“He’s been through here in the last couple of days,” said Jack. “We’re hot after him now.”
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“Little things. Broken grass. Turned earth. See that tree, with the bark all rubbed off one side? He does that to sharpen his horns. Yesterday I seen some droppings. We’re right behind him, all right.”
We spent the remainder of the day following a path which time and climate had rendered almost invisible. Once, great herds of the brown giants had tramped through this area on their migratory path to Canada, but now it was all grown over and planted with wheat and corn so that Bill Cody himself would have had trouble tracking the one that remained. But if tracking was difficult, Jack didn’t say so. He covered every inch of ground with his eyes, missing no detail and making no comment except to point out an obscure sign here and there. The trail—what there was of it—kept more or less parallel with the Rogue River, now bearing close to its grassy bank, now meandering away until the raging torrent shrank to a glistening thread in the distance. Along about sundown, we came to a point where our quarry’s path was crossed by a gate in a log fence, from where it continued across a farmer’s field. I was curious as to how such an ungainly beast had managed to leap a four-rail fence, and asked Jack about it.
“Don’t never sell them short, boy,” he said. “Once I seen a old bull leap a twelve-foot stream in the Texas Panhandle just when me and Charlie Jones thought we had him cornered. There ain’t nothing they can’t do if they want to bad enough.”
“But why would he want to jump here?”
He shrugged, a rapid up-and-down movement of his lean right shoulder. “Any number of things. Seeing as how he’s the last of his kind, I reckon he’s more than a mite skittish where humans is concerned. Could be he caught some farmer’s scent and took the quickest way out.”
Jack dismounted and pulled out three of the logs to let me through on horseback, then led his mule and the burro across. He had bent to replace the logs when a man on the back of a stout work horse came galloping over the hill and reined in facing us. The horse was a cobweb gray in color, and still wore its blinders. “You, there!” he challenged. “Who are you and what’re you doin’ on my land?” He was a blunt-featured farmer in bib overalls and a gray flannel work shirt, and he had a double-barreled shotgun pointed at Jack with its barrels resting on his left forearm. He was hatless and his brown hair was beginning to thin in front. I recognized him instantly.
“Hello, Mr. Bullock,” I said, friendly-like. This caught him off guard, and he squinted against the sinking sun to get a look at my face.
“Who’s talkin’?” he demanded.
“Jeff Curry, Mr. Bullock. We met last year when Pa and I brought our sow to your place and mated her to that big old razorback you used to have. Remember?”
“What’s your pa’s name, son?” His tone had lost some of its edge.
“Frank. Franklin Curry. He named me Jefferson.”
“Frank Curry?” The hand holding the shotgun relaxed and the barrels dropped about two inches. “Hell, in the old days me and Frank Curry pulled the cork on more jugs than the entire Grand Army of the Republic! You’re his boy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, it sure is a small world. Who’s this you got with you?”
I introduced them. Jack touched his hat with his thumb and forefinger as a sign of greeting.
Bullock acknowledged the gesture with a nod. “Sorry about pullin’ down on you like that, mister,” he said. “I got to be careful. For all I knowed, you was another jasper tryin’ to ride through my cornfield.”
Jack perked up at that. “It happened before?” he prompted.
“Son of a bitch galloped right through this same area last week. Tore hell out of my crop over on the south forty. It was only pig corn, but it cost good money and time to plant it.”
“You see it happen?”
He shook his head. “Nope, my boy Bob was comin’ home cross-lots from school when he heard hoofs thumpin’ ground and the top log in the gate come down with a thud. Says he could hear it crashin’ through the corn for five minutes.”
“What day was this?” said Jack. His voice was calm, but I could tell he was burning up inside. So was I.
The farmer frowned, trying to think. “Let’s see; it was the day I finished plowin’ the north forty for the later corn. Friday, I reckon. No, Saturday.”
“Was it Saturday?” This time I caught an impatient edge in Jack’s tone.
“It was Saturday.”
There was a pause while Jack digested this information. Then: “You know where he come out?”
“Do I! The son of a bitch took out ten yards of good barbed wire along my western property line. Only consolation I got’s his horse will never win no beauty contest. We found enough hide stickin’ to that fence to build a whole new animal.”
“You suppose me and the boy could take a look at that spot? This sort of thing interests us.”
Bullock said. “Why not?” and swung his horse around to take us to the spot.
The path through the cornfield was nine feet wide. We crunched over the broken-down stalks of early corn for a hundred yards or so until we came to the fence, where Jack and I dismounted. The farmer remained astride his horse.
“We just about got her fixed now. That there’s some of what he took out.” Most of the fence had been replaced, but he pointed to a tangled mess of rusted barbed wire piled at the foot of a big maple tree on the edge of the cornfield. Jack reached down and detached a tuft of something from one of the barbs.
“That’s some of the hide,” explained Bullock unnecessarily. “Funny kind of stuff, ain’t it? Don’t look like no horse I ever seen.”
Jack handed me the tuft. It was just like the hair on the robe he kept tied over his bedroll.
After swapping some comments with the farmer about the weather and other unimportant things, we said our farewells and passed through the gap in the fence back onto the trail. We found some brown spots that Jack said was blood, but I can’t swear to it because it was hard to see them against the scarcely lighter brown of the bunch grass. By this time the sun had slipped below the horizon; many experienced trackers would have given up for the night, but we rode on, Jack using the faint traces of light that remained to follow a trail that only he could see. It grew so dark that I could barely see the reins in my hand, let alone the trail ahead, but still we traveled. We were ten miles north of Bullock’s farm when at last I heard him dismount.
I followed his lead. My foot brushed a small shrub and I tied the bay to it. Jack tethered the burro to a blackberry bush, but his mule had been trained to stop when its reins touched the ground, so he left it alone. A half-moon had appeared from behind the creeping cloud bank to cast a dirty gray light over the surrounding hills. As my eyes became accustomed to it, I could see Jack loosing a sack of bacon from the burro.
“I’ll get some firewood,” I volunteered.
Jack grunted a reply of some kind, and I trudged off toward the wooded area to the east.
When I returned a few minutes later with an armload of wood, Jack already had a fire going from kindling he’d picked up around the area. I was anxious to heap more wood onto the fire and get it crackling—the night air was getting nippy—and I guess I went too fast, because the next thing I knew the flames had gone out and a little wisp of smoke escaped the heap like a sigh. I braced myself. I expected Jack to sail into me like Pa used to when I did something foolish, but he didn’t. He just took out another of the matches he kept wrapped in oilcloth in his saddlebags and rekindled the fire.
Two or three minutes later, he said, “Fire’s a thing you got to be careful with. It can mean your life up in the snow country, where it gets to forty below after sundown in December.” He reached into the open saddlebag and pulled out a cast-iron skillet about eight inches in diameter. With his conventional knife he began slicing strips of bacon to lay in the pan.
“I’m sorry,
Jack,” I said.
“Don’t be. Just don’t let it happen up in them mountains, unless you like raw fish. I et some once in Colorado. Can’t say as I particularly cared for it.” His task with the knife completed, he placed the skillet atop the fire. Within a few seconds the bacon began to sizzle. The smell reminded me that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast.
He looked up and saw me watching the bacon. “Hungry?” he said, “I’m starving.”
He grunted. “Closest I ever come to starving was in Texas in ’68. That was the year me and Charlie Jones cornered that old bull I told you about near Amarillo.” He used the point of his knife to slide the bacon around in the pan and grease the surface. The frying strips hissed and spat hot grease onto his cheeks and forehead, but he appeared not to notice it. “It was three weeks after we split up.” he recalled. “A mountain lion mauled a little girl to death outside of Sierra Blanca and took off limping for the high country with a double load of buckshot in its right hip. Sheriff put out a two-hundred-dollar bounty on its hide. I carried a Spencer repeating rifle in them days: I took it and a little black-and-white burro I brung from Nogales and tracked that cat clear into the Quitman Mountains. I was six days out and six thousand feet up when I lost my burro. Just dropped clean out of sight, along with all my grub and ammunition. That left me with just the Spencer.
“There weren’t no sense in going back; it was mountain behind me and mountain up ahead, so I slung the rifle over my shoulder and headed on up the grade.” Manipulating his knife like a spatula, he slid the blade beneath the strips of bacon and deftly flipped them over. “Game was scarce, it being winter,” he continued. “Even if it wasn’t, I didn’t think it right to waste the cartridges I had in the gun on anything but mountain lion. The next day I was hungry enough to eat the business end of a skunk. Four days later I had to use both hands to put my hat back on after it fell off. By the end of the week I could feel my belly brush my backbone every time I sucked in.
“To make things worse, the grade got steeper and steeper until I had to grab ahold of the slippery rocks and pull myself up an inch at a time. All the time I kept thinking about all the steaks and potatoes swimming in dark brown gravy I would buy with that two hundred dollars. I reckon I was more than a mite crazy by that time. Two weeks out of Sierra Blanca, my hands bloody and my belly full of grass and nettles, I clumb up onto a rock shelf and fagged out with my legs hanging over the edge.
“I woke up with a ripping sound in my ear. At first I didn’t know where I was, but then I felt that hard rock under my chest and I remembered. I rubbed my eyes to clear out the sleep. And then I saw him. That ripping sound I heard was a growl, and it was coming from the throat of a mountain lion standing not fifteen feet from where I was laying with my legs dangling over the side of the ledge.”
The bacon was almost done, but I no longer cared. I hung on Jack’s words.
“They always told me that everything grows big in Texas,” he went on, “but I never put any store in it up to that moment. That cat must of stood eight hands high at the shoulder, and I reckon it would of dressed out to right around a hundred and eighty pounds if it ever got any meat on its bones. I could count its ribs from where I laid; there was twenty, ten on each side. It had come down from its lair near the peak of the mountain and stopped when it seen me. Its right hip was black with blood and its ears drooped, but when it seen I was awake it hunkered down and got ready to spring. I reckon it was as desperate for food as I was.
“Slow, because I knowed that any quick moves on my part would startle that cat into pouncing, I worked my left hand around to my right shoulder and slipped it under the buckhide sling. This weren’t no easy job, remember; I was about as near dead from starvation as a body can get and still be moving around. After about a hundred years I freed that rifle from my shoulder and sweated to get it under my arm without dropping it. And all the time that cat’s eyes was watching me, all yellow and filmy. Just waiting for me to make a wrong move. My fingers was so torn from the climb up that I could scarce feel the rifle in my hands, and I had to fumble a mite afore I found the trigger. All of a sudden I lost my grip. The action come up against the edge of the rock with a bang and that cat sprung.
“Its snarly roar echoed up and down the mountain. I seen a flash of white as its belly shot over my head, and then I stuck the barrel of the Spencer straight up and pulled the trigger. I don’t think I ever heard no more welcome sound than the baroom of that rifle going off and the sound of that cat’s guts splatting all over the rock wall behind it. The lion come down on my shoulder like a ton of bricks and I near fell, but then it glanced off and went tumbling into open space. I found its carcass at the bottom of the mountain. I et mountain lion all the way back to Sierra Blanca.”
At the end of his story, Jack removed the skillet from the little campfire and tossed the strips of bacon into a pair of tin plates he had taken from his gear. We ate in silence for some minutes, Jack using his knife while I made use of the ancient utensils he carried and washed it down with water from my tin cup. I was the first to break the peace.
“Jack,” I said, staring into my cup, “what are you going to do with that buffalo after you find it?”
“Shoot it,” he said. He swabbed a bit of bacon around in his plate to clean up the grease.
“No. I mean after that.”
He stopped eating. “I don’t know. I ain’t give it much thought. Reckon I’ll take the hide and leave the rest for the wolves and buzzards.”
“Seems like an awful waste.”
“Well, how about this?” He put his plate to one side and wiped his greasy fingers on his shirt. “Me and you, we’ll build us a bonfire and eat buffalo steaks for a week. The rest we’ll make into jerky and split it up between us to have on the trail. That way we’ll be paying the critter the respect he deserves, and appease our hunger at the same time. Ever eat hump steak?”
I shook my head.
“Well, you’re in for a treat.” He got to his feet and went over to check our mounts.
It was the work of twenty minutes to wash the dishes and get the camp ready for bed. Jack had only to spread out his soft buffalo robe on the ground to make himself a comfortable berth, but I was able to create something almost as good by bunching grass and last year’s fallen maple leaves into a makeshift mattress near the fire. I didn’t realize how completely exhausted I was until I crawled under Pa’s old blanket and settled my aching muscles into the soft natural cushion. I had no trouble getting to sleep. My dreams were of buffaloes and mountain lions.
Chapter Four
There was no dawn next morning, just a slight lightening of the sky to the east. During the night the bank of clouds I had taken the measure of the day before had rolled in to create a great dark ceiling that blotted out the blue of the sky and cast its gloomy shadow over everything. The air was raw.
“Wet weather coming,” warned Jack, in the midst of saddling his mule. As if to confirm his statement, a rumbling peal of thunder uncurled itself over our heads like a mule skinner’s whip. I was thinking that our wisest course lay in making for shelter as soon as possible, but Jack explained that you could tell how close a storm was by counting the seconds between the lightning flash and the thunder, and that we had plenty of time, as there was almost a full minute between them. I reckon somebody up there didn’t know this piece of useful information, though, because we had made less than a hundred yards on the trail when the clouds opened up and dumped about three hundred gallons of water over our heads in the first minute.
There wasn’t a house or even a lean-to for miles around. Well, there was Bullock’s place ten miles back, but getting Jack to double back on a “hot” trail was like inducing a dog to stand still while you bobbed its tail. I gave up after a couple of tries and huddled my chin into the collar of my canvas jacket while Pa’s bay, as game as ever, splashed forward through the soupy mud without so much as a whinny of complaint. I’ll say this for my partner, though; anytime he wanted to,
he could have taken that buffalo robe from behind his saddle and draped it around himself and it would have shed that rain like a slicker, but he knew I had nothing for my own protection, so he left it where it was. Some of you might say, well, if he was so considerate why didn’t he give the robe to me? The answer is that he was too considerate to risk insulting me by offering me something he had disdained for himself. That’s what a partnership is all about; when one suffers, you both suffer, and if that arrangement doesn’t appeal to you then you had best go it alone, because no one is going to want to accompany you.
Jack said he knew of an abandoned building west of Quartz Mountain that had once served as a line shack on a cattle range owned by someone named Ford Harper, but that to get there we had first to cross the South Umpqua River and then follow along its right bank for another five miles through the driving rain.
I said, “Sure, why not? We can’t get any wetter than we already are,” and so we swung east toward a fording place Jack remembered from his scouting days during the Indian wars.
The only thing wrong with this plan is that when we got to the place Jack remembered, he wasn’t sure that that was the place at all. It had been a lot of years, he explained, and with the rain coming down in sheets and chopping the water into a muddy mess it was hard to tell just how deep it was. He added that even if this were the right place, there was no guarantee that the river had not undergone a change and that the only safe spot to cross was now several miles downstream. We were in a pretty fix.
“One thing’s sure,” he said, shouting to be heard above the downpour that streamed off the brim of his hat and drenched his buckskins, “we won’t never know if this is the right place unless we give it a try.” So saying, he twisted the leather halter by which the little burro was secured to his saddle horn around his left wrist, kicked his mule, and all three plunged forward into the swelling torrent.
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