by Ivan Doig
There he had me. Crofutt notwithstanding, anyone with an eye in his head could see that the key to Scotch Heaven was not our homestead acreage, because no piece of land a half mile long and wide is nearly enough to pasture a band of a thousand sheep on. They’ll eat their way across that while you’re getting your socks on in the morning. No, it was the miles and miles of free range to the west, the infinity of grass in the foothills and on up into the mountains, that was going to be the larder for our flocks of fortune. Ninian Duff had seen so, and Rob and I, not to mention our treasurer Lucas, could at least puff ourselves that we glimpsed Ninian’s vision.
“Our woolly darlings,” Rob broke these thoughts now, “can you spot them up there?”
“Just barely. They’re grazing up over the shoulder of the butte. One of us is going to have to, again. You know I’d gladly tell you it’s my turn, except that it isn’t.”
Rob swore—sheep will cause that in a man, too—and went down the ladder, the fourth time that morning one or the other of us had to leave off roof work to ride around our zestful new band of yearling ewes and bring them back within safe view.
• • •
“Angus, I wish we had oakum to do the chinking with. Make nice dark seams against the logs instead of this clay.”
“Toussaint told you how to darken it.”
“Considering the cure, I’ll accept the ill, thank you just the same.” The Toussaint Rennie formula for darkening the chinking clay was: You take horse manure. Mix it in nice with that clay.
• • •
A buckboard was coming. Coming at speed along the road beside the North Fork, past Duffs’ without slowing, past Erskines’ just short of flying. It looked like a runaway, but at the trail which led up the butte to us, the light wagon turned as precisely as if running on a railroad track. Then Rob and I saw one of the two figures wave an arm. Arm only, no hand to be seen. Lucas. And Nancy was driving.
The rig, one of Dantley’s hires, clattered to a stop just short of running over us and the house. The horses were sweat-wet and appeared astounded at what was happening to them. Behind their reins Nancy seemed as impervious as she did in the kitchen. Lucas was as merry as thick jam on thin bread.
“By Jesus, there’s nothing like a buggy ride to stir the blood,” he announced as the buckboard’s fume of dust caught up with the contingent. “Air into the body, that’s the ticket. Angus, lad, you’re working yourself thin as a willow. Come to town for some buttermilk one of these evenings.” Both arms cocked winglike for balance, Lucas bounded down from the wagon. “So this is your castle, Robbie. I’ve seen worse, somewhere, sometime.”
“You’re a fund of compliments,” Rob said back, but lightly. “This will do me well enough until I have a house with long stairs.”
“And a wife and seven sons and a red dog, ay? That reminds me, lads, Gros Ventre has progress to report,” announced Lucas. His stubs were in his coat pockets now, he was wearing his proprietor-of-Montana demeanor. “A stagecoach line! Direct from up there where they’re building the Great Northern railroad, to us. What do you say to that? I tell you, our town is coming up in the world so fast it’ll knock you over.”
There was more than a little I didn’t know about stagecoaches, but I had a fair estimate of the population of Gros Ventre and its surroundings. Helena had more people on some of its street corners. “What, they’re running a stage line just to Gros Ventre? Where’s their profit in that?”
“Oh, the stage goes on to Choteau too,” Lucas admitted, “but we’ll soon have that place out of the picture.”
“Up here we have news of our own,” Rob confided happily in turn. “Ninian has had word of three families from the East Neuk of Fife on their way to here.”
“Grand, grand,” exulted Lucas. “The Scotch are wonderful at living anywhere but in Scotland. I suppose they’ll all be Bible-swallowers like Ninian, but nobody’s perfect.” Lucas rotated himself until he stood gazing south, down the slope of Breed Butte to the North Fork and its clump of willows. Beyond, against the sky, stood the long rimrock wall we now knew was named Roman Reef, and then a more blunt contorted cliff called Grizzly Reef, and beyond Grizzly other mountains stood in rugged file into the Teton River region. “By Jesus, this is the country. Lads, we’ll see the day when all this is ranches and farms. And Robbie, you’re up in the place to watch it all.” A whiff of breeze snatched at Lucas’s hat and he clamped an arm stub onto the crown of it. “You’ll eat some wind here, though.”
While we toured our visitors through the attractions of the homestead and Lucas dispensed Gros Ventre gossip—Sedge and Lila were very nearly ready to open the hotel but couldn’t agree what sign to paint on it; Wingo had another new niece—I tried to watch Rob without showing that I was. He was an education, this first time he had been around Nancy since Lucas’s bargain made homesteaders of us. So far as Rob showed, Nancy now did not exist. His eyes went past her as if she was not there, his every remark was exclusive to Lucas or to me or to the human race with the exception of one. It was like watching the invention of quarantine.
Nancy’s reaction to this new Rob, so far as I could see, was perfectly none. She seemed the exact same Nancy she had been at the first moment Rob and I laid eyes on her in the doorway of Lucas’s kitchen, distinct but unreadable. That always unexpected flash of front teeth as she turned toward you, and then the steady dark gaze.
Meanwhile Lucas was as bold as the sun, asking questions, commenting. “Lads, you’re a whole hell of a lot further along with all this than I expected you’d be. Do you even put your shadows to work?” Nearly so. Never have I seen a man achieve more labor than Rob did in those first homestead months of ours, and my elbow moved in tandem with his.
Rob gave a pleased smile and said only: “You’re just seeing us start.”
“I know this homesteading is an uphill effort. At least Montana is the prettiest place in the world to work yourself to death, ay?” Lucas paused at a rear corner of the long low house, to study the way Rob’s axework made the logs notch together as snug as lovers holding hands. While Lucas examined, I remembered him in the woodyard in Nethermuir, choosing beech worthy for an axle, ash for shafts, heart of oak for the wagon frame. I could not help but wonder what lasts at the boundaries of such loss. At his empty arm ends, did Lucas yet have memory of the feel of each wood? Were the routes of his fingers still there, known paths held in the air like the flyways of birds?
“And the woollies,” Lucas inquired as he and Nancy returned to the wagon. “How are the woollies?”
That was the pregnant question, right enough. The saying is that it takes three generations to make a herdsman, but in the considerable meantime between now and the adept grandson of one or the other of us, Rob and I were having to learn that trying to control a thousand sheep on new range was like trying to herd water. How were the woollies? Innocently thriving when last seen an hour ago, but who knew what they might have managed to do to themselves since.
Rob looked at me and I at him.
“There’s nothing like sheep,” I at last stated to Lucas.
Lucas and Nancy climbed into the buckboard, ready for the reversal of the whirlwind that brought them from Gros Ventre.
“Well, what’s the verdict?” Rob asked in a joking way but meaning it. “Are we worth the investment?”
Lucas looked down at him from the wagon seat.
“So far,” he answered, “it seems to be paying off. Pound them on the tail, Nancy, and let’s go home.”
• • •
That first Montana summer of ours was determined to show us what heat was, and by an hour after breakfast each day Rob and I were wearing our salt rings of sweat, crusted into our shirts in three-quarter circles where our laboring arms met our laboring shoulders. Ours was not the only sweat dripping into the North Fork earth. In a single day the arrival of the contingent from Fife almost doubled our valley’s population—the Findlater family of five, the young widower George Frew and his small daug
hter, and George’s bachelor cousin Allan. Two weeks later, a quiet lone man named Tom Mortensen took up a claim over the ridge south from my place, and a week after that, a tumbleweed family of Missourians, the Speddersons, alit along the creek directly below Rob. As sudden as that, the valley of the North Fork went from almost empty to home-steaded.
• • •
“Who do you suppose invented this bramble?” Barbed wire, that was meant. Neither of us liked the stuff, nor for that matter the idea of corseting our homesteads in it. But the gospel according to Ninian Duff rang persuasive: If you don’t fence, you will one morning wake up and find yourself looking into the faces of five hundred Double W cows.
“Never mind that, why didn’t they invent ready-made postholes to go with it?”
Rob and I were at my homestead. We had bedded the sheep on the ridge and come on down to wrestle a few more postholes into my eternal west fenceline before dark. There were occasional consequences from nature for decreeing lines on the earth as if by giant’s yardstick, and one of them was that the west boundary of my homestead claim went straight through a patch of rock that was next to impossible to dig in. Small enough price, I will still tell you all these grunted postholes later, to have the measures of the earth plainly laid for you; but at the time—
“Now, you know the answer to that. A homestead is only 160 acres and that’s nowhere nearly enough room to pile up all the postholes it needs.”
“Dig. Just dig.”
Can a person be happy while he’s weary in every inch of himself? Right then, I was. I entirely liked my homestead site. Maybe you could see around the world and back again from Rob’s place on Breed Butte, but mine was no blinkered location. Ridges, coulees, Roman Reef in the notch at the west end of the valley, the peak called Phantom Woman, the upmost trees on Breed Butte—all could be seen from my yard-to-be. The tops of things have always held interest for me. Rob’s house was just out of view behind the shoulder of the ridge. Indeed, no other homesteads could be seen from mine, and for some reason I liked that, too.
“Digging holes into the night this way—back in Nethermuir they’d think we’re a pair of prime fools.”
“We’re the right number for it, you have to admit.”
Dusk slowly came, into this country so appropriate for dusk—the tan and gray of grass and ridge looking exactly right, the soft tones a day should end with. This time of evening the gullies blanked themselves into shadow, the ridgelines fired themselves red with the last sunset embers. But we were here to make homesteads, not watch sunsets. And by the holy, we were getting them made. Just as soon as Rob’s house was done we began on our sheep shed, at the lower end of my homestead for handiness to the creek. The shed work we interrupted with the shearing crew for our sheep. We finished the wool work just in time to join with Ninian and Donald in putting up hay for the winter. Any moment free from haying, we were devoting to building fencelines. And someway amid it all we were hewing and laying the logs of my house, to abide by the spirit of the homestead law, even though I was going to share the first winter under Rob’s roof; we were reasonably sure President Harrison wouldn’t come riding over the ridge to check on my residency.
Full dark was not far from being on us but we wanted to finish my fenceline. Between bouts with shovel and crowbar and barbed wire, we began to hear horses’ hooves, more than one set.
“Traffic this time of day?” Rob remarked as we listened. “Angus, what are you running here, an owl farm?”
We recognized the beanpole figure of Ninian Duff first among the four who rode out of the deep dusk, long before he called out: “Robert and Angus, good evening there. You’re a pair who chases work into the night.”
“It’s always waiting to be chased,” Rob said back. I ran a finger around the inside leather of my hat, wiping the sweat out. Besides Ninian the squadron proved to be Donald Erskine and the new man Archie Findlater and a settler from the South Fork, Willy Hahn. Every kind of calamity that could put men on saddle leather at the start of night was crossing my thoughts. Say for Ninian, you did not have to stand on one foot and then the other to learn what was on his mind.
“Angus, we’ve come to elect you.”
I blinked at that for a bit, and saw Rob was doing the same. What was I, or my generation,/that I should get such exaltation? “Elected, is it,” I managed at last. “Do I get to know to what?”
“The school board, of course,” Ninian stated. “There are enough families herearound that we need a proper school now, and we’re going to build one.”
“But—but I’m not a family man.”
“Ay, but you were a teacher once, over across, and that will do. We want you for the third member of our school board.”
“Together with—?”
“Myself,” Ninian pronounced unabashedly, “and Willy here.” Willy Hahn nodded and confirmed, “You are chust the man, Anguss.”
“The old lad of parts!” Rob exclaimed, and gave my shoulder a congratulatory shove. “He’ll see to it that your youngsters recite the rhyming stuff before breakfast, this one.”
“That fact of the matter is,” Ninian announced further, “what we need done first, Angus, is to advertise for a teacher. Can you do us a letter of that? Do it, say, tomorrow?”
I said I could, yes, and in the gathering dark there at my west fenceline the school was talked into shape. Because of their few years’ headstart in settlement, the South Fork families had a margin more children of schoolable age than did Scotch Heaven, and so it was agreed to build the schoolhouse on their branch of the creek.
“You here in Scotch Heafen will haff to try hard to catch up with uss,” Willy Hahn joked.
“Some of us already are,” came back Ninian Duff, aiming that at the bachelorhood of Rob and me.
“The rest of us are just saving up for when our turn comes,” Rob contributed. That drew a long look from Ninian, before he and the other three rode away into the night.
• • •
It was morning of the third week of August, still a month of summer ahead on the calendar, when I came in from the outhouse with my shoes and the bottoms of my pantlegs damp.
Yawning, Rob asked: “What, did you miss your aim?”
I almost wished I had, instead of the fact to be reported: “Frost on the grass.”
• • •
That forehint of North Fork winter concentrated our minds mightily. In the next weeks we labored even harder on Rob’s outbuildings and fences, and when not on those, on the schoolhouse or on my house; and when not any of those, we were with the sheep, keeping a weather eye on the cloudmaking horizon of the mountains. Soon enough—too soon—came the morning when the peaks showed new snow like white fur hung atop.
On the day when Donald Erskine’s big wagon was to be borrowed for getting our winter’s provisions in Gros Ventre, we bet magpies to see which of us would go. Mine flew first from the gate. “Man, you’re sneaking out here and training them,” Rob accused. But off he went to the sheep and I pointed my grin toward Gros Ventre.
The Medicine Lodge was empty but for Lucas. “Young Lochinvar is come out of the west,” he greeted me, and produced an instant glass between his stubs and then a bottle.
“What’s doing?” I inquired.
“Not all that much. People are scarce this time of year, busy with themselves. We’ll soon have snowflakes on our heads, do you know, Angus.”
“We will and I do,” I answered, and drank.
“You and Robbie are ready for old winter, are you?”
“Ready as we’ll ever be, we think.”
“Winter can be thoroughly wicked in this country. I’ve seen it snow so that you couldn’t make out Sedge’s flagpole across there. And my winters here haven’t been the worst ones by far. Stories they tell of the ’86 winter would curl your dohickey.”
“I’ll try not hear them, then.”
“You and Robbie have worked wonders on those homesteads of yours, I have to say. Of course I could tell f
rom the moment the pair of you walked in here that you were going to be a credit to the community.”
“Credit. Do you know, Lucas, there’s the word I was going to bring up with you.”
“Angus, Angus, rascal you.” Shaking his head gravely, Lucas poured a drink for himself and another for me. His toast, odd, was the old one of Scottish sailors: “Wives and sweethearts.”
After our tipple, Lucas resumed: “What do you and Robbie do, sit up midnights creating ways to spend my money? What’s the tariff this time?”
“Pennies for porridge. We need groceries enough to get us through the winter, is all.”
“All, you say. You forget I’ve seen you two eat.”
“Well, we just thought if you maybe were to mortgage the Medicine Lodge and your second shirt—”
“I surrender, Angus. Tell Kuuvus to put your groceries on my account. By Jesus, you and Robbie would have to line up with the coyote pups for supper on the hind tit if I didn’t watch over you.”
“We might yet, if half of what you and Ninian keep saying about winter comes true.”
“Put me in the same camp with Ninian, do you. There’s a first time. How is old Jehovah Duff? Still preaching and breeding?”
“In point of fact, Flora does have a loaf in the oven. As does Jen Erskine. As does Grace Findlater. If our neighbors are any example to the sheep, we’re going to have a famous lamb crop come spring.”
“Lambs and lasses and lads,” Lucas recited with enthusiasm. “By Jesus, we’ll build this country into something before it knows it.” I raised an eyebrow at his paternal “we” there. Lucas raised it a good deal higher for me by declaring next: “Angus, I believe you need to think of a woman.”
“I do, do I.” Truth known, on my mind right then was the visit I was going to make to Wingo’s niecery as soon as I was finished with other provisioning. “Along any particular lines, do you recommend?”
“I’m talking now about a wife. All right, all right, you can give me that look saying I’m hardly the one to talk. But the situation of Nancy and myself is—well, not usual.” That was certainly so. “You’re young and hale and not as ugly as you could be,” he swept on, “and so what’s against finding a wife for yourself, ay? I tell you, if I were you now—”
