Clair Huffaker - The Cowboy and the Cossack

Nobody was moving, but there was still a tension and anger among all the men there that you could actually feel in your skin, like hot, stormy weather.

Rostov’s blazing eyes swept over us. “Who started this?”

Shad put his gun away and said flatly, “One a’ my men.”

The fight was over, but if it just got left like that, with the mean and bitter feelings we all had now, there’d be scars of anger on both sides that wouldn’t ever heal. And there was no possible way to say anything, or do anything, that could somehow make things right between our outfit and the cossacks.

Except for one thing.

And that’s the thing that Shad did.

Yuri was just getting up, and he now stepped forward to pick up his fallen saber.

But Shad reached down and picked it up for him. With all of the men watching, he slowly put his left hand out in front of him. Then, without a word, but with all the quiet meaning in the world, he drew the razor-sharp edge of the saber across the back of his own wrist, cutting it so deeply that his blood gushed out and flowed freely.

After that, paying no attention to the bleeding, he tossed the saber slightly into the air with his right hand, caught it by the blade, and offered it back handle first to Yuri.

The saber had drawn blood.

Yuri and Shad looked at each other for a long, stony moment.

Then Yuri finally nodded, understanding, and though his outside expression didn’t change much, you could see that on the inside there was a new and growing respect for our boss. He and all the other cossacks were getting an insight into the caliber of the man that Shad was.

Yuri took his saber and, silently accepting Shad’s blood on the blade, slowly put it back into its scabbard.

And somehow, by a strange magic in that quiet, strong thing that Shad had done, none of us around that spring there felt much like enemies anymore.

No one had to say anything about that sudden kind of a warm feeling Shad had caused. We all just felt it.

I had a hunch Rostov felt it most. He was still sore about the fight, but he was looking at Shad in a slightly different way, his original, hard anger now tempered almost involuntarily by something else. If I’d had to name just what that something else was, I’d have made an educated guess, knowing Rostov, that it was a small, almost begrudging touch of admiration.

Shad then turned and started back to camp, and fifteen minutes later the herd was moving through the early morning sunshine and some faint low-valley mists, on its way north again, toward Khabarovsk.

IN A way, that fight had made us closer. During the next few days, even though we generally camped along streams that ran damnere forever on a roughly east-to-west basis, small tributaries of the Ussuri, our camps at night just somehow managed to get a little nearer, and nobody seemed to mind it a whole lot.

Old Keats used to say that the more men were really men, the more they were like little boys. And sometimes they had to just naturally knock each other down, just to sort of get a general feeling about each other.

In any case, we weren’t quite so much total foreigners, back and forth, as we’d been up until then.

One night I finally got around to telling our outfit about why the cossacks all wore those scarlet-red vests, so that if they were hurt in a rough battle their blood wouldn’t show up so much. And even Dixie didn’t make any fun of that idea.

On the contrary, he said, “That ain’t too bad of a notion, all in all. Half a’ bein’ on top a’ the other guy is just showin’ him you ain’t hurt or scared.”

Shiny Joe looked at his brother, Link, with the kind of a look that would normally require a wink, but between them the understanding was already inbuilt. “You sure did that the other mornin’ in that fracas, Dixie. When that big cossack sergeant was holdin’ your head under the water, you didn’t say one damn thing t’ give him any hint that you were in trouble.”

“That’s very hilarious,” Dixie said. “But the whole damn thing wouldn’t a’ happened except that I was stickin’ up for you two goddamned niggers.”

But that was all in fun, and nobody was in the least bit mad at anybody else.

Rufe, sitting by the fire, tossed a small piece of wood into it. “I said it before, an’ I’ll say it again. They’re both a hasty an’ a heavy-lookin’ bunch, them cossacks.”

Shad was chewing a small wad of tobacco. He shifted it slowly in his mouth, glancing at the cossack camp nearby. “I ain’t about t’ issue you fellas red vests,” he said. “Hopefully you’ll have enough brains not t’ go around gettin’ yourselves hurt in the first place.” His tone of voice was just about as tough as ever.

I couldn’t help but think that Shad was a strange and unusual case. He was sure as hell a kind of an all-around genius in his own ways, and yet on the other hand it wasn’t too difficult for me to picture him standing for a whole long time in a pumpkin patch in Uporaskaya.

Rostov and I spent the next afternoon crossing some almost endless, low rocky hills a mile or so ahead of the herd. He was making it a point to learn every little bit I knew about longhorns, and we’d somehow gotten onto the subject of their coloring.

“There’s an old Western sayin’,” I told him, “that longhorns come, solid or speckled or painted, in every single color of the rainbow.”

He thought about this for a moment. “Purple?”

“Well—” I hesitated. “Some of ’em, sort of—in a way.”

“Green?”

“Well—” He never asked an easy question in his life. “I guess I’ve seen a few of ’em that had kinda, more or less, greenish spots.”

He thought about that for a moment. Then he said, “They are colorful, but I think that old saying is an exaggeration.”

He let it go at that for a while, and we passed over the last, low rocky hills into a vast, level plain of high, waving grass. In the distance far before us there was a jagged range of steep, tough mountains that looked like they’d been shoved up abruptly by God’s fingers on an angry morning.

And, somehow, it was an absolutely magnificent view, with ten million miles of crystal-clear blue sky above it.

Maybe it was that view that kicked me off, but whatever the reason, as we were cantering along through the high grass, I asked Rostov without thinking much about it, “Say, sir, do you believe in God?”

“I beg your pardon?” he said in that faultless English that was so good I was beginning to wonder where the hell he ever learned it. And in his case, it wasn’t American, it was English.

Repeating that kind of dumb question, that I shouldn’t even have asked in the first place, was sort of embarrassing, but I was stuck with it. I said once more, “Do you believe in God?”

We rode on a few strides before he finally answered, “Yes—and no.”

He was looking far ahead, across that huge plain of yellow, gently waving grass, toward the jagged brown mountains and the immensity of cool blue sky above. I didn’t think he was going to say anything more about that, but after a time he said, rather factually, “I believe that people who are devoutly religious, within any specific religion, have no true respect for the ultimate vastness that is God.”

That was surely some kind of an answer, and there was just no way that I could come up with any kind of a reply to it.

And the subject never came up again.

We rode on to where those steep, jagged brown mountains started to slope up, and by then it was getting along toward evening. There wasn’t any water here, but we’d had plenty most every day on the trek so far and were well supplied. So Rostov decided this would be as good a place as any to camp.