Clay’s only defense against these onslaughts was the things he couldn’t say aloud.
Several months before this, Robert went out into the sagebrush to catch his red roan stud, which was running with some draft horses by the springs. He came with nothing but a little pan of oats and a lariat. (Wait’ll you see how good this trick works.) Just as he got his stud caught, one of the draft horses bites the stud, and Robert gets hung up in the rope and dragged. Your uncle O. C. Drury was plowing up wheat stubble about two miles away and saw the dust cloud from where Robert was being hauled. At his age, Robert really never should have lived, but he did. He was in the hospital all winter.
I ran into him after he’d healed some, and he said to me in his kind of whiny voice, “Bill, I been laid up. Can you carry me to the place?” I went with him into his little shack of a cabin, and he stripped down to his long underwear. He pulled back the covers of his bed, and there was a great big nest of mice, just full of little pink babies. He carefully moved them to one side and got in next to them, pulled up the covers, and nodded thanks for the lift. (Set your watches for hantavirus.)
Gradually, I heard rumors that he was back at work pulling up his poor fence and halfway cowproofing it. He brought back his black baldies and his bulls. He was even seen crawling around the cockleburs packing a sprayer with a full tank and a rag tied across his face. He had always lived and worked alone and was still on the place where he was born. (Same dog bit me.)
Robert was an old-time spade-bit horseman. His horses were quick and bronc-y, and the only safe place around them was on their backs. But they were quiet in a herd of cattle and had the lightest noses in Montana. O. C. Drury hauled cattle as a sideline, and he hated to haul Robert’s calves. Invariably, he’d arrive in the ranch yard mid-October, and Robert would complain, “O.C., I’m so shorthanded just now. Would you catch up that bay and help me bring these cattle in?” O.C. would feel obliged, and he’d crawl on the old bay or the old sorrel, both of which would know right away it wasn’t Robert Wood. So one false move, and the bronc ride was on. (Nice way to treat someone helping you out.)
So I let Robert sleep through the night, and by the time I woke, just before sunup, I could smell his fire and coffee. Then in a bit I could hear Leo’s voice, and I knew the two of them were working on a plan. I threw on the lights and got dressed, went into the kitchen, and started cooking. I knew I didn’t want to put on a breakfast for everyone. I was buying time, and I was still hoping I could talk Robert out of his dangerous plan to bring these horses off the mesa with such a small crew. Leo came in with Robert, who had to be helped up the steps, and we shared a big breakfast, and then we smoked and shot the shit. Leo was a little Indian-looking feller from Sonora, with black bangs over his face. You couldn’t joke with him, because he was always serious, but he could work like nobody’s business and make any kind of a horse do like he said, even the ones you’d rather not get on. (Of course he didn’t have a sense of humor. Wasn’t nothing around there that was funny.)
Robert had an old-fashioned, long-nosed face, and you could see a little blue vein in the thin skin of his forehead. He was a puncher who had outlived his time. (Sound familiar?) He hated farming and especially alfalfa, which he thought was the enemy of the Old West. I suppose he was seventy-five. The hat he wore was just the way it came out of the box — no crease, no nothing. He wore it year-round. He said a straw hat was a farmer’s hat. He said that was what you wore when you went out to view the alfalfa.
We always laid our plans at breakfast, except if I was sitting on the john writing out the day’s work on a matchbook cover. Robert wanted us all to go up the switchback together all the way to the mesa. “When we get there,” he said, “I’ll ride around to the crack.” The crack was a deep washout, and Robert didn’t want the horses to get past it and escape. Instead, he’d hide in the brush and keep them from getting there. Once they were out on the flat, we’d just ride on past them and turn them down toward my corrals.
That crack was deep and steep, and personally I didn’t think Robert was going to be able to turn them there. I felt sure this herd of canners would jump the crack even if it meant breaking their necks and no horse or rider would consider following them. If it had been me, I’d just fog them off toward the neighbors’ and gather them up when we had us a big-enough crew. (Why take a knife to a gunfight?) But Robert didn’t think a lot of our horsemanship after all his years on the N Bar and Niobrara. So I thought better of voicing my doubts.
He looked pretty stove up leading his sorrel mare out of the pen behind the scales and tied her to a plank of the chute, just his kind of horse, sickle hocked, good withers, short pasterns, low crouped, and coon footed, a real mutt of a cow horse you wouldn’t take to a halter class. (In short, the whole reason God invented cars.) Robert looked barely strong enough to throw his old Miles City saddle up on her or reach over to pull the Kelly Brothers grazer into her mouth. He led her around to the front of the chute, threw one rein up around the horn, and looped the other around the corner post. She had her nostrils blowed out and white all around her eyes, but then all his horses looked half loco.
Robert limped around to the holding pen, squeaked open that old gate, went inside, crawled up the chute, out the end, and sorta fell onto his horse. She snorted, backed away stretching out that one rein until he could reach down and retrieve it, plait them both through the fingers of his left hand, which he lifted a tiny bit, and the mare sat down on her hocks and backed across the ranch yard. Robert lifted his hand, and she stopped, straightened up, and looked around for some work to do.
Karen came in with Lewis, who wanted to talk about his rabies shot, but Karen raised a finger to her lips, and now all three of us had to hear this damn thing all over again. Lewis at least had a coloring book, and Karen could tap around on her smartphone. I was dying for a cigarette.
Ramrod straight as we go single file up the trail, Robert had his boots plumb home in iron oxbows; he turned to look us over. It wasn’t long before we were on top. Leo loped out to the west and made a little dust. His small form sank and then nearly disappeared as he made a big ride around the horses. They had wheeled up to watch him and only began to disperse and feed as the circle he made came to seem too grand to concern them. I was able to ride straight back to the far side of the mesa, and by the time I got there, Leo was closing in my direction and those horses, two miles off, had already begun to drift away.
We rode straight at them, and in two jumps they were smoking. Our horses caught their wildness and for a minute or two were pretty hard to handle, kicking out behind and trying to run slap through their bridles until we got the best of them. (I admit this is actually scary.) The mares had such a cloud of dust behind them it just seemed to drift off into that day’s weather, like from a grass fire. We’d seen Robert just float out of there to remind us how coarse broke we had our ponies.
Robert was nowhere in sight, and there was no possible way to turn them down the road the way we had planned. We knew the mares had winded him somewhere because they suddenly slowed down and blew out their nostrils. The crack, which was big enough to be an earthquake fault, was the place to turn them, so long as they didn’t try to jump it. All we could do then would be to throw them down the slope and let them play hell with the farming on all those little ranches along the river. What a mess. (Here comes the part I still like hearing even if I sometimes wish I could have been there.)