Gallatin Canyon Read Online Free Page B

Florida. A Hereford still had its horns was a walkin miracle and the old sumbitch had him a smart little deal goin. I soon learned to give him credit for such things, and the old lady barking commands off the sofa weren’t no slouch neither. Anybody else seen their books might say they could be winterin in Phoenix.
    They didn’t have no bunkhouse, just a LeisureLife mobile home that had lost its wheels about thirty years ago, and they had it positioned by the door of the barn so it’d be convenient for the hired man to stagger out at all hours and fight breech birth and scours and any other disorder sent down by the cow gods. We had some doozies. One heifer had got pregnant and her calf was near as big as she was. Had to reach in and take it out in pieces. When we threw the head out on the ground she turned to it and lowed like it was her baby. Everything a cow does is to make itself into meat as fast as it can so somebody can eat it. It’s a terrible life, and a cowboy is its little helper.
    The old sumbitch and I got along good. We got through calvin and got to see them pairs and bulls run out onto the new grass. Nothin like seeing all that meat feel a little temporary joy. Then we bladed out the corrals and watched em dry under the spring sun at long last. Only mishap was the manure spreader threw a rock and knocked me senseless and I drove the rig into an irrigation ditch. The old sumbitch never said a word but chained up and pulled us out with his Ford.
    We led his cavvy out of the hills afoot with two buckets of sweet feed. Had a little of everything, including a blue roan I fancied, but he said it was a Hancock and bucked like the National Finals in Las Vegas, kicking out behind and squalling, and was just a man-killer. “Stick to the bays,” he said. “The West was won on a bay horse.”
    He picked out three bays, had a keg of shoes, all ones and aughts, and I shod them best I could, three geldings with nice manners, stood good to shoe. About all you could say about the others was they had four legs each; a couple, all white-marked from saddle galls and years of hard work, looked like maybe no more summers after this. They’d been rode many a long mile. We chased em back into the hills and the three that was shod whinnied and fretted. “Back to work,” the old sumbitch tells em.
    We shod three cause one was going to pack a ton of fencing supplies—barb wire, smooth wire, steel T-posts and staples, old wore-out Sunflower fence stretchers that could barely grab on to the wire—and we was at it a good little while where the elk had knocked miles of it down or the cedar finally give out and had to be replaced by steel. But that was how I found out the old sumbitch’s last good time was in Korea, where the officers would yell, “Come on up here and die!” Said they was comin in waves. Tells me all this while the stretcher pulls that wire squealin though the staples. He was a tough old bastard.
    “They killed a pile of us and we killed a pile of them.” Squeak!
    We hauled the mineral horseback too, in panniers, white salt and iodine salt. He didn’t have no use for blocks, so we hauled it in sacks and poured it into the troughs he had on all these bald hilltops where the wind would blow away the flies. Most of his so-called troughs was truck tires nailed onto anything flat— plywood, old doors, and suchlike—but they worked alright. A cow can put her tongue anywhere in a tire and get what she needs, and you can drag one of them flat things with your horse if you need to move em. Most places we salted had old buffalo wallers where them buffalo wallered. They done wallered their last, had to get out of the way for the cow and the man on the bay horse.
    I’d been rustlin my own grub in the LeisureLife for a good little while when the old lady said it was time for me to eat with the white folks. This wasn’t necessarily a good thing. The old lady’s knee replacements had begun to fail, and both me and the