The Whistling Season (16 page)

When Morrie's breathing was back in the vicinity of normal, we moved off to our horses. Before we could mount up, Houdini started to whine. Usually that bargained some petting from Toby, but this time the dog bounced away from him. Nose down, it raced toward the buffalo jump.

"Houdini!" Toby tried to call him back. "Crazy pooch." The agitated dog was searching for something, back and forth along the edge of the drop-off, whining louder all the while. "Houdini," Toby's indignation was growing, "do you want a spanking?"

"Houdini, here, boy," I took my turn, "that sage chicken is long gone."

Damon tried a more direct approach, whistling sharply through his teeth. Houdini lifted an ear, but kept on snuffling along the top rock ledge of the cliff.

One look at Morrie told me his command of subjects did not extend to canines. We had to do something, though. Toby would fret all the way home if we left Houdini. "I'll get him," I said, and started toward the recalcitrant dog. "No, Tobe, you stay back."

Seeing me coming, Houdini wagged his tail guiltily but stood his ground. Heights didn't bother me, but Houdini was a sizable mutt and I most decidedly did not want to have to wage a tug-of-war with him that close to the lip of the buffalo jump. I knelt a few feet away, patting a coaxing rhythm on my knee. "Come on, Houdini, get away from there."

The dog whined, wagged, whimpered, and refused to budge.

"What's got into you? Houdini, now I mean it, come here or—"

Bwhoom!
The sound of a rifle and the instant echo of the shot rang in all our ears.

I shall always owe Damon. He leaped toward the pair of us at the brink and latched onto me by the tail of my coat as I swooped and grabbed Houdini around the neck. The load of a struggling dog, my blind exertion and Damon's, the thunder roll of the rifle shot yet in our ears, the gape of the cliff so near, everything mixed in some oldest instinctive wrestle to exist. Fate's heart is hard; ours were temporarily harder. In some common will beyond fear, the clump of us lurched back onto safe ground. Morrie had hold of Toby. We all had our footing, and my hand somehow still was over Houdini's muzzle, keeping him quiet except for the whimpering. It took a considerable moment for the fact to soak in that each of us up there had life left in us. Together we stared down off the cliff at what Houdini alone had sensed was happening.

My throat suddenly had as many kinks in it as the winding river below. There in the broad bottomland, around the nearest
bend of the river, came the steel-gray horse I had run the race against, galloping as hard as ever, but this time with its rider hunched forward in the saddle as he jacked another shell into his rifle. A smaller gray creature fled ahead in a struggling lope. When it tried to veer toward one of the breaks in the bluffs, the rifle spoke again and a small geyser of dirt exploded just in front of the animal, making it turn back toward the flat ground of the bottomland, in front of the relentless gray horse.

Morrie exclaimed as though something hot had been spilled on him: "What on earth—?"

By the time the words were out of him, the pursued animal had started to labor across an open stretch of meadow, dodging desperately. Now the man on horseback had plenty of time to rein up and shoot again, but did not, keeping the chase going.

I found enough voice to tell Morrie what he was seeing.

"Brose Turley. He's wolfing."

As we watched the zigzag marathon—Damon was open-mouthed and Toby had crept down to hold on to Houdini with me—Morrie sounded more confounded than ever. "But—he runs them to death? Isn't the man licensed to trap?"

"It pulled loose. There, see everything it's dragging?" By now the chase had drawn near enough below us that the instrument of destruction on one hind leg was visible. Somehow the wolf had fought the trap stake loose, digging, lunging, the jaws of the trap surely cutting bone deep. As the wolf scrambled along crookedly on three good legs the clamped trap skittered beneath the crippled foot, and the iron stake traded it like a flattened-out ball and chain.

Toby whispered across, "Paul, I'm goose-bumply. If that was Houdini, I'd feel so awful." He looked at me to see if that was all right, and I nodded that it certainly was. Anyone who grows up around farm animals cannot side with a wolf in the long clash of things. But you can be against tormenting any creature.

Another gunshot. This one steered the wolf away from our side of the river bluffs, toward some rocky broken country that looked across to the buffalo jump.

"He's herding it someplace," I figured out. "Don't you think, Damon?"

"Box canyon. Up over there."

Through it all, Brose Turley never looked up. Knee, rein, whole body, he aimed the big gray horse after the wolf as if jockeying in a derby.

The wolf struggled harder as the ground began to climb. Whenever it tried to head for the shelter of a rock formation, a bullet zinged in its way. Turley hazed it like that past the wings of the box canyon. Before long the wolf could find no more room to run, straight-up stone penning it in on three sides. We saw it make a staggering loop along the base of the inmost cliff, the trap in and out of sight in the harsh rock spill. Then the wolf leaped at the cliff face, paws scrambling, vaulting its full length up the steep canyon wall. And fell back.

Turley was there on the grizzled horse at once, forcing the wolf to its feet with another shot that shattered rock near its head. The animal clambered off into the rock spill, dragging its shackle.

As the brutal chase went on, Morrie had sunk to a squat beside Toby and me and our quivering dog. His voice still held incredulity as he asked, of us or the universe:

"Why doesn't he just shoot it and put it out of its misery?"

Damon, ever our expert on things gory, knew.

"Fur dealer won't give him as much if there's a hole in the pelt."

That was one answer. Another came in the night, in the
cruel clarity of my dream. I was outside a corral of bones and rock—femurs and rib cages stacked on boulders, some combination of the buffalo jump and an arena. The Turleys, father and son, shapeless hats on the back of their heads, circled the middle of the corral looking over their catch of wolves. I followed around on the outside trying to see in as Eddie advised me not unkindly, "You stay on out, Milliron. Leave this to us." He flapped his hat at the wolves to tease them and said as if making a schoolyard boast, "We know how to deal with these woofs." Brose Turley said, "Quit wasting time. Let's pelt 'em up." He had a knife out. The wolves huddled like sheep. One after another, they were dragged by a hind leg to the center of the corral and skinned alive, Brose kneeing down on the neck, Eddie holding on to the tail. As I watched the wolves being slaughtered and the pelts thrown into a pile, someone showed up beside me. "They are getting blood on everything." I heard the disapproval in Rose's voice. Rose? All along I had been expecting Morrie—dreams have that odd element of illogical anticipation. It was unmistakably Rose at my elbow, though, on saying over and over, "But why do they do that?" I seemed to be tongue-tied, for I had no answer then. Each gutting slash by Brose Turley drew a whimper from a wolf. The pelt pile Dead or alive or somewhere between, the wolves lay there in skinned sinew and gut piles. "But that's terrible. Don't you think that's terrible?" Rose kept saying indignantly as we peered through the bone corral. Of course it Was I would be able to tell her now mankind at its most remorseless always is.

That night sweat was hours ahead yet, and Brose Turley held front and center in the long shadows of the box canyon as the four of us and Houdini watched now. The horseman kept the wolf on the move, its tether dragging, until finally the stake tangled in the rocks. The exhausted wolf fell over, the caught hind leg angled behind. Satisfied at last, Turley pulled out a stout forked stick about as long as a shovel from alongside his rifle scabbard and swung down from his saddle. He obviously had done this many times before.

Approaching the wolf, he feinted with the stick, the creature snapping at it with what ferocity it had left. Quick as anything, Turley slid the fork of the stick just behind the wolf's ears and onto its neck, putting his full weight into pinning the animal down. Carefully maintaining his balance, he lifted his booted foot nearest the animal. He stomped on the wolf's chest, crushing its heart.

"Beastly," Morrie spat out. We knew he did not mean the wolf.

T
HE HOUSE WAS COLD WHEN I FUMBLED MY WAY OUT OF BED
and the wolf-butcher dream. Dancing unhappily on the bare floor as I struggled into my clothes, I checked on Damon in the dimness. He had rolled to the wall, as far away from me and my dream tumult as it was possible to get and still be in bed. I supposed I had to sympathize, although it was his proclivity for the sharp edges of things that had led us to the buffalo jump the day before.

I knew my way in the dark, step by measured step down the stairs and to the match holder in the kitchen and, in the flare of the struck match, to the lamp on the table. Father always banked the stove for the night by chocking it full of coal, and there were ruby-red embers left for me to feed a crumpled newspaper and sticks of kindling. With everything lit, I took stock of myself.

It did not require much: I felt like a wreck. Sweet dreams, hooey.
Nightly awaits that sweet address/Principality of Sleep/ Happy Land of Forgetfulness—could
a poet be any farther wrong than that? If that was the best the grown-up world had to offer on the subject, I would need to construct my own approach to what went on in me when I was not awake.
Don't let it get to you,
I sermoned myself, although there still was so much leftover ventriloquism in my head that the voice sounded like Eddie Turley telling me to how to best behave around woofs.

That made me mad—people hanging around in me when I was trying to evict them—but it also triggered the thought that, frazzled though I might be, at least I was better off than anything that met up with Brose Turley by day or night. This and a cup of cocoa when the teakettle began its tune improved my outlook a bit. If the past was any guide, little by little the disturbing dream should cool down into manageable memory. I pulled out
Robinson Crusoe
and sat to the table to read. It would be nearly an hour yet before the alarm clock went off in Father's room and our household began to muster itself toward what passed for breakfast and then another adventurous schoolday under Morrie.

I was buried in hermit life on a desert island when the front door creaked open. The wind? When wolves and bloodthirsty wolfers have been roaming the back of your mind, you don't doubt the ability of the wind to turn a door handle.

Unanchored as I was in all the waters between actuality and imagination, I knew nothing to do but try to stay motionless while I waited for whatever was coming in to come in. One instant the kitchen doorway breathed the cold rush of air from the door opening, and the next there was the whisk of a coat already being taken off.

"Will you look at us!" the whispered greeting practically pranced in. "At least there are two people in the world up and going."

Rose. As if she had alit from my dream, before it could quite pull out of the station.

Rose had a talent for arriving. Just by showing up, she turned the mood of a place around the way a magnet acts on a compass. "I saw your light all the way from George and Rae's," she kept to a speedy whisper as she came over to stand by the stove, rubbing her hands. "
One if by land,
Paul Revere?"

"Slept in a hurry, I guess," I alibied my presence at the opened book and glowing lamp. Rose herself seemed to have traded her bed for a lantern. This was her earliest ever at the house.

She must have read curiosity all over me. "Every mitten in this house needs mending," she provided. "I thought I had better do it before you need to go to school with them on." She peered at me in the lamplight, her brown eyes lively even at this time of day. "The last person I knew who gets up this early was my poor husband. He didn't sleep well either."

"Nightmares?" I whispered back tensely.

"Just worries, I would say. There at the last. And then—" Realizing that did not lead in a promising direction, she tempered it with a rapid smile. "We all have off nights," which sounded particularly confidential when whispered in the houseful of sleepers around us. "Morrie tells me you seem to have a lot going on in your head, for someone your age."

More than she was going to know. Maybe it simply proved that I was green in years, but I was not about to tell a woman she had just spent the night in my dream. "Uh, want some cocoa?"

Rose started to shake her head, but on second look at me she whispered back, "Yes, I could have some. Let me gather up the mending and I'll join you."

In a flash she raided the mud room of its mittens and, while she was at it, Toby's much-abused scarf and Father's winter sweater. Putting the pile on the table between us, she got busy with yarn and darning needle and every so often remembered to take a teensy sip of the cocoa I had fixed for her.

"Well, demonstration day was quite something!" she said as if I had asked. "Plows and more plows. Rae bowled over everyone at the potluck with her, what's that called, rhubarb cobbler?" The wavy curls bobbed on her brow as she moved her head this way and that to take advantage of the lamplight for whatever item she was mending. Her eyes were quick, back and forth between me and her task. "Oh, and did your father report that we met up with the entire other half of your class? The county agent's daughter? Cornelia?"

"
Cor
nelia. Like in
carbuncle?

"Oh now, tsk. She's not a bad-looking girl."

"You watch. She'll marry a banker." Why I said that, I have no idea. But it turned out to be true.

Rose giggled. "Such powers of prediction. You have blind-sight."

"I have what?"

"It's a knack. Some people just know how a matter will turn out, while the rest of us are in the dark."

"Huh uh. I don't think I want that."