Cowboys Are My Weakness

by Pam Houston

  “Go on,” I thought at them again and again, but they stayed there, posed on the skyline while the men got closer.

  Finally Boone and James were at the top, about six hundred yards from the rams. But the rams saw them first and started back down on my side. If I wanted to do as Boone told me, it was time to start walking. I sat in the tundra and slowly pulled on my gloves. I knew Boone could see me from up there. I knew he would know if I didn’t do my job. I took a step toward where the rams were coming down, and then another. I had their attention, and they stalled nervously on the mountainside between the hunters and me. I sat down to change my socks, which were soaked and suddenly annoying. When I stood back up I watched the five rams, one at a time, slip down into the valley floor in front of me.

  It was after dark when Boone and James got down off the mountain. We decided to camp there and look for the rams again early in the morning. I made some freeze-dried chicken stew and instant chocolate pudding.

  Right after dinner we met Brian. He approached our camp at dusk, hollering for all he was worth so we wouldn’t think he was a bear and fire. He walked and talked and looked like a Canadian lumberjack, but sometime during the evening he confessed to being from Philadelphia.

  Brian was a survival specialist. He taught survival courses in Anchorage and nationwide. When he finished his two-week solo hunt he was off to the Sonoran desert to teach people how to jump out of helicopters with scuba gear on. He was the only man I met in Alaska who said nice things about his wife.

  Brian carried Jack Daniel’s in a plastic bottle that said “emergency provisions” in six different languages. He told us about his students; how they were required to solo for three days at the end of his course; how he gave them each a live rabbit to take with them so they could have one good meal. He hoped they would dry some jerky. He hoped they would stitch a hand warmer together with string made from the sinews in the rabbit’s legs.

  “But it never works,” he said, “because companionship is a very special thing.”

  We all thought he was going to say something dirty, and we waited while he took a long hit off the bottle.

  “I check on them sometime during the second day,” he said. “They’ve all built little stone houses for their rabbits, some of them with mailboxes. They’ve given their rabbits names, and carved their initials into pieces of bark and hung them above the little doors.”

  We all sat there for a minute without saying anything, and then the conversation turned back to the usual. A brown bear that continued to charge after six rounds with a .300 Winchester. A bull moose that wouldn’t go down after seven shots, and then after eight. A bullet that entered a caribou through the anus and exited through the mouth.

  I looked across the fire in time to see Boone, out of chewing tobacco, stick a wad of instant coffee between his cheek and gum. Brian passed the bottle again, his rifle across his knees, a bullet in the chamber. He said he had followed grizzly prints the last mile and a half to camp, big ones, indicating at least a seven-foot bear.

  I wanted to go to bed, but the tent was almost one hundred yards from the fire, and I knew I’d never get Boone away. I was tired of hunting stories, tired of chewing tobacco and cigars and the voices of men. I was tired of bear paranoia: of being afraid to spill one drop of food on my clothing, afraid to go to the bathroom, afraid to really fall asleep. I was tired of being cold and wet and hungry and thirsty and dirty and sweaty and clammy and tired of the sand that was in our eyes and our mouth and our food and our tent and even the water we drank and of the wind which blew it around and was incessant.

  We never saw those five big rams again, but on the second-to-last day of James’s hunt we got close enough to some new rams for another stalk. We had the wind in our favor but only a few hours till dark. We crawled like soldiers for what seemed like a long time, the only sound besides the river James’s rhythmic grunting every time he lifted his belly out of the mud.

  We got into shooting position with just enough light, Boone talking softly into James’s ear, James positioning his body, then his rifle, then his body again. There were eleven rams in front of us, eight high and five low. At least four or five of them were full curls. I was trying to decide which one was the biggest when the gun fired sharp and loud, and then fired again.

  “Don’t shoot again!” Boone said, his voice angry. “Watch that ram.”

  And we all watched as one of the five lower rams ran down the gravel bed, his front legs splayed and awkward.

  “Let me shoot again,” James said. “Let me shoot at another one.”

  “We need to see if the one you shot at is hit,” Boone said, calm again.

  “He ain’t hit,” James said.

  “He is hit,” I said.

  “At this point I can’t tell,” Boone said.

  James cocked his gun.

  The ram hobbled farther down and out of our view. James and Boone kept talking, talking themselves into the fact that the ram wasn’t injured, but I knew it was. I knew it the way a mother knows when her child’s been hurt.

  “That ram’s been hit,” I said again. “I just don’t know where.”

  First one and then three other rams ran down to join the first.

  “I didn’t see any blood,” Boone said. “I think he’s okay.”

  “He’s not okay,” I said, loudly now. “Do you hear me?”

  Both men turned suddenly, as if remembering my presence for the first time, and then just as suddenly turned away.

  “Let’s see if we can get closer,” Boone said. And then, after all that crawling, Boone stood up and strode across the moraine towards where the five lower rams had disappeared. James and I followed. The eight rams above us watched for a minute and then started climbing, slowly but steadily, up to the top of the ridge. The sun had set behind that ridge hours ago, but the Alaskan twilight lingered and lit the backdrop as the rams, one by one, topped out and filled the skyline, each one a perfect black silhouette against a bloody sky.

  One of the five lower rams ran up to join the herd on the skyline. We came over a ledge and saw three more, not fifty feet below us.

  “This is my kind of shot,” James said.

  “Not yet,” Boone said. The three rams walked out in full view. None of them was bleeding.

  “The first two are full curls,” Boone said. “Fire when you’re ready.”

  “We’re still missing one ram,” I said. “The injured ram is still down there.”

  Boone didn’t even turn around. His hand silenced me. The gun fired again and the first ram went down.

  “Dead ram!” Boone said.

  I remember thinking I shouldn’t watch, and I suspect everything would have been easier from then on if I hadn’t. But it wasn’t the way Boone had said it was going to be.

  The ram was hit in the hindquarter, leaving him very much alive but unable to stand. For ten or twelve seconds he tried to drag himself across the glacier on his front feet, and then, exhausted, he gave up and started rolling down the glacier, rolling, in fact, right for a crevasse.

  “Stop, you son of a bitch!” James yelled. “Stop, you motherfucker!”

  The ram was still alive, twitching and kicking its front legs, when it fell several hundred feet to the bottom of the crevasse, irretrievable, even for the wolves, even for the eagles. We all watched the place where it had fallen.

  “Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” James said.

  That’s when the injured ram, the first injured ram, limped out from the place we couldn’t see below us and started to run, or tried to run, across the glacier. It was faltering now, dying, and we could see the blood running down between its front legs. Without a word to either of us, Boone grabbed James’s gun and took off at a dead run across the glacier. Even fatally injured, the ram made better time on the ice than Boone, but just before the ram topped out above him he aimed and made a perfect heart-lung shot and the ram fell, instantly dead.

  Of course we’d left our backpacks miles behind. Boo
ne sent me back for them alone, and I clutched the little gun in my pocket as if it would help me. I walked right to the back-packs, in the near total darkness, something that even Boone himself couldn’t have done. I had learned, by then, to make mental markers each time we left the packs, to find a mark on every surrounding horizon so that even after dark the spot could be relocated.

  The temperature had dropped thirty degrees in thirty minutes, and I dug for my down coat and put it on over my wet clothing, and headed back toward James and Boone.

  I found them just by following the smell of the dead ram. We were all without flashlights, and Boone decided it was too dark to butcher.

  “We’ll gut it and come back for it tomorrow,” Boone said. “If the bears don’t get it, the meat won’t spoil.”

  “Fuck the meat,” James said. “Let’s cut the horns off the son of a bitch and get the hell out of here.”

  It was true dark now and James was getting nervous about bears. He had the safety off his gun and he kept spinning around every time a chunk of ice rolled down off the glacier.

  “That’s against the law,” Boone said. “Come help me gut this ram.” He turned to me. “You stay close.”

  I found out later about Alaska’s wanton waste law, designed to protect the wilderness from trophy hunters like James. I also found out later the reason the ram smelled so awful. He died so slowly his adrenaline had lots of time to get pumping; James’s first shot hit him in the gut and by the time he finally died his insides were rotten with stomach acid.

  That night, though, the smell just seemed like a natural part of the nightmare. Even when they were finished gutting and we all started gingerly down the glacier, the smell of the ram came off Boone like he was the one who’d been shot in the gut. For the first time ever, I wouldn’t hug him. He saved me from slipping once by grabbing my hand and left the smell all over my glove. It was worse than sour milk, that smell, worse than cat piss, worse than anything.

  We walked for over an hour and I could tell by my marks on the skyline that we hadn’t even gone a half a mile.

  “This is crazy,” I said. It was so dark that we couldn’t see the dirty ice we walked on. “One of us is going to wind up in a crevasse with that ram.”

  “Maybe we should sit for a couple hours,” Boone said. “If we sit for three or four hours it will start getting light.”

  “I think we should keep walking,” James said.

  Neither option was good. We were wet and cold already, we smelled like dinner for a bear, we had one real gun and a hunter who couldn’t make an accurate shot at thirty yards. But we were alive and whole and together, and each careful step I took into the blackness made my heart race.

  “We’ll sit until we get so cold we have to move again,” Boone said.

  We piled up, nearly on top of each other. I opened three cans of sardines.

  “That’s perfect,” Boone said. “The bear will think he’s getting surf and turf.”

  We did okay for the first half hour. There had been a light cloud cover at sunset but now a million stars dotted the moonless sky. Boone was the thinnest, and he started to shiver first. We moved even closer together.

  My fantasies were simple. A long hot shower. A plate of vegetables. A bed with sheets. TV. I thought of my mother, our last conversation by satellite telephone from North Pole, Alaska, where I assured her there was no real danger, and she told me about an actor, Jimmy Stewart or Paul Newman. “He used to be an avid hunter,” she said, “and now he’s a conservationist. He’s done a hundred-and- eighty-degree switch.” And I stood there for five dollars a minute listening to myself tell her that conservation and hunting are not antithetical, listening to myself use words like “game management,” words like “harvest” and “herd control.”

  “This,” I said out loud, “is wanting to love somebody too much.”

  “Here come the lights,” Boone said, and even as he said the words a translucent green curtain began to rise on the horizon. Then the curtain divided itself and became a wave and the wave divided itself and became a dragon, then a goddess, then a wave. Soon the whole night sky was full of spirits flying and rolling, weaving and braiding themselves across the sky. The colors were familiar, mostly shades of green, but the motion, the movement, was unearthly and somehow female; it was unlike anything I’d ever seen. I was suddenly warm with amazement. I pressed my body harder into Boone’s.

  Early the next morning we went back for the ram. I shot a roll of film while James and Boone hugged and shook hands over it, while they picked up the horns and twisted the now stiff head from side to side, and then shook hands again. They were happy as schoolboys and I understood that what we had accomplished was more for this moment than anything, this moment where two men were allowed to be happy together and touch.

  James flew back to Fairbanks the next morning, giving Boone and me our first day together in more than two weeks. We needed to take another hundred pounds of food up to the cabin for the hunter who was already on his way, and bring the garbage back down to the strip. With the six miles of packing each way from the airstrip we had a full day, but I was hoping we’d have time for a nice lunch once we got up there, hoping we’d have time for some loud, rowdy sex before we had to load up our packs and come back down.

  The sun came out for our walk to the cabin, and when we got there I made Boone lunch and a couple of drinks. I mixed the Tang and water separately from the rum so the drinks would taste real. I added extra butter to the freeze-dried food, some dehydrated Parmesan, some parsley flakes.

  I can’t remember how the fight started, or why we disagreed. I only remember the moment when we stepped, as we always did, out of ourselves, and into the roles from which we fight.

  “I spent the whole day trying to make everything nice for you,” I said, hearing the script in my head, already knowing the outcome of the scene.

  “What did you do?” he said. “Boil water?”

  And he was right, what I had done was boil water, and there still might have been a way of saving the day if it hadn’t been for the fact of those parsley flakes, if it hadn’t been for the fact of that Parmesan cheese.

  “Go to hell,” I said.

  “What was that?”

  “Fuck you.”

  And then he was there, in my face, temples bulging. He grabbed my neck and twisted it into an unnatural position. I felt one of the lenses fall out of my glasses, felt something pinch between my shoulder blades, and I screamed, trying to channel all the pain into my voice so he’d let go, and it worked. But then he came back at me, grabbed my shirt around my neck and twisted it.

  “If you hurt me again,” I said, “I’ll shoot you.” It was sort of a ridiculous thing to say, on many levels, not the least of which being that the gun in my pocket, the one that Bill had given me simply out of pity, wasn’t big enough to kill a ptarmigan unless you hit it in exactly the right place. I remembered another argument of months before, where I’d said I wouldn’t shoot a rapist and infuriated Boone, and I tried to decide if what was happening was somehow worse than rape, and I knew even then that Boone would never really hurt me and I would never really shoot him, loving him like I did. And I decided it was just something I said because it seemed like the next logical line in the drama, but it made Boone wilder.

  He ripped my coat off and took the little gun out of my pocket. He knocked me onto the floor of the cabin and then picked me up and threw me out the front door. My knee hit the rock that was the doorstop. He threw my backpack out after me, and then my bag of dirty clothes. The wind coming off the glacier picked up one of my T-shirts, a couple of pairs of underwear, and scattered them across the tundra, which was finally, I noticed, all red and gold.

  “Give me my gun,” I said, as if that were the issue.

  “You won’t have it,” he said. “And don’t ask again.”

  Stupid in his anger, he walked to the river, leaving his rifle a few feet away from me. I stared at it for a minute and thought about my
previously nonviolent life. Only rednecks and crazy people had fights with guns, people in the inner city, people on late-night news shows.

  But I was fascinated by us with our dramatics, and somehow bound to the logical sequence of the scene. I picked up the rifle, carried it into the cabin, hid it under a foam pad on the bunk bed, and sat on it.

  “Where is it?” he said, minutes later. “Did you touch it?” I knew in his anger he thought he might have misplaced his gun. He crashed around the cabin and then outside.

  “Where is it?” he said again.

  “Give me my gun,” I said.

  This undid him. He ripped his gun out from under me.

  “If you messed up the scope . . .” he said. I eased into the corner as he examined the scope. If it had moved a fraction, even if only in his mind, I was in big trouble. We had gone too far this time, and at that instant I didn’t know if and how we’d ever get back. He put his rifle down and took a step toward me.

  “Don’t come near me,” I said.

  “Now don’t get upset,” he said, suddenly all control and condescension. “Just get yourself together.” He patted my knee. “Take it easy now,” he said. “Take a deep breath.”

  That was when my hiking boot moved, it seemed, all by itself and my Vibram sole connected with his thigh and I pushed with all the strength I had and sent him hurtling backwards across the cabin into the woodpile and the stove. A shelf crashed down on his head when he hit the wall. My foot hung in the air and I stared at it, amazed at its power, amazed at my life’s first violent act.

  Then Boone was up and coming across the cabin at me and I just balled up and let him throw me out the door again, let my knee make contact with the rock. I gathered my clothes around me, pulled my backpack over my legs to block the wind.

  Boone stayed inside, shouting things I only half heard. “You’re out,” he said at one point. “In more ways than you know.”

  I thought I ought to be horrified at myself, but I felt okay, light-headed, almost elated. He was stronger but I was strong. I looked again at my boot and flexed the muscle in my leg.