The Jump-Off Creek Page 2

  3

  The high place named Bear’s Camp Mountain was a long turned-back ridge, not much more than that, with a lot of narrow brushy folds running down from it, good places to hide if you were a cow. Going up there, Blue spooked a bunch of horses and ran with them a way until he saw they were Carroll Oberfield’s, then he pulled up and whistled back the dog and rode on up the grassy shoulder of the mountain. In the gray dampness there wasn’t much sound, just the squeak of leather, the soft placing of the horse’s feet. The dog trotted silently, mouth shut, coat full out against the chill. Blue wriggled his feet sometimes in the thin worn boots. His toes were damp, cold.

  Sometimes they cut sign, day-old pies or muddy slurred prints, but there wasn’t anything clear enough, fresh enough to follow. They crosshatched the mountain, working slowly down to the spring.

  He nooned at the spring, squatting on his haunches behind a tiny blaze, smoking a cigarette while a can of corn heated. He held the cigarette with his left hand, letting the right one rest against his doubled-up leg. His collarbone ached. The dog lay flat on his belly near him, watching him while he smoked and then while he ate, and coming in quick for the leftovers when he stood to scuff out the coals. Blue, waiting for the dog, shrugged his shoulders to try to loosen the bunched-up muscles at the base of his neck.

  There was a little warning, a racketing noise like a breaking of limbs, and then a big steer cleared the rise in front of him, eyeing whitely down the steepness of its face and then pivoting to go along the backbone, running loplegged, clumsy. Blue was reaching for the bridle of his horse when the rifle reported through the sodden trees and the steer missed a step and went over, shoulder first, skidding up a comber of mud and pine needles. Before the steer had stopped good, a man burst through the trees along his backtrail, riding hard-trot on a little buckskin horse, holding a carbine high in his right hand. He was looking after the steer but he must have seen Blue there from an edge of his eye. His face jerked, showing pale twist of surprise and alarm. He yanked the buckskin around, slobbering, clanking the bit, and as he jabbed his spurs to send the horse back out of sight, Blue was grabbing at the roan, kicking past the dog to vault for his saddle. The dog made an offended, yowling sound, but by then Blue had booted the roan and was sailing the muddy water of the spring. The horse took the far slope in half a dozen grunting jumps. They cleared the steer’s carcass at the top of the ridge and started down through the trees after the buckskin. It wasn’t steep. He felt the roan’s off front leg skip cadence, that was all, then the flash of trees in a high wheeling spin.

  The rain came very meekly out of a low oyster-colored sky. For a while he lay where he was, in the rain, waiting for his breath. The dog came and smelled him and touched the back of his hand with his wet nose and then squatted to wait.

  All right, he thought. Get up.

  He took hold of his right shoulder with his left hand and rolled up to a sit. He began to sweat softly beneath the dampness of his clothes. When he had sat a while, he brought his legs under and came to a wobbly stand. He was still holding on to his shoulder. He’d broken the collarbone twice before. But under the squeeze of his hand, there was a bright ache, no scrape of bone, nothing grinding. Maybe it was okay this time, or would be. In a moment, blood dribbled from one of his eyebrows and ran down his cheek. He touched his face timidly, found a sticky wound above one eye. Shit.

  He turned his head carefully, looking along the scarred slope where the roan, spilling, had raked a long gouge through the duff. The horse was waiting, standing patient, watching him. He limped down through the scrub to where the horse stood. “Jay,” he said, stroking the velvet muzzle once in apology. Then he squatted and ran his palm over the horse, each muddy leg in turn, then the ribs and chest, the shoulders. The roan’s wet shag fell out in hanks in his hand.

  Above him on the ridge, the dead steer lay in a skid of wet leaves. Blue stood resting his forehead against the horse’s neck. He thought of letting the steer lay up there, letting the coyotes have it. Then he grunted sourly and went up the ridge, knelt in the wet and unfolded his knife.

  Shit. “Shit,” he said, and the dog, hearing aggravation, turned his eyes away under raised-up, anxious brows.

  4

  They had come up gradually on the ridge. There was a line of pines along the creek but finally they could look across the tips of them, and when they came out of the timber Lydia saw the trail ahead of Mr. Whiteaker was a little rocky line chased on the steep treeless face of the slope.

  Mr. Whiteaker waited, as he had only done the one other time, above the mud slide, judging the steep downhill. He looped one of his legs around the saddle horn and massaged the knee carefully, sliding his hand up under the edge of the stiff oilskin. He did not look back toward her. He watched the dog persuading the cows single file ahead of him along the narrow track in the bluff. She watched the dog herself. Until seeing this one, she had not ever seen a dog do a true job of work, only Lars’s foolish retriever bringing up a dead barn swallow or a hatchling quail from the stubble of the barley field, carrying the bird clamped between his jaws and then letting it down happily in the yard. Mr. Whiteaker’s dog was big-headed, mud yellow, ugly. There was a hitch in his gait, an old or a false limp. But she liked to watch his steady, inconspicuous effort, keeping the cows together and headed right.

  When the mule had brought her up to him, Mr. Whiteaker dropped his leg down in a stiff way and toed the stirrup. He sat hunched under his oilskin, looking off vaguely into the trees behind her. “Some people get a dread of high places,” he said in a low voice. He had a gesture, ducking his chin like a horse trying to get loose of the rein, and he did that now. She could not tell, yet, whether it was a habit of discomfort or of temper. “I knew a cowboy once who wouldn’t ride a horse that stood more than fifteen hands. He said he started to sweat if he got any higher than that.”

  She made a thin, brief smile for his sake, and pinched the collar of Lars’s coat tight with one hand. She had been up on the roof of her dad’s barn without misgiving, that was about her only experience with highness. She would not say that, if she could keep from it.

  He ducked his chin again, shifted his weight. “If you think you would want both hands, ma’am, I’ll hang onto your string for you.” He said it in a low way, glancing aside: she saw in his face that he was wary of her.

  She had not ever found just the right manner for these occasions. She smiled carefully, looking past him along the narrow notch of the trail. “I have never had any fear of highness myself, Mr. Whiteaker,” she said.

  His shoulders moved slightly inside his dirty corduroy coat. “All right then,” he said. He turned and nudged the bay down the little notch, and the mule went behind him without pressing.

  Away from the trees, the wind drove the rain ahead of it. Lydia pulled her hat down on her ears, hunched her shoulders inside the collar edge of the coat. She looked down once toward the distant pencil stroke of the creek and after that kept her eyes on a place just in front of the mule’s stride, watching the puddles that riffled cold and brown in the wind.

  “Okay, ma’am?” Mr. Whiteaker had hipped around on the saddle to look back at her. His shout sounded reedy, thin. She nodded once and smiled in a bare way and he turned frontward again, settling his shoulders against the wind and the rain. Ahead of him the cattle went along quick, anxious, pussyfooting. They had, maybe, a dread of high places. She held her mouth and looked fixedly past them, where the trail went steeply down across the face of the ridge and finally under the trees.

  The mule jerked his head suddenly, but it was Mr. Whiteaker who shouted, whatever word or name it was blown thin on the weather. She looked and saw him put one hand on the neck of the bay horse, and the bay wallowing under him as if his touch had done that. Her heart pitched too: she heard or felt the little sideslip of gravel. He yelled again, maybe at the horse, and the bay shoved ahead, bunching his big hindquarters in a grunting lunge. The edge of the trail slumped under him, but he was
already down the notch, jumping ahead in a jolty high canter, when the rocks scrambled loose down the long bluff. The mule flung up his head, backsquatting as though he wanted to sit. Lydia put her hand flat on his jerking neck and held him steady. Three or four feet were gone out of the trail. The broken edge was stubbled, rocky. She looked at it.

  Mr. Whiteaker called something to her, she could not hear what it was, and he swung down to loosen the cinch on his horse. She saw him stand holding on to the saddle a moment before he let go and worked the buckles. The bay stood for him restlessly, rolling the bit, huffing air. There was a shallow cut along the shank of the horse’s off rear leg. Mr. Whiteaker wet his neckerchief in the rill along the notch and daubed away the gritty mud and blood. She sat stiffly on the mule, in the gusty rain, and watched him.

  Finally he came back up the trail to the broken edge. A little color had bloomed in his face. “Give those goats a swat. See if they won’t jump across,” he said to her.

  She had one hand twined tight around the saddle horn, the fingers holding on rubbery. She thought of backing her way off the hillside. I believe I’ll just go around, thank you. And he would take his cows and go on without waiting. Suit yourself, ma’am.

  But she stood down from the mule, careful and grim, and pulled the goats up on the long tether. She remembered suddenly that one of the does was named Rose; the man who had owned her had called her after his wife’s mother. She didn’t know the name of the other goat, nor which of them was Rose. She stood, fishing uselessly for the name. Louise. The brown doe was Louise, after the man’s own mother. She undid the lead and bunched it up in a coat pocket. Then, standing at the edge of the short gravelly slide where the trail had broken down, she slapped Rose’s flank smartly. The goat shied, twitched her hide, blatted. Lydia got behind her and slapped again and pushed on her hindquarters. Rose made a cross sound gathering herself, and shot across the break. Louise bolted after her, stuttering and bleating protest at the edge.

  Mr. Whiteaker had got back out of the way, squatting up on the steep sidehill. Now he stood up. “If you’ll sling me the end of the pack mule’s lead, I’ll see if I can persuade him to come over.”

  The wind flapped the brim of his hat suddenly and he jerked his arm up, holding onto it. She held her own hat and waited until the gusty wind had fallen off. Then silently she brought the gray mule up and cast the lead across to Mr. Whiteaker. He pulled it and made a wordless, foolish clucking sound. The mule stood stubbornly with his neck stretched out, eyeing whitely over the edge of the trail down to the pine trees and the creek. Lydia slapped his haunch.

  “If you’ve got a stick, ma’am, hit him with it.”

  She had no stick. She backed up from the mule and threw a rock. It smacked him at the root of the tail and he jerked and came over in a clumsy bounce, jolting his top-heavy load. The man let go the lead, let him go on by, trotting high-headed down the notch to take comfort from the bay horse and the goats, bunched up together halfway down to the trees.

  “Now you, ma’am,” he said. He ducked his chin. “I don’t know if you want to jump that mule over, or get over on your own.”

  She had got to recognize in the faces of most cattlemen a little conceit about mules. She had seen it once, maybe, in Mr. Whiteaker’s face, but there was nothing of it now, just that slight wariness.

  She stood beside the black saddle mule, in the rain, and looked ahead along the notch, not at him. “This mule has not even a name yet, Mr. Whiteaker, I have not known him long enough for that.” She glanced toward him. “But I have a general trust of mules on tricky ground.”

  He stood holding on to his hat, squinting at her through the rain. Then he said, in a low way, “I believe if you give him your heels, he’ll bring you across okay, ma’am.”

  She nodded gravely and got up on the mule. She had a habit of going quick in these events, before the misgiving would set in. She gripped the horn, made a little involuntary squeaky sound, rammed her heels against the mule. The mule squatted back, deciding, and then they came over in a clumsy leap. Her bottom rose off the saddle and slapped down when they lit on the other side. She let the mule take her on downslope at a jittery trot, straight on past the bunched-up animals. They fell in after her, as if she had them on a lead. Even the bay horse started down, jerking his head, fretting.

  When she came down under the trees, she got stiffly off the mule and stood there. The dog had brought Mr. Whiteaker’s cattle down onto the flatter ground and he was holding them patiently, waiting. He came and smelled Lydia where she was standing beside the mule. When she saw Mr. Whiteaker coming down on the trail, she took the lead out of her pocket and looked at the goats and then went after them slowly.

  The shank of the bay horse dribbled a little blood through muddy hair. The man, when he came down, squatted looking at that without speaking to her. The horse made a low, snuffling sound when he touched the leg. He straightened up and reached under the saddle, tightening the rigging. “We’d have been quite a while, taking any other way down off that ridge,” he said. She understood that it was a kind of apology.

  She nodded, with her mouth deliberately unsmiling. “Well, we have got down all right,” she said.

  He looked at her. “Yes.”

  The horse stamped its foot.

  “I have been told that a solution of carbolic will keep the corruption out of a wound,” she said, while he bent down looking at the sore leg again.

  He glanced around at her. After a silence, he said, “I don’t know if I have any of it. I guess we ought to get some.” He nodded as if she had said something more. Then he stood and climbed up on the saddle and said a word to his dog. He started to follow the cows. But then she saw him straighten suddenly and he stopped his horse and got down again and left the horse standing there while he went up the steep side of the hill beside the trail. The dog came a short way with him and then made a sound, a vague throaty gnarl, and squatted to wait. On the wind, suddenly, Lydia had a breath of something rank. She saw what Mr. Whiteaker was after, the dead steer lying flat along the brushy hillside. Some of the belly had been eaten out and a hindquarter was gone, gnawed or cut away. A fox was dead on the grass too, a young thin one tongue-choked and staring, and a pair of blue-black ravens, feathers standing askew on the wind.

  Mr. Whiteaker pushed against the carcass with his boot. Then he walked all the way around it slowly, expressionlessly, not puckering his face against the smell. He stepped over the ravens, out around the fox pup, then came back down the little slope to where she and the dog waited. He might have gone on without a word, but she said, “Mr. Whiteaker?” so that it was a question, and that made him stand a minute.

  He looked across at her and then back toward the dead animals and then, tiredly, he began to rub his eyes with the knuckles of his forefingers, twisting them both together, back and forth in little half circles the way a child would. There were pairs of long curving creases beside his mouth and his eyes, and she thought suddenly: they gave him the look of a little boy tickled and not liking it, a sort of pained, unwilling smile.

  “Times are hard,” he said, blinking, dropping his hands. “A wolf gets eastern money for the pelt, and the state is paying a bounty for the ears. So I guess half the cowboys on the grub line have got poison in their kits. If nothing else presents itself, some of them will bait up a cow. Sometimes it’s not wolf that eats the bad meat.” He didn’t look toward her, nor toward the carcasses. He looked down along the gully where his cows were wandering off, lowering their big heads to the tufts of grass.

  “In the La Grande paper this week or last, I believe I saw the wolf bounty was to be done away with,” she said.

  He looked at her in surprise. “Is that right?” Then he ducked his head. “I worked in Montana when I was a kid, twenty years ago when there was still buffalo. The wolfers would bait with buffalo over there. I knew a man brought in two hundred pair of ears from a winter’s work. But that was a long time ago. There’s a hell of a lot more wor
k to it now, and a hell of a lot less sense. A one-loop outfit is liable to lose more cows to wolfer than ever went to timber wolf.” He gave her a quick look afterward, so that she saw boyishness in his face again: it was the look boys have when they begin to swear, their eyes shying around to see what effect it has. “Pardon, ma’am,” he said, muttering and looking away from her.

  She said solemnly, “That’s all right, Mr. Whiteaker.”

  In a while Buck’s Creek ran down into some other water. Mr. Whiteaker stopped his horse and named the creek—“This is the North Fork of the Meacham,” he said. There was a good beaten trail along it. A spurt of water ran in every crosswise channel and spilled across the track in a slippery thin sheet, but she thought a careful mule wagon might get through along that trail in summer when the mud had gone dry and hard. Probably the downstream end of it came out at the rail line along the Meacham Creek.

  He gestured with his head. “Upstream from here, ma’am, the next gully with more than a little piddly runoff in it will be the Jump-Off. There is a trail goes up there.”

  She looked upstream, nodding.

  “You know where you’re going from there?” he said.

  She looked toward him. He had been careful, had not said, I don’t suppose you can get lost from here.

  “I have bought the deed to Mr. Claud Angell’s land,” she said. She ought to have got the way from someone besides the real estate man, gone up one of the narrow rutted lanes off the Ruckel Road there above Summerville and asked at a farm door—Do you know the Claud Angell place? They’d have known the Jump-Off Creek, anyway, and she’d have been able to find it out from there without going about lost in the wet trees and playing The Damfool Woman for this Mr. Whiteaker.

  He nodded as if he was not surprised. It may have been that Angell’s was the only house on the Jump-Off. He dismounted his horse and walked on the rocks, leading the bay out until the water came up white around the horse’s legs. He pushed up one sleeve and squatted to wash out the little cut along the bay’s shank. Then he straightened again, lifted his hat, combed his wet fingers back through his hair. She saw a high forehead, white above the line of hat shadow. Looking at her sideways, he said, “Angell, he never had much of a place.”