Buffalo Summer
Nadia Nichols
“I know nothing about buffalo.”
Pony’s words were clipped and brusque.
“You know all you need to know,” Pete told her. “You worked a whole summer with the tribal buffalo herd.”
Pony snatched up the stack of papers she’d been marking. Her heart was hammering and her mouth was dry.
Pete continued. “I told Caleb McCutcheon I’d ask around for someone who could help him. You’ll live right there on the ranch. McCutcheon’s a good man and the Bow and Arrow is beautiful….”
“I appreciate your coming, Pete,” she said. “But I’m not interested.”
“Take the job, Pony. It pays more than you make here as a teacher or what you’d make over the summer working for some farmer.” Pete turned and walked out without another word.
Pony returned to her desk. She wanted to ignore what Pete had said, but he was right. She needed the money.
But Caleb McCutcheon would look her up and down and try not to laugh. He would probably make an effort to be polite—Pete had said he was a good, kind man. But he’d think that a woman applying for the job of managing a herd of buffalo was ridiculous.
And he would be right!
Dear Reader,
Even in this age of routine space travel, the American West has the power to evoke images of a time when buffalo roamed in herds beyond number, a time when the wind blew across plains so vast and over mountains so tall that all of eternity could not measure the boundaries of it. No animal was more closely associated with the West, or was more powerful, both physically and spiritually, than the buffalo.
For the most part, the West we romanticize is gone, paved over and plowed under by the relentless tide of humanity seeking to settle and civilize everything that is wild. The great herds of buffalo are also gone, hunted to near extinction in the nineteenth century, and the sound of their thundering hoofbeats is only a memory…or is it?
Buffalo Summer explores the possibility of returning the buffalo to their native range and restoring these venerable denizens of the wild to the American West. It also explores the conflicts and courageous hearts of two people from two vastly different cultures struggling to find common ground in the midst of a sometimes very hostile and chaotic world. Caleb McCutcheon and his herd manager, Pony Young Bear, take up the story where Montana Dreaming leaves off, and together they bring the history of the legendary Bow and Arrow full circle.
Enjoy the journey.
Nadia Nichols
Buffalo Summer
Nadia Nichols
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Thank you, Grandmother, for teaching me the old ways.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam…
—Brewster Higley, 1873
PONY YOUNG BEAR’S TRUCK was old. It had belonged to her older brother, Steven, who had gotten it from one of the elders, who had gotten it from some government program that found used trucks for needy people on the reservation. It was an ’83 Ford, standard shift, four-wheel drive. At one time it had been red. Now it was rust-colored, but it could still squeak out an inspection sticker if taken to the right place, and Pony always made sure she took it to the right place. It was cheap and reasonably reliable transportation, but this morning she wished that it didn’t look so battered, that the paint wasn’t peeling away to reveal big brown boils, that it didn’t rattle so loudly, that the tires weren’t bald.
Above all, she wished that she didn’t have to be driving to a ranch called the Bow and Arrow outside of someplace called Katy Junction, Montana, to beg for a job she wasn’t qualified for. But she needed the money to buy school supplies for the children. Without them the kids would be at a disadvantage, and that was just one more disadvantage they didn’t need.
Pete Two Shirts had understood this. Which was why he had come to the school yesterday afternoon to tell her about this job. She’d been sitting at her desk in the sudden quiet that always descended on the heels of the departing third-grade students when a man’s voice spoke her name from the doorway.
She glanced up, startled, and laid down a stack of papers, giving no reply to his greeting. Pete walked into the room in his lean, catlike way, long hair tied back with a red strip of cloth, dressed in his typical cowboy attire of blue jeans, boots, denim jacket and red plaid shirt. He kept his thumbs hooked in the broad leather belt at his waist sporting the big fancy silver rodeo buckle and stopped just short of her desk, gazing at her beneath his black, flat-crowned hat brim. “I came by to tell you about a good-paying summer job.”
She dropped her eyes, picking up the stack of papers and tapping them on the desk to straighten them. Anything at all to avoid looking at him. Pete reminded her of a time in her life that she would much rather forget. “So tell me,” she said, suddenly short of breath.
“I got a call this morning from Guthrie Sloane, the foreman of a rancher who’s looking for someone to help with their buffalo herd. It’s the ranch I worked at this past fall, when Sloane got crippled in a horse wreck and they needed temporary help. Over near Katy Junction.”
“I know the place.” She laid the papers down again and smoothed them with her hands, avoiding his eyes. “The Bow and Arrow. Steven told me about it.” Her heart beat painfully, and her body tensed with shame and guilt even after all these years. One summer, one night, and her life had never been the same. Would never, ever be the same…
“I thought of you,” Pete said.
“I know nothing of buffalo.” Her words were clipped and brusque.
“You worked for me one whole summer with the tribal buffalo herd. You know all you need to know. You can ride a horse pretty good, too. You need that money to buy school things for the kids.”
She snatched the stack of papers yet again and rose from her chair, walking to the window and staring out. Her heart was hammering and her mouth was dry.
“I told him I’d ask around for someone who could help out,” Pete continued. “It would be an easy job. You’d live right there, on the ranch. Room and board included. Caleb McCutcheon’s a good man and the buffalo herd is tiny, nothing like the size of ours.”
“I appreciate your coming,” she said. “But I am not interested.”
“Take the job, Pony. It pays more than what you make here as a teacher, or what you’d make hoeing weeds in some farmer’s field.” Pete Two Shirts turned and walked out without another word. She stayed where she was until the sound of his boot heels and the faint ring of his spurs faded from her burning ears.
One summer. One buffalo summer…
When she finally returned to her desk, the children’s papers she held in her trembling hands were hopelessly crumpled, and no amount of smoothing could flatten them. She wanted to ignore what Pete had said, but he was right. She needed the money. And if the job paid well, did she have the right to deny her students such a windfall?
Unlike many of the children she taught, Pony had been handed the best of everything, the best that any Indian born on the rez could ever hope to have. Her brother Steven had pushed her hard, pushed her to do well in school, pushed her to apply for colleges, and when the pushing had opened doors for her, he had made sure those doors stayed open by footing the bill for her education with the money he earned as an environmental lawyer. She’d graduated from one of the best schools in the country, had gone on to get her master’s degree in early childhood education.
Steven had sacrificed so much for her since the death of their parents, and she loved him fiercely. She’d loved him ever since she’d been a little girl and he’d tolerated her pesky company, defended her against his taunting friends, lifted her onto his broad shoulder and carried her when her legs grew tired. Later, as she grew older, he’d driven off unwanted suitors. He’d never asked for anything in return for being the best brother a girl could ever have. That was Steven’s way. Yet when he changed his name to a white man’s name and chose to live in the white man’s world, she couldn’t understand that his needs might not be the same as hers.
Her resentment toward the lifestyle he had chosen had limited her visits to his pretty little house in Gallatin Gateway with the name Brown stenciled in big block letters on his mailbox. It had taken her a long time to realize that her brother had the right to walk his own path.
Last night when she had had gone to see him to ask him about Caleb McCutcheon and the job at the Bow and Arrow, the neatly stenciled letters on his mailbox had read Young Bear. Unbeknownst to her, he had taken back his own name. His hair had grown long again and was drawn back the way he used to wear it. He had looked so good, so handsome, standing there in the doorway of his cozy little house, that she had been momentarily unable to speak, overwhelmed by a sudden and poignant surge of remorse that brought her to the verge of tears.
“Pony,” he said. “It’s good to see you. It’s been a while. Christmas, wasn’t it?”
She blinked the sting from her eyes. “It’s good to see you, too.”
He nodded. “Come in. It’s not a teepee but it’s comfortable.” He stood to one side for several moments, and when she didn’t move he reached out and drew her firmly inside, closing the door behind her. “I’m cooking supper. You can watch me and tell me all the things I’m doing wrong.” He turned and walked back into the kitchen, picked up the spatula he’d left on the counter and added strips of cooked chicken into the stir-fry mix that was sizzling in the wok. He shook in a generous splash of soy sauce, added a little more water and a small mound of freshly grated gingerroot. He stirred for a few minutes before turning off the gas burners beneath both the wok and a pot of steamed brown rice. “There’s plenty here for both of us,” he said, taking two plates from the cupboard.
“I’m not hungry,” Pony said, standing uneasily on the other side of the counter. Steven paused for a moment to look at her and then divided the rice between the two plates and spooned the stir-fry over the mounds. He carried the plates and silverware to the table, returning to the kitchen to strip two paper towels off the roll, grab two glasses from the counter and a quart of milk from the refrigerator. “Unless you’d rather have wine or a beer?” he said, pausing at the refrigerator.
“Milk’s fine.”
“Sit then, and eat. You’re too thin.” He dropped into a chair and Pony did the same.
“I came here to ask you about Caleb McCutcheon.”
“I know,” Steven said, pouring the milk. “Pete called me. He told me that he’d gone to see you at the school to tell you about the job.”
Pony wasn’t surprised that Steven already knew. Pete Two Shirts was his boyhood friend, and they still kept in close touch. “I know nothing about buffalo. The job would be a farce.”
Steven ate for a while then picked up his glass of milk and drank half of it. Finally he lowered the glass and studied her across the table. “You know enough,” he said. “McCutcheon would be lucky to get you. Now eat. This stuff is good for you. It’s not sage hen or buffalo tongue, but it’s healthy.”
She picked up her fork and stabbed it fiercely into a piece of broccoli. “Why do we always argue?”
“You’re mad because I don’t live on the rez like you do, because I don’t champion the Indian’s fights the way you do.”
“The way you should,” she said vehemently.
“The way you think I should,” he amended.
“Steven, you paid my way through college,” she said, leaning toward him. “You made it possible for me to do the things I’m doing now. Working with the children, teaching school and lobbying the Bureau of Indian Affairs, trying to make things better. If you and I don’t do these things, who will? The changes have to come from us.”
Steven finished his meal and glass of milk while she sat and watched him, the same piece of broccoli still speared on her fork. He wiped his mouth on the paper towel. “McCutcheon’s a good man. Go talk to him about the job.”
“Is he one of those rich movie stars?”
Steven laughed at her disapproving glare. “Caleb was a star, but not in the movies. He was a professional baseball player with the White Sox. He grew up as a poor kid in the slums of Chicago and pitched his way to the top of the world. People still sing his praises, and he hasn’t played for years. He had to retire when a baseball shattered his ankle during the World Series.
“Is he married?”
“Until recently. He was divorced last fall, shortly after he bought the Bow and Arrow. Seems his wife didn’t share his dream of living on a remote ranch.”
“Any children?”
“Nope.” Steven looked at his sister and grinned. “He definitely ranks up there as one of the most eligible bachelors in the State. If I were you, I’d hurry right over there.”
“I’m not looking for a man. I’m applying for a job.”
“Just filling you in on the particulars. No need to get testy.”
“Even if I go to talk to him and he offers me the job, what will I do about the kids?”
“How many are there now?”
“Five. Nana’s watching them tonight,” she said, referring to her aunt.
“Five.” Steven poured himself another glass of milk. He fixed her with a solemn gaze. “Pony, you can’t save the world.”
“I know that, but I can help make their lives a little better.”
“I’ll send you more money. I didn’t know there were that many kids. The last time we talked, you just had the two boys.”
Pony set her fork down abruptly and raised the folded paper towel to her eyes, holding it there for a long moment, hiding from him until he reached out and squeezed her arm gently. She lowered her hand and blinked rapidly. “I can’t turn them away,” she said in a voice tight with pain.
“I know.”
Her eyes stung. “And I can’t walk away and leave them for the summer. Nana can’t take care of all of them. There’s no point in even thinking about taking that job, even if it were offered to me.”
“I’m almost afraid to ask this, but these other three kids you’ve taken on…are they juvenile delinquents like the first two?”
“They’re not delinquents, Steven. They’re school dropouts that I’m tutoring. They’re just confused. They’re living in a mixed-up world and they don’t know where they belong.”
“Teenagers?”
Pony nodded.
“All boys?”
She nodded again. “The girls tend to stay with their families. The boys rebel against everything, especially their parents.”
Steven pushed his glass with one finger, back and forth. “Can any of them ride a horse?”
“They’re teenage boys. They can do anything.”
“Then go talk to McCutcheon,” Steven said. “Sell him a package deal. He gets you, and for the same price he gets five more hard workers who would be really good at pulling down miles and miles of rusty barbed-wire fence. Tell him the truth about the boys, about how you’ve taken them in. Talk to him, Pony. He’s a good man. Go tomorrow morning, first thing. Now clean your plate, or I’ll send you to bed right after supper with no dessert.”
She had spent the night at Steven’s little house and had risen before dawn to drive to Caleb McCutcheon’s ranch. The sun was just shy of peeking over the Beartooth Mountains when Pony turned onto the five-mile gravel road that headed into the foothills and ended at the Bow and Arrow. She downshifted and swerved to avoid a large pothole. She was nervous, and her driving reflected it. Caleb McCutcheon would look her up and down and try not to laugh. He would try to be polite, because Steven had said he was a good, kindhearted man. But he would think to himself, What’s this? A woman applying for a job managing a herd of buffalo? Ridiculous!
And he would be right.
CALEB MCCUTCHEON AWOKE in the early morning and lay in bed, hands laced behind his head, listening to the song of a white-crowned sparrow lifting sweetly over the rush of the creek. He thought about how much his life had changed. One year ago he hadn’t set eyes upon this place. He hadn’t yet met the full-blooded Crow Indian Steven Young Bear, the young conservation attorney who had introduced him to Jessie Weaver and had been instrumental in helping Caleb purchase her failing cattle ranch.
One year ago he’d still been married to a woman who’d held his heart from the first time he’d set eyes on her, when he was full of fire and his career as a professional baseball player for the Chicago White Sox still sizzled. He had pledged his allegiance to this sophisticated woman who had shepherded his rise to fame and guided him along the complicated paths of stardom. She’d stood beside him when fate had dealt its untimely blow to his career, and he’d undergone multiple surgeries on his ankle, and then drifted off when his name faded into history to find a more interesting life for herself.
Divorce was an ugly word, but he had never realized just how ugly until his wife had asked him for one. Their divorce this past November had been a staggering blow, although in retrospect he should have seen it coming. Rachael craved the bright lights and the big cities. Her life was lively and political and she traveled in the highest social circles, whereas he had followed his childhood dream into the backwater wilderness of Montana. It was here that they had parted company.
The winter that followed had been long and dark, and Caleb had spent countless hours in this cabin on the edge of the Beartooth Wilderness reexamining his life. He had no regrets about being in this place. In spite of the loneliness that at times overwhelmed him, he never tired of this land and its many moods, the vast and palpable silence that dwarfed the imagination, the thundering wind that blew tirelessly, the crashing roar or the gentle murmur of the creek. He loved this old cabin, hewn of big-mountain cedar over a hundred years earlier. Caleb had never felt so much at home as he did here. In time, he supposed, he’d learn to live with the loneliness. He’d made some good friends. He counted Guthrie Sloane, his twenty-nine-year-old ranch manager and Jessie Weaver’s fiancé, as one, and of course Jessie herself. Steven Young Bear, café owner Bernie Portis, the old ranch hands Badger and Charlie…all good friends. A man could do much worse.
Caleb’s lifelong dream of owning a ranch in the Rocky Mountain West had come true, but unfortunately the ranch hadn’t come with an operations manual, and his attempts to persuade Jessie Weaver to remain as manager were thwarted when she returned to veterinary school to finish her degree. It was Caleb’s great good luck that Guthrie Sloane, who had worked for the ranch and had loved Jessie Weaver since he was thirteen years old, had taken the job and was patiently teaching Caleb the ropes.
Jessie and Guthrie’s long-awaited wedding would take place this coming September, and for months already it had been the topic of conversation in Katy Junction. Caleb could certainly understand all the buzz. It was reassuring to know that true love still existed.
He rolled out of bed and walked barefoot into the kitchen, which was nothing more than a little nook off the living room. The cabin boasted three rooms: bedroom, bathroom and kitchen/living room. There was a sleeping loft above and a root cellar below. Though the place was simple and spartan, Caleb was very comfortable in these quarters and preferred living here than in the main ranch house. He put on a pot of coffee, threw a few sticks of firewood into the woodstove and opened the door to the porch. It was a few moments before sunrise, yet already he could feel the burgeoning energy of the season. The sounds and smells of springtime warmed his blood and charged his spirit.
There was so much to do, and it was a solid, satisfying feeling to fill the days with activities that meant something. Just splitting firewood was a joy to him. He devoted an hour a day to the task, keeping his woodpile tidy and arranging the split wood by size so that he could easily grab what he needed when he needed it.
But tending to his firewood was nothing compared to the daunting task of ripping down the cross fences that partitioned the land into separate pastures. The plan was to leave the pole corrals around the barns, the penning corrals and the boundary fences that would need to be strengthened to contain the small herd of buffalo that Pete Two Shirts had talked Caleb into buying last fall. All the rest of the barbed wire would be removed. The men would coil the wire as they took it down and reuse the newest of it to bolster boundary fences. Then they’d pull out the metal posts and cut the wooden fence posts off at ground level, so as to leave no holes for the animals to step in. It sounded simple, but there were over sixty miles of barbed-wire fence to deal with.
The sharp fragrant smell of coffee tantalized him, and he returned to the snug warmth of the cabin, closing the door on the cool mid-May morning. He poured himself a cup and carried it with him to the chair beside the window. He opened his notebook and stared at the scrawl of figures on the page. Took a sip from his cup and felt himself frown as he studied his jottings. Lord, what a huge job he’d undertaken when he’d accepted Pete Two Shirts’s suggestion that they bring the buffalo back to their home range.
Pete had assured him that the venture would be both environmentally beneficial and financially sound. But now that Pete had returned to his full-time job on the reservation managing the Crow buffalo herd, the project had suddenly become unwieldy. Huge. Almost terrifying. After all, Caleb was just a city boy—born and bred in the Chicago slums. What the hell did he know about two-thousand-pound animals that stood six feet high at the shoulder?
Caleb lifted his mug of coffee for another appreciative sip. Maybe Guthrie would scare up someone who would be interested in teaching them how to manage the herd. After readily admitting his own ignorance in buffalo husbandry, Caleb’s ranch manager had put the word out, but so far there had been no applicants. Not a single one. Guthrie had cautioned him against impatience, but Caleb was beginning to wonder if this buffalo venture might not have been too ambitious for a greenhorn wanna-be rancher.
Yet, as intimidating as the buffalo were, they had to remain. Somehow he had to make this plan work. There was bound to be some big, burly, ham-fisted, tobacco-chewing, burly buffalo-loving expert out there looking for a job in one of the prettiest spots in all of Montana.
Bound to be…
Caleb pushed out of his chair with a sigh and carried both the notebook and his cup of coffee as he left the warmth of his cabin and headed up to the main house.
His cook and housekeeper, Ramalda, didn’t like it when he was late for breakfast.
PONY CAUGHT her breath and hit the brake as the truck crested a rise. For a moment all she could do was stare as the sun’s first rays spilled over the rim of rugged mountains and laid their golden fingers across the valley floor. She’d learned about the history of the Bow and Arrow from Steven. The ranch had been around since the mid-1800s and was one of the longest surviving in Montana, an enduring testament to a Texan by the name of Weaver who had come here with a solid dream, a dream that had been good for the Crow. Weaver had been generous and had fed them in hard winters when the buffalo were gone. During the winter of starvation he had saved an entire village with his gift of cattle, and in return was given a young woman from that village to be his wife.
So the Bow and Arrow had been founded by a white man from Texas who had taken a full-blooded Crow as his wife, and his son from this union had married a Blackfoot, the sworn enemy of the Crow. And so Jessie Weaver, who had sold the ranch to Caleb McCutcheon, was of three worlds. Crow, Blackfoot and white. Pony had never met her but had wondered at such a legacy, for to carry the blood of three such disparate worlds could surely only create confusion. Yet Pony had heard only good things of this strong young woman.
Steven had told her how Jessie Weaver had lost the ranch to falling cattle prices and her father’s skyrocketing medical bills as cancer had slowly robbed him of life. How she had quit veterinary school in her third year to take care of her ailing father. And how, after her father’s death, Jessie could have sold the ranch to developers and made a tidy profit even after the debts had been paid, but instead chose to write conservation restrictions into the deed and sell the ranch to Caleb McCutcheon at a huge loss in land value. She’d sacrificed a great deal—including her long-term relationship with Guthrie Sloane—to protect the place she loved, and Pony could understand and sympathize. In the end, Guthrie Sloane had, too; he and Jessie Weaver had reunited and were getting married in the fall.
Sitting here in her rusty old truck, looking down the valley at this historic place, Pony felt a sense of wonder. To live surrounded by such beauty would surely give grace to the spirit. The Crow had first cast their shadows in this valley long ago, in the good years when the sun still shone upon them, in the years before the buffalo were gone. Her great-great-grandfather might have set his horse in this very spot and looked upon this same valley and felt the same way she did now.
She put the truck in gear and drove slowly, not wanting to miss anything. She parked briefly at the place where the road first paralleled the creek and stood on the banks, listening to the rush of cold mountain water—happy music rippling over the smooth rocks lining the shallows. The air was cool and sharp with the tang of the tall evergreens that grew here. When she climbed back into the truck she felt relaxed. The tension that had been building in her at the prospect of speaking to Caleb McCutcheon had mysteriously vanished, and as she drove past the old cabin and headed toward the main ranch buildings, a curious calm settled over her.
Maybe she would get the job. Maybe she wouldn’t. Whatever the outcome, she had made the journey, followed the path. She parked beside two other trucks, both Fords, both much newer than hers and she drew a steadying breath before climbing the porch steps of the weather-beaten ranch house. Hopefully Caleb McCutcheon himself would be available to speak with her. Pony knocked on the door.
Which was opened almost immediately by a very fat old Mexican woman wearing a large and shapeless housedress and apron. A red bandanna covered most of her white hair.
“Yes?” Her voice was gruff and her black eyes were not the least bit friendly.
“I’ve come to speak with Mr. McCutcheon about the buffalo,” Pony said.
The woman abruptly closed the door in her face. Pony waited, patient in the way she had learned to be. She looked down toward the pole barn and corrals. Horses grazed on piles of hay while curlews hopped amongst them on the ground, looking for something to eat. Below the barn, near the bend in the creek, she could see the roofline of the old cabin. Smoke curled lazily from the massive fieldstone chimney. Steven had told her that McCutcheon preferred to live in the original homestead but took his meals at the ranch house with the rest of them. She thought it was odd that he wouldn’t choose to live in the big house.
The door opened, and Pony swung around. A man stood in the doorway, one hand on the doorknob, the other holding a notebook, eyebrows raised in a mute question. He was tall, lean and athletically built, with sandy-colored close-cropped hair, a neatly trimmed mustache and clear eyes the color of prairie flax with deep crow’s-feet etching the corners. His face was wind-burned, rugged and purely masculine. He was unexpectedly handsome, and she felt her heartbeat skip as she looked up at him and tried to remember why she was standing on his porch.
“You’ll have to excuse Ramalda’s behavior,” he said, studying her with those keen blue eyes. “She doesn’t trust strangers, even small female ones.”
“Mr. McCutcheon,” she said, her voice sounding tense because all of a sudden it mattered very much that she get this job. “I am sorry to bother you, but I had heard that you were looking for someone to help manage your buffalo.”
“My buffalo?” If anything, her words seemed to confound him more than her presence on his porch.
“Yes. Pete Two Shirts told me this. I worked for Pete on the reservation with the tribal herd.”
His expression cleared somewhat at the mention of Pete’s name and he nodded. “Pete helped get me started with the buffalo,” he explained, “but when he returned to the reservation…” He paused for an awkward moment. “Well, to be honest, I guess I wasn’t expecting a woman. I mean, it’s just that…” He took stock of her again, his eyes narrowing in a critical squint. “Please,” he said, stepping aside and gesturing with the sheaf of papers. “Come inside.”
Pony felt a flash of anger and shook her head. “If it’s a man you’re looking for, Mr. McCutcheon, I will not waste your time or mine.”
She was surprised to see the color of McCutcheon’s face deepen. “I meant no offense,” he said.
“It’s all right. I understand completely,” she said. “Of course you would prefer a man to manage your buffalo herd. A man is so much stronger than a woman, and strength is very important when dealing with the buffalo, especially when you wrestle them to the ground to brand them.”
His forehead creased skeptically. “Brand them?”
“And a man rides a horse so much better than a woman,” Pony continued, “because a man is so much stronger, and a horse truly appreciates brute strength.”
“Now look…”
“Mr. McCutcheon, if you talked to Pete Two Shirts, he would tell you that I know my stuff. And I would tell you this. I have five strong boys who would do your bidding for the summer. They would cost you nothing more than room and board. I was told you have a lot of work. If you have buffalo, you will need good boundary fences. Six strands of wire at least six feet high. Panels seven feet high would be even better, with wooden corner posts sunk into four feet of concrete. Putting up sturdy boundaries takes a lot of time and work, but without them, your herd might run clear to Saskatchewan.”
“Look, why don’t you—”
“And you’re right about the branding, Mr. McCutcheon. You don’t brand buffalo. But you do need a good set of corrals with an eight-foot-high fence and an indestructible chute of welded pipe, because even though they don’t get branded, they do need to be tested for brucellosis, tuberculosis and pregnancy. They need to be wormed and vaccinated. I know how to design such a set of corrals and a good chute. I know how big and how strong the buffalo are, Mr. McCutcheon, and how wild.”
McCutcheon eyed her appraisingly. He ran the fingers of his free hand through his hair. “Please, come in and have a cup of coffee. We can talk—”
“I don’t drink coffee,” she said. “Why don’t you call Pete and ask him about me?”
He nodded. “Okay.” He hesitated. “Won’t you at least come inside while I call?”
“I’ll wait out here, thank you,” she said, not wanting to run into the unfriendly old Mexican woman.
He nodded again, clearly perplexed. “Who should I tell Pete I’m checking on?”
“Steven Young Bear’s sister,” Pony said.
McCutcheon’s blue gaze intensified. “That’s why you look so familiar. I’ll be damned! Why didn’t Steven tell me you were coming?”
“I asked him not to. I’ll wait here while you call Pete.”
McCutcheon shook his head with a faint grin. “I don’t need to call anybody. If you’re Steven’s sister, that’s good enough for me.”
Pony’s heart leaped. “Does that mean you will consider me for the job?”
“That means you’re hired, you and your five boys. There’s plenty of room for all of you here in the main house. When can you start?”
“In three weeks.”
“That long?” His face fell.
“I’m a teacher and school lets out in three weeks.” Pony held her breath, her heart hammering. Please, oh please…
McCutcheon nodded reluctantly. “All right. We’ve survived this long. I guess we can wait until mid-June. The job pays three-fifty a week, plus room and board.”
She could hardly have hoped for as much, and struggled to maintain a neutral expression. “I can only work the summer.”
“I’m hoping you can teach me and my ranch manager all we need to know in that time.”
“I am sure that I can.”
“Good. Then I guess I’ll see you in three weeks.” He put out his hand and took hers in a warm, firm handshake; a single up-and-down motion that made her fingers tingle curiously. She turned to descend the porch steps and was almost at her truck when his voice stopped her. “Ah…miss?” She turned and glanced up at him questioningly. “What’s your name?”
“Oo-je-en-a-he-ha,” she said. She stood for a few moments, watching him mentally grapple with the impossibility of it, and then, with a barely suppressed smile, she said, “But you can call me Pony, if you’d rather.”
CHAPTER TWO
“SHE HAS FIVE BOYS,” McCutcheon said, pulling the mug of coffee that Bernie Portis had just topped off closer to him and studying the whorls of steam rising from the strong black brew. It was midmorning of the following day and the Longhorn Cafe, the only eating establishment in Katy Junction, was enjoying a brief lull between breakfast and lunch.
“Five?” Bernie paused, coffeepot in hand. Her friendly face split into a smile. “She’s been a busy gal. How old is she?”
“Not old enough. At least, she didn’t look like the mother of five kids.” Too young and too beautiful, he thought.
“How old?”
McCutcheon lifted his shoulders. “Hard to say. Late twenties. Early thirties, maybe.”
“Okay, so she started young. Say, eighteen years old. First baby. Second baby at twenty. Third at twenty-two. But how much work are you expecting to get out of a bunch of little kids? And who’s going to wipe their noses and change their diapers while their mother is out herding buffalo? Ramalda?” Bernie gave him a teasing smile before making a run through the tiny restaurant, refilling customers’ coffee cups and pausing to chat briefly here and there. She was Guthrie Sloane’s big sister, and a sweeter, more generous soul did not exist west of the Rockies nor east of them, either.
McCutcheon took a sip of his coffee and frowned. He hadn’t thought to ask Pony how old her children were. He had a sudden vision of a three-year-old boy in the saddle, reins in his teeth, horse running flat out, twirling a lariat better than a washed-up baseball player by the name of Caleb McCutcheon could. It wasn’t Caleb’s fault that Badger and Charlie hadn’t taught him how to throw a rope yet. They kept promising, and then one day slid into the next, one week followed another, and he was no closer to being a cowboy than he’d been the day he’d bought the ranch.
Ramalda had already threatened to quit. “Indians!” she had muttered when he told her, as if the word itself were a bitter poison in her mouth. Her venom had surprised Caleb, but not Badger, who’d been sharing the table the way he and Charlie almost always did nowadays, at suppertime. Or any other time for that matter. The two old cowboys had sort of come with the ranch. “Now, Ramalda,” Badger said, smoothing his white mustache. “When I first laid eyes on you, I thought to myself, that there’s an Apache woman, sure as shootin’. How do you know you ain’t part Injun yourself? And what gave you such a sour take on things, anyhow? I thought you liked little ’uns.”
Ramalda had turned her broad back to them with a string of heated Spanish that neither he nor Badger could make heads or tails of, banging pots and pans about and letting her feelings be known in no uncertain terms. “Six Indians here?” she exploded, brandishing a frying pan in one fat fist. “I queeet!”
“Whoa!” Caleb said, alarmed at the thought of losing such a phenomenal cook and housekeeper. “They’re Steven Young Bear’s nephews. They’re his sister’s children. You like Steven.”
Ramalda turned and slammed the frying pan down on the woodstove, cut a big chunk of lean salt pork into it and turned again, wielding the knife as if she intended to use it on Caleb. “Six Indians here, I queeet,” she repeated emphatically.
“Well, it’s too late. I’ve already hired them,” Caleb said. “But I’d sure hate to lose you, Ramalda. I can’t imagine coming into this kitchen and not having you cussing me out in Spanish or feeding me those delicious meals. Look at me. I’m getting fat.” He glanced down and felt a twinge of alarm at the truth of his words. “I guess maybe it would be better for my waist if you left, but I’d sure hate it. I hope you stay. You’re important to this place. We need you here, and Jessie’s coming home soon. It would be awful if you weren’t here for her wedding to Guthrie.”
Jessie. That name had been enough to melt Ramalda’s stern visage. She turned back to the stove to stir the sizzling pork with the point of her knife and never said another word about quitting. Maybe she remembered that Jessie was part Indian, too; that Jessie’s father had been a half-breed, and that the history of the Bow and Arrow had been linked with Native Americans since the very beginning.
Or maybe she’d really quit when Pony and her five boys came in three weeks. “You’re looking mighty pensive,” Bernie said, sliding a piece of apple pie in front of him. “Thinking about what having five kids stampeding around the place will be like?”
Caleb picked up his fork and grinned. “I’m thinking about all the work we’ll get done this summer,” he said, feeling another twinge at this half-truth and recalling Badger’s troubling prophecy. “One good boy can do the work of half a man,” the old cowboy had said when Caleb told him about the new hires. “But two boys? Put two boys together and they’re worthless. Five, you say? Hell, boss, I don’t even want to think about it.”
Five boys. Caleb forked a piece of apple pie into his mouth and savored the blend of tart apples and spices and tender crust. Five boys…and one very intimidating young woman, Oo-je-ne… He shook his head and gave up. Pony. Strange name, but a whole lot easier to say. Put all of them together with a herd of buffalo rampaging across the ranch… Caleb laid his fork down and pushed the plate away, overwhelmed with a sudden surge of anxiety.
In three weeks the summer would begin, and quite suddenly he was dreading it.
PONY WASN’T SURE how the boys would take the news that she had hired out their services for the summer. She was especially leery of Roon, the latest of the five to have taken refuge in her little shack on the edge of the Big Horn foothills. Roon was an introvert with so much anger and confusion bottled up that Pony sometimes feared he would explode. She had taught him in her third-grade class. He had been like the others then, a normal nine-year-old on the brink of discovering the universe. Now he was thirteen and the world was his enemy. Four years had passed. What had happened? She had not pried. When he’d shown up one cold snowy night on her doorstep, she’d stood aside and let him in. He had been there since December, a quiet brooding presence who listened to the lessons she gave the others but did not participate.
One of the rules of her household was that any child she took in had to learn the lessons she taught and eventually take the GED. It was a fair trade. Since she had been living on the reservation in the capacity of teacher and unofficial foster parent, she had launched four young people into far more promising futures than they might have had the opportunity to explore otherwise. Two of them had gone on to college, a major triumph for her. The other two had taken mining jobs off the reservation, and she still had contact with all of them on a regular basis.
So what of Roon? How would she ever reach him, turn him around, make him obey the rules she laid down? She had threatened repeatedly to throw him out, but in the end she never did. Where would he go? His own parents had left the reservation. They had leased their land allotment to a white farmer and gone to Canada, to live on a Cree reservation where the wife had blood relatives. They had taken the younger children with them. Roon had stayed with Pony, and she did not have the heart to displace him.
But would he work willingly for Caleb McCutcheon? That, and so much more, remained to be seen. She would tell the boys about the job, and if they didn’t want to go to the ranch, they could return to their own families for the summer. That was fair.
But the boys were not at Nana’s place. “They took your uncle’s old truck,” Nana said, sitting in her rocker and smoking one of her acrid-smelling hand-rolled cigarettes. “Went back home.”
“But none of them can drive. None of them even have licenses!”
Nana shook her head, her deeply wrinkled face impassive. “They went home.”
Pony drove the five miles to her little house much too fast, but the tribal police were not on patrol. She spied no wrecked vehicles along the way, and was relieved to see Ernie’s truck parked safely in her yard. She ran up the steps and burst into the kitchen. The boys, four of them, were crowded around the table, eating peanut butter sandwiches and drinking cans of soda.
“Where’s Roon?” she said.
“In the back room,” Jimmy replied, mouth full of sandwich. “Nana gave him a book to read.”
“Who took Ernie’s truck? Who drove here?”
“Dan did,” Jimmy said. “Nana said we had to leave.”
Pony looked at Dan. “Why?”
Dan’s dark eyes dropped and he lifted his shoulders. Pony looked at Joe. “Why did she tell you to leave?”
“We took her tobacco,” he said. “We told her we’d replace it.”
“Yes, you will,” Pony said grimly. “Right now. Let’s go.”
“We already smoked what we took,” Martin said, staring at her ruefully through his thick glasses. “It’s gone. But we’ll get her more. Don’t worry.”
“How? By stealing it from someone else? You promised me you wouldn’t smoke, but I never thought I would have to make you promise not to steal.” Pony sat down and dropped her head in her hands. There was a long moment of quiet around the table. She raised her head and studied each boy in turn. “Right now I think I should open the door and ask you all to leave. Right now I feel as if all of you have betrayed me.” She drew a deep steadying breath. “Right now I am very angry, so I am going to take Ernie’s truck back to Nana’s and then walk home. That will give me some time to think about things.”
She stood up from the table and left her little house and the silence of the four boys that filled it.
THE SECOND WEEK in June came faster than it should have, and Caleb glanced at the calendar on his way out the kitchen door. He paused, coffee cup in hand, to look at the scrawl that was written on this date. “Five boys/Pony” was a memo that he had made, but in another hand was written, “Day I quit!!!” The word quit was underlined strongly three times. He glanced to where Ramalda stood at the kitchen sink, washing the breakfast dishes. The brightly colored bandanna she always wore covered most of her white hair, but a few strands lay on her shoulders. A wave of affection warmed him, and he shook his head with a faint grin and pushed through the door, stepping onto the porch where his ranch manager waited patiently. He looked for the little cow dog who was never very far from Guthrie Sloane.
“Where’s Blue?”
“Left her to home. Figured you’d be wantin’ to ride after the buffalo.”
“You figured right. There are ten old cows and one huge bull out there, and we have no idea where they are. It would be nice to be able to tell my buffalo expert that they’re still on the home range, but for all I know they’re halfway to Canada.” The sun wasn’t up quite yet but the horses were saddled and tied to the hitch rail. “If the last you saw of them was over on Silver Creek, maybe we should start there.”
“I saw signs of them this past week near the head-waters of the Piney.”
“That high up?”
“Yessir.”
Caleb drained the last of his cup and set it on the porch rail. “Let’s ride.”
Guthrie’s halting footsteps followed Caleb’s down the porch steps. Caleb unwrapped Billy Budd’s rein from the rail and stepped into the saddle, wishing the old gelding’s legs were a little shorter or that his own legs were more flexible. It was a hard thing to look graceful while hauling his six-foot frame into the saddle. Still, he couldn’t complain. Guthrie was still so crippled up that he had to use the porch steps to mount his horse. That had to burn deep down inside, because Guthrie Sloane had been one of the best horsemen in Park County before that mare had fallen on him last October.
The ranch manager was a hard man to read. He didn’t say much, didn’t reveal himself in long-winded conversations the way some people did. He was quiet and competent and he worked damn hard. Caleb liked him very much and counted himself very fortunate to have the skilled cowboy in his employ.
“Steven’s sister is coming today,” he said, nudging Billy into a walk and giving him a loose rein.
“The boys, too?” Guthrie said, falling in beside him.
“As far as I know. I didn’t dare broach the subject at breakfast. Didn’t want to get Ramalda too upset.”
“She cleaned the bedrooms yesterday.”
Caleb’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh?”
“I saw her bring out the rugs and hang ’em over the porch rail to air. Then she disappeared down the back hall carrying a whole bunch of clean bed linens, muttering away to herself.”
“I’ll be damned. Maybe she isn’t going to quit after all.”
“If Ramalda leaves, she knows Jessie’d never forgive her.”
“No, I guess she wouldn’t,” Caleb agreed. “Speaking of Jessie, when’s she coming home? Classes must be over for her.”
“Yessir, they are. She’s way ahead of where she thought she’d be, and the school has advanced her into senior-year studies.”
“Does that mean she’s going to be graduating sooner than you thought?”
“Yessir. She’s apprenticing with that horse doctor down in Arizona again to finish her credits.”
“She’s down there now?”
“Yessir. She’s there for the summer.”
“Huh. Too bad she couldn’t come home for a little visit, but at least you got to see her at spring break. And she’ll be back in September. I assume she’s planning to be here for her own wedding.”
“Oh, probably,” Guthrie said with a faint grin, smoothing his horse’s mane with one gloved hand. “She said she might.”
They rode up along the creek to the place where a smaller tributary fed into it, then threaded through groves of Engelmann spruce and across high meadows of greening grass spangled with wildflowers. They caught sight of some cattle but no buffalo. After an hour they stopped to rest their horses on a high knoll from which they could survey the valley. The wind pushed tall, bunched-up clouds across the vast expanse of blue sky. “I’m buying the leases back,” Caleb said, leaning his forearm on the saddle horn. “The ones Jessie’s father had to sell. Ten thousand acres of leased land, most of it belonging to the Bureau of Land Management. That gives the whole ranch a footprint of fifteen thousand acres. Enough room to run us some buffalo.”
“Damn,” Guthrie said. “That’s good news.”
“I didn’t want to tell Jessie until it was a done deal.”
“She’ll be real glad to hear about it.”
“I paid too much for them, but the ranchers who sold them needed the money.”
“Ranchers always need money,” Guthrie said, smoothing his horses mane with one gloved hand.
Caleb nodded. “I guess. I know they think what I’m trying to do here is nuts, but how much crazier is it than what they’re doing—fighting a losing battle trying to raise enough cattle to make land payments when cattle prices keep falling?”
“It’s the only way of life they know.”
“How many buffalo do you figure we can run on fifteen thousand acres?”
Guthrie’s gaze swept over the valley. He shook his head. “That’s a question for your buffalo girl,” he said. “In the meantime, we have ten cows and a bull to find, and five thousand acres to search. We’d best get at it.”
PONY TURNED her old truck down the ranch road with a premonition of impending doom. Her hands gripped the steering wheel far more tightly than necessary. Jimmy and Roon shared the bench seat beside her. Roon sat pressed against the passenger door, staring broodily out the side window. Jimmy squeezed against him, trying to avoid the stick shift. Jimmy was the youngest at eleven. The other three boys rode in the back of the truck. Dan was fifteen, Martin and Joe were both fourteen. None of them was smiling, but all of them were clean and presentable, and all had agreed—albeit grudgingly—to be on their best behavior.
Pony knew from past experience that their perception of what constituted best behavior was the reason why she was gripping the steering wheel so tightly. By the time she pulled up in front of the ranch house, her hands were so badly cramped that she had to sit for a moment rubbing them together. “Okay,” she said to Jimmy and Roon. “Now remember. Best behavior!”
They both stared at her. Nodded. Roon wrenched his door open and dropped to the ground. Jimmy followed. The boys in back jumped out. Pony was the last to climb from the truck. She stood in the yard, looking up at the ranch house and then down toward the barn and corrals. The place was quiet. Peaceful. She could hear the flutelike song of a meadowlark and the distant bawl of a cow. The wind was moderate, warm and out of the south. The sky was a wide blue dome overhead, providing a vivid backdrop to the snowcapped peaks of the Beartooth Mountains. She drew in a lungful of sweet air and exhaled slowly, willing the tension from her body.
The house door opened and an enormous figure emerged, carrying a broom. It was Ramalda, the Mexican woman who had shut the door in Pony’s face, and she looked as grim as ever. “Good morning,” Pony said. “I’ve come to see Mr. McCutcheon. We’re reporting for work.”
Ramalda held the broom as if she wished it were a rifle. She scowled fiercely at the boys, who stood in a group, seeking safety in each other’s short midday shadow. “Work?” she said as if she had never heard the word before. She threw her head back and laughed. It was neither a long laugh nor a friendly one. She lowered her head and scowled at them again. “Come. Entra.” She turned and squeezed her body through the kitchen door, letting the screen bang shut behind her.
“Get your things,” Pony said to the boys. She lifted her own small satchel out of the truck bed and climbed the porch steps. The last place in the world she wanted to be was inside that ranch house with that woman, but she squared her shoulders, lifted her chin, pulled open the screen door and stepped inside.
The room she found herself in transported her into another time. There was almost no hint of modern life among the simple furnishings and wall cupboards, the huge wood-fired cookstove, the hand pump at the big slate sink, the oil lamps—some in their wall gimbals, others set on the table. Even the gas stove was an antique, a cream enamel with green and gold piping and the words White Star scrolled ornately across the oven door. It was a beautiful kitchen, and in spite of her initial trepidation, Pony felt instantly at home.
Ramalda was standing by the sink with her hands on her hips, watching them with great suspicion. “You’re hungry,” she accused.
Pony shook her head. “If you could just show us where to put our things, we can get right to work.”
She was afraid Ramalda would laugh at them again, but instead she turned and walked out of the kitchen and into a back hallway that ran the length of the rambling ranch house and exited at the far end of the porch. Pony and the boys followed. Off the hallway were several doors. She pushed the first one open. “This is my room,” she said, and before they could glimpse inside, she pulled the door shut again with a sharp bang. “My room,” she repeated. She led them to the next door and opened it, turning to Pony. “Your room.” Pony stepped inside, followed closely by all five boys. It was a small room, perhaps ten by sixteen feet, papered in an antique rose print of pinks and greens, with a double bed, a bureau, a chair and a mirror hung above the dresser. A braided rug fit neatly between the bed and the bureau, and a narrow door opened onto a little closet. Pony set her satchel on the chair and smiled.
“It’s very nice,” she said, and the boys all nodded in solemn agreement.
Ramalda led them down the hall and opened yet another door. This room was a third again the size of Pony’s and had two sets of bunk beds on opposite walls and a twin bed set beneath the single window. The boys looked around at the plain whitewashed walls hung with old cowboy prints, the well-worn desk and chair, the one tall bureau, the small closet. A braided rug similar to the one in Pony’s room graced the floor between the sets of bunk beds. The boys laid their duffels down on the bunks, each choosing by order of rank. Roon, Pony noticed, though not the oldest, chose first, and he picked the bed beneath the window. Dan and Martin took the top bunks, Jimmy and Joe got the bottom.
The next room they were shown was the bathroom. It was small, basic, no bathtub, just a shower. Clean, Pony noticed. The entire place was spanking clean. The Mexican woman might not care to host a passel of Crow Indians, but she was a good housekeeper.
Ramalda led them back to the kitchen. “You eat now,” she said gruffly, motioning for them to sit. Pony stood for a moment in indecision, wondering if their hunger was that obvious, and then nodded to the boys, who immediately dropped into five chairs. Pony slowly followed suit. Ramalda then served them a meal that could have fed Pony and the boys for a week. It began with a thick spicy stew of lamb, onions, beans and chili peppers ladled into deep colorful Mexican bowls and set before them with big bone-handled soupspoons on the side. A platter of fresh soft tortillas, still warm, was plunked down in the middle of the table, along with a brimming pitcher of cold milk and six tall glasses. The savory aroma of the stew overcame the awkwardness of the moment. They glanced respectfully at the strange old woman who stood by the stove and watched them eat with a fixed scowl on her face.
Breathless with the joy of having full stomachs, they pushed back from the table with dazed expressions. Every bit of the delicious stew was gone, every tender tortilla devoured, the pitcher of milk empty. Ramalda nodded grimly, went to the oven and drew forth a pan of beef ribs done to a tender turn and dripping with sauce. She used a spatula to push them all onto a serving platter and slid the dish into the center of the table, refilled the pitcher with more cold milk, then stood back and waited.
They stared around the table at each other, and then at the ribs. Even Roon was smiling as they dug into them with rapturous abandon, wearing the sauce shamelessly on their chins and laughing, finally, when there was nothing left but a stack of gnawed bones.
“WE’VE MISSED the noon meal, I guess,” Caleb said as they let their horses pick a careful descent down the steep draw. “Ramalda was going to make barbecued ribs.”
Guthrie was ahead of him. “Don’t worry. She’ll save some for you.” He glanced back, grinning beneath his hat brim. “She likes watching you get fat.”
Caleb didn’t presume to tell Billy how to get down the steep slope. He gave the gelding free rein and shamelessly clutched the saddle horn to keep from tumbling over the horse’s shoulders. “That’s no lie,” he said. “I was in a whole lot better shape when I first came here than I am now.”
“Winter,” Guthrie called back. “All those long dark days with nothing to do but eat what Ramalda cooks, and she’s a damn fine cook. Thinks if a person ain’t always hungry they must be sick. But don’t worry, you’ll burn it off. From now till the snow flies you can eat whatever you want and you’ll still lose weight.”
The slope bottomed out, and Guthrie drew rein, leaning over his horse’s shoulder and studying something on the ground. “That’s fresh,” he said. “Them buff are here somewhere close by.” He straightened and sat for a moment, contemplating. “Wind’s out of the south. We ought to be able to work up this draw and maybe catch sight of them, but if they catch a whiff of us, they’ll be on the far side of tomorrow in the blink of an eye. Ride quiet and follow me.”
Caleb did just that, and in less than an hour they had ridden up onto a knoll that overlooked a high, pretty meadow shaped like a basin lying amongst the lower flanks of three rugged snow-clad mountains. “That’s Piney Creek,” Guthrie said, raising his arm and pointing toward a dark ribbon that snaked through the meadow. “The old line camp is in that big clump of fir.”
Caleb had seen the camp once. “Joe Nash flew me in here last fall,” he said. “He said it was the prettiest place in all of Montana, but it wasn’t quite so pretty on that particular afternoon.” He looked at Guthrie. “That was the day we brought you down off the mountain more dead than alive.”
Guthrie glanced sidelong at him and then faced forward again. A muscle in his jaw corded. He pulled his hat brim down a little lower. “Well, that’s all in the past, and right now we’re hunting for your buffalo.” He shifted in his saddle. “As a matter of fact, I think I’m lookin’ right at one.”
Caleb leaned forward. “Where?”
“See that little black dot way down there, followed by a dash? Down near the creek? That black dot is a buff, sure as I’m sitting here. That dash is three or four others, following along behind. I bet the entire bunch is hiding in that brush along the creek.”
“How close do you think we can get?”
“If the wind holds, pretty close. Close enough to count ’em, anyhow. You game?”
“Hell yes, I’m game. What are we waiting for?”
They heeled their horses and set off at a slow jog. The distance to be covered was over a mile. Guthrie reined his horse to a walk when they got within a quarter mile, and Caleb did the same. The afternoon was a fine one, with a steady breeze and the warm June sun to gentle it. Caleb wished he’d brought his field book along because he was seeing birds and flowers he’d never seen before. The vitality and diversity of the land continually astounded and humbled him. He wondered if he would ever truly be connected to it the way he really wanted to be.
Sometimes he felt he was so close…
“Whoa,” Guthrie said, his voice low, and they stopped side by side, stirrup to stirrup. “That big old cow there. See her?”
Caleb tried to follow Guthrie’s point but he could see nothing yet. No buffalo. He shook his head.
“She’s watching us, standing in that bunch of chokecherry down in that brushy draw. Hold now. Hold…”
They sat very still and the horses were motionless as if they knew that any small movement would betray them. There was a sudden explosion in the thicket and before Caleb’s dazzled eyes a huge buffalo cow burst from the draw, tail held high, and made off at a dead run. She climbed a knoll at a speed that seemed impossible for such an ungainly-looking beast and yet she was pure grace and incredible power as she fled their presence and sought the safety of the rest of the herd.
“What’s that?” Caleb said, his breath catching in his throat. “Look, beside her. What is that!” He watched the little blond ball that bounced at the cow’s flank as she raced up the knoll.
Guthrie’s reply was an affirmation of something Caleb already knew. “That’s a baby buff, boss,” he said. “That cute little critter is one of your first baby buffs.”
THE EUPHORIA of the afternoon stayed with Caleb on the long ride home. The buffalo were all there. Not only were they all there, but the ten cows had made seven calves. Not bad at all, considering he’d bought all ten without having them certified pregnant. Seven out of ten wasn’t bad, and maybe they weren’t done calving, either. Caleb was feeling pretty good about things.
“Lord, they were something, weren’t they?” he said for the umpteenth time as they jogged home.
“Yessir,” Guthrie said.
Hard to tell what Guthrie really thought about it all. Did he really think the buffalo were a good thing? Or was he too much of a cattleman to ever change his ways? “They scare me a little, I won’t lie,” Caleb said. “But they’re the true natives of this land. They belong here.”
“Yessir.”
“I think this ranch will be a better place for having them.”
“Me, too,” Guthrie said.
Caleb drew rein so abruptly that Billy snorted in protest. Guthrie was slower to follow suit, easing his horse to a walk and pivoting it around to face him. He gave Caleb a questioning look.
“Do you mean that?” Caleb said.
“You forget that I grew up here with Jessie,” Guthrie replied. “I’ve been working on this ranch since I was thirteen years old, and she’s been wanting this to happen for a long time. Ripping down the cross fences and bringing back the buffalo. Giving the land back to itself and letting it heal the wounds we’ve made in it over the years.”
“But what about you? How do you feel about it?”
Guthrie studied him for a moment then shifted his gaze to the distant mountains. “All my life has been about beef cows and alfalfa hay,” he admitted. “Worrying about the weather and the cows. Worrying about the graze and the cows. Worrying about makin’ hay and makin’ money and losin’ all of it when the cattle prices just dropped and dropped. I’m just like all them other ranchers. I think in beef cow. But when I look at them buffalo I feel like someone’s taken me by the scruff of the neck and given me a good shake, and I catch myself thinkin’, what the hell took us so long to get smart?”
The two men regarded each other for a long silent moment. Caleb nodded. “I want to make this work.”
“So do I,” Guthrie said.
“Good.” He nudged Billy with his heels and walked him up beside Guthrie’s horse. “You really think Ramalda saved any of those ribs?”
Guthrie grinned. “Dunno. How much do you suppose five hungry boys can eat?”
“I think they could eat a whole buffalo.”
“Let’s just hope they don’t, or we might be out of business by summer’s end.”
CHAPTER THREE
CALEB WAS RENDERED speechless at the size of the boys. He’d been expecting a spread of five-to twelve-year-olds. He’d been expecting to have to smooth Ramalda’s feathers when she realized she’d be babysitting in addition to her other duties at the ranch, but he’d been way off base. These weren’t little kids. He sat in the saddle, gazing at the five young men who stared silently back at him, lined up along the corral fence just outside the pole barn. They’d been sitting on the top rail when he and Guthrie had ridden in, studying the horses inside the corral, and had jumped down at their arrival, lining up as if for inspection. Pony was nowhere to be seen.
“Well,” he finally managed to say. “I see you made it here all right. Did Ramalda feed you?”
All five nodded.
“Good. Did she show you where you’d be bunking?”
Another somber nod of five heads.
“You picking out your horses, are you?”
The smallest boy said, “I like the dun.”
“That’s a good horse. His name’s Gunner.”
“I’m Jimmy,” the boy said, standing taller. “This is Roon, Dan, Martin and Joe.”
“I’m Caleb McCutcheon,” he said, shaking each boy’s hand in turn, “and this is my ranch manager, Guthrie Sloane. You boys will answer to him as long as you’re riding for the Bow and Arrow.” He hesitated. “Is your mother around?”
“Mother?” Five blank expressions met his gaze.
“Pony.”
“She’s down near the creek,” Jimmy said. “She wanted to see what grew along the banks.”
Caleb glanced at Guthrie. “Why don’t you introduce the boys to the horses? We’ve got a couple hours to kill before supper. I’ll find Pony and then give everyone a brief tour of the ranch.”
He touched his heels to Billy’s flanks and headed toward the creek, half dreading the encounter with the dark-eyed young woman. Ever since the moment they’d first met he’d been more than a little intimidated by her.
“She’s a lot like Jessie,” he told Billy Budd, and the gelding flicked his ears at the sound of his voice. “And I have to tell you, old boy, she kind of scares me.”
He almost hoped he wouldn’t find her, but he came to the bank of the creek and spotted her almost immediately. She was standing in the shade of a gnarly old cottonwood, holding a bunch of wildflowers she’d picked, dressed in jeans and a red-and-black plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled back. Her thick, shiny black hair was plaited in a braid that hung over her shoulder.
“We would have gone to work right away,” she said when he approached, regarding him with those dark, direct eyes. “But there was no one here to tell us what to do.”
Caleb reined Billy in and swung out of the saddle to stand beside her. “Those five boys can’t all be yours,” he said.
“Mine?” For a moment her eyes were puzzled, and then she shook her head. “No. At least, not in the way you mean. I am not their biological mother.” Her slender shoulders rose and fell around a helpless shrug. “It’s more like they’ve adopted me. I’m sorry. I should have explained that beforehand. You must have been expecting—”
“Babes in swaddling clothes,” he admitted. “But those boys are big enough to do a man’s work, and I’ll be glad to pay them a working wage.”
“They are big enough to work,” Pony agreed, “but they will work for room and board, as we agreed, and if you can get that out of them you’ll be doing well.”
He recalled Badger’s prophecy with a twinge of unease. “What does that mean?”
“That means they are teenage boys.”
“I don’t have any kids of my own,” Caleb admitted. “The closest I ever came to parenting was playing uncle to a bunch of my ex-wife’s nieces and nephews for an hour or two at time, once or twice a year.”
Pony smiled. “Mr. McCutcheon, you are about to get a whole lot closer than that. But if the day comes when you think you’ve had enough of us, you must tell me. They are good boys, but they can try the patience of a saint.”
“Can they ride?”
She nodded. “They have been on horseback and I’ve been teaching them all I know about buffalo.”
“We’ll be doing a lot of fence work. That’s hard going.”
She nodded again. “It will be good for them.” She gazed out across the creek to where the rolling grassland reached out toward the timbered mountain slopes. “They need a place like this to show them what life can be like. They’re disillusioned and discouraged. They dropped out of school, got into trouble. Not big stuff, or serious, but their parents couldn’t or wouldn’t deal with them anymore.” She shook her head. “They don’t know where they belong, or what the future holds for them.”
Caleb gripped the reins in his hands as anxiety tightened his stomach muscles. He was sailing onto an uncharted ocean and he wondered how deep and dangerous the waters were. “What does the future hold for them?”
She shook her head again, staring straight at him with a frankness that was disarming. “I don’t know. When they come to me for help I tell them that I will feed them and give them a place to live, but in turn they have to study for and pass the GED. And then I tutor them so they can do this.”
“You do that on your own time and at your own expense?”
She shrugged. “It seems the least I can do after what my brother did for me. Steven put me through school, through college. He gave me a life I never would have had otherwise. What I do for these boys is not nearly as much as what he did for me.”
“But he’s your brother.”
“Those boys are my tribal kin. There is a bond there, Mr. McCutcheon. We are family. We take care of each other.”
He saw the fierce pride shining in her dark eyes and felt a surge of admiration. She was so slender, so small, and yet her spirit encompassed an entire tribe. “Five boys must eat a lot.”
“Steven sends me money every month. I don’t make very much teaching and he knows that. I never asked him for the money. He just sends it.”
Caleb nodded. Steven Young Bear was as bighearted as his sister. Their sacrifices made him feel small. He dropped his eyes and studied the ground at his feet. The creek rushed past and a surge of wind rustled through the cottonwood. Her nearness was strangely unsettling. He was acutely aware that she was watching him, and he felt as tongue-tied as a teenage boy. He glanced up. “Have you eaten?”
“Yes, thank you.” Her expression spoke volumes. “Your housekeeper fed us.”
“Ribs?”
“Very delicious beef ribs, and an excellent lamb stew.”
He nodded again. “Well, I guess I’ll grab a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich then, before giving you a tour of the ranch.”
Pony’s smile was shy. “Ramalda saved some ribs for you. She said that you had a big hunger all the time, like a—” She stopped abruptly and glanced down at the wildflowers she held, her expression softening. “This is a place that my grandmother would have liked. Already I have found seven of the sacred healing plants she made her medicines with.”
“Seven? How many did she use?”
“As many as she needed.”
Caleb paused, running the strip of rein through his hands. “What did Ramalda tell you my hunger was like?” he asked, curious.
“Like a cow in a feedlot,” Pony replied, the smile reaching her eyes before she lowered them.
They walked back up the hill toward the ranch house side by side, in awkward silence.
PONY DID NOT GO on the tour of the ranch with Caleb McCutcheon. She watched the boys pile into the back of the pickup truck, Jimmy sharing the front seat with the rancher, and felt a pang of regret that she had offered to help Ramalda with supper. The woman had readily accepted her offer, which was why Pony was standing on the porch and watching the others drive off in a billow of dust, thinking that if she had gone she would have ridden in the cab with him. She would have been sitting where Jimmy was, and they would have had a chance to talk more.
She could have asked McCutcheon about the job. About his buffalo herd. About the land.
But what she really wanted to ask him was why he had no wife. A man like Caleb McCutcheon should not be traveling through his days all alone. He had once been married and had spoken of his ex-wife’s nieces and nephews.
She felt a flush of embarrassment at wondering about something that was none of her business. She was here to do a job, and that was all. Her interest must therefore stay with the buffalo herd. She was here for one brief summer to earn money to buy school supplies in the fall. She was not here to speculate on Caleb McCutcheon’s past.
And she most definitely would not want him speculating about hers.
FACED WITH THE TASK of entertaining five boys for two hours, Caleb was beginning to count his blessings that his life had been so uncomplicated. He gripped the steering wheel and glanced sidelong at the youngest boy, Jimmy, with a curt nod. “You heard what I said. You open a gate, you shut it behind you. Those are the rules out here in cattle country. Now go on and shut the gate.”
“If we’re going to be ripping all these fences out and running buffalo through here anyway,” the one called Martin said from the truck’s open bed, “why bother closing the gates?”
“Because I said so.” Caleb turned to look through the open rear slider and lasered the boy with a steely glance. “And my word is the law around here.”
There was a soft snicker at his words. Roon? Dan? But Jimmy was already moving, jumping out of the passenger seat to close the gate behind them. Caleb was taking them up to the holding pens where the annual branding was done. He’d had no idea what to do when Ramalda had accepted Pony’s offer to help with supper preparations, leaving Caleb to the task of supervising the boys. Guthrie was nowhere to be found.
Caleb carefully guided the pickup around the worst of the ruts and rocks that made the road a challenge at the best of times and pretty near impossible in mud season. He pulled to a stop at the series of corrals and chutes that stood on one side of a big wide-open meadow high above the ranch. Caleb climbed out of the cab and followed the boys to the nearest corral, where he hooked one arm over the top rail. He gazed at the weathered wood posts and rails, and in spite of his ranching ignorance knew that this arrangement would never hold a two-thousand-pound bull buffalo that went by the name of Goliath.
“This is where they used to work on the cattle in the spring. The branding, castrating, vaccinating, deworming, ear notching,” he said. “We’ll probably use this area for the buffalo, too, once we strengthen the fences. This high valley is a natural place to do the work, because once we’re done we can turn them out and they’ll already be at summer pasture. You can see how the land lies, and where the good graze is. That pass between those mountains to the east of us leads to more high meadows just like this. Good grass and water. Once in a while a few head will stray over Dead Woman Pass, way up on the shoulder of Montana Mountain, but for the most part they stick around on this side of the range. They have all they need right here.”
He glanced around at the circle of faces, looking for some response, some flicker of interest. Nothing. “You boys won’t be working with cattle because there aren’t many left. All the Herefords and short-horns were sold off a year ago. There aren’t many longhorns, maybe twenty head, all told. Sometimes a whole summer’ll go by and you won’t catch sight of a single one, or so my ranch manager says. They’re as wild as deer, and just as wily.”
“Why keep them?” Jimmy said. “Why not eat them or sell them off?”
Caleb plucked a stem of grass and chewed on it for a moment. “Well, I’m told that their meat is tougher than hell. But they’re here because Jessie Weaver wanted them to stay on the land, and I agreed to that.”
“Who’s Jessie?”
“You’ll meet her in a few months, maybe. She’s away for the summer, finishing up her veterinary degree, but she grew up here. The Bow and Arrow was in her family for generations, up until this past October when she sold it to me. She’s marrying Guthrie Sloane, my ranch manager, this September—”
“You call it the Bow and Arrow,” the one called Roon interrupted, “but it says Weaver on the ranch sign.”
Caleb threw the grass stem to the ground. “The name Weaver was carved into that cedar plank over a hundred years ago because a hundred years ago you wouldn’t hang a sign that said Bow and Arrow, not when you were a half-breed ranch owner and your neighbors were all old Indian fighters.”
“What about now?”
“Things are a little different now, and before the summer’s over there’ll be a new sign that tells it like it is.”
The sun was setting, the shadows were long and blue, and a golden wash of color swept over the meadow. The sky to the east was a deepening violet and to the west the mountain peaks snagged at salmon-pink clouds. Already there was a chill in the air as the cold sank back down into the valleys from the higher climbs. “Well, boys,” Caleb said. “It’s getting late and it’s a slow crawl back to the ranch. Get back aboard and we’ll haul on home and see what Ramalda and Pony are cooking up for supper.”
“Supper?” Jimmy said, brightening. “You mean we get to eat again?”
“Three square meals a day. That’s the deal. You work, you eat.”
Jimmy climbed into the cab beside him while the others piled into the open bed. “Well then, I’m for working,” he said as Caleb put the truck in gear. “I’m for working real hard. Hold on up there, Mr. McCutcheon, and let me get that gate for you.”
BADGER SAT on the porch bench, his shoulders slouched against the wall, his worn, scuffed boots stretched out in front of him, legs crossed at the ankles. His hat was pulled down almost over his eyes and he was sleeping, or he thought he was. In his dreams he was young again, riding a pale horse called Moon across the lower pasture down near the creek and the old homestead cabin. He caught a whiff of wood smoke from the cabin’s big stone chimney and he could see Jessie’s father standing on the porch, pulling on his pipe and studying something across the creek. Badger drew old Moon in and shaded his eyes against the westering sun, following his boss’s gaze.
By God, it was a buffalo silhouetted against the fiery Rocky Mountain sunset. A big honest-to-God bull buffalo! “Well, what do you know about that?” he said to Moon. “There ain’t been a buff on this land for a century or better.”
The smoke smelled of cedar. Badger filled his lungs with the sweet fragrance and watched the buffalo. He folded his hands across his stomach, adjusted his rump on the bench, eased his shoulders against the rounded logs of the cabin’s west wall, and then opened his eyes a little wider, wondering with a little jolt what had happened to Moon and Jessie’s father. Badger realized he was napping on Caleb McCutcheon’s cabin porch. The dream had left him, but the buffalo was still there, standing across the creek from the log cabin, watching with an almost haughty and proprietary grandeur. Badger sat up. He swallowed and rubbed his hand over his eyes, removed his battered hat and ran his fingers through his thin white hair.
“Damn,” he said, clearing his throat. He reached into his vest pocket for a foil packet of tobacco and stuffed a big wad of it in his mouth, working it around to his left cheek. “I may be gettin’ old and senile,” he muttered to himself, “but that there’s a buffalo I’m lookin’ at, sure as shootin’. What’s the old bull doing way down here?”
He heard the approach of a pickup truck behind the cabin and the slam of the cab’s door. Caleb McCutcheon rounded the corner of the cabin and headed for the porch steps carrying a paper bag. He grinned when he spotted Badger sitting there. “You hiding out?” he said, climbing the steps.
“Yep,” Badger said. “That ranch house up yonder is way too crowded for an old coot like me. But look’ it over there and feast your eyes on that!” He nodded toward the big buffalo. McCutcheon swung on heel and froze, staring in disbelief.
“By God, a hundred more yards and that bastard’ll be on my porch!”
“He won’t cross that creek.”
“Oh? Well, I’d like to believe that, but he’s crossed the Silver and east branch of the Snowy all in less than a week, and just this morning he was way the hell up on the mountain hanging with the rest of them. He’s covered a good five miles since then. This little ribbon of water isn’t going to slow him down. What do you suppose he wants?”
Badger levered himself off the bench and walked over to the corner of the porch railing, leaned his hip into it, and spat over the edge. “Maybe he’s tired of hangin’ around all them sexy buffalo cows,” he said, wiping his chin.
“Well, if that’s the case, I bought myself a bum bull. He’s supposed to be romancing those cows in another month or so.” Caleb McCutcheon shook his head with a disgusted sigh. “To hell with him. After spending the past few hours trying to entertain five boys, right now I’m more interested in having a drink. I just drove all the way to town to pick this bottle up and hide out here on my porch for a little while before going up for supper. Care to join me?”
“Be my pleasure,” Badger said.
A few moments later they were ensconced side to shoulder on the wall bench, watching the buffalo. The daylight waned as they sipped smooth scotch whiskey and enjoyed the silence of the early-summer evening. McCutcheon was halfway through his drink and relaxing more by the moment. “Were they all up there at the ranch house?” he said.
“Well, I counted five boys and one little woman. Guthrie was there, too, lookin’ mighty peaked, but just before I snuck off I seen that Ramalda was pouring a big slug of her medicinal brandy into his coffee. Now, boss, I got to warn you, just in case you don’t know,” Badger said, his gravelly voice ominous. “She speaks Spanish.”
“Pony?”
Badger nodded, taking another sip. “Yep. She and Ramalda were chattering away like two jaybirds in that kitchen. Laughin’ and everything!”
“Ramalda was laughing?”
“Yep.” Badger looked grim. He took another sip. “Laughin’.”
“What about the boys?”
“Them boys is downright determined not to show anything of themselves.”
“Mmm.” Caleb raised his glass, gazing at the darkening bulk of the big bull standing broadside to them across the creek. “I’ve been thinking about those kids. There isn’t really anything for them to do here, once the working day is done. I mean, when supper is over, what then? It seems to me they’re going to need something.”
“Like what?”
“Like maybe a television.”
Badger snorted. “That jabber box was the ruination of this nation’s youth, and if them boys put in a hard day’s work like you seem to think they will, all they’ll be needin’ after supper is a mattress to flop onto and about eight hours of solid shut-eye.”
“But they could watch things if we had a television.”
“What kind of things? The news? You ever seen anything good on the news?”
“Movies, then.”
“Them movies they show are pure violence! Trust me. Those kids don’t need to be learnin’ that stuff.”
Caleb took another sip of whiskey. “There are a lot of good movies out there that aren’t mindless or violent. I could buy a few and they could watch them once in a while, for a special treat.”
“Just what the hell would you power that useless thing with?”
“The same setup we use for the water pump in the bathroom and the computer we enter all the ranch data into,” McCutcheon said. “Guthrie rigged it up. Same as he did in his own cabin. Two seventy-five-watt solar panels, four six-volt batteries, a cheap inverter. It works great and it would easily power one of those TV/VCR combos for a couple hours a week.”
Badger shook his head. “Maybe, but a movie ain’t gonna make ’em happy if they don’t want to be here.”
The buffalo shook his head suddenly, and Caleb leaned forward, his keen eyes narrowing. “True. But I want this thing to work. I want them to like it here.” He watched as the bull took two steps and then lowered his massive head to graze. “I want them to stay,” he said with conviction.
Badger drained the last of his glass and felt the whiskey burn deep. “Well, boss, you keep tellin’ yourself that and you might just come to believe it. Meantime, you best finish off your drink. It’ll give you the courage to face that silent tribe at supper. I don’t know about you, but I ain’t lookin’ forward to it one little bit, much as I admire Ramalda’s cookin’.”
“Maybe we have time for another,” Caleb said, lifting the bottle from the floor beside him with the expression of a condemned man.
Badger examined his glass. “That ain’t the worst offer I ever had,” he said, holding it out for a refill. “No point rushin’ into things.”
CHAPTER FOUR
PONY WAS STANDING at the kitchen counter when he came into the room, just as Ramalda was running through yet another string of heated rants about Caleb McCutcheon always being late, always late! And then quite suddenly the tall lean broad-shouldered rancher was there, and just as suddenly Pony felt all confused inside, turning quickly back to the task she had set herself—sliding the hot biscuits out of the pan and into a deep basket lined with a clean kitchen towel.
The boys were already seated at the table, washed and silent, watching this next culinary performance with a kind of suspicious anticipation. McCutcheon stopped just inside the kitchen door and glanced around the room, nodding almost imperceptibly when his eyes met hers, and then again at Guthrie Sloane, who stood in the back hallway as if hiding from the moment. “Sorry we’re late,” Caleb said to Ramalda, removing his hat as if he were in the presence of royalty. “It’s my fault. I hope you aren’t too angry.”
Ramalda paused in mid-waddle from stove to sink, holding a pot with something delicious-smelling in it. “Lavate las manos!” she said, nodding her head curtly toward the sink and glaring at them. She wrinkled her nose as if smelling something bad. “Hueles a vaca. You wash!”
“Yes, ma’am.” McCutcheon nodded humbly. He and Badger hung their hats on pegs beside the door and made for the sink, standing politely to one side until Ramalda had finished with it.
Pony had discovered that beneath that gruff and scowling exterior, Ramalda had an exceptionally soft heart. From speaking with her during supper preparations, Pony had also learned that the Mexican woman had worked for Jessie Weaver’s family back in the ranch’s glory days, before the fall of cattle prices, before Jessie’s father had gotten cancer. Ramalda had been like a mother to Jessie, whose own mother had died when she was just a child. When hard times had come to the ranch, both Ramalda and her cowboy husband, Drew Long, had been laid off, and Ramalda had confided that it had been a kind of miracle when Caleb McCutcheon had bought the ranch and hired her back—at Jessie’s prompting—shortly after Drew’s death.
Having washed up, both McCutcheon and Badger approached the table, where they stood awkwardly for a few moments before claiming chairs together at one end of the table. Guthrie joined them, and the three sat down and rested their elbows on the table, glancing around the room. McCutcheon’s eyes touched hers again briefly and Pony felt her cheeks warm. He cleared his throat.
“That bull buffalo is standing right across the creek from my cabin,” he said, reaching for the coffeepot that Ramalda had plunked in the center of the table and filling his cup. He did the same for Guthrie and Badger.
“I’ll be damned. Guess he traveled some today, didn’t he?” Guthrie said, raising his cup for a swallow. “Maybe in the morning he’ll be standing on your porch, lookin’ in the window.”
“That big buff’s like a mountain on hooves,” Badger said. “I’ve never seen any bigger. Kind of spooky, if you ask me. I’ll take beef cattle any day.”
“That’s because you don’t know what from wherefore,” Guthrie said. “Buffalo are the wave of the future. The meat is healthier, tastier, and since when could you sell a beef cow’s skull and hide for nearly a thousand dollars?”
“Since when could you throw a rope around a buffalo and slap your brand on it?” Badger challenged, adding three heaping spoonfuls of sugar to his coffee.
“Speaking of which,” McCutcheon interrupted, “Badger, weren’t you and Charlie supposed to give me a roping lesson yesterday? Charlie mentioned something about it when I ran into him at the Longhorn Cafe.”
Badger’s eyebrows raised and he rubbed his whiskery chin. “That’s the first I heard of it.” He shook his head in disgust. “Charlie’s a senile old coot.”
Pony helped Ramalda with the final preparations while listening to the conversation, and the boys’ heads turned solemnly from one speaker to another as if watching a tennis match.
Guthrie reached for the coffeepot. “Charlie and Badger can’t throw a rope anyhow,” he said, topping off his mug. “Between the two of them, I doubt they could rope a stump and tie it to a tree. Why’d you want to take lessons from them?”
“I was throwin’ a rope long before you hit the ground, son,” Badger said, adding another spoonful of sugar to his cup. “And I expect I can still throw one better’n you.”
“Maybe we should have us a rope-throwing contest after supper,” Guthrie said. “I could use a little extra pocket money betting on a sure thing like that.”
Badger laid down his spoon, straightened his spine and smoothed his mustache. “Son, there’s no such thing as a sure thing, but if you want to run on the rope, go right ahead. To my way of thinkin’, you’d be better off keeping your money in your pocket. You’re going to need all the cash you can get to pay for this big wedding of yours that your sister Bernie’s plannin’.”
Guthrie sipped his coffee. “Why, Badger, I thought you was plannin’ to foot the bill. You’re always talkin’ about how Jessie’s been just like a granddaughter to you.”
“That she is,” Badger said, his voice gruff but his expression softening. “Maybe we’d both best be saving our money.”
McCutcheon leaned back in his chair. “I guess this means I’m never going to get my roping lesson.”
Pony set the basket of golden biscuits on the table, but when Jimmy immediately reached for one she said, “Wait.” She helped Ramalda bring the rest of the food, and then took a chair between Jimmy and Roon. Ramalda went back to the sink and began fussing with the dirty pots and pans. Badger reached for a biscuit. “Wait,” Pony said again, and Badger drew his hand back as if he’d been slapped. Pony folded her hands in front of her. “We must wait.”
The boys sat silently. McCutcheon and Guthrie exchanged a questioning glance while Ramalda scrubbed noisily away at the pots in the kitchen sink. The wait stretched out for several long minutes and finally Badger cleared his throat. “Now, maybe I’m practicing rude behavior here, ma’am, but just what the devil are we waiting for?” he said, giving her a reproachful look. “Are you about to say grace?”
Pony’s clasped hands tightened. “It is impolite to begin eating before everyone is seated.”
Badger snorted. “Hell’s bells, Ramalda never sits with us. We’ll all starve if we wait for her. She eats in her own place, at her own time.”
Pony looked at McCutcheon with a surge of indignation. “You mean that she is not allowed to eat with you?”
His face flushed. “She’s more than welcome, but she won’t. Maybe you can convince her to, but I can’t. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
She looked behind her to where the woman worked at the sink. “Ramalda, sientate, y come con nosotros.” Ramalda swung her bulk about and scowled, raised a dripping hand holding a scouring pad and shook her head.
“No. Comaselos ustedes ahora que están caliente.”
Pony faced front again, her cheeks flushing with embarrassment. “She says for us to eat while the food is hot.”
“There now, you see?” Badger said. “She’s an old-time camp cookie, Ramalda is. She knows full well that us cowboys is nothin’ more than a big appetite ridin’ a horse.” He reached for the basket of biscuits and helped himself, handing the basket to his left, and did the same with the platter of two plump roasting chickens. A spicy dish made of cornmeal with peppers and onions followed, and finally, the big pitcher of milk. For a while there was only the noise of cutlery scraping against plates as the boys dug in and the men followed suit. Pony glanced up as Ramalda plunked a big cast-iron pot of spiced beef and beans onto the table and replenished the biscuits and the milk. She tried to eat but couldn’t, her nerves were that rattled. But it didn’t matter. The noon meal had been sufficient to last her several days.
“So tell me why that big bull buffalo roams,” Caleb McCutcheon said, startling her. She caught his gaze for a moment and then dropped her eyes to her plate and pretended to concentrate on her food.
“The bulls will generally remain near the herd, but they hang together in their own group. The cows stay with the cows, the bulls with the bulls,” she said to her plate. “The only time the bulls run with the cows is during the mating time. Your bull is lonely, but not for the cows. Not right now. Right now he needs other bulls, the same way you men seem to need each other’s company.”
“But won’t they fight amongst themselves?”
Pony nodded, glancing up briefly. “In the mating time they’ll test each other. They’ll fight sometimes, and sometimes there’ll be injuries. But the rest of the year the bulls like each other’s company.”
“Yepper,” Badger said, deadpan. “Maybe you’ll find him on your porch in the morning. Maybe he just wants to hang out with you, boss.”
“How many bulls do you think I should have here?” McCutcheon asked.
“That depends. How many cows do you want to run?”
“How many cows could this ranch support?” he said, fork poised halfway to his mouth.
“How big is your range?”
“It’ll be fifteen thousand acres in another month, but right now we’re working with five thousand,” McCutcheon said.
“And you have ten cows and one bull.” Pony broke a biscuit in half and laid it on her plate. She buttered both halves carefully, concentrating on the task. “You’ll need five bulls to start, and at least thirty cows. Three times that would be better. Anything less, and you won’t make any money at all.”
She laid down the knife and raised her eyes.
He regarded her steadily. “The money part doesn’t matter,” he said.
She paused, carefully considering his statement. “Maybe it should, Mr. McCutcheon.” She felt her heart rate accelerate. “Maybe it isn’t enough for this little herd of buffalo to be the token toys of a rich man. Maybe it would mean more if you could prove that what you are doing here is a good thing, that it is good for the land, good for the buffalo, and good for the people, too. And if you can make money doing a good thing, and make the ranch work again and hold itself up without your support, maybe that would be the very best thing of all.”
Dead silence.
McCutcheon pushed his plate away and set back in his chair. All eyes at the table were on him, awaiting his response. He picked up his coffee and took a swallow. Set the mug down gently. “Okay,” he said, nodding slowly, his blue eyes calmly speculative. “So where do we get these buffalo?”
“There are auctions,” she said. “Usually these are held late in the year. You can also buy directly from other ranches. You could talk to Pete and see if he will sell you some more. But first you need to get your fences fixed, or the buffalo will just push them down and wander off.”
McCutcheon nodded again and glanced at Guthrie. “We’ll make an early start in the morning. Everyone had better get a good night’s sleep,” he said, standing abruptly. “That was a good meal, Ramalda. Muchas gracias.” He lifted his hat off the wall peg and walked out of the kitchen without looking back, the screen door slamming behind him.
Pony watched him go and felt a sudden twist of anxiety at her brashness. The words she had spoken were true, but they had hurt the way the truth sometimes did. He was no doubt standing on the porch thinking about how he could politely ask her and the boys to leave, because this much she already knew about Caleb McCutcheon; he might be a rich man, but he had a good and honest heart.
CALEB WALKED OUT into the twilight, grateful for the chill air that cooled his flaming face. The words she’d spoken had stung, but she was absolutely correct. If he wanted to make a real difference, it had to be in a real way. He couldn’t rely on his inexhaustible bank account, because that wouldn’t help this land or the people who lived upon it.
He walked to the porch rail and leaned over, elbows braced, gazing at the last shreds of color in the sky. The cow dog, Blue, rose from her nap and crossed the porch to sit beside him companionably. He let one hand drop to stroke the top of her head and shortly afterward heard two sets of boots come onto the porch behind him. Guthrie and Badger walked up to the porch rail and stood—one on each side of him—staring out at the June evening.
For a while they were quiet, and then Guthrie made a strange choking noise and turned away, limping a few steps to put some distance between them. His head was ducked and his shoulders rounded over. Caleb stared at his back for a moment, wondering if Guthrie was all right or if the pain he had lived with for the past eight months had suddenly overwhelmed him. Just as he was about to voice his concern, the young man straightened, drew a deep breath, wiped his forearm across his eyes and turned to face him.
“You’re laughing,” Caleb accused. He shot a suspicious glance at Badger, but the old man was stuffing a wad of chewing tobacco into his mouth. “Damn!” he said, beginning to get angry. “The both of you think I’m a fool, don’t you? A rich fool, just like she does.”
Guthrie shook his head but he was still fighting down the laughter. “Nossir,” he said. “God’s truth, we don’t. Nobody in this whole valley feels that way about you. But the look on your face while she was talkin’ to you…” He ducked away again in another paroxysm of laughter, and Caleb watched him. He couldn’t remember ever seeing Guthrie Sloane laugh before. He swung around to face Badger, but the cowboy’s expression was neutral.
“Yepper.” Badger nodded, working the tobacco into position with his tongue. “It took millions of years for man to evolve from monkeys, but a woman can make a monkey out of a man in seconds.” He pondered for moment before adding, “Now I ask you, is that the least little bit fair?”
The anger drained out of Caleb as quickly as it had come, and he slumped in defeat, resting his forearms on the porch railing. “All right, then, have your laugh. But just remember, we’re in this buffalo fiasco together.” He gazed toward the pole barn, watched the horses walking about in the corral, and felt his tension slowly ebb. “Tomorrow the work begins, but tomorrow’s still half a day away. I’m heading to the cabin for a nightcap, and you’re welcome to join me.” He started down the porch steps, and the two men fell in behind, trailed by the cow dog. Halfway to the cabin he paused and looked back up at the ranch house. “Did any of those boys say one word during supper?” he said.
“Nossir,” Guthrie said. “Nary a one.” He stood beside him, wearing a puzzled frown. “It’s like they were just sitting there, waiting for something to happen.”
“Yeah,” Caleb said. “But what?”
WHEN THE KITCHEN was tidied and the dishes washed, dried and put away, Pony walked into the living room looking for the boys, but they were nowhere to be found. Ramalda had retreated to her bedroom after banking the cookstove and lighting the oil lamps, and Pony allowed herself the luxury of enjoying the peaceful room in silence. It was a comfortable space, not too big, with the fireplace as its focal point. Above the mantel hung an old gilt-framed oil painting of a herd of longhorn cattle being driven across an arid plain, with a wall of mountains shimmering in the heat-baked distance. She knew little of art but recognized and admired the quality of the work.
A couch and two overstuffed chairs flanked the fireplace, and there were bookshelves on either side, filled with hardcover books. She withdrew a few to thumb through the pages. A book by Einstein about the theory of relativity. A very old copy of Stewart Edward White’s The Forest. Her eye caught another title and she drew the book from its spot. Hanta Yo, by Ruth Beebe Hill. This volume was well-worn and her hands caressed it as if she had found an old friend after a long absence. She had read this book as a young girl, read it again as an adolescent, read it one more time in college. It had taken her on a mystical journey down the red road, and she had absorbed more each time she’d traveled it.
The room had a pleasing smell, a mingling of cedar, saddle leather and winter apples, though she could find no evidence of any such things. The floor was sheathed in wide boards and covered over with a large handwoven rug of Navajo design. There were several periodicals scattered on a scuffed plank coffee table in front of the sofa—cattlemen’s journals and such. And over on the wall, beneath a window, was a desk with a large computer workstation. The computer seemed glaringly out of place in this room. Pony replaced the book and walked down the hallway that led to the bedrooms, tapping lightly on the boys’ door.
Nothing.
She peeked into her own room. Empty. She walked through the kitchen and out onto the porch, standing in the darkness and wondering where they were. Her eyes came to rest on the dark bulk of the pole barn, and she descended the porch steps and walked toward it. She could hear the horses moving about in the corral as she drew near and the murmur of low voices from inside the barn. She opened one half of the big door just wide enough to peek inside, and stared, unnoticed, at the sight of five boys and one flashlight crowded around a big western stock saddle draped over a stall partition.
“No, stupid,” she heard Jimmy say as the flashlight beam shifted. “That’s called the horn. This part back here is the cantle.”
“Then what’s this thing called?” Martin said, and Jimmy’s head bent over the little paperback guidebook he carried—the one Pony had given him a week ago.
“That’s the cinch. It goes around the horse’s belly and holds the saddle on.”
Pony quietly closed the barn door and stood for a moment beneath the bright spangle of stars. She smiled with relief at what she had just witnessed. It was going to be okay. If Caleb McCutcheon didn’t send them packing tomorrow, everything would be all right. And in the event that he allowed them to stay, she had some studying of her own to do before blowing out the lamp. In her little bag she had packed the notebook that Pete Two Shirts had given her, filled with his unruly, nearly illegible scrawl. It contained all his notes about the buffalo—everything he had come to know from his years of working with the tribal bison herd.
Pete had given her the notebook shortly after finding out she’d gotten the job. He’d come to the school again—it was a safe place to see her, a neutral place—and he’d waited until the children had gone home before walking into the classroom and laying the book on her desk. “Thought you might need this,” he said. “In case you’ve forgotten what you learned that summer.”
The blood had left her head with a rush, and for a moment, looking up at him from the relative security of her chair, she felt as if she might faint. “I will never forget,” she said. “I only wish I could.”
His eyes had held hers in a steely grip that she couldn’t break. “Don’t let the past haunt you, Pony. Don’t let it destroy your life.”
He was right. She knew he was right. But she couldn’t change what had happened by pretending that it hadn’t. She would have to live with the guilt for the rest of her life.
Now Pony climbed the ranch-house steps, arms wrapped tightly around her waist, and stood for a moment in the vast, almost-palpable silence of the night. She suddenly felt alone and lonely, overwhelmed and scared. Sometimes those dark memories became too powerful to push back and she felt as if she were drowning in all the mistakes she’d made.
Sometimes, she wished she’d died that summer.
CALEB MCCUTCHEON WAS NOT a night owl, but at one o’clock in the morning he was still reading by lamplight, studying the history of the Crow Indian tribe. He was reading a book called Parading Through History by Frederick E. Hoxie, because he felt compelled to learn more about Pony and her boys. He found the book fascinating enough to make a pot of coffee at midnight, turn up the lamp wick and draw an old wool blanket over his lap to thwart the night chill. At 1:00 a.m. he paused to listen to the wild and eerie song of a group of coyotes yipping in the foothills and wondered where the old bull buffalo was, glancing at the window and hoping he wouldn’t see the reflection of the great beast looking back at him.
He didn’t. He got up, poured himself another cup of coffee and returned to the comfortable chair, the warm blanket and the book. It was 2:00 a.m. before he finally blew out the lamp and went to bed, and a short three hours later he was rolling out from under the warm blankets with a reluctant moan, boiling up a fresh pot of coffee, drinking his first cup on the porch, bare toes curled over the edge of the weathered porch boards, and shivering in the quiet, mist-shrouded dawn.
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