Ivan Doig - Work Song

Unexpectedly Sandison reined to a halt, and I pulled up beside him. He massively shifted in his saddle to turn in my direction. “Take a good look, Morgan. I owned it all.”

At first I thought he meant the plot of land we were riding across. Then I realized he meant the entire valley.

I cannot forget that moment. Picture it if you will. A woolsack of a man, surely two hundred and fifty pounds, nearly twice of me, sitting on his horse, looking down on me like a wild-bearded mad king.

Suddenly he raised a meaty hand and swiped it toward me, his action so swift I had no time to grab for the pistol.

Paralyzed, I felt the swish of air as the thick palm passed my face and descended to mash a horsefly on the neck of my mount.

Flicking away the fly carcass, he rumbled, “Don’t just sit there with your face hanging out, we’ve got a ways to go.”

He put his horse into a trot, and mine followed suit. I rode holding tightly to the reins and my Stetson. In Montana, it is a good idea to keep your hat on your head so the wind doesn’t blow your hair off. Besides, it gave me something to concentrate on, other than the thought that I might have shot a man for swatting a fly. But Sandison’s behavior still unnerved me. Keen as a tracker, he stood in his stirrups every so often to peer ahead at the print of ruts we were following; it might once have been a road but looked long unused.

Leading to where? There were wide open spaces around us to all the horizons, but no arithmetic of logic that I could find in the destination Sandison had set for us. I knew from my time among the homesteads of Marias Coulee that land is surveyed into townships of thirty-six sections, each section a square mile. The numbering starts over at each township. Where, then-and for that matter, what-was Section 37? Was I going to survive to find out?

After an eternity of joggling along, we came to a plot of land boxed by a barbwire fence. We-rather, I-opened the treacherously barbed gate, and the horses stepped through, skittish enough about it that they had to be reined hard.

It could be said they were showing horse sense. The ground changed here. The soil, to call it that, had an unhealthy grayish hue, like the pallor of a very sick person. The sudden change was puzzling to me. I did not know thing one about the raising of cattle, but what was beneath our horses’ hooves would not pasture any creature, I was quite sure.

My riding companion now simply sat in his saddle, lost in contemplation of the expanse of valley. I resorted to my water bag. The day was warming to an extreme, and I could see sweat running down Sandison’s cheeks into his beard, although he paid it no heed.

“Back then,” he all at once spoke in the voice of a man possessed, “this was a paradise of grass. And I bought up homestead claims and mining claims and every other kind of land until every square foot of it was Triple S range. I tell you, there never was a better ranch nor a prettier one.” His words cast a spell. What a picture it made in the mind, the green valley filled with red cattle with that sinuous brand on their hips.

The bearded head swung in my direction. His voice dropped ominously.

“Then it got to be the old story. The snake into Eden.” The meaty hand swept around again and, past my ineffectual flinch toward the Lady’s Special, pointed over my shoulder.

“That thing.”

He had taken dead aim at the smelter stack. Even at this distance, the giant chimney dwarfed all of nature around it, clouding that half of the horizon like a permanent storm. Staring at that ashen plume along with Sandison, I felt something more oppressive creep over me than the heat of the day.

With a great grunt he climbed down from his horse, stooped low, and scooped a handful of dirt. Holding the dull-colored stuff up to me, he uttered:

“Here. Have some arsenic.”

Choosing to consider that rhetorical, I cleared my throat and managed to respond.

“Sandy, am I to understand we are camped on a patch of poison?”

“That’s what it comes down to,” he said, letting the unhealthy soil sift from his fist. Each word bitter, he recited to me that the furnaces of the smelting process released arsenic and sulphur, and the Anaconda stack piped those into the air like a ceaseless spout.

Wiping his hand on his pantleg, he went on: “It kills cattle like picking them off with a rifle. The first year after the smokestack came in, we lost a thousand head. Hell, it wasn’t ranching anymore. All we were doing was burning carcasses.” He shook his head violently at the memory. “We sued the mining company every way there is. The Anaconda bunch had the big money for eastern lawyers, so they beat us. But that was later.” His voice sharpened again. He gestured as if in dismissal toward the smokestack and its almighty smudge. “That isn’t what you’re here to see. Let’s get to it.” With cowboy agility, he again swung onto his horse and headed us toward a grove of trees along a slip of a stream not far ahead. Damp as I was with sweat from the unrelenting sun-and just as relentless, Sandison-I welcomed the notion of shade.

The trees, though, revealed themselves to be leafless as we approached. What had been a thicket was now a stand of lifeless trunks and limbs, graying above the soil that had sickened them. In the midst of the witchy trees stood eight or ten huge old cottonwoods, dying more slowly than the rest.

Sandison dismounted and walked his horse over to the nearest great wrinkled trunk. I gingerly did likewise. Under a big overhanging limb, he turned to me with that unsettling royal glint in his eyes again.

“Welcome to the grove of justice, Morgan.”

At first I did not take his meaning.

“It was before copper was on everyone’s mind,” he began. “This valley was just sitting here, best place on the face of the earth to raise cattle. My backers put up most of the money and I built the herd, cows from here to breakfast. Until one branding time when the count was way off. There weren’t dead cows lying around from winterkill or some disease, so you didn’t need to be a genius to figure out the malady was rustlers.” The fi xed intensity of that blue gaze was hypnotic as he told it all. “The money men threw a fit, said if it happened again they’d sell the place out from under me. They were town men, they didn’t have a fig of a notion about how you have to let the good years carry you through the bad ones in the livestock business. I had to do something to keep the herd count up or lose the ranch.” Trickles of sweat from under his hat into his beard retraced that predicament of long ago. “My riders told me they’d seen some of the squatters up in those hills”-he indicated across the valley to coulees that must have held shanties at that time-“acting funny around our stock. And there were always drifters riding through, you could bet they’d about as soon rustle your cattle as look at them. Try tell that to a sheriff who’d rather sit with his boots up on his desk than chase after rustlers with a couple of days’ head start, though.” His gaze at me never wavered. “Now, you know what my answer to that was, don’t you?”

I was afraid I did. The Montana necktie had a reputation to the far ends of the world, ever since frontier times when vigilantes in the untamed gold camps took the law, along with a noose, into their own hands.

“My riders knew how to handle a rope in more ways than one,” he was saying in that voice terrible to hear. “Anybody they caught in the vicinity of a cow or calf with a Triple S brand on it had some hard answering to do.” The man who had been lord of this valley turned ponderously, broad back to me now, toward the line of sturdy cottonwoods. “We hung them like butchered meat. Right here.” Facing around to me again, he lifted those thick hands. “Many a time I tied the noose myself.”