“It turned cold and started snowing early that year,” he continued. “Granddad had this old .45-70 single-shot he’d carried in the war, but they only had twenty-six cartridge cases for it. He and Dad loaded up all those cases the night before Dad left. They’d pulled the wheels off the wagon and put the runners on as soon as the snow really set in good, so it was all ready to go. After they’d finished loading the cartridges, Granddad gave my dad an old pipe. Way he looked at it, if Dad was old enough to be counted on to do a man’s work, he was old enough to have his own pipe. Dad hadn’t ever smoked before — except a couple times down in back of the schoolhouse and once out behind the barn when he was a kid.
“Early the next morning, before daylight, they hitched up the team — Old Dolly and Ned. They pitched the wagon-bed, and they loaded up Dad’s bedding and other gear. Then Dad called his dogs and got them in the wagon-bed, shook hands with Granddad, and started out.”
“I’ll betcha he was scared,” I said.
“Grown men don’t get scared,” Jack said scornfully.
“That’s where you’re wrong, Jack,” the Old Man told him. “Dad was plenty scared. That old road from the house wound around quite a bit before it dropped down on the other side of the hill, and Dad always said he didn’t dare look back even once. He said that if he had, he’d have turned right around and gone back home. There’s something wrong with a man who doesn’t get scared now and then. It’s how you handle it that counts.”
I know that bothered Jack. He was always telling everybody that he wasn’t scared — even when I knew he was lying about it. I think he believed that growing up just meant being afraid of fewer and fewer things. I was always sure that there was more to it than that. We used to argue about it a lot.”
“You ain’t scared of anything, are you, Dad?” Jack asked, an edge of concern in his voice. It was almost like an accusation.
Dad looked at him a long time without saying anything. “You want to hear the story, or do you want to ask a bunch of questions?” It hung in the air between them. I guess it was always there after that. I saw it getting bigger and bigger in the next few years. Jack was always too stubborn to change his mind, and the Old Man was always too bluntly honest to lie to him or even to let him believe a lie. And I was in the middle — like always. I went over and climbed back up in my father’s lap.
The Old Man went on with the story as if nothing had happened. “So there’s Dad in this wagon-bed sled — seventeen years old, all alone except for the horses and those two black and tan hounds of his.”
“Why can’t we have a dog?” I asked, without bothering to raise my head from his chest. I averaged about once a week on that question. I already knew the answer.
“Your mother won’t go for it.” They always called each other “your mother” and “your father.” I can’t think of more than two or three times while we were growing up that I heard either one of them use the other’s name. Of course most of the time they were fighting or not speaking anyway.
“Well, Uncle Dolph had loaned Dad an old two-dollar mailorder pistol, .32 short. Dad said it broke open at the top like a kid’s cap gun and wouldn’t shoot worth a damn, but it was kinda comfortable to have it along. Uncle Dolph shot a Swede in the belly with it a couple years later — put him in the hospital for about six months.”
“Wow!” I said. “What’d he shoot him for?”
“They were drinking in a saloon in Spokane and got into a fight over something or other. The Swede pulled a knife and Uncle Dolph had to shoot him.”
“Gee!” This was a pretty good story after all.
“It took Dad all of three days to get up into the timber country around the lake. Old Dolly and Ned pulled that sled at a pretty steady trot, but it was a long ways. First they went on up out of the wheat country and then into the foothills. It was pretty lonely out there. He only passed two or three farms along the way, pretty broken-down and sad-looking. But most of the time there wasn’t anything but the two shallow ruts of the wagon road with the yellow grass sticking up through the snow here and there on each side and now and then tracks where a wolf or a coyote had chased a rabbit across the road. The sky was all kind of gray most of the time, with the clouds kind of low and empty-looking. Once in a while there’d be a few flakes of snow skittering in the wind. Most generally it’d clear off about sundown, just in time to get icy cold at night.
“Come sundown he’d camp in the wagon, all rolled up in his blankets with a dog on each side. He’d listen to the wolves howling off in the distance and stare up at the stars and think about how faraway they were.” The Old Man’s voice kind of drifted off and his eyes got a kind of faraway look in them.
The wood in the stove popped, and I jumped a little.
“Well, it had gotten real cold early that year, and when he got to the lake, it was frozen over — ice so thick you coulda driven the team and wagon right out on it, and about an inch of snow on top of the ice. He scouted around until he found a place that had a lot of deer-sign and he made camp there.”
“What’s deer-sign, Dad?” I asked.
“Tracks, mostly. Droppings. Places where they’ve chewed off twigs and bark. Anyhow, he pulled up into this grove, you see — big, first-growth timber. Some of those trees were probably two hundred feet tall and fifteen feet at the butt, and there wasn’t any of the underbrush you see in the woods around here. The only snow that got in under them was what had got blown in from out in the clearings and such, so the ground was pretty dry.”
From where I sat with my head leaned against the Old Man’s chest, I could see into the dark kitchen. I could just begin to build a dark pine grove lying beyond the doorway with my eyes. I dusted the linoleum-turned-pine-needle floor with a powder-sugar of snow made of the dim edge of a streetlight on the corner that shone in through the kitchen window. It looked about right, I decided, about the way Dad described it.
“He got the wagon set where he wanted it, unhitched the horses, and started to make camp.”
“Did he build a fire?” I asked.
“One of the first things he did,” the Old Man said.
That was easy. The glow of the pilot light on the stove reflected a small, flickering point on the refrigerator door. It was coming along just fine.
“Well, he boiled up some coffee in an old cast-iron pan, fried up some bacon, and set some of the biscuits Grandma’d packed for him on a rock near the fire to warm. He said that about that time he’d have given the pipe and being grown-up and all of it just to be back home, sitting down to supper in the big, warm, old kitchen, with the friendly light of the coal-oil lamps and Grandma’s cooking, and the night coming down around the barn, and the shadows filling up the lines of footprints in the snow leading from the house to the outbuildings.” Dad’s voice got faraway again.
“But he ate his supper and called the dogs up close and checked his pistol when he heard the wolves start to howl off in the distance. There probably wasn’t anybody within fifty miles. Nothing but trees and hills and snow all around.
“Well, after he’d finished up with all the things you have to do to get a camp in shape, he sat down on a log by the fire and tried not to think about how lonesome he was.”
“He had those old dogs with him, didn’t he, Dad?” I asked, “and the horses and all? That’s not the same as being all alone, is it?” I had a thing about loneliness when I was a kid.
Dad thought it over for a minute. I could see Jack grinding his teeth in irritation out of the corner of my eye, but I didn’t really look over at him. I had the deep-woods camp I’d built out in the kitchen just right, and I didn’t want to lose it. “I don’t know, Dan,” the Old Man said finally, “maybe the dogs and the horses just weren’t enough. It can get awful lonesome out there in the timber by yourself like that — awful lonesome.”