Buffalo Jump Blues Read Free Page A

driftboat swept away down the river, Robin Cowdry already false casting his fly line.
    She turned back to the truck. Harold had climbed into the bed and was sitting with his arms around the little bison. “Ejector seat, huh? I didn’t know you were so good with kids.”
    â€œYou forget I raised two of them.”
    Harold jabbed his chin, a
Look over my shoulder
gesture. “I knew we waited around, they’d finally show,” he said.
    â€œWho?”
    â€œDrake. I can smell him from here.”
    Martha looked up the access road. Harold was right. A truck was coming, it rattled down the grade, a horse-and-cattle emblem identifying as a DOL vehicle—Montana Department of Livestock.
    â€œHarold, this doesn’t have to get personal.”
    â€œMaybe if your eyes are blue.”
    â€œWell, my eyes are blue, so just let me do the talking. Okay?”
    It was Drake, Francis Lucien Drake, though everyone just called him Drake. He stepped out of the truck in parts, everything about him big, pushing his hat back on a high forehead, hitching his jeans, shaking his head when he saw the bison calf. He stuck a hand-rolled cigarette into the corner of his mouth and worked it without lighting it.
    â€œYou cavorting with livestock now, Harold? Getting yourself some of that barn candy?” A smile on his face, or rather a deliberate pulling back of his lips, exposing tombstone teeth stained by nicotine. He had a whorl of creases in his chin that constantly shifted, as if worms churned under the stubble.
    Another man, shorter, swarthy, had climbed from the cab. He kicked caked mud from his boots against a big truck tire with a dragon-tooth tread. Carhartts head to cuff, old cracked boots. A gunfighter mustache gone salt-and-pepper. Martha knew him, had to wait a second to recall the name.
    â€œCalvin,” she said.
    â€œSheriff.”
    She made the introduction to Harold, who knew Calvin Barr only by his reputation as a wolfer for Animal Damage Control. Barr spoke out of the side of his mouth to say hello, his eyebrows, wiry and black, running together as he frowned at the calf. He came forward in a bowlegged walk and rubbed the head of the bison.
    â€œLittle red bull calf,” he said. His voice had sandpaper in it.
    â€œI see somebody’s been crawling the stock of his rifle,” Harold said.
    â€œYou’d think I learned the lesson.” Barr tapped the upper arch of his right orbital bone, where dozens of half-moon scars, caused by the steel rim of a rifle scope, showed white through a forest of eyebrow hair.
    â€œWhat kind of gun recoils so hard the scope cuts you?”
    â€œForty-five ninety Sharps original with a Malcolm’s six-power. But it’s my own durned fault. If I kept my cheek back where it belongs, the scope wouldn’t jump back far enough to kiss me.”
    Martha had led Drake away from the truck. Harold could see them standing by the river, Martha with her hands on her hips, Drake shaking his head.
    â€œJust so we’re clear,” Harold said. “He points the finger, you pull the trigger?”
    Barr tilted his head as if considering. “That would be the job description,” he said.
    â€œI heard the wolf lovers called you Killer Barr.”
    The man nodded. “That wasn’t fair. I made it my business to know if I was shooting a guilty party. A lot of livestock deaths are blamed on predators when it’s rancher neglect, blue tongue . . .” He shrugged. “Teeth don’t have a thing to do with it sometimes.”
    â€œNo, it wasn’t fair. You’re just a man caught in the middle, doing his job. My problem’s with the law that has you do it. ’Bout an hour ago I shot five bison that fell off the cliff. That’s where I found this little fella. Don’t know how he survived the fall.”
    â€œMust have fallen on top of one of the others, reduced the