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dedicated as I was in later years to my Oldsmobile 88, and I no longer had a horse but wistfully attended horse auctions in Billings and elsewhere. I was at a dispersal of the Bar J Hat Pin, a hundred-thousand-acre cattle operation near Cohagen that was sold to a man who had made a fortune selling vitamins on television. The cowboys, mostly older men, were all let go, and they brought their saddle horses to the sale. They pooled their mounts in a few thirty-foot gooseneck trailers and followed along in dusty sedans. I never saw such a bunch of heartbroken old men as many of their ponies were consigned to the killer pen because of their age, to be sold for meat. It all reminded me of Wiley, who by that time was long gone.
    I admired Gladys and Wiley for the very realistic way they went about their lives. Theirs was a meager operation that sent a hundred calves tomarket each year; they were obliged to grow some winter feed, mostly non-irrigated wild hay that Wiley harvested with his 9N Ford gas tractor. I got a great lesson in precision by watching Wiley squint through cigarette smoke as he dressed and adjusted the teeth of the sickle bar on his mower when we prepared our annual siege of the meadows. His equipment was old and minimal, but it enabled him to swathe the most beautiful mix of orchard grass and clover, which we made into small sixty-pound square bales that he could ferry around in his truck and throw here and there “without breaking my goddamn back.” His little herd of Hereford cattle always did well in those days before the Angus triumph, and he was expert at the treatment of sunburned udders, pro-lapses, and eye cancers that afflicted this pleasant breed in our part of the world. By contrast, my parents invested in a mail-order shoofly pie business that foundered in a matter of months, extinguishing my mother’s pride in her baking and landing them in yet more financial turmoil, probably at least the twentieth episode since the days of steam-cleaning rugs. I once thought that my father was a willing accomplice to all these gyrations, but I eventually learned that the few years of war had crowded out the rest of his life, and thinking about them, re-imagining them, and finally relating them to some view of life took up much of his time. I expect most of his fellow veterans shared the belief that what they had experienced could never be conveyed but rather was owned as a private matter or, at best, shared with one another. I remember noticing when his war cronies were around a kind of contempt for that vast portion of the world that hadn’t “been there.” I heard one of them say that he had more respect for a German soldier than an American civilian and what a shame it was you could legally shoot only the former. That was the generation that raised me, and in general they were happy enough to watch us piss away our opportunities on cheap amusements because we were a mob of untested ninnies anyway and there was no sense spoiling our fun.
    It must have been the last summer I worked on the White Bird that Wiley took me up to his summer pasture to clean moss and slime out of the stock tanks. One was on a sandstone ridge overlooking a shallow draw. Atop the ridge, a tall tree held a nest of prairie falcons, and the newly fledged young were gliding down the draw to another tree full of indignant magpies, lording it over birds that would prey on them by theend of summer. We had a packhorse carrying some war surplus panniers that opened from the bottom, and in those we carried several hundred pounds of salt, which we distributed to the salt troughs arrayed near the springs. We hobbled Train and Madelyn and took a break. Wiley shook a Camel from its pack and captured it with his lips. Striking a match with his thumbnail, he lit the cigarette and drew in the smoke with an air of grateful relief. “We ship in the fall. You need to get out there and be somebody,” he said right out of the blue. I was finished with