Chapter Seven

UNTIL WORLD WAR II CAME ALONG, changes to the West came slowly, almost imperceptibly. Then, almost over-night, the young men were gone, and even older ranch hands with able bodies had gone off to make money in factories. The ranches were left to survive as best they could with the dregs of the labor pool.

At Yamsi, we used old saddle horses that should have been retired, since there was no one around to ride Whingding or break colts. The young horses were there, of course. You can’t turn off a pregnant mare. But the horses that were ready for training got older every year and harder to handle when someone did pass by willing to start one.

At seventeen, I wasn’t quite old enough for the service, but I had to grow up in a hurry with all the responsibilities that were thrust upon me. I was a-horseback dawn to dark, moving cattle, doctoring, looking for strays. Buck had to open his own gates, for I was gone before he got up in the morning and back after he had gone to bed.

For years I had wanted to ride Whingding, but he had always been in someone else’s string. Now he was mine if I wanted him. He snorted a little as I got on him one cold morning, but he seemed to know I was itching for him to explode, and I couldn’t have made him buck if I tried.

My uncle liked to migrate to warmer climes in winter. Rather than be stuck with me, he shipped me off to school in California. I was an indifferent student, my mind filled with horses rather than mathematics and Latin. I couldn’t wait to get back to the ranch for Christmas vacation.

Most of the crew had been sent to the Williams, California, area to take care of several thousand wintering cattle. I spent the first of my vacation at Yamsi on long, bone-chilling rides to gather strays from lonely draws or meadows, which, coated with snow, were a far cry from the beautiful grasslands of summer. Outside of Ern Morgan, an old sheepman named Jim O’Connor, and Fred Shepherd, who we called Shep, the ancient chore man, there was no one around to help when things needed being done.

Morgan was beside himself with worry. “This goddam war! All the employment office in Klamath Falls ever sends me are winos, stinking of strawberry wine. I’m already three weeks late getting the cattle out of here for the winter, and if a storm strikes we’re in deep trouble!”

There was just so much hay in the Yamsi haystacks, but the long meadows were dark with cattle gathered off the ninety-thousand-acre range, cattle that would soon have to be fed. Morgan was right. We should already be moving out with the herd, driving them overland across the tablelands to the wintering area on the BK Ranch at Bly.

Morgan stayed at the telephone, trying to find men, but when the promised help failed to show up, the old foreman had little choice but to pray for decent weather. Each day we delayed increased the chances we would be snowed in with the cattle for the winter. Every day found Morgan up at dawn’s first light watching for clouds scudding along the tops of the Cascade Mountains to the west, indicating whether or not a storm was in the offing.

It was twenty below zero and still dark when we saddled our horses and started the herd of six hundred dry cows up over the long, snowy trail through the pine forest, up past Taylor Butte toward Bly, forty miles away. Most years the cows would have been eager for the trip and the herd stretched out down that snowy road through the lonely forest, thinking only of the stacks of timothy, clover, and bluegrass hay awaiting them at the end of the trail. But this time there were no leaders. These cattle had been summered on Klamath Marsh and wintered in California. They had no idea of the trail.

We were so desperate for riders, we let the old lady come along to help us over the hills. She was bundled up so only the tip of her nose and her faded blue eyes showed, but we saddled her horse, Ginger, for her, lifted her up on a stump, and shoved her aboard. There wasn’t a peep out of her, swathed as she was in wool. It turned out we couldn’t have made it up that first hill without her.

We had gone maybe two miles when it started to snow hard, and in minutes the backs of the cattle were covered, making them hard to see. It was just breaking daylight, but the woods were still ominously dark with the storm. Had the decision been mine, I would have turned the herd back, but somewhere in front of us, Ernie Morgan had taken a small bunch of cows at the point and was pushing them up the hill, breaking trail in what was now knee-deep snow. Morgan wasn’t a man to give up, and besides that, he knew from long experience that this might be the last chance left to get the cattle out of the valley before Yamsi Ranch was snowed in until spring.

The cows were hungry and stopped at each snow-covered bitterbrush bush to nose the snow from the branches and strip the leaves. I was riding Whingding at the rear of the herd, and he shied and snorted at each unfamiliar snow-covered shape. All I need now, I thought, is to get bucked off and have the drag take off back to the ranch.

All I had for help in the drag was a couple of red-nosed, well-intentioned neighbor kids and Margaret Biddle. Somewhere up along the flank was seventy-five-year-old Jim O’Connor, who would be doing his best because that was Jim’s way. But he was known as a better hand with sheep than with cows. Jim wasn’t very well mounted, and besides, there was only so much any man could do in a storm like this.

I screamed and cursed at the cattle, but the wind tore my words away. The kids seemed to be trying hard. I grinned at them whenever I passed, but already their horses were leaden with fatigue. Even with daylight, there was not much visibility. Each of us rode in a small world limited by how far we could see around us in that storm. We would ride up to a cow, scream, and pop the animal with the ends of our reins, only to find we were trying to drive a snow-covered bush. Whingding moved angrily back and forth, ears laid back, biting at the backs of cattle to drive them on. There was a gleam in his eye; he was tough as iron, and this was what he had been bred to do. He had two passions in life, bucking off cowboys and driving cattle.

We rode with one hand under our chaps for warmth, but one hand had to be out in the weather to rein the horse. Our fingers ached horribly, and our cheeks burned even as we snuggled our faces in our scarves and rode with heads bowed against the onslaught.

Now and then I would see the old sheepman ahead of me, hunched up and cold but doing his level best. He would glance back at me, reading my misery.

“Be the Jaisus, lad,” he’d shout with a grin. “Ain’t this fun, though? ’Tis a great day I be havin’!”

Trailing the herd at a distance was the chuck wagon, pulled by the gray Percheron draft team, Rock and Steel. Shep was in his eighties but a good chore man. He had been instructed to follow the herd to Eldon Springs, where we planned to take shelter for the night. The wagon carried a tent and our bedrolls, plus beefsteaks, eggs, coffee, biscuits, and candy bars to help us survive the ordeal of sleeping out in a blizzard.

Margaret Biddle and the kids in the drag were pounding on the cattle, moving them up twenty feet at a time, but as soon as the pressure was off and the riders rode after another laggard cow, the first cows would stop to eat. I trotted back and forth behind the herd, making sure I kept on the outside of all the tracks. Now and then I would find a bunch of cows trying to sneak off through the pines and head back down the hill. I would scream at them like a banshee and run them back into the herd.

It was noon when we finally made it to the top of the ridge, but here the wind came charging down off Fuego Mountain, ready to freeze us to our saddles, and blinding us with icy pellets. I hadn’t seen Morgan in two hours and hoped he could still locate the road through the trees. The old lady was a frozen lump on her horse, and I begged her to go back to the ranch. A few teardrops froze to my face, for I wasn’t sure I would ever see her again alive.

One of the kids in the drag was too cold to get off his horse and tried to pee from the saddle, but all he managed to do was wet his chaps. The laugh we had at his expense made us feel a little better, but we all had our own battle to fight, and the storm seemed determined to defeat us.

We hit the Sycan River at Teddy Power Meadow. Morgan somehow kept the cattle in the timber, for the open flats were a whiteout of blown snow, and the cattle would have bunched up, tails against the wind, refusing to move. There were trees across the road, felled by the storm, and the cattle had trouble working their way around them. Every delay cost us precious time. The days were short, and we dreaded having darkness catch us still out on the trail.

Three o’clock, and the storm showed no signs of abating. Whingding was tired but still determined to make the cows go. We were out of the pines now and surrounded by groves of mountain mahogany that gave scant shelter.

“It won’t be long now,” I shouted to the kids in the drag, but they were so bundled up in misery, they didn’t seem to hear.

Darkness came, and still we had not come to Eldon Springs. I was worried about the chuck wagon. It had been right on our tail at Teddy Power Meadow, but I had not seen it since. I kept thinking about possible disasters. What if old Fred lost track of the herd in the snow? What if he had a heart attack and died? What if the wagon lost a wheel, or a tree collapsed on the team?

We kept pounding on the cattle until at last the herd became thicker, and some of the tired cattle were even bedding down in the snow. I recognized some of those cows as having been part of Morgan’s herd in the lead. Maybe we had gotten as far as he wanted to go. Not far ahead I saw flames shoot up as Ern Morgan set fire to a big pitch snag. We had made it to the shelter of aspen groves at Eldon Springs, and here we would set up camp with the wagon and hot food, spending the night warm and snug in the tent.

Or so I thought. We got down off our horses and crowded up to the fire for warmth. Yellow pitch dripped from the burning snag, and black smoke poured up to bore a hole in the clouds of swirling snow. Steam rose from our frozen clothing. Once we could function, we unsaddled, letting our tired horses roll in the snow. Morgan kept looking back into the darkness the way we had come.

“Somethin’s wrong,” he said flatly. “Old Shep and the wagon should have been here long ago.”

We fed our horses from a stack of loose hay that rancher Bart Shelley had left for emergencies. I volunteered to go looking for the old man and the wagon. Surely they couldn’t be very far back on the trail. I started to saddle Whingding, but the old horse stood with his head down, too tired even to eat. “I’ll go afoot,” I told Morgan. “He can’t be that far away.”

At the end of the first mile, I stumbled over the body of a cow that had died unnoticed on the trail. But still there was no sign of the wagon. I rested for a few moments in the lee of a big pine, then decided to go back to looking for Shep. I could hardly make out the road. Here and there the wind had bared the trail. Here and there it had buried our tracks in huge drifts. I started to get frightened that I might lose my way, die on the trail, and never see Yamsi again.

My feet were numb in my overshoes, and I stopped frequently at trees to kick the bark to restore circulation. At Teddy Power Meadow, I lost the road and wandered up on the frozen meadows where once I had chased flopper ducks with my friends. It all seemed so long ago.

The going was easier here where the wind had swept much of the snow away. In the darkness I made out the walls of Teddy’s old log cabin and took shelter from the wind to rest.

There were only three sides to the cabin. Teddy’s Indian wife had been a large woman, so big, in fact, that when she got down with appendicitis, Teddy had to tear out the end of the cabin to get her out the door. She took up the whole front seat of the buckboard, and Teddy stood behind her handling the reins all the way to Beatty, sixteen miles away.

I seemed to hear Teddy’s voice in the darkness encouraging me to go on, giving me advice. “Better go on, kid. You stay here, you won’t last the night.”

Back on the forest road again, I found signs of the chuck wagon. From the tracks, Shep had passed this way twice. Apparently the old man had lost our trail and headed back to the ranch, leaving us to our fate. Six miles later, I staggered through the door of the bunkhouse to find Shep fast asleep in his bed.

I might have let the old man sleep, but I was mad at him for letting us down. Besides, we were shorthanded and needed his help with the wagon. Grabbing a side of his cot, I dumped him, bedroll and all, on the floor.

I was relieved to find Ginger tied to his stall and see lights on in the big house. Mrs. Biddle had made it home safely. Working quickly, I had a fresh team harnessed when Shep caught up with me at the barn.

“Danged smart-alec pup,” he snorted. “I was dreamin’ I was chasin’ a beautiful redheaded girl and was just about to catch her too when you dumped me out of my bed.”

“You were layin’ there dreamin’ when the rest of us were about to die of hunger out in that storm!”

“Don’t know where you disappeared to,” the old man said. “That herd of cows just left off leavin’ tracks.”

Moments later, wrapped in blankets and canvas, we were bundled up on the front seat of the chuck wagon and headed south toward Eldon Springs with food, tent, bedrolls, and hot coffee, plus some rolled oats for all our hardworking horses. There were grins of relief when we finally cleared the last bend and found the little party still clustered around the fire.

We slept a little late in the morning, for the big tent was swaybacked with fresh snow, and we suspected that today was going to be colder and tougher than the day before. We sat in our bedrolls, dressing slowly, careful not to dislodge the lining of frost that clung to the inside of the canvas from the moisture in our breath.

Old Shep built a roaring pitch fire in the chuck wagon stove and cooked a big breakfast of steak, eggs, black coffee, and biscuits. Once I was mounted, Whingding lost his temper and tried to buck me off in the deep snow, but every time he put his head down, his nostrils plugged up, and he quit trying. Soon he forgot his outlaw ways as we went back to hustling the cattle, trying to gain the spot where the old road plunges over the edge of the rimrocks, where we could hope for a few miles respite from the blizzard.

Once, as the wind died for a time and the snow turned to sleet, we saw Morgan far up ahead, pushing a small bunch of lead cows so the others might have a track to follow. Midway in the herd, we could glimpse Jim O’Connor, bundled up to his eyeballs, flat-siding the flanks. We were so shorthanded Jim had to work both sides, tucking strays back into the herd, crossing over from left to right or right to left, whenever he saw a need. The snow had frozen to his clothes and the right side of his horse so that horse and rider seemed to have been sawed down the middle.

The cows still moved slowly, heads down, seeking out spears of last summer’s grasses that managed to show above the snow. The older cows had used up what little strength they had left, and every mile or so we would find one dead or dying on the trail. There was not much we could do except take comfort that soon the fallen animals would have a proper burial beneath a soft blanket of snow.

It was late that afternoon when we drove the cattle into a holding field at the edge of the Sycan River. Ern Morgan had bought a stack of wild hay from Bart Shelley, who lived at the Sycan Bridge. We had no way to handle the hay and scatter it, so we opened the gates and let in the whole herd of hungry cattle to eat. We tied our horses in an old barn out of the storm, and went into Bart’s house to thaw out.

There were two main rooms, but one was filled clear to the ceiling with old western magazines which Bart had read and discarded. I could hardly walk without stepping on a cat, and Bart had a habit of spitting tobacco juice on your boots as he talked. He wanted us to put our bedrolls on the floor, but we muttered something about checking on the cows, and soon had our tent set up out in the snow.

That night the wind howled and shook the canvas as we tried to sleep, but soon the snows drifted over the tent and all was silent. Shep had slept in the chuck wagon, and in the morning he dug the snow from in front of the tent and rousted us out. We could smell bacon frying and the fragrance of coffee and dressed in a hurry in the cold.

We knew the town of Beatty lay somewhere south of us, but the blizzard still raged and familiar landmarks were few. Our best chance to save the herd was to cross the Sycan at Bart’s Bridge and head across the flats toward Paiute Camp and the pine forests north of Charley Mountain and Five Mile Creek.

We had gone perhaps three miles when the drag slowed and stopped, and I trotted back to see if the kids were having trouble. The two boys were nowhere to be seen. From their tracks, they had left the herd and set off to try to find Beatty, abandoning us to the storm. I took over the drag myself, riding back and forth in the blinding snows, pushing cows as best I could. Minutes later, Jim materialized in the whiteout. He took in the situation without comment and went to work pushing animals across the sagebrush plain.

“Those kids,” he mused. “Be the Jaisus, those kids are sure going to miss out on a lot of fun!”

Three of us, six hundred cows, and one of the worst storms in history. In the good old days, in good weather, we used to figure one cowboy for a hundred cows. The lives of every one of those cows depended now upon three men and an old chore man. There wasn’t a choice but to carry on.

At noon Morgan appeared through the drifts, so caked with snow that at first we did not make him out. He saw at a glance that the kids were gone and Jim and I were pushing the herd alone. But there was more on his mind than that.

“I missed the trail in the storm,” he said. “Instead of heading east and to the north of Charley Mountain, the cattle took off south until they hit the railroad tracks and turned east along the tracks at a long trot. No way I could hold ’em. They got the Sprague River on their right and rocky cliffs on the other. If the trains are running, the cattle will have no way to escape being killed.”

Morgan rode close to us so he could read our faces. “Listen good,” he said. “If a train does come along while you’re on the track, you won’t have a chance to save yourselves or the cattle. I’m going to try to push the cattle through, but I’m telling you both to head on north of the mountain. You got that? I’m ordering you not to come with me.”

As Morgan trotted back to talk to Shep and send him north with us, Jim and I grinned at each other and moved off after the cattle. When Morgan caught up, we were already hurrying the cattle down the narrow track as fast as we could go.

As luck would have it, we moved the herd through the steep cuts of the railroad grade without getting caught by a train. We left the track at the Elder place, hoping we would catch someone at home. The hungry cattle milled around the buildings looking for shreds of hay. The Elder cattle had been trailed out to the desert earlier in the fall, and there were only a few butts of stacks left in the stackyards.

Morgan slipped from his horse and pounded on the door of the house. Snow cascaded from the tin roof, burying the old cowboy in the pile. There was a screech of rusty hinges, and the door opened a crack. One of the Elder boys stood looking out in surprise at Morgan buried to the waist, then at the hungry cattle milling around his yard. But he was quick to gather his wits. “Come in!” he said. “There’s hay in the barn for the horses, and the cattle can make do in the stackyards!”

None of us had a word to say, for at that moment, a logging train came thundering past, its snowplow flinging up clouds of frozen snow.

The next morning we left the Elder place in a storm that seemed to have doubled its fury. Ernest Paddock had sent out a four-horse team with a wagonload of hay from the BK, six miles away, and the team had broken a trail through the drifts. I led Jim’s horse, and Jim rode the hay wagon, tossing flakes of hay from the wagon racks. The cattle herd flowed on behind the wagon, their backs white with new snow. To our right, whenever the storm moderated, we could catch glimpses of the great Bly Valley, and occasional distant ranch buildings huddled against the storm.

Along the county road were miles of split-rail fences with only a few top rails showing above the drifts. The cattle seemed to sense that they were nearing the end of the trail, for they ambled down the road, heads hanging low, too tired to try the drifts on either side. At the top of a rise, the ranch tractor had cleared the drifts from a gate, and here Morgan turned the point of the herd off the county road. The cows gathered speed, and soon the whole herd was trotting down the hill toward a level field where Paddock’s men were using pitchforks to roll hay off loaded wagons.

That night we sat at the long ranch table in the BK dining room, thankful to be warm once more. We would rest up for two or three days, take fresh horses, and set out a-horseback over the long road back to the ranch. With luck we would make it with only one night spent on the trail.