The Cowboy and the Cossack (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) (2 page)

Many readers might argue that the difference lies in the quality of the writing: a western, they’d assert, is filled with clichéd language and cookie-cutter plots. They’d add that the characters are little more than placeholders to move the action forward: there’s the good guy, often the sheriff or marshal of the town (think Gary Cooper in
High Noon
); the loner who rides into town, rights the wrongs, and rides out again (which in itself is a pretty good plot summary of the novel
Shane
by Jack Schaefer); the scoundrels who rob banks or stagecoaches and shoot men in the back (too many to reference by name); the fearsome, loathed Indian, who’s usually referred to only by his tribe: the feared Apache, the Navajo, and so on.

And yet. I once read somewhere that we judge genre fiction by the worst of what’s published and we judge mainstream, non-genre fiction by the best. (I’d love to get a reference for this, if only to thank the person who first articulated it.) This way of thinking about fiction leads to a five-word phrase that I despise with every atom of my reader’s being: “This novel transcends the genre.” I’ve always felt that it’s used most often by those people who are a wee bit embarrassed about what they’re reading (and very much enjoying) and want to ensure that others realize that they know the qualitative difference between an “ordinary” genre novel—the sort that one reads only for pleasure—and the
one they’ve chosen to read. Ghettoizing westerns (or any genre, for that matter) is not only offensive (at least to me), but it also serves to deny readers the full range of pleasures to be found in fiction, wherever in the library or bookstore collection those books might be shelved.

I’m sure there are those who have said, and will say, that Clair Huffaker’s
The Cowboy and the Cossack
does indeed “transcend the western genre.” If people feel a need to describe this terrific novel that way in order to convince themselves to read it, I won’t disagree with them (although I’ll probably sigh—unobtrusively, I hope). But I’m just as happy to describe it as purely a western, albeit a mighty superior one. The story, set in 1880, unfolds around an eventful (and rather unusual) cattle drive: fifteen cowboys are tasked with delivering a herd of cattle from the ranch where they’re employed in Montana (the Old West) to Bakaskaya, a small town in Siberia (the Old East, if you will). Once the men and five hundred longhorns set foot on Russian soil—and it’s a most dramatic entry—they’re accosted by a group of sixteen Russian Cossacks, who assist on accompanying them to their final destination.

The tale is told by one of the cowboys, nineteen-year-old Levi Dougherty, who idolizes Shad Northshield, his boss, mentor, and surrogate father. This is how Levi describes Shad: “He was purely tougher than a spike. And yet, hard as he was, Shad never asked anything from any man that he wasn’t willing to give twice back.”

When Levi first meets Captain Mikhail Rostov, the leader of the Cossacks, he seems alien, indeed. But, as he gets to know the Russian, observes him with his men, and sees the respect that’s growing, if grudgingly, between Shad and Rostov, the cowboy and the Cossack, he starts to understand how similar these two men are, though they come from opposite ends of the earth.

Clair Huffaker’s novel, however it’s designated (or shelved), offers the reader a myriad of pleasures. It’s at once a coming-of-age
story, a thoughtful and moving exploration of the possibilities, and difficulties, of cross-cultural communication and friendship, and finally, a crackling page-turner: Drunken cattle! Attacks by wolves! Bad Cossacks! Noble Cossacks! Tartar Warriors!

The Cowboy and the Cossack
is a keeper, and I hope you love it as much as I do.

Nancy Pearl

F
OR
S
AMANTHA
C
LAIR,
W
HO
I
S
A C
OSSACK
I
N
L
OS
A
NGELES.
F
OR
I
VAN
I
GOROVITCH,
W
HO
I
S
A C
OWBOY
I
N
L
ENINGRAD.
A
ND
F
OR
A L
ADY
N
AMED
B
IG
R
ED,
W
HO
I
S
E
VERYTHING,
E
VERYWHERE.

      
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

      
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;

      
But there is neither East nor West, border, nor breed, nor birth,

      
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!

—Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of East and West,” 1889

FROM THE DIARY OF LEVI DOUGHERTY
BORN 1861. DIED 1905.
R.I.P.
HERE LIES A GOOD FRIEND

PART ONE
HARD TIMES AT VLADIVOSTOK

Diary Notes

I
T’S THE
spring of ’80 on the coast of Siberia when our greasy-sack outfit first runs up against those cossacks. We establish instant hate for those fancy foreigners, which is reciprocated.

Various and sundry unlikely things come to pass, like getting our bunch of Montana longhorns drunk on Russian vodka, which I will try to honestly and faithfully relate, as much as is humanly possible.

CHAPTER ONE

I
’D MANAGED
to limp up to the main deck of the
Great Eastern Queen
to stare off, squinting hard over her swaying wooden railing against the black horizon, hoping to see those first lights along the coastline of the far Siberian Gulf of Peter the Great. I was limping because a big yellow cow had stepped heavily on my foot where I was sleeping near the cattle down in the hold. And that’s enough to make a fella wake up quickly, and maybe even mutter a few choice words of resentment.

Still in some agony, leaning over the rail looking off, my eyes were starting to be tearful from the foot hurting and from the cold, howling wind tearing at my face. Hundreds of handfuls of stars were tossed and scattered at random all over the sky, and some of the big ones were hanging so far down on the horizon you’d have sworn they were getting wet, way off over there, from the surging ocean spray.

“There,” a low, strong voice said from behind me.

Shad had silently come up, and now he hunched his broad shoulders on the railing beside me, shifted his tobacco, slowly chewing, and nodded so that his deeply creased black hat somehow pointed exactly where to look. I followed his steady gaze, frowning against the wind-made tears in my eyes, and finally made out that a couple of those low-lying stars were dim, distant, man-made lights.

“Yeah!”

And then Shad said one more word, very tightly and very hard.

“Russia.”

The way he said it, I got a chilly feeling in my backbone that was more than the cold sea wind could account for. I looked at the lights again, and then back at him. “Well—hell, boss. After all this time at sea, any solid land ought t’ look pretty damn good.”

Old Keats came up then and joined us. “Look
pretty
good?” He pulled the collar of his sheepskin coat higher around his neck with his good hand and grinned, his teeth chattering briefly. “Me and five hundred cows and bulls have been seasick longer than any of us would care to remember. Anything without waves on it has to appear to be pure heaven right now.”

Somebody had once pointed out that Old Keats’s name was also the name of some English poet, and he tended to talk in fancy terms, so he’d gotten the part-time nickname of “The Poet.” Maybe his bad left hand had something to do with that too. Old Keats could do wonders with that hand, except he couldn’t lift it higher than his chest. And sometimes, when he got serious and was talking fancy, and went to waving that hand at chest level, it looked like he really was talking poetry, or even making a speech.

“There sure is somethin’ out there!” I told him. “Shad just now spotted it!”

Old Keats stared ahead, his smile-crinkled eyes nearly closed. “Yes. That’ll be the growing metropolis of Vladivostok.”

Shad’s voice still kept its tough edge. “All ten buildings of it—counting outhouses.”

The lights were coming clearer and I said, “It looks t’ me a little bit bigger than that.”

Shad glanced down at my boots. “That yellow cow hurt your foot much?”

“No.” I flexed my ankle to make sure. “It’s okay.”

Old Keats said, “We ought to be there in an hour or so, boss.”

“Want me t’ roust out the men?” I asked.

Shad looked off once more toward the lights that were now getting a feeling of inky black land hovering around them. He
pulled his hat down against a gust of bitter wind. “Give them a few more minutes’ sleep first. Then wake ’em.”

He went across the swaying deck and up the ladder toward the captain’s cabin, walking surely, with a cougar’s instinctive movements and grace.

“That Shad”—Old Keats shook his head thoughtfully—“never gets thrown off balance. Never clumsy, never even gets seasick. I personally think that he believes this ship is nothing more than a big wooden horse, swaying and bucking and jumping all over the place. And he rides it just like one. Never misses a beat.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He don’t never miss nothin’. I was the only one who could know about a cow stompin’ on my foot in the dark down there. But he not only knew it happened, he even knew it was the old yella who done it! Seems t’ me he’s got eyes in the back a’ that hard head of his, even when he’s asleep.”

“He’s got a good eye.” Old Keats held his sheepskin collar close around his neck. “But I think you’ll see this country better than he does, Levi.”

I turned and looked and still couldn’t see much more than the few lights that were just vaguely beginning to separate themselves and the shadowed earth from the stars and the sky. “You’re crazy, Keats.”

Old Keats leaned closer, seeming to gain warmth from my shoulder, or wanting perhaps to give warmth to me. He said very seriously, “A gigantic new land is ahead of us.”

I shivered in the cold and dark. “That’s for damn sure.”

“We’re a long way from Montana, with a far way yet to go.” Old Keats hesitated. “For whatever reasons, Shad is going in there hostile, and therefore blind. And he will never see Russia, or Siberia, any more than we can see it now. A few dim lights fighting in the distance against the dark.”

“Well, now, if Shad can see my foot accidentally stomped on in a pitch-black hold, with a bunch of beeves jumpin’ all around, and even know the stomper was that old yellow cow, that keen-eyed bastard can see anything.”

“Not necessarily,” Old Keats said. “There are many ways you can see things, aside from your eyes.”

“I’d sure be interested t’ know just how.”

He touched me on the shoulder, swaying a little with the boat. “You know how else, Levi. A man can see with his mind, his spirit, his heart.”

I grinned at him a little. “Ah, c’mon, Keats. You don’t have t’ live up t’ that nickname.”

“The Poet?” He stretched his bad hand just high enough to rub his lowered chin with the back of it. Then he looked back at the approaching lights of Vladivostok. “I’ll prophesy you something, Levi.” His gray eyes were level with the horizon and deadly serious. “We do have a long way to go.” He hesitated. “And if we don’t learn to see with lots more than our eyes, none of us will come out of that big country right-side up or alive.”

CHAPTER TWO

C
RAB
S
MITH
was the first man I woke up when I got down to the dark forward hold. He was one of the few lucky cases who had a bunk. The others, like I’d been, were wrapped in their bedrolls on the floor, most of them using saddles for pillows. I scratched a match and lighted the kerosene lamp on the wall only a few inches from Crab’s face, then turned it up bright.

“Jesus!” he muttered, blinking hard at the light. “Just what the hell d’ you think you’re doin’?”

“Time t’ get up. We’ll be there pretty soon.”

“Good God. Don’t this goddamn boat never get no place except in the goddamn middle a’ the goddamn night?”

“C’mon, Crab. T’night’s somethin’ really special.”