Spirit Wolf (3 page)

While they ate, Uriah told the Andersons about the Pryor wolf, the contest, and the five hundred dollars.

Uriah had just put a period on his last sentence when Lars stepped in to pick up the story.

“Some folks,” Lars said in a hushed, conspiratorial voice, “say the Pryor wolf is a ghost that roams the prairie in the dark of the moon.”

Lars's voice dropped to a whisper. The children leaned forward in their chairs to listen to him, to hear this story whispered in the dim light of a kerosene lamp.

“And when it's dark, so dark you can't see your breath on the night air, so dark you don't know if you are alive or dead, you can see his eyes burning like two coals, searching the prairie for LITTLE GIRLS AND BOYS TO EAT!”

He ended the story with a hard slap on the table, and every child, Nash included, jumped.

Lars whooped, and Edna grinned, trying to sound stern as she said, “Lars, you're going to scare these kids so bad they won't be able to sleep.”

Nash's ears were burning. He hoped Ettie hadn't noticed how he had jumped at the slap. Imagine a wolf hunter jumping at a little trick like that.

Lars grinned at Edna. “The kids know well enough by now to take their papa with a grain of salt,” he said. Then he turned to Uriah. “Smart to take Nash along. He can be a big help in the camp while you're out hunting.”

“Nash will be hunting with me,” Uriah replied.

Lars looked at Uriah, hesitating a moment before he continued. “Uriah, I've heard stories about this wolf, stories I wouldn't tell the children. Stories I wish I hadn't heard.”

“I've heard those stories, too, but you know as well as I do that if you get a bunch around a campfire, there'll be more stories than smoke in the air. Ghost wolf! Grown men pass that story around like it was gospel. This wolf is something special, all right, but he's no more ghost than I am.”

Then Uriah slapped the table, but nobody jumped, nobody laughed.

Lars leaned forward, into the ball of yellow light cast by the kerosene lamp. “Uriah, I saw Zeke Campbell's little herd of cattle after that wolf finished with them. They were all bunched up against a fence in a spring storm, cows and calves. That wolf killed them all. I won't tell you how he killed them. I don't want that on my kids' minds like it is on mine, some nights when I'm out in the dark and I hear the dogs barking and I don't know why. But I'll tell you there was something evil got into those cattle that night, something I wouldn't ever want to meet.”

Uriah was silent, but Nash probably wouldn't have heard him if he had spoken. His thoughts were racing through what he had heard at the table tonight.

Ghost wolf!
Nash pretended that it made no difference to him whether he was hunting a ghost or not, but his effort was sickly at best. He picked at his food through dinner, hearing only snatches of conversation at the table.

When the last plate was empty and the last stomach filled, Ettie and Edna began clearing the table. Lars, stretching in his kitchen chair, said to Uriah, “Let's get a breath of fresh air. It's a little stuffy in here.”

Uriah nodded, and the two men stepped outside. If they were really looking for fresh air, they found it. The temperature had dropped with the sun, and the wind was picking up. Little drifts of snow were marching across the pasture, growing and shrinking under the artistry of the wind. It was cold, and the men's ears popped in the occasional gusts.

“You're looking a little peaked, Uriah,” Lars said. “I've got just the thing for you.” Uriah laughed and followed Lars to the barn.

Inside the cabin, Nash offered to help with the dishes, but he was turned down. He had grown in stature during dinner, during the talk about the wolf hunt. Ettie's younger brother and sisters stood back from him, as though some magic had transformed him into someone they didn't know and it was not proper to ask him to help with the dishes.

After the dishes were done, Ettie brought out a limp deck of cards, and the children played rummy to a background of hoots and jeers. Edna Anderson sewed, mending socks and stitching patches over patches on the knees of the younger children's denim pants in the light of the kerosene lamp. At about nine thirty she dropped her work into a wicker sewing basket.

“Time for bed” brought a chorus of protest, but that was only a matter of form, part of the nightly ritual of the family.

“Nash, I'll make up a bed for you by the fire. You might throw a stick or two into the stove during the night if you get cold.”

The ritual of going to bed, undressing, donning nightshirts, and saying prayers and a parade of good nights took nearly half an hour. After the latch closed on the door to the family's bed rooms, Nash stripped off his clothes and climbed into the pile of quilts stacked on the floor. The bed was comfortable, the room warm, and Nash near exhaustion. It was a matter of moments before he was asleep, and it seemed only moments had passed, too, before he was awakened.

Nash didn't know if it was the sound of the two men whispering or the blast of cold air following them through the open door that awakened him. They were whispering together and twittering. Nash was intrigued and embarrassed at the same time. Imagine grown men—imagine his own father—twittering.

Uriah tossed a stick of wood into the stove, still chuckling to himself, and lay down on the makeshift bed on the floor. It wasn't as easy for Lars. Nash could hear the discussion in the bed room.

“What in the world have you been doing to keep you out till this time of night? It's nearly midnight.”

Lars's voice was slurred, staggering like his walk. “Well, Edna, Uriah was feeling a little peaked, so we've been doctoring.”

“You have a bottle again, don't you? You've got one hidden out in the barn somewhere.”

“No, Edna. I can swear on a stack of Bibles that there isn't a drop of liquor in the barn. Now go to sleep. I don't feel so good.”

Nash heard a muffled
whoof, whoof, whoof
coming from his father's blankets as the boy turned over. Nash whoofed a few times, too, before he went to sleep.

Morning came early, and Nash awakened to the creak of the stove door and the thump of wood tossed on a bed of embers inside. At first he thought he was home, that Uriah would be calling him in a moment to go milk Bess, and then his mind caught up with the morning.

“Better get up, Nash. We've got to get moving.”

Nash climbed out into the cold, shivering as he slipped into his wool pants and flannel shirt. He was sitting on the floor pulling on his shoes when Mrs. Anderson came out of the bedroom.

“Lars isn't feeling well this morning,” she said, and Nash could have sworn a wink followed her words. “But I told him he should get up and look at his ‘patient'.”

Uriah smiled, but the expression was almost as much grimace as glee. He seemed pale and his skin a little pasty, but compared to Lars he was the picture of health.

Lars appeared gnomelike from the bedroom. He was bent over as though he were trying to stay below a black cloud hanging over his head. His face seemed swollen and blotchy, eyes hidden in squints, as he wove gingerly across the room.

Uriah's face bent and cracked into a painful grin. “You're looking a little peaked, Lars,” Uriah said. “I've got just the thing for you.”

Lars looked up and his face turned stark white. He bolted for the door, shirttail flying, and plummeted through the wall of cold waiting outside as though it didn't exist.

“He didn't have any shoes on,” Nash said, but no one was listening.

Uriah was whoofing again, and Edna twittering. Nash was glad his father wasn't twittering anymore.

Lars spent breakfast curled around his coffee, wincing whenever cup clattered against saucer. It was clear it would be a quiet Sunday at the Anderson place.

It was still dark as Uriah saddled their horses and led the two animals from the barn to the house. At Uriah's knock, the Anderson children spilled from the house into a circle of light streaming from the cabin door. Ettie was there, too, hanging back a little by her mother, shoulder set against the doorframe.

“Just wanted to say thanks. You're welcome at our home anytime,” Uriah said.

“No thanks needed,” answered Edna. “You two come back, and bring Mary next time.”

“We'll do that.”

They rode away in silence, suspended in the night, in space, with light from the stars striking sparks on the snow until false dawn dulled the dark. The world turned drab before it turned bright, and it did turn bright. The first touch of the sun ignited the night's frost on the snow and set the prairie on fire with a flash of white as cold as death and bright as life.

The horses were frisky, and their riders nudged them into a trot for a mile or two, and then Uriah, his face pale, pulled the animals to a brief stop.

“Are you feeling a little peaked?” Nash asked, and his father broke into laughter, color coming back into his face.

“Try not to be as foolish as your father,” Uriah said with a grin. “Isn't anything made better looking at it through the bottom of a bottle.”

2

The country was beginning to break up into sharp, pine-fringed coulees outlined by sandstone rimrocks. Sage and yucca poked through the snow, and prickly pear huddled beneath. On ridges exposed to the wind, bunch-grass long since dried into hay tempted the horses to snatch at it in passing.

Here and there man had left his mark on the land; a straggling corral made of lodgepole pine nailed to living trees, an old trapper's soddy caving in under the weight of the land and the years, and now and then a homestead shack with wide-eyed kids watching the two horsemen pass.

The day was bright and clear and the sun gave the illusion of warmth although it was cold enough to numb the hands and feet. Nash and Uriah stopped around the middle of the day and climbed off the horses. Nash was more than a little grateful. He felt stiff and sore, his muscles and bones not yet content with the saddle.

“Won't be long now. We're on the Lazy KT,” Uriah said. “Not more than a couple of miles.”

Not long, but it seemed like hours to Nash before they came to the corner post, cut from a giant cottonwood and branded KT, which marked the entrance to the ranch. They rode up a neat barbed wire lane to the ranch house a mile deeper into the hills.

It was a good spread. Anyone who had ever worked the land could see that. Corrals were put into the ground to stay. Stacks of hay put up by men who knew what they were doing poked out of the hay-ground down by the creek, and the barn was one of the biggest structures Nash had seen. It was built of lumber, rough-cut, like most everything else in that country, but it had a real mortar and stone foundation and it put most homes to shame. The other ranch buildings—the tack shed, bunkhouse, and even the sturdy outhouses—lent an air of prosperity to the scene.

As the two pulled into the yard, Katie Jeffries called from the kitchen door of the ranch house.

“Uriah! Nash! Come have a cup of coffee and warm up. Suppose you came here for the hunt. I'll tell you where the doings are.”

Uriah and Nash climbed down, loosened the cinches on their saddles, and walked up to the front door.

Katie's mother had died when the girl was ten years old, and she grew wild, like the cattle on the ranch. Women were rare in the territory then, and cowhands were more comfortable with the ladies who spent their evenings in the Stockman's Bar in Billings—and the rooms above—than they were with the boss's daughter. So they treated her like one of the boys, and she came to accept the solitude. She considered herself happy, those years when she was a man-child, happy until her father took her and a load of cattle to Chicago one year. The streets of the Windy City were a rude awakening for the wild girl from Montana. Ladies swirled around the city like animated bouquets of flowers. She watched the other patrons of restaurants and learned how inadequate her bunkhouse manners were. She listened to the lilt of conversations in hotel lobbies and realized how little she knew outside the world of cattle and men and Montana.

And on her return to the ranch she became a voracious reader, reaching out to the world beyond. She worked to improve herself as hard as she worked on the ranch, filling her spare hours with study.

And then she met Ulysses Jeffries. He was a remittance man, profligate son of a rich English family, sent to the American West to save his family from embarrassment. Ulysses Jeffries stood out on the frontier like a daisy in a cactus patch. He was an oddity, a man who talked funny and dressed like a dude. But the stockmen's association recognized that Jeffries was more than that, and sent the Englishman to Helena to lobby the legislature. He held the rough-cut Montanans in thrall with his bearing and clarion voice.

He was on association business when he first met Katie. She had been out checking cattle that day and didn't return until after dinner. Ulysses and Katie's father were sitting in the kitchen living room-parlor of their three-room cabin when Katie stepped through the door. Ulysses looked up and kept looking.

Katie was burned brown by the spring sun, and she smelled more of horse than anything else, but Ulysses noticed something no one else had. Katie was a woman, and a pretty one at that.

Katie couldn't keep her eyes and ears off the stranger. As they were introduced, Ulysses took her hand and kissed it, and a flush of pink crept under the deep tan of Katie's face.

She was embarrassed, elated, and flustered all at the same time, and the best she could manage in response was “I declare,” a line straight from a book she was reading on the prewar South. And when he looked at her and grinned, she fled from the room—but not far and not fast.

Their courtship was a strange affair, neither being sure what was proper in the other's world, but both so determined that it would work that it did.

As Uriah and Nash entered the kitchen, Katie said, “Come in. Come in. I've got some hot coffee waiting. You want coffee or cocoa, Nash?”