The Jump-Off Creek (20 page)

By then Mrs. Walker had come out. Mike looked at her. “Well, Mother, are you ready to start home?”

She slid a girlish, fond look at him. “I guess I am.”

Tim thought Mrs. Sanderson might offer her hand to Carroll but she didn't. Only after she had climbed up in the wagon and Mike's wife up to the high seat, she said in her usual serious way, inclining her head over the side of the wagon, “It was kind of you to have us all, Mr. Oberfield.”

He nodded, seeming serious too. “Enjoyed your company, ma'am.”

Oberfield stood there on the porch as Evelyn Walker drove the wagon off and it was Mrs. Sanderson who lifted her hand once and got a wave from him.

“Thanks, Carroll,” Blue said, and stuck out his hand to shake. Tim shook the old man's hand too, and Mike did. Then they rode their horses over and got their steers and Mike's and two that were CrossTie-branded, and drove them slowly down the road after the wagon.

It wasn't much of a road, the ruts were cut deep and hardened. Tim could see Mike's wife keeping the wheels up on the shoulder where she could, but the ride generally was rough. Mrs. Sanderson sat in the back, behind the high seat, holding the boys' heads on her stretched-out lap after the first hard bump had woke them crying. Tim couldn't hear if the two women were talking at all. Sometimes Mrs. Walker would turn around and she and Mrs. Sanderson would pass a soft look or a tired one between them, and she would run her eyes over the two boys and then swing around again.

The sun fell behind the mountains, casting up a red stain that dimmed gradually to purple. The wind dropped off, but the darkness was sharp with cold. Tim buttoned his coat up and blew on his hands. By the moon there was enough light to see the road, but he got so he couldn't make out Mrs. Sanderson's narrow sunburnt face, just the solid shadow of her there, braced against the jounce of the wagon. He had begun to think of saying something to her about his not coming after the milk, but he didn't know how he ought to bring it up, or if he would get the chance.

Evelyn Walker pulled the wagon over, where Chimney Creek ran in a slippery sheet across the road. Tim heard Mike say gently, “Here is Chimney Creek, boys,” as if they might not know it. There was a trail that ran back along it to their place. It was the springs of the Chimney that they had dammed up into a pond.

They sorted out the steers there in the road, in the cold moonlight. There were five Half Moon steers, four that were Mike's and the two CrossTie.

In the darkness, Tim got up a little courage. He rode over to the wagon. “I don't know if Mike was planning to see you and those steers home in the dark,” he said to Mrs. Sanderson. “If he was, we could as well do it ourselves. It's not out of the way.”

It was Mike who answered, pulling up his shoulders and glancing at his wife. He said, “I guess she's going to stay over and go home in the morning.” He didn't say anything about the milch goats. Maybe she had brought them along to his place and left them in his barn all day.

She said, “Thank you, Mr. Whiteaker,” in a tired voice, or keeping her voice low for the sake of the sleeping boys. After the one occasion, when he had brought her packages up from the post office, she had become, again, gently solemn, firmly polite.

Tim ducked his chin. He took a breath. “When I finished that work for the log camp, I meant to get over to the Jump-Off to let you know about it. But we got busy and I didn't make it.”

There was a short silence. Then she said, as if it was an answer, “I don't believe I ever thanked you, Mr. Whiteaker, for bringing that milk trade to me.”

He thought about what he ought to say. “I guess we both got the benefit of it,” he said after a moment.

He saw her nodding. “Yes.”

Blue touched his hat, began to move his horse away. “We'll be seeing you,” he said.

Tim glanced toward him, but couldn't see his look in the darkness. He touched his own hat and followed Blue and the steers up the steep rise of the trail. He heard Mike starting his and Mrs. Sanderson's steers, and the wheels of the wagon making a crackly noise on the cold, rocky ground. The horses grunted, scrabbling up on the frosty mud. At the top of the ridge Blue let the dun stand a minute, letting the steers go on down the trail. When Tim came up alongside him, he never said anything to him. They both looked back after the wagon but it was gone by then. They couldn't hear anything but the horses breathing and the creek falling downhill in the cold darkness.

The clearing along the Jump-Off Creek was unfenced, and the grass was patchy, eaten down over the summer by the mule and the two goats. Evelyn Walker's husband let Lydia bring her steers down onto the Owl Meadow along the northeast of his property. There was an old fence there and the wreck of a cabin. He and Otto Eckert hadn't mowed the field, they hadn't been able to get the mower up there over the poor trail. So she patched the low places in the fence, wiring up the old pine poles, and in twenty days, riding the mule purposefully up every draw and gully, scouting the open timber and the burnt clearings and the shoulders of the ridges, she slowly brought fifteen steers down onto the meadow. She found them singly or in pairs—once a bunch of five that had come to a salt lick she had not known about, on the edge of Tim Whiteaker's property.

The mule was steady as he ever had been, dependable and tireless, and she knew enough to stay back from a steer, to come up to it gently and let it go ahead of her at its own slow gait. But if one took off unexpectedly, the mule would not jump quick to head it. While it bolted away startled into the brush, he was apt to flatten his ears and keep on at an unvarying jog-trot while she
flailed his rump in a rage. It was wearying work and little reward in it. Her back ached from the long riding. She wished, for the first time in her life, for a willing and quick horse.

But she liked the methodicalness, at least—maybe even the forced unhurriedness. There was no rain. The frost had brought up a glossy gold in the aspens and the brush willows. The maples were naked, their leaves filling up the gullies with a dry yellow duff that lifted and rattled softly when the wind blew. The timber felt open, light. There was a certain pleasure in riding out every day in the silent company of the mule, crossing the long, golden ridges slowly in a bright wind.

There was a spring that made a reddish bog in a low corner of the Owl Meadow but no clear water in it. She had to bring water half a mile from another spring, hauling it in pails. By the time there were fifteen steers on the meadow, she was going down and back for the water six times a day, or seven. It was the worst of the work. There was a saucer formed among the stones of the old chimney where the cabin had fallen down, and she let the pails of water into it. But it leaked out slowly onto the ground, and often when she came onto the meadow in the afternoon the steers would be standing muddy-legged around the empty basin of the chimney, or snuffling the mud of the spring.

On one of the last days, a steer was stuck up to its belly in the quickmud in that bog. From half a mile off, coming in tiredly after a second gainless day, she heard it lowing dully and steadily with an unpitiful sound of complaint. She rode to the edge of the drying-up pond and looked at the steer unhappily. She was loath to get out in the mud herself. But the stupid steer kept up its crying, and made no effort to get clear of the bog on its own. Its eyes were glazed, blank.

She stood down beside the mule and dispiritedly bunched her skirt, pulling it up under the belt so her long shins in black stockings were bared above the boot tops. She stepped her boots unwillingly into the sucking mud and pitched a noose of rope
around the steer's big horns. He kept up his steady complaining. She backed out of the mud and tied off the rope to the saddle horn of the mule, backed him up slowly until it was taut. The mule squatted back hard until the saddle tried to stand up on its pommel, but the big steer stood sullenly in the wallow, eyes bulging, neck twisted over by the pull on its horns. Lydia put all her own weight on the rope too, planting her feet and yelling at the mule, but the steer stood where it was. Finally she went into the trees and got a stick. She slogged out into the mud again and hit the steer hard across the nose. It bellowed in surprise and eyed her, white-edged. She yelled at the mule and the rope twanged tight a couple of times, but by then the steer's eyes had glazed again and it stood glumly in the mud, unmoving.

“Damn you!” Lydia said suddenly, harsh and loud.

She hit the steer's head again, swinging the long stick in flat and hard between the eyes, a cracking blow. The steer rocked once, silently—for a wild moment she thought she might have killed it—then it lurched ahead suddenly in the mud, bellowing and slinging its horns, hurling mud and slobber in a short, spattering flurry.

Lydia staggered quick out of the mud herself, grabbing along the rope for Rollin. She flung a leg up over the mule's back and held on to the saddle, hanging half off it while the mule sprang out of the way of the steer's short, mad lunge. The mule had never been inclined to buck, but the rope pulled around under his tail when the steer staggered past him, and he snorted wildly, put his head down and bucked up his back. She would have stayed on him if she'd had both stirrups, a solid seat. But she was hanging off the saddle clumsily and his one stiff-legged bounce shook her off. She hit on her back and got up quick, scrabbling around to watch the steer. He kept bellowing and hooking his horns, trying to get loose of the rope, but he stood in one place, cross-legged and swaying, as if he hadn't figured out yet that he was unstuck from the mud.

Lydia got shakily on the mule again, setting her boots well in the stirrups. Then she sidled up along the steer's shoulder. Rollin was set stubbornly on keeping away from the slung horns, she had to pull his head up hard, twisting the reins, kicking him, to get him in close enough, and then she leaned out, grabbing warily for the rope. She tried five or six times, reaching in and out, before she got the rope loose of the steer.

By then her mouth was aching and full of blood—she had bit her cheek, jarred her teeth, when Rollin had bucked her off. She sat on the mule, rocking and keening a little, and feeling the inside of her mouth gingerly with her fingers, while she watched the steer staggering off irritably across the grass. She had a piteous impulse to go home. She would have liked to leave the big dumb steers standing around the chimney basin and ride Rollin away now, with her handkerchief inside her mouth stopping the blood. She did put the handkerchief in her mouth. But then she got the pails and walked slowly, bitterly, down to the other spring. After a while she walked with the bloody handkerchief wadded up in the pocket of her sweater, but the taste of blood stayed in her mouth, and a sourness, from that moment standing scared and frozen facing the mad steer.

Evelyn Walker was sitting on the dry leaves at the edge of the Owl Meadow, with the two boys climbing on her, when Lydia walked up the long timbered hill the fourth time, lugging water.

“I have brought you a lunch,” Evelyn shouted to her. She held up a sugar sack.

Lydia let out the water into the chimney and came to where Evelyn sat, in the striped shadow under the maple trees. Her mouth was stiff but she smiled and deliberately kept from telling about it. “Evelyn, I hope you didn't walk up from your house that long way.”

Evelyn's face looked pink and happy. She had spread a cloth on the leaves and she brought sandwiches out of her sack, and radishes, milk in a mason jar, and a chocolate cake wrapped up
in a clean towel. “We had a good ride, don't worry. We drove the wagon as far as we could get and then we unhitched and all three of us rode Judy up the hill without a saddle and we've only been waiting a little while for you.” She gestured, and then Lydia saw her placid white mare browsing with the cattle.

“Well I am quite filthy for picnicking,” she said, sighing. At the spring she had rinsed out her sore mouth, washed mud and blood from her hands, but the dress was spattered with mud and the steer's yellow slobber, her skin and clothes smelled of cattle and sour fear-smell.

Evelyn said solemnly, positively, “Well you are cowboying, and liable to be dirty because of it.” The boys stood coyly behind her, peering at Lydia across their mother's shoulders.

Lydia rubbed the sore palms of her hands on the front of her skirt and smiled gingerly, with her sore mouth. She had not thought of herself, before now, as cowboying. “The truth is, I am half starved,” she said. She sat down stiffly on the ground and when Evelyn handed over one of the sandwiches she ate slowly, chewing on the side of her mouth that was not raw.

“I believe I must have about all of them,” she said tiredly, watching the steers crowding up to the water. “I have not seen any but cows and calves since yesterday morning.”

“Fifteen,” Evelyn said. She put a sound of assurance in it, as if she'd named a grand number.

“I think I'd be advised to let back six of them,” Lydia said ruefully. “They're last year's calves I think. You can see they're small yet. I would get more for them at three years old when they've put on their full weight.” She had got this from Evelyn's husband when he had ridden up to the Owl Meadow with her, behind the two steers from Carroll Oberfield's. On that occasion he had shown her a little of driving cattle, riding along one side of them and then on the other to keep them headed right, and he had managed to tell her half a dozen useful things about the ranching business without bringing up her inexperience at all.

“If there are nine, I won't be discouraged,” she said firmly. “That's enough to see me another year without starvation. Only I suppose I shall be on bad terms with ground corn before then.” She smiled grimly.

Evelyn had Charlie in her lap now. She smiled, but slow and irresolute, while pressing her cheek against the crown of Charlie's head. She might not have known what response was called for. Then she said, “Claud Angell never had many cattle, I guess,” as if it were a reassurance.