The Jump-Off Creek (6 page)

Blue shook his head and let the roan stop, as soon as they got where they could see one of the horses was a buckskin. “Hell.”

Tim waited for him. They sat looking up the slope. In a while Blue made a cigarette, tapping his forefinger carefully against the little sack of tobacco. But he didn't light it. He ran it back and forth between a thumb and a finger.

“You'll know this guy if you see him?” Tim said.

“Big curly coat was about all I saw. And the horse.”

They sat in silence. Then Blue said, “We could let it go. It wasn't one of our steers anyhow. Was a Box O. I guess Oberfield can take the loss well enough.” Looking up the hill, he put the unlit cigarette inside his coat, in his shirt pocket.

In a while Tim said stubbornly, “It might not be this guy. We ought to see whether it is or not.”

Blue made a sour sound.

They held their carbines across the pommels of the saddles and put the horses sway-butting up the slope. The dogs went
ahead, their nostrils smoking and coats standing out full in the chill. When they broke across the front edge of the bench, they could smell ill-cured or green hides, and rankness of wolf. Tim had left the bay behind to heal his leg. The gray mare he rode was fidgety, timid. She tossed her muzzle against the stink, and started to walk sideways. He had a hard time keeping her turned, with one hand occupied, holding on to the Miller rifle.

Danny Turnbow came out of the shack and stood just under the overhanging eave, watching them come. He had a big notch in his chin, a thick straight forelock of hazel hair. When they stopped the horses a dozen yards out, he pushed back at his hair with a self-conscious gesture of his right hand. “Blue,” he said. “Tim. Long time no see.”

Tim said, straight, “We thought maybe you would've moved someplace else by now.”

Turnbow smiled slowly, looking at them from under his eyebrows, chin down. “This place sits good and high, varmints like it high. Game's good too. For the baits.” He kept smiling gently. When they'd known him in the Spokane country he'd had a soft and wise hand with nervous horses. He was known for it.

Tim felt something, maybe it was embarrassment. “We've seen a few baits around,” he said. “They've been cows, sometimes.”

Turnbow shook his head, looked beyond them down the long timbered slope. “I seen some of that too,” he said. He was solemn. “They ought to use leg-holds if they can't get an honest bait.”

Tim said, “Wolf is smart. Hard to get into a trap.”

Turnbow shrugged without answering. He was still smiling slightly.

There was a silence. “I guess the fur season is about done,” Tim said.

Danny made a loose gesture. “State is still paying five dollars each. Don't need a hide at all for that, and they don't give a damn how those ears look.” He grinned, persuading them. “By fall, won't be a timber wolf alive from Meacham to Summerville.”

Blue hadn't said anything up to now, but he wouldn't let that one go by. He said, low-voiced, “We lost more cows to shooting, lately, than anything else.”

There was a stiff little silence. Then Danny lifted his brow in solemn surprise. “'S'at so?” He pushed back his hair.

“The truth is, we've been tracking a cow shooter,” Tim said. “Probably he's a wolfer. We wondered if you knew him.”

Danny shook his head. He still looked solemn, unsmiling. “We haven't seen anybody in quite a while. We're pretty much out of the way up here.”

The gray horse hadn't quit squirming. Tim wished he had both hands to head her. He said, holding the mare hard, “He would be riding a buckskin horse like that short-legged one you've got over there. He'd be wearing a curly Montana-style coat.”

Turnbow, holding his chin down, looking at them low like that, said, “A lot of men wear Montana coats. A lot of men have got buckskin horses.” His voice was easy, faintly sorrowful.

Tim kept on stubbornly. “We were tracking him over behind Bear's Camp,” he said. “Your tracks went through there too, so we thought maybe you saw him. It was your horses going through there that spoiled his sign for us.”

Danny seemed to think about what he ought to say. He hunted for something in the middle distance. Then a boot moved below the scabby hide hung in the door opening of the shack. Tim got a quick heat in his chest. He put his thumb on the hammer of his carbine. Maybe Blue eared his all the way back, because he heard a faint clatching sound and Danny's face jerked as if somebody had goosed him. “Don't jump the gun now,” he said, but it wasn't clear who he meant it for.

A hand pushed the hide and then a boy came out to stand under the eave of the roof. They'd seen him once before with Turnbow, a kid named Harley Osgood. He was thin and tall, his pimply face set high above a very long neck, and above that a flat-brimmed hat as wide as a boarding house platter. Under the
hat he showed sorrel red hair in a long shag, and skin that looked dead white around the pimples. He stood next to Danny, looking down at his boots. He had no curly coat, just a thin canvas jacket with stains on the cuffs and across the front. Danny didn't say anything to him. He shifted his weight making room for him in a slight way, and gave Tim and Blue a look, maybe of embarrassment. The kid, Osgood, had a big-handled pistol sitting up high in a holster at his waist.

The Adam's apple in the boy's long neck skated up and down once slowly. Then he looked over at Tim. Maybe he had been getting up his gumption. “I figured an Indian could track a mouse over a flat rock,” he said. His voice was low and hoarse, and his face grew suddenly blotchy and red. “What's wrong with yours there? He lose his eye for it when he cut off his braids?”

Blue had a pretty high boiling point. He made a short sound like a laugh, without saying anything. But there was a stiffness in the air. Even the dogs were standing up, with the hair lifted along their shoulders. Osgood kept looking at Tim in a sullen, wild way.

Danny said slowly, “Why don't you all come on in and set.” He touched the edge of the doorhide. “We got a pot heating up.”

Blue began to smile. “I'll bet you do,” he said, low, and Turnbow made a smile of his own, sliding his eyes sideways to Osgood.

“Yeah, well.” He scratched the back of his neck with raggy black fingernails. “The truth is, the coffee's pretty damn bitter. We been using them grounds since last week,” He eyed them again, from under his brows. “Times are hard. You know what I mean?”

There was a waiting silence. Tim couldn't tell what Blue might be wanting to do by now. “I thought there were three or four of you living here, last time we came by,” he said.

Turnbow swung his hand vaguely, looking past Tim. “There's three of us, that's right. Jack's in bed. Got ahold of a little strychnine maybe, off his hands. He's sick as death. Been in bed four days now.”

In a while Blue said, “Maybe it was the coffee made him sick.”

Turnbow smiled slightly. “Might be it was.”

Tim shifted his seat carefully, looking sidelong at Blue. Blue shrugged up both his shoulders, maybe not just easing the ache of his collarbone.

“I guess not,” Blue said. Maybe he was answering Turnbow's offer to come in and have a cup.

Tim said, in a moment, “You keep an eye out for a guy in a curly coat, riding a buckskin horse.” He wanted to say something more, something about hanging him, but it sounded stupid or cocky, any way he could think of saying it.

He thought the kid might make some kind of a sour answer, but he didn't, he just stood next to Danny, looking down at the toes of his boots. You would think you could kick him around like a stone, he had that aspect now. But he had stood before, all dare and hot piss, giving them a straight look.

“Sure,” Danny said, nodding, solemn. “We'll watch.”

In the silence afterward, Tim heard Blue shifting his weight on the saddle and then turning the roan. Tim didn't want to turn his back on Osgood, or on the other, the Montana man, inside the shack, but he did, finally, giving Danny a look as he swung around. He jigged the mare when he saw Blue was doing the same, and they went pretty fast across the bench with the dogs running to keep up. When they got to the tree line they slowed down, and after a while let the horses walk. Blue took the made cigarette out of his inside pocket and smoked it.

Tim remembered suddenly a sorrel horse Blue had owned once, that would buck like the devil every time he lit up a cigarette. It had been a good horse otherwise, but Blue never had been able to break him of that little peculiarity, and he'd wound up trading him for a big, strong-looking bay that proved later to have tender feet. Tim didn't know why he thought of that now.

“I guess there wasn't any point in pushing it,” Blue said, not looking at him.

Tim pulled his shoulders up. Finally he said, “I guess we can wait and see what they do.” He could hear his heart beating inside his ears.

Where the chinking had fallen out, the gaps between the logs began finally to show grayness. Lydia stood stiffly and went out in the muddy clothes she'd not taken off the day before. There was no rain, just the damp chill raising the flesh of her arms, and the clouds caught in the tops of the trees along the edges of the clearing.

The back of the house stood up close against the high slope of a ridge. There were trees still standing there, where maybe Angell hadn't wanted to log on the steep grade. She went up under the trees and squatted and then came down to the creek and washed in that cold water without soap or towel, no telling where those were in the heap of goods in the shack. She shook out her cold wet hands, blinked wet eyelashes. She made the best of the unstill water as a looking glass and with stiff fingers worked through the tangle of her hair, retrieving and rearranging the few hairpins she could find, shaping a small, unruly knot. She would have been satisfied with simple tidiness, but in a while gave up ever reaching it and went back through the brush fence to the animals.

In the bare daylight, in the mud, she let down the goats, catching up a little in a chipped white coffee cup and drinking it down while standing there beside the goats, with her fingers lapped
around the cup and her face held close over the little warmth of it.

Across the rim of the cup she looked at Angell's place. Another ridge rose up along the south, steep and high as the one behind the house. The Jump-Off Creek ran between them, along the flattish bottomland where Angell had cut his crossties. It was a narrow clearing, a hundred yards wide at most, running up and down the banks of the creek, maybe twenty acres altogether of weeds and grass and thin saplings and brush growing among the stumps. Where the brush pen was, and in front of the house, nothing grew, it was all mud and rocks and deep tracks of men's boots, horses' shod feet. There were slick muddy trails at the near edge of the creek, too, where they'd come for the water.

Lydia stood and stared at all of it for quite a while. She had spent some of the night sleepless on the bare bunk, folded up in her mother's Windmill quilt, fitting her bony hip and shoulder into a gap where two logs joined. And in the darkness, lying a long time awake, listening to the dripping roof and the rats chewing the garbage in the yard, she had begun finally, stubbornly, to tally the work. It was an old solace. Her mother hadn't ever liked to have her list them like that, all the things needing doing ranked from worst to least, first to last.
You'll make the heart go right out of you.
But Lydia always had liked to see the whole shape to her work. When there was time for it, and paper, she would write the jobs down and afterward mark a line through every one as it was finished. In the blackness last night, inside the cold stinking house, she'd made the list against her closed eyes, inside her head, going over it slowly and over it, getting the order right. Now in the gray daylight, standing looking at the mud and the high wet weeds, looking at the whole shape, all the things needing doing, she felt her heart tighten up like a fist.

She cut brush all day, grubbing out thickets by the roots with a blunt mattock, leaving the tall skinny saplings and the bracken ferns for the goats. The weather stayed damp and cold, the sky
coming down low so there was no seeing how high the ridges stood. But the rain held off and she got warm enough, working. For a while she wore Lars's big gray coat but as soon as she'd worked up a sweat it came off and she was able to get by with just the green sweater buttoned all the way up over the navy waist she'd worn for traveling.

Every little while she stood and filed an edge onto the mattock and then piled up the brush on a tarp and dragged it behind her across the rough ground to the house. She laid out the new fence starting at the back corner of the house and going up under the trees on the steep slope where the ground was not worn slick, tramped to mud. The hill was duffy with moss and old brown needles, and the trees would maybe keep off the rain.

When the brush was laid in place, she dug a ditch along it for the dead-hedge, using the mattock and a spade, and pushing down the soil around the roots with the mattock and the heel of her boot. The ground was rocky on the hillside, under the shallow duff, and it was matted with root. The ditch was slow going. Often she stood up straight, pushing the ache out of her back and then plucking at the front of the sweater and the blue cotton waist, letting cold air in deliberately under her breasts, where she sweated. She had Lars's big gloves. Her hands slid inside them so a blister was gradually rubbed on one hand, along the web at the base of the thumb. She wound a clean rag around that hand, inside the glove. She scraped the mattock along the ground stubbornly, huffing white breath on the still, cold air.

At dusk, in a frosty cold, she drove the mules and the goats inside the stiff new fence and let the goats down and again drank a cupful, standing there. She remembered suddenly, tasting the sweet heat of the milk: she had not made a meal. And remembering it, her stomach clenched with hunger.