Louis L'Amour by Hanging Woman Creek

in a straight line for long, it means somebody is driving them. Going to water is an exception, sometimes, but you’ll soon learn to judge.”
    All the time I talked I was busy looking. There was a big old grizzly in this country, I could tell … I’d seen his claw marks high up on scratch trees where he’d made his mark. Grizzlies do that to stake a claim to a piece of territory. If any other bears want to come in, they look at those scratch marks, and if they’re too high on the tree they turn around and heist out of there—if they’re smart.
    I saw wolf tracks, too—tracks of a big lobo that I’d guess would weigh a hundred and fifty pounds … and few get that big. There was lots of deer, elk, and antelope too.
    We rode up the Hanging Woman to Trail Creek, and then turned east toward the Otter. We found the trail of a travois … the two trailing poles on which Indians load their gear to drag it behind a horse or a dog … and a small party of Indians—two men and several squaws and youngsters. They were riding west toward the Big Horns. One of the horse tracks looked like something I’d seen before, but I couldn’t place it.
    It was long after dark when we got back to the cabin, and we came up on it mighty slow and careful, but everything was as we’d left it. After I’d fed the stock in the corrals, I scouted around a bit.
    Not that I was looking for anything special. I just wanted to get the feel of the place after nightfall.Everything has a way of looking different at night, so I walked around sizing up the layout from all angles, studying the outlines of things against the sky, testing the night smells.
    Something about those smells worried me. There was the smell of the pines, of the creek down below, of the horses in the corral, of smoke from the house, of fresh-cut wood … but there was another faint, hardly noticeable smell. Whatever it was brought a feeling of loneliness almost of homesickness, and that I couldn’t figure. I’d had no home in so many years that I—
    Eddie stuck his head out of the door. “Come and get it,” he said, “before I throw it away.”
    Whatever that smell was, it was like a flower, like some sort of flower had just opened up. And that didn’t make sense at this time of year.

    F OR THE NEXT five days we had no time to think of anything or anybody. We worked the country west toward the Rosebud, and north as far as the Muddy and Skully Creek, most of the time just starting cattle drifting back to the south and our line camp. It was early for snow, but in Montana a man never could be sure, so we made a quick, scattering sweep across the country to begin, with a view to making a more careful search later if time allowed.
    Eddie Holt was a rider, no question about that, and he was a fair hand with a rope, so it took him no time at all to get the hang of it. Of course, knowing cattle comes with experience, and no man is going toget that overnight, but I told him what I could, and the rest he’d have to learn.
    The stock was in good shape, although it could stand culling. Some of the young stuff and cows carrying calves we started back toward the Hanging Woman, but we found no tracks that day except the tracks of cattle or wild life.
    Along in the late afternoon we pulled up on a ridge near the head of Wolf Creek, and looked down the valley of the Tongue.
    “It’s a fair land,” Eddie said softly, “a fair, wild land.”
    “It is that,” I agreed.
    The bright glare was gone, the shadows softening the distance, and the coolness of evening was coming on. Far off an eagle soared against the sky … soon he’d be going in, leaving the sky to the owls and the bats. I saw a gray wolf sloping along through the trees, head down, nose reaching out for the scent of game.
    We sat motionless and not talking, just taking in the peace of eveningtime. Finally Eddie said, “It was no wonder they fought for it.”
    “Yeah,” I said, “and they
fought
, too. Not