Chasing a Dream: A Horseman's Memoir Page 5

  Gotta love those mules--Jack, as usual, kept his composure and lay there quietly while I pulled my leg out from under him. That I was not injured further still amazes me. The dangers of cowboying and breaking horses were becoming clear and real, but I was still determined to be a cowboy and a horse breaker.

  After a time I managed to ride One Eye around in the barn, but he was still very scared and each ride was risky. My better judgment prevailed. It wasn’t worth taking any more chances training a horse during the winter. I delayed One Eye’s training until spring.

  That winter on the Kitchen I was learning some lessons, all right--the hard way, as usual. The question was whether I’d survive the learning.

  One cold evening, Renny called and invited me to go skiing the next day, two hours away at Jackson Hole. Healed up and happy for any break in the monotony and an escape from loneliness, I agreed.

  We practically had the resort to ourselves because the high temperature was ten below that day. After skiing hard I was exhausted when Renny dropped me at the driveway. The temperature had dropped to about thirty below. Renny asked, “Are you sure you can make it, Grant? It’s getting dark and it’s awfully cold.”

  “Yah, I’ll be all right. I’ll walk on the snowmobile trail. I’ll be there in no time.” The sun disappeared and darkness set in. The snowmobile trail was hard to see, and I kept stepping off and sinking waist deep. All I could do was wallow around and feel with my gloves until I found the hard-packed trail, and then pull myself back onto it. Every few feet I’d fall off again. My legs tired as I tried to plow my way through the snow. By now I was sweating profusely. Exhausted, I lay back in the snow and closed my eyes, thinking, I’ll just rest for a couple of minutes.

  Who knows how long I was there before I heard loud noises and then felt something on my face. I opened my eyes to see Zack licking me. Get up, get up! he was saying. My teeth were chattering and I was shaking terribly. My sweat-soaked clothing felt stiff and frozen. I thought, I had better get moving or I’m going to freeze to death. My legs refused to respond. A world of snow and darkness surrounded us. I could not see or feel the snowmobile trail.

  A gentle, peaceful feeling came over me. Never before had I seen such a beautiful sky, jet black with billions of twinkling stars. My eyes felt heavy. It’s so beautiful. I could stay here forever. Zack licked my face again and then bounded around as if coaxing me to play. Get up!

  A story came to my mind that my Dad had told me about a family surviving a blizzard in Kansas where he grew up. Lost and blinded by the snowstorm, they followed a fence line back home.

  I knew a fence ran parallel along the driveway to the ranch. But the fence was likely at least a quarter mile away. I finally convinced my body to move. With Zack’s encouragement I pushed on through the snow. Each step was a struggle, especially where the snow had drifted. At times it was more like swimming than walking. Finally I felt the fence. Hand over hand, and using the wire as a guide, I postholed through the snow. The barbed wire tore at my black leather ski gloves. My body kept telling me to quit and rest, but I knew I had to keep going. I thought, You can’t quit now or you will die here standing up. I thought of the pioneers who had died on the Mormon Trail where I spent the night, and understood some of their mindset and suffering. I imagined my mother learning that her son had frozen to death in the Wyoming snow. I couldn’t stand the thought of hurting her. The next post became the new goal, then the next, and the next.

  Hours passed. I could no longer feel the tips of my fingers. The cold air felt like pins poking at the inside of my lungs. At last, I topped a rise and saw a hint of the night light at the ranch. Zack became more excited; he bounded toward the ranch and then returned to me again. Hope and energy filled me, and with them new strength.

  My frozen gloves made turning the trailer doorknob difficult. I let Zack in, turned the thermostat to high, and slumped to the floor exhausted, hugging Zack close. The clock read four a.m. Before allowing myself to drift asleep, I rubbed Zack all over. “Thanks, dog. How did you know to come out there? Or were you just wandering again?” Zack licked my face.

  By February, cabin fever was driving me bonkers, and I couldn’t stand the isolation any longer. I hiked about five miles up the road to the neighboring ranch where the archway read, “Bar Cross Ranch.” I followed the winding driveway that led down a hill to open meadows that had long lines of black cattle eating on feed lines of hay in the snow.

  I knocked on the door of a two-story ranch house. A tall, thin woman in her thirties with long brunette hair and a friendly smile opened the door. The smell of freshly-baked bread wafted out. I said, “My name is Grant. I’ve been taking care of the Kitchen Ranch up the road. I’m looking for work if you have anything.”

  “Elaine Barlow,” she said. “This is my husband’s and my place.” Inside, several people sat around a long table eating lunch. The atmosphere reminded me of home. I shook hands with Elaine’s husband, John, a blond, bearded man in his thirties, the son of a U.S. senator, and a songwriter who’d written several songs for the Grateful Dead. He hired me on the spot to help feed cattle and calve heifers in the spring. John would pay me three hundred dollars a month plus room and board. The pay didn’t matter. I would be around people again, and I could bring Jack and One Eye. The Bar Cross owned several cowdogs and Elaine wasn’t happy with the idea of having a husky around, but she reluctantly agreed that Zack could come along.

  Almost immediately he began chasing newborn calves. This was a game to him, and great fun. But these kinds of games can escalate into killing. In ranch country, dogs can legally be shot on sight even for harassing livestock, and the cow boss, exasperated with Zack, repeatedly told me she couldn’t allow this behavior. I tried everything, including tying him again which made him miserable.

  Elaine became a pseudo-mother to me. Each morning she cooked all of her hands sourdough pancakes with bacon and eggs. John and I would feed five hundred head of cattle each morning, and after lunch the Barlows and the workers would sit around the kitchen table telling stories.

  I learned to harness and drive a team of four Belgian draft horses and feed the cattle with a hay sled until the snow melted enough for us to feed with a wagon. I loved the long hours working on the sleigh with John, and the physical exertion of bucking bales. But Zack was either gallivanting or chasing livestock. John and Elaine made a declaration: if I wanted to stay, Zack had to go.

  I needed the job, and the Barlows had become like family. I thought long and hard about what I should do, and concluded I had no choice but give up Zack. He had never really been mine, anyway. I couldn’t stomach the thought of taking him to the pound, where he’d be locked up and miserable. At the time I only knew of one option.

  Zack and I loaded up in my old pickup, headed out of the hills and across about sixty miles of rolling sagebrush flats to the rim where the highway began winding down through the forest toward Jackson Hole. Where forest met sagebrush, I pulled over and turned to Zack. “I don’t know what to do. You keep getting in trouble, and I like this job. I need this job. You don’t want to stay home. You never have. I don’t know what else to do.”

  Zack kept looking out the window.

  I got out and Zack followed. I bent down and petted him all over, wondered if I was about to do the right thing. “You’ve always wanted to live in the wild. I’ve got to let you go.”

  I released him. “You’re free, Zack.” Wagging his tail, he trotted off into the sage and into the forest without looking back.

  Buzzing with emotion, I got in my truck, turned around, and drove away. I felt guilty and wondered if I had done the right thing.

  For several weeks I thought about Zack. I had figured he would find his way back, find another home, move on, or make his own way. One thing I knew for certain, though; he knew how to take care of himself.

  I continued to work side by side with John on the Bar Cross. He was highly educated, a real philosopher, so we spent a lot of time talking about the
meaning of life. While we didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of subjects, we agreed on one concept—what cowboys referred to as “riding for the brand.” Louis L’ Amour mentioned the idea a lot in his books. It meant that a cowboy would be extremely loyal to the ranch for which he worked, even if that loyalty might cost him his life.

  I liked and admired John, and I rode for the Bar Cross brand. One night, when I was drinking tequila at the Cowboy Bar in Pinedale, a local construction worker, much larger than I was, took to bad-mouthing John. By criticizing my boss, he was criticizing the outfit for which I rode, and me. No sooner than the words came out of his mouth, I swung at him across the table and hit him square on the jaw, knocking him and the table to the floor, breaking glasses and scattering beer bottles. We went to the ground but my wrestling experience soon had him saying “uncle.”

  Then, an acquaintance of mine, a big lanky cowboy, grabbed me from behind, clasped both my arms together, picked me up, and toted me outside like a sack of corn. He said, “You’re getting out of here before you go to jail.” He put me in his truck and drove me home. You’d think I would have been remorseful, but I wasn’t. In my eyes I had done the right thing because I was riding for the brand.

  When spring came, Zack had not returned. I hadn’t heard anything about him, not even a sighting. I had built a strong bond with the Barlows but I didn’t want to spend the summer irrigating and putting up hay. That was farmers’ work. I wanted to work like a cowboy from the back of a horse. Brian drove up from Colorado to pick up his mule. Jack had been with me ever since our ride from Colorado, and we had been through a lot together, but he was not my mule. I knew I’d miss him and felt a bit sad seeing Brian haul him away. Now by ourselves, One Eye and I headed back to punch cows and wrangle dudes at the Big Sandy.

  Although I was leaving the Bar Cross, I felt loyal to John and Elaine because they had taken me in like a stray and made me part of their family. Before leaving I told John, “If you ever get in a bind you let me know. I‘ll be there for you.” I should never have said that, because before long I’d want to eat those words.

  My moving on was also a response to a sort of restlessness that had begun when I went to live with Aunt Florence and Uncle Oscar, and continued on my trips to Grand Mesa, my work with the railroad, and my mule trip to Wyoming. At the Big Sandy, One Eye continued his dangerous ways, and Renny demanded I get rid of him because he was too dangerous for a dude ranch. After working the summer at the Big Sandy, and about to turn twenty-one, I had to sell One Eye for next to nothing. In the fall, dogless, horseless, and muleless, I returned to Wolf Lake Out-fitters, where I was promoted to elk-hunting guide. At the end of the season, Zack had not returned. Restlessness and thoughts of the impending winter caused me to think about moving on. I had heard about the big cow outfits down south near Elko, Nevada, where the buckaroos were not expected to perform any work they couldn’t do from the back of a horse. That pure cowboy life appealed to me, so in the fall I packed everything I owned under the camper shell of my truck. Unencumbered, I drove alone down the long, desolate road to Nevada. I felt sad but excited, too, and then that old song came to mind and I started singing.

  “The way that you wander is the way that you choose

  But the day that you tarry is the day that you lose.”

  9

  ELKO, NEVADA, 1978

  My first stop in Elko was at the unemployment office, where the agent said there was only one ranch job available, at the Tamara Ranch out of Carlin, Nevada. He said, “But if I was you I would file for unemployment. I can’t recommend you work there. Everyone says the food is terrible and the accommodations are worse. No one ever stays.”

  Fresh from Wyoming cowboy country, I puffed out my chest. “I will not draw unemployment. I want to work. I’ll take the job.”

  Butch Tamara owned the Tamara Ranch. Butch was a wiry little Basque man in his seventies and had a tanned leathery face. He couldn’t have been more than five feet five even while wearing his gray Stetson and handmade boots. He struck the perfect image of an old-time cowboy. He was married but I never once laid eyes on his wife, who supposedly had been a prostitute from Elko.

  At one time Butch had been the largest private ranch owner in Nevada, running over seven thousand head of cattle. He was a good man, and I liked him, but he was better at relating to his fat Australian shepherd, Mr. Waffles, than to people. Butch had another employee, John, an Indian in his fifties who bunked with me in a two-room bunkhouse with a shared bathroom.

  We fed hay to three hundred yearlings each morning. Each afternoon we checked and doctored sick cattle. John was a good roper and easily caught the yearlings around their necks. I, on the other hand, was inexperienced with a rope and took several tries to catch the heels. John seldom said anything but his body language and expression said he was annoyed about having to work with a green hand. I wanted so badly to be a good cowboy and practiced after work every day on a roping dummy out behind my bunkhouse where no one would see.

  Loneliness set in again, especially at Christmas. I missed my family. My truck payment took almost all of my paycheck, and I was always broke. I couldn’t even afford to drive to Elko forty miles away. In the cowboy life, I was learning, the lows were as low as the highs were high.

  To pass the dark winter evenings I took up leather braiding. Sometimes, desperate for company, I would drive to a brothel outside of Carlin. I entered with only five dollars, only enough money to buy some conversation. That girl’s companionship was worth every dime. She was young and pretty and said she didn’t want to be there, that she was just broke and desperate. Like me she had dreams, but she had made some poor choices and was stuck. Come spring she hoped to move on. I hoped she could move on, too.

  One morning Indian John didn’t show up at the cookhouse. I checked on him at the bunkhouse--he was passed out on his bed. I couldn’t wake him up. My bottle of rubbing alcohol that I used to shave with was lying askew and empty on the floor next to his bed. I thought the rubbing alcohol had killed him, and began shaking him and slapping him on the face. He finally moved a bit and mumbled, “Leave me alone.”

  John lay around sick for several days, and I had to feed the cattle myself. When payday came around he went to the dentist to ease a toothache. He didn’t return for two weeks, but Butch said this was not unusual. As is common with cowboys, John would sometimes stay in town until he had drunk up all his money.

  To help me, Butch drove the pickup while I fed. I asked, “Why do you let John come back each time after he goes on a drunk?”

  “He’s done this for years,” Butch said. “I guess I’m the only one that will hire him. He’s good help when he’s sober.” And that was all he said about the matter.

  Butch had become a father figure, and I worked hard hoping he would complement me just once, but if he appreciated my work only Mr. Waffles knew.

  While Butch didn’t talk much, neither did anyone else on the ranch except the cook, Butch’s brother Tom, who’d had polio as a kid and who was physically and mentally disabled. Tom spoke in a high-pitched childlike voice. He jabbered non-stop. He wore the same bib overalls every day and reeked of body odor and chewing tobacco. Brown juice dripped down his chin and added to the stains on his overalls. Tom would often sit on the cookhouse steps and repeatedly yell at me across the ranch yard. “Hey! You got da whiskey? Hey! You got da wine?”

  This would make me laugh every time. I’d say to Tom, “Hey! You got da whisky? Hey! You got da wine?” And we would both laugh.

  Tom was a terrible cook. He fed us white bread, boiled potatoes (no butter), canned green beans, and boiled beef. Sometimes he would serve canned corn. The beef and potatoes were pretty much the same every day. We wouldn’t complain because Tom would get furious and start grumbling and cursing. “Ah shit! Damn it, damn it! Shit, shit!” he would grumble as tobacco juice sluiced out the corner of his mouth.

  Butch would yell, “Oh shut up, Tom!”

  When we moved a large herd of c
ows, Butch would bring Tom along on his old sorrel horse, an animal that watched over Tom and took great care of him. Tom was too short and fat to get his foot in the stirrup, so he would lead his horse up to the barbed-wire fence and balance on the wire. The fence would sag down so far he couldn’t get his foot in the stirrup, and he would huff and puff and dribble tobacco juice all over himself. We couldn’t help but laugh, which would make him even more furious. “Damn it! Shit! Damn it, damn it!” in his high-pitched voice. About the time he would be ready to step on, his horse would step away from the fence and infuriate him even more. One day he just slumped to the ground and started crying. For men who valued toughness above all traits, this was an uncomfortable scene, so we just sat there doing and saying nothing. Butch and Tom cursed back and forth, and once their arguing died down we gave Tom a leg up on his horse and rode off to work.

  One of my mounts was a white shaggy gelding named Snowball, a good cow horse that took care of me, too. He taught me a lot about working cattle. One day a wild heifer escaped the pasture and I couldn’t get her back in. She kept running the wrong way, so I decided to test my improved roping skills. Snowball ran right up next to her and set me up for a perfect shot, and I caught the heifer around the neck. Automatically, Snowball dragged her to the nearest gate, but I had no idea how to remove the rope from around her neck. Luckily, John rode up and roped the heifer’s hind legs, pulling her to the ground. His horse held her fast, while I dismounted and retrieved my rope. Stepping back in the saddle, chest puffed out, I felt like a real Nevada buckaroo.

  In February, the cows--even the experienced mothers--began having difficulty calving. The cause was a mystery. To save the calves’ lives, we tried manually pulling them out of their mothers using a mechanical device called a calf puller, a small winch hooked to the calf’s protruding feet. The calf would get stuck and would not come out without tremendous pressure. They were extremely deformed--their elbows stuck out at odd angles so they could not pass normally through the birth canal. Most died shortly after birth.