The Pastures of Beyond

by Dayton O. Hyde

  “I was looking for my uncle,” I smarted off. “He owns this place. You must be his hired man.”

  He watched me, unruffled, as though he hadn’t heard. “Deaf as a post,” Hi Robbins had said. “He’s got a hearing aid, but damned if he ever turns it on.”

  “Your ma was the pretty one in my family,” my uncle said, as though he had read my lips and needed to put me in my place. “It would appear that none of her good looks rubbed off on you.”

  With that he turned back toward the house, hooking his head to indicate that I should follow.

  The house had a musty smell of mildewed books and was dark and chilly. I had been around enough antiques in the big old houses in northern Michigan to know quality when I saw it, but there was a dark, somber cast of ancient walnut to the carved chests and highboys that depressed me.

  He led me upstairs and down a long, gloomy hall to a north bedroom, where there was only a bureau, a small desk and chair, and a narrow cot. “You can sleep here,” he said. “I’ve got business in town for a couple of days. There’s food downstairs in the cool room.”

  I was looking at the cot, wondering how I’d fit, and when I turned he was gone and the hall was empty. I sat in my room, fighting homesickness, until I heard his car start and its sounds fade in the distance. Then I got out of that cold house to sit on the massive, sun-warmed lava rocks that formed a garden in front of the ranch house. Yellow-striped garter snakes slithered off to cracks in the rock as though they were not used to human intrusion. The shallow soil bore a profusion of wild roses, all bursting in pink as though to cheer me up. I sat until the sun had warmed me, and then began to explore.

  The house was wired for electricity, but there were no power lines stretching from town. Instead, one of the out-buildings possessed a diesel generator that, I learned later, was only used during evening hours. Hanging on the kitchen wall was a crank telephone which rang every few minutes, jolting the silence with a variety of rings.

  From the ranch, a single wire stretched from tree to tree through little white insulators. Listening in to conversations, I soon determined that the line ran to several ranches and various fire lookouts, with a central office at the Klamath Indian Agency, which handled emergency calls about forest fires. Penciled instructions on the kitchen wall informed me that in order to make a call one had to crank out two longs and a short to reach the agency operator, who would then complete your call. I had eavesdropped on some pretty interesting flirty conversations when someone heard my breathing and screamed at me to get the hell off the line.

  That night, I lit a kerosene lantern with a big wooden kitchen match, cut two giant beefsteaks from a hindquarter hanging in the pantry or cooler, lit a fire in the big woodburning cookstove, peeled some potatoes that Hi had brought from town, and cooked myself a meal fit for a thirteen-year-old. I stood on the bridge over to the point of discomfort and erased all evidence of my meal from the kitchen, I took the lantern and went upstairs to bed.

  The next morning, I awoke shivering in the chill of the fresh mountain air. A front had moved down off the Cascade Mountains to the west. Outside my window, pine boughs clashed like swords, parrying thrust with thrust. A flock of Canada geese, feathers ruffled, sailed past and sought shelter on the pond beside the house. A tree crashed nearby, and I could hear the scream of busting barbed wire and the snapping of wooden posts under the falling tonnage. Yet above the din, from the shelter of the gables, I could hear the persistent cooing of a mourning dove pleading for peace in the forest.

  I was still apparently alone at the ranch, and my uncle would not be back until the morrow. I had ventured out into the dying storm to survey the damage when I saw a great cloud of pumice dust rising up like smoke through the pine trees south of the ranch and all but obscuring the sun. My immediate fear was of a forest fire, but soon I heard in the distance the bawling of cattle and the wild yells and curses of cowboys. First a trickle and then a deluge of thirsty cows rushed through the trees, found an open gate, and flowed toward the house springs to drink. Soon there were cowboys, faces caked white with dust, who eased through the milling cattle, dismounted, took the bridles off their horses so they could drink, then bellied down beside their mounts to thrust their own faces into the cold, crystal springwater.

  The din hurt my ears. There were cows bawling for their calves and calves bawling for their mothers. A pair of white-faced Hereford bulls fought up a dust storm, battling at the edge of the willows, bellowing curses at each other, rattling horn on horn. Then the riders mounted again. “Move’em out, boys!” someone shouted, and the yelling began once more. Reluctantly the herd left the water and knee-deep grass to move across the house lot into the corrals.

  I stood on the bridge over the stream, watching from a distance as the cowboys rode through the corrals, mothering up calves with their cows. Soon the bawling stopped, and the cows, having nursed their calves, lay down to rest. In time, calves at their sides, the animals began to move out through the open gates and drift northward down a lane toward the home meadows along the Williamson River.

  The cowboys unsaddled their mounts and turned them out to roll in the dust. The tired horses lay with their hooves kicking the air, then lurched to their feet and ambled out to pasture. Dark sweat marks showed on their backs and flanks. There was no running, kicking, or biting. It was the end of a long cattle drive, and their heads hung low with fatigue. From a hundred feet away, I could smell the sharp odor of wet horse hair and sweaty saddle blankets.

  One by one and in pairs, the cowboys headed for the bunkhouse. A boy, not much older than I, nodded to me shyly. For a moment I thought he was going to come over and talk to me, but he changed his course swiftly and ran for the outhouse.

  Black smoke poured from the bunkhouse chimney, then turned white as a fire took shape in the kitchen stove. Two men came out with buckets and scooped up water from the spring. I sat on the bridge and watched, too shy to go over and talk.

  One at a time, men came out on the front stoop and emptied washbasins of pale gray water on the grass.

  As I sat on the heavy planks, dangling my feet above the water, a big, white-headed horsefly bit me on the knee. I smacked it hard and sent the body floating down the stream, where a hungry trout made short work of it. My knee still hurt from the bite when I got up and headed for the ranch house to cook myself another pile of steak.

  When he arrived from town the next day, my uncle seemed surprised to see the kitchen clean. He glanced into the cool room at the big chunk I had carved from the beef but made no comment. He seemed shy and unable to carry on a conversation with someone my age and was no friendlier than he had been when I arrived, but I gathered courage to ask him what had been uppermost on my mind since I arrived. I figured that he couldn’t get more grouchy than he already was. “I was wondering,” I asked, in a voice loud enough for even a dead man to hear. “I was wonderin’, Uncle, when do I get to ride a horse?”

  Chapter Two

  I WAS’T SURE MY UNCLE HEARD ME ask about riding a horse, for he gave no sign, just turned and walked out of the house. I followed, but he ignored me, and so I wandered off. The bunkhouse and corrals were deserted, and I whiled away a few hours looking at wildflowers on the meadows and watching warblers mate in the willows, wishing that I had someone to talk to, wishing that I could learn to ride so that the next time Rose offered me her horse, I would be able to impress her.

  I was shaking with hunger but wasn’t about to ask the old man for food. That afternoon, just when my hunger pains were about to overcome my pride, the old man came bustling around a willow bush, tossed me a brown bag containing a meat sandwich he’d made for me, and told me to get into his car, that he needed someone to open gates.

  I was to learn that my uncle hated to open gates and would put up with anyone handy as a passenger as long as he didn’t have to get out of his car.

  He drove a big, fancy, four-door Chrysler and treated it like a pickup truck, driving out over irrigated fields, ro
cks, and fallen trees as though it were impossible to get stuck. Whenever he drove down through the ranch, the crew kept a team of draft horses harnessed just in case. On this, my first ride with him, he had hardly gone a mile down the ranch when he gunned through a slough lickety-split, and buried that big green monster right to the axles. I started walking for help, but a couple of cowboys had been watching from afar and met me halfway with the team. The old cowboy driving the horses winked at me and shook his head. It was about the first friendly gesture I’d seen since my arrival, and my home-sickness vanished in a flash.

  While the men were hooking up chains to ease the car out of the mud, the old man took a shovel out of the trunk and informed me that it was time I learned how to irrigate. With the shovel over his shoulder, he stalked off across the flooded plain, inspecting the flow of icy springwater as it coursed down ditches and spread out over the grass through small cuts in the ditch bank.

  Here and there he stopped to build a sod dam in a ditch, or put boards in a wooden irrigation box. I watched his every move, trying to learn. My legs grew numb from wading in cold water, and now and again I would leave a tennis shoe sticking in the mud and have to probe for it. Maybe deafness had affected his balance, for my uncle couldn’t walk a straight line to save his soul from hell. Every time he changed directions unannounced, the shovel over his shoulder would come about like the boom on a sailboat and clout me alongside the head with a clang. Off he would go on another tangent.

  The water flowed from a dam at the headwaters of the Williamson River, a crystalline stream rising from fault lines along the base of the pine-clad ridges. With that water, my uncle flood irrigated some two thousand acres of timothy, bluegrass, and clover, catching the water up in a series of small earthen dams, and redistributing it as it flowed down through the long valley.

  Once the cowboys had used the team to pull the car to dry ground, the old man headed back, put his shovel in the trunk, and slammed the lid.

  “Don’t know how the hell I got stuck there,” he muttered to the men. “Been through that slough a thousand times.”

  The men looked away so as not to be caught grinning. A road of sorts wandered along the meadow at the edge

  of the valley. My uncle seemed to drive by memory, looking out over the meadows and seldom at the road. The branch of a pine tree smacked my window, causing me to jump and throw up my hands to protect my face.

  Seeing me make a fool of myself put my uncle in a good mood.

  “Those BarYs of mine are damn fine Hereford cattle,” he bragged as we drove through the cows and calves that had arrived the day before. When the road finally skirted the dams and hugged the main channel of the Williamson, we had to stop at every bend to look down at the huge shadows of trout lurking like logs in the bottoms of the pools. I had already been smitten by Rose, the Indian girl; now I fell in love with the ranch. I was aching not only to ride a horse, but to get after those big trout.

  During that trip down the valley, the man became more and more expansive, and I guessed that much of his early reticence was due to shyness. He drove with his hearing aid unplugged and the batteries eloquently placed in the ashtray where I could see them, indicating thus that I was not expected to interrupt with a comment. He never glanced at me when he talked, and might have been addressing the cows, the fish, or the pine trees.

  I sat there as he drove, bouncing with every jolt, watching the scenery, thinking over what little I had heard about the man. He was my mother’s favorite brother, and the son of the Reverend G. Mott Williams, bishop of the Episcopal diocese of northern Michigan.

  Being the son of clergy, he grew up proving to other kids he was no sissy. He learned how to fight, and adopted the name of Buck instead of Dayton, maybe because it sounded tough. This I understood, for I had been named Dayton after my uncle but felt much more comfortable with the nickname of Hawk. To me the name fit right into my plans to be a cowboy.

  At thirteen, Buck proceeded to make a small stake hunting deer for the logging camps, which set up a standard for my own independence. At fifteen he ran away from home to live with Cree Indians in the vicinity of Great Bear Lake in Canada. In one of the worst winters in history, he holed up in a small cabin and lived out the winter on beaver meat from his trapline. By spring he had developed scurvy, and as a result lost most of his hearing.

  Across the ridge from him lived a Cree family, consisting of a man, his wife, several children, and an old grandmother. When the man froze to death on his trapline, the woman saved her children by feeding them the grandmother.

  When spring came, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police took my uncle to Edmonton to testify at the woman’s trial. Through my uncle’s testimony, the woman was acquitted. “After all,” my uncle delighted in saying, “they’d eaten the evidence.”

  According to my mother, when he tired of living a wilderness life he drifted south by railroad, through Portland, and then to San Francisco. His looks and charm brought him ready acceptance in Bay Area society, and he had enough income from his mother’s inherited farms near Detroit to live rather well. A stage-door Johnny, he surrounded himself with actresses and lived on the top floor of the new St. Francis Hotel with his Airedale dog, captivating all who would listen with his tales of the far north.

  Almost trapped into a social marriage, he sought the wilderness again, taking a job locating vast timber holdings in the Northwest for such railroad giants as the Harrimans, who were interested in investing some of their fortune in Oregon. While appraising timber for his new bosses, he stumbled upon that magic valley in southern Oregon that contained the headwaters of the Williamson River. In spite of a lack of major financing, he began putting together the large cattle ranching complex known as Yamsay Land and Cattle Company, whose brand was the BarY, and whose headquarters ranch was Yamsi. Both “Yamsi” and “Yamsay” were taken from Yamsay Mountain, high above the ranch, which Klamath Indians called “the home of the north wind.”

  My gentle mother lost faith in her adored brother when Buck visited his uncle Will Biddle in Portland, Oregon, and ran off with Will’s wife, Margaret. On her divorce from Will, Margaret became my uncle’s partner in his endeavors. That relationship was already fraying when I arrived at Yamsi, which may have accounted for the fact that the great stone house was often empty.

  A year before the economic crash of 1929, Buck hired Margaret’s son-in-law, a well-known Portland architect, Jamison Parker, to draw up plans for a large house at Yamsi, to be built out of native lava rock and huge ponderosa pines cut from the virgin forest around them. My uncle had a pal named Mortenson in Klamath Falls who owned a sawmill, and Buck was able to select the boards for the interior himself. These were hauled by steam locomotive over a logging track to a point ten miles from the ranch, and taken the rest of the way by team and wagon.

  For a moment as I drove with my uncle, my reveries were shattered by a mule deer doe which darted in front of the car and plunged into the river. Lost in thought, my uncle didn’t seem to notice that close call, and I went on with my thoughts.

  The old man had a thing for towers, and the original plans included one as tall as the neighboring pine trees. Using cowboy help, Buck completed the house at a cost of eight thousand dollars. It included a foundation for the tower, but that edifice was never built, possibly because the Depression came along to put a brake on his spending.

  Despite hard economic times, Buck and Margaret Biddle managed to turn the house into a showcase, filled with rare antiques from Europe and a superb collection of Oriental rugs. Such elegance tended to build a cultural gap between Buck and the cowboys. He might own a fine herd of cattle, but the men would never accept him as I wanted to be accepted, as a real hand.

  Being the boss’s nephew and ignorant of all facets of ranch life, I was beginning to realize that I would have to battle hard to belong. No one had to tell me that to be respected by the men, I would have to beat them at their own cowboy games.

  As I rode along in the big car,
I reflected that I had been at the ranch three days and still hadn’t ridden a horse or talked to a cowboy. With the impatience of youth, I felt that life was slipping past quickly and there was no more time to waste.

  I was about to shout at my uncle and see if he had any vestige of hearing when he ran his Chrysler over a big pine stump. I flew up out of the seat, hit my head on the ceiling, and saw stars. My neck felt broken, and I moved my fingers carefully, happy to find that they still worked.

  “Who the hell left that stump in the road?” Buck grumbled. He wasn’t driving on the road, having left it a couple hundred yards back, but I wasn’t about to make that point.

  As he drove onward, he talked about places I’d never heard about, the BK Ranch, the Grigsby place, Wocus Bay, and Klamath Marsh. I looked at the instrument panel and saw that the radiator was overheating. I had no way of telling him, but pointed at the temperature gauge. He ignored me until a big cloud of steam arose from the radiator, obscuring the forest ahead. Fortunately we were still close to the river, and he let the engine cool, then carried up enough water from the river in his hat.

  As we took off again, I hoped that my whole life here wouldn’t consist of riding in his Chrysler, opening gates. The world I’d seen here so far was pretty small. Beyond the trout in the river and the horses I saw only at a distance, I was starting to think that maybe I should have stayed in Michigan.

  What I did not appreciate was that at the time of my arrival on Buck’s doorstep, the BarY was a great old-style livestock outfit, a rough, tough cattle and horse operation running seven thousand head of fine Hereford cattle and two hundred and fifty mostly Percheron broodmares. The land consisted of an eleven-thousand-acre holding on a vast plain at the foot of the Cascade Mountains, known as Klamath Marsh; a lease option on the BK, a great hay ranch in the Bly Valley; and the headquarters ranch, Yamsi, at the head of the Williamson River, plus ninety thousand acres or so of range leased from the Klamath Indians. Most of the cattle were shipped south every fall to winter on ranches in northern California, west of the town of Williams.