The Trackers

DedicationFor David and Elizabeth EpigraphsAs soon as you embark, you’ll be free . . .But don’t go astray.—Sophocles, The Trackers. . . hunger and cold and death ride the greenlight of every train the child tramp flips. Soonhe knows them as old acquaintances.—Thomas Minehan, Boy and Girl Tramps of America, 1934 ContentsCoverTitle PageDedicationEpigraphs[Untitled text opener]I. Ten Thousand Foot BlueII. Charcoal and UmberIII. Rust and ChartreuseIV. Cinnabar and AzureV. Indelible BlackAuthor’s NoteAcknowledgmentsAbout the AuthorAlso by Charles FrazierCopyrightAbout the Publisher A MUDDY BLACK-AND-WHITE NEWSPAPER PHOTOGRAPH. I’m standing on a scaffold made from two tall stepladders with boards running between them. I’ve barely begun the mural, haven’t even started putting color on the wall of the brand-new post office. In the photo, the wall looks almost blank, though if you know what you’re looking for, you can faintly see the penciled grid I’ve been laying out, where I’ll soon sketch the underlying form of my plan—curving lines moving across the space, swelling and rising and breaking like waves, the flow of energy moving left to right like a line of text. Up on the scaffold, my head nearly touches the ceiling. My tousle-top hair needs a trim. I’m wearing baggy khaki pants and a workingman’s T-shirt and an old pair of Converse All Stars. In the photograph, the paint stains barely show. I’m holding a brush in my hand, not because I’ve been using it but because the photographer asked me to hold it where the camera would see it. Long and Eve stand a few feet apart on the new black-and-white tile floor, their chins lifted, looking up at me. Eve is wearing a fancy show business cowgirl outfit. She looks a little silly, and at that moment somewhat ordinary. Long wears a dark business suit with subtle Western yokes on the chest. The photo highlights the gray at his temples and emphasizes the difference in their ages. They’re tired, having driven hours from Cheyenne after a few late nights of political business, lobbying and glad-handing. The flashbulb pops and records the moment we first met, and it was news. The caption on the front page of the Dawes Journal read, After Cheyenne trip, prominent rancher John Long and wife greet WPA painter. ITen Thousand Foot Blue MID-AFTERNOON, MAY, UNDER AN EMPTY HIGH-ALTITUDE sky, cool but the sun blazing like it yearned to cinder you, I took a right turn off pavement and passed under a massive H-shaped ponderosa-log entryway. A nearly discreet sign swinging on two chains from the crossmember read Long Shot. Down the dirt drive, two black arcs of telephone and electric lines drooped pole to pole for half a mile of tallgrass and sage.At the end of the road, the ranch house sat long and dark brown. It wasn’t old—not much is out there except the land itself—but this was aggressively new. Its angular flattish rooflines looked like Frank Lloyd Wright had been hired to draw up an enormous log-and-stone cabin one morning and had tossed it off in time for lunch. The center of the house stood tall and angled, and the two wings stretched low and flat. My first thought was that it hunkered against the world, as if attacking bands might still roam the plains. As architecture, it made me wonder who it was afraid of or, conversely, who its anger was aimed at.To the left of the house, the paved highway ran far enough away that vehicles passed miniaturized, barely visible and totally silent. To the right, open country stretched west across sage hills to distant blue-black pine mountains in front of ghostly snow peaks flat as drawing paper against the sky, the Wind River Range. Centered in my windshield, heavy double doors, tall and wide enough for a locomotive, or at least a Packard, to pass through, stood closed. Above the shoulders of the house, a herd of red cattle grazed a near hillside. They drifted all in the same direction, paired with their shadows, moving slow as a tide change. Sky stretched blank and blue to the horizon in every direction.I stepped up on the porch and knocked three times. The knocker was a stylized bronze horseshoe big as the mouth to a five-gallon bucket. I waited and knocked again.No response.To the right of the house, a pole-fenced round pen with sandy footing sat next to a massive hip-roof horse barn. In the center of the circle, an elder slim cowboy in a frayed straw hat lunged a young quarter horse on a long line, the horse shorter both front to back and up and down than the thoroughbreds some of my father’s clients rode to kill foxes with packs of dogs. Handle and lash, the cowboy’s lunge whip was twice as long as he was tall. He swirled his right hand loose-wristed, making a figure eight with the whip, apparently just for the slow, rhythmic whooshing sound of it, the music. The tip never touched the horse. It trotted in circles, head and tail up and ears back.I walked over to the corral and waited to be noticed. The cowboy didn’t even look my way. He seemed to be muttering low to the horse. Sometimes he let the whip end fall to the ground and barely tapped the horse with the long handle across its chest or upper legs. A reminder, like tapping someone on the shoulder. The horse would stop, change directions, change gait with tiny movements of the cowboy’s right hand or his muttered words. One time he let the horse slow to a stop, and then he slacked the line and let it fall to the ground. He lowered his head and looked at his boot tips and backed away a few slow steps like he had no expectations of the horse, required nothing from it, had in fact forgotten all about it. After only a few seconds, the horse stepped toward him, curious but wary, and then the cowboy pulled the line until it was off the