Fur Magic (2 page)

He tried to find something to hold on to, for Uncle Jasper did not turn into the ranch road, but pointed the jeep towards a very dark range of hills, and cut off across country.

They bounced and jumped, whipping through sage-brush, around rocks, until they half fell into the dried bed of a vanished stream, and used that for a road. Once they heard a drumming even louder than the sound of the motor. Uncle Jasper slowed to a stop, his head turning as he listened so that the silver disks on his hatband glinted in the strengthening light. Then he got to his feet, steadying himself with one hand on the frame of the windscreen, his face up almost as if he were sniffing the wind to catch some scent as well as listening so intently.

Cory studied him. Uncle Jasper was even taller than Dad. And, though he wore a rancher's work clothes, the silver-studded band on his wide-brimmed Stetson, and the fact that he had a broad archer's guard on his wrist, made him look different from Mr. Baynes. The latter was tanned almost as dark as Uncle Jasper and had black hair, too.

Then Cory forgot the men in the front seat as he saw what they watched for, a herd of horses moving at a gallop. But the wildly running band passed well beyond the stream bed and Cory sighed with relief.

“Cougar started 'em maybe,” Mr. Baynes commented. His hand dropped to the rifle caught in the clips on the jeep side as men had once carried such weapons in saddle scabbards.

“Could be,” Uncle Jasper agreed. “Take a look when we come back—though cougar is more interested in deer.”

The jeep ground on. Now Cory thought of cougar, of a big snarling cat lying along a tree limb, or flattened on top of a rock such as that one right over there, ready to jump its prey. He had read about cougars, and bears, and wolves, and all the other animals of this country when he was all excited about coming here.

But that had been only reading, and now that he was truly living on a ranch—he was afraid. One could easily look at the picture of a cougar, but it was another thing to see shadows and think of what might be hiding in them.

Cory stared at the rocky ridge they were now nearing, really coming much too close. Was that a suspicious hump there, a hump that could be a cougar ready to launch at the jeep? Cougars did not attack men, he knew, but what if a
very hungry cougar decided that the jeep was a new kind of animal, maybe a bigger species of deer?

The trouble was that Cory kept thinking about such things all the time. He knew, and tried to keep reminding himself, of what he had read in all the books, of stories Dad had told him of the times he himself had stayed here with Uncle Jasper—that there was nothing to be afraid of. Only now that he was here, the shadows were too real, and he was shivering inside every time he looked at them. Yet he had to be careful not to let Uncle Jasper know—not after what had happened yesterday in the corral.

They bounced safely past the suspicious rock, and the jeep pulled up the bank to settle down again in a very rough and rutted way. Uncle Jasper guided the wheels into the ruts and their ride, while still very bumpy, was no longer so shaky. The sky was much lighter now and those big, dark shadows, so able to hide anything, were disappearing.

Save for the ruts, they might have been passing through a country where they were the first men ever to travel that way. Cory saw a high-flying bird and thought, with a thrill not born from fear this time, that it must be an eagle. It was the animals possibly lurking on the ground that scared him, not birds.

The rutted way swung around the curve of a hill and they came to a halt before a cabin. Cory was surprised to see that it looked so very much like those he was familiar with in the TV Westerns. There were log walls, with the chinks between the logs filled with clay. A roof jutted forward to shelter the plank door, and there were two windows, their shutters thrown open. To one side was a pole corral holding
several horses. And a stone wall, about knee-high, guarded a basin into which a pipe fed a steady flow of water from a spring.

In a circle of old ashes and fire-blackened stones burned a campfire. There was a smoke-stained coffee-pot resting on three stones, with the flames licking not too far away.

Cory sniffed. He was now very hungry. And the smell from a frying pan, also braced on stones, was enough to make one want breakfast right away. The man who squatted on his heels tending the cooking stood up. Cory recognized Ned Redhawk, Uncle Jasper's foreman, whom he had seen only at a distance a couple of days before.

“Grub's waitin'. Light an' eat,” was his greeting. He stooped again to set out a pile of aluminium plates, and then waved one hand at some logs rolled up at a comfortable distance from the fire.

“Smells good, Ned.” Uncle Jasper uncoiled his long length from behind the steering wheel of the jeep. He stood for a moment breathing deeply. “Good mornin' to hit the high country, too. Baynes is ready to pick him out some prime breedin' stock.”

“White-top herds most likely,” Ned returned. “Saul says they're movin' down from Kinsaw now at grazin' speed. You should be able to take your look ‘bout noon, everythin' bein' equal.”

“Been huntin', Ned?” Uncle Jasper nodded towards the still-barked tree log that formed one support for the porch roof of the cabin. Cory was surprised to see what hung there—an unstrung bow, beneath it a quiver of arrows. Of course, he knew that that big bracelet Uncle Jasper wore was
a bow guard, and he had seen bows in a rack at the ranch. But he thought they were only for target shooting. Did Uncle Jasper and Ned still use them for real hunting?

“Cougar out there has got him a taste for colt. Plenty of deer ‘bout, no need for him to use his fangs on the herds,” Ned said. “He's a big one, front forepaw missin' one toe, so he marks an easy trail. Found three or four kills this past month, all his doin'—two of them colt.”

“Should take a rifle,” Mr. Baynes cut in. He pulled the one from the jeep clips as if ready to set off hunting the big cat at once.

Uncle Jasper laughed. “You know what folks say about us, Jim. That we're too tight with pennies to buy shells. Fact is, we like to use bows, makes things a little more equal somehow. Killin' the People goes against the grain, unless we have to. Anyway—this is our way—”

What did he mean by “the People,” Cory wondered. Did he mean that he and Ned hunted
men?
No, that could not be true. He wished he dared to go over and examine the bow. And the quiver—he could see it was old, covered with a bead-and-quill pattern just like the very old one back at the ranch. And there was a fringe of coarse, tattered stuff along the carrying strap. He had seen something like that in a picture in a book—scalps! That was what it had said under that picture—scalps! Cory jerked his eyes from the quiver and sat down beside Uncle Jasper on one of the logs, determined not to imagine any more things.

“Here you are, son.” A plate of bacon and beans, a mixture he would not ordinarily consider breakfast, was offered him.

“Thank you, sir. It sure smells good!”

Ned looked at him with some of the surprise Mr. Baynes had shown. “Cliff Alder's boy, ain't you?”

“Yes, sir. Dad's in Vietnam now.”

“So I heard.” But there was something in that bare statement of fact which was better than any open concern.

“This all new to you, eh?” Ned made a sweeping gesture which seemed to include the hills and the beginning of the valley in which the cabin stood.

Before Cory could answer, there was a sharp yelp from farther up in the heights, which was echoed hollowly. Cory did not have a chance to conceal his start, the quick betraying jerk of his head. Then he waited, tense, for Uncle Jasper, someone, to comment on his show of unease.

But instead, Uncle Jasper set down his coffee cup and looked up the slope as if he could see who or what had yelped. “The Changer is impatient this mornin'.”

Ned chuckled. “Takes a likin' for some plate scrapin's, he does. Wants us to move out and let him do some nosin' 'bout.”

“The Changer?” Cory asked, his shame in betraying his alarm lost for a moment in curiosity.

It was Uncle Jasper who answered, his voice serious as if he were telling something that was a proven fact. “Coyote—he's the Changer. For our tribe, the Nez Percé, he wears that form, for some other tribes he is the Raven. Before the coming of the white men there were my own people here. But before them the Old People, the animals. Only they were not as they are today. No, they lived in tribes, and were the rulers of the world. They had their hunting grounds, their warpaths, their peace fires.”

“But the Changer,” Ned was rolling a cigarette with loose tobacco and paper, and now he cut in as Uncle Jasper paused to drink more coffee, “he never wanted things to be the same. It was in him to change them around. Some say he made the Indian because he wanted to see a new kind of animal.”

“Only he tried a last change,” Uncle Jasper took up the story again, “and it was the Great Spirit who defeated him. So then, some way, he was sent out to live on an island in the sea. When enough time passes and the white man puts an end to the world through his muddlin', then the Changer shall return and turn the world over so the People, the animals, will rule again.”

“Could be that story has somethin',” commented Mr. Baynes, “considerin' all we keep hearin' of world news. Most animals I've seen run their lives with a lot more sense than we seem to be showin' lately.” He raised his own cup of coffee to the direction from which the coyote yelp had sounded. “Good mornin' to you, Changer. Only I don't think you'll get a chance to try turnin' the world yet a while.”

“When,” Cory asked, “is he supposed to turn the world over?”

Uncle Jasper smiled. “Well, you may just be alive to see it, son. I think the legend collectors have it figured out for about the year 2000, white man's time. But that's a good way off yet, and now we have some horses to look at.”

Cory's fork scraped on his plate. Horses—but there were only two saddles in the jeep. He glanced—unnoticed, he hoped—at the rail beside the corral. One there—that would be Ned's. Maybe—maybe Uncle Jasper would not force him to say right out what he had been trying to get up courage
enough to say all morning—that he could not, just could not, ride today.

But Uncle Jasper was talking to Ned. “Seen any more smoke?”

“Not yet. But it's time. Sometimes he just rides in without warnin'—you know how he does.”

Uncle Jasper looked down now at Cory. “You can help me, Cory.”

“How?” the boy asked warily. Was Uncle Jasper just making up some job around here to cover up for him? He felt a little sick—after all his big plans and wanting to make Uncle Jasper glad he had asked him—and Dad proud of him—

“Black Elk is due about now. He is an important man, Cory, and he generally stops here before goin' on to the ranch. There's a line phone in there.” Uncle Jasper nodded at the cabin. “But Black Elk keeps to the old ways, he won't ever use it. If he comes, you can phone in and they'll send the other jeep up to drive him down. He does like a jeep ride.”

“You mean the old man still travels around by himself?” demanded Mr. Baynes. “Why, he must be near a hundred!”

“Close to that,” agreed Uncle Jasper. “He was with Chief Joseph on the Great March. His uncle was Lightning Tongue, the last of the big medicine men. And Black Elk was his pupil, made his fastin' trip for a spirit guide and all. He says it's his medicine that keeps him young. Ned sighted a smoke from the peaks three days ago, which means he's on the trail. And he likes to spend a little time at the spring.” Uncle Jasper nodded to the bubbling water. “Place means a lot to him, though he's never said why. Has something to do with the old days. He may stay to inspect any colts we bring down. Still has a master
eye for a horse. They used to pay him well, our breeders, to pow-wow for them. Most of the old ones believed he could get them a five-finger colt every time. But that's something else he won't talk about any more. Says the old times are slippin' away and no one cares—makes him disappointed with us.” Uncle Jasper finished his coffee.

“What is a five-finger colt?” Cory wanted to know.

“A perfectly marked Appaloosa has five well-placed spots on the haunches, and that makes a five-finger horse. Not all of them have it, even if they are carefully bred. They give us Nez Percé the credit for developin' the Appaloosa breed, but whether that's just legend or not”—he shrugged—“who knows. We did and do have good luck raisin' them. And now they're in big favour, for which we can thank fortune.

“So, Cory, if you'll stay here and wait for Black Elk, phone in if he wants to go on down to the ranch, that will be a help. If he wants to wait, tell him we'll be back before the sun touches Two Ears. He doesn't hold with watch-measured time.”

Mr. Baynes and Ned had already gone on to the corral, making ready to rope out their mounts.

“All right, Uncle Jasper.” Cory stood up. “I'll stay right here.”

But as the men saddled up and prepared to ride for the high country, Cory had to struggle not to call out that he wanted to go with them, that somehow he would stick on a horse, that he was willing to walk all the way, but that he could not stay here alone.

Uncle Jasper rode over with a last message. “Don't forget the phone. And your lunch is in a box in the jeep. Don't wander
off—this country can be tricky when you don't know it. But you've got good sense, Cory, and I know you can be depended upon not to get lost.”

At least Uncle Jasper gave him that much credit, thought Cory, and tried to take some comfort from that. But he knew that he had fallen far below the standard Cliff Alder's son should have kept.

After they were gone, Cory went and sat in the jeep. Somehow, with the sun-warmed seat under him, he felt more secure. He had thought that once the men were gone it would be quiet. But now when he listened he heard all kinds of other sounds. A bird flew down from the roof of the cabin and pecked at some of the crumbs from breakfast. And some brownish animal shuffled around the far end of the cabin, plainly intent upon its own affairs, paying no attention to Cory. But he watched it carefully until it disappeared.