The Long Trail: My Life in the West Read Free Page B

of the waves and the rumbling tin floor are still as vivid as yesterday.
    The farm had apples, corn, peas, beans, a greenhouse with grapevines and a Jersey cow named Nelly. And, of course, my father’s uninvited guests: his horses. The in-laws didn’t like the old man, and he didn’t like them much either. They were Scots Presbyterians and he was a Brit, and they regarded him as a man of no account. I think he just dumped his horses, Ginger and Steel, in with the Jersey cow until he rented a nearby pasture with a barn, a stable and a big chestnut tree right in the middle of the field. He always planned to buy that land but never got it done.
    At Cadboro Bay I’d ride the old man’s horses bareback, messing around trying to get them to do something athletic. They were gentle creatures but if you tormented them enough, they’d move. (Eventually I’d learn to ride bareback like a Comanche.) My dad loved to run his horses on the beach at Cadboro Bay, and I’d ride with him, happily galloping through the salty surf.
    A laconic Chinese man named Lee cared for everything on the farm. We were very fond of each other, old Lee and I. He lived alone in a shack at the end of the lane that led to the backside of the farm. There he’d eat his meals of rice on the porch. Lee later claimed I knew how to speak Cantonese when I was very young, but I can’t recall that.
    I do remember, years later, his producing a nickel-plated Smith & Wesson .38 revolver from a hidden drawer in his table and giving the gun to my father. Many Chinese lived on the island, and the tongs — secret societies for Chinese immigrants — were ever present. Most of their members were gamblers, and I guess Lee was too, but I don’t think he was in a tong. One of Lee’s Chinese buddies had been murdered in a big wealthy house up the hill;afterwards he obviously felt it was necessary to keep a gun. But its usefulness eventually passed, and that’s when he handed it off to my dad. (He liked the old man a lot, just as he liked me.)
    My only memory of the Second World War is at Cadboro Bay. There was an army base a couple of miles away at Gordon Head, and I remember the enlistees marching along the narrow country roads on hot summer days in 1940, when I was six years old. Jean and I took a break from fighting over Monopoly to stand at the side of the road with baskets of apples from our orchard, passing them to the tall soldiers as they marched past.
    I got hooked on the cowboy way of life thanks to my dad’s horses and the Will James books he gave me as presents. In the early 1940s the prolific James became
the
mythic western figure in North America, presenting himself as an authentic drifting cowboy from Montana. I was totally captivated by his highly skilled drawings and colourful stories of buckarooing in the West. His illustrations of horses in all kinds of action set him apart from other artists. James drew the western horse, the shaggy and unpredictable bronc, the precursor of what we know now as the American quarter horse — a small, strong horse bred for short bursts of speed. Nobody could draw them like Will James.
    James’s books came out at the rate of about two a year, giving the old man the perfect, inexpensive solution for his kid’s birthday and Christmas needs. The wild tales totally captivated a whole generation of young gunsels—wannabe cowboys — including me. But even as a boy I sensed therewas something wrong with James’s stories. He never named any towns. He never named any actual ranches. His locations and geography were always vague. His fellow punchers seemed to have no surnames.
    Years later, in 1967, when Nevada writer Anthony Amaral put out his book
Will James: The Gilt Edged Cowboy
, we Jamesian cowboys found out that our hero was actually Ernest Dufault from Quebec, who around 1907 had hopped on a train for Saskatchewan and set about learning the cowboy trade. He soon drifted south across the porous Saskatchewan–Montana