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By Root 1228 0

I had ever belonged to. Mrs. Tidyman could give out more uproar reading a paragraph of Dickens than the bunch of us might in a week. No one was particularly prettier or handsomer than those in the classes which had gone through before us, nor I think any more winsome or wicked; but several of us were more persevering than was usual, and a surprising number had more cleverness. I found, after Mrs. Tidyman's keelhauling examination of me when I first arrived, that I got along easily at the school. Clearly I was an odd commodity—my mind did tricks nobody else's did, nor did anyone else come out of anything like my sheep ranch-Reservation-Dupuyer cafe jumble of backdrop, nor were most of the other boys quite as stoic as I seemed about the subject of girls—yet none of these classmates seemed more than bemused by any of it. And I did contribute the point of pride that in those school-wide exams, I could be counted on to trounce everyone else in the school for us.

I went through the school year, then, to three steady pulses: days at classes in Valier, nights at the Chadwicks', weekends on the Jensen ranch with Dad and Grandma. Just once did this rhythmed northern fife threaten to fly apart. In early December, out of nowhere, Grandma announced to us that she was going to spend Christmas with her sister in Wisconsin.

I had not been at the ranch while that decision brewed, but knew that there was little holiday flavor to it. Shell get it out of her system this way, Dad said, and maybe then.... And maybe then come back and tell us the trip had been so clarifying that she was going to keep on right out of our lives, yes, I could see all the and maybe then.

What the episode was all about, I never knew, nor did Dad seem to have any notion. Perhaps my grandmother simply reached a point where she had to make some test on life for herself, and certainly her turn was long overdue. We said an apprehensive goodbye to her at the bus station in Great Falls. She gave us a frosty farewell and marched aboard.

I had no idea how the ranch household could run without her. To my surprise, Dad housekept diligently. He cooked as heartily as she had—I had forgotten his stint in the White Sulphur cafe—and we lived in high style on venison steak and the rich milk gravy he made from the fry grease to layer over discs of fried potatoes. But the house echoed empty enough to boom lessons into us, and Christmas spluttered in and away as a wan day we were glad to see end. When Grandma arrived back in her promised two weeks, cheerful and full of scorn for Wisconsin— Gee gosh, I forgot how dampish the winters come back there —we were overfed and entirely eager to have her with us again.

The winter went in truce, then it was the lambing season again, the moment for another of the Jensen ranch's routine springtime calamities to conk us. A mid-May blizzard hit, and in a day and a night sealed the ranch in fat heavy snowdrifts. The Hoots came crashing across the benchland with a giant bulldozer and punched our way to the stranded bunches of sheep. We had some loss, but not nearly what it might have been, and at the start of summer we pushed the sheep north to the Reservation with the thought in our minds that this year's worst lay behind us.

But as soon as the Mexican crew finished shearing the sheep in the first few days of July, worry and edginess set in on Dad. The weather had an unaccountable chill—Gee gods, is it gonna snow on us for the Fourth of July? Grandma demanded of the sky—and with our shorn ewes we had on our hands a double thousand of the world's most undressed creatures, caught in only their paunchy yellow-white carcasses like hospital invalids with their gowns suddenly ripped away. Within a week, the sheep would be gray and hardy again, their next fat round sponge of fleece already beginning to cloak them. But for these first days, they stood naked, helpless to a storm. And dragging across the spire-line of the Rockies, black clouds, somehow sprung ahead from cold late autumn into July, were beginning to fray into rain.

Early on the second morning