“What ghosts?” Nora asked.
“That Indian. The one I killed up on the Musselshell.”
“When you were running with Wiley and Shorty?”
“Uhn-huh. I been thinkin’ about him again lately, wonderin’ did he have a family that maybe looked but couldn’t find him. I been thinkin’ about Wiley and Shorty, too.” She wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “And the Frakes boys. I get these dreams, Nora.” The panic was returning, digging its claws inside as if reaching for her soul. “They won’t leave me be, and I don’t know why.”
“What kind of dreams?”
“The baby …,” Rose began in a tiny voice.
“Oh, Rose, that couldn’t be helped. There wasn’t a thing you could’ve done.”
“I could’ve buried it. I could’ve gotten the body outta there. That ain’t right, the way that happened.”
“No!” Nora said sharply. “Don’t even think that.” She gripped Rose’s shoulders, giving her a shake. “Listen to me, don’t you dare think such thoughts. Nothing good can ever come from them.”
“It was my baby,” Rose said in a choked voice. “Mine ’n’ Shorty’s.” She trembled, tears pooling in the corners of her eyes.
“There wasn’t any way to recover the body, or likely even a body to recover. It was too early, Rose. It was a miscarriage.”
“I dream of it cryin’ for me, Nora. Sometimes I dream about Muggy, too … that I’m in the grave with him and people is throwin’ dirt on top of us and I’m tryin’ to get out but Muggy keeps holdin’ me down. Sometimes I dream it’s Wiley up there, throwin’ the dirt in, and sometimes I dream Shorty’s tryin’ to get outta his grave while I’m standin’ on top of it, whackin’ it with a shovel. They keep comin’ back, Nora, all these dreams, all these people. They’re tearin’ me apart.”
“Oh, Rose,” Nora breathed, stroking her hair. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“What was I supposed to say. Don’t be scared, Nora, but you’re trapped in a mountain cabin with a loony?” She shuddered. “Lordy, that’s it, ain’t it. I’m losin’ my mind?”
“No, you’re not losing your mind, but you have to start talking about these things. You can’t bottle them up and not expect them to haunt you.” She shook her head. “I should’ve realized that growing up the way you did, you’d think it was wrong to speak of something so personal.”
Rose lowered her head, the chills subsiding. “There ain’t nothin’ to talk about,” she said softly. “They’s just dreams.”
“Then talk about the dreams. Your past is eating you up inside. Talking is the only way I know to get through it. That’s something I learned in half a dozen hook shops between here and Chicago. If you don’t, then you probably will go crazy.”
“I … I don’t know what to say.”
“Why, hell,” Nora said, taking a seat on the hearth and handing Rose her tea. “You just open your mouth and see what comes out.”
Chapter
27
Of all the weather phenomena a person was likely to encounter in Montana over the course of a year, Rose considered none more pleasant than a Chinook. Not even a summer thunderstorm could compare favorably, since those events were far less singular and normally preceded by gusting winds and cracking bolts of lightning.
A Chinook would generally start as a subtle shift in sound, almost always too imperceptible to grasp on a conscious level. Nine times out of ten, Rose would be working on something around the cabin and intent on the task at hand, or else asleep in the middle of the night, when she would become aware of a disturbance in the pattern of her existence that frightened the bejesus out of her until she figured out what it was.
Usually what the sound was—and thinking about it, she’d realize it had been there for quite some time, like the ticking of a clock in the next room—was the patter of melting snow. Only then would she become aware of the rising temperature, or note the blessed moisture permeating the normally dry air. And always she would stop whatever she was doing and turn to the warming winds, or if the Chinook arrived during the night, she’d pull on her overboots and go outside to stand on the stoop and absorb it, while hope for a future beyond drifting snowbanks and numbing cold blossomed once more.
That was the way it was in the spring of 1887, if a person in that northern latitude could rightly call February a child of spring. The Chinook swept over the A-Bar-E sometime before dawn, so that a steady dripping from the cabin’s eaves was the first thing Rose heard when she awoke that morning. She threw her blankets back with a hoarse shout and padded to the window in her wool socks.
In her own bunk across the room, Nora elbowed her blankets back to squint quizzically at Rose. “Whazzit?” she mumbled.
“Summer’s come,” Rose announced, running a fingernail across one of the windowpanes and scraping away a slushy layer of ice to reveal the glass underneath. With a disinterested groan, Nora flopped back to her pillow, pulling the blankets over her head.
Because the temperatures had moderated somewhat since the worst of the freeze in January, they no longer slept in shifts to watch the fires at night. Some days now, the thermometer on the outside wall of the cabin would climb to twenty above, although Rose knew such temperatures were misleading. She had to resist the urge to throw off her coat and mittens and bask in the newly arrived warmth, reminding herself that it was a false warmth, and that a person could die almighty quick in twenty-degree weather.
But this was different. This was a bona-fide Chinook, and by afternoon the red mercury in their thermometer had climbed well above freezing. Although there would be more cold and snow, Rose knew the worst was over. It was only a matter of time now, a few more weeks would put the season behind them for good.
Hanging on had become easier for Rose since Nora had encouraged her to start talking about the things that bothered her. It had been a struggle at first, what with her pap’s voice constantly harping that a woman was to be seen and not heard, and that her problems were small when compared with others.
It helped, Rose figured, that Nora was a woman. It enabled her to talk not just about her past and family, as she’d done last winter with Shorty, but about her feelings and hopes, the things she still wanted in life—a good man who loved her, a home, kids. And dammit, what was wrong with a white picket fence and a flower box under the window?
She wasn’t blind to the fact that she was still shying away from the darker subjects of her dreams, but that was all right. Now that the nightmares had retreated, she was content to let the whole affair slide. Besides, with winter breaking, they were finding more pressing matters to contend with.
Rose had been out on Albert several times in the weeks preceding the Chinook, and what she’d seen worried her. The range was a mess, their own land rife not only with Flying Egg cattle, but with other northern brands as well. And their own A-Bar-E stock had vanished altogether.
Nor were the cattle she did find faring all that well. With a hard cap of ice under the snow, the range had yielded little to keep an animal going. The body fat had melted off the stock at alarming rates, creating washboards out of rib cages, bony, protruding knobs out of hip joints. Long before the thaw began to release the life-saving pastures, Rose was looking at cattle so thin she could have wrapped her arms around their stomachs and clasped her hands on the opposite side.
At first the sudden melt created about as much trouble as it alleviated. Lowlands flooded, and the footing on even the higher slopes was made uncertain by the deep slush. It was more than a week into the thaw before Rose felt confident enough to venture onto the range.
She rode east first, but the land that only a few weeks before had seemed crowded with stray cattle was now empty. Except for scattered carcasses, she didn’t even see a Flying Egg cow.
Knowing that the open-range herds would have drifted south ahead of the bitter, lashing winds, she shifted he
r search to the bluffs above the Yellowstone. It was there she began finding the cattle she sought, in far larger numbers than she’d anticipated. It was there, too, that Rose began to discover the true scope of the winter’s legacy.
Dead cattle were stacked like cordwood in the draws and coulées above the bluffs. Caught by drifting snows and too weak from hunger to fight their way out, they’d simply given up and died. The piles of bodies emerging from the melting snows reminded Rose of tangled, broken driftwood left in the wake of a flood. Wolves and coyotes feasting on the half-frozen remains trotted lazily out of her path, their bellies obscenely distended. On the ride back to the cabin, Rose counted fourteen wolves and over a hundred dead cattle—the beeves all carrying the Crooked Bar-O-Bar brand of the Flying Egg.
There was very little conversation in the cabin that night, following Rose’s description of what she’d seen on the range. The next day she left before Nora awoke, riding Albert down through the gap in the bluffs to the valley below.
If what she’d discovered yesterday had frightened her, what she saw today nearly broke her. At least five hundred head had tumbled to their deaths from the bluffs above, and those just along the short stretch of cliffs where she explored. She had little doubt that the number of perished livestock would climb into the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands.
Among the dead she counted thirty-nine of the forty-five head of A-Bar-E stock they’d started the new year with. All of the calves were there, even the little bull she’d saved from wolves the day the blizzard struck.
Reining away from the bluffs, Rose entered the timber along the Yellowstone. It was here she began finding a few live ones. Although none of them carried the A-Bar-E brand, she couldn’t help but feel some hope. Yet as she rode among them, even that tiny ray was extinguished. The cattle she found had hardly escaped unscathed. Many were crippled beyond recovery. She saw scores of hoofs that had frozen and split, so that the animal was left with only bloody stumps to stand on; others had knees swollen to three times their normal size, their agony apparent in their runny, infected eyes. None appeared capable of moving. Most didn’t even swing their heads to watch her pass. Their time now would be short, Rose knew. Soon these pitiful survivors would succumb to infection, shock, or scavengers; those that didn’t would die an even more horrible death, consumed from the legs up by maggots and rot.
Nora had supper waiting by the time Rose got back, but neither of them were very hungry. They drank tea laced with whiskey kept on hand for medicinal purposes, then fell into their bunks as if drugged. The next morning, they sat on the stoop in their coats and talked.
“It ain’t lookin’ too good right now,” Rose said tentatively.
“You warned me last spring that livestock was a risky investment, but who could’ve imagined a winter like this?”
“It wasn’t just the winter. The range was in poor shape to begin with. Cows was thinny even last fall, when they should’ve been fat.”
Nora’s features drew taut. “Well, no one will have to worry about overgrazing this year, will they?”
Taking a deep breath, Rose said: “Nora, we got bills to pay. We owe Sutherland over a hundred dollars, and I figure they’ll tax this place this year, too. We got a registered brand now, and you can bet ol’ Ostermann is gonna make sure the tax inspector knows how to find us. We might scrape together enough money to get by one year, but we’ll sure as Hades go belly up next, assumin’ we could scrounge up enough supplies to see us through. Herman Sutherland’ll outfit a body on credit if he thinks the odds is good, but ours ain’t so shiny no more.”
In a ragged voice, Nora said: “I won’t go back to whoring. I’d rather rob stagecoaches.”
“Nobody said anything about whorin’ or robbin’ coaches, but we’re gonna have to come up with something.”
“Maybe I could get a job in a restaurant,” Nora said after a pause.
“That’d help, and I reckon I could skin mules. Ol’ Calamity Jane’s done it aplenty.”
“We could get by,” Nora said.
But Rose was already shaking her head. “I reckon that’d be all we’d do. We’d never get enough money ahead that way to restock the place.”
They were quiet for a long time then, until finally Nora stood, brushed off the seat of her skirt, and went inside. A couple of minutes later, Rose heard the clang of a skillet as she started breakfast.
• • • • •
In the weeks that followed, Rose spent as much time as possible scouring the plains to the east and the Yellowstone Valley to the south in search of the six remaining head of A-Bar-E stock, but she never found them.
By April, life had returned more or less to normal. Still haunting the timber along the Yellowstone, Rose began to encounter travelers using the Miles City to Billings toll road. Through them she learned the extent of the winter’s devastation. People had died by the hundreds, livestock by the millions; tragedy had been wrought as far east as Minnesota and as far south as Colorado. Some newspapers estimated that as much as eighty percent of the cattle that had roamed the northern ranges in the autumn of 1886 had perished by the spring of ’87.
“Buzzards are so heavy they can’t get off the ground, and coyotes’ll just lay up along the road and watch you pass,” one old bullwhacker told her on a sunny afternoon toward the middle of the month. “Damnation, but it stinks. Everywhere you go.”
Rose nodded morosely. It stank up above, too, and the wolves and crows and magpies were fat and indolent.
As spring advanced she saw several Flying Egg cowboys roaming the land, but they never came near. Still, they made her wonder what Ostermann was planning now that his herd was gone. Would he still be intent on taking control of the A-Bar-E, or would he return to his home across the Atlantic to mourn his losses among the gambling dens and whorehouses of London?
Word along the trail revealed that some ranchers were settling the question of their future with a bullet in the brain, but Ostermann hadn’t struck Rose as possessing that kind of fortitude. He’d invested some time and effort, and potentially a great deal of someone else’s money, into the Flying Egg, but she doubted if he’d put any of his own heart or soul into the venture. In her opinion it generally took that kind of commitment to induce a man to take his own life when an undertaking failed.
Rose and Nora still hadn’t come up with any kind of solution to their own dilemma. The lost cattle and the debt they owed Sutherland continued to hang over them, tinting their every decision—even the trivial ones.
The grass was turning green on the day they spotted an approaching horse. Although it was late evening and the light was poor, they both noticed the meandering animal as soon as it exited the trail that had brought it up though the bluffs. Coming to a stop, Rose let her hand swing back to touch the Smith & Wesson’s butt. She continued to carry the pistol even around home—Ostermann had made that kind of an impression.
“Why, it’s a horse,” Nora said in surprise.
“Looks more like an overgrown jack rabbit,” was Rose’s droll reply.
Nora took a couple of steps forward. “Isn’t that …?”
“I reckon so.”
Twenty minutes later, Dirty-Nosed Dave Merritt’s stunted buckskin wandered into the yard. Rose moved to intercept it, but the horse snorted and trotted off.
“Contrary ol’ hammerhead,” Rose commented.
But Nora was laughing so hard that tears were streaming down her cheeks. “It ain’t dead, Rose. It survived. Do you know what that means?”
“That if only the good die young, this nag is gonna live to be a hundred and twenty-nine?”
“I’m serious.”
“Nora, if you’re thinkin’ any of our cows survived just because this jughead did … well, I wouldn’t get my hopes up.”
“Why not?” She was clearly in an optimistic mood. “If eighty percent of the herds were de
stroyed, doesn’t that mean twenty percent lived. And doesn’t it stand to reason that some of them might be ours. They were in better condition than most of the stock on the range.”
“That last part’s true, but I been up and down the Yellowstone a dozen times. There ain’t no A-Bar-E cows out there.”
“Then where are they. If they aren’t along the Yellowstone or under the bluffs, where’d they go. And where’s this horse been?”
“I don’t know where that buckskin’s been, but them cows is dead. Maybe they’re buried under a pile of other dead critters and lost to sight, but they’ve gotta be dead.”
“What if they aren’t?” Nora insisted. “What if they crossed the river onto the reservation?”
Rose hesitated. “It wouldn’t be like cows to leave good shelter along a river to cross the open plains in the middle of a blizzard,” she said finally. “They’d want to stay in amongst the trees where the wind wasn’t so sharp.”
“What if they were starving or freezing or chased out by wolves?”
“Then I’d say if they crossed onto the reservation, they’ve already been in and out of some hungry Crow family’s bellies.”
“Oh.”
“Aw, hell,” Rose said, seeing the crestfallen look that came over her friend’s face. “Maybe they did cross over on the ice. It wouldn’t hurt to ride down that way and take a look.”
But Nora’s mood had already crashed. “Whites aren’t allowed on the reservation, are they?”
“Not unless you’ve got special permission from the agent, but I been over there a hundred times without no one knowin’ it, just like them Crows come north of the river all the time. I reckon Indian agents need to know only what they need to know, and that sure as shootin’ ain’t everything.”
Fetching her lariat, Rose went after the buckskin, grazing beside the barn. She wanted to put it in the corral with Albert and the mules, but the undersize gelding wouldn’t be caught. It wouldn’t even allow her within roping distance. After several failed attempts, Rose gave up and returned to Nora’s side. “That’s a cantankerous little bronc’,” she said.
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