Blood Sport

Chapter Eight

The girl in the punt opened the ranch house door, walked halfway to meet me from the car, and greeted me with professional instant welcome.

‘Mr Hochner? How nice to have you with us.’

‘I’m glad you could take me at such short notice, with the Fourth coming up next weekend.’ I shook her hand, putting a slight touch of German accent into my voice because it was easier for me than American if I had to keep it up for any length of time. It didn’t seem altogether wise to be English.

‘We’re seldom full this early in the season.’ She smiled as far up her face as her cheek bones while her eyes skimmed my clothes, car, and luggage. Only a hotel keeper’s check up: it hadn’t occurred to her that she’d seen me before.

‘I’ll show you straight to your cabin, if you like? Then you can freshen up and come along here to the ranch house for dinner later on. There will be a bell, to let you know when.’

I parked the car, and carrying my two suitcases, the old one and the new one from Jackson, followed her along a grassy woodland track towards one of several small log cabins scattered among the trees.

She was tall and strong, and older than she had seemed on the river: twenty-six or twenty-seven, I guessed. The fair hair no longer hung childishly loose, but was combed up into a round topknot, leaving her neck cool and uncluttered. She wore dark blue Levis instead of the white trousers, but the pink shirt on top looked identical. One of the storekeepers in Jackson, the fifth I tried, had known her immediately when I had artistically let the photograph drop face up in front of him as I took money for a local map out of my wallet.

‘Yola Clive,’ he said casually, picking it up. ‘And Matt. Friends of yours?’

‘I’d thought of looking them up,’ I agreed, sorting out bills. ‘How do I get there, do you know? I haven’t been to their place before.’

He obligingly gave me clear directions for a fifteen-mile drive, finishing, ‘and the High Zee Ranch is the only place along there, so you can’t miss it. But if you’re planning on staying, I’d give them a call and make a reservation. It’s a mighty popular place they run.’

I sure will,’ I said: and I did. I also bought some Levis and shirts and a pair of riding boots, and the suitcase to put them in. In cowboy country guns passed without comment: I added a heavy black tooled leather belt with a silver buckle, and the clerk didn’t show any surprise at my wanting to make sure that the small-of-the-back holster I sometimes used would slot on to it.

Jackson preserved its own wild western flavour to the extent of a small authentic stage coach waiting in front of the drug store: but the sleepy disillusioned horses between the shafts looked a poor prospect against galloping redskins. Broad raised boardwalks edged with hitching rails ran along in front of the stores in the short main street, though the mud they had been built to avoid had long been metalled over. Motels with signs saying ‘air-conditioning and central heating’ were called ‘Covered Wagon’ and ‘Rustlers’ Hideout’. Jackson was an uneasy mixture of evolution and make believe, and clearly a success.

I sat in the sun on a hitching rail most of the afternoon: did a bit of thinking, and made two calls to Walt at Buttress Life.

Yola Clive led me round a neat stack of sawn logs, up two steps, across a minimal porch and through a screen door and a wood door into the cabin.

‘Bathroom through there,’ she said, pointing. ‘And you’ll probably need to light the stove in the evenings. The snows only melted here two or three weeks ago, and the nights are cold.’ She smiled briefly and indicated a small tubful of a crumbly mixture which stood beside the squat black stove. ‘Light the logs with two or three handfuls of that.’

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Pep,’ she said. ‘A mixture of diesel oil and sawdust.’ Her eyes glanced professionally round the room, checking that everything was in order. ‘There’s an ice machine out back of the kitchen, if you want to make drinks. Most guests bring their own liquor... We don’t sell it ourselves. I expect you’ll want to go riding tomorrow. We usually fix that up over dinner.’ The half smile came and went, and Yola walked quietly away along the track.

Sighing, I investigated my quarters. There had been a reasonable compromise between age-old materials and modern construction, resulting in a sturdy two-roomed cabin with a pitch roof and varnished tree trunk walls. Two single beds stood on the polished wood floor in the main room, covered with patchwork quilts. A curtain across a half-shelved recess acted as closet, and the two upright chairs and the table were all home built. So, too, I discovered, were the towel rail, stool, and shelf in the bathroom. But the backwoods stopped short of the plumbing: and the lighting was ranch generated electric.

I unpacked on to the shelves and hangers, and changed from town clothes into Levis and a blue-and-white check shirt. The complete vacationer, I thought sourly: and buckled the gun belt round my waist.

After that for an hour I sat on the porch and looked at the view, which was good enough for a chocolate box. The Teton range of the Rocky Mountains stretched north and south, with dark green pine forests washing up from the valley to meet spotless snowcapped peaks. Along the bottom ran a sparkling thread of blue and silver, a tributary to the upper reaches of the one thousand mile Snake River: and between the river and the woods on whose edge my cabin stood, a wide stretch of sage brush and scrub was dotted with yellow weed-like flowers.

The woods around the cabin stood on the lower slopes of another ridge of peaks which rose sharp and high behind the ranch, shutting it in, close and private. The stream ran right along, in and out, but the only road into the narrow valley stopped dead in the parking area of the High Zee.

A bell clanged loudly up at the ranch house. I went back into the cabin and put on a sloppy black sweater which hid the Luger and looked reasonable at nine thousand two hundred feet above sea level, though the still persisting heatwave was doing a good job in the mountains too. Walking slowly along the dusty grass track I wondered if Matt Clive would know me. I certainly had no clear memory of his face on the punt, though I now knew it well from the photograph. It was unlikely, since his full attention must have been concentrated on Dave Teller, that he had taken much notice of me; but he might possibly have a sharper impression than Yola, as I had been closer to him when I went in after Dave.

I needn’t have wondered. He wasn’t there.

Yola sat at one end of a long golden wood table flanked by chattering well-dug-in ranch guests. Family groups, mostly, and three married couples. No singles except me. A bright well-coiffured mother invited me to sit beside her, and her hearty husband opposite asked if I’d had a long drive. On the other side of me a small boy told his parents loudly that he didn’t like stuffed pancakes, and every face round the table looked sunburned, vital, and overflowing with holiday spirits. I battened down a fierce urge to get up and go out, to get away from all that jollity. I didn’t see how I was ever going to make the effort to look as if I were enjoying myself.

By the end of the meal it felt as if my smile were set in plaster, rigid and mechanical to the extent that my face ached with producing it. But the hearty man opposite, Quintus L. Wilkerson III, ‘Call me Wilkie,’ seemed pleased to have a practically non-speaking audience, and made the most of it. I endured a splash by splash account of his day’s fishing. His wife Betty-Ann had ridden to the lake with him, and then gone on into the hills in a party containing her two children, Samantha and Mickey. I heard about that too, from all three of them. They asked me to ride with their party the next day, and I wrenched my tongue into saying I’d be glad to.

I lasted out the coffee. The Wilkersons promised to see me at breakfast, and Yola asked if I were comfortable in the cabin.

‘Thank you, yes.’ Remembering the German accent. Smile.

‘That’s fine,’ she said brightly, her eyes sliding past. ‘Ask if there’s anything you need.’

I walked stiffly out of the ranch house and along the dark track to the empty cabin; leaned wearily against one of the posts holding up the porch roof and looked at the row of peaks glimmering palely in shifting moonlight, with streaky cloud across the sky. My head ached with a feeling of compression, as if my brain wanted to expand and fill up with air.

How could I go on like this, I thought. Dinner had been about as much as I could manage. I didn’t know what to do about it. No use praying: no faith. If I went to a doctor I’d get a bottle of tonic and a homily about pulling myself together. There was absolutely nothing to be done but endure it, and go on with that until it got better. If I could only convince myself that it would in the end get better, at least I would have something to cling to.

Somewhere in the valley a stallion shrieked.

Maybe it was Chrysalis. If he wasn’t actually on the High Zee Ranch I thought the chances very high that he was somewhere near. Maybe Keeble did know what he was doing sending me to find him, because it was evident that I could still function normally on the work level: concentration acted like a switch which cut out the personal chaos. If I concentrated twenty-four hours a day, life would be simple.

One trouble with that. It was impossible.

The ranch held upwards of a hundred and twenty horses. About forty of them were penned in a big corral near the main ranch house, saddle horses for the ranch guests to ride.

Breakfast had been early, but the fitting of guests to horses took some time, even though everyone except me had been there two or three days and knew which animal they wanted. The head wrangler asked me if I could ride, and if so, how well.

‘I haven’t been on a horse for nine or ten years,’ I said.

He gave me a dead quiet one with U-shaped hocks. The western saddle seemed like an armchair after the postage stamp I’d been teethed on: and there were no new-fangled things like buckles for raising and lowering stirrups. The head wrangler unlaced the thong holding the three-inch-wide leathers to the saddle, slid them down two or three holes, and laced them up again. Good soft leather, which could go all day and not rub the horse.

Over to one side of the ranch house, past its green watered lawn, there was a smallish sturdily railed paddock of not more than an acre. I’d spent all breakfast looking out of the window at the seven horses in it. Three mares, two small foals, two stallions. Both the stallions were bays, but one had a white blaze and was no thoroughbred.

‘What are those horses over there?’ I asked the wrangler, pointing.

He paused a second while he worked out how to put it delicately to an ignorant dude, and foreigner into the bargain, and then said, ‘We breed most of the horses, on this ranch.’

‘Oh, I see,’ I said. ‘Do you have many stallions?’

‘Three or four. Most of these’, he glanced round the patiently waiting mounts, ‘are geldings.’

‘That’s a nice looking bay,’ I commented.

He followed my eyes over to the small paddock again. ‘He’s new,’ he said. ‘A half-bred Matt bought in Laramie two or three weeks back.’ There was disapproval in his tone.

‘You don’t like him?’ I said.

‘Not enough bone for these hills,’ he said briefly, finishing the second stirrup. ‘Now, is that comfortable?’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

He nodded with casual friendliness and went to see to someone else. The wranglers differed from the dudes only in the matters of age and dress. They were all boys or young men between eighteen and thirty, several of them college boys working their vacation. The dudes were either parents or children; scarcely one in the twenties. No one, Betty-Ann Wilkerson told me knowledgeably, called cowboys cowboys anywhere except in films. Cowhand was possible, but the right word was wrangler. There were no cattle on the High Zee. The wranglers herded the horses, and the horses were there for the dudes to ride.

In the matter of clothes the wranglers were less flamboyant, less well pressed, altogether dustier. They had been up since five-thirty and other people’s holidays were their hard work.

‘They turn the horses out on the hills every night,’ Wilkie explained, ‘and go up and herd them down in the morning.’

We set off from the ranch in two parties, about twelve guests and two wranglers in each. Down over a flat wooden bridge across the narrow river, and up into the main Teton range opposite. Wilkie rode in front of me and Betty-Ann behind as we wound upwards through the woods in single file; and neither of them tired of talking.

‘They turn the horses out on the hills over here because there isn’t enough pasture in the valley to feed them.’ Wilkie turned half round in his saddle to make sure I could hear. ‘They go miles away, most nights. The wranglers fix a bell on to some of them, like cowbells in Switzerland, so that they can find them in the morning. The ones they put bells on are the sort of natural leaders, the horses other horses like to be with.’ He smiled heartily. ‘It’s sure difficult to see them sometimes, with the sun shining through the trees and making shadows.’

What he said was true because we passed a group of three in a hollow later on, and I didn’t see them until one moved his head and clinked his bell.

‘They only bring in the number they need,’ Betty-Ann filled in. ‘They just leave the rest out, and maybe bring some of them in tomorrow, if they come across them first.’

‘So sometimes a horse could be out for a week at a time?’ I suggested.

‘I guess so,’ Wilkie said vaguely. He didn’t really know. ‘Of course, if they want one particular horse, the wranglers will go right up the mountain to find him, I do know that.’

‘Anyone who can ride well enough can go up with the wranglers in the morning,’ Betty-Ann said. ‘But they canter up and down here instead of walk.’

The path was steep and also rocky.

‘These horses are born to it, honey,’ said Wilkie kindly. ‘Not like the riding school horses back home.’

At eleven thousand feet the path levelled out on to a small tree-shaded plateau overlooking a breathtaking pine-wooded valley with a brilliant blue lake in its depths. The cameras came out and clicked excitedly. The chattering voices exclaimed over an order of beauty that demanded silence. And eventually we rode down again.

Yola asked me at lunch if I had enjoyed my morning, and I said without difficulty that I had. The Wilkerson children were calling me Hans and asked me to swim in the stream with them in the afternoon. Wilkie clapped me heartily on the shoulder and told me I was a good guy, and Betty-Ann had irritatingly begun looking at me in a way which would change her husband’s mind about that instantly, if he noticed.

I left the lunch table last and whisked away a large slice of bread in a paper napkin. Alone in my cabin I unpacked some specially acquired groceries, filled one pocket with sugar cubes, and on the bread scooped out a whole tin of sardines. With the bread still held in the napkin I walked down through the sage brush and along to the mares’ and foals’ paddock, reaching it on the far side from the ranch house.

There I offered sugar in one hand and sardines in the other. The mares came and sniffed, and all chose sugar. The foals chose sugar. The bay with the white blaze chose sugar. The dusty half-bred that Matt bought two or three weeks ago in Laramie came last, less curious than the rest.

He sniffed at the sardines and raised his head with his ears pricked, staring across at the high Tetons as if hearing some far off sound, smelling some distant scent. His nostrils quivered gently. I looked at the splendid lines of bone in the skull, the gracefully slanted eye, the perfect angle of head on neck. He had the crest of a thoroughbred stallion, and the hocks of a racehorse.

He bent his head down to the sardines and ate the lot.

Yola and Matt Clive lived in a cabin of their own, separate from the main ranch house, which contained only the dining room, kitchens, sitting room, and wet day games room for the guests.

Yola backed an olive-drab pick-up with small white lettering on its doors out of a shady carport beside her cabin, and drove away down the dusty road. I stared after her, half amazed, half smiling. Full marks to the horse van drivers, I thought. They’d seen both the Snail Express van and the pick-up. They must have seen them both several times, but even so, they’d remembered.

Guests were allowed to use the telephone, which was located in the Clives’ cabin. I strolled over there, knocked on the door, and found the place empty. Not locked, though in this case there was a key. There were no locks on any of the guest cabin doors: one could only bolt them on the inside, with a simple wooden wedge slotted into the latch.

A quick tour of the Clives’ cabin revealed two separate single bedrooms, living room, kitchen, bathroom, and office. I planted three hypersensitive listening devices as invisibly as possible, and unhurriedly left.

After that I climbed into the Chevrolet and drove myself back to Jackson, where the telephone was more private. My call to Buttress Life lasted a long time, and Walt’s contribution to the second part of the conversation consisted of gasps and protests of ‘You can’t.’

‘Listen, Walt,’ I said in the end. ‘We’re not policemen. I imagine your company would settle for the property back and no questions asked? And my brief is to restore Chrysalis to Dave Teller. Just that. Nothing more. If we start things the way you want, we’ll end up with a lot of smart lawyers and most probably a dead horse.’

There was a long pause. ‘All right,’ he said slowly. ‘OK. You win.’

He wrote down a long list of instructions. ‘This is Wednesday,’ I said, thinking aloud. ‘Sunday morning. That gives you three clear days. Should be enough.’

‘Only just.’

‘Never mind,’ I said soothingly. ‘You can do most of it sitting down.’

Walt wasn’t amused. ‘And you, what exactly will you be doing?’ he asked sarcastically.

‘On a dude ranch,’ I said reasonably, ‘one dudes.’

At the Post Office I mailed off to him by express delivery six hairs from the mane of the sardine horse, and motored back to the grim business of acting the holiday I’d feared from the start.

The three days seemed eternal. Riding took up the mornings and most afternoons and that was the best of it. Meals continued to be a desperate trial. The nights were long. I wished that Lynnie could have come with me, because in her company the depression seemed to retreat, but she was Eunice’s crutch, not mine. And her father, trust me as he might, would have found it hard to believe I would only ask for her daytime closeness. And maybe I couldn’t have done it. So no props. No props at all.

Yola ran the ranch with a sort of super-efficiency which looked easy, juggling staff and guests into harmony without a single wrinkle of anxiety and without any show of aggression. The fair hair continued to be worn tidily on top. Her clothes were jeans and shirt and soft flat shoes. No boots: no masculinity. She radiated friendliness and confidence, and her smile never once reached her eyes.

She didn’t go riding with her guests, and I never sat next to her at meals because most of the husbands and many of the wives conducted a dignified scramble for her favours, but on Thursday evening, when with several others I was drinking after-dinner coffee out in the open on the long porch, she dropped gracefully down into the empty chair beside me, and asked if I were enjoying my holidays, and was finding my cabin comfortable.

I answered with half-true platitudes, to which she half listened.

‘You are young,’ I said next, with great politeness, ‘to own so beautiful a place.’

She replied to this small probe with frank ease. ‘It belonged to my grandfather and then to my mother. She died a year or two back.’

‘Has it always been a dude ranch? I mean, it seems a bit hilly for cattle...’

‘Always a dude ranch,’ she agreed. ‘My grandfather built it about forty years ago... How did you hear of us?’

I glanced at her unhurriedly, but she was merely curious, not suspicious.

‘I asked in Jackson for somewhere good and fairly quiet, out in the mountains.’

‘Who recommended us?’

‘Just a man in the street.’

She nodded, satisfied.

‘What do you do in the winter?’ I asked.

There was a flicker in the eyes and a quick private smile on the mouth: whatever she did in the winter pleased her more than hotel keeping.

‘We move down south. Snow completely blocks this valley from November through March. Most years it’s May before we come back... We usually open the ranch the second week in June, but the canyons are often impassable then.’

‘What do you do with the horses?’

‘Oh, they go down to the plain, on a friend’s ranch.’

Her voice was as strong and capable as the rest of her. I watched her eyes slide round towards the paddock with the mares and foals, and pause there calmly, and return to me. Expressionless.

I smiled her a force five version of an adults-only smile, and asked if she ever found it lonely, so far out in the wilds. To this mild but unmistakable come-on there was no reaction beyond a crisp shake of the head. I was the only man there not guarded by a watchful wife: Yola wasn’t in the least bit interested.

I complimented her on the ranch food, and on the helpfulness of the wranglers. She said she was glad I was pleased. I yawned and apologized, and said it must be all the fresh air... she’d heard it all dozens of times a year, said everything she’d said so often that she no longer had to think. No use on this occasion using any jolting technique to force out an unguarded phrase: jolting her was roughly the last thing I wanted to do.

After a while I stood up lazily and said I would turn in, and she gave me the usual meaningless halfway-up smile. She hadn’t really seen me at all: wouldn’t remember me in another month. Unless I inadvertently gave her cause.

The three bugs in her cabin worked on the audio-switch principle: any noise, and speech especially, which they picked up, automatically started the recording machine which occupied the back half of the ordinary looking transistor radio standing beside my bed. But there was little to overhear. Yola slept alone, and apart from one evening when she invited four of the guests in for a drink, the only conversations were telephone calls.

In my cabin each evening, warming by the squat black stove, I played back the day’s ‘take’. Nearly all the calls were to do with business: grocery orders, laundry, blacksmith’s supplies, and future bookings. But one call, on Friday evening, was worth all the trouble.

‘Uncle Bark?’ Yola’s voice said, low and clear. One of the bugs was behind a picture of drooping roses on the wall over the telephone table.

‘...honey.’ The occasional word escaped from the receiver in return, but Yola must have been holding it close to her ear.

‘Sure. Everything’s fine here,’ she said. ‘Absolutely no kind of trouble.’

‘...Matt?...’

‘That’s what I called about, Uncle Bark. Matt wrote me he’s having to give up in Europe. He says he can’t get near to you-know-who, they’ve got him holed up as tight as Fort Knox. So I guess we’ll just have to keep everything under wraps for a while longer.’

‘...’

‘It sure is a nuisance, yeah. But as long as we get him to you before the snows come again...’

‘...’

‘How can we? You know it isn’t built for that.’

‘...stay...’

‘We certainly can’t send him down to Clint’s with the others. We’d waste a whole year and he might break a leg or something.’ ‘...desert.’

‘We don’t want him at Pitts, it isn’t built for it. But there’s a good long time for Matt to arrange something.’

‘...hadn’t started.’

‘Yeah, I’m sure you would. But it’s too late now. How were we to know that something so goddam stupid would happen? Matt will probably be home some time tomorrow. I’ll have him call you.’

She put down the receiver soon after that: and I wound back the tape and played the conversation over again. Two unsubstantial points emerged. If Dave Teller had been too obviously guarded, Matt would have realized that the punt episode was not considered to be an accident. And the something ‘goddam stupid’ which had somewhere or other upset the Clives’ original plans might be that I’d been there to fish Dave out of the river, or might be something else quite different; something which had made the removal of Dave necessary in the first place. The horse had been stolen on June 15th, Tuesday, and Yola had asked the London hotel for Dave’s weekend address on June 19th, Saturday. So what, if anything, had happened in the four days between? Something goddam stupid...

I told Yola after breakfast on Saturday morning that I had enjoyed my stay immensely and would be leaving the following day. She smiled the regulation smile without clearly focusing, and thanked me for letting her know.

‘So if I could have my bill at breakfast tomorrow?’ I suggested.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘But you can’t stay over Monday for the Fourth?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

She nodded, not caring one way or the other. ‘I’ll get it ready for you, then.’

The Wilkersons exclaimed over my going. ‘You’ll miss the barbecue,’ Samantha said. ‘And the float trip down the river.’

A local man took parties down the fast flowing Snake on black inflated rubber raft dinghies: one of the area’s attractions, like the rodeo and the ski lift. The Wilkersons had asked me to join them. ‘Maybe I’ll come back next year,’ I said. And maybe I wouldn’t.

I looked after the children that afternoon while Betty-Ann went to the hairdresser and Wilkie drove to a distant lake for the fishing. They swam in the stream, where I refused to join them in case my head in the water jogged Yola’s sleeping memory, and we fed sugar and handfuls of grass through the rails to the leggy foals in the little paddock. The rails were solid young tree trunks dove-tailed and nailed into even sturdier posts, and the gate was just as substantial. Its hinges were bolted through the gatepost, and a heavy padlock fastened it through two strong hasps. None of this strength was new.

Samantha and Mickey didn’t think much of the sardine bay.

‘Too spindly,’ Mickey said. ‘His legs would snap if he went up the mountain.’ I looked across at the Teton range, the tops shining white in the hot sun. The surefooted born-to-it ranch horses picked their way easily up and down the steep rocky paths over there, through the woods growing with flat huckleberry leaves, across the screes left from landslips, and on to the bare stony patches above the snow line.

‘Why don’t you stay till Monday night?’ said Mickey. ‘If you go tomorrow, you’ll miss the fireworks.’