“Well, it ain’t broken.”
“Then let’s go snare ourselves that half-tailed lobo down there!”
“Shoot, that’s a good idea!” Slim quickly got back aboard Charlie. “I ain’t lassoed a wolf in a coon’s age!”
“You take the left point! Levi, when we’re ready you bust outta here!”
“Right!” I said with as much phony excitement as I could muster up. That kind of tricky, expert roping wasn’t exactly the strongest card in my deck, and I was frankly sort of concerned about the high possibility of making an ass of myself. I was a little surprised he’d told me to join in with them instead of somebody like Natcho, who could damnere ride out blindfolded and rope a jack rabbit. I guess his decision may have had something to do with me being his more or less official representative with the cossacks.
In any case, Slim to the left and Shad to the right, they spurred out at wide angles from the camp, both of them at a dead run. They both skirted the herd that was much nearer to us on the down-sloping plain, neither one of them seeming to have any interest in the wolves far beyond at all.
This way, when they got into position, there’d be three of us coming in on the wolves from three different directions, sort of like an inside-out triangle. Shad could have had five or six of us go along, but I knew he felt that only three of us would make it more of an impressive and sporting proposition. That is, if we managed to catch the wolf in the first place.
There was a five-dollar bounty on wolves back in Montana, which was nearly a week’s pay, so any wolf was just naturally always fair game for any cowboy. But sometimes instead of just shooting it, which was comparatively easy, we’d make a fairly rough sport out of it by trying to lasso it, and making bets on who’d be the first one, if any, to get a rope around its neck.
That big wolf was pretty smart. He was watching Shad and Slim as they galloped off on both sides of his flanks. But they were far away and not headed in his direction, so that it would seem to him that he was reasonably safe.
And we sure as hell had the attention of the cossacks. They were watching Shad and Slim, slightly puzzled, or possibly even thinking both men had suddenly gone crazy.
They reached their far-off points and turned their horses, so now it was my turn to act. I lunged Buck down the slope before me, straight toward the distant wolves, at the same time letting out a long, fierce yell. I’m not a great lassoer, but I’m a hell of a good yeller, and a lot of the cows I was now galloping by shied off nervously, thinking the end of the world was roaring past them.
The wolf started away in an easy, loping retreat, the bitch and pup following after him. And then for the first time that big black male began to realize he was in deep trouble.
From each of their points Shad and Slim were barreling toward him too, yelling their lungs out. All that hollering was supposed to scare and confuse a wolf, to panic him so he wouldn’t be quite as smart as usual, and it generally worked. But not with that tough, half-tailed big bastard. He stopped dead, seeing that he was kind of surrounded and sizing up the situation calmly.
He didn’t have a whole lot of time to think about it, because we were coming in like bats out of hell. Both Shad and Slim had their lariats out, and Slim was already twirling a loop in his right hand. I got my rope off the saddle and damnere dropped it as Buck leaped over a knee-high outcropping of rocks that appeared in our path.
And then the big wolf made its decision. It seemed to instinctively know that it was him we were after. And he gave some kind of a command to the bitch and the pup in whatever kind of talk wolves talk. Apropos of that wolf talk, I have been known to be wrong, but I do believe that animals do talk, even though they may have a pretty limited choice of words. Then he turned and raced in my general direction like a streak of greased lightning.
I sure as hell had to admire that damn wolf, for two reasons. First, he’d somehow unerringly picked the weakest of the three links, me, for an escape route. Second, and most important, was the fact that the bitch and the pup, following his orders, took off as fast as they could in exactly the opposite direction. That wolf, like any really good man would have done, was pulling us enemies off after him so that the other two weaker ones would have a better chance to live.
And his plan worked perfectly. Both Shad and Slim instantly veered in that slightly new direction, and with my legs I turned Buck just a little left to match the angle that it looked like the wolf was going. I had a loop going now, but Jesus the timing was going to be tough. I rode a train once that went sixty miles per hour, and that was kind of breathtaking. But estimating by that, at the rate that wolf was going and Buck was going, we’d pass each other at roughly goddamn near one thousand miles per minute.
At the very last instant, as he was streaking past me on my left, I threw that loop as hard and fast as a rock. From the swift move of my arm, he guessed that something bad was about to maybe happen. He was going too fast to change direction too much or too quickly, but in that split second he suddenly leaped nearly six feet straight up in the air.
My throw must have been terrible, because if he hadn’t leaped like that I’d have missed him by a mile. As it was, I accidentally caught his left hind leg while he was in mid-flight.
He must have weighed over a hundred pounds, and when his flying, lunging weight snapped violently tight on my right hand holding the other end of the rope, it felt like I’d lassoed a speeding mountain.
I hadn’t had time or even thought of taking a dolly around the saddle horn, so the whole force hit me instead of the saddle with Buck’s weight under it. Therefore, I was damnere jerked off onto the ground. I wound up with only my right knee across the saddle, clutching desperately to it with all the muscles in that leg, and for a while my head was so far down it was hitting the tall grass.
I’d have gone off altogether except that, luckily, the rope only stayed on the wolf’s leg for maybe a second. Then it slipped off as the wolf somersaulted down from its six-foot leap. He must have rolled over three or four times before he got his feet back under him again, running.
But that brief time he lost turned the tables against him. Shad and Slim sped past me as I tried to slow and turn Buck. And Shad tossed the first noose over the wolf’s neck while I was turning Buck. Caught, the big black struggled furiously for a moment, leaping against the rope. Then, finding he couldn’t jerk free, he turned and charged defiantly at Shad to do all the damage he could to both Shad and Red.
But Slim’s rope snaked out now, and this second noose snapped tight around the wolf’s neck from the other side, so that he was strung out between the two of them, unable to either attack or get away.
“Boy!” Slim muttered, dollying out a little rope so that the big, thrashing wolf wouldn’t strangle itself. “He surely is a monster.”
We could hear the cowboys, and maybe some of the cossacks, yelling and cheering from off in the distance.
I was rolling up my rope, making loops down from my thumb and around my elbow, and Shad said, “That was some hell of a throw, Levi, leg-catching him right in midair that way.”
I hung the lariat back on my saddle. “I was aimin’ for his neck.”
I guess he knew this in the first place because he just answered with one of those brief half-grins of his.
“Now we got ’im,” Slim said, “what we gonna do with ’im?”
“There’s only one courteous thing to do. We’ll give ’im to Rostov as a token of our affection.”
“Aw, c’mon, Shad,” I said.
“Yeah,” Slim agreed. “I doubt he’d take that as bein’ altogether friendly.”