Free Tears in the Darkness by Michael Norman Page B

the edge of the state’s eastern plains.
    In the summer the terraces and benches in the Bulls are covered with sweetgrass, but in the winter when the Alberta clippers bear down from the north, the plains and the Bulls turn into a bleak, snow-swept wasteland.
    The meadowlarks and mourning doves are gone now, and the sharp-tailed grouse have left their sage-and-bunchgrass nests to winter among the cottonwoods and pines. Hungry coyotes howl through the arctic night, and in the early morning the frost- and snow-covered ground around the ranch house at Hawk Creek is covered with their tracks.
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    THE WIND WAS PUSHING against the windows of the big room in the main house, and Ben Steele lay there on his cot in the cold and dark, waiting. Any minute now the Old Man would yell from the bedroom for him to get up and light the potbelly stove.
    He pulled the comforter over his head, grabbed it against his chest.
    â€œBud?”
    He lay very still.
    â€œYou hear me, Bud?”
    He poked his face out now but kept his eyes shut tight against the cold.
    â€œDamn it, Bud!”
    Off came the covers, noisily, so his father could hear.
    At least he’d remembered to cut kindling the night before. Nothingworse than standing out in the vale of Hawk Creek in the frozen dark cleaving off strips of wood while an unseen audience watched from the hills.
    He pulled on his moccasins and shuffled, shivering, to the woodbox.
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    HE GOT SO HE LIKED THE COLD , or so he would say. What he really liked was learning to stand it. Showing the Old Man.
    â€œIt’s really cold today, Dad,” he used to say at breakfast, as the Old Man handed out the day’s work assignments.
    â€œCold?” the Old Man would come back. “God, I used to sleep in the snow with nothin’ but a slab of bacon.”
    Maybe. But Bud hated it, the snow and bite of the wind. The Old Man would take him out to round up strays and he’d come back damn near froze to death. Next day, out they’d go again.
    He’d say, “My feet are cold, Dad,” and the Old Man would tell him, “Get off your horse and walk, that’ll warm you up,” but the cold went right through his overshoes, and he felt like he was tramping on frozen stumps.
    â€œStamp ’em,” the Old Man said, but that only made the stumps hurt more.
    Then one day, maybe he was ten or eleven, he stopped feeling the cold, or he just stopped complaining about it.
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    HE WORKED . He worked all the time. Started when he was eight, early even for a boy ranch-raised.
    Whenever Bess would say, “That’s no job for a kid,” the Old Man would come back with, “He has to learn, he has to learn how.”
    The Old Man might give him some pointers, if the chore involved the kind of work the Old Man liked—roping, shooting a rifle, working a wild horse. Range work, cowhand work. Most everything else, often as not the Old Man would issue instructions and leave him to figure the rest for himself.
    Before he could reach their withers, the boy learned to hitch workhorses without help. He’d lead the large animals into a bronc stall, climb the rails, and drop the heavy collar on them upside down so he could reach the buckle later to fasten it. Lot of bother for a kid.
    He started driving a team and hay rake before his legs were long enough to brace him as he sat in the seat. He had to stand on the crossbar,straddling the center pole and lean back against the pull of the horses. A hay rake was hard enough for a man to handle, much less a boy of nine.
    Be careful, the Old Man would warn. “A team could run away with you, and you can get tangled up in those teeth.”
    He was okay. He had good balance, never lost his footing. Then one fine September day when the sun was shining and the wind was whistling in the bull pines, he was making a turn at the far end of a field and something, some rut or root, made the rake pitch.
    Going down he grabbed for