Blackfeather
1 Just Kidding
KYLE AND I couldn’t wait to get on our horses after school let out for the summer. We started out easy, but horses like to kick it a little going uphill. Before long, we were whooping and hollering and cantering up the trail to Centennial Ridge. I was thirteen-and-a-half and my best friend—my brother—had just turned thirteen. Seventh grade was behind us. YeeHah!
Kyle’s my half-brother really, but who cares? Mom Mar had me in November and Mom Ash had him in May. We do everything together—riding, roping, hunting, fishing. Even fighting with the brats. Everything. Kyle’s got my back and I got his.
By the time we’d made it up to the ridge, though, I was feeling a little punky.
“Kyle, I gotta pee.”
“Yeah?”
“You’re a lotta help. I need to head for the bushes.”
“Ah, just do it here. I gotta go, too. I’ll point this way and you point that way.”
Well, I usually find a bush to pee behind, but we hadn’t made it to the woods yet and the nearest human being to us had to be close to a mile away. So, we just jumped off the horses and I faced uphill a few feet from where he faced downhill. An old raven was sitting on a rock about twenty feet away just watching me.
“Shoo, bird. I gotta piss. Don’t need an audience.” He didn’t go anyplace, but something caught his interest behind him and he turned that direction. I pulled my pants down and squatted.
I got hit with such a bad cramp I almost fell over.
“Ow! Ow, ow! Oh, shit!”
“You okay, Ramie? What’s wrong?”
“Don’t look!”
“I ain’t lookin’. What’s wrong?”
“Just stay put.” I stuffed some toilet paper in my drawers and pulled them up. My first time and I’m up at the top of a freakin’ ridge with my brother. “Kyle, get my light poncho out of my pack and toss it over my saddle, would ya?”
“What’s wrong, Ramie? What do you want to sit on your poncho for?”
“’Cause I don’t want to get my saddle bloody,” I said in a huff. Damn it! My gut hurts.
“You’re bleeding? Ramie, what do we need to do? I gotta get you down to a doctor. We need to tie off the flow. I got a bungee cord in my saddle bag. We can use that for a tourniquet,” my idiot brother said. He was panicking. Why do I have to explain this to him?
“You can’t tie it off with a tourniquet. I ain’t gonna die. Just… I got cramps. Help me up on Pooky. I want to go home.” All right, I was getting whiny. I’ve got to hand it to Kyle, though. He didn’t hesitate to do what I told him to. I could depend on him.
It was a long trip back down to the ranch. It was never as fast going downhill as going uphill. We rode along quiet-like and I tried not to be bitchy. Mom Ash warned me that when it hit, the hardest thing was not to make enemies of everyone around me. It wasn’t their fault. There was a howl off someplace south of us.
“You think that’s them damn wild dogs?” Kyle asked.
“I don’t know. Sure didn’t sound like a coyote.”
“We should take a summer hunting trip and just go shoot ’em. They’re scaring all the game away.” Well, we agreed about that, but Pa was firm that we didn’t shoot animals for sport. Oh, we hunt and fish, but animals are food. If you ain’t gonna eat it, you don’t shoot it.
“Did you peek, Kyle?”
“No!” That was a little too fast.
“Ya did, too.”
“How can you say a thing like that?”
“I know you peeked.”
“How would you know that?”
“I peeked.”
“Ramie! You…” he looked over at me. I held his eye as he tried to get his upset on. Then we both started laughing. Oh, god! That just started the cramps up again and I doubled up over my saddle horn. I felt Kyle’s hand on my shoulder.
“Is there anything I can do, Ramie?” he asked. I knew I could ask him anything.
“You got my back?”
“You know I do.” I looked up and smiled at him. It was a little weak, I suppose, but at least it didn’t come off like a grimace.
“Would you rub down Pooky so I can go on in? I’ll make it up next time. Promise.”
“Let’s just tie ’em at the post while I get you inside to Mom Mar. I’ll come out and take care of him when I get Dado. Come on. You can lean on me when you get down.” I slid off my horse and was thankful Kyle was waiting for me. He supported me on the way in and when Mom Mar saw me come into the kitchen she knew immediately what was going on.
“Kyle, I’ll take care of Ramie. You take care of the horses. Your Pa will be out to talk to you in a few minutes and explain everything. Get going.” Kyle left me with Mom Mar and headed back for the horses. It embarrassed me to think that Pa was going to go explain to him what a period was and that I’d just started mine. I was pretty sure he’d figured it out by now anyway. He wasn’t stupid—just clueless.
We had to work on the ranch that summer, but we got plenty of time to just ride. I love horses. A lot better than cows. Someday I’ll have a horse ranch.
Only thing was, we got new orders from Pa that no one could go off alone out of sight of the house. One of the hired hands radioed down that he was sure he saw a pack moving down in the valley southeast of where the herd was grazing. He wasn’t sure if it was wild dogs, coyotes, or wolves. Either way, Pa didn’t want the young ones riding out even together unless Kyle and I were with them. With our rifles.
So, we mostly spent the summer wrangling Caitlin and Phile. Why Moms ever decided to add them to the litter is beyond me. They had two perfectly good kids already. I swear those two were raised by coyotes. We managed to have a pretty good time of it anyway. When the cattle came down from the upper range at the end of August, I was pretty sad that summer was almost over. School would start Tuesday after Labor Day.
“We gotta talk to them,” Mom Ash said. It was still hot and all the doors and windows were open for air. The brats were sent to bed. Kyle and I were watching TV but we could both hear our parents in the kitchen. “We can’t know for sure and they need to be prepared.”
“But she’s still my baby,” Mom Mar said.
“Honey, she’s still my baby, too,” Mom Ash said. “Both of them are. You know it’s for the best. When they get back to school anything could happen.”
“Kyle. Ramie,” Pa called from the kitchen. “Come to the office, would you please?” Pa always asked stuff like that so nicely. You didn’t make the mistake of thinking it wasn’t an order, though. When Pa asked you to do something, you did it. He never hit me. I know he laced Kyle’s hind end with his belt the day my brother almost burned the barn down, though. The brats, now, that was something else. If they weren’t getting a spanking, it was just because somebody gave up.
“What is it, Pa?” I asked. I was going to go hug him but he pulled up his chair behind his desk and motioned us to the couch where Moms were sitting. Moms were together in the middle of the couch so Kyle and I had to sit on opposite ends. This can’t be good.
“First of all, we’ve done our best to talk to you about the facts of life and you’ve lived on the ranch all your lives, so you’ve seen cattle and horses breeding. But people are more complicated than cattle. You’ve got emotions and a brain that will let you control your behavior. School’s coming up and it will be different with kids’ hormones kicking in. We just want you both to know that if you have any questions, we’re always available to talk with you. You can come to any one of us, or all of us. We’ll answer you truthfully and fully if we are able to. And if anyone approaches you sexually, just say no,” Pa said.
Mom Mar groaned. Kyle and I nodded. Say no? Some dude makes a pass at me and he’ll go home in a sack. If they find the pieces.
“Get on with it, Cole,” Mom Ash said. Apparently, that wasn’t the conversation she was waiting for.
“All right, Ashley,” Pa said. He sighed. “Now that you are both more grown up, we have to tell you some things that might be hard to believe at first. Kids, you might be time travelers.”
I leaned forward and looked at Kyle. He leaned forward at the same time and Moms leaned back with a shake of their heads. Kyle and I started laughing. We were waiting for Pa to say “Just kidding.”
“We thought we’d done something wrong or something,” I laughed.
“For Pete’s sake, Cole,” Mom Mar said, still shaking her head. “You say it like that and I don’t even believe it anymore. Kyle. Ramie. Stop laughing. Your father is serious and I want you to pay attention. It might sound crazy, but it’s real—and embarrassing, too.”
Kyle and I stopped laughing. I looked at Mom Mar and could see her face turning red. Dang! What’s that about? Mom Ash was sitting there with her arms folded waiting on Pa. Pa had his elbows on the desk and was running both hands through his hair.
“All right. Settle down and I’ll tell you. We don’t know if this stuff gets passed down from generation to generation or if it was a one-time thing. We just want you to be prepared so you recognize what’s happening and don’t get yourselves or your hosts killed like I almost did. Well, did. I did get my host killed eventually.”
What followed from the mouth of our father was a science fiction story about him being sucked out of his body whenever a redtail hawk called and getting plunked down in the body of a 19th century kid. He did his best to explain how it worked, but he didn’t have much of an idea, really. The hawk called and he left his body. He said Kyle was named after Kyle Redtail, the man he inhabited in the 1880s, and I was named after Laramie Wyoming Bell, the girl he fell in love with. He even pulled his antique Smith & Wessons off the hat rack where they’d hung ever since I could remember and said they were his in 1889. And then he said Kyle and Laramie had become our great-great-great-grandparents. He even showed us the family Bible.
Then he dropped another bomb and Mom Mar turned beet red.
“The reason we’re telling you about this now is that… well, kids develop faster these days than they did in ours and we thought we were pretty fast. The first time I traveled was right in the middle of when Mary Beth and I were losing our virginity together. I never asked Grandpa Philemon how he got started. I don’t suppose you even remember him. The only other person I talked to who had traveled, though, started in the middle of her first sex experience, too. She was younger than me when she started and I was sixteen. Geneive was about your age. Her story isn’t a very happy one,” Pa said. He looked sad. “She’s gone now. None of us knew exactly why we were selected to travel. It helped us save a lot of ranches here in the county. But it seems like it created the problem, too. Maybe there won’t be any more time travel. We just want you kids to be prepared. And not to have sex too soon.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. Holy fuck! Pa’s gone batshit crazy!
“Kids, go to bed now. Don’t ask questions,” Mom Ash said. “Tomorrow morning, you’ll start to think up some really good ones. Tonight, just sleep on it.”
Kyle and I kissed and hugged our parents and then headed upstairs to bed. As the oldest, I had a room all to myself. I was sorry Kyle had to share with Phile, but there were only three bedrooms plus our parents’ room. Maybe we could send Phile and Caitlin back in time. Permanently.
We were on that dang bus headed to school on Tuesday morning early. At least we didn’t have to walk to Centennial to catch it. We drove two four-wheelers a couple miles to the elementary school where we dropped Caitlin and Phile and caught the bus. There were only eight of us who rode the bus from Centennial down to Laramie for junior and senior high school. Of course, it had to stop at half a dozen places along Snowy Range Road to pick up kids from the outlying ranches.
Kyle sat next to me and we started talking about what Moms and Pa told us Friday night. We didn’t ask any questions the next day or any of Labor Day weekend. I didn’t want to encourage my parents. I didn’t believe it at all. Kyle, though… he sort of loves science fiction and I think he watches too much TV.
“You going to do it?” he whispered.
“What do you mean do it? The way Pa described it he didn’t have any choice. That hawk screamed and he was gone. You can’t just decide to do it.”
“Yeah, but you know what he was doing. And that Geneive girl he talked about, too. It happened when they… did it, you know?” He was turning red. You’d think he was Mary Beth’s biological son instead of Ashley’s. Mom Ash never blushed at anything.
“Sex?” I said a little too loudly. A couple kids turned and looked at us. “If that’s what it takes to time travel, you can tell me about it when you get back. Have a boy stick his dick in me down there? No way. It’s disgusting!”
“I’m going to do it. Right on my sixteenth birthday like Pa.” He shifted in his seat and moved his hips around a little. My brother was becoming a pervert right in front of me. He was looking up front toward Annie Wilcox.
“If you’re supposed to be with another virgin, you’ll have to look further than her,” I whispered. “She ain’t going to wait till you’re sixteen.” I wouldn’t be surprised to find out Annie was already giving it out. Kyle folded his arms over his chest and dropped his chin to pretend he was sleeping. Guess that conversation is over. I took the same position. We looked quite the pair, I’m sure.
We got through eighth grade without learning anything useful. Well, I liked history the way Mr. Carlson taught it. He said history books don’t always tell the truth. He took two classes at a time for a walking tour of Laramie and showed us an official plaque right in the middle of town that had it all wrong. It made me wonder how much other stuff we get taught that isn’t true. If I could get a first-hand look at the Civil War, for example, would I think Abraham Lincoln was as much a hero as we make him out to be? Pa said there were still unanswered questions about both Lincoln’s assassination and Kennedy’s and Mr. Carlson agreed. I had to open my big mouth and Mr. Carlson ‘suggested’ I should write a paper on Lincoln’s assassination. Kyle helped me look it up on the Internet, but I suppose unless you were there you wouldn’t really know. Maybe it wouldn’t be bad to time travel.
Pa and Mom Ash took us hunting on my fourteenth birthday. Kyle and I knew our guns pretty well by then. We’d been taught how to shoot from the time we were kids and had to practice every week. Some things Pa and Moms were all in agreement about. We were ranch kids and we needed to know how to live on our own.
Mom Mar handled the base camp and the kids while we rode up into the mountains. There were only a few inches of snow on the ground in the high areas and the elk were still pretty high up. Later we might see some come down to the river, but they just don’t get along well with ranches. We found a good place and hunkered down with a thermos of soup to watch for a prize. It was a fruitless day. We were cold and wet and hungry by the time we got back to Mom Mar at the base camp. Most I saw were a couple squirrels and an old one-eyed raven that sat in a tree and just sort of watched us all day.
“Pa, why don’t we raise more cattle?” I asked as we rode home. “We’ve got plenty of pasture and range land. You said there were 5,000 head when we were born and we don’t have a tenth that now. Better yet, we could raise horses.”
“Well, little girl, we did have a season or two with a pretty big herd. But it wasn’t because we could justify supporting it. Even with 6,000 grazeable acres, that isn’t enough to support a herd that size and we had to dry feed even in the summer,” Pa said. “We were in the middle of a range war and it was all economics. The price went down and we couldn’t sell them. Dry feed alone ran us well over five million dollars. MB, that about right?”
“Yes,” Mom Mar said. “Don’t forget we had to hire close to thirty people and not all of them were cowhands. That was another million. Then when we finally got the market back, we had to fatten them on the feedlot. Rack up another couple million.”
“Don’t forget that for close to a year, none of us slept,” Mom Ash added. “I don’t mind working hard, but don’t get between me and my bed. Our bed.” She stretched. After sleeping on the hard cold ground last night, all of us were thinking about how nice our beds were. I was doing some fast calculating. Kyle looked over at me. He knew I was adding it up.
“Eight million,” I mouthed at him. His mouth fell open.
“Um… Pa? I guess I never thought about it. Are we rich?”
“Well, we don’t lack for anything. It’s part of the legacy from when I was… uh… traveling,” he said. “We created Gold Watch Cattle Company and pretty much subsidized the entire cattle operation of the county that year—well over fifty million.”
“Wow!” Kyle breathed. I could see his eyes light up. I was pretty sure he was going to go treasure hunting if he ever went time traveling. He didn’t have a practical bone in his body.
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