Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove

"Well, the horses wouldn't go in them trees," Soupy explained.

"I didn't want to either," Allen O'Brien admitted. "If we had gone in the trees we might not have come out."

The mules had run three miles before stopping, but because the plain was fairly smooth, the wagon was undamaged. The same could not be said for Lippy, who had bounced so hard at one point that he had bitten his tongue nearly in two. The tongue bled for hours, little streams of blood spilling over his long lip. The remuda was eventually rounded up, as well as the cattle.

When the Texas bull calmed down enough so that it was possible to approach him, his wounds seemed so extensive that Call at first considered shooting him. He had only one eye, the other having been raked out, and the skin had been ripped off his neck and hung like a blanket over one shoulder. There was a deep gash in his flank and a claw wound running almost the whole length of his back. One horn had been broken off at the skull as if with a sledgehammer. Yet the bull still pawed the earth and bellowed when the cowboys rode too close.

"It seems a pity to shoot him," Augustus said. "He fought a draw with a grizzly. Not many critters can say that."

"He can't walk to Montana with half his skin hanging off his shoulders," Call pointed out. "The flies will get on that wound and he'll die anyway."

Po Campo walked to within fifty feet of the bull and looked at him.

"I can sew him up," he said. "He might live. Somebody catch him for me."

"Yes, rope him, Dish," Augustus said. "It's your job. You're our top hand."

Dish had to do it or be embarrassed by his failure for the rest of the trip. His horse didn't want to go near the bull, and he missed two throws from nervousness and expected to be killed himself if he did catch the animal. But he finally got a rope over the bull's head and slowed him until four more ropes could be thrown on him.

Even then, it was all they could do to throw the bull, and it took Po Campo over two hours to sew the huge flap of skin back in place. When it was necessary to turn the bull from one side to another, it took virtually the whole crew, plus five horses and ropes, to keep him from getting up again. Then, when the bull did roll, he nearly rolled on Needle Nelson, who hated him anyway and didn't approve of all the doctoring. When the bull nearly rolled on him Needle retreated to the wagon and refused to come near him again. "I was rooting for the bear," he said. "A bull like that is going to get somebody sooner or later, and it might be me."

The next day the bull was so sore he could barely hobble, and Call feared the doctoring had been in vain. The bull fell so far behind the herd that they decided to leave him. He fell several miles behind in the course of the day. Call kept looking back, expecting to see buzzards in the sky-if the bull finally dropped, they would feast.

But he saw no buzzards, and a week after the fight the bull was in the herd again. No one had seen him return, but one morning he was there. He had only one horn and one eye, and Po Campo's sewing job was somewhat uneven, the folds of skin having separated in two or three places-but the bull was ornery as ever, bellowing at the cowboys when they came too close. He resumed his habit of keeping well to the front of the herd. His wounds only made him more irascible; the hands gave him a wide berth.

As a result of the battle, night herding became even more unpopular. Where there was one grizzly bear, there could be others. The men who had been worrying constantly about Indians began to worry about bears. Those who had chased the wounded bear horseback could not stop talking about how fast he had moved. Though he had only seemed to be loping along, he had easily run off and left them. "There ain't a horse in this outfit that bear couldn't catch, if he wanted to," Dish contended.

The observation worried Jasper Fant so much that he lost his appetite and his ability to sleep. He lay awake in his blankets for three nights, clutching his gun-and when he couldn't avoid night herding he felt such anxiety that he usually threw up whatever he ate. He would have quit the outfit, but that would only mean crossing hundreds of miles of bear-infested prairie alone, a prospect he couldn't face. He decided if he ever got to a town where there was a railroad, he would take a train, no matter where it was going.

Pea Eye, too, found the prospect of bears disturbing. "If we strike any more, let's all shoot at once," he suggested to the men repeatedly. "I guess if enough of us hit one it'd fall," he always added. But no one seemed convinced, and no one bothered to reply.

WHEN SALLY AND BETSEY asked her questions about her past, Lorena was perplexed. They were just girls-she couldn't tell them the truth. They both idolized her and made much of her adventure in crossing the prairies. Betsey had a lively curiosity and could ask about a hundred questions an hour. Sally was more reserved and often chided her sister for prying into Lorena's affairs.

"She don't have to tell you about her whole life," Sally would protest. "Maybe she can't remember. I can only remember back to when I was three."

"What happened when you was three?" Lorena asked.

"That old turkey pecked me," Sally said. "A wolf got him and I'm glad."

Clara overheard part of the conversation. "I'm getting some more turkeys pretty soon," she said. "Lorie's so good with the poultry, I think we might raise a few."

The poultry chores had been assigned to Lorena-mainly just feeding the twenty-five or thirty hens and gathering the eggs. At first it seemed that such a small household couldn't possibly need so many eggs, and yet they absorbed them effortlessly. July Johnson was a big egg eater, and Clara, who had a ferocious sweet tooth, used them in the cakes she was always making. She made so many cakes that everyone got tired of them except her.

"I got to have sweets, at least," Clara said, eating a piece of cake before she went to bed, or again while she was cooking breakfast. "Sweets make up for a lot."

It didn't seem to Lorena that Clara had that much that needed making up for. She mostly did what she pleased, and what she pleased usually had to do with horses. Housework didn't interest her, and washing, in particular, didn't interest her. That became Lorena's job too, though the girls helped her. They asked questions all the time they worked, and Lorena just gave them whatever answers came into her head-few of them true answers. She didn't know if the answers fooled them-the girls were smart. Sometimes she knew she didn't fool them.

"Are you gonna marry that man?" Betsey asked one day. "He's already got white hair."

"That's no reason not to marry him," Sally said.

"It is, too," Betsey insisted. "If he's got white hair he could die any time."

Lorena found that she didn't think about Gus all that much. She was glad she had stayed at Clara's. For almost the first time in her life she had a decent bed in a clean room and tasteful meals and people around who were kind to her. She liked having a whole room to herself, alone. Of course, she had had a room in Lonesome Dove, but it hadn't been the same. Men could come into that room-letting them in was a condition of having it. But she didn't have to let anyone into her room in Clara's house, though often she did let Betsey, who suffered from nightmares, into it. One night Betsey stumbled in, crying-Clara was out of the house, taking one of the strange walks she liked to take. Lorena was surprised and offered to go find Clara, but Betsey wasn't listening. She came into the bed like a small animal and snuggled into Lorena's arms. Lorena let her stay the night, and from then on, when Betsey had a nightmare, she came to Lorena's room and Lorena soothed her.

Only now and then did she miss Gus, though then she missed him with a painful ache and felt almost desperate to see him. At such times she felt cowardly for not having gone with him, though, of course, he himself had urged her to stay. She didn't miss the rest of it at all-the cowboys watching her and thinking things about her, the hot tent, the unpredictable storms and the fleas and mosquitoes that were always there.