Claiming Ground

by Laura Bell

  In these early nights of June, the moon shines full, and the sheep travel through it, restless for green feed, a luminous, drifting mass that spills in rivulets through gullies and rises up hillsides, conforming intricately to the imperfect shape of earth. Their bleating is incessant. With muzzles blistered by the day’s sun, they inch across the sparse range and, between clumps of grass, break into a brief and urgent trot, never lifting their noses from the ground.

  My dreams are edged with the sound of their wandering. I wake each morning brittle and ragged with their longing, worried about where the night might have taken them. But out in this vast country, there is no place where I cannot find them, no lush farm field for them to invade, no neighboring band of sheep with which to mix. My early mornings are spent slowly arcing around them, tucking in the edges and counting the markers I can identify—the black sheep, the mottled, the disfigured—to raise the odds that I’ve found them all.

  When the sun rises high and we’re pinned beneath it, I turn binoculars across the basin to the Big Horns some sixty miles to the east, seven thousand feet above us, and watch the snow line retreating to the highest peaks. Sterling has shown me where we’re going, pointing a shaky finger north to where the horizon bumps down to the lower bench above the Yellowtail Reservoir and the town of Lovell. “Little Mountain,” he says. “That’s where you’re headed with these sheep next, but you can’t start yet.”

  Every day I watch this hem of snow lift away from the bare rock face in the shimmering distance, trying to imagine snowbanks melting into freshet streams and warming to the first blush of green mountain grass.

  He kills the engine as his trail of dust catches up, billowing a fine sift of grit across us.

  “God almighty, it’s hot.” Sterling lifts his hat and wipes his forehead with a shirt sleeve. He’s traded his sweat-stained silver belly Stetson for a new straw hat that appears almost comical on this pinched and dour man.

  “Yes and I hope you’ve come to get me out of this godforsaken place.”

  He sighs and pulls out a Camel. “Sorry, kid, but you’re the last to go up. Lucka the draw.”

  He has told me this before, but in the heat I’m whiny and impatient. I watch him navigate the match to his cigarette, his fingers long and surprisingly delicate for a man who pushes at the hard edges of working and drinking. He keeps them moving so the wobble doesn’t show, but I know it’s there and know that when he leaves my camp, he’ll go sit in the Medicine Wheel Bar on Lovell’s Main Street. He’ll drink whiskey ditches in the air-conditioned dimness and tell stories about me—not mean, not unkind, but with the proprietary ownership of the captor.

  When the dust has settled, he shoves the pickup door open, gets out, and goes around to retrieve a Styrofoam cooler from the passenger-side floor, setting it down in front of me in the dirt. The cooler is brand-new and bright white.

  “What’s this?” I ask and lift the lid. Inside are two pints of strawberries, a six-pack of Coors, a package of frozen hamburger from the ranch locker, and a block of ice. I press my palms to the frozen meat and ice until they hurt, then raise them to my face and cover my eyes with the cold. When I drop my hands, the dogs are staring hard, their heads cocked in puzzlement.

  “Won’t last long in this heat, but it’ll float your boat for a while.” Sterling tries hard not to smile, but he’s clearly pleased with his gift. I’ve never seen him flat out smile, much less laugh. The lines of his face are sharp and thin, pinched around the mouth. Maybe his mouth no longer opens wide enough to smile, or maybe he’s just so long out of practice.

  “Thank you, Sterling. Nothing’s tasted good, hot as it’s been.”

  “The ol’ lady’ll prob’ly scream to high heaven when she sees fresh strawberries on your grocery ticket. But hell, I couldn’t pass ’em up. She drives her damn fancy car, and you can at least have strawberries.” Then he adds, “I remember how it is.” He’s snuffling around the pickup, pulling more groceries and mail out from the clutter piled on his truck seat.

  “Thank you, Sterling,” I say, my hands still lingering in the cooler.

  “And that six pack ain’t from the outfit. I bought it for you, myself.” He stares hard for a moment at the shimmer of mountains in the heat, his jaw set against the pleasure of this last gift.

  In all the weeks that he’s tended my camp, Sterling has seen to it that I’ve had the necessities. Early on, he’d measured my head with a string and on the next trip brought me a silver belly Stetson. “That ball cap don’t cut it in the sun all day,” he’d said. “Got to carry your shade with you, ’cause you sure as hell won’t find any out here.” And then, “Looks good, kid.”

  The following week he brought a Winchester .30-30 lever-action rifle and five boxes of shells. “For the coyotes and for anybody else out here that don’t belong. You know how to shoot?”

  “Yes, I shot a twenty-two on my grandfather’s farm growing up.” Which had some little truth to it. I didn’t want him leaning over my shoulder to show me how.

  It all got charged to my ranch account and taken out of my three-hundred-dollar-a month paycheck, but all the same they’d seemed like gifts.

  Sterling pulls a small calendar from his shirt pocket and runs a finger over the page, studying it.

  “So when do we go up?” I can’t help but ask.

  “Friday. Friday, I’ll move you on over to Larry’s Last Pond. You’ll just have to stay put there till we can get everybody else goin’. Then I’ll move you over to Dead Horse Pond, where you’re on deck to go.” He emphasizes this last part as though we’re rodeo ropers about to bust out of the starting box, but in fact we are a slow, tired, hot, and cranky bunch looking to get out of here.

  “Once we get everbody else up, I’ll come back and start you. It’ll be about the middle a the month.”

  “Who was Larry, anyway?”

  “What?”

  “Larry’s Last Pond …”

  “Oh, hell, I dunno. Some old guy out in the middle a nowhere, I guess. I’ll see you Thursday mornin’ about nine, and you can take the ranch truck in and do your woman business. Don’t drink all that beer in one splash, now.”

  “I won’t, Sterling.” Though I can’t for the life of me imagine why it would matter.

  Sweltering hot. Sterling came today to stay with my sheep while I went to town to get a filling from the dentist. He sent me off in the ranch pickup with words of caution: “Be careful, and don’t forget to come back. Make sure’n get all your woman things you’ll need for the summer.”

  It felt good to drive. I shopped Main Street in less than an hour and bought all kinds of things I needed for the mountain—new saddlebags, boots, warm gloves, socks, underwear. And I treated myself to a long, silky nightgown and a soft pink corduroy robe. I’d thought it would seem like a homecoming, with familiar faces crowding the street, but anyone I knew was off on a tractor or out in the hills. I came back to camp as soon as I could.

  The real gift was this morning, early, in the first gray light when I trotted off through the sagebrush to get around my sheep before Sterling showed up. Though I wasn’t even looking, a pale chiseled spear point caught my eye. Right there on top of the ground.

  Before first light I called up the dogs and took out horseback for the rock ridge where the sheep had bedded the night. It was move day and we started early because of the heat. While Sterling hooked the pickup to the wagon tongue, I held the flashlight and listened bleary-eyed to my instructions.

  “Well, kid, these old gals know where they’re goin’, so you just have to stay behind ‘em and keep the little’ns bumped up. But if it gets too hot, they’ll plum bog down and you’ll be dark-thirty gettin’ to camp. Short trail, this’n, and an early start. You should make camp by ten or eleven.”

  The sheep trailed easily through the early light, eager to be going somewhere and knowing they were heading to the mountain. A half mile out from the new camp, the lead ewes smelled water and began running toward the pond, leaving
their lambs to straggle behind. I gave one last push, then cut around, letting the bunch sort itself out, and headed up the hill where Sterling was setting up my camp.

  From a distance, I could see that something was wrong. He was moving in and out of the wagon with a choppy thin-legged gate. Tarps were scattered all over the ground, cardboard boxes of groceries tipped on their sides. As I rode closer, he began to include me in his stream of conversation, though he wouldn’t look at me.

  “Nearly lost the whole outfit on that washed-out sum-bitchin’ road, and I got no idea how this miserable outfit expects me to pull a goddamn thing in this sorry, weeny-assed pickup. Jesus H. Christ.”

  Smoke was coming out of the chimney. He’d started a fire in the wagon’s woodstove, and through the open door I could see my new coffeepot on top of the stove. But in the sage outside there was a glint of shiny metal, and looking closer, I saw its aluminum basket and percolator stem stomped flat in the dirt.

  As I dropped from my horse, he slowed his tirade and looked sheepishly around him, realizing I’d caught him in his tantrum. Following my eyes to the ground, he said, “Got rid of them goddamn coffee guts for you, kid. A waste of time if ever I saw one.”

  During lambing, Sterling ran what was called the outlaw shed. To this small, low shed, attached by a fenced alleyway to the main shed, were brought all the unpaired and unloved: ewes whose lambs had died, lambs whose mothers wouldn’t claim them or had no milk, the smallest and weakest triplet born to a single ewe. The orphaned lambs were bottle-fed until a ewe who’d lost her own lamb was brought in. Sterling would neatly skin the dead lamb, rub the skin in its mother’s afterbirth, if he had it, and place the “jacket” on one of the bums, lacing it together at the throat and belly with a few stitches of baling twine. Sometimes the ewe took to her new lamb with enthusiasm, or maybe required coaxing and even baling-twine hobbles around her hind feet so she couldn’t kick the lamb as it tried to nurse. But once the orphan lamb was filled with the ewe’s milk, her smell would begin to seep through its pores.

  Somehow Sterling found the patience to stitch the little jackets on the gangly lambs and trick the pair into a bond, but his infamous temper made him an odd choice for the job. Just a few years later, he would shoot himself in the head with a pistol in one of the cheap Lovell motel rooms frequented by herders on a binge. But in these months, he coaxed the new relations until he could remove half-rotten jackets from potbellied lambs and worry the devoted pairs into an outside pen to join all the others.

  On this oilfield road, there is traffic. Trucks come and go, not a lot of them, but more than nothing, which is what I’ve seen all spring. The pumps are scattered through the hills and from a distance look like fat hens pecking their heads to the ground and up, to the ground and up. No big lights or platforms. Men drive this road to check the pumps, check pressure gauges and I don’t know what else. Their windows are rolled up against the heat and dust, but they look hard trying to figure me out, and then they wave. Sometimes they stop.

  This one man who stops tells me he does leatherwork, that it’s how he passes time in the motel room until he can go home to his family. When he asks what size belt I wear, I’m wary and say, “I don’t know. I don’t wear a belt.” Then he asks if he can measure my waist and make me one, and I don’t know why but I say yes. He seems sincere, and I’m lonesome. He’s soft faced, his pale skin burned bright. He smells clean. He unhooks his belt and pulls it out from the loops of his jeans. He tells me to hold up my arms and kneels down on one knee and wraps the belt around my waist. I can see his scalp because he’s taken off his ball cap, and he’s so close I can feel the heat rising off his body. I think that maybe I shouldn’t be letting him do this, but what comes to mind is my mother fitting me for a school dress, not some scared feeling, so I let him. He pulls a pencil from his shirt pocket and makes a mark on the back side of the leather where it meets the buckle. “There,” he says, and stands back up. “Give me a couple of days.”

  I let my breath out and watch him climb back into his pickup and drive away, not knowing at all whether I have the whole world spread around me, the luckiest woman, or if I’m a prisoner in my own special jail.

  In this desert country, water is hard won. On average, five to seven inches of precipitation fall on low-elevation ground that grows what can survive it. Sagebrush, four-wing saltbush, greasewood, saltsage, spare clumps of slender wheatgrass, Indian ricegrass with its panicles sprung open like fireworks. After a spring rain, tiny pricks of grass emerge from spidery cracks in shallow hoofprints, a fringe of green appears around the edges of rocks where moisture has some slim reason to collect. Narrow gullies conceal streamers of color twisting and turning beneath the surface: white and pink phlox, copper mallow, mariposa lilies, yellow mustards, tender patches of pale wild violets. Only the evening primrose, Oenothera caespitosa, blooms exposed on the brittle hardpan. At dawn their ivory petals haven’t yet contracted to reveal the pale pink underside but are still spread wide open like transparent moons fallen from the sky during the night.

  The heat is oppressive with no breath of air, no shade for miles. I splurge on rationed water and fill a bucket and stand naked on the cottonwood stump at the wagon door. I tilt my head back and pour it all on my face and down through my hair, spilling over my back and down to the ground. For just this minute I’m cool as my skin prickles and the sunlight sucks the moisture from it. Below my feet the cottonwood takes on the smell of wet river-bottom shade and shelter, the water disappearing into the dust.

  Antelope nibble on sage leaves, waiting delicately for the storm. I’ve been watching it simmer in the western sky, steely gray closing in over Heart Mountain and swallowing the northern Absarokas. The air is still, the sheep stunned quiet by the heat. Then there’s a puff of breath from the east, and another, the feel that something’s happening. This must be what war is like, nights spent quietly waiting for bombs to release this tension in the air. To the west, jagged silver branches dart through the charcoal sky, the thunder indicating that the storm is ten or eleven miles away. I can hear, before I feel it, the wind shifting from east to out of the west, and it sounds like a convoy of semis in the distance. I watch it whip and tear dust from the ridge road, coming toward us. I want to be anywhere but here and imagine a plush hotel room with drawn curtains, running water, and movies on television, and maybe popcorn, too.

  On the knoll above Larry’s Last Pond, my sheepwagon’s metal chimney is the highest thing around. Sterling has said I’m safe with the metal tongue propped up on a block of pine. Lightning will hit the chimney, he tells me, come down through the stove and the metal frame of the wagon, then get grounded by the rubber tires and block of wood. But the stove’s only four feet away, and the block of pine’s maybe a foot and a half tall and slim comfort against it all.

  I move Willy’s picket down off the crest of the hill and pour a measure of grain onto the ground for him, wishing I could bring him inside. The sheep are loud with complaint now and moving off the water and out into the hills, away, as if there is shelter within reach. Would some other herder go after them, I wonder? I call the dogs into the wagon and feed them each a big finger of peanut butter from the jar. We sit with the top door open and watch the storm come.

  When it hits us, the temperature plummets and sheets of rain and hail blast the wagon. I latch the door shut and retreat to the bed, as far from the iron woodstove as I can get, and call the dogs up beside me to wait it out. Lightning explodes around us, thunder in deafening cracks and menacing growls. The dogs pull up closer as the wagon rocks and tilts in the wind. I hold them close and sing to them, to me, a lullaby, “Sweet Baby James,” because it comes to mind. Within moments, the gullies are running water, and beads of hail pelt the wagon. The sheep are running, too, the few I can see through the window above my bed. The wagon smells of kerosene, peanut butter and rank dogs as lightning flashes and thunder rumbles our insides.

  This storm’s moving fast, and when it passes, I saddle up
and slog through the mud to look for sheep and bring them home. The sun comes out strong, and the hills glitter with pockets of hail, streams of water. There are puddles in every nook and cranny, three ponds that had been bone-dry now filled. We quietly move up the west ridge, Willy intent on his footing. From the cliff, I can see the sheep below and one dead ewe, struck by lightning. Out of this silence I give a whoop to turn back the lead sheep, and from below the cliff, a golden eagle lifts from its hidden perch, its wings a good six feet across and beating the air with a whap-whap-whap right before our noses. Willy shies and stumbles over his own feet, sliding nearly to his knees in the mud and catching his balance as the dark figure rises up and is gone away from us.

  Home late, I fix the dogs a skillet of eggs and bacon and gravy and bread and give Willy an extra scoop of oats. I’m tired and ready for bed, grateful to be alive. Tomorrow morning, if Sterling can get through the mud, he’ll move us on to Dead Horse Pond.

  “Not sure I’m cut out for this package,” Sterling grumbles. He’s got his pickup all chained up to get through the mud, and he’s crabby. His body gives off the sour smell of days and nights spent drinking. “Was gonna leave you a day to dry up, but that greasy bastard Rudy’d be cryin’ to get up the mountain. Jesus, I’m done when I get these pansies up top. Give the whole bunch back over to John and good riddance.”

  Then, as though remembering I’m there, he asks, “How’d you make out in that storm?”

  It’s on the tip of my tongue to say I’d never been so scared, to ask if herders get killed by lightning. But I can tell he’s not really listening, not interested in anyone else’s drama. “Fine,” I say. “No problem.”