Doc's poem, "Blowing Snow" was featured in April 2006 on Wacobelle.org - The Cowboy Poetry of Casey's Corral:
H. D. Koerner’s painting Hard Winter (below), originally appeared as a black and white reproduction illustrating the novella entitled Short Grass, by Hal G. Evarts. The text and its images were serialized in The Saturday Evening Post from the third week of May 1932 through July of that same year. Hard Winter revealed a tragic figure who experienced the hardships of the western frontier. This painting is notable in that regard; it stripped the romanticism often associated with cowboy mythology as portrayed in most western paintings at the time. In the featured poem Blowing Snow, Doc Hayes does likewise.
Blowing Snow
On the Lesser Slave I froze. I'm here to tell you how I froze.
You know you just can not believe how cold that wind blows.
At 45 below the moaning of the wind becomes a living mournful noise.
Elizabeth Anne left me and she took the little girl and the boys.
And our cabin became a cold and dead thing,
As cold and as lonely as when the wolves sing
The news of the death of a rider on the ice whose horse has broken through
Or when starvation takes another Indian at the reserve on the Louchoux.
On the Lesser Slave, I froze. Oh let me bear witness how I froze.
The cheap whiskey took my mind and the ice took my fingers and toes.
I forgot about my cattle and I drove my horses away.
I was drunk through each night and slept through most of each day,
My lips frost bit and the cold sealed up my mouth
While I laid in my buffalo robes and ached for the woman who'd gone south.
I guess I would have died wrapped in self pity and buffalo hide
Except Rupert Broken Leg Wolf and his new Hobema wife
Came by, looking for a place to get warm, and they saved my life.
They started up the fires and they pulled me back into my head,
Though now I curse them when the memories flood back and I'm almost dead
For want of that woman, when the wind blows,
And the memory of her drifts about me like the blowing snows.
Dale "Doc" Hayes ©1975, renewed© 2001
reprinted, with permission, from http://wacobelle.org/dochayes.htm
The Cowboy Poetry of Casey's Corral presents a complete entertainment package featuring cowboy poetry, audio, art work by Western artists including Charles M. Russell, Frederick Remington and N. C. Wyeth; along with cowboy western poems by outstanding western poets; and historic accounts of the Old West.
