High Country : A Novel Read Free Page B

looking in the cold and the distance. Beyond the Swan Range was the mystery. He hadn’t seen any roads there until well beyond the Continental Divide, almost to Great Falls. He wondered what was in between, what kind of country you would find if you made it over that snow and rode to where the waters changed direction.
The men woke at the road to Fenton Pardee’s, tumbled out of the cab stomping and spitting. The one who’d slapped himself took a long pee while Gus Wilson unloaded Ty’s gear. They all seemed livelier now that they were closer to home. Ty liked hearing them call out their warnings about Pardee and his mules, about the back-country.
He shouldered the saddle and started up the road, wondering what it would be like to live in the shadow of a sawmill with big saws whining and skinned logs stacked everywhere. He figured if Gus Wilson worked there, there’d be some plan, some order to it.
Looking out across a little meadow that opened toward the Swan, he wondered if there were any order ahead for him. He studied the peaks lifting above the trees and suddenly had questions about everything. He was sorry he hadn’t learned more from Gus Wilson. He wanted to know about trails and horseshoeing and schedules, fearing Fenton Pardee wouldn’t provide many answers. It was getting late, but he was held there, caught by the sunlight slanting through the trees, deep shadows on the Swan, snow on the ridges beyond.
He was not yet into his sixteenth year, but he already felt a long way from home. And he was looking at a country that seemed to pull him still farther. He felt odd, apart from himself, just as he felt apart from his new height and the strength he was beginning to know, apart from his family’s problems—as far behind him now as the Bitterroot Valley. He wasn’t thinking about what was behind. Everything in him was looking ahead, up at the Swan Range, across it and into the country beyond.
    Fenton didn’t have much faith in the way the Conner boys had stacked the hay, and they’d only tied the bales down with one lash cinch. He wasn’t even sure they’d cinched that tight, which was why he was creeping along at five miles an hour when he saw the boy staring off into the woods. He was taller than Fenton remembered but thin as a post, and Cody Jo’s misgivings came back to him. She’d watched him hurry Buck and Spec out to the barns that morning to shoe the mules. “Strong as trees,” she’d laughed, “and about as inventive. They need perfect directions.” Fenton knew she was right. He also knew he wasn’t very strong in the direction-giving department.
    Which is why he’d sent for Ty, who was supposed to be different. He’d heard from Horace, who picked up things from people in the Bitterroot, that the boy had a lot of his grandfather, old Eban Hardin, in him. That was good enough for Fenton. He thought he might have learned more from Eban Hardin about mules than he’d learned in his forty years of packing, and he hadn’t even seen him that often. But what he had seen of Eban made him know what he needed now: someone to quiet the stock, not fight it like Buck. And when Spec slipped off into the woods like the Indian he was, someone to watch the camp, know which way the horses were drifting, when to get wood, water, how to keep the bears away. He needed someone who looked after things rather than let them slide.
    In the Elkhorn that night,Will Hardin had finally admitted that Ty was better than good with the stock—gifted somehow. But Will didn’t linger on the good. Mostly he talked about how accidents weren’t supposed to happen to Ty, who was so careful with his stock he never had wrecks. To Will Ty’s accident proved how sour the Hardin luck had gone. He didn’t need it verified with a lot of doctor bills.
    Fenton thought Will must have been born discouraged. He didn’t pay nearly as much attention to Will’s complaining as he did to the other, the part that said it wasn’t the