The Norman Maclean Reader

by Norman Maclean

  After a while he asked me if I would take off my clothes and swim for the ducks, and I did, but I hated it. It was all kind of marshy stuff, and I had to pull my legs through ooze a foot or more deep, dragging bubbles behind me, and when I swam I could feel things touching my body. I was exhausted by the end of the day and hoped that my father would soon get rid of the dog. I needn’t have worried about my father. He regarded the dog as an anti–duck dog and even as an antichristian. It wasn’t the dog’s retrieving seaweed that was sacrilege to my father; it was her pushing the dead duck aside. You can be sure that it was the only day we ever hunted with Fanny II.

  I tend to remember best the almost duck dogs that enraged my father most. One made him swear—the only time I ever heard him do so. This Fanny was rather late in the succession, and by the time I acquired ownership, I was going with a girl whose home was in Wolf Creek, which is only a few miles from the Missouri River and not too far from its headwaters. Even there it is a big river and looks as big or even bigger than it does six or seven hundred miles farther down. It is still clear but is powerful and full of undercurrents and big bends against cliffs. It was just below the fabled canyon named the Gates of the Mountains by Lewis and Clark.

  My father had hunted several seasons with this dog and evidently had found her satisfactory, but he had hunted with her in the quiet oozy outlet where seaweed drifts by that I described earlier. Well, there is no seaweed drifting on the Big Missouri, where we were shooting. The Missouri is one of the main flyways for ducks in America, and when the autumn storms begin in the north, the ducks come whistling out of Canada, hit the Missouri River, follow it to the Mississippi and coast the rest of the way to Louisiana. When they go around those big bends on the upper Missouri, the air is left hurt and shaking, and if you are a duck hunter, the place to be is behind a rock on the cliffside of the bends, because the ducks’ speed on the turns almost drives them into the cliffs and into your gun barrel. That is just where my father and I were.

  My father was in good form, and we knocked down several ducks so close to shore that we almost could have retrieved them without a dog. Then a stray came by making such faint vibrations that he passed us before we saw him. We both fired, and he hit the water at least halfway across the river, but the dog had seen him and started out. The trouble was she was used to retrieving in quiet water, and she should have run down the river bank a lot farther before starting to swim for the duck because the current carried the duck a long way before the dog caught up with it. In fact, the duck by then was nearer the other bank, so the dog gave an extra snap of her neck to set the duck securely in place and then just kept going—for the other side.

  I have a theory—probably not subscribed to by academic geneticists—that just as Chesapeakes are coded for retrieving, Scotchmen are coded for profanity. Not obscenity, just profanity. I have known quite a few Scotchmen in my time, including my father’s brother, so this has to be taken at least as a considered opinion. I always felt that my father lived a somewhat unnatural and unhappy life because he could not swear, but once, to my knowledge, he showed his genetic tape.

  He leaned his shotgun against the rock and stood up, scaring off a big flight that had started to make the bend, but he never noticed it. “Goodness!” he said, which is as far as he usually descended into the abyss. Then he said, “My goodness.” Then he exploded: “Do you see that damn dog over there?” It was a hell of a long way off, but I could see the bitch lying on a sandbar with what looked like a big fat mallard between her paws. I believe that if my father thought his gun could have carried the river, he would have given the dog both barrels. After a good rest she came swimming back, without the duck, and if you are interested in things that give the appearance of being a long way off, take a good look at a duck you have shot that’s lying dead forever on the other side of the Missouri.

  Fortunately, the dog handled most of the rest of the ducks fairly well, but she carried four or five more across the river and left them there—which was enough to spoil the day for my father. I am glad to say, though, that the experience left no lasting marks on any of us. That evening my Wolf Creek girl and I had several good laughs, and a little later in life we were married and lived happily for many years. My father forgave the dog and hunted with her for a number of seasons—but always on quiet water. It might have been simpler if he had trained her to recognize that he was the center of the universe and that all things falling into the water were to be returned to him, he being, as it were, the Creator. It wouldn’t have been hard.

  Our almost-perfect duck dog was our last Chesapeake—as if genetics had arranged itself in dramatic and climactic order. She was bigger than our other dogs and more imperial. When my father started me fly-fishing, there were only about a dozen flies that any trout fisherman carried with him—plain and royal coachmen, grey hackles with red or yellow bodies, brown hackles and my favorite—if only for its name—Queen of Waters. To me, this dog was Queen of Waters. I wish that she could have found it in her heart to return a little of the feeling I had for her, but she did not care for me particularly or for my father or even for my mother or ducks or even dead ducks. She was my first encounter with a strict professional. She loved only one thing—she loved to do the thing she could do, which was to bring in dead ducks.

  She made that Missouri River look like an irrigation ditch. Sometimes, while the rest of the world lies turning in bed and counting sheep, I lie turning in bed and counting the ducks she brought in for us the first day we worked her on the Missouri. It was as cold as hell and the ducks were being projected from Canada as if from a rocket base, but she missed nothing that skidded upon the waters. We were hunting with two other parties, each of which had a spaniel, and by nine o’clock in the morning both spaniels were through. The big water and the undercurrents and the cold had finished them off. There could be five dead ducks floating down the river and the dogs would only put a foot in the water and whine. Finally, their owners took them back to the car and wrapped them in blankets. Even in the bitter cold of the late-afternoon shooting, the Queen of Waters was still retrieving the ducks for my father and me and the other two parties. It was so cold by then that long icicles hung from her brown curls. I can still hear her rushing by me for the river, tinkling like a glass chandelier in a windstorm, and I can go to sleep with this sound in my ears.

  This dog was great even when she goofed. Actually, I can remember her goofing only once, and then she almost killed my father, me and herself. Not just one or two of us—the works. She swung only in the larger orbits. This was the first season she had been shot over, and we were shooting on a slough on the Blackfoot River. There were a good many ducks on the water when we sneaked into our blind around daybreak, and we got three of them when they rose off the water. The dog hit the slough as if she had come out of a cannon, but even so, she hadn’t got the three ducks to shore before another flight circled, started to light, then saw the dog and took off before my father had a shot. This is a good slough, and for an hour or so after daybreak there is a big movement of ducks over it, so it is best not to send your dog out on the water until the flights start easing off. Well, the Queen of Waters, although still but a large pup, was doing her thing and in the process she scared another flight that had started to settle. Finally my father fumbled in the pockets of his hunting jacket, pulled out a long piece of stout cord, softly called her and tied her to him, from her collar to his leg. Then he looked shyly at me to see if I had been watching.

  This slough is in deep woods, and usually you hear the ducks coming in before you see them. I didn’t even hear the ducks this time, but I saw the dog stiffen and I kept raising my eyes. I saw my father swing his gun to his shoulder and then I saw a duck swerve out of the flock, and in a moment you could project the duck’s curve to the water. The moment you could, the dog could, too, and the cord held. She started for the water like a supercharged dray horse, hauling my father’s leg through the reeds. My father didn’t freeze on the tri
gger because the gun was a semiautomatic and if he had frozen on the trigger he would have fired only once. Instead, he must have gone into a state of convulsions, and his gun was blazing. One shot went through the reeds and laid down a swath as if he were mowing hay. Then he just missed me and then he just missed the dog and once, I am sure, he almost shot himself. It scared the hell out of me, but I lived to verify the accuracy of the old western description of a charge of shot going past your head as “busting a hole in the breeze.” Shakily, I got my father unwound from the reeds and the dog and the cord and his gun, but even before I had totally completed this operation and certainly before I had quit shaking, I heard the spraying of water on reeds, and there was the dog with the duck.

  She was a magnificent creation and had a privilege not granted to many mortals—of living long enough to approach perfection. Then, shortly after these things happened to the dog, my brother was murdered. I try to say it the way it was—without premonition, never to be explained and never to be assimilated. It had no past and it never went on and turned into something else. It just was—suddenly, shockingly and forever.

  After the funeral my father and mother and I spent several weeks at our cabin on the lake. It was early May, and the forest floor of the cathedral of thousand-year-old tamaracks was covered with dogtooth violets, which are really lilies. Around the lake they are often called glacier lilies, probably because it is only about twenty miles from our lake to the glaciers. We thought they were the most beautiful and fragile flowers we would ever see, and we tried not to walk on any of them.

  My father aged rapidly. He never hunted ducks again and had to give up most of his trout fishing. His feet dragged when he walked, as if his leg muscles had atrophied, so he could not fish the big rivers any more or even the creeks that were hard to get to. Mostly, he fished in the lake in front of our cabin in a flat-bottomed boat he had made many years before. If it was bright, he wore no hat, and his almost-red Scotch hair paled until it became part of the sunlight. If it was at all cool, he wore one of my brother’s fishing jackets, and soon after my brother’s death he adopted his dog. My brother’s dog was a handsome springer spaniel called Quake because my brother had got him as a pup in 1935, the year of the earthquake in Helena. My brother had been a fine shot with a scatter-gun, and Quake was a very good duck dog—not as professional a duck dog as the Queen of Waters, but in the end the best dog of all.

  This dog and my father greatly changed each other’s lives. The dog and my father were inseparable, whereas before, my father cared to be with dogs only during the hunting season. As for the dog, I am sure there are other cases like his, but he was the only dog I ever saw that became another dog for love of another man. For my brother he had been a duck dog, and now for my father he became a fishing dog, if one can speak of such a species. He would sit all day in the boat on the seat next to my father and peer into the impenetrable water. He not only loved but admired my father greatly—I am sure he thought the whole fishing thing was completely under my father’s control, as I did when I was the dog’s age and believed my father could come up with a fish whenever he was so minded. After staring a respectable length of time into the water without seeing anything but pieces of sunlight, he would bark at my father, and when my father caught a fish, the dog would lick my father’s whole face, though my father still needed part of it to see how to unhook the fish.

  To the others in my family, the dog was something of a sacred object that had prolonged my father’s life and helped to steady the rest of us. He was a fine dog, and after him, my father had no other dog.

  Logging and Pimping and “Your Pal, Jim”*

  “Logging and Pimping and ‘Your Pal, Jim,’” the short story positioned between the two novellas in A River Runs through It and Other Stories (1976), was written in the early 1970s, before the two novellas. In it the reader glimpses a long-ago world of logging camps before chain saws and other power equipment, places where a boy could prove himself a man. Maclean first announces a theme that occupies him in his novellas and Young Men and Fire: an abiding, pervasive respect for those expert with their hands and the tools of their trade.

  The first time I took any real notice of him was on a Sunday afternoon in a bunkhouse in one of the Anaconda Company’s logging camps on the Blackfoot River. He and I and some others had been lying on our bunks reading, although it was warm and half-dark in the bunkhouse this summer afternoon. The rest of them had been talking, but to me everything seemed quiet. As events proved in a few minutes, the talking had been about “The Company,” and probably the reason I hadn’t heard it was that the lumberjacks were registering their customary complaints about the Company—it owned them body and soul; it owned the state of Montana, the press, the preachers, etc.; the grub was lousy and likewise the wages, which the Company took right back from them anyway by overpricing everything at the commissary, and they had to buy from the commissary, out in the woods where else could they buy. It must have been something like this they were saying, because all of a sudden I heard him break the quiet: “Shut up, you incompetent sons of bitches. If it weren’t for the Company, you’d all starve to death.”

  At first, I wasn’t sure I had heard it or he had said it, but he had. Everything was really quiet now and everybody was watching his small face and big head and body behind an elbow on his bunk. After a while, there were stirrings and one by one the stirrings disappeared into the sunlight of the door. Not a stirring spoke, and this was a logging camp and they were big men.

  Lying there on my bunk, I realized that actually this was not the first time I had noticed him. For instance, I already knew his name, which was Jim Grierson, and I knew he was a socialist who thought Eugene Debs was soft. Probably he hated the Company more than any man in camp, but the men he hated more than the Company. It was also clear I had noticed him before, because when I started to wonder how I would come out with him in a fight, I discovered I already had the answer. I estimated he weighed 185 to 190 pounds and so was at least 35 pounds heavier than I was, but I figured I had been better taught and could reduce him to size if I could last the first ten minutes. I also figured that probably I could not last the first ten minutes.

  I didn’t go back to my reading but lay there looking for something interesting to think about, and was interested finally in realizing that I had estimated my chances with Jim in a fight even before I thought I had noticed him. Almost from the first moment I saw Jim I must have felt threatened, and others obviously felt the same way—later as I came to know him better all my thinking about him was colored by the question, “Him or me?” He had just taken over the bunkhouse, except for me, and now he was tossing on his bunk to indicate his discomfort at my presence. I stuck it out for a while, just to establish homestead rights to existence, but now that I couldn’t read anymore, the bunkhouse seemed hotter than ever, so, after carefully measuring the implications of my not being wanted, I got up and sauntered out the door as he rolled over and sighed.

  By the end of the summer, when I had to go back to school, I knew a lot more about Jim, and in fact he and I had made a deal to be partners for the coming summer. It didn’t take long to find out that he was the best lumberjack in camp. He was probably the best with the saw and ax, and he worked with a kind of speed that was part ferocity. This was back in 1927, as I remember, and of course there was no such thing as a chain saw then, just as now there is no such thing as a logging camp or a bunkhouse the whole length of the Blackfoot River, although there is still a lot of logging going on there. Now the saws are one-man chain saws run by light high-speed motors, and the sawyers are married and live with their families, some of them as far away as Missoula, and drive more than a hundred miles a day to get to and from work. But in the days of the logging camps, the men worked mostly on two-man crosscut saws that were things of beauty, and the highest paid man in camp was the man who delicately filed and set them. The two-man teams who pulled the saws either worked for wages or “gyppoed.” To gyppo, which w
asn’t meant to be a nice-sounding word and could be used as either a noun or a verb, was to be paid by the number of thousands of board feet you cut a day. Naturally, you chose to gyppo only if you thought you could beat wages and the men who worked for wages. As I said, Jim had talked me into being his partner for next summer, and we were going to gyppo and make big money. You can bet I agreed to this with some misgivings, but I was in graduate school now and on my own financially and needed the big money. Besides, I suppose I was flattered by being asked to be the partner of the best sawyer in camp. It was a long way, though, from being all flattery. I also knew I was being challenged. This was the world of the woods and the working stiff, the logging camp being a world especially overbearing with challenges, and, if you expected to duck all challenges, you shouldn’t have wandered into the woods in the first place. It is true, too, that up to a point I liked being around him—he was three years older than I was, which at times is a lot, and he had seen parts of life with which I, as the son of a Presbyterian minister, wasn’t exactly intimate.

  A couple of other things cropped up about him that summer that had a bearing on the next summer when he and I were to gyppo together. He told me he was Scotch, which figured, and that made two of us. He said that he had been brought up in the Dakotas and that his father (and I quote) was “a Scotch son of a bitch” who threw him out of the house when he was fourteen and he had been making his own living ever since. He explained to me that he made his living only partly by working. He worked just in the summer, and then this cultural side of him, as it were, took over. He holed up for the winter in some town that had a good Carnegie Public Library and the first thing he did was take out a library card. Then he went looking for a good whore, and so he spent the winter reading and pimping—or maybe this is stated in reverse order. He said that on the whole he preferred southern whores; southern whores, he said, were generally “more poetical,” and later I think I came to know what he meant by this.