Spanish Crossing

by Alan Lemay

  It was a colorless sort of horse, anyway, a dirty gray-white, shaggy, and always round barreled, for it was a good keeper; the only horse that Jed had ever thought of as "it." The name it recognized was "Hey!" Though Jed also addressed it as "Here, you!"

  Jed never thought of wolf hunting as a job. Its hardships were the same as those of paid winter riding, but, because nobody was telling him what to do, Jed thought he was idling - just drifting around, and meantime piecing out by taking wolf scalps for bounty.

  He meant to go back to work by and by to "get somewhere." The trouble was that he never rode for a cow outfit for long without concluding that everybody in the spread was down on him. Since he was uncommunicative, a methodical man with an unkindled eye, no one ordinarily thought anything about him - but Jed believed differently. Presently some small dispute would arise, over a rope or some such matter, and Jed would recognize the old story - universal enmity breaking out again.

  As a wolf hunter he found that the few cents each scalp brought was enough for his needs. He almost never had to buy food; that was supplied by the cow camps to which necessity periodically drove him. This liberality, accorded by the ranchers to the wolf hunter as a valuable, almost selfsacrificing citizen, was a mystery to Jed. He could neither imagine himself publicly useful nor believe in anyone's friendliness. The generosity remained unexplained. Jed took it as an ominous sign.

  Summers he grub-tested, moving on from camp to camp, working stock satisfactorily but very little; but through the long winters he wandered alone with his strychnine bottles. He would ride a twenty-mile circle, leisurely scattering wolf bait, then slowly traverse the circle again, looking for dead wolves. He found plenty. Sometimes he shot a steer, for meat and bait; that was another thing the ranchers thought nothing of.

  Each year he grew more solitary, avoiding chance meetings shamefacedly, almost like a hunted man. As he grew more solitary, he grew more careless of his own comfort. He would go for days without making coffee or cooking food, subsisting by perpetually chewing raw corn meal, like tobacco. Since he did not count raw corn meal as food, he thought he was a man who could go for days without eating. He had worked himself into a singularly bleak rut by the time the Grinner took him up.

  The grinning varmint was an undersized but unusually shaggy coyote of the race that formed the bulk of Jed's catch. They were commonly accepted under the law as prairie wolves, drawing a bounty somewhat less than that for timber wolves or grays. When Jed first saw him, the Grinner was sitting in the open a hundred yards away, watching Jed make his perfunctory camp. Jed upped his rifle, but lowered it again, for the coyote flicked out of line and merged with the sage. The wolf hunter went about frying a steak from a chunk of beef he was packing, the coyote out of his mind.

  The steak had no more than sizzled in the pan than the coyote appeared in another quarter, again sitting on his haunches, his tongue lolling. This time Jed pretended not to see. Casually he lay down, as if intending sleep, worked the rifle out in the coyote's direction, slowly rolled on his belly, upped sights, and - the coyote was not there.

  Not until he had sat up, rifle in hand, did he see the coyote sitting in another place, looking exactly as before. This time he made a snap shot of it, and the dirt jumped where the mark had been. But the animal had disappeared.

  Jed was not surprised; it had happened before. Only one scare was generally enough for one coyote. This time he was surely gone for good. A faint sift of snow was beginning to settle, and Jed, who had made almost a fetish of his rifle, wrapped the weapon in a blanket. When this was done, and the steak turned, the coyote appeared again.

  The wolf hunter took a better look at him - meanly small, foolishly furry, with the usual slanting, close-set eyes. Some coyotes have a wrinkle between the eyes, giving them a sharp look, and this one had that. The frown gave that tongue-lolling laughter a peculiarly personal, irritating turn.

  Jed's lips formed unfriendly names. There was still plenty of light - long hours formed no part of Jed's resume. With deliberate motions he unwrapped his rifle. When he looked up again and found, as he had expected, that the beast was gone, he sat down to wait the coyote out.

  The long minutes passed. The steak scorched, was jerked off the fire, and slowly cooled to rigidity. Jed sat twisting his neck, watching for the coyote to reappear. Dusk settled with the snow that was frosting his sheepskin collar. It was almost too dark for a shot when he decided that the coyote was gone for good. He thumbed his nose in two directions.

  "Go to hell!" he shouted, so that Hey!, the indeterminate horse, raised a simple head.

  He wrapped the rifle in the blanket once more. When he raised his eyes, there sat the coyote, scarcely fifty yards away.

  That night the Grinner stole his beef.

  All the next day the coyote followed him, not pointedly, but casually, as if merely trotting about its business. Twice Jed fired at it. As he slowly scattered his baits, he was thinking that he would pick up the ears of that coyote on his next round.

  During the night a coyote howled surprisingly close to the ashes of his fire, a shrill, yammering, nickering scurl of sound fit for twelve animals of that size - Hee-ee yipipipip, ah-ahyapapapapapa-o-o-o - dying away at last in a mournful dree. And in the morning when he found that his saddlebags had been dragged off, rifled, and their non-edible contents defiled, the same meanly sized, over-furry coyote was sitting in a hummock two hundred yards away, his tongue lolling in that foxy laughter.

  "You damned Grinner," Jed shouted. "I'll fix your clock works fer that!"

  From then on he thought of the coyote as he instead of it.

  At his next camp he poisoned a bit of meat, and left it close by his dead fire, and took care that nothing else stealable was left around.

  Daybreak showed the bait gone, but the coyote in the middle distance, scratching fleas. Jed was mystified and exasperated.

  "Oh, you copper-lined son-of-a-gun!" he yelled at the animal. He thought that by some slip he had failed to poison the bait.

  At the next opportunity he slit a good-size hunk of wolf haunch and loaded into it enough poison to stretch out half the wolves on the open range. When in the morning the bait was gone and the Grinner still on deck, he took advantage of a light snowfall to trace the imprinted diagram of the coyote's theft. He found the remains of his bait skillfully nibbled, but with the heavy drench of poison untouched. Jed grunted. Three times more that day he tried to bring the coyote down by rifle.

  So it went for another week, while Jed's circling carried him from the slopes to the flats and back to the rock-bound slopes again. Soon after midday he would begin looking for a good place to camp. Unless he was seeking water, the prairie was a vast blank, with no point of focus, no logical place to stop. This induced an indecision that used up most of his afternoon.

  But once the fire was built, all that was changed. His fire had a way of seeming the center of the universe, a permanent living thing that had always been destined to be just there. It was a bright landmark, reducing everything to relationship with itself.

  And by the time the darkness had closed in about the fire, the grinning coyote was there. Jed got so he paid no attention to him. After all, he was not trying to get all the coyote ears in the world - only the easy ones. If the Grinner didn't want his baits, Jed didn't give a whoop. Thus the wolf hunter and the coyote, along with that unconsidered horse, slowly trailed a great circle and got back to the place where the Grinner had first baffled Jed's gun.

  Now a new element came in, changing their relationship. For the first time in three years Jed rode along a day's line of baits without finding a dead wolf. At first, Jed thought only that wolves were getting scarce, but when, the next day, he still found no wolves, he inquired into causes. He rediscovered his baits with some trouble, but, when he had found a few, the difficulty became clear.

  Systematically the Grinner had nosed out Jed's baits, nibbled what he could of each without poisoning himself, and so defiled the remainder tha
t no animal would touch it.

  A fury steamed up in Jed, making his eyes watery pale against the red of his face. He shook knobby fists over his head, calling upon heaven to witness that he would get even with that varmint if it were the last thing he did. When he had cooled, he began to scheme, matching his resources against the coyote's nose.

  From day to day he rode on, in short stages now, spending most of his hours in preparation. He no longer rode back over his baited lines, for the continuing company of the coyote discouraged him. Instead, he put out only clever baits, pointed for the Grinner alone.

  He made grooved sticks and crammed the grooves with poisoned tallow. These the Grinner spoiled, but would not touch. He poisoned tiny, hashed pellets of meat and set them aside to freeze, to kill the scent, hid the pellets in small chunks, and froze them, and finally wrapped the chunks in fresh meat, forming baits still so small that a coyote should take each at a gulp. The Grinner gnawed off the outside wrappers, and the ruse failed.

  For a week he experimented with marrow bones, making short tubes of them, with poison in the middle and pure marrow in both ends. This failed, too. He made snares with his lariat, cunningly contrived and baited with non-poisoned meat. The Grinner scratched in underneath, and stole the bait. He also tried a deadfall, when once materials lay at hand, but that night the ground thawed. The Grinner, tunneling under, escaped uncrushed, and after that would not steal from beneath logs again.

  Stopping at a ranch for provisions, Jed borrowed a string of wolf traps, very cumbersome to carry with no pack horse. These failed him, as had everything else. He cached them in a gully and never remembered to take them back to their owner.

  Jed wandered on, his marches lengthening. He made only half-hearted efforts now to poison the beast. Instead, he burned his scraps of food in an attempt to starve the coyote out, but there were as many resources along Jed's trail as anywhere else, and the coyote stuck. The wolf hunter brooded sourly over this thing that was "just his luck."

  Jed's unplanning routine, calling for little thought or attention, had served as a comfortable oblivion. Through the slow days his mind wandered wool-gathering over his past. As he relived each remembered scene, he improved it, putting into his own mouth bold and witty remarks, confusing and overbearing his persecutors. He reenacted his battles, letting inconclusive outcomes flower into triumphs. "A mite quicker, an' 1'd 'a' had him by the throat. Now, blast you, I guess you'll....

  But the Grinner broke into his meanderings like a persistent fly on the face of a man who is trying to sleep. A dozen times a day Jed's hand stole toward his rifle. In the night he sat watching for the Grinner's green eyes, like phosphorous balls hung in black frost. He roused from sleep at the Grinner's howls, cursing and hoping for a shot. When the coyote was long out of sight, which occurred every day, Jed's eyes forever searched the sage, so that the brute's absence was no relief.

  Sometimes, as he lay looking at the pulsing dance of the rocks behind his fire's heat column, he thought of women he had known and certain others he had only seen. His wandering mind glorified himself and them so that for a while he forgot the cold snow cake of the prairie, and walked in a world of music, warmth, and light, admired by women's eyes. His vi lion caressed contouring silk, round white arms. Then nearby would go up that long falsetto devil-yell: Hee-ee yipipipipip.... And out of his blankets would start the actual Jed, the man with sourly furrowed face and hands grimed and gnarled, cursing so as to shatter any dream past all recall.

  One day, in a paroxysm of helpless wrath, he turned the dirty-gray horse toward the coyote, and with spur and quirt set out to run the animal down. For two miles the Grinner led him up slope and down, then, tiring of the pursuit, went into an easy sprint and was lost in a long reef of sage.

  The horse stumbled to a walk, then stopped of his own accord, head down. Jed, getting off to tighten the cinch, noticed how lean the animal was. It was weeks since the horse had tasted grain. A poor keeper would have been out from under him long ago.

  In the saddle again Jed mumbled endless curses at the forlorn sage. He sat thinking for a long time, sometimes turning the wad of cornmeal in his cheek.

  "All right," he said at last. "You win. I'm leavin' this whole damned range to you. Take it an' keep it. 1 ain't wantin' it no more."

  He turned Hey!'s head north. "I guess you can go it three days more," he decided.

  That day he covered a long distance steadily north through a rising blow. Gray noon found him at the foot of Long Ridge, which divided that part of the free range, the north from the south. He was heading over for the Crazy K country. "The varmints have their ranges, same as a man," he was telling himself. "They won't noways cross out of 'em if they ain't terrible pushed."

  Late in the day the toiling horse reached the saddle notch in Long Ridge's backbone, and Jed stopped. A slashing gale was rearing through the gap, swaying him in the saddle. It carried with it a whip of hard, dry snow. He turned sidewise, looking back. "1 ain't through with you," he promised. "I'll come back and do fer you yet."

  A furlong down the trail he twisted his head to look back through the thin, racing snow. On a boulder he saw a small, blurred projection, like a vague pin. It disappeared, and a gray wisp, like a shadow, drifted tangent-wise down slope across a drift of snow. The Grinner was following Jed through.

  Hollow eyed and bitter lipped, Jed pushed on down the slope with the sting of the wind in his face. The darkness closed in an hour earlier than usual, under a moaning sky already hidden by level-driving flakes. The gray horse tried to turn tail to the wind and quit, but Jed forced it to go on. For an hour more they drifted with the barren slope, head down into the storm, until at last the flattening way suggested the foot of Long Ridge, and Jed swung down.

  Moving clumsily on saddle-cramped legs, Jed sought a windbreak behind which a man in blankets could live through the night. He clung stubbornly to the idea that since here he had stopped, here he would camp; yet, as rod after rod showed only wind-scoured hollows and windward drifts, he was forced to admit that only a fool would have crossed to the windward side of Long Ridge in such circumstances.

  The storm was growing worse. The sage shrilled, and the sky was alive with a vast moaning, the rushing of great winds high above. Shamefacedly he resigned himself to pushing on twelve miles to the Crazy K.

  He hurried back, searching for Hey! in the dark. When he reached the place where he had left the horse, it was gone.

  A stark terror - the first he had known in years - came into Jed like rising water, slowly at first, then with a wild rush like the scouring wind. Panic urged him to go rushing and plunging ahead. For an instant he almost yielded, and his bedroll slid from his shoulder to the snow.

  Then the plainsman's experience took the upper hand, and, instead of abandoning his bedroll, he sat down on it. He sucked at the cornmeal in his cheek, seeking half by reason, half by instinct, to divine in which direction the gray horse should be sought.

  At first, while he still thought his horse could be found, he searched keenly and wisely. Later, as successive sorties gained him nothing, he searched obstinately still, but with an increasingly fearsome despair. He lost account of his position and hence of the probable position of the horse.

  There could be no limit to that groping under the blizzard, other than that set quite as much by the grip of despair as by the numbing of his limbs. He went on with the dogged hunt until his feet were like clubs and the dree of the wind was dulling in his ears. His purposes were becoming blurred.

  Jed did not believe it possible for a man to lie down on that wind-planed slope and live through the night. To roll in his blankets meant to him to die, caught in the closing trap of the cold. Yet, partly because the shelter of his blankets offered that last slender hope, he at last resigned himself to it.

  He fumbled the strap from his bedroll. The wind tore at the loosened blankets, almost snatching them from his grasp, but his numbed hands held on to them with the grip of fear, and he managed
to roll himself into them, like a mummy or like a worm in a cocoon. He lay in a bitter snow, nose down in the blanket, breathing hard.

  Swiftly the snow salted over the blanket roll. Within it, the nightmare of conscious existence was slowly seeking numbed oblivion. Yet, when the Grinner yelled, Jed heard the yammering voice through the growl of the wind, and his mind was drawn back.

  He thought: No coyote howls in a blizzard. And then: It ain't right he don't get froze.

  The Grinner howled again, that long falsetto nicker: Yipipipip, hee-ee-yapapapapap.... An insane fury brought him to his elbow, fumbling his Colt free. He dragged the blanket away from his face, and the salt snow whipped against his mouth. In the faint gray luminosity of the snow he thought he made out a moving blur, a close circling form.

  He leveled the gun, elbow grounded, and fired.

  The dark blur became a fallen, frantically kicking swirl. He heard the Grinner's thin yip, and fired four times more into that swirl, until the hammer snapped on an empty cylinder. Then he drew back into the tube of his blankets, better fixed - as he thought - to die.

  Jed was mistaken. He was not dying, or anything near it.

  He woke in misery, every joint filled with cold pain. A faint seepage of light showed on the nap of the blanket an inch before his eyes, and presently he stiffly raised himself. A douse of snow dropped across his face like feathers, for half a foot of it lay over his bedroll. He blinked his eyes across a morning gray and still. The gray horse was huddled dejectedly a few feet away.

  The circumstances of the night returned to him slowly. Their force was dulled, even when they were complete. He was a little chagrined that he had overestimated his danger, a little pleased that he was mainly unharmed. But his underlying emotion was a flat one - merely the wretched sense of illbeing that goes with stiff joints and a cold dawn. Then his loose Colt reminded him of the Grinner.