Hard Winter Page 7

  “The oldest brother got in trouble in the river. The younger one jumped in to save him, but Tavish . . . he’s the young one . . . couldn’t swim a lick, and they both drowned. That happened when Lainie was thirteen. That’s the real reason why the MacDunns left Scotland. Oh, they knew Mister Gow . . . he’d been up here for more than a decade . . . and after Simon and Tavish died, the major wanted to put Scotland behind him. He has. So has Lainie. I don’t think you could say the same about Blaire. That’s why she teaches school, why she runs this bunkhouse like an orphanage. She wants her two sons back.” His grin widened. “Lainie didn’t tell you that, eh?”

  I wet my lips. Looking back, I realized at first I’d been jealous that my pard, my best friend and bunky, good old Tommy O’Hallahan was spending more time with Lainie MacDunn than he spent with me. Now me and Lainie hadn’t gotten off to a good start, what with her riling me so, but she’d become my friend, too. Likely the first friend who was a girl I’d ever had. I never counted that old red-haired fat woman in Mobeetie who kept telling me she’d never had a friend as good as me, her being roostered eight days a week, and a whore to boot.

  Right then, when Tommy was giving me this look, pleased to be telling me something, and even happier to know his words were stinging me good, I knew Tommy was jealous of me. Shucks, I spent maybe twenty minutes with Lainie on Saturday evenings, and a few minutes after school. That’s all. Lainie sat across from Tommy in the schoolhouse, while I was stuck between some freckle-faced boy whose name I’ve long forgotten and Camdan Gow. Lainie stayed as close to Tommy as my butt stayed to the saddle.

  “I reckon we talk about other things,” I said, and Tommy’s face turned red. Hadn’t meant nothing by it. It was the truth, is all.

  Tommy hit me first, a real chicken-livered thing to do, me with both hands in my pockets, and I somersaulted over my bunk, and fell to the floor. Tommy let out a curse, and dived right after me. I remember hearing Camdan Gow yell: “Fight!” Next thing, I knew, I was on my feet, fists swinging wildly, Tommy grunting, getting in some good punches. I tasted blood. Couldn’t see a thing, blinded by tears, but I could tell I was doing my share of damage.

  “Go get him, Texas!”

  “Kick his butt, Hawkins!”

  “Stay in there!”

  “Use your left, Tommy!”

  Only us boys filled the bunkhouse. Gene Hardee had ridden off to oversee a herd coming up from Nebraska, and Ish was the only grown-up man, other than the major, who was at the ranch that night, but Ish must have been in the barn or privy or somewhere.

  I busted Tommy’s nose wide open. Knew that because I heard Camdan Gow say so. Then we both were on the floor, kicking. Tommy was trying his best to get his thumbs into my eyeballs, with me holding him off, but growing weaker. Maybe we would have killed each other if Ish hadn’t busted through the door.

  “Fire!” he yelled first. Then: “What the hell’s going on here?” He didn’t wait for any explanation, he was shoving through, tossing Camdan Gow one way, Walter Butler another. My eyes started to clear, and I focused on Tommy’s enraged face. Behind him appeared Ish, who jerked Tommy off me, and threw him like he was nothing but a canvas war bag. Threw him toward the door.

  “Get up!” Ish was yelling at all of us boys. “And get out. We got a prairie fire to put out.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Didn’t see raging blazes, no smoke, just a small woman, a stranger, standing next to Mrs. MacDunn, and a Negro cowhand, who had driven the spring wagon. He was switching out the lathered team. She stood weaving, fanning her face, talking excitedly to Mrs. MacDunn.

  “Mother!” Camdan Gow sprinted ahead of me, and wrapped his arms around that tall, frail spectacle of a female. Almost knocked her down. “What is it, Mother?”

  “Prairie fire.” She looked past her son and at the major, who just stepped out of the house, throwing fancy leather braces over his shoulders. “You’ve got to help us. Please help us. I’ve ridden. . . .”

  I reckon she was about to collapse from the strain of it all, because Mrs. MacDunn took her, helped her toward the house.

  “Where?” the major asked.

  “North of Old Agency,” she said.

  The major turned. “Fishtorn, get these boys mounted. All of them.”

  “Not Camdan!” Mrs. Gow pleaded, but her son wouldn’t have none of that. He told her he was going, and the major agreed.

  “We must all go. Tristram will need every hand he can get, dry and windy as it is. Blaire, you and Lainie. . . .”

  “We are going, too,” Mrs. MacDunn told him. Yes, she was the only person I ever met who could make the major back down.

  * * * * *

  Rode all night, we did, taking advantage of a half moon, but even before dawn we could smell burning grass. Our eyes started to sting. At the Gow Ranch, we fortified ourselves with coffee, and, it being daylight by then, Mrs. MacDunn noticed my face, swollen, bruised, caked with dried blood.

  “My goodness, Jim,” she said. “What happened to you?”

  “I run into something at the bunkhouse,” I said. That wasn’t enough, so I explained further: “It being dark and all.”

  At first, she halfway believed me, but Tommy stood just a few rods behind me, and, when she spotted his smashed lips and that shiner I’d given him, she asked: “Did you run into the same thing, Tommy?”

  “Just about,” he said, which got Walter Butler to giggling like a girl.

  The major ordered the girls to stay behind at the ranch, then led the rest of us to the fire, but not before he gave the girls one last order: “If the fire gets too close, get into the root cellar. Do not try to outrun it. You will die if you do.”

  Never seen a prairie fire, have you, boy? Pray to God you never do. Like you’re standing by the hinges of hell, watching the inferno come straight to you.

  The wind blasted us with heat, smoke so thick, boiling, blotting out the sun, the mountains, the sky—just something awful. Couldn’t believe how fast those flames moved, how hot, how intense. Nobody had any idea what started the fire. Dry lightning perhaps. Good a guess as any.

  The wind came from the west and northwest—almost always did—and just kept pushing that fire.

  “Thank God you’re here!” Tristram Gow sprinted toward us, pumping the major’s hand, but the major turned away from Mr. Gow, and barked an order at us to get moving.

  “What are we supposed to do?” Walter Butler asked.

  I knew. Me and Tommy had seen fires in Texas, some worse than this one. We hobbled our horses, and walked toward the inferno, me emptying my canteen over a gunny sack, then tossing the canteen to the ground, and Tommy toting his rain slicker, not saying a word, not looking in my direction, just walking on. I pulled my bandanna over my mouth and nose, and just started pounding the flames, taking a place beside one of Mr. Gow’s hands, armed with a broom. Must have been two dozen or more cowboys out there, swinging, swatting, sweating, but I didn’t spot John Henry. Fighting right alongside us waddies were even a couple of grangers trying to make something out of their homesteads. Wasn’t but a handful of farmers up here in those days, this being cattle country. And sheepherders. There were plenty of sheepmen, most of them north or west of the Bar DD and 7-3 Connected ranges.

  This fire could have been wilder. Grass had been pretty much overgrazed. That helped a mite. Still, it turned brutal real quick.

  We attacked those flames. Backing up to keep from getting burned alive. Couldn’t hardly breathe.

  Tell you the truth, I was still a heap mad at Tommy, so I hit those flames with that wet gunny sack like I was punching Tommy’s nose out the back of his head. Pictured myself doing it. I thought the long ride would have calmed me down, but it didn’t do nothing but give me a lot of hours to hurt and fume, especially since I’d been riding right behind that spring wagon that was carrying the womenfolk, including Lainie.

  Might could have burned to death, mad as I was, if it hadn’t been for Tommy.

  Ther
e I stood, that gunny sack dried out by now, starting to smolder, and I felt someone pulling on my shoulder, soft at first, then almost jerking me off my feet. Eyes pained from the smoke, heat, dust, I whirled to find Tommy.

  “Move!”

  “Get away from me!” I barked at him. Went back to the fire, but Tommy grabbed me, turned me around, shoved me forward.

  “What’s the matter”—he coughed, pointed—“with you?”

  That’s when I realized that me and Tommy were the only ones still at the line. Everybody else had pulled back another two hundred yards or so.

  “Move, Jim!” Tommy yelled. “Run!” I was hacking something awful, but I staggered on ahead, past a burned-up broomstick that Mr. Gow’s hired man must have dropped, felt Tommy behind me. We got back to our horses, where the major told us to mount up and ride for a hill. We’d make another stand there.

  Which is what we did, and that’s where I found John Henry Kenton. Never would have dreamed I’d ever see him like that, his hands gripping a Fire Fly—that’s a single-wheeled hoe, cultivator, and plow, all in one—helping a sodbuster unload it from a wagon.

  Mr. Gow kept yelling at Major MacDunn that plowing would save the grass on the other side.

  “It will not work!” the major barked.

  “It might,” Mr. Gow pleaded.

  “The winds are too strong, Tristram. The fire will leap across your break.”

  “Not if we make it wide enough.”

  “There’s no time for that! Kenton!”

  John Henry gladly took his hands off that plow.

  “Your name is Kenton, right?”

  John Henry’s head bobbed.

  “Get your saddle gun, Kenton, and follow me.” Next, the major threw me a sheathed skinning knife. John Henry understood—can’t say I did—and Mr. Gow ran to the plow that John Henry had just abandoned. Which was fine with Major MacDunn.

  “You do it your way,” the major said. “I need you, too, O’Hallahan. And you.” He pointed at Ish. “Rest of you, plow your fields.”

  I’ve thought about it a lot over the years. I’d like to think the major was doing what had to be done. Maybe it was the major who saved the rest of that range, maybe it was Mr. Gow and the farm equipment some sodbusters had brought over. Maybe it was the both of them. I’d like to believe that the major wasn’t . . . well . . . no point guessing. Like I said, I never could predict the major, nor figure out his motives. And he wasn’t the only cattleman who fought a prairie fire that way.

  John Henry knew what to do. He shot the first steer we rode up to, trying to run from the onrushing fire, and didn’t stop, kept riding ahead till he had killed another. The major galloped over a hill, where his rifle boomed.

  Didn’t disgust me, skinning that dead steer. Wasn’t like earlier that spring in Texas. I’d figured out what we were doing by then. Basically I just gutted that animal, split it in two, skinning one side. Wasn’t like I was letting it bleed out before carving up steaks. About the time I was finished, John Henry rode up, and I helped him tie the end of his lariat around the dead steer’s carcass. “Get that other one I killed,” he told me. Then he spurred that big sorrel and loped out, dragging the bloody steer over the flames, right on the edge of the fire. He rode about a hundred yards, turned the sorrel around, rode right back, pulling the steer over the flames.

  Tommy followed the major over the hill to skin the beef he’d killed, and I chased after Ish to the other steer John Henry had shot dead. Skinned that one, too, sort of, and watched Ish drag its body. By then, the major was pulling the one he’d killed and Tommy had skinned.

  The major, John Henry, and Ish rode in front of the flames, just a little ways, then turned around. Reason for that was to keep the horses’ hoofs from getting charred. Tried to, anyway, although Ish Fishtorn had to kill the horse he was riding—its legs got so burned. That was the cost. Part of it.

  I watched in awe for a moment, then, coughing, I hurried back to Mr. Gow. Had to help. Which is one of the good things I remember about my first year in Montana. You hear about how sodbusters and ranchers never got along, how sheepmen and cowboys hated each other, but in Montana, we all worked together, let each other alone. There were no range wars, nothing like that. Not then. Wouldn’t say we respected each other, but we let each other be. On that day, up along Muddy Creek, sodbusters, and ranchers, and sheepmen fought that fire, side-by-side.

  Well, the cattle we’d killed, the break the others had dug—we stopped the fire, let the flames just burn themselves out, and, while Mr. Gow and his son rode around the blackened earth to see how bad things were, the major led the rest of us back to the Gow headquarters. The grangers packed up their plows, went back toward their homesteads. The sheepmen went back to their flocks. Nothing left at the 7-3 Connected but cowboys, faces so blackened, hair singed, so filthy they looked like something out of a bad dream.

  Still coughing like a lunger, eyes red, face smeared with soot, I could hardly breathe, but Mrs. Gow made me drink some tea, and she just sat beside me, washing my face, bathing my eyes with a cool, damp towel, me too tuckered out to resist. Didn’t like anybody fretting over me, nursing me, but I’d taken the worst of it. Nobody else got so much smoke in his lungs, but it was my fault. Hadn’t been so riled at Tommy, I wouldn’t have almost gotten myself burned like bacon. Good thing was that I wasn’t mad at Tommy any more, even if I saw him sitting on the ground, eating his supper while talking sweetly to Lainie.

  “I am so glad we didn’t have to go into that root cellar,” Mrs. Gow told me.

  The ranch wasn’t much to look at. Wondered what John Henry thought of it. I mean, Major MacDunn had a real house, but the Gow place wasn’t nothing but a soddie, and the bunkhouse was a dugout. Pretty uninspiring, and the Gows had been in Montana a lot longer than the MacDunns. Except for Mrs. Gow. Melvina was her name.

  “I hate the root cellar,” she told me.

  “How come?” I asked. It looked deep enough to keep a lot of food, probably a man like the major could even stand up inside it. Come in handy during a bad winter, and I warrant the major had been right. Even had the flames been higher, the wind a bit stronger, the grass taller, I imagine the major would have been right, and the women would have been spared had they taken refuge inside the root cellar.

  “It’s like a tomb,” she said. She wasn’t looking at me, just staring off at the smoky haze. The sinking sun was just a wild orange ball, soft, fuzzy. She shook and sighed.

  “And the wind . . .”

  “It blows out here,” I admitted.

  “Do you ever get used to it?”

  I shrugged, suddenly wanting to be with John Henry, even Tommy, even Mrs. MacDunn.

  She smiled at me, feeling better I guess, and asked how I was doing. “I’ll be fine,” I said, though my lungs still ached.

  “I have only been here since March,” she said. “Tristram did not want me to come until he felt the ranch was secure.”

  “I thought Mister Gow’s been here for ten years.”

  “Eleven,” she said. “Camdan and I did not make the journey till . . .” Her face changed. She looked horrified, and I didn’t know what to make out of it, till she asked: “Good heavens, child, what happened to your face?”

  “Run into something in the bunkhouse,” I mumbled.

  * * * * *

  Well, the ladies decided to fix us a celebration supper, and went to making baking-powder biscuits, beef stew. Mrs. Gow even went into the root cellar she hated so and come out with a bottle of Dewar’s, which she passed around. Even let me and Tommy have a swig. Walter Butler wouldn’t taste it, though. ’Course, John Henry took the biggest pull on that bottle.

  Long past dark, Mr. Gow and his son rode up, while we was celebrating, bragging about all our heroics, telling some fine lies. Me and Tommy laughing aplenty, but that was like us two. Fought like brothers, ’cause we really were brothers, but seldom held a grudge. Mrs. Gow, who hadn’t even sampled that Dewar’s, was showing us some n
ew dance popular over in Scotland, trying to get Ish Fishtorn to learn how to make those steps, and I swear the major slapped his thighs and laughed so hard his eyes teared. Till Mr. Gow rode right up to him.

  Guess we had started that fandango way too early.

  “You just had to do it,” Mr. Gow said, his lips tight, face white underneath all that soot, all that rage.

  “I saved your ranch, Gow,” the major said.

  “Tristram . . . ,” Mrs. Gow began.

  “Shut up, Melvina.”

  Camdan, on a buckskin right behind his father, looked paler than his father. His mother brought her hands to her mouth. I wanted to be as far away from that place as possible.

  “Your firebreak would never have held, Gow,” the major said.

  “Not as dry as it has been.”

  “I do not fault your methods,” Mr. Gow said. “But you. . . .” That was about as close as I ever come to hearing Mr. Gow cuss a man. I swear Mr. Gow started to cry. “Thousands of steers and heifers, but, you, you . . . you killed a magnificent, five-hundred dollar Aberdeen Angus bull!”

  Chapter Twelve

  Summer seemed to pass quickly after we rode back to the Bar DD, leaving Mr. Gow grieving over the loss of his prime bull, leaving Camdan Gow with his folks, and a lot of burned-up range.

  I’d go to school, read some with Lainie, watch Lainie and Tommy hold hands. I’d work with Gray Boy and some other widow-making bronc’s. I chopped wood. Gathered dried cow dung. Mended leather. Practiced my ciphers. Rode Crabtown. Listened to Ish Fishtorn’s stories in the bunkhouse. Played some mumblety-peg with Walter Butler. So things went.

  The better days of life were ours;

  The worst can be but mine:

  The sun that cheers, the storm that lowers,

  Shall never more be thine.