High Country : A Novel Read Free Page A

coat.
“Use it.” He tossed it to Ty. “I won’t be in those mountains anyway. Too busy cheerin’ up all the hands outta work.”
    Ty had spent the last three days at the Adams’s house, most of it working with Smoky Girl, Etta Adams’s filly. Fenton Pardee had started her under a pack saddle the summer before, and when Etta fell in love with her, he’d traded her to Horace against his feed bill.
    Only Smoky Girl hadn’t worked out the way Fenton said she would. She was hard to ride right from the start, and over the winter Etta had given her so many sugar cubes and carrots and little sweet apples that getting more was all that interested her. She wouldn’t even let Etta get a foot in the stirrup until Ty got hold of her. He made it so she wanted to pay attention, but mostly to Ty, who soon saw she was probably more filly than Etta could handle. He was about to talk with Horace about that when the lumberjacks came, swearing at each other and putting him between them in the cab. The man to Ty’s right fell asleep immediately. The driver turned the heater up and started to doze off himself, the smell of beer and stale cigarettes getting so strong Ty felt sick. He was about to ask if he could wind down a window when the driver bolted upright and slapped himself. Ty was startled to see a man hit himself that hard.
    “Jesus.”The man’s cheek was red from the blow. “Another dream about them yellow bears.” He wound his window down, stuck his head out into the cold. “Bastards.” He pulled his head back in. “Hate that dream.”
    But the subject kept him awake. From there until Seeley Lake he told Ty stories about the bears and their doings with lumberjacks and Pardee’s packers. He was still telling stories when they pulled up at the bar at Seeley Lake. A man with a deep scar on his face was waiting. To Ty he seemed surprisingly good natured, considering the condition of the two lumberjacks.
    “A man could get light headed off these fumes,” he said, opening the door. “I’ll drive. Don’t say a goddamned word about why you’re late. Those stories lost their excitement for me.”
    The man who had slapped himself got out and surrendered the keys. Ty climbed out himself, getting into the bed of the truck with the saddle and his kit bag.
    “You the guy Fenton thinks can wrangle his mules?” The man with the scar looked at Ty. “Between Fenton and his mules you’ll get a compressed education.”
    “My name is Ty Hardin.” Ty was surprised to hear his voice crack. “I look forward to gettin’ started.”
The man looked at Ty more closely.
“Might as well call me Gus Wilson.” He leaned across the bed of the truck, his hand out. “The rest do. Hell, there’s Wilsons all over this valley. Won’t hurt to know a few.” The two lumberjacks were swearing at each other again, this time about who would ride in the middle. “These are some wilted. But they’ll repair. They perk right up after a few days at the mill.”
Gus Wilson said something persuasive to the men and they piled into the cab. After a few miles Ty dusted off the window and saw that both men had fallen asleep. He settled back, feeling better since the man with the scar had shown up.
He wondered about the scar, thinking it must have come from some scrape with a grizzly. Gus Wilson, he thought, must be the Wilson you could count on if you wanted to get somewhere. And more than anything else, Ty wanted to get somewhere. The more people he met the less sure he was of what he would be doing, even where he was going. The suspense was a lot worse than the work, no matter what that turned out to be.
He buttoned Horace Adams’s coat against the wind, watching the high crest of the mountains rising to the east. He had studied this country on Horace’s road map and was pretty sure he was looking at the Swan Range. He didn’t know what the name of the range was to the west, but he saw it was almost as high. Snow was still on the ridges, purplish