by Bart Paul
“What’re you doing?” she said.
“Fuchs said Kip bought ammo from Rick. I wanted to talk to him about it.”
“Isn’t he closed?”
“It’s not quite eight, yet. You want to come in?”
She shook her head no. I parked opposite the Sporting Goods and jogged across the street. It was dusk, and the lights were on. I saw Nick’s niece behind the counter. She looked up and saw me and made for the door. I sort of smiled and waved, but she locked it before I got my hand on the knob. She gave me a scowl and tossed her head and turned around. I could see her turning off lights and walking to the back of the store, fading into the shadows. I walked back across the street.
“What was that all about?” Sarah said.
“No love for the trigger-happy home wrecker. I guess Kip got a chance to work his charms on her in person.”
“Right,” she said. “Obviously no woman can resist him.”
It was dark back in her room, but I could make out her eyes staring at me across the pillow.
“You’re up to something,” she said. Her voice was soft and kind and earthy, but after that “work his charms” crack I figured I’d best watch what I say, so I pretended I was asleep.
“Faker,” she said. She sort of goosed me. “Why did you bring up gathering the permit?”
“Just thinking.”
“It’s always kind of a big operation, so we’d have to get Becky and our usual crew to help us,” she said. “At least Kip wouldn’t follow us out there.”
“What if he did?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if just the two of us went out. And he knew it was just the two of us. Instead of him being the hare and us being the hound, we swap it around. Make him chase us.”
“There’s a hundred square miles of rock and sagebrush out there,” she said. “It would take the two of us weeks to gather.”
“But Kip don’t know that. And he doesn’t know the country.”
Chapter Sixteen
We lay awake a bit longer talking about what we needed to do and what we needed to take on a make-believe cattle gather. How many horses, what camp equipment, hay and human food and such, plus things we would borrow for the trip. We both knew the basics, but there were a million details and just the pair of us, and we were giving ourselves just one day to get it all prepped. One thing we agreed on was getting the word out, telling everyone we knew that we were going by ourselves.
We ran Sarah’s horses in right after breakfast. She picked the four we’d take so we wouldn’t be riding any of them two days in a row. We wanted to be able to travel fast—us being the hare and all—but not be too hard on the animals. She finished our shopping list and headed up north to Gardnerville. I set to shoeing a dun mare, the one horse that was still barefoot, then headed south to Becky’s to let them know our plans and to borrow a propane fridge.
Out at Bonner & Tyree’s, Harvey was cleaning a ditch in the mare pasture by the road with the backhoe, getting ready for summer. I met him at the gate, and he got in my truck and we drove down the lane to the ranchyard. All his sawbucks, pack bags and slings, tarps, tents, lash ropes and such, plus things like generators and the fridge that I was there to borrow were semi-organized in the back stalls of Becky’s barn. We rooted around, and Harv got me squared away with the little fridge and an almost full propane tank. He offered to ride with us on the gather and bring his aught-six. I told him why the two of us were going it alone and asked him to keep the reason to himself, his wife, Becky, and Dan.
“You and old Sarah like working together,” he said. “I can tell.”
“I know I do. But with her it’s mas o menos.”
“I know what you mean. My first wife, Francie Overmeyer, she was an ornery old hide, but when we were youngsters she used to work with me every day, too,” he said. “Her dad ran some sorry-assed cattle out on that Whiskey Flat country by Hawthorne. That girl went everywhere with me and rode like a goddamn Comanche.”
“’Fess up, Harv. You must have loved her to take her with you every damn day.”
“Naw, she was just too ugly to kiss good-bye.”
I could never tell if he was serious or not. He helped me load the fridge and some other stuff into my truck, and he saw the Remington in the scabbard.
“You keep both eyes open, you hear?” he said. “There are folks around here who wouldn’t want to see you survive them two wars just to get yourself shot by that little prick. Not me, you understand, but some folks.”
“I’ll be careful, you old bastard.”
Becky was coming up the lane in her truck as I drove out. We zipped by each other with a wave of the hand like folks do in that country, and I realized I might not see any of them again.
I drove into Dave’s ranchyard at Rickey Junction. Sarah had topped off the tank on her Silverado and was checking the tire pressure on her gooseneck. We stowed the fridge in the back of her truck just behind the cab. I unloaded more stuff from my truck and was hanging our saddles in the tack room of the gooseneck when Sarah came out of the doublewide lugging my old bedroll. She hefted it into the back of her truck next to a bale of hay, then lifted a pack saddle I’d just set next to it.
“Why are we taking a sawbuck?” she said, “And lashropes, tarps, hobbles—all this packing crap?”
“Might come in handy.”
“Dad gathered that permit for twenty years without that stuff. We don’t need it.”
“If we were actually planning to gather those cattle, that would surely be the case.”
We sorted and packed the food last, then hooked up the trailer. When we were finished, we piled into my truck and headed north for dinner at the JT Bar, then caught visiting hours with Mom in Reno. I told her what I’d be doing and that I wouldn’t be seeing her for a few days. We were a pretty teary bunch when we said our good-byes. Sarah and I got back to Rickey Junction to hit the sack way later than we’d planned.
We had the horses grained and loaded before sunup. We got our firearms checked and our slickers, coats, and gloves accounted for before six and then hit the road. A few miles north of the State Line Lodge we turned east off the Reno Highway. We passed a scattering of ramshackley houses and mobile homes and a tattoo parlor with a handmade sign, then a health clinic off in the sagebrush next to a medical pot outfit. We climbed a treeless pass that dropped us down into a ravine. Off to the left I saw the southern base of the Pine Nut Mountains that separated Hudson Valley from Carson Valley and ran north almost to the state capitol. We’d be on the northernmost fringes of the Pine Nuts for the next few days if we lived that long. They were steep rolling mountains with bare ridges and some reefs of exposed rock pushing through those ridges, all scattered with sage and the piñon that gave the range its name. We were barely into Hudson Valley when we turned straight north on a farm road, passing five-acre ranchettes with lights on in the kitchens where retired folks were just stirring, then past older hay ranches with flat fields and irrigation wheel lines or pivots, and headquarters off at the base of the mountains. Everything was so peaceful and normal with another day starting that we felt like a couple of fugitives, armed and red-eyed and ready to take doom itself to the ones hunting us.
“So do you believe Kip’s story about being in Oregon?” she said.
“Not a bit.”
“A person gets so used to hearing lies,” she said. “You think that some of them must be true.”
“Lies about me?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t believe those. You know that.”
“Those lies are what guys like him count on.”
“His rant bothered you, though,” she said.
“There’s sure no secrets anymore. Even guys at Fort Benning saw that crap.”
“You have people there cyber-stalking Tommy Smith just for the hell of it?”
“Seems like. Enough so that right this minute I’d feel funny going back.”
“Then don’t,” she said.
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nbsp; In another ten minutes we were past the last of the houses, and the first sunlight was coming up over Mount Grant. We were in sparse sagebrush with the last pastures of the valley slipping by us on the right. Up ahead was an alkali flat that would have water and ducks in a wet spring. Beyond that was Buckskin Mountain, brown and barren. Between the Pine Nuts and the Buckskins was a low spot in the ridge. That’s where we were headed.
We stopped for a mess of sheep crossing the road tended by a boy. The flock spread across the slope and through the dust we could see the herder’s tent and a stakebed trailer hooked to the camp tender’s old International. The camp tender was an ancient man who waved at us. Sarah waved back.
“Eufemio?”
“Yeah,” Sarah said. “The kid’s his grand-nephew.”
“Eufemio must be a thousand years old by now.”
She was about to say something else when she jerked upright at the sound of a plane. We scanned the sky till we found it—a common-looking reddish, single engine top-winged two-seater. It could have been the plane we saw four days before heading for Monte Cristo Summit, or it could have been nothing more than some prosperous onion farmer flying to breakfast in Carson City. We watched it until it disappeared. By then the sheep were far behind us. We’d be out in the open early the next morning, and the biggest drawback to the Let-Kip-Chase-Us plan was how damn easy catching us was going to be for him.
Chapter Seventeen
The road forked. To the right it circled past the alkali flat at the foot of the Buckskins and climbed across the valley to the white scar on the bare slope that had been a copper town and railroad terminus until the 1940s. It seemed like every year some tourist or dirt biker exploring that place discovered an old mineshaft the hard way.
We took the left fork into the Pine Nuts. At the BLM sign I geared down as the washboardy road began a climb across open flats with clumps of green Mormon tea and yellow sulfur flower scattered among the sage. Another half mile and the road folded into a canyon, climbing high as the canyon grew steep. Big cottonwoods along the trickle of creek below us reached overhead and spread shade on the road. Along the trickle were willow and bitterbrush and the pink of wild peach, and Nevada elms with fire-black trunks, their dead branches poking up through new leaves. When we got some altitude, I could see the hills that had burned the fall before, where incinerated piñon left charcoal sketch lines outlining the edges of every ridge and the contours of every rise and gully. I’d been in the hospital in Bethesda when it happened, the fourth fire in that range in three years, with the cause split pretty equal between lightning and idiots.
I looked over at Sarah. She was staring out the window with no expression. The road turned, spanning the narrow watercourse under a single elm. The water was clear, and willows grew below the crossing with patches of green at the water’s edge. Beyond the creek, tan cheatgrass with purplish tips grew up the slope.
“What are you thinking?” she said.
I’d been wondering again if maybe her dad had been dead since that first morning she found him gone, or if Kip had kept him alive for some water-fraud scheme. “Just wondering how many pair you’re running up here.”
“Only a hundred and ten,” she said. “They cut back the allotment after the fires.”
“Letting the range heal?”
“Something like that.”
The road now was reddish clay, deep ruts dried solid after hard rain, then climbing through juniper growing from sandy ground. Ahead we saw open country. We came to a cattle guard where the road passed through the drift fence that marked the edge of Dave’s grazing allotment. Beyond the fence all the piñon and juniper were gone. Not thinned out, but totally vanished. On either side of the road there were piles of brush. Dead piñon limbs and trunks lay white from the sun, and pine boughs dry and rust-red were spread in clumps into the distance. When we cleared the cattle guard, I stopped the truck and we got out.
“The hell?”
“Wildlife mitigation,” Sarah said. “Part of the BLM’s new conditions on the permit. Dad hired those two weightlifters of Kip’s last fall to come out here with chain saws and cut down the trees for sage grouse habitat.” She sounded pissed just thinking about it.
I looked at the mounds of dead trees. Then I scanned the open sage and bare ridges. “Not bad.”
“What’s the matter with you?” she said. “This is horrid.”
“I was just thinking that for us, this ain’t so terrible. No cover. Not for amateurs, anyway.”
She looked like she was sorry she ever asked me home. We got back in the truck. The road climbed for another treeless quarter mile. The fires hadn’t burned this far, so the next trees we came to were healthy and thick. Piñon gray as sage against darker junipers, short trees so close together we couldn’t see around the next bend. I drove slow, then stopped altogether. Sarah watched me lay the Remington across my lap with the muzzle out the open window. She slipped her 9mm out of its holster on the seat between us. I started up again, just creeping along in second. Finally, the road straightened and the trees fell away at the top of the rise and we could see the pipe corral and loading chute, and the back of the cabin. The morning was warming up. We were at Dave’s cowcamp.
Sage had overgrown the corral. The steel was rusty and the chute looked dicey. There was a lodgepole round corral next to the log cabin and wooden sorting pens below it in the center of a sandy flat. Scattered in the brush, I saw bits of scrap and rolls of wire and rusted steel drums. There was a water pump on its side no longer connected to anything and new galvanized stock tanks in the pens. A tarp covered a ton of hay stacked in one of the pens beyond the reach of grazing cattle.
There was an outhouse and shed and wood pile behind the cabin and a ratty Ford flatbed parked next to them. The camp was set on a rise in an open spot where the dirt road forked. The left fork disappeared into the trees. Beyond them I could see small meadows under burned hills. The right fork skirted the pens into open country.
It took us an hour to unload the truck and trailer. The cabin was low ceilinged, with two iron bunks with rolled mattresses and folded blankets stacked on bare springs, a cast-iron cook stove with a full woodbox next to it, an icebox, a table and wooden chairs, and shelves for tin goods. It was no different than the thousands just like it that used to be scattered across the West, except maybe a bit bigger. Dave left it unlocked, as was the custom in an earlier age. Those who used it—hunters, four-wheelers, and souvenir scavengers today, drifting cowboys, prospectors, and mustangers in his dad’s generation—were expected to leave the place as unmolested as they found it and the woodbox full.
Sarah unrolled the larger of the two mattresses and I set my bedroll on it and unrolled that. She peeled back the canvas tarp and aired out the bedding inside. Neither of us commented that the last time the bedroll had been used a couple of years before was the first night she and I had ever been together. We got busy and set the fridge in a likely spot. I hooked up the propane tank and Sarah stocked the fridge with what Harvey always called the basics—eggs, beef, bacon, butter, and beer. The cabin had two small windows cut into the logs, and I kept checking them, trying the latches and studying how much terrain I could see from inside. I caught Sarah watching me.
“We probably don’t want to get cornered in here,” she said.
“No. We’ll keep moving. Get him to show himself.”
“Do you think there’s a chance the law might catch him before he follows us out here?” she said.
“There’s always that chance.”
The cabin was squared away, and we went outside and checked the fencing in the pen where we’d turned out the horses. It was in rough shape, with missing boards and exposed nails. The day was starting to get hot. In the morning we would ride out together, then separate, staying close enough to signal but looking as lonesome and vulnerable as could be. Maybe not my best plan, but I was counting on Kip and whatever crew he’d bring to get lost in all that country. After a day or so of searc
hing, he’d try to hit us at the cowcamp, not far out in the open where they didn’t know exactly where the hell we’d be. Then he’d be easier to take. Plus, we’d let those cows and their calves run interference for us. In a normal year, they’d be coming down toward the camp anyway when the feed further back got poor. They were used to getting herded out of the canyon to a ranch in the valley that belonged to Becky’s brother. But this wasn’t like every other year.
We heard a vehicle coming and scampered back to Sarah’s Silverado. We picked up our long guns, then spread out and went back to nailing up loose boards—or pretending to. The driver was only some BLM lady that Sarah and Dave knew. Sarah leaned her shotgun against a post and walked over to the government truck, stopping for gulps from her water bottle. They talked for three or four minutes, then the lady gave me a hell of a nasty look and drove off. Sarah walked back to me with sweat on her forehead and blood in her eye.
“What a bitch,” she said.
“What happened?”
“She was hard-assing me about the permit,” Sarah said. “All whiney that Dad had put out the salt too close to the tanks and the cattle hadn’t spread out enough across the winter, and now they’re spread out too much, and one of the floats on a tank was broken and the wild critters had no water. Jesus.” She stared right into me. “Basically she was wondering what I was doing camped up here with a man who wasn’t my husband.”
“So what’d you tell her?”
“I told her to go screw herself.”
I watched her pick up the shotgun and head for the cabin. She looked about ready to load the horses and head out of there. I went back to nailing up boards.
I finished a while later. She’d set up kindling and wood in the stove, but the day was too hot to light it until we had to. I got a beer from the fridge and sat at the table.
“What’s in the shed out back?”
“Some salt blocks, some wire,” she said. “A beat-up old pack rig Dad used to haul the salt. Stuff like that.”