The Hearts of Horses (27 page)

The Little Bird Woman River sauntered across the valley floor between the Whitehorns and the Clarks Range at an agile but dignified clip, and then at the east end of the valley picked up speed and made a dash downhill, cutting a steep gorge through cliffs and terraces and talus slopes of dark basalt blotched and streaked with red iron oxide, which was the Lewis Pass. The road had been put through in the heyday when the canyon had been settled end to end by the farms of people coming late to the game, claiming homesteads in that marginal land along the river where they could graze a few head of stock on the small handkerchiefs of grass at the bottom and plant alfalfa hay on the patches of flat benchland. In those early days the road had carried a lot of wagon traffic, but the farms had quickly starved out and now the canyon was owned, by and large, by the mule deer and the whitebark pines; the grassland benches were summer range for a few ranches whose winter headquarters were down around Long Creek.

The road, twisting along the bottom of the river gorge, crossed the river and crossed it again—six bridges in fifteen
miles—and never out of range of the ringing, boisterous cannon-racket of water pouring downhill between stone walls. The road was almost entirely built on bald scabs of rock so in rainy weather it was a puddled track but muddy only where springs or small creeks brought dirt down from the brushy draws.

The two cars that passed Martha, bumping and jarring over the rough, ridged rock, weren't having any trouble getting through the stream wash. A hardware salesman headed up from Canyon City to his customers in Elwha County stopped his car and shouted over the rattle of the engine, no, he hadn't stopped at Eightmile Crossing, didn't know if a Mr. Romer was in the roadhouse there. In the second car a young couple fully decked out in dusters and goggles and gloves smiled and waved jauntily as they went by, but did not slow to talk. Martha turned Big Brownie to the side of the road each time, and spoke to the horse approvingly as he tolerated the noise of the passing cars, their rattle and throb briefly outshouting the noise of the river.

About the time Martha reached the third bridge the sun broke clear, which threw all the west side of the gorge into shadow and flooded the east side with bright, straw-colored light. She was carrying in her coat pocket a lunch that Louise Bliss had packed in the morning, and she finally gave in to hunger and sat on a rock at the edge of the sunlight and ate her sandwiches while the horse cropped the skimpy grass that sloped down from the road to the river, and then she went on.

At five miles into the canyon, on the steep downgrade between the third and fourth bridge, Martha came around a hairpin curve in the road and found a car whining toward her backward, which wasn't a surprise, as in those days quite a few automobiles would back up the steep hills in reverse to keep the gas running into the carburetor. There was hardly room for her to move over at that particular place, the road caught be
tween a dark wall of basalt and a steep talus slope that dropped down to the river, but she moved Brownie close to the wall and put her hand along his neck to console him while they waited for the car to get by. There were two men in the car, the driver peering back over his shoulder and steering with one hand while his mouth steadily moved in discourse with his passenger, words she couldn't hear over the noise of the river and the high howl of the reverse gear. When he saw Martha he gave her a startled look and must have said something that caused the other man in the car to turn and look, and she saw that this second man was Reuben Romer.

His left eye was droopy and watering—he had spent the day far gone in drink, which was no more than Martha expected—and he was a bit late to recognize her, but then he gave her a lazy, lit-up smile. She raised herself in the stirrups to shout to him, but by then he was turning from her, leaning across the other man to press a horn button bolted to the side of the steering column, a Klaxon horn that blared out suddenly, cutting across the rumbling of the river, and Big Brownie flung his head back in startled fear and backed his rump into the wall and then lunged forward. If she'd been deeper in her seat it wouldn't have unbalanced her, but she half-fell across his shoulder and lost the left stirrup, and when Reuben blew the horn again the horse seemed to just rise up in the air. Martha twisted her fist in his mane to keep aboard without being able to stop him or turn him, and he cleared the road, cleared the car, and hurled himself right off the edge of the road, right out into the sunlight, and she let go her grip without realizing she'd decided to, landed hard in a shower of gravel and rock dust, and in the stunned moment afterward heard the car going on up the road, the horn bellowing twice more to approve the entertainment, and then the whine of the motor swallowed by the curve of rock wall.

She didn't sit up but went on lying where she was, waiting for the sky to settle and come into focus; and then she turned her head to look down the steep, shingly drop to the river, the gravel still sliding and rattling down to where Brownie was gaining his feet, moaning with fear, his hide muddy and scraped, his reins caught up in the dense thickets along the riverbank. She was amazed he wasn't dead. She sat, and her left arm flared in startlingly bright pain, a pain she recognized—she had broken bones three or four times before—and she began to sob, not only from pain but from despair: the horses she was breaking weren't all the way finished yet and she was afraid she might not be able to finish them with her arm in plaster.

She waited until she felt able to stop crying and then she lifted the broken arm carefully with her right hand and guided it into the pocket of her coat and clamped her left elbow against her ribs and waited until she could breathe and then she looked down at Brownie again, considering grimly all the difficulties of getting him out of that steep gorge without breaking more bones—her own or the horse's. The gravelly bank was loose and slippery and damn near standing on its end. If she managed to get down to him from here, she didn't see how she could lead him back up the same way, even if it turned out he wasn't knee-sprung or torn up.

After a while she got carefully onto her feet and recovered her hat from where it was lying in the weeds and she walked down the road a couple of hundred yards until the dropoff flattened somewhat and became a shelving bench, and she stepped down carefully through the rocks and brush to the river and spent the better part of half an hour getting back upstream, picking her way through shrubwood, wading carefully out into the rocky river margins, to reach the place where the horse was stranded.

Brownie was trembling from fear and shock, his hide cov
ered with lather and sweat plastered over with rock dust. His head hung almost to his knees and a yellow froth had dried around his mouth. His off front foot was tangled in a coil of rusted barbed wire some farmer had tossed down into the ravine and blood ran down his leg onto the ground. The saddle was muddy and scraped and one stirrup had torn partway off. Martha said quietly to the horse, "Hey there, Big Brownie," and took her time easing up to him, but when she could she rubbed her face tenderly against his cheek and breathed into his nostrils, and he breathed into hers. She sobbed two or three times. "I'm sorry," she said, which could have been meant for just about anybody but was meant for the horse.

She untangled his reins from the thicket and ran her right hand carefully over his trembling hide and said to him, "I don't discover any broken bones," to encourage them both. Then she found a flat rock and put it under a likely place in the barbed wire and picked up another rock and began carefully and slowly to pound and grind the wire between the two, and when the wire broke she bent the ends back out of the way—all of this done awkwardly with her right hand—and then picked another place in the wire to work on. It was a slow process one-handed, and her right hand not the one she would have liked to be using. She had to cut through the coil at four places before Brownie could step free. Then she spent a slow hour coaxing him back through the brush downstream to the place where they could climb up to the road, which was empty of traffic and likely to remain so, and she started out leading the horse uphill toward Shelby. Brownie was favoring his off shoulder, bringing his leg forward with a peculiar dragging motion; but he set the foot down all right, so she didn't think the damage was to his leg. The foreleg that had been caught in wire had stopped bleeding and she didn't think it was a crippling cut.

A few cow camps were scattered in the breaks of the canyon,
used as overnight stops by cowboys trailing cattle between winter and summer ranges. Briggs Newton, who came upon Martha Lessen and her horse an hour or so after they started walking back up the hill, had been headed up to one of the camps. It was late February but the weather had been mild and the recent rains had greened the timbered uplands—some penstemon and wild iris were already blooming in sheltered places on the slopes of the canyon—and he was riding up to take a look at the grassland benches and make up his mind if it might be all right to move some of his cattle. He was deeply astonished and alarmed to see a young girl dressed like Calamity Jane limping up the middle of the road, cradling an arm he guessed to be broken and leading a big lame horse that was all scraped up and muddied, with his mane full of burrs and broken-off twigs.

The river made a hell of a noise going through that canyon and he didn't want to scare her, coming up behind her, so he coughed a couple of times in a loud way and when she half-turned toward him he called out, "Evening," because by then the light was beginning to go out of the canyon. The girl was pale and suffering, he could see, resting her arm gingerly in the pocket of her coat, but she just forced a smile and then turned back around and went on walking along the road.

When he had come up alongside her he said, "You got throwed did you?" which he intended merely as a way into conversation, but thought afterward was a stupid thing to ask.

She said, "Yes sir, more or less," and kept walking along. She seemed to assume Briggs would pass by, go on with his business and let her go on with hers, which he might have done without an argument except she looked to be very close to the age of his daughter Devota. He said, "There's a telephone down at Eightmile at that store. Why don't I put you on this horse and we can go down there. Those folks can telephone for a
doctor to see if your arm is broke, and the doctor can set it if it is."

The girl looked over at the horse Briggs was riding, which was a gray gelding he called Teddy, but she kept walking and said, "Thank you, I'd just rather go on back home."

"Where is that? Up at Shelby?"

"Yes sir, near there."

"Well that's a good three- or four-miles hike, is my guess, and pretty much every bit of it uphill. You come on now, and I'll take you down to that store at Eightmile. It ain't but a couple of miles, and you can ring your folks from there."

"Thank you, I'd just rather go on home."

He thought about Devota and what he might want if somebody came upon her walking up the road with a broken arm and a lame horse, and miles from home. "Well all right, then. But you're in no shape to walk home, and that horse of yours is in no shape to be ridden, and I'm heading up to Shelby myself." This last was a lie, but he figured she wouldn't give him any leeway if he told her the truth. "I'm not in no hurry and I'm wearing my broke-in boots and my arm ain't broke, and there's no reason for you to walk when you can ride. So why don't I get down off Teddy and let you be the one riding."

She looked at him and at the horse, and from her look he expected her to give him an argument—to tell him it wasn't her foot that was broke or something along those lines—but what she said was "He's a nice-looking horse. His name's Teddy?"

He had almost saddled a different horse for the ride up into the canyon, a skittery knothead named Adios, and it occurred to him to thank God for small favors. Teddy was the most tame beast he owned, and he had a smooth and level walk for carrying a girl with a broken arm. But he could see he had to get around her pride, so he grinned and said to her, every word of it
a lie, "Well here's an idea. I bought this horse for my daughter who hasn't done much riding at all, and I was trying him out tonight to see how he'll do. It'd be a favor to me if you got up on him, because I guess if he's gentle enough for carrying a girl with a broken arm, he'll be gentle enough for a girl who ain't rode much."

Martha looked at Briggs and began to smile, which even in the failing light he could make out the meaning of—his wife had been telling him for thirty-five years he was the world's worst liar and ought to give up trying. The girl said, "I appreciate it, but I'm all right walking, it's not my foot that's broke."

Briggs had to laugh. "Well all right, but I'll just walk along with you for a ways, if you don't mind the company." He got down from the horse and fell into step with the girl.

After a while she said, looking at Teddy with somewhat more attention, "He's got a bright look to his eye and I like the way he moves. I imagine he's a good horse."

"He is," Briggs said, and then he took one last run at her: "He's the most imperturbable horse I ever met, and if you change your mind and decide to try him out, you will discover him to have a smooth and level walk."

She gave the horse another close look, her face shadowed by her big hat so he couldn't quite see her expression, but Briggs wasn't surprised when she slipped his hook. She said, gesturing with the reins of her own horse, "This horse I was riding is still pretty green, but I think he'll turn out as good as any I ever met. He was tangled up in barb wire and he just stayed put, he didn't start jumping around and make it worse. His name is Big Brownie."

Briggs had been watching the horse, how he brought his off front leg forward. "Looks like he's sprained his shoulder," he said.

"Yes sir. But he'll be all right if I can get him fomented and give him some rest."

"I guess that's right."

Briggs went on talking to her about various things, not to distract the girl from her broken arm but to distract himself from the boredom of a long slow walk up a darkening road. He spoke of his wife, Oleta, and their four children, the youngest being Devota, who was just a bit younger than Martha, and he described to her the ranch he and his brother ran together, which they had got from their father and enlarged and improved upon. It was the first place you came to after the outfall of the canyon, he said, their land running west to east on the south side of the Whitehorns, with the broad lower reach of the Little Bird Woman River bisecting it near the midpoint. They had about a hundred acres of good bent grass for hay, he told her—two cuttings in a wet year—and plenty of grazing in the fall after the last cutting. There were still some decent patches of bunch grass on the slopes where they turned their cows and horses in the spring and winter, and timber higher up on the mountains for firewood and posts, and some good big logs for building sheds, and an allotment in the gorge for summer grazing. He allowed that some of Grant County wasn't too beautiful or too prosperous—a lot of rock and sagebrush and too dry for growing wheat—but he and his family had a beautiful and prosperous piece of it.