at the sight of the herd. It was soon plain that he was drunk.
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