by Jim Harrison
We were only a few miles upriver when I discovered I’d left my spare ammunition at home and only had two bullets for the rifle and three for the Iver Johnson. Smith made a lame joke about my previous bull-killing expertise that I let pass, feeling my whole body blush with shame. I meant someday to replace that expensive bull but the wherewithal was beyond my reach. It had mostly English Hereford blood with improbably thickish quarters and was meant to add meat to our rawboned herd.
We made camp in the bull’s vicinity after a hard day’s ride, and decided to forgo a camp deer to save ammunition and also not to warn the bull of our presence by rifle shot. The pie my mother sent along for our victory celebration had become a bit mashed in the pack horse’s trepanniers so we scooped it up with our fingers as best we could. The loaf of bread was an unattractive idea without roasted venison, the heart of which we had intended to eat raw for strength and bravery, which Smith insisted his people used to do.
By dark we were being tortured by mosquitoes and thought of moving our campsite away from the river bottom to a distant hill but had become too lazy to do so. We added bunches of green grass to the fire for smudge which only helped with the mosquitoes if our bed rolls were right next to the fire. Unfortunately it was an overwarm night and it came down to death and discomfort by roasting smoke or mosquitoes. Smith had filched a bottle of his father’s plum wine which I at first refused, still smarting from my Duluth binge, but in the end took a couple of pulls in order to sleep. We talked for a few minutes about the blond immigrant Norwegian girl who had moved with her family into a deserted homestead choked with nettles a half dozen miles down the road from our homeplace. The father doubtless bought the worthless property by mail and there was a month’s work in clearing the nettles. We resolved to help when he was nearly finished to get a closer look at the girl. The talk of the Norwegian girl did nothing toward making us sleepy. Smith asked where the hell Norway was and if they were against Indians there. I said I didn’t know but I bet the girl couldn’t ride a horse and perhaps we could teach her. Certain stories my father told me about longhorns in an attempt to dissuade us from the mission drifted into my mind. There was a somewhat famous attack of longhorn bulls on a cavalry contingent and this cheered Smith. Another lone bull had gored two mules, one man, and had tipped over a loaded chuck wagon before being killed. We took several more pulls of the plum wine while thinking this over, then finally slept to the crackle of the fire and drone of mosquitoes.
An hour before dawn there were vast and powerful explosions, a violent thunderstorm, and us without a tarp because the weather had looked assuredly fair. Buck, the fierce cowdog, began howling and crawled under my sodden blanket with me. I finally jumped up and got my horse blanket for extra protection, the dried horse sweat on the blanket offering some waterproofing. During a flash of lightning I thought I had a brief glimpse of an animal bigger than God pretty close to our campsite, so I kept the rifle clutched in my hands. I could not believe that Smith snored through the entire storm, though he had had the lion’s share of the plum wine.
At first light Smith was off at the edge of our small clearing examining the ground. He came back and turned over a large damp fire log, stirring some coals to life for coffee. He announced gravely that the critter had visited us during the night and we were lucky to be alive. I went off and tended the hobbled horses, noting their restlessness and the fact that they were staring into the densest thicket, about forty acres in size, that was on a horseshoe bend in the Niobrara. That was where the tracks of our nighttime visitor had emerged and returned to the thicket.
While we drank coffee Buck ate one of our loaves of bread and buried his nose deep in the jam jar. A poor camper, Buck, but then he looked up, stared into the thicket and growled a rather timid growl. I passed Smith the revolver so we’d both be armed. We mounted up carrying our tools and leaving the pack horse hobbled.
There was a hoped-for gully at the top end of the horseshoe bend and we set about to make our trap pen and makeshift corral out of the ample supply of cottonwood saplings. The morning had turned quite windy and we thought we’d heard an awful noise from our encampment but hurried through our chores before checking. Our plan was to follow the tracks through the thicket, driving the unwary bull before us until he trotted down the gully and into our trap near the river.
We returned to the campsite to find our pack horse terribly gored, a line of entrails strung out behind him, with a large patch of brush torn up by the struggle which had obviously been one-sided. While Buck began to feed on the carnage both our courage and sense of humor dissipated. We stayed mounted for safety and I fired the rifle in the air to signal our serious intent. Smith mentioned that he’d heard a longhorn could run faster than a buffalo which did not increase our sense of security. We both desperately wished to be elsewhere, and I made a halfhearted joke that it might be difficult to thread a leather throng through this bull’s nuts, and Smith could busy himself with the project while I sawed off the horns like a merry barber. In response Smith laughed, then let off a blood-curdling war cry, heading for the thicket at a full gallop. I added my own howling as we thrashed into the dense thicket on the bull’s track, not pausing as we heard the bull crashing through the brush well ahead of us.
As luck would have it the thicket became sparser and we could see the bull’s immense ass disappearing over the lip of the gully straight toward our trap. We increased the volume of our screams and speed of our horses, reaching the gully’s edge in time to see the bull blast through our enclosure as if it were built of twigs. Up on the bank we were still about forty feet higher than the bull, but even that far up a tree would not have given me comfort from this creature. We had a clear view of its massive brindle-and-black shape standing in the river, its widespread horns still red from the pack horse’s blood. It turned to us and bellowed, the sound reverberating up and down the river. Then in the arrogance of its position it paused to take a deep drink of water. We never quite got over that gesture, but at this point Smith whispered, “Shoot the son-of-a-bitch before he kills us.” I raised the rifle but in a trice the bull was out of the river and charging up the bank toward us. My horse reared and took off without my urging. I went one way and Smith the other. It was several hours before we found each other on the far side of the river. I assumed the bull had chased him because in a three-mile run looking over my shoulder and crossing the river I never saw it. Smith said he’d had no control over his horse which after a hundred-yard run had floundered across the river. He glanced back then and the bull was up on the bank where I’d drawn out my rifle. The bull was grazing. We sat there on our horses thinking this over when Buck trotted up with a red muzzle and a distended gut full of horse meat. We rode a few more miles toward home for absolute safety, then stopped for a swim and a snooze, arriving back at the farm at the end of a long summer twilight.
It is accurate and fair to say that the longhorn experience knocked the cowboy out of me for quite some time, and my Willow melancholy took a new turn. My father had threatened to send me over to the Indian school in Genoa, Nebraska, if I didn’t settle down to my studies. The young folks there were virtual captives, and I replied that I’d shoot my way out. This errant comment occasioned a lecture and a bribe. He knew of my sidelong interest in art that had scarcely been sated by our single book of Gustave Dorß reproductions, and all that I could find in our 1895 Britannica, which wasn’t that much. The Frenchwoman at the Omaha exposition kept coming to mind and I’d look at the map of France in the atlas studiously trying to figure out where she might live.
My father’s bribe was that he’d order a raft of art books for me, plus a subscription to Scribner’s magazine, if I’d settle down to my prescribed studies in mathematics, natural history and literature. The Scribner’s was quite a concession on his part to modern times, as he was intent on not only protecting me from his own obsession with the Lakota but from the whole world at large, an effort he must have begun to sense that summer as hopeless. Of co
urse Scribner’s was laughably sedate but I had seen it in the town library and had begun to feel a poignant curiosity about the outside world. I was such a late child, my father was in his fifties at the time, that my shenanigans must have exhausted him into realizing there was no way of protecting me. Our only magazine at that time was the Philosophical Speculator which contained alarming (to my father) disquisitions by William James on the nature of psychology. I found them intriguing, but then as a wild young man of fourteen I had no cultural or religious territory to defend. The only subject I knew very well was horses and it was already being bandied about that horses would pass from our existence with the advent of the motor car.
Most of the contents of my studies were onerous and generally too far advanced for my capabilities. Mathematics was relatively easy, biology painfully difficult with our antique microscope revealing nothing of interest to me. Anthropology was in its heyday as a new science and was fascinating to me, from the drama of the Egyptologists to the obsessions of Boas. I liked Keats well enough, though I read Willow’s name between many lines, but found Pope and Wordsworth dreary. Shelley was flimsy indeed compared to the glories of Lord Byron whom I strongly admired and envied right down to his efforts to be buried with his dog. I thought Tennyson a hopeless windbag and could never quite get the hang of Dickens. Shakespeare was quite beyond me, though I liked the music of the language that my father had told me must be read aloud. Lucretius was soporific but Virgil’s Georgics of sharp interest as I could see his concerns in the country around me. Emerson was pounded into me, while I only pretended to read Hawthorne. After all of my father’s years with the Lakota our household was neither puritanical or Victorian, and I could not fathom or sympathize with people under such repression. My father viewed Walt Whitman and Melville as “curiosities” but I was drawn to both. Melville had fallen well out of literary favor but I noted the copy of Moby-Dick was dog-eared and much underlined. The Natives were my father’s own white whale and he was given to delivering eccentric lectures on their fate at any time from dawn to dark.
Amid this whirl of mental activity which took place in the heat of the day and in the late evening I was bold and ignorant enough to try to write poems to Willow which mainly served to increase my respect for Keats. In my notebooks, more important, I tried to draw pictures of her and deeply regretted that no photo of her had ever been taken. Her odor was warm sand and plums, her voice mostly soft except while laughing, her body beige and supple and deceptively strong. She could climb trees much faster than Smith and I with our more bulky musculature. How could it be that there was not a single photo of her slender beauty? Nowadays it is unthinkable that there is someone unphotographed. Whether this is good or bad I’m not sure, but it is a struggle for me to recapture her image except in the rare dream, or just on waking while still in a half-sleeping state when perhaps the truer content of our lives begins to dissipate. In any event, my first clumsy drawings failed to capture her; in one perhaps an eye would be correct, in another, the lips, or part of the neck, the arm jaunty against a fence post.
My life was to change quite abruptly at the 1900 version of the Nebraska State Fair late that summer. Back then it was almost totally an agricultural event with countless exhibits of produce and livestock, an elaborate meeting of ranchers and farmers and their families and a grand respite from the year’s labor.
My mother had urged Smith to go with us because he was in a dour mood, having been driven at gunpoint from the Norwegian’s yard after stopping by to help clean the nettles. He had said hello to the blond girl as she pumped water and she began to scream, whereupon her father ran from the house with his shotgun, not a promising beginning to a courtship. I had been in a Keatsian fever that day and had thankfully not gone along, though Smith’s idea of burning down their house and scalping them seemed reasonable. Smith had settled for riding past their house while standing on his horse and baring his bottom at them as they sat in their miserable yard. Even my father smiled at this story though he had brooded about the family, what with their having arrived too late to plant crops, and what would they eat in the winter?
At the fair we felt thrilled to see Peerless Big-Boned Bob, a boar of over a thousand pounds and said to be the largest pig in creation. Bob failed to show any signs of life until we tossed him a piece of sausage which he was glad to eat, proving himself a cannibal according to a gleeful Smith. Bob’s keeper told us to move along which we ignored, and this precipitated a scrape with some young men from Lincoln, thuggish city kids, during which we acquitted ourselves quite well. I pitched one over the fence and he landed near Bob which put the boar in an ugly mood. We ran for it after a crowd gathered, drawing up to catch our breath in front of an exhibit that advertised “the only living Eskimo family in the United States.” A man, woman and child sat there in and on furs in a hot tent surrounded by blocks of ice. They were sweating profusely and the scene was dismal indeed. Smith and I discussed setting them free but then we weren’t sure they were captured or simply there of their own free will, far from their Arctic wasteland. One of the furs they sat upon was a polar bear so unimaginably large that we were confident it was a fake. The tent was crowded with folks jostling to see these poor sweating creatures from the great North, and Smith could no longer contain himself, bellowing, “What a goddamn shame!” Immediately a group of burly farmers advanced on us: “Get out of here you son-of-a-bitching redskins.” And we did.
Smith took off on a several-mile walk to downtown Lincoln, wanting to see the state capital, while I continued to drift with lessening enthusiasm around the crowded midway. I thought of checking the bull and cow barns to see the best of the year but was stopped again by Keats. All I would hear there was the usual “nice and thick through the crops and chine, remarkable spring of rib and built right on the ground.” I was all cowed out and even the horse show scheduled for late that afternoon failed to stir my interest. I stood there in the crowded dust murmuring rather strangely to myself, “What can ail thee, wretched wight, alone and palely loitering; the sedge is wither’d from the lake, and no birds sing, etc.” That sort of thing, the memory of which brings embarrassed blood to my ears. Then, by happenstance, I spied the arts and crafts tent well off the side, and was drawn there by fatal luck, passing from the brassy sunlight into the dim tent loaded with painted china, elaborate hot pads, a cow sculpted out of glued-together corncobs with black river stones for eyes, certainly nothing that approached my vaunted notion of the art calling. At that moment the word “arts” meant as much to me as the name “Jesus” does to a cloistered nun, with the actual object of adoration the same distance away.
Down at the far end of the tent in the least favorable location sat a gaggle of Sunday painters displaying their sunsets, vases of flowers, mountain ranges, and a few ill-proportioned horses, children and house pets. Further off to the side stood a tall thin young man in a smock and blue beret surrounded by a half dozen young ladies, whom he was sketching deftly in turn on a large pad, charging them a quarter apiece. I stood well back, gradually coming closer, until I could hear his badinage clearly. I was instantly jealous of his abilities which would have allowed me to draw Willow in a memorable fashion. After finishing each sketch he would shout “Voilà!” which I took to be a French word because he wore a beret. One ditzy girl wanted a full-length drawing and he sharply accentuated the size of her breasts to the merriment of the others. This seemed utterly daring to me, so much so that I joined the group as he was telling the big-breasted girl to “stick around” and he’d buy her a soda, whereupon she blushed with pleasure and pride. He noticed me standing there and asked if a “son of the soil” would like his picture drawn, and I said, “No thank you.” I added that I greatly admired his skill as an artist, and this embarrassed him a trifle. He attempted to make me a butt of the general fun and asked me to name my favorite artists other than Rembrandt and Michelangelo, perhaps hoping to catch me at a loss. I mentioned the English landscapist I’d read about in the Britannica
, Joseph Mallord William Turner, using his full name. He raised an eyebrow, and asked “Who else?” I struggled and came up with Courbet, pronouncing it “Corbett.” This gave him an angle and he yelled” ‘Coorbay,’ you bumpkin. It’s pronounced ‘Coorbay.’” I blushed deeply and found myself saying, “A shit-heel like you could get thrown through the side of this tent.” He and the tittering girls became silent, and I felt further shame in threatening the first real artist I’d ever met. Then he asked, now serious, “Do you draw?” and I answered, “Not very well.”
He took a break then and we went off for sodas with the girl in tow, proudly holding her mawkish drawing. She said she was pleased to have met two real artists which made me feel terribly awkward. He dismissed her, telling her to come back before dinner for a free roll in the hay, at which she nodded and left. I was astounded at his cheekiness but assumed it must be the way actual artists talked.
His name was Theodore Davis and he came from Omaha where his father was a railroad executive, a “benighted capitalist,” Davis called him. Davis could never utter a sentence without a flourish of hyperbole. I took him to be older but he was eighteen and was headed off in a few weeks to the Chicago Art Institute. His beret was a bit of fakery to help prove to his father that an artist could make money. He was pleased with himself, jingling his pocketful of quarters, “the fruits of my labor” as he called them. Before we parted company he gave me a large sketch pad and some drawing pencils, promising to keep in touch. I had fibbed and said I was sixteen and he suggested I quit high school and join him when I could at the Art Institute. I admitted that I had left school at age nine, telling him the story in brief which he found “preposterously marvelous.” I walked off with my brain in a storm of possibilities, totally ignorant that I was making the first step into an upheaval that would be with me the rest of my life. It is largely misunderstood that the first forays of a young man or young woman into the world of arts and literature, the making of them, are utterly comic and full of misadventures, rather than most of the dour and melancholy renditions that are made public.