Spirit Wolf (4 page)

“Cocoa, please.”

“That's a good choice,” Katie said. “I believe I'll have some too.”

Nash's hands were still a little numb from the ride, and he stood in front of the coal-burning range in the kitchen, palms out, reaching for the heat.

“You should have brought Mary. We could have sent a man over to your place to feed the sheep. I would have liked the company. People are thicker than hairs on a dog's hind leg around here, and about as much fun to talk to, at least until you two came along.”

She turned from stirring the cocoa on the stove and gave Nash a wink.

The cocoa was hot enough to burn Nash's lip as he took his first sip, but he savored the rare treat, holding the cup near his face so he could feel its heat and smell the chocolate.

“Ulysses drew quite a crowd.” They're down by the old cabin. Some of them started coming in a couple of days ago. Wanted to do some scouting before the rest showed up, but Ulysses put a stop to that. That man's got a sense of the dramatic. By the time this thing starts, he'll have the whole crowd straining at the tether, all for an old wolf. Funny, but I'll be sorry to see the old wolf go. He's as much a part of this ranch as I am.

“Sorry to chatter on so, but I don't get much chance to visit. How is everything with the Brue family?”

“Pretty good,” Uriah said. “We're short on hay. Looks like our milk cow is about to dry up. The sheep are bunching up in the cold, and two of them have suffocated already.” Uriah let out a snort. “Pretty good, I'd say.”

Katie laughed too.

“You'll make a Montanan yet,” she said. “I knew you would the first time I saw you.”

Uriah turned serious. “It was a tough year. Dry. But I'm going to try to put in a ditch next summer. If I can irrigate the meadow, I can triple my hay tonnage. Maybe add a few head of cattle. Put in a little barley, too.”

“That's what Ulysses says too. Irrigation is the answer for country like this. Want you to know that we can help out if you need it. We'd like to have a good steady source of hay. You could pay us back that way.”

Uriah stiffened a little in his chair.

“Didn't ask for charity,” he said.

“Didn't offer it,” Katie answered. “In case you didn't notice, we were talking business.”

Katie bustled back to the stove for the large enameled coffeepot and poured Uriah another cup. “No need to be so sensitive. We want good neighbors out here. You and Mary and Nash are good neighbors.”

The front legs of Uriah's chair bumped back on the hardwood kitchen floor. “Sorry. I didn't mean to give offense.”

“None taken. Nash, how's school going this year? Who's getting the best grades, you or that pretty Anderson girl, Ettie?”

“We're pretty much even,” Nash said. He and Ettie had indeed been competing for grades over the past years. The competition spurred them along, and pulled them together, too.

“You better take your horses out to the barn. Tell Bill I said to give them oats and a rubdown. You're going to have a hard time for the next few days and you don't want your horses to give out. Ulysses is going to start the whole thing in about fifteen minutes. You better walk down there and listen to him. He'll be upset if you don't. You know how he never misses an opportunity to give a speech, and he's got his hooks into that bunch out there. They have to listen to him if they want a chance at the bounty. You stop in on your way back out. Spend the night here before you go. No sense taking a chance on the weather.”

“We might do that, Katie. Thank you for the coffee and cocoa. We'll be going now.”

“Now, you stop in before you go home. Remember,” Katie called after them as they walked to the hitching rail where their horses were waiting.

They led the animals over to the barn, glad for the chance to stretch the muscles in their legs. Bill took over from there while Uriah and Nash walked over a small knoll to the old ranch sprawled in a meadow below. The meadow was carpeted with people—moving, chattering, foot-stomping people. They were a mixed group; ranchers and homesteaders in abundance, and a sprinkling of men who preyed on other men's weaknesses. Dudes poked out of the crowd here and there, but Nash was most fascinated by the hunters and trappers. Some of the bearded, fur-bedecked men were of an age to have been buffalo hunters. Some of them had been. They were men who took their lives from death, and their faces showed that.

Just beyond the crowd was a wagon parked against one of the old outbuildings. Standing near that wagon was Ulysses Jeffries.

Ulysses was easy to spot. He collected stares as casually as a child on an outing collects stones. There was something about his bearing that pulled men's eyes and conjecture to him. Ulysses looked up as Uriah and Nash strode down the hill, and lifted his arm in welcome.

It was time. The introduction was given by one of the neighboring ranchers. Uriah and Nash arrived at the edge of the crowd. The Englishman turned Montanan climbed gracefully into the bed of the wagon and stood there silently for a moment, waiting for the sheer weight of his presence to capture the attention of the crowd. It did. Quiet bumped against noise until all was silent.

At that moment, Ulysses began to speak. “Gentlemen,” he said in a voice that seemed somehow too heavy for his tall lean body. “Gentlemen,” Ulysses repeated. “There are some one hundred twenty souls gathered here today, a bigger turnout than any of us expected, and that will work in your favor. Perhaps you can do what nobody else has been able to. Perhaps the sheer weight of your numbers will allow you to succeed where all others have failed. That is what we, members of the Montana Cattlemen's Association, are hoping. We hope, once and for all, to be rid of this scourge that has plagued us for so long.

“Most ranchers would understand the loss of a calf now and then to wildlife. It is the natural order of things that predators kill to eat. Our cultivation of animals obeys that order. But this wolf kills for pleasure.

“If you had come, as those of us who live in this area have, to a meadow strewn thick with the carcasses of newborn calves, you would hate this animal as we do.

“He is a piece of the past, a beast of another time that leaves his scat where we tread. He must be killed. He must be killed to make way for us.

“The cattlemen of Montana have carved the future from the dirt and rocks and grass and trees and water of this place. The gold miners have taken their gold and gone. The buffalo hunters have killed the buffalo and gone. Only we remain, we and the homesteaders who are coming after us.

“We have met each challenge head on—and beaten it. When rustlers were thicker on the plains of eastern Montana than the cattle they stole, cattlemen rented a train and loaded it with men, horses, gear and rope. Each time the men on that train came across a rustler, they left him dangling from the nearest tree, like a crow strung up on a fence to frighten other crows away. We were the law then because there was no other. We did what had to be done to make this country safe.

“And bandits were the least of what we faced. At first, there were the Indians. They would come to the doors of our ranch houses, and if the man was gone—if the odds were right for their particular brand of courage—they would rape and kill the women and steal the children.

“And even these, these noble savages we have read about in dime novels written by men who have never ventured farther west than the Mississippi, were nothing compared to this land.

“It writhes like a snake under man's touch. In the summer, winds from the deserts of the world are turned back by the blasts of air that sear these plains and hide the horizon behind a veil of shimmering heat. The summer wind sucks the soil dry and then picks it up and carries it like a blast of shot from a double-barrel into the face of man or beast who ventures out on these godforsaken plains.

“And summers, those dry, hot, miserable summers, are paradise compared to the time when winter has its way on the prairie. It is cold today. The thermometer outside our kitchen window, or what remains of the window under winter's layer of frost, records today's temperature as twenty degrees below zero. It is twenty degrees below zero, and you and I stand here talking as though it were a balmy spring day.”

Nash was transfixed by Ulysses's words, carried along by them, a leaf in a windstorm, but he was brought abruptly to the ground by the sound of a nearby voice.

“That man's as full of crap as a Christmas goose,” the voice said. “If it's balmy today, it's because of all that hot air that old geezer is spewing out.”

The voice came from a rough-looking character with a full, black beard and a derby hat. He was dressed more city than country, with a heavy coat worn more from the rub of bar tops than from work. Had he been a baby, a doting mother would have referred to him as pleasingly plump. As a man, he somehow seemed too soft.

“I thought we came here to kill a wolf, not to be jawed to death by that old bastard,” he said, and he glanced at a man standing next to him as though for approval.

The second man was leaner, dressed more like the cowhands around him, and almost invisible to the crowd. Nash couldn't see the second man's face. It was hidden under the brim of a down-turned Stetson.

The second man said nothing, but the hat brim canted up a moment to reveal the hidden eyes to his burly companion.

Whatever the man saw in those eyes caused him to recoil as though he had been slapped. He shuffled his feet a moment and was silent.

“… Most of you don't remember the winter of eighty-six. Most of you weren't in Montana yet. Some of you weren't yet born,” Ulysses said with a nod in Nash's direction. “But those of us who were in Montana then will never forget it. The winds screamed out of Canada like souls of the possessed, and they carried with them snow that bit your face white. The cattle moved ahead of that storm, drifting with the wind until they came up to a coulee or a rimrock or a river. Then they stood with that wind to their backs while the snow covered them.

“The cattle froze standing up and they stayed that way until spring when the snows melted. Then they rotted from the outside in. Cattlemen tried to stop the awful slaughter. They fought that wind as though it were another man, a rustler or a wild Indian. They might as well have fought death. Their bodies were found the next spring too. Along the lower Yellowstone only one cow in ten lived through that winter. In all, some three hundred sixty-two thousand head of cattle perished—nearly sixty percent of all the cattle in the state.

“And the open range died with the cattle. Ranchers changed, philosophies changed, and modern ranching was born from that time when hell came to this state.

“We have lived through hard times. Through the cold of winter. Through drought and floods and fire and hail, but, by God, we lived!

“This wolf is a reminder of the past. The stink of it curls the nostrils of decent men. It is a symbol of all that we want to leave behind. And we want its head. We want it grinning down from the wall of the stockmen's headquarters in Miles City.

“That is all that I have to say. My foreman will explain the rules to you. May the best man bring that beast to ground. Thank you for your attention, gentlemen.”

Ulysses's foreman was tall and rangy and sported a mustache flecked with gray. He was not accustomed to speaking to large groups of people, and his nervousness soon became apparent in the way he shuffled his feet and stumbled over the words. But it was just as obvious that he was a man accustomed to giving orders.

“Everybody to the left of my arm take about ten steps to your left,” he said, and he moved through the crowd like that, dividing the men into five groups. Then he climbed up on the wagon seat.

“Nobody has seen the wolf for years, but we find his kills scattered all over. We're going to send you to one of five camps. Just so you know that we're not trying to give anybody an edge, one man from each group will pick the name of the camp out of my hat.”

In turn men stepped forward and took pieces of paper from the foreman's Stetson: Spring Creek, Horseman Meadow, Cowboy Steele Flat.

Nash and his father were in the fourth group, and as the foreman moved toward them, the heavyset man who had been criticizing Ulysses during his speech grabbed Nash by the arm.

“The kid will draw for us,” he said, and he shoved Nash toward the foreman. Nash stumbled forward, afraid to be the center of attention, afraid to retreat into the anonymity of the crowd. He reached into the hat and handed the foreman a folded piece of paper.

“This bunch is on Dry Creek,” the foreman announced, holding the paper out at arm's length to read it. “Jack Flynn will take you out there. We've got a man in each camp to act as the association's representative. If you have any questions, you can ask him. Jack, you step out here so they can see you.”

Flynn was a man in his late sixties. A shock of gray hair fanned out from a ruddy face wrinkled like the land where he had spent most of his time. He had what Uriah called “whiskey eyes,” eyes dimmed from the rotgut that passed for bourbon in the West of earlier times. But he wasn't a bum, and there were more laugh lines than frowns cut into his face. He tipped his hat to the group, and his face crinkled into a grin.

“Pleased to be of service,” he said, with a faint touch of Old Eire in his voice.

The foreman's voice pulled their attention back to the wagon. “You people are going to be a half day's ride from here. You're going to be a long way from help if you get in trouble, so don't get in trouble. The barometer has been rising, so you should get decent weather, but you all know how quick that can change. Ol' Doc has promised to stay here at the ranch for the week this thing is goin' on. He'll do what he can if somebody gets hurt. We got oats and hay for the horses at the camps. Your grub is up to you. Good luck.”

As Nash turned, he saw his father talking to the stranger who had shoved Nash. The stranger was grinning, but Uriah was not. Taller and slighter, Uriah seemed to be leaning on the column of air that separated the two men. As Nash drew nearer, Uriah stepped away, and the stranger chuckled. But there was no humor in the laugh, only malevolence.