The cattle began to turn too, all except the Texas bull, who let out a loud bellow.
Call saw the runaway without seeing what caused it at first. He and Augustus were riding along together, discussing how far west they ought to go before angling north again.
“Reckon that horse ate loco weed or what?” Call asked, spurring up to go help hold the cattle. He almost went over the mare’s neck, for he leaned forward, expecting her to break into a lope, and the mare stopped dead. It was a shock, for she had been quite obedient lately and had tried no tricks.
“Call, look,” Augustus said.
There was a thicket of low trees along the creek, and a large, orangish-brown animal had just come out of the thicket.
“My lord, it’s a grizzly,” Call said.
Augustus didn’t have time to reply, for his horse suddenly began to buck. All the cowhands were having trouble with their mounts. The horses were turning and running as if they meant to run back to Texas. Augustus, riding a horse that hadn’t bucked in several years, was almost thrown.
Instead of fleeing, most of the cattle turned and looked at the bear. The Texas bull stood all by himself in front of the herd.
Call drew his rifle and tried to urge the Hell Bitch a little closer, but had no luck. She moved, but she moved sideways, always keeping her eyes fixed on the bear, though it was a good hundred and fifty yards away. No matter how he spurred her, the mare sidestepped, as if there were an invisible line on the prairie that she would not cross.
“Damnation, there goes the grub,” Augustus said. He had managed to subdue his mount.
Call looked and saw that the mules were dashing off back toward the Powder, Lippy sawing futilely on the reins and bouncing a foot off the wagon seat from time to time.
“Captain, it’s a bear,” Dish Boggett said. He had managed to turn his horse in a wide circle, but he couldn’t stop him and he yelled the words as he raced past.
There was confusion everywhere. The remuda was running south, carrying the Spettle boy along with it. Two or three of the men had been thrown and their mounts were fleeing south. The thrown cowhands, expecting to die any minute, though they had no idea what was attacking, crept around with their pistols drawn.
“I expect they’ll start shooting one another right off,” Augustus said. “They’ll mistake one another for outlaws if they ain’t stopped.”
“Go stop them,” Call said. He could do nothing except watch the bear and hold the mare more or less in place. So far, the bear had done nothing except stand on its hind legs and sniff the air. It was a very large bear, though; to Call it looked larger than a buffalo.
“Hell, I don’t care if they shoot at one another,” Augustus said. “None of them can hit anything. I doubt we’ll lose many.”
He studied the bear for a time. The bear was not making any trouble, but he apparently had no intention of moving either. “I doubt that bear has ever seen a brindle bull before,” Augustus said. “He’s a mite surprised, and you can’t blame him.”
“Dern, that’s a bit big bear,” Call said.
“Yes, and he put the whole outfit to flight just by walking up out of the creek,” Augustus said.
Indeed, the Hat Creek outfit was in disarray, the wagon and the remuda still fleeing south, half the hands thrown and the other half fighting their horses. The cattle hadn’t run yet, but they were nervous. Newt had been thrown sky-high off the sorrel Clara had given him and had landed painfully on his tailbone. He started to limp back to the wagon, only to discover that the wagon was gone. All that was left of it was Po Campo, who looked puzzled. He was too short to see over the cattle and had no idea there was a bear around.
“Is it Indians?” Newt asked. He had not yet seen the bear either.
“I don’t know what it is,” Po Campo said. “But it’s something mules don’t like.”
Only the two pigs were relatively undisturbed. A sack of potatoes had bounced out of the fleeing wagon and the pigs were calmly eating them, grunting now and then with satisfaction.
The Texas bull was the only animal directly facing the bear. The bull let out a challenging bellow and began to paw the earth. He took a few steps forward and pawed the earth again, throwing clouds of dust above his back.
“You don’t think that little bull is fool enough to charge that bear, do you?” Augustus asked. “Charging Needle Nelson is one thing. That bear’ll turn him wrong side out.”
“Well, if you want to go rope that bull and lead him to the barn, help yourself,” Call said. “I can’t do nothing with this horse.”
The bull trotted forward another few steps and stopped again. He was no more than thirty or forty yards from the bear. The bear dropped on all fours, watching the bull. He growled a rough, throaty growl that caused a hundred or so cattle to scatter and run back a short distance. They stopped again to watch. The bull bellowed and slung a string of slobber over his back. He was hot and angry. He pawed the earth again, then lowered his head and charged the bear.
To the amazement of all who saw it, the bear batted the Texas bull aside. He rose on his hind legs again, dealt the bull a swipe with his forepaw that knocked the bull off its feet. The bull was up in a second and charged the bear again—this time it seemed the bear almost skinned him. He hit the bull on the shoulder and ripped a capelike piece of skin loose on his back, but despite that, the bull managed to drive into the bear and thrust a horn into his flank. The bear roared and dug his teeth into the bull’s neck, but the bull was still moving, and soon bear and bull were rolling over and over in the dust, the bull’s bellows and the bear’s roar so loud that the cattle did panic and begin to run. The Hell Bitch danced backward, and Augustus’s horse began to pitch again and threw him, though Augustus held the rein and managed to get his rifle out of the scabbard before the horse broke free and fled. Then Call found himself thrown too; the Hell Bitch, catlike, had simply doubled out from under him.
It came at an inopportune moment too, for the bull and the bear, twisting like cats, had left the creek bank and were moving in the direction of the herd, although the dust the battle raised was so thick no one could see who had the advantage. It seemed to Call, when he looked, that the bull was being ripped to pieces by the bear’s teeth and claws, but at least once the bull knocked the bear backward and got a horn into him again.
“Reckon we ought to shoot?” Augustus said. “Hell, this outfit will run clean back to the Red River if this keeps up.”
“If you shoot, you might hit the bull,” Call said. “Then we’d have to fight the bear ourselves, and I ain’t sure we can stop him. That’s a pretty mad bear.”
Po Campo came up, holding his shotgun, Newt a few steps behind him. Most of the men had been thrown and were watching the battle tensely, clutching their guns.
The sounds the two animals made were so frightening that they made the men want to run. Jasper Fant wanted badly to run—he just didn’t want to run alone. Now and then he would see the bear’s head, teeth bared, or his great claws slashing; now and then he would see the bull seem to turn to bunched muscle as he tried to force the bear backward. Both were bleeding, and in the heat the blood smell was so strong that Newt almost gagged.
Then it stopped. Everyone expected to see the bull down—but the bull wasn’t down. Neither was the bear. They broke apart, circling one another in the dust. Everyone prepared to pour bullets into the bear if he should charge their way, but the bear didn’t charge. He snarled at the bull, the bull answering with a slobbery bellow. The bull turned back toward the herd, then stopped and faced the bear. The bear rose on his hind legs again, still snarling—one side was soaked with blood. To the men, the bear seemed to tower over them, although fifty yards away. In a minute he dropped back on all fours, roared once more at the bull, and disappeared into the brush along the creek.
“Captain, can we go after him?” Soupy Jones said, clutching his rifle.
“Go after him on what?” Augustus asked. “Have you gone daft, Soupy? You
want to chase a grizzly bear on foot, after what you’ve seen? You wouldn’t even make one good bite for that bear.”
The bear had crossed the stream and was ambling along lazily across the open plain.
Despite Augustus’s cautions, as soon as the men could catch their horses, five of them, including Dish Boggett, Soupy, Bert, the Irishman and Needle Nelson, raced after the bear, still visible though a mile or more away. They began to fire long before they were in range, and the bear loped toward the mountains. An hour later the men returned, their horses run down, but with no bear trophies.
“We hit him but he was faster than we thought,” Soupy explained. “He got in some trees up toward the hills.”
“We’ll get the next one,” Bert predicted.
“Hell, if he was in the trees, you should have gone in and tapped him with your pistol butt,” Augustus said. “That would probably have tamed him.”
“Well, the horses wouldn’t go in them trees,” Soupy explained.
“I didn’t want to either,” Allen O’Brien admitted. “If we had gone in the trees we might not have come out.”
The mules had run three miles before stopping, but because the plain was fairly smooth, the wagon was undamaged. The same could not be said for Lippy, who had bounced so hard at one point that he had bitten his tongue nearly in two. The tongue bled for hours, little streams of blood spilling over his long lip. The remuda was eventually rounded up, as well as the cattle.
When the Texas bull calmed down enough so that it was possible to approach him, his wounds seemed so extensive that Call at first considered shooting him. He had only one eye, the other having been raked out, and the skin had been ripped off his neck and hung like a blanket over one shoulder. There was a deep gash in his flank and a claw wound running almost the whole length of his back. One horn had been broken off at the skull as if with a sledgehammer. Yet the bull still pawed the earth and bellowed when the cowboys rode too close.
“It seems a pity to shoot him,” Augustus said. “He fought a draw with a grizzly. Not many critters can say that.”
“He can’t walk to Montana with half his skin hanging off his shoulders,” Call pointed out. “The flies will get on that wound and he’ll die anyway.”
Po Campo walked to within fifty feet of the bull and looked at him.
“I can sew him up,” he said. “He might live. Somebody catch him for me.”
“Yes, rope him, Dish,” Augustus said. “It’s your job. You’re our top hand.”
Dish had to do it or be embarrassed by his failure for the rest of the trip. His horse didn’t want to go near the bull, and he missed two throws from nervousness and expected to be killed himself if he did catch the animal. But he finally got a rope over the bull’s head and slowed him until four more ropes could be thrown on him.
Even then, it was all they could do to throw the bull, and it took Po Campo over two hours to sew the huge flap of skin back in place. When it was necessary to turn the bull from one side to another, it took virtually the whole crew, plus five horses and ropes, to keep him from getting up again. Then, when the bull did roll, he nearly rolled on Needle Nelson, who hated him anyway and didn’t approve of all the doctoring. When the bull nearly rolled on him, Needle retreated to the wagon and refused to come near him again. “I was rooting for the bear,” he said. “A bull like that is going to get somebody sooner or later, and it might be me.”
The next day the bull was so sore he could barely hobble, and Call feared the doctoring had been in vain. The bull fell so far behind the herd that they decided to leave him. He fell several miles behind in the course of the day. Call kept looking back, expecting to see buzzards in the sky—if the bull finally dropped, they would feast.
But he saw no buzzards, and a week after the fight the bull was in the herd again. No one had seen him return, but one morning he was there. He had only one horn and one eye, and Po Campo’s sewing job was somewhat uneven, the folds of skin having separated in two or three places—but the bull was ornery as ever, bellowing at the cowboys when they came too close. He resumed his habit of keeping well to the front of the herd. His wounds only made him more irascible; the hands gave him a wide berth.
As a result of the battle, night herding became even more unpopular. Where there was one grizzly bear, there could be others. The men who had been worrying constantly about Indians began to worry about bears. Those who had chased the wounded bear horseback could not stop talking about how fast he had moved. Though he had only seemed to be loping along, he had easily run off and left them.
“There ain’t a horse in this outfit that bear couldn’t catch, if he wanted to,” Dish contended.
The observation worried Jasper Fant so much that he lost his appetite and his ability to sleep. He lay awake in his blankets for three nights, clutching his gun—and when he couldn’t avoid night herding he felt such anxiety that he usually threw up whatever he ate. He would have quit the outfit, but that would only mean crossing hundreds of miles of bear-infested prairie alone, a prospect he couldn’t face. He decided if he ever got to a town where there was a railroad, he would take a train, no matter where it was going.
Pea Eye, too, found the prospect of bears disturbing. “If we strike any more, let’s all shoot at once,” he suggested to the men repeatedly. “I guess if enough of us hit one it’d fall,” he always added. But no one seemed convinced, and no one bothered to reply.
92.
WHEN SALLY AND BETSEY asked her questions about her past, Lorena was perplexed. They were just girls—she couldn’t tell them the truth. They both idolized her and made much of her adventure in crossing the prairies. Betsey had a lively curiosity and could ask about a hundred questions an hour. Sally was more reserved and often chided her sister for prying into Lorena’s affairs.
“She don’t have to tell you about her whole life,” Sally would protest. “Maybe she can’t remember. I can only remember back to when I was three.”
“What happened when you was three?” Lorena asked.
“That old turkey pecked me,” Sally said. “A wolf got him and I’m glad.”
Clara overheard part of the conversation. “I’m getting some more turkeys pretty soon,” she said. “Lorie’s so good with the poultry, I think we might raise a few.”
The poultry chores had been assigned to Lorena—mainly just feeding the twenty-five or thirty hens and gathering the eggs. At first it seemed that such a small household couldn’t possibly need so many eggs, and yet they absorbed them effortlessly. July Johnson was a big egg eater, and Clara, who had a ferocious sweet tooth, used them in the cakes she was always making. She made so many cakes that everyone got tired of them except her.
“I got to have sweets, at least,” Clara said, eating a piece of cake before she went to bed, or again while she was cooking breakfast. “Sweets make up for a lot.”
It didn’t seem to Lorena that Clara had that much that needed making up for. She mostly did what she pleased, and what she pleased usually had to do with horses. Housework didn’t interest her, and washing, in particular, didn’t interest her. That became Lorena’s job too, though the girls helped her. They asked questions all the time they worked, and Lorena just gave them whatever answers came into her head—few of them true answers. She didn’t know if the answers fooled them—the girls were smart. Sometimes she knew she didn’t fool them.
“Are you gonna marry that man?” Betsey asked one day. “He’s already got white hair.”
“That’s no reason not to marry him,” Sally said.
“It is, too,” Betsey insisted. “If he’s got white hair he could die any time.”
Lorena found that she didn’t think about Gus all that much. She was glad she had stayed at Clara’s. For almost the first time in her life she had a decent bed in a clean room and tasteful meals and people around who were kind to her. She liked having a whole room to herself, alone. Of course, she had had a room in Lonesome Dove, but it hadn’t been the same. Men could come in
to that room—letting them in was a condition of having it. But she didn’t have to let anyone into her room in Clara’s house, though often she did let Betsey, who suffered from nightmares, into it. One night Betsey stumbled in, crying—Clara was out of the house, taking one of the strange walks she liked to take. Lorena was surprised and offered to go find Clara, but Betsey wasn’t listening. She came into the bed like a small animal and snuggled into Lorena’s arms. Lorena let her stay the night, and from then on, when Betsey had a nightmare, she came to Lorena’s room and Lorena soothed her.
Only now and then did she miss Gus, though then she missed him with a painful ache and felt almost desperate to see him. At such times she felt cowardly for not having gone with him, though, of course, he himself had urged her to stay. She didn’t miss the rest of it at all—the cowboys watching her and thinking things about her, the hot tent, the unpredictable storms and the fleas and mosquitoes that were always there.
She didn’t miss the fear, either—the fear that someday Gus would be off somewhere and Blue Duck would come back. What had happened had been bad enough, but she knew if he ever got her again it would be worse. Fearing him and missing Gus were mixed together, for Gus was the only person who could protect her from him.
Unlike the girls, Clara seldom asked her any questions. Lorena came to wish that she would. For a while she had an urge to apologize to Clara for not having always been able to be a lady. It still seemed to her a miracle that she had been allowed to stay in Clara’s house and be one of the family. She looked for it to go bad in some way, but it didn’t go bad. The only thing that changed was that Clara spent more and more time with the horses, and less and less time in the house.
“You came at a good time,” she said one day as Lorena was coming in from feeding the hens. It was a task Lorena enjoyed—she liked the way the hens chirped and complained.
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