The Fighting Shepherdess

by Caroline Lockhart

The early summer was fulfilling the promise of a hot rainless spring. Bitter Creek was drying up rapidly and the water holes, stagnant and strongly alkaline, had already poisoned a few sheep. The herders could not understand the sheep woman’s delay in moving to the mountains.

“I’m runnin’ myself ragged over these hills tryin’ to hold back them yearlin’s,” Bunch declared. Bowers, too, having his own special brand of grief with the buck herd, had looked the interrogation he had not voiced. Kate herself knew that the sheep should have been higher up, away from the ticks and flies and on good food and water all of two weeks ago, but, on one pretext or another, had postponed giving the order to start, though she knew in her heart that the real reason was because Disston had said he was coming again.

Now she told herself contemptuously that she was no different from the homesick Nebraskan, and, having made up her mind, lost no time in giving each herder his instructions as to when and where to move his sheep.

Kate never paid wages for anything that she could do herself, so the morning after her decision to start for the mountains she was in the saddle and leading two work horses on the way to move Oleson’s and Bowers’s camps before the sun was up.

The two sheep wagons were a considerable distance apart and the road over the broken country to the spot where Kate wished Oleson to make his first camp was a rough one, therefore it was late in the afternoon when Kate reached Bowers’s camp—too late to pull the wagon toward the mountains that night.

She pulled the harness from the tired horses, slipped on their nose bags with their allowance of oats, and, when they had finished, hobbled and turned them loose to graze in the wide gulch where the wagon stood. Then she warmed up a few pieces of fried mutton—and this, with a piece of baking-powder bread and a cup of water from the rivulet that trickled through the gulch, constituted her frugal supper.

While driving the sheep wagon it had required all her attention to throw the brake to keep the wagon off the horses’ heels, and release it as quickly, to select the best of a precarious road and maintain the wagon’s equilibrium, but immediately the strain was over and her mind free to ramble, her thoughts reverted at once to Disston, in spite of her efforts to direct them elsewhere.

Activity is the recognized panacea for a heavy heart, and efficacious while it lasts, but with a lull it makes itself felt like the return of pain through a dying opiate; and so it was with Kate as she lay wide-eyed on the bunk to-night with both the door and window open, while a warm wind, faintly scented with the wild peas that purpled the side of the gulch, blew across her face.

The rivulet gurgled under the overhanging willows and alder brush. A belated kildeer broke the night stillness with its cry. The hobbles clanked as the horses thumped their fore feet in working their way slowly to the top of the gulch. Bowers fired his evening salute before retiring as a hint to the coyotes, and, sometimes, when the wind veered, a far-off tinkle as a bell-sheep stirred on the bed-ground came to Kate’s ears—all were familiar sounds, so familiar that she heard them only subconsciously. In the same way she saw the dark outlines of objects inside the sheep wagon—the turkey-wing duster thrust between an oak bow and the canvas, the outline of the coffee pot on the stove, the cherished frying pans dangling on their nails, her rifle standing on the bench within reach. So far as she knew, she and Bowers were the only human beings within miles, yet she felt no fear; to be alone in the sheep wagon in the dusk of the gulch held no new sensation for her.

She was thinking of Disston as the door of the wagon swung gently to and fro, rattling the frying pan which hung on a nail on the lower half of it, of her brusque and ungracious reply when he had told her he was coming again to see her, of the sorry figure she had cut beside the girl he had brought, and of her fierce resentment at the girl’s covert ridicule. She had shocked and disgusted Disston beyond doubt by the manner in which she had retaliated, yet she knew that in similar circumstances she would do the same again, for her first impulse nowadays was to strike back harder than she was struck.