by Laura Bell
The dogs are at the edge of camp now, leaning toward her, bristled, waiting to see if this is friend or foe. I look into the small mirror by the door and wipe at my face with my sleeve, peer unblinking into my eyes, and listen to my heart rattling loose in my chest. I turn and smooth the covers across the bed, close a drawer, come back to glance out the door, then arrange the stack of books on the counter, straightening the spines so she’ll be able to see them, see that I’m smart, see that I’m a good person.
Pinned to the wall above the books are cards from friends and the calendar where I record the weather, the visitors and the dead. I’d begun with crude drawings of sun or rain or a stick figure ewe on her back with her legs splayed high in the air and a vulture circling overhead. As the days passed, these squares had become more elaborate and within months become a series of tiny watercolors, one inch square. I smooth the pages and level them behind the books. This is all I am and nothing more. I think of the herders in their perversions, their drunks, their strange ways and want to believe in this moment that I’m one of them, accountable only for my sheep. Nothing more.
With the sun high overhead, the wagon alone provides shade above timberline, so when she arrives, I invite her inside to the benches. “The boys are napping with their dad,” she says in explanation. Her graying hair’s cut short and is damp around her face, her breath labored with the altitude and the weight she carries, but she still has a clipped and feisty Massachusetts diction after all these years.
“I could heat the coffee?”
But she shakes her head, and I remember, embarrassed, that as a converted Mormon she wouldn’t drink it.
“Water, then?”
“Yes, that would be wonderful.”
Her face softens, and I lift two thick mugs from the hooks by the stove and carry them down to the spring box, dogs at my heels. I dip them into the icy water bubbling up from the ground and feel my fingers go numb. I’m thinking to chill the mugs themselves as a hospitable gesture, but with my back turned, I linger in the wavering reflections and the sense that my body could take root here and never move, the flies buzzing and water gurgling through invisible cracks in the earth. I feel the numbness creep up through my fingers and up my arms, pleasantly, solidly, until I know for sure I’ve been away too long.
She’s waiting for me inside, leafing through the stack of books. I set the mugs down on the table between us and pull an open package of cookies from the cupboard. When I sit down, we are nearly knee to knee in this tiny space, and then there’s nothing else to be done and nowhere else to look.
“So, how are you? What are the boys up to this summer?” My heart is pounding and I gather to myself images of the other herders at their worst, fouled and stumbling through their January binges, and I want instead to hiss, This is all I am, and you can’t expect me to be more. All I am. Nothing more. Don’t ask.
“They’re good,” she says. “Summer ball’s nearly over and we start back to school in a couple weeks.” Her voice is shaky, seemingly directed out the door. She pauses, considering whether to answer the first question. She turns to me and her mouth collapses into an uneven smile. “They miss their dad, but it won’t be too long before he’s down the mountain and out in the hills. Not so far from us then.”
We both study the view, and the sheep beginning to peel off the pond below us, trickling out into their afternoon graze.
This woman who sits not three feet from me could tell me when it was that the small disappointments began to gain on the joy. She’d be able to say when she first saw the hole in her husband’s soul open up and swallow him, leaving behind a stranger. But I don’t risk this question, sure that I would be included in the tally of her losses.
Her sudden movement startles me back to the present, and when I turn, she’s working to push herself out from behind the table. “I need to be getting back,” she says but then lingers, flushed, and looks me in the eye, and I see there are tears in hers. Having made to leave, she does not.
“Are you all right?” My voice is sharp with concern, as though I didn’t know all there was to say, but I say nothing. I have chosen my safety, and you walking up the road, sitting across from me with eyes moist and full of a sorrow you will not name, you cannot uncover me.
She shakes her head, almost imperceptibly, not so much no to the question as no to answering. “It’s a long way back, and they’ll wonder where I’ve gone.” Still she doesn’t move, as if she means to say more. I wish myself back at the spring, my hands in the icy water, longing for the cold to creep up through my limbs and clutch my heart. She shakes her head again, this time to clear her thoughts. “Thank you,” she says, and finds a smile to take her leave. She steps heavily from the wagon to ground and begins her long walk home.
Maple stands at her picket below the pond, her head hung in a doze. An evening breeze stirs and lifts a thatch of flaxen mane, whispers her tail, then stills. She’s a muddy sorrel, a caramel that deepens to black at her knees and hocks. Her head is all of one color, dished, with dark, wide-set eyes. Her mane and tail are light and shot through with hairs of black and brown, her near hind foot white.
John had brought her to me several months before, late in the spring. “I run the phony bastard off. Called hisself Buffalo Bill and fancied hisself a horseman, but he run her ragged. I got a little meat back on her bones and her sores healed up enough for saddle if you pad her good. But she could use a little TLC, if you know what I mean.”
“What’s her name?” I’d asked.
“Hellsakes, I don’t know,” he’d said, cocking his head and stooping down to tap the ash of his cigarette on a rock at his feet. “I bought her off the trader late in the winter and don’t know that she’s got one. Ol’ numbnuts musta called her something, but for the life a me I can’t think what.”
When I lift the lid off the galvanized metal trash can that holds her oats, an ear twitches, and she lifts her head, watching. I scoop a Folgers can full and dump it into her pail and put the lid back and push it tight. Stepping up into the wagon, I find an apple in the sacks beneath the bench and pull the table out and slice it into a rough dice, scrape them off the board into the pail and mix them down into the grain until each bit of apple’s stuck with oats. As I step down from the wagon, she nickers softly.
A moon has risen unnoticed in a sky not yet dark, a thin rice-paper moon that’s almost full. I set the pail to ground and run my hands along the warm silk of her neck. “Hey, sweetheart, you got the big soft eyes today. You got the big soft eyes, yes you do.” I unwrap the loosened latigo and let the cinch drop and pull the saddle and blankets from her back in one motion and rest the saddle on its horn and lay the blankets flat in the grass, bottoms up to air out even though this whole day we’d never ridden them to a sweat. The dogs move closer and then lie down, one head on the twist of stirrup leather, another on the pad, their eyes back and forth between her hind feet and me.
I sweep the brush across her round belly and the sores healed and grown back white haired at her withers and, lower down on her side, the half-moon shape of cinch ring. She raises her head high, bobbing it, sending grain and slobber falling from her mouth, and curls her upper lip in protest at the fruit. “I never met a horse that didn’t know an apple.” The dogs lift their heads at the sound of my voice. Maple steps one foot forward and lowers her head against her leg, rubbing it, and then goes back to her grain. When I run my hand down her near front leg and squeeze, she lifts her foot, and I move the flat side of my pocket blade around the inside of the iron to loosen the dry, caked mud and a stone, then check that the shoe’s tight. She lifts each foot when I ask and have asked every day for the last month. When I come back around to the last, I see that she’s cleaned the bucket, leaving only a few pieces of apple in the bottom. I scratch the hollow between her jaw bones and clean the crust from the corners of her eyes while she rubs her head against me. “Oh, you’re sweet, oh you’re good. You’re my precious, yes you are.” Across her back the sky ha
s softened to periwinkle and violet, and against its darkening the moon becomes luminous, as if gathering to itself all the light being lost to us. I rest my cheek against her neck and watch the sky, daring to imagine the life now gone from my belly, and the tears I hadn’t allowed myself leak down my cheeks.
I lean into her neck and spread my arms up around her, thinking she’ll move away, but she shifts to me and I lean the whole of my weight against her and smell the warm salt of her skin and ride for a while the rise and fall of her breathing.
MEDICINE WHEEL
The sheep move silently now without their lambs, knowing the trail and where it leads. Snow sifts down, thin, almost rain, a cloud disintegrating to ground, and the wind rattling through the trees confirms what the calendar page does not, that winter’s coming and we must leave the mountain. We trail the dirt road along the Little Big Horn and turn through the timber into the broad flats past Rooster Hill and the low wooden corrals at the Sheep Mountain Road, where weeks before we’d trailed and worked the sheep. There we ran them through narrow alleys and cutting gates, separating lambs from ewes with semitrailers backed up to the loading chute, and we pushed the lambs up ramps, loading them carefully into the maze of compartments. As trucks pulled away, the ewes cried out in search of their lambs for a day, then two, and then afterward came an eerie silence as though something essential had been forgotten, lost.
Through the sleet, John’s pickup appears with water and oat barrels tied into the stock rack and my sheepwagon hitched behind. “Have you got jacket enough? Want to get in and warm up, have some coffee? I’ve got my winter coat behind the seat here if you need it, but it’d come to your knees, not that you’d mind that today.”
“I’m fine. Maybe some coffee.” I sidle Maple over next to his window and lean across my saddle horn, letting the accumulated sleet drip off the brim of my hat.
He unscrews the cap off a Stanley steel thermos, pours a pale brown cupful, and hands it through the window. “I’m gonna get on up ahead of you on the road and wait at the cattle-guard past the Medicine Wheel. I’ll get a good count on the old biddies comin’ through the gate.”
I peel off soggy Handy Andy gloves and hold the cup warm in my hands. “I wish you’d learn to make real coffee.”
“Shit. Get yourself up to Bear Lodge then. If you trot on out, you might get there by dark.”
“I’ll suffer.”
He lights a cigarette and rummages through a cardboard box on the passenger floorboard. “Here, you better take these.” And he hands me a pair of new leather gloves with gray wool liners.
I trade the empty thermos cup for the gloves and shove my wet ones down into the saddlebags.
“And you may as well fill your pockets, too.” He tears open a package of Fig Newtons and holds it out in the sleet until I manage to grab a handful with the too-big gloves.
“John?”
“Hmm?” He tilts his head out the window to look up under my hat and into my face, as if waiting to find, make, or do whatever it is that I need.
“This summer … I don’t think I’ve ever quite said thank you for all you did.” His gray eyes the color of thunderstorms, looking up at me, not blinking. “You know, the doctors and all.”
He pulls his head back out of the sleet and takes a drag on his cigarette. “Oh, hell, that was nothing.” He blows smoke away from me into the passenger side and then taps his ashes out the window. “I’m just glad you’re okay.” His eyebrows are knit together in a frown, but a shy smile creeps across his face before he looks away.
The skies have turned the color of raw wool and so thick that the lead ewes have disappeared into the fog with only the sound of their bells tinkling. Lady and Louise have ducked under the front bumper, trembling as they watch the sheep drift out of sight beyond their reach. I zip my collar up around my neck and fasten the top button of my slicker, the chill gone to my bones already with miles yet to cross. I raise a gloved hand into a reluctant farewell. “I’d better get.”
“Okay, see you up top.” John leans forward to start the engine but stops. “And just so you know, this is between you and me. Ain’t nobody’s business but ours, and you can take that to the bank.”
We push hard up the trail-riddled slopes that fall off into the headwaters of Porcupine Creek and down into Devil’s Canyon, the dogs working them until the lead ewes find the narrow gravel road that climbs Medicine Mountain toward the radar station notched in a peak and the Medicine Wheel beyond, and the sheep begin to string out beyond my sight again into the frozen fog.
I drop from my horse and walk to warm my feet across fractured shale and fossils, the tiny alpine phlox of summer surviving still in cracks and crevices. With the altitude, the sleet has hardened to snow and lightened to something I can lift my face to. There is the soft rattling of sheep hooves clicking across stone, the tinkling of their bells, the thud of Maple’s iron shoes following behind, and the swish-swish of the long yellow slicker against my jeans. The ground levels off in the cloud, and the sheep disappear into it along the two-track and shale, John waiting somewhere ahead to see them through the gate. I follow behind, picking up stragglers and walking with the dogs to the far edges to listen because we can’t see much of anything.
Out of snow wisps appears the tall chain-link fence that circles the Medicine Wheel, its woven wire studded with remains of pilgrimages, and I veer from our path to follow its perimeter. Thin strips of cloth, once bright reds and yellows and greens, are now bleached by weather and silvered with the gathering snow, tied in ribbons and fluttering limply. The wires are full of gifts: prayer bundles of soft hide and cloth, small animal skulls, branches of sage, beads strung on rawhide thongs, a silk scarf wind whipped into soft fringes, an eagle feather, a small bell hanging silent. Inside the fence, rock spokes wheel out into a circle some eighty feet across and, within it, another, ten or fifteen feet wide. Around the far edges are six oval stone cairns, only a few feet long, now filled with offerings, but might once have held a person singing. All of this from some distant time that no one knows for certain, five or maybe eight hundred years ago, on this day receiving the first dusting of winter, soon to be covered in deep snow for months to come.
Without an offering myself, I look around for possibilities and end up pulling from my saddlebag a wet and frozen glove, traded earlier for dry, and work the fingers into the wire so that they’re spread skyward. For all I have. I weave its mate next to it as best I can, though it looks more clownlike than I would have wished among all the hopes and miseries tied alongside.
I walk beyond the fence to the west edge of cliffs and look out into the cloud, into the miles of what I know is there, but I can see only the ground falling off to cliffs and crevices. What I know to be there is the whole of the basin, and to the far west, the Absarokas and the steaming sulfurs of Yellowstone. In this place where I stand fires were lit, signals sent and answered, and still now the Crow, Shoshone, Arapaho, Sioux, and Cheyenne gather to sing and pray here, so close to the sky.
The dogs sit their haunches, leaning out over the rocks below and the squeaking of marmots among them. When I reach for the saddle horn and pull myself horseback again, they turn and fall in at Maple’s heels. We complete the circle, stepping carefully around the rock edges, and follow the sheep as the ground begins to tilt back down toward the sound of John’s voice calling out to his dog and, beyond that, to the trails that will take us down.
HIGHWAY
It is late April 1979, and thin puffs of clouds sail through the sky. Between them, a wash of sun warms the air where I sit, watching the empty highway below and scanning the horizon for a red Volkswagen beetle. Seeing nothing, I turn back to the rise of hills behind me, where my sheepwagon’s parked, my horse picketed, and, hopefully, my dogs are curled up and staying put. I’d been stern with them, feigning a gruffness I didn’t feel to make them stay. They’d been puzzled, cocking their heads to one side, whimpering. We don’t go anywhere without one another, but this is different
. This afternoon I’m headed to town.
My alarm clock’s in my jacket pocket, and having checked it once and again, I know what it says: that it’s past the time we were to meet, five thirty, and there’s nothing to do but wait. If something’s happened to her, I’d have no way of knowing. With the fuzzy fingers of my Handy Andy gloves, I work the dried mud and sheep manure from the creases of my boots and wait.
Last week, tending my camp, John had brought a note from Sonia and slapped it down on the sheepwagon table with a dramatic sigh. “Jesus. I told her I’m not supposed to know one damn thing about this, but if you’re goin’, just point your bunch towards that far knob there and they’ll be parked sure as shit when you get back. Now don’t make me come to town lookin’ for you.”
“What’s going on?”
But he’s already out the door and unloading a bag of horse feed from the back of the pickup. “Just read the damn note. I don’t know a thing about it, and if you go off on a toot, then I won’t be claimin’ any part of it.”
As a rule, the sheepherders that work for this outfit are pretty good, but even the best are strung tight. John’s had his share of pulling herders out of the bars because some tourist dropped off a six pack of beer or a bottle of wine.