The Palo Duro Trail

Chapter 24

The ground was white and cold when the hail stopped. Dag saw dead jackrabbits lying here and there, stoned to death by the rocketing hail. Now a steady chill rain fell. Dag pulled his sougan free of its lashing behind the cantle and slipped into it. His was a heavy poncho that he wished he’d had when the storm started. He was cold, shivering, and soaked through to the skin as he started trying to pick up the trail of at least some of the cattle that had scattered to the winds.

As he rode, without bearings, ducking his head against the slashing rain, Dag saw a dead quail, then another, and the icy hail melting ever so slowly, for the rain was almost as cold as the ice that blanketed the ground. He heard an unearthly sound, and he rode toward it. As he drew closer, he realized it was a calf, and it was bawling at the top of its lungs. He came upon it, saw it standing there, shivering and shaking on wobbly little legs, as forlorn a sight as he’d ever seen.

The calf did not move when Dag rode up. He dismounted, picked it up in his arms. It struggled feebly as he mounted Firefly, and when he was in the saddle, he pulled the sougan over it to protect it from the rain, keep it warm against his own shivering body. He rode on, blindly, listening for sounds beneath the patter of rain, the heavy sighing of the wind.

More dead quail. And rabbits. A manzanita bush fractured and smashed, its skeleton filled with balls of hail. Then a roadrunner sprawled out, brained, in a rivulet of water where the hail had melted, its wing and tail feathers rippling from the flow of water. A young antelope limped along, bleating softly, one of its legs broken. It did not run away when Dag rode right up on it. He felt sorry for the small creature. A wolf or a coyote would have it for supper sometime during the night.

That was the way of nature, he knew. It was not cruel, merely unfeeling, dispassionate. It gave and it took away. It let things be what they would be. It let things happen that would happen without judgment or criticism. He sighed and rode on, coming then upon cows huddling together in clusters or singly, their rumps pointed toward the wind, their heads, with their long sweeping horns, hanging disconsolately. He left them as they were, for he did not know in which direction to drive them and they were not going anywhere for a while.

He hoped the stampede was over, and he heard nothing to prove that any cattle were still in a mad run, gripped in fear, blind to all but the panic that flowed through a herd at such times like an electric charge.

A rattlesnake swam ahead of him over the icy ground and the tiny waterways, while another lay dead, its head smashed flat, its tail quivering as if life still clung to it in some mysterious way. The quick and the dead, Dag thought, and continued on, looking for the road he had ridden the year before.

The road loomed before him, an ancient buffalo trail that he knew to be one of the highways of the West. The trail, he thought. And somewhere in the mix of the pattering rain and the slosh of the melting ice, he heard cattle lowing, grumbling deep in their chests and he headed Firefly toward the sound. The calf had settled down and only quivered sporadically, so, his arm nearly numb, he scooted his butt back up the cantle and let the calf gently down on the saddle, between the pommel and his lap, where it draped like some dead furry thing.

Past dismembered and bleeding cactus he rode, struggling to see through the rain that peppered his face, stung his eyes. A figure loomed up in the silver-sheeted darkness, a man on horseback, dark-cloaked behind a shimmering wall of rain, his horse’s legs enveloped in a fine mist, its hocks spattered with dripping mud.

“Who’s there?” Dag called, as he approached.

“That you, Mr. Dagstaff?” It was Skip Hughes, his massive bulk seeming small inside his black slicker, the brim of his hat sogged downward like a wilting flower.

“Yeah, Skip. That the herd beyond you?”

Hughes laughed harshly, a wry tone to it that made it humorless.

“What’s left of it, I reckon. Me’n some of the boys are holding these.”

“How many?”

“Maybe a thousand head or so. Hard to tell in this rain. Hell, you can’t see ten feet.”

Dag looked over a sea of spiked horns sprouting upward like naked trees in a dead forest. Visibility was more like twenty yards, but it was sporadic, as the wind gusted and lashed at them, rattling their raincoats with a tinny tattoo.

“They got a fire goin’ up ahead,” Hughes said. “Up against a big rock. Chuck wagon’s there, with a broken spoke. Whatcha got under your sougan, Mr. Dagstaff?”

“Lost calf.”

“Imagine we might have lost a few of the young ‘uns,” Hughes said.

Dag said nothing. He rode off into the needling rain and the darkness, following the contours of the bunched herd, passing men on horseback hunched down in their slickers like deformed creatures recently emerged from Dante’s Hell. None of them spoke to him and he did not speak to them.

There were other, smaller bunches of cattle packed together, their rumps to the wind and the slashing, needling rain, silent wraiths, still shivering from the cold and beaten into submission by the recent hail.

Dag saw the fire then, reflecting off a rock wall that was part of an outcropping risen up from the harsh land centuries ago. Then the wagon, part of it lit by a storm lantern flickering an orange light, swaying back and forth as if someone were signaling a passing train.

Jo was holding the storm lantern, while her father was wrestling with a wheel, trying to put in a new wooden spoke, his dark hulk hunched over the sawhorses, a small maul in his hand.

Jo was wearing overalls and a yellow slicker that glistened like wet butter in the lantern light.

Flagg came up on foot, away from the fire. “Dag,” he said.

“Jubal, take this little calf, will you? Put him by the fire. He’s shiverin’ like a dog shittin’ peach seeds.”

Dag lifted his sougan and Flagg reached for the calf, lifted it tenderly out of the crotch of the saddle.

“Hey there, little feller,” Flagg said. “We’ll get you warm right quick.”

Dag stepped out of the saddle, tied Firefly to the front of the wagon, behind the wet and disconsolate mules still hooked to it like beaten dogs to a stone sledge too heavy to pull.

“Fingers, can I help?” Dag asked when he walked around to the other side of the wagon. “Jo?”

“I’m fine,” Jo said.

“You can tilt this wheel a mite,” Fingers said. “I ‘bout got it, I think.”

Dag grabbed one side of the ironclad wheel and tilted it upward. Fingers slid one end of the wheel into a hole in the hub. The wood groaned as he pushed it in, then made a small snapping sound as it slid in and snugged up.

“Set the wheel down, Dag,” Fingers said. “Upright. I just want to tap the rim some to make sure she’s snug.”

Dag set the wheel down, slid his hands to the sides. Fingers took the hand maul and tapped on the upper rim.

“Snug as a bug,” he said.

Together, Dag and Fingers rolled the wheel over to the wagon. The rear end was jacked up, the bed resting on a boulder. They slid the wheel onto the axle and Fingers tapped in the peg that kept the wheel on, and slipped the thong over a flange on the wheel hub, so that if it ever slipped out, it would not be lost.

Jo let the lantern down, then shifted it to her other hand and rubbed the arm that had carried its weight.

“Should I put out the lantern, Daddy?” Jo asked.

“Naw, not yet. Hang it up on that hook underneath the bed.”

“What happened?” Dag asked.

“Wagon hit a big hole and we dropped a foot or so and hit a big old rock. Splintered one spoke.” He reached down and picked up the broken spoke to show it to Dag. “We was lucky, Dag. The wagon pitched and I thought we were going to go over. Me’n Jo shifted our weight and righted it. Just in time.”

Dag looked at Jo. She looked so forlorn with her rain-splashed face and hair streaming down around it like sodden black crepe. She was shivering.

“Let’s go over by the fire, Jo,” Dag said. “I’m some cold too.”

“Y-y-yes,” she stuttered. “I’m plumb froze through.” Then she laughed and Dag put an arm around her back and they walked to the blazing fire, Fingers following in their wake.

The rock reflected the heat toward them and Jo soon stopped shivering. The little calf was standing there, bleating pitifully like a little lost lamb, with Flagg’s hand stroking its back.

“Oh, Dag,” Jo said. “You saved the little tyke. He’s so cute.”

“He’s a heifer,” Dag chided. “She’s cold and hungry.”

“And I can’t feed her,” Jo said. “We need to find her mama.”

They stood there as riders came in and those who were warm left to relieve them. Dag rubbed his hands to bring back the circulation. His fingers were wrinkled and bone white at the tips, like some unknown vegetable preserved in brine.

The rain lessened, finally, but it was still cold.

“Never saw a colder rain,” Flagg said, “nor so much of it all at once’t.”

Dag nodded. He was thinking about the stampede. No one had mentioned it, as if bringing it up just then would be taboo. But he knew Flagg was thinking about the scattered cattle as well.

“Not all the cattle are scattered,” Dag said, after a few moments, turning his back to the fire. Someone—he didn’t know who—was putting more deadwood on it. “I passed Skip, who was with about a thousand head.”

“Dag, there’s near three thousand more we’ve got to get back when we can see our hands in front of our faces. I wish this damned rain would stop.”

“It will,” Dag said. “They won’t run any more tonight and we can start roundup in the morning when the sun comes up.”

“Yeah, it’s going to be a damned mess,” Flagg said. “And we’ll likely lose or never find a few.”

As if to emphasize Flagg’s dire prediction, a wolf howled from a long way off, its mournful cry so depressing, nobody by the fire even mentioned it. But they all shivered, not from the cold, but from the dread of what they might find in the morning. Jo huddled against Dag and he put an arm around her. She looked up at him in gratitude and smiled a weak smile, the rosebud of her lips faded to a pale bloodless remnant.

He wanted her at that moment so badly, he could taste those lips that he dared not kiss.