The Big Range by Jack Schaefer

Author:Jack Schaefer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 2017-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

I didn’t ride out much the next months. Having knocked off the rest of the summer and fattening my three-year steers for market on special rations took the fall. But I saw him a few times driving past my place in his little buggy. The best route to that rebel roost of his was up my valley and left along the trail that climbed through the notch to the tablelands. Even that must have been a hard pull for his old horse. I didn’t know how often he made the trip because sometimes I’d miss seeing him and only know he had gone past by chancing on his fresh wheel tracks in the mud where the road forded the valley stream not far from my house. Then the cold edge of late fall began to creep into the air and I didn’t see him or his tracks at all.

Winter hit us early that year. It hit us weeks ahead of the usual first snow with a surprise storm that whipped over the near line of mountains and caught plenty of us unprepared. I know because it caught me and shook me for a nice loss. I liked to keep my market-age steers as long as possible, putting on the last possible pounds with good grain, and move them out just before the winter snows when the price was at a peak. I hadn’t even begun thinking about moving them that year when the storm hit. I had checked my fences and filled the trays in the feedlot again and come in and gone to bed early, and along before midnight I woke startled and heard the wind shrieking in the chimney. I crawled out of the bunk and went to the door and opened it and the snow struck me in a sheet and stung my face. It was the worst kind, dry and fine and driving. I was plenty worried, not about the cattle themselves because I had stout shelters, but about what a real blizzard could mean. Not many hours of that kind of snow would choke the trails and even the travelled roads. If the cold held and later snows kept building the drifts, I might have to feed my steers all winter and sell in a dropping spring market.

I pulled on clothes and went out to take care of the horses. They were bunched under the roof-shelter out from the barn. I propped open the door to the stretch of stalls and didn’t have to use any coaxing to get them in. There were knee-high drifts already by the time I pushed against the wind back to the house.

By morning I was snowed in tight, and the wind was still piling it down. I fought and floundered my way to the barn and saw the little path I made filling in fast again. I got one of the heavy work horses and climbed on him bareback and sent him ploughing back and forth from the barn to the house and return till I had a real path showing.

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