I saw her again sooner than I expected. It was suddenly haying season, and my uncle offered a haying job for any Indian who wanted work. The bunkhouse filled rapidly, and the overflow camped out in tents by the house spring. There were no hay balers in those days, and putting up loose hay took lots of labor.
In addition to the hay Buck’s crew put up at Yamsi and the BK, the BarY bought stacks at various neighbors, and since loose hay couldn’t be transported to the ranch, the cows had to be driven to the hay for wintering.
Buck had bought his neighbor Lee Hatcher’s hay for years, and the only problem with the deal was that Lee was a friendly man who never could say no to a neighbor in need. He was always willing to lend out his hay machinery to friends, and by the time haying season came every year, Lee never had much equipment around to put up his own hay. This year, all Lee had left was an old truck no one wanted to borrow, two mismatched draft horses, and a dilapidated sulky rake. He was pretty much limited to putting up the hay by hand.
Since I was low man on the totem pole, I was sent down to help Lee put up his hay in his barn. The system we used was pretty basic. An old man named Joe Perry drove the team on the mower and rake, and when Joe had raked the cured hay into windrows, Lee would arrive with the truck, and we would fork the windrows onto the bed until we had a load. Lee would drive the truck to the barn, where his wife would help him unload it into the haymow.
Late that afternoon, as the truck came back for its fifteenth load, Joe Perry stopped his team, tied up the reins, and stepped off the rake to relieve his bladder. The truck made a swift U-turn and sped back toward the barn, empty. Minutes later, Lee appeared in the hay field, out of breath and angry.
“Joe,” he roared, “that was my wife driving the truck. Why in hell did you have to pee right in front of her?”
“Aw, Lee,” Joe Perry said. “I wouldn’t get excited if I were you. After all, she only saw part of it.”
That night I slept in the barn in the loose hay and was lulled to sleep by the contented snuffling of my horse, Yellow-stone, and the work team as they ate new hay from the manger. I had blisters on my hands from the handle of my pitchfork, and my muscles ached when I moved, but I think I must have slept with a smile on my face. Each day that I lived in Oregon was bringing me a new adventure.
It was a week before I could get back to Yamsi. One evening I drifted down through the pine forest on Yellow-stone and was relieved to see the big rock house standing in the trees. The horse seemed as glad as I was to be home. He nickered to friends in the corrals, as I looked around amazed at the number of new tents that had gone up since I’d left.
A new tent stood by the house spring, and there was Rose, packing a bucket of water up the slope. She smiled at me in recognition and then disappeared into the tent. Yellow-stone shied at the tents, and I almost fell off, but by the time Rose came back out I had righted myself and rode past her, straight in that old Porter saddle as though I were a real hand.
I wanted to stop to talk to her, but the cowboys were sitting on the front porch of the bunkhouse, and I knew they’d never stop teasing me. So, despite my long trip from the Hatcher Ranch, I rode up the hill into the pine trees, making my horse jump logs as I entered the woods. Old Yellow-stone must have thought I was crazy. Rose was camped on the place for haying season! At least I’d get to see her at a distance. I returned well before dark, but the tent appeared to be empty, and the flaps were tied tight from the outside.
Left to my own devices, I would have camped by the tent until she came back, but I could see my uncle’s Chrysler parked at the house. While I was unsaddling Yellow-stone in the barn, I heard the sound of hooves in the corral, and Buster Griffin trotted in, leading a bunch of fresh draft horses from the BK to be used in haying.
By the time I had finished helping Buster with the draft horses, everyone was asleep in the big house. I crawled into bed and lay there eager for a new day to begin. I heard a few owl hoots and the call of a nighthawk, and then dropped into a deep sleep far beyond dreams.
All I did that first week was drive a big gray team hooked to a mowing machine, but I loved every minute of it. The horses, Rock and Steel, did all the work, and I sat immersed in the whir of the Pittman and clatter of the teeth on the mower bar as they knifed through the tall timothy and clover. One day I was dreaming about Rose when Ern Morgan shouted at me and shook his fist. I looked behind me to see that I had failed to overlap with the mower, and the meadow looked like the head of a kid with a bad home haircut.
Mowing was hard work for the horses, and every few minutes I stopped to let the sweating animals rest, backing up the team a foot so they did not have to start up with a loaded sickle bar. I couldn’t rest long, for ahead of me were a dozen Indians driving mowers. We tried to keep pace with each other, stopping to rest in unison. Round and round we went until the whole field was mowed and the grass lay flat to be cured in the sun, then raked into windrows.
At noon we stopped for lunch, unhooked the teams from the mowers, and led them off to drink from a round spring welling up at the edge of the timber. While the teams lazed in reveries known only to them, we sat on fallen logs and ate, or covered our faces with our hats and napped.
If mowing were all there was to haying I would have loved it, but one morning I found an Indian boy about my age driving my team. I was sent on a crew to cut a derrick pole. Ten of us rode a special horse-drawn wagon with a heavy log X-frame on each end. We traveled up into the pine forest and cut a heavy fifty-foot log, which we peeled, then muscled up until it rode on the X-frame of the wagon. Next we cut and peeled a shorter pole to be used as a spar and loaded it on the floor of the wagon below the derrick pole.
We had almost made it back to the hayfield when the wagon lurched through a small ditch and flung the derrick pole through the air as the wagon tipped over on its right side. There was a sickening sound, like a pumpkin being hit hard by a baseball bat, as the huge log smacked one of the men in the head. The rest of us were thrown over the top of the log and lit on our feet as we scampered out of the way.
The injured man was a white man from Kansas named Harold Nehouse, and the Indians didn’t seem to care if he lived or died. They dragged him out of the way, unhooked the team, righted the wagon, and then hooked the team back up. Within minutes the derrick pole was back riding the X-frame, and we were headed out for a piece of dry ground Ern Morgan had picked for a haystack.
It took the remainder of the afternoon to attach a swinging boom to the derrick pole, rig it with cables, and raise it to tower over the stack site. The hay we had mowed the day before was now sun-dry and crisp. The next morning, the men raked the flattened hay with sulky or dump rakes with long, curved tines, which gathered the dried grass and dumped each load in line to extend a windrow. These long ribbons of hay were then bucked into piles with buck rakes or sweeps, long wooden poles six to eight feet long capped with steel, sliding along the ground in front of teams of two horses. The rake teams were always the best teams, capable of pushing a heavy mound, shoving the hay over pole-and-chain nets set on the ground beside the stack, then backing out from under the loads.
Once the nets had been fastened around the hay and closed with a trip latch, the net man signaled the driver of a pull-up team, who drove away from the stack and pulled the load to the top of the derrick pole. The stack foreman swung the load over the stack with the boom spar until it was positioned where he needed the hay. “Dump her!” he called, the net man jerked the trip rope, and the net flew apart, dropping the load of hay on the stack.
Stacking hay on a hot, dusty summer day was no place for a thirteen-year-old kid, but that was where they put me. I was as far away from the horses as I could get. Overwhelmed by heat, choking on dust, I wallowed around in the soft hay, trying to get my legs under me. Ern Morgan could thrust a pitchfork into a whole dump load of hay and shove it right where he wanted it, building the edges of the stack as straight and even as the walls of a brick house. I sweated buckets; hays
eed, perspiration, and dust made rivulets down my bare skin and made me itch. At lunchtime I was too exhausted to come down to eat and was still there fast asleep when the foreman dumped a whole load of hay on me.
Little by little, the stack rose in the air. From my vantage point high atop that giant loaf of bread, I could see the buck rake teams pushing loads in from afar, the mower teams mowing tomorrow’s hay, and the sulky rakes raking the dried hay into windrows. Harold, the man who had been hit by the boom, was working at a soft job, pulling the nets back to the ground with a saddle horse. He had a bandage around his head, and there were pink roses on the cloth where blood had seeped through.
Midway in the afternoon, as a load was being hauled skyward, a cable broke from the strain, and the frayed end whipped past me and caught Morgan’s ear, cutting it badly. He tied a bandanna around his head and went to splicing the cable as though nothing had happened. I was finding out that there wasn’t much Morgan couldn’t do. A hundred tons were now in the stack, enough to take fifty cows through the winter.
By now my hands were blistered and stuck to the pitchfork handle. My eyes were swollen nearly shut and crusted with dust and grass seed. If I didn’t move fast enough in the loose hay, Morgan seemed to delight in dumping the loads on my head. I watched the sun, praying it would go down.
In the distance I saw Rose riding my horse Yellow-stone, taking canvas water bags out to the men driving the teams. I struggled even harder, hoping that she would see me there high on the stack, moving hay like a grown man. Morgan seemed to notice that I was trying harder and followed my gaze as I looked over the fields at Rose. A crooked smile turned at the corner of his lips, but he left me alone to my misery.
That afternoon, Buck arrived from town with a new cook and gave Mrs. Biddle strict orders to stay the hell out of the kitchen. There was a hay crew to feed, and if that cook got mad, he said in no uncertain terms, it would be Mrs. Biddle and not the cook who went down the road.
That night, the big oak table in the Yamsi dining room was loaded with enough food for an army. Perhaps from his winter among the Crees, he loved Indians and could not have put up hay without them.
While some of the Indians showed a smoldering resentment toward whites, they treated Buck with respect and only laughed instead of killing him when his bold tongue occasionally pointed out a truth they didn’t want to hear. I remember that first haying supper: the table was crowded with Indians, all tired from a long day’s work in the hayfields. Buck sat at the head of the table and looked down at the silent faces. “You guys,” he said. “You guys are a bunch of murderers! How many killings have you got between you?”
I thought my short life was about to be terminated. I jerked my feet over the bench, spilling hot soup down my shirt, and got ready to run for it.
An astonished silence hung in the air, and then the Indian on Buck’s right started to laugh. “By gawd, Buck, you’re sure as hell right. I killed four I know about. Remember that trapper and his kid they found chained up and froze to death in that cabin on Klamath Marsh? That was two of ’em. We’d been partyin’, and things got pretty drunk. I’d had a few traps set out with theirs, and I knew they had cheated me out of some mink and marten. When they happened to pass out, I chained ’em to the bed and left. Hell, it was twenty below that night, and when they found them come snowmelt, they was still stiff as boards.”
The man next to me wiped some of my soup off his sleeve. “I got a few myself,” he admitted. “They all had it comin’ to ’em, an’ I never did serve time. I remember I had a girl frien’ named Edna. She was Shoshone from Fort Hall, Idaho. I just got her so she was pretty handy in bed an’ she left me for a white logger over to Bly. All they ever found of that bastard was his fancy cowboots an’ his fishin’ pole along the Sprague.”
I sat big-eyed and quiet as a mouse as the men at the table proceeded to acknowledge twenty-three killings.
As I left the table, a big Indian named Elmer with a scar across his Adam’s apple traced the wound with one forefinger as he grinned at me. “You didn’t hear a word, kid,” he warned.
But I did hear, and those stories stuck with me many a year.
The next day, my uncle hired a man just out of the Oregon State Penitentiary who was related to some of the Indians on the crew and feared even by his relatives. He was a big man with a knife scar that matched his grin from ear to ear. “Best man with a team of horses I ever saw,” Buck said as though justifying the man’s presence on the crew.
Margaret Biddle had taken to ignoring my hard work in the hayfields and would put me to work cleaning and dusting whenever she had me alone in the evenings. Needing sleep, I took to staying in the bunkhouse with the men. My purpose may have been twofold, since I was getting a good education in the facts of life, listening to stories from men who had been everywhere and done everything, including murder.
That evening, I managed to catch Rose at the spring and took the heavy bucket of water from her hands and carried it for her toward her tent. I had hardly taken up the bucket when the new man stepped from behind a willow and grabbed the bucket from me. “You stay away from that girl, see!” he snarled.
Rose’s face flamed with embarrassment. She grabbed the bucket from the man’s hand and fled into the tent.
That night, I lay awake on my iron cot in the bunkhouse trying to sleep. Someone in the darkness across from me began to snore loud enough to make the chimneys on the kerosene lanterns rattle. I stood it as long as I could, then groped for one of my boots and hurled it in the darkness to wake the offender. My boot caught the ex-con on the point of his nose and split his flesh right to his hairline.
Someone lit a lantern as the enraged man, covered with blood, charged about the room in his underwear, ready to do violence with whoever had flung that boot. I was the one with only one boot under my cot. He seemed ready to blame the old chore man in the cot next to mine, however, before I spoke up. “I did it!” I said. “I threw that boot. You were keeping the whole damn bunkhouse awake with your snores.”
There was a long silence, as though the man was remembering that this was the insolent pup who had taken a shine to Rose. He took a lantern, lit it with a big kitchen match, and walked to the mirror to inspect the damage. Suddenly he began to laugh, and the tension in the bunkhouse melted like butter. “Dang!” he said. “Dang if the kid didn’t improve my looks.”
The next day it rained too hard to hay, and the foreman paired me with the ex-convict to take out a wagonload of livestock salt to the cattle. For a time the man’s face was frozen as though it hurt him to smile. I kept both hands on the Jacob’s staff, a notched upright on the front of the bed where the teamster ties his reins when leaving the wagon. I was ready to hurl myself off and run should he make a move.
It wasn’t long, however, before I forgot my fears. I kept watching the man’s hands on the lines and how well the horses read his wishes, as though some mysterious thought process traveled down those leather ribbons. My uncle was right. The man had a great way with a team.
“Sure wish I could handle horses like that,” I said.
For a long moment the man stared at me, and then he grinned. “I reckon there ain’t no better time than this to learn,” he said. Handing over the lines, he stepped into the air and headed back to camp.
Chapter Five
THE ONLY THING THAT COULD INTERRUPT a haying operation was broken machinery or rain. If rain fell on our hayfields and not the neighbor’s, we went to help them, but if the rain was general, we got the day off to heal.
One morning, I was awakened early by the roar of a heavy mountain rainstorm pounding the shingles of the ranch house roof and knew that it was too wet for haying. I could have slept the clock around, but hunger gnawed at my stomach, and I dressed and slipped down to the kitchen. The old lady was off traveling, and my uncle was sitting at the kitchen table reading Time magazine. He wore his favorite wool cardigan with leather patches on both elbows and seemed to sense my presence without ev
en glancing my way. “Yeah,” he grunted by way of greeting, and went on reading.
He got up from his seat, went to the stove, and poured a cup of tea. I guessed it was for himself, but he set it before me, gave me a pat on my shoulder, and resumed his reading. That one little gesture brought tears to my eyes. Underneath that solemn exterior, he cared! Not being able to hear, maybe he compensated. Instead of conversations, he spoke in monologues, and when you were with him you listened rather than try to interrupt. Maybe, I thought, maybe he really likes kids but with his hearing problems doesn’t know how to talk to them.
I fried myself a couple of eggs, made an egg sandwich with a cold biscuit, and sat down at the table. “Uncle,” I said, putting my hand on his arm for attention. “My mom said you were the best trout fisherman to come out of Michigan. If I really tried hard to learn, would you teach me?”
My uncle did not smile or comment. Instead he rose from his chair, left the kitchen, and returned with a couple of rods, one of which he handed me, and we were off in the rain to fish the river.
The old man had a strange way of fishing. He used a long cane pole and a short line to which was attached a tiny silver spinner. He never cast more than three times in any of the deep holes at the bends of the meandering stream but moved off, restless to be on. Soon he was out of sight in the mists, leaving me to my own solitary ways. It was almost dark when I saw him again. He had traveled north fifteen miles and had only a couple of trout to show for it. I had stayed at the first bend of the river and caught twenty.
That night we feasted on Yamsi trout, dipped in cornmeal and fried in butter. From that day on I never again saw him fish, but he took me often, and sat quietly on the bank and watched as I reeled them in.
The Pastures of Beyond: An Old Cowboy Looks Back at the Old West Page 4