by Ivan Doig
No hellos passed between us these days, only dry glances of acknowledgment. I expected Rob to pass me by and step straight to the workhorses and their harness, but no, anything but.
He paused by Scorpion’s stall. “This horse has seen his days, you know.”
What I knew was the hateful implication in those words. To close off Rob from spouting any more of it, I just shook my head and gave Scorpion’s brown velvet neck an affectionate rub as he munched into the hay.
Rob cocked a look at me and tried: “He’s so old he’d be better off if you fed him your breakfast mush instead of that hay.”
I turned away and went on with my feeding of Scorpion.
“The fact is,” Rob’s voice from close behind me now, “he ought to be done away with.”
So he was willing to say it the worst he could. And more words of it yet: “I can understand that you’re less than keen to have him done away with. It’s never easy. The old rascals get to be like part of us.” They do, Rob, my thought answered him, which is why I am keeping Scorpion alive this winter instead of putting the bullet you suggest into the brainplace behind his ear. “But,” that voice behind me would not stop, “I can be the one to do away with the old fellow, if you’d rather.”
“No. Neither of us is going to be the one, so long as Scorpion is up and healthy. Let’s put a plug in this conversation and go feed the sheep.”
But Rob blocked my way out of the stall. “Do you take telling?” he snapped. “We can’t spare so much as a goddamn mouthful of hay this winter, and you’re poking the stuff into a useless horse as if we’ve got worlds of it. Give yourself a looking-at, why don’t you, man. This winter is no time for charity cases. Any spear of hay that goes into Scorpion doesn’t go into one of those ewes half-starving, out there.”
I knew that. I knew, too, that our hay situation was so wretched that Scorpion’s daily allowance mattered little one way or the other. We needed tons of the stuff, not armfuls. We needed a chinook, we needed an early spring, we needed a quantity of miracles that the killing of one old horse would not provide. I instructed Rob as levelly as I could:
“I know the word doesn’t fit in your ears, but I’ve told you no. He’s my horse and you’re not going to do away with him. Now let’s go, we’ve got sheep waiting for us.”
He didn’t move. “I have to remind you, do I. He’s the horse of us both.”
Then I remembered, out of all the years ago. The two of us pointing ourselves down from Breed Butte toward Noon Creek on my horse-buying mission; that generous side of Rob suddenly declaring itself, clear and broad as the air. Angus, you’ll be using him on the band of sheep we own together, so it’s only logical I put up half the price of him, am I right?
And now the damn man demanded: “Get out the cards.”
Those cold words of his sickened me. How could he live with himself, as sour as he had become? None of us are what we could be. But for Rob to invoke this, to ask the sacrifice of Scorpion and all the years this tall horse had given me, when it was his own blind gamble that delivered us into this hay-starved winter—right then I loathed this person I was yoked to, this brother of Adair’s whom I had vowed to persist with because she wanted it so. Enduring him was like trying to carry fire in a basket.
I choked back the disgust that filled me to my throat. I turned so that Scorpion was not in my vision, so that I was seeing only this creature Rob Barclay. I slowly got out the deck of cards.
Rob studied the small packet they made in the palm of my hand. As if this was some teatime game of children, he proclaimed, “Cut them thin and win,” and turned up the top card. The four of diamonds.
I handed the deck to him. He shuffled it twice, the rapid whir of the cards the only sound in the barn. Now the deck lay waiting for me in his hand.
I reached and took the entire deck between my thumb and first finger. Then I flipped it upside down, bringing the bottom card face-up to be my choice.
The two of us stood a moment, looking down at it. The deuce of hearts.
Rob only shook his head bitterly, as if my luck, Scorpion’s luck, was an unfair triumph. As we turned from the old brown horse and began harnessing the workhorses, he stayed dangerously silent.
• • •
Near the end of January I made a provisioning trip into town. Every house, shed, barn I passed, along the North Fork and the main creek, was white-wigged with snow. Gros Ventre’s main street was a rutted trench between snowpiles, and no one was out who didn’t have dire reason to be. All the more unexpected, then, when I stomped the white from my boots and went into the mercantile, and the person in a chair by the stove was Toussaint Rennie.
“What, is it springtime on the Two Medicine?” I husked out to him, my voice stiff from the cold of my ride. “Because if it is, send some down to us.”
“Angus, were you out for air?” he asked in return, and gave a chuckle.
“I thought I was demented to come just a dozen miles in this weather. So what does that make you?”
“Do you know, Angus, this is that ’86 winter back again.” No deer, no elk. No weather to hunt them in. West wind, all that winter. Everything drifted east. I went out, find a cow if I can. Look for a hump under the snow. Do you know, a lot of snowdrifts look like a cow carcass? “That ’86 winter went around a corner of the mountains and waited to circle back on us, Angus. Here it is.”
“As good a theory as I’ve heard lately,” I admitted ruefully. “Just how are your livestock faring, up there on the reservation?”
Toussaint’s face altered. There was no chuckle behind what he said this time. “They are deadstock now.”
The realization winced through me. Toussaint had not been merely making words about that worst-ever winter circling back. Again now, humps beneath the vast cowl of whiteness; carcasses that had been cattle, horses. The picture of the Two Medicine prairie that Toussaint’s words brought was the scene ahead for Scotch Heaven sheep if this winter didn’t break, soon.
I tried to put that away, out of mind until I had to face it tomorrow with a pitchfork, with another scanty feeding of hay by Rob and me. I asked the broad figure planted by the warm stove: “How is it you’re here, Toussaint, instead of hunkered in at home?”
“You do not know a town man when you see him, Angus?”
I had to laugh. “A winter vacation in temperate Gros Ventre, is this. Where are you putting up?”
“That Blackfeet niece of Mary’s.” Nancy. And those words from Lucas, echoing across three decades: Toussaint didn’t know whether he was going to keep his own family alive up there on the Two Medicine River, let alone an extra. So he brought Nancy in here and gave her to the DeSalises. “She has a lot of house now,” Toussaint was saying. “That Blackfeet of mine”—Mary—“and kids and me, Nancy let us in her house for the winter.” He chuckled. “It beats eating with the axe.”
• • •
Before leaving town I swung by Judith’s house for any mail she wanted to send out to Rob. She handed me the packet and we had a bit of standard conversation until I said I’d better get started on my ride home before the afternoon grew any colder. The question came out of Judith now as quietly as all her utterances, but it managed to ask everything: “How are you and Rob getting by together?”
To say the truth, the incident over Scorpion still burned like a coal in me. But I saw no reason to be more frank than necessary in answering her. “It’s not good between us. But that’s nothing new.”
Judith had known Rob and me since our first winter in Scotch Heaven, when I still thought the world of him, so it was not unexpected when she said in an understanding voice, “Angus, I know this winter with him is hard for you.” What did surprise me was when this loyalest of wives added: “It’s even harder for Rob with himself.”
• • •
February was identical to the frigid misery of January. At the very start of the last of its four white weeks, there came the day when Rob and I found fifteen fresh carcasses of
ewes, dead of weakness and the constant cold. No, not right. Dead, most of all, of hunger.
Terrible as the winter had been, then, March was going to be worse. Scan the remaining hay twenty times and do its arithmetic every one of those times and the conclusion was ever the same. By the first of March, the hay would be gone. One week from today, the rest of the sheep would begin to starve.
A glance at Rob, as we drove the sled past the gray bumps of dead sheep, told me that his conclusion was the same as mine, with even more desperation added. He caught my gaze at him, and the day’s words started.
“Don’t work me over with your eyes, man. How in hell was I supposed to know that the biggest winter since snow got invented was on its way?”
“Tell it to the sheep, Rob. Then they’d have at least that to chew on.”
“All it’d take is one good chinook. A couple of days of that, and enough of this snow would go so that the sheep could paw down and graze a bit. That’d let us stretch the hay and we’d come out of this winter as rosy as virgins. So just put away that gravedigger look of yours, for Christ’s sake. We’re not done for yet. A chinook will show up. It has to.”
You’re now going to guile the weather, are you, Rob? Cite Barclay logic to it and scratch its icy ears, and it’ll bounce to attention like a fetching dog to go bring you your chinook? That would be like you, Rob, to think that life and its weather are your private pets. Despite the warning he had given me, I told him all this with my eyes, too.
• • •
The end of that feeding day, if it could be called so, I was barning the workhorses when a tall collection of coat, cap, scarf, mittens and the rest came into the yard atop a horse with the Long Cross brand. If I couldn’t identify Varick in the bundle, I at least knew his saddlehorse. I gave a wave and he rode through the deep snow of the yard to join me inside the barn’s shelter.
“How you doing?” asked my son when he had unwrapped sufficiently to let it out.
“A bit threadbare, to say the truth. Winter seems to be a whole hell of a lot longer than it ever used to be, not to mention deeper.”
“I notice the sheep are looking a little lean.” Lean didn’t begin to say it, Varick. They were getting to resemble greyhounds. “You got enough hay to get through on, you think?”
“Rob and I were just discussing that.” I scanned the white ridges, the white banks of the North Fork, the white roof of the sheep shed. Another week of this supreme snow sitting everywhere on us and we had might as well hire the coyotes to put the sheep out of their hungry misery. “Neither of us thinks we do have anywhere near enough, no.”
Varick was plainly unsurprised. He said, part question and part not, “What about that Dakota spinach they’ve got at Valier?” Trainloads of what was being called hay, although it was merely slewgrass and other wiry trash, were being brought in from North Dakota to Valier and other rail points and sold at astounding prices.
“What about it?” I nodded to the east, across more than thirty miles. “It’s in Valier and we’re here.”
“I could get loose for a couple days to help you haul,” offered Varick. “Even bring my own hay sled. Can’t beat that for a deal, now can you?”
I said nothing, while trying to think how to tell him his generosity was futile, Rob and I were so far beyond help.
Eyeing me carefully, Varick persisted: “If you and Unk and me each take a sled to Valier, we can haul back a hell of a bunch of hay, Dad.”
“Varick, our workhorses can’t stand that much journey. This winter has them about done in.” As it about has me, too, I kept to myself.
“How about if I get you fresh horses?”
Well and good and fine but also impossible. Every horse in Scotch Heaven and anywhere around was a sack of bones by now. There wasn’t a strong set of workhorses between here and—abruptly I realized where Varick intended to get fresh teams.
“Yeah, they’d be Isaac’s,” he confirmed.
Isaac. My nemesis who was never my enemy. In a better world, there would have been an Anna for each of us.
“Don’t worry, Dad. He’ll loan you the horses.”
Why would he? Although I said it to Varick as: “What makes you so sure of that?”
“I already asked him. The old boy said, ‘I hate for anyvun to get in a pince. Tell Annguz the horses is his.’ ”
A pinch definitely was what winter had us in, you were purely right about that, Isaac. I stared east again, to the white length of Scotch Heaven, the white miles beyond that to the railroad cars of hay in Valier. Why try, even. A sled journey of that sort, in a winter of this sort. There is so much of this country, Angus. That quiet mountaintop declaration of Adair’s. People keep having to stretch themselves out of shape trying to cope with so much. This Montana sets its own terms and tells you, do them or else.
Or else. There in the snow of the valley where Rob and I had just pitched to them half the hay they ought to have had, the sheep were a single gray floe of wool in the universal whiteness. I remembered their bleating, the blizzard day we were late with the feeding; the awful hymn of their fear. Could I stand to hear that, day after day when the hay was gone?
Finally I gave Varick all the answer I had. “All right, I’m one vote for trying it. But we’ll need to talk to Rob.”
“He’ll be for it. Dead sheep are lost dollars to him. He’ll be for it, Dad.”
• • •
In the winter-hazed sky, the dim sun itself seemed to be trying to find a clearer look at our puzzling procession. A square-ended craft with a figurehead of two straining horses was there in the white nowhere, plowing on a snow sea. Then an identical apparition behind it, and a third ghost boat in the wake of that.
Three long sleds with hay racks on them, Varick at the reins of the first, myself the next driver, Rob at the tail of this sled-runner voyage toward Valier, our convoy crept across the white land. But if slowly, we moved steadily. The big Reese horses walked through the snow as if they were polar creatures. Copenhagen and Wood-row, my pair was named. Even Isaac’s horses had the mix of his two lands. Horse alloys, strong there in the dark harness in front of me.
We stopped at the Double W fenceline, half the way between Gros Ventre and Valier, to eat from the bundle of lunch Adair had fixed us. Rob and I stomped some warmth into ourselves while Varick cut the barbed wire strands so we could get the sleds through. Of the four-wire fence, only the top two strands were showing above the snow. While Varick was at that, I gazed around at the prairie. Cold and silence, stillness and snow. Once upon a time there were two young men, new to Montana, who thought they were seeing snow. This is just a April skift, was the freighter Herbert’s croaking assessment. That April and its light white coverlet sounded like high summer to me now. That flurry that had taken the mountains and the wheel tracks from our long-ago trek toward Lucas and his nowhere town was a pinch of salt compared to this. And Rob and I of then, how did we compare with what we are now? The journeys we had made together, across thirty years. Steamship and railroad and horse and foot and every kind of wheel. And by ash sled runners, enmity accompanying us. What, were we different Rob and different Angus, all the time before? Else how did the enmity manage to come between us? In all likelihood I am not the best judge of myself. But I can tell you, from trudging through the days of this winter beside the unspeaking figure known as Rob Barclay, that this was not the Rob who would throw back his head and cockily call up to the hazed sun, Can’t you get the stove going up there?
Onward from the fence, the marks of our sled runners falling away into the winter plain behind us. Silence and cold, snow and stillness. The murmurs within myself the only human sound. Adair asking, when Varick and I went into the house with his offer to make this hay trip: Do both of you utterly have to go? Reluctant yeah from her son, equally involuntary yes from her husband. From her: Then I have to count on each of you to bring the other one back, don’t I. Toussaint, when I arranged for him to feed the sheep while we were gone, saying only:
This winter. You have to watch out for it, Angus. And myself, here on this first ground I ever went across on horseback, scouting for a homestead site. Did I choose rightly, Scotch Heaven over this prairie? That farmhouse there on the chalky horizon. If I had chosen that spot those years ago, I would right now be in there drinking hot coffee and watching hay-hungry sheepmen ply past on their skeleton ships. No, not that simple. In the past summer of drought and grasshoppers and deflated prices, that farm, too, was bitter acres. The year 1919 had shown that farming could be a desperate way of life, too. Maybe everything was, one time or another.
It was dusk when we came around the frozen length of Valier’s lake and began to pass the stray houses of the outskirts. Valier did not have as much accumulation of winter as Scotch Heaven or Gros Ventre, but it still had about as much as a town can stand. The young trees planted along the residential streets looked like long sticks stuck in to measure the snowfall. The downtown streets had drifts graceful as sand dunes. Stores peeked over the snowbanks. Pathways had been shoveled like a chain of canals, and at the eastern edge of town we could see the highest white dike of all, where the railroad track had been plowed.
Along the cornices of the three-story hotel where we went for the night, thick icicles hung like winter’s laundry. When we three numb things had managed to unharness the teams at the stable and at last could think of tending to ourselves, Varick gave his sum of our journey from Scotch Heaven: “That could’ve been a whole hell of a lot worse.”
And Rob gave his. “Once we get those sleds heavy with hay, it will be.”
• • •
At morning, the depot agent greeted us with: “I been keeping your hay cool for you out in the icebox.”
When no hint of amusement showed on any of the three of us, he sobered radically and said: “I’ll show you the boxcar. We can settle up after you’re loaded.”