Great Plains (15 page)

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I talked to:

Gas station attendants. Whenever I stopped for gas, I always asked the name of the local high-school team. I never found a person working in a gas station, convenience store, or truck stop who didn't know. In Deer Lodge, Montana, the team is called the Wardens; Deer Lodge is the home of the state prison. In Havre, Montana, the team is the Havre Blue Ponies. In Newcastle, Wyoming, it's the Newcastle Dogies. In Brush, Colorado, it's the Brush Beet Diggers. Beaver, Oklahoma, has the Dusters; Oakley, Kansas, the Plainsmen; McCamey, Texas, the Badgers; Tucumcari, New Mexico, the Rattlers; Matador, Texas, the Matadors. Colby, Kansas; Eads, Colorado; Hondo, New Mexico; and Pecos, Texas, all call themselves the Eagles. Chappell, Nebraska; Rush, Colorado; and Chugwater, Wyoming, all are the Buffalos. At a gas station near an Indian reservation in Montana, a white gas-station attendant told me that Indian basketball teams are easy to beat. He said all you have to do is punch one guy, and then the whole team will attack you and get kicked out of the game.

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A Hunkpapa Sioux woman named Doreet. I picked her up hitchhiking with another woman and two men. Doreet sat in the front seat and told me that her brother recently found a stone serpent head while diving in the river, that she had a young son named Eagle on His Journey, that a medicine man had predicted that Journey (his nickname) would be born either retarded or dead, that the medicine man was wrong. In the back, Jason, Derek, and I didn't get the other woman's name, talked in Sioux and sometimes asked me questions like “So, bro, what do you think of the Sioux people?” Of a nearby butte, Doreet said, “That's Devil Butte. High-school kids go up there and try to arrange these white rocks to spell out their initials, but by morning the rocks always rearrange themselves into the shape of a devil's head.” Doreet was big, pretty, with scars up both arms. She was wearing a Cornell T-shirt. I asked her, “Did you go to Cornell?” She said, “Where's that?” I pointed to the name on her shirt. She said, “Oh, probably—I've been all over the country.”

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Two young guys named John and Tom. They gave me a ride to the site of Sitting Bull's cabin in Tom's red four-wheel custom deluxe Dodge pickup. (I had been to the site before, with Jim Yellow Earring, but I wanted to go back, to make sure the trees over the monument were actually bur oaks.) It was pouring rain. As I looked for the turnoff, my van slid off the road. John and Tom drove up, regarded me in silence, helped me get unstuck, and told me they'd take me to Sitting Bull for some money. I got in their truck. I asked them what they were doing out here.

John: “Drinkin' and driving around.”

Tom: “Nothin' else to do when it rains like this.”

J: “What do you want to go back there for, anyway? It ain't that much different from anyplace else.”

T: “We take people to Sittin' Bull all the time. People like you, come back here in their two-wheel-drives, get stuck—”

J: “Indians down in Bullhead give 'em directions, don't say nothin' 'bout gettin' stuck.”

T: “Indians don't care about gettin' stuck. They got nothin' to do anyway. Government pays 'em just to lay around.”

J: “Last winter some guy in a Cadillac all the way from California gave us a hundred dollars to take him to Sittin' Bull. Snowdrifts were ten feet deep. He just wanted to see it, take a picture.”

T: “We make a lot of party money takin' people out to Sittin' Bull.”

The floor of the truck was shin-deep in beer cans. They finished the twelve-pack, pushed the box out the window. The truck roared and ripped down the last descent to the river valley. The front wheels threw fist-sized pieces of prairie through the windows. John and Tom rolled the windows up. In some parts of the flatland along the river, water came above the wheel wells. Grasses waved in the wake the truck left. “This ain't tough—not for
my
pickup,” Tom said. We sped right up to the Sitting Bull monument. I hopped out, walked over, plucked a leaf from the bur oak above it.

*   *   *

My old friend George Scott. He is a rancher who lives southwest of Casper, Wyoming. (He is the same one who told me about the “early-man tools.”) George and I became friends in college. In the riots in the spring of 1970, he and I ran from the cops together, and later went to the Red Cross first-aid station and pretended to have been tear-gassed so that the beautiful hippie-girl volunteers would bathe our eyes with cool compresses. Summer, 1970, I worked as a hand on his family's 14,000-acre ranch. Today George is married and has two children. With his older brother, Charlie, he runs a second, much larger ranch which his family bought in 1971. George is tall, red-haired, freckled, with deep squint lines at the outside corners of his blue eyes. He drinks six or seven Pepsis a day. All the men in his family stick their tongues out to one side and bite them when they concentrate, like boys building models in old-time illustrations.

I spent four nights sleeping in my van in George's driveway. His driveway is long, dirt, with ruts that keep redefining themselves to one side or another. After leaving his house, it passes his brother Charlie's house, the bunkhouse, an equipment barn, a horse barn, and a long, low cow barn with a green roof. Alongside the driveway are tractors, pickups, a three-wheel motorcycle with a shovel strapped across the back, tanks of gas and diesel for ranch vehicles, bent pieces of irrigation pipe which somebody ran over by mistake, horse trailers, kids' bikes, stray hay bales, sleeping or running dogs, and an old sheepherders' wagon, which looks like a mini covered wagon. Beyond George's house, the driveway crosses an irrigation ditch and heads off into fields of alfalfa and Sudan grass. Nights I spent there were quiet, except when I bumped the inside of my van in my sleep and started the dogs barking.

George's wife, Milcey, made us breakfast at six, and he and I were usually off driving somewhere by seven. The ranch's homeplace is the capital of tens of thousands of acres stretching in a patchwork for more than fifty miles. We drove through pastures big enough to have their own rainfall pattern. Along a straightaway, a coyote raced the truck, his tongue flapping beside him like a tie. I saw a golden eagle the size of a building ornament sitting in a field doing nothing. Across the plain, a herd of antelope ran, and then pivoted all at once like a school of fish. A single antelope stood in the line of shadow of a telephone pole. George did a lot of work through small bird-watching binoculars. He would drive to a ridge, look for cattle, drive to another ridge, look again. Near a cabin where a hay hand named Eggleston killed himself one winter, we stopped and fished for brook trout in the Little Medicine Bow River. The spot was so ancient that I wondered what its name had been eight thousand years ago. The windowsills of the cabin were piled with worked pieces of stone—choppers, grinders, scrapers, points—which had been found around there. Then George drove to a place where he wanted to build a three-hundred-yard fence to keep cattle from drifting, and met with an agent of the Bureau of Land Management, who had to okay the fence before it was built: like a lot of range-land, this pasture is on long-term lease from the federal government. George wanted to build a four-strand fence, but the BLM would allow only a three-strand fence, because a BLM biologist had ruled that this land was primary antelope habitat, and four-strand was too liable to cut antelope up. At the side of the road, leaning against their vehicles, George and the BLM agent discussed this, and also maybe ten other topics. The sun rose higher and crossed their faces. George applied and reapplied chapstick to his lips. Lip cancer is something ranchers worry about.

Another day, George rounded up some yearling calves for sale. He told me he had a wild horse for me to ride at the roundup. I said, “That's just fine—I've stomped down many a bronc in my day!” Russell Brown, George's nineteen-year-old top hand, laughed. We went to the corral and caught and saddled the horses. I wasn't much help. The horses did not want to get in the trailer. Russell mounted his horse, rode off, and rode back at full gallop toward the trailer. At the last second, he jumped from the saddle and swung on the trailer roof as the horse went in. The others followed easily after that. George's kids, Jessica and Chris, rode along in the back seat of George's crew-cab Ford pickup. Chris: “Dad, Jessie keeps repeating my words!” The truck was working hard to pull the loaded trailer up hills. Suddenly—
whompf!—
the radiator hose blew. All the coolant hit the engine block in a tumult of steam. We got out and ate our bologna sandwiches on white bread and drank Pepsis by the side of the road while George called Milcey on the radio. The wind blew so hard the bread got stale in our hands. Then we listened to oil-rig workers placing nervous requests over the radio for Oil Sorb, a product used to soak up oil spills. Milcey came with a new radiator hose and jugs of coolant. Soon we drove on.

George and Russell were talking about a white-face yearling that had run off earlier in the summer. They hadn't seen him in two months, but they'd heard from a neighbor that he was in the vicinity. As we came over a rise, in the road ahead was a white-face calf. “That can't be him,” George said. He took out his binoculars and read the number of the calf's ear tag. “I don't believe it!” Russell and George opened the horse trailer, took out their horses, un-limbered their ropes. Whiteface stood in the road with a dawning sense of dread, then turned and ran. George and Russell took off like a drag race. The calf dodged, cut back; George threw his loop, missed; Russell came whipping through sagebrush, threw, stopped short, the rope twanged, the calf's hind feet flew up in the air. The roped calf was up instantly, bawling hoarsely, shaking his head. George rode over and roped him. It took two horses to move him, stiff-legged, crow-hopping, bellowing, to the trailer. Russell held him while George backed the trailer up to the side of a bank so the calf could walk in. They maneuvered the calf to the door. George undid the rope from his saddle horn, and the calf dodged around the other side of the trailer and pulled Russell's horse up against it. George grabbed the calf and Russell undid his rope. The calf bellowed, bucked, kicked the outside of the trailer. George had him by the head, then he only had him by the foot, then the calf was loose and running across the prairie, this time trailing two ropes. Russell borrowed Jessica's rope and chased him again. After another big struggle, the calf was in the trailer. He stood there panting, eyes crazed.

We reached the place for the roundup and unloaded the horses. Russell and George were instantly gliding up this hill and that, collecting little black specks of cattle into a bigger and bigger mass. Jessica, Chris, and I rode along the creek bed looking for strays. My horse did nothing I wanted. Finally I went back to the corral and got off and left him as if he were a car. George and Russell brought the yearling herd and its cloud of dust into the corral. Later two cattle trucks came, and the drivers put coveralls over their regular clothes and hazed the yearlings into the trucks. The drivers poked with cattle prods and shouted, “
On
the bus!
Git
on the bus!” Then all the yearlings, including the whiteface who almost got away, were taken to Torrington, Wyoming, and sold at auction to a feedlot for 65 cents a pound.

Another morning, stopping the truck occasionally for me to get out and open fence gates, George said, “The cattle in this field are our best herd. We've been trying for a long time to come up with a way to select our best cows and put them in a pasture with our best bulls, and this bunch Charlie finally selected with a new computer program he wrote. We've got two computers on the ranch. I hardly do anything with them, but Charlie spent three hours every morning—he got up at five—and then he'd work two or three hours every night, and he finally came up with a program that would tell us which cows produced the best calves. Each of these cows has her own computer card. The software companies sell several different ranch programs, but none of them really do what we wanted. We think the program Charlie wrote is better than any you can buy. See, the commercial programs all rate calves in terms of weaning weight—that's the calf's weight at about six months. But we wanted a program that used weight gain per month instead. That's what's important in a calf—how fast he puts on weight, rather than how much he weighs at any one time. Our ranch is a cow-calf operation. Most cattle ranches in Wyoming are. We raise calves for sale to feedlots, which fatten them up to market weight. What's really hurt the beef-cattle industry is this recent idea that red meat is bad for you. I agree, actually, that corn-fed feedlot beef has too much fat, and I wouldn't be surprised if it caused some of that stuff they say it does. But that's just a result of the feedlot system in this country, along with the fact that people nowadays want meat so tender you don't have to chew it. That type of meat is not what beef is, really. We eat a cow of ours about every other month, and it's not tender. Grass-fed beef is good, but it's tough. Charlie wants to start a campaign to get people to eat grass-fed beef as a health food. It's got all the protein, but the cattle haven't been eating antibiotics and the meat isn't fat. That's the kind of project Charlie likes to work on—that, and computers, and irrigation systems, and machinery. He does that, and I work with cattle. I like beating on things and making them do what I want.”

We turned down a fence line through high sagebrush. The truck drove over bushes as high as the hood, and the smell of crushed sage rose. Suddenly there was another smell, very strong. George hit the brakes. “What was that?” We got out. Right next to the fence was a dead calf. Its lip was up off its teeth and its side was a metropolis of maggots. George bent over and noted the number of the calf's ear tag in a green notebook. Then he got back in the truck. He said, “One fact you learn in ranching is that things have a tendency to die.”