The Cowboy and the Cossack (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) (7 page)

Slim and the others had brought our ton or more of oats and barley and corn up from the beach and piled the gunny sacks near the fire.

“Hey, them Ruskies ain’t half bad,” Slim said. “Look at all these barrels and such they brang.”

“We told ’em we’d pay ’em,” Shad said flatly. Then he walked off toward the herd.

“Where the hell’d they all go?” I asked Slim.

“They just brang these things an’ then took off. Maybe they have t’ git up pretty quick. They’re mostly fishermen, an’ some farmers.”

“How d’ you know what they are?” I started unloading the bottles from the pack sacks. “Your Russian’s not too fluent.”

“I dunno. I just know that somehow ya’ know if you’re a’ talkin’ t’ somebody an’ ya’ both know it’s friendly.” Slim started helping me with the bottles. “Some a’ them fishermen’ve made purty good hauls in the last two, three weeks. They tell me fish’ve been runnin’ real good out there.”

Shad now came striding back into the light of the fire. He said tersely, “Some of those cows’re lyin’ down t’ die.”

“They ain’t in real good shape, boss,” Slim agreed. “Their leg muscles’re startin’ t’ stiffen up.”

“All right!’ Shad’s powerful voice carried to all of us over the sound of the fire and the wind. “We got some more of this white whiskey comin’, but we’re gonna start now! We’ll fill these containers with grain and wet it down with that whiskey! Fast!”

“How much whiskey for how much grain?” Crab asked.

“A little bit goes a long way!” Shad said. “Taste it and pretend you’re a cow!” He wasn’t fooling, for that was about as accurate a way to judge as any. Then he added, “Let’s go!” and we all jumped to it.

The rest of the night was kind of funny, in a way.

Old Keats and Shiny showed up half an hour later with the rest of the “white whiskey,” just at about the time we were running short. All in all, we fed nearly a hundred bottles mixed with more than a ton of grain to our five-hundred-odd head of cattle. As we figured it, that was roughly half a bottle to every ten pounds of feed. Depending on how you looked at it, that was either a pretty dry mash or awful wet.

Some of the stronger bulls started at the Russian white-whiskey mash first, as we all started lugging it out to feed them. On my third trip out, carrying a washtub with Mushy, I noticed Old Fooler sniff the air like a deeply damaged cowboy on Saturday night. He raised his right foreleg like he was waving an uncertain hello to no one in particular and headed vaguely but enthusiastically for the next refreshments he could find.

And what with all the mooing and calling and bellowing and snorting of the first ones to try this new recipe, it brought the sick and the lame, the halt and the mostly damnere frozen to their feet, even if it was just out of pure curiosity. On my fourth trip out, hauling half a big barrel with Big Yawn and Natcho, I saw that spotted cow with the yearling calf who’d stopped the stampede aboard ship. She’d had a bit out of a washtub herself and was insistently nudging her bawling youngster toward it.

Along toward daylight, they were the drunkest, healthiest, most relaxed bunch of longhorns anyone could ever hope to see. Most of them were out there on the frozen ground sleeping, but it was a deep, comfortable sleep, with easy, regular breathing and relaxed leg muscles.

“Them cows could all be takin’ their forty winks on a block a’ ice an’ not know any different,” Slim said as the first glimmer of sun began to break dimly in the east.

Shad looked off toward the dim gray dawn. “The herd’ll be ready t’ move in about four hours. I’ll take two volunteers t’ stay up with me an’ watch ’em. The rest of ya’ get a little sleep before we bust outta here.”

Thank God Slim and Big Yawn volunteered because by that time I was too tired to hardly raise my arm or even speak. Along with the others I laid out my bedroll by the fire and almost died in it.

And when I woke up, a bright sun was shining and burning in my eyes. It was like a clear, brisk spring day anywhere in the world, except somebody was yelling that some goddamned cossacks were riding down the hill toward us.

CHAPTER FIVE

I
STAGGERED
up into a sitting position and started pulling on my boots, looking off up the far rise, the corners of my eyes still sand-filled with sleep.

Chakko, who never said anything, muttered, “Jumpin’ Jesus Christ, Goddamn hell!” It was the longest sentence I’d ever heard him say.

And then, as my eyes focused better, I began to see why Chakko had made up such a long sentence.

Old Keats told me one time there was a fictitious thing called a centaur. Half man and half horse. Those men coming down the hill surely looked like a group of those fictitious characters. There were about fifteen or twenty of them loping swiftly down, and you just knew that if any one of those horses flicked its tail at a fly biting its ass, its rider would have known all about it and, without looking, reached back and down and grabbed that fly and thrown it away onto the ground, all in stride.

Those men and their horses were that much together.

But on top of that they were an even more spooky bunch because there was, somehow, an invincibility about them that scared the hell out of you from a mile away. It was like nothing on earth could stop them from getting where they were going.

They wore uniforms no one ever heard of since the Napoleonic Wars. They had on trim black-fur hats and black capes that flowed behind them as they rode. But the inside of their capes and their thick laced vests were bright scarlet. They wore roomy black trousers tucked into very high, shiny black boots. They all carried handsome swords at their sides and had rifles strapped across their shoulders. Their leader, a black-bearded giant of a man, wore a huge sword that glinted silver
and gold in the distance. Big Yawn, with his occasional grasp of description, muttered, “Fuck! Are they fancy!”

“I hope t’ hell they’re not after us,” Slim said. And then he added grimly, “But they sure seem t’ be headed this way.”

“Both sides,” Natcho said quietly, and Shad, who already knew about it, nodded.

I looked in the other direction and saw Yakolev barreling up along the beach on a little pony that looked too small to carry him, the bottom of his long brown coat flapping clear back and down against the hocks of the overworked pony’s back legs. Riding behind him, on equally miserable mounts, were thirty or forty men in long coats and scrubby fur hats like the three men we’d seen in the bar.

“Looks like Yakolev’s mad about somethin’ an’ he’s called out all the marines in the whole damn country,” Slim said.

“I want every man to have a gun in easy reach.” Shad slowly took out his pack of Bull Durham.

Most of the men who were up already had revolvers on. I stood and quickly buckled on my old Navy Remington .44. A couple of others just moved closer to their saddles and the rifles they now had near at hand in their scabbards.

Yakolev jerked his undersized pony to a halt and swung down, slightly tripping in his fury, and stalked toward Shad. The men behind him dismounted and followed, looking ready for trouble.

“You came here ashore!” Yakolev snarled in his thick, muddy accent.

Shad was now pouring tobacco into the cigarette paper, but he knew exactly how much to put in, so he was looking right at Yakolev while he did it. “Want t’ check our Sea Papers again?”

“I have brought these many soldiers to enforce our port laws! There are large import duties, many taxes that I must have to collect!”

Shad rolled the paper around the tobacco and licked it, then started to gently and slowly firm it together with his fingers. “We’re all paid up front, mister. And you know it.”

It was then that the cossacks rode up from the other side. Scared as I was, I couldn’t help noticing the great difference between the two bunches of men. Yakolev and his soldiers were grubby hunks of dirt compared to the cossacks. Even their shabby little horses couldn’t begin to compare with the cossacks’ handsome, finely groomed mounts. The cossacks came up twice as fast and with half as much noise, and when they dismounted, swiftly and surely, every man’s foot seemed to touch the ground within the same split second.

The big, bearded man leading them strode toward Yakolev and Shad. It struck me as strange that he walked with that same cougar’s grace and controlled strength that was in all of Shad’s movements.

“Christ!” Slim muttered. “It looks like we’re gonna have t’ swim back to Seattle!”

The big cossack said something to Yakolev in a voice that sounded like a bear growling when he hasn’t decided whether he’s mad or not. They started talking, with the cossack asking short questions and Yakolev answering a little uncertainly. A couple of us looked at Old Keats, wondering what they were talking about, but he wasn’t able to keep up with them and just shrugged his shoulders.

As they spoke, Shad reached over to a box of cooking matches on a pile of gear and took one, striking it on his thumbnail to light his now-built cigarette. Yakolev was startled by the sudden spurt of flame from Shad’s hand and stopped halfway through some answer or another.

“Whatever you two fellas are talkin’ about,” Shad told Yakolev, lighting up his smoke and tossing away the match, “tell your fancy friend that come hell or high water, we’re movin’ out right after breakfast.”

“You’re moving out before breakfast,” the big cossack said.

Shad’s reaction was a difficult thing to paint. The rest of us damnere fell down. But Shad looked, for a moment, like he had the night before when he drank the glass of white whiskey.
In both cases he’d bitten off quite a bit, but he sure as hell was going to chew it.

He frowned slightly. “You talk American.”

“Probably better than you do,” the big cossack growled.

Shad’s voice got harder. “In that case, you know what ‘fuck you’ means.”

There was a silence as the two men stared at each other, both of them looking like something over six feet of solid granite.

“Now wait,” Yakolev finally said with nervous anger. “I am Harbor Master here! First there are matters of import duties, taxes and other expenses!”

The cossack glared at Yakolev. “You have been paid.”

Some of us glanced at each other, wondering who was on whose side.

“No!” Yakolev struggled to take a small brown cigar from one of his pockets. “And remember, I have forty soldiers here who represent the Tzar!”

“Ah?” the cossack growled thoughtfully. “Forty soldiers? And we are only sixteen cossacks?” He smiled, his powerful white teeth flashing briefly. “Perhaps, then—you have really not been paid in full.”

Yakolev nodded, gaining courage from these words, and put the cigar in his mouth so that it jutted out arrogantly. The cossack reached for the box of cooking matches, obviously intending to light the cigar, and Yakolev now said confidently, “I must to have three dollars per each one of the beasts.”

“Like hell,” Shad said in a dangerous tone.

The cossack lifted the box of matches and struck one of them on the side of the box. With the box in one hand and the flaming match in the other, he extended his hands toward Yakolev’s cigar. He lighted the cigar as Yakolev puffed contentedly, and then he touched the still-burning match into the box, which was just under Yakolev’s chin.

That one burning match suddenly ignited all the others and searing flames hissed up against and around his face as Yakolev
screamed and dropped to his knees, frantically slapping whatever beard he’d had and his thick, burning eyebrows and hair.

Then, as Yakolev was crouched down with shaking hands clasped over his singed face, the big cossack growled, “Now you have been paid in full.”

Then he turned and thundered something in Russian to his men and they roared with laughter as they whipped out their swords and started forward.

But by that time Yakolev’s forty men weren’t taking anything too funny. Every one of them suddenly looked even more scared than I felt. Two of them came up in a big hurry and grabbed the whimpering Yakolev and boosted him onto his horse. Then they all rode away, making a lot better time going than when they’d come.

“All them soldiers runnin’ away from them few cossacks?” Sammy the Kid said in disbelief.

“They was scared shitless!” Slim glanced at Old Keats. “What the hell did he say?”

“I—I think him and his cossacks were gonna burn all the hair off any survivors, includin’ the hair around their balls.”

“Jesus,” Big Yawn rumbled. “That even hurts t’ think about.”

We all started to drift closer in to where Shad and the big cossack were watching Yakolev and his men disappear down the beach toward Vladivostok in the distance. The other cossacks, every one of them some kind of a tough-looking man, were gathering around too, so that we wound up facing each other in a rough circle around Shad and the cossack boss.

Without thinking, I said to Shad, “That was pretty slick, what he did. Really drove those bastards off.”

Shad gave me a look so stern it would have stripped the bark off an oak tree. “Hate t’ waste good matches.”

The big cossack turned from looking off at the distant, retreating soldiers and gave an order to his men in a brusque, low voice.

He’d obviously told them it was okay to put back their swords. And they obeyed his order.

But the way they did it was, in its own silent way, truly spectacular to us cowboys.

Every single one of them, hardly thinking about it and just out of sheer habit, drew his razor-sharp four-foot sword blade across his other arm enough to draw blood. Some of them just got a few drops, and some of them got a couple of lines of dripping red clear down into their hands.

And then they shoved their swords back into their sheaths, each one making a tiny, sliding, hissing sound.

You didn’t have to be too bright, right then, to pretty much figure out their point of view. It looked like they never pulled those swords without drawing blood, and it was getting more and more apparent why those forty soldiers were long gone by now.

And, for whatever reasons, we were facing those cossacks in much the same situation.

The rest of the hands, at least counting me, had mixed emotions, but Shad looked quietly at the big cossack and spoke in a flat voice. “My men and me are moving out like I said, right after breakfast.”