I
’M GAZING AT THE stars sprinkled through the darkness, and wonder if anyone’s staring back at me. Scientists claim there’s no life up there. The stars burn out long before we ever see them. They tell us we’re looking at the past when peering at heaven, and I guess I’m living in the past too, instead of the future. A long day on the trail, eating dust and smelling cow shit has loosened my bones until they slip into the bedroll like water, my head nestled in the wellworn saddle on the ground. I hear the stomping and blowing of the horses, the low moans from the cattle, other men shifting around in their sleep, a lullaby here in Wyoming. From far off, there’s the howl of a coyote, wishin’ he was fierce enough to penetrate the herd, gnaw off a good piece of Hereford for dinner. Maybe he’ll try, if enough of them answer his call. I find the pistol, run my fingers over the steel, spin the cylinder. I’m a real Cowboy, though truth be told, I drifted here over forty years ago from the city of St. Louis. I was no good at school but couldn’t keep my nose out of those books about the wild west, the Indians and
the law of the land. There wouldn’t be many more chances to see the great west the way it was in the books, so at sixteen I left home and found my way here to the Sweet Water Ranch. I’m a seasoned cattleman now, a range boss, paid my share like everyone else, getting thrown off horses, kicked by bulls, and hustled by the others in the bunk house. I lost my dignity, a tooth or two, and wages in their poker games for quite a while until, one day, they all ignored me and picked on somebody else. That’s when I knew I’d made it. That I was one of them. Times are changing. People are heading west in droves, the cowboy way’s shrinking like a watering hole in August. There once were covered wagons, then trains, and now cars on the newly chiseled roads, crisscrossing the country like the lines on my face. The trains haul the cattle back east to market. We don’t cover much land on our drives these days, bringing cattle down to holding pens, or keeping them safe and fed on the ranch until we herd them out of the hills and close to the railroad.
