Читать книгу Buffalo Summer - Nadia Nichols - Страница 9

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.”