Horses of the North

VIII

To men accustomed to stalking close enough to deer and other game to bring them down with a single arrow, the stalking of the nighttime sentries walking the perimeter and the settlement that once had been the Utah town of Laketon proved absurdly easy of accomplishment. Razor-edged knife and deadly garrote did their sanguineous tasks of severing or crushing human windpipes, quickly, brutally, but very efficiently, in silence so absolute that not even the domestic animals of the settlement were alerted. Milo and those few oldermen who had done this sort of thing before, long ago, in another world, were very proud of their proteges on that night.

They had left the wagons, the carts, the herds and the women and children several miles to the north and come in on foot, leading their mounts for the last mile or so in the darkness. When the yodel of a loon, repeated three times, then twice, notified the waiting men that the last of the sentries was down, they mounted, rechecked their weapons and moved out, those with torches lighting them from a watchfire as they walked their horses and mules across the now-unguarded perimeter and into the sleeping town.

All were armed with the automatics, short shotguns and handguns taken from the ambushed motorcycle outlaws years before, for unlike the other rifles and shotguns, these weapons were utterly useless for hunting, their sole utilization being the purpose for which they had been made or adapted: man-killing at very close range. In addition, some of the better archers bore bows, the arrow shafts wrapped near the heads with lengths of rag impregnated with oil, resin, lard and other flammables. Milo carried the last two grenades—one fragmentation, one concussion; the grenades had disappeared over the years in the Snake River country simply because they were a sure way to harvest large numbers of fish from a lake with little or no effort.

At the directions of the leaders, the archers uncased their first arrows, fired them from the blazing torches, then loosed them into anything that looked flammable—roofs, buildings with wooden siding, three half-buried strongpoints roofed with logs and weathered timbers, and the like. Other men dismounted to open the gas caps of vehicles, dip strips of cloth into the tanks, light the outside ends and run back to their horses. Detached units had dealt similarly with the flotilla of powerboats at the lakeside docks, then opened the cocks of the fuel storage tanks, following which—and from a goodly distance away—Milo had used one of old Paul Krueger’s homemade spring projectors to send the single available concussion grenade to bounce along the cracked concrete in and out of the widening pools of gasoline for the few seconds it had taken for its fuse to set off the fiery main charge.

The first explosion brought armed men boiling out of five of the larger buildings directly into the withering barrage of automatics, shotguns, pistols and even a few arrows. No unarmed man or woman was shot at—the leaders had so instructed the raiders—but those armed received short shrift in the now well-lit streets. And with the prisoners under heavy guard, needing only to look at the bleeding corpses of their comrades to guess the fate of any who attempted escape or resistance against the invaders from out of the night, Milo and the rest of the men went through every building that was not burning, rooting out any hiding humans and collecting everything that even looked like a weapon of any description as well as every round they could find of ammunition. Those they judged might be useful to them were packed on the mules they had brought along; the rest were heaved onto the nearest fire, there to explode or melt or burn or at the least have their temper drawn by the heat.

As dawn began to streak the sky to the east, the rider was sent north at the gallop to announce to the waiting wagons, carts and herds that the way now was cleared of human opposition and that they might proceed south; the packtrain with a few guards followed close behind the rider. Then Milo had a grimy, middle-aged man with singed beard and hair dragged from out the huddle of terrified, woebegone prisoners and brought before him.

Smiling coldly, he said, “Do you remember me, General Ponce? I told you last year that I’d be back.”

“You… you murderin’ bastard, you!” the big man half-sobbed in frustrated rage, his jowls and sagging belly aquiver, spittle showering through his gapped, filthy teeth and hot rage beaming from his black eyes. “You may crow big now, but you gonna sing a diffrunt tune when my boy gits back here with his calvery p’trol, you. This here’s our land, just like I tole you and your other sonofabitches las’ year, and don’t nobody pass over it or th’ough it lessen we gets our choice of ever’thin’ they got, first.”

Milo smiled grimly. “Those days are over for you and your pack, Ponce. We’ve seen to that this morning, for good and all. Oh, and I’d not advise that you try holding your breath until your boy and his mounted patrol come riding back in, either. If you wonder just where they are, wait until it gets full light and head for the spot up northwest where you’ll see the buzzards circling.

“We’ve burned down half your settlement here—your motorized transport, your powerboats and all of your fuel, the weapons and ammo we could easily locate in a short time. Without those things, you swine are going to play merry hell trying to mount raids against your neighbors or exact cruel tolls of travelers, as you bragged of doing for years when last we met. When my main party arrives, we are going to loot your settlement far more thoroughly, believe it, Ponce.”

And it was so done. With the arrival of the wagons and the carts, the settlement—what by then remained of it—was stripped of long years’ worth of ill-gotten gains, food, clothing, usable artifacts and equipment, animals to add to the milling herds, plus a baker’s dozen of captive women and some thirty children gotten on them by their captors during the years of their vile captivity.

With the wagons and carts and riders and herds on the road to the southeast, Milo had the remaining inhabitants of the town that had once been a resort called Laketon tied up and roped together. From his saddle, he addressed his parting remarks to the self-styled general, Ponce.

“You know, what I should do is send riders around to the various nearer settlements to let those off whom you and your pack have been battening for years know that you all are now here, unarmed and with neither motor vehicles, boats nor horses.” He cocked his head, as if in consideration of the matter, and Ponce paled to the color of skim milk, while several of the bound men began to struggle vainly against the ropes.

When he could see the smoldering rage in Ponce’s beady black eyes replaced by fear, Milo shook his head and said, “But my schedule simply will not permit me to see real justice done to you and this collection of scum that you’ve gathered around you, so I suppose that we’ll just have to leave you all here the way you now are. Eventually, one or more of you will wriggle loose, out of those knots … and maybe they’ll then free the rest of you, but don’t count on it, Ponce. There’s no honor among thieves.

“And even when you do finally get loose, even if some of your former victims don’t chance on you and stake you out over an anthill with your eyelids and certain other parts cut off, you all are going to have a rough life for some little time. You’ll have to actually do hard, manual labor, just to eat every few days, like as not, but most of you seem to have enough fat to keep you going for a while, at least. And all through your sufferings, both the big ones and the lesser ones, just remember that had you not coldbloodedly shot down one of my men last year, then stolen his horse and a few others from the remuda, all of this might not have occurred here today. I say only ‘might not,’ Ponce, for I don’t like or even easily tolerate your brand of predatory opportunist. People of your stripe made a terrible situation far, far worse, after the War, for the few survivors of the plagues and the starvation. So I just might have done what I did to your den of thieves on general principles, even had you not murdered young Robin Ogilvie at the conclusion of what you had assured us was to be a peaceful, friendly meeting.”

Milo made to rein about, then turned back, admonishing, “Oh, and if you and any of your crew had any idea of following us, forget it. Any of you I catch after this day, I’ll turn over to the thirteen women I rescued from you, them and some folks who were held as slaves by a group like yours years ago, down to the south, in Nevada and California.”

Without further incident, they crossed the Bear River into what had once been the State of Wyoming and, in the southerly outskirts of the deserted ruins of a close-clinging cluster of small towns, they camped, rested the herds and draft beasts and explored the nearby ruins for anything they might want to use, then headed on, first east, then southeast, to the place at which Route 30 merged with a former interstate road, Route 80.

They halted again, briefly, at the empty town of Rock Springs, rested and scavenged, hunted, fished, performed necessary repairs to the wagons, carts, harnesses and other equipment, washed out their water barrels and laundered their clothing, washed themselves, their riding and draft beasts, collected a few head of feral cattle and even a half-dozen wild horses to be broken and added to their horse herd. They also managed to rope a fine, big burro stallion, which feat Milo and the other leaders considered a very good omen, for their mules were all aging and, as the sterile hybrids did not reproduce more of their kind, younger ones were become impossible to acquire.

Despite the most vociferous urgings, it simply provedan impossibility for the train and herds to average anything in excess of about ten miles per day, so it was thirty-two days before they reached what had been called Cheyenne.

They rolled onto the cracked streets of that all but deserted city to a rousing welcome from some hundred or so people and the mayor, Clarence Bookerman—a wiry little man of indeterminate age and some bare five feet-six inches of height, but full of energy and with intelligence sparkling from his bright blue eyes. He greeted the van of the train mounted on a tall, leggy, splendid red-bay Thoroughbred which he handled with the relaxed ease of a true horseman; both he and his people seemed beside themselves with the pleasure of meeting the folk of the train and quickly proved themselves gracious, generous hosts.

After a sumptuous, delicious dinner, that night, Milo arose and introduced their host to the assembled leaders. “Gentlemen, unlike the most of us, Mayor Bookerman is a highly educated man, holding both an M. D. and a doctorate in biology, and he was, before the War, a professor at a university in Colorado, south of here.

“He it was who organized the survivors hereabouts and got them to farming and rounding up animals to be certain that they could feed themselves after the food stocks they had scrounged and scavenged ran out. He got them formed into a militia to beat off the inevitable marauders that seem to survive any disaster of whatever dimensions. He persuaded them all to take to shank’s mare or horseback in order to preserve the available stocks of fuels for heating and electrical generators. He has kept this community going for nearly thirty years now.

“But as he knows this country so well, he now thinks that the climate is changing here just as it has in other places, and not for the better, unfortunately.”

There was a single, concerted groan from the leaders of the Snake River folk. The journey here had been long and hard on them, their families and their animals, and they had thought, had hoped, had prayed that they were migrating to a land that was, if not flowing with milk and honey, at least capable with proper care and tillage of sustaining them and theirs for years to come.

Milo held up a hand, palm outward. “Hold on, there, Harry, Jim, the rest of you. Let me finish what Dr. Bookerman told me an hour or so before dinner.

“He is not saying that anyone has to mount up and move on tomorrow or even the day after.” He grinned. “No, what he is saying is that we should not hunker down to stay for a generation or two. For as much as five more years, we will all of us be able to wrest a good to fair living from the surrounding land, but we should not plan to stay beyond that time, for the winters here have been getting colder and longer, year by year, just as they did on the Snake, back in Idaho.”

Olsen demanded, “Well, where in the hell are we all supposed to go from here, Uncle Milo? Not that I mind traveling—I think if it was up to me alone, I’d travel and herd and hunt for a living full-time. But this stop and go, go and then stop again shit is sure hard on me and a whole heap of other folks.”

“I know, I know,” said Milo sympathetically. “But we’re only talking about one final migration, Dr. Bookerman and I, and that not for three to five more years. When we move on, he is of the opinion that we should move southeastward again, down into eastern Colorado, out of the mountains. He and I looked at the maps he has, and he has made several suggestions as to the eventual destination. When we decide on one, or at least narrow the choice down to three or four, I’ll scout out them and the roads just as I did before.

“For now, we all should let Dr. Bookerman’s people show us to the better stretches of currently unused farm and pasturelands, do what building or repairs we have to, then get ourselves ready for spring and all that that will entail. But just keep it in mind that we are not going to be here for more than five years, come what may, unless the climate improves drastically.”

It did not. That first winter came on suddenly with no bit of warning, and was exceedingly hard, with deep snows and long days and nights of howling blizzards which often left buildings, trees and all other exterior surfaces sheathed in ice. That first winter lasted far longer than should have been normal, to judge by old almanacs and records from before the War, and when at length it did relent, the floodings were massive, with the snowmelt abetted by heavy spring rains, which made quagmires of the fields being prepared for planting and bogs of the pastures. It seemed to the recent immigrants fully as bad as anything that the Snake River country had had to offer. Talking at some length as he worked at his forge for those in need of his services, Olsen began to gather converts to his idea of leading a lifelong nomadic existence, rather than trekking from one place to another in search of land that was easier to farm in the face of increasingly hostile weather.

I was fully aware of the blacksmith’s ongoing campaigning, speechmaking and arguments with whomever he had around his forge, but I did nothing, said nothing. You see, I was beginning to agree with him. I was coming to the conclusion that, as the climate seemed to have changed and as few mechanized farming devices were still in usable condition, we were beating our collective head against a brick wall by trying to farm.” Milo stopped the flow of his memories briefly to beam to Arabella Lindsay. “It had been my scouting expeditions that had shown me just how much easier it would be to live off the country—off the profusion of game animals and feral beasts, wild plants and, in some areas, volunteer crops of grains and vegetables still growing on deserted farms. And my own people had become pretty good at fabricating functional, well-made, tough and capacious wagons and carts, stout running gear and finely fashioned harness. They had learned through practice to make tents very comfortable and weatherproof. Furthermore, some looms had been scrounged while we abided in the Snake River country, and some few of the women had become quite adept at fashioning cloth starting with only raw wool sheared from our own sheep, and others had experimented with and developed the art of felting assorted varieties of hair and fur. We’d been tanning, of course, for many years and working the resultant leather. If we supplied Olsen with the proper amounts of good-grade fuel and metal scrap, there was damned little that he couldn’t fashion for us in the way of hardware. We also, of course, numbered among us many fine, if self-taught, wainwrights, carpenters and cabinetmakers, wheelwrights, horse leeches, midwives, trackers, horse tamers, seamstresses and the like. I reckoned that we could, if necessary, be as good as self-sufficient and could learn to live as well off the country as the American Indians had done for thousands of years, probably better, due to the fact that we had a resource available to us that they had lacked utterly—our herds. So I just allowed Olsen to maunder on, doing my work for me, as it were.”

Once more, he opened his memories of events long years in the past.

They all nearly starved to death the third year, when an early winter came down too soon for the necessarily late planted crops to be harvested properly. They only squeaked through the dark, bleak period by slaughtering ail of the swine and a larger number of cattle and sheep than Milo, Booker-man and the other leaders liked to see go down. The following spring was when the Cheyenne people started collecting the materials to build carts and wagons with the help of the experienced newcomers from Idaho.

Olsen, perforce, moved his operation and his gospel into a place prepared for him in the city, closer to the supplies of fuels, timber and metals and in the hub of the activities of the wainwrights, wheelwrights, carpenters and their new, willing, but mostly unskilled apprentices.

Almost all of the Cheyenne people had become riders, because of Dr. Bookerman’s dictates against the use of fuels in the remaining motor vehicles, but none of them had any experience in driving horses for anything other than plowing or short-distance draft of agricultural implements, hay wagons and the like. So Milo and others began a school in the arcane arts of the long-distance trek. As soon as the crops were in, they broadened the courses to include maintenance of wagons, carts and harness; the pitching, striking and care of tents and other camping gear; the proper laying and making and feeding of cookfires; and the basics of archery, afoot and ahorse, for even though they would leave the Cheyenne area well supplied with arms and ammunition, their stock of cartridges would not last forever and there was no assurance that wherever they stopped to scrounge and scavenge, they would be able to find more of the correct calibers and still usable after years of improper storage.

Supplied with antique weapons from a Cheyenne museum, Milo taught some of the better horsemen of both groups of people the basics of saber-work on horseback and resolved to himself to see to it when the then-overworked men had the time that Olsen turned out blades for similar sabers and for light horsemen’s axes, as well. He considered lances, which would have been easy enough to fashion, even without the services of the smith, but he had never used one on horseback and felt that he should give himself time to digest a couple of books he had dug from the stacks of the main Cheyenne library before he began to try to teach the use of the tricky weapon. Best to confine his instruction to weapons he did know—bow, saber, light axe.

Dr. Clarence Bookerman quickly proved himself to be the most adept of Milo’s pupils. His horsemanship had been consummate, from the start, and after a few days, he handled the heavy saber as if it were a mere extension of his wiry arm. Milo was amazed, at first, that so old a man—to judge by his experiences and attainments both before and since the War, the mayor had to be somewhere between sixty and seventy years of age—could handle so difficult a weapon so well within so short a time, and he told his accomplished pupil just that.

Smiling faintly, Bookerman said, “True, I have not held a hilt in many years, Milo, but it is not an art which once fully mastered one forgets easily. I studied for some years in West Germany, you see. You have heard of dueling societies, perhaps?” The old man outlined with one fingertip two scars—one over his left cheekbone, the other low on his right cheek, a bit above the upper perimeter of his carefully trimmed chin-beard.

“In the Verbindungen, we used a straight blade without a point, of course, but I can see the advantages to a horseman of a cursive, pointed blade, especially if his opponent be on foot.”

Milo relaxed in the supportive stock saddle, resting the flat of his blade on the top of the horn. “‘Bookerman,’ Doctor, has a decided Teutonic ring to it. Are you, perchance, of German origin or descent?”

The mayor smiled again, a bit more broadly. “And I had thought, I had imagined, that I had gained complete mastery of standard American English, Milo; I thought that I spoke it with the fluency of a native.”

“You do, Doctor,” Milo assured him. “Look, it’s none of my business, really, and …”

“No, no.” Bookerman shook his head rapidly. “Are we two to live out the remainder of our two lives in close proximity, it is proper that you should know such things. And this particular thing is no longer of the slightest importance.

“Yes, I was born in Germany and lived the most of my youth on one of my father’s estates in Niedersachsenland. I took my M. D. in Germany and came to the United States in order to pursue a course of study which interested me. I met and married a fine American woman and decided to stay and become a citizen. For a number of reasons, we Anglicized our name to Bookerman, rather than staying Bucher-mann, and at the same time, I changed my baptismal name from Karl-Heinrich to Clarence.

“But please believe me that it all was aboveboard and most completely innocent, Milo.” He grinned, adding, “I was born far too late to have had anything to do with the Third Reich, along with anyone now still living, although several relatives of my father were, rightly or wrongly, adjudged war criminals after World War the Second—two of those men were hanged and one was sent to prison, solely for being good officers who remembered their oaths and their honor and followed the lawful orders of their military superiors. However, as I have said, my friend, none of this now is of any slightest importance—not to you, not to me, not to any of our dependent peoples and not, especially, in this new and strange and possibly deadly world within which we all now must live … or die.”

Then, still smiling, the elderly little man whirled up his saber and delivered a lightning-fast overhand cut with the dull and padded edge which Milo barely managed to stop with a parry in the sixth, the force and shock of the blow tingling his hand and wrist and arm clear up to the shoulder.

Bookerman laughed. “Your reflexes are excellent, Milo. Your style is most unorthodox, however; I can tell that you learned the blade in no Fechtsaal. There is a veneer of the Olympic to your style, and that is what you have been teaching here. But when you are not thinking, then comes out an entirely different mode of combat and defense from your subconscious, an instinctive one, if you will, that I think was learned from no modern master.”

Many long centuries later, Milo was to recall these words.

As that year’s crops were tended and finally harvested, the schools went on. So, too, did the work in and around Olsen’s forge. So, too, did Olsen’s preachments anent the giving over of the settled, farming life for the existence of nomadic herders. The smith was forceful and voluble, and by the coming of winter, he had managed to convince and convert Harry Krueger and most of the other leaders of the immigrants, not a few of the lesser heads of household and even a few of the Cheyenne people, none of whom had ever before lived for more than a few days at best in portable housing, which last feat was, in itself, something of a real accomplishment.

At the first meeting of the council following the first hard freeze of the early winter, Milo readily yielded the floor to Olsen, who had come to the conclave directly from the still-operating forge and wagonyard, grimy with coal dust and from the ever-constant wreaths of smoke in which he and his helpers labored. His presence filled the small room with the mingled odors of smoke, sweat, wet woolens and singed hair.

Olsenarose, standing and resting the weight of his thick torso on the skinned knuckles of his two clenched fists as he leaned on the table of what was become the council chamber. He cleared his throat and began, “All right, let’s us get the bitching out of the way, first. I know that Les Folsom means to complain to the rest of the council that when some of his folks brought me and the wainwrights sheet metal they’d scrounged to have their cart bodies fashioned of it, I junked the aluminum and had the sheet steel cut up to make straps and whatnots.”

Folsom, a blond, clean-shaven man of early middle years, grunted and nodded and looked on the verge of speaking, but Olsen just spoke on—after all, he had the floor and he knew it. “Les, boys, there is a damned good reason or three that I ordered what I did. When we first emigrated up to Nevada from southernCalifornia, years ago, we found us a whole bunch of U-Haul trailers, which were better than the travoises we were all using back then, but that’s about all.

“Because we were then in danger, pressed hard for time, we used those same damn trailers on the march up to the Snake River country from Lake Tahoe. But when we knew we were headed east, coming here, we built new wooden wagons and carts and left every damned one of those old sheet-metal trailers to molder in the Snake River Valley.

“Les, your folks ranted and raved about how heavy and thick wooden wagon bodies were and how messy the waterproofing we used of tar and resin and oakum is, and they’re right, for as far as their thinking and the limited experience that that thinking is based on go.

“But, Les, boys, when a sheet-metal body is holed—and they are, too, damned often—it ain’t any way to patch it, short of taking it off the running gear, dragging it over to my travel forge and trying to hammer-weld a piece of steel over the hole, and that fails as many times as it works, I’ve found; besides which, I’m generally up to my ears in trying to do really urgent, important things like keeping the draft beasts and the riding horses decently shod so they don’t turn up lame at a bad time for everybody.

“Wooden boards, now, if they get holed, you just stuff the littler ones with oakum and resin or break a chunk off the nearest road and render it in a pot for the tar. Bigger ones you might have to nail a short piece of wood over and then recaulk it. If a board is smashed bad and there is no seasoned lumber to replace it, you can straighten it out, reinforce it lengthwise with long steel or iron straps, then use short straps or angle straps or whatever you need for that job to give the repair support from the whole lumber around it, then just caulk it all up so’s it’s watertight again.”

“It sounds like a hell of a lot of needless work, to me,” said Folsom dubiously. “I still think that a properly welded sheet-metal body would be better in all ways than a wooden one. Look at the automobiles and trucks—they took a hell of a beating, but the manufacturers never stopped using sheet metal to make them, Olsen.”

“Have you got any conception of how long it would take us to hammer-weld all the seams of a ten-foot wagon body, Mr. Folsom?” Olsen demanded in controlled heat. “With cars and trucks, back before the War, it was a body shop in damn near any direction you looked all over the country, and mostly, they didn’t repair as much as hang new fenders or doors or whatever, even then. If it came down to welding, they had oxyacetylene torches. Man, I don’t!

“You tell your people to bring me all the sheet metal they can find—except that thin aluminum, which is good for nothing. I need it at the forge, as much of it as I can get. But if they or you think I’m going to waste time and energy and fuel to try to make them welded sheet-steel wagons, they better find them a way to put in an order to Detroit—maybe Ford or Chrysler is still in operation up there.”

Folsom’s long-fingered hands clenched into fists on which the prominent knuckles stood out white as the new snow, and his fine-boned face turned almost livid. It was abundantly clear to all those present that it would not take much more to precipitate open violence between him and the smith.

This was not exactly what Milo had had in mind for the discussion at this meeting, so he moved to halt it before it reached the sure conclusion for which it now was headed.

He bespoke the fuming smith first, since he had known him longer. “Jim, there’s no need to be so sarcastic to Les. Recall, if you will, that he and his people have never been on a trek, and that around here they have gotten good service out of their sheet-metal-bodied farm wagons and buggies and whatnot. Allow for a little honest, well-meaning ignorance of just how conditions are from day to day on a migration. Remember, you’ve done it three times; Les and his folks have yet to do it once.

“As for you, Les, the things that Jim Olsen has told you and your people are nothing less than the clear, unvarnished truth—wooden wagons or cart bodies are better, more serviceable on the march and easier to repair, despite the weight and bulk and the necessity for using frayed rope and resin or tar to pack the seams and interstices. And none of your arguments to the contrary are going to change that which is, to those of us who have made it through several treks, proven and incontrovertible fact.

“Jim, here, is in or near the last stages of utter exhaustion, if you need to be told, and his nerves are as frazzled as the rest of him. He has been working eighteen- and twenty-hour days for months on end and really needs to go home and sleep for at least a week; but his skill, his expertise, his experience, these all are irreplaceable in that forge and wagon-yard down there, and he knows it and is damned nearly killing himself for the common good—for you, for all of us and all the other people. Think hard on what I’ve said the next time you are moved to ride Jim, to needlessly antagonize him, Les. We could probably do it all without him, but it would take one hell of a sight longer, and be done far less well and at risks we have not the right to take for the well-being of families, women, children.”

He turned to Krueger, saying, “Harry, I understand that you and Jim and some others have spent a good deal of time poring over the maps. Have you come up with any ideas for an eventual destination for us all?”

Krueger looked at Olsen, and Olsen looked at Chuck Llywelyn and several others of the Snake River group, as well as at a couple of the Cheyenne leaders. Then the rancher arose and said:

“Uncle Milo, it wasn’t for farming sites we were studying those maps, but for the best grazing lands, whereall they seem to lie and how far from each other, and then we tried to figger out how long it would take a herd the size of ours to use up the grass and force us to move on.

“You see, farming is all well and good and all for them as likes to suffer, but we don’t, and we think we could live just as good if not a sight better off game and wild plants and our herds as we do scratching at the dirt and hoping and praying that whatall we plant comes up before the snows come in or before there’s an early freeze that kills everything. When that happens—and it’s been happening more years than not—we’ve worked and sweated our asses off and we still have to end up making do until the next harvesttime on game, wild plants and the produce of the herds.

“What it all boils down to, Uncle Milo, is we’re thinking of moving out come spring, right enough, but moving only as far as the flatter country in eastern Colorado and only staying where we finally stop until we’ve used up the graze and the game and all, then moving on to the next good graze and hunting. Does that sound crazy to you, Uncle Milo?”