The Crossing(10)

Them traps are under two feet of snow, said his father. What is the use in goin up there?

I want to see where she’s usin.

You might see where she’s been. I doubt it will tell you where she’s goin to be tomorrow or the next day.

It’s got to tell you somethin.

His father sat contemplating his coffee cup. All right, he said. Dont wear your horse out. You can hurt a horse in the snow. You can hurt a horse in the mountains in the snow.

Yessir.

His mother gave him his lunch at the kitchen door.

You be careful, she said.

Yes mam.

You be in by dark.

Yes mam. I’ll try.

You try real hard and you wont have any problems.

Yes mam.

As he rode Bird out of the barn his father was coming from the house in his shirtsleeves with the rifle and saddlescabbard. He handed them up.

If by any chance at all she should be in a trap you come and get me. Unless her leg is broke. If her leg is broke shoot her. Otherwise she’ll twist out. Yessir. And dont be gone late worry in your mama neither. Yessir. I wont. He turned the horse and went out through the stockgate and into the road south. The dog had come to the gate and stood looking after him. He rode out a little way on the road and then stopped and dismounted and strapped the scabbard alongside the saddle and levered the breech of the rifle partly open to see that there was shell in the chamber and then slid the rifle into the scabbard and buckled it and mounted up and rode on again. Before him the mountains were blinding white in the sun. They looked new born out of the hand of some improvident god who’d perhaps not even puzzled out a use for them. That kind of new. The rider rode with his heart outsized in his chest and the horse who was also young tossed its head and took a sidestep in the road and shot out one hind heel and then they went on.

The snow in the pass was half way to the horse’s belly and the horse trod down the drifts in high elegance and swung its smoking muzzle over the white and crystal reefs and looked out down through the dark mountain woods or cocked its ears at the sudden flight of small winter birds before them. There were no tracks in the pass and there were neither cattle nor tracks of cattle in the upper pasture beyond the pass. It was very cold. A mile south of the pass they crossed a running branch so black in the snow it caused the horse to balk just for any slight movement of the water to tell that it was no bottomless crevice that had split the mountain in the night. A hundred yards farther the track of the wolf entered the trail and went down the mountain before them.

He stood down into the snow and dropped the reins and squatted and thumbed back the brim of his hat. In the floors of the little wells she’d stoven in the snow lay her perfect prints. The broad forefoot. The narrow hind. The sometime dragmark of her dugs or the place where she’d put her nose. He closed his eyes and tried to see her. Her and others of her kind, wolves and ghosts of wolves running in the whiteness of that high world as perfect to their use as if their counsel had been sought in the devising of it. He rose and walked back to where the horse stood waiting. He looked out across the mountain the way she’d come and then mounted and rode on.

A mile further she’d left the trail and gone down through the juniper parklands at a run. He dismounted and led the horse by the bridlereins. She was making ten feet at a jump. At the edge of the woods she turned and continued along the upper edge of the vega at a trot. He mounted up again and rode out down the pasture and he rode up and back but he could see no sign of what it was she’d run after. He picked up her track again and followed it across the open country and down along the southfacing slope and onto the benchland above Cloverdale Draw and here she’d routed a small band of cattle yarded up in the junipers and run them off the bench all crazed and sliding and falling enormously in the snow and here she’d killed a two year old heifer at the edge of the trees.

It was lying on its side in the shadow of the woods with its eyes glazed over and its tongue out and she had begun to feed on it between its rear legs and eaten the liver and dragged the intestines over the snow and eaten several pounds of meat from the inside of the thighs. The heifer was not quite stiff, not quite cold. Where it lay it had melted the snow to the ground in a dark silhouette about it.

The horse wanted no part of it. He arched his neck and rolled his eyes and the bores of his nose smoked like fumaroles. The boy patted his neck and spoke to him and then dismounted and tied the bridlereins to a branch and walked around the dead animal studying it. The one eye that looked up was blue and cast and there was no reflection in it and no world. There were no ravens or any other birds about. All was cold and silence. He walked back to the horse and slid the rifle from the scabbard and checked the chamber again. The action was stiff with the cold. He let the hammer down with his thumb and untied the reins and mounted up and turned the horse down along the edge of the woods, riding with the rifle across his lap.