English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  Good Help went as still as Lot’s wife, and I swear he even turned about as white.

  “Ordinarily, now”—I didn’t get to hear all of the ensuing catalogue of excuse, because I had to saunter away to keep my giggles in, but—“this goshblamed back of mine”—I heard more than enough—“if it’ll help you out with that stubborn bozo I can just head on home, Pete”—to know that it constituted Good Help’s adieu to haying.

  That night at English Creek my father and mother laughed and laughed at my retelling of the saga of Wisdom and Good Help.

  “A pair of dandies, they are,” my father ajudged. Recently he seemed to take particular pleasure in any evidence that jugheaded behavior wasn’t a monopoly of the Forest Service.

  But then a further point occurred to him, and he glanced at my mother. She looked soberly back at him. It had occurred to her, too. She in fact was the one who now asked it: “Then who’s going to drive the stacker team?”

  “Actually,” I confessed, “I am.”

  • • •

  So that was how I went from haying’s ideal job to its goddamn dullest.

  Back and forth with that stacker team. All of haying until then I had idly glanced at those little towpaths worn into the meadow, out from the side of each stack we put up, identical routes the exact length of the stacker cable. Now it registered on me how many footsteps, horse and human, it took to trudge those patterns into creation. The scenery meanwhile constant: the rear ends of Jocko and Pep looming ahead of me like a pair of circus fat ladies bending over to tie their shoelaces. Too promptly I discovered a charm of Pep’s, which was to hoist his tail and take a dump as soon as we were hitched up at a new stack site, so that I had to remember to watch my step or find myself shin deep in fresh horse apples.

  Nor did it help my mood that Clayton with his tender ankle was able to sit on the seat of the scatter rake and do that job. My scatter rake. The first long hours of driving the stacker team I spent brooding about the presence of the Hebner tribe in this world.

  I will say, the stacker team job shortly cured me of too much thinking. The first time I daydreamed a bit and was slow about starting the load up onto the stack, Wisdom Johnson brought me out of it by shouting down: “Hey, Jick! Whistle or sing, or show your thing!” I was tempted to part Wisdom’s hair with that particular load of hay, but I forebore.

  • • •

  Maybe my stacker team mood was contagious. Suppertime of the second day, when I got back to English Creek I found my mother frowning over the week’s Gleaner. “What’s up?” I asked her.

  “Nothing,” she said and didn’t convince me. When she went to the stove to wrestle with supper and I had washed up, I zeroed in on the article she’d been making a mouth at. It was one on the Random page:

  PHANTOM WOMAN:

  WHEN FIRE RAN

  ON THE MOUNTAIN

  Editor’s note: The fire season is once again upon us, and lightning needs no help from the carelessness of man. It is just 10 years ago that the Phantom Woman Mountain conflagration provided an example of what happens when fire gets loose in a big way. We reprint the story as a reminder. When in the woods, break your matches after blowing them out, crush cigarette butts, and douse all campfires.

  Forest Service crews are throwing everything in the book at the fire on Phantom Woman Mountain, but so far, the roaring blaze has thrown it all back. The inferno is raging in up-and-down country near the headwaters of the North Fork of English Creek, about 20 miles west of Gros Ventre. Reports from Valier and Conrad say the column of smoke can be seen from those communities. How many acres of forest have been consumed is not known. It is certain the loss is the worst in the Two Medicine National Forest since the record fire season of 1910.

  One eyewitness said the crews seemed to be bringing the fire under control until late yesterday afternoon. Then the upper flank of the fire broke loose “and started going across that mountain as fast as a man can run.”

  H. T. Gisborne, fire research specialist for the U.S. Forest Service at Missoula, explained the “blowup” phenomenon: “Ordinarily the front of a forest fire advances like troops in skirmish formation, pushing ahead faster here, slower there, according to the timber type and fuels, but maintaining a practically unbroken front. Even when topography, fuels, and weather result in a crown fire, the sheet of flames leaps from one tree crown to the next at a relatively slow rate, from one-half to one mile an hour. But when such ‘runs’ throw spots of fire ahead of the advancing front, the spots burn back to swell the main front and add to the momentum of the rising mass of heat. Literally, a ‘blowup’ of the front of the fire may then happen.”

  No word has been received of casualties in the Phantom Woman fire, although reports are that some crews had to flee for their lives when the “blowup” occurred.

  When my father came in for supper, my mother liberated the Gleaner from me and handed it to him, saying: “Mac, you might as well see this.” Meaning, you might as well see it before our son the asker starts in on you about it.

  The headline stopped him. Bill Reinking always got in touch with him about any story having to do with the Two Medicine National Forest. “Why’s this in the paper?” my father now demanded of the world at large.

  “It’s been ten years, Mac,” my mother told him. “Ten years ago this week.”

  He read it through. His eyes were intent, his jaw was out, as if stubborn against the notion that fire could happen in the Two Medicine National Forest. When he tossed the Gleaner aside, though, he said only: “Doesn’t time fly.”

  • • •

  The next day, two developments.

  I took some guilty pleasure at the first of these. Not long before noon, Clayton dropped one wheel of the scatter rake into a ditch that was closer than he’d noticed, and the impact broke one of the brackets that attaches the dumping mechanism to the rake frame. Clayton himself looked considerably jarred, although I don’t know whether mostly by the jolt of the accident or the dread that Pete would fire him for it.

  But Pete being Pete, he instead said: “These things happen, Clayton. We’ll cobble it with wire until we can get a weld done on it.” And once I got over my secret satisfaction about the superiority of my scatter-raking to Clayton’s, I was glad Pete didn’t come down hard on the boy. Being a son of Good Help Hebner seemed to me punishment enough for anybody.

  Then at the end of the workday, as Pony and I came down the benchland to the ford of English Creek, I saw a second Forest Service pickup parked beside my father’s outside the ranger station. I figured the visitor might be Cliff Bowen, the young ranger from the Indian Head district just south of us, and it was. When I stepped in to say hello, I learned Cliff had been to headquarters in Great Falls and had come by with some fire gear for my father. And with some rangerly gripes he was sharing as well. Normally Cliff Bowen was mild as milk, but his headquarters visit left him pretty well steamed.

  “Mac, Sipe asked me how things are going.” Sipe was Ken Sipe, the superintendent of the Two Medicine National Forest. “I told him, about as good as could be expected, but we’re going to need more smoke-chasers.” July and now August had stayed so hot and dangerous that east-of-the-Divide rangers had been permitted to hire some fire manpower, but only enough, as my father had said, “to give us a taste.”

  “How’d that go over with him?” my father wondered.

  “About like a fart in church. He told me it’s Missoula policy. Hold down on the hiring, on these east-side forests. Goddamn it, Mac, I don’t know what the Major’s thinking of. This forest is as dry as paper. We get one good lightning storm in the mountains and we’ll have fires the whole sonofabitching length of the Two.”

  “Maybe the Major’s got it all arranged with upstairs so there isn’t going to be any lightning the rest of the summer, Cliff.”

  “Yeah, maybe. But if any does get loose, I hope to Christ it aims for the rivets on the Major’s hip pocket.”

  My father couldn’t help but laugh. “
You think snag strikes are trouble. Figure how long the Major’d smolder.”

  Two developments, I said back there. Amend that to three. As I led Pony to her pasture for the night, the heat brought out sweat on me, just from that little walk. When I reached the house the thermometer in our kitchen window was catching the western sun. Ninety-two degrees, it read. The hot heavy weather was back. The kind of weather that invites lightning storms.

  • • •

  But all we got that night was a shower, a dab of drizzle. When I climbed out of bed in the morning I debated whether Pete’s hay would be too wet to stack today. So that I wouldn’t make my ride for nothing, I telephoned the Reese ranch.

  “Pete thinks it’ll be dry enough by middle of the morning,” Marie’s voice told me. “Come on for breakfast. I have sourdough hotcakes.”

  It turned out that the sourdough hotcakes were the only real gain of the morning for our hay crew. We took our time at the breakfast table and then did a leisurely harnessing-up of our teams and made no hurry of getting to the Ramsay place’s hayfields, and still Perry and Bud and Wisdom had a lot of smoke time while Pete felt of the hay and gandered at the sky. Finally Pete said, “Hell, let’s try it.” We would do okay for a while, put up a dozen or so loads, then here would come a sun shower. Just enough moisture to shut us down. Then we’d hay a little more, and another sun shower would happen. For a rancher trying to put up hay, that is the most aggravating kind of day there can be. Or as Pete put it during one of these sprinkly interruptions: “Goddamn it, if you’re gonna rain, rain.”

  By about two o’clock and the fourth or fifth start-and-stop of our stacking, he had had enough. “The hell with it. Let’s head for home.”

  I naturally anticipated an early return to English Creek, and started thinking about where I might go fishing for the rest of the afternoon. My theory is, the more rotten the weather, the better the fishing. But as I was unharnessing Jocko and Pep, Pete came out of the house and asked:

  “Jick, how do you feel about a trip to town?”

  Inasmuch as we were rained out anyway, he elaborated, I might just as well take the scatter rake in to Grady Tilton’s garage and get the broken bracket welded, stay overnight at the Heaneys’ and in the morning drive the repaired rake back here to the ranch. “I checked all this out with headquarters”, meaning my mother, “and she said it’d be okay.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I told Pete. The full fact was, after the days of trudging back and forth behind the stacker team it sounded like an expedition to Africa.

  • • •

  So I set off for Gros Ventre, about midafternoon. Roving scatter raker Jick McCaskill hitting the road, even if the route only was to town and back.

  The first couple of miles almost flew by, for it was remarkable what a pair of steppers Blanche and Fisheye now seemed to me; speed demons in comparison to Jocko and Pep. My thoughts were nothing special. Wondering what Ray Heaney would have to report. Mulling the rest of the summer. Another week or so of haying. The start of school was—Christamighty, only thirty days away. And my fifteenth birthday, one day less than that. I ask you, how is it that after the Fourth of July each summer, time somehow speeds up.

  I like to believe that even while curlicues of this sort are going on in my head, the rest of me is more or less on the job. Aiming that scatter rake down the Noon Creek road I took note of Dill Egan’s haystacks, which looked to me like poor relations of those Wisdom built. Way over on the tan horizon to the northeast I could see specks that would be Double W cattle, and wondered where Alec was riding or fence-fixing today. And of course one of the things a person always does a lot of in Montana is watching other people’s weather. All that sky and horizon around you, there almost always is some atmospheric event to keep track of. At the top of the country road’s rise from Dill Egan’s place, I studied a dark anvil cloud which was sitting over the area to the northwest of me. My father was not going to like the looks of that one, hovering along the edge of his forest. And our Ramsay hayfield is going to have itself a bath, I told myself.

  In a few more minutes I glanced around again, though, and found that the cloud wasn’t sitting over the Ramsay place. It was on the move. Toward Noon Creek and me. A good thing I was bright enough to bring my slicker along on the rake; the coat was going to save me from some wet.

  But the next time I reconnoitered, rain was pushed off my mental agenda. The cloud was bigger, blacker, and closer. A whole hell of a lot closer. It also was rumbling now like it was the engine of the entire sky. That may sound fancy, but view it from my eyes at the time: a dark block of storm, with pulses of light coming out of it like flame winking from firebox doors. And even as I gawked at it, a jagged rod of lightning stabbed from the cloud to the earth. Pale lightning, nearer white than yellow. The kind a true electrical storm employs.

  As I have told, I am not exactly in love with lightning anyway. Balling the reins in both my hands, I slapped Blanche and Fisheye some encouragement across their rumps. “Hyaah, you two! Let’s go!” Which may sound drastic, but try sitting on a ten-foot expanse of metal rake with lightning approaching and then prescribe to me what you would have done.

  Go we did, at a rattling pace, for the next several minutes. I did my best to count distance on the thunder, but it was that grumbling variety that lets loose another thump before you’ve finished hearing the one before. My eyes rather than my ears had to do the weather forecasting, and they said Blanche and Fisheye and the rake and I were not going as fast as the stormcloud was traveling or growing or whatever the hell it was doing.

  The route ahead stretched on and on, for immediately after coming up out of Dill Egan’s place the Noon Creek road abandons the bottomland and arrows along the benchland between Noon Creek and English Creek until it eventually hits the highway north of Gros Ventre. Miles of country as exposed as a tabletop. I tell you, a situation like that reminds a person that skin is damn thin shelter against the universe.

  One thing the steady thunder and the pace of the anvil cloud did tell me was that I somehow had to abandon that road. Find a place to pull in and get myself and my horses away from this ten-foot lightning rod on wheels. The question was, where? Along the English Creek road I’d have had no problem: within any little way there, a ranch could be pulled into for shelter. But around here the Double W owned everything, and wherever there did happen to be a turnoff into one of the abandoned sets of Noon Creek ranch buildings, the Double W kept the gate padlocked against fishermen. As I verified for myself, by halting my team for a quick scan at the gate into the old Nansen place.

  A lack of choices can make your mind up for you in a hurry. I whapped Blanche and Fisheye again and on down the county road we clattered, heading for a high frame of gateposts about three quarters of a mile off. The main gate into the Double W.

  It took forever, but at last we pulled up at that gateframe and the Double W turnoff. From the crosspiece supported by the big gateposts—the size and height of telephone poles, they really were—hung the sign:

  WW RANCH

  WENDELL & MEREDICE WILLIAMSON

  The sign was creaking a little, the wind starting to stir in front of the storm.

  Neither the sign nor the wind I gave a whit about just then. What I had forgotten was that this turnoff into the Double W had a cattleguard built in there between the gateposts. A pit overlaid with a grill of pipes, which vehicles could cross but hoofed creatures such as cattle couldn’t. Hoofed creatures such as cattle and horses. To put Blanche and Fisheye through here, I would have to open the barbwire livestock gate beside the cattleguard.

  You know what I was remembering. “GODAMIGHTY, get AWAY from that!”—Stanley’s cry as I approached the wire gate at the cabin during our camptending trip. “You happen to be touching that wire and lightning hits that fence—” This coming rumblebelly of a storm made that June one look like a damp washcloth. Every time I glanced in its direction now, lightning winked back. And nowhere around this entrance to the Doubl
e W was there a stick of wood, not one sole single goddamn splinter, with which to knock the hoop off the gate stick and flip the wire gate safely aside.

  Holy H. Hell. Sitting here telling this, all the distance of years between that instant and now, I can feel again the prickling that came across the backs of my hands, the sweat of dismay on its way up through my skin there. Grant me three moments which could be erased from my life, and that Double W gate scene would be one.

  I wiped my hands against my pants. Blanche swished her tail, and Fisheye whinnied. They maybe were telling me what I already knew. Delay was my worst possible behavior, for that storm was growing nearer every second that I stood there and stewed. I wiped my hands again. And jumped at the gate as if in combat against it. One arm grappling around the gatepost, the other arm and hand desperately working the wire hoop up off the gatestick. Oh yes, sure, this gate was one of those snug obstinate bastards; I needed to mightily hug the stick and post together to gain enough slack for the hoop to loosen. Meanwhile everyplace my body was touching a strand of barbwire I could feel a kind of target line, ready to sizzle: as if I was trussed up in electrical wiring and somebody was about to throw the switch.

  I suppose in a fraction of what it takes to tell about it, I wrestled that gate open and slung it wide. Yet it did seem an immense passage of time.

  And I wasn’t on easy street yet. Blanche and Fisheye, I have to say, were taking all of this better than I was, but even so they were getting a little nervous about the storm’s change in the air and the loudening thunder. “Okay, here we go now, nothing to it, here we go,” I soothed the team and started them through the gate. I could have stood some soothing myself, for the scatter rake was ten feet wide and this gate was only about eleven. Catch a rake wheel behind a gatepost and you have yourself a first-class hung-up mess. In my case, I then would have the rake in contact with the barbwire fence, inviting lightning right up the seat of my pants, while I backed and maneuvered the rake wheel out of its bind. Never have I aimed anything more carefully than that wide scatter rake through that just-wide-enough Double W gateway.