He talked me to a place of real children born on a homestead beside the dangerous currents of the John Day River in eastern Oregon, where his mother “whipped our bare legs with a willow switch all the way to the house if she caught us near that river without telling her first. It was the only way she could raise ten kids and keep us from drowning.” By telling a story of himself as “a boy just about your age” he was telling something about me. I felt the kinship.

Dad didn’t deal a handset axiom like, if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing right. Instead he launched into the event that was on his mind at the moment. It was up to me to remember their two-story frame house held its ground between the river and the rimrocks, the horse pasture a mile up river where he went every early morning to wrangle the horse home. Grandma rode sidesaddle to her garden spot a mile down river. While she and the four girls did the home chores the older boys helped grandpa freight goods to and from the little river communities of Kimberly and Monument to the Dalles on the Columbia River, or ran horses, or hired out to one of the bigger ranches during haying season. I had the sense from the first that they all pulled their weight. The little ones had jobs and as they grew up more was expected of them.

His mother raised a little band of sheep from bummer lambs brought to her by tramp sheepherders. Most of the herders were Irish and drawn to a country woman so like those they left behind or buried in Ireland. Moments in her kitchen, kids stirring currents of memory, her constant motion a tide touching home, gave them more than even trade for a wobbly lamb drawn from a flour sack slung over a shoulder.

I remembered a photograph of Grandma with a herd of those lambs all around her skirts like a teacher on playground duty. She raised them on extra milk until they were big enough to handle grass. Come fall she sold the wethers for cash and put the ewe lambs into the ranch flock. She raised livestock to feed her family but something in the photograph—the way her hand fell easily toward the lambs—stuck in my mind.

In this story Dad was sent out to herd the sheep—coyote bitches were restless hunters when they pupped in spring. But the sheep’s pace was ponderously slow for a boy of ten. He threw rocks at the leaders to get them to bend up hill and wished for his father’s dogs, Tip or Queen, to work the edges. But this day they were riding on the wagon with his father and his oldest brother, Ben, headed home from delivering a load of wool to the railhead at Heppner, and he was tending the sheep all by himself. The ewes nipped early grass against rock ledges that held heat long after the sun went down. As the sheep mowed up the steep hillsides, bells chiming in a nodding rhythm, he pitched rocks at coyotes he pretended were hiding in the brush.

When they shaded up mid-day he also found a juniper or mahogany, pulled a book from his bag and a slab of bread flattened between the book and his sweating back, and read himself from the dullness of solitary hours into adventures with his chosen brothers: Tom and Huck.

On this day, the ewes rose up, one by one, from the shade, heads low, and started to move. He cussed some words he’d heard Ben say and let them go a way before he closed the book and followed. That’s when he saw the track—a ghostly brush of rounded toes and pad—on top of those of the sheep. Puma. Cougar. Mountain lion. Panther. Fear nicked his gut. He dropped to his knees and leaned to smell the track. Pitch of scratching tree. Sage. Piss. Blood. And earth. He rose up on his feet and laid his own bare foot beside. The track took half his length and wider. He thought to gather up the sheep. But a track was a story to tell at supper. A track would capture the attention of his older brothers, but sighting the cat that made the track would be what Huck would do.

There was no plan to leave the sheep, Dad explained as he shifted the truck down for the grade, but each step took him farther away. He watched the thicker limbs and forks of trees because he’d read cats could climb and leap down on the backs of horses, biting into their necks, clinging by the strength of their claws until the horse went down. Every sense tightened around the next track twelve feet, twenty feet ahead. The sun moved down the sky. At every clearing he stopped and holding his breath searched the tapestry of broken woodland, waxy sheen of leaves, dulled sunlight, and shade for the cat that drew him deeper in the broken country back of the rims where Jeffrey pines grew into darkness overhead. The boy had reached the farthest boundary of his bravery. He lifted his eyes from the ground. The sun swung from his shoulders and was suddenly in his eyes. The cat was doubling back. He turned and ran. Brush tore at him, rocks bruised his toughened feet, but he ran straight ahead, straining to hear the sheep’s bells over his pounding heart.

The draw where he left the band was empty. Their tracks took him west to the spring box then cut back under the hill toward the old mine road. And then he found where the stampede started. It can be read, such a thing, on the face of the earth, where panic stays behind in chunks of sod and deep cuts of sharp hooves. He searched till dark closed in and sent him home in misery.

His father waited at the pasture gate. The white of his bare forehead gleamed in the moonlight and his shirt sleeves were rolled high on his arms. Tip and Queen wagged their tails at his approach. The sheep were in the long lot by the barn. Seeing the sheep bedded down in the long lot by the barn did not console him.

“All but three,” his father said into the boy’s tear streaked face. “Where did you see them last?”

“East of Gravely Creek,” the boy got out.

“All right. Ma has supper waitin’.”

“I’ll go with you, Pa.”

“You’re give out, son. Go on in.” He left my father guilt enough to eat on for a week and started out, sleek black dogs following into the dark shadows of the canyon trail.

My father was to the yard before his head lifted from his chest. The cat. He forgot to tell about the cat and his father carried no rifle. There was no danger in the mountains like a cat. No one could fight a cat with empty hands.

He hurried to the house and quietly pulled the screen door open just enough for him and not enough to stretch the spring and stepped inside. The supper table was wrapped in noise of passing plates and children’s chatter. His mother’s back was to him. She was feeding the twins. The rifle was on the hooks above the icebox beside the kitchen door and came down slowly to his arms. He took a pouch of shells and slipped out the door.

The rifle’s weight cuffed against his knee as he ran down and up the pitch of the trail. The way to Gravely Creek was as plain in his mind as in the moonlight. And then he saw his father’s back, crouched down, the dogs beside him. Ahead the fray of a sheep and the cat ripping the flesh, crushing bones. The dogs sensed him, then his father quickly took the rifle, and broad hand to my father’s chest, pressed him back. He raised the gun to his cheek. The barrel was steady and shining with a long streak of moonlight before it bolted fire. The cat leaped and disappeared.

“My father was never a very good shot. Ben could always beat him at targets,” he told me as he turned off the highway on our road. “Even I could, later on.”

“The mountain lion got away?”

“Yes.”

“But she killed the sheep?”

“Just the one. We found the others in the morning.”

I wasn’t sure I should ask, but did, “Were you punished?”

“No. I didn’t have to be.”

My father stopped the story there but as I watched his face in the dashlights I saw the lesson lingered. I looked from his silence to seek the mountain cat that led a boy off his job, thinking it might appear in the long beams reaching down the road toward home.

From Lige: A Desert Rodear, forthcoming from the University of Oklahoma Press.