Bestiary! (39 page)

THE PEGASUS

In Greek mythology, Pegasus was the winged horse of the Muses—born of the blood of the decapitated Medusa, and tamed by Bellerophon with the aid of a magic golden bridge—but winged horses are common in the mythology of many other cultures as well. Winged horses turn up again and again as images in painting, sculpture, and even advertising (note the winged horse which was the logo of a major gasoline company some years ago, for instance), and often seem to symbolize a yearned-for transcendence, the kind of transmogrifying freedom that liberates you from the common cares of the earth. Flying horses are symbols of freedom because their domain is the limitless and trackless expanse of the sky, where they can roam as they will, without concern for fences or borders or boundaries.

Here's a strange encounter between a winged horse and yet another symbol of freedom and the romance of unfenced horizons—the Cowboy.

Rob Chilson is a writer who has appeared frequently in
Analog,
as well as in
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Amazing,
and in other markets. His novels include
As the Curtain Falls, The Star-Crowned Kings,
and
The Shores of Kansas.

The Last of His Breed

bY

Rob Chilson

"No HORSE EVER born could take that slope at that speed and live," mused Ken Hastie, looking down it. Parts of Arizona are quite rugged, and this was one of them. He was looking down a mountainside. The slope was by no means a cliff, but he would have walked his horse down it even in his wildest youth. The tracks he'd been following approached it well spaced, obviously at a good fast lope if no real gallop.

Dismounting, Hastie kicked at a fairly fresh horseball. This morning, near dawn, he thought. There was no dead or wounded horse at the foot of the slope.

There were not even any tracks on the slope.

Leading his horse, he picked his way down it. The horse, a sturdy brown with plenty of sense in his think-tank, was no longer young either, and had come far since before sun-up; it gave him no trouble, allowing him to concentrate on the slope.

Near the bottom he found fragments of two more horseballs, widely spaced. Both were fragmented as if they had fallen some distance. There were no tracks, horse or animal, anywhere near either of them.

Hastie rolled himself a cigarette, musing. His eye tended to climb; he kept tracing the scarps and slopes above him, always swinging out into the pale keen blue of the stainless sky. Every wheeling bird-dot took his instant attention.

When he had smoked half his cigarette he said, "Well." Not a talkative man. Hastie had no words for the feelings he was experiencing, but that was not new to him. He blew smoke four ways, which the horse might have noted had it been as profound a student of human nature as he was of horse nature. But this time the act didn't signify the end of a train of thought.

Still, Hastie mounted as if this show was over. The brown carried him off along the slopes. Their day's work wasn't half done, and Hastie and the horse went about it with professional economy: eyeing the stock for fitness and flesh, discovering its locations, checking the pasturage, examining every spring and stream they passed. Hastie was not to be distracted, but not infrequently he looked aloft, and no bird passed but that his eye noted.

It was dusk when they came down, tired horse and tired man, onto the gentle series of terraces above the ranch. By the smell the ranch hands had been cutting hay; it grew lushly in these irrigated bottoms, and the smell of cows was thick. Hastie scorned to look at these fat, short-horned animals, much less to drop his rope on one.

The ranch hands were congregated on the porch of the Number Two bunkhouse. They laughed and talked in an island in the darkness, slapping mosquitos. Hastie turned the brown loose, spread his saddle blanket, draped the saddle over the rail, there being no rain in prospect. He moved mechanically.

Though his hair was getting a little grizzled before the ears, he was by no means old; it wasn't physical weariness that tied him down. Nor hunger. He had arisen before dawn, before the cooks, and ridden off without breakfast. Cowboys scorned to carry food like damned picnickers, and he'd returned after the fires were out and the remainders thrown to the hogs. But that was usual, and he didn't even notice it.

Passing the ranch hands with a nod, he entered the darkened bunkhouse and sought his bunk. Stretching out on it, hands behind his head, he continued the day's musings. No one noticed anything unusual; it wasn't usual for him to join the evening talk. What could a cowboy talk about with ranch hands?

The foreman's name was Tim Conroy and he was a good man with cows and knew it and wouldn't tolerate a hand who wasn't also pretty damn good. No one on the R Bar A mishandled a cow; even profanity was frowned on unless it sounded cheerful. The steers' negligible minds mustn't be disturbed; they must concentrate on putting on weight—good, solid, marbled beef. And no prima donnas, either—among the hands. When work was to be done they all dived in and did it. Conroy pitched in right along with the hands, as he bluntly told them. And did more work than any, which he didn't need to tell them.

One of his work-hardened hands rested now on the rail of the boss's house's porch. His round red face earnest, looking not unlike one of his own short-horns, he looked up into the equally full-fed features of Carmichael, the manager. The Roy and Andy of the brand and name were gone; the R Bar A was owned by a New York bank.

"It's the cowboy, boss. This makes the second time. Now, yestiddy, he was up in the hills, tending to his stock. That's all right. But day before, now. What was he doin' then? Shoeing horses, I could understand, but all he did was mess around the smithy. And this mornin' he went there again. Now, boss, we
got
to git that hay in."

Carmichael had given up trying to keep the men from calling him boss. He looked into the distance, reckoning the R Bar A's fields and the number of hands.

"If it's that bad, I can find a couple of part-timers in the Springs till the season's over."

"I hate pick-up and drop-off labour," said Tim. "The cowboy's a good steady dependable man. No reason to my notion why he can't pitch hay."

Banging sounds came from the smithy. "Goddamn!" said Conroy.

"Well, I can tell you one thing." Carmichael idly kicked a porch post. "He didn't help you fix fence day before yesterday, not because he was so busy, but because he damn well wouldn't."

"What?"

"Fact. 'Fore you come, him and one of those peppereatin' cow-ponies of his busted down the corral fence, which is rails and not even wire, and he wouldn't help fix it. Left it to us."

"Goddamn! When he broke it down hisself? And you stood for that?"

Carmichael smiled, half-wry, half-admiring. "Tim, there's near three thousand head of longhorn stock up in the hills. They'll run twenty, twenty-five per cent of the ranch's income, end of the year. And there ain't but one man of us knows how to take care of 'em. Could you do it if he was to quit? Could any of the hands?"

Tim shook his head, but frowned and said, "But—" He stopped, started again. "You're sayin' that if
you
ordered him—"

"He calls me boss same as the rest of you, but I don't tell him to do nothing he don't want to do. I'm not givin' him orders to pitch hay."

Hastie crossed a distant yard between the smithy and the stable.

Tim's temper flared. "Goddamn! Look at him! Walks like he owns the earth."

"No," mused Carmichael. "That's a different kind of freedom. More like he doesn't need the earth. Think of a horse with wings."

Ken Hastie spent the entire summer preparing for winter. He checked his ropes and replaced any that wouldn't take the strain. He patched his waterproof. He made sure every strap of both saddles was tightly anchored, of the strongest leather. He soaped and rubbed endlessly. From spurs to wooden piggins to hat nothing escaped his eye, and his boots he replaced every autumn when he could afford to.

And every third or fourth day he checked on his stock.

Last year there had been a wild cat. He'd sold the hide in Excelsior Springs. This year nothing ... nothing he could tell of. Now he overhauled his stoutest saddle and considered another visit to the range. Not to check on the stock. To look for a horse .. .

The scrunch of feet on gravel caused him to look up. Carmichael, the boss, or at least the bosses' representative, approached him, dressed in his dark coat. Beyond, the plum-coloured Packard was backed up to the porch. Going to town.

"A week ago you said the situation for horses in the hills isn't so good this year." Carmichael began without preliminary—the best way to deal with the cowboy.

"Yeah, they're gittin' wild, and besides, the cattle're eaten'em off the range."

"And you're not too well fixed for horses?"

Hastie thumbed his hat back, straightening up, automatically looked at the sky. "I was just thinkin' about that. Want to go back up and scout for horses, but I don't hold out much hope—and if I have to spend a month catchin'em, I won't have time to break'em. Course, I don't need cow-ponies for this winter, just good strong willin' horses."

"Strong, young, and willing. Care to come along to pick'em out?"

Hastie looked at the Packard. It had sixteen cylinders, they said, but he was only vaguely aware of what a cylinder was, and it looked the same as another car that only had twelve. It was fast, but not his kind of fast. Suppose it got the bit in its teeth, how could anyone ever hold it in?

"I got enough to do to keep me busy a week. Besides, you're a tolerable judge of horseflesh."

"Okay, I'll do my best. Anything else you need?" Hastie shook his head, returning to work.

Carmichael stood watching him a moment. But this was the man who left Texas because they wanted him to fix fence. He'd sworn never to return, and Carmichael, to whom he'd told that, didn't for a moment doubt he'd keep his word.

"Okay, I'll see what they got."

Hastie tugged on a string, unaware of the crisis that had passed.

Hastie took food with him the next day and two horses, and was gone before sun-up. Nobody but Tim Conroy missed him.

"What a hell of a thing! And we got to have him," he said to his strawboss, Linwood by name. "The boss says it'd take the whole crew near a month to bring the wild stock down from the hills, but that ride-ever'where cowboy can do it in less'n a week, even in a blizzard."

"Catch me up in them hills in a blizzard," said Linwood contemplatively, shaking his head.

"We'd lose half the crew off the cliffs," Conroy said, glum. "What makes a man too good to pitch hay? Or manure? Hell, he ain't no better'n you or me!"

"Not as good, to my notion," said Linwood, and spat. "A man that won't work ain't in
my
class."

But Conroy was fair-minded. "Oh, he works, right enough. But only at what he wants to. Prima donna!"

"He's a lightweight. Mark my words, someday he's gonna fly off and leave us."

Hastie spent two days looking at horse tracks. He was mindful of the duty he owed his employer and looked at every cow and every stream and every bit of grass that he came across, and, spending hours scanning the mountainsides, took automatic note of distant pastures. But his mind was on none of this.

"A loner."

High up, higher than stock normally went, he found its tracks. By now he knew them as well as a face. A bit of meadow-land on a high shoulder, the snow-breath air cool in high summer. The strange horse had grazed here alone for parts of three days. The tracks and 'sign'—droppings-indicated it had been here on three successive days, but it hadn't eaten enough to feed that size of horse for three days.

Ergo, it came and went.

Hastie had seen no tracks coming or going. He looked at the sky, saw nothing. At other places he'd seen its tracks mingled with that of a few head of wild horses still pasturing here. They didn't seem to avoid it, but of course couldn't follow it.

The next day he saw it.

A distant dark shape on a mountainside. He brought it to middle distance with his binoculars, studied it as carefully as he could.

It looked like a normal horse at this distance, with these lenses, but very deep in the chest. Broad-shouldered, too, he thought. Sleek, its sides shining, not quite the
texture
of the back and neck. Dark brown with a hint of flame, near as he could make out through the chromatic aberration.

It had been grazing and grazing about in a desultory fashion, and aware of its habits as he was, he was not surprised when it began to run across the mountainside. Turning sharply down the slope, it spread its wings and was airborne.

Hastie watched it glide out, tilt sidewise in a falling turn, and start around the mountain it'd been on. Then the great wings came down and it surged forward and up in the air, its legs folded, its head high, nostrils expanded—he couldn't see that fine detail, and it was turning its back—but Hastie knew horses.

Did a distant, joyous neigh come back?

It was gone. Hastie lowered the glasses, still staring after it, with no words for his feelings. He could only repeat: "Always alone. Prob'ly the last of its kind."

A man doesn't have wings, and, having none, has responsibilities. They paid Hastie to do a job.

"I'm shiftin' the stock to the south, boss. There's good pasturage there."

"All right—I thought you said the present pasture would be adequate for awhile yet?"

"It's not in bad shape, but I want the stock on good ground before I leave."

Carmichael looked up, startled. "Leave!" He stood up from the rocking chair, looked down at Hastie beside the porch. "You're going to—why? Did Tim tell you to pitch hay, or something? 'Cause that isn't your job—"

"No, no. I got no complaints, boss, but I been here nigh on to three years now. Time I curled my tail and drifted."

"But. My God, Hastie, you can't just up and leave us. You know two years ago I couldn't find a cowboy to take your place—"

That was the occasion when Hastie had told him why he'd left Texas—he'd quit this job then. Carmichael had kept him on till he could find a replacement, which he never did.