The Meadow (15 page)

“Ferris was all smiles and squints and apologies. He said he sure didn't know how they'd got out and he'd see to it right away. Then Frank says, ‘Listen, Mister, do you know what kind of a place you are living in here? You couldn't have found a windier place on the face of the earth that I know of. What the hell are you thinking about?'

“Ferris just grins, and Frank says, ‘Well, you'd better tie all this stuff down before winter or it's going to be spread all over the country by spring, including that sardine tin you're living in.'

“Ferris just squinted and smiled and allowed as how he wasn't afraid of no wind.

“Well, Frank rode home marveling, and ever after that he referred to Ferris as the Goat Man, which kind of stuck with the rest of us, though some referred to him as the Cracker, since he was the first honest to God cracker anybody in these parts had ever seen or mostly even heard of.

“So Ferris collected his stock and shooed them back inside the forty-acre gravel patch where he starved them for a couple of days, and then he turned them out again, this time into Colorado, where he figured the stud horses might stay out of trouble better. But they didn't. They got in with another parcel owner's horses and cut hell out of them, too, though this other outfit was already friends with Ferris and more like him than not, and didn't mind what kind of foals their mares spewed out. They just got him to shoo the herd back onto the gravel patch for another couple of day's starvation before they somehow got out again.

“This went on until the first heavy snowfall, and folks sat around kitchens shaking their heads about what kind of humans had moved in on us and how it sure hadn't taken very long for the country to go to hell.”

 

 

What we never knew until too late was Ferris never owned them horses. He had duped a lot of people in Fort Collins into
paying
him to ‘pasture' them for the winter. If those folks had found out sooner what Ferris meant by pasture, and what was going to happen to their pets when the heavy snows came, they probably would have lynched him on the spot—the only problem being to find a big enough tree anywhere near the Goat Man's digs.

“By January no one knew where the horses were, and if you looked at Ferris's shacks and goat sheds, they were all drifted under about six feet of snow.

“I snowmobiled down that way one morning out of curiosity, and it sure looked abandoned and buried to me, but when I drew up close a dog started barking. I figured Ferris, if no one else, was still there, and I sure as hell had no reason to get any closer than I was. After all, I wouldn't have wanted him sneaking up on me. The wind was humming a lonesome note as I turned around and headed home. It wasn't till spring when I saw Frank again that I heard the end of the story.

“By the time I went down that day and heard the dog bark, Ferris had already left. In fact, when it had snowed a good two feet all in one shot the week before, and then the wind never come to open things up, he and his son had panicked and tried to get out. It took them five days of digging, day and night, to work their pickup down to the plowed county road, and make their getaway back to Fort Collins. The woman wasn't with them (she probably would have made them tough it out). The horses had long been turned out to forage, and several of them had foundered and starved. The goats were all locked up in their pens, froze or starved or suffocated under drifts. The birds all froze. Two dogs and a cat, including that last survivor I heard bark, were locked inside the trailer, where they perished.

“None of this was discovered until a coyote hunter on snowmobile happened to see what was left of the horse herd and called the sheriff, who called Frank, who, together with Ray, hauled several bales of hay up to them using Ray's Trackster and saved them. The SPCA was contacted, and those horses were fed by helicopter till spring, and a warrant was issued for Ferris's arrest.

“Mid-April Frank rode up to the junkpile and found the most grizzly scene he said he'd ever laid eyes on, what with twenty or more animals of various kinds whose frozen carcasses the coyotes had torn apart, except, of course, for the dogs and cat inside the trailer, which had torn each other and the trailer apart in their frenzy.

“When the heavy snow loosened its grip at the end of that month, Ferris just moved back in with a truckload of ammunition and vowed the sheriff would never take him alive. By that time there was a whole county full of ranchers who would have gladly obliged him by taking him in dead just to be helpful. As it turned out though, as things like that usually turn out, he gave himself up without a shot fired.

“By then the roof of his shack had blown clean away and his room was full of snow. He had collected as many goat-parts, chickens, and house pets as he could, and incinerated them right there in the yard, either to get rid of evidence or to get rid of what the evidence would smell like when it thawed. The horses had been rounded up, and the survivors returned to their owners.

“Ferris was sentenced to ten days in the Larimer County Jail and fined a modest fee for cruelty to animals—less than a thousand dollars. Once they had him in the hoosegow they found out he'd been brought up on rape charges two or three times in Collins and had gotten off each time. The wife kicked him out, or off, or whatever—the forty acres had been bought in her name, for reasons one might guess—and Ferris went off in search of more wilderness.

“When the Sand Creek Proprietor's Association demanded that the wife clean up the junk and corpses, she refused, and claimed—and it was borne out—that the shacks and pens and junkpiles were not on her property, but actually occupied an adjacent forty belonging to someone else. The other owner refused to have anything to do with it, since he had never even
seen
his parcel. He was just investing in land with a view.

“So there it sits to this day, glittering like a snowdrift in July, slowly dissipating in gusts of wind, reminding us of what we used to have, how fragile it had been, how little was left of it, and just what kind of a thing it is when people come into the country.

“The last time I seen Ferris I was hauling my oxygen tanks to refill in town. It was mid-May. I still had to shovel a couple of times and use chains to get off the mountain. On the way down the ridge I seen him and his son. They was mired in the spring mud we call gumbo. I suppose they was trying to retrieve something from the trailer; I don't know. I slowed down for a closer look and considered pulling them out, but as soon as they recognized me they started walking guiltily away from their truck, as if they wasn't really stuck at all or in need of a hand, as if they was out to pick wildflowers or hunt arrowheads or something. They slunk a good distance off, so I got back in gear and headed for town.

“By afternoon when I come home the road was a slop-trough of grease. If I'd slipped off the road into the unpacked gumbo, it would have sucked the truck under till it was floating on its running boards. I had to keep momentum to make the hill, or I would have had to back all the way down, a couple of miles, and try again.

“About halfway up the grade I see them again, Ferris and his son, though neither was what you'd call recognizable. They was covered head to foot in thick red mud. Their truck was about fifty feet from where it had been that morning, off the road, like a sinking skiff.

“They was driving a steel fencepost into the mud, chaining up to it, and hand-winching with a come-along, then jacking out the post again and gaining about three feet with each repetition of the operation. They only had about a mile and a half to go to attain the junkheap. They looked downright aboriginal in their mud suits.

“It wasn't so much that I knew if I slowed down I'd never get up the hill, or that if I left the road to try to pull them out I'd be as stuck as they was. It was just that there are limits.

“This time I just left them there.”

II.

 

 

Frank said, “I guess we do ride a lot. Some ranchers have tried to get away from horses with ATVs and helicopters and such. But it turns out you can't raise cattle without using horses. Not in this country anyway. Horses are cheap, low maintenance, reliable, and they'll go places no vehicle can. Just the kind of places cows like to go.

“So we ride all summer, checking the herd. We move the cows from one pasture to another on horseback, of course. Gathering in the fall entails a lot of riding. We ride when we brand in the spring, and when we sort and pregnancy-test in the fall.

“Sometimes right after haying we get a little free time. That's about the only time of the year where there's a space with not much to do before gathering, winter feeding, and calving. Then we like to take a little time off and go horseback riding.”

 

 

Full, the reservoir looks all right: a mirror Sheep Creek dies in, timber straight and still along the edge, and sky swimming through its face.

Drained of water, the reservoir that used to be a hayfield is a barren gravel pit with the dead creek laid out in the bottom of it.

Just below the outlet Sheep Creek resurrects itself in an instant. It leaps from the outlet into boulders, tangled willows, and tall grasses. Below the gunsight rock outcrops that pinch the valley into a waist, Lyle's haymeadow opens like a proper afterlife.

In spring the new grass grows in standing water. At sunset the white mirror-light shines through the grass. That's when the beaver ponds light up, too, and the rising trout make bull's eyes on the surface.

A doe that has been drinking lifts her head to listen. Done irrigating, Lyle heads home across the shining field. He has a shovel on his shoulder that looks like a single wing.

 

 

The water we count on is the runoff from high snows gone underground. Some years the rain we get wouldn't fill a thimble. All our streams and springs come from melted snow. After a mild winter the streams are weak by August, so you need a bad winter to have a good year.

A contour map of America shows a heart-shaped basin covering several western states, from southeast Oregon and Idaho down through Nevada and Utah, the real heart of America, where cold air sinks in and fills, like a reservoir of air, until it rises to the spillway and pours through Divide Basin and South Pass like water through a pitcher spout. Only it isn't water, it's all the wind in Wyoming. Snow that settles on open country soon rises into the wind and falls again into the deep timber of mountain ridges where it will be safe. The prairie is often scoured when there's ten feet of snow in the woods.

Ditches they built in the twenties and thirties with dynamite, slips, and mules gather several streams up on Deadman and divert them into the reservoir. Someone has to go up there in the spring and shovel snow out of the ditches to get them running and keep them from washing out. Water is saved behind the dam till they run it out to irrigate the Colorado Plateau. The snow that was saved in the timber is saved again in the reservoir. They sell the water.

In Lyle's meadow a system of ditches girdles the hillside, delineating hay from sagebrush hills. Ditches fork like nerves to reach every part of the meadow. A wooden flume vaults the creek, water crossing water, to irrigate hay on the far bank. Lyle made hay over forty years. It snowed and flooded the meadow. He cut the water off and cut the hay. He saved the hay in the barn. It started to snow again.

 

 

Bill McMurray had done virtually nothing but snowshoe back and forth to Deadman between 1948 and 1972. The new water engineer had it all planned out to work hard at the start and get ahead of everything that needed paint or repair. Ray figured when he got a little older things would take care of themselves. He could stay drunk all the time and just read the clocks and turn the wheels on the ditches and dam, which is more or less what happened, only it all happened sooner than expected. There was a period between the hardworking part and the giving-up part where Ray actually tried to moderate his drinking.

One August morning Ray woke about five o'clock with the shakes. Margie was a sleeping mountain next to him in the bed. Nothing could have waked her, but he didn't want to start the day with his usual snort, so he dressed and went out without making a fire or coffee. The air was cold and the sun had not risen above the side of the valley below the dam. The grass was frosted and Ray could see the absolute white where his breath left him for the air.

He went down to the shop and gassed and oiled the chainsaw without making too much of a mess. He loaded the saw and then himself into the pickup, and his little stock dog, Linda, jumped in over his knees. He started the engine without revving it and let the truck roll gently down the hill away from the house. He could barely see through the dog's noseprints on the windshield.

He stopped the truck in the deep meadow grass by the stream below the dam and got out. The grass was white, more like fine bone, and knee-deep. It was like standing in ossified clouds. Ray lit a smoke and watched Sheep Creek, what was left of it, tumble over rocks and stumble into pools, all the water he had gathered from Deadman in his ditches, all the snowmelt he'd laid claim to and saved, then had to turn loose and start over again, shoveling snow out of his ditches in spring.

Ray made an expansive gesture outward with the hand that held the cigarette, and said to no one, “Here we go…” Then he made the gesture again and repeated, “Here we go.” He walked back through the deep, white, breakable grass to the truck and climbed in. Linda jumped in and resumed her post, forepaws on the dash, nose pressed to the glass.

He drove down the draw to a stand of lodgepoles that had died just his side of Lyle's fenceline. Ray figured if he hauled a load of firewood in and split it for the kitchen stove, that would be worth a drink, maybe even in Margie's eyes. He fired up the Homelite and quickly felled six good-sized trees, all close together so he could back right up to them for loading. He cut the motor on the saw and listened for a minute, then set it down on a stump.