Buffalo Summer
So the Bow and Arrow had been founded by a white man from Texas who had taken a full-blooded Crow as his wife, and his son from this union had married a Blackfoot, the sworn enemy of the Crow. And so Jessie Weaver, who had sold the ranch to Caleb McCutcheon, was of three worlds. Crow, Blackfoot and white. Pony had never met her but had wondered at such a legacy, for to carry the blood of three such disparate worlds could surely only create confusion. Yet Pony had heard only good things of this strong young woman.
Steven had told her how Jessie Weaver had lost the ranch to falling cattle prices and her father’s skyrocketing medical bills as cancer had slowly robbed him of life. How she had quit veterinary school in her third year to take care of her ailing father. And how, after her father’s death, Jessie could have sold the ranch to developers and made a tidy profit even after the debts had been paid, but instead chose to write conservation restrictions into the deed and sell the ranch to Caleb McCutcheon at a huge loss in land value. She’d sacrificed a great deal—including her long-term relationship with Guthrie Sloane—to protect the place she loved, and Pony could understand and sympathize. In the end, Guthrie Sloane had, too; he and Jessie Weaver had reunited and were getting married in the fall.
Sitting here in her rusty old truck, looking down the valley at this historic place, Pony felt a sense of wonder. To live surrounded by such beauty would surely give grace to the spirit. The Crow had first cast their shadows in this valley long ago, in the good years when the sun still shone upon them, in the years before the buffalo were gone. Her great-great-grandfather might have set his horse in this very spot and looked upon this same valley and felt the same way she did now.
She put the truck in gear and drove slowly, not wanting to miss anything. She parked briefly at the place where the road first paralleled the creek and stood on the banks, listening to the rush of cold mountain water—happy music rippling over the smooth rocks lining the shallows. The air was cool and sharp with the tang of the tall evergreens that grew here. When she climbed back into the truck she felt relaxed. The tension that had been building in her at the prospect of speaking to Caleb McCutcheon had mysteriously vanished, and as she drove past the old cabin and headed toward the main ranch buildings, a curious calm settled over her.
Maybe she would get the job. Maybe she wouldn’t. Whatever the outcome, she had made the journey, followed the path. She parked beside two other trucks, both Fords, both much newer than hers and she drew a steadying breath before climbing the porch steps of the weather-beaten ranch house. Hopefully Caleb McCutcheon himself would be available to speak with her. Pony knocked on the door.
Which was opened almost immediately by a very fat old Mexican woman wearing a large and shapeless housedress and apron. A red bandanna covered most of her white hair.
“Yes?” Her voice was gruff and her black eyes were not the least bit friendly.
“I’ve come to speak with Mr. McCutcheon about the buffalo,” Pony said.
The woman abruptly closed the door in her face. Pony waited, patient in the way she had learned to be. She looked down toward the pole barn and corrals. Horses grazed on piles of hay while curlews hopped amongst them on the ground, looking for something to eat. Below the barn, near the bend in the creek, she could see the roofline of the old cabin. Smoke curled lazily from the massive fieldstone chimney. Steven had told her that McCutcheon preferred to live in the original homestead but took his meals at the ranch house with the rest of them. She thought it was odd that he wouldn’t choose to live in the big house.
The door opened, and Pony swung around. A man stood in the doorway, one hand on the doorknob, the other holding a notebook, eyebrows raised in a mute question. He was tall, lean and athletically built, with sandy-colored close-cropped hair, a neatly trimmed mustache and clear eyes the color of prairie flax with deep crow’s-feet etching the corners. His face was wind-burned, rugged and purely masculine. He was unexpectedly handsome, and she felt her heartbeat skip as she looked up at him and tried to remember why she was standing on his porch.
“You’ll have to excuse Ramalda’s behavior,” he said, studying her with those keen blue eyes. “She doesn’t trust strangers, even small female ones.”
“Mr. McCutcheon,” she said, her voice sounding tense because all of a sudden it mattered very much that she get this job. “I am sorry to bother you, but I had heard that you were looking for someone to help manage your buffalo.”
“My buffalo?” If anything, her words seemed to confound him more than her presence on his porch.
“Yes. Pete Two Shirts told me this. I worked for Pete on the reservation with the tribal herd.”
His expression cleared somewhat at the mention of Pete’s name and he nodded. “Pete helped get me started with the buffalo,” he explained, “but when he returned to the reservation…” He paused for an awkward moment. “Well, to be honest, I guess I wasn’t expecting a woman. I mean, it’s just that…” He took stock of her again, his eyes narrowing in a critical squint. “Please,” he said, stepping aside and gesturing with the sheaf of papers. “Come inside.”
Pony felt a flash of anger and shook her head. “If it’s a man you’re looking for, Mr. McCutcheon, I will not waste your time or mine.”
She was surprised to see the color of McCutcheon’s face deepen. “I meant no offense,” he said.
“It’s all right. I understand completely,” she said. “Of course you would prefer a man to manage your buffalo herd. A man is so much stronger than a woman, and strength is very important when dealing with the buffalo, especially when you wrestle them to the ground to brand them.”
His forehead creased skeptically. “Brand them?”
“And a man rides a horse so much better than a woman,” Pony continued, “because a man is so much stronger, and a horse truly appreciates brute strength.”
“Now look…”
“Mr. McCutcheon, if you talked to Pete Two Shirts, he would tell you that I know my stuff. And I would tell you this. I have five strong boys who would do your bidding for the summer. They would cost you nothing more than room and board. I was told you have a lot of work. If you have buffalo, you will need good boundary fences. Six strands of wire at least six feet high. Panels seven feet high would be even better, with wooden corner posts sunk into four feet of concrete. Putting up sturdy boundaries takes a lot of time and work, but without them, your herd might run clear to Saskatchewan.”
“Look, why don’t you—”
“And you’re right about the branding, Mr. McCutcheon. You don’t brand buffalo. But you do need a good set of corrals with an eight-foot-high fence and an indestructible chute of welded pipe, because even though they don’t get branded, they do need to be tested for brucellosis, tuberculosis and pregnancy. They need to be wormed and vaccinated. I know how to design such a set of corrals and a good chute. I know how big and how strong the buffalo are, Mr. McCutcheon, and how wild.”
McCutcheon eyed her appraisingly. He ran the fingers of his free hand through his hair. “Please, come in and have a cup of coffee. We can talk—”
“I don’t drink coffee,” she said. “Why don’t you call Pete and ask him about me?”
He nodded. “Okay.” He hesitated. “Won’t you at least come inside while I call?”
“I’ll wait out here, thank you,” she said, not wanting to run into the unfriendly old Mexican woman.
He nodded again, clearly perplexed. “Who should I tell Pete I’m checking on?”
“Steven Young Bear’s sister,” Pony said.
McCutcheon’s blue gaze intensified. “That’s why you look so familiar. I’ll be damned! Why didn’t Steven tell me you were coming?”
“I asked him not to. I’ll wait here while you call Pete.”
McCutcheon shook his head with a faint grin. “I don’t need to call anybody. If you’re Steven’s sister, that’s good enough for me.”
Pony’s heart leaped. “Does that mean you will consider me for the job?”
“That means you’re hired, you and your five boys. There’s plenty of room for all of you here in the main house. When can you start?”
“In three weeks.”
“That long?” His face fell.
“I’m a teacher and school lets out in three weeks.” Pony held her breath, her heart hammering. Please, oh please…
McCutcheon nodded reluctantly. “All right. We’ve survived this long. I guess we can wait until mid-June. The job pays three-fifty a week, plus room and board.”
She could hardly have hoped for as much, and struggled to maintain a neutral expression. “I can only work the summer.”
“I’m hoping you can teach me and my ranch manager all we need to know in that time.”
“I am sure that I can.”
“Good. Then I guess I’ll see you in three weeks.” He put out his hand and took hers in a warm, firm handshake; a single up-and-down motion that made her fingers tingle curiously. She turned to descend the porch steps and was almost at her truck when his voice stopped her. “Ah…miss?” She turned and glanced up at him questioningly. “What’s your name?”
“Oo-je-en-a-he-ha,” she said. She stood for a few moments, watching him mentally grapple with the impossibility of it, and then, with a barely suppressed smile, she said, “But you can call me Pony, if you’d rather.”
CHAPTER TWO
“SHE HAS FIVE BOYS,” McCutcheon said, pulling the mug of coffee that Bernie Portis had just topped off closer to him and studying the whorls of steam rising from the strong black brew. It was midmorning of the following day and the Longhorn Cafe, the only eating establishment in Katy Junction, was enjoying a brief lull between breakfast and lunch.
“Five?” Bernie paused, coffeepot in hand. Her friendly face split into a smile. “She’s been a busy gal. How old is she?”
“Not old enough. At least, she didn’t look like the mother of five kids.” Too young and too beautiful, he thought.
“How old?”
McCutcheon lifted his shoulders. “Hard to say. Late twenties. Early thirties, maybe.”
“Okay, so she started young. Say, eighteen years old. First baby. Second baby at twenty. Third at twenty-two. But how much work are you expecting to get out of a bunch of little kids? And who’s going to wipe their noses and change their diapers while their mother is out herding buffalo? Ramalda?” Bernie gave him a teasing smile before making a run through the tiny restaurant, refilling customers’ coffee cups and pausing to chat briefly here and there. She was Guthrie Sloane’s big sister, and a sweeter, more generous soul did not exist west of the Rockies nor east of them, either.
McCutcheon took a sip of his coffee and frowned. He hadn’t thought to ask Pony how old her children were. He had a sudden vision of a three-year-old boy in the saddle, reins in his teeth, horse running flat out, twirling a lariat better than a washed-up baseball player by the name of Caleb McCutcheon could. It wasn’t Caleb’s fault that Badger and Charlie hadn’t taught him how to throw a rope yet. They kept promising, and then one day slid into the next, one week followed another, and he was no closer to being a cowboy than he’d been the day he’d bought the ranch.
Ramalda had already threatened to quit. “Indians!” she had muttered when he told her, as if the word itself were a bitter poison in her mouth. Her venom had surprised Caleb, but not Badger, who’d been sharing the table the way he and Charlie almost always did nowadays, at suppertime. Or any other time for that matter. The two old cowboys had sort of come with the ranch. “Now, Ramalda,” Badger said, smoothing his white mustache. “When I first laid eyes on you, I thought to myself, that there’s an Apache woman, sure as shootin’. How do you know you ain’t part Injun yourself? And what gave you such a sour take on things, anyhow? I thought you liked little ’uns.”
Ramalda had turned her broad back to them with a string of heated Spanish that neither he nor Badger could make heads or tails of, banging pots and pans about and letting her feelings be known in no uncertain terms. “Six Indians here?” she exploded, brandishing a frying pan in one fat fist. “I queeet!”
“Whoa!” Caleb said, alarmed at the thought of losing such a phenomenal cook and housekeeper. “They’re Steven Young Bear’s nephews. They’re his sister’s children. You like Steven.”
Ramalda turned and slammed the frying pan down on the woodstove, cut a big chunk of lean salt pork into it and turned again, wielding the knife as if she intended to use it on Caleb. “Six Indians here, I queeet,” she repeated emphatically.
“Well, it’s too late. I’ve already hired them,” Caleb said. “But I’d sure hate to lose you, Ramalda. I can’t imagine coming into this kitchen and not having you cussing me out in Spanish or feeding me those delicious meals. Look at me. I’m getting fat.” He glanced down and felt a twinge of alarm at the truth of his words. “I guess maybe it would be better for my waist if you left, but I’d sure hate it. I hope you stay. You’re important to this place. We need you here, and Jessie’s coming home soon. It would be awful if you weren’t here for her wedding to Guthrie.”
Jessie. That name had been enough to melt Ramalda’s stern visage. She turned back to the stove to stir the sizzling pork with the point of her knife and never said another word about quitting. Maybe she remembered that Jessie was part Indian, too; that Jessie’s father had been a half-breed, and that the history of the Bow and Arrow had been linked with Native Americans since the very beginning.
Or maybe she’d really quit when Pony and her five boys came in three weeks. “You’re looking mighty pensive,” Bernie said, sliding a piece of apple pie in front of him. “Thinking about what having five kids stampeding around the place will be like?”
Caleb picked up his fork and grinned. “I’m thinking about all the work we’ll get done this summer,” he said, feeling another twinge at this half-truth and recalling Badger’s troubling prophecy. “One good boy can do the work of half a man,” the old cowboy had said when Caleb told him about the new hires. “But two boys? Put two boys together and they’re worthless. Five, you say? Hell, boss, I don’t even want to think about it.”
Five boys. Caleb forked a piece of apple pie into his mouth and savored the blend of tart apples and spices and tender crust. Five boys…and one very intimidating young woman, Oo-je-ne… He shook his head and gave up. Pony. Strange name, but a whole lot easier to say. Put all of them together with a herd of buffalo rampaging across the ranch… Caleb laid his fork down and pushed the plate away, overwhelmed with a sudden surge of anxiety.
In three weeks the summer would begin, and quite suddenly he was dreading it.
PONY WASN’T SURE how the boys would take the news that she had hired out their services for the summer. She was especially leery of Roon, the latest of the five to have taken refuge in her little shack on the edge of the Big Horn foothills. Roon was an introvert with so much anger and confusion bottled up that Pony sometimes feared he would explode. She had taught him in her third-grade class. He had been like the others then, a normal nine-year-old on the brink of discovering the universe. Now he was thirteen and the world was his enemy. Four years had passed. What had happened? She had not pried. When he’d shown up one cold snowy night on her doorstep, she’d stood aside and let him in. He had been there since December, a quiet brooding presence who listened to the lessons she gave the others but did not participate.
One of the rules of her household was that any child she took in had to learn the lessons she taught and eventually take the GED. It was a fair trade. Since she had been living on the reservation in the capacity of teacher and unofficial foster parent, she had launched four young people into far more promising futures than they might have had the opportunity to explore otherwise. Two of them had gone on to college, a major triumph for her. The other two had taken mining jobs off the reservation, and she still had contact with all of them on a regular basis.
So what of Roon? How would she ever reach him, turn him around, make him obey the rules she laid down? She had threatened repeatedly to throw him out, but in the end she never did. Where would he go? His own parents had left the reservation. They had leased their land allotment to a white farmer and gone to Canada, to live on a Cree reservation where the wife had blood relatives. They had taken the younger children with them. Roon had stayed with Pony, and she did not have the heart to displace him.
But would he work willingly for Caleb McCutcheon? That, and so much more, remained to be seen. She would tell the boys about the job, and if they didn’t want to go to the ranch, they could return to their own families for the summer. That was fair.
But the boys were not at Nana’s place. “They took your uncle’s old truck,” Nana said, sitting in her rocker and smoking one of her acrid-smelling hand-rolled cigarettes. “Went back home.”
“But none of them can drive. None of them even have licenses!”
Nana shook her head, her deeply wrinkled face impassive. “They went home.”
Pony drove the five miles to her little house much too fast, but the tribal police were not on patrol. She spied no wrecked vehicles along the way, and was relieved to see Ernie’s truck parked safely in her yard. She ran up the steps and burst into the kitchen. The boys, four of them, were crowded around the table, eating peanut butter sandwiches and drinking cans of soda.
“Where’s Roon?” she said.
“In the back room,” Jimmy replied, mouth full of sandwich. “Nana gave him a book to read.”
“Who took Ernie’s truck? Who drove here?”
“Dan did,” Jimmy said. “Nana said we had to leave.”
Pony looked at Dan. “Why?”
Dan’s dark eyes dropped and he lifted his shoulders. Pony looked at Joe. “Why did she tell you to leave?”
“We took her tobacco,” he said. “We told her we’d replace it.”
“Yes, you will,” Pony said grimly. “Right now. Let’s go.”
“We already smoked what we took,” Martin said, staring at her ruefully through his thick glasses. “It’s gone. But we’ll get her more. Don’t worry.”
“How? By stealing it from someone else? You promised me you wouldn’t smoke, but I never thought I would have to make you promise not to steal.” Pony sat down and dropped her head in her hands. There was a long moment of quiet around the table. She raised her head and studied each boy in turn. “Right now I think I should open the door and ask you all to leave. Right now I feel as if all of you have betrayed me.” She drew a deep steadying breath. “Right now I am very angry, so I am going to take Ernie’s truck back to Nana’s and then walk home. That will give me some time to think about things.”
She stood up from the table and left her little house and the silence of the four boys that filled it.
THE SECOND WEEK in June came faster than it should have, and Caleb glanced at the calendar on his way out the kitchen door. He paused, coffee cup in hand, to look at the scrawl that was written on this date. “Five boys/Pony” was a memo that he had made, but in another hand was written, “Day I quit!!!” The word quit was underlined strongly three times. He glanced to where Ramalda stood at the kitchen sink, washing the breakfast dishes. The brightly colored bandanna she always wore covered most of her white hair, but a few strands lay on her shoulders. A wave of affection warmed him, and he shook his head with a faint grin and pushed through the door, stepping onto the porch where his ranch manager waited patiently. He looked for the little cow dog who was never very far from Guthrie Sloane.
“Where’s Blue?”
“Left her to home. Figured you’d be wantin’ to ride after the buffalo.”
“You figured right. There are ten old cows and one huge bull out there, and we have no idea where they are. It would be nice to be able to tell my buffalo expert that they’re still on the home range, but for all I know they’re halfway to Canada.” The sun wasn’t up quite yet but the horses were saddled and tied to the hitch rail. “If the last you saw of them was over on Silver Creek, maybe we should start there.”
“I saw signs of them this past week near the head-waters of the Piney.”
“That high up?”
“Yessir.”
Caleb drained the last of his cup and set it on the porch rail. “Let’s ride.”
Guthrie’s halting footsteps followed Caleb’s down the porch steps. Caleb unwrapped Billy Budd’s rein from the rail and stepped into the saddle, wishing the old gelding’s legs were a little shorter or that his own legs were more flexible. It was a hard thing to look graceful while hauling his six-foot frame into the saddle. Still, he couldn’t complain. Guthrie was still so crippled up that he had to use the porch steps to mount his horse. That had to burn deep down inside, because Guthrie Sloane had been one of the best horsemen in Park County before that mare had fallen on him last October.
The ranch manager was a hard man to read. He didn’t say much, didn’t reveal himself in long-winded conversations the way some people did. He was quiet and competent and he worked damn hard. Caleb liked him very much and counted himself very fortunate to have the skilled cowboy in his employ.
“Steven’s sister is coming today,” he said, nudging Billy into a walk and giving him a loose rein.
“The boys, too?” Guthrie said, falling in beside him.
“As far as I know. I didn’t dare broach the subject at breakfast. Didn’t want to get Ramalda too upset.”
“She cleaned the bedrooms yesterday.”
Caleb’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh?”
“I saw her bring out the rugs and hang ’em over the porch rail to air. Then she disappeared down the back hall carrying a whole bunch of clean bed linens, muttering away to herself.”
“I’ll be damned. Maybe she isn’t going to quit after all.”
“If Ramalda leaves, she knows Jessie’d never forgive her.”
“No, I guess she wouldn’t,” Caleb agreed. “Speaking of Jessie, when’s she coming home? Classes must be over for her.”
“Yessir, they are. She’s way ahead of where she thought she’d be, and the school has advanced her into senior-year studies.”
“Does that mean she’s going to be graduating sooner than you thought?”
“Yessir. She’s apprenticing with that horse doctor down in Arizona again to finish her credits.”
“She’s down there now?”
“Yessir. She’s there for the summer.”
“Huh. Too bad she couldn’t come home for a little visit, but at least you got to see her at spring break. And she’ll be back in September. I assume she’s planning to be here for her own wedding.”
“Oh, probably,” Guthrie said with a faint grin, smoothing his horse’s mane with one gloved hand. “She said she might.”
They rode up along the creek to the place where a smaller tributary fed into it, then threaded through groves of Engelmann spruce and across high meadows of greening grass spangled with wildflowers. They caught sight of some cattle but no buffalo. After an hour they stopped to rest their horses on a high knoll from which they could survey the valley. The wind pushed tall, bunched-up clouds across the vast expanse of blue sky. “I’m buying the leases back,” Caleb said, leaning his forearm on the saddle horn. “The ones Jessie’s father had to sell. Ten thousand acres of leased land, most of it belonging to the Bureau of Land Management. That gives the whole ranch a footprint of fifteen thousand acres. Enough room to run us some buffalo.”
“Damn,” Guthrie said. “That’s good news.”
“I didn’t want to tell Jessie until it was a done deal.”
“She’ll be real glad to hear about it.”
“I paid too much for them, but the ranchers who sold them needed the money.”
“Ranchers always need money,” Guthrie said, smoothing his horses mane with one gloved hand.
Caleb nodded. “I guess. I know they think what I’m trying to do here is nuts, but how much crazier is it than what they’re doing—fighting a losing battle trying to raise enough cattle to make land payments when cattle prices keep falling?”