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Short Stories & Tall Tales
Lament of a Lonely Cowboy
By Tom Sheehan
The “thing” on the skyline was still in place. And in four days at the line camp Jack Harbors had herded 57 loose cows into the small corral against the cliff face and he’d keep them there until the crew came this day, or tomorrow at the latest, to run them into the main herd. The boss, Harold Ledgewick, had told him, “Anything beyond 40 head is a small bonus, and anything less will be the subject of a discussion between me and you. That was always my least favorite job, out there alone, but it has to be done. You’ve got a shot at something good here, a little extra, because there’s always been some strange activity around that canyon and I need a good man to keep an eye out for me.”
“I wonder what today will bring.” Harbors said almost under his voice, but his horse snickered a response of sorts. Behind him, over the range of eastern hills, the morning sun had rushed itself after a slow start. As always, upon his favorite horse, coffee under belt, he was fully awake.
Sitting the lone saddle of the line rider, he was having his usual morning curiosities, as he called them. Going back over his life, he summed it up as a lonely cowpoke in most instances. He was not complaining where he had brought himself and was convinced he had known it all, the good days, the bad days, and everything else thrown in between. That included, he was apt to say, things that had names and things that didn’t. Curiosity, for example, was a name, a thing, though he could not see it. And that strange new form on the skyline, not there yesterday, had not moved today, had no name either. Was it supposed to tempt his curiosity, make him think, wonder, and set him off to investigate? One old cowpoke, he suddenly remembered, had told him a long time ago beside a trailside campfire, “Don’t chase ghosts.” The words still hung around in his head, fitting themselves to different occasions, different needs. One fit him now.
Anything out of the ordinary, to an alert cowboy, demanded investigation, answer, final resolution. “Putting things to bed,” his mother used to call it. She said it a lot, when arguments had softened, hate had reared its ugly head and then slid downhill, distance had come between friends or relatives and then closed up a bit. “Put such things to bed, let them have a good nap, and tomorrow will be rosier than you can imagine.”
Now he was caught up in his own reasoning or that of others as their words hung on for his listening: “Don’t chase ghosts,” came back at him from one direction, and “Put things to bed” came from another point.
After all the self-questioning and self-convincing he had put himself through so early in the day, it was loneliness that earlier had twisted him the most, the gray yet encircling transparency of it, the void that makes itself known the way nothing else does. It was like toting an emptiness right there in his saddle bag; no matter how hard his horse bolted or bucked or jumped, loneliness stayed stashed in his saddle bag.
All that brought about another argument: he was caught between “town’ and “here.” “Town” carried its own tags of noise and handshaking and backslapping of old trail hands and a snort of good liquor to clear his head and a square card game with decent men and all those ladies in dresses that kept saying, “Sundown is worth the wait, every sundown like this one.”
That other element, “here,” spread out before him, a mix of yellow and green grass and hills and cliff faces looming like prison walls at the end of the run of grass. He wondered if he would be contained here forever no matter how hard he worked, with his usual unswerving loyalty to a good boss. Bosses said, and cowpokes did. It was that simple, and the law of the land. The bawling cows he had herded from their liberty into the small corral said so. So did the sky of clouds and sunlight and noon blaze of the day and finally the low stars on the countless, endless nights sitting as a roof on this prison wide as the horizons.
He had not firmly agreed that adventure was here, though it came at him regularly. Was that dark figure on the skyline a lone Indian, as hungry as any man, with a woman and a child depending on him? Was he ready to cut a cow out of the small herd, thinking Jack had not seen him? But Jack Harbors, keeping his back turned to the silhouette, his mouth shut, believed the world was not big enough to tolerate hunger, though he had known those distinctive pangs. His mother had preached it endlessly, telling him “the way it was in the old country, folk falling down at your feet, poor things, and not a good tater in miles, or a fair turnip. You don’t make soup out of rain. You need the goods, no matter how meager you find them.”
Dutifully, like a regular cowpoke, he would protect the herd of cattle for all he was worth, but a bit of food on the hoof was a small gift when he considered how many of them in his trust would be lost before they would be delivered into the hands of a buyer at a railhead, or to a butcher way down the line and so far out of sight he’d never truly picture the place. That stance was not from his mother’s words, but from his father. “I was chained to the land in the old country from the day I was born. Make your life a different life. It’s why we dared come here this far from the old country and then from Boston, this far from relatives. This far from a choking land. Get some room for yourself, son. It might be all you can ever hold on to.”
So here was Jack Harbors 20 some years later, not beholden to the land, for it was free at times for miles upon miles, a wide open range in places, but to another man. It was not the good trade-off he had expected, but life had to be taken in hand and lived.
The form on the skyline still had not moved, but good old curiosity moved. He could feel the movement in his bones, on his back, making its way to announcement of some kind. He decided to wait it out. He was more valuable watching the cows he had gathered than running around the hills looking for “ghosts” the old trail hand had spoken about, the mysteries that abound around a lone cowboy. “Including the ones in yore head,” the old trail hand had added, the way a fortune teller might have said it.
Later in the day the boss man and his crew arrived to take the cattle back to the main herd. Ledgewick said, “You hear anything strange today? We found a butchered cow off the trail back there, all the meat plain cut out of him and the coyotes or other vermin types must have cleaned the bones a bit. Had to be two people to carry it off. You didn’t hear a thing, you say?”
Harbors had spun around and looked at the skyline. The dark form was not there. He had not seen it move. But it was gone as if it had never been there. He couldn’t tell Ledgewick about it, it was too zany to mention; they’d talk about him.
Ledgewick continued, “You did a good job. Extra in your pay this month. Want to go to town for a few days? We won’t be starting out until the Quentin and his BBQ stock join up for the drive. Three days at the least.”
“I think I’ll do that boss, but I’ll take a peek around here, see if I can track anything down. I’ll be in town tonight. Leave my money with Stilson at the hotel. I’ll appreciate that, and so will Stilson.”
Ledgewick laughed and said, “I’ll do just that for you, Jack. You did a good job. Lonely work, ain’t it?”
“It’s always lonely when nobody’s around,” Harbors replied, looking again at the skyline empty of a familiar form.
A few hours later, Ledgewick, his crew, and the cattle, were out of sight. Silence ringed around Harbors until he heard the shriek of some bird unseen behind him, the cry of a coyote coming right from folds in the hills, and a whistle of wind, cutting itself in two, as it traversed the split face of a cliff. The sound of the split wind made him think of the whistles he had seen and heard in Arkansas one time, whittled by an old Indian who said he had been doing it all his life. The romance and mystery of the old man’s life had enamored the young traveler bound out of the east for the far west, and he could still feel the strange powers the old man carried with him, the history of a whole race carried in ageless eyes and in magical hands.
Packing up some gear, and a few supplies, he saddled his horse Joe and set out in the early afternoon. His route took him straight away from the line shack as if to follow the small herd that had left. But at the end of that cluster of cliff faces and hills, he cut back in behind the hills and found a path he had seen before, one leading straight toward the mountains of cliffs that rose straight up from the prairie grass.
Before dark set in, he had found a suitable bed-down, a narrow cave that in years past must have been used by other people, on hunting routes he assumed, or tribal situations. The cave of sorts was small, but offered protection front and back, and he felt safe. The heat of the day lingered in the rock formation. Not one Indian incident had happened in a couple of years, lest the mysterious butchering of an occasional cow was a mark, as Harbors had a few suspicions that Indians were the cause of such happenings. He also agreed that if a huge bear came out of the darkness after him, he’d be prepared, but a ghost would frighten the pants off him, and some old Indian, running ahead of all time, would do the same thing to him.
Before he fell asleep he set his mind to hear Joe if he let out any warning of a predator on the loose. Joe was as good a watchdog as any horse he ever owned. With that in mind, his eyes closed and the night came down on him.
It was a mild snicker that Joe gave off, and Harbors rolled over slowly, a minor chill in the night air. The first thing that came to him was a small flame of light down the length of the canyon, but he could not tell how far. He set his saddle, propped two stones beyond the pommel but directly in line with the pommel and the small flickering light, a night fire of some kind, by some person, in some place he could not determine in the dark.
He went back to sleep. Joe was quiet the rest of the night. When he woke in the morning, shadows still hanging out in the canyon, he spotted on the line of sight and saw the dark entrance of what he figured was another cave. There was no fire visible, no smoke, no movement. The darkness of the cave mouth he marked by other landmarks. He was satisfied he could find it in full daylight. He chewed on jerky and old biscuits, drank water instead of making coffee, and gave Joe some oats and water.
Later in the morning, cautiously making his way, he came near the mysterious cave. There was no smell of smoke, but he could detect the smell of cooked meat on the air. When the old Indian came out of the cave, hearing one clink of Joe’s shod foot on a stone, Harbors was looking him in the face.
Harbors held out his upturned hand in a peaceful gesture. The old Indian did the same, and said, “I take cow for children. We have lost our tribe moving through here. We were hungry. My daughter sat all day on hill to make you come. I was working the cow I killed. Two children helped me carry meat. We must travel to find our new village far on the river, after we smoke meat. We have been here long days to make the trip. Now we have enough meat. Only two cows. Other was killed by wolves. Too fast for us, for me. I am old man now. My name is Wings Talk. The others will not come to look for us because my daughter’s man has died. It is up to me to get them home. Brave must do that. You work hard. I have seen you work. You work like brave. I watch a lot. What are you called? Does big chief of yours get angry we kill cow?”
“I am called Jack,” Harbors answered, holding out his hand. “Meat feeds people as well as other animals, the wolves, the coyotes, the hard birds that do not let go. It feeds Indians old and young, nobody should go hungry. My mother hated hunger. My family moved because of hunger, from a land far away.”
Wings Talk smiled. “You do not come in anger. It is good sign. I work like you work. I watch you for many days. Does big chief not get angry?”
Two young Indian boys, about 8 and 10, came out of the cave, and then a beautiful woman, obviously their mother, followed them. She looked to Harbors to be about 30 years old and said, “Do we have trouble?” She looked at the old man and not at Harbors.
“No,” the old Indian said. “He is white brave and works hard. He saw you on the hill and did not chase you away. He is not angry. He says big white chief is not angry.”
He turned to Jack and said, “My daughter is Bird Sings, mother of young braves. She packs food for our trip. She will have trouble without a brave to share her lodge. Will you make trip with us?”
There was a soft look in his eyes, as though he was praying. From a small leather pouch he took a pipe, loaded some kind of tobacco into it, and lit it from a fire stick one of the boys brought to him from inside the cave. “Do you have custom like this? Soften wounds. Fill heart. Make talk with Big Chief who never talks back. Make enemy become friend, like sheep and wolf sleep in same tepee for one night.”
“I cannot leave my job,” Harbors said. “I finish what I start. Big boss depends on me, but I will let you have the meat that you have taken. I will pay for it, make it up to big boss. He will smile sometime about all of this.”
Yet all that time Harbors had a difficult time keeping his eyes off the Indian mother. She was so beautiful, she almost pulled the soul right out of him. A blush had come on her cheeks that the old Indian saw and he said, “She will not know this again, I know. So you keep this sign from her forever.” He held out one hand, palm up, as if the gesture was carried there, lifelong, endless, to be remembered.
When the old Indian stood, it was as if all talk had ceased for good. He waved at the young boys who sauntered into the cave, their mother behind them with one look back that Jack Harbors, in his endless loneliness, would remember forever.
When Jack Harbors got to town, when he saw the red dresses again, heard them rustle, he could never forget the Indian mother. In all his loneliness from then on, her face carried him from one place to the next, the lonely way that cowboys ride forever.
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