by Ivan Doig
The name of the rancher was Carl Nansen, and that Nansen land was bought up by the Double W. “Wendell Williamson’ll let us have the house on the Nansen place to live in” had been Alec’s words about the domestic plan after he and Leona became Mr. and Mrs. this fall.
The thought of this and the sight of that creek S were as if wires had connected in me, for suddenly I wanted to turn to my father and ask him everything about Alec. What my brother was getting himself into, sashaying off into the Depression with a saddle and a bridle and a bride. Whether there was any least chance Alec could be headed off from cowboying, or maybe from Leona, since the two somehow seemed to go together. How my father and my mother were going to be able to reason in any way with him, given last night’s family explosion. Where we stood as a family. Divided for all time? Or yet the unit of four we had always been? Ask and ask and ask; the impulse rose in me as if coming to percolation.
My father was onto his feet, had pulled out his pocket watch and was kidding me that my stomach was about half an hour fast as usual, it was only now noon, and I got up too and went with him to our horses. But still felt the asking everywhere in me.
No, I put that wrong. About the ask, ask, ask. I did not want to put to my father those infinite questions about my brother. What I wanted, in the way that a person sometimes feels hungry, half-starved, but doesn’t know exactly what it is that he’d like to eat, was for my father to be answering them. Volunteering, saying “I see how to bring Alec out of it,” or “It’ll pass, give him a couple of weeks and he’ll cool off about Leona and then . . .”
But Varick McCaskill wasn’t being voluntary; he was climbing onto his horse and readying to go be a ranger. And to my own considerable surprise, I let him.
We tell ourselves whatever is needed to go from one scene of life to the next. Tonight in camp, I told myself, as we ended that June lunchtime above the English Creek–Noon Creek divide. Tonight would be early enough to muster the asking about Alec. What I was temporarily choosing, with silence, was that my father and I needed this trail day, the rhythm or ritual or whatever it was, of beginning a counting trip, of again fitting ourselves to the groove of the task and the travel and the mountains. Of entering another Two summer together, I might as well say.
• • •
Dode Withrow’s sheep were nowhere in evidence when we arrived at the counting vee an hour or so after our lunch stop. A late start by the herder might account for their absence, or maybe it just was one of those mornings when sheep are poky. In either case, I had learned from my father to expect delay, because if you try to follow some exact time when you work with sheep you will rapidly drive yourself loony.
“I might as well go up over here and have a look at that winter kill,” my father decided. A stand of pine about a mile to the north was showing the rusty color of death. “How about you hanging on here in case the sheep show up. I won’t be gone long.” He forced a grin. “Think about how to grow up saner than that brother of yours.”
“This whole family’s sanity could stand some thinking about” crossed my mind in reply but didn’t come out. My father climbed on Mouse and went to worry over winter kill on his forest.
I took out my jackknife and started putting my initials into the bare fallen log I was sitting on. This I did whenever I had time to pass in the forest of the Two, and I suppose even yet up there some logs and stumps announce J McC to the silent universe.
The wind finally had gone down, I had no tug at my attention except for the jackknife in my hand. Carving initials as elaborate as mine does take some concentration. The J never was too bad to make and the M big and easy, but the curves of the Cs needed to be carefully cut. Thanks to the tardy Withrow sheep I had ample leisure to do so. I suppose sheep have caused more time to be whiled away than any other creatures in the world. Even yet on any number of Montana ridgelines there can be seen stone cairns about the height of a man. Sheepherders’ monuments they are called and what they are monuments to is monotony. Just to be doing something a herder would start piling stones, but because he hated to admit he was out there hefting rocks for no real reason, he’d stack up a shape that he could tell himself would serve as a landmark or a boundary marker for his allotment. Fighting back somehow against loneliness. That was a perpetual part of being a sheepherder. In the wagons of a lot of them you would find a stack of old magazines, creased and crumpled from being carried in a hip pocket. An occasional prosperous herder would have a battery radio to keep him company in the evenings. Once in a while you came across a carver or a braider. Quite a few, though, the ones who give the herding profession a reputation for skewed behavior, figured they couldn’t be bothered with pastimes. They just lived in their heads, and that can get to be cramped quarters. Those religions which feature years of solitude and silence I have grave doubts about. I believe you are better off doing anything rather than nothing. Even if it is only piling stones or fashioning initials.
In any event, that jackknife work absorbed me for I don’t know how long, but to the point where I was startled by the first blats of the Withrow sheep.
I headed on down through the timber on foot to help bring them to the counting vee. A sheepman could have the whole Seventh Cavalry pushing his band along and he’d still seem glad of further help.
Dode Withrow spotted me and called, “Afternoon, Jick. That father of yours come to his senses and turn his job over to you?”
“He’s patrolling to a winter kill. Said he’d be back by the time we get up to the vee.”
“At the rate these sonsabitches want to move along today he’s got time to patrol the whole Rocky Mountains.”
This was remarked loud enough by Dode that I figured it was not for my benefit alone. Sure enough, an answer shot out of the timber to our left.
“You might just remember the sonsabitches ARE sheep instead of racehorses.”
Into view over there between some trees came Dode’s herder, Pat Hoy. For as long as I had been accompanying my father on counting trips, and I imagine for years before, Dode and Pat Hoy had been wrangling with each other as much as they wrangled their sheep. “How do, Jick. Don’t get too close to Dode, he’s on the prod this morning. Wants the job done before it gets started.”
“I’m told you can tell the liveliness of a herder by how his sheep move,” Dode suggested. “Maybe you better lay down, Pat, while we send for the undertaker.”
“If I’m slow it’s because I’m starved down, trying to live on the grub you furnish. Jick, Dode is finally gonna get out of the sheep business. He’s gonna set up a stinginess school for you Scotchmen.”
That set all three of us laughing as we pushed the band along, for an anthem of the Two was Dode Withrow’s lament of staying on and on in the sheep business. “In that ’19 winter, I remember coming into the house and standing over the stove, I’d been out all day skinning froze-to-death sheep. Standing there trying to thaw the goose bumps off myself and saying, ‘This is it. This does it. I am going to get out of the sonofabitching sheep business.’ Then in ’32 when the price of lambs went down to four cents a pound and might just as well have gone all the way to nothing, I told myself, ‘This is really it. No more of the sonofabitching sheep business for me. I’ve had it.’ And yet here I am, still in the sonofabitching sheep business. God, what a man puts himself through.”
That was Dode for you. Poet laureate of the woes of sheep, and a sheepman to the pith of his soul. On up the mountain slope he and Pat Hoy and I now shoved the band. It took a while, because up is not a direction sheep particularly care to go, at least at someone else’s suggestion. Sheep seem perpetually leery of what’s over the hill, which I suppose makes them either notably dumb or notably smart.
Myself, I liked sheep. Or rather I didn’t mind sheep as such, which is the best a person can do towards creatures whose wool begins in their brain, and I liked the idea of sheep. True, sheep had to be troubled with more than cattle did, but the troubling was on a smaller scale. Pulling a lamb fro
m a ewe’s womb is nothing to untangling a leggy calf from the inside of a heifer. And a sheep you can brand by dabbing a splot of paint on her back, not needing to invite half the county in to maul your livestock around in the dust of a branding corral. Twelve times out of a dozen, in the debate of cow and ewe I will choose sheep.
For a person partial to the idea of sheep I was in the right time and place. With the encouragement of what the Depression had done to cattle prices the Two Medicine country then was a kind of vast garden of wool and lambs. Beginning in late May, for a month solid a band of sheep a day passed through the town of Gros Ventre on the way north to the Blackfeet Reservation, band after band trailing from all the way down by Choteau, and other sheep ranchers bringing theirs from around Bynum and Pendroy. (Not without some cost to the civic tidiness of Gros Ventre, for the passage of a band of a thousand ewes and their lambs through a town cannot happen without evidence being left on the street, and occasionally the sidewalks. Sheep are nervous enough as it is, and being routed through a canyon of buildings does not improve their bathroom manners any. Once, Carnelia Muntz, wife of the First National banker, showed up in the bank and said something about all the sheep muss on the streets. I give Ed Van Bebber his full due. Ed happened to be in there cashing a check, and he looked her up and down and advised: “Don’t think of them as sheep turds, Carnelia. Think of them as berries off the money tree.”) This was a time on the reservation when you could see a herder’s wagon on top of practically every rise: a fleet of white wagons anchored across the land. Roy Cleary’s outfit up around Browning in itself ran fifteen thousand head of ewes or more. And off to the east, just out of view beyond the bench ridges, the big sheep outfits from over in Washington were running their tens of thousands, too. And of course in here to the west where we were working Dode Withrow’s sheep to the counting vee, my father’s forest pastured the English Creek bands. Sheep and their owners were the chorus in our lives at the English Creek ranger station, the theme of every season and most conversation.
• • •
At the counting vee my father was waiting for us. After greetings had been said all around among him and Dode and Pat, Dode handed my father a gunny sack with a couple of double handfuls of cottoncake in it, said, “Start ’em, Mac,” and stepped around to his side of the counting gate.
Here on the spread-out English Creek range the tally on each grazing allotment was done through a vee made of poles spiked onto trees, the sheep funneling past while my father and the rancher stood alongside the opening of the narrow end and counted.
Now my father went through the narrow gate into the vee, toward the leery multitude of ewes and lambs. He shook the sack in front of him where the sheep could see it and let a few cottonseed pellets trickle to the ground.
Then it came, that sound not even close to any other in this world, my father’s coax to the sheep: the tongue-made prrrrr prrrrr prrrrr, remotely a cross between an enormous cat’s purr and the cooing of a dove. Maybe it was all the R’s built into a Scotch tongue, but for whatever reason my father could croon that luring call better than any sheepman of the Two.
Dode and Pat and I watched now as a first cluster of ewes, attentive to the source of the prrrrrs, caught the smell of the cottoncake. They scuffled, did some ewely butting of each other, as usual to no conclusion, then forgot rivalry and swarmed after the cottoncake. As they snooped forward on the trail of more, they led other sheep out the gate and started the count. You could put sheep through the eye of a needle if you once got the first ones going so that the others could turn off their brains and follow.
My job was at the rear of the sheep with the herder, to keep the band pushing through the counting hole and to see that none circled around after they’d been through the vee and got tallied twice—or, had this been Ed Van Bebber’s band, I would have been back there to see that his herder, on instructions from Ed, didn’t spill some sheep around the wing of the corral while the count was going on, so that they missed being tallied.
But since these were Dode’s sheep with Pat Hoy on hand at the back of them I had little to add to the enterprise of the moment and was there mostly for show. I always watched Pat all I could without seeming to stare, to try to learn how he mastered these woolies as he did. Some way, he was able just to look ewes into behaving better than they had in mind. One old independent biddy or another would step out, size up her chance of breaking past Pat, figure out who she was facing, and then shy off back into the rest of the bunch. This of course didn’t work with lambs, who have no more predictability to them than hens in a hurricane. But in their case all Pat had to do was say “Round ’em, Taffy” and his caramel-colored shepherd dog would be sluicing them back to where they belonged. A sheep dog as good as Taffy was worth his weight in shoe leather. And a herder as savvy as Pat knew how to be a diplomat toward his dog, rewarding him every now and then with praise and ear rubbing but not babying him so much that the dog hung around waiting to be complimented rather than performing his work. That was one of my father’s basic instructions when I first began going into the mountains with him on counting trips, not to get too affectionate with any herder’s dog. Simply stroke them a time or two if they nuzzled me and let it go at that.
Taffy came over now to see if I had any stray praise to offer, and I just said, “You’re a dog and half, Taffy.”
“Grass gets much higher up here, Jick, I’m liable to lose Taffy in it,” Pat called over to me. “You ever see such a jungle of a year?”
“No,” I confessed, and we made conversation for a bit about the summer’s prospects. Pat Hoy looked like any of a thousand geezers you could find in the hiring bars of First Avenue South in Great Falls, but he was a true grassaroo; knew how to graze sheep as if the grass was his own sustenance as well as theirs. No herder in all of the Two country was more highly prized than Pat the ten months of the year when he stayed sober and behind the sheep, and because this was so, Dode put up with what was necessary to hang on to him. That is, put up with the fact that some random number of times a year Pat proclaimed: “I quit, by damn, you can herd these old nellies your own self. Take me to town.” Dode knew that only two of those quitting proclamations ever meant anything: “The sonofagun has to have a binge after the lambs are shipped and then another one just before lambing time, go down to Great Falls and get all bent out of shape. He’s got his pattern down like linoleum, Pat has. For the first week he drinks whiskey and his women are pretty good lookers. The next week or so he’s mostly on beer and his women are getting a little shabby. Then for about two weeks after that he’s on straight wine and First Avenue squaws. That gets it out of his system, and I go collect him and we start all over.”
• • •
You can see how being around Dode and Pat lifted our dispositions. When the count was done and we had helped Pat start the sheep on up toward the range he would summer them on—the ewes and lambs already browsing, taking their first of however many million nibbles of grass on the Two between then and September—Dode stayed on with us awhile to swap talk. “What’s new with Uncle Sam?” he inquired.
“Roosevelt doesn’t tell me quite everything, understand,” my father responded. “We are going modern, though. It has only taken half of my goddamn life, but the Billy Peak lookout is about built. Paul will have her done in the next couple days. This forest is finally going to have a goddamn fire tower everyplace it ought to have one. Naturally it’s happening during a summer when the forest is more apt to float away than burn down, but anyway.” Dode was a compact rugged-faced guy whose listening grin featured a gap where the sharp tooth just to the left of his front teeth was missing, knocked out in some adventure or another. A Dode tale was that when he and Midge were about to be married he told her that he intended to really dude up for the wedding, even planned to stick a navy bean in the tooth gap. But if Dode looked and acted as if he always was ready to take on life headfirst, he also was one of those rare ones who could listen as earnestly as he could talk.
“Alec still keeping a saddle warm at the Double W?” Dode was asking next.
“Still is,” my father had to confirm.
Dode caught the gist behind the tight pair of words, for he went on to relate: “That goddamn Williamson. He can be an overbearing sonofabitch without half trying, I’ll say that for him. A while back I ran into him in the Medicine Lodge and we sopped up a few drinks together, then he got to razzing me about cattle being a higher class of animal than sheep. Finally I told him, ‘Wendell, answer me this. Whenever you see a picture of Jesus Christ, which is it he’s holding in his arms? Always a LAMB, never a goddamn calf.’ ”