The Haymeadow Read online

  Cawley smiled. “They’ll drive just fine. Don’t worry about it. We’ll harness Spud and Speck today on some weight and you’ll see how they do. There won’t be no problems.”

  John had doubted it but Cawley had been right. They brought the mare and gelding out of the corral, let them smell the harnesses and collars, then harnessed them up. They both stood quietly while Cawley finished harnessing, though Speck—she was always curious—looked around at the contraption on her back for a moment. John helped Cawley back them into position, one on each side of the tongue, and they hooked the trace chains to the doubletrees, snapped the tongue crosspiece up to the collars, and they still stood quietly.

  Cawley climbed into the seat of the wagon, John sat next to him, and Cawley slapped them lightly on the rump with the lines.

  That did it.

  They slammed forward so hard, John went over the seat backward and landed inside the wagon and Cawley had all he could do to hold them while they took out across the prairie.

  They calmed down after a bit, snorted some, then went to work and in ten or fifteen minutes acted like they’d been pulling wagons forever.

  “Slick as a wet cat,” Cawley had said. “We’ll throw your saddle in the back and you’ll have two horses up there to use.”

  I won’t get lonely, John thought, looking at the empty plate, wondering how he’d eaten it all without throwing up. I’ll have the horses and the dogs and the sheep and the mountains and and and.…

  After easing Spud and Speck into driving instead of riding they spent the rest of the day getting ready. Cawley brought out a box of shoes and tools and shoed both Speck and Spud because they wouldn’t be here when the farrier came. John had never seen him shoe before—other than to repair a problem shoe if it came loose—and he was surprised at how well Cawley did it.

  “How come you don’t shoe all of them?” he asked. Cawley was putting the tools away and he turned after setting the toolbox on the shelf.

  “Because I didn’t hire on to shoe horses. I hired on to hand, and that’s it. Being a hand don’t mean shoeing a whole herd of horses come summer every year. Now, let’s load that wagon.”

  Johns list was nothing compared to what Cawley put in for him. Cans and more cans of food—he stripped the house, which was always full of canned food.

  “Can’t have nothing much fresh,” Cawley said. “It’ll go on you right away. We could have tried some of that freeze-dried stuff you just boil with water and you wouldn’t have empty cans to carry back in the fall. But Tink, he don’t trust that dried stuff, wanted canned goods, and we had already made a run to town for Tink so you’re stuck with canned food.”

  There were whole canned chickens, canned bacon, canned potatoes, canned fruit and beef and vegetables and dozens and dozens and dozens of cans of fruit cocktail.

  “Tink, he liked his fruit cocktail,” Cawley said, sitting on a box while he shoved other boxes under the bunk. “I mean likes—I guess he ain’t gone yet.”

  John thought the wagon was nearly caved in with just his food but Cawley added the dog food. They used a high-protein, high-fat dry dog food and he put in two hundred pounds.

  “Thing is, there ain’t no way you can carry everything you need. You’ll need more food and so will the dogs.”

  “We will?”

  Cawley nodded. “It’ll go fast once you start eating it and you’ll start eating it once you start working.”

  “What work is there? I thought you just sat and watched the sheep.”

  Cawley laughed. “Well. That’s true. And the dogs do most of the true work. But you’ll be on horse for ten, twelve hours a day and that has a way of making work. Then too, things happen.”

  “What do you mean—what things?”

  “Things come along to happen to sheep. I don’t know why it is, but if you have fifteen horses, twenty cows, and one sheep standing on a hill and a thunderstorm comes, lightning will hit the sheep. Every time. Things just happen to sheep.”

  As if to emphasize his point he loaded a big box of medicine, ointments, salve, and even sutures and forceps. “You’ll know when to use them.”

  That was when John had dug his heels in—halfway through the afternoon when he saw all the medicine. “Cawley, I ain’t the one for this job.”

  Cawley nodded. “Could be, could be not. But I ain’t the one you talk to. The boss is in town, your pa, and I was just told to get you ready and take you up there.”

  “I’m just fourteen and he’s sending me off with six thousand head of sheep.…”

  Cawley sat back and filled his lip with chew. “You take a shine to the old man, don’t you?”

  “Who do you mean?”

  “The old, old man—the first John. The top waddie who started all this. You’re always talking about him, asking about him, wanting to know more about him.”

  “Well—I guess so. Yes.”

  “He stuck his kid on a drive, had him riding drag, when he was ten years old. On longhorns. Eating dust and worse for eighteen hours a day at ten. Your pa went out with the sheep to the haymeadow when he was fifteen.”

  “He never talks about it.”

  “He keeps close, your pa.”

  John agreed. Sometimes he wanted his father to talk to him, tell him things—tell him more about his mother, his great-grandfather. Or just tell him what to do. But he was almost like Tink. Some days would go by and he wouldn’t say ten or twelve words, and they might be to a horse and not all of them nice.

  “Your pa summered the sheep at the haymeadow for four years, then Tink came along and he’s done them ever since. So you taking them up when you’re fourteen ain’t so bad.” Cawley spit out the back of the wagon. “Not bad at all. And you’ll learn as you go—learn more than you’d ever believe you could.”

  But now, this morning, as they were making final preparations, John stopped on the steps out of the house.

  “You said yesterday that I couldn’t carry everything I need to eat—for me or the dogs.”

  Cawley was in back of him and he nodded. “Yup. That’s right.”

  “So what happens when I run out?”

  “You eat sheep.”

  John turned, looking for a smile, and finally saw one. “You’re kidding.…”

  Cawley snorted. “Time was, they ate sheep. Or cattle. Or deer and elk. But in your case one of us, me or your pa, will bring you some more fodder in a month or so. You’ll be fine, just fine—don’t worry.”

  They hooked Spud and Speck to the wagon—they settled in with no problem even with the morning coolness when they liked to pop a little—and pulled the wagon to the end of the yard by the barn. John loaded his saddle and blanket in the back of the wagon—on top of everything it nearly filled the wagon to the height of the canvas top—and Cawley saddled a horse named, simply, Roan. It was a big red, almost a bloodred gelding and Cawley rode him out of the yard the half a mile to where the sheep were being held in pasture.

  They were like a gray carpet—six thousand of them pushed against one end of the large holding pasture.

  The wrong end, naturally, John thought. He was driving the wagon—trying to master it in the short distance from the buildings—and it was coming hard. It wasn’t like riding a horse at all. He had to pull hard on the left rein to turn them left, rather than neck-reining, and had to think to turn wide on corners to make up for the length of the wagon and team.

  The dogs were so excited they could barely contain themselves. All four of them had gone to the mountains with the sheep for at least three years running now. Peg was the youngest and she was four and had been doing it since she was a one-year pup.

  They ran ahead of Cawley and the red gelding, came back, streaked out to the sides, ran ahead again and couldn’t stay still. At the fence they ran through the end of the gate where there was a small gap and went out wide around the herd at the other end of the pasture.

  John loved to watch them work and was always amazed at how smart they were.

>   Cawley opened the gate without getting off the red and swung it sideways, then sat on the horse and waited.

  The dogs did the rest.

  Billy and Peg went out to the sides of the herd and Jenny and Pete went up on their backs, ran across the herd jumping from sheep to sheep and came in on the back side of them and started them moving with barks and small bites at some of the sheeps’ legs or rear ends.

  Most of the herd had done the same trip several times and as soon as they saw the open gate and the dogs running at them they started across the field, out the gate and onto the road, a stream of gray backs and bleating heads.

  The dogs kept them moving, snapping and using the small excited barks they used on stragglers and lambs and in an hour the herd was out of the pasture.

  Cawley closed the gate, grinned at John, and pointed at the dogs. “Ain’t automation great?”

  And they were on the way.

  Chapter Six

  WHEN THE HERD was moving well Cawley came back to the wagon.

  “You want to ride the red and I’ll take the wagon?”

  John shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. What are we going to do at the highway crossing?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s think on it.”

  He spun away and let the red move up with the sheep again and John traced the path they would take in his mind.

  They would stay on gravel and secondary farm roads for all of this day until just before dark. Then they hit the main highway. It wasn’t a freeway, but it was well traveled with a lot of trucks and they had to cross it once they got to it because they would not be able to stop the sheep, even with the dogs’ help.

  When the sheep came to the road they would start to spread—they did every year—and try to go up and down the highway instead of across and it usually took one person on each side, one pushing, and the dogs to get across the highway. From there they stayed on gravel roads and open range for three more days, then up through the canyons to the high country on Barron land again.

  With only two of them the highway was a problem and Cawley must have been thinking about it constantly because when they were four hours down the roads, moving well, the dogs keeping them compact and the pace up, Cawley came riding back.

  “Any ideas?”

  John shook his head. “Just push them across and hope the dogs can hold them.…” In truth he’d been looking at the morning, listening to the meadowlarks and feeling the warm sun on his face and thinking how pretty it looked, and felt. The sky was a clean blue—he had a shirt that looked the same color right after it was washed—and even the smell from the sheep coming back over him, the ammonia-lanolin stink of them, didn’t seem bad.

  He’d read a book once about a man who felt guilty because he was being paid to be a forest ranger in a national forest, doing something he loved and getting paid for it, and John thought that if the herd were cattle instead of sheep and he was riding a horse instead of the wagon he would feel the same guilt. He didn’t read much, maybe two books a year other than reading for school, and the story stuck with him. Being paid for doing exactly what you wanted to do—that must be the best of all.

  “Well, think on it some more,” Cawley said. “And so will I.” He looked at the sun—he never carried a watch and went completely by the sun—and then the country around the wagon and sheep. “We got two, two and a half hours at this pace and we’ll be at the highway. We want to have a plan when we get there.”

  John nodded again, watched Cawley ride back up the herd and the solution came to him. Just that fast. He whistled and Cawley came back.

  “I just figured it, I think. When we get closer I’ll stop and take Speck out and saddle her and then help you across. When we get them lined out again I’ll come back, put Speck back in, and bring the wagon up.”

  Cawley seemed to think for a moment, then nodded. “Sounds good … we’ll do her.”

  As he turned away John saw him smile and thought: He knew that. He knew to do that and he let me make the decision. But why? Why not just tell me? …

  It was part of all of it, he thought, part of taking the sheep up to the high country and being alone. Cawley was setting him into it a bit early, letting him be the one who made the decisions.

  When they were still a half hour from the highway—John could see it two miles off, trucks and cars sliding by—he stopped the wagon, unharnessed Speck, and took his saddle out of the back of the wagon.

  It took him a couple of minutes to saddle and bridle Speck and he settled into the saddle like an old friend. He would rather ride on a horse than a wagon, would rather ride on a horse than walk. It was another tie to the old man. He couldn’t remember when he’d started to ride. One day, when he was about eight, he was sitting on a small horse named Hammer with a saddle too big for him, riding across the short grass of the prairie with two dogs loping alongside and he had no idea how long he’d been riding or how he started.

  He asked his father once and he’d just shrugged.

  “I don’t know. There was an old Morgan named Doofus around here and one day I came out and you were sitting on him. You were small but I can’t remember how old. Three, maybe, or four. I don’t know how to this day you got up on him—must have climbed a leg or something. That might have been the first time. Just seems like you was always on a horse.…”

  It didn’t matter, John thought, catching up to the herd and riding out on the right to get to the highway ahead of them. He rode, that’s all that mattered, and he’d rather ride than do almost anything. No. Than anything. Ride and “see the country.” That’s how the old man was told to have said it. He just “… rode to see the country.”

  The crossing went as well as it had ever gone. He and Cawley stopped traffic from both directions and the dogs started them across.

  The front end tried to spread on the highway but Peg and Billy came up to help and pushed them back, barking and biting, while John used Speck to turn back a group of twenty or so that squirted through and mixed with the stopped cars and trucks.

  One car with New York plates was full of tourists and there was a girl with long brown hair who got out with a camera and John felt a little shy but tipped his hat to her. She smiled back and waved and he felt himself blushing but was glad he’d done it anyway. He sat and watched the sheep until the drag—the last of the herd—had crossed and felt her eyes on him the whole time. When they were all passed he called the dogs up—which was silly because they knew more about highway crossing than he did and were already pushing the drag down the gravel road—and turned back to where he’d left the wagon. As a little bit of show-off he let Speck jump off the road into the ditch, bound once, and jump up the other side and knew he looked good but thought it would be too much to look back and see if she was watching.

  When he did turn, the car was gone and he felt stupid about doing it all. She was probably not watching anyway.

  He unsaddled and harnessed Speck once more and used his tongue to make a clucking sound and move them along.

  The herd was already a mile ahead and he had to catch up. Cawley would be getting hungry and the food was all in the wagon and he knew it was foolish but he looked back past the side of the wagon twice after he’d crossed the highway, thinking of the brown-haired girl.

  Chapter Seven

  CAWLEY OPENED a can of cold chili with a pocket knife, setting the can on one of the tires of the wagon and jacking the knife around the edge. He took a large spoon out of his shirt pocket, wiped it on his pants, and ate the chili cold in three huge bites.

  John watched him and thought he must have a stomach made of cast iron. John had some canned meat and bread and made sandwiches—it was bad enough without butter or mayonnaise but at least he wasn’t eating those cold bits of hardened fat he saw in Cawley’s chili.

  They ate in complete silence, as they usually did in the house. With Cawley and his father eating was a business to get out of the way—like putting gas in a tank on a car. Just something to get don
e so they could get back to whatever it was they were doing before they had to sit down to eat. And for John it was becoming that, but he still liked to chew his food slowly and think of things while he ate. The end result was that he was always the last to finish eating and the one who had to clean the table and wash the dishes, if there were any.

  Cawley finished his “lunch” in less than a minute, threw the empty chili can under the seat of the wagon, and remounted the big red.

  “Pull some water for the dogs and call them in. They had some in that ditch back there but they’ll need more.”

  John nodded. There were two five-gallon water containers in the back and he took down a pan from the back of the wagon, filled it with water, and whistled for the dogs. They were way ahead of him, had heard the metal of the pan scraping over the bleating of the herd and were coming in four streaking black-and-white lines to the wagon. They didn’t lap the water but gulped at it, biting it, and when the edge was off their thirst they were gone again—they hadn’t been at the water for more than five seconds—and were back in position around the herd.

  “All business, ain’t they?” Cawley said, smiling. He left John and the wagon and moved back to the front of the herd. The sheep were coming to another intersection and at this one they had to turn right and would need to be guided.

  John took slightly longer to finish his lunch and ate two sandwiches—one was never enough, somehow—and put things away.

  As it happened Cawley did not have to go to the front after all. The dogs remembered from year to year what to do. Peg and Billy turned the front end easily enough and Jenny and Pete kept the edges of the long, gray, fuzzy mass within the road and between the fences as they moved around the corner.

  John never tired of watching them at work. If a sheep tried to move away from the herd, or straggled and didn’t keep up, one of them—usually Jenny because she seemed to be the most watchful—would climb up on top and cross the herd at a full run, jumping from sheep to sheep to get to the one that needed personal attention. A couple of bites at the back legs, a high-pitched bark or two or just a look, a stare, and sheep got the message. At one point John decided that maybe sheep weren’t so dumb after all because they would watch the dogs and react before the dogs could get to them. A ewe would start to straggle and feel guilty about it and look for the dogs before they even came.