Hide Money

by Leigh Brackett, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The wind came a little after two in the morning, and Nell Gattis heard it before she felt it.

It was a different sound from the other wind, the one that had lived in the stovepipe since November. That one screamed thin and high and drove the snow through the chinks between the logs so that she woke some mornings with a white seam on the blanket. This one came down off the Belts with a long hollow roar, like a train on a trestle that never finished crossing, and the cabin sat inside it and ticked.

She lay on her back in the bunk and listened. The roof dripped. One drop, on the table. Then another on the stove lid, where it hissed. Then a run of them, steady as a clock.

The air in the cabin smelled of wet sod and wet wool and, under that, of something she had almost forgotten. Dirt. Live dirt, thawing.

She did not get up. There was nothing to do in the dark. She lay there with her hands folded on the blanket like a laid-out woman and listened to the snow give up, and she knew exactly what it would give up, and she did not let herself count.

---

At first light the cabin door opened onto a country she had not seen in four months.

The drifts that had stood higher than the corral poles were gone to grey rotten heaps, honeycombed, sagging, running water from underneath. The air was warm. Not spring-warm. Wrong-warm, a soft breath on the back of the neck, fifty degrees at least on a morning in March when last week the thermometer nailed to the doorframe had stood at thirty-one below and stayed there. Water ran everywhere. It talked in every hollow. The yard was a sheet of brown slop with the old snow showing through like bone through a sore.

And down on the creek bottom, where the cottonwoods stood in their bare grey line, there were the humps.

She had known they would be there. She had watched them walk down into that bottom in January, the steers with their eyes iced shut and their hip bones standing up like tent poles, and she had cut cottonwood for them all through February, felling the young trees with Tom's double-bit and lopping the branches so the cattle could strip the bark. They had eaten the bark. They had eaten the twigs and the little branches and then they had eaten each other's tails, the hair right off them, and then they had lain down.

She had stopped going down to the bottom in the second week of March. There was no more cottonwood she could reach and nothing else to do for them.

Now the snow was off them. Red and brindle and roan, a few white-faced ones that Tom had been proud of, lying every which way in the brown water, some on their sides with the legs stuck straight out and some still folded up on their knees, heads down, the way they'd been when the snow came over them. Magpies were already on the near ones. A coyote trotted between two of them, unhurried, and looked up at the cabin and went on.

She counted them. She couldn't help it. Tom had kept the tally book and she had learned his way of it, by fives, the stroke across. Forty-one on the bottom that she could see from the door. There would be more in the willows.

She went and caught up the grulla.

---

The grulla had come through. Horses did. A horse would paw down through the crust to the grass, where a cow would only stand and bawl and wait for somebody to do it for her, and the grulla had pawed all winter on the bench above the cabin and come out of it ribby and mean and alive. He laid his ears back when she put the saddle on and she thumped him in the belly with her knee and he let the air out and she cinched him.

She took the Winchester. She took Tom's long-handled shovel, tied behind the cantle, though she didn't think the ground would be thawed more than a hand's depth.

Then she rode south, down Careless Creek, toward the cutbanks.

The creek was coming up. She could hear it under the ice, a heavy sound, a grinding, and in places the ice had already broken and stood up in grey slabs with the brown water racing over them. The bottom was full of dead. She rode around them. The grulla didn't like it, the smell wasn't much yet but the horse knew, and twice he shied at a carcass half-sunk in a drift and she had to sit down hard and haul his head around.

It was four miles to the cutbanks. She'd made that ride on foot on the twenty-ninth of January, and again on the thirtieth, and again on the fourth of February when the blizzard broke. She'd gone the first time in the storm itself with a lantern tied to her wrist, which was stupid, and she'd known it was stupid, and she'd gone anyway until she couldn't see the lantern.

Tom had ridden out on the twenty-eighth to turn the drift. The cattle were going with the wind, the way they did, heads down, walking blind, and down that way the creek doubled back on itself under the high banks, and anything that walked in there with the wind behind it would walk right over the edge or into the pocket underneath and pile up. He'd said he would turn them at the forks and be back by dark.

Keep the fire up, Nellie.

She'd kept it up.

---

The wolves were there ahead of her.

She saw the ravens first, a black boil of them over the pocket under the cutbanks, and then she came around the last bend and the whole of it opened up in front of her.

The drift had walked in there just the way he'd said it would. They lay piled three and four deep against the foot of the clay bank, two hundred head, maybe more, all heaped together, horns and legs locked, the top ones lying where they'd climbed on the bottom ones trying to get out of the wind. The snow had filled the pocket to the brim, and now the chinook had eaten it down, and what had been a long smooth white slope was this.

Four wolves were working on the edge of the pile. Big grey buffalo wolves, thick in the coat after the winter they'd had, the best winter for wolves since the buffalo. One of them lifted its head and looked at her with its muzzle red to the eyes.

She got down off the grulla. She did it slow. She dropped the reins and the horse stood, trembling, and she levered a shell in and put the rifle to her shoulder and laid the front sight on the one that was looking at her.

The shot went flat across the bottom and came back off the cutbank twice. The wolf went down on its back with its legs kicking. The other three were gone before the echo was, up the coulee in long low bounds, not hurrying much even then, and the ravens went up in a black sheet and came down again on the far side of the pile and went on eating.

She walked over to the wolf. It was dead. She stood and looked at it a while, the size of it, the big paws. It had been eating well.

Then she began to walk around the edge of the pile.

---

She found the bay horse first.

He was out at the end, on the downstream side, half under a red cow. The saddle was still on him. One stirrup stood up out of the slush with the fender twisted, and she knew the stirrup because she had sewn the leather on that fender herself in November when it split.

So he'd got this far. He'd got all the way down here ahead of them, in that wind, in the dark it must have been by then, and he'd tried to turn them at the mouth of the pocket where there was still room to turn. She could see how he'd have done it. Riding back and forth across the front of them, yelling, swinging his rope. And they'd kept coming, the way they did, because a cow in a blizzard will walk into a river or off a cliff before she'll turn her face into the wind. And the bay had gone down.

She looked for him for an hour.

It wasn't a thing she thought about. It was work. She went around the pile, and where she couldn't see in she went in, between the bodies, onto them when she had to, her boots sliding on the wet hides. The smell came up stronger as the sun got on things. She tied her bandanna over her nose. The ravens yelled at her. Once a carcass she was standing on shifted with the thaw underneath and dropped a foot, and she went down to her thigh between two of them in ice-water and had to get out of it with her hands.

He was in the middle of them. Nearly at the bank.

He was sitting up. That was what she would remember, after. That he was sitting, with his back against a roan steer and his knees drawn up, like a man resting on a long drive. His hat was gone. His slicker was buttoned to the throat and the collar up around his ears and he had his hands pushed in under his arms. There was frost still in his beard, in the shadow there where the sun hadn't reached, and his face was a bad color, and his eyes were shut.

The bay must have thrown him, or gone down, and he'd got up and the drift had carried him the rest of the way in, the whole moving weight of them, the way a river carries a man, and when it stopped he was in the middle of it. And he'd done the only thing left. He'd got down in among them, out of the wind, where it was warm, where their bodies were warm. And it had been warm, for a while.

She stood and looked at him.

"Well," she said. "You turned some of them."

She didn't know if it was true. She thought it might be. There had been cattle on the bottom by the cabin, after; some of them must have come from somewhere.

---

She could not get him out by herself. She tried. She got her arms under his and pulled, and he was frozen to the hide behind him and to the slush underneath, and he didn't move, and she sat back down hard in the wet with her heart going.

So she went at it the other way. She went back to the grulla and took the shovel off the saddle and came back and chopped him loose, the hair and the ice, careful, a little at a time, with the edge of the blade. It took a long time. The sun came round. When he was free she got a rope on him under the arms, and walked the grulla out to the end of it, and the horse didn't want to go anywhere near there but she talked to him and kept his head and they eased Tom out a foot at a time across the backs of the cattle and down onto the ground.

She wrapped him in the slicker and her own coat over that. She tied him onto the bay's saddle blanket and made a drag of it with the rope.

The ground was no good. She put the shovel in to see and it went down three inches into mud and stopped on frost like iron. So she would have to keep him. There was the meat house at the camp, the little log shed back against the hill with the sod roof, and it would be cold in there yet a while. A week, maybe. Till the ground came.

She stood by the grulla's shoulder with the rope in her hand and looked at the pile one more time. Then she went back and pulled the saddle off the bay, which took a while too, and slung it over her own saddle horn. A saddle was forty dollars.

She went home slow, walking, leading the grulla, with Tom coming along behind on the drag.

---

There were horses at the corral when she got back. Three of them, and a pack mule, and smoke coming out of her stovepipe.

Dutch Ahlquist was sitting on the chopping block outside the door. He got up when he saw her. He was a big slab-sided Swede gone grey in the mustache, the Crooked L's wagon boss since before there were any wire fences in the territory, and he'd been the one who'd put Tom and her out here in October. He looked at her and he looked at the drag and he took his hat off.

Behind him in the door were two others. One was Pike Sudbury, who she knew a little, who'd worked roundup on the Crooked L three summers. The other was a boy she didn't know, sixteen maybe, with a scarf wrapped around half his face against a cold that wasn't there any more.

Nobody said anything for a while.

"Cutbanks?" Dutch said.

"Under them."

He nodded. He put his hat back on and came over and the two of them got Tom off the drag and carried him to the meat house and laid him down on the plank shelf. There was half a quarter of beef still hanging, from November, frozen hard. Dutch looked at it and then at her.

"That's the last of the good beef in this country," he said. "Right there."

"You want it, take it."

"No," he said.

They went back to the cabin. The boy had made coffee. It was bad coffee, boiled too long, and she drank two cups of it, standing by the stove with her wet skirt steaming, and nobody said anything about it.

"How many on the bottom?" Dutch said.

"Forty-one I counted from the door. Willows I didn't look. Two hundred in the cutbanks, I make it, near enough. Maybe more underneath."

Pike whistled through his teeth.

"What'd he winter here?" Dutch said. "Eleven hundred?"

"Eleven hundred and sixty. On the book."

"And what's walking?"

"I don't know yet. I don't know what came down from the forks. I didn't look."

He nodded. He sat down on the bench with his big red hands on his knees and looked at them.

"Same everywhere," he said after a while. "Same on the Judith. Same on the Musselshell clear to the Missouri. They say there's beeves in the Missouri so thick at the bend below the mouth of the Musselshell you could walk across. I ain't seen it. Pike seen it."

"I seen it," Pike said.

"Edinburgh people wired the bank in Helena," Dutch said. "Bank sent a man out to the home ranch. Everybody's off wages the first of April. Everybody. Me too."

She drank her coffee.

"There's hide money," he said. "That's what I come out to say. The outfit'll pay by the hide. Hides go down to Billings on the wagons and they'll sell back East for what they'll fetch, which ain't much, but it's something, and the outfit wants what it can get, and so does every man that's going to be out of work the first of April. It's dirty work. You skin 'em and then you pile up what's left and burn it, so there ain't sickness in the water this summer. That's the job. That's all the job there is."

"How much a hide?"

"Two bits to the man doing it."

"I'm a good hand with a knife."

He looked at her. He didn't say anything.

"I've skinned beef," she said. "I skinned every beef on this place for four years. Tom didn't like it. He'd do the killing and I'd do the rest."

"I know it."

"You're going to put a crew on the cutbanks."

"Me and Pike and the kid. Starting in the morning. Got to get at 'em before the creek comes up any more and takes 'em off down to the Musselshell."

"Then put me on it."

The boy looked at Pike, and Pike looked at the floor.

Dutch got up and went to the window. There wasn't any glass in it, only a deer hide scraped thin and oiled, and the light came through it the color of weak tea. He stood there with his back to her.

"Nell," he said. "There's a stage out of Martinsdale end of the week. Your sister's in Bozeman, ain't she? I'd stand you the fare. I would. The outfit owes Tom his January pay and his February and his March, and I'll see you get that. Hundred and twenty dollars. That'll get you set somewhere."

"I'm going to stay till I put him in the ground."

"I know that. I'd figured that."

"And I'm going to need more than a hundred and twenty dollars."

He didn't turn around.

"You go on out there tomorrow," she said, "the three of you, and you skin out that pocket, and then you come on up here and skin my bottom. Forty-one head and whatever's in the willows, and every one of them is one I cut cottonwood for. I stood out on that bottom in February with the axe and cut down trees for them. I know which ones are which. I know the one with the bad horn and I know the brindle cow that used to come up to the door. You'll be peeling them in front of my door whether I'm on the crew or not. You understand? There ain't no reason I shouldn't get the two bits."

It was quiet in the cabin. Water ran off the roof outside in a long silver string. Somewhere down the creek something heavy let go with a crack, and then a long grinding roar, and the boy jumped.

"Ice going out," Pike said.

Dutch turned around. He looked at her a long time, the whole length of her, the big chapped hands and the wet skirt and the bandanna still around her neck, and she stood there and let him.

Then he went over to his saddlebags by the door and got out a book. It was a long narrow book, a time book, with the Crooked L burned into the cover, and a stub of pencil tied to it with a string. He sat down at the table where the roof had dripped and opened it and licked the pencil.

"Name," he said, not looking up.

"You know my name."

"I'm asking it for the book."

"Gattis."

He wrote it. She watched him write it. He didn't put an initial in front and he didn't put Mrs. and he didn't put anything after it, just the one word in a column of other names, and the Edinburgh people would see it there in the summer when the books came in and they would think whatever they thought.

"Daylight," he said. "Bring your own knife."

---

She sat up that night by the stove, after the others had rolled up in their blankets on the floor, and she put an edge on Tom's skinning knife with the whetstone and a little spit. She did it slow, the long strokes, the way her grandfather had shown her, until she could lay the blade against the hair of her arm and the hair came off clean.

Outside the warm wind went on roaring down off the mountains, all night long, eating the snow. The creek ran loud. Down on the bottom something was moving among the dead, and she heard the slop of its feet in the water, and the snap and pull.

At daylight she put the knife in her belt and went out and caught up the grulla.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum Kalendās Novembrēs (26 October 2026), ā Leighā Brackett per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Leigh Brackett, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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