Free Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) by John Graves

its wide rock-strewn eddying mouth, and two army helicopters rounded down at me. Poised against the wind just over me, their pilots waved and shouted; they were young, and came probably from Camp Wolters twelve or fifteen miles to the south. I waved back. They gestured toward the creek, but I couldn’t make out their meaning and shook my head. Together, as if maneuvered by one set of controls, they veered back over the land and flew down the creek and, from waters I couldn’t see, flushed fifty or more bluebills toward me. Meat or no meat, beaters in helicopters weren’t a part of my personal leisure-class ritual, and I had no notion of killing any ducks that way. But if you were once young and harebrained in a uniform yourself, you keep some tolerance for the breed. I picked up the shotgun to humor them. The bluebills flared away before they came in range, so that there was no need to play out the show. One of the pilots hovered over me again for a moment and held his nose between his thumb and forefinger; then, as I laughed, he flew off over the jumbled cliffs of the shore.
    During a second I envied him, dominant as a hawk over the country and the river, minutes away from places it would take me a week to reach by water. But the envy was a spasm and without point; I was on the river in the wayI’d chosen to be there. And I’d had enough of the young, uniformed, harebrained business to last me three lifetimes.
    Big Keechi (if you’re of those who don’t care, I guess you probably won’t have come this far with me) is about as historic as places get in the upper-middle Brazos country. It is a biggish and dependable creek for that part of the world, and it runs far up into Jack County in a wide valley that caught the eye of cattle-minded men when the whole country was free for the choosing. Like the other north-south tributaries, it was a road in and out of the Brazos valley for The People, and consequently it heard the bowstrings’ thrum and the rifles’ pop, time and time and time again.
    Old Man Charlie Goodnight lived up there when he was young, at Black Springs. It was where he settled when he first struck out on his own with a little herd and a big set of guts and considerably more direction and determination than most of his neighbors. Mr. Charlie’s life spanned about three eras, and he was vigorously central in all three. Born in Illinois, he came to Milam County, Texas, as a child at just about the time when Texas entered the Union, and grew up in the hunting-farming-stock-raising aura of that time and place. Young, he earned cattle of his own by tending a herd on shares, set himself up on the Keechi range, and by the time the war and the bad years came along knew about as much as anyone in the region about Indians, Cross-Timbers cattle raising, and how to stay alive. He served out the war as a scout and ranger on the plains, fighting Comanches instead of Yankees (Texas had its asterisk on the Stars and Bars, but on these fringes there were many men who had no stake in slaveholding nor any particular excitement about the whole fracas), and he could, they say,practically tell you how many miles you were from usable water by fingering the foliage on a chittamwood tree.… Indians and neighbors stole him blind while he was away, but he built up another herd and joined with another Keechi cattleman, Oliver Loving, to open the harsh trail to New Mexico and Colorado. Old, he had the JA in the Paloduro Canyon where the Cap Rock breaks away to rolling prairies, and was, more than any other man on the South Plains, a symbol of the cattle baron. He was a tough and bright and honorable man in tough not usually honorable times, and had respect and a kind of love for the Indians even when he fought them. They called him Buenas Noches.
    Old people around that country will tell you also, with some bitterness, that Buenas Noches had a big mouth and took credit for much that Loving did. It is so. But the Comanches got