CHAPTER 8

Unpleasant tasks are best dispatched quickly, so I called Jilian as soon as school was out. Being a hunter and a rancher, I’ve come to know that death is ever-present, natural, and not often something to worry about. But Peatry was my first buffalo, and even I wanted a convenient pigeonhole for his death that made some sense. I had lots of experience with animal death but I had zero experience talking to children about it. I got Jilian’s mom on the phone. “Peatry croaked.”

“Oh, no.”

“Is Jilian home?”

“She’s right here.” The phone was handed off before I had a chance to ask what I should say, how one should handle such a situation.

To my dismay, Jilian’s first words were, “How’s Peatry?”

My first instinct was to lie. But, of course, it wouldn’t work. “I’m sorry, honey. He died this morning.”

There was silence on the line and I searched my mind desperately for something to say. But the desperation was more mine than Jilian’s. She was no product of New Age romanticism. “Well,” she said, “how about the rest?”

This was a serious question fired with pinpoint accuracy that reminded me of her mother. “They’re fine,” I said. “I think they’re going to make it.”

A little more silence, then: “What percentage is twelve of thirteen?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe ninety-two percent.”

“That’s pretty good, huh?”

“Pretty good.”

“Are you going to eat Peatry?”

“No.”

“Oh.” I could feel her trying to find the sensible place for Peatry, even in death. Then, brighter and more sincere than any adult could muster: “How about that old mother coyote and her pups?”

It was as if a bolt of lightning had cracked through the telephone line. “Of course!” I said.

An hour later I sat on the deck of the house, wrapped in insulated coveralls, with a wool cap pulled down over my ears and nearly to my eyes. I held a full glass of single-malt scotch in my gloved left hand and adjusted the focus on the spotting scope set on a tripod in front of me. It was a bright, brittle, starry night, and when the view through the scope came clear, I could count the hairs on Peatry’s back as he lay in apparent frozen sleep on the ridge above and behind the corral.

The scotch was half-gone and I was damned near frozen when I blinked and like magic the mother coyote was sitting calmly beside Peatry and staring right down the barrel of the spotting scope. I almost jumped back in fright but with just a glance of those knowing eyes the old bitch had me. I stared wide-eyed at this scene being played out before my eyes and it dawned on me that I might be the first man in a hundred years to have such a chance. I was actually witnessing a historic event that no one ever thought would occur again. It was like being transported in time, like watching the first man step from the Bering land bridge onto the North American continent, like watching Shakespeare himself direct the first performance of Macbeth. I took a long pull on the single-malt without removing my eye from the scope.

As if that swig of whiskey was what she was waiting for, as proof of my good intentions, the coyote gave her trademark single yip and followed it with three short squeals. That must be coyote for “Come and get it,” because in two seconds Peatry was covered with hungry, squalling yearling pups. The mother did not move. There would be a few bones left for her. Not since the time of Crazy Horse had there been a banquet like this. It was a thing to savor.

The more I pondered the attributes of buffalo and the drawbacks of cattle, the more it seemed to make sense to convert my ranch. It wasn’t hard to convince myself that my salvation and the salvation of the land were represented in that little buffalo herd huddled in the corral. The long nights of February I spent in the time-honored ritual of the Great Plains as colonized by Europeans: juggling debt. I stoked the stove in the kitchen with green ash logs and scribbled endlessly on legal pads—trying to pencil out the deal. I figured what it would cost to put a buffalo fence around the whole ranch. That was about eight miles of five-foot-high fence with six barbed wires, plus corner posts that could stand the pressure of stretching the wires fiddle-string tight. (A fence like that could never withstand a buffalo charge but it might deter it.) I came up with a cost of about a dollar a foot. Eight miles is 42,240 feet, so: $42,240. If you amortized the loan over ten years that would be a principal payment of $4,224, and, at 9 percent interest, a total annual payment of about $6,200. It would take Erney and me a whole year to build such a fence—the expense I just calculated was for materials alone—and, assuming the market held about steady, I’d have to produce and sell about three buffalo heifer calves annually to make the fence payment. And the chances of the market remaining high were slim.

To utilize the land without overgrazing I’d want almost a hundred head of buffalo. A hundred minus the twelve head I already had left eighty-eight buffalo to buy. Eighty-eight head at about $3,500 apiece would be a loan of . . . Christ Almighty! . . . $308,000. Could I ever make the interest payments? Could I even get a bank to go along with such a scheme? What about corrals and chutes? Was this a good idea or just one more Great Plains pipe dream?

I had to remind myself that this range land, and particularly the Broken Heart Ranch, has a history of bad decisions dating back beyond Freeman Smalley to the very first people to homestead. The false starts and dead ends on the way to a mythical success began right away. The place was originally homesteaded in the first years of the last century by two brothers from Missouri. Their names were Will and Frank Courtney and they hit this country in the middle of a stretch of ten good years. It was raining fairly regularly, and grain and cattle prices were reasonable. They thought they had found heaven and began a letter-writing campaign to convince their brother John to come up from Missouri and join them. John had a good job with the railroad and a lovely wife, Alicia. He wanted to keep both job and wife, so he resisted his brothers for a few years. But finally he gave in and packed up Alicia and their two very young children and headed for the land of milk and honey.

Alicia was from a fairly well-to-do family and by all accounts was intelligent and hardworking. Though she was skeptical of the venture, she pitched in and before long the Courtney brothers and their families had made the required improvements on their homesteads—a shelter and at least one field plowed and planted— and were issued patents for about half of what is now my ranch. John and Alicia added ten more children to their family while still living in a two-room shack.

A few years ago I was in the shop working on some miserable piece of machinery when I heard voices. I kept listening for them to tell me to commit some act of mayhem but they were saying things more like, “Well, for crying out loud. Looks like a chicken hawk.” I stepped out of the shop and found two old men peering into the chamber where my falcon spends the summer. A long, brand-new, silver Cadillac was parked in the driveway. That explained why I hadn’t heard them pull up: I was used to pickups in need of valve jobs. The old men looked at me like I had just crawled out of the ground.

“Who are you?” the smaller one asked.

“Who are you?” I asked back.

“I’m Darrell Courtney. I think I used to live in there.” He pointed to my house.

“No,” his brother said, “our house was bigger. Lots bigger.” Though both men were old, this brother was clearly the older of the two.

“Bullshit,” Darrell said. “We were just little. Things always seem bigger when you’re little.”

They had pretty much forgotten about me. “There was no deck on our house,” the older brother said.

“Well, of course not. They hadn’t even invented decks yet. He built the deck.” Darrell pointed at me. “You O’Brien?”

“Yeah.”

“You put the deck on?”

“Yeah.”

“See there! That’s our house.”

“Mother said they turned it into a grain bin.”

This rang a bell with me. “That’s your house,” I said. I had been told that it had been used as a grain bin twenty years before I bought it.

“Well, see there?” Darrell said. He waved his hand to dismiss the question. “Our house.” He walked away to survey the house from a different angle. He wore Bermuda shorts and had the whitest, skinniest legs I’d seen for some time. His brother turned to me.

“Say,” he said. He nodded toward the falcon chamber. “That a chicken hawk?”

“Falcon,” I said.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Falcon. I got to go tell Darrell.” He limped off after his brother and I went into the house to mix up some iced tea.

After I got the Courtney brothers settled down on the deck with iced teas in their hands I learned that their homestead was about a mile from where the house stood. I knew the spot. There was an indentation in the ground, a few scraps of wood and metal, and a patch of roses that bloomed incongruously yellow every June. The older brother could remember Alicia planting the roses. “Oh,” he said, “those roses were a big deal. Don’t know where Mother got them, but I remember hauling water for them. Buckets and buckets of water.”

Water was something I’d never thought about at that site. “Was there a well back there?”

“No, no. We hauled every drop with a horse and wagon. That’s why we moved up here.”

It turns out that Will and Frank, after luring brother John out to Dakota, sold out to him and moved on. They built my house on the spot that had been Frank’s homestead. That was about the time it quit raining. The old men grew quiet when they got to that part of the story. Their reminiscing had brought them to the brink of the Dirty Thirties and to the point where my knowledge of the place began to overlap with theirs. The rumors were that their father, John Courtney, had taken the bad years hard. The crops failed and he borrowed from the only neighbor who had any money, Freeman Smalley. It is a natural and time-honored tradition in the West to go to a neighbor when the bank loses interest in you. But John’s financial trouble, though perhaps the root cause of his discontent, was not the only problem. He and Alicia had lost a son in the stock pond behind the house. He’d gone for a swim after a hard day in the fields and drowned without a sound in the only water on the place. Alicia held John responsible and the resentments boiled to the surface. The stress got to John and somehow he came to believe that Alicia, mother of eleven, a woman who got to town perhaps twice a month, was unfaithful.

The story goes that his paranoia settled deep into him and that he took to carrying a gun. In John’s mind Alicia had lovers behind every tree and bush, which is very odd because there were no trees on their ranch and only the rosebush Alicia had planted herself. I was dying to ask the Courtneys about this shadowy time in their family history but they were old and venerable men who, if they knew anything about their mother’s affairs or their father’s delusions, had long since filed it in the category of “doesn’t matter.”

What did matter to them was the money their father had been forced to borrow. “We tried desperately to hang on to the place,” Darrell told me. But in 1932, soon after experiencing his own problems with women, Freeman Smalley foreclosed. “Freeman Smalley,” Darrell said, “is a name of infamy in our book. He didn’t need the money. He had really nothing to gain from it, and nobody lived on this place after he took it.” The brothers told me that their saddest, most difficult memory was the day of the foreclosure auction. Darrell was eight years old as he watched most of the family’s possessions being snapped up by neighbors and strangers alike. “World War II didn’t bother me as much,” he said—and Darrell saw action aboard the USS Saratoga.

“All those bad times is what made Dad so moody,” Darrell said. “They got divorced a couple years later. He moved just ten miles down the road to Whitewood but we never saw him again. I guess he died in 1946.”

After the foreclosure, Alicia moved to Sturgis with her eleven children. She found work in a WPA soup kitchen set up to feed poor kids from farms and ranches. I suppose she made a special deal to feed her kids there, too.

Everyone on the bench agrees that Alicia Courtney was a good woman and nobody believes there was anything to her husband’s accusations except a troubled mind. It was a case of falling prey to the stress of Great Plains agriculture. Darrell and his brother, both in their seventies, still revered Alicia and, after I got them loaded into the truck and we started off for their original homestead site, they settled in to talk about their mother. “I don’t know how she did it,” Darrell said. “Worked day and night, that’s how. Got all of us raised in pretty good shape.”

“She took in laundry, too,” the brother said. “You remember that, Darrell? We used to walk around town collecting it. ’Member that?”

“I remember,” Darrell said absently. But his mind was not on the conversation. He was squinting in thought as he scanned the spring-green hillsides of the ranch. We were approaching the site of the homestead and I was curious to know if either man would recognize their childhood home.

“This ain’t it,” Darrell said. “There was a county road.” Years before, I had noticed that the track we used to get to the back pastures had at one time been graded. There were collapsed culverts in some of the draws.

“This might have been a county road,” I said. “It’s on a section line.”

“No,” Darrell said, “it was a good road. It went right to Uncle Frank’s place, remember? Then east and hit the road to town. There was a family lived on that corner.”

“Hansons,” the brother said.

“No, they were in the section north.”

“Was it Lemkes?”

“Maybe. They had a bunch of kids, too. But this isn’t it. There weren’t any trees in the draws.”

“When we first come, there was. We cut ’em up for firewood.”

“This ain’t it. It was just dust. Look at that grass.”

“It’s been raining, Darrell.”

“This ain’t it.”

But when we came over the last little hill both men fell silent. There in the middle of an ocean of grass was the blaze of bright yellow. The pickup was moving slowly and both men’s eyes were locked on that incongruous smear of color. We all knew that we were looking at the tiny roses that Alicia Courtney had planted. No one spoke as we pulled to a stop. I could only imagine what these men were thinking. Here was a living remnant of a heroic woman. Here was a splash of civilization that she brought to this inhospitable, impossible place. No family could ever live on the 160 acres of this land granted by the Homestead Act. She must have known that the minute she laid eyes on the place. But she gave it her best, and when it fell apart she moved on. She was a much more typical homesteader than the very few who are celebrated for hanging on.

Darrell and his brother got out of the pickup and walked around the site. They didn’t kick at the rusty Model T and half-buried, rotten beams. They moved as men move in a cemetery, slowly, gently, seeming to float on the memories seeping up from the earth. These were two men who had lived full and productive lives. They had fought for their country, raised children, and made successful careers. What could they be thinking as they mulled over the poverty of their origins? “Best damned thing that ever happened to me,” Darrell said.

“Being raised here?” I asked.

He looked at me like I was crazy. “Hell, no!” he said. “Best thing that ever happened to me was getting away from this godforsaken place.”

His brother nodded. “That’s for sure, Darrell.” They slid back into the truck and left me staring at the tiny roses fighting to keep a toehold on the windy knob that was once the Courtney place.

The visit of those two old men occurred years before I brought the buffalo calves home from the 777. I had cattle then and the Courtneys only grunted when we drove by them. Their father had tried cows and it hadn’t worked out. He’d tried sheep, too. And hogs and chickens. None of it had worked out and for all the effort the place had ended up in the hands of the neighbor who had lost the joy in his own life a few years before. The Courtneys found me interesting. They liked all the books in the house. They liked the bird dogs and the falcon. If they come back they will probably be interested in the buffalo, but I’m afraid these wise, world-weary men will see the idea of a buffalo ranch as just another attempt to make something out of nothing. An attempt to make a home from “this godforsaken place.”