Chapter 17
Seventeen
The little sorrel mare took the hill without being asked. Della had realized that if she simply let the animal get on with it, she didn’t have to grip and steer and hang on quite so much.
The saddle creaked under her in a steady rhythm in an oddly soothing way. Besides the odd bird call, and cattle braying, and the wind drifting in a gentle caress across them, there was silence.
"How you doing over there?"
Beau had reined in a little to let her come alongside, one hand loose on the horn, hat tipped down against the westering sun.
"I am not certain my legs or my backside will ever recover," said Della, "but at this precise moment, I am sitting pretty."
He laughed, an easy and unguarded sound that went through her like warm water.
She watched him from under the brim of his old hat that he’d unearthed from a store somewhere, plopping it on her head, with a promise that one day, he'd buy her one of her own, instead of needing to use his hand-me-down.
Out here, he was freer. A man on a horse in his own lands with nobody to answer to.
They’d been out since early. Their second day of riding and counting.
And she had quickly learned it was not as easy as one, two, three.
Cattle do not stand still and be counted.
They drift. They lie in draws you cannot see into.
They go behind the rises. They move, and you forget which brown cow was which.
Ten become eleven, eleven become nine or fourteen, and there is not one single way of telling which.
Nobody could count this. Not honestly. Not over forty thousand acres of broken country where a hundred head could stand in a coulee two miles off and you would never know they were there.
She’d concluded that across the years, the numbers must have been guesses, as accurate as they could be.
Which was why Beau had taken the number a man had given him.
They came up onto the top of the rise, and Beau stopped. Della reined in beside him, stunned into silence.
The country fell away, long grass slopes going tawny at the tips.
Out further still. Miles of it, ridge after ridge, the draws cut in dark green where the water ran and the tops burnt pale, with the shadows of clouds crossing it slowly like ships.
Away east she could make out the line of cottonwoods that meant the river.
There was not a fence, nor a roof or a wagon.
It felt like not another soul but the two of them.
"All of this," Beau said quietly, as taken in the moment as she was, "is Hawkins’s land. Right up to that hill yonder." He pointed.
"The one that looks like a sleeping cow?"
He looked at her, eyes a brilliant blue. “It’s called Sleeping Cow. Ma named it," Beau chuckled. "Pa hated it. He'd say the north boundary,” his voice went lower to imitate his father’s voice, “and she'd say Sleeping Cow. Eventually, he gave up and started calling it Sleeping Cow, too."
Della smiled.
"You love it," she said.
He was quiet for a moment. Nodded. "I do. When my father came up here in sixty-six in his wagon, Grand Springs was just a swing station. Vance ran supplies out of a canvas tent. No rail, no fences between here and Canada. He picked this ground because of the water. Put in for his homesteader’s land.
Every acre you're looking at, he put his name on it, a piece at a time for twenty years." He shifted in the saddle. "I didn't want any of it. He loved it, and I resented it.” The admission seemed to cost him, and Della went still, listening. “I left after a blazing argument. He told me I wasn’t welcome at Silver Sage. That I’d broken my Mama’s heart by signing up, even though Ma had been gone a long while by then.” His jaw mouthed.
“I drifted after the war. Through Texas and beyond. Working the land, learning what Pa hadn’t taught me, just so as I’d come back here knowing more than he ever would.
” His eyes narrowed at the horizon. “Turns out, the things I needed to know, I needed to know from him.” When he looked at her, she could see the cost of his choices, the naked pain behind his gaze.
Then he blinked, and the vulnerable boy was gone again.
“I couldn't wait to get away from this land.
Now I'd cut my own hand off before I'd let a foot of it go. "
“Is letting some of it go an option?”
His head came round, eyes fixed sternly on her. "What?"
“Beau, we don’t have four thousand dollars. You are sitting on forty thousand acres. If selling a section or two is an option, it would give us some breathing space."
“There might not be a choice.” A shadow went across his face. “I’ve been holding off on breaking up what Pa worked so hard to put together.” He turned the buckskin's head, and they started down off the rise.
Della squeezed, and her little mare followed.
“Thing is, most of it is just this,” he said over his shoulder.
“Scrubland. Many ranchers here are struggling, just the same as we are. Feed prices are ten times more than they were in my father’s day, yet beef prices haven’t kept up.
We’ve had tough winters, too. No one has any money to buy the land. It’s why I’ve held off for so long.”
Della rode alongside him.
“The only piece of land that has ever held interest is over on the west end,” he checked the ground guiding them both down. “Even Hollis was talking about it when I saw him back in July.”
“Which piece?”
"Crimson Creek, though I’d sooner sell the house than the land.”
“Why?”
"There's miles of that creek," he said, "and every foot of it is cut bank and gravel. It’s deep, except for one place. My father bought it. Paid over the odds for it. He said that people called him a fool until they realized it’s the only crossing place for miles in either direction. Then they weren’t laughing so much.” His voice was laced with remembered amusement.
“You can put a loaded wagon over it in April with the melt coming down and not lose a wheel.
" He looked across at her. "I could sell that to pay this bank loan. And the day after, I've got no road west. I'd have to ask Colter for leave to cross his ground every time I moved a beef. Colter is an old coot. He’d charge the earth, or he’d refuse. I couldn’t move anything on that side, and I’d have to sell that too, and lose a third of my land. "
“And you’d still have another bank payment to meet after it.”
Beau inclined his head. “Welcome to my world of impossible choices.”
"The railroad wants part of the land, too."
Beau's head came round again, sharper this time. "How do you know that?"
"Because Denny Walsh told me whilst he was taking flour off the cart." She lifted a shoulder. "Surveyors have been out looking at lots of parts in Grand Springs. He is under the impression it is for the coal."
"That's what Duke reckoned, too."
"What do you think?"
"If they want a spur down off the main line," he replied, “they want a crossing that they don't have to build a big bridge for. The spur would end up going straight through the west pasture. Straight through the middle of what John Hawkins spent his life putting together, and out the other side."
Della rode along beside him and thought about the one asset on this entire ranch that anybody in the world was queuing up to buy, which happened to be the one piece the man beside her would part with last.
She was still turning it over when Beau reined in.
They had come down off the grass into scrub, amongst sage and rabbitbrush. A lot of bare, gray ground. Ahead of them the land opened into a wide shallow bowl with a dry watercourse winding through the bottom of it.
On the far side the bank rose up in a great curving wall, twenty feet of raw clay and shale scoured out by water that had not run there in years. A bowl within a bowl, the wind came round it and made a low hollow noise.
Beau sat looking at it intently.
"What are we looking at?" said Della.
"Cutbank," he said.
She sat up. Swiveled in her saddle, taking in the scene. "This is where you lost them," she said. "The thirty-one cows."
"That's right." His jaw saw set, a muscle bouncing in his cheek.
"A blizzard came down out of the north the second week of January, and the herd drifted with it, the way they do.” He tipped his chin at the wall.
“They would have tried to shelter against that, but the snow trapped them. Covering them.”
Della frowned, filled with sadness at the thought of animals being trapped and buried alive, freezing to death in winters she’d only heard about and was yet to experience.
"Duke said the draw was full for a week. He and Boyd were gone for days,” his tone was distant now.
“I was worried. Thought maybe I’d lost my foreman, too.
Took them longer to take the hides because of the snow.
They had to take them here, leaving the cattle for the wolves, and there wasn’t nothing that he could do about the meat.
” Beau's voice had gone flat. "He said he lost the feeling in three fingers doing it, that it’s never come back proper. "
Della looked at the bowl.
The wind moved the sage. There were two magpies over on the far side and a heap of tumbleweed piled at the foot of the bank, and some way off, a scatter of white where a rock had weathered out of the clay.
Beau growled, and his horse moved in response to the sound.
“Beau?”
When he turned on her, he was ferocious. “I’ve ridden out here time after time, never come down this far though. Didn’t think to.”
"I'm afraid I don't follow," she said carefully.
Beau put both hands on the horn and leaned forward.
"That ground," he said, "ought to be full of bones. Come on," he snarled.
“Where are we going?” Della quickly tried to keep up.
“Home,” Beau called over his shoulder, his horse already moving quickly. "I want to speak to Duke."