The Poacher's Daughter

by Michael Zimmer

  Their eyes met across the room and he winked broadly. “Be with you in a bit, Kitten,” he said in a voice gone scratchy from too much booze, too many cigarettes. “Gotta get my rifle.”

  “Sure,” Rose said, standing uncertainly. She didn’t know what else to say. She felt as if she were meeting an old friend of the family, someone she didn’t remember at all, but who could recall even the tiniest details of her own early years—such as that her pap had always called her Kitten when he was in a good mood.

  Daniel Ames waited in front of a large oak desk while the jailer went to fetch his rifle. Deputy Allen stood nearby, disapproval stamped across his brow like an official seal. The jailer soon returned with a long gun encased in fringed elk-hide and a cartridge belt that gleamed with heavy brass shells.

  “I hope they ain’t no damage to this here rifle, sonny,” Daniel remarked to Deputy Allen. “They don’t make ’em no better’n this.”

  “If you value that firearm so highly, I’d suggest you quit using it for unlawful activities,” Deputy Allen advised.

  Daniel snorted, glancing at Rose. “Onlawful, he calls it. ’Course, when a lawdog takes what ain’t his’n, they call it confiscation. But for the rest of us, it’s onlaaawful.”

  “It’s stealing, Mister Ames,” Deputy Allen replied. “And to clarify … proceeds from confiscated items go toward the purchase of new equipment for the city.”

  But Daniel was unswayed. “You expect a hard-workin’ citizen to buy a bucket of crap like that. What’s the matter with you, boy. Your mama drop you on your head when you was a baby?”

  Deputy Allen drew himself up rigidly, his jaw thrust forward like a chunk of granite smothered in bay rum. “These loopholes that release men such as yourself back into society will eventually be closed, Mister Ames. Take my advice and find gainful employment while there’s still time.” He spun sharply toward Rose. “I’d encourage you to aid your father in that, Missus Edwards, before he ends up in Deer Lodge. As a further word of caution, the open carrying of sidearms is prohibited within city limits. I’d advise you to remove your pistol as soon as practical and either store it somewhere safe or keep it pocketed. I shan’t overlook a second infraction.” With both opinion and position made clear, Deputy Allen exited the room.

  Daniel whistled, clearly impressed. “That was pure for fancy,” he said to the jailer. “That boy’ll go far with a line like that.”

  “Deputy Allen was trained in Philadelphia,” the jailer replied with a trace of civic pride. “He ain’t like the old-time lawmen we used to have.”

  “Screw Deputy Allen,” Daniel retorted cheerfully. He crossed the room to his daughter’s side. “Hello, Kitten. You finally come to see your old pappy, did you?”

  “Hello, Pap,” Rose said hesitantly, reaching out to give him a light tap on the shoulder. “You’re lookin’ fit.”

  “Feel it, too, by damn. I’m huntin’ again, did they tell you?”

  “Yeah, the deputy told me.”

  Daniel laughed. “I can imagine what that little pissant said. Thinks they can outlaw huntin’, for Christ sake.” He shook his head at the audacity of such sentiment. “Come on, girl. All I’ve had to eat for a week is jailhouse slop. I’ll let you fix me a decent meal. You’ve learned to cook, ain’t you?”

  “Sure, I can fix somethin’.”

  Handing her his jacket and cartridge belt, he said—“Here, make yourself useful.”—then headed for the door with the rifle canted proudly across his left arm. Lowering her head from habit, Rose hurried after him.

  • • • • •

  Rose knew the shack behind Jepson & Lane’s Livery was a reflection of more hard-pressed times in her father’s life, days when booze had dominated his every waking moment. Empty whiskey bottles scattered around what passed for a yard were testimony that he still drank.

  Home was nothing more than a squat, flat-roofed hut constructed from cross-ties pilfered from the Northern Pacific reject pile. The sharp smell of creosote assaulted Rose’s sinuses as soon as she walked in, and she knew from past experience that if she stayed more than a day or two her skin would break out in hives.

  Old newspapers and pages torn from back issues of the Police Gazette were tacked to the walls for insulation. The floor was lumpy and thick with dust, not having been swept or sprinkled in months, for even a dirt floor required attention. There was a small coal stove in one corner, a narrow rope-sprung bunk in another, a table and two mismatched chairs. A low cowhide trunk with the hair still on sat at the foot of the bunk. Had she looked inside, she would have found her pap’s reloading gear for his rifle—he’d never trusted factory ammunition for hunting purposes—the family Bible, and some personal items of her mother’s that he never unwrapped any more. An opening in the back wall that could hardly be called a door allowed access to a small storage area where he kept his saddle and what odds and ends of gear he hadn’t hocked to buy liquor.

  Nor had his manners improved, Rose was quick to learn. He was still the same old Daniel Ames, more likely to break wind or blow his nose with his fingers than offer a lady assistance with her chair. Yet for all that, she sensed less hopelessness in his outlook, more enthusiasm in his voice. It was the hunting, she thought; it had brought purpose back into his life, given him a renewed strength that, if it couldn’t conquer his alcoholism, could at least provide some balance for it.

  “Leave the door open,” Daniel instructed as he laid his rifle on the table and sank into a chair. He fished a sack of Lone Jack and a little bible of smoking papers from his pocket and began a cigarette. “Get a meal burnin’,” he said, without looking up. “I traded breakfast this mornin’ for this tobacco. I ain’t had shit to eat since supper last night.”

  Rose laid his jacket and cartridge belt on the bunk, then went to the stove. It hadn’t been emptied in a long time. The top was layered with dust, and ash and jagged, rock-like clinkers were piled up in the middle of the firebox. She knew she should haul the old ashes outside before kindling a fresh blaze, otherwise it might be days before the cast-iron stove cooled enough to be cleaned, but she also knew her pap would poorly tolerate such a delay. He wanted his breakfast.

  She kindled a fire with wood, then added a few fist-sized chunks of coal she found on the floor beside the stove. When she was satisfied the flame would catch, she brushed her dust-blackened fingers off on a rag. Her pap looked up as she did, and Rose knew he’d been watching from the corner of his eye all along.

  “There’s some beef in the back room,” he said.

  She nodded and went to the small opening in the rear wall. Wrinkling her nose, she said: “It smells pretty ripe in there, Pap. Don’t you have any beans or rice?”

  Daniel looked up, his eyes narrowing. “Yeah, there should be some rice in there. Fix it with the meat.”

  Rose licked her lips. “I’m thinkin’ that meat’s gone bad.”

  “Cut the bad off. What the hell, girl. You gone soft?”

  “Naw, I ain’t gone soft.”

  “Then get your ass in there and get me some meat, god dammit.”

  Resolutely Rose took a deep breath and ducked through the opening. Although it was dark, she had no trouble locating the meat. It hung from an iron hook fastened to a rafter. Taking it down, hook and all, she scuttled backward into the main room, then took what looked like part of a shoulder outside.

  The outer rim of meat was flyblown and rotting, soft as mush and stinking to high heaven, but she found enough red stuff closer to the bone to make a meal. She hauled what was bad around back and tossed it onto a pile of manure carted down from the livery; the good stuff she took inside and set on the table.

  She fetched water from the livery’s well and rice and coffee from the back room, and soon had a hearty meal sizzling. While she cooked supper, her pap stripped the elk-hide cover from his long gun and brought it into the light. It was a nearly new Rem
ington-Hepburn, with an engraved action and checkering on the wrist and forearm—a single-shot, breech-loading hunting rifle, built on the same principle as her Sharps. It had a long, telescopic sight to replace the more familiar iron sights his fading vision had forced him to give up.

  Whistling appreciatively, Rose said: “That’s a mighty fine-lookin’ shooter, Pap.”

  “Best damn’ rifle ever made.”

  Save for a couple of small dings in the stock, the gun looked spotless, as clean and sharp as a bull elk’s bugle during rut, and she said as much. Her father beamed at the compliment, but his expression clouded over when she asked permission to look through the scope.

  “I ain’t never had a peep through one,” she added hastily. “I was just wonderin’ what things would look like, is all.”

  “Is that meat burnin’?” he asked.

  “It shouldn’t be. I just turned it.”

  “Turn it again. It’s burnin’.”

  Rose retreated to the stove, properly chastised. Although the meal didn’t require it, she turned the meat anyway, then stirred the rice. Meanwhile her pap examined the Remington carefully for any sign of damage incurred while in possession of the Billings police department. Evidently satisfied that it had survived the encounter unharmed, he laid it on top of the elk-hide case, then leaned back to roll another cigarette. His gaze went out through the open door, but Rose knew his thoughts were turning inward, his expression darkening by the minute. Her own mood sank at an equal pace, as if father and daughter were emotionally linked.

  Daniel Ames’s chameleon-like humor wasn’t entirely unexpected. Rose had seen it happen before, brought back after some form of excitement—a binge or a fight or a good hunt—to the realities of his hard-scrabble existence. Although she needed to take care of the mules, she was afraid that if left alone for even a few minutes, her pap’s spirits would sink beyond recovery. So while the meal cooked she sat in the chair opposite him and tried to distract him with conversation.

  “How’d you get started poachin’ buffalo?” she asked.

  He gave her a lingering glance, then took the cigarette from his mouth and jetted a stream of smoke toward his lap. “It ain’t poachin’,” he said finally. “That’s what the law calls it, but it ain’t.” He stirred, warming to the subject. “That there’s a national park, right?”

  “Yeah, I reckon.”

  “Reckon, my ass. It’s a national park, owned by the people of the United States. Right?”

  “All right,” she agreed warily.

  “So ain’t I a citizen of this here country?”

  She hesitated, knowing where he was taking this even as she recognized the futility of arguing the principles of public ownership. Her brother Luke had tried to differ with him once, and suffered a broken nose for the effort.

  “Yeah,” she said in defeat. “I reckon you got as much right to shoot buffalo up there as anyone.”

  “Damn’ right I do.” He leaned back in his chair. “There’s good money in it, too. I went up there the first time last summer, camp doggin’ for a Bozeman outfitter haulin’ a bunch of Eastern dudes up to see the geysers. It was an eye-opener, girl. God, they’ve got some buff’ up there. Saw one bunch that must’ve numbered sixty head. Biggest herd I’ve seen since ’Eighty-Two. ’Course, the damn’ park ranger won’t let you shoot ’em, but he’s just one man and that’s a big country. I ain’t worried about him. The problem is they’ve got the Army stationed at Mammoth Hot Springs now to keep the hunters out. But I figure if I can dodge them and kill just two or three a year, I’ll be sittin’ pretty.” He laughed, shaking his head. “What’d we used to get for a hide … four, five bucks apiece for a good one. Today I can get fifty dollars for every one I haul out, plus another two hundred for mountable heads. All to fancy up some dude’s house back in Boston.”

  Rose’s jaw nearly dropped in astonishment.

  “It’s because it’s the West,” her pap continued. “Ten years ago, most of the peckerwoods east of Saint Louis thought we ought to give this country back to the redskins, but now that it’s disappearin’, they all want a piece of what it used to be. God damn, if I’d’ve known this, I’d have saved every damn’ robe and head I could lay my hands on. I’d have fifty thousand dollars, easy, and never have to work another day in my life.”

  “Lordy,” Rose said softly. “Think of all them heads we just throwed away.”

  “That’s what I’m sayin’. I could’ve been rich.”

  “What about skulls?” Rose asked, recalling the trip she, Wiley, and Shorty had made last year between Two-Hats’s trading post on the Musselshell and Miles City. In places, she remembered, the ground had been almost white with the bones of dead buffalo, their black-horned skulls scattered everywhere. But her pap was already shaking his head.

  “Done thought of that, but nobody wants ’em. They ain’t scarce enough. Hell, they’ve got ’em piled up along the N.P. tracks higher’n the smokestacks on their locomotives, waitin’ to get hauled to some fertilizer plant in Pennsylvania. Naw, skulls are worthless except to the bone pickers, and I ain’t a god-damn’ bone picker. I’m a hunter.”

  “But if robes and mounted heads is worth so much today, maybe skulls will be, too, down the road.”

  “Daughter, you’re just plain dumb when it comes to finances. It’s the girl in you, I figure. Skulls ain’t worth the sweat a man’d break pickin’ ’em off the ground. Not to a real hunter.”

  Rose let the subject drop, but vowed she’d talk to Nora about it when she got home. There were plenty of skulls out east of their place, and it wouldn’t take much to gather a wagonload or two to store in their barn, just in case.

  “I heard about Muggy’s gold,” Daniel said out of the blue. “Been hearin’ about you, too. They say you’re raisin’ hell out on the plains.”

  “Been dodgin’ it as much as possible. Don’t go believin’ them tales they’re tellin’ about me. Folks are just havin’ fun at my expense, is what I think.”

  “What about Muggy’s gold?”

  “There weren’t no gold that I saw, though there’s knuckleheads about that believe there was.”

  “Maybe folks aren’t as easily fooled as you’d like to think,” her pap said shrewdly.

  Rose bit her lip but held her tongue. She turned to the stove to check on the meat, aware of her father’s gaze lingering on her.

  “What do you mean, there wasn’t any gold?” he asked after a pause.

  “Just what I said. Maybe someone else took it and blamed it on Muggy. Or maybe the vigilantes found it and split it amongst themselves. I ain’t even sure any more there was any gold. But everybody thinks Muggy had it, and now they think I’ve got it, which is pretty dang’ funny, considerin’ I just spent nearly every nickel I had to bail you outta jail.”

  Her pap’s brows wiggled suddenly, like worms touched with hot steel, and Rose immediately grew cautious; her pap’s brows were like a barometer that could register a change in mood seconds before it touched any other feature on his face. Over the years, she’d grown adept at reading them.

  “Girl, I’d watch that mouth of yours,” Daniel said coolly. “I’ll slap you silly if you get smart with me.”

  “I ain’t gettin’ smart, Pap,” Rose said quickly. She kept her back to him, but also kept one eye cast warily over her shoulder. “I didn’t mean nothin’, other than I ain’t got the money folks think I’ve got.”

  “I figure you’re lyin’ about that. I won’t put up with lyin’ from my own kid.”

  “I ain’t lyin’.”

  “You do and I’ll slap you silly.”

  She flinched when he surged to his feet, but he only laughed. Sweeping his chair aside with a foot, he headed for the door. Rose dropped her stirring fork and followed him outside. “Where you goin’?”

  He tossed what was left of his cigarette to the ground. “I�
��m gonna find something to drink, if it’s any of your damned business. You stay with that meal, make sure it doesn’t burn. And clean the place up a little. It looks like a pigsty.”

  “Don’t go. We ain’t seen one another in more’n a year.”

  “Whose fault is that?”

  “Pap, please.”

  A look of fury crossed his face. “You just do what you’re told for a change. If you wasn’t so bull-headed, I wouldn’t have to drink.”

  Tears sprang to Rose’s eyes as her father turned away. “Don’t,” she called, though keeping her voice low so that Skinny Jim wouldn’t hear her beg. “Pap.”

  But Daniel Ames might as well have been deaf.

  Chapter

  23

  Her pap didn’t return home that night, nor did Rose expect him to. Still, she kept the meat and rice and coffee warm for as long as she could; if he did show up, he’d expect to be fed.

  At dusk she went outside to care for the mules. It angered her that they’d been forced to stand in harness all day just because of her pap’s temper, but she’d come to realize a long time ago that Daniel Ames didn’t feel the same way toward animals as she did. Horses, mules, oxen, dogs—they were all just tools to him, soulless brutes to be used until worn out, then discarded and replaced. Any regard he’d ever shown had been based on economic factors, since it was usually cheaper to provide superficial care for a beast than purchase a new one.

  Rose stabled the mules with Jepson & Lane at four bits a night, letting Skinny Jim take them to a corral where there was fresh water and shelled corn for feed. She left the wagon where it was and piled the harness in back, then returned to the cabin to supper on overcooked meat and rice.

  The following morning, with frost clinging to the weeds and the ringing of church bells echoing off the bluffs, Rose began her search. It didn’t take long. She was an old hand at this, and knew all the likely places to look, even in a strange city. She found him, lying drunk in a vacant lot behind the Blue Heifer Saloon, clutching a bottle of sour mash to his stomach that still held an inch or so in the bottom. The smell of booze emanated from his body like the stench of last night’s rotting meat.