Sid Gustafson
Novelist and Veterinarian

The journey to becoming a novelist involved reading novels and writing short stories. Sid Gustafson has published numerous short stories in a variety of magazines, including Montana Crossroads Magazine, Rosebud, Thema, and Big Sky Journal. He currently is awaiting publication of his collected short stories and novellas, and uses the short story form to compress his storytelling style. As in his novels, imagery carries the narrative momentum. His Montana stories are included in three acclaimed letterpress fiction anthologies published by Birch Brook Press.
Both of his published novels were born as short stories. "Brakeman" was published in 1997 in Montana Crossroads Magazine, and a version of that story subsequently appeared as the first chapter of HORSES THEY RODE, the popularity and success of the story impelling the writing of the novel.
"Prisoners of Flight" was a short story published by Thema Magazine in 1998, later expanded and published in New York as the novel of the same name. Sid continues tp pursue the art of short fiction, continuing work on period pieces set in his cherished Blackfeet Country.

Kindle Wireless Reading Device (6

Fresh Fiction for Fresh Water Fishing

Unpublished Fiction sneak Preview
Chapter 1
SWIFT DAM, a novel by Sid Gustafson

Note: During the Flood of '64 Swift Dam burst and drowned 28 Blackfeet Indians and other residents of the Birch Creek Valley below Swift Dam

a Montana literary novel
to be published in NYC 2010
Before edits



Swift Dam

Rain lulled them to sleep. The rain stopped and the sky cleared and they dreamt in that quiet. A silence held sway, save an occasional whisper of wind. Peace as if they were not only alone in the house, but alone in the world. Later in the night, much later, the phone rang. And rang. The wife did not hear the phone ring at night anymore. A certain part of her sleeping subconscious had learnt to block the belling, so seldom any good coming from that phone at night. On she slept in her dreamy smile.
Sheriff Oberly opened his eyes. His wife’s hair lay over them. He brushed her hair away, softly. Then deliberately slipped his hand from under the covers, grasped the phone, and answered ‘yes’ quietly. He listened to the anxious voice. He muffled the receiver over his ear and carefully rolled away from his wife to hear out an apparent missing-person report, already assessing the possibilities.
The seasoned sheriff quickly concluded that the controversial Doctor Ripley, subject of the midnight call, had driven into the mountains (as he had many times before) and parked his car and fallen asleep (his usual modus operandi)—sleeping through the rain into the moonglow, and now the quelling moonshadow of Swift Dam⎯a cherished occasional pastime the sheriff had become silent witness to with a certain regularity in recent years. Doctor Ripley and Sheriff Oberly had become good friends over the decades. They knew one another well, better than some wives know their husbands.
For some reason Doctor Ripley’s eldest son was determined to make a big issue of this particular foray, ranting unwarranted details into the phone. Oberly might have been more concerned had he not known young Ripley’s father so well. His dad was not just any old senile driving off and getting lost like he didn’t know what he was doing or where he was going; no, this was his longtime acquaintance and fellow nighthawk Doctor Rockefeller Alphonse Ripley, Sr., a most lucid moondriver.
Oberly sighed through his nose, licked his teeth, and listened like a good sheriff, deflecting Junior’s haughty tone, not appreciating advice at this hour on how to proceed in matters of Teton County law enforcement, and surely not about his close friend Rock.
The sheriff propped himself to an elbow. His wife purred beside him, her breathing rhythmic and hearty. Oberly followed her breathing, he tried anyway, bringing his breathing in cadence with her quiescent breathing. Slowly, he relaxed his jaw muscles. He squinted his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose and quietly bemoaned the ringing of this call taking him from the middle of a spacious dream he now wanted back into. He looked to the window, trying to determine the time of night. Normally, Oberly would have a sense of the time of night, but with the drone of late-evening rain hypnotizing his and his wife’s sleep his internal clock had been thrown askew. He loved his wife, he loved time spent with her in the somnolescent sense.
Oberly couldn’t see the full moon, but her glare configured his bedroom windowpanes, rectangled phosphor of midnight tribulations with which he’d become so familiar through his three terms in office. He’d come to despise the full moons he’d once cherished as a child in Heart Butte. Back then, a time without ringing phones, the moon was never any trouble, none he could ever remember. In fact, back then the Moon was worshipped, as was the Sun and the Morning Star⎯life back at Heart Butte with his clan of Blackfeet relatives, a clan he’d somehow been pushed from in some way he still didn’t fully understand. He never understood his Indian blood, not really, other than it was thin blood, blood thinner than his clansmen. Thinned by whom, or how, he did not know, and never was it said, never to be said. There are many things Indian these days for which little can be said⎯little said these days about the Indians drowned when Swift Dam burst in the Flood of ’64.

Moons these days did not have so much to do with moons of the old days. Moons changed after the Flood of ’64. And moons changed again when O became sheriff. Presently, fullmoons elicited phonecalls. The consolation tonight was that of all the phonecalled troubles he might be called upon to resolve, Doc Rock Ripley driving off into the aqueous night was probably the least of troubles.
Then again, Junior wasn’t making this particular foray of his father’s an easy trouble to ignore. Truth be known , the sheriff was pleased Junior’s father was out there keeping an eye on the night. The two shared the keeping of night. Some wear darkness fashionably, especially moonlit darkness, Rock Senior foremost among them. The horsedoctor beheld the night, he cherished the early morning hours as the only part of the day that hadn’t been screwed up by Manifest Destiny. Through the years night had been Rock’s constant friend, an accomplice he was not to be denied in his old age.
The sheriff snaked out of bed so as not to disturb his wife. He moused down the hall to the kitchen to hear Junior out. What with all the attention that surrounded Rock the past few years, Sheriff Oberly had the son’s father’s routine pretty well cased out—a matter of camaraderie as well as civic duty. Tonight’s absence seemed routine enough, and the sheriff told the son so, but the son remained unconvinced.
Oberly came fully awake to have a sheriff moment. From Junior’s tone, an awareness arose that Rock had once again departed with that elusive bag of rumored money, a Teton folktale that had lost credibility with the sheriff over the years, a black bag of money, ablack bag of something. As close as they were, Doctor Rockelfeller had never mentioned any bag of money to the sheriff. The night they knew together had little to do with money. Oberly had yet to come into any bags of money, hard-earned or otherwise. He had come to disbelieve that reservation dream that somewhere in the whiteman’s world their existed bags of money for the Indian. In Teton County he had seen none—and to think he himself had fled the reservation to stockpile a wad of his own.
Nonetheless, it was noted by a few of the more observant locals that Rockefeller Ripley periodically toted a black bag with him on his trips north, a worn leather doctor’s bag carried out of the bank and placed in the trunk of his sedan amidst the bottles and tools of Rip’s veterinary trade. But money for what? No one seemed to know that, or say, anyway. Rock had plenty of money, everyone knew that, now that the money came from somewhere besides hardscrabble Front Range ranchers. Never spent much though, modest house, modest life, living the same nonmaterial life as he did before coming into real wealth; modest car, modest wife.
Immodest son.
Oberly set the squawking phone down on the windowsill and folded open the dining room shutters to marvel at his willows along Whitetail Creek. The sweep of the massive grove gave him a feeling that even the phonecall could not discompose, his treasured trees softening Junior’s rave. The son’s sparking voice became insignificant in the realm of wet willows. If not for fullmoon phonecalls, the sheriff would seldom behold such splendor. The waxy foliage glistened in soft rolls of wind, leaves rippling as water. The trees sheltered his house from town, providing a privacy he treasured, a sheriff’s privacy—shelter from the streets, from the world.
When the duck of voice on the windowsill stopped, Oberly picked up the receiver and held it in front of him like he might hold the two-way radio microphone in his Plymouth cruiser.
“Did you hear me? Are you listening to any of this?” the voice chipmunked.
This is about money, Oberly thought, that black bag of money, the son believes his father is unfairly disinheriting him of money. “I’m listening,” the sheriff said.
“Figured you’d cut me off or something.”
“No,” the sheriff said. “Just didn’t know if you’d finished singing or not. Quite a lot you’re unloading on me here about a father who moondrives regular. Is there some reason this particular brief absence is all-of-a-sudden serious?”
“Why, hell yes. Of course there is. He’s been out all night, for Chrissakes. He hasn’t been right, lately, if you know what I mean.” Rocky Junior then went on to insinuate that some sort of senility might have suddenly overtaken his father, which Oberly didn’t buy for one second. He knew Rock solidly, Rock had mental edges, but remained keen-notioned as ever.
“Are you sure you’re okay, Junior?” Oberly asked, putting a big U in the ‘you’re,’ suggesting the son’s mental health might be amuck rather than the father’s, a diversion measure he’d been taught at sheriff school to stifle such accusations. Oberly was a well-trained officer of the law, having attended many domestic-dispute seminars in his ascent up the slope of law enforcement.
He punched his arms into his bathrobe one at a time, throwing the phone from one hand to the other. He walked down the hallway with the phone on his shoulder tying the waistband like he was rodeoing. Striding in his beat way, the sheriff marched into his living room. His picture window faced the mountains west. The love bubble had fallen low, its roundness plumped by some optical effect of atmosphere. Wherever Rock Senior had spent the night, he’d had a fine and silver moon to keep him company. With such luminosity it couldn’t have been such a long night, and certainly didn’t seem one now. The shortest night of the year was a few weeks away, and this morning’s sunrise was not so far off. The son carried on: “Come on, Sheriff, you best get a search and rescue going after him. He’s been out there too long!”
The sheriff considered all the people he’d have to call to get a search and rescue going and there was just no way. He thought what Doctor Ripley might think of an expedition set forth on his behalf.
“Not all that out of the ordinary, the way I see it,” Oberly reasoned. “Let’s just wait him out for a bit. Give him some time.”
“That’s easy enough for you to do, now isn’t it sheriff? —wait him out.”
“Be reasonable, son. I’ve waited out many a man. It’s simpler than waiting out a woman, you know.” The sheriff, as instructed, tried to lighten the conversation. “It’s just a few hours till daylight here. He’s spent the night out there before. He’ll return like a good father. He fell asleep in his car. Sometimes I think that’s what he goes out there to do, sleep, don’t you?”
“He’s eighty-four.”
“People get sleepy at that age. Your dad goes off like this time and again, and you know it.”
“It’s freezing out there.”
Oberly looked out there. Backlit mountains in low moonlight, the moon swelling with dawn, mountains soon flaxen as his sleeping wife’s hair. He walked to his weather station. “Fifty-four degrees here at my place,” Oberly declared. “Fifteen mile-an-hour wind. Tropical Montana.”
“He’s eighty-four years of age.”
“That’s getting’ up there all right.”
“He could die out there.”
“We all find our time and place,” Oberly replied, knowing it to be a comment Rockefeller Senior said over many a death. The veterinarian and the sheriff shared that thing death as they shared the night, shared death alone and shared it together many a night of their Front Range careers, animal and human death alike.
“You’ll regret saying that if he ends up dead out there.”
“Not likely he’ll end up dead out there, not likely at all if you ask me. He takes pretty good care of himself. Especially at night. I know.”
“And just what makes you so clairvoyant about my father, sheriff?”
“My watchful eye. Observation makes one clairvoyant.”
“Who said that, Buddha?”
“Sitting Bull.”
“⎯”
The son knew the sheriff embraced Buddha, as did his father, embracing Buddhism not as religion, but as philosophy, as night and death bring about philosophy, night and death and moon and water and horse. Doc’s doctorate in medicine, his crafting of fiction, along with O’s hybred investigative zeal, brought forth philosophies that irritated Rock, Jr.
“Well, out-all-night is where I draw the line,” Junior whined, sensing the sheriff was more in charge than he had hoped.
“He’s not out-all-night just yet, then,” the sheriff replied, smiling, breathing easy. “Just a few more hours of night.”
Oberly envied Doc.
“What a sweet moonlit darkness it must be for him,” Oberly added, gazing Swift way. “Do you see that setting moon, Junior?”
Junior said he did not see the setting moon and did not care about the setting moon.
“Best we give him a few more hours, son,” the sheriff said decidedly. “I’ll start a search if he doesn’t roll in by midmorn, say.” The sheriff pictured Rock rolling into to town like he had always rolled into town from those moonlit drives through the years, his veterinary car travelling low and dusty. Doc learned moondriving well achieving a sleek-wheeling touch with those long sedans he sailed from horse to cow through all those foothill ridges and prairies, over all those gravelly roads that dusted the Eastern Front. Pluming dust, pluming snow, splaying mud, trunk full of veterinary tools, bottles and potions jingling the meticulous music and valorous smell of a country vet’s life. Rock claimed those sedans had traction, claimed real horsedoctors didn’t need trucks.
Oberly breathed yet more easily holding the phone to his chest. Not listening so much as dreaming of the horsedoctor parked up Swift Dam way, knowing Doc revered the concrete as the gravestone of Indian drowned. He thought to tell the son to stuff it so as to align him in his father’s purpose, but thought better of it, diplomatic sheriff he was.
“Something might happen by daylight. Something might have happened already. Best you do something. You could lose your job if anything happens to my father, you could end up losing upcoming votes!”
The election, each and every case now fraught with the impending election.
Oberly had had enough. He was getting off the phone.
“I’ll take care of it my way,” Obe ended, terminating the conversation with the heat and conviction he’d learned to end such phonecalls over the years. Let ‘em vote me out, he thought, let someone else do this nightwork.
The willows wept low, the wind softening, the moon sinking into the mountains, sinking as time itself sinks.

The sun would start wedging daylight into the world in an hour or so, illumination the sheriff counted upon to lure the missing Rockefeller Ripley home. Oberly reassured himself it would best serve the citizens of Teton County to wait the veterinarian out, officially, after breakfast in the cafe where his most-trusted informants drank coffee and groped at the waitress’ rumps (despite Oberly pointing out its illegality whenever witnessed by himself). By 6:45 the regular crew would be creamed and caffeinated, waiting to inform him of the previous day and night’s sightings and happenings—the waitresses themselves most informative, hoping Obie might someday brush against them, handsome dark-skinned man he was. Oberly’s build, his sculpted facial features and good bone, attracted women except that Oberly wasn’t that way. He was a Blackfeet Indian living one county below the reservation; a faithfully married man, faithfully married to a blonde. He kept his hands off women, did things soft-spoken, had Indian ways of handling flirty waitresses, Indian ways of enforcing the law. A gentle sheriff; a considerate, quiet man.
The sheriff continued to gaze out his picture window as he’d gazed dozens of interrupted nights before. The forced-air propane heat provided a selfish comfort unfamiliar to Oberly’s clan upcountry. Oberly tossed the phone on the coffee table and flopped to his sofa. Muffled in his bathrobe he tracked the squat moon as it slid into the Rocky Mountain Front. He dozed in and out of thought, or maybe sleep. Each time he opened his eyes, the sky had coalesced a bit more. He said a prayer asking the dawn to awaken Rockefeller Alphonse Ripley, Sr, an Indian prayer to bring the horsedoctor back home safely to his waiting people…he repeated the prayer, again and again…a prayer his grandmother had taught him up Heart Butte way…
The sheriff opened his eyes.
Dreams he could not remember.
Solid light outside.
He stretched and stood and stretched some more.
He hoped Rock’s disappearance wouldn’t end up creating a mess of paperwork. Obie hated paper. It was always best for the Blackfeet Indian if there was no paperwork, best certain incidents remained undocumented. Another thing began to gnaw, Oberly letting it gnaw knowing he shouldn’t. Oberly didn’t appreciate the way the upcoming election had started hovering over his jurisdiction; his first opponent in two terms, a primary election of all things, a former deputy from his own department challenging his law enforcement capabilities. His insinuations about Oberly’s Indian ancestry, a questioning of his ability to keep order, had set forth underpinnings of doubt through the general public, or so Oberly believed.
Oberly always seemed able to handle Chouteau’s local bias, but as his terms wore on effective blunting of the prejudice he’d originally overcome to get elected sheriff seemed harder to maintain. It was true his latest incumbency had its failures: a murder committed yet unsolved, a missing person unfound—the sheriff coming up empty on both counts. Regardless, Oberly didn’t like the higher authority of an election pressuring his day-to-day law-enforcement decisions.
Mrs. Oberly moaned softly as her husband wedged his cold feet back between the sheets. Oberly often coupled with his wife after he took sleep-time phonecalls; surprise, surprise. She liked it and he liked it. She was often half-asleep, and it felt like he was taking her in a dream, which aroused him all the more. The phone—a ringing in the night—became Pavlovian, a conditioned stimulus for the wife; at least that was Oberly’s hypothesis after twelve years of sleeptime ringings. He imagined the longer he let the phone ring before he answered, the better the sexual resonance afterward.
The wile had the added benefit of simmering down anxious callers. By the time Obie picked up, the complainant was grateful he’d answered at all, and the wife… the wife was subconsciously preparing herself. Sex cleared Oberly’s tubes, allowing his forensic mind to relax, marital accord to help resolve the Teton County problems that awaited his resolution. His wife was the daughter of a local rancher, a nice Irish lass he’d meant at grade school in Dupuyer, one of the reasons he ended up in Chouteau, living on the edge of town in the ranchhouse of one her father’s outlying ranches. But since he was an Indian, they’d only gotten a corner of land. The brothers had the ranch, and the brothers did the ranching. All that remained for Oberly and his wife were horses and some nice horse pasture, which both of them rode with passion deep into the mountains, to the wilderness, where they would spend Oberly’s annual week off each year.
It was with Doctor Ripley that Oberly first discussed the Pavlovian arousal aspect of sleeptime phone rings, Ripley a recipient of endless midnight calls himself through the years. Rockefeller Alphonse Ripley, Sr. was a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, the only veterinarian between the State Capitol and the Canadian Line for some time following WWII. Their Pavlovian ruminations began over a dead horse years ago, the two rousted out of the sack by the same phonecall, the creature shot in the head just as they arrived, shot in the head by a trucker who’d stopped to help out. Downed horse, wrecked car, no one hurt but the horse, the scent of rimfire in the air, the horse surviving the gunshot. The deputy stood on one side of the horse keeping the onlookers away while the vet went for his black bag. The trucker’s bullet hadn’t quite penetrated the brain and the horse seized about, galloping on its side, feebly now, pitifully. Doc loaded a jumbo syringe with barbiturate and harpooned the horse’s jugular vein, pushing the drug he’d pushed more than he ever wanted to push, yet helping the animal to a grassy world beyond. A deep last sigh and death cleared the crowd.
The night-travellers shuffled off to their cars and trucks. Doors slammed, engines turned, headlights brightened, folk fleeing as if the beast had succumbed to contagious distemper rather than Rockefeller’s intravenous coup de grâce.
Deputy Oberly and Doctor Death stood alone in the night, appointed executors of the roadhit horse, their respective professions delegating them resolvers of such misfortune with no written words. Had Rockefeller not been there, Oberly would have had to deliver the horse with his Glock .45, or if he couldn’t get close enough with that, with his rifle. Obe was as deft with his bullets as Doc was with his needle when it came to taking horses out, but with a crowd Doc always had the honor.
The two men stood watching the cars pull away, including the car that hit the horse, a bent Lincoln Continental, a dentist who wore his seatbelt. Everyone who drove far and long enough across netherland Montana eventually collided with livestock or wildlife. The key to not hitting creatures of the night was driving 55 or slower and keeping your eyes on the road. Beyond that speed the driver lacked the speed to avoid sudden crossings.
Care had to be taken not to overdrive one’s headlights. Knowledge of the countryside’s nature was helpful, knowing where the deer lived and drank, their crossings, knowing which ranchers grazed their cows and horses behind lax fences.
Rock first noticed a certain segment of the Teton County population taking to the backroads in the boom days of the fifties, sightseers of the night, big cars all sharky with fins, back in the days when double headlights and deep seats began making road travel popular. By the time Oberly came on as deputy, these wanderers began finding their share of travel troubles. Some troubling wrecks. Oberly’s childhood friends, seven of his clan, had been killed in a car wreck between East Glacier and Browning, a single car rollover off into a deep roadside lake at night. Death by trauma and drowning. They had gone to a pow-wow, he left behind because his skin was too light. Had it not been for that lightness, he would have been with them. It seemed Oberly’s destiny to take care of the nightdrivers of the world, the ghosts of his friends with him at night, forever.
Certain moondrivers drove alert and careful. Others were melancholic, sleepiness making them weave and drift. Oberly helped them out of ditches, pulling them out and pulling them over through the years, insomniacs and amnesiacs chasing down some starlit hope they could neither identify or explain. Oberly figured the pastime to be a form of displacement: the road displaced people, took them out of their life, certain lives needing out more than others. If their land was taken from them, for example, they drove, and often at night when no one could witness their mad wanderings. Some land taken was ancestral land, and those drivers were his Blackfeet, other land was generational, owned in a different way.
While Oberly served ditched folk, Doctor Ripley serviced ranchers laid low, laid low with their animals, ranchers bought out or foreclosed upon, swept off their land one bad way or another, their cattle repossessed and sold off. Rock witnessed the ranch-hands who’d helped him so faithfully through the snowblown springs under the front, ranch hands abandoned on the streets of Chouteau to live out their days without the benefit of cattle, but with the benefit of Rock’s generosity. Little left to do for excitement other than moonwalk the streets of Chouteau and remember how ranching once was.
Foresightful others had accurately predicted the regression of agriculture and sold up to the gentry before debt jerked them around—becoming landless but wealthy, in the end no happier than the financially bereft. Rock worked for ranchers old and new, former and future. He took care of their cows and horses, their poodles and their cats. He drove to their ailing animals by day and by night. Sheriff Oberly drove the same landscape on his law enforcement rounds, occasionally drifting north through the panhandle of Pondera County to visit his mother above Swift Dam.
Doctor Rockefeller dragged a winch out of his car's trunk that Pavlov night of long ago. He fastened chain to the deadhorse, knowing well which joints to strap and hitches to throw. Deputy Oberly secured the jack to a corner post and began cranking. The horse stretched, and slowly began its creep off the road. Rockefeller guided the dead weight along with pulls and tugs on the strained cable, coaxing the carcass down and across the barrow pit. He knew the mechanical tricks needed to move a dead horse along, having moved more than he would care to admit. When the two men managed the horse off the roadway, they stopped to rest and take in the empty night. Rock's gravelly voice interrupted a starry silence: “In Kentucky they bury the head, heart, and hooves of a dead horse in a bluegrass hole and call in the rendering service to haul off the torso.”
The barrow-pit horse groaned from within.
“Long way from Kentucky, here,” Oberly replied, nodding at the forlorn beast. “Magpies and coyotes will get this one, head, heart, hooves and all.”
Rock looked at the dead animal and imagined the horse’s better days, a life on the last squeeze of the Great Plains, not a bad existence. The brand seemed familiar to Rock and the brand seemed familiar to Obe, but oddly neither man could bring their memory to connect the brand with a name, or even a place. Rock and Obie wondered. They traded stories and talked of brands, of animals coming into the hands of man, their fate as such. Rock and obie told their animals stories as they had few other stories they cared to tell. Sustainers of the starlit oral tradition, they bade the horse farewell with animal stories.
Oberly remembers that Rockefeller told the deputy the story of Spokane, the only Montana-bred to win the Kentucky Derby, 1889 when it was run at a mile and a half. Spokane still holds the record 2:34.50.
Rock’s rapt voice vibrated in the night, resonating with the breeze. Oberly listened with pleasure, learning to listen to stories from his raising up off Birch Creek, the creek that Swift Dam dammed. Rock portrayed how Noah Armstrong the trainer walked the horse from Montana to Kentucky, his cadence taking the rhythm of a walking horse, a two month journey. They rode some trains here and there, but the horsedoctor breezed over those details. It was the hoofing that delivered Spokane to Louisville fit as a Kentucky fiddle. He ambled onto the track and ran down the favorite Proctor Knott and the other trailing Kentucky bluebloods, winning the fabled Derby in record time.
Spokane never left Kentucky. Spent the rest of his life at stud there. His heart, head and hooves buried in Kentucky loam. His hard-running torso drayed away in a gut wagon. That is how the story went, but maybe not how it really was. It didn’t matter, and yet it did. Both men knew stories were one thing and reality quite another. It’s why they told them, to escape reality, to escape the reality of dead horses, what to do with them, and how.
When Rock’s vibrant voice ceased Oberly resumed cranking. The two managed the horse into a roadside meadow, July air warm as the dead horse. A last gurgle of defiance percolated within, indefinable, perhaps the horse’s soul fleeing its crumpled body. “Takes a long time for a big animal to stop living,” Rockefeller Ripley told Oberly. “For all the organs to get the message. They spasm and contract, hoping to continue on.”
“I thought you said horses die quickly, an evolutionary pain-escaping mechanism.”
“I did say that. I believe that. Death is often what it takes for a horse to escape pain. They have no tolerance for pain. Comfort seekers they are, comfort and safety. If there is no comfort and safety, there cannot be life for them, and they die.”
The men waited for the spirit to leave the horse, for death to cool. It is peculiar what memories men remember, and women. Oberly remembered that night well, the words they shared, the horse they took out of pain fast as they could. The stars sparked memory, wherein a discussion arose regarding their wives, lonely at home in bed. “How long did you let your phone ring tonight before you answered it?” Obie asked Rock, after another breezy period of quiet.
“A long time,” Rock answered. “I like to see how serious the callers are. Certain polite people hang up after four or five rings if its trouble that can wait.”
Obie shared the Pavlov theory with Rock that very night. He knew Dr. Ripley to be a student of Pavlov, dog owner and dog doctor and horsedoctor and all. The veterinarian contemplated the Pavlovian notion with a torn-pocket smile. Middle of the Montana night, fullmoon, guardians of a dead horse, Pavlov. Wives at home in bed. Funny Oberly would get a call tonight regarding the good Doctor Rockefeller himself. In the years since Pavlov was first suggested, Rock and Obie regularly assessed their theory. In the aftermaths of nocturnal debacles various aspects were related and discussed. When Obie’s wife purchased a new phone with a different ring, everything had to be relearned. Doc never let a new phone into his bedroom. They men visited about their dogs as well as their wives and phones, serious talk about everything important to them. A sheriff and a vet don’t have all that many others to comfortably talk with about their worlds without the conversations somehow interfering with their respective professions, so they talked with one another. The men loved their dogs, their dogs loved them, keeping them company through the miles of moonlit roads. All the virtuous things the men wish to see in themselves they saw in their dogs, and of these things they spoke.