Bestiary! (40 page)

"I been thinkin' about that. I'll put the stock where they'll be all right for three weeks, a month or five weeks if it rains. You can find someone."

Carmichael shook his head, flung out his hands helplessly.

"If you can't find anybody, you might try that fellow Slim works at the livery in town. He's a fair hand with horses and I seen him rope."

"You said two years ago he'd never be a cowboy." "No, he won't, but he's the best around."

Hastie's real objection to Slim was that the young man had once taken a job on a ranch where he had milked cows.

Hastie himself had once owned a small ranch. He'd taken up land, cut logs, built a tiny cabin and a larger stable, a corral, outbuildings, and fixed his own fences and milked his own cow, as well as feeding slops to a pig he had kept one summer. But a man, even a cowboy, will do for himself what he won't for others, for pay. Slim would never be a cowboy.

Moving the stock was a tedious but not difficult operation. Hastie had brought them down from the mountains in the teeth of a blizzard once, and had fought through more ordinary snowstorms to bring out stock that had been missed in the earlier sweeps, bucking through waist-deep snow. Those terrible struggles against great odds were not to him romantic or thrilling. His was a flat, matter-of-fact outlook. Hard work and danger were a part of the way of life of a cowboy. Romance was for womenfolks, reading books.

He just called it a job. Tim Conroy would have approved.

It was that attitude that held Hastie motionless now.

He sat his horse with its feet on gravel, drinking from a clear mountain stream. The stream bank was just before him, about the height of his knees. Along it grew a screening line of willow and aspen. Beyond the screen was a rather brushy glade.

The horse with wings was there.

It had ignored his unsuspecting approach, hearing nothing unusual in a horse's advance to the stream for a drink; the breeze was up the mountain, from it to him. It spread its left wing now and licked the underside, oblivious.

Hastie's rope was just in front of his hand, and the horse's neck was within easy reach of a throw. He'd seen it in motion once before, on the ground, and knew that it had to have considerable speed to get into the air, like one of those aeroplanes Hastie had heard of. It would be a savage battle, with the horse leaping and beating its powerful wings, but he could have had it.

But he'd made a man a promise.

Besides, he'd sort of made himself a promise.

And what's more, he owed it to the horse, didn't he?

The horse spread its wings, stretching, and flapped them silently a couple of times. Wind blew out from it. It was a fairly large horse, dark brown with a red cast to its hair, a hint of subdued fired where the sun ran along it. The wings weren't covered with feathers as he'd thought, but with what looked like shingles of horsehair. Hastie had never heard of agglutinated hair and thought a rhino's horn was made of horn, but he compared the shingles to horsehair licked into placed and sticking together wet, continuing to stick after drying. Glued together.

The horse, ignoring the restless shifting of the cowpony's feet, made a lonely whickering sound and tossed its head, looking all about it. Then it charged across the dell, spread its wings, flapped them heavily and with some noise—but not much, for its size—and again, and was airborne, folding its legs back but low yet. Circling, its wings beating easily, it climbed until it found the uprush of air along the mountainside, and wheeled into the sky.

"It wouldn't'a'been right," said Hastie to no one, looking after it without expression.

The sorrel snorted softly and stamped to dislodge a fly.

Tim Conroy was outraged. "My God, boss, a man doesn't just up and walk off from a job because he feels like he's been there too long! Now if he had a reason, or could make more—We should'a' fired him a long time ago."

"I would have, if I could have found a replacement. I've come to appreciate cowboys some since, Tim, and I doubt if any replacement would've been any better. Cowboys were an independent bunch."

Tim shook his head, unable to picture a world in which the best men were so independent they thought nothing of throwing up a good job on a whim. If his best men were like that, the ranch would fall apart. Nothing would get done.

"They're not just working men, Tim. They're highly skilled technicians, like automobile mechanics. Automobiles are fairly new, so not many people know about them, but there's a lot of 'em, so there's a great need for mechanics. It was the same for cowboys."

"How could you run a ranch when all the hands are prima donnas?"

"I guess it cancels out. And they're good at keeping their word, taken all around."

Tim considered all that, shook his head. A prima donna was a prima donna to his mind. "What about Raynard? I already made it plain to him that he's no better than the rest of us. I'll have him pitchin' hay the day after he shows up. Think he'll quit? He didn't seem to take it hard."

"Hastie said he'd never be a cowboy. I expect he's right. But he's the best I could find. Cowboys are gone ... If Slim will pitch hay, have him pitch. I just hope to hell he can handle stock, too."

Tim nodded soberly at that.

Carmichael shook his head. "Like I said. He's the last of his breed."

It would rain. Good. That'd stretch the pasturage a week, if it rained enough. Hastie sat down and slid his booted feet under his waterproof. Unbuckling his belt, he slid his pants down his legs to the boot-tops, then drew his feet out of his boots. In the old days, during round-ups, he undressed that way routinely. He had only to dive his feet down into his boots and pull up his pants to be ready to ride, in the event of an emergency, and the loose waterproof kept everything dry.

Sliding dexterously sideways into the bedroll, he lay musing, looking at the stars being cut off by the encroaching clouds.

Hastie had finished moving the stock, as he'd promised, but hadn't gone back to the ranch. It no longer held anything he wanted.

It had been a long life, though he wasn't forty yet. Cowboys were gone, and the future belonged to the ranch hands, fixing barbed wire and stall-feeding short-horns with grain. There just wasn't much place left for a man who hadn't been able to make a go of ranching on his own. To continue working, you had to be a ranch hand.

Not me, he thought.

Hastie wondered how it felt to pilot an aeroplane. He thought he knew the breed of men who did. Young, they were, and independent, and proud of themselves, their craft, and their skill .. .

His father'd been like that. Hastie was born on the open range, a birth that killed his mother. With that, the heart went out of his father, who was killed in a common dust-up at a corral branding when his horse went down.

After his father was killed, Hastie was taken in hand by a small rancher his father had befriended. The old man raised him on up to years of discretion. He'd been good at breaking horses and roping cattle before he was old enough to drink. He'd ranged the west from beyond the Canadian border to beyond the border of Old Mexico. For a time there in the south he'd ridden the high trails of outlawry, rustling cattle south of the border and bringing them north, to sell them again south of the border.

He'd associated with The Men Who Can't Come Back, that inglorious legion, at that time, and been offered the job of working a machine-gun with some of them, in the pay of a gang of ragged promoters of liberty, equality, fraternity. But he didn't speak the language, and those people didn't speak his language. Their promises, even the white men, were no good, and he wouldn't associate with someone he couldn't trust. So he'd come back, and had ridden down from the high trails, which he figured meant he was grown up now and not a wild young cowboy.

"I always thought growin' up and gettin' old were the same thing. Now I figure one causes the other. Wonder which ..."

The brown came down out of the mountains alone. It wore no saddle, nor were there reins on its bridle. Yet its presence smelled of death. The ranch hands milled about, hushed and solemn.

"He had two horses, boss," said Tim Conroy, subdued. "This'n and the sorrel. One packed and the other rode."

"Likely he and the sorrel are piled up at the bottom of some slope," said Carmichael.

"What about Hastie?"

"We're bound to look for him. But, Tim, this crew can't handle that. We haven't all that many good riding horses, not suitable for mountain work—"

"Or men who can ride that well," said Conroy quietly.

"Right. I'll take Raynard; we'll ride Hastie's horses—have Slim saddle the bay and the new gelding. We'll take the brown along for Hastie, it doesn't look too tired. Evidently it never panicked."

"It was out to pasture when it happened, I reckon." "Yes. The two of us'll have to do—you keep the hands busy."

"Right. And—good luck, boss."

For days Hastie had sought a certain place he'd never seen. A cove or valley high up on a mountain, shielded from the northwest winds. It needn't be very big, nor have much pasturage.

When he found that bedding ground, he found more: the spring where the winged horse drank. Characteristically, this was not even on the same mountain; it swooped over above a narrow valley for its morning drink. Hastie spent all night getting into position; there was time only for a couple of hours of restless sleep before the pre-dawn light woke him.

He was ready, suppressing any reaction to the chill of morning, looking down on the spring. It was like a cup hacked out of a steep house roof. The wind was favourable, behind the horse on its matutinal swoop. Hastie was calm, at peace. He'd left his camp neat, the horses unhobbled, all promises filled.

And there it came, wheeling against the blue-grey sky, great wings spread wide. It grew and grew and grew. Then the wings came together, and again, and again, and Hastie's hat vibrated on his head. He slitted his eyes and didn't move. Wheeling sharply, its wing tip seeming to brush the steep scarp, it came level and folding its wings, landed springily at a trot on the nearly level spot before the break in the slope where the spring bubbled out.

It walked coolly forward, lowered its proud head, standing almost under Hastie on the rim of the cup. He'd studied its tracks well and knew where to put himself. It drank, raised its head, looked about; lowered its head again. Hastie, who'd had no breakfast, let it drink its fill. Then he sprang on its back.

It reared with an angry neigh, wheeled in the close quarters, bucked once, kicking. Hastie's legs held its wings closed, but as it erupted out of the cup he gambled, slipping first one leg up and then the other far enough to let it unfold them. The horse sprang forward, neighing again in fury, and beat its wings. Hastie's hat flew off; the string caught it. A bucking leap took them into the air. The world swooped and spun around them. Hastie gasped for breath, fear an emptiness in his belly, a grip in his legs and hands. His fingers ached in the horse's mane.

The horse made an amazing buck in mid-air, but it was nothing to Hastie, since it lacked the spine-wracking jolt at the end. It spun about abruptly, dived, beat upward, and none of these evolutions were so severe as those a horse could make, thrusting hoofs against solid ground. Only the slippery insecurity of horsehair under his pants made them dangerous. Hastie still panted, but his stark fear had eased.

Then the horse turned upside down. He felt his legs slipping, only his hands held him on, death was near—thousands of feet down—But the horse could no more tolerate that then he, and righted itself in time.

It can't fly upside down!
he thought. And he knew he'd won.

The horse levelled out, sobbing for breath and fear, and looked back at him. Its eyes were white-ringed. A surge of confidence came over Hastie and he let his eyes sweep around. Mountains before and behind and to every side, slopes here, there and everywhere, valleys and canyons below. All their snow.

The horse was over the first panicked fury, building up strength for the next bout. Hastie leaned forward, talking softly to it. Now he was confident; he knew he could not fail. For Hastie knew horses. He could foresee each successive battle, each trick and sleight and feint, and knew that he could not lose. Each battle would leave him stronger and the horse more docile.

"There now, there now, it's not so bad, is it?"

He'd made up his mind never to tie it down, he'd brought no rope with him, nothing but hobbles and bridle.

It would be the ultimate test of his skill, to tame and train this creature of the sky without breaking its spirit or letting it escape. But he felt nothing but the most unutterable confidence in his ability.

They flew easily across the sky, riding the thermals above the mountains, swooping and soaring, and his heart beat high for fear and joy. What a horse!

Abruptly it 'broke in half', kicked in mid-air, bucked, spun, flipped over on its back—that nearly caught him—and bucked again. Hastie, gasping for breath, held on with a fierce elation, knowing he could not lose, that this was his fated horse, this sky his sky.

He'd been training for this all his life .. .

Tim Conroy watched sharply to his right, and when the rake came even with the hay, he heaved down on the lever. The curved tines of the rake raised and dumped the rolling cylinder of hay they'd scraped up. The little pint pony perked steadily on at its light trot and he dropped the tines again. The pony was smart and already knew the pattern, making now for the next line of hay. Tim held himself ready at all times to kick his heels in the air and roll backwards out of the big iron seat if bumblebees should go for the horse, lest he fall off in front and be dragged to death when the horse panicked.

At the end of the field they circled and he glanced swiftly around, saw nothing amiss, and let his eyes go to the mountains beyond. Slim and the boss were still out there, but it'd been a couple of days, and Tim knew that they'd never bring the cowboy back alive. He doubted if they'd even find the body. Fell off some cliff, likely, or went off when one of those half-wild ponies started bucking for no reason at all, as they frequently did. He shook his head morbidly. Too bad.