Lonesome Heart

During the deadly winter of 1886-1887, which would end the era of the open range, a ranch hand seeks to escape the crushing solitude and boredom of his isolated station in the merciless vastness of the Wyoming Territory.

*** Content warning: This episode contains descriptions of cruelty and harm to animals. Listener discretion is advised. ***

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Transcript

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

The history of the American frontier is often cast as a story of rugged individuals battling with a hostile wilderness and overcoming it, prospering by sheer strength of will. And while there may be grains of truth in that narrative, the realities were not so simple and not nearly so clean, so heroic. Death and misery were frequently the prices paid by pioneering frontiersmen for their desperate ambitions, and sometimes they forced others to pay those prices in their stead. The celebrated American cowboy was often merely an underpaid youth whose bitter privations and deadly labors brought great profit to ruthless cattle barons, to wealthy investors and powerful companies headquartered half a world away.

And many of these young men met their end on the open range, visited upon them by innumerable injury and disease, by the extreme and unpredictable weather of the plains, sometimes by great violence.

Dig very long in the prairie earth, and you are bound to find bones beyond counting, for the dead are never lonely… least of all in these darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro - Continues]

NARRATOR

Episode Eleven: Lonesome Heart.

(Sounds of storm and cattle bawling)

NARRATOR

Winter has sunk her long claws into the hills and flats, wails through the cracks in the newspapered walls and batters at the thin panes of glass in the sole window of the cramped bunkhouse. The blown snow whispers insistently against the thin timber, hissing like an angry lover, occasionally probing through the threshold with a searching, wispy white finger.

Hugh, known somewhat confusingly to his boss and fellow ranch hands as Oklahoma Hughie despite hailing originally from Texas, sits alone inside the crude structure, trying to warm himself beside the small woodstove, where dried chips of cow dung burn and fill the air with the smell of a prairie fire.

He is the last of the hands left at this station, the others let go or relocated to the ranch headquarters near the river, where the herd can be more easily managed over the winter.

Hughie has been kept on mainly for the purpose of wolf hunting, to protect the herd from predation as game becomes ever scarcer with winter’s tightening grip. It is one of the more envied jobs among cowpokes, with both a good monthly salary of thirty dollars and a bounty of five dollars per wolf pelt at the end of the year.

But the weather has been too wild these last two days for Hughie to even venture from the warmth of the bunkhouse, unless it’s to run to the tiny cookhouse for the standard meal of bacon, biscuits, beans, and strong coffee, or to the outhouse for his other needs.

Turning for a moment from the woodstove and its blessed heat, he gazes forlornly at the sole pelt he has managed to acquire this winter. It lies draped over the back of an empty, home-carved chair, grey and heavy and lifeless. He thinks of the night he obtained it, when he had been roused from sleep by the bawl of a yearling steer that had strayed from the herd. It had not been the customary sound of a lonely bovine seeking its fellows, but a cry of mingled panic and rage – the sort an animal only makes when it finds itself in mortal peril.

And so he had thrown his coat and boots on over his pajamas and gone out into the dark, unarmed. The snow had not yet come then, and he had, as hastily as he could, thrown a saddle on a horse and mounted up, left the stable and ridden toward the bellowing. He had only left the small cluster of buildings about thirty paces behind him when, by the faint moonlight, he had seen the steer making its desperate threat display of lowered, short-horned head and hoof-churned dust cloud, seen the three lean wolves that were even then encircling the beef.

Two of them had turned at his approach and, fearful as wild wolves often are of men, especially on horseback, turned and fled across the benighted prairie to find less dangerous quarry. But the other had lingered, perhaps made desperate by hunger or perhaps driven to the same fear-fueled fury that its intended prey had felt, instead turned to growl at Hughie and bared its long, long fangs.

With neither rifle nor revolver at hand, Hughie had instead relied upon that which resides on every cowboy’s saddle: his lariat. He cast the rope twice before he ensnared the deadly hunter, then, improvising, had knotted the free end and used it as a heavy flail, beating the wolf slowly to death.

Such cruel treatment of humankind’s distant kindred was nothing new to Hughie, is well-known to every man who ever rode a cattle trail. And never before had Hugh gave it a second thought, except perhaps as a toddling child wholly new to the world, but at the last he had seen by the waxing moonlight a look of intelligent suffering in the eye of that wolf that had given him pause, and then that had given way to a piercing gaze of such absolute hatred that it had made his veins feel frozen solid.

As much to kill that unaccustomed feeling as to earn his pay, he had dwelt three final, heavy blows to the wolf’s skull, then secured the lariat to his saddle horn and dragged the carcass back toward the ranch station to hang it up and skin it in the morning. He had spent the rest of the night rounding up the stray steer and driving it back toward the herd, returning to the small bunkhouse as dawn had tinged the sky a frigid grey and sleeping until late morning.

It was only a few days afterward that the winter storm had come and cut Hugh off entirely from the outside world.

Hugh’s lip twitches with distaste for the memory. Like every cowhand, he has ridden horses to exhaustion when the need arose, broken the tail of a truculent bovid to drive it, even killed both mount and beef by occasional accident or necessity, but never once has he felt guilty for it.

But for some reason, the wolf’s final expressions seem scored into his memory, and that golden, baleful eye creeps at times into his dreams. This is something that he will never speak of – not to another cowpuncher, who would only disgustedly deride his softness, not to one of the smiling, whispering painted ladies in the distant cow towns, whom he sometimes pays for the privilege of sharing a bed for half an hour, not even to any woman he may someday convince to take him as husband.

He doesn’t dare to look at the table, where the slightly cracked skull sits. After he had skinned the beast, he had thrown the carcass out into the grass for scavengers and rot to take as they may, but not before cutting off the head and simmering it in a battered old pot for the better part of a day to cook the flesh off the bone.

Ever since, though, he has wished he hadn’t bothered. The skull, eyeless, pale, and immobile, seems nevertheless to still project that lethal gaze at him, and he keeps telling himself he will dispose of it too.

Yet somehow, he never seems to get around to it, and the dead thing sits waiting, leering and infinitely patient.

(Short pause)

NARRATOR

The sun emerges after a few days, and Hugh’s mood improves. He almost considers riding to one of the other stations for a few rounds of cards and drinks, or maybe just to borrow a bit of preserved food to supplement his unvaried diet, but the Carsten Cattle Company is an employer as much known for sternness as generosity, and he decides not to risk appearing idle.

So instead, he takes his .44 Winchester rifle and two horses out into the nearby range to hunt, hoping equally to find wolves to fatten his wages, or game to fatten his body against the cold, short days and long nights.

He finds no wolves, but does after a couple of hours spot a mule deer buck who has not yet shed its stately antlers in the middle distance. The beast is still, with its head lowered to the ground, sniffing or licking at something, and seeming not to have heard or scented him yet. When he takes it down with a single well-placed shot, he scabbards his rifle with no small amount of satisfaction and rides to collect the carcass.

But on drawing near, he finds that the antlers that had seemed so perfect from a distance are markedly asymmetrical, with the right having six points, and the left seven. And stranger still, before it, barely darker than the snow and ice which partially encrusts it, is the top of what can only be a buffalo skull. Most of the bone has fragmented away, by either crushing or slow weathering, but the two curving, porous horns remain intact. Hugh wonders if this was what had held the buck’s attention, shakes his head in dismissal of the musing, and kneels to work the partial skull free from the soil and frost. Examining the aged thing for only a moment in curiosity, he stows it in his large saddlebag, then hefts the buck onto the back of the second, unsaddled horse and lashes it into place.

He goes home, looking forward to a change in diet, planning how to prepare and cure the meat. But from time to time, as he looks back at the mismatched antlers, he frowns, and wonders if there was something wrong with the creature, some unguessable health condition.

But the rumbling of his stomach is enough to dispel that concern quickly.

(Short pause)

NARRATOR

The snow continues to fall sporadically, ever deepening, swept by the wind into long, wavy drifts.

Hugh sits at the table, gnawing at a chunk of cured venison. He had at first so relished the taste, first of the fresh venison he had cooked into a simple stew, and then of the meat he preserved. It had seemed so different from the bacon and beans on which he has been living, but after days of working away at the buck’s meat, he has come to associate the flavor with the wild wind and the insistent chill, with the snowfall that never seems to fully relent. Finishing his spartan supper, he looks at the skull, which rests in the empty chair, atop the shaggy wolfskin pelt. A few worn playing cards from well-used deck lie scattered on the tabletop between them.

A powerful gust skirls outside the window, like the sharp cry of a vengeful spirit.

Hugh tells the skull to hurry up and take its turn, then laughs at himself. He knows how unwell he sounds, but there is likely not another living soul for miles around, and even if there were, the deep snow and the bitter cold would keep any sane soul safe inside.

And he is so bored, so starved for company. The prairie frontier is always a lonely place, where any human soul feels swallowed by the wide horizons and endless grassy flats and the hungry blue skies, but this a solitude more desperate than he has ever known. The blizzard outside seems eternal, and he fears that it will not relent before his dwindling pile of sun-dried cow chips is exhausted, that the larders in the cookhouse will be emptied of everything except a bit of salt and weevilly flour before the relief of spring comes.

He is trapped here, the only being capable of speech for many miles around, while the winter rages and buries the world in an ocean of freezing white. And how long this total isolation will last, he has no way of guessing.

So he gathers up the cards on the table, and deals two new hands to himself and the grisly remnants of the wolf.

The skull is not quite the same as it was, back when he had felt a twinge of repulsion every time he looked at it. That was only a few weeks ago, he realizes, but it feels like years. He has affixed the cap of the bison skull to it, as well as the lopsided antlers which he removed from the deer when he butchered it. They had come away easily, only a matter of days, Hugh guesses, from being shed.

He had used the hooves of the buck for the adhesive, slowly boiling them down and then adding the acid from the deer’s stomach to render the mixture into a keratinous paste. It had taken him almost two days to get it right.

But that was not a problem, he thinks, smiling wryly to himself. There is nothing else to do, after all. A cloud of powdery snow swirls across the window, and Hugh doesn’t know whether it is fresh snow falling, or old snow being cast up and carried by the unrelenting wind.

He makes a comment to the amalgamation of dead animal parts about the weather, listens as though waiting for a reply.

Then, after a few moments of silence, he observes aloud that he really is losing his goddamned mind.

Throwing down his hand of cards, which clatter and whisper softly upon the rough, worn wood of the table, he stands and walks out into the snow without putting on his coat. Striding about twenty yards from the bunkhouse, he yells into the wind, into the sky, for someone to come, anyone.

Only the wind replies.

(Short pause)

NARRATOR

Old Zeke – this is what Hugh has named his companion, after the prophet who witnessed the bones of the valley rise and garb themselves once more in flesh – is growing more complete by the hour. Sometime, Hugh cannot really believe he was ever troubled to look at the skull which forms Zeke’s face; it now looks so familiar, so friendly.

As he works for his companion’s benefit, Hugh jokes that Zeke needs to put some flesh on his frame, because he is all skin and bones, and they share a moment of uproarious laughter over the wordplay.

That morning, Hugh had awoken to find about a half dozen cattle standing just beyond the fence of the horse yard. At first, he had not even known anything was wrong, apart from them being miles away from the river and from the rest of the herd. Then, he had noticed how impossibly still they stood, how their coats glistened icily under the sunlight that feebly penetrated the grey clouds.

They were dead, frozen in place where they stood.

For the past two days, the wind had howled and raged. Hugh and Zeke had hardly slept, almost expecting the bunkhouse to blow apart under the storm’s fury. In all the noise and the dark of the snow-filled air, he had missed the arrival of the shelter-seeking beeves.

Not that he could have saved them, in truth. There was not enough fodder, not enough space in the small stable to shelter and feed both them and the horses.

But he could, at least, have skinned them while their bodies were still warm enough to allow that grim work. It is what his boss would want, so that the ranch could at least recoup some of the value from the dead creatures.

Yet, as Hugh sits there, working, he thinks he might have used it for the benefit of his new friend, instead.

But there are other things that will serve, he reminds himself.

Somewhere, deep in the pits of his bewintered mind, Hugh realizes that he is lost, that he has come unstuck from reality. But he also knows that there is nothing for him, in the harsh solitude he has left behind.

So, instead, he focuses on extending and filling out Zeke’s unfinished body. Using the bones left over from the buck, and the glue he rendered from the hooves, he has almost completed a crude skeletal body and limbs for Zeke. He wonders if this will be enough, or if Zeke will also ask him to cover the bones with muscle, to provide all the innards which he lacks.

Scratching at his lengthening beard, Hugh thinks that if he must, he can spare one of the horses in the stable, if they too have not frozen in the night.

Then he goes very still, listening to what Zeke has to tell him.

(Short pause)

NARRATOR

When the snow finally recedes and the two men from headquarters come, it is not with good news. The herd has been all but destroyed, and the company has taken such staggering losses that it is not likely to survive. To grasp at even the most fragile hope of survival, they have no choice but to reduce expenses, and that means dismissing hands.

So, the two men are not surprised when there is no answer to their knock upon the bunkhouse door, but neither are they discomfited. Since it is company property, they offer only a shouted warning before they enter, expecting to find a surly and uncompliant cowpuncher awaiting them.

They are given much more pause by the sight that greets them within.

One of the men mutters a vile blasphemy. The other only stands, unblinking, looking much like the many beeves that froze upon their very legs.

Later, they will investigate, and bring word back to headquarters. But they will find and offer few answers, will offer only a brief report of the death under suspicious circumstances of the hand known as Oklahoma Hughie, how they found him with a bloody knife in his hands and with his chest cut open. They find no sign of any struggle, but of course, they reason, it must have been murder. For how could any man cut and gouge at himself with such terrible force as to break open his ribs, and ruin the blade of his long knife? And why, even in the very depths of despair, would a man ever inflict such brutality, such agony, upon himself?

They will say nothing of Zeke, or of any animal remains at all, because they do not see any sign thereof.

It is only after the two men leave that an impossibly thin shape, wearing a wolfskin and doubly crowned with both horns and antlers, will crawl spiderlike from under Hugh’s bed, a new heart beating in its cervine ribcage, rise to its full height, and walk through the door and out, for the first time, into the full light of the sun.

(Creepy music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

Story, narration, and musical arrangement by Lars Mollevand. If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]