The Great Karoo

by Fred Stenson

  Inevitably, the boys started betting on how many jumps a fellow would last. All good fun until Lt.-Col. Sam Steele, Herchmer’s second-in-command, caught them at it. It was bad luck because it was the only day Steele was in Regina. Sam gravitated to the arena and soon figured out that the seasoned riders were mocking the junior ones. He called them on it.

  In that moment, Frank knew he was going to suffer. Of all the Mountie brass who had passed through Ft. Macleod, Frank’s father insisted Steele was the toughest, tough as his fake-sounding name. He could ride all day and drink all night. Single-handed and sick with the flu, he had once bluffed a mob of miners into giving up their strike.

  “This is not real soldiering,” Steele began, “to come here to Regina and show off how well you can ride your own horse. Any damn fool can ride his own horse. In the deserts and mountains of South Africa, horses will die, just like men will. So, before you go any farther toward that destination, I want you to demonstrate that you can ride any horse—not just the tolerant beast who knows and permits your clumsy ways.”

  They were told to stable their own horses and ride a horse chosen for them by the riding sergeant. Steele and the riding sergeant kept moving them around until they got a horse that bucked. The goal was to have each man bucked off once. Some who thought themselves clever play-acted a bit and let themselves fall toward a safe landing. Frank saw the others do it and thought, why not? When everyone had bucked off once, Steele pointed at the play-actors and invited them to go up against a tougher horse.

  Throughout this process, a monkey-coloured outlaw had been bucking off every man he faced. This was the horse Sam Steele wanted roped for the thespians. Frank saw a few bad wrecks, then the horse was snubbed again and it was his turn. When he was in the saddle, and the snubbers let go, the outlaw horse stood still. Its skin shuddered wherever Frank touched it. Then the beast turned its neck and considered him with a sideways eye. The rank gelding exploded upward, and the landing hurt every inch of Franks spine. It raced to gain momentum and flung itself in a twisting buck. Lest he be taken for an actor again, Frank fought to hold on. The result was that he came off awkwardly down the horse’s side, close enough to take a hoof in the ribs. A couple of fellows ran in and dragged him to the rails while two horsemen raced after the bucking horse to rope it for another.

  Frank lay on the ground and waited for his breath to return. He felt along his ribs to see if any were broken. There were no juts or points of specific agony so he decided he was only bruised. He sat up among the other semi-invalids, and saw that several were faced away from the rodeo. They were looking at an Edmonton man named Albert who had arrived in Regina late, riding a dull nag. Well before Sam Steele’s lesson, he had developed a leg problem and been excused from the horse work. Now, his condition seemed to have worsened. He was screwing at his kneecap like it was a loose jar lid.

  When the outlaw had laid out the final rider, one of the injured called, “How’s that knee, Albert? A little better, maybe?” Several did the same until they drew the horse sergeant’s attention.

  Before long, the ropers had the outlaw snubbed to the post again. A big fellow had the ears thumbed down while another twisted the nose. When the horse went to his knees, Albert settled himself in the saddle, poked his boot toes in the stirrups. He called for the snubbers to let the horse go.

  Soon the outlaw was rocking above ground and Albert was flapping back and forth like a rag doll. A couple of high jumps and rock-hard landings, and both stirrups were lost. At times, Albert’s only connection to the horse was a death grip on the saddle horn.

  By now, even the badly injured were feeling guilty. The outlaw horse was infuriated to have Albert still attached. Into his next combination the horse poured so much wild energy that he shot a rear hoof into and through one of the empty stirrups. Now, he was bucking on three legs, and still it was more than Albert could handle.

  Finally, it dawned on Albert that he was serving no useful purpose. He let go the horn, flew, landed, bounced, and lay still.

  Military discipline was forgotten as the men charged into the arena centre and clustered around the fallen man. Limb by limb, Albert began to move. It was like a miracle to see him rise to his feet, and the boys cheered. Albert even had the aplomb to lick his fingers and twitch his moustache ends back into place.

  “Well, boys,” he said, “you know me, I can ride most anything with hair. But, when a horse puts his hoof in the stirrup and tries to get on behind, I reckon it’s time to let him go.”

  They laughed so hard the riding sergeant started hitting them with his stick to make them subside.

  That evening, Frank Adams sat on his bedroll on the floor of the jam-packed barracks room and probed at the purple decoration on his ribs. Though expanded and frilly, it still contained the shape of an iron-shod hood, and he would be wearing the reminder for some time.

  What annoyed him about the bruise—annoyed him about all of the pains inflicted here at Regina—was how it was meant in some way to bring the men together. They had come to this war in little bunches, or alone, and were otherwise strangers. Training was supposed to change all that and weld them into a gang so unified they would back one another to the point of risking death. Frank looked around and concluded it would take more than bouncing them on the ground to make it happen.

  When they’d first arrived, they had been organized into troops. Frank was in Squadron D, in a troop of Pincher Creek and Ft. Macleod men. He came from neither town but it was the closest troop to home. They had been assigned to this skinny barracks and, as soon as they were stuffed inside, had begun to divide until the Pincher herd was stacked along one side wall and the Macleod bunch along the other. Tom Scott, who had ranched near both and had enlisted in Ft. Macleod, had to choose. He had settled with the Pincher Creek men.

  Frank, who took pride in belonging to neither town, bedded down on the room’s midline, where eventually he was not alone. Ovide Smith had his bedroll on this line, and so did Jeff Davis, where it met the short wall.

  The thing about Pincher Creek and Ft. Macleod was that, though they were both young and only thirty miles apart, they had developed a dislike of one another. Macleod was the oldest by a few years and, being the first, had a courthouse and a Mountie barracks. All Pincher had for public buildings was a small Mountie detachment and a post office desk in the corner of the hardware store. Pincher was the aggressor in the dispute, while Macleod pretended indifference.

  Despite no one else in the Canadian Mounted Rifles caring less about Pincher Creek or Fort Macleod, the soldiers in the room around Frank were still thinking about who was best and how to prove it. It was almost inevitable, given the events of the day, that a contest would result involving the monkey-coloured outlaw horse.

  Frank’s sleeping spot in the middle of the room was ideal for eavesdropping. He heard Pincher Creek rancher Reg Redpath suggest to his best friend, Robert Kerr, that both Pinchers and Macleod’s best cowboys should ride the outlaw horse for a purse. Pincher men like the Wilson brothers and Harry Gunn were asked for their thoughts.

  The idea came from Pincher because they believed they had the best rider: Fred Morden. Morden was good at everything—as if God had paused in His factory and said, “Hey, let’s make this one by hand.” Kerr asked Morden if he was up for it, and Morden said all right, though he wasn’t sure how long he could stay on the horse. All that was needed, the others assured him, was to stay on for more jumps than whoever rode for Macleod.

  Frank watched Redpath cross the room’s short width and deliver the challenge. Macleod accepted, because to do otherwise would have appeared frightened or uncertain. But they had no obvious candidate to go up against Morden. Though it seemed unlikely that the army would allow this test, they felt they should have a contestant in case it did.

  Frank switched his attention back to the Pincher side, to see how they intended to make the riding instructor accept this event, but he seemed to have missed that part. All he heard was that Stee
le and the riding instructor had agreed the outlaw horse had no military use and should be sold to Regina’s abattoir.

  In the Macleod scrum, they were now discussing Jeff Davis. Davis was certainly a good rider. He had won bucking contests and had worked as a bronc twister in a Pat Burns beef camp. But the question was, was Davis a Macleod man? This was argued both ways. He had been born in that town and mostly raised there, but after his father and his Indian mother split up, Jeff had gone to live with the mother and his younger siblings on the Blood Reserve. Though he did not stay there, he had never returned to live in Fort Macleod.

  An additional problem was that Jeff Davis was not at the barracks that night. He had been given leave to dine and stay over with family friends. The Ft. Macleod group voted Jeff Davis to be their contestant in absentia.

  Next morning, Frank stayed as near Reg Redpath as he could. He also watched for Jeff Davis but Jeff was late getting back, a fact that made the Macleod contingent anxious. When Redpath and Kerr started for the riding instructor, Frank tagged along, stopping at the edge of earshot.

  Redpath and Kerr asked the riding sergeant about the outlaw horse: had a decision been made about him? The sergeant said there had: the horse would go to the abattoir. Redpath and Kerr said they thought that was a terrible waste.

  How could it be a waste, the officer said. Hadn’t yesterday’s display been ample evidence that the horse was a man-killing savage?

  Redpath said the boys had been talking about exactly that and had found themselves impressed with the horse’s spirit and athletic ability. It might be the best horse in the Mounted Rifles, if it could be subdued.

  The riding sergeant said this was doubtful. Redpath said he had a couple of fellows who were willing to ride the horse and put it to the test.

  Finally, the idea was broached. Why not let two of the best riders have a go at the outlaw horse? Maybe, once topped, it would lose its killer streak, in which case the army would acquire a valuable animal.

  The riding sergeant told them to go ahead; it was their funeral.

  Shortly afterwards, Jeff Davis returned from his night of leave. The Macleod men went to him. Frank saw how the Macleod soldiers argued, and how Jeff said next to nothing. Jeff shook his head at each wave of them. Finally, they stomped away. They went to Redpath and Kerr and said they were going to forfeit. The rider they were counting on would not ride.

  All that remained was to tell the riding sergeant, but when they did, Redpath and Kerr got a shock. They told him that only one of the riders was willing and so the thing must be called off, but the sergeant did not see their reasoning. Surely, one rider, if successful, served as well as two. He insisted the ride go ahead. This was an army, after all, not a rodeo.

  There was nothing for it but to rope and snub the outlaw. In a brief meeting of the Pincher Creek men, Robert Kerr said it should no longer be automatic that Fred Morden ride. They should choose straws. Fred said no. He had said he would do it, and he would.

  To his credit, Morden rode the outlaw better than anyone else had. But the result was the same. When Morden got to his feet after an ugly fall, he was holding his elbow and his face was white. He walked past them and straight to the infirmary. When they saw him next in barracks, he was wearing a sling. The medic thought he might have a cracked bone. Morden’s training was over.

  That night, Jeff Davis stayed outside until lights out. The Macleod men were happy to forget the riding contest, and the Pincher Creek fellows were mostly subdued about the disaster as well. Only Pete Belton, the older and smaller of the two Belton brothers from northwest of Pincher Creek, was in a temper. “We should beat the tar out of that damn Halfbreed right now. Stinking coward!”

  Fred Morden was in a dark mood and told Belton to shut up.

  “It’s my arm. If there’s anything to be done, I’ll do it.”

  “So you’re going to take a round out of that bastard? When you’re healed? Someone sure as hell should.”

  “It’s none of your business, so shut up about it.”

  Canadian Pacific Railway

  The horse cars on the train were called palace cars. Four horses on each side faced into two alleys. Each car had four open doorways. That made sixteen horses per car, eight travelling across the nation facing the Atlantic, eight looking backwards at the Pacific.

  The horses hated the train. The sideways rocking was foreign to their senses. The ever-present, ever-changing noise twitched their ears night and day. Every minute there was something going on that they would have bolted from on the prairie, but there they were, slotted into narrow stalls, unable to move more than a foot in any direction.

  There were soldiers charged with the horses’ care: tending their feed bags and offering them water from the alley barrels. But most owners visited every day. They picked their way through the packed colonist cars, then left the relative warmth to climb a ladder to the roof. In the icy wind, it was down, across, up, and along until they came to the car that held their horses, where they climbed down a side ladder to the correct door.

  When the wind was in your face, you’d arrive with a frostbitten forehead you had to rub the colour back into. The hope was that your voice could contradict the strangeness of everything else. But the horses stood tense and gritted.

  Frank visited, brushed, and talked to Dunny on roughly the same schedule as everyone else. He had noted that the distribution of horses was not random. The sorters placed them according to troop, but friends with pull saw that their horses stood together. Morden, Kerr, Redpath, Harry Gunn, and the Miles brothers had theirs in the forward eight of one car. Jeff, Ovide, an Irish teamster named Callaghan, the Belton brothers, and Frank had theirs in the same car’s back end. The remaining stalls in Frank’s end were free-pool.

  Looking at his car’s arrangement, Frank understood the hierarchy. Where Morden and Redpath were, that was for blooded horses. The back end was for animals that lacked breeding. Regina had been like a horse show; Frank had never seen so many. But, out of all of them, the only two he admired as much as his own dun mare were in the back end of this car. That is, if a trade was forced on him, he would only take Jeff Davis’s blue mare or Casey Callaghan’s big buckskin. Morden, Redpath, and the rest at the front had bays and chestnuts. They were fancy horses, no doubt, but there was something about the bone and confirmation that Frank found too elegant. In the conditions of Africa, he was betting Jeff’s and his mares, and Callaghan’s gelding, would prove stronger.

  Much of Frank’s horse knowledge was passed down to him by his Uncle Doc, a Texan who was very long-winded on the topic. Doc said Frank’s dun was a descendant of old-time Spanish horses, horses that had run wild for centuries before becoming saddle stock again. Buckskins like Callaghan’s and Jeff’s blue also belonged in this category; a kind of horse that horse fanciers often called cayuse and would not ride or own.

  Not all wildys were good but even the not-good ones tended to do better at picking their way over rough ground. Their eyes were set better for seeing in every direction, and that kept them from falling into badger and gopher holes. When you got a cayuse that was built pretty and had spirit, you really had something. Casey, Jeff, and Frank all had something.

  The Beltons, on the other hand, had ugly horses, the kind that happens when you breed your plow horse with your saddle horse. Sometimes you get a quicker-footed workhorse. Other times, you get a saddle horse that rides like a stoneboat. The Belton horses were the latter. Frank knew a little about the Belton family from having rounded up on the Waldron range. He’d seen their dilapidated shacks off the edge of the Waldron lease.

  After a day when the train had stood still for twenty hours of track fixing, they started moving again and actually got up some speed. They were enjoying the pace when a soldier came back to say the horses were freezing. The speed was sucking frozen air into the open doorways and the horses were in trouble.

  They scrambled for blankets and coats, and, so burdened, climbed and crawled their way back
. The horses were uneasy or dangerously far asleep, with frost growing all over their backs and faces. The sleepers had already begun to lean and hang, losing connection with the world.

  In Adams’ half-car, Casey Callaghan took his old buffalo coat and nailed it across the windward doorway. The men climbed onto the stalls, spreading their sleeping blankets over the horses’ backs. They rubbed the frost off the faces and picked the rime out of the eyes.

  Pete Belton’s gelding was very nervous and making an odd noise. He stamped back and forth, as if he had sandflies on his sack. Belton said he wanted to pull the gelding out and check what was wrong. This was never done because of the open doorways. If a horse saw daylight and bolted, there would be no stopping it. But Belton said he would put his coat over the horse’s eyes and direct it toward the side where Casey had the doorway covered.

  The stall for Pete Belton’s horse was between Davis’s blue and Eddy Belton’s giant. Davis’s and Pete’s horses had worked up a feud, and as soon as the big gelding’s ass cleared its stall, he fired a kick that split The Blue’s door. Davis’s mare bared her teeth and lunged, hitting the end of her halter rope.

  Even with Casey’s buffalo coat over the light and the blanket on his head, Belton’s horse almost plunged off the train. It took all of them to twist his anvil head into the wall. While three held the brute, Belton examined his horse all over and found, finally, that his tail was raw and bloody at the base. Abruptly, he turned on Davis.

  “That cayuse bitch of yours bit my horse’s tail bloody.”

  Jeff Davis had torn a board off the inside wall to patch his gate. He had borrowed a hammer from Callaghan and was pulling and straightening nails. He set the hammer down and rose. Most people match the mood of their challengers, but a few meet anger with calm. Davis did not answer but waited.

  “They should never let a fucking cayuse like that with white man’s horses. That’s no kind of army horse.”