by Ivan Doig
At the next climbing turn of the trail I glanced back at Adair. She had on Varick’s old brown Stetson he had left home when he went away to the army, and her riding skirt, and a well-worn blouse that had begun as white and now was the color of cream. My unlikely wife, an unlikely mote of light color against the rock and timber of the mountain. I wondered if she at all had any of the division of mind I did on this journey of ours. Part of me saw, desperately, that if the sheep had found a way to destroy themselves since Rob left them atop this mountain, Adair and I would possess what we had on our backs and that homestead down there and the rest you could count in small coins. Yet if the sheep were gone, stampeded all over the hemisphere, eaten, dead a myriad of ways, that also would mean the end of my teeth-gritting partnership with Rob. As we climbed and climbed, there was a kind of cruel relief for me in the fact that the sheep in their woolheaded way were doing the deciding, whether this enforced pairing of Rob and myself was to be the one thing or the other.
Atop, with the afternoon all but gone, Adair and I urged our horses toward where Davie’s sheepwagon showed itself like a tall canvas igloo on wheels. Rob had shut Davie’s dog in the sheepwagon so that he wouldn’t follow down the mountain. When I unjailed him he came out inquisitive as to why I was not Davie, but otherwise ready to participate. I climbed back on my horse, leaned down from the saddle and called, “Come up, Scamp. Come up, boy.”
The dog eyed me a moment to see if I really meant such a thing, then crouched to the earth and sprang against my leg and the stirrup leather, scrambling gamely as I boosted him the rest of the way into my lap. There across my thighs between the saddle horn and my body he at once lay quiet, exactly as if I had told him to save all possible energy. If the sheep were not where Rob had left them, this dog was going to have to work his legs off when we found them. If we found them. If we found them alive.
Adair and I and my border collie passenger in about a mile found what I was sure was the meadow Rob had described, and no sheep. An absence of sheep, a void as stark as a town empty of people. We sat on our horses and listened. Except for the switching sounds of our horses’ tails, the silence was complete. I put the dog down. “Find them, Scamp.” But the sheep had been over so much of the meadow that the dog could only trace out with his stymied dashes what I already knew, that some direction out of this great half-circle of grass they had quit the country.
Below us the last sunshine was going from the plains, the shadow of these mountains was now the first link of dusk. This meadow in the fading light looked like the most natural of bedgrounds for sheep. Tell that to the sheep, wherever the nomadic bastards had got to. Here Rob had made his decision that flung the sheep to their own wandering. Now I had to make mine to consign them to their own perils for the night.
“We’ll take up the looking in the morning, Dair. It won’t help anything for us to tumble over a cliff up here in the dark.”
Back at the sheepwagon, Adair began fixing supper while I picketed our horses and fed Davie’s dog. Then I joined her in the round-topped wagon, inserting myself onto the bench seat on the opposite side of the tiny table from the cooking area. That was pretty much the extent of a sheepwagon, a bench seat along either side, cabinets above and below, the bunk bed across the wagon’s inmost end and the midget kitchen at its other. I suppose a fastidious cook would have been paralyzed at the general grime of Davie’s potwear and utensils. Adair didn’t seem to notice. She gave me a welcoming smile and went on searing some eggs in a black-crusted frying pan.
I sat watching her, and beyond her, out the opened top half of the wagon’s Dutch door, the coming of night as it darkened the forest trees. So here we are, Dair. The McCaskills of Montana. After twenty-one years of marriage, cooped in a mountaintop sheepwagon. Sheepless. All the scenery we can eat, though. Not exactly what you had in mind for us when you contrived that will of yours, ay, Lucas? Somewhere out there in the prairie towns, Rob was scouring for a herder in these hireless times, at Choteau or Conrad if none was to be had in Gros Ventre, as there likely wasn’t. Everyone in the war effort, these days. It was an effort, they were most definitely right about that.
After we had eaten, I leaned back and looked across at this wife of mine. Those twin freckles, one under each eye, like reflections of the pupils. Flecks of secondness, marks of the other Adair somewhere within the one I was seeing. I asked, “How do you like sheepherding, so far?”
“The company is the best thing about it.”
“You have to understand, of course, this is the deluxe way to do it. Usually there are a couple of thousand noisy animals involved.” Sheep sound like the exact thing to have, Rob responding to Lucas’s suggestion of our future in my newfound valley called the North Fork. Now if we only had sheep.
“Tomorrow will tell, won’t it,” she answered my spoken and unspoken disquisitions on sheeplessness.
Well, if today was its model for revelation, it would. Adair volunteering herself into these mountains: I could have predicted forever and missed that possibility.
My curiosity was too great to be kept in. “Dair, truth now. Coming up here today where you could see it all, what did you think of it?”
In the light of the coal-oil lantern, her eyes were darker than usual as she searched into mine.
“The same as ever,” she told me forthrightly, maybe a bit regretfully. “There is so much of this country. People keep having to stretch themselves out of shape trying to cope with so much. Distance. Weather. The aloneness. All the work. This Montana sets its own terms and tells you, do them or else. Angus, you and Rob maybe were made to handle this country. Adair doesn’t seem to have been.”
“For someone who can’t handle that”—I inclined my head to the sweep of the land beneath our mountain—“you gave a pretty good imitation today.”
“Such high praise,” she said, not at all archly, “so late at night.”
“Yes, well.” I got up and stepped to the door for one last listen for the sheep. The dark silence of the mountains answered me. I turned around to Adair again, saying “Night is what we’d better be thinking about, isn’t it. That bed’s going to be a snug fit.”
Adair turned her face toward me in the lanternlight. She asked as if it was the inquiry she always made in sheepwagons: “Is that a promise?”
The buttons of that creamy blouse of hers seemed to be the place to begin answering that. Then my fingers were inside, on the small pert mounds of Adair’s breasts, and eventually down to do away with her riding skirt. Her hands were not idle either; who has said, the one pure language of love is Braille? If no one else, the two of us were inscribing it here and now. We did not interrupt vital progress on one another even as I boosted Adair into the narrow bunk bed and my clothes were shed beside hers. Two bodies now in the space for one, she and I went back and forth from quick hungers of love, our lips and tongues with the practice of all our years together but fresh as fire to each other, too, to expectant holidays of slow soft stroking. Maybe the close arch of canvas over us cupped us as if in a shell, concentrating us into ourselves and each other. Maybe the bachelor air, the sheepwagon’s accumulated loneliness of herders spending their hermit lives, fed our yearning. Maybe the desperation of the day, of the marriage we somehow had kept together, needed this release. Who knew. It was enough for Adair and me that something, some longing of life, had us in its supreme grip. Something drives the root, something unfolds the furrow: its force was ours for each other, here, now.
As ever, Adair’s slim small body beneath mine was nothing like Anna’s the single time it had been under mine; as ever, our lovemaking’s convulsion was everything like Anna’s and mine. Difference became sameness, there in our last straining moments. This was the one part of life that did not care about human details, it existed on its own terms.
• • •
At first hint of dawn, we had to uncoil ourselves from sleep and each other. No time for a breakfast fire, either; the two of us ate as much dried fruit from Davie�
��s grocery supply as we could hold, and then we were out to our saddle horses and the eager dog. As we set off into a morning that by now was a bit fainter than the darkness of night, my hope was that we were getting a jump on the sheep of maybe an hour.
That hour went, and half of another, before we had sunrise. Adair and I tied the horses and climbed up to an open outcrop of rock where we could see all around. As we watched, the eastern sky converted from orange to pink. Then there was the single moment, before the sun came up, when its golden light arrived like spray above a water fall. The first hot half of the sun above the horizon gave us and the rock outcroppings and the wind-twisted trees long pale-gray shadows. Scrutinize the newly lit brow of the mountain as we did, though, there were no shadows with sheep attached to them.
“All this,” Adair said as if speculating, “you’d think something would move. Some motion, somewhere.”
I took her arm to start us down from the vantage point. “We’re it, Dair. Motion is our middle name until we catch up with those goddamn sheep.”
We worked stands of timber. Sheep sifted out of none of them.
We cast looks down over canyon cliffs. No wool among the harsh scree below.
We found at least three meadows where the grass all but shouted invitation to be eaten by sheep. All three times, no least trace of sheep.
Two hours of that. Then another. Too much time was passing. I didn’t say so, but Adair knew it, too. The day already was warm enough to make us mop our brows. If we didn’t find the sheep by ten o’clock or so, they would shade up and we would lose the entire hot midpart of the day without any bleats of traveling sheep to listen for.
Now Adair and I were ears on horseback, riding just a minute or two and then listening. How could there be so much silence? How could the invisible ligaments that bound the sky to the earth not creak in tense effort at least once in a while?
But nothingness, mute air, answered us so long and so steadily that when discrepancy finally came, we both were unsure about it.
I shot a glance to Adair. She thought she had heard it, too, if you could call that hearing. A sliver of sound, a faintest faraway tink.
Or more likely a rock dislodging itself in the morning heat and falling with a clink?
The dog was half-dozing in my lap. One of his ears had lifted a little, not enough to certify anything.
Adair and I listened twice as hard as before. At last I had to ask, low and quick, “What do you think, Dair?”
She said back to me in a voice as carefully crouched as my own: “I think it was Percy’s bell.”
By now we were past mid-morning, not far short of ten. We could nudge our horses into motion toward the direction where we imagined we’d heard the tink and risk losing any repeat of it in the sounds of our riding. Or we could sit tight, stiller than stones, and try to hear through the silence.
With her head poised, Adair looked as if she could sit where she was until the saddle flaked apart with age. I silently clamped myself in. I say silently. Inside me my willed instructions to the bellwether clamored and cried. Move, Percy, I urged. Make that bell of yours ring just once, just one time, and I promise I’ll feed you graham crackers until you burst. If you’re up, don’t lie down just yet. If you’re down, for Christ’s sake get up. Either case, move. Take a nice nibble of grass, why not, make that bell—
The distant little clatter came, and Davie’s dog perked up in my lap. I put him down to the ground and away he went, Adair and I riding after him, in the direction of the bell.
But for the dog, we still would have missed the sheep. They were kegged up in a blind draw just beneath a rimrock, as if having decided to mass themselves to make an easy buffet for any passing bear. The dog glided up the slope and over into the draw, we followed, and there they were, hundreds of gray ghosts quiet in the heat, contemplating us remorselessly as we rode up.
Adair anxiously asked, “Is it all of them?”
“I can’t tell until I walk them. Make the dog stay here with you, Dair.”
I went slowly on foot to the sheep, easing among them, moving ever so gradually back and forth through them, a drifting figure they did not really like to accept but did not find worth agitating themselves about. All the while I scanned for the band’s marker sheep. Found Percy, with his bell. Found nine of the ten black ewes, but not the tenth. Found the brownheaded bum lamb with the lop ear, but did not find the distinctive pair of big twin lambs with the number brand 69 on their sides.
When I had accounted for the markers that were and weren’t there, I went back down the slope to Adair.
“Most of them are here,” I phrased it to her, “but not quite all.”
• • •
It was noon of the next day before Rob appeared with a herder in tow, a snuff-filled Norwegian named Gustafson. “And I had to go all the way to Cut Bank even to come up with him,” Rob gritted out. His eyes were on the sheep, back and forth across them, estimating. “Much loss?”
“At least a couple of hundred, maybe a few over.”
“Lambs, do you mean? Or that many ewes and lambs together? Spit it out, man.”
And so I did. “That many of each, is what I mean.”
Rob looked as if my words had taken skin off him in a serious place. In a sense, they had. He knew as well as I did that such a loss would nick away our entire year’s profit. But dwelling on it wasn’t going to change it, was it. I asked him, “How’s Davie?”
“Sick as a poisoned pup.” Rob cast a wide gaze around, as if hoping to see sheep peeking at him from up in the treetops, out the cracks in rocks, anywhere. “Let’s don’t just stand here moving our mouths,” he began, “we’ve got to get to looking—”
“Dair and I have done what looking we could,” I informed him, “and now that you’re here, the three of us can try some more. But there hasn’t been a trace of the rest of the sheep. Wherever the hell those sheep are, they’re seriously lost.”
• • •
We never found them. From that day on, the only existence of those four hundred head of vanished sheep was in the arithmetic at shipping time; because of them, our sheep year of 1918 subtracted down into a break-even one. Not profit, not loss. Neither the one thing nor the other.
“Sweet suffering Christ,” Rob let out bitterly as we stuffed the disappointing lamb checks into our shirt pockets. “What does it take, in this life? I put up with this goddamn partnership Adair keeps us in, and for no pay whatsoever?”
“Just think of all the exercise we get out of it, Rob,” I answered him wearily.
• • •
By that September day when we shipped the lambs and turned toward the short weeks before winter, Davie had recuperated. His malady stayed on among us, however. Doc Murdoch could not account for how the illness had found Davie, as remote and alone on his mountainside as a person could ever be, but he was definite in his dire diagnosis: this was the influenza which had first bred in the army camps. Here in its earliest appearance in Scotch Heaven, it let Davie Erskine live, barely, while it killed his father.
From all we heard and read, the influenza was the strangest of epidemics, with different fathoms of death—sudden and selective in one instance, slow and widespread in another. Donald Erskine’s fatality was in the shallows, making it all the more casual and awful. One morning while he and Jen were tending Davie, he came down with what he thought was the start of a cold, and by noon he was feeling a raging fever. For the first time since childhood, he went to bed during the day. Two days after that, the uneasy crowd of us at the Gros Ventre cemetery were burying that vague and generous man.
Man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets. Donald Erskine and Ninian Duff were the first who homesteaded in Scotch Heaven, and now there was just Ninian. I only half heard Ninian’s grief-choked Bible words, there at graveside. I was remembering Adair and myself, our night together in Davie’s sheepwagon, our slow wonderful writhe onto and into each other, there on his bedding. Davie had
not been in that wagon, that bed, for some days before his illness, tepeeing behind the sheep as he grazed them on the northern reach of the mountain. Had he been, would one or both of us now be down with the influenza? Or be going into final earth as Donald was? Ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken . . . My thoughts went all the way into the past, to my family’s house of storm in Nethermuir. To Frank and Jack and Christie, my brothers and sister I never really knew, killed by the cholera when I was barely at a remembering age. To the husk that the McCaskill family was after that epidemic; my embittered and embattled parents, and the afterthought child who was me. Thin as spiderspin, the line of a family’s fate can be. Or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern . . . And now another time of abrupt random deaths? What kind of a damn disease was this influenza, a cholera on modern wings? With everything medicine can do, how could all of life be at hazard in such a way? Maybe Ninian had an answer, somewhere in the growlings of John Knox that a fingersnap in heaven decided our doom as quick as we were born. I knew I didn’t have one. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was . . .
• • •
Adair and I were silent on our wagon ride home from Donald’s funeral. I supposed her thoughts were where my own were, at Camp Lewis. Winter was not far now, Varick’s frail season. What chance did he have, there in one of the cesspools of this epidemic?
• • •
What chance did anyone have, the question suddenly began to be. You couldn’t turn around without hearing of someone having lost an uncle in Chicago, a cousin in Butte, a sister on a homestead east of Conrad. Distant deaths were one thing. News of catastrophe almost next door was quite another. At a homestead on the prairie between Gros Ventre and Valier a Belgian family of six was found, the mother and four children dead in their beds, the father dead on the floor of the barn where he had tried to saddle a horse and go for help.
People were resorting to whatever they could think of against the epidemic. Out on the bare windy benchlands, ’steader families were sleeping in their dirt cellars, if they were lucky enough to have one, in hope of keeping warmer than they could in their drafty shacks. Mavis and George Frew became Bernarr Mcfadden believers, drinking hot water and forcing themselves into activity whenever they felt the least chill coming on. Others said onion syrup was the only influenza remedy. Mustard plasters, said others. Whiskey, said others. Asafetida sacks appeared at the necks of my schoolchildren that fall. When a newspaper story said masks must be worn to keep from breathing flu germs, the Gros Ventre mercantile sold out of gauze by noon of that day. The next newspaper story said masks were useless because a microbe could pass through gauze as easily as a mouse going through a barn door.