High Country : A Novel

by Willard Wyman

  But telling it as he had had never meant thinking about it the way he did that afternoon in Cold Canyon. He told Thomas Haslam about hesitating over the hunter’s torn body, watching as the wounded bear circled, wanting him to leave, nurse his great hulk deep in some hidden glade—live to reclaim his canyon, his solitude. About the bear’s finally charging after all, as though to go out with these men who had betrayed him, injured him so deeply, go out with them or fix them so they could never injure anything again.

  And so Ty had had to shoot, his bullet going to its mark but the bear withstanding even that, and another shot still. Only the final one, fired into the huge bear’s anguished mouth, had finally put it all to rest.

  And he told him about turning to the dying hunter, the blood bubbling from the torn face, an ear and the scalp gone, an arm all but ripped away, a leg broken and akimbo, the man speaking through the orangy froth of his battered lungs, Ty bending to hear him say, “Kill me.” The voice pushing blood from the torn mouth. “Kill me.”

  But Ty not able to do it. Knowing he should but turning away, stumbling back—leaving some part of him behind with the huge bear and the dying man and the torn earth. He returned with the others to find the broken life still there. No talk from the ravaged body now, just the bubbling flecks of blood telling them how stubborn, against reason, life can be.

  They stopped in Fenton’s old camp, brought in what was left of the man on a crude litter, made a place for him to die as Ty dressed the wounds of the other, fashioned a splint for the arm just as Fenton had fashioned one for Bob Ring’s leg in what seemed to Ty another life, another place.

  The hunter died in the deep darkness of the overcast night. Ty mantied him up in the morning and packed the broken body out on Cottontail, as steady a mule as he had for a task more somber than any he’d ever known.

  Word came out ahead of them. The Forest Service was there, waiting. Two of Spec’s cousins, skinners, were already going back in to weigh and measure and dress out the great bear. The officers did their duty: sent the broken hunter on to the hospital, took the mantie from the torn body of the other, examined it, sat down with Ty to write their reports, to answer the hard questions reporters were asking. The reporters astonished as they looked from the body to the mountains and back to the haggard packer, wanting more but making do with the spare facts he offered.

  “Hard to know what ate at me so,” Ty told Thomas Haslam. “Must have been that the bear could live with us so long—with Fenton and Spec and the rest. Like we lied to him. To ourselves.”

  “About what?” Haslam asked. He was moved hearing Ty speak this way. “You had to pull that trigger.”

  “Not about that. By then one of us had to go.” Ty looked out across the meadow, watched his horses moving higher, seeking the sun. “I mean about thinking we could have it forever.”

  Thomas Haslam thought of all those deaths pouring in on Ty at once, everything he’d counted on gone.

  “I’m sorry about Willie,” he said simply, looking at Ty. “The child.”

  “Maybe it was in the cards,” Ty said. “Maybe she saw something coming.”

  If Willie did see anything coming, Ty never knew it. She was Willie until the moment they wheeled her into the delivery room. But she’d known shooting the bear had changed him, seen that look on his face when he came down from the mountains. It was the same he’d had after Fenton died. After Cody Jo left. The same look he’d had after Bernard.

  Ty hadn’t wanted to seem gloomy. He’d taken Willie dancing, big as she was. But she’d known something was missing. Something about the promise, always there in the way he danced, was gone. He couldn’t lose himself in the music, surrender to its rhythms.

  When the Sister of Providence came to him, the same who’d counseled Willie in school, saying her prayer in that clear, beautiful voice, Ty knew. He hardly heard the doctor’s explanation. “Tried to hold the blood, save the child, the rupture unexpected.” He’d turned away as though there was no need to hear at all, walked the night away through a town suddenly strange to him, across a campus finished for him, past houses closed to him.

  And so they talked, Thomas Haslam and Ty, the doctor knowing most of it but not how it had come to Ty, not until that afternoon in Cold Canyon when Haslam found he had to swallow his own feelings away. Glad as he was that Ty could finally talk it out, he found it hard to hear it out, to watch Ty’s face—the acceptance in it, the finality.

  The Haslams had been in the South Fork with Ty earlier that very season, bringing with them Opie Kittle, a packer whose sons wanted nothing to do with the Sierra pack station the Kittle family had run for almost a century. They’d told Kittle about Ty, and it hadn’t taken the old packer a day of watching Ty work before he offered him a job. By the end of the trip he’d offered him half-interest in his whole operation, which had only made Ty smile. Opie Kittle saw why when they came out of the woods and Willie was there, her belly a watermelon and her voice clear as mountain water.

  “She’d make any man stay to home,” he said to Ty. “But things change. Write when you’re ready. Ain’t seen a packer like you in a lifetime.” He squinted up at Ty, liking everything about him. “High country’s just right for you. And where I pack is the highest we got.” He watched Ty settle Cottontail’s breeching between the sawbucks, swing the breast collar onto that, the cinches up across all of it, lifting the saddle and pads together, switching them so the pads would dry where he stacked them. “It’s where you ought to be.”

  Thomas Haslam reminded Ty of that when he came from San Francisco for Willie’s funeral. All of them were there, Cody Jo and Bliss Holliwell too, even Beth and Loretta, trying not to be noticed but tearing up when they saw Ty.

  He was with Bob Ring, looking at them all, speaking to them all. But it was as if he didn’t see them at all, as if he were a wooden man being told where to turn and what to say.

  They buried Willie and the child in the Catholic cemetery next to Willie’s mother. Bob Ring limped along behind the coffin with Ty, his face creased—everything about him looking older with each crooked step he took. Ty seemed to be looking beyond the coffin, beyond everyone, looking at something else, someplace else.

  Cody Jo began crying, holding Buck’s arm as though it might save her from something, burying her face in his shoulder.

  “Oh, Buck. He’ll never have it now. I thought someone like Willie . . .” Buck held her, his eyes wet as he looked across her buried head at Bliss Holliwell, whose face was just as anguished as Buck’s.

  “I was so wrong.” She looked from one to the other through her tears. “How could I have been so wrong?”

  Ty didn’t seem to hear it when Thomas Haslam reminded him of Opie Kittle. He didn’t seem to hear it when the banker called him in and told him they would continue with the mortgage on the house but couldn’t be responsible for the back-country, wanted him to convert the packing business into day rides, start a guest ranch, do what was safe.

  But he heard something when Opie Kittle called and told him he still wanted Ty to come and run things, that the half-interest offer held. He didn’t even seem to consider it, just said he would come.

  Two weeks later Cody Jo heard about it. She wrote telling the banker to sell, to settle the cash on Ty, that she’d take care of the details.

  When it was done, there was enough for Ty to buy a decent truck and a four-horse trailer and have some left over.

  When spring came, he loaded Smoky and Cottontail and Loco, deciding to take little Apple too. She wasn’t young anymore, but she was Willie’s.

  “They won’t miss her,” he told Buck, who helped him load. “Won’t be much use to them anyhow.”

  But Buck knew better. Buck knew Ty wanted to take some of Willie with him when he left.

  34

  Coming into the Country

  Opie Kittle—Mr. Kittle to almost everyone in Big Pine and up and down Owens Valley—had never seen anything like Ty Hardin.

  “Pulled in h
ere one night with two horses and two mules. Next morning had shoes on all four. Started on my mules next. Hardly said a word.” He shook his head to punctuate it. “Ain’t that the goddamndest?”

  “Maybe you’ve got your man.” Harvey Kittle, Opie’s youngest son, watched as Ty caught up another. “Now you can move to Bishop like you had good sense.”

  Harvey was a dentist. He’d crippled a leg when he was a boy, doing things with Opie Kittle’s mules he didn’t like doing in the first place, which had set him against mules once and for all. But with one brother gone in the war and the other dealing faro in Reno, he knew Opie was his responsibility. It just wasn’t easy, given his father’s devotion to his mules.

  “Glad he found you.” Harvey Kittle watched Ty quiet a leggy mule who didn’t like the rasp on his hoof. Ty let the hoof down, rubbed the mule’s hock before turning to look at Harvey, who had the same scrunched-up features as his father. But his bow tie was so perfectly knotted and his shirt so perfectly white, he didn’t look like he belonged anywhere near Opie’s barn.

  “Drove down from Bishop,” Harvey said. “See if I can keep him from throwin’ saddles on these mules and startin’ up a trail a sane man wouldn’t even salt. Not yet, leastways.”

  It was all right with Ty that there was no introduction. They knew about one another already, and they both had a soft spot for Opie Kittle.

  “So far he spends most of his time bringing me Cokes from the cooler.”

  “That is restrained, for him. But it won’t last. He was best for so long he still believes he is.”

  “Quit crabbin’.” Opie Kittle appeared. “Ty’s got everything under control.”

  “Then let’s hop in the car and go. Got a root canal in the morning. Watchin’ you and these mules makes my hands shaky.”

  “A beer won’t hurt your hands. Got things to show Ty.”

  “Show him over the phone.”

  “Never learned to point over the phone.”

  Ty opened the cooler and got out the beer, handing them each one and cracking one himself. He was smiling. And he hadn’t smiled for a long time.

  It was the work that made things better, he thought, that and listening to Opie Kittle talk about the Sierra. Looking up at the great range didn’t tell him a lot, but looking at the photographs spread around the little ranch house, hearing Kittle describe what was going on in them, did.

  And he liked listening to Harvey and Opie talk, the dentist scrubbed and tidy but still his father’s son, still comfortable with his father’s language and eccentricities. People came to Harvey Kittle from up and down the valley, getting him to take care of their good teeth and pull their bad. And all of them asked about his father as soon as Harvey got his hands out of their mouth—what trips the old packer was taking, how many mules he was packing, what kind of help he was having trouble finding.

  Opie Kittle was always having trouble finding help, the kind that did things the way he wanted. That’s why both Harvey and Opie were so happy to watch Ty move through a day’s work. In no time they were as comfortable with him as with each other. And when he talked, they didn’t just warm up their own arguments. They listened. Partly because it was a surprise to hear him talk at all but mostly because he said things about packing that even Opie had forgotten, if Opie had known them in the first place.

  What worried them now was how to introduce Ty to the Sierra. They could take him up to their corrals at Goat Creek, but what then? How was he to know what was beyond the passes? Opie wanted against reason to be the one to show him, but with all his ailments that was out, which didn’t keep them from chewing at the idea anyway, arguing and swearing at each other and rooting around for a solution. It came the minute Sugar Zumaldi showed up and said he’d be happy to work a few trips—if Opie would haul his burros up to Goat Creek come August. That’s when Sugar planned to take his whole family and vanish into the Sierra, the mountain range he loved almost as he loved the family he took into it.

  “Lucked out,” Opie Kittle told Ty. “Ain’t a man knows the country better. He’s took me places that surprised his goddamn burros.”

  In two months’ time Ty would find out how true that was, be astonished at the little hanging valleys Sugar would slip into, where the feed was plentiful and the water good. Sugar seemed to find the same comfort in mountains that Spec found. He made Ty at home in them too—the mountains as much in Sugar’s blood as Ty’s mules were in his.

  And there was reason. Sugar Zumaldi’s father was among the last of the Basques to run sheep in the Sierra, his father’s father one of the first. The sturdy drover shipped into a strange country to do what other men would not, knowing little of English but everything of animals and weather and mountains and learning the Sierra by seeking out every nook and cranny where there was grass. And each pass that led to more.

  “Hoofed locusts,” John Muir had called them, “leaving nothing.” But the sheep of the Zumaldis always seemed to leave plenty, the Zumaldis more interested in what was on the other side of canyon walls, on the next bench, out of sight around the next reach of rock than in exhausting the feed where they stood. It was their legacy to Sugar, who found it in him as a hawk finds flight. Ty sensed it when they met, Sugar doing what needed to be done but his dark eyes on the great range—or on Apple, the little mare he took to as no other. Ty watched him favor her, brush her, give her treats, walk out to bring her in as quietly as Spec moving through woods—a Spec who liked horses and mules and packing in a way the real Spec did not.

  Opie Kittle had moved up to Bishop by then, giving Ty the ranch house, Sugar sleeping in the bunk room where Ty had started out. But Opie was back with them more often than not, enjoying watching Ty and Sugar as he enjoyed nothing else—except his mules.

  “Why call him Sugar?” Ty watched as the Basque brushed Apple. “Had a mule named Sugar once. Good one too.”

  Opie looked to see if Ty was serious. “Don’t know about your mule. But watch Sugar with his burros and you’ll know. He’ll call and them rascals come runnin’ and fartin’ just to get close. He don’t pack feed, just sugar lumps.”

  Ty watched Sugar Zumaldi go on with his brushing.

  “Well, you can get some farther with sugar than with vinegar.”

  “With a colt too?” Opie Kittle liked knowing what was going on in his new packer’s head. “A mustang?”

  “With most everything,” Ty said, “that you got to live with.”

  Two weeks later they herded all their stock up the twisting road to Goat Creek. The road dusty and hot until they reached the cool of the timber, climbing still higher to corrals perched by the tumbling stream, shaded from the late sun by the looming Sierra crest.

  “We’re higher than the peaks in the Swan.” Ty saw the trail threading its way still higher along the canyon wall. “And we still got three thousand feet before the pass.”

  “That’s why it’s Goat Pass,” Sugar said. “Grandfather claimed goats is the only ones not to get dizzy when they cross.”

  “I crossed once without gettin’ dizzy.” Opie Kittle had trucked up a load of hay, inching along so slowly he’d only then caught up with them.

  “I believe I was drunk.” He hunched into his coat, the cold coming in now. “Or hung over. I forget which.”

  “One’s more fun,” Ty said. “But harder to remember. You sure Sugar’s girl can handle the cooking? We’ll have our hands full with all this stock.”

  “Sugar’s kids can do anything. And Nina’s his best. It’s when they leave that’s got me worried. Once he gathers his family with them burros, he just disappears.”

  “Nina’s a fine cook.” Sugar tied Apple to the hitch rack and unsaddled. He’d led her most of the way, liking to walk more than ride. He looked so fresh to Ty he seemed ready to go another ten miles.

  “The Basques eat good, so they work good.” Sugar stacked Apple’s saddle on the hitch rack. “Know how to live in the mountains.”

  “That’s the trouble, you damn bandit.
You ain’t stayin’ long enough to teach Ty. How’s he gonna eat well and work good when he’s alone?”

  Ty looked at the trail climbing away above them, crossing raw cliffs to wind high above the plunging stream.

  “I got an idea.” He looked at Opie Kittle. “If Sugar’ll show me that country, maybe I know who can take care of the rest.”

  “Better be a smart idea. Don’t want that desert trash again ...or them drunk boys from Olancha.”

  “It’ll seem a smart idea on some days,” Ty said. “Not so smart on others. But it’ll sure keep things lively.”

  That night, after they’d set up the wall tent and Opie had gone back to Bishop, Ty lit the lantern and sat down to write Angie and Buck.

  35

  Over Goat Pass

  They loose-herded the stock over the pass to cross the Sierra and pick up the first party. Sugar and the girl pushed the mules behind Ty as he let Smoky feel her way up the headwall. A chill went up his spine when they crested. He pivoted and pulled his hat tight, watching the mules gather themselves in the hard wind, noses to the impossibly narrow trail. Behind he saw the purplish gray of Owens Valley, ahead cliffs spilling their talus into blue lakes. Beyond the lakes the green of meadows, darkening pods of forests dropping into canyons. It swept him up like a leaf. He couldn’t believe what they’d crossed to get here, what they found when they were here.

  “I seen that look before.” Sugar rode Apple up beside him as they skirted the first lake. “It ain’t always this good.”

  “It’s this country. It opens up so . . . it opens me up.”

  “It can close you down too. I wanted a good day. For you. But not this good. Ain’t so pretty when it’s lightning. Snow.”