by Ivan Doig
• • •
It was a Saturday early the next May that there was the Hebner occurrence.
The family of four was Rob’s first delivery to me in this new season of ‘steaders. As Rob and the Ford receded back down the road to further depot duty, the newcomers and I sized each other up.
The man was loose-jointed, shambly, with a small chin, a small mouth, small nose, and then a startlingly high and wide forehead. The woman was worn, maybe weary after their journey from wherever to Montana, maybe just weary. Two children thin as sticks, the boy a replica two-thirds the size of his father, the girl small yet. Both children and the man stared at me as openly as hawks. As to what they saw in all this eyework on me, I do not really know, do I.
I introduced myself, and received from the man in just less than a shout: “Our name’s Hebner, but you got to call me Otto.”
I invited them into the wagon, and after an odd blank little pause while the rest of the family glanced at him and he fidgeted an untrusting look at me, up they came.
The ride into the south benchlands was a few miles, and would be longer than that without conversation. I inaugurated:
“Where is it you’re from?”
The man peered at me in dumb dismay. Hard of hearing, the poor pilgrim must be. Deaf and a ‘steader too ought to be more hardship than any one soul rated. I squared around to the fidgeting Hebner and repeated my question louder and slower.
Relief came over him. In a braying voice, he responded: “Couldn’ cut through your brogue, there that first time. A feller gets so used to hearin’ American he gets kind of spoiled, I reckon.”
I gazed at Hebner, hoping that was what passed for a joke wherever to hell he had been spawned, but no. He rattled on: “Anyhow, we come from Oblong, Illinois. Ever hear of it?”
“Illinois, yes.”
Having had my fill of conviviality Otto Hebner style, I whapped the team some encouragement with the reins. Delivering this man and his wan family to their 160 acres of delusion couldn’t come too soon for me.
Atop the rim of the benchland, I halted the wagon. Beside me Hebner kept his head turned in a gawk toward the mountains and the North Fork for so long that I truly wondered if he and I both belonged in the human race. Now he gesticulated for his family’s benefit to the hay-green valley of the North Fork, the newly lambed bands of sheep on its ridges around, the graceful wooded line of the creek and its periodic tidy knots that were our houses and outbuildings.
“Hannah, honey, those’re what I been tellin’ you about,” he resounded to his wife. Noticing that the boy’s stare was still fixed in my direction rather than onto the Scotch Heaven homesteads, Hebner added sharp to loud in telling him: “Garland! You listen up to what I’m sayin’ here, you hear?” The boy’s gaze slowly drifted from me to the North Fork. His father by now had reached his proclamation point: “Those’re what our homestead is goin’ to be like before you know it.”
Bring that moment around to me again and I would utter what I furiously kept myself from uttering at the time. Hebner, you major fool, you’re looking at twenty years of stark work down there. Twenty years of building and contriving and fixing and starting over again. Twenty lambing times, twenty shearings, twenty hayings. Twenty Montana winters, each of them so long they add far beyond that. You’re looking at the stubborn vision of Ninian Duff, you’re looking at the tireless ambitions of Rob Barclay, you’re looking at the durable routes Scorpion and I have worn into the ground back and forth between sheep and schoolchildren, you’re looking at choreworn wives who put up with more isolation and empty distance than anyone sane ought to have to. You cannot judge this country by idle first glance. I am here to tell you, you cannot. But no, I was there to guide the Hebners of the world to available acres, such as they were now. Try to dike this ‘steader flood with myself and all I would get was reputation for being all wet.
I drew a steadying breath. My own gaze down into Scotch Heaven helped. On the shoulder of Breed Butte between Rob’s homestead and mine, a rider had come into motion: Varick, on his way up to check our sheep, while I was in the midst of this Hebnerian episode. Varick on a horse now looked as big as a man. Already his first year of high school was nearly behind him. His school year of boarding in town with Lucas and Nancy and returning to Adair and me only on weekends was his first footprint away from home, and this summer would bring his next. He had asked Stanley Meixell for, and received, the job of choreboy at the ranger station until school began again in the fall. Not many years now, not many at all, Angus, until this son of yours would need to find his own foothold in this country, and so I swung back to the task of delving with ‘steaders.
“Those of us in Scotch Heaven do have a bit of a head start on you, Mr. Hebner, so there’s—”
“Otto,” he corrected me with a bray.
“Otto, then. As I was setting out to say, there’s no real resemblance between a settled creek valley and a dry-land homestead. So I don’t want to startle you, but here we are at the available land for you to have a look at.”
Hebner hopped down and gawked south now, across the flat table of gravelly earth sprigged with bunchgrass, his son duplicating the staring inspection while I took the girl down from his wife and then helped her out of the wagon. We stood in a covey at the section marker stone, the wind steadily finding ways to get at us under and around the wagon, until Hebner strode off twenty or so paces toward the yawning middle of the benchland as if that was the favored outlook. After a long gander and kicking his heel into the soil, what there was of it, a number of times, he marched back and took up a stance beside me. Still scrutinizing the benchland, the shanties and chicken coops and pale gray-brown furrows of the Keever and Reinking and Thorkelson homesteads, he demanded: “You’re dead-sure this here is the best piece of new ground?”
Anyone with an eye could see that the benchland was equally stark, stony, unwelcoming, wherever a glance was sent. “None of it is fair Canaan, is it,” was all I could answer Hebner. “But if here in this dry-land end of the Two country is where you truly want to homestead, right where we’re standing is as good as any.”
Not a lot of satisfaction for him to find in my words. He leaned away from me and turned a bit so his silent wife would see the shrewdness of what he asked next: “How deep is it to water?”
The question I had been dreading. “I can only tell you this much. The Keevers and the Reinkings and the Thorkelsons all dug about forty feet to get their wells.”
“Forty! Back in Illinois we could dig down ten feet anywhere and get the nicest softest vein of wellwater there is!”
“Then you ought to have brought one of those matchless wells with you.” I faced around to his wife, on the chance she might not be so hopeless a case as him. “Mrs. Hebner, you had better know, too—the water up here is hard.” She made no reply. “Just so you know, come first washday,” I tried to prompt, “and you won’t cuss me too much.” Still nothing from her except that abject or defeated gaze at her husband. By the holy, if she could stand here wordless and let this Hebner commit her to a homestead eternity of clothes washed out stiff as planks and of a sour grayness in every teaspoon of water she ever used, why then—
“Seems like you ain’t overly enthusiastic about this here ground,” Hebner now gave me with a suspicious frown.
“Mr. Hebner, listen—”
“Otto,” the man insisted thunderously.
“Otto, then. Listen a minute. None of this is going to be easy or certain, for you and your family. Even at its best, homesteading is a gamble, and it’s twice that in these benchlands. A dry-land homestead is just what it says it is, dry.”
“I didn’ notice as how you left us any room back down there along the creek,” he retorted, making only small attempt to smile around the resentment.
Roust yourself twenty years ago from Lopside or wherever it is that spawned you, and there was room along the North Fork, along the South Fork, room everywhere across the Two Medicine country. And
in the same thinking of that I knew that I would not have welcomed Otto Hebner even then; that anyone who did not come accepting that the homestead life was going to be hard, I did not want at the corner of my eye.
“Let’s call this off,” I said abruptly. “We’re not doing each other any good here.”
“Call it off!” Hebner blinked at me, thunderstruck. “This’s a funny doggone arrangement you’re pullin’ on us, seems like,” he brayed. “Leadin’ us out to this here ground and then givin’ us the poormouth about it. This’s doggone funny exchange for the money we paid, is what I say.”
“I thought you might want to know what you’re in for, trying to homestead country such as this. I was obviously wrong. I’ll give you your money back and take you in to Gros Ventre. If you’re still set on finding a site, someone in town can do your locating for you.”
“Nothin’ doin’.” Hebner did not look toward his wife and children, did not look around at the land again. He fixed his gaze onto my face as if defying me to find any way to say him nay. “This here’s what I’m goin’ to claim, right where we’re at.”
“Even against my advice, you want me to mark off the claim?”
“That’s what we come all the way out here for.”
I wrote HEBNER on four corner stakes, climbed into the buggy and counted the one hundred and fifty wheel revolutions south, east, north, and finally west to the section stone again.
• • •
By the time that day was done, I knew my craw could not hold any more Hebners, ever. All ‘steaders from here on were going to have to dry-land themselves to death without my help.
In bed that night, I said as much to Adair.
“We’re back where we started, then,” she said as the fact it was. “Back to just getting by, and putting nothing ahead.”
“There may be a way we can yet,” I offered to her in the dark. “Dair, if I’m going to get us and Varick anywhere in life, it’s going to have to be some way where I savvy and believe in what I’m doing. Something I know the tune of.” I could feel her waiting.
“Sheep,” I announced. “If we were to take on another band of sheep, the profit from that we could set aside for Varick.”
Silence between us. Until Adair spoke softly: “You’ve never wanted to take on more than the band you and Rob run.”
“I’ll need to try stretch my philosophy, won’t I.” Try, for Varick. For you, Dair. For myself?
“Do we have the money for another band of sheep?”
“No. Half enough, maybe.”
“Lucas would have it,” she contributed.
“Lucas took his turn in backing me with sheep, long since. Besides, he’s in up to his neck in land dealings these days. No, I think I know who would be keener than Lucas for this.” Although I didn’t look forward to hearing it from him: I never thought I’d see the day, McAngus, when you’d start sounding like me—’More sheep, that’s the ticket we need.’ “Dair, I thought I’d see if Rob will partner with us on another band.”
Adair spoke what I was counting on, from her, from her brother. “He will.”
• • •
What I had not counted on was Rob’s notion of where we ought to put a new band of sheep. “Angus, I won’t go for putting any more sheep up there in Meixell’s hip pocket, even if the damn man would let us.” If not on the national forest, then we’d have to rent grazing somewhere else, I pointed out to him. Maybe in the Choteau country, not that there was that much open range left there or anyplace, for that matter.
“Give me a couple of days,” Rob said. “I just maybe know the place for those sheep, where Meixell or some Choteau geezer either one won’t have a hoot in hell to say about them.”
• • •
The couple of days later, Rob’s announcement was pure jubilation.
“The reservation! Angus, you remember that Two Medicine grass. Elephants could be grazed on it! The Blackfeet don’t know anything to do with it but sit and look at it.”
I stirred. “Rob, hold your water a minute here. You know as well as I do why the Agency fenced the cow outfits out. That old business of ‘borrowing’ reservation grass—”
“ ‘Borrowing,’ who said anything about ‘borrowing’? We’ll be paying good lease money to the Blackfeet. You can ask your pocket whether there’s any ‘borrowing’ to this. No, this is every-dot legal, Angus. The agent will let us on the big ridge north of the Two Medicine River with the sheep the first of the month. Man, you can’t beat this with a stick! A full summer on that grass and we’ll have lambs fat as butter.”
I gave it hard thought, sheep on the Blackfeet grass. Sheep were not plows that ripped the sod; sheep with a good herder were not cattle casually flung Double W style. Prairie that had supported buffalo herds vast as stormclouds ought to be able to withstand a careful load of sheep. If Rob saw this band as a ladle to get at the cream of reservation grass, so be it. With Davie Erskine as herder, I could see to it the summer of leased grazing was kept civil and civic. I wanted it begun right, too.
“Those are some miles, from here to the Two Medicine,” I pointed out. Forty or more, in fact.
“Sheep have feet,” retorted Rob. As I knew, though, the days it would take to trail the sheep were not going to be his favorite pastime. “I hate like the dickens to lose that many days from the locating business. But I suppose—”
Without needing to think, I said: “I’ll take the sheep up. Varick and I can, with Davie along.”
I felt Rob study me. Probably it was all too plain that I didn’t want to see his next crop of ‘steaders. Then from him:
“Angus, you’re made of gold and oak. If you can handle the reservation band until shearing, I’ll make it right to you when we settle up this fall.”
• • •
They were a band of beauties, our new sheep; the top cut of ewes and their eight-week lambs from the big Thorsen sheep outfit in the Choteau country. And confident grazers, definitely confident. The morning Varick and Davie and I bunched them to begin the journey from Scotch Heaven to the reservation, making them leave the green slopes above the North Fork was sheer work. You could all but hear their single creed and conviction in the blatting back and forth, why leave proven grass for not proven? That first hour or so it seemed that every time I looked around, a bunch breaker was taking off across the countryside at a jog trot, her lamb and twenty others in a scampering tail behind her. Relentlessly Varick and Davie and I dogged that foolishness out of them, and the band at last formed itself and began to move like a hoofed cloud toward the benchland between the North Fork and Noon Creek, toward the road to the Two Medicine River.
Telling Varick and Davie I’d be with them shortly, I rode back down to the house.
“Varick and I ought to be no more than a week, Dair. Four days to get the sheep there, a day or two to help Davie settle in, and then the ride home.”
“I’ll look for you when I see you coming,” she said.
“We’re going a famous route, you know. A wife of mine came into this country by way of it,” I said from high spirits. “My expectation is that there’ll be monuments to her every mile along the way.”
Adair smiled and surprised me with: “I hope there’s not one at a certain coulee south of the Two Medicine River.” Coachman, a soyoung Adair to Rob at the reins, are there any conveniences at all along this route of yours? Myself ready to throttle Rob as she disappeared to piddle: Your idea was to get her over here and marry her off to me, wasn’t it? The inimitable Rob: If it worked out that way . . . Rob’s was the way it had worked out, although whether life after the wedding vow was working out for Adair and me seemed ever an open question.
“Dair?” The impulse of this felt deeper, truer, even as I began to speak it. “Come along with us, why not. To the Two Medicine.”