Clair Huffaker - The Cowboy and the Cossack

And his plan worked perfectly. Both Shad and Slim instantly veered in that slightly new direction, and with my legs I turned Buck just a little left to match the angle that it looked like the wolf was going. I had a loop going now, but Jesus the timing was going to be tough. I rode a train once that went sixty miles per hour, and that was kind of breathtaking. But estimating by that, at the rate that wolf was going and Buck was going, we’d pass each other at roughly goddamn near one thousand miles per minute.

At the very last instant, as he was streaking past me on my left, I threw that loop as hard and fast as a rock. From the swift move of my arm, he guessed that something bad was about to maybe happen. He was going too fast to change direction too much or too quickly, but in that split second he suddenly leaped nearly six feet straight up in the air.

My throw must have been terrible, because if he hadn’t leaped like that I’d have missed him by a mile. As it was, I accidentally caught his left hind leg while he was in mid-flight.

He must have weighed over a hundred pounds, and when his flying, lunging weight snapped violently tight on my right hand holding the other end of the rope, it felt like I’d lassoed a speeding mountain.

I hadn’t had time or even thought of taking a dolly around the saddle horn, so the whole force hit me instead of the saddle with Buck’s weight under it. Therefore, I was damnere jerked off onto the ground. I wound up with only my right knee across the saddle, clutching desperately to it with all the muscles in that leg, and for a while my head was so far down it was hitting the tall grass.

I’d have gone off altogether except that, luckily, the rope only stayed on the wolf’s leg for maybe a second. Then it slipped off as the wolf somersaulted down from its six-foot leap. He must have rolled over three or four times before he got his feet back under him again, running.

But that brief time he lost turned the tables against him. Shad and Slim sped past me as I tried to slow and turn Buck. And Shad tossed the first noose over the wolf’s neck while I was turning Buck. Caught, the big black struggled furiously for a moment, leaping against the rope. Then, finding he couldn’t jerk free, he turned and charged defiantly at Shad to do all the damage he could to both Shad and Red.

But Slim’s rope snaked out now, and this second noose snapped tight around the wolf’s neck from the other side, so that he was strung out between the two of them, unable to either attack or get away.

“Boy!” Slim muttered, dollying out a little rope so that the big, thrashing wolf wouldn’t strangle itself. “He surely is a monster.”

We could hear the cowboys, and maybe some of the cossacks, yelling and cheering from off in the distance.

I was rolling up my rope, making loops down from my thumb and around my elbow, and Shad said, “That was some hell of a throw, Levi, leg-catching him right in midair that way.”

I hung the lariat back on my saddle. “I was aimin’ for his neck.”

I guess he knew this in the first place because he just answered with one of those brief half-grins of his.

“Now we got ’im,” Slim said, “what we gonna do with ’im?”

“There’s only one courteous thing to do. We’ll give ’im to Rostov as a token of our affection.”

“Aw, c’mon, Shad,” I said.

“Yeah,” Slim agreed. “I doubt he’d take that as bein’ altogether friendly.”

Shad looked at me. “He told you once about puppies barkin’ and wolves bitin’.”

“Yeah, but—”

“C’mon.” Shad led off, Slim matching his pace so that the still-fighting wolf was dragged forcibly along between them.

As we approached the cossack camp, all of the cowboys from our camp nearby came over to get a better look at the giant wolf, and also to sort of see what was going on.

By now the sun was gone and it was only a short while until dark.

Shad and Slim came to a stop, with me just behind the wolf and a little off to one side.

Rostov stepped toward us, studying the savage-eyed but now motionless wolf.

Then he looked at Shad. “That was an interesting exhibition with your ropes. They’re very effective .”

“We brought this fella over t’ give t’ you,” Shad said quietly. Then he added, “It’s a Montana puppy.”

There was a whole lot being said there, and Rostov understood every word of it. Shad had put him in a tough, touchy spot to get out of.

Yet the way Shad had said it, he wasn’t being quite as mean as it might sound. It was more of a hard kind of a testing where the way a man responds can sometimes make a big difference in your judgment of him.

Right now it was up to Rostov to respond. But just how the hell do you respond upon being presented with a giant, killer wolf as a pet?

He looked at the big wolf and said, “I admire the way he protected the other two with him.”

“Admire!” Crab grunted from where the cowboys had gathered. “I think that’s the bastard that got my arm that night! Only one thing t’ do with that vicious sonofabitch! An’ that’s put a bullet through his head before he bites somebody else’s arm clean off, or tears their throat out!”

Rostov ignored Crab, and now did an amazing and downright terrifying thing, a thing that I’d never dream of doing in a hundred years.

He walked up to where the wolf was still strung out tight between the two lassos. He grabbed Slim’s rope with his left hand about two feet away from those savagely bared fangs and lifted the wolf up onto its hind legs by that rope on its neck. Then, as the wolf thrashed around violently, trying to get its teeth into Rostov anyplace it could, he grabbed it firmly by the neck with his right hand, so that its slashing fangs couldn’t quite get at his arm.

“Slack off your ropes,” he said.

Shad and Slim both gave him slack in their lariats, and he managed somehow to get the nooses quickly off the wolf’s neck with his left hand without losing it.

Then with his powerful right hand still around the wolf’s neck, he lifted it completely off the ground as it snapped and thrashed violently in that iron grip.

It was a damn impressive, and frightening, sight to see.

Holding the wolf up almost at eye level, its fangs flashing only a few inches from his face, he said, “I appreciate your gift, Mr. Northshield. In return I’m going to give this Montana puppy a gift he’ll appreciate too—his freedom.”

With this, he threw the heavy wolf away from him. It landed about six feet from where he stood, whirled and charged away with blinding speed.

On its way out it sped by Mushy Callahan and Mushy leaped aside so fast that he damnere fell over.

Crab, whose arm still wasn’t completely cured, might just possibly have been mad about what Rostov had done, but nobody else was.

Even Shad had a kind of a good look on his face as he watched that big black wolf race off toward the darkening horizon, that one-half of a tail of his sticking straight and level out behind him at the speed he was going.

Rostov turned toward Shad. “I think both gifts that were given were rather interesting, in their own ways.”

Shad nodded briefly, impassively. “They weren’t too bad, Rostov.”

And then, with most everyone somehow feeling sort of good, we rode back to our camp to start supper.

It was two days later that I saw my first Tartars.

Rostov and I were far ahead, as usual, and were approaching the top of a high bluff. I don’t know whether it was out of instinct or because of something he’d seen or heard that I hadn’t, but he pulled up before we were on the skyline.

We dismounted and went up cautiously, finally lying down at the top of the bluff. And ahead of us, maybe two miles away on the flats, were thirty or forty riders that you could just barely see in the distance. Rostov studied them through his little telescope and then, handing the scope grimly to me, he went back down the hill to signal his men behind us to stop.