The Jump-Off Creek (3 page)

Finally he came back up the trail to the broken edge. A little color had bloomed in his face. “Give those goats a swat. See if they won't jump across,” he said to her.

She had one hand twined tight around the saddle horn, the fingers holding on rubbery. She thought of backing her way off the hillside.
I believe I'll just go around, thank you.
And he would take his cows and go on without waiting.
Suit yourself, ma'am.

But she stood down from the mule, careful and grim, and pulled the goats up on the long tether. She remembered suddenly that one of the does was named Rose; the man who had owned her had called her after his wife's mother. She didn't know the name of the other goat, nor which of them was Rose. She stood, fishing uselessly for the name. Louise. The brown doe was Louise, after the man's own mother. She undid the lead and bunched it up in a coat pocket. Then, standing at the edge of the short gravelly slide where the trail had broken down, she slapped Rose's flank smartly. The goat shied, twitched her hide, blatted. Lydia got behind her and slapped again and pushed on her hindquarters. Rose made a cross sound gathering herself, and shot across the break. Louise bolted after her, stuttering and bleating protest at the edge.

Mr. Whiteaker had got back out of the way, squatting up on the steep sidehill. Now he stood up. “If you'll sling me the end of the pack mule's lead, I'll see if I can persuade him to come over.”

The wind flapped the brim of his hat suddenly and he jerked his arm up, holding onto it. She held her own hat and waited until the gusty wind had fallen off. Then silently she brought the gray mule up and cast the lead across to Mr. Whiteaker. He pulled it and made a wordless, foolish clucking sound. The mule stood stubbornly with his neck stretched out, eyeing whitely over the edge of the trail down to the pine trees and the creek. Lydia slapped his haunch.

“If you've got a stick, ma'am, hit him with it.”

She had no stick. She backed up from the mule and threw a rock. It smacked him at the root of the tail and he jerked and came over in a clumsy bounce, jolting his top-heavy load. The man let go the lead, let him go on by, trotting high-headed down the notch to take comfort from the bay horse and the goats, bunched up together halfway down to the trees.

“Now you, ma'am,” he said. He ducked his chin. “I don't know if you want to jump that mule over, or get over on your own.”

She had got to recognize in the faces of most cattlemen a little conceit about mules. She had seen it once, maybe, in Mr. Whiteaker's face, but there was nothing of it now, just that slight wariness.

She stood beside the black saddle mule, in the rain, and looked ahead along the notch, not at him. “This mule has not even a name yet, Mr. Whiteaker, I have not known him long enough for that.” She glanced toward him. “But I have a general trust of mules on tricky ground.”

He stood holding on to his hat, squinting at her through the rain. Then he said, in a low way, “I believe if you give him your heels, he'll bring you across okay, ma'am.”

She nodded gravely and got up on the mule. She had a habit of going quick in these events, before the misgiving would set
in. She gripped the horn, made a little involuntary squeaky sound, rammed her heels against the mule. The mule squatted back, deciding, and then they came over in a clumsy leap. Her bottom rose off the saddle and slapped down when they lit on the other side. She let the mule take her on downslope at a jittery trot, straight on past the bunched-up animals. They fell in after her, as if she had them on a lead. Even the bay horse started down, jerking his head, fretting.

When she came down under the trees, she got stiffly off the mule and stood there. The dog had brought Mr. Whiteaker's cattle down onto the flatter ground and he was holding them patiently, waiting. He came and smelled Lydia where she was standing beside the mule. When she saw Mr. Whiteaker coming down on the trail, she took the lead out of her pocket and looked at the goats and then went after them slowly.

The shank of the bay horse dribbled a little blood through muddy hair. The man, when he came down, squatted looking at that without speaking to her. The horse made a low, snuffling sound when he touched the leg. He straightened up and reached under the saddle, tightening the rigging. “We'd have been quite a while, taking any other way down off that ridge,” he said. She understood that it was a kind of apology.

She nodded, with her mouth deliberately unsmiling. “Well, we have got down all right,” she said.

He looked at her. “Yes.”

The horse stamped its foot.

“I have been told that a solution of carbolic will keep the corruption out of a wound,” she said, while he bent down looking at the sore leg again.

He glanced around at her. After a silence, he said, “I don't know if I have any of it. I guess we ought to get some.” He nodded as if she had said something more. Then he stood and climbed up on the saddle and said a word to his dog. He started to follow the cows. But then she saw him straighten suddenly and he
stopped his horse and got down again and left the horse standing there while he went up the steep side of the hill beside the trail. The dog came a short way with him and then made a sound, a vague throaty gnarl, and squatted to wait. On the wind, suddenly, Lydia had a breath of something rank. She saw what Mr. Whiteaker was after, the dead steer lying flat along the brushy hillside. Some of the belly had been eaten out and a hindquarter was gone, gnawed or cut away. A fox was dead on the grass too, a young thin one tongue-choked and staring, and a pair of blue-black ravens, feathers standing askew on the wind.

Mr. Whiteaker pushed against the carcass with his boot. Then he walked all the way around it slowly, expressionlessly, not puckering his face against the smell. He stepped over the ravens, out around the fox pup, then came back down the little slope to where she and the dog waited. He might have gone on without a word, but she said, “Mr. Whiteaker?” so that it was a question, and that made him stand a minute.

He looked across at her and then back toward the dead animals and then, tiredly, he began to rub his eyes with the knuckles of his forefingers, twisting them both together, back and forth in little half circles the way a child would. There were pairs of long curving creases beside his mouth and his eyes, and she thought suddenly: they gave him the look of a little boy tickled and not liking it, a sort of pained, unwilling smile.

“Times are hard,” he said, blinking, dropping his hands. “A wolf gets eastern money for the pelt, and the state is paying a bounty for the ears. So I guess half the cowboys on the grub line have got poison in their kits. If nothing else presents itself, some of them will bait up a cow. Sometimes it's not wolf that eats the bad meat.” He didn't look toward her, nor toward the carcasses. He looked down along the gully where his cows were wandering off, lowering their big heads to the tufts of grass.

“In the La Grande paper this week or last, I believe I saw the wolf bounty was to be done away with,” she said.

He looked at her in surprise. “Is that right?” Then he ducked his head. “I worked in Montana when I was a kid, twenty years ago when there was still buffalo. The wolfers would bait with buffalo over there. I knew a man brought in two hundred pair of ears from a winter's work. But that was a long time ago. There's a hell of a lot more work to it now, and a hell of a lot less sense. A one-loop outfit is liable to lose more cows to wolfer than ever went to timber wolf.” He gave her a quick look afterward, so that she saw boyishness in his face again: it was the look boys have when they begin to swear, their eyes shying around to see what effect it has. “Pardon, ma'am,” he said, muttering and looking away from her.

She said solemnly, “That's all right, Mr. Whiteaker.”

In a while Buck's Creek ran down into some other water. Mr. Whiteaker stopped his horse and named the creek—“This is the North Fork of the Meacham,” he said. There was a good beaten trail along it. A spurt of water ran in every crosswise channel and spilled across the track in a slippery thin sheet, but she thought a careful mule wagon might get through along that trail in summer when the mud had gone dry and hard. Probably the downstream end of it came out at the rail line along the Meacham Creek.

He gestured with his head. “Upstream from here, ma'am, the next gully with more than a little piddly runoff in it will be the Jump-Off. There is a trail goes up there.”

She looked upstream, nodding.

“You know where you're going from there?” he said.

She looked toward him. He had been careful, had not said,
I don't suppose you can get lost from here.

“I have bought the deed to Mr. Claud Angell's land,” she said. She ought to have got the way from someone besides the real estate man, gone up one of the narrow rutted lanes off the Ruckel Road there above Summerville and asked at a farm door—
Do you know the Claud Angell place?
They'd have known the Jump-Off Creek, anyway, and she'd have been able to find it out from there without going about lost in the wet trees and playing The Damfool Woman for this Mr. Whiteaker.

He nodded as if he was not surprised. It may have been that Angell's was the only house on the Jump-Off. He dismounted his horse and walked on the rocks, leading the bay out until the water came up white around the horse's legs. He pushed up one sleeve and squatted to wash out the little cut along the bay's shank. Then he straightened again, lifted his hat, combed his wet fingers back through his hair. She saw a high forehead, white above the line of hat shadow. Looking at her sideways, he said, “Angell, he never had much of a place.”

She made a small deliberate smile. “No. I was told so.”

He pulled down his damp sleeve and looked at her again, glancing, uncomfortable. “He never did farm that land. He used to cut ties for the railroad and when the line was put through he ran a few cattle.”

She nodded. “Yes. I mean to raise cattle myself.”

He glanced at the goats. “I figured you would be wanting to farm,” he said, low.

She shook her head. “No. Or only so much as will keep me from starvation.” She smiled slightly.

He led the bay out of the water and stood a moment fiddling with his saddle, smoothing the webbing where it pulled through the rings. He didn't look toward her. Finally he said, “Last time I went by there, a couple of cowboys was squatted in Angell's shack.” He glanced toward her across the dip of the saddle. “Maybe they've moved on by now.”

She sat still on the mule, taking it in. In a while she said, “I have a clear deed.” She said it as flat as might be.

He looked at her but he didn't say any more about Angell or the squatters. He just nodded once, slowly, and climbed up on the horse. He looked graceless, clumsy, swinging up his stiff leather chaps.

“Where is your own place, Mr. Whiteaker?”

He gestured vaguely down the North Fork of the Meacham. “We dammed up the springs of the Chimney Creek for a pond.” He seemed to think something over. Then he said, “There's only four or five lived-in houses between the Ruckel Road and Meacham Creek. We're your next neighbor, I guess.”

He had an unmistakable bachelor's look, hair hanging shaggy, the collar edge of his shirt black with old stain. She said, without hope, “You don't have a family, Mr. Whiteaker.”

He dipped his chin. “No. There's me and Blue, we are neither one of us married.” Then he said, “We have got about thirteen hundred acres between the two of us,” so that it became clear it was not the dog who was named Blue. A partner.

“You aren't farming.”

“No. Cattle.” He looked at her. “We've been picking up some of Angell's cows with ours. When you get time, you can come over and take them home.”

The country was rough and steep, probably everybody's cattle ran together, there would be little help for it with the way the land lay. But it seemed plain that if Claud Angell had stayed gone and no one had come to claim his place, Mr. Whiteaker and his partner would have put their own brand on the Angell calves.

She said, nodding her head once, “Thank you. I appreciate your holding on to them.”

He nodded too. “Yes, ma'am.” He put his hat on, touched his fingers to the brim. “Good luck.” He started his horse, following the dog and the cows down the wide trail.

“Thank you, Mr. Whiteaker.”

He looked back across his shoulder without stopping the horse, only ducking his chin or nodding once, she couldn't tell which. “Welcome, ma'am.” He settled back around and went on.

Lydia thumped her heels against the mule and pulled his head around hard to get him to go up the North Fork. He wanted to follow the bay horse.
The rain had not quit. Her back ached from riding hunch-shouldered with the collar of Lars's coat turned up around her cold neck. She had cold feet too, the boots poor to start with, too big, filled out with newspaper. But she had not ever found much reward for woefulness. She tightened her mouth, raising a familiar little buttress against misery. She made a plan, several plans, for handling whomever might be found in Claud Angell's house, supposing the difficulties one after the other and answering them in a dogged way.

The shack sat in a stumpy clearing more or less on the flat, with the Jump-Off Creek going slow through the weeds past the front of the house. It was built with unskinned pine logs chinked poorly with mud and fern and moss. The house was eight feet by twelve, no more than that, listing slightly to the south. There was an open-face leanto, like a hat brim, at one end of the building inside a half circle of failing brush fence. Two horses stood under it, looking dismal and uncomforted.

Lydia sat on the mule. She held her shoulders up straight. “Hello,” she said, calling it out loud. The creek made little noise running slow across the flat of the clearing, so she heard the surprise from inside the shack, the knock of a boot against a wall, or chair legs against a board floor. In a moment a boy came out through the door, swinging it back on tin can hinges until its edge caught in mud. He was combing his hair with the fingers of both hands, blinking and squinting against the gray dusk. Behind him the room looked dark; she saw the floor was dirt.