Other Writings

 

 

 

The guests at Medway Plantation had finished dinner and moved into the library, old Mrs. Legendre leaning on the arm of one of the men who served us, perhaps a butler, perhaps some other title. We were going to shoot wood ducks in the morning and had to get up very early, so most of the others went to bed, but Mrs. Legendre had spun tale after tale at the dinner table, recounting hunts in the Teton Range decades before it was discovered by Hollywood, safaris in East Africa before Hemingway, horseback treks through French Equatorial Africa, travels by pirogue through the Mekong delta of Indochina—known to young American men many years later by a different name—hunts in the mountains of what was then Persia, Spartan camps in Kashmir, safaris in Abyssinia, a dozen other places, a dozen other adventures, and I wanted to hear more.

But as she was helped into her chair and I settled myself with a whisky, I had a sudden memory of drifting in and out of consciousness in an isolated hunting camp and waking once to find a silver-haired man standing over me and asking—I think I spoke—if he was the doctor.

“No,” he said, “I’m the angel of death and I’ve come to take you home.”

Well, that’s alright, I thought, he looks like a good man to go with.

I remembered too a tacky, dirty little room in a tacky, dirty little hotel in a decidedly unromantic arrondissement of Paris where I awoke alone after thirty-six hours of unconsciousness, and thought before I passed out again, Well, this is where I’ll die, just like Oscar Wilde.

Those two incidents flashed through my mind as Mrs. Legendre and I settled ourselves and I reflected that I was almost fifty years younger than she, and I had the advantage of vaccines and medicines and doctors that were nonexistent in the time and places she spoke of.

“Mrs. Legendre,” I said, “you make it all sound so carefree and exciting and fun, but surely there must have been some hardships, some bad times.”

“Oh yes,” she said…

 

Her life spanned an arc from the horse and buggy to the space shuttle. She was born Gertrude Sanford in Aiken, South Carolina, in 1902, but time and place are meaningless. It is more accurate to say she was born into an aristocratic world of wealth so rarified and glamorous that she became the inspiration for the wealthy heiress played by Katherine Hepburn in Holiday. Her ancestors included Thomas Welles (1590-1660), the only man in Connecticut history to hold all four top offices: governor, deputy governor, treasurer, and secretary. Her father and grandfather were both New York congressmen as well as immensely successful businessmen, owners of the Bigelow-Sanford carpet company whose slogan was: “A title on the door deserves a Bigelow on the floor.” Her brother Stephen “Laddie” Sanford was an internationally famous polo player whose team won the US Open five times.

Her family followed the pattern of their class and era, migrating with the seasons from their Beaux Arts mansion on East 72^nd Street to their upstate horse breeding farm to the milder climes of Aiken, interspersed with regular trips to France and England, where her father kept stables of race horses. These migrations always included a retinue of servants: butlers, chauffeurs, French governesses, cooks, most of whom—typically for that time—were considered family members in their own right. Eighty-five years later, Mrs. Legendre’s memories and stories of a cook, a horse trainer, a chauffeur, a butler, a beloved sewing-and-cleaning maid who chose to stay with the family rather than leave with her fired husband, were more vivid and real than her stories of her parents.

In Peter Shaffer’s Tony Award winning play Equus, the psychiatrist says: “A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs, it sucks, it strokes its eyes over the whole uncomfortable range. Suddenly, one strikes. Why? Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles. Why?”

Of all the sophisticated and accomplished people her parents exposed her to as a child, from Arthur Rubenstein to the then Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII, later still the Duke of Windsor), the one who most influenced her later life was a man named Paul J. Rainey.

The vastly wealthy heir to a coal and coke-production fortune, Paul J. Rainey was also a product of his class and era. His life revolved around hunting and horses and dogs, luxurious homes and private railroad cars, and polo. His was the first American polo team ever to beat the British, and the round brick stable he built still stands on the grounds of his once vast estate in northeastern Mississippi. But Paul Rainey also had an adventurous side. He conducted expeditions to the Arctic to collect specimens (legend has it he roped a polar bear and brought it back alive for the Bronx Zoo, a feat I should have liked to witness—through binoculars) and was one of the very first—possibly the first—men to film African animals while on safari.

In the summer of 1914 Mrs. Legendre’s parents hosted a party for Paul J. Rainey where he screened a film of one of his lion hunts. Young Gertie had been sent to bed, but the excitement was too much for her.

“At nine, with sounds of the dinner ending downstairs, I was wide awake. I got out of bed, opened my bedroom door and scanned the hall. I darted to the head of the staircase and eased my way down along the banister. As I peered through the slats of the railing, I could just see through the half open curtain of the living room archway. There it was: Africa in jumpy, badly lighted, black-and-white images against the far wall. I may have had a poor seat, but that evening changed my life. From that moment on, I knew I would go to Africa someday.”

However, before that chain of shackles could be completed, she had to grow up. She was educated at Foxcroft School in Middleburg, Virginia, then and now a prestigious boarding school for the well-heeled daughters of very affluent parents—the annual tuition is slightly more than the annual median American household income—the kind of school where girls take their own horses for fox hunting.

Most of Foxcroft’s graduates in 1920 spent the summer in a swirl of debutante balls intended to help them marry well and then retire. Gertie Sanford opted instead to go hunting with two family friends in the Grand Tetons back when Jackson Hole was, in her words, “a dusty frontier town consisting of a post office and couple of houses.”

Fox hunting and bird hunting were things she had grown up doing, but this was her first big game hunt.

“Even the waiting was a thrill. There I was, sitting on a log beside a game trail on a ridge in the middle of the Wyoming mountains on a beautiful afternoon. I held the gun tightly, in a ready position, across my knees. The faint scent of gun oil mingled with the scent of the surrounding woods…”

When I met Mrs. Legendre eighty years later, that first bull elk still hung in a place of honor in the log cabin she built at Medway Plantation to house some of her trophies.

Wyoming was followed by a succession of hunting and fishing trips to destinations that would be considered adventurous today—Alaska, Canada, the Laurentians, New Brunswick—and for game that are still considered challenging: Dall sheep, caribou, moose, brown bear. And all this was done at a time when Alaska’s largest city, “…in those days resembled a T.V. Western set—several bars and one hotel.”

Thirteen years after watching movies while hidden on a staircase, Gertrude finally made it to Africa. Harold Talbott, president of the firm that produced more wartime airplanes during World War One than any other company, and later Secretary of the Air Force, invited her and her brother to join him and his wife on safari.

Just getting to Mombasa involved eighteen days of ocean travel for the perennially seasick Gertie, and with it came strange and conflicting advice for how to stay alive when they got to Africa. A hot bath every night would ward off germs. A hot bath every night would kill her. A strip of red flannel to keep the sun off her spinal column was the only thing that would keep her alive. If she went outside without a pith helmet she’d be deader than a smelt in just a few hours. The only advice she followed was to take quinine with her whiskey and soda.

The business of safaris was only just beginning, so everything had to be purchased on the spot in Nairobi: clothes, food, camping gear, medicine, even the vehicles that had no discernible springs and required constant tinkering and repair, tires going flat, radiators boiling over, making them happy if they could manage forty miles in a day, a different camp site every night, folding chairs around the fire, toasts with whiskey and quinine, mosquitoes the size of moths beating against the netting, the grunt of lions, the eerie mocking laugh of the hyenas, and always the plains full of game in unimaginable amounts, numbers so great it was impossible then to imagine it ever coming to an end.

“It was often a time for reflection—the kind of thoughtfulness that many people have never known. I still remember that feeling of remoteness from the world of cement walls and streets and city noises. I was miles away from the routine of social life—weddings, parties, polo, fancy clothes, and repetitious, trite, silly talk. I remember thinking I would like to stay forever in that open land with its strange night sounds and smells.”

She couldn’t however, and return to social life three months later introduced her to her future husband. Her father decided to rent an estate near London for the summer, a neo-classical confection known as Osterley Park, designed by Robert Adam and sometimes described as “the palace of palaces.”

 

 

 

 

 

Among the many guests who drifted in and out were two brothers, Sidney and Morris Legendre, heirs to a sugar fortune in Louisiana. Gertrude Sanford was so smitten with them that when she went to the Riviera she invited them both to join her.

The Riviera in 1928. The Great Depression was still two years away and the Roaring Twenties were in full swing, the height of the Jazz Age: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald; Ernest Hemingway; Somerset Maugham; Harpo Marx; acerbic Alexander Woollcott and George Kaufman who would later write a play about him; suffragette poet and novelist Alice Duer Miller of The White Cliffs of Dover; author and professional hostess, “the hostess with the mostest,” Elsa Maxwell; Philip Barry, who would write Holiday about young Gertie and her family; wild stunts with motorboats by day; wild dances by night, the Charleston and the Black Bottom and the Lindy Hop, the very rich and the famous and the wannabees all playing as hard as they could, almost as if they knew the good times couldn’t last much longer.

Sixty years later Gertrude Sanford Legendre would write: “The roaring Riviera. What’s all the fuss? Simple-minded nonsense and a lot of fun…” And also: “I honestly don’t remember anyone working that hard at writing except [Somerset] Maugham and he was a complainer and not very likeable… Maybe it’s a mistake to meet authors. Being a good writer often has nothing to do with being a good person. In fact, the opposite is frequently the case. I don’t do somersaults at the mention of Hemingway or Fitzgerald; they were drunk most of the time.”

But while the band played on that summer, young Gertie danced with them all.

 

In the fall of 1928 she began making arrangements for another safari and invited both Legendre brothers to join her. She had decided to collect specimens for the African Hall of the American Museum of Natural History, specifically mountain nyala.

According to James Mellon in African Hunter, the mountain nyala had only been discovered twenty years earlier, in 1908, in south-central Ethiopia, known then as Abyssinia. Also according to James Mellon: “Sooner or later, every serious trophy hunter has to contend with the mule and the Abyssinian; both are visited upon us as plagues and the mule is the more agreeable of the two.”

Typically, Gertrude Sanford did it in style.

“We had to ship practically everything from the States to the port of Djibouti and hope that it would get there. I remember we spent hours in David Abercrombie’s store ordering special tents and flies to be made. We even got one of those invaluable portable toilets. It was the greatest invention of all; it made camp life almost civilized.”

Gertrude and Donald Carter (one of the curators of the Museum of Natural History) and the Legendre brothers met in Paris and started their trip from the Hotel Ritz. It took seventeen days just to get to Djibouti and another three by train to get to Addis Ababa, the capitol, where there was only one hotel, and they were warned that if they went out at night they should carry large sticks to ward off hyenas and wild dogs.

 

 

Also typically for Gertrude, they were invited to visit the Emperor Haile Selassie, the Lion of Judah, King of Kings, Elect of God, direct descendent of both King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. It took them twenty-nine days to assemble the necessary gear and crew and mules and they spent their evenings with the emperor in what she described as a study in contrasts. The palace itself was a simple wood-frame building and the palace soldiers were all barefoot, but Haile Selassie sat on a golden throne and they ate fourteen-course meals off gold plates, while drinking tej, the national honey wine. Some evenings were spent watching formal entertainment; other evenings the emperor would play records on a Victrola and dance with the young lady who had already shot five lions in Tanganyika and who had come to do what only one or two men had yet done in his country. He must have been quite taken with her for he presented her with a riding mule from his own stable, along with a silver bit and a green velvet saddle.

James Mellon again: “Woe to the efrenji (wretched foreigner) who wishes to rent mules for a nyala hunt…” Gertrude and the Legendre brothers finally assembled their fifty mules and muleteers, trackers, skinners, and the gear they needed to survive for four months, and on the day of departure she and the others spent an entire morning carefully weighing and balancing the loads on their mule train. The lead mule promptly started bucking and, “…threw off his entire load and the rest did the same. It was chaos. Equipment was everywhere. I’ve always said the easiest hunting is on elephants. You can have the mules!”

But the mules were only the beginning.

“The whole trip was a tough one—heat, rock cliffs the mules couldn’t climb, thorn trees, lava slopes, flies, mosquitoes, anything else you can imagine.” The muleteers came from different tribes and fought amongst each other. One night they got drunk and got girls from a nearby village into their tents and raised such hell the Legendre brothers had to drive them all away. Smallpox broke out in the camp and all the tents and blankets had to be burned. Then malaria broke out. The muleteers got drunk again, and when Morris Legendre fired the headman, the whole group quit. The cook mistook fly repellent for cooking oil. But they hunted constantly.

“Finally, we had to turn back. Our plan had been to cross the Omo River and follow the White Nile, but the river was too high to ford and the mules would not swim it. The rains had come early and chicka mud was so thick that the mules couldn’t get a foothold. We had to lay down our tent flies for the animals to walk over. Everything was soaked through and never dried out. It finally got so bad that after a day’s progress, we could look back and see where we’d camped the night before.”

But the safari ended with over three hundred mammalian specimens, from rodents to a forty-inch nyala bull, over a hundred birds, and with Gertrude Sanford engaged to be married to Sidney Legendre.

 

In today’s recession the truly rich have been unaffected. The same was true during the Great Depression. The moderately affluent, the middleclass, and especially the working poor were wiped out, but families with names like Vanderbilt, Biddle, Duke, Rockefeller, Pratt, Mellon, Sanford, and Legendre were unaffected.

Gertrude Sanford and Sidney Legendre were married on September 17^th, 1929 and Black Tuesday (October 29^th) came and went without making a ripple in the newlyweds’ lives. Part of that was because their honeymoon was a pack trip through the Cassiar Mountains of British Columbia, where they stalked sheep and goats through snow drifts and were tent-bound for days in a blizzard. Her description of it was simply: “It was glorious.”

 

 

 

 

 

When they returned, the first thing they did was buy Medway Plantation, the oldest masonry structure in South Carolina. Today it is a beautiful and unusual pink Dutch-stepped-gable gem whose ivy-covered walls lean in toward each other as if each was politely trying to hear what the other had to say, and whose 6,695 acres are protected by conservation easements and environmental trusts, courtesy of Gertrude Legendre. When the young married couple bought it, however, it was a dilapidated historic building with no electricity, no running water, no plumbing, no heating. Only a couple whose dream honeymoon was hunting in the snow could have fallen in love with the ancient wreck.

 

 

 

 

 

 

From 1932 to the outbreak of the war, Gertrude and Sidney Legendre led three more expeditions for various museums, each of which lasted almost a year, what with planning, travel, procuring permits and supplies, and hunting.

In Indochina they hunted their way alternately by pirogue and elephant and horseback, in places with a French army escort against bandits. She was the first white woman “Meo” tribesmen (Hmong) had ever seen and they were confused by her wearing men’s clothing, the men bowing, the women reaching out to touch her. In Laos they visited the king in his stucco palace overlooking the Mekong River. In the northern mountains she shot the only tiger they took, a nine foot, six-hundred pound specimen.

In Southwest Africa, later Namibia, they hunted across the Kalahari to the Okavango. Waiting and waiting and waiting for supplies in Windhoek, a local official berated Sidney for taking his wife on such a dangerous expedition.

“I’m not taking her; she is taking me,” he replied.

They hunted their way through clouds of flies, blistering heat so severe they could only hunt until nine in the morning, constant thirst, bad water, and bad tempers among their drivers. One, an Afrikaner almost seven feet tall and three hundred pounds, was capable of single-handedly lifting a truck out of “ant bear” (aardvark) holes. They took everything except kudu, which eluded them time after time until finally, after three months of hunting, they had to give up and hunt their way back. Five miles from the downtown Windhoek, they found a bull in a ravine.

Bureaucratic red tape and flies in the Kalahari, bureaucratic red tape and bandits on the Mekong River, and in Persia, only recently renamed Iran, even more bureaucratic red tape and secret police.

“They were so obvious and clumsy that one day I motioned to them to get into our droshky” (a horse-drawn Victoria) “and show us through the market to buy pustines.” (sheepskin-lined leather coats) “To my surprise, they climbed in and rode around with us all afternoon speaking good English. They were very cooperative for secret police.”

They needed permits for everything, and even after they paid the permits still didn’t arrive.

“Tomorrow.”

“A month from tomorrow.”

For obscure reasons, the Minister of Education was in charge of the permits, and after twenty-two days of waiting he called them into his office where he announced they wouldn’t be allowed into the country with so many guns. “Over five hundred,” he told them solemnly. Someone had mistaken the listed calibers and gauges for the number of guns being brought.

The Shah’s hotels were riddled with fleas, and the toilets consisted of a hole in the floor with two foot supports, but the Shah wanted to impress them, so they were allowed to eat trout and caviar, partridges and Russian vodka, and to buy gold and pearls, rubies and emeralds in the markets, but “…the people seemed anxious, maybe even frightened. Most were very poor and seemed unhappy. They clung to their pustines, their only possession. Summer, winter, spring; they never let them out of their sight.”

Finally, accompanied by their secret police escorts, they drove north into the mountains, past mud-walled cities and ornate mosques with onyx and alabaster floors. The bureaucratic delays had put them into the rainy season and they hunted in continuous mud, but managed to get everything they wanted. They had their trophies and specimens, but the secret police wouldn’t let them leave without examining every item, developing (and damaging) all the film, and demanding egregious “export fees.”

 

World War Two. The Greatest Generation. Like practically everyone else in America, the Legendres immediately dropped everything and volunteered. Sidney joined the Navy and was shipped off to the Pacific. Gertrude used her connections to wrangle a job for herself in Washington at the precursor to the Office of Strategic Services which was itself the precursor to the CIA. Government in those days, especially any part of government that had anything to do with intelligence, was very much an Old Boys Club. OSS was commanded by Colonel (later General) William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who may have been the first generation son of Irish immigrants, but he was a football hero graduate of Columbia University, a decorated World War One hero, a lawyer, a US Attorney, and most importantly, a trusted advisor and friend of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

When Wild Bill Donovan tapped David Bruce, who was very much an Old Boy, to head OSS in London, Gertrude was one of six women chosen to work there. She stayed there, enduring the blitz, until the September following D-day when she was sent to recently liberated Paris to help OSS set up shop locally.

Much of what OSS did during the war is still, to my knowledge, classified, so much of what Gertrude Legendre later said and wrote about her motives for going to front, specifically to Wallendorf where German prisoners were being interrogated, should be taken with a block of salt.

“A crazy lark.” “A wild adventure with some old friends I just happened to run into.” “Something to do during a five day leave.”

Right. One of the old friends was a Naval Lieutenant Commander, the other an Army Major. She did indeed love adventure, and she undoubtedly had tremendous courage, but she wasn’t stupid.

Whatever the reasons, four days later (excuse me, what was that again about a five day leave?) she and the soldiers she was traveling with came under sniper fire only a few kilometers from Wallendorf. Two of the three soldiers were wounded, and as they lay together in a mixture of blood, mud, and motor oil, waiting to be captured, they all quickly burned their OSS identity cards and concocted cover stories. (Excuse me, what was that again about “old friends she just happened to run into?”) And Gertrude Legendre became the first American woman taken as a prisoner of war on the Western front.

(After the war, Wild Bill Donovan maintained the story that it was all a wild and irresponsible lark, but that too should be washed down with salt.)

What is unquestionable is that if the Germans had suspected she was with OSS, her fate would have been horrifying. As it was, they seem to have bought her story that she was a Red Cross volunteer who was working temporarily as an interpreter for the two officers. In fact, they seemed confused as to precisely what to do with her. Initially she was interrogated by the regular German Army officers and kept in an ever-changing sequence of conditions, improvised jails in private homes, vast prison camps little better than concentration camps, an old barn, a barracks, a spectacular thirteenth century castle in Diez.

Then she was turned over to the Gestapo and taken to their headquarters in Berlin.

Torture was a specialty of the Gestapo, as were murder orders that were issued with the victim’s name space left blank, to be filled in at someone’s whim, but she was transferred almost immediately to a criminal prison in Wannsee and kept under twenty-four hour guard. She was repeatedly interrogated, but confusion reigned supreme in the German army toward the end of the war, and no one seemed to know what to do with her or what to make of her. Once she was asked outright what the letters OSS stood for and got away with playing the bubble-headed society girl.

“Oh, heavens, I don’t know. I suppose it’s some sort of officers’ social club.”

Finally she was moved to the Rheinhotel Dreesen in Bad Godesberg, on the banks of the Rhine, where Hitler used to go to relax. Her fellow prisoners included French generals, colonels, diplomats, the Prince of Montenegro, and Charles de Gaulle’s sister, and for two months her situation improved dramatically. When the American army began to close in on the Rhine, the prisoners were all moved across the river to the Hotel Petersberg in Königswinter, another luxury hotel where Hitler once made a fool of Neville Chamberlain. When the American army reached the banks of the Rhine, Gertrude and the other “special” prisoners opened all the windows just so they could hear the sound of American tanks.

The next day they were force marched east and herded onto a train, but just before it took off, two civilians ordered her off and drove her to a private house in Kronberg. For several weeks she lived in comparative luxury with a well-to-do family, the idyll marred only by continuous Allied bombing raids.

The circumstances of her escape are as mysterious as her “jaunt” to the front.

She was told orders had been issued in Berlin for her to be turned over to the Swiss. SS officers drove her south, but at the border, customs officials had no such orders and refused to let her cross. The SS took her to a safe house until night, and told her she could get across the border by train, that she was to stay on the train until it got to Singen, that her story to the Swiss authorities was to be that she had been helped by French farmers, and that she was never to mention any kind of German assistance.

She walked by herself through the darkened streets to the train station. At the far end of the platform a tall man in a trench coat was watching her. When the train arrived, she slipped on board in the dark and confusion of descending passengers and hid under a seat. An official began to make his way from compartment to compartment, checking the seats with a lantern, so she slipped out and locked herself in the toilet. The train finally started and she once again hid herself under the seats.

Then the train stopped. She could see the white gates of the border crossing, but the train had stopped short of it. She climbed out of the train onto the tracks and walked slowly, staying in the shadows of empty freight cars. When she got to the last car, only fifty yards or so from freedom and safety, she suddenly sensed someone behind her. It was the man in the trench coat.

“Run,” he said.

She ran. She heard whistles, someone shouting at her to halt, threatening to shoot, footsteps chasing her, the Swiss border guard ahead of her shouting at her to stop.

“American,” she screamed. “American passport,” and she ran under the barrier.

“I have no idea why the German guards didn’t shoot me,” she said later. “Perhaps something had been arranged. I never found out.”

 

In 1946 she was already planning her next expedition, this time to the Indian state of Assam for the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale. To paraphrase Tolstoy: all successful expeditions are alike; each unsuccessful expedition is unsuccessful in its own way.

Assam is in the remote northeastern corner of India, and in 1946 you couldn’t get there from anywhere. The good news was that a tea plantation had been converted to a vast military base during the war, where B-24 bombers flew over the eastern end of the Himalayan mountains, dryly referred to by pilots as “the Hump.” The base and all its provisions, seven square miles worth of supplies where tigers roamed at night, had been abandoned, so gearing up was relatively easy. Unfortunately, their porters, trackers, skinners and bearers simply refused to go into certain prime hunting areas because that territory was inhabited by headhunters. One of their head guides ran out of opium and refused to go anywhere until his quota arrived. One species, the takin (a member of the sheep family that looks like a cross between a yak with mange and a wildebeest) had to be abandoned altogether because the porters refused to make a ten thousand foot climb so close to the Tibet-Burmese border. The portion of jungle they could hunt was completely void of game. Crossing a river, their riding elephant (named Alfred) and the opium-smoking guide were both washed away and had to be rescued. The best chance for a tiger came as they were crossing a river on bamboo rafts and an enormous tiger came out to drink less than fifty yards from Gertrude. Her rifles and camera were all packed away.

The highlight of the trip home was visiting the Maharaja of Cooch-Behar where Gertrude did shoot a leopard, but without any pride in the accomplishment because it was a driven hunt.

 

Back at Medway, with neither warning nor fanfare, Sidney’s heart gave out. Forty years later Gertrude wrote:

“Every evening, I sit at one end of the dining room table facing his portrait. He stands there in his shooting jacket with a gun over his shoulder, looking cool and detached at the portrait behind me—that of a young, confident woman looking less like me than I remember. Sidney is exactly as he was. I have no memory of his aging. In my mind, I shall always be married to a young and vital man who sees only the youth in me.”

 

She hunted again, of course: Nepal, for the Peabody Museum again, where she visited the Maharaja of Nepal, and they took some fine specimens; Chad; French Equatorial Africa; Rey Bouba, now part of Cameroon, but then an independent sultanate where she was entertained by the Sultan; Gabon, where she stayed with Albert Schweitzer. She even married again, briefly, but Medway and memories began slowly to become more important to her. She had two daughters to raise, almost seven thousand lovely acres to protect. And age slows us all down. Forty years later her writing and conversation were always of the time when Sidney was alive, the hunts with Sidney, the adventures with Sidney, the good times with Sidney.

 

 

 

 

 

“Mrs. Legendre,” I said, “you make it all sound so carefree and exciting and fun, but surely there must have been some hardships, some bad times.”

“Oh yes,” she said. She waved her casually, as if waving away a mosquito, or a memory. “Oh yes, there were some hardships, some bad times, but I don’t remember any of that.”

The Foreman and the Oldest Hand leaned against the corral and watched through the rails as the new kid tried to unsaddle his horse. The crew had brought almost 300 head of cattle down from some of the more distant and inhospitable reaches of the ranch and most of them had already turned their horses out and gone in to eat or driven home to their wives, but the new kid seemed to be having trouble with his mount.

 

“Think he’ll get the saddle off that horse before next winter?” the Oldest Hand asked. He was rolling a cigarette and appeared to be concentrating on that.

 

“Probably not,” the Foreman answered. “If we’re lucky, he’ll starve to death in process. ‘Course, the horse will likely starve to death too, and I hate like hell to lose a good horse.”

 

The Oldest Hand blew through his nose very much like a horse himself. “You won’t be losing nothing. That damn roan ain’t worth the grass it takes to keep him alive. I watched him try to buck that kid off three times today and he couldn’t get her done. Any halfway decent horse would’ve killed the kid on the first go. Put him in the hospital at the very least.”

 

“I’m afraid you’re right.” The Foreman sighed. “Could be a long damn season of baby-sitting. Useless college boy.”

 

The Oldest Hand lit his cigarette, cupping his hands around the match flame and drawing the smoke in. “Having him along is like losing three good men. Why don’t you fire him?”

 

“Can’t,” the Foreman said. “The Boss hired him and said to make something out of him.”

 

“Why’d the Boss hire him?”

 

“He and the Missus met the kid’s sister at a church social and took a shine to her. Want to do her a favor.”

 

The Oldest Hand considered this for a while, smoking peacefully and watching the horse circle away from the kid. “How about bedroom slippers?” he said at last.

 

“What?”

 

“Well, if you got to make something out of him, maybe you could skin him and use his hide for something useful. He’s too soft to make anything practical, saddlebags or chinks or such, but maybe you could make some of them moccasin bedroom slippers.”

 

At that moment the kid got the girth undone and the saddle promptly fell off. The roan backed and reared, his hooves striking out. Both men’s faces lit up with hope, but the kid was able to hang on to the lead rope and get his mount under control. He took the halter off and turned the gelding out with the rest of the horses.

 

The Oldest Hand snorted in disgust. “Told you that roan wasn’t no damn good. If you’d put him on one of them Hancock horses that kid would be dead now and our troubles would be over.” He threw his cigarette away. “I just can’t hardly wait to see him swing a rope. Should be more fun than we’ve had on this ranch since all them bulls got loose on the highway. But for right now, I’ve had all the excitement I can take for one day.”

 

He turned and walked over toward the cookhouse where there was an enticing smell of beef on a grill.

 

The Foreman pushed himself away from the rails, but then he stopped to watch as the kid picked up the saddle and the blanket and the bridle and started to carry them all to the tack room at the far end of the barn. He watched as the kid stepped on the trailing girth and went over in a heap. The kid scrambled to his feet and stood looking at the tack lying in the dust.

 

“You got the fox and the goose and the bag of corn,” the Foreman said softly. “Let’s see if you can figure it out.”

 

The kid tried to pick up everything again, but then he stopped and put the saddle down. He picked up the blanket and the bridle and took them into the tack room. Then he came back out and picked up the saddle, wrapped the girth around the seat and disappeared into the shadows of the barn.

 

There was a light step behind the Foreman and he turned around to find himself gazing into the eyes of the prettiest girl he had ever seen. He yanked his Stetson off and wished he had gotten his hair cut the last time he was in town.

 

“Is W.W. around?” she asked.

 

“W.W? I don’t know of any W.W.”

 

“Will?”

 

The Foreman shook his head.

 

“Willy?”

 

“No Will or Willy either.”

 

“William?”

 

“No William working on this ranch.”

 

“He just started. Today was his first day,” she added.

 

“Oh! You mean the new kid. We were calling him….” He stopped himself just in time. “I didn’t rightly know what his name was. Yeah, he’s putting his tack away.”

 

She gave him a dazzling smile. “How’d he do?”

 

The Foreman was about to tell her when he suddenly remembered why the Boss had hired the kid.

 

“We brought 290 head down,” he said carefully. “Are you his sister?”

 

She paused. “Uh, yes.” She gave him another 500-watt smile. “Where is your tack room?”

 

“I’ll go get him.”

 

The Foreman swung himself up over the top rail of the corral and dropped lightly down on the other side. He had been up since five and out on a horse since eight, but now he felt suddenly energized and he had to force himself to walk slowly to the barn. He stuck his head inside the tack room.

 

“Your sister’s here.”

 

The kid was trying to get his saddle onto one of the few empty racks, up high, but now he stopped and stared at the Foreman.

 

“Who? My what?”

 

“Your sister.”

 

There was a pause while the kid looked at the Foreman with his mouth open. Then he seemed to come to himself.

 

“Oh. Yeah. Sure. Tell her I’ll be right there.”

 

The Foreman walked back across the corral and swung himself over the rails with such ease he nearly landed on the girl.

 

“He said he’d be right out.”

 

“Thank you.” And again she gave him a smile as bright as fireworks.

 

The Foreman had a satchel-full of things in mind he meant to say to her, but that smile distracted him and left him confused and a little dazed, so instead he just stood and tried not to stare at her while he wondered what to do with his hands.

 

The kid came out of the barn and walked across the corral. As he clambered over the fence the Foreman finally found his voice.

 

“If you come back out here, if you’d like to see the horses, or go for a ride, or like that, we’ve got some pretty good stock, if you’d like to, you know, I mean some people like to see horses, good horses, you know, if you’d like….” He trailed off.

 

The girl looked at him and there was something, the Foreman couldn’t have said exactly what, but something almost like laughter in her eyes.

 

“Thank you,” she said.

 

She and the new kid walked away and climbed into a geriatric yellow pickup. The Foreman watched it disappear where the road dipped out of sight behind the willows at the river and then walked slowly over to the cookhouse.

 

The Oldest Hand was standing in the doorway with his plate in his hand.

 

“That was a fine looking young filly,” he said, “great conformation on her.”

 

“It’s his sister.”

 

“Oh, yeah? Did you tell her to find him some other line of work? Did you tell her to find him a job more in keeping with his talents, like maybe a shoe salesman or something? Did you tell her—”

 

“I didn’t tell her anything,” the Foreman interrupted. “The Boss wants me to make something out of that kid and that’s what I intend to do. He just needs a little experience, that’s all. You and me wasn’t top hands when we started out.”

 

The Oldest Hand stared at him. “Hmm.” He looked down at his plate. “Well.” He looked at the Foreman again. “It’s spring,” he said cryptically, and turned back into the cookhouse.

 

………………………………………………………………………………

 

The cook and the Oldest Hand and the Foreman were the only members of the crew to live on the ranch and not in town. The cook was married, and he and his wife lived behind the cookhouse in a converted bunkhouse. The Oldest Hand and the Foreman lived in cabins built in the shade of a cottonwood grove near the barn.

 

A few minutes after five the Oldest Hand emerged from his cabin and walked to the barn. The light was on and the Foreman was already putting hay in the back of an ancient jeep they used to take feed to the remuda. At the sight of him the Oldest Hand stopped and stared.

 

The Foreman was wearing his new, clean, Sunday-go-to-Meeting Stetson and a pair of clean jeans. His boots had been cleaned and oiled—for the first time, the Oldest Hand knew, since the winter’s snows had melted off more than a month ago—he was wearing his fancy silver-overlay spurs, and a spotless silk wild rag was peeking out over the collar of his jacket.

 

The Foreman saw him staring. “Anything wrong?” he inquired, but there was an edge to his voice that made the Oldest Hand cautious.

 

“No, no, I was just thinking about… about it being breeding season and all.” He turned away quickly and busied himself with his handkerchief.

 

They finished loading up the jeep and then drove the hay out to the remuda in silence. By the time they were done the lights were on in the cookhouse and they went there to get their coffee.

 

The cook did an unmistakable double take when he saw the Foreman. “Well,” he said.

 

The Oldest Hand dropped back a step and put a finger up to his mouth and shook his head.

 

“Well what?” And again the Foreman’s voice was at least as sharp as one of the cook’s knives.

 

“Well…. Well, how would you like your eggs this morning? And do you want grits or toast or a biscuit?”

 

“I want my eggs sunny side up, the way I always eat them, and I want grits like I have every damn day. What’s wrong with you?”

 

The cook had been married long enough to recognize dangerous waters when he saw them and was wise enough to know when to avoid them. “Nothing, nothing,” he said. “Just every now and then, sometimes, for no particular reason or anything, a man feels like a change, you know, and I just thought I’d ask.” He picked up the tongs and turned the bacon.

 

The Foreman ate quickly and by first light, when the trucks started driving up, he was lounging on the cookhouse porch with his coffee. Some of the crew were still sleepy enough to make the mistake of commenting on his appearance, but he woke them up in short order. When the geriatric yellow pickup pulled in, the windows of the cookhouse behind him suddenly filled up with curious faces.

 

W.W. climbed out and walked toward the cookhouse. The yellow truck turned around, then slowed, and the Foreman was rewarded with a wave as she drove off. The faces at the windows vanished before the Foreman turned around, but the kid had seen them and he paused, looking at his boss.

 

“Nice hat,” he said.

 

………………………………………………………………………………

 

All that day the Foreman was unexpectedly solicitous and helpful to the new kid. He put him on a sweet-natured gray the Boss’s grandchildren sometimes rode bareback when they came out to the ranch. He sent him out to look for strays in the gentlest and safest canyons. And after lunch, when they went into the holding pasture with the cows, the kid was asked to do nothing more than sit his horse on the far side and keep any of the herd from leaking into the next pasture. Some of the crew grumbled amongst themselves that there was a perfectly good gate there, but no one seemed to feel the need to point this out to the Foreman.

 

That evening, when the yellow pickup drove in, the Foreman had already dusted off his best hat and washed his face and hands with care. The girl got out and leaned against the side of the truck as he walked over.

 

“Hi,” she said. “How did W.W. do today?”

 

“Real good,” the Foreman replied. “For a guy who’s never worked on a ranch before, he’s a natural. I’m going to show him how to rope, and he’ll get plenty of practice.” Embolden by the truth of the last statement, the Foreman embroidered a little. “He’ll be a top hand in no time.”

 

“It’s very sweet of you to take him under your wing like this.”

 

“Oh, it’s no problem at all. It’s the kind of thing I like doing.”

 

The Oldest Hand was walking past just then and had a sudden coughing fit.

 

“Everybody’s been so nice to us here,” the girl went on. “Mr. Jacobs hiring W.W. and you training him and everything.”

 

“What brought you to this neck of the woods? We got a pretty small town here and we don’t get too many… folks… moving in.” He had wanted to say, “beautiful girls,” but his nerve failed him.

 

“I got a job at the bank and these days a girl needs to take any job she can get, no matter what kind of a town it is.”

 

The Foreman thought perhaps it wasn’t the most diplomatic reference to his hometown, but he let it go. “Well, it may be small, but we do have a movie theater, and maybe… maybe you’d like to go to a movie one evening. Maybe tomorrow evening, it being a Saturday and all.”

 

He hoped for a yes, and he was braced for a no, but he wasn’t prepared for her answer.

 

“Well,” she said slowly, “that would be nice, but of course I’d want W.W. to come along.”

 

The Foreman was stunned. “You want that—you want your brother to come with us?”

 

“This is an awfully small town, and you know how gossip is in a small town where everyone knows everyone and knows their business. I wouldn’t want people thinking the wrong thing. I wouldn’t want any of the people in my church thinking the wrong thing. Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs, for instance.”

 

The new kid walked up just then, safe and secure in his inability to read the Foreman’s mind. “Hey, Sam, let’s get out of here.”

 

“Sam?” the Foreman asked.

 

“Samantha.” She put out her hand with grave formality, but again the Foreman thought he saw something like laughter in her eyes.

 

“Mike,” he said, and he held her hand longer than was strictly required for a handshake.

 

“Tomorrow evening, then,” she said.

 

“What’s tomorrow evening?” W.W. asked. His head snapped back and forth from the girl to the Foreman.

 

“I’ll tell you as we drive home,” the girl said, climbing in the truck. She started the engine.

 

Again the Foreman stood and watched until the pickup disappeared from view.

 

……………………………………………………………………………….

 

The next day the crew was treated to an even more extraordinary display of solicitousness. W.W. was put back on the old gray, despite a time-honored rule about not riding the same horse two days in a row. When the crew grumbled about it amongst themselves, the Oldest Hand pointed out that as little work as the new kid was doing, two days in a row on the old gray hardly qualified as one moderate day of riding. That shut them up, but it didn’t seem to satisfy them.

 

In the afternoon, when they started roping calves for branding, the Foreman took great pains to teach W.W. how to throw a loop, patiently showing him over and over how to shake out his line and how to swing it. He was enthusiastically encouraging, even though the only things the new kid caught all day were his own horse’s tail and the Oldest Hand’s hat. The Oldest Hand showed considerable enthusiasm himself for teaching the new kid a different kind of lesson and stepped off his horse with alacrity, but Mike rode between them. After that he sent the new kid outside the branding corral to practice his roping there.

 

But what the crew noticed most of all was the new kid’s attitude. He was cautious and deferential around them, and he gave a wide berth to the Oldest Hand, but around the Foreman he seemed to have a sense of entitlement, and he had a cocky swagger to him that they found almost intolerable. The Foreman had a reputation in the whole northern half of the state as being very free and handy with his fists when the occasion called for it, but now occasion after occasion went by and nothing happened, and the crew was torn between disappointment and disgust.

 

………………………………………………………………………………

 

The movie was only a partial success. It was a Western, and entertaining enough, but Samantha sat on one side of the new kid, leaving the Foreman no alternative but to sit on the other side, and there was something about the presence of W.W. that discouraged casual conversation as they waited for the movie to begin. In fact, there was something about his presence between them that made the Foreman want to bounce the new kid up and down, perhaps upside down on his head.

 

After the movie they went to The Busted Latigo for a beer and again the new kid endangered his life by sitting between Mike and Samantha, but now the girl focused on the Foreman so intently and with such charm that Mike had trouble breathing. The new kid sat slumped over his beer and seemed to take little pleasure in the conversation that flowed back and forth across him. And when the girl reached over and put her hand on Mike’s, the new kid stared at it with his mouth open.

 

But then Samantha said, “You will look out for W.W., won’t you? Working around cattle can be awfully dangerous. You won’t let anything happen to him, will you?”

 

The Foreman had thought the new kid was doing so little already that the only thing safer would be to leave him in a rocking chair on the cookhouse porch, but his hand burned like a flame under the girl’s touch and his throat swelled up so much it was all he could do to croak.

 

“You bet I’ll look out for him. I’ll look out for him like he was my own brother. Matter of fact,” he had to swallow twice and his voice still sounded as if it had been rasped with a farrier’s file, “I’ll look out for him like he was your brother.”

 

Samantha rewarded him with a smile that made any other words he might have spoken dissolve in his mouth so that he had to swallow again.

 

The new kid shut his mouth and glanced at the Foreman. Then he looked at Samantha, a long and lingering look that combined equal amounts of amazement, appraisal, and amusement.

 

………………………………………………………………………………

 

For the next several weeks W.W. was little more than a symbolic presence on the ranch. He showed up on time, driven by his sister, and tagged along and got in the way and generally caused more harm than good, but instead of throwing him into one of the stock tanks, the Foreman treated him with a deference that drove the crew into frenzies. They discussed taking matters into their own hands, but the Oldest Hand pointed out that the only result would be a bunch of cowboys looking for work at a time of year when all the ranches already had their crews set for the season. The crew consoled themselves with heavy-handed comments on the new kid’s abilities, whenever the Foreman was out of hearing, but W.W. proved that he combined a thick hide with a sharp tongue of his own, and he generally gave better than he got.

 

For his part, the Foreman was as frustrated as his crew. He was unable to pry Sam and W.W. apart, and his dinner bills at the El Vaquero Mexican diner and The Sagebrush Steakhouse began to take a toll.

 

At the Memorial Day rodeo he was able to buy some time alone with the girl by waiting until the line for refreshments stretched all the way back to the stands before giving W.W. some money and orders for beer and tortilla chips. The new kid looked at the money and the line without relish, but there was little he could do about it, and Mike was rewarded by the girl’s sliding over closer to him as they talked, and when W.W. came back she stayed where she was, holding the bag of chips on her lap for the two men on either side of her to share.

 

When she came out to the ranch on a Sunday after church, she proved a far better rider than W.W., and the Foreman immediately suggested a gallop along a winding dirt road. The race didn’t have the result Mike had hoped for—the new kid didn’t break his neck—but they were able to lose him, and when they turned back to find him, by carefully following the wrong tracks the Foreman was able to spend most of the afternoon alone with Samantha. To Mike’s delight, the girl seemed perfectly content without W.W. and only occasionally made token sounds about looking for him. When they stopped to drink their thermoses of coffee, hobbling the horses as they sat under a cottonwood by a year-round stream, the girl made herself comfortable by leaning partially against him, and the Foreman wore that particular shirt again the next day, just because her scent was on it.

 

Without the new kid around, Mike found it even easier to talk to the girl. Much of the reserve she maintained when W.W. was present vanished, and she laughed more easily and frequently than she ever had before. She also looked at the Foreman in a way that sometimes made him forget what he was trying to say.

 

When they went to mount up again, Mike turned to her as he held her horse’s head.

 

“Would you maybe like to stay and eat with us tomorrow night? Cookie does a tri-tip that’s out of this world, and it would…” He had intended to say something about how much it would mean to him to have her there by his side at the big trestle table, but the words seemed to get stuck somewhere between his brain and his mouth. “It might be a nice change of pace for you.”

 

“It would be nice.” She looked at him in a way that made his breath short and choppy. “It would be very nice to eat dinner out here with you.”

 

They finally found the new kid back at the barn. He was sullen and unappreciative when they both told how hard they had looked for him. He even seemed disbelieving, and he looked at Sam in a way that made the Foreman uneasy.

 

………………………………………………………………………………

 

The next morning the geriatric yellow truck didn’t appear. Mike delayed and stalled as long as he possibly could, but he finally had to lead his crew out without the new kid. And without him, they were able to move a little over 200 head in half the time it might otherwise have taken.

 

They were riding back to the ranch headquarters for lunch when the Foreman spotted a stock tank overflowing. The control valve was worn out, water spilling lazily over the edge of the tank. It was the kind of thing that normally would be fixed if and when time permitted, but now he turned to the Oldest Hand.

 

“After lunch, run on into town and pick up a new valve at Ranch Supply. And see if you can find out where the hell that damn kid is and why he ain’t here.”

 

The Oldest Hand looked at the trickle of water. If he had any opinions about the urgency of the errand, he kept them to himself.

 

………………………………………………………………………………

 

That afternoon most of the crew had already unsaddled their horses when the Oldest Hand returned with the valve. There was normally a race to be the first in line at the cookhouse, but now the crew showed uncharacteristic concern over details that were normally treated cursorily and frequently ignored altogether. Horses were curried as carefully as if they were about to enter the show ring, feet were checked and re-checked for non-existent pebbles, tack was dusted and put away with more care than it normally received in a year. Ears, human ears, quivered at attention.

 

The Oldest Hand turned the valve in his hands as he spoke.

 

“That kid ain’t working here anymore.”

 

“Where the hell’s he working?”

 

“Don’t know. He’s left.”

 

“Left?”

 

“Left town.”

 

“What about his sister? What about Samantha?”

 

“Don’t know exactly. I swung by the bank, had to cash some checks, you know, and she didn’t show up for work this morning. Called in sick. But—” The Oldest Hand paused. “She may have left too.” He examined the valve closely. “Cause she ain’t his sister.”

 

Curry combs hung frozen in the air. Men put hooves down and straightened up. Saddles about to be placed on racks were held above heads. Even the horses seemed to freeze.

 

It took the Foreman a while to speak. “She ain’t his—What the hell is she?”

 

“Fiancée. She told it all to Debbie-Lynn and Debbie-Lynn told me. They’re fixing to get married. They just told people they was brother and sister ‘cause they didn’t want people thinking anything about them living together, especially Mr. and Miz Jacobs, what with them being in the church and all.”

 

The Foreman turned back to his horse, but no one else moved.

 

“For what it’s worth, Debbie-Lynn told me that girl talked about you all the time. Said she started just wanting to get you to make things easy for the kid, but then she talked about how you was a pretty nice guy and all, how she was starting to like you—”

 

“That’ll do,” the Foreman said.

 

The crew finished unsaddling and turned out their horses.

 

……………………………………………………………………………..

 

The cookhouse was unnaturally quiet. The Oldest Hand sat across from the Foreman, but everyone else sat as far away as they could get. No one spoke. Salt and hot sauce were pointed at or just reached for. Even the cook seemed to be making a special effort not to touch a pot with a spoon. The dripping of the coffee pot was louder than any man could remember hearing it before. So when the door opened, people started as if a gun had gone off.

 

The girl stood in the doorway. She was wearing dark glasses.

 

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she said.

 

She crossed over and sat next to the Foreman, looking down at the table. No one spoke.

 

The Oldest Hand stood up with his plate and walked over to the door. He cleared his throat, and the rest of the crew got up and filed out. The cook was standing with his mouth open, and the Oldest Hand cleared his throat again, so loudly the cook jumped, and when he jumped, he jumped for the door.

 

“You didn’t expect to see me?” the girl asked.

 

“No.”

 

“I came to say I’m sorry.”

 

“Nothing to be sorry for. You wanted me to go easy on your brother… on W.W…. and I did. You got what you wanted.”

 

“W.W. suggested it. He saw the difference, how you treated him, I mean, after you met me, and he told me to go along with it. While he learned the ropes, he said. But I could tell he wasn’t ever going to learn the ropes, that he didn’t even want to, and then I—” She broke off.

 

“You what?”

 

“I began to like you for real. To really like you.”

 

There was a long silence. The Foreman suddenly realized he still had his fork in his hand and he put it down.

 

The girl got up and moved to the door. “I just wanted to apologize.”

 

“Are you going to go… wherever he’s gone?”

 

“No.”

 

“I thought you were getting married.”

 

“No. I told him I wouldn’t marry him. He left me with this.” She took off the dark glasses. Her left eye was swollen shut.

 

The foreman drew his breath in through his teeth. He stood up and moved slowly toward her, and the look on his face made her shrink back toward the window.

 

He raised one hand up near her face, and then, realizing it was balled up into a fist, he opened it slowly and gently touched her cheek below the swollen eye.

 

“Where did he go,” he asked, his voice a barely audible whisper.

 

“I don’t know. I didn’t care enough to ask.”

 

For a moment they stood looking at each other. Then she looked down.

 

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

 

She reached out and opened the door, but before she could turn he raised his hand to her face again. He drew her gently toward him, bent his head, and with infinite delicacy he kissed the swollen eye and then her upturned lips.

 

There was a loud cheer outside. The Foreman immediately turned to go outside, but the girl hugged him to her, and this time she kissed him. There was another cheer outside, accompanied by applause.

Tonopah—it’s a Shoshone word meaning either “water brush” (a small desert shrub) or, more likely, “little spring”—in central Nevada, owes its existence to a sometime hay farmer, sometime prospector, and sometime district attorney (for thirty-five dollars a month) named Big Jim Butler who camped there in May of 1900. The story goes that his burros wandered away from him in the night, and when Big Jim found them they were sheltering from the wind near an outcropping that looked likely. It turned out to be somewhat more than likely, assaying out at a staggering six hundred and forty ounces of silver to the ton. Less than a year later, Tonopah was a town of sorts, with eager hopefuls living in tents, or in shacks made out of barrels or oil cans or glass bottles set in adobe, living even in the shafts themselves.

In 1903, some Mormons decided to jump a claim on the edge of Tonopah and when the mining company representative confronted them, they pulled their guns on him. Among the townspeople who came to see what the commotion was about was a fifty-five year-old saloon-keeper who looked down the vertical shaft.

“You gentlemen get on out of there. This ain’t your mine.”

“Oh, yeah? And who the hell are you, old man?”

“My name’s Wyatt Earp.”

It was many years since his days as a lawman, many years since Tombstone and the OK corral, many years too since he had made and gambled away a fortune in Alaska, but such was the strength of his reputation that the claim jumpers climbed quickly and quietly out.

His reputation was not strong enough, however, to keep him from being run out of town shortly afterward for fixing a boxing match.

The Pine Creek Ranch lies about sixty miles north of Tonopah and has the reputation of being the single most isolated ranch in the United States. The hardtop ends at the picturesque old semi-ghost mining town of Belmont (summer population between twenty-five and thirty, winter population six), once the county seat, with an elegant brick courthouse, and it is eighteen miles of dirt road from there to the ranch headquarters. The ranch owes its name and its existence to the creek that comes down out of the mountains there; the water made it a natural place for a stage stop on the Belmont to Austin stage line back in the eighteen-sixties, long before Tonopah.

I know this land. This is where, as a transplanted Easterner, I began to fall in love with the West. I have hunted and camped multiple times in the Arc Dome Wilderness in the Toiyabe Range, and on Table Mountain in the Monitor Range. Trout streams empty into ponds the color of strong tea. Elk and deer move through the pastures and woodlands. In the Arc Dome, after I shot a five-by-six buck, two mountain lions trailed us almost all the way back to the camp; we found their tracks over ours the next morning. On Table Mountain, near 11,000 feet is an aspen grove known as Porno Grove where lonely—and seriously horny—Basque sheepherders once carved their fantasies into the trunks of the trees: naked women standing, on their backs, on all fours; breasts with life-support systems attached; men with heroic phalluses, coupling in every imaginable and some unimaginable positions; hundreds of images carved into the trees. Most are done just about as crudely as you might expect. Some are elevated by aesthetics or humor, a few by both.

It was on Table Mountain that a white mule—who has since gone, unlamented, to his just reward—led our entire pack string, in hobbles, away from camp and back down fourteen miles of exceptionally difficult trail to the valley floor.

There are few things in this life quite as deflating as bouncing out of your tent in the pre-dawn hours to go feed the horses and finding them conspicuous by their absence. You stand there with a bucket of feed in each hand and your jaw listing southward, reflecting that not only is it fourteen miles to the trailhead, but another honest fifteen or twenty miles from there to the nearest and only ranch—Pine Creek—where there might—emphasis on might—be signs of life. Suddenly you begin to think fond thoughts of mass transportation and the interstate highway system and beltways and traffic jams.

Fortunately, our outfitter’s wife had a cell phone with her. Fortunately the weather was clear enough that she was able to get a signal. Fortunately the cell phone at the Pine Creek Ranch—they had no hard-wiring for phones or electricity—was working (it also functioned solely at the whim of the weather). And, most fortunately of all, there was someone there.

The next afternoon a young buckaroo rode into camp, leading our string—and the damn mule. The young hand wore a flat-brimmed, round crowned black Stetson, neckerchief, chinks, Carhartt jacket, Garcia spurs, and a Garcia bit on his horse, and he looked as if he just ridden right out of a Will James or Charlie Dye painting. His name was Wayne Hage, Jr., and that night he and I sat up late on opposite sides of the fire drinking Coors and Jack Daniels as he told me the story of his family’s legal battles and harassment and persecution at the hands of the United States government. It was easy to dismiss his tale as the delusional ravings of a disenfranchised cowboy, which is pretty much what I did, until one May night several years later when Tom Brokaw said something that made my ears perk up.

NBC Nightly News is hardly a hot bed of radical right-wing thought. Like all the major networks it tries to both reflect and influence the thinking of the mainstream majority of Americans, so when Tom Brokaw announced, “And the Fleecing of America. The government seizing private property just to increase the tax base. Is that fair?” I sat up. I had heard words very similar to those on top of Table Mountain. I decided I wanted to know more.

 

There is a lot of arid nothing to drive through in Nevada, and zipping through with the cruise control set at seventy does nothing to change that impression. But the thirty-sixth state gets its name from the Spanish word, nevar, meaning ‘to snow,’ and Nevada, meaning ‘snow clad,’ or ‘snow covered,’ is an apt name. The Sierras in California block most of the westerly storms—the western slope of the Sierra Mountains may get as much as eighty inches of precipitation in a year, while the eastern slope averages around ten inches—yet despite that, the mountains of Nevada get enough snow each winter that at the higher elevations the nation’s most arid state has some surprisingly good trout fishing—native brook trout—and equally good grass range. In a state where eighty-six percent of the land is publicly owned, that good grass range has become a bitter bone of contention.

In 1862, in an effort to encourage Western settlement and relieve urban labor pressures, Congress passed the Homestead Act, which essentially gave one hundred and sixty acres, free, to anyone willing to occupy and cultivate the land for five years. One hundred and sixty acres, a quarter section, one half mile square—free! To Easterners, accustomed to rich, arable land, and thinking in terms of pasturing many cows per acre, one hundred and sixty acres—free!—must have seemed like manna from Heaven.

Unfortunately, unlike the manna, rain did not fall from Heaven.

The ninety-eighth meridian runs a little ways west of the North Dakota-Minnesota border. It runs down through Mitchell, South Dakota, home of the aptly-named Corn Palace, a little east of Grand Island, Nebraska, near the staging grounds of Sandhill cranes on the Platte River, and in Kansas it runs just west of Wichita, where Wyatt Earp served briefly as a lawman. In Oklahoma it pretty much follows highway 81, west of Oklahoma City, and in Texas it passes near former President Bush’s home in Crawford and on down through Austin. It is an arbitrary line, but it is significant because it is an isohyet.

An isohyet is any line connecting points on a map that have equal amounts of rainfall, and along the ninety-eighth meridian the amount is thirty inches, the bare minimum needed for agriculture. Speaking in generalities, one can say that east of the ninety-eighth meridian enough rain falls to make one hundred and sixty acres a decent farm. West of that line there is not enough rainfall to make one hundred and sixty acres productive agriculturally, and a quarter section is not enough land to ranch. The farther west you go, the less rain there is. For thousands of eager settlers the Homestead Act was just a cruel joke. Homesteaders sold, mortgaged, and borrowed everything they could lay their hands on to make the journey west to their free piece of paradise, and by 1890, only one out of three had managed to stay on their dream long enough to gain the title.

In the desperately arid Great Basin of Nevada, as in most of the West, you can’t think in terms of multiple head of cattle per acre. You think instead of how many acres it takes to run a cow-calf unit, and in some places it may take an entire section, six hundred and forty acres, or more, to run a single unit. Where grass is converted to dollars through the medium of cattle, good grass is almost as valuable as gold.

So in a state where the Federal Government claims public ownership of eighty-six percent of the land, grazing rights become an extremely valuable commodity, and if you’re a rancher, those grazing rights directly affect the ultimate value of your ranch, as well as your ability to earn a living.

Even more valuable than grass is water, both kinds of water. Ground water is reasonably straight forward: it means any water that is under the ground. Surface water is a little more complex. It can refer to the obvious, such as streams and lakes, or it can refer to wells or stock ponds or other collecting systems that are influenced by surface water. Either way, without water the land is useless, so water rights become critical, and the history of water rights in the West is a story of bloodshed, chicanery, legal maneuvering, politicking, fraud, lobbying, graft, greed, malfeasance, and shady dealings so complex and so convoluted as to be almost unbelievable. If John Grisham and Tom Clancy collaborated with Jackie Collins, they might be able to do justice to the story.

But if you own the land, all this is moot, right? Well, no. Land ownership in the West is nowhere near that simple. For one thing, in addition to the water rights and grazing rights, there are also mining rights, timber rights, oil and gas rights, wildlife rights, easement rights, development rights, trespass rights, and possibly other rights that I’m not aware of. It is a concept known as the ‘split estate,’ and to take it to its illogical extreme, it is theoretically possible for you to own a piece of land in the West with which you can’t do a single damn thing except pay taxes and boast.

Conversely, if you own grazing rights, say, on land controlled by the Federal government, when you die, the IRS will tax those rights as your ownership interest in the land, your private property.

For ranchers throughout the West these rights, grazing, water, and so on, have become inextricably entangled with the question of property rights as defined under the Fifth Amendment. If the government decides to take your property for the greater good of society, should you not be compensated fairly, as spelled out in the Fifth Amendment?

 

When I was there, The Pine Creek Ranch was 757,000 acres, give or take a plot or two. 757,000 acres is—if I’ve done my math correctly—roughly 1,183 square miles. To give you an idea of the scale of the place, Rhode Island, at 1,214 square miles, is only slightly larger, while the country of Luxembourg (nine hundred and ninety-nine square miles) is substantially smaller. The country of Liechtenstein (sixty-one square miles) would barely qualify as one of Pine Creek’s pastures. The ranch was eighty-two miles long, running north-south, and varied in width from eight miles at the narrowest to almost thirty-five miles wide. It encompassed two separate mountain ranges with peaks ranging from 11,000 to 12,000 feet. The ranch headquarters on the valley floor sit just at 7000 feet.

7000 acres of meadows and hay fields on the valley floor were owned by Wayne Hage, Sr. in fee patented land (sometimes called full fee simple, or fee simple absolute) which means he owned both the land itself and all the inheritable rights that come with the land. 750,000 acres were fee lands, which means the public owns the land, while he owned some of the inheritable rights, in this case water rights and grazing rights.

This is a little like saying, “I own the chair, but you own the right to sit in it,” but that’s the way things have evolved in the West, thanks to a raft of frequently contradictory and indigestible slabs of legislation such as the Homestead Act, the Organic Act (the one of 1897, of course, not the Organic Acts of 1849, 1884, 1890, 1900, 1916, 2003, or any of the others by the same name), the Taylor Grazing Act, the Forest Reserve Act, the Mining Act, the Stock Raising Homestead Act, the Illinois Central Act, and the Act of July 26, 1866 which has surely the most spine-tingling, breath-taking, pulse-racing sub-title of any act ever passed by Congress: “An Act granting the Right of Way to Ditch and Canal Owners over the Public Lands and for other Purposes.”

Clearly, any cattle baron with 757,000 acres and the intestinal fortitude to duke it out toe-to-toe in the middle of the legal ring with the United States government for twenty-five years must be larger than life, a titan of a man in a twenty gallon Stetson, a sprawling, brawling, hairy-chested, two-fisted cross between John Wayne and Daniel Webster, shaking the devil by the scruff of his neck, while dispensing home-spun wisdom and rough justice from a ponderosa-pine castle.

Not exactly. I once had a sweetly vague professor who would occasionally try to absentmindedly write on the blackboard with the stem of his pipe. That’s who Wayne Hage, Sr. reminded me of. Small, rumpled, portly, hair and shirttails both sticking out at variegated angles, his Stetson little more than a glorified fedora, a beard that managed to somehow be both short and untidy, he was an unlikely warrior, who dispensed his hard-won legal knowledge from a modest cinderblock ranch heavily festooned with dozens of mud cliff-swallow nests.

There were three common rooms in the ranch house: Wayne’s office, which looked like a cross between an unsuccessful law office and a disorganized history professor’s inner sanctum; a family room with an enormous fireplace and a television set; and the great room, a combination kitchen, entry, and dining room, with a wonderful antique wood-burning cook-stove and some prints by Western artist Jack Swanson on the walls. Wayne and I sat at the long table in this room on the folding metal chairs that served as dining chairs, looking out at an ancient unpainted wooden barn (possibly a hangover from the old stagecoach days) and the great expanse of the Monitor Valley.

Before the advent of instant celebrity and super-lotteries and reality television, Americans used to admire Horatio Alger men, men who overcame adversity through hard work and pluck and self-reliance.

“I started working as soon as I was old enough be able to. My father was in mining, a consulting geologist, but a lot of the other members of the family were involved with ranching, so I pretty well grew up with ranching, up around Elko.

“The winter of ’51, ’52 was devastatingly hard, so I persuaded my parents to let me drop out of school. I spent my high school years working around on different ranches in that country. At that time you had the big cattle outfits and they’d put out a roundup wagon and just stay out on the range for maybe ten months of the year. For a teenaged boy, that kind of life made school seem pretty dull and uninteresting, so I just stayed with it.

“I was breaking horses in the Owyhee Mountains when the Korean War was going on. I figured I’d beat getting drafted and enlist in the Marines, but at the recruiting office I ran into a friend of the family. He said, ‘You’re a dumb S.O.B. Just look at you. You haven’t even been to high school. You enlist in the Marines and put in three years, and when you get out you’ll still be a dumb S.O.B.’ Then he started telling me about all the educational opportunities that were available in the Air Force, and before I knew it I had signed on the line and enlisted for four years. I got good schooling, came out at the top of all my classes, learned a lot about electronics, made up my high school with a G.E.D. test.”

At the end of the long table where we sat was a stack of magazines, Western Livestock Journal, Range, The Economist, Archaeology, and a carefully folded American flag. As we spoke, his ran his fingers over the flag, much as a man might run his hand absently over the head of a dog.

“When I came out of the Air Force I went right back to work on the ranches. Once that gets in your blood, making your living on horseback in that environment, it’s hard to get it out of your system. But I had the G.I. Bill, so I went ahead and got my degree. I was working on my Master’s at Colorado State when I got married, so I came back to a little ranch just over the Nevada line in northern California, finished up my Master’s at the University of Nevada. About fifteen years later I had the opportunity to buy this place, the kind of ranching I like, big open range kind of ranching.

“I knew the people were selling the place ‘cause they were having a lot of trouble with the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, but I had worked for both of them, and I had taken a lot of courses relating to range science. I thought to myself, I understand good range management better than they do, and if that’s what they want, we’ll get along just fine.”

Wayne bought Pine Creek Ranch in 1978, and two months later the National Park Service met with him at a coffee shop in Tonopah and informed him that they were going to buy his ranch.

“They offered me a price that was about half of what I had just paid for the place, so I said, ‘OK, that’s fine, that’s for the land. What are you going to pay me for the water and the grazing?’ They said they weren’t going to pay me anything, that I didn’t own those. I told them I disagreed, that I had just paid a whole lot of money for those rights and I expected to be paid for them in turn. I said, ‘You go on back and do your homework. If those grazing allotments are public lands and the government owns them, then we’ll talk your price. If they’re not public lands and the government doesn’t own them, then we’re going to talk my price.’ Well, they went back and did their homework and I never heard from them again.”

All this is perfectly standard. America is a nation of laws, and when you and I disagree on something, we turn to the law to resolve our differences. And as proof of the efficacy of the system, you need look no further than Pine Creek Ranch, for Wayne Hage Sr. won every ruling in every court at every stage of his twenty-five year battle with the federal government.

What is not standard, and what Wayne Hage was not prepared for, was what happened outside the courtrooms, a dreary litany of unrelenting harassment: gates left open, fences cut, vandalism, destruction of property, his cattle mysteriously turning up over and over again on the wrong side of allotment fences, all of it coupled with an overwhelming avalanche of paperwork. In a single grazing season, one hundred and five days, Pine Creek Ranch had seventy ‘visits,’ and forty citations from the United States Forest Service. (One of these was an accusation of failure to maintain the fences on Table Mountain. After two days of riding the fence line, a hand found the Forest Service flag marking a single missing staple.) Forty-five separate trespass citations (for cattle) were served, all of which were subsequently dropped when an eyewitness saw Forest Service employees moving Hage’s cattle onto restricted land. A major spring was fenced off and the water illegally diverted to a local Ranger Station. The Forest Service filed claims over water rights, and each claim had to be defended before the state water engineer. Permits were cancelled, suspended, and burdened with impossible conditions.

Finally, Forest Service employees armed with semi-automatic rifles and wearing bullet-proof vests came in and confiscated one hundred and four head of cattle. They must have been a little disconcerted when Wayne Hage reached into his truck for his own weapon, a thirty-five millimeter camera, and asked them to, “Smile pretty, boys.”

But by that time four administrative appeals against the Forest Service (at $50,000 to $200,000 each) and fifteen years of legal battling had left him bankrupt.

“I thought to myself, ‘They’ve driven me into the ground. I’m broke. I’ve spent all my money fighting the Forest Service. They’ve made it so expensive for me to operate that it costs me twice as much to run a cow as I can hope to gain out of her. I can’t even maintain the essential functions of the ranch. If the United States wants this ranch that bad, they can have it. I’m not going to argue anymore. I’m folding my tent and getting out. But the Fifth Amendment says they have to pay me for it.’”

Which of course begs the question of just why the United States wanted the Pine Creek Ranch that much.

In the play The Zoo Story, Edward Albee has one of the characters say: “Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way in order to come back a short distance correctly.”

Asking Wayne Hage, Sr. about the motivations of the government, or the relationship of the various administrations to the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management over the last twenty-five years, or the legal issues at the heart of his lawsuit, would invariably prompt a response that would have made Edward Albee proud. One hand absently stroking the flag, he would look at the swallows flashing past the window and say, “Well, now, let me walk you through that…” and off we would go on a long hike across the dry and rocky terrain of the jurisdiction authority of the Federal District Court versus the United States Claims Court, prior appropriation doctrine, riparian law, alienable rights versus unalienable rights, the inappropriate influence of the Sierra Club on the Department of Agriculture, the externalizing of the national debt under the Johnson administration, the implications and interpretation of the fourteenth Amendment….

But the bottom line, like everything else in the West, was water. Or money; in the West the two words are pretty much synonymous. The Pine Creek Ranch sits on the largest source of fresh water in central Nevada, some 80,000 acre feet worth of ground water, readily and regularly renewed by the run-off from the Monitor Range on one side and the Toquima Range on the other. At 7000 feet that water is an easy gravity feed to either Las Vegas, the fastest growing city in America, or even to Los Angeles, which is expected to add six million more people to its freeway system in the next twenty years. So instead of raising beef and supporting the elk and deer and antelope—and brook trout—of central Nevada, the Pine Creek water will go to fuel the fountains in front of those tastefully understated casinos in Sin City, or to water those oh-so-vital and ubiquitous lawns and golf courses in what Richard Henry Dana, Jr. once described as, “…a fine plane country, filled with herds of cattle, in the center of which was the Pueblo de Los Angelos…”

The final phase of this ordeal was the determining, by the United States Court of Claims, exactly how much the grazing rights and water rights on 750,000 acres were worth. According to various sources, the ultimate settlement, delivered after Wayne Hage’s too early death, was $4,000,000. Was it fair? Would ten times that amount have been fair? When looked at in the context of having your way of life taken from you, or in context of the harassment he and his family had to endure, would one hundred times that amount have been fair?

 

The kid who once found high school too dull and uninteresting ended up knowing more about constitutional law and American history, and legislative history in particular, than most superior court justices, but that knowledge came at a terrible price. Sitting at that long table, I asked Wayne Hage, Sr. if, after everything that had happened, after all his legal battles and victories, he had more or less faith in America.

“Well, the situation has changed.”

“But you’ve won.”

“It’s not that simplistic or that clear.”

“Wayne, you took on the United States government in the courts, using the United States laws and the United States Constitution, and you won.”

“Constitutional rights don’t exist under Federal Courts. All they’re interested in is what the rules are and did you violate the rules. I was smart enough to go through the Claims Court. If I hadn’t done that, I would have lost.”

“Yes, but…” I couldn’t let it go. The man who sat absently stroking the flag and gazing out over the land that would soon no longer be his wasn’t bitter or defeated or victorious, but somehow infinitely sad, and I wanted him to at least acknowledge what he had achieved with Hage v. United States, both for himself and for all property owners. At last he looked at me.

“You bet I believe in the rule of law, but most people are trapped in a fiction of law, rules and regulations, and don’t understand the law at all.”

I had to be satisfied with that, but perhaps that’s Wayne Hage, Sr.’s greatest lesson and legacy.

 

As I left, as my dog and the ranch border collie both walked around stiff-legged, taking turns peeing on all four of my tires, I turned to Wayne Hage.

“A hypothetical question for you, Wayne. If you get all that money and you could still keep the ranch, what would do?”

“I’d be like the rancher in the old joke. Rancher wins $250,000,000 dollars in the Super Lotto. Goes down to pick up the check and the press are all there and one of them asks him, ‘Now that you got all that money, what are going to do?’ Rancher takes off his Stetson, scratches his head a bit, puts the Stetson back on, says, ‘Well, I reckon I’ll keep on ranching until all that money is gone.’” He laughed for the first and only time during my visit.

We shook hands.

“Well, Wayne, I hope you get a fortune out of the government. You deserve it, and you’ll be a rich man.”

He didn’t hesitate. “I’ve always been a rich man. I’ve always had a roof over my head, clothes on my back, three meals a day. I’ve always been rich.”

Since first writing this several years ago, Rob has retired with, I am happy to report, all his faculties intact.

 

 

The second ride of the evening did not go well.

 

Rogerio de Souza Pereira came out on Wild Thang and within two seconds, on the third or fourth massive, twisting buck, Rogerio was in trouble, his head snapping back, throwing his weight off balance. The Kamikaze Kid was already moving. Things that were happening faster than thought appeared to be in slow motion.

 

On the next buck, Rogerio was thrown forward, his face hitting the bull’s head, which was now coming up. It’s unclear if the damage was done then, or if it happened later, when Rogerio’s head hit the bull’s horn as he flopped at Wild Thang’s side, the young Brazilian’s hand caught in his own bull rope—‘hung up’ is the technical term—but by the time the Kamikaze Kid freed Rogerio’s hand, the bull rider was already unconscious and bleeding heavily.

 

Rogerio fell on his back, loose and inert as a sack of grain, one arm out to the side, the other almost straight above his head as if he were still riding. The bull, still bucking, stepped on his belly, 1700-pounds concentrated onto a hoof the size of a dessert plate, and a collective sound of pain and pity went up from the crowd.

 

The Kamikaze Kid and the other two bullfighters, Dennis Johnson and Greg Crabtree, were still in motion, twisting and dodging in front of the bull, drawing him away from the fallen man. As soon as the bull peeled off after Dennis Johnson, the Kamikaze Kid, still running, circled back to the injured rider. He knelt by his side, placed his hands on Rogerio’s chest as delicately as a man might touch a sleeping baby, and bowed his head in prayer. The eight-second buzzer sounded.

 

The whole incident, from the moment Rogerio’s head snapped back, to the stillness of the two men in the dust and noise of the arena, one helpless, the other praying for him, had taken less than six seconds.

 

 

“Anticipation is a lot of it.”

 

The Kamikaze Kid is not a kid anymore at forty-six. His name is Rob Smets and he is considered to be the greatest rodeo bullfighter that ever lived, though he would never admit that.

 

“You see a rider’s chin come off his chest, you know he’s fixing to come off that bull. Or if you see his back ‘C’, you know, not sitting straight anymore.”

 

Rob slumped forward like a sullen teenager. His normal posture is Marine color guard at the White House.

 

“That’s called riding on the pockets and it’ll cant his pelvis. Or if his free arm goes past his head on the back swing or too far across his body on the front swing, ‘cause that’ll torque his hips and then he’s off balance. Or if his feet start flopping, though sometimes that just means the rider’s trying to get a better hold. That’s the sort of stuff you look for. You got to read the bull and you got to read the rider and you anticipate.”

 

Rob Smets is sitting on the edge of his bed in the Marriott Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, eating a room temperature room service hamburger, his typical dinner before he leaves for the ‘office.’ The ‘office’ tonight is Kansas City’s Kemper arena. Next week it will be the Dallas, Texas American Airlines Center, then the Bismarck Civic Center in North Dakota, then the Prescott Rodeo Grounds, then Cheyenne, Tulsa, North Carolina, Nevada, Florida, Michigan, California, the states and cities and arenas, the hotel rooms and airports, all piling up like snapshots in a shoebox.

 

But tonight in Kansas City will be Rob’s first night back after a ten-week layoff following a broken leg in Albuquerque. There are unavoidable hazards to messing about with animals that weigh in the neighborhood of a ton, and it doesn’t make much difference whether you’re trying to sit on their backs for eight seconds or trying to outrun and outmaneuver them on the ground. The Professional Bull Riders Association keeps a running news brief on its website listing the sidelined riders and bullfighters and the extent of their injuries—broken shoulder, fractured ribs, facial injuries (resulting in a titanium plate in the skull), fractured and dislocated hip, broken collar bone, perforated bowel, concussion, dislocated shoulder, torn ligaments, herniated discs, broken ankle, torn groin muscle, the list goes on—but it doesn’t mention the ancillary financial impact on the athletes.

 

Unlike other professional sports, the PBR makes no allowance for injuries. There is no second string, no backup, no sitting on the bench, no injured reserve list. If you don’t perform, you don’t get paid, so the combined motivation of pride and paycheck is considerable. Rob had already tried to make it to the office in Phoenix three weeks earlier, but the leg refused to hold him on a sharp cut to the right during a practice run, a down-and-out pattern. He has a ranch in Texas that needs to be paid for; he has a wife and child counting on him; he has horses, dogs, cattle to be fed. Above all, he has pride.

 

“I’m competitive. I want to win. I don’t care if it’s flipping a coin, I want to win. When I get knocked down by a bull, I get up mad. I want to get even.”

 

Eating his dinner he is strangely relaxed for a man who is about to risk his life—more than risk it, offer it up—to save someone else, someone he may not like nor even know particularly well.

 

Our mutual friend, Mike Schwiebert, Rodeo All-Pro Bullfighter of the Year in 1978, long retired from bull fighting, is sitting on the other bed: “A bullfighter is like a Secret Service agent,” he says. “The job is to protect the rider at all costs, and if that means taking the shot for him, that’s what you do.”

 

The analogy seems to amuse Rob and he grins, transforming his face. He is a former Golden Gloves champion and long-time barroom brawler, his face battered and broken by gloves and bare fists and bulls, and within the collage of mashed lips, flattened nose, and scar tissue are eyes as unblinking and dispassionate as a bird of prey. Would it be worth my time to kill you? Would you be good to eat? But when he laughs or smiles the eyes become lighted windows, the mouth a welcome mat.

 

“Stepping in front of the bullet.” He laughs as if it were the funniest thing in the world, as if the degree of danger from either bull or bullet wasn’t worth anything more than a laugh.

 

“I first saw Rob in 1977 in Ardmore, Oklahoma and I thought, That kid will never last; he takes too many chances.” Mike is looking at Rob as he speaks. “Three years later I was finished. And now, twenty-six years later, he’s still going strong. How’s the leg?”

 

“Good. I was in the pool doing therapy two days after I broke it. It’s fine now.”

 

What he doesn’t say is that those two days were spent alone in a motel room with over-the-counter pain killers, without even having had X-rays taken or anything more than a cursory examination by the emergency doctor behind the chutes after he was helped out of the arena.

 

“I wanted to wait till I got home to my own doctor. Cheaper. And I couldn’t grab an earlier flight out without paying extra.”

 

Medical insurance is not an option for someone who makes his living doing whatever it takes to save a fallen rider, relying on his own timing and speed of reflex to distract a misanthropic 1500- to 2000-pound animal. That’s when everything goes well. When things get Western, it can come down to hurling his own body over an unconscious rider and enduring whatever he must endure until the other bullfighters or the single mounted cowboy in the arena, known as the safety-man, can pull the bull’s focus away.

 

Over the years the broken bones, torn muscles, and torn hide have added up, but most obvious is the aftermath of a twice-broken neck (once, C-1, the same vertebra that paralyzed the late Christopher Reeve). Rob has some partial mobility to the right, but none to the left, so when he turns now to look at the clock he has to turn his entire torso, twisting from the waist and rolling his eyes.

 

“Oh! I got to go. We’re having a prayer meeting. Hand me that shirt, will you.”

 

He pulls his T-shirt off and grabs the red PBR shirt he will wear to the arena. He is a stocky, powerfully built man, slightly bow-legged, an attribute that is exaggerated by the extra-long blue jeans falling in folds—called a stack in cowboy parlance—around his boots. The bow-leggedness and his slightly rolling gait make him appear deceptively clumsy in a bear-like way, but now, as he changes shirts, the thick bones and heavy muscles show the boxer he once was. The shoulders especially are massive and speak of long hours on the heavy bag, driving T-posts into hard ground, tossing bales of hay onto a flatbed, staying in shape to stay alive.

 

Prayer is something new for Rob. His father was a heavy machine operator who worked for mining companies in Thailand, Singapore, Australia, Puerto Rico, and around the States, and fighting seems to have come naturally to a tough American kid in foreign lands. He was finally asked to leave school in Salinas because of the constant brawling.

 

“My friends were all Hispanic and I didn’t like it when people would pick on them.”

 

The statement is both true and disingenuous. The impulse to save, to help, to protect—to don dented armor, grab a rusty sword, and ride off in all directions—is undoubtedly very strong in Rob. He wouldn’t be a bullfighter if it weren’t there. But there is also a lot of pit bull in him too.

 

Three months earlier, a group of men were standing in the kitchen of a remote hunting camp in California, waiting for supper. The men were excited about the next day’s pig hunt, and beer and whiskey and margueritas were flowing. The combination of booze and empty stomachs was making everyone boisterous, everyone but Rob. He was the center of attention, the star, as he is in places where men know anything about rodeo and bull riding, and he leaned against the sink, his face flushed with alcohol, still and deadly quiet. Whenever anyone asked him anything he would answer politely, but the more he drank, the more he gave the impression of a ticking clock attached to a stick of dynamite. The conversation turned to boxing, and from boxing to fighting generally, a few of the men recounting their own exploits, usually humorous, usually self-deprecating, but always coming back to Rob, to his brawls in and out of the ring.

 

“Hell, Rob. Didn’t you ever lose any fights?” The man who asked was no drunker than anyone else, but perhaps his judgment was worse.

 

“No. I never lost a fight.” He said it as softly and matter-of-factly as another man might say, No, I’ve never been to Morocco, or, No, I’ve never driven a race car.

 

“Well, aren’t you worried someone will take you someday?”

 

“No one in this room.” It wasn’t surly or aggressive or ugly, just a quiet statement of fact, yet behind it was an eagerness no one was drunk enough to ignore.

 

At least half-a-dozen of the men in that kitchen were substantially bigger than Rob, but there was an uncomfortable moment of silence and then Mike Schwiebert stepped gracefully, humorously in, deflecting and defusing, and the group recaptured their anticipation and high spirits.

 

The next morning Rob came to the breakfast table looking as much the worse for wear as the others, but his eyes were lighted windows. He stood by his seat as if he were standing in front of the blackboard and said his piece.

 

“I had too much to drink last night, and I said some things I shouldn’t have. I apologize to everyone here. It won’t happen again.”

 

It didn’t.

 

The bull fighting came almost by accident.

 

“I was sitting on the fence at a high school rodeo watching the bullfighter,” Rob told me, “and I could see what he was doing wrong. I kept yelling at him to get closer to the bull until he finally turned around and said, Why don’t you try it, kid. So I did.”

 

He was an instant sensation in the rarefied world of bull riding, his insane, daredevil style of charging the bull earning him the nickname Kamikaze Kid. But there was another side to rodeo life in the late seventies and eighties.

 

“I was a total pothead. I’d roll a joint first thing in the morning before I got out of bed. I worked stoned. Sometimes I’d smoke a joint, do a line of cocaine and then go out and fight bulls.”

 

He is very candid about the drugs and the booze and the brawling and nameless girls in the back of horse trailers, candid too about the price he paid in a failed marriage, failed friendships, and failed finances. What he doesn’t mention are the triumphs: an unprecedented five World Championships; being voted to the PBR finals seven times and to the National Finals Rodeo six times. He doesn’t mention qualifying for the National Finals Rodeo bullfighter’s competition seventeen times in a profession where ten years is the top end of a bullfighter’s working life. Instead he talks about getting off drugs.

 

“When I broke my neck the second time the doctor asked me if I smoked cigarettes. Well, no, I’d never smoked a cigarette. But he said it could make your bones brittle. So I lay in that hospital bed and thought about it. I thought if tobacco could do that to you, pot probably could too. When I got out, I rolled one last joint and smoked it as I drove home. Then I threw the bag out the window, and that was that. Took me six months to get over the smoker’s cough.”

 

The next step was meeting his wife, Carla.

 

“She was a big influence. She works with disturbed children, and I’m her biggest case study. But the religion…. That came because I was always searching for peace, for happiness. I finally realized it wasn’t about booze and drugs and girls. And I realized I couldn’t fix everything, that Rob Smets couldn’t do it all. I had some friends, Lynn Shawls and Rope Myers. They were in a church. I could see the joy in their eyes, and that was what I wanted.”

 

Now, in Kansas, he grabs his suitcase and his bag with his uniform and athletic shoes and pads—similar to those worn by hockey players—and carefully places his twenty-X Stetson on his head. At the door he turns and smiles again.

 

“I’ll see you there.”

 

 

Most of the sports that came out of the cowboy lifestyle used to be lumped together under the name rodeo. Today, while there is still bull riding in rodeo, it has evolved as a sport on its own, as have cutting (separating a single cow from the herd) and reining (riding a set pattern at different speeds, spinning, and a slide stop, as a test of the athletic ability and training of the horse, and the horsemanship of the rider).

 

Traditional rodeo events such as saddle-bronc riding, bareback-bronc, bulldogging (steer wrestling), calf roping (tie-down roping), team roping, barrel racing, even reining and cutting, all had their genesis in the day-to-day activities on the long cattle drives in pre-barb wire days, or in the day-to-day activities on the great ranches post-barb wire.

 

The exception is bull riding. There is no practical reason why any sane man would ever try to ride a bull. In the unlikely event you could get the thing broke to ride, it would be the sorriest form of transportation in the world, worse even than a camel.

 

Bull riding has only existed as a pure expression of cowboy machismo. Somewhere, back in the dust of history, some idiot put his beer down and yelled, “Hey, y’all! Watch this,” and was promptly killed or invalided. The ancient Minoans risked their lives against bulls in ceremonies that evolved out of the ritual slaughter of their king every eight years to ensure a bountiful harvest, but even those slim and agile youths merely vaulted over the bull. They didn’t actually ride the sucker. (Of course, if you’re going to have your throat cut or be roasted alive for the benefit of the community, anything you can do with a bull, even riding it, looks pretty good.)

 

Bull riding was always the glamour event in rodeo, and today it stands on its own under the aegis of the Professional Bull Riders Association. It stands on its own because it is more dangerous than any other sport. Infinitely more dangerous. It is not a question of if a cowboy gets hurt; it’s simply a question of how badly and how often. In a society where the threat of dying is no longer a quotidian issue for most of us, where there is pill for every ache and every discomfort, people are thrilled by the spectacle of men risking their lives, and will pay money to see it. ‘Recreational terror,’ as writer Jeff MacGregor calls it, has become big business in America.

 

All sports, from bowling to boxing to bull riding, offer the spectator a chance to experience vicariously what his own limitations, physical or psychological, keep him from doing. All people and all societies admire courage, whether you’re the first man ever to eat an oyster, or the first man ever to fly a plane faster than sound. The appeal of bull riding lies in the courage of the young men who do it. There is absolutely nothing you can do that is more dangerous than bull riding. It is the ultimate Fear Factor.

 

But there is far more to successful bull riding than mere courage. There are the issues of balance, coordination, timing, speed of reflex, and – just as important as courage – the ability to ignore pain.

 

Add to all this the fact that bull riders are young, greyhound-lean and fit, attractive, clean-cut, and have the ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’ manners of the cowboy culture, and you can understand why they have such an incredible following. They are revered and idolized. Perhaps not quite as much as the bulls, whose Breyer statuettes sell like hot cakes, and whose names are whispered with breathless admiration—Bodacious! Little Yellow Jacket! Blueberry Wine! Mossy Oak Mudslinger!—but enough that sponsors fight to be first in line with their checkbooks, fans with their autograph books. And after the bulls, Rob Smets is the biggest selling item, even more than any of the riders, on play sets, playing cards, figures, T-shirts, a host of other forms of licensed merchandise.

 

Cabela’s was one of the sponsors of the Kansas City event (Ford Motor Company, truck division, is the primary sponsor of the whole thirty-one city tour, which bills itself as The Ford Built-Tough Series, presented by Wrangler, the secondary sponsor) and they arranged for Rob and some of the riders to come sign autographs at their 150,000 square-foot store.

 

You might think nearly three-and-a-half acres under roof would be enough space to accommodate any amount of autograph signing, but the folks at Cabela’s know their business.

 

In the parking lot in front of the main entrance they had set up a tent capable of holding a three-ring circus, which was pretty much what it held. There was an archery booth inside a specially designed eighteen-wheeler, where people could test their skills with high-tech compound bows; a similar booth, just as large, selling bratwurst; another selling candied popcorn; an enclosed ring with an inflated pad and a fuzzy mechanical bull where people stood in line for a chance to imitate the young men at the autograph tables. The stuffed and padded bull bore a remarkable resemblance to Barney the dinosaur, only brown, not purple, and with horns, and moved in an equally stately and non-threatening manner, but no one lasted eight seconds.

 

And amid the crowds and confusion and blare of country music, autograph seekers waited patiently in lines so long they snaked around the displays and booths and games and out into the bright heat of the June Kansas sun, waiting to have their scraps of paper or hats or T-shirts signed, their pictures taken with the all-American heroes.

 

Rob sat behind a table with a stack of photographs in front of him. It’s a color shot of him leaping onto a bull’s back, totally focused on the bull rope and the hand of the airborne young man hung-up below him. And as each person stepped to the table he turned his full attention to them, focusing on his nameless admirers as he had on the hand of the hung-up rider, signing autographs, chatting, answering questions. Over and over he stood up to pose for pictures, until, in an effort to save his legs for the event that night, he began pulling the women down onto his lap, smiling disarmingly at their husbands and boyfriends, laughing and joking, wishing them well, signing more autographs.

 

 

Kemper arena is a circular building with a tunnel, also circular, that runs under the seats. Sprouting off the tunnel like cogs on a fly-wheel are storage rooms, maintenance rooms, electrical rooms, janitorial rooms, private entrances for athletes, a private bar and restaurant for VIP’s, administrative offices, and, of course, dressing rooms.

 

The riders are in one dressing room, the three bullfighters—and the single clown, also known as the barrel man—in another. It used to be that all four men were referred to as rodeo clowns, all wore garish makeup and ridiculous costumes, and all were responsible for entertaining the crowd as well as protecting the riders. In recent years the two functions have evolved away from each other in the PBR, and now the clown does nothing but entertain, the bullfighters nothing but try to keep the riders alive. A documentary on Rob Smets filmed only a few years ago shows him putting on makeup before going into the arena, but that too has been dropped now. The only hangover from the old days is the loose clothing, but that has a very functional purpose: the chest protector and pelvic padding preclude tight jeans or shirts.

 

In the riders’ dressing room the moods vary widely. Some men sit quietly on benches with mouths as tight as their jeans. Some pray. One young cowboy who had missed the prayer meeting got on the elevator in the hotel praying softly under his breath. He punched the lobby button and finished his prayer before he nodded politely to the other people in the elevator. Now he sits on a bench by himself, lips moving.

 

Some of the riders laugh and joke and roughhouse. Tony Mendes, currently number six in the PBR standings, is loose as a goose, roping people as they pass by. It is an activity that might spark anger if anyone else did it, but Tony’s goofy charm allows him to get away with a lot. It is hard to tell if the joking and horseplay are a result of relaxed confidence or an effort to stimulate that condition.

 

The bullfighters’ dressing room is very different. The barrel man has already dressed and gone off somewhere, and Rob, Dennis Johnson, and Greg Crabtree are the only ones in there, so it’s much quieter, for one thing. There is a good deal of razzing and laughter as they dress, but there is also a good deal of the casual catching up of people who know each other but haven’t been together for awhile. Dennis is working with a broken arm and he is struggling to get his shirt on over the cast. Without being asked, without interrupting the story he is telling, Rob pulls the shirt down for him and keeps on talking and getting himself dressed.

 

All three men are mixing dressing with cursory stretching. All three could benefit from a yoga class. Greg Crabtree, who has the reputation of being the craziest man in the PBR, which is really saying something, lies on the floor in the position known as the plow.

 

Rob stops talking and looks down at him. “Damn, Greg. Doesn’t your wife let you be on top sometimes?” He and Dennis laugh as Greg keeps trying, unsuccessfully, to touch his toes to the floor.

 

“We go after each other in here,” Rob fakes kicking Greg in the backside, “we even get into it sometimes, but if anyone out there goes after one of us, he better be ready to go after all of us.”

 

It is the warrior sentiment, the psychological glue that binds squads and platoons and battalions, the motto of men who only feel truly alive when risking death together. It’s not just talk.

 

A rider got his spur caught in the flank strap in Greensboro, NC earlier this year. Unlike the bull rope, which is wrapped around the bull’s withers and has heavy bells that hang below to make it come loose as soon as the rider releases it, the flank strap is tied on, and the spur must be worked free or the strap either untied or cut. As the rider came off, the flank strap half-hitched around his spur, jerking him underneath the bull. The animal continued to spin, each turn adding another half-hitch. Cowboy boots are designed to allow the rider’s foot to slip easily out for just this reason, but bull riders use a leather strap just above the ankle to keep the boot secure when they grab hold with their spurs during the ride. There was no way the boot could come off or the spur come free.

 

Rob, Greg, and Dennis went instantly after the bull, who kept running, bucking, kicking, spinning. Time and time again the bullfighters were thrown, tossed, knocked down. It all happened in a fistful of seconds as the rider continued to be dragged and stepped on.

 

And then the riders came over the bucking chutes, five, ten, fifteen of them, each man with a knife in his hand to cut the strap, and under their combined weight and strength the bull was finally brought to a halt. The bull had gone from rival athlete to enemy and the entire assemblage of PBR had come together as a single unit to combat him.

 

Rob is wearing a pair of tight-fitting shorts and a T-shirt that go under his pads and uniform. He walks out into the tunnel and starts for the physical therapy room. Located midway between the two dressing rooms, this is the heart of pre-event activity, a steady stream of young men coming in for attention from one of the three therapists. It is stunning how many of these men are riding injured. Ankles are taped, shoulders are taped, ribs, knees, wrists, elbows. Brendon Clark, a young Australian rider coming back from a knee injury, has his entire leg taped from groin to ankle. (It doesn’t help him. Later that night he will be thrown twice and the second time he will hobble out of the arena in obvious pain.)

 

Rob briefly rides a stationary bike to warm up his muscles and then lies on a table as a therapist tries to help him stretch out the hamstring of the leg that was broken. Then the therapist tapes the leg from knee to ankle, and Rob starts back to his dressing room.

 

The circular tunnel is crowded with people: sponsors, press, TV crews, wives, friends, stock contractors, hangers-on, PBR reps, and little knots of remarkably pretty girls. These last are all heartbreakingly young, all blond, all wearing hip-hugging, low-rider jeans that have been spray-painted on, and shirts that leave their arms and midriffs – and as much of their fronts as possible – bare. In the rock music world, they would be called groupies. In the bull riding world, Annie Proulx has called them buckle bunnies.

 

Walking toward Rob around the curve of the tunnel are a man and woman and a little boy. The boy, five or six, wears glasses and has one arm in a blue cast. Rob has an affinity for children, his own, his deceased grandson, any children.

 

“Hey, pal. What’d you do to yourself?”

 

His eyes are beaming benevolently, but the battered face is what it is, attractive but intimidating, and the little boy shrinks back next to his father.

 

The father tries to do the right thing. “Tell him how you broke it.”

 

Rob squats down. “Did you fall down while you were playing ball?”

 

The little boy tries to get between his father’s legs. “Tell him what happened.”

 

“I just got my leg out of a cast.” Rob pats his taped shin. “They sure aren’t any fun.”

 

“Tell him how it happened.”

 

But it’s clear the boy is on the Audible-Speech-Injured-Reserve list.

 

“Well, since we both had broken bones, give me a high-five.”

 

This the little boy is willing to do, cautiously and gently, with his good hand.

 

Rob stands up and the mother speaks for the first time.

 

“Oh, my God!” She is staring at Rob. “Oh, my God. Do you know who this is?” She doesn’t turn her head away from Rob so it is unclear if she is speaking to her husband or her son, but she doesn’t wait for a reply. “It’s Rob Smets! We got to get a photograph. Can we get our picture with you? Oh, my God!”

 

She and her husband take turns photographing each other posing with Rob and their son, and either the little boy is aware of who Rob is or he picks up on his parents’ excitement for as Rob starts to leave the arm in the cast comes up and the fingers wave a farewell. “Thank you.”

 

“You’re welcome, son.”

 

 

The noise in the darkened arena is deafening, visibility almost non-existent. The show starts with pyrotechnics and pounding music, and then the riders walk out one by one in the glare of a spotlight as the announcer calls their names and gives a one-sentence update, this one’s standing in the ratings, that one’s most recent injury, another one’s most famous ride.

 

The young men walk out from their place by the chutes in their black or red PBR shirts and brightly colored chaps festooned with sponsors’ names—Mossy Oak, Ford, Rocky Boots, Jack Daniels, Luchesse, Branson tractors, Enterprise Car Rental, Jim Beam—and as each hears his name he doffs his hat to the crowd. The applause and cheers are constant, but certain names cause a swell in volume: Adriano Moraes, Justin McBride, Tony Mendes, local Missouri rider Matt Bohon, J. W. Hart, Ross Coleman.

 

At the other end of the arena the three bull fighters and the barrel man stand in the gloom, waiting. Greg and Dennis and the barrel man fidget and shift nervously from foot to foot, Greg kicking at the dirt with each shift in weight. Only Rob stands absolutely still, arms hanging loosely by his side, and the contrast of his stillness to their constant motion is compelling, the old gunslinger surrounded by anxious townspeople. He is the last to be introduced and he is the only man of the evening to be introduced as a legend. As he jogs forward in the spotlight beam, the applause and cheers swell as they did for the handful of popular top-ranked riders.

 

The smoke in the air, from the pyrotechnics and a fog machine, and the volume of the announcers voice and the music—an eclectic selection, ranging from Charlie Daniels to Pink Floyd—and the excitement of the crowd, lend a surreal atmosphere to the event, so that it is possible to imagine almost anything occurring in the sand of the arena: a rock concert, a magic act, a sporting event, a human sacrifice.

 

Behind the platform where the riders are grouped are the chutes where the bulls wait. They are magnificent beasts, all massive, sculpted muscle, reminiscent of some of the more powerful top heavyweight boxers of a few generations ago, Ken Norton, or Ernie Shavers, a young George Foreman.

 

Looking down on the bulls from the stands it is hard to appreciate the sheer, staggering size of them. From the stands, their size only becomes apparent when one of them gets near the safety man. He is mounted on a rangy, sixteen-hand sorrel, but every time a bull comes near him his horse suddenly looks like an emaciated Welsh cob. It’s like putting a Hummer next to a Mini Cooper.

 

Walking around the chutes gives an immediate, visceral appreciation of their size. They are colossal, mythological, Jungian symbols of some nightmare archetype.

 

In size. In temperament, standing placidly and patiently in the holding pens, they are very docile, gazing through the bars with dull curiosity. One of the riders drapes his chaps over the top rail of a holding pen and the Brahma raises his head to smell them attentively. The chaps are fringed and after smelling them for several seconds the bull extends a long pale tongue and samples the fringe. His eyes are bulbous and ringed with white, making him look like an apoplectic bullfrog, but after deciding the chaps are not edible he goes back to his serene contemplation of the flow of traffic around him. A foot-long string of slobber hangs from his mouth.

 

The bull in the pen next to him paws impatiently at the ground sending a spray of sand over the waiting riders, the TV crew, the paramedics, a PBR official, and some buckle bunnies who have made their way down here. The buckle bunnies squeal and bend over to shake the dirt out of their hair and everybody watches them appreciatively.

 

The bulls are moved from pen to pen and ever closer to the bucking chutes by a system of inter-connecting pens and gates no less intricate and no less mystifying than the labyrinth Daedalus designed. The two men who move the bulls are respectful of the animals, but not unduly cautious. Of the sixty waiting bulls, only three cause the men to scramble up the rails of the pens. Three alert, aggressive bulls that move quickly and unpredictably, heads swinging from side to side as if looking for someone or something to fight, turning unexpectedly back to the pen they just came out of, or spinning around to catch the men before they can clamber to safety.

 

But those three are the exception. The rest are true to Hemingway’s assessment: the pacifying effect of the herd instinct makes them safe in numbers. Alone, out in the arena, they will become dangerous.

 

In the arena the three bullfighters are very busy. Rider after rider gets thrown, a string of nine unsuccessful rides. But even successful rides keep the bullfighters busy. After the eight-second buzzer the cowboy may use the momentum of the next buck to spring to the ground, but the bull, alone and aggressive, is completely unpredictable. He may continue bucking or he may stop. He may charge the first person he sees or he may simply run back to the gate that leads back to the pens. He may fixate on a fallen rider or he may swing erratically from bullfighter to rider to another bullfighter. He may run down to the far end of the arena where the safety man, on his suddenly small horse, will try to get a rope on him. He may just run around randomly near the chutes.

 

The bullfighters are responsible for distracting him and trying to guide him back toward the pens, and until the gate swings shut behind him anything can happen.

 

One rider gets his spur caught in the flank rope. The bull runs in a circle, dragging the rider face down and terrifyingly close to the massive pounding hooves of the hind legs. There is an audible intake of breath, almost a groan, from the crowd. The three bullfighters close in on the bull and he swings suddenly to face one of them. The dragged rider becomes airborne as the bull turns; his weight is so insignificant relative to the bull’s strength that it is very possible the bull is completely unaware of his presence. Then suddenly all three bullfighters are on the bull. Dennis has grabbed the horns, Greg the tail, and Rob is on the animal’s back trying to release the spur from the flank strap.

 

That frozen vignette, less than a second, almost a duplicate of the picture Rob autographs for fans, illustrates the puniness and futility of their efforts. If the bull bucks, Rob will be thrown. If the bull hooks with his head, Dennis will be injured. If the bull kicks, Greg might very well be killed. Yet for no reason, the bull suddenly stops. A second later the rider is freed, the bullfighters move away, the bull gallops back to the open gate, and the crowd breathes again.

 

Mike Schwiebert, applauding with the rest of the audience, shakes his head. “Sometimes it just pays to be lucky.”

 

The next rider is thrown hard and Rob runs between the fallen man and the bull. It is a tried and true tactic to distract the animal and it works now. The bull goes after Rob with its head lowered. Rob runs, feints, and cuts to the right, but the bull catches him and tosses him like a cheese omelet, then swerves to go after Dennis. Rob falls and rolls onto his feet as gracefully as a cat and when he turns there is murder in his eyes. His fists are clenched and everything about his body language says there will be no more running, he will stand and fight. But the bull is already on its way back to the gate.

 

Rob roars and punches the air in rage and frustration. The crowd laughs and applauds. This is part of why they love him so much. He is the ultimate contender. He will never quit. He will go down fighting.

 

In the stands Mike Schwiebert stares down at his friend. “Ten years ago, even five years ago, that bull would never have caught him like that.”

 

Just before the last ride of the night the announcer lets the audience know that Rogerio de Souza Pereira is alright. He has suffered lacerations and a concussion and will be out of action for an indefinite period, but the protective vest saved him from any serious damage when the bull stepped on him. The crowd applauds.

 

A middle-aged woman waves and calls to Rob from the stands. She is wearing a white T-shirt with a picture of kittens wearing bikinis made of hamburger rolls with the caption Beach Buns. She is sitting with a man who appears to be her husband, but she screams mightily.

 

“Rob! Rob! I love you! You’re the greatest!”

 

Rob turns. It is unclear how much he has heard, other than his name, for he looks up at the right section but not at the right row. He raises one hand and smiles, happy, proud, the best there ever was. Then he turns. He will face one more bull tonight. He will shower and go straight to the airport. There is a roping in Reno where he hopes to win a few bucks. The Kamikaze Kid will be back in the office in Dallas next weekend.

Well, sir, I never seen nothing like it, and I been sheriff here twenty-two years, in law enforcement going on thirty-five. Course, this is a small county. Population-wise, I mean. Square miles, I put better than 30,000 on that truck ever year. But never seen nothing like it. Blood ever where. On the walls, on the damn ceiling. I guess that’s what started me thinking. I mean, how dead do you have to kill someone? I could understand the daddy. You could tell he tried to protect his wife and daughter, could see where he kept trying to crawl forward, so I could understand that. But the wife and daughter. How many damn bullets you need? Only time you see that many bullets these days is with them gang bangers. Drugs. You know. But this old boy was a businessman, semi-retired. Couple of car dealerships down in the city, richer than hell, but squeaky clean. No damn drugs. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

 

So I guess the blood was the first thing I noticed. There was other stuff. Flies, them little black beetles I don’t know the name of, the smell, bodies all swollen up and ever thing. None of it the kind of stuff you tell to the papers. None of it the kind of stuff to make you think anything other than what you was supposed to think. But see, that’s where it didn’t seem right.

 

House was trashed, and I right away wondered about that. Killing looked like gang bangers, but gang bangers means drugs, and like I said, this old boy didn’t have nothing to do with no drugs. So if it was gang bangers, what the hell they be looking for in a fancy vacation house like that way out in the boonies?

 

And then there was the way the house was trashed. Thirty-five years you get a feel for this stuff. It didn’t look like anybody been looking for anything. It looked like somebody wanted me to think somebody been looking for something. And that didn’t fit with the blood.

 

Think about it. It ain’t drugs. So let’s say somebody breaks in to steal something. Family comes home, surprises them. You just kill them and get the hell out of there. Old man had fourteen bullets in him. Wife had five. Sister had seven. That ain’t no run-of-the-mill, garden-variety, three-for-a-dollar burglar. That’s a hell of a lot of damn fire power. Why?

 

We don’t have no forensics up here. I had to call down to the city and that left me with a lot of time to look around and think while I was waiting on them. And looking around, it didn’t seem to me like nothing was stolen. Usually there’s something pretty obvious, but not here. Just everything torn apart to look like something was stolen. So I start thinking. And of course the first thing I think with all them bullets is that it’s personal. Personal means either family or some pretty damn close business associate.

 

Well, when them city boys get there it’s old Frank Bell. I known Frank long as I been sheriff, maybe more, think real high of him. Course, you always do think high of anybody thinks high of you. Shows they got good judgment, don’t it? So I tell him what all I’m thinking and we decide to kind of divide it up. I know the kid, the son, arrested his sorry ass couple, three times, running that fancy sports car around like he was king of the road, so I take him as the most logical family choice. Hell, only choice. Only close family member. Frank’s down there in the city, so he takes the business end.

 

Kid’s in college, other side of the state. I track him down, but I don’t call him. I decide to drive over, tell him face to face. Takes about four hours, so it’s going on evening by the time I get there. I walk into his dorm, knock on the door, and right away I know I’m onto something, cause he ain’t surprised to see me one little bit.

 

I tell him what all’s happened. You got to be real careful passing judgment on people, how they react to this sort of thing. I seen a big old boy, rancher, former Green Beret, Viet Nam and everything, tougher than hell, seen his knees give out and he just fell down flat on the floor bawling. And on the other side, I seen a gal, little bitty blue-haired school teacher, go into shock and get so calm and practical it gave me goose bumps. So you can’t tell how people is going to react. But same time, thirty-five years, you get a feel for what’s real and what ain’t. A dog can smell fear on a man. Maybe a man can smell lies on another man.

 

And when I drive him on up there to the house, I know I’m right. He just goes walking through there talking about money, worrying about who all’s going to pay for the damage where them forensics boys dug the bullets out of the walls, cut out chunks of the carpet, that sort of thing. He stepped right over the blood where his mother and sister was laying and barely even glanced down. Stepped right over.

 

So I know.

 

Problem is he’s got an alibi. With a bunch a kids at a party the night his family got killed. Fact, he took one of them girls back to his dorm room and they spent the night together.

 

I can’t tell you what that did to me. I understand you got to just look at the evidence, let the evidence tell you what’s right and what’s wrong. But call it what you want, instinct or hunch or intuition or thirty-five years experience, you get a feel, and to think that boy was in bed with a girl while he knew his parents and sister was being murdered….

 

Cause he couldn’t of done it hisself, no way. But I knew he was involved.

 

Frank found out pretty quick it wasn’t no business thing, so we teamed up. We checked out all the kid’s friends there in college, and they was pretty much all exactly what you’d expect, bunch of affluent kids, athletes mostly, no records, nothing unusual. All of them pretty much alike. One exception.

 

Kid named Myron stood out like a gouty toe. All them other kids is from well-to-do families, some rich, some just middle-class, but none of them hurting. Myron’s on total scholarship, no daddy, mama on disability pension, and he works in the kitchen, plus he’s got an outside job doing custom metal work for some fancy motorcycle shop. He ain’t into motorcycles. Just good with his hands.

 

All the other friends is into some kind of sports. Myron ain’t. All the other friends is kind of average students. Myron’s running straight A’s and looks to be that laude, Phi Beta stuff when he graduates. All the other friends kind of hang out together. Myron’s a loner. All the other friends look kind of like the damn kid, clean cut, short hair, button-down shirts. Myron’s got hair down to his shoulders and wears baggies. All the other friends is straight shooters with a DUI about the worst thing on the record. Myron’s had some scrapes with the law. Nothing big time, but he knows what the inside of juvy looks like. Most important, Myron’s the only name the kid doesn’t give us when we ask about his friends, but he’s the guy all the friends say the kid hangs out with. So we start looking.

 

Well, hell, it ain’t hard at all. The kid’s one of them spoiled rich kids, always had ever damn thing in the world he wanted. That BMW he drives ain’t even the one I arrested him in, speeding up here. He wrecked that one and Daddy bought him another to replace it. Didn’t tan his hide. Just bought him a new one.

 

So of course a kid like that got his own cell phone, had it since junior high. But when me and Frank start doing surveillance, we find out the kid’s making phone calls from a pay phone pretty regular. Makes a quick call, punches in some numbers, hangs up, sits and waits. Always, no more than ten minutes go by, usually less, pay phone rings. Well, you don’t have to be no laude Phi Beta college graduate and all to know what’s going on, so we get the records from the phone company. Number he’s dialing is a pager. We get that number, we have a pager made identical, so now we get paged ever time Myron gets paged. Who else you think it was?

 

Problem is, kid is smart. Never calls from the same phone twice, so it takes us a while to get a tap, and even when we get a tap there ain’t no more conversation than you could have with your cat.  But Myron makes reference to some three stooges job, he calls it, and he makes reference to money.

 

Bank records show the kid’s pulling out money pretty regular, $500 here, $1000 there. And by golly, what a surprising coincidence. That Myron fella is depositing $500 here, $1000 there.

 

About that money. I talked to a cousin who was at the reading of the will. Kid inherited seventeen million dollars. But, the way it was left, he couldn’t touch the principal until he turned thirty. Cousin was shocked by the kid’s reaction. Threw your basic tantrum, wanted to know why the hell his daddy would do that, tie that money up like that, pounded his fist on the lawyer’s desk and all. Strange thing from a kid his whole family just been butchered. Remember them reporters and that Deep Throat fella back when Nixon was in office? Follow the money.

 

Well, that’s where she sets. We know damn good and well what happened, but knowing and proving is two different things. So we keep watching and listening and waiting.

 

One night we’re listening, me and Frank, and Myron says to the kid something about me tailing him. That kind of threw me. Myron’s even smarter than I thought. But then the kid says, If all you got to worry about is some stupid, fat, old, red-necked cowboy following you around, then we’re in good shape.

 

Something like that. I won’t say it ain’t all true, but I won’t say it didn’t get under my skin neither. He was such a cocky little you-know-what. My daddy didn’t have no seventeen million dollars. I didn’t go to no college. Hell, I didn’t even graduate high school. Just got my GED. But there was a time I was young and pretty as that worthless little piece of crap, and there was a time if it said Blue Boone on the posters you could bet your bottom dollar the stands would be full of girls that night waiting on the bull riding to commence.

 

Well. That was a long time ago.

 

Now, ever now and then, when the kid and Myron is talking, a name comes up, Chong, like that Mexican comedy fella. Problem is, Frank can’t find any Chong anywhere.

 

So we go back and look at their phone records, both them kids, for the year before the murders, and Myron made a couple calls to a motorcycle supply house out of state. That kind of caught my attention. He just does metal work for the shop. He don’t order anything for them, and he ain’t a motorcycle guy. And if he did order something for them, he wouldn’t do it on his own damn phone. So I check and it turns out this supply house is owned by a Vietnamese fella by the name of Charlie Ng. Check a little more, turns out his nickname is Chong. Check a little more, find out he’s one of them people on a first name basis with the local police in his home town. Check a little more and find out he’s someone the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms is real interested in. Hell of a lot of guns passing through his hands.

 

So me and Frank, we drive over there, have a little conversation with Mr. Ng. Forensics says it was a nine millimeter gun. Well, there ain’t a whole lot of nine millimeters around hold twenty-five shots or more, and by golly, what do you know? Seems Mr. Ng bought one of them semi-auto grease guns not too long before them murders.

 

Where is it? He don’t know. Don’t he have it? He can’t find it. Well, me and Frank and the BATF, we’ll be real happy to help him search his place of business, his home, his momma-san’s home, the home of ever body he ever done business with his whole life. Fact, we’ll be real happy to turn his whole life inside out and upside down. Oh, he just remembered. That particular gun was stole right out of his office not long after he took delivery of it. Never even had a chance to fire it.

 

I tell him his state’s got a law says you got to report a stolen gun, and there ain’t no stolen weapon report on the books, and that looks like a mandatory three to five.

 

All of a sudden, Mr. Ng’s real eager to do whatever the hell he has to do to help us. Yes, he sold a nine millimeter to Myron, just before the murders. Matter of fact, Mr. Ng even fired the son-of-a-buck at the local range before he sold it.

 

We go out there to that range and we excavate the whole damn backstop where he shot. We sift out ever damn nine millimeter bullet in there, and we run them under the scope, compare them to the ones we dug out of the walls and the bodies, and by God we got a match.

 

After that it ain’t no big deal. Mr. Ng turns state’s evidence. We confront Myron and in exchange for us dropping the death penalty he tells us ever damn thing about it, how the kid was going to split the seventeen million with him, how the kid told him when the mom and dad and sister’d all be out, how he, Myron that is, wore all new clothes, rubber gloves, spread out a plastic tarp and sat on it waiting for them to come home, how he shot from the tarp, which explained why we couldn’t find no DNA. Told us ever thing. Myron gets life without parole. Kid gets death.

 

Good thing none of them lawyers goes back and checks Mr. Ng’s end of the deal. Cause there ain’t no law says you got to report a stolen firearm. I may be old and fat and red-necked, but I ain’t stupid.

The camp stood in a clearing in the bush, wall tents surrounding a wall-less thatched-roof structure, with a bar and stone fireplace, where meals were both cooked and served. The wall tents added a specious air of genuine, old-fashioned safari, but they were as permanent as the dining room, set up on platforms with grass mats, zebra and impala rugs, tables, bureaus, and cast-iron beds that could only have been moved by Mayflower or Bekins.

The PH was not a laconic, gin-drinking Englishman with cold eyes. He was a stout, displaced Boer as big as Africa and twice as furry. Blond, glossy pelt sprouted from every pore, from his nostrils and ears, a large cinnamon bear in khaki shorts. When the little plane that flew us out into the bush – circling over a small herd of giraffes running in slow-motion – when it finally landed and we climbed stiffly out, disheveled and disoriented, in neither this time zone nor that, he was there at the foot of the stairs, arms thrown wide – “Welcome to Africa!” – his voice rumbling up out of the vast caverns of his belly.

“I am Dietrich Maartens, your PH. This is Jocko.” He waved a huge paw at a sandy-haired, fresh-faced boy standing next to him. “This is Friday,” a tall, delicately-built black man, “my assistants. Come. Staff will bring your bags and guns. Come.”

We climbed into one open Land Rover as staff, four silent black men in khaki jump suits, climbed out of another.

In my tent, unpacking clothes, laying out gear, I could hear the other American, his voice booming all the way from the far side of the dining area, telling his wife what a damn fine camp this was and what a damn fine safari this was going to be. Young trophy wife, pink and golden, starting to plump, diamond the size of a Peterbuilt headlight on her finger.

First night in camp is always the same: moose in Alaska, deer in Wyoming, safari in Africa, it makes no difference. You spend some time drinking, then eating, then drinking again, feeling out the guides, the other hunters, the whole operation that will be your home for the next week, two weeks, month, whatever.

There were four of us, plus the wife, and I knew before we got to the dinner table that it wasn’t going to be good. The other American was loud in his tent. He was louder after a few drinks at the bar, cruise director, font of wit and wisdom, self-designated entertainer, suddenly belting out part of some Italian opera for the benefit of the other two hunters. I thought the PH might shush him, but the big Boer seemed a little nonplussed, his blond beard opening to show appreciative white teeth at the wit, a deep concurring rumble at the wisdom, and a gape of stunned surprise at the opera.

The other two hunters were an Italian father and son, and at the sound of the aria there in the African bush, they both seemed to suddenly forget the excellent English I had overheard them speaking at the airport. They kept their eyes on their drinks and went right to their tent after dinner.

I went to mine, but the voice followed, filling the camp, the surrounding bush, all of Africa. It was going to be a long hunt.

 

In the morning, after breakfast, we went to a range near the camp to check our rifles. The other American had a custom bolt-action and a double that had been built as a set, with exquisite bulino engraving of zebra and gemsbok on one, cape buffalo and lion on the other. I wanted to ignore him and his guns, but he was too loud and the guns were too beautiful to be ignored. And he knew how to use them.

When we were sighted in, the father and son took off with Friday and two trackers in one Land Rover. Dietrich signaled to me to climb in with him and the other American. And the trophy wife.

Seated up front, in a chair welded onto the front of the vehicle, was our tracker. His name had a lot of glottal stops and vowels in it, and in spite of the temperature, already hot and getting hotter, he wore a blue woolen watch cap and a woolen surplus German Army greatcoat over his khaki jump suit. A flatbed with three more black men followed us, two of them standing up in the back, watching for game.

The other American immediately began a lecture, his voice rising easily above the sound of the engine.

“You know, of course, the best trackers in the world are the Bushmen in the Kalahari. Much better than these guys. And they don’t ride in the vehicle. No sir! They run alongside watching for tracks as they run, and they can go all day long, day after day. If you could ever get one of them to compete in a marathon, they’d win it hands down. The Ethiopians and Kenyans would get left in the dust, but of course those Bushmen don’t have any competitive spirit in them at all. They’re too goddamned lazy. They just do what they have to do to stay alive and that’s it. But they can track. And that Kalahari desert is hard to track in. I mean hard, literally. You’ve hunted the Kalahari, of course, haven’t you?”

He slapped me jovially on the shoulder.

“No.”

“Oh. I thought a guy like you would have hunted there. Well, you think of the desert being sandy, right? But it isn’t. It’s hard-packed and rocky, and when you do find a place where it is sandy, a dry wash, something like that, it’s so dry that the sand just sort of spreads out under your feet, so it’s impossible to track anything. But those goddamn Bushmen can track an angel across the head of a pin. Amazing. Much better than these guys.

Since our tracker with the unpronounceable name and wool coat had said, audibly and clearly, “Hello, Mister,” when Dietrich had introduced him, I wondered what he made of this unflattering comparison. I didn’t find out. He never spoke again or even looked at us.

“I was hunting lion there one time…”

It was a long story about how his shooting prowess had saved the life of a less than competent PH from an attacking lion.

But, damn it, he could shoot. While I only had five animals on my tag – all I could afford – he apparently had a permit for everything that walked or crawled in that part of Africa. It seemed as if every few miles one of the staff would spot a herd of something the other American had on his license and off they would go while the trophy wife and I cooled our heels and drank copious amounts of water until we heard the inevitable shot and the staff would bring another body back, throwing it onto the bed of the truck.

I made the mistake of trying to talk to the trophy, but it was like talking to cotton candy. Intelligent cotton candy. She was no fool, but other than a mild desire to upend her, there was nothing about her that didn’t make me yawn until my jaw creaked. They were having their house redone and the decorator just didn’t understand the importance of blending English floral chintz with trophies. They had done it in their condo in Telluride and it worked beautifully. Not only worked, it was absolutely necessary to keep from being overwhelmed by the raw masculinity of all those trophies, which are beautiful, of course, but just so very masculine.

I idly contemplated overwhelming her with my own raw masculinity, but some of the staff had been left behind, presumably to ensure nothing of the kind occurred.

 

I put up with this for three days and then I took Dietrich aside.

“That’s it. Either I go off with Friday or Jocko or I’m going to add an obnoxious American billionaire to my hunting tag. I can’t take this anymore.”

“What can I do? It is two hunters for each guide. If I send you off with Friday, this is not fair to Mr. Rovarino and his son.”

“Dietrich, this is probably the only safari I’ll ever be able to afford. I came here to hunt and to have a good time. I’m not having a good time.”

“But just yesterday you took a wonderful red hartebeest, and the day before…”

“It’s not the hunting, Dietrich. It’s the company. It’s not going to look good on your record if I shoot this pompous ass. Let me go out with Jocko.”

“Oh, Jocko is only nineteen. He is only apprentice. He does not yet have full license. It is illegal.”

“Who the hell is going to know? I’m not going to tell anyone. You’re not going to tell anyone. The only way to get here is by plane. In the highly unlikely event that the government sends someone out to check on us, we’re going to have a little warning as he lands his plane.”

The next morning Jocko and I drove off by ourselves, no staff, no tracker, a cooler full of water and sandwiches in the back of a topless, army-green flatbed truck, and the sounds of Figaro echoing in our ears.

“Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, FiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigarOOOO!”

I don’t like opera. I hate it at breakfast.

The only high-dollar animal I had on my tag was greater kudu. We hadn’t seen any sign of kudu in three days, but now, as if getting the hell away from the diva had changed my luck, we spotted a good one before lunch, over 50 inches, Jocko said. We sat in the truck and glassed him, half-a-mile off, standing in the sparse shade of some stunted, scrubby little tree.

“This will not be easy.” Jocko glanced briefly at me at me and went back to his binoculars. “Do you feel wind?”

I did. I felt the wind in my left ear. I felt the wind in my right ear. I felt it on the back of my neck.

“I don’t care about easy. This is what I came for. Let’s go have some fun.”

For a moment he sat, still glassing the kudu. Then he grinned and grabbed his rifle.

“Yes. We go have fun.”

Well, we didn’t get that kudu, but we did enjoy ourselves. The swirling wind kept pushing him out in front of us, but Jocko kept on him. It was an impressive job. He would point out tracks with the barrel of his Mannlicher-Schoenauer, a beautiful, battered pre-war 10.75X68mm I had spent the morning lusting over, and only then could I make out the prints. I wouldn’t have seen any of them if he hadn’t pointed them out.

At other times he would seem to stop tracking entirely and would walk very rapidly, 50 or 60 yards to some spot picked at random, as far as I could tell, and always there would be a track.

We went on like that all day. Three times we saw the kudu, a glimpse in the distance, a vague movement of gray in the scrub, gone as soon as it was noticed, until finally, just before dark, we stumbled onto a really good warthog and I took him as consolation prize. It was a hell of a good day.

The other American was celebrating heavily when we got back. He had shot a Cape Buffalo, a fine one that would put him high up in the record books, and he was louder than ever, holding forth at the bar and ordering drinks for everyone as if it were all going on his personal bill. After we moved to the table, while we were eating, the trophy put her hand – the one with the diamond – on his shoulder and purred, “Tell them how you shot it, honey.”

I could have killed her.

It was an interminable tale. He was already drunk and the more he drank the louder he got. Part way through the saga he got unsteadily to his feet to act out how he and Dietrich had stalked up on the buff – that was what he called it – slipping up to within twenty yards…

I saw Dietrich’s mouth open, but he must have thought better of it for he closed it again.

…but then the treacherous wind had swirled and the buff had spun to face them.

“Could tell the bastard was about to charge. Tell you something,” he was addressing all of us, the whole group, the quiet elderly black man in a spotless white shirt who waited on us, the cook on the far side of the building, the unseen staff, enthralled throngs in distant lands, “it takes brass ones, baby, to stand your ground when a buff’s about to charge.”

He grabbed his crotch. He actually grabbed his crotch in case no one understood which brass ones he was referring to.

Dietrich finally protested. “No, no, I don’t think he was going to charge. He was trying to locate…”

“Going to charge! He was going to charge, Dieter. When you’ve taken as many buff as I have, you’ll know, you’ll learn to recognize the whatdoyoucallits, signs.”

Dietrich’s eyebrows went up, like two small blond dogs jumping into the air, and he opened his mouth again, but then he just put food in it.

“Had the Rigby double with me – 470 Nitro Express, 500-grain bullet; handle anything, anything – stepped in front of old Dieter here …” He paused, his face flushed and furious. “…and… I… just… stood there. Stood there and looked the bastard right in the eyes.”

Well, it was unfortunate, but just at that moment I happened to look Jocko right in the eyes and both of us instantly became completely hysterical. He handled it better than I did. I had just taken a mouthful of rice which went everywhere, including up my nose, and I used that as a cover, staggering out into the cool night air, choking, gasping, howling, coughing. I choked and coughed my way back to my tent, put the pillow over my head and laughed until my lungs burned and my stomach muscles cramped.

 

Two nights later we were all sitting in the bar after dinner. The other American had missed a very long shot at a sable and either because of that or because he was tired, he was, for once, quiet. The trophy had already gone to bed and the two Italians and Dietrich were talking by the fire. I was nursing a single-malt whisky and a feeling of contentment. I had taken a good impala that afternoon so, except for the kudu, my tag was filled, The weather had warmed and I was enjoying the mild breeze that always seems to come with a full moon, blowing through the dining area, stirring the grass thatching of the roof.

I had swung around on my stool, leaning my back against the bar, when I saw movement in the shadows between two of the wall tents. A moment later Jocko stepped out into the moonlight. He was staring at me. He made a small movement with his head in the direction of the vehicles, then stepped back into the shadows and vanished.

I waited about a minute, then took another sip of whisky and walked out in the direction of my tent. I walked past the tent and circled around behind to the cars.

Jocko was sitting behind the wheel of the open flatbed, the Mannlicher-Schoenauer in the rack.

“Come. I will show you lions. They have made a kill, only a few kilometers away. Come.”

I climbed in. “Why the secrecy?”

“I am only apprentice. It is not allowed. And too, I like better not to have any brass ones come with us.” He grabbed his crotch and grinned at me.

We drove a long way through the bush on one of the rough tracks that meandered out from the camp in all directions. Then, abruptly, for no discernible reason, the bush ended, first on one side of the road, then on the other, opening out into a vast, grassy plain. In the moonlight it looked like another, better world, a golden plain of wheat and infinite possibility you might want to run through forever. We drove on for about a mile and then Jocko swung off the road and into the grass. He stopped the truck, took his rifle out of the rack and jacked a round into the chamber. Then he put it back in the rack and we drove on again.

“That’s a great rifle. Where’d you get it?”

“My father.”

“Oh, is he a professional hunter?”

“No, he is dead. He was farmer in Zimbabwe, but we lost our farm. He was also very good hunter, but only for himself, for my family.”

“Was he the one who taught you how to track?”

“Oh, yes. He was very good, my father.

“And is this what you wanted to do, be a professional hunter?”

“No, I wanted to be farmer like my father, but the government took our land, all the land of the white farmers. There.”

I had never seen lions before outside of a zoo. They were by a small waterhole, a perfectly round pond maybe fifteen feet across with a single tree growing beside it, as if both had been placed there by a landscape designer. Jocko drove right up, stopping thirty yards away.

It was a male and a female, crouched over a kill, a wildebeest, and in the moonlight their bodies, so much larger than I had realized, were the color of rich cream. They kept feeding, the male ignoring us, the female watching as she braced her front feet on the carcass and tore off strips of meat, jerking her head back and up. The sound of the frogs in the pond was deafening, but over it I could hear the wet smacking of the lions eating, the occasional cracking of bone.

A golden plain, a full moon, cream-colored lions feeding in a balmy wind. So, I thought, this is Africa. This is what they all wrote about, Hemingway and Roosevelt and Ruark, moments of paradise like this.

The female had never taken her eyes off us and now she rose suddenly and walked away from us, turning her head to look back over her shoulder as she went out into the grass. She walked away for about a hundred yards and then started to swing around in a large semi-circle on my side of the flatbed, the moonlight reflecting off her, a splash of cream in a field of butter, her face turned, watching us, always watching. When she walked past us I swiveled around in my seat to keep an eye on her. Finally I couldn’t take it any more.

“Jocko, I think we’re about to become the second course in this dinner party.”

He put the truck in reverse and backed up very fast, putting the lioness in front of us again. Then he turned quickly around so that she was on his side and we drove back toward the road, but I kept watching her as long as I could see her.

“My God, Jocko. Thank you. You just made this whole trip. I’ll remember those lions on my death bed.”

“Good. I am glad you saw them. Tomorrow, the male, he will be dead.”

I turned to look at him. “Why?”

“Brass Ones will kill him. He has a lion on his tag.”

“Does Dietrich know where those lions are?”

“No, but I will tell him.”

“Why?”

“It is my job. I would prefer that no one kills this lion. Most of all I would prefer not to have Brass Ones kill him. But this is what he pays for. This is what I am paid for. It is what I must do.”

 

It was my last day of hunting and I was feeling very ambivalent. I wanted to stay forever and go out after animals every day, to see the sudden, surprising variety and richness of Africa for the rest of my life, to tramp across the whole damned continent, shooting my meals as I wanted, discovering places never seen before, dozing at midday in the sparse shade of trees I couldn’t name, spending my nights in wall tents, warming my hands in the first cold of morning over a wood fire, becoming one with the land. Any good place makes you feel that way. Of course, what I wanted had ceased to exist long ago, probably before I was born, and I had a home and wife and children and commitments half a world away.

Jocko had decided to make a last all-out effort to get me my kudu. We left very early, driving out past where we had spotted the 50-incher to an area I hadn’t seen before. We stopped at the top of a low escarpment where the land sloped away into the distance, and we hunkered down in some rocks and glassed for a long time. I could almost trick myself into believing I was deer hunting in Utah or Colorado, and then I would see the heads of giraffes moving among the tops of distant trees, or a herd of wildebeest raising a cloud of dust, and once, a cow eland within easy rifle range.

What we didn’t see was kudu. We hunted hard, dropping down the escarpment into the open bush below and working our way carefully along the lower edge for a long distance, to where the ridge above us trailed off into nothingness. Then we hunted our way back to the truck and drove on, driving down into the lower plain and hunting on foot. We did this all day, driving, glassing, hunting, driving on again.

In the late afternoon we turned around and began to hunt our way back. We were driving along a rough track that Jocko seemed to know. He was telling me a funny story about his father and a pet zebra that belonged to a neighbor and terrorized everyone. We were laughing, we were both laughing, when he suddenly braked hard and backed up, looking off to his side.

“What is it? What do you see?”

“A truck has driven down here.” He pointed off into the bush.

Just like the kudu, once he pointed it out, I could see it, tracks of tires in the grass, curving away and down into the trees.

“Probably Dietrich. Or Friday. Did they hunt up here?”

He shook his head. “No one has hunted here.” He put the truck in gear and started forward. Then he stopped. “No. I go look.”

He backed up again and then drove slowly forward, putting the truck into the old tracks.

We dropped down into a shallow depression where the bush was thicker. When we had gone about a hundred yards the tracks curved sharply to the left and we drove into a crudely cut clearing.

At first I didn’t know what I was seeing. My eyes saw it, but my brain couldn’t compute what it saw. I thought for a moment that it might be where they, the safari company, processed all their animals, a sort of outdoor abattoir. First I saw the giraffe’s legs, five of them, wedged in the crotches of trees. I looked for the missing legs and saw parts of carcasses hung from the trees, wildebeest and hartebeest, others rotted beyond recognition. Hides and fragments of hides had been tossed casually into the branches. Impala legs littered the ground, hundreds of them, bones of other animals I couldn’t identify, a fresh kudu hide, lying amid Coke cans and beer bottles. Dried blood and shreds of meat too small to be bothered with were everywhere, as if the animals had been torn apart in some kind of monstrous orgiastic frenzy.

“What the hell is this?” I think I already knew, but my mouth still said the words. “What does this mean?”

For a long time he said nothing. Finally he exhaled, as if he had been holding his breath against the stench. “It means I come back tonight with my rifle.”

I turned to look at him. He looked old, older than any nineteen-year old should ever look, and his face was gray.

“I don’t understand, Jocko. Who did this?”

“Poachers.” His voice was small and distant.

We sat and looked. I tried to calculate how many animals this represented, to identify different species, to imagine the men who could have done this and how they differed from me.

“Was this for food? Are these people just trying to eat?”

At first he didn’t answer. Then he pointed to some of the rotting carcasses.

“They have no heads. You see? The heads have been cut off for trophy. Everything we shoot here, our hunters shoot, we give that food to local people. Everything. This is for money.”

I swung my legs over the side of the truck, but he grabbed my arm.

“No! No tracks. And do not speak of this when we get back. I will tell Dietrich, but no one must know. Otherwise…” He made a gesture with his hand. “Gone.”

He put the truck in reverse and backed carefully out, staying in the same tracks we had driven in on.

We didn’t even make a pretence of hunting our way back. We drove back in silence, and when we parked just outside the camp he sat, looking ahead, almost as if he were still driving.

“Do you have to go back there tonight? With your rifle, I mean.”

“We are the law out here. We must enforce the law. I will go back with my rifle.” He got out and turned to look at me. His color was better, but he still looked ancient and very tired. “I am sorry we do not get you a kudu.”

 

The other American got his lion. They had some kind of celebratory ritual, chanting and dancing, carrying him in a chair around the bonfire in the center of camp, but it all looked very silly and very choreographed to me, like one of those Revolutionary War reenactments with people pretending to be shot.

After they put him down he bellowed at me to come see his lion, but I told him I had already seen it. I didn’t tell him I had seen it before he had.

 

The next morning Dietrich and Friday said goodbye to me before they left for the day’s hunting. I gave Dietrich a tip for Jocko, but then, as one of the staff drove me out to the little runway, we passed him driving in to camp in the green flatbed. I waved to him as we passed each other, but he didn’t turn his head to look at me. There was something on the bed of the truck, covered with a tarp, and I wondered where he would take that load.

 

There were an unknown number of strays hidden in the canyons and higher pastures along the northern end of the ranch. The Foreman and the Oldest Hand were sitting their horses in the shade of a sycamore waiting for the crew to spread out when the newest member rode back to them. He was a stocky young man from out of state and this was his first day on the ranch.

“You told me when I get up to the top of that mountain to head east or west?”

He turned his head and shot a stream of tobacco juice at a rock. “Bull’s-eye.”

“I told you to go east first,” the Foreman said, “until you come to the fence line, then turn around and head back west with any cows you find till you get to that year-round stream. Then bring your cows down along that. We’ll be coming down the valley about then and we’ll take them all to the chutes in a herd.”

“Gotcha.” He shot another stream at the rock. “Missed. Damn.” He turned his horse and trotted off through the sage.

The Oldest Hand shook his head. “Disgusting.”

He was carefully rolling a cigarette with one hand and the Foreman stared at him.

“I don’t see how chewing is that much more disgusting than smoking.”

The Oldest Hand licked his paper. “I wasn’t talking about his chewing. I was talking about his association-tree saddle and his nylon rope and that taco-brimmed hat. He looks like a damned Texan. That’s disgusting.” He lit his cigarette and inhaled deeply. “Tobacco, in any form, is one of those things the Good Lord gave us to make us better men.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Tobacco makes a man patient and tolerant and easy going, and without it there’d probably be a whole lot more violence in this old world.”

The Foreman snorted. “Sounds like it makes a man senile too.”

The Oldest Hand looked at him with pity. “That’s just the childlike ignorance in you talking. Didn’t I ever tell you about the time I tried to quit smoking?”

“If you did, I was able to forget it.”

“Well then, I’ll tell you again, ‘cause there’s an important lesson to be learned.”

 

Alice and me (the Oldest Hand said) we’d just met, and I was courting her pretty hard and pretty serious. In fact, I was trying ever damn thing in the world I could think of to get a reata on her and wasn’t having no damn success at all. I was riding for the Double J back in those days, and I got into a routine of getting back to headquarters, cleaning up, and going straight over to Alice’s place. I’d tell her how pretty she was and how much I loved her and how I
couldn’t possibly live without her and would she marry me, and she’d laugh at me and tell me no, and I’d say, oh okay, and the next night we’d do it all over again. It was real comfortable and all like that, but I was starting to get a
little impatient. I knew she liked me so finally, after a couple of months, I asked just exactly why she wouldn’t marry me.

“Daddy won’t let me. He says you have all the bad traits of my brothers and none of the good traits.”

Alice was only seventeen and still living at home with her folks and her two brothers. Her daddy was the local preacher man, one of them hell-fire and brimstone types. He was built along the lines of an Angus bull and when he’d
get worked up and start pounding the pulpit the whole damned church would rock on its foundations.

Her two brothers were built just like their daddy, but that’s where it ended. It’s a funny thing how that happens in preachers’ families. The wildest kid in town is always the preacher’s son. Who gets arrested for drunk and disorderly ever Saturday night regular as sunup? Preacher’s kid. Who gets into a fight ever time he gets liquored up? Preacher’s kid. And who’s dumb enough to try and duke it out with the sheriff ever time he gets arrested? Preacher’s kid.

That’s just how it was at Alice’s. Her daddy was a teetotaler. Them two boys was busting up a bar ever Saturday night. Her daddy thought smoking was the devil’s invention. Them two boys only took the cigarettes out their mouths when they was shaving and maybe not even then. Her daddy was a regular model of morality. Them two boys could find their way around Madame Louise’s social club blindfolded. In fact, when Alice told me what her daddy said it kind of left me speechless, ‘cause I couldn’t think of one damn single good trait them boys might have. They was always going after me ever time I went to the house, laughing at me and making fun of me on account of Alice wouldn’t marry me and all, but I made up my mind early on that I wouldn’t let them get under my skin no matter what they said, ‘cause I wasn’t going to do nothing that might turn Alice against me, and I wasn’t going to do nothing to give her Daddy any excuses to run me off the place. So that’s where things stood.

Well, I went to studying on it. It was in the early summer and we was moving a pretty big herd up into the mountains and that gives a man plenty of time to think. I was riding old Freckles back then, best damned horse I ever had, the kind of horse I could of just about sent him out with the herd all by himself and stayed in bed. I dropped the reins and started to roll myself a cigarette to help the thinking process. It’s a well-known, well-documented-and-calcified
scientific fact that smoking stimulates the brain, and by golly, it worked just like a damn charm this time.

My thinking went kind of like this: Alice wouldn’t marry me because her daddy wouldn’t allow it. Her daddy wouldn’t allow it because he said I had all of the bad traits of them two boys and none of the good traits. So what I had to do was list all the traits of them two boys, good and bad, and then figure out which ones her daddy might think I had or didn’t have, and then start working on them, dropping some and adding others. You follow my thinking so far?

Okay. I pulled out my little tally book and a pencil and I made two columns and it sort of looked like this:

Alice’s
Brothers
Good Traits:

 

 

 

Bad Traits:

Drinking
Fighting
Whoring
Cursing
Cheating
Stealing
Fat
Lazy
Ugly
Smoking

Well, of course that made my job a whole lot easier on account of I didn’t have to waste a bunch of my time figuring out which good traits to work on, so I set about studying the bad list.

Drinking. Well, I do like to have a little chat with Mr. Jack Daniels in the evening after the work is done, but I don’t usually ever have more than one, and at that time I wasn’t even doing that on account of trying to make a good impression on Alice’s daddy and all.

Fighting. Ever now and then a man runs across someone who just naturally needs to have his head thumped, but other than Alice’s brothers I hadn’t met anyone like that in a pretty long time, and like I said, I was trying real hard to ignore them so as not to give her daddy any excuse for running me off.

Whoring. I’m not going to say I hadn’t never been to Madame Louise’s, but with Alice on my mind, I couldn’t even think about another girl, so that was out.

Cursing. I’ve always prided on myself on not using no damned strong language, so she was out too.

Cheating. I don’t even cheat myself at solitaire, so that wasn’t it.

Stealing. Other than girls’ hearts, I never stole a damn thing in my life.

Fat. I didn’t weigh a pound more or a pound less back then than I do today. Still wear a 32-inch waist.

Lazy. I starting putting in an eight-hour day soon as I was old enough to go out on a horse by myself, and I shifted up to working full-time soon as I graduated high school.

Ugly. Well, of course it don’t do for a man to brag on himself, so I’ll just say my family has always been known for its good looks.

Then I got to smoking. Tell you the truth, I almost hadn’t even put her down on the list. The only reason I did was on account of I knew the old man didn’t approve of it, so I figured he might have some unnatural prejudice. But the more I thought about it, the more I figured that had to be it. That had to be the whole damned reason behind her daddy’s dislike for me.

I took my pack of tobacco and papers out and looked at it. I thought about that first cigarette in the morning with your coffee, and I thought about that last one at night as you’re sipping on your bourbon. And then I thought about Alice.

Well son, I’m not going to lie to you. I felt pretty much the way a man does who has to choose which one of his kids he’s going to throw out in the snow ‘cause there ain’t enough food for the winter and the wolves is howling outside the door. But I dropped that pack, tobacco and papers and matches and all, right into a cow patty and kept on riding.

And a funny thing happened. I didn’t know it back then, but there are three separate stages a man goes through when he quits smoking.

The first stage is kind of hard to describe, but I guess it’s sort of the way Saint Paul must of felt in the Bible when Jesus gave him all that trouble with his eyes and then that guy in Damascus fixed it and all. I was blind but now can
see. Or maybe that was someone else said that. Anyway, that’s what you feel like. You feel like you just want to go around doing good things and helping people. When we stopped for lunch and I saw old Sam Gingold, who was the
cowboss back then, lighting up, it was all I could do not to rip the cigarette right out of his mouth. The only thing that stopped me was I knew damn well he’d fire me on the spot, and if I didn’t have a job I wasn’t never going to get married.

That night, when I went over to Alice’s, her two brothers was slopping around on the porch, smoking, and they right away started in on me.

“Here comes old Hopeful.”

“Looks like a mangy old hound trying to figure out how to get inside the fence.”

“Say, Hopeful, ain’t you getting discouraged yet?”

“Maybe you should consider becoming a monk, ‘cause you sure ain’t having any luck with the girls.”

But I just thought about Jesus saying in the Bible that we should turn the other cheek, and so I smiled at them and walked on in the house. Their daddy was sitting right there by the door and he shook his head in disgust when he saw me, but I smiled at him too. And by golly, I felt good about it.

And after I’d kissed Alice a little bit I asked her again to marry me and she laughed at me and turned me down again, and instead of feeling frustrated I felt like I could forgive her anything. I almost felt like I’d be satisfied to go on wanting her and getting turned down for the rest of my natural life. I just felt…. Virtuous! That’s the word I was looking for.

The second stage is a little different. You’re drinking that first cup of coffee in the morning and you reach up to your vest pocket and there ain’t nothing there, and the first thing you feel is shock. Then you remember, and it’s like remembering that the person you love most in all the world has died, like maybe your whole damned family and your best horse and your dog have all died. You don’t know what to do with your hands, and you’re so damn depressed all you want to do is go jump off the bridge and end it all, and then you remember that it was the driest winter in twenty years and there ain’t enough water in the river to drown you and the best you could hope for is maybe you’d bust both your legs. So you go and start your day and ever time you reach up to that vest pocket the day gets a little greyer and drearier, like the sun is trying to shine through an old sweat sock, a damned dirty sweat sock that ain’t been washed all season.

And that night you go to see Alice and them two brothers are slopping around in the yard with cigarettes in their mouths, and when they start in on you –

“Yee-haw! Old Hopeful’s back for his nightly refusal.”

“He’s like an old gelding in with a bunch of mares. He knows he’s supposed to do something, but damned if he knows what it is.”

– all you want to do is cry. And when you walk in the house and see her daddy shaking his head the way he does ever night you start thinking maybe there is something wrong with you after all. You’re so damned depressed you don’t even feel like kissing Alice, and when she turns you down again, you actually have to go into the washroom and put cold water on your face before you can look at her.

But it’s the third stage where things get kind of interesting.

I’m pretty confident, having been through it and all, that the third stage is responsible for all of the wars and most of the murders that have ever taken place. I know there’s no mention of it in the Good Book, but I’d be willing to
bet you that Cain was trying to give up smoking and that’s why he was so rough on old Abel. ‘Cause, son, when you’re in the third stage, you just naturally hate the whole damned human race. In fact, there isn’t a single living thing on this earth you wouldn’t happily kill with your hands.

You step outside and your dog wags his tail when he sees you and all you can think is where the hell did you leave your gun. Your horse knickers when you get to the barn and the sound goes through your skull like a masonry drill. You pass someone on the street and they wave and say, “Have a nice day,” and all you want to do is slam them up against the wall and say, “Don’t you dare tell me what kind of a day to have, you miserable son of a bitch!” You keep thinking if you could just kill 14 or 15 people how much better you’d feel.

Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, all them guys? They was just trying to quit smoking.

Well, I made it through the day without killing anyone, mostly on account of I didn’t see anyone all day. And when evening came I didn’t want to go see any ugly half-grown, half-witted girl and her loathsome family of morons, but habit is a strong thing, so I showered and put on some clean clothes and went over there.

Her two brothers was slopping around near the woodpile, making a show of chopping some kindling, and the sight of the cigarettes in their hideous mouths was just more than I could stand.

“Say, Hopeful – ”

That’s all it took. I hit him so hard he was still airborne when I slammed him into the water trough. I was holding him under and had him pretty near drowned when his brother called out.

“Hey!”

That dumb tub of lard was staring at me with his mouth open. He still had the ax, not like he was fixing to use it, but more like he had forgotten he was even holding it, and I ripped that thing out of his hand and if he had been a
fraction slower they would of had to bury him with the ax still in his skull. But he was quick. Both them boys was a whole lot quicker than you would have given them credit for, and the last I saw of them was where the driveway curved heading out to the road, running neck and neck, and I’m telling you, you’d of had to have a horse with pretty damn good speed index to have caught either one of them.

When I walked back to the house Alice and her daddy was both standing on the porch with their mouths open.

“Why young fella,” her daddy says, “I thought you was a man of peace.”

“Shut your trap you big damn fool or I’ll run you right off after them two damned hogs you’re dumb enough to claim as kin.”

“I thought you wanted to marry my daughter.”

“If I wanted to marry that feeble-minded mud fence of yours I’d of done it long before this.”

“Am I to take it you no longer wish to marry my daughter?”

“You can take whatever you want and stick it where the sun don’t shine, and if you don’t like it feel free to step on down here and do something about it.”

I still had the ax in my hand and I was looking forward to using it. In fact, I was already working in my head on a short list of people in town and guys I worked with that I was going to go looking for as soon as I finished up with
the old man, but he did something strange. He turned to Alice and just beamed at her as if this was the finest evening of his entire life. She beamed back at him, and then he turned around and went back inside and I could see him picking up his paper and sitting in his chair by the door.

Well, that so disgusted me I slung the ax out into the pasture and started back toward my truck. But I hadn’t taken two steps when I saw the most beautiful sight I had ever seen in my life. Not Alice, though she came down off the porch and was standing next to me, but a cigarette lying in the dust, still smoking, that one of her fool brothers had dropped.

I picked that cigarette up and brushed the dirt off the wet end and took the longest drag any mortal man has ever taken. It was like I had lungs all the way down to the soles of my feet.

And you know, as soon as I did, the milk of human kindness came rushing into my veins by the quart, by the half-gallon. I looked at Alice and she was smiling up at me like I’d just won the world championship of everything, and it began to cross my mind that maybe I had said and done some things that a beautiful and intelligent and sensitive girl might find a little on the harsh side. After all, there are some girls who might not enjoy seeing their daddy and their brothers killed with an ax. And of course there are some girls who might misunderstand if they heard you calling them a feeble-minded mud fence.

But she was just glowing at me. “You were magnificent,” she said.

“Uh, well, you know, maybe, just maybe, I might of kind of over reacted there just a little bit, but – ”

“No. You were wonderful. Aren’t you going to kiss me?”

“You want me to kiss you?”

“Yes. Oh, yes. And then we need to go in and set a date for the wedding. I thought we could maybe wait until the roses are all in bloom, but not too long.”

“What about your daddy?”

“Oh, Daddy will be happy to marry us anytime.”

“You mean he won’t mind us getting married?”

“Mind? Why, he’ll just be tickled pink. He only objected to you because he thought you were kind of spineless, putting up with my brothers and all. But he said when he saw you trying to drown Cletus and only giving up on the job so you could brain Rufus with the ax, he knew right away he had misjudged you. Kiss me you fool.”

So when you think that we’ve been married going on 45 years, me and Alice, it just goes to show what a good thing tobacco is.