“Just about; although, if this Northern drive keeps extendin’ itself, there’ll be longhorns winterin’ at the north pole, it looks like,” the wagon boss replied. “If you want to see some new country, here’s a chance.”
“From Mexico to Canada, personally conducted!” Rock laughed. “All right, I’m with you.”
Thus did he come into the foothills of the Rockies, north of 49°, in the month of September. They crossed the Missouri where Chief Joseph had forded it with his braves ten years earlier, with U. S. cavalry in hot pursuit. They plodded west and north to their destination, leaving the Bear Paws to the right, Sweet Grass Hills on their left, sweeping across a country where grass grew to their stirrups, driving before them twelve hundred cattle of divers age and sex, marked with a brand on the left ribs, called a steering wheel.
Rock looked once or twice to the westward before they reached the boundary line. Somewhere in that great empty area the Marias River split the plains. Somewhere on the Marias was the headquarters of the Maltese Cross. The Cross would keep. He had given his word to go through with the Steering Wheel. In the winter or in the spring he would drift into Fort Benton, and he would contrive to make himself familiar with the ways and works of Buck Walters. For the present——
The Old Man revealed itself as a pleasant country, well grassed, well wooded with small pine, and with a small, swift-flowing stream in which trout lurked in eddying pools. Axes and saws they had in the chuck wagon. By some mysterious agency of freighting across the plains, they found themselves in possession of a mower and a dump rake. For once, faced as it were by an emergency, these knights of the saddle, who had all the man-on-horseback’s traditional contempt for labor on foot, fell to as carpenters, corral builders, reapers and stackers of hay.
So that, when the first November snows hit them, they were housed in a comfortable log dwelling. Each man had a saddle horse tied in a warm stable, and hay stacked to feed his mount till spring. The Steering Wheel cattle had sun-cured grass to graze upon and brushy creek bottoms to shelter them against the blizzard.
“It might be worse,” Rock said to a fellow rider a few days before Christmas. “I had an idea this Canada country was like the arctic regions. But it shapes up like a real cattle country. It’s colder than Texas, but there’s more grass and better shelter. These mounted police, with their funny red coats and striped pants, are about like the Texan rangers, only they don’t shoot so frequent nor play as tight a game of poker.”
“She’s a lonesome country,” the other rider said.
It was indeed a lonely land. When spring opened, with streams in flood and blue windflowers thrusting ahead of the first grass blades, Rock missed the gathering of the clans, the scope of great round-ups, and the hundreds of riders with gossip from a thousand miles of range. It was like being a chip in an eddy, he thought to himself, being given to similes and metaphors. The Steering Wheel seemed to have the entire Northwest to itself. They heard that another big outfit lay somewhere north of them. The STV had headquarters two hundred miles east. But from September to April Rock saw no four-footed beast on the range outside of the Steering Wheel brand. Nor did any rider ever come up from the horizon to pass the time of day. Fort MacLeod was a police barracks chiefly. It boasted a trading store, where trappers from the mountains sold their furs and bought supplies. Community life there was none at all.