She looked at me and smiled shyly. “Hey,” she said. “You want to go over to the Sycan River with us to catch floppers?” Her long black hair wasn’t braided yet this morning. Half fell over her right breast, and the rest cascaded down over her shoulders. Raindrops glistened like diamonds on the strands.
“Sure,” I said. “Let me put this old horse away and get on a dry shirt.” I had no idea what floppers were, but I was burning up with excitement at spending some time with her.
A half hour later I was crowded into the back of an old pickup truck with a dozen half-drowned Indian kids, bouncing up over the ridges of Taylor Butte toward the Sycan River drainage. It turned out that floppers were young ducks that had grown to full size but had not yet acquired the power of flight.
The sloughs and potholes along the Sycan River were full of them, and we scampered shivering through the raindrenched sloughs in water up to our hips, catching the largest of the ducks and loading them into the pickup until we had enough for several good meals. I was a little bit disappointed. Even though Rose had asked me to go along, she ignored me to hunt with the girls, while I was surrounded by boys.
This was reservation land, and Indians could hunt and fish as they pleased without worrying about legal methods or seasons. I was conscious that I was a white kid, and kept looking back over my shoulder expecting that any moment now a federal warden would cart me off to jail.
On the way back to the ranch the woman who was driving slammed on the brakes and stopped the pickup. Grabbing a rifle from the window rack, she shot a big buck that had crossed the road in front of her. The antlers of the deer were covered with velvet, and it was fat and sleek. The woman made short work of gutting out the animal and piled the entrails alongside the road as a signal to other Indians that hunting had been good here.
“We’ll make some good jerky,” Rose said, addressing me for the first time in an hour. “You like jerky?”
I shrugged with the indifference of a teenager. I was paying her back for ignoring me.
We ended up at a deer camp just outside my uncle’s fence at the head of the Williamson River. There were pickup trucks everywhere, all equipped with what was standard equipment for the Indian, a spotlight atop the cab for night hunting and a rack of rifles in the back window. Most of the men had been hunting all night and were sleeping, but there were several sitting around the campfire drinking beer.
They watched with mild interest as the old woman who had shot the deer slid it from the pickup and skinned out the animal on the ground. No one made any effort to help. The woman worked swiftly and soon had rendered the whole carcass into thin strips, which she draped over drying racks of poultry netting stretched over the fire.
She nodded to Rose, and said a few words in the Klamath language. Rose dragged the fresh hide over to my uncle’s fence and draped it raw side up over the barbed wire to dry. There were at least a hundred other hides hanging there; some were so tiny they obviously had come from small fawns.
Smoke rose from the willow fires and bathed the drying venison, but there were bluebottle flies buzzing everywhere, flying through the smoke to lay their eggs on the meat.
Rose helped the woman scatter pepper on the jerky strips, then took a piece off the rack, shook off a couple of bluebottle flies, and offered it to me. I shook my head. I was dying to try some, but the flies made my stomach squirm. Rose had no such qualms. Her cheek bulged as though she were storing a chaw of tobacco, but it didn’t interfere with her speech. “You goin’ to the rodeo tomorrow in Beatty?” she asked.
“Where’s Beatty?”
“On the Res. ’Bout twenty miles south of here.”
“That far? I guess not. I got no way to get there. And if it’s dry enough I’ll have to work in the hay.”
“Your uncle won’t have a crew,” Rose said. “All us Indians are going to the rodeo. They say Jack Sherman’s going to make an exhibition ride on Blackhawk. I tell you that old black horse can buck up a storm.”
She moved the wad of jerky to the other cheek. “You could ride over with us,” she said.
I was so mesmerized by the pretty roundness of her face and the dark mystery of her eyes that I scarcely heard her.
“You could ride over with us,” she repeated.
That night I could hardly sleep for thinking about going to the rodeo with Rose. But in the morning, Buck woke me early and insisted that I ride along with him to open gates. As we left to drive down through the ranch, I saw Rose and her family loading up for the rodeo. I sat hunkered in the front seat, overwhelmed with self-pity, hoping that the raindrops misting my uncle’s windshield would turn into a deluge, hoping he would get stuck in the mud, that he would run out of gas, that the engine would fail to start.
We had gone less than a mile when the old man thought of something he had forgotten to do in town and made a U-turn, dumping me back at the house. The old lady was there and calling my name. Not wanting to get caught up in housework, I stayed outside in the shelter of an overhang until I heard the distant sound of his Chrysler as he sped up the first hill. I was too late to catch a ride with Rose, so I fled to the corrals, captured old Sleepy, and was soon trotting south over the hills toward Beatty, twenty-three miles away.
Sleepy had one redeeming feature in that he would rather trot than walk. He moved out eagerly, singing his groaning complaint but eating up the miles. I rode standing in the stirrups, looking out for the black-and-white signs with which the Indian Agency marked the roads. I soon left the timber behind, and passed over miles of rocky flats covered with mountain mahogany and small groves of aspen. Five miles from town, as I crossed a vastness of sagebrush, I began to see clouds of dust from the south and knew that the rodeo had already started.
The arena lay just south of town. The surrounding fence was pretty primitive, but it was buffered by cars parked fender to fender and crowds of people. Here and there Indian women sat on blankets, legs extended, playing at gambling games, hiding pieces of painted bones in their hands. The cowboys in the arena were mostly Indian with a sprinkling of whites. Behind the parked cars were hordes of children riding horses, galloping back and forth, raising more dust than the cowboys. They all seemed to be riding with one hand on the reins, the other with a death grip on a bottle of pop, and were much more interested in each other than in what was happening in the arena.
Rose spotted me from afar and came running, vaulting up behind me on Sleepy’s back as the old horse threatened to dump us both. He crow-hopped a few jumps then settled down to a walk. Now and then I felt Rose’s breasts bump my shoulder blades and I was in heaven.
We found a place along the fence not far from the bucking chutes and sat astride Sleepy watching the rodeo from our vantage point. I had missed the bareback riding event, but the saddle broncs would come later. In the arena was a confusion of ropers of all sizes, shapes, ages, and degrees of inebriation. Some of them fell off their horses before they caught up with the animals they were trying to rope.
“That’s my uncle,” Rose said as a plump Indian fell off his horse and lay still. Another rider roped the man by the feet and dragged him out of the arena to laughter all around.
“Why do they drink so much?” I asked Rose.
She shrugged. “I guess they just like being drunk,” she replied. There was a loud clatter from the bucking chutes as the Indians began to fill the chutes with big, stout horses.
“Those are the saddle broncs,” Rose whispered in awe. “The big black horse in chute number one is Blackhawk.
Dally Givons says he’s the best there is. Jack Sherman’s going to try to ride him. Bart Shelley owns him, an’ every rodeo contractor in the country would like to buy him but old Bart won’t sell.”
In an effort to see around me, Rose put her cheek close to mine and a lock of raven hair fell down over my chest. “See,” she said. “There’s Jack now over by the chutes, sitting on his saddle on the ground, getting his stirrups set for his ride.”
Jack was a tal
l, angular cowboy, with sandy hair, gray eyes, and a crooked smile. He was a natural athlete and, though I didn’t know it at the time, was one of the great bronc riders of the forties. I began to worship Jack as a hero before I ever saw him ride.
Jack climbed the chute beside the big horse and lowered his bronc saddle on its back, then used a long wire with a hook to draw up the cinch beneath the animal’s belly. Blackhawk snorted as the cinch came up tight and hammered the planks of the chute behind him with jagged hooves. I watched mesmerized as the big man strapped a braided rein to Blackhawk’s halter, drew it back to the swells of the saddle, and marked a place on the rein with a wisp plucked from Blackhawk’s mane.
“What’s he doing that for?” I asked Rose.
“He’s marking a place to hold the rein. Too short and the horse will duck his head and jerk the cowboy forward out of the saddle. Too long and the rider can’t keep his seat.”
“You think he can ride him?” I asked, a charge of excitement running up my spine.
“Who knows?” she replied. “On a good day, Dally Givons says, Jack Sherman can ride anything with hair.”
The crowd went utterly silent as Jack climbed the slats of the chute and settled down on Blackhawk’s back. The big black turned his head around as though to see who dared to try him. His black eyes snapped in anger as he waited for the side of the chute to open.
“Watch closely,” Rose hissed. “To make a qualified ride, Jack has to keep his spurs in the horse’s neck through the first jump and ride for ten seconds.”
Jack carefully gripped his rein where he had marked it. His toes found the stirrups. His eyes glanced out into the arena at the two cowboys, the mounted pickup men, who would help him from the horse at the end of the ride. “Let’s have ’im,” he said, nodding to the gate man, and the chute gate shot open.
Blackhawk followed the gate out with a wild plunge that knocked Jack’s hat off on the planks above the chute, then bucked high and wild, turning his body flat in the air in what is called a sunfish. For a moment it appeared the big horse would fall flat on his side, crushing the cowboy’s leg, but Blackhawk caught himself and threw in a couple of crooked, jolting jumps. The crowd screamed as Jack Sherman came closer and closer to completing his ten-second ride.
A big woman lurched against old Sleepy, almost knocking the animal off its feet. “Jump high and fart loud!” she shouted, spilling her cup of beer all over my pant leg. But suddenly the big horse leaped high, hit hard, and sucked back beneath himself, sending Jack catapulting off. Jack lit on his shoulders in the dirt and rolled away from the horse’s hooves. He lay for a moment watching Blackhawk buck on without him, empty stirrups hitting above the saddle, then got up slowly, a crooked grin on his lips, took a sack of Bull Durham tobacco from his shirt pocket, rolled a cigarette, lit it, and limped back to the chutes. Maybe it was just a little Indian rodeo at Beatty, but I sensed that rodeo didn’t get much better than that.
That night, a full moon lit my way across the tablelands. Sleepy trotted on and on, following the slender ribbon of a road as it wandered through the pines. On my left I could make out the familiar landmark of Fuego Mountain; on my right I could see a gap in the trees formed by the steep rocky canyon of the Sycan River. As I rode up the ridge toward Taylor Butte, I could feel the icy pockets of cold air settling in the hollows. Ahead of me, a great gray owl caught a mouse and sat on a stump until my horse got too close, then flew off into the darkness with its prize.
Now and then I would see sudden flashes of lights towering skyward as a carload of Indians spotlighted deer. Sometimes the beam would illuminate me and old Sleepy, and the hunters would slam on their brakes and the lights would go out as they slipped on past and the rumble of their vehicle was lost in the pines.
It was after midnight when I finally made it back to the Yamsi barn. I groped about in the darkness to unsaddle Sleepy and then turned him out to roll in the corral. In the distance one of Sleepy’s friends nickered to him, and the tired bay horse answered back. As I walked toward the bunkhouse, I heard the hollow drumming of his hooves crossing the plank bridge, and then splashing sounds as the horse trotted off across the wet meadow to join his friend.
Chapter Six
BY THE TIME I WAS SIXTEEN, I had grown into a six-foot-five beanpole of a cowboy. Some folks claimed I kept my pockets full of rocks to keep from blowing away. Strangers would grin at me as I walked the streets of Klamath Falls and say, “Hey, how’s the weather up there, Slim?” I longed to spit in their eyes and retort, “It’s rainin’ up here. How is it down there?”
But I didn’t, of course. I just slouched on my way, hoping to duck around the next corner and disappear. I even daydreamed of becoming invisible. But invisibility was a tough trick to pull off on Main Street. In those days, I couldn’t walk a block on Main Street without passing several Indians off the reservation, people who needed me as much as I needed them. They were my solace, for I could stop and talk to them about horses and rodeo, and they treated me like a friend rather than a freak. By stopping in at Charley Read’s saddle shop, I could count on seeing some Indian friends like Buck Scott or Lee Hutchison, only a little older than I, who were already becoming pretty good saddle bronc riders.
Or I could go over to the Montgomery Ward saddle department, where Jerry Ambler, the reigning world champion saddle bronc rider, ran the department. Jerry was slender as a willow whip and rode by balance instead of brute strength. He sat the saddle on a space no bigger than a handkerchief, shoulders bowed, looking as though he were being towed along by his bucking rein. Of the balance riders I watched through the years, probably only the great South Dakotan Casey Tibbs, from Fort Pierre, was his equal. Maybe Jerry could sense my intense interest and knowledge of bucking horses, for he was always nice to me and would drive out of his way to pick me up at the ranch and take me to a rodeo.
In those days, before World War II, a great many rodeo contestants were ranch-raised kids who had grown up a-horseback and learned to ride bucking horses by breaking colts. Perhaps they rode the rough string and spoiled horses for a big outfit like the ZX over at Paisley. They might go to town for a Fourth of July rodeo and compete against other riders from other ranches, take home a little prize money, and go back to buckarooing on the ranches. If they were good enough, they made rodeos on weekends, paid their entrance fees, and hoped that the prize money they managed to win would exceed gas money, food, entrance fees, and doctor bills.
I read and reread the rodeo magazine Hoofs and Horns until the pages fell apart. My heroes were the bronc riders of the day — Bill McMackin, Doff Aber, Perry Ivory, Gene Rambo, to name a few. In my dreams I competed at Madison Square Garden, Pendleton, Calgary, and Salinas. I rode high, wide, and handsome until they opened the chute gate and my dream mount plunged bucking and kicking into the arena. There the dream always ended, for I could not fight reality and was suddenly snapped back to being a tall, gangly kid, a wannabe with no talent for riding the really tough horses.
My head was full of great bucking horses like Steamboat, Tipperary, Midnight, and Five Minutes Till Midnight, and the bunkhouse cowboys must have gotten sick of hearing about them.
Each of the cowboys at Yamsi had six horses on his string, one for each of the six working days. I was no exception and gloried in those that might buck a little. I had a big gray horse named Smoky that was cold-backed, meaning he would hump up and buck, in the morning when I got on. We were a pretty good team. Smoky liked to buck and I liked to ride. Without any encouragement on my part, Smoky would drop his head between his knees and buck in long, easy jumps. He leaped high, and made me feel more talented than I really was.
I wanted desperately to belong somewhere, to earn the respect of those I idolized, but I was still growing like a weed, and no matter how much I wanted to sign up as a contestant at each rodeo I went to, I ended up just hanging around the chutes, watching for any opportunity to help. There were lots of rodeos each summer, and I went to every one I could. Beyond the
rodeo events, there were parades and dances. The towns filled up with local ranchers and cowboys, and for many of them it was their one trip to town for the year, the source of many a tale to be told again and again around the bunkhouse stoves.
One Sunday, I rode over to the Beatty Rodeo with Rose and her family. On the way, we passed Bart Shelley, driving a bunch of his horses across the vast sagebrush flats toward town. I was thrilled to see the big horse Blackhawk in the lead. I had brought a camera with me and couldn’t wait to photograph Blackhawk coming out of the chute. He was ridden by a cowboy named Ed Donovan, who managed a tensecond ride. I took the film to a Klamath Falls drugstore for development and sweated out the results for nearly a week. With most of the bunkhouse cowboys gathered around me, I opened the envelope from the photo shop and found I had captured Blackhawk sunfishing high in the air. It was to be the first of thousands of rodeo photographs I would take through the years, and that gave me a niche in rodeo beyond being a mere spectator.
I had no formal training as a photographer but learned by doing. Most of my early attempts ranged from bad to awful, and it took several rodeos before I shot anything as good as the photograph of Ed Donovan on Blackhawk.
Soon I was sending off a flood of rodeo shots to Ma Hopkins, the editor of Hoofs and Horns, and it wasn’t too hard to persuade her to give me a job as official photographer. She neglected to ask me my age and would have been aghast had she known I was only sixteen.
Without rodeos, Saturday nights at the ranch were lonely, and often I rode into town with some of the Yamsi Ranch crew and sat in the darkness outside houses known as Irene’s or the Iron Door, as the cowboys sought out what they had come to town for. I would listen and wonder as music and laughter came from within. Sometimes a woman would come out to bring me a bottle of pop and sit in the cab of the truck, visiting me. I would marvel that these women seemed like any other women I ran into in town. They talked of families in towns I’d never heard of, and what they dreamed of doing with their lives once they got money. They called me “honey” and “sweetheart,” and their perfume lingered on long after they had gone back to the house.
The Pastures of Beyond Page 5