High Hunt (21 page)

“I picked the wrong horse,” I told him. “That little exhibition back there was all his idea.”

“How the hell'd you manage to stay on?”

“Clint warned me about this knothead in the truck on the way up. I was ready for him. You might not have noticed, but I had a pretty firm grip on this saddlehorn.”

Jack laughed. “You two didn't slow down long enough for me to see that part of it.”

I gingerly felt my rump. “I sure hope he doesn't feel he has to go through this every time we start out.”

Jack laughed again, and we plodded down the road.

“How's this Miller strike
you
?” I asked him.

“I don't think I'd want to cross him.”

“Amen to that, buddy,” I agreed.

“‘He sure as hell acts like he knows what he's doin',” my brother said.

“He's an old-time Marine,” I said. “Him and Clint both.”

“McKlearey'll cash in on that,” Jack said, unbuttoning his quilted hunting vest.

“Wouldn't doubt it.”

“How's Clint? He seemed pretty grouchy back at the house.”

“That's mostly bark,” I said. “We talked quite a bit on the way up. Like I told you, he was the one that warned me about this horse and his little habits.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “I noticed that he was callin' you by name when you guys got down from the truck.”

We turned around and rode back on up to the others. Stan and Sloane were mounted now and were starting off down the road. Sloane seemed to be puffing pretty hard. Maybe his horse had him a little spooked, or maybe his down-filled parka was a little too warm.

Jack and I got down and helped Miller and Clint load up the packhorses. Then Miller called in the others.

“Now here's how we'll go,” he said after they had dismounted. “I'll lead out and Clint'll bring up the rear with the packhorses. Don't try nothin' fancy along the trail. Let the horse do all the work and most of the thinkin'. Just set easy and watch the scenery go by. The horses know what they're doin', so trust 'em.”

He showed us how to tie our rifles to the saddle where they'd be out of the way. His own gun case was lashed to the back of one of the packhorses, and Clint's .30-30 was tucked in beside it.

I think we all saw the quick glance that passed between Miller and Clint when we hauled our pistol belts out of McKlearey's car.

“Bears,” Sloane explained, almost apologetically.

“Bears!” Clint snorted. “Ain't no damn bears up that high.”

“Oh,” Sloane said meekly. “We thought there might be.”

Miller scratched his mustache dubiously. “Can't leave 'em here,” he said finally. “Somebody might come along and steal 'em. I guess you'll have to bring the damn things along. They might be some good for signalin' and the like.” He shook his head and walked off a ways by himself, his fists jammed down into the pockets of his sheepskin coat and that big hat pulled down low over his eyes.

We all looked at each other shamefacedly and slowly strapped on our hardware.

“Looks like the goddamn Tijuana National Guard,” Clint muttered in disgust.

We stood around like a bunch of kids who'd been caught stealing apples until Miller came back.

“All right,” he said shortly, “get on your horses and let's get goin'.”

We climbed on our horses—Ned didn't even twitch this time—and followed Miller on up to the end of the road and onto the saddle trail that took off from there. The trail moved
up along the side of a ridge. Once we got up a ways, the pines thinned out and we could see out for miles across the heavily timbered foothills. The horizon ahead of us was a ragged line of snow-covered peaks; to the east, behind us, it faded off into blue, hazy distance. The grass up here was yellow and knee-high, waving gently in the slight wind that followed us up the ridge. I could see little swirls and patterns on top of the grass as gusts brushed here and there.

It was absolutely quiet, except for the horses and the sound of the wind. I felt good—I felt damned good.

At the top of the ridge we stopped.

“Better let the horses blow a bit,” Miller said. “Always a good idea to let 'em settle into it easy.” He seemed to have gotten his temper back.

“Do we have quite a bit farther to go?” Sloane asked, breathing deeply. He looked pretty rough. I guessed that he was feeling the lack of sleep.

“We're just gettin' started,” Miller said. “We'll cut on up across that saddleback there and then down into the next valley. We stay to the valley a piece and then go up to the top of the other ridge. Then on into the next hollow. ‘Bout another twelve miles or so.”

Sloane shook his head and took another deep breath. “I think I've got this damned belt too tight,” he said. He opened the parka, undid his gun belt, looped it a couple times around the saddle horn and buckled it. He eased off on his pants belt a couple notches. “That's better,” he said.

“I told you your beer-drinkin' habit would catch up to you someday, Calvin,” Jack said laughing.

“Doe!” Miller said suddenly, pointing up the ridge at a deer that had stopped about a quarter of a mile away and was watching us nervously.

Sloane pulled a pair of small binoculars out of his coat pocket and glassed the ridge. “Where?” he demanded.

“See that big pine off to the left of that patch of gray rock?”

“Back in the shade a bit,” I said.

“I don't—oh, yeah, now I see her.”

We watched the doe step delicately on over the ridge and go down into the brush on the other side.

“There's a big game trail up there,” Miller said. “I followed it down last winter during the big snow. It was the only place I could be sure of the footing.”

“On horseback?” Stan asked.

“I was leadin' 'im,” Miller said. “He'd gone lame on me up the ridge a ways. I had to hunker down under a ledge for two days till the snow eased up.”

Stan shook his head. “That would scare me into convulsions,” he admitted. “Did you ever think you weren't going to make it?”

“Oh, it give me a few nervous minutes,” Miller said. A stray gust of wind ruffled that white mustache of his. He squinted up the ridge, his face more like rock than ever.

McKlearey came up. He'd been hanging back, riding about halfway between the rest of us and Clint, who was a ways back with the packhorses. Maybe he was ashamed of himself because Miller'd had to speak to him about running the horse. He reined in a little way from the rest of us and sat waiting, watching us and rubbing at his bandaged hand.

“It's good country up here,” Miller was saying. “Ain't nobody around, and things are nice and simple. Air's clean, and a man can see a ways. Good country.”

I reached out and scratched Ned's ears. He seemed to like it. My eyes were a little sandy from lack of sleep, but Miller was right—you could see a ways up here—a long ways.

A
BOUT
three thirty that afternoon we crossed the second ridge and dropped down into a little basin on the far side. There were several small springs in the bottom, all feeding into a little creek that had been dammed a couple times by beavers. There were several old corrals down there—poles lashed to trees with baling wire—and a half dozen or so tent frames back under the trees. You wouldn't have expected to find a place like this up on the mountainside.

“Old sheep camp,” Miller said as we rode down into the basin. “Herders are all down now, so I figured it'd be about right.”

“Looks good,” Jack said.

“Got water, shelter, and firewood—and the corrals, of course,” Miller said. “And the deer huntin' up on that ridge is about as good as any you'll find.” He nodded to a ridge that swelled on up out of the scrubby timber into the open meadows between us and the rockfalls just below the snow line.

We reined up in the camp area and climbed down off the horses. My legs ached, and I was a little unsteady on my feet. We tied our horses to the top rail on one of the corrals and walked around a bit, looking it over.

The six tent frames were in a kind of semicircle at the edge of the trees, facing a large stone fire pit and looking out over the grassy floor of the basin and the largest of the beaver ponds out in the middle. Out beyond the pond, the draw rose sharply in a series of steeply slanted meadows. Directly overhead, almost as if it were leaning over the little basin, the bulky white mass of Glacier Peak rose ponderously, so huge as to be almost unbelievable.

There was a rocked-up spring behind the last tent frame, a sandy-bottomed pocket of icy water about two feet deep and perhaps three feet across. The outflow trickled off along the edge of the trees toward the horse corrals at the lower end of the camp.

None of the trees in the little grove were much more than fifteen feet tall, and they were brushy—spruce mostly. We were within a quarter of a mile of the timberline. There were a lot of low shrubs—heather, Miller said—lying in under the trees, and moss in the open spaces. I noticed a lot of sticks and downed trees lying around.

“Beaver,” Miller said. “Greatest firewood collectors around.”

McKlearey rode on in and climbed down off his horse. He still kept off to himself.

“Clint'll be along in a few minutes,” Miller said. “Let's get a fire goin' so we can have some coffee.”

We all moved around picking up firewood, and Miller scraped the debris out of the fire pit. The wood was bone dry, and it only took a few minutes for a good blaze to get started.

Then Clint came in with the pack-string, and we started to unpack. The two-gallon coffee pot and a big iron grill that looked like a chunk of sidewalk grating were the first things to come off. Clint filled the pot from the spring behind the tent frames while Miller piled several big rocks in close to the fire to set the grill on.

“A man can cook with just a fire if he's of a mind,” he said,
“but this makes things a whole lot simpler.” He set the grill in place while Clint dumped several fistfuls of grounds into the water in the pot.

“Don't you use the basket?” Stan asked.

“Lost it a couple years ago,” Clint said. “Don't do no good up this high anyway. Water boils at about a hundred and seventy up here. You gotta get the grounds down close to the fire and kinda fry the juice out. Gives you somethin' to chew on in your coffee with them grounds floatin' loose, but that never hurt nobody.”

He rummaged around in one of the packs and came up with a sack of salt and dumped a couple pinches in. Then he did something that still makes my hair stand on end. He fished out a dozen eggs, took one and cracked it neatly on a rock. Then he drank it, right out of the shell. I heard Sloane gag slightly. Clint paid no attention to us but crumbled the shell in his fist and dropped it in the pot. Then he clamped on the lid and put the pot down on the grill over the fire.

“I've heard of the salt before, Clint,” I said when my stomach settled back down, “but why the eggshell?”

“Damn if I know,” he said. “Only thing is, I never tasted coffee fit to drink without it had some eggshell in it.”

I didn't ask him why he'd drunk the raw egg. I was pretty sure I didn't want to know.

“We'll have some jerky and cold biscuits with our coffee,” Miller said. “That'll tide us till we get camp set up and Clint can fix a real meal.”

We all sat around the fire on logs and stumps waiting for the coffee to boil. It boiled over, hissing into the fire with a pungent smell, three times. Each time Clint doused cold water into the pot and let it boil again. Then, the fourth time, he decided it was ready to drink. I'll have to admit that it was damned good coffee. The strips of beef-jerky chewed a bit like old harness leather, but they were good, too, and the cold biscuits with honey set things off just right. I don't think I'd realized just how hungry I was.

Miller brushed the crumbs out of his mustache and filled his coffee mug again. “First thing is to check out the corrals,” he said. “We'll need two good ones anyway—that way we won't be stirrin' up the pack animals ever' time we want a saddle horse. Way we'll do it is this: Go around those nearest two corrals and yank real hard on ever' place that's wired. Any place that comes loose, we'll rewire. Balin' wire is looped
around that dead tree by the spring. Soon as we get that done, we can unsaddle the stock and turn 'em loose in the corrals. We brought some oats for 'em, but we'll have to picket 'em out to graze in the daytime while you men are up on the ridge. After we get the horses tended to, we'll set up the tents.”

“Couldn't some of us start on the tents while the others work on the corrals?” Sloane asked, puffing slightly again.

“I suppose we could,” Miller said, “but we'll do 'er the way I said before. Me'n old Clint there was in the Horse-Marines when we was pups, and the first thing we learned was to see to the stock first. Up here a man without a horse is in real trouble. She's a long damn walk back down.”

“I see what you mean,” Cal said, breathing heavily. He was used to making the decisions, but Miller was in charge, and now we all knew it.

It only took us about fifteen minutes to check out the corrals. Most of the lashings were still tight. Then we unsaddled the horses and turned them into the corrals, laying the saddles over the top rail of a corral we weren't using. Miller dumped oats from a burlap sack into a manger that opened onto both corrals. The horses nuzzled at him and he moved among them. He spoke to them, his voice curiously gentle as he did.

Then we all went up to the fire and had another cup of coffee. The sun was sliding down toward the tops of the peaks above us, and the air was taking on a decided chill. We stood looking at the welter of packs, sleeping bags, and rolled-up tenting that lay in a heap under the tent frames.

“Take a week to get all that squared away,” Jack said.

“Hour on the outside,” Clint disagreed.

First we put up the tents. They were little six-by-eight jobs that fit neatly over the frames. Miller and Clint showed us how to set them up and pull them tight. We set up five tents and then pilled all the packs in the end one.

“Leave the front of that one open and tied back so's I can get in and out easy,” Clint said. He showed us where to put the packs to make sure he knew where everything was. Then Miller sent us out to gather moss to pile into the rectangular log bed frames on the ground inside the tents.

“Next to feathers, that's about the softest bed you're gonna find.”

“Right now, I could sleep on rocks,” I told him.

“No point in that unless you have to.” He grinned.

It really took a surprisingly short period of time to set up
camp. Miller and Clint had it all down pat, and McKlearey was a damned good field soldier. He seemed to be everywhere, checking tent ropes, ditching around the tents, cleaning dead leaves out of the spring. His cut hand didn't seem to bother him, but the bandage was getting pretty used-looking. Miller took to calling him “Sarge,” and Lou responded with “Cap,” something the rest of us didn't have guts enough to try yet. Maybe it was that they'd both been in the Marines. Lou seemed to be coming around. He even gave Stan some friendly advice about his bedding, pointing out that the sticks Stan had gathered with the moss he put in his bed frame might be just a touch lumpy.

Sloane grinned at us all as we hauled in our third load of moss and began to blow up an air mattress.

“You goddamn candy-ass,” Jack said.

“Brains,” Sloane said, tapping his forehead. “This ol' massa ain't
about
to sleep on no col', col' groun'.” He went on blowing into the mattress. He was sitting on the ground near the fire, and his face kept getting redder and redder. He really didn't seem to be making much headway with the mattress. Then he got a funny look on his face and sort of sagged over sideways until he was lying facedown in the dirt.

“Christ, Sloane!” Jack said sharply. We all jumped to get him up again.

“Leave 'im be!” Miller barked. He stepped in and rolled Sloane over onto his back. He felt Sloane's pulse in his throat and then pulled over a chunk of log to put the big man's feet up on.

“Altitude,” he said shortly. He looked around at us. “His heart OK?”

“He's never had any trouble I know of,” Jack said, “and I've known him for years.”

“That's a break. Get some whiskey.”

We all dove for our sacks, but Lou beat all of us. He was already out. Miller nodded approvingly. He and McKlearey began working on Sloane, and soon they had him awake.

“Son of a bitch!” Cal said thickly. “That's the first time
that's
ever happened.”

“Better take 'er easy for a bit,” Miller said. “Takes some men a while to get adjusted to it. You come from sea level to better'n eight thousand feet in less'n a day.”

“I just couldn't seem to get my breath,” Cal said.

I picked up his air mattress and blew it up for him. Toward the end I got a little woozy, too.

“Easy, boy,” Clint growled. “We don't need two down.”

“Sloane, you dumb shit,” Jack said, “why didn't you bring a bicycle pump? You like to scared the piss outa me.”

Sloane grinned weakly. “I figured as windy as this bunch is, I wouldn't have any trouble gettin' enough hot air to pump up one little old air mattress.”

“Are you sure you're all right?” Stan asked.

“I'll be OK,” Cal said. “Just a little soft is all.”

“If I was carryin' as much beer as you are,” Jack said, “I'd be pooped, too.”

“For God's sake, don't the on us,” Lou said. “You still owe me three days' pay.”

“You're all heart, McKlearey,” I said.

He grinned at me. It suddenly occurred to me that he could be a likable son of a bitch when he wanted to be.

We eased Cal onto his air mattress and then stood around watching him breathe.

“We better get to work on the firewood, men,” Miller said. “Ol' Sarge here can watch the Big Man.” He gathered up the lead-ropes we'd taken off the packhorses. “Slim,” he said to Jack, “you and the Professor and the Kid there take these two axes and that bucksaw and go down into that grove of spruce below the corrals. Bust the stuff up into four-or-five-foot lengths and bundle it up with these. Then haul 'em out in the open. We'll drag 'em in with a saddle horse.” I guess that was his way. Miller seldom used our names. It was “Sarge” or “Slim” or “Big Man” or “Professor” or “the Kid.” I suppose I should have resented that last one, but I didn't.

The three of us grabbed up the tools and headed off down into the spruce grove.

“You think Cal's going to be OK?” I asked Jack.

“Oh, he'll snap out of it.” Jack said. “Sloane's a tough bastard.”

“I didn't much like the way his eyes rolled back when he passed out,” Stan said.

“Did look a little spooky, didn't it?” Jack said. “But don't worry. Soon as he gets his wind back, Sloane'll run the ass off the whole bunch of us.”

We spread out, knocking off dead limbs and dragging downed timber out into the open. We started to bundle the stuff up, tying it with the lead-ropes.

“Say, Dan,” Stan said after a while, “give me a hand here with that ax.”

I went over to where be was working on a pile of dead limbs.

“It'll take me all night with this saw,” he said.

I grunted and started knocking limbs off. I could hear Jack chopping away back in the brush.

“It's beautiful up here, isn't it?” Stan said when I stopped to take a breather. I looked around. The sun had just slid down behind the peaks, and deep blue shadows seemed to be rising out of the ground.

“Good country,” I said, echoing Miller.

“I wish Monica could see it,” he said, zipping up that bright orange jacket. “Maybe she'd understand then.”

I sat down and lit a cigarette. “She gave you a pretty rough time about it, didn't she?”

“It wasn't pleasant,” he said. “You have to understand Monica though. She's an only child, and her parents were in their forties when she was bom. I guess they spoiled her—you know how that could happen under the circumstances. She's always been a strong-willed girl, and nobody's ever done anything she didn't want them to before.”

“She's got to learn sometime,” I said.

“I've tried to protect her,” he went on. “I know she's not much of a wife really. She's spoiled and willful and sometimes spiteful—but that's not her fault, really, is it? When you consider how she was raised?”

“I can see how it could happen,” I said.

“But this trip got to be such an issue,” he said, “that I just
had
to do it. I couldn't let it go any longer.”