by Dick Francis
Her voice was as strong and capable as the rest of her. I watched her eyes slide round towards the paddock with the mares and foals, and pause there calmly, and return to me. Expressionless.
I smiled her a force five version of an adults-only smile, and asked if she ever found it lonely, so far out in the wilds. To this mild but unmistakable come-on there was no reaction beyond a crisp shake of the head. I was the only man there not guarded by a watchful wife: Yola wasn’t in the least bit interested.
I complimented her on the ranch food, and on the helpfulness of the wranglers. She said she was glad I was pleased. I yawned and apologized, and said it must be all the fresh air … she’d heard it all dozens of times a year, said everything she’d said so often that she no longer had to think. No use on this occasion using any jolting technique to force out an unguarded phrase: jolting her was roughly the last thing I wanted to do.
After a while I stood up lazily and said I would turn in, and she gave me the usual meaningless halfway-up smile. She hadn’t really seen me at all: wouldn’t remember me in another month. Unless I inadvertently gave her cause.
The three bugs in her cabin worked on the audio-switch principle: any noise, and speech especially, which they picked up, automatically started the recording machine which occupied the back half of the ordinary looking transistor radio standing beside my bed. But there was little to overhear. Yola slept alone, and apart from one evening when she invited four of the guests in for a drink, the only conversations were telephone calls.
In my cabin each evening, warming by the squat black stove, I played back the day’s ‘take’. Nearly all the calls were to do with business: grocery orders, laundry, blacksmith’s supplies, and future bookings. But one call, on Friday evening, was worth all the trouble.
‘Uncle Bark?’ Yola’s voice said, low and clear. One of the bugs was behind a picture of drooping roses on the wall over the telephone table.
‘… honey.’ The occasional word escaped from the receiver in return, but Yola must have been holding it close to her ear.
‘Sure. Everything’s fine here,’ she said. ‘Absolutely no kind of trouble.’
‘… Matt?….’
‘That’s what I called about, Uncle Bark. Matt wrote me he’s having to give up in Europe. He says he can’t get near to you-know-who, they’ve got him holed up as tight as Fort Knox. So I guess we’ll just have to keep everything under wraps for a while longer.’
‘…’
‘It sure is a nuisance, yeah. But as long as we get him to you before the snows come again …’
‘…’
‘How can we? You know it isn’t built for that.’
‘… stay …’
‘We certainly can’t send him down to Clint’s with the others. We’d waste a whole year and he might break a leg or something.’ ‘… desert.’
‘We don’t want him at Pitts, it isn’t built for it. But there’s a good long time for Matt to arrange something.’
‘… hadn’t started.’
‘Yeah, I’m sure you would. But it’s too late now. How were we to know that something so goddam stupid would happen? Matt will probably be home some time tomorrow. I’ll have him call you.’
She put down the receiver soon after that: and I wound back the tape and played the conversation over again. Two unsubstantial points emerged. If Dave Teller had been too obviously guarded, Matt would have realized that the punt episode was not considered to be an accident. And the something ‘goddam stupid’ which had somewhere or other upset the Clives’ original plans might be that I’d been there to fish Dave out of the river, or might be something else quite different; something which had made the removal of Dave necessary in the first place. The horse had been stolen on June 15th, Tuesday, and Yola had asked the London hotel for Dave’s weekend address on June 19th, Saturday. So what, if anything, had happened in the four days between? Something goddam stupid …
I told Yola after breakfast on Saturday morning that I had enjoyed my stay immensely and would be leaving the following day. She smiled the regulation smile without clearly focusing, and thanked me for letting her know.
‘So if I could have my bill at breakfast tomorrow?’ I suggested.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘But you can’t stay over Monday for the Fourth?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
She nodded, not caring one way or the other. ‘I’ll get it ready for you, then.’
The Wilkersons exclaimed over my going. ‘You’ll miss the barbecue,’ Samantha said. ‘And the float trip down the river.’
A local man took parties down the fast flowing Snake on black inflated rubber raft dinghies: one of the area’s attractions, like the rodeo and the ski lift. The Wilkersons had asked me to join them. ‘Maybe I’ll come back next year,’ I said. And maybe I wouldn’t.
I looked after the children that afternoon while Betty-Ann went to the hairdresser and Wilkie drove to a distant lake for the fishing. They swam in the stream, where I refused to join them in case my head in the water jogged Yola’s sleeping memory, and we fed sugar and handfuls of grass through the rails to the leggy foals in the little paddock. The rails were solid young tree trunks dove-tailed and nailed into even sturdier posts, and the gate was just as substantial. Its hinges were bolted through the gatepost, and a heavy padlock fastened it through two strong hasps. None of this strength was new.
Samantha and Mickey didn’t think much of the sardine bay.
‘Too spindly,’ Mickey said. ‘His legs would snap if he went up the mountain.’ I looked across at the Teton range, the tops shining white in the hot sun. The surefooted born-to-it ranch horses picked their way easily up and down the steep rocky paths over there, through the woods growing with flat huckleberry leaves, across the screes left from landslips, and on to the bare stony patches above the snow line.
‘Why don’t you stay till Monday night?’ said Mickey. ‘If you go tomorrow, you’ll miss the fireworks.’
Chapter Nine
At one o’clock, early Sunday morning, I stood on the porch of my cabin waiting for my eyes to dilate, and listening to the night.
A slight wind, riffling the trees. A car horn, very distant. The faint hum of the electric generator in its special house. No sound from Yola’s cabin. None all evening. Matt hadn’t yet come home.
With some misgivings I had left my riding boots in the cabin, and wore only thin rubber-soled plimsolls, with a pair of socks on top. I walked quietly through the sage brush on the long way round to the little paddock, the spicy fragrance rising into my nose as I disturbed the silver-grey leaves. The half moonlight was enough to see by without a torch and streaky clouds made shifting shadows across the ground: it couldn’t have been better if I’d sent in an order.
The padlock’s strength was illusory. It had a simple lever movement inside which took me less than five minutes to fiddle open. No one could have heard the click of success. Nor the tiny squeak of the gate opening. I slipped through and distributed sugar to the mares and foals. The bay with the white blaze greeted this with a trumpeting whinny; but no lights went on in Yola’s cabin or the wranglers’ bunkhouse.
The sardine horse flared his nostrils at me but ate the sugar and let me slip over his head the simple rope halter I had come armed with. I spent some time rubbing his nose and patting his neck, and when I walked towards the gate he came with me docilely enough. I opened the gate and led him through, and the mares and foals quietly followed, their unshod hooves making dull little clops on the loamy ground.
The gentle procession went slowly across towards the river, over the flat bridge with hollow thuds, and up into the darkness of the pine woods. The mares soon stopped to graze, and the foals with them, but the bay stallion with the blaze suddenly realized he was free again, and crashed past me at high speed, squealing and cantering up the path and making as much noise as a train-load of football supporters. Anxious, heart-quickened moments passed: but still no reaction from below.
The sardine bay tugge
d hard to follow. I soothed him and steadied him, and we presently walked on. He picked his way too cautiously over the stones and corners of rocks sticking up in the narrow path, but I couldn’t hurry him without risk; my neck prickled at the thought of being slung into a Wyoming jail for horse stealing; but it was nothing to the fear I had that Mickey might be right about those spindly legs.
In places all the way up the width of the path dwindled to two feet, with a wall of rock on one side and a steep slope on the other. Riding along them by day one simply had to trust that one’s horse wouldn’t tumble over the edge, as nothing could then have stopped a rock-strewn descent of two or three hundred feet. At these points there wasn’t room to walk side by side with a horse one was leading: I inched up the path ahead of him, and slowly, cautiously, he put his feet delicately down between the bigger stones, and scrunched after me.
Two or three times we passed small groups of horses from the ranch, the cow bell clanking gently round the neck of the leader and betraying their presence. Their dark shapes melted into the jumbled background of woods and rocks, and the moonlight picked out only an eye, a rump, a swishing tail. The wranglers found them each morning by tracking, as the bells were only audible for a furlong. I’d had a long talk with one of the boys about tracking, and he’d shown me how they did it. They were going to be able to follow my way up the mountain as clearly as if I’d given them directions, and to tell the time I went by the amount of dew which formed in the hoof prints. The boy had shown me hoof prints, told me how many horses had gone by and when, and all I had seen were some scattered dusty marks. They read the ground like a book. If I tried to obliterate the sardine horse’s hoof prints, I obliterated also any chance of the Clives believing he had wandered off by accident. The fuzzy outline of plimsolls under socks was, I hoped, going to pass unnoticed: nothing less was worth the discomfort of wearing them on such jagged going.
It took two hours to reach twelve thousand feet and to come to the end of the tracks I’d learnt in the past four days. From there it was a case of trusting my own nose. The drifting streaks of cloud made black shadows like pits across the rocks and several times I stood still and felt ahead with one toe to make sure that the ground was in fact still there, and I was not stepping straight off a precipice. The moon itself, and the cold mountain air moving against my right cheek, kept me going in the right general direction, but the dotted-line trail I had studied on the map proved more optimistic than actual.
The horse’s legs stood up to it remarkably well. Mine had already had enough. Mountaineering was not among Civil Service requirements.
The peak of the Grand Teton rose to thirteen thousand seven hundred feet. The summit loomed very close. Patches of snow, half melted, exposed black looking banks of scree. I came suddenly across a narrow trail winding past them like an eel: people had walked along there recently, scraping into the snow. I had, with some luck, come the right way. The cold bit down under my black jersey and through the thin shirt underneath, and I wished I had had the sense to bring gloves. But it couldn’t be a great deal farther: through the short canyon pass, and out the other side. I looked at my watch. The climb had taken nearly three hours and I was late.
It was darker in the canyon, but also invisible from the valley below. I took the small torch out of my jeans pocket, and shone it in front of my feet. Because of that, the whole expedition came unstuck.
A man suddenly rounded a corner a short way ahead and stood foursquare in the centre of the trail. Startled even more than I was, the horse backed instantly away, tore the rope out of my hand, pulled me flat over as I tried to hang on, and skipped sharply away along a narrow ridge branching off to the left.
Sick and furious I got back on my feet and turned to go after him. The man took a tentative step down the trail and called out.
‘Gene?’
It was Walt.
I bit my tongue literally to stop the rage in my mind from spilling over him. There wasn’t time for it.
‘I saw you coming. The light,’ he explained. ‘I thought I’d come along to meet you. You’re later than you said.’
‘Yes.’ I shut my mouth. There was half a million pounds loose in a death trap. My responsibility, and my fault.
The moon pushed out a feeble twenty watts. I couldn’t see the horse. The path he had taken in panic was a ledge eighteen inches wide with sheer rock on the left and a fierce slope of scree on the right. A gradient so steep that it was as dangerous as a straight down drop: and in its black invisible depths there would be the usual big slabs with upjutting edges.
‘Stay here,’ I said to Walt. ‘And keep quiet.’
He nodded without speaking, understanding that the situation was beyond apology. His instructions had been expressly to wait for me at one arranged spot.
The ledge was thirty feet long with a bend to the left. I walked along it slowly, not using the torch, my left hand trailing along the rock wall, the grey light just enough to show the crumbly uneven outer edge.
After thirty feet the ledge widened into a saucer-shaped bowl three quarters surrounded by towering rocks. The sloping floor of the bowl led directly into the sharper slope of the scree. On the floor of the bowl, patchy snow and rough black pebble.
The horse was standing there, sweating. Quivering in every rigid limb. There was no way out except back along the ledge.
I stroked his muzzle and gave him four lumps of sugar, speaking gently to him in a voice much calmer than my feelings. It took ten minutes for the excessive tension to leave his body, and another five before he would move. Then I turned him carefully round until he was facing the way he had come.
Horses react instantly to human fear. The only chance I had of getting him safely back was to walk round there as if it were a broad concrete path across his own stable yard. If he smelt fear, he wouldn’t come.
Where the ledge began, he baulked. I gave him more sugar and more sweet talk. Then I turned my back on him and with the halter rope leading over my shoulder, walked slowly away. There was the faintest of protesting backward tugs. Then he came.
Thirty feet had never seemed so interminable. But an animal’s sixth sense kept him from putting a foot over the edge, and the slithering clop of his hooves on the broken ground came steadily after me all the way.
Walt, this time, made no sound at all. I came across him standing motionless several yards up the intended trail and he turned without speaking and went on ahead.
Less than half a mile farther the path descended and widened into a broad sweeping basin: and there, where Walt had been supposed to meet me, waited another man, stamping his feet to keep warm.
Sam Kitchens. Holding another horse.
With a powerful torch he inspected every inch of the one I’d brought, while I held his.
‘Well?’ I said.
He nodded. ‘It’s Chrysalis all right. See that tiny scar up there, under his shoulder? He cut himself on a metal gate post one day when he was a two-year-old and a bit full of himself. And these black dots, sort of freckles, along that patch of his belly. And the way his hide grows in a whirl just there inside his hock. He always had clean legs. There’s a mark or two on them now that wasn’t there when I had him. But apart from knowing him from his general shape, like, I’d certainly swear to those other things in any court you’d like to mention.’
‘Was the cut from the gate post bad enough to be treated by a vet?’
He nodded. ‘Five or six stitches.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Then off you go with him. And take good care.’
Sam Kitchens grinned. ‘Who’d have thought I’d have seen him again up the Rocky Mountains in the middle of the night? Never you mind, I’ll take care all right.’
He turned Chrysalis expertly round, clicking his tongue affectionately, and began the mile-long walk down to the Teton camping ground, to where he and Walt and Sam Hengelman had come in a horse box.
Walt said, ‘It’s too late for you to go back. Come with us.’
>
I shook my head. ‘I’ll meet you in Idaho Falls as we arranged.’
Walt moved uncomfortably. ‘It’s not safe to go back.’
‘I’ll be fine. You just get the two Sams cracking. They’ve got to be well on their way before dawn. They’ve got that bill of sale?’
Walt nodded, looking at the big mountain pony beside me.
‘He cost five hundred dollars. One bay horse, no markings, entire, aged seven or eight. As ordered. That’s what the bill of sale says, and that’s what we’ve got in the van, if anyone asks. Sam Kitchens chose it. Said it was as near as you would get, without actually paying thousands for a blood horse.’
‘This one looks fine. See you, then, Walt.’
He stood in silence while I levered myself on to the new horse’s bare back and gathered up the reins. I nodded to him, turned away, and started back up the trail to the canyon.
Late, I thought. Almost too late, now. The wranglers would be high up in the hills by six, rounding up the horses. Dudes rode as usual on Sunday mornings. It was already five, and the first greyness of dawn had crept in as the moon faded. If they saw me out so early, I was in trouble.
At a jog trot, his sturdy legs absolutely at home on the terrain, the new horse took me back up into the canyon, past the fearful little ridge that Chrysalis had taken, and out on to the Clive valley side of the Tetons. From there down I looked out for a bunch of High Zee horses, but I was well below the snow line before I heard any of the bells.
There was a little group in a tree-filled hollow. They moved away at my approach, but slowly, and when I was among them and stopped, they stopped also. I slid off the horse I was riding, threaded my fingers through the mane of one of the High Zee group, and transferred the bridle from one to the other. Then, leaving Dave Teller’s five-hundred-dollar purchase free on the hill, I pointed my new mount’s nose homewards, and gave him a kick.
He knew the way, and he consequently could go much faster. The Wilkersons had told me the wranglers cantered down those steep rocky inclines, but until I did it I hadn’t imagined what a hair-raising business it would be. The horse put his feet where I would have said no man could balance, let alone a quadruped, and when I turned him off the regular path he hardly slackened his pace. We went headlong downwards through pines and alders and groves of silver-trunked dead trees, back to the thicker woods with patches of grass underfoot, and more undergrowth of huckleberry and sapling. There was one sticky incline of black bog where a mountain stream had spilled out sideways on to a slope of earth, but my pony staggered across it, tacking downwards, sinking-in to his knees at every step. Farther on, he crossed the tumbling stream itself, picking his way through a mass of underwater rocks, and lower still he went straight down a bare pebbly slope where the normal path ran from side to side in easier zigzags. Whippy branches caught at us under the trees, but I laid my head flat beside his ears, and where he could go, I went too.