Grady, a stocky, bowlegged Alabaman, picked drop at the sheds at night. He had a droll humor and after pointing out something funny—the bored way a ewe looked around as the first lamb squirted out—his wide smile seemed to encircle his whole face. He met his wife, a Massachusetts schoolteacher, while crossing a mountain highway with a band of sheep. She’d taken a picture of him and asked for his address to send copies. Their correspondence grew. Since she had been teaching in Alaska, she stopped in the Big Horns on her way home the following June and never went farther. She and Grady honeymooned in a sheep wagon, on the job.
A binge drinker, Grady’s once-a-year drunks were saturnalian. He’d chase cars on Main Street, barking at the tires like a dog; he’d shoot holes in the door of his wagon—from inside—then ask how I liked his new picture window. Sometimes he begged to be locked up. This we did in a rusted iron cage that had been the town’s turn-of-the-century jail, abandoned now and lying on its side in an alley. Every few hours we’d bring him an ounce of whiskey until the shakes died down. Then he’d want a bath, a shave, and a hot meal.
While most herders with drinking problems get on the bottle only when they’re in town, others stock up before going to the hills. When bringing supplies to one herder, the camp tender’s truck turned over. In the mess John discovered a healthy cache of liquor in the man’s belongings. “It’s for the cooking,” the herder contested. “Well, what kind of shittin’ dish do you cook with this?” John asked as he picked up ten half gallons of vodka.
By mid-April this “togetherness” became tiresome to everyone: the long hours, the drunks, the deep cold. As soon as all the sheep had lambed out, thirteen or fourteen bands were made up with a thousand or fifteen hundred sheep in each, then shipped in beet harvest trucks to spring range. Herding can be difficult at that time of year. The grass is short and storms spray themselves into the herds like shotgun blasts. The sheep scatter. One herder woke up to find all his sheep gone and after tracing and retracing ambiguous sets of tracks, he found them ten miles away, walking single file toward the mountains.
After one virulent string of storms I went to visit Grady. His wagon was set on a gray promontory, the badlands, a solemn seascape flowing out from around him. He was still puffed up and jowly from a binge but looked gnomish with his ear-to-ear smile and his bald head shined. “If I’d known you were coming I’d have put my teeth in,” he said, laughing. Then, urgently, “Talk to me … tell me some news … I haven’t seen anyone for a month.” But he did the talking: it had been cold—below zero day and night. His dog had had pups; three of them froze to the floor as they were being born and died. She had the rest inside his bedroll under which he had tucked a fifty-pound sack of potatoes and three dozen eggs to keep them from freezing. “But I’ve been lonelier than it’s been cold, and it’s been pretty damned cold.”
Another herder I visited told me it was the ducks flying overhead in pairs that made him feel left out and lonesome.
By May the range brightens up. In badlands that looked so desolate as to resemble a charnel ground, wildflowers pop up, and sage exudes its musky-mint perfume. Songbirds return to the state and hang their cupped nests among the protective paddles of cactus or string them in a patch of wild rose. Mallards cruise the water holes. When their eggs hatch, ducklings swim among the noses of sheep and antelope who drink there.
John, the handsome, effeminate bachelor who managed the sheep, orchestrated the movement of thirteen bands of sheep to the mountains in late June. For two weeks they moved, peaceful armies, checkerboarded across one hundred square miles. John pulled the wagons ahead with his pickup, meeting the herders at a prearranged spot to “noon up,” and again in the evening. He took care of the older herders as if they were all his grandfathers, at the same time handling their fragile psyches with aplomb. By the time a herder arrived at the wagon with his sheep, John would have lunch ready: Spam sandwiches cut into tea-party triangles, or else pancakes, bacon, and eggs.
Between June 25 and the Fourth of July the sheep moved again, this time to the tops of the mountains. I helped Fred Murdi move his sheep up what they called the “slide”—a vertiginous rockfall where the year before he had broken his leg. Fred was a Basque who had herded sheep since he was five. He was seventy-seven when I met him, stooped and bright-eyed, and from what I could see of his face beneath a thick coating of Bag Balm, he was a handsome man. Fred was one of the 14 million people who immigrated through Ellis Island on a third-class steerage ticket. He remembered the huge brick lobbies flooded with people: “All kinds of the darks and the lights, the good and the bad, and all poor like me.” During the rough December passage he soothed his shipmates with Basque tunes played on a harmonium but now, almost sixty years later, he said he played only “for the sheeps.”
Fred had become a hoarder. Opening the door of his sheep wagon was to risk a bombardment of junk—chains, rusty wire, gunny sacks, broken cardboard cartons—none of it usable. His living space had been reduced to a few feet. Fred slept half sitting on the floor by the door, his mattress propped against these belongings whose bulk perhaps served as ballast against so many years alone.
Fred cut a curious image on the range: he wore rags—layers of overalls, slickers, sweaters, wool shirts stitched together—topped by what looked like a Maine fisherman’s rain hat. Under it all, his long underwear had been changed so infrequently, his body hair had grown into the weave.
“I’ve worked at this ranch since April 23, 1937, and I’m just the same as when I started. Some people, they raise up … get ahead. But not me! I don’t have it. And you can herd the sheeps all your life and still you don’t know anything. Oh, you may know a lot, but that’s just the beginning.”
Fred was proud of his self-discipline. He’d taught himself English, abstained from tobacco and drink, and never owned a radio. Since solitude was the peg he’d hung his life on, he saw no point in complaining about it. Besides sheep, his one enthusiasm was international politics. He seemed to inhale the whole of U. S. News & World Report each week, knew where every war, small and big, was being fought, and would plead for peace, he told me, if only someone could hear him.
“You know why I have no wrinkles?” he’d ask, purring the words in an accent that sounded more Scottish than Basque. “Because I have no worries. I drink the water straight … and I don’t eat no lamb.”
The next summer Fred’s horse fell with him, and he cut his leg badly in the spill. Telling no one, he preferred to doctor himself with a remedy from the old country: a poultice of fresh sheep manure packed into his boot. He died of gangrene the day before his eightieth birthday.
Summer headquarters for the ranch was a roomy, high-ceilinged log cabin set at the edge of a meadow. From there John supplied the sheep camps, rising each morning at four, building a fire, ladling creek water flecked with gold into the coffeepot to boil. Once a week he’d butcher a ewe. From Fred’s band he’d select “a dry,” running across the hummocky grass in a confusion of a thousand sheep until he brought one to her knees with a sheephook held out straight like a spear. He’d slit her throat as deftly as a conductor slicing air to bring on a rush of music; then hang her by her hind legs to the crossbar. An irregular creek of her blood trickled past our feet. As orange evening light shone on John’s face, he disrobed the ewe, then dismantled her: the hide, the guts, the liver, the heart, then the fore and hind legs quartered. A breeze fanned the acrid smell into our clothes as if to remind us later what we had done.
In all my visits to sheep camps only one herder gave me trouble. Albert, a big-boned New Mexican with a sensuous face and belly, herded in a great, treeless bowl on the northern end of the Big Horns where cornices of snow stuck to the ridge lines until late August. The nights were bone-chilling, and by morning the wildflowers were trimmed with ice. When Albert wasn’t checking his sheep, he cleaned his wagon. He mopped and scrubbed and painted the rounded ceiling “azul.” Another day he would go on a binge of cooking: posole, tortillas, chile verde.
Once, while rolling out a tortilla he tried to kiss me. “Be pretty good, you come up here tonight. I treat you real nice.” Then he’d bolster the offer with money, a Cadillac, a horse. When he’d worked for an outfit near Rock Springs, the owners brought whores to the camps. “Keep the sheepherders abroken all the time,” he’d tell me. Another day I saw him work with a colt. He hummed and spoke softly to the animal. His lecherousness seemed to be only a kink in a deeply affectionate nature, and his caresses, saved up for the children he might have had, were being squandered elsewhere. That day he grabbed my hand and placed it on his swelling erection. When I pulled back he got mad and started hitting me with a broom. It scared me and I rode home. When he came to headquarters another time, I hid under the bed until he was gone.
Bob Ayers herded half a day’s ride from Albert’s allotment. He was a bright, bullheaded man with a hooked nose and a world-weary look in his eyes. “Gal, you’re a sight for sore eyes,” he’d say when I rode up; then he’d bake me a pie. Bob had wandered onto the ranch dragging a brand-new saddle behind him in a gunny sack. He’d done a stint in prison, worked as a day laborer in Salt Lake, and cowboyed before herding sheep. Bob was a workingman’s man: he didn’t want to own sheep, he wanted to unionize ranch labor. “Goddamn, we’d have the whole world on its knees. But how in hell are you going to get guys like us to stick together. We won’t do it. We’re just too damned ornery. We’d rather starve than agree on anything,” he said, pushing his Scotch cap back on his head and looking out the window. “But even if we are underpaid, I’d rather herd sheep than have some flat-footed prick telling me what I can and can’t do and when and how to do it.”
The last time I saw Bob he was in jail for shooting six cows. “A bunch of smartass cowboys were putting their cattle in on my pasture. I warned them … but they kept it up. I should have shot the cowboys instead.…”
He had been herding near the town of Ten Sleep, where seventy-five years earlier, the Spring Creek Raid culminated thirty years of conflict between sheepherders and cattlemen. On an April morning in 1909, two ranchers and their herder, Joe Lazier, were drinking coffee in the sheep wagon. Lambing had just begun. When they stepped outside to go back to work, seven attackers shot the men in cold blood, burned the wagon, then slaughtered the entire band of sheep.
Such violence was intended to warn other sheepmen to stay away. All over Wyoming “dead lines” had been posted over which sheep could not cross; a sign at the outskirts of Jackson read: “There shall be no sheep residing in or passing through Jackson’s Hole.” Near Rock Springs, 150 masked men turned several thousand sheep back, then killed them and their herder.
Cattlemen resented the arrival of sheep in the state not because sheep wreck the range as was often suggested, but because the cattlemen had been here first and wanted all the public grazing land for themselves. They had already grossly overstocked the range, and newcomers of any species would not have been welcome. In Bob Ayers’s mind, six dead cows represented a token revenge.
Bob and I talked all afternoon with bars between us. I told him my favorite story about a Japanese hermit, Kamo no Chomei, who had left a comfortable life and gone to the mountains. Every year he built a new hut, each one smaller than the last, until, finally, the walls were merely hinged together. When the hermit tired of a place, he folded up his house and carried it to another part of the mountain.
When the guard said it was time to go I asked Bob if he needed anything. “Yeah … tell the judge he’ll be wasting taxpayers’ money if they put an old man like me in the pen … and in case that doesn’t work, bake me a chocolate cake—with a hacksaw in it.” He laughed as the guard took him away.
All summer the Big Horns were washed with rain squalls. The lightning that accompanied these afternoon storms struck so close sparks jumped off the metal tops of the sheep wagons. The sky seemed less like something above us than a bright finial enclosing our heads. I met “Hoot” during one such storm. Lightning hit a rock in front of us, breaking it apart. “I’ve already been hit by lightning twice,” he told me. Hoot had the shakes. During the war he suffered shellshock and still underwent agonizing bouts of fear. One spring he left his sheep wagon and walked all night. The camp tender found him ten miles from town, trembling and shouting incoherent bursts of words. He wintered that year at the VA hospital in Sheridan and the following spring returned to the ranch with a bewildered look that seemed to have taken charge of his face and never left him. He said he couldn’t herd anymore. His wagon was set behind the sun sheds near town, where he spent his days reading Oui magazine and writing letters home to Minnesota.
John hired a couple to replace Hoot. We called them “Liz” and “Dick” after the Burtons because they fought strenuously and she fancied herself a great beauty. When John brought supplies to their camp, Liz refused to emerge until she had her makeup on: great daubs of purple eyeshadow and clownish dots of rouge. The first week they ordered a case of vanilla. “Doing a lot of baking?” John asked, though he knew they were drinking it for the alcohol. They were soon replaced by a young man so ill at ease with domestic routine that instead of washing his dishes, he tossed the dirty plates and cups behind the wagon, then ordered more.
By the end of August the sun-cured grass had faded. The lambs were shipped and this procedure took a week. Every morning at five, three semis backed up to the sorting corrals and three tiers of lambs per truck were taken away. Afterward, the crew would come to headquarters to eat. We cooked 60 eggs, 3 rashers of bacon, 120 pancakes a day, then washed the dishes in the creek.
Sterling, who had been helping John tend camp, quit and went to town. He had complained of “a bad case of the jitters” and worried that he wasn’t doing a good job. Later that week he shot himself at the entrance to town. In a letter he said, “I just got to where I had to do something, couldn’t sleep or sit still my damn nerves was about shot.” He was a tall, string-bean man who walked like a chicken: after a few high steps he’d stop and scratch the ground with his boot as if trying to find a place to hide. His shyness was part of an old-fashioned western style. When he lived at headquarters, he’d insist on saddling my horse, and if the weather turned raw while I was riding, he’d come looking for me with an extra slicker and a flask in his saddlebag.
Sterling died a slow death because his aim had been off—probably a result of the shakes. After the bullet exited his back it continued, puncturing the rear tire of his pickup. That’s how they found him—a friend stopped to tell him he had a flat. “He bled from around two in the morning until dawn,” the sheriff told us on a crisp fall morning under the badly executed bronze statue of a wild horse.
In mid-September the ewes were on Little Mountain again. The hills were fawn-colored. Loping over them was like sliding over a sable coat, but late in the day, they looked benumbed. As I watched one long string of sheep climb down a close-cropped dome of grass, a Vesuvian flow of tan clouds seemed to fall like a curtain behind them. Two dark figures showed through: a black dog and a herder. “You want to go home? Let’s go home,” he whispered into his mare’s ear. Soon they were dots too indistinct to see.
The ranch auction was a success. Piece by piece the lamb sheds and ranch yards were carted away: feed bunks, chutes, panels, graineries, wagons, even the border collies and heelers the herders hadn’t claimed. Such dismantling raises questions about the demise of the West. Historians relegate the “Wild West” to a tidy twenty-year span when rangeland was unfenced and youngsters signed on with the trail herds moving north from Texas, but the West, however disfigured, persists. Cowboys still drift from outfit to outfit, riding the rough string, calving heifers, making fifty-mile circles during fall roundup; and year around, the sheepherders—what’s left of them—stay out with their sheep. But ranchers who cherish the western life and its values may also pray for oil wells in their calving pasture or a coal lease on prime grassland. Economics has pressed them into such a paradoxical stance. For years they’ve borrowed $100,000 for operating costs;
now they can’t afford the interest. Disfigurement is synonymous with the whole idea of a frontier. As soon as we lay our hands on it, the freedom we thought it represented is quickly gone.
A week after the ranch was dispersed, one-armed Red, the last of the old-time herders, died. There were empty spaces around his trailer where all the others had been pulled away. They gave him a Mormon funeral because he died in a Mormon town, though his only religion was “the bars, the mountains, and a band of woolies.” Grady was there in a blue gabardine suit so old it had turned shiny. He had stuck a white carnation into his lapel and wore a short-brimmed Stetson gangster-style. His duty as pallbearer worried him: “Gretel, I still have the shakes. But if I drop old Red, he’ll understand.”
The funeral home was pink inside with hardware store chandeliers and overstuffed red couches on either side of metal folding chairs. Pink washed over Red’s hard life and touched none of it. Three hefty Mormon women sang “Abiding Love” and “In the Garden,” their voices ululating as if gulping sugar.
“Nineteen of us herders have died since I started working here,” Grady said as we walked from the gravesite. The backhoe passed, lights flashing. He waved because the driver was one of Grady and Red’s drinking buddies. “They don’t dig them graves by hand anymore, do they?” He pulled the carnation from his lapel and threw it by the side of the road. “I guess I’m getting pretty high up on the list.” We drove to Grady’s ex-wife’s house and ate donuts and fudge and drank coffee. Though the demise of the ranch had been sealed that week by bankers, long before, its very heart had been picked clean.
OTHER LIVES
The Solace of Open Spaces Page 3