by H. V. Elkin
“Can’t we do anything to help him?” she asked.
“Just stay near,” Cutler said. “Pick him up and put him back together if he falls. Long’s he’s mounted, it’s just between him and the horse, and I guess that’s the way he wants it.”
Now that the mare was running again, Baker was able to work the rope, forming a second noose with two half hitches. But before he was able to do anything with it, the horse stopped and bucked again, and Baker had to hang tightly to the mane.
Cutler pulled up. Ellen followed suit.
“What’d we stop for?” she asked.
“Better let our own mounts rest, so they might have some speed left if we need it later.”
They watched the mare bucking, rearing on its hind legs and twisting to throw the man off. But the man stayed. It looked like the mare was beginning to tire, but getting a second wind, she started to run again.
“Let’s go,” Cutler said, and he and Ellen went in pursuit.
Now finding it easier to keep his seat, Baker took the noose he had formed and managed to throw it over the horse’s head, looping the noose around its nose. Now he had two lengths of the rope in his hands and was able to work them like reins.
Cutler took off his shirt and waved it in the air. “Dave! This way!” He hung the shirt from a tree limb, then told Ellen. “Time for us to back off.”
“What?”
“We get too close now, and the mare’d bolt again. She’s runnin’ smooth now, and Dave might be able to bring her this way.”
They rode off some distance and stopped. They watched Baker steering the horse toward the tree with the shirt. Running at such a breakneck speed, the horse didn’t see the shirt before it was under it, and Baker was able to grab the shirt before the mare veered away. The horse ran off away from the tree. Baker threw the shirt over her head, so she couldn’t see. In a moment the horse stopped and stood still. They could hear Baker speaking in a soothing tone. It looked like the battle had been won.
“I never saw ridin’ like that before,” Ellen said. “Did you?”
“Yeah, just once,” Cutler said. “It was a Comanche.”
The mood was jubilant in camp that night. As far as most of the men were concerned, they had been successful. Each man would be able to return kidnapped stock to its ranch. Some would even have the bonus of a colt.
Baker sat with a cup in his hand and his eyes closed. He could not remember when he had been so tired. He wondered if he was getting too old for ranching, not particularly impressed with his phenomenal ride or thinking that it had anything special to do with the fatigue he felt now.
“Say, Dave.”
Baker opened his eyes and saw Bo squatting beside him. “Huh?”
“I heard someone sayin’ you might be lookin’ for a hand.”
“I might be.”
“You got more stock now. Figured you might be needin’ help.”
“Who is it who’d want the job?”
“I ain’t got nothin’ else to do once we get these horses back where they belong.”
“Maybe I could use a hand with some experience.”
“Well, I had some. If it’s only one you’re lookin’ for, I got to tell you I ain’t the only one here who’d like to work for you, and I ain’t the one with the most experience. But I ain’t green all the way through neither.”
Baker smiled. “Hike a man who knows what he don’t know.”
Bo held out his hand. Baker looked at it a moment, then shook it warmly. “When do you want to start?”
“Whenever you say.”
“Right now?”
“Sure.”
Baker pointed to a tree where the medicine hat was tied. “Then you can keep an eye on my new mare over there tonight, and maybe I can get some sleep.”
They posted guards around the corral that night in four-hour shifts. There was always a chance that Mesteño would be coming back to reclaim his mares. But the stallion did not appear and the mares became quiet in the corral.
The stars shone clearly in the vast black sky. Cutler lay in his bedroll and looked up at them. But between him and the pinpoints of light was the image of Mesteño, the great dun-colored stallion with the black markings, the primitive beast that had lost its mares and was now roaming the land alone somewhere, as Cutler roamed alone now that his wife was dead. And with that thought, Cutler’s sense of affinity to the stallion was greater than before. Capturing the stallion would be like capturing himself. And yet if the wild horse must be caught, it could only be done by Cutler. The lone animal and the lone man.
Chapter Six
The next morning, Cutler looked over the horses in the corral—seventeen mares and half a dozen colts plus Kate the mule. He decided they had become calm enough to herd back to where they belonged.
“You’ve got a colt in here,” he told Baker, “that goes with your medicine hat.”
“And two of the mares,” Baker said.
“Well, we’re gonna move ’em out today and not wait around for Mesteño to come back to get ’em.”
“He’ll come get ’em wherever they are, John.”
“Not if I get him first.”
“You gonna want help with that?”
“No, Dave. That’s something I got to do alone.”
Baker nodded. “Guess you do. But now that he’s separated from his herd, there’s some might want to gun him down.”
“Anyone who tries is gonna be gunned down by me.”
“Oh, I ain’t one of ’em.”
“I know that, Dave. You’d better go on ahead with the medicine hat, and we won’t start the others ’til you’re long gone. Point out your mares, and we’ll have somebody break off them and the colt when we get near your spread.”
“Bo can bring them. He’s workin’ for me now.”
Cutler smiled. “Real glad to hear that. You can teach the boy what he needs to know.”
“Yeah, and maybe he can teach me something, too.”
“Think so?”
“Maybe how not to see colors.”
“Guess you’ll both learn that after you’ve worked together long enough. After a while, you’ll both be the color of dust.”
Baker laughed. “Expect so, John.”
The mares seemed to respond to being herded by men. Without the lead mare and Mesteño, they reverted to their domestic ways as quickly as they had become wild. Ellen had been expecting more trouble.
“I keep thinkin’ they’re gonna try to get away,” she said.
“Don’t look that way,” Cutler said.
“Well,” Ellen smiled, “at least they got their memories.” Then she looked at Cutler and the smile faded.
He knew what she was thinking.
By the time they reached the Harmon ranch, there were only Cutler, Ellen and five men driving the herd. Those mares that could be identified as belonging to other ranchers had been split off by riders from those ranches. The herd now consisted of five mares, a colt and the mule.
“We got all the mares,” Ellen told her father, “including the lead.”
“Where’s the stallion?” Chase asked.
“He’s still free,” Cutler said.
Chase looked to Harmon and shook his head. “Figure it’s my turn now, Ben?”
Harmon looked at Cutler. “What do you say?”
“Say I still got a job to finish. You want him alive, don’t you?”
“Tell me, Cutler,” Harmon said, “if you lost him this time, what makes you think you can get him next time?”
“Because now it’s just me and him. Neither one of us has a herd of mares to think about. It’s just me and him, and that’s how it should be.”
“Well, like you said, I want him alive.”
Cutler spent the night in his wagon.
“John?” It was Ellen at the opening by the tailgate.
Cutler sat up.
“John, you want company?”
He wanted company very badly. But, since she asked th
e question, she knew something about his frame of mind. Tomorrow he would ride off to do something that might turn out to be impossible. He might return to defeat, and Mesteño would have to live the rest of his life under the threat of a bullet from a man like Chase. Nothing else could be important now, nothing but capturing the stallion alive. And that required a single-minded purpose, the kind of obsession that left room for nothing else.
“When this is over,” he said. “Maybe then.”
She nodded. “Good night then. And good luck.”
“Ellen?”
“Yes?”
“If you were Mesteño and I was comin’ after you . . .”
“I’d want to stay free,” she said. “But if I had a choice, and you were the man, I’d want to keep you company for a little while.”
‘That’s all a man like me can be, Ellen. Just company for a little while.”
She nodded. “But not tonight.”
“I understand. But I’m sorry.”
“There’re other nights.”
“But not as many. When you can see the end of something, you want to grab all you can get while it’s here.”
“Ellen, you better leave now before I change my mind. There’s one thing we both want more’n we want each other, and that’s to give Mesteño a chance to live.”
“Goodnight, John.”
He heard her footsteps fade into the night and sighed deeply. He wished he was not working so he could be drinking, but he turned his thoughts sharply to his single objective. Until Mesteño was caught alive, nothing else existed,
The image of the mustang was in front of him as he fell asleep and there was a vague sense of it following him down the plummeting long dark corridor to the oblivion of his sleep. And the image was waiting for him when his eyes opened the next morning, and it stood between him and Ellen who handed him a cup of coffee.
“Will you be comin’ in for breakfast?” she asked.
“No.”
“You got to eat, John.”
“No.”
He made sure the mules would be attended to in his absence and he rubbed Red behind the ears to say goodbye. Then he saddled up Apache, hung a bag of salt from the saddle horn on one side, with two soft hair ropes, a hackamore and a blind hanging from the other side. Then he rode off without a word to anyone.
He rode back to the corral, now empty, empty like an old Pueblo village. Nothing living was there, but the structure they had built and the earth disturbed by panicked hoofs and the two dark furrows leading away, these things still held on to the passions of the men and animals who created it all, a monument to human and animal spirit.
He went on to the east and picked up the trail of the stallion. He followed the trail, slowly, purposefully, always watching the high ground, knowing that somewhere from high ground the stallion might be watching him. By the time he made camp at the end of the first day, there had been no sign of his quarry.
The next day he continued on the trail and saw that it was circling back to the west. Eventually the trail led him back to the rise overlooking the Harmon ranch. Here the mustang had stood looking down to the corral where some of his band was held. But the corral was now closely guarded day and night, and the stallion had not gone down from his lookout to recapture his mares, Cutler knew that as long as nothing threatened the lookout spot itself, the stallion would keep returning, waiting for the moment when the corral would not be guarded.
In another day, Cutler could see the pattern of the mustang’s movements, although he had not yet seen Mesteño and, so far, he thought Mesteño had not seen him. Now he had two things in his favor. He could predict where the horse would be, though not know when. And the clouds had changed their shapes, and now they promised rain.
One lone cottonwood grew near an arroyo along the mustang’s trail. From a branch Cutler tied the sack of salt, then he rode to some high ground to the south where he could see the tree, and he camped.
All of the next day he sat in his camp, and the mustang did not appear. That night it rained. The water came out of the sky in a steady stream for fifteen minutes and then it was over. Lying under a slicker, Cutler did not get soaked through, but wet enough so that as he dried he could smell himself. The mustang might smell him, too. If you could not stay downwind always, it was important to keep your smells, not to bathe or change clothes. The man’s smell was something the animal had to get used to and come to accept as part of the natural environment. Just as Cutler had come to accept the dampness as a part of what was and what had to be. Comfort was no consideration at all. Later, in a hot bath, he would remember that he had been cold, and in dry clothes, he would remember that he had been wet. But now the only thought was of Mesteño.
In the morning, Cutler saw Mesteño approaching the cottonwood. The horse stopped and sniffed the air, backed away a few yards, sniffed the air again, then moved cautiously forward. He came beneath the cottonwood and sniffed the ground, then licked at the salty ground where the rain had dropped through the salt bag and settled. When the horse was finished, he looked around again, then proceeded in the direction he had been going before the salt had diverted him.
When the horse was out of sight, Cutler took one of the soft hair ropes and went down to the cottonwood. He dug a deep hole in the ground nearby. He tied a large knot in one end of the rope and dropped the knot into the hole. Then he filled in the hole, with the knot buried deep underground, and packed the earth tightly. He stood six feet away and pulled on the rope with ail his might, and the knot stayed buried. It could only be pulled out vertically, and a captured mustang would not be able to do that.
Cutler tied a noose in the other end of the rope and, with two small forked sticks, propped it above the ground near the salt lick. Then he covered the rope and its noose with earth.
He climbed into the tree and, with water from his canteen, soaked the bag until more salt water fell to the earth. He got down from the tree and looked over the ground to be sure he had not, with his digging, left any dark turned earth visible. Where he saw any telltale signs of it, he carried dry, dusty earth from nearby and sprinkled it around.
He climbed back to his camp. He did something he had never had to do before. He tied Apache securely to a tree trunk, making sure the horse had enough lead to reach the grass nearby. Then he took a blanket, some beef jerky, the other rope, the hackamore and the blind and climbed back up into the tree. He found himself a perch, hung his gear on a limb, wrapped the blanket around him and prepared himself to spend the rest of his life there if necessary.
It rained again that night and, without his slicker, the rain soaked through his blanket and his clothing. That did not matter now anymore than it had mattered before. All that mattered was that the earth below was being well soaked with salt, and he had a better chance of finishing the job. The next morning he was stiff and his bones ached. The rain had not exposed the rope or noose on the ground below. Let it be today, he thought. It has to be today.
He heard the stallion coming before he could see it.
When he saw it, the horse had stopped several feet from the salt lick. Why? Cutler knew his smell would not travel downward.
Then Cutler heard Apache on the hill whinnying loudly. The mustang looked up to the hill, then avoiding the salt, ran up to investigate. Cutler climbed higher in the tree to see.
He saw the stallion racing up the hill, probably thinking its territory had been invaded by another stallion, ready to fight and chase off the interloper and commandeer any mares the stallion had with him. But when Mesteño reached the rim, he stopped, saw that Apache was tied, saw the signs of a man’s camp, then raced back down the hill. He did not return to the salt lick. Instead, he picked up his normal trail beyond it and ran out of sight.
Cutler cursed to himself. And he prepared to wait some more. His only hope now was that Mesteño would come by again, maybe tomorrow, and accept the situation that had frightened him off today. By evening Cutler did not notice that his clothes had dr
ied and that the blanket was only damp. As the sun was dying in the west, Cutler saw beneath him that some salt had recrystalized on the ground and had not soaked into it.
That night, Cutler’s fatigue and aching muscles became so great that they forced themselves to be noticed. But they were nothing more than irritants, his sense of purpose in being there still stronger than physical discomfort. The same was true the next morning, except the irritants were greater. He had not allowed himself a moment’s sleep. Discomfort and fatigue, though, now threatened to take over. It took a great act of will then to remember they were unimportant and to concentrate on his goal.
The way he felt, the pain, the drowsiness, all problems disappeared in the next morning. He was suddenly alert. He could hear the mustang approaching.
At first it seemed like yesterday was repeating itself. Mesteño paused some distance from the tree. Apache whinnied. Mesteño raced up the hill to investigate, paused at the rim for a long time, then turned and came back.
But this time, the horse did not run away. It came back to the tree and began to lick the salt from the ground. Now, for Cutler, all that existed was the mustang’s front hoofs as they stepped around and near the spot where the noose was buried. They came close, they backed away and then came close again. Then the right leg lifted above the noose.
Some moments seem frozen in time. Everything seems to stop and a ghostly stillness descends. Mesteño’s step stayed poised in the air. And from Cutler, watching from the tree, there was no breath or heartbeat, and his eyes strained from their sockets.
Time resumed. Mesteño stepped.
And then it was as though action, by having been unnaturally suspended a moment, resumed with a fury to make up the difference. As soon as Mesteño’s hoof settled through the soft manmade mound of earth, he jolted back and up, the noose securely fastened around his leg, and his movement ripped the rope from the earth like a great snake. The shock of the noose and the sight of the tightened line that disappeared into the ground brought a violent and unearthly sound from the horse that shattered the hills around, even seeming to shake the limb on which Cutler perched. The horse reared again and its frightened sound was greater, this one answered by the sympathetic sound of Apache on the hill.