Star Valley

July 21, 1973

We drove them up the mountain in the rain. The ewes bellowed and the lambs cried back in their wavering voices as they moved in a circulating mass, their dirty wool mounded like foam. Around us the grass bowed down and the dark leaves of chokecherry gleamed, and as it rained, the red of the soil deepened. Tiny pools formed and spilled, turning the trail from mud to grease, and our horses slid and struck.

Mitch rode close and flung his arm toward the crest. "Another week, we'll be right on top," he said. "Two months. We won't come back this way."

I could feel the rain's weight, slipping off the brim of my hat down my yellow slicker, onto my denim thighs, cold. We split up, crowding the sheep, cursing them, inciting the dogs. The herd surged east, like a flood returning to its source, and we followed, climbing in long jags through thickets of serviceberry, each horse track a muddy cup for the rain to fill.

* * *

That last night at the ranch I lay awake, staring at a patch of moonlight. The upstairs room had one window and one door, and the four walls belonged to someone else, and the sheets and the musty blankets. All I owned was the dark. The coming day would be hard, and each hour without sleep promised to make it harder, but sleep wouldn't come: I felt like a boulder, heavy and perfectly round, balanced on a bare hill. Given a push, I could roll to any point of the compass, and I would roll for a long way, and for a very long time.

Another year in school had passed, without a proper ending. My family hoped that June would see my graduation, but I was many credits short, with thirty failed hours. In the middle of spring term, I'd spent a day examining another wall, then filled a pack once more and hitched south to the canyons, to find red rocks and quiet sand.

Is there a word for the color of moonlight? On the papered wall of the room, the moon laid its moving pattern over the faded flowers, shadowing the cottonwood leaves that rattled faintly through the open window. My clothes hung from a hook on the door, and my boots gaped by the bed like two open mouths. There were still long hours to wait. "It's not your fault," Cassandra had said the week before as we huddled in a sleeping bag, under the rush of the creek. The question was how to live. She had plans and I hadn't, except for this. She wanted things and I wanted out. Something had snapped, between me and all else.

I had been told too many times how I should feel, too many times what I should do. On television, the old men stood between us and the flag, hiding its stripes with their dark suits and pressed uniforms, their heads a moving blot against the field of stars, with lies falling from their lips. Defense? Did they believe that skinny, black-clad troops, from a poor country across the world's widest sea, would overrun San Francisco on bamboo rafts one rainy night?

This country is ours, earned with our blood. Always that. The blood-marked valleys under these high ranges, the Salt Rivers, the Bear Rivers, and the Wasatch, were my home, if I had one. My great-grandfather once had a ranch in this valley. My father was born not far away. But how could I earn the right to live in this place? By killing someone I'd never seen, in his own land, on the other side of the earth?

I couldn't make sense of that: our deeds never cancel out. The wrong stays close to the right, twisted like strands in a rope.

A peace treaty had been signed in Paris in January, and that same month the military draft had been ended, but I was still on the hook, my case pending. There'd been a siege at Wounded Knee, dissident Indians with rifles hemmed in by FBI agents and federal marshals with machine guns, armored vehicles, and helicopters. The Watergate hearings were underway, and Senator Sam Ervin was digging for President Nixon's tapes, and Nixon had ordered the Secret Service not to testify. There was no end to it. Our soldiers had been called home, but the war would go on inside us. I could see those heavy-bodied old men, chins thrust out. All countries are ours.

I had to find one that wasn't.

* * *

In a high valley on the far western edge of Wyoming, the Preston ranch house stood alone, cornered by lanes of rutted dirt. The house was nearly a cube, and the direction it faced was uncertain. The front door, clean and unused, opened west. On the south, a cottonwood old as the house loomed over a sidewalk cracked by roots, and the south door had a tire-tread mat and bore signs of use. But the real entrance lay on the east, where a streak of muddy prints led up to a boot-marked door. The east door opened on the sprawl of corrals and sheds, and the white barn, and the mountains, which rose up blue and close beyond.

Mitch, my skiing partner, had tended camp the year before for Prestons' regular herder. The herder was named Alfonso Gonzales and was called Pancho. He stayed in a tiny trailer by the barns, going to Thayne or Afton to drink, fight, and hunt a bedmate. He would return in a fine, high glow to sing, curse, challenge, and scandalize the Mormon ranch. Eventually, sometimes with help from Royal or Roger, he would burrow into his quilts.

The trailer had a propane heater, and in late spring 1973, during lambing season, the heater exploded. Pancho was burned on his face, arms, shoulders, and chest. Roger called Mitch, who had been his college roommate. "Pancho's hurt, his trailer blew up. Can you herd instead? Okay? Good deal. Can you get a campjack in Logan?"

"The tall guy? Rawlins? He might work out."

* * *

At first light we started the sheep from the pasture north of the house and drove them up the long fenced lanes that followed section lines as rain swept in on a blue front. Roger rode ahead on a gelded palomino named — rancher's joke — the Black Stallion. I rode a sorrel named Red, and Mitch rode a young black horse called Tony. We stayed behind the sheep, and I could see the rain dripping from Mitch's hat into his black beard, and his teeth flashing as he yelled.

Uncle Warren, crippled by a stroke and near blind, pushed the center, his yells emerging as gargles and coughs. His white horse, Tom, spun and trotted as Warren hung on and let the old gelding work, his bony knees clinging to the ribby flanks.

It rained in pulses all morning, clouds dropping almost to the ground, then lifting to admit the sun. The oatmeal and boiled rhubarb made a fist in my guts. When I yelled at the balky sheep, I also cursed Mitch and Roger, who yelled back, red faced, with equal fervor.

"Goddam, goddam, goddam — booooooorrega! Yiiip-yiii-owwww!"

Twice an hour, a ranch truck would come to a halt as the sheep eddied around it. The hay harvest was rained out, and the drivers, sunburnt men with tension in their jaws, spoke to Roger while eyeing me and Mitch. "New herders? How's Pancho? My damn baler's broke and the part just got in. Clear up tomorrow, they say. So...