English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  “Damn fire anyhow,” I seconded with a slurp of my own. “But what got you across the mountains, here to the Two?”

  Stanley gave me quite a glance, I guess to estimate the state of my health under Dr. Al K. Hall’s ministration. I felt first-rate, and blinked Stanley an earnest response that was meant to say so.

  “Better go a little slow on how often you visit that cup,” he advised. Then: “The Two Medicine country. Why did I ever kiss her hello. Good question. One of the best.”

  What ensued is somewhat difficult to reconstruct. The bald truth, I may as well say, is that as Stanley waxed forth, my sobriety waned. But even if I had stayed sharp-eared as a deacon, the headful of the past which Stanley now provided me simply was too much to keep straight. Tale upon tale of the Two country; memories of how the range looked some certain year; people who passed away before I was born; English Creek, Noon Creek, Gros Ventre, the reservation; names of horses, habits of sheepherders and cowboys, appreciations of certain saloons and bartenders. I was accustomed to a broth of history from my father and Toussaint Rennie, some single topic at a time, but Stanley’s version was a brimming mulligan stew. “I can tell you a time, Jick, I was riding along in here under the Reef and met an old Scotch sheepherder on his horse. White-bearded geezer, hadn’t had a haircut since Christmas. ‘Lad!’ he calls out to me. ‘Can ye tell me the elevation here where we are?’ Not offhand, I say to him, why does he want to know? ‘Ye see, I was right here when those surveyors of that Theological Survey come through years ago, and they told me the elevation, but I forgot. I’m pretty sure the number had a seven in it, though.’ ” The forest fires of 1910, which darkened daytime for weeks on end: Stanley helped combat the stubborn one in the Two mountains west of where Swift Dam now stood. The flu epidemic during the world war: he remembered death outrunning the hearse capacity, two and three coffins at a time in the back of a truck headed for the Gros Ventre town cemetery. The legendary winter of ’19: “We really caught hell, that time. Particularly those ’steaders in Scotch Heaven. Poor snowed-in bastards.” The banks going under in the early twenties, the tide of homesteaders reversing itself. “Another time I can tell. In honor of Canada Dan, you might say. Must of been the summer of ’16, I was up in Browning when one of those big sheep outfits out in Washington shipped in five thousand ewes and lambs. Gonna graze them there on the north end of the Two. Those sheep came hungry from eighteen hours on the stock cars, and they hit the flats out there and got onto deathcamas and lupine. Started dying by the hundreds. We got hold of all the pinanginated potash and sulfate of aluminum there was in the drugstore at Browning, and sent guys to fetch all of it there was in Cut Bank and Valier and Gros Ventre too, and we started in mixing the stuff in washtubs and dosing those sheep. Most of the ones we dosed pulled through okay, but it was too late for about a thousand of them others. All there was to do was drag in the carcasses and set them afire with brush. We burned dead sheep all night on that prairie.”

  Those sheep pyres I believe were the story that made me check out of Stanley’s companionship for the evening. At least, I seem to remember counseling myself not to think about deceased sheep in combination with the social juice I’d been imbibing, by now three cups’ worth. Stanley on the other hand had hardly even sipped during this tale-telling spell.

  “I’ve about had a day,” I announced. The bunk bed was noticeably more distant than it’d been the night before, but I managed to trek to it.

  “Adios till the rooster crows,” Stanley’s voice followed me.

  “Or till the crow roosts,” I imparted to myself, or maybe to a more general audience, for at the time it seemed to me an exceptionally clever comment.

  While my tongue was wandering around that way, though, and my fingers were trying to solve the bootlace situation, which for some reason began halfway down my boots instead of at the top where I was sure they ought to be, my mind was not idle. Cowboying, teamstering, river pigging: all this history of Stanley’s was unexpected to me. I’d supposed, from my distant memory of him having been in our lives when I was so small, that he was just another camptender or maybe even an association rider back when this range was occupied by mostly cattle instead of sheep. But riding along up here and being greeted by the elevation-minded sheepherder as an expert on the Two: that sounded like, what, he’d been one of the early ranchers of this country? Homesteader, maybe? Fighting that forest fire of ’10: must have volunteered himself onto the fire crew, association rider would fit that. But dosing all those sheep: that sounded like camptender again.

  Then something else peeped in a corner of my mind. One boot finally in hand, I could spare the concentration for the question. “Stanley, didn’ you say you been to this cabin before? When we got here, didn’ you say that?”

  “Yessir. Been here just a lot of times. I go back farther than this cabin does. I seen it being built. We was sighting out that fenceline over there when old Bob Barclay started dragging in the logs for this.”

  Being built? Sighting the boundary fencelines? The history was skipping to the most ancient times of the Two forest now, and this turn and the whiskey together were compounding my confusion. Also, somebody had put another boot in my hand. Yet I persisted.

  “What, were you up here with the Theologic—the Geologic—the survey crew?”

  Stanley’s eyes were sharp, as if a new set had been put in amid the webs of eyelines. And the look he fastened on me now was the levelest thing in that cabin.

  “Jick, I was the ranger that set up the boundaries of the Two Medicine National Forest.”

  Surely my face hung open so far you could have trotted a cat through it.

  In any Forest Service family such as ours, lore of setting up the national forests, of the boundary examiners who established them onto the maps of America as public preserves, was almost holy writ. I could remember time upon time of hearing my father and the other Forest Service men of his age mention those original rangers and supervisors, the ones who were sent out in the first years of the century with not much more than the legal description of a million or so acres and orders to transform them into a national forest. “The forest arrangers,” the men of my father’s generation nicknamed them. Elers Koch on the Gallatin National Forest, Coert duBois on the Lolo, other boundary men who sired the Beaverhead and the Custer and the Helena and so on; the tales of them still circulated, refreshed by the comments of the younger rangers wondering how they’d managed to do all they had. Famous, famous guys. Sort of combinations of Old Testament prophets and mountain men, rolled into one. Everybody in the Forest Service told forest arranger stories at any chance. But that Stanley Meixell, wrong-handed campjack and frequenter of Doctor Al K. Hall, had been the original ranger of the Two Medicine National Forest, I had never heard a breath of. And this was strange.

  “My sister is Mandy,

  she’s got a dandy.

  At least so the boys say.”

  I woke with that in my ears and a dark brown taste in my mouth.

  The serious symptoms set in when I sat up in my bunk. My eyes and temples and ears all seemed to have grown sharp points inward and were steadily stabbing each other. Life, the very air, seemed gritty, gray. Isn’t there one hangover description that your tongue feels like you spent the night licking ashtrays? That’s it.

  “Morning there, Jick!” Stanley sang out. He was at the stove. “Here, better wash down your insides with this.” Stepping over to the bunk, he handed me a tin cup of coffee turned tan with canned milk. Evidently he had heated the milk along with the coffee, because the contents of the cup were all but aflame. The heat went up my nose in search of my brain as I held the cup in front of my lips.

  “No guarantee on this left-handed grub,” Stanley called over his shoulder as he fussed at something on the stove top, “but how do you take your eggs?”

  “Uh,” I sought around in myself for the information. “Flipped, I guess.”

  Stanley hovered at the stove another minute or two while
I made up my mind to try the death-defying trip to the table.

  Then he turned and presented me a plate. Left-handed they may have been, but the eggs were fried to a crisp brown lace at the edges, while their pockets of yolk were not runny but not solidified either. Eggs that way are perfection. On the plate before me they were fenced in by wide tan strips of sidepork, and within a minute or so Stanley was providing me slices of bread fried in the pan grease.

  I am my mother’s son entirely in this respect: I believe good food never made any situation worse.

  I dug in and by the time I’d eaten about half the plateful, things were tasting like they were supposed to. I even managed to sip some of the coffee, which I discovered was stout enough to float a kingbolt.

  Indeed, I swarmed on to the last bite or so of the feast before it occurred to me to ask, “Where’d you get these eggs?”

  “Aw, I always carry a couple small lard pails of oats for the horses, and the eggs ride okay in the oats.”

  Breakfast made me feel restored. “Speaking of riding,” I began, “how soon—”

  “—can we head down the mountain.” Stanley inventoried me. And I took the chance to get in my first clear-eyed look of the day at him. Stanley seemed less in pain than he had when we arrived to this cabin but less in grasp of himself than he had during last night’s recounting of lore of the Two. A man in wait, seeing which way he might turn; but unfortunately, I knew, the bottle habit soon would sway his decision. Of course, right then who was I to talk?

  Now Stanley was saying: “Just any time now, Jick. We can head out as soon as you say ready.”

  • • •

  On our ride down Stanley of course was into his musical repertoire again, one minute warbling about somebody who was wild and woolly and full of fleas and never’d been curried above her knees and the next crooning a hymnlike tune that went “Oh sweet daughters of the Lord, grant me more than I can afford.”

  My mind, though, was on a thing Stanley said as we were saddling the horses. In no way was it what I intended to think about, for I knew fully that I was heading back into the McCaskill family situation, that blowup between my parents and Alec. Godamighty, the supper that produced all that wasn’t much more than a half a week ago. And in the meantime my father had introduced Stanley and Canada Dan and Bubbles, not to mention Dr. Al K. Hall, into my existence. There were words I intended to say to him about all this. If, that is, I could survive the matter of explaining to my mother why the tops of my boots gaped out like funnels and how come my pants legs looked like I’d wiped up a mountainside with them and where the tail of my shirt had gone. Thank the Lord, not even she could quite see into a person enough to count three tin cups of booze in him the night before. On that drinking score, I felt reasonably safe. Stanley didn’t seem to me likely to trouble himself enough to advertise my behavior. On the other hand, Stanley himself was a logical topic for my mother. More than likely my father had heard, and I was due to hear, her full opinion of my having sashayed off on this campjacking expedition.

  A sufficiency to dwell on, and none of it easy thinking. Against my intentions and better interests, though, I still found myself going back and forth over the last scene at the cabin.

  I had just handed the lead rope for the black mare and ever-loving Bubbles up to Stanley and was turning away to go tighten the cinch on Pony’s saddle. It was then that Stanley said he hoped I didn’t mind too much about missing the rest of the counting trip with my father, to the Billy Peak lookout and all. “I couldn’t of got along up here without you, Jick,” he concluded, “and I hope you don’t feel hard used.”

  Which of course was exactly how I had been feeling. You damn bet I was, ever since the instant my father volunteered me into Stanley’s company. Skinning wet sheep corpses, contending with a pack horse who decides he’s a mountain goat, nursing Stanley along, lightning, any number of self-cooked meals, the hangover I’d woke up with and still had more than a trace of—what sad sonofabitch wouldn’t realize he was being used out of the ordinary?

  Yet right then, eighteen-inch pincers would not have pulled such a confession from me. I wouldn’t give the universe the satisfaction.

  So, “No,” I had answered Stanley, and gone on over to do my cinching. “No, it’s all been an education.”

  TWO

  This will mark the fifteenth Fourth of July in a row that Gros Ventre has mustered a creek picnic, a rodeo and a dance. Regarding those festivities, ye editor’s wife inquires whether somebody still has her big yellow potato-salad bowl from last year; the rodeo will feature $140 in prize money; and the dance music will again be by Nola Atkins, piano, and Jeff Swan, fiddle.

  —GROS VENTRE WEEKLY GLEANER, JUNE 29

  I HAVE TO HONESTLY say that the next few weeks of this remembered summer look somewhat pale in comparison with my Stanley episode.

  Only in comparison, though.

  You can believe that I arrived back to English Creek from the land of sheepherders and pack horses in no mood to take any further guff from that father of mine. What in Holy H. Hell was that all about, him and Stanley Meixell pussyfooting around each other the way they had when they met there on the mountain, then before it was over my father handing me over to Stanley like an orphan? Some counting trip, that one. I could spend the rest of the summer just trying to dope out why and what and who, if I let myself. Considering, then, that my bill of goods against my father was so long and fresh, life’s next main development caught me by entire surprise. This same parent who had just lent me as a towing service for a whiskeyfield geezer trying to find his way up the Rocky Mountains—this identical father now announced that he would be off the English Creek premises for a week, and I hereby was elevated into being the man of the house.

  “Your legs are long enough by now that they reach the ground,” he provided by way of justification the suppertime this was unveiled, “so I guess that qualifies you to run this place, don’t you think?”

  • • •

  Weather brought this about, as it did so much else that summer. The cool wet mood of June continued and about the middle of the month our part of Montana had its solidest rain in years, a toad-drowner that settled in around noon and poured on and on into the night. That storm delivered snow onto the mountains. Several inches fell in the Big Belts south beyond the Sun River, and that next morning here in the Two, along the high sharp parts of all the peaks a white skift shined, fresh-looking as a sugar sprinkle. You could bet, though, there were a bunch of perturbed sheepherders up there looking out their wagon doors at it and not thinking sugar. Anyway, since that storm was a straightforward douser without any lightning and left the forests so sopping that there was no fire danger for a while, the desk jockeys at the national forest office in Great Falls saw this as a chance to ship a couple of rangers from the Two over to Region headquarters for a refresher course. Send them back to school, as it was said. Both my father and Murray Tomlin of the Blacktail Gulch station down on the Sun River had been so assiduous about evading this in the past that the finger of selection now never wavered whatsoever: it pointed the pair of them to Missoula for a week of fire school.

  The morning came when my father appeared in his Forest Service monkey suit—heather-green uniform, side-crimped dress Stetson, pine tree badge—and readied himself to collect Murray at the Blacktail Gulch station, from where they would drive over to Missoula together.

  “Mazoola,” he was still grumbling. “Why don’t they send us to hell to study fire and be done with it? What I hear, the mileage is probably about the same.”

  My mother’s sympathy was not rampant. “All that surprises me is that you’ve gotten by this long without having to go. Have you got your diary in some pocket of that rig?”

  “Diary,” my father muttered, “diary, diary, diary,” patting various pockets. “I never budge without it.” And went to try to find it.

  I spectated with some anticipation. My mood toward my father hadn’t uncurdled entirely, and some time o
n my own, some open space without him around to remind me I was half sore at him, looked just dandy to me. As did this first-ever designation of me as the man of the house. Of course, I was well aware my father hadn’t literally meant that I was to run English Creek in his absence. Start with the basic that nobody ran my mother. As for station matters, my father’s assistant ranger Paul Eliason was strawbossing a fire trail crew not far along the South Fork and the new dispatcher, Chet Barnouw, was up getting familiar with the lookout sectors and the telephone setup which connected them to the ranger station. Any vital forest business would be handled by one of those two. No, I had no grandiose illusions. I was to make the check on Walter Kyle’s place sometime during the week and help Isidor Pronovost line out his packstring when he came to pack supplies up to the fire lookouts and do some barn cleaning and generally be on hand for anything my mother thought up. Nothing to get wild-eyed about.

  Even so, I wasn’t prepared for what lay ahead when my father came back from his diary hunt, looked across the kitchen at me, said, “Step right out here for some free entertainment,” and led me around back of the ranger station.

  There he went to the side of the outhouse, being a little gingerly about it because of his uniform. Turned. Stepped off sixteen paces—why exactly sixteen I don’t know, but likely it was in Forest Service regulations somewhere. And announced: “It’s time we moved Republican headquarters. How’re your shovel muscles?”