Redeye (11 page)

Little holes were around in the walls and in one of them I saw a little leather pouch, or something like leather, real old, tied with a string. I got it without Zack seeing me and put it in my pocket.

We heard a rifle shot down in the valley.

“That's Pittman shooting a coyote for Redeye,” said Zack.

“What for?”

“I ain't sure. That's just what he said he was gone do. I ain't sure about him and that dog. It ain't natural.” He looked out at the late sunlight. “We better start on down. If we had a little more time, we could look for stuff.”

“Do you think that's true about lost tribes of Israel being in here?” I'd heard talk about that.

“Naw.”

It was getting dark, so we filled up our canteens and herded the cows out and down the ridge. They'd smelled that water, I guess, and didn't want to go down but we poked them and got them started and then followed them down and got the horses. Zack blocked off the ledge with dead wood so no more cattle could get back up.

Mr. Pittman had a fire going and hot coffee and some oatmeal, cornbread, and bacon cooked up. We was all good and hungry and he'd cooked up enough. After we ate, we smoked a smoke and took a swig of whiskey.

Mr. Pittman says, “You boys come on with me and I'll show you something. Redeye. Stay here.
Stay
!” He lit a lighter knot and we walked in the dark a ways until he lit another pile of wood that he must have fixed up earlier. I saw what he'd rigged. There was a fairly high tree limb that had a rope over it. One end of the rope was staked to the ground—out a ways from under the limb and at a angle. The rope looped right many times around the stake. The other end of the rope was tied around the hind legs of a dead coyote so that he was hanging straight down from the limb with his nose about head high. The fire wavered light over all of this.

I was trying to figure out what he was gone to do.

“Redeye,” he hollered, and whistled.

Redeye came a-running and as soon as he saw the coyote, he went into a crouch, and started creeping like a sheep dog.

“See him, Redeye, see him, boy. Now, whoa, whoa . . .
stay
. That a boy. Don't move. That a boy.
Stay
.”

Redeye froze like a bird dog pointing. He was watching that coyote.

Mr. Pittman walked over and started unwrapping the rope from around the stake so that the coyote was lowered.

This deep growl started in Redeye's throat. All the hair along his back was standing up. He looked like all his muscles was about to explode.

Mr. Pittman stopped unwrapping. The coyote was swaying. It was a pretty skinny, beat-up old coyote, shot in the shoulder, through the heart it looked like. Now it was hanging with the head about waist high and Redeye was starting to move toward it.

“Whoa, Redeye.
Whoa.”

Redeye stopped.

“Now. One . . . two . . .
Sic
'em, Redeye.
Sic
'em.”

Redeye was off, digging up dirt. He leaped and clamped on the coyote's nose and the two were hanging like one, swinging slow, back and forth. Redeye'd hold still and sway and then growl and shake his head, swaying back and forth all hooked into the coyote.

“I used to see terriers and badgers hooked in like that,” said Mr. Pittman, “and they'd go at it so long you'd have to pick the badger up by the hind legs and dip the terrier in a tub of water to cool him off, and then do the same with the other one.
Halt
, Redeye!”

He didn't turn loose.

“See,” said Mr. Pittman, still looking at Redeye. “That's what's wrong with the son of a bitch.” He pulls his quirt off'n his belt and lunges at Redeye—“I said
halt
”—and hits him with the quirt across the back.

Redeye drops off, but he starts circling, eying the coyote. Mr. Pittman walks over, pulls on the rope, raising the coyote, and when he gets it up out of reach he loops his rope around the stake. “
Heel
,” he says, and Redeye starts in behind him, following him on back to camp.

It made me a little bit jumpy. I couldn't quite figure it. “That don't seem like it would be too much fun with something dead,” I said to Mr. Pittman.

“It don't seem to make much difference, does it?” he says.

Though we have found our way out of the old century and into the new, the word “cowboy” still strikes a chord of adventure and excitement. The skills they honed, the sights they saw can hardly be imagined by us mere mortals. Oh, if each of us, for only a day or two, could climb upon the back of a stalwart steed and . . .

Next morning the pack mule, Jake, had wandered off. Once we got out of the little canyon, Zack checked ahead and didn't find no fresh tracks, so he said Jake was probably back where we left the river. He said him and Mr. Pittman would wait with the cattle while I went back after him.

“Herd him—just like you would a cow,” he said. “If that don't work, rope him and pull.”

“I ain't really learned to lasso yet.”

“Ain't learned to lasso? What the hell? And you expect to be a cowboy?”

“Mr. Copeland hadn't learned me yet.”

“Here. Watch this. Hell, I thought you'd have learned to lasso.” He got his rope in his hands and fed out eight or ten feet of it, and twirled it over his head. “You get it going like this and then you throw it just like you would a rock. Damn, I didn't know you couldn't
rope
.” He threw the rope at me and I ducked and it looped right over me and down around my shoulders. He jerked it tight, hurt a little.

“There you go,” he said. “It takes a lot of practice. Just get up close to him and drop the loop over his head if you don't know how to use a rope yet. If he ain't cooperating it won't be easy.”

A short ways back I saw Jake grazing next to the riverbed under some cottonwood trees. I figured I'd ride wide around him, and then drive him on up toward Zack and Mr. Pittman.

When I got about, oh say, twenty feet from him he looked up at me and started trotting away from the riverbed toward the plain, and I started trying to head him up. I was holding up the rope and whistling the way I'd seen Zack do when all on a sudden he stopped dead still just short of a shallow gully. I got right up behind him and popped him on the butt with my quirt and he give a jump, but started off back the way we'd just come, so I rounded him up, but he just stopped and stood still again. I come
up beside him and popped him. He jumped a little with his front feet, dropped his ears back, and then bared his teeth, jumped a little again and snorted, so hell, I popped him again and he turned his rump at me quick, flattened his ears and kicked, but missed. Since he was standing still I just dropped the lasso over his head, tightened it, and started out. He started out too, like that's what he expected.

We hadn't gone far before I seen we could trot, so I clicked up Sandy. But that old mule just stopped—stopped dead in his tracks.

Problem was that I had the rope wrapped around my hand—mostly around my thumb—instead of the saddle horn. There was this hard snap of my arm and then I was laying in the dust. My hand felt like it had been hit with a maul, but I didn't know it was so bad till I pulled off my glove. My thumb was hanging down, kind of. It was starting to swell and turning a real light blue. I just sat there in the dust, hurting pretty bad. I remember I was thinking that it was a good thing it was my left thumb instead of the right, and had started to get up when I heard a horse coming from upriver. It was Mr. Pittman. He rode up and stopped. I tried to act like nothing had happened. He didn't say nothing, just sitting there on this big mule he rides. I started to put the glove back on but that hurt, so I stuck the glove in my pocket, and felt that thing I'd put in there. I'd completely forgot it.

“What'd you do—forget to use your saddle horn?”

“Yessir.”

“Well, use it now before he takes a notion to head off again.
Let me see your hand.” He clicked to his mule and took a few steps over close.

I held it out.

Jake snorted and did that damn little jump.

“Wrap the goddamned rope on the saddle horn,” he said.

I did. Jake dropped his head and started backing off. Sandy knew to hold. I felt pretty stupid.

“You bench-legged bastard,” said Mr. Pittman. He got down off his mule, walked right up to Jake and hit him upside the head with the heel of his open hand—hard, real hard—and then did it again. Jake's head jerked back both times. Then he walked over to my saddle, untied the rope from the saddle horn, tied it to his saddle, got his rope, and then with one hand on the taut rope followed it to Jake's head, which was rearing up and down considerable, and here he does this maneuver which went something like this. He looped his rope around Jake's near front leg, went under Jake's head to his other side, pulled the slack outen the rope, and grabbed the other front leg beneath the knee, lifted and pushed against Jake's shoulder with his own so that Jake went right down onto his side with a thud and dust flying up and then and there he stomped twice on Jake's neck while Jake is jerking his rear around trying to stand up.

“You goddamn hinny-head,” he yells. Then he walks over to me. “Let's see your hand,” he says. I was a little scared of him. He'd gone kind of crazy, kind of in this mad-crazy way. Like something had took him over.

I held out my hand. “It's out of joint,” he said. He told me to
turn around and face away. I did, and he held my hand behind my back. “Look up toward that ridge there and start counting back from a hundred.”

He was holding my wrist and sort of rubbing my hand, getting the thumb in the right place, I reckon. I'd got down to about ninety-five when he jammed it back in place. I hollered. It hurt bad, but I could tell it was back in. But hurting. Then he got my wipe and wrapped and tied it so it was tight around my wrist and hand and held the thumb solid. So I couldn't get in my pocket where that little pouch was.

“It'll be tender for a while,” he said. “You learned a lesson—about as cheap as can be learned. There's right many cowboys with nine digits. Fellow I used to know'd stick his nub in his ear and you'd think he'd sunk his whole finger in there.”

I didn't say nothing about the thumb all afternoon, and that night I got the fire going like I had done the nights before. Zack cooked up some bacon and biscuits and opened some canned tomatoes. We ate good, then cleaned up, and went to lay down while Mr. Pittman talked to Redeye. I was finally able to dig the little pouch out of my pocket, given some time. When I went to untie the leather string that held it, it more or less crumbled. I pulled out a . . . a
frog
—a dull jet black, and the eyes were made from turquoise. I put my shirttail to it and in no time it was shined up considerable. I put it back in my pocket. I wanted it to be mine.

I woke up two or three times in the night with my thumb hurting and kept dreaming my hand had a rock in it.

———