“What about the little ones?” Chavez asked.
“We’ll all have to carry those calves across. I don’t want to lose a single one.” He pointed straight up at the sky. Buzzards were gathering like undertakers at a massacre.
Chavez nodded.
“You take the lead steer across, Manny, and the rest ought to follow. We may have to whip some of ’em into the river.”
While Flagg and Dagstaff led the chuck wagon across, holding on to the traces of the mules, the drovers turned the herd, moving them slowly down to the ford. Chavez sent Skip Hughes and Barry Matlee downstream with extra lariats to catch any cattle that washed their way. The wagon made it across at a very slow pace, but rumbled out on the other bank and up onto dry land, then proceeded on to the northwest at a lumbering pace.
Next, Chavez ordered Jimmy and Little Jake to run the remuda across, watching the progress of the stock and letting the cows watch, as well. The lead steer stood there, its forelegs extended and stiffened, showing Manny that he didn’t want to go anywhere near that rushing water.
“Ready, Jubal,” Chavez said, when all the horses were across and well out of the way.
“Dag, you come right on in after I get that lead steer in the water,” Flagg said. “Manny, you and your boys be ready to crowd ’em.”
When all hands were set, Flagg roped the lead steer, rode into the water, and pulled the steer in as Dag pushed with Firefly from the rear.
Once the cattle started into the water, those on the shore started bawling. Cows struggled against the current and one started to wash away, regained its footing, and continued on. It took hours to get the herd across and some did get swept downstream. Each drover picked up a calf and carried those across via a slightly different route. Dag carried five calves across himself.
Cowhands kept crowding the herd so that they became a steady stream fording the swift waters. In the west, the clouds moved closer and the sky overhead became overcast, then began to darken. By the time the entire herd had reached the opposite bank, it was late afternoon and looked like dusk.
The hands downstream had lost only five head, but they rescued more than a dozen and brought them back, and dragged them over with ropes around the bosses of the longhorns.
Dag was riding drag with the other late-crossing hands when the first raindrops began to spatter his face.
Then the temperature dropped sharply, and the wind picked up to a brisk thirty knots, gusting to forty or more. Riders slipped into their slickers and pulled down their hats.
A few moments later, it started to hail with a sudden ferocity. Pea-sized hailstones pelted Dag and the other riders, stinging their faces, chests, and arms. Then the hailstones grew larger until they were the size of walnuts. It grew sharply colder and the wind howled over the land with whipping and swirling gusts.
Dag could barely see twenty yards ahead and then his visibility dropped to less than ten feet, then to five. He heard a roar up ahead and the terrible sound of thousands of cattle bawling. He spurred Firefly ahead, ducking to avoid the steady blows of hailstones on his face. He saw, finally, the herd moving away from him in a full run, and out of the corners of his eyes, he saw cattle streaming out of the herd and disappearing into the rain, the hail, and the churned-up mist from the damp ground.
“Stampede,” Dag yelled, but there was no one to hear him. When he looked around, he saw none of the drag riders. The hailstones grew larger and he was nearly knocked senseless by one the size of a pear that struck him in the head. Another smashed into his cheek, drawing blood where it had cracked the skin.
Dag lost all sense of direction. He could feel the ground tremble beneath Firefly’s hooves when he stopped and hunkered down to escape the brunt of the wind’s blast and hurtling onslaught of lethal hailstones.
His heart pounded as the rumbling sound subsided and there was only the clatter of icy balls of hail striking the ground, smashing into rocks. Firefly quivered beneath him, his head hanging low, helpless against the cannonballs that struck his wet hide and staggered him nearly to his knees.
Dag writhed as each stone struck him, bringing a stinging pain, not only to his flesh, but his bones.
And worst of all, he thought, he was completely lost, with the precious herd in full stampede.
Chapter 24
The ground was white and cold when the hail stopped. Dag saw dead jackrabbits lying here and there, stoned to death by the rocketing hail. Now a steady chill rain fell. Dag pulled his sougan free of its lashing behind the cantle and slipped into it. His was a heavy poncho that he wished he’d had when the storm started. He was cold, shivering, and soaked through to the skin as he started trying to pick up the trail of at least some of the cattle that had scattered to the winds.
As he rode, without bearings, ducking his head against the slashing rain, Dag saw a dead quail, then another, and the icy hail melting ever so slowly, for the rain was almost as cold as the ice that blanketed the ground. He heard an unearthly sound, and he rode toward it. As he drew closer, he realized it was a calf, and it was bawling at the top of its lungs. He came upon it, saw it standing there, shivering and shaking on wobbly little legs, as forlorn a sight as he’d ever seen.
The calf did not move when Dag rode up. He dismounted, picked it up in his arms. It struggled feebly as he mounted Firefly, and when he was in the saddle, he pulled the sougan over it to protect it from the rain, keep it warm against his own shivering body. He rode on, blindly, listening for sounds beneath the patter of rain, the heavy sighing of the wind.
More dead quail. And rabbits. A manzanita bush fractured and smashed, its skeleton filled with balls of hail. Then a roadrunner sprawled out, brained, in a rivulet of water where the hail had melted, its wing and tail feathers rippling from the flow of water. A young antelope limped along, bleating softly, one of its legs broken. It did not run away when Dag rode right up on it. He felt sorry for the small creature. A wolf or a coyote would have it for supper sometime during the night.
That was the way of nature, he knew. It was not cruel, merely unfeeling, dispassionate. It gave and it took away. It let things be what they would be. It let things happen that would happen without judgment or criticism. He sighed and rode on, coming then upon cows huddling together in clusters or singly, their rumps pointed toward the wind, their heads, with their long sweeping horns, hanging disconsolately. He left them as they were, for he did not know in which direction to drive them and they were not going anywhere for a while.
He hoped the stampede was over, and he heard nothing to prove that any cattle were still in a mad run, gripped in fear, blind to all but the panic that flowed through a herd at such times like an electric charge.
A rattlesnake swam ahead of him over the icy ground and the tiny waterways, while another lay dead, its head smashed flat, its tail quivering as if life still clung to it in some mysterious way. The quick and the dead, Dag thought, and continued on, looking for the road he had ridden the year before.
The road loomed before him, an ancient buffalo trail that he knew to be one of the highways of the West. The trail, he thought. And somewhere in the mix of the pattering rain and the slosh of the melting ice, he heard cattle lowing, grumbling deep in their chests and he headed Firefly toward the sound. The calf had settled down and only quivered sporadically, so, his arm nearly numb, he scooted his butt back up the cantle and let the calf gently down on the saddle, between the pommel and his lap, where it draped like some dead furry thing.
Past dismembered and bleeding cactus he rode, struggling to see through the rain that peppered his face, stung his eyes. A figure loomed up in the silver-sheeted darkness, a man on horseback, dark-cloaked behind a shimmering wall of rain, his horse’s legs enveloped in a fine mist, its hocks spattered with dripping mud.