He went down alongside the Parshall flume. “Keep track of these numbers on the gauge. If you see a big change, either up or down, come get me and we’ll read the tables and make another plan. You never know when they’ll shut down the center pivots upstream. So, it could change.… Waylon?”
Bill wanted to get the horses but he wasn’t confident Waylon could keep a horse moving; so he put the truck into four-wheel drive and took him around four or five more projects. Tighten about a mile and a half of fence, adding clips and stays as he went. Fix the chain in the manure spreader. Add hydraulic fluid to the front-end loader and hit all the grease points. They drove past the salt blocks set out in old tractor tires, checked fly rubs, tanks, and springs. This didn’t require Bill to talk, and it got pretty quiet in the cab. Then Waylon Remington began to hum. He hummed songs from Jefferson Airplane. Bill began to panic. Could he really leave?
Bill put five yearlings into the pen and warmed up Red Dust Number Seven in front of them. The young horse was cinchy and liable to buck the first few minutes. He stopped him and rolled him back a couple of times.
Bill trotted Red in a circle. He had him in a twisted wire snaffle and draw reins, and he kept Red’s head just flexed enough that he could see the glint of his eye on the inside of the circle. Red was getting so that if Bill took a deep seat and moved his feet forward in the stirrups he would start down into his stop. Then he’d likely as not run his head up and be piggy about turning. This was where Bill thought he was the roughest. Red kind of straightened up when he had a cow in front of him.
Bill cut a yearling out of the small herd. The steer just stopped and took things in. The steer moved and Red boiled over, squealing and running off. Bill took a light hold of him, rode him in a big circle, then back to the same place on the steer. This time, Red lowered himself and waited; and when the cow moved he sat right hard on his hocks, broke off, stopped hard, and came back inside the cow. Now he was working, his ears forward, his eyes bright. This little horse was such a cow horse, he sometimes couldn’t stand the pressure he put on himself. The steer then threw a number nine in his tail and bolted. Red stopped it right in front of the herd. He was low all over, ready to move anywhere. Bill tipped his head and saw the glint of eye and the bright flare at his nostrils. Bill cut another cow.
This one traveled more and let Bill free Red, moving fast across the pen. Bill was pleased to be reminded that this was a horse you could call on and use. After a minute more, Red was blowing and Bill put his hand down on his neck to release him. The colt’s head came up as though he were emerging from a dream, and he looked around.
First, they were going to drive, then a nervousness about being gone so long came over them. Bill said, “Why are we going on this trip anyway?”
“I wanted to go to the Alamo, and then you wanted to go to Monticello, I think, and Bunker Hill.”
“What happened to that?”
“You said the Texans would be funny and let’s skip Texas. And then we were going to go — I don’t know, something about Thomas Jefferson.”
“That seems inappropriate. We’d spend the whole time explaining to strangers what we were doing.”
“Well, we’ll just go somewhere else,” Elizabeth said. She was looking long and hard at Bill, who was clearly in some kind of turmoil. He knew that, even while they talked, his brothers were making things happen. Bill didn’t seem to want what he and his brothers owned, but he didn’t want it taken away.
“I don’t know about Monticello,” he said. “It’s just a big house. The Alamo and Bunker Hill speak for themselves.”
“Oh, Bill.”
Bill felt serious failure very close now.
“Listen,” she said, “I’m going to take this trip.” In her green cotton shirt, she seemed mighty. Bill didn’t say anything.
“You ought to come, Bill. But I’m beginning to think you won’t.”
“I’m going to miss you.”
“I’m going to take the road atlas.”
“You think I’ve just quit, don’t you?”
“I don’t know whether you have or not,” she said. “But I can’t. Something’s got to give.”
FLIGHT
During bird season, dogs circle each other in my kitchen, shell vests are piled in the mud-room, all drains are clogged with feathers, and hunters work up hangover remedies at the icebox. As a diurnal man, I gloat at these presences, estimating who will and who will not shoot well.
This year was slightly different in that Dan Ashaway arrived seriously ill. Yet this morning, he was nearly the only clear-eyed man in the kitchen. He helped make the vast breakfast of grouse hash, eggs, juice, and coffee. Bill Upton and his brother, Jerry, who were miserable, loaded dogs and made a penitentially early start. I pushed away some dishes and lit a breakfast cigar. Dan refilled our coffee and sat down. We’ve hunted birds together for years. I live here and Dan flies in from Philadelphia. Anyway, this seemed like the moment.
“How bad off are you?” I asked.
“I’m afraid I’m not going to get well,” said Dan directly, shrugging and dropping his hands to the arms of his chair. That was that. “Let’s get started.”
We took Dan’s dogs at his insistence. They jumped into the aluminum boxes on the back of the truck when he said “Load”: Betty, a liver-and-white female, and Sally, a small bitch with a banded face. These were — I should say are—two dead-broke pointers who found birds and retrieved without much handling. Dan didn’t even own a whistle.
As we drove toward Roundup, the entire pressure of my thoughts was of how remarkable it was to be alive. It seemed a strange and merry realization.
The dogs rode so quietly I had occasion to remember when Betty was a pup and yodeled in her box, drawing stares in all the towns. Since then she had quieted down and grown solid at her job. She and Sally had hunted everywhere from Albany, Georgia, to Wilsall, Montana. Sally was born broke but Betty had the better nose.
We drove between two ranges of desertic mountains, low ranges without snow or evergreens. Section fences climbed infrequently and disappeared over the top or into blue sky. There was one little band of cattle trailed by a cowboy and a dog, the only signs of life. Dan was pressing sixteen-gauge shells into the elastic loops of his cartridge belt. He was wearing blue policeman’s suspenders and a brown felt hat, a businessman’s worn-out Dobbs.
We watched a harrier course the ground under a bluff, sharptail grouse jumping in his wake. The harrier missed a half dozen, wheeled on one wingtip, and nailed a bird in a pop of down and feathers. As we resumed driving, the hawk was hooded over its prey, stripping meat from the breast.
Every time the dirt road climbed to a new vantage point, the country changed. For a long time, a green creek in a tunnel of willows was alongside us; then it went off under a bridge, and we climbed away to the north. When we came out of the low ground, there seemed no end to the country before us: a great wide prairie with contours as unquestionable as the sea. There were buttes pried up from its surface and yawning coulees with streaks of brush where the springs were. We had to abandon logic to stop and leave the truck behind. Dan beamed and said, “Here’s the spot for a big nap.” The remark frightened me.
“Have we crossed the stagecoach road?” Dan asked.
“Couple miles back.”
“Where did we jump all those sage hens in 1965?”
“Right where the stagecoach road passed the old hotel.”