Bless the Beasts & Children

by Glendon Swarthout

  Cotton swore a soft blue streak and said to get out of there fast, and helping each other, slinging up the trophy and rifle and burnt, bloody pillow, they creaked up and over the wire fence and out of the lane, then up and over a second, and jumped down and stood around shaking till he said to come on, they were safe now.

  They investigated the pens. The sides were eight feet high, the crossbars roughcut 4X8's as big as railroad ties which were bolted to posts a foot or more in diameter. Nothing less, evidently, would confine what was inside. There was no gate here.

  They turned a corner. This was the long side of the rectangle, and it fronted the open range. They passed a Ford pickup with lettering and an insignia on its door, and a stack of baled hay. Cotton said they could talk now if they kept it down, they were far enough away from the ranch and the mighty hunters, but they couldn't goof around all night, they had to find the layout of the pens, so he was going up, right by this gate.

  He climbed three bars high and got a cloud break and motioned the others up beside him. At first, on their toes, they peered out over what seemed a maze of pens, but as their eyes adjusted they could see that the entire rectangle was divided by inner walls into at least four smaller rectangles, and that the herd had to be in the far right corner section, facing the gate and lane. Along the tops of the inner walls, constructed of the same heavy crossbars and posts, ran plank catwalks eight feet high. They dropped.

  "Damn," Cotton said. "I didn't think we'd run into anything like this. One of us should've come down here yesterday and had a look."

  "How'd we know we'd be back?" they demanded.

  "Well, we have to see where the gates are and how to do it. Somebody's gotta go out on that catwalk."

  They panicked.

  "Not me!"

  "What if you fell off?"

  "They'd mash you!"

  "I can't stand high places!"

  Cotton sighed. "What a hairy outfit. So I s'pose I have to."

  "No," Goodenow said. "You've done enough. So's Teft. It isn't fair."

  Shecker had one of his unfunny ideas. "Maybe you go in like in a bullring." He held a make-believe cape, he stamped a matador's foot. "Toro! Hah, toro! Then when they charge, open the gate—"

  "Gas 'im," they snapped.

  "Hey, I know," said Lally 1. "Draw straws. The shortest one walks the plank. I'll get some hay from those bales."

  He was gone and back with a fistful and sorting lengths before they could think the method through.

  "Cotton holds 'em," Teft said. "You cheat."

  "I do not!"

  "I get dizzy even on a chair," Goodenow pleaded.

  "If it was only lighter," Cotton said. "Say, where's Lally 2?"

  They chased their tails. The little stinker was always sneaking off, down a road or under a bed.

  "No!" Cotton snapped his fingers. One leap and he stood on the third crossbar. The rest followed, the straws forgotten.

  And there was Lally 2, already too far out to haul back, inching on hands and knees along the catwalk toward the center of the pens. It was so crucial to him that he had even left his pillow behind. Box Canyon Boys Camp rented its horses reasonably from a resort near Phoenix which stabled them for dude guests in winter and needed a place to summer them out of the heat. For the most part they were indolent animals which required a hard leathering to get beyond a trot. Lally 2 was terrified of the one assigned to him, an elderly mare named Sheba. He refused to mount her, much less to ride. One night early in the session Cotton missed him, and scouting, found him seated on the corral fence talking to Sheba. "Are you a mother horse?" asked Lally 2. "Have you had some babies?" He hopped down, walked to the mare, and putting an arm over her neck, spoke into her ear. "Sheba, want to know where I sleep sometimes at home? In the sauna. There's some little people living there under the hot rocks. Ooms, that's their name, and hundreds of them come out and sleep with me." She whuffed and nuzzled his pajamas. "If you had any babies," he asked her, "did you stay with them or go galloping away and leave them?" Cotton brought a bridle from the barn, helped the boy mount, and led them around the corral. The next day Lally 2 rode her. After that he was aboard the mare most of the time. He could whisper in the ear of that old crowbait and make her perform like a show horse. They won the barrel race in the camp rodeo.

  Cotton was climbing, using a post for leverage, and hoisting himself. The rest were climbing, too, which he rather expected of them. Set them an example and they came through every time. Lally 2 was not all that intrepid, though. He waited for them.

  The catwalk was made of two 2X6's nailed side by side and braced atop the inner wall which bisected the rectangle. In the dark the planking seemed about as wide as a snake's hips and as high as the Empire State Building. Along they crawled as though on combat patrol, noses to rumps—Kenilworth and Rocky River and Mamaroneck and Sixty-Fourth Street and Shaker Heights and Kenilworth. The system of pens began to make sense. They were holding pens, four large sections designed to hold the entire herd during roundups, to break it down into manageable bunches, and to cut individuals out for vaccination. Singly they could be driven into a small diamond-shaped squeeze pen in the center of the four-sectioned rectangle, and from it into the squeeze chute, a box of steel bars which trapped them and vised them immobile while the veterinarians gave them the needle. Fortunately, and necessarily, all the inner barriers including the gates in each were topped with catwalks, since no one in his right mind would enter a pen at ground level.

  Just as the Bedwetters reached the center, the squeeze pen, the scud of clouds opened, and Lally 2, the leader, stopped. But the five behind him could not see, and cautiously, unsteadily, they stood up, and teetering, clasping hands, edged sideways on the planks. Then Lally 2 said "Oh!" And there they were, in their magnificence.

  The buffalo is the largest, most awesome game animal found on the American continent. Standing six feet at the shoulders, even higher at the hump, measuring more than nine feet in length, the bulls weighed 2,000 to 2,600 pounds, the cows but a few hundred less. They tapered from mighty forequarters and heads and humps to slender hindquarters supported on delicate ankles and hooves, and beards of hair tufted from below their snouts and from their heads and legs and tails. Even in wan moonlight the curved, carved horns glinted, sleek hides tautened over muscle, eyes struck sparks of fire. And they were loco. Given reasonable situations, a man might reasonably guess how a buffalo would behave, but these beasts, deprived of the open range and comparative freedom they had known from birth, cut out from the big herd and stockaded for three days without food and water and goaded by alien sounds and smells, were totally unpredictable.

  What they did now, for example, by instinct, they had never done before. In the old days, one of the most remarkable sights on the prairies each spring was the thousands of circles where the grass had been trodden bare. "Fairy rings," the pioneers called them, unaware what had made them. In reality, they were formed by bull buffalo walking circular guard round and round the cows and calves to fend off wolf packs. And now, as the animals snuffed the odor of man nearby, of man their mortal enemy now, as they drew into flaring nostrils that scent which for the first time connoted death, half the herd advanced, the bulls, and stood on guard before the cows, snorting and stamping hooves, heads lowered to hook with horns whatever might attack.

  Nothing would. Instead, high on the catwalk, holding on to each other, six boys quaked before the beasts below.

  They turned, they deflated, they crawled back as fast as they could along the planks to the squeeze pen. There, letting legs down, they sat like bumps on a log as what they had seen sank in. The enormity of the task hunched their shoulders. To liberate the herd they must get it through two pens: the squeeze and one of the big ones. Three gates had to be opened: one between the section in which the herd was now held and the squeeze pen; a second between the squeeze pen and a large; and a third in the outer wall of the large, which opened onto the range. And through those gates they must hoo-h
ah or sweettalk thirty tons of critters as mean as sin and twice as jumpy as they were themselves.

  Cotton found some dried blood on his nose and peeled it off, thinking. Then he said it wasn't as tough as it looked. Here was how. The second and third gates they could open safely now, no sweat. He'd stay here on the squeeze pen by gate one. The rest of them would go back outside the way they came, around the corner to the section where the herd was. That would turn the buff toward them and away from him. Then he'd jump down, open number one gate into the squeeze pen, climb up again, and when they saw he'd done that here, all five of them should climb the pen wall above the herd, suddenly, together, and lean over and not holler but wave headgear and kick the crossbars and that ought to stampede the herd out past him and out the last two gates.

  "Okay," he said. "Got it?" He knew they were petrified. "Okay," he said decisively, "Teft, you open two and three gates on your way. And for God's sake, when all of you get over there, when I jump down to open this one, give me time to get up again before you guys go up the wall. And remember, this is what we're here to do. Okay, everybody move on out."

  Nobody budged. He despaired. And then, of all unlikelies, Lally 1, on the end and more afraid his little brother would steal the show again than he was of the buffalo, took off on hands and knees and the rest followed.

  Cotton watched them go. With this bunch, you never knew who or why or what next. They were as bad as buffalo. He watched Teft drop, open number two gate on the opposite side of the squeeze pen, climb to the catwalk again, crawl to the outer wall and open gate three. Then they disappeared into the night.

  He tried to time them around the corner and along the wall. They'd be slow, he was sure of that, knocking knees and dragging tails. Then movement in the herd clued him. He stood up, sensing rather than seeing. It seemed to him the animals had wheeled, facing the wall away from him. He heard them snuff and stomp. Clouds had closed down and he could not tell, but they must be there now, revving themselves up to assault the wall, the herd acted like it. He pulled his helmet chinstrap tight. He crouched to jump. He tried to whisper Geronimo but his mouth was dry.

  He jumped. The gate was secured with a chain and drop-bolt. The instant his bootheels hit dirt he reached for the chain and jerked the bolt and grabbing a crossbar swung the gate wide and in the same frantic sequence of movement leaped for the opposite wall and flew upward hand over hand and toe over toe before he got a horn up his rear.

  Things happened so fast that Cotton nearly fell off the catwalk. On the wall over the herd he thought he saw the flap of hats. Then he heard milling and that awful rumble and the hats vanished and there was a crash and splinter of wood and he thought, oh God they've smashed right through the pen wall. Then below him a bull and two cows tried to batter through the gate he'd opened and the whole squeeze pen swayed and he did fall, flat, flinging arms around the planks as the damnfool animals rushed through gate two into the big pen and instead of taking the last gate and cutting the scene wheeled and rammed right back through his gate and back into the original pen with the rest of the herd.

  If Cotton could have, he'd have cursed loud enough to wake George Armstrong Custer. If he'd had cry time, he'd have flooded the pens with frustration and salt water. Instead, he jumped down, damn the danger now, shut gate two, and legged it out gate three and past the pickup and baled hay and panting, around the corner and along the outer wall, thinking, oh no, oh God, the buffalo went through that wall like a knife through butter with the guys on top of it and I did it, I got them slaughtered, because they're dead, every one of them dead!

  14

  He collided with them in the dark by the lane. There were no casualties.

  But they had come completely unglued again. Lined against the fence, they embraced the wires like long-lost friends and stammering, managed to tell him that a whole horde of bulls had charged the wall while they were on it and almost torn it down, and weak with relief, Cotton leaned against a fencepost and removed his helmet and swabbed his forehead with a sleeve.

  "Where's my pillow?" lamented Lally 2.

  "My feet are blistered," Goodenow complained.

  "I knew we should've gone home," said Lally 1. "We'd be in Flag by now except for my smartass brother."

  "Be kind to dumb animals bleah," Shecker said.

  "Zap! Pow!" Teft marveled. "They hit that wall like the Green Bay Packers! Bam!"

  "Can it," Cotton ordered wearily. "I gotta think." He listened. In the pen the buffalo were still milling, but at least the commotion had not roused the Arizona sportsmen from their tents and campers. And he listened to the Bedwetters whimper about no radios and how pooped they were and how cuckoo to attempt this in the first place. They were about to flake out on him again, he knew the signs. If it wasn't one nitpick crisis they overreacted to, it was another—a bird out of a tree, a police car startling them, running out of gas, and now being tossed off a wall by a few emotionally disturbed animals. And if they were nice, normal, cereal-eating, deodorant-using American kids he could slap them into shape—but they weren't. They were always up on a wall waving crazy hats. And crazy beasts were always charging them. He had to come up with a plan pronto. But first they needed the old vitamins and minerals.

  "We better bump," he said. "C'mon."

  They were doubtful.

  "C'mon," he urged. He put his back to the fencepost, held hands out, and slowly, dubiously, they came to him and made the magic ring, then closed it tight, heads bowed.

  They closed eyes.

  Bracing and embracing each other, they bumped cheeks and noses gently, touching faces.

  A minute passed, and two. Deaf, dumb, sightless, but joined in hope and fear and the warm fur of their humanity, they stood guard over what they had created together that summer.

  It worked again.

  Cotton opened his eyes. "Okay, men, hear this," he said. "We try it one more time."

  Separating, they groaned for effect.

  "We might as well, it's damn near morning and we're gonna be caught anyway with no wheels. We came close that time, believe it or not. After I opened the squeeze gate, three of them did go through—but they're as shook up as we are and they came right back. So what we've gotta do is, without making noise, some way stampede 'em, the whole bunch, so they'll light out and keep going, and I know how."

  What they'd do, he explained, was station two guys, one at the near squeeze gate he'd opened and one at the far. Gate three, to the range, would be left open. Then when the herd was through one and two, the two guys would jump down and close 'em to make sure none of the buff turned around. Burning rubber and with no place to go but out the last gate, they damn well would.

  "Who'll be the two?" Goodenow interrupted.

  "Me and Teft."

  "No. That's not fair either." Goodenow was being ethical again. "Shecker and I will. We haven't done anything. I urped and he made us stop in Flagstaff to eat, so it's our turn to contribute."

  With both hands, Shecker wrenched at the dagger in his chest. "Stabbed! Give me a break!"

  Cotton clapped on his helmet. "Have it your way. But here's how we panic 'em. The other four of us climb the wall again, together, like before, only this time we flash flashlights at 'em and throw radios and hats into 'em and they'll go, I swear to God they will."

  "Radios?" they asked hollowly. "Throw radios?"

  "What else?" Cotton's voice hardened. "All of us know we're not just doing this for the buff. This is the last chance to find out what we've really got. What this summer adds up to. So let's find out. Goodenow and Shecker, give us your radios and flashlights and hats and take off. When our lights come on, get set for the action. We'll stay here till we think you're up on the squeeze pen and ready. Okay, men, this is it. Good luck. To us and them."

  Shecker and Goodenow surrendered flashlights and transistors and the Hopi headband and Arnold Palmer's golf cap and went thoughtfully off along the wall. Cotton had his three, Teft and the Lally brothers, arrange gear in p
ockets so that they could throw in this order: flashlights, radios, hats. When he gave the signal, he said, jump up the wall, about three bars up, hang on with one hand and bomb with the other. That would do it, he said again. That damn well better do it.

  They waited. On the other side of the wall the animals snuffed and bristled and waited, too. Cotton timed by low clouds covering and uncovering a decrepit star.

  Scorned, they scorned. Cast out, they bunched. Impulses to call home they sublimated. The use of surnames became habitual.

  Although he was not a natural leader, the authority Cotton had seized by he-man hocus-pocus, with razor and dogtags and cigar and whiskey, he held on to with claws and clamped jaws. If a fight with an outsider seemed obligatory, he fought it, losing invariably to bigger boys but taking his bruises with redheaded stoicism. Within the cabin he was friend and counselor and drill sergeant, coaxing his platoon along paternally at one moment, kicking it with ridicule the next. Deviants and dings they might be, short in the saddle and inept with a rifle and butterfingered before a ground ball, but by the end of the fourth week, the middle of the session, the Bedwetters had turned a kind of psychoneurotic corner. The midnight ride to a movie let air out of their tensions and nailed up their tailbones. Their second raid shocked the entire camp into recognition.

  Cotton conceived it. They executed it perfectly. Late one night they opened the corral gate and slapped the string into the pines, then ran hallooing through the camp: "Horses out! Horses out!" Lights went on, campers and counselors cursed and dressed and fanned out to round up the animals before they reached California. Since it had happened once before, someone's carelessness in closing the corral gate, no one suspected. Sticking together in the dark, the Bedwetters doubled back to the deserted camp. One by one they bagged the five trophies from the unguarded cabins, the buffalo, mountain lion, bear, bobcat, and antelope heads, and toting them to open ground, lined them in a row. Teft put a weird cherry on the triumph. Telling them to wait a minute, he loped off to the rifle range, brought back a .22 and cartridges, and standing over the prizes, fired a round between the glass eyes of each head. They scattered quickly then, rejoining the roundup in the woods and staying with it till the job was done and the corral full.