Clair Huffaker: The Cowboy and the Cossack

I guess that ocean water must have cooled his nose off pretty fast.

I know damn well that about two minutes later it cooled me off fast. The rest of the remuda and the pack mules followed the longhorns, and when the last big, balky mule got to the sea door, Slim whacked him on the tail with his torch and yelled, “Abandon ship, goddamnit!” And an instant later they were all gone.

“We’re bringin’ up the rear, so carry your torches!” Slim said, swinging up onto Charlie, his calico stud. He went over and when he came up, still holding his torch, he yelled in a strange, choked voice, “Come on in! The water’s fine!”

I got aboard Buck, who was, naturally, a buckskin, and who was as nervous as I was. But when I pushed him toward the edge, he went right on over, out and down without even looking back.

And great, holy God was it cold! It was already kind of cold because we’d all sent our warm jackets on the small boats. But now ten thousand wet, tiny icicles plunged paralyzingly into every pore of every part of my skin, through shirt and pants and even boots. It was colder right then than any time I can remember, even including the time Ma and Pa froze to death around me. Just the shock of it alone was so much I couldn’t even try to get my breathing going for a while.

Slim was a few yards to my right, waving his torch and yelling, steering the cattle in front of us toward the shore. Looking at me he called, “Yell out, Levi! Holler! It’ll start your breath goin’!”

“Yowwwwwww!” I put all my lungs into it.

“Shad was right about it bein’ refreshin’!” Slim called.

I could yell back by now. “Sure takes your mind off drownin’!”

Crab was on my left, holding his torch high. All he could manage through clenched teeth was a loud, chattering “ Jesus !”

“Steer ’em!” Slim bellowed. “Keep pushin’ ’em in!”

And then, in those freezing, heaving black seas, we lost one of the herd. A mud-colored cow with only one horn was about twenty feet ahead of me. For no understandable reason, she suddenly turned around toward me and started swimming back in the other direction. It sounds silly, but for a minute I had the awful feeling that she thought she’d left something behind on the ship. “ Hey! ” I yelled, waving the torch toward her. “Back!”

Her eyes were glazed over, and I don’t think she was even aware of the torch or my shouts. She started to go under, but then swimming frantically she raised her nose up among the rough waves for one last pathetic half of a wheezing breath. And then she sank like a rock.

I dropped my torch and grabbed for her, which was pretty ridiculous, but didn’t seem like it at the time. As the torch sputtered out in the water beside me, I caught one of her soft, water-soaked ears for a brief moment, and then it slipped out of my hand as the cow went down below into the dark, icy sea.

“Let go!” Slim was already bellowing. “You’re pullin’ your horse off balance!”

Somehow, cold and frozen and scared as I was, I was damnere ready to cry. And maybe even did, a little.

That poor damn cow!

I couldn’t quite get all of my broken feelings for her in place. But it was just so sad for her to die alone and helpless out here in this black, terrifying water. So damn sad for her to die like that, way off at the end of the world where she’d sure as hell never asked to come. To die stunned and frozen, and not understanding it at all, in this unknown place, while she was trying blindly and so desperately to somehow struggle back home.

We were probably not in the water much more than half an hour, but it seemed closer to a hundred years of Sundays. Toward the end, up ahead, Purse lost his seat on Vixen somehow. But he managed to grab the saddle, and then the mare’s tail as she went by, and she pulled him in all right. Along the way, Purse didn’t have much chance that night to help a speckled bull. It got its horns caught in a huge bunch of seaweed. And the seaweed came up afterward but the bull didn’t. Natcho’s black Diablo turned over under him and started kicking and thrashing like hell. But Natcho just got out of the way and the two of them swam along onto the beach together.

Finally, with both my hands almost frozen stiff around his reins, Buck’s feet touched ground, and he just walked up through the water to the shore as calmly as if this kind of a cattle drive was an everyday, or every night, experience for him.

We were a little ways away from town here, and Sammy, who had been in the first boat, had already got a giant bonfire started on the beach. There’d been key gear on that first boat to hopefully keep us from freezing solid, including kerosene, and Sammy had poured a lot of that over a big pile of driftwood he’d gathered and struck a match to it.

“My God!” Rufe stuttered, almost falling off Bobtail. “That fire looks like the pot a’ gold at the end a’ the rainbow!”

As we came ashore we all headed straight for it.

Except for the sailors bringing more of our supplies from the boats up onto the beach, Sammy the Kid was the only dry one there. He’d already pounded stakes into the ground near the fire and strung a lariat between them to fix a handy rope hitch for our horses. And now he was keeping himself busy handing out dry shirts and britches and socks to us from our gear so we could change into them, and then passing out our jackets as soon as he could find them. But while he was doing it, he wasn’t looking any of us in the eye too much, and wasn’t saying anything.

He handed Dixie Claybourne’s rawhide jacket to him and Dixie was just barely thawed out enough to say, “How was that boat trip, Sammy?” Dixie had a way of saying things, sometimes, so that you didn’t know if they were as mean as they sounded or not. But Sammy looked like he’d been slapped, and pretty hard at that.

“Well,” Dixie kept on, “was it tough?”

“In case you didn’t know it, Dixie,” Shad said quietly, “we needed one man to take the first boat. And, all things equal, I elected the Kid.”

“Sure.” Dixie shrugged. “If you say so, boss.”

“I wanted someone here t’ start settin’ things up for the rest of us. If not him, somebody else.” Shad’s tone hardened a little. “Maybe you.” When Shad spoke this way, Dixie was smart enough not to answer too fast. He was thinking for some kind of an answer when Slim grinned, buttoning up his dry shirt with still-shaking hands.

“Hell, I wish it’d been me, boss. Right now my ass is froze damnere completely off!”

Shad turned to Sammy. “Break out the bourbon ya’ got over there. If Slim froze his ass off, it’d be the biggest loss our outfit ever suffered.”

There was some easy laughter from all around now, but everybody knew just exactly what had actually happened. It’s kind of complicated, but it’s honest-to-God true. Dixie had insulted Sammy the Kid, who was sure as hell feeling bad enough already. Shad, knowing the way the youngster felt, had protectively taken his side. Dixie had tried to back down, but his own pride had got in his way and wouldn’t let him really back off altogether, or in an easygoing fashion. That kind of pride Dixie had, starting out with needlessly hurting the Kid, was a false pride, and Shad nailed him for it on the spot. Dixie was caught in a bind, and Slim came to the rescue of the situation by saying something for everyone’s benefit that was kind of funny. Shad picked up on that and decided to let it go by saying something back to Slim even funnier, and at the same time getting us the bourbon he’d had brought in on the first boat.

I can guarantee the above is almost exactly accurate, because Old Keats brought it up to me a few minutes later, while we were all drinking tin cups of bourbon, the two of us standing a little apart from the others. “Strange thing, Levi,” he said, raising his cup to drink with his good right hand. “There is no parliament, no congress, where the men can know each other so completely and well as men know each other who do hard daily work, sometimes dangerous work, together. No, not even the classic ancient Greek or Roman Senates.”