English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  “Wisdom? That burg?” Ordinarily Bud Dolson was silence himself. But Anaconda where he was from was not all that far from the Big Hole town of Wisdom and Bud had been there. As Cyrus now had the misfortune of asking him.

  “I think so,” replied Bud. “I blinked. I might’ve missed most of it.”

  Cyrus looked hurt. “Now what do you mean by that?”

  “Cy, I mean that the town of Wisdom makes the town of Gros Ventre look like London, England.”

  “Aw, come on, Bud. Wisdom is a hell of a nice town.”

  Bud shook his head in pity. “If you say so, Wisdom.” And ever since, the big stackman was Wisdom Johnson to us.

  • • •

  This first stack was well under way, Pete having buckraked several windrows in to the stacker. Now began my contribution to the haying process. I went over and climbed onto my scatter rake.

  If you happen never to have seen one, a scatter rake simply resembles a long axle—mine was a ten-foot type—between a set of iron wheels, high spoked ones about as big around as those you think of a stagecoach having, but not nearly so thick and heavy. The “axle,” actually the chassis of the rake, carries a row of long thin curved teeth, set about a hand’s width apart from each other, and it is this regiment of teeth that rakes along the ground and scrapes together any stray hay lying there. As if the hayfield was a head of hair and the scatter rake a big iron comb going over it, so to speak. Midway between the wheels a seat stuck up for the rake driver—me—to ride on, and a wooden tongue extended forward for a team of horses to be hitched to.

  My team was in harness and waiting. Blanche and Fisheye. As workhorses go, they weren’t too bad a pair; a light team, as you didn’t need the biggest horses in the world just to pull a scatter rake, but more on the steady side than frisky. That Blanche and Fisheye were civilized at all was a relief to me, because you never know what you might get in a team of horses. One of them maybe can pull like a Percheron but is dumb, and the other one clever enough to teach geometry but so lazy he constantly lays back in the traces. Or one horse may be a kicker, and his mate so mild you could pass a porcupine under him without response. So except for Fisheye staring sideways at you in a fishy way as you harnessed him, and Blanche looking like she needed a nap all the time, this team of mine was better than the horse law of averages might suggest.

  I believe I am right in saying Pete was the first rancher in the Two country to use a power buckrake: an old automobile chassis and engine with a fork mounted on it to buck the hay in from the field to the stack. Wisdom Johnson a few summers before had brought word of the invention of the power buckrake in the Big Hole: “I tell you, Pete, they got them all over that country. They move hay faster than you can see.” That proved to be not quite the case, but the contraption could bring in hay as fast as two buckrakes propelled by horses. Thus the internal combustion engine roared into the Reese hayfields and speeded matters up, but it also left dabs of hay behind it, scatterings which had either blown off the buckrake fork or which it simply missed. The scatter raker was the gatherer of that leftover hay, which otherwise would be wasted. In place on my rake seat, I now clucked to Blanche and Fisheye, reined them toward the part of the meadow Pete had been bucking in loads from, and my second summer of scatter raking was begun.

  I suppose I have to admit, anybody who could handle a team of workhorses could run a scatter rake. But not necessarily run it as it ought to be done. The trick was to stay on the move but at an easy pace. Keep the horses in mild motion and the rake teeth down there gathering leftover hay, instead of racing around here and yon. Roam and glean, by going freestyle over a field as a fancy skater swoops around on ice. Well, really not quite that free and fancy, for you do have to tend to business enough to dump your scatterings in some good place for the buckrake to get it, and not in a boggy spot or on top of a badger mound. But still I say, the more you could let yourself go and just follow the flow of the hayfield, so to speak—keep swooping back and forth where the power buckrake had recently been, even if there wasn’t much spilled hay there—the better off you were as a scatter raker. A mind as loose as mine was about right for scatter raking.

  • • •

  “How did it go?” my mother asked, that first night of full haying. We were waiting supper for my father, who was somewhere up the North Fork inspecting the progress of a CCC trail crew there.

  “A stack and a half,” I reported offhandedly as if I had been a hayhand for centuries. “About usual, for first day.”

  “How did you get along with Blanche and Fisheye?”

  “They’re kind of a logy pair of sonsa—” I remembered in time to mend my mouth; the vocabulary I’d been using around Pete and the crew was a quick ticket to trouble here at home—“of so and sos. But they’re okay.”

  She appraised me from where she was leaning against the kitchen sink, arms folded across her chest. Then surprised me with her smile and: “It’s quiet around here, without you.”

  I chose to take that as a compliment. More than that, I risked ribbing her in return, a little. “Well, I guess I could call you up on the telephone every noon from Pete and Marie’s, and sing you a song or tell you a joke.”

  “Never mind, Mister Imagination,” she declined. “I’ll adjust.”

  • • •

  I didn’t pay it sufficient mind at the time, but in truth my mother did have to adjust. Alec in exile. Me rationed between English Creek and the Noon Creek hayfields. My father beginning to be gone more and more as fire danger increased in the forest. The reverse of her usual situation of a houseful of male McCaskills, a genuine scarcity of us. There is another topic which occupies my mind these days. The way life sorts us into men and women, not on any basis of capability that I have ever been able to see. High on the list of questions I wish I’d had the good sense to ask, throughout that immense summer, is the one to my mother. Her view about being born as a woman into a region which featured male livelihoods.

  • • •

  “You finally starved out, did you,” she now greeted my father’s late arrival. “Wash up and sit up, you two; supper will be just a minute now.”

  “How’d it go today?” my father asked me, and I repeated my report of Reese haying. Through that and other supper conversation he nodded and said uh huh a lot, which signaled that he was only half listening. The symptom was annual. At this point of the summer, and hot as this one suddenly had turned, fire was forever on the mind of a forest ranger. The joke was told that when the preacher at a funeral asked if anyone wanted to memorialize the deceased, a ranger was the first one onto his feet and began: “Old Tom wasn’t the worst fellow I ever knew. Now I’d like to add a few words about fire prevention.”

  When you think about it, my father’s yearly deep mood about fire was understandable enough. He was responsible for an entire horizon. The skyline made up of peaks and reefs and timbered slopes and high grasslands: that conglomeration of nature was designated his district of the Two Medicine National Forest, and every blessed inch of it was prey to lightning storms and careless campfires and flipped cigarettes. His line of defense was a light thread of men across that mass of mountain and forest; the lookouts in the tall towers, and at this time of year, the fire guards and other smokechasers he would start hiring and stationing for quick combat against lightning strikes or smolders of any sort. My father entirely subscribed to the theory that the time to fight a forest fire was before it got going. True, the timber of the Two here on the east face of the Rockies was not as big and dense and incendiary as the forests farther west in Montana and Idaho. “But that doesn’t mean they’re made of goddamn asbestos either” ran the complaint of east-side rangers on the Two, the Lewis and Clark, the Custer and the Helena, against what they saw as a westward tilt in the thinking and the fire budget of Region One headquarters. It was a fact that the legendary fires occurred over there west of the Continental Divide. The Bitterroot blaze of 1910 was an absolute hurricane of flame. Into smoke went three
million acres of standing trees, a lot of it the finest white pine in the world. And about half the town of Wallace, Idaho, burned. And this too: the Bitterroot fire killed eighty-five persons, eighty-four of them done in directly by the flames and the other one walked off a little from a hotshot crew on Setzer Creek and put a pistol to himself. The Forest Service, which was only a few years old at the time, was bloodied badly by the Bitterroot fire. And as recently as 1934 there had been the fiasco of the Selway fires along the Idaho-Montana line. That August, the Selway National Forest became the Alamo of Region One. Into those back-country fires the regional forester, Major Kelley, and his headquarters staff poured fifty-four hundred men, and they never did get the flames under control. The Pete King Creek fire and the McLendon Butte fire and about fifteen smaller ones all were roaring at once. The worst afternoon, ten square miles of the Selway forest were bursting into flame every hour. And when the fire at Fish Butte blew up, a couple of hundred CCC guys had to run like jackrabbits. Five fire camps eventually went up in smoke, both the Pete King and Lochsa ranger stations damn near did. Nothing the Forest Service tried on the Selway worked. Nothing could work, really. An inferno has no thermostat. The rains of late September finally slowed the Selway fires, and only weeks after that Major Kelley killed off the Selway National Forest, parceled out its land to the neighboring forests and scattered its staff like the tribes of Israel. The Selway summer sobered everybody working in Region One—that total defeat by fire and the Major’s obliteration of a National Forest unit—and for damn sure no ranger wanted any similar nightmare erupting in his own district.

  I stop to recount all this because of what happened now, as my father finished supper and thumbed open the day’s one piece of mail, an official Forest Service envelope. “What’ve we got here,” he wondered, “the latest kelleygram?”

  His next utterance was: “Sonofabitch.”

  He looked as if he had been hit with a two-by-four, stunned and angry. Then, as if the words would have to change themselves when read aloud, he recited from the letter:

  “ ‘Placement of manpower this fire season will be governed by localized fire danger measurements. An enforced lag of manning below current danger will eliminate over-manning designed to meet erratic peak loads and will achieve material decrease in FF costs over past years’ expenditures. Organization on east-side forests in particular is to be held to the lowest level consistent with carefully analyzed current needs.’ ”

  My mother oh so slightly shook her head, as if this confirmed her suspicions of brainlessness in the upper ranks of the U.S. Forest Service. My father crumpled the letter and crossed the kitchen to the window looking out on Roman Reef and Rooster Mountain and Phantom Woman peak and other of the profiles of the Two.

  I asked, “What’s all that mean?”

  “No fire guards on our side of the Divide until things start burning,” said my father without turning from the window.

  • • •

  Right up until the time haying started, I had been rehearsing to myself how to talk my parents into letting me live in the bunkhouse at Pete’s with the rest of the hay crew. It was something I imagined I much wanted to do. Be in on the gab of Wisdom and Perry and Bud, hear all the tales of the Big Hole and First Avenue South and Texas and Anaconda and so on and so on. Gain one more rung towards being a grownup, I suppose was what was working on me. Yet when haying time arrived I did not even bring up the bunkhouse issue.

  For one thing, I could anticipate my mother’s enunciation about one shavetail McCaskill already living in a bunkhouse “and to judge by Alec’s recent behavior One Is More Than Enough.” For another, with my father on the go as much as he was this summer it seemed plain that he would prefer for me to be on hand at English Creek whenever he couldn’t. But do you know, I actually made it unanimous against myself. What the matter came right down to was that I didn’t want to give up the porch bedroom at English Creek for the dubious gain of bunking with hay hands.

  Which is how I became a one-horsepower commuter. The one horse being Pony, whom I found I regarded with considerable more esteem ever since Mouse decided to hose down the rodeo grounds that time in front of Leona. Each morning now I got up at five, went out and caught and saddled Pony outside the barn—quite a lot of light in the sky that time of year—and the pair of us would head for the Reese ranch.

  Where morning is concerned, I am my father all over again. “The day goes downhill after daybreak” was his creed. I don’t suppose there are too many people now who have seen a majority of the dawns of their life, but my father did, and I have. And of my lifetime of early rising I have never known better dawns than those when I rode from English Creek to my haying job on Noon Creek.

  The ford north of the ranger station Pony and I would cross; if there was enough moon the wild roses along the creek could be seen, pale crowds of them; and in a few minutes of climbing we came atop the bench of land which divides the two creek drainages. Up there, at that brink of dawn hour, the world revealed all its edges. Dark lines of the tops of buttes and benches to the north, towards the Two Medicine River and the Blackfeet Reservation. The Sweetgrass Hills bumping up far on the eastern horizon like five dunes of black sand. The timbered crest of Breed Butte standing up against the stone mountain wall of the west. What trick of light it is I can’t really say, but everything looked as if drawn in heavy strokes, with the final shade of night penciled in wherever there was a gulch or coulee.

  The only breaks in the stillness were Pony’s hooves against the earth, and the west breeze which generally met us atop that broad benchland. I say breeze. In the Two country any wind that doesn’t lift you off your horse is only a breeze. My mountain coat was on me, my hat pulled low, my hands in leather work gloves, and I was just about comfortable.

  Since Pete’s haying season always lasted a month or a little more, I rode right through the phases of the moon. My favorite you can guess on first try. The fat full moon, resting there as if it was an agate marble which had rolled into the western corner of the sky. During the early half of my route the mountains still drew most of their light from the moon, and I watched the reefs and other rock faces change complexion, from light gray to ever so slightly pink, as the sunrise began to touch them. Closer to me, the prairie flowers now made themselves known amid the tan grass. Irises, paintbrushes, bluebells, shooting stars, sunflowers.

  Then this. The first week or so of those daybreak rides, the sun was north enough that it came up between the Sweetgrass Hills. They stand sixty or seventy miles across the prairie from where I was riding, way over towards Havre, so there was a sense that I was seeing a sunrise happening in a far land. The gap between the mounded sets of hills first filled with a kind of orange film; a haze of coming light, it might be called. Then the sun would slowly present itself, like a big glowing coal burning its way up through the horizon.

  Those dawns taught me that beauty makes the eyes greedy. For even after all this, mountains and moon and earth edges and the coming of the sun, I considered that what was most worth watching for was the first shadow of the day. When the sun worked its way about half above the horizon, that shadow emerged to stretch itself off from Pony and me—horse and youngster melded, into an apparition of leftover dark a couple of hundred feet in length. Drawn out on the prairie grass in that far-reaching first shadow, Pony and I loomed like some new creature put together from the main parts of a camel and a giraffe.

  Is it any wonder each of these haying-time dawns made me feel remade?

  • • •

  Meanwhile it continued to be the damnedest summer of weather anybody could remember. All that rain of June, and now July making a habit of ninety degrees. The poor damn farmers out east of Gros Ventre and north along the High Line were fighting a grasshopper invasion again, the hot days hatching out the ’hoppers faster than the farmers could spread poison against them. And for about five days in the middle of July an epidemic of lightning storms broke out in all the national forests of Region
One. A lookout reported a plume of smoke up the South Fork of English Creek, on a heavily forested north slope of Grizzly Reef. This of course caused some excitement in the ranger station, and my father hustled his assistant ranger Paul Eliason and some trail men and a nearby CCC brush crew up there. “Paul’s used to those big trees out on the coast,” my father remarked to my mother. “It won’t hurt him to find out that the ones here are big enough to burn.” That Grizzly Reef smoke, though, turned out to be a rotten log and some other debris smoldering in a rocky area, and Paul and his crew handled it without much sweat.

  That mid-July dose of lightning and his dearth of fire guards to be smokechasers put my father in what my mother called “his prowly mood.” But then on the morning of the twenty-first of July we woke up to snow in the mountains. Fire was on the loose elsewhere in Montana—spot fires across the Continental Divide in the Flathead country and others up in Glacier Park, and a big blaze down in Yellowstone Park that hundreds of men were on—while my father’s forest lay snoozing under a cool sheet of white.

  “How did you arrange that?” my mother mock-questioned him at breakfast. “Clean living and healthy thoughts?”