词汇：herd

n. 兽群，畜群；放牧人

相关场景

IT CAME TO RANKLE CALL that Gus had left his half of the cattle herd to the woman. The woman was down in Nebraska.>>完整场景

“I pointed that herd the whole way up here,” Dish said stubbornly. “I guess I can find my way back. Besides, I got a coat.” Call had little money on him, but he had arranged for credit in the little bank in Miles City and he wrote Dish out an order for his wages, using the bottom of a frying pan to rest his tablet on. It was just after breakfast and a number of the hands were watching. There had been a light snowfall the night before and the plains were white for miles around.>>完整场景

Old Hugh Auld came and went at will on his spotted pony. Though he talked constantly while he was with the crew, he often developed what he called lonesome feelings and disappeared for ten days at a time. Once in a prolonged warm spell he came racing in excitedly and informed Call that there was a herd of wild horses grazing only twenty miles to the south.>>完整场景

Dish Boggett felt angry. He hadn’t hired on to carpenter either. His first work for the Hat Creek outfit had been well- digging, and his last would be swinging an ax, it appeared. Neither was work fit for a cowhand, and he was on the verge of demanding his wages and standing up for his rights as a free man—but the Captain’s look dissuaded him, and the next morning, when they started the herd east along the Milk, he took the point for the last time. With Old Dog dead, the Texas bull was frequently in the forefront of the drive. He looked ugly, for his wound had been sewn up unevenly, and being one-eyed and one-horned had made him even more irascible. He would often turn and attack anyone who approached him on his blind side. Several men had narrowly escaped disaster, and only the fact that Captain Call favored the bull had kept them from shooting him.>>完整场景

He found a creek with a good stand of sheltering timber and decided it would do for a headquarters, but he felt no eagerness for the tasks ahead. Work, the one thing that had always belonged to him, no longer seemed to matter. He did it because there was nothing else to do, not because he felt the need. Some days he felt so little interest in the herd and the men that he could simply have ridden off and left them to make the best of things. The old sense of being responsible for their well-being had left him so completely that he often wondered how he could ever have felt it so strongly. The way they looked at him in the morning, as they waited for orders, irritated him more and more. Why should grown men wait for orders every day, after coming three thousand miles?>>完整场景

“That’s the last one,” Old Hugh said. “You go much north of that river and you’re in Canada.” Call left the herd to graze and rode east alone for a day. The country was beautiful, with plenty of grass and timber enough in the creek bottoms for building a house and corrals. He came across scattered buffalo, including one large herd.>>完整场景

The day after they crossed the Marais, Old Dog disappeared. From being a lead steer, he had drifted back to the drags and usually trailed a mile or two behind the herd. Always he was there in the morning, but one morning he wasn’t. Newt and the Raineys, still in charge of the drags, went back to look for him and saw two grizzlies making a meal of the old steer. At the sight of the bears their horses bolted and raced back to the herd. Their fear instantly communicated itself to all the animals and the herd and remuda stampeded. Several cowboys got thrown, including Newt, but no one was hurt, though it took an afternoon to gather the scattered herd.>>完整场景

OLD HIGH AULD soon replaced Augustus as the main talker in the Hat Creek outfit. He caught up with the herd, with his wagonload of coats and supplies, near the Missouri, which they crossed near Fort Benton. The soldiers at the tiny outpost were as surprised to see the cowboys as if they were men from another planet. The commander, a lanky major named Court, could scarcely believe his eyes when he looked up and saw the herd spread out over the plain. When told that most of the cattle had been gathered below the Mexican border he was astonished, but not too astonished to buy two hundred head. Buffalo were scarce, and the fort not well provisioned.>>完整场景

Newt heard the facts from Dish, who soon rode around the herd, telling the boys. Many of them loped into the wagon to get more details, but Newt didn’t. He felt like he had the morning he saw Deets dead—like turning away. If he never went to the wagon, he would never have to hear any more. He cried all afternoon, riding as far back on the drags as he could get. For once he was grateful for the dust the herd raised.>>完整场景

The men were turning their horses to go back to the herd. They stopped as if frozen.>>完整场景

Finally, as night fell, he mounted and rode on, not anxious to get anywhere, but tired of sitting. He rode on, his mind a blank, until the next afternoon, when he spotted the herd.>>完整场景

This time it wouldn’t be resumed, and Call found he couldn’t adjust to the change. He felt so alone that he didn’t really want to go back to the outfit. The herd and the men no longer seemed to have anything to do with him. Nothing had anything to do with him, unless it was the mare. For his part he would just as soon have ridden around Montana aloneuntil the Indians jumped him, too. It wasn’t that he even missed Gus yet all that much. Only yesterday they had talked, as they had talked for thirty years.>>完整场景

“You’re restless,” Old Hugh said. “You go on. I’ll creep along in this wagon and catch you north of the Musselshell.” Call rode back toward the herd, but at a fairly slow pace. In the afternoon he stopped and sat for several hours by a little stream. Ordinarily he would have felt guilty for not heading back to the boys right away, but Gus’s death had changed that. Gus was not a person he had expected to outlive; now that he had, much was different. Gus had always been lucky—everybody said so, and he said so himself. Only Gus’s luck ran out. Jake’s had run out, Deets’s had run out; both deaths were unexpected, both sad, terribly sad, but Call believed them. He had seen them both with his own eyes. And, believing in the deaths, he had put them behind him.>>完整场景

“I doubt they got better, open or closed,” Augustus said. “I have a few more instructions, if you’re ready to hear them.” “Why, fine,” Call said. “I suppose now you’ve decided you’d rather be buried at the South Pole.” “No, but do stop in Nebraska a night and let the women know,” Augustus said. “I’m leaving my half of the herd to Lorie,and don’t you dispute with me about it. Just see she gets what money’s coming to her. I’ll leave you a note to hand her, and one for Clara.” “I’ll pass them on,” Call said.>>完整场景

“I’ve funds in a bank in San Antonio,” Augustus said. “Also I own half a cattle herd. It ought to be north of the Yellowstone by now.” “I brought pen and ink,” the doctor said. “If I were you I’d make your will while you’re still sober.” Augustus drank all afternoon and did not use the pen or ink. Once, when the music stopped, he looked out the window and saw a skinny pockmarked girl in a black dress standing in the street looking up at him curiously. He waved but could not be sure she saw him. He took another twenty-dollar gold piece from his pants pocket and sailed it out the window toward her. It landed in the street, to the puzzlement of the girl. She walked over and picked up the gold piece, looking up.>>完整场景

All day he persevered, dragging himself along. He stopped less frequently, because he found it hard to get started once he stopped. Rest was seductive, made more so by his tendency to improve the situation through imagination. Maybe the herd had moved north faster than he calculated. Maybe Call would show up the next day and save him the painful business of dragging along with his crutch.>>完整场景

He was not used to the crutch and he made poor time. When occasionally he forgot and set his bad foot to the ground, the pain was almost enough to make him pass out. He was weak, and had to stop every hour or so to rest. In the hot sun, sweat poured out of him, though he felt cold and feared a chill. Two or three miles from where he started, he crossed the tracks of a sizable herd of buffalo—they were probably the reason the Indians had left. With winter coming, buffalo were more important to the warriors than two white men, though probably they meant to return and finish off the whites once the hunt was over.>>完整场景

The crew, which had been in high spirits and drunk on their own celebrity—for weren’t they the first men to bring a Texas herd across the Yellowstone?—sobered up immediately when they saw the condition Pea Eye was in.>>完整场景

Two hours after sunup the next day, Dish Boggett, who had been sent off to do a little scouting, thought he saw a figure, far to the north. At first he couldn’t tell if it was a man or an antelope. If it was a man, it was an Indian, he imagined, and he raced back to the herd and got the Captain, who had been shoeing the mare—always an arduous task. She hated anyone to handle her feet and had to be securely snubbed before she would submit to it.>>完整场景

Then it grew dark, and he wanted to cry with disappointment. He had walked long enough—surely it was time the boys showed up. Once it was full dark, he stopped and listened. He felt the herd might be close, and if he listened maybe he would hear the Irishman singing. He heard no singing, but when he got up and tried to stumble on, he felt the presence of his guide again. This time he knew it was Deets. He couldn’t see him because it was dark, and of course Deets was dark, but he lost the floating feeling and walked easier, though he was a little scared. He didn’t know what the rules were with people who were dead. He would have liked to say something but felt he shouldn’t. Deets might go away and leave him to stumble along in the dark if he said anything. Maybe travel was no trouble for the dead—Pea didn’t know. It was a considerable trouble for him. He walked slow, for he didn’t like to fall, but he walked on all night.>>完整场景

“Dern you, walk straight,” he said. The sound of his own cracked voice startled him out of his fury.Then he felt embarrassed. A man who would cuss his own legs just because they were weak was peculiar, he knew. He got the floating feeling again, so strong that he felt frightened. He felt he might be going to float right out of his own body. He wondered if he was dying, if that was how it felt. He had never heard of anyone dying while they were just walking along, but then dying was something he knew little about. He would take a few steps and then feel himself begin to rise out of his own body, which frightened him so that he stumbled and fell. He didn’t want to stand up again, and he began to crawl, looking up now and then to see if the herd was in sight. He felt he couldn’t live another night so alone and hungry. He would die in the grass like some beaten animal.>>完整场景

He stumbled on, feeling that the sun would burn off what skin he had left. Several times during the afternoon he fell. He grew lightheaded and felt as if he were floating. Then his swollen feet would refuse to work, and instead of floating he would fall. Once he came to lying flat on his back in the grass, the sun burning into his eyes. He scrambled up and looked around, feeling that the herd might have walked right past him when he slept. He tried very hard to walk a straight line south, but his legs were so weak that he kept wobbling off course.>>完整场景

It was the emptiness that discouraged him most. He had almost stopped worrying about Indians and bears. What he worried about was being lost. He knew by the stars he was still going south, but south where? Maybe he had veered east of the herd, or west of it, so that no one would spot him. Maybe he had already passed them, in which case there was little hope. The snows would just come and freeze him, or else he would starve.>>完整场景

After he had thought about it for a while, Pea was profoundly glad the night was so dark. He wished it could stay dark forever, or at least until he pulled in sight of the herd. When he thought of all the perils he was exposed to, it was all he could do to keep from running. He remembered vividly all the things Indians did to white men. In his rangering days he had helped bury several men who had had such things done to them, and memories of those charred and gouged corpses was with him in the darkness. With him too, and just as terrifying, was the memory of the great orange bear who had nearly ripped the Texas bull wide open. He remembered how fast the bear had gone when they tried to chase it on horseback. If such a bear spotted him he felt he would probably just lie down and give up.>>完整场景

“You can’t carry me to the herd, and I doubt I can walk it,” Augustus said. “I’m running such a fever I’m apt to go out of my head any time. You’ll probably have to trot back and bring some of the boys, or maybe the wagon. Then I can ride back in style.” The thought struck Pea Eye for the first time that Gus might die. He had no color, and he was shaking. It had never been suggested that Gus might die. Of course, he knew any man could die. Pea himself had seen many die. Yet it was a condition he had never associated with Gus McCrae, or with the Captain either. They were not normal men, as he understood normal, and he had never reckoned with the possibility that either of them might die. Now, when he looked at Gus and saw his pallor and his shakes, the thought came into his mind and wouldn’t leave. Gus might die. Pea knew at once that he had to do everything possible to prevent it. If he went back to the wagon and reported that Gus was dead, there was no telling what the Captain would say.>>完整场景