They talked about how dry it was. Ben had been up at the source of the Dancing Bird, and it was no more than a seep; though in the spring it was a little waterfall nearly two feet high, and they called it The Falls. Rachel admitted to Ben that whenever she was at the head of the creek she always looked for the bird Papa had seen there that had given the stream its name. Ben laughed a little, but as much at himself as her. He said, “I always do, too.”
“Papa was chasing Pawnees,” she said, knowing this was wrong. She had found she could always get him to tell her the old stories she liked by pretending she didn’t have the facts right.
Old Zack had been chasing a Comanche raiding party, in the early days of the War; it was that ever-lasting raiding and chasing that had kept snatching him back every time he set out to enlist. This time the chase had led them a long way through the dry, until finally their loose horses had lit out, thirst-blind and undrivable. And Zack himself had left the trail to recover them. They had smelled the live water, running freshly in the heat, a dozen miles away.
Downstream, the little creek disappeared in the sands; only four miles of it ran all year round. Zack had followed upcurrent to where the water came out from under a limestone ledge. And there on the flat rock just above the water was dancing the strangest bird, some kind of a crane. Zack knew sand-hill cranes, and whooping cranes, and every kind of shidepoke, whether it lived in Texas or just passed through; but this was none of them. It was bigger than a whooper, nearly five feet tall; blue and white, with yellow legs and a red beak. Nobody had ever heard of any such a thing. But there it was, reflected in the water as it bobbed and wheeled and pirouetted with halfspread wings, the way sand-hill cranes like to do, though only around their mates.
Papa sat neck-deep in the cool water under the ledge and watched the dance, and the bird seemed not to mind him. And as he sat there the notion came to him, he used to say, that this was no natural bird, but a spirit bird, sent to him for a sign. The Indians would have called it that. Papa told that part as if he didn’t mean for you to believe it—and yet as if he did more than half believe it, himself.
“I sure miss Papa,” he told Rachel. “He’s four years gone; and yet, this year, I miss him more than I ever did before. We needed him, Sis. We needed him bad.”
In some ways he sounded weary, and about a hundred years older than he was. But there was something else in the way he spoke that reminded her of a little boy.
She was afraid. She could not remember ever having been so much afraid in her life. Ben was naturally good-natured, when not harassed, or overworked too much. Maybe he hadn’t minded being so nice to her as he had always been, so long as the pretense that they were brother and sister held up. But maybe he wouldn’t like to think of her in any other way; maybe he wouldn’t have any use for her at all. There never seemed to be a right or natural time to tell him. Nothing they talked about ever led into it any way. She couldn’t seem to find a way to tell him without it sounded far-fetched, and crude, and kind of out of a clear sky. Like a rock plunked into the pancake batter, all unexpected out of no place.
She asked him where Witch River was, where Papa had died, and why nobody outside the family ever seemed to have heard of it. It was a reached-for question, to keep him out here on the stoop a little longer. Any time, now, he might yawn and go to bed.
He explained—and this was new to her—that Witch River wasn’t the right name of anything. It only ran in the spring, or during hard rains. Just one of the innumerable runoff channels that gullied the prairies everwhere. Few drivers logged it, because they crossed it when it was dry. Those who had trouble with it, during the spring melt, called it the Death Crossing, or Deadman’s Creek, or the Ghost Fork, since Old Zack died there. Only the Zacharys called it Witch River, after a stock joke Papa had used, just before he started his herd into the angry water.
Old hands were always sending some greenie up to ask the boss what river they had come to.
“Witch River,” Old Zack would say.
“Why, this one, right here.”
“That’s right,” Zack would answer, sending the boy back bewildered. If the jokers in the swing could get the boy to say he guessed it must be the Wright, they were satisfied. From there on the kid couldn’t head his horse into any stream, without somebody asking him if he was sure it was the right river.
To Ben it seemed fitting that the river in which his father died should be named after this country joke. He believed Old Zack would have chosen to go to his death with any kind of makeshift, rather than with no joke at all.
Now Ben told her about the day his father had died. The family knew, of course, that Papa had been drowned, while crossing cattle, but Rachel had never known Ben to feel like talking about it in any detail before.
Zack had reached Witch River late in the day, but he had ordered a crossing anyway, though it would run on into the dusk, and maybe the dark. They put the herd through in bunches of about five hundred, going into the water where the banks were low. The current was running pretty hard, but they had enough riverwise hands to press hard against the leaders, lest they yield and be turned. Three bunches crossed all right. But as they put the fourth into the water the light was failing, and maybe the horses were tiring, for this time the leaders turned, and were swept downstream with the current. The wild Texican cattle would do that, sometimes, in spite of all hell and the best men in Texas.
The cows were carried downstream into a deeper, narrower channel, under the nigh bank, where the faster water got hold of them. Here the south bank was high and bluff, and even undercut; there was no way to turn back. The riders who fought against the sweep-away found themselves either too far across, or caught in the mix of the turned cattle—a mortally dangerous place to be.
Ben himself was in the broad shallows on the far side. The lead cattle, with thrashing hundreds behind them, rushed past and got below him in the first moments, swimming with the fast current. Old Zack—Papa, to Ben—was famous for his crossings. No disaster was in his record such as caught him this time, all in a moment. Ben was running his horse at a stumble through the shallows, trying to get down-stream of the leaders. So he was well placed to see what Papa did then.
Straight off the bluff came Zack’s rocketing horse, winging far out over the channel as it plunged to deep water. How far below was the river? To Ben the bluff looked sky high—crowding fifty feet, maybe. But this sounded like such a stretch that he always afterward called it “worse than thirty.” Not a record jump, but one hell of a piece of cow-handling. Zack sounded the rebel long yell all the way down. An explosion of water went up as the horse hit just ahead of the leaders—and they turned.
As Papa came up he was trailing free from the saddle horn, on the downstream side of his horse—you can be swept under your animal, into the meat-chopping hoofs, from the upstream side. Papa’s horse sunk its hindquarters, treading for bottom, and found it. Man and horse surged up onto sound footing, and all the hardest part was behind….
Once Papa had said, “All accidents are freak accidents. All dangers are hidden dangers, by the very meaning of the word. Look out for the Indian sharpshooter where there’s no cover to hide him. Watch out for the badger hole, far from where any badger should be. A man can ready himself for anything on earth, if he knows it’s there.”
So now the unforeseeable struck from under the fast water. As Zack’s saddle horn came streaming up, some thing sodden whirled to the surface, and shawled itself over the nose of his horse. The horse reared and went over backward, and the current rolled over horse and man. They did not reappear.
Ben sent the herd on, and stayed to search Witch River. The stream emptied like a bucket in a day or two, and Ben found his father’s horse, along with some drowned cattle, in a mess of drift. And with the horse was a drowned wolf. Now, how many drowned wolves have ever been seen? Ben had never heard tell of one in his life. Those varmints refuse to be drowned; too strong, too tough, too wary. Yet this one had come a long way to surface right there, at the nose of Zack’s horse, in that one split second when Zack’s life could be ended by it.
Though Ben rode downstream a long way, and later others rode, Zack’s body was never found.
Zack had been around forty-five when he died, but full of drive, and a don’t-give-a-damn quality, much like
