When We Were Wolves

by Jon Billman

  “Good luck,” said the cowboy.

  The big turbine whined and struggled to take. Mayday smelled of garlic and Jet-A fuel. Mud-caked floor panels. Strain had seen cleaner bulldozer cabs. The windows were scarred and the insides covered with the hulls of sunflower seeds. Between the front seats stuck the battered, oily twenty-eight-inch bar of a Stihl 044 chain saw, stained red with slurry or blood. A couple of grasshoppers caromed off the insides of the windows, “What’s the chain saw for?”

  “To cut trees with,” Mayday said. “Why do you have it beside you?” “Sometimes you gotta cut your way down.” Good Lord, Strain thought.

  The rotors took and beat the stiff wind. Mayday pulled on the collective with his left hand. The ship rose five feet in the air. He twisted the cyclic between his legs as if it were the handle on an antique coffee grinder. Seams creaked.

  “What year is this thing?” asked Strain. Untrimmed, the ship spun 180 degrees on an axis of cold, dry air, rose, and nosed east, with the wind.

  “‘Seventy-six,” Mayday said. A brown grasshopper landed and stuck against his forearm. “Eighteen seventy-six. Custer wishes he would have had this son of a bitch at the river.”

  After a turbulent jump over the Shoshone and Bighorn ranges they flew in silence over the Powder River and the sage country of eastern Montana, dusted white with what little snow could cling to the prairie in the cold late-autumn wind. The bird flew over the Seventh Cavalry’s route to the Little Bighorn from Fort Abraham Lincoln in North Dakota.

  Mayday looked bored and hungover. He sipped from a plastic Mini Mart coffee mug and chewed sunflower seeds from a big bag stuffed into a slot on the instrument panel that once housed something electronic.

  Another fifty minutes of 110-mile-an-hour Montana between his legs, steady turbine whine, rotor thrum, and vibrations, and the Jet Ranger began descending toward a cluster of cottonwoods and willows along the Little Missouri River. Camp Crook.

  Strain expected to see convection columns coming off the complex of wildfires. To the west lay a chaste range of low mountains. Burned snags stuck through the skiff of snow like gray hairs on an old white dog. On the north end of the town were the rusted, corrugated remains of a sawmill. A dirt main street consisted of a tavern with a bug light above the painted letters BAR. A weathered gazebo leaned, nearly toppling over, in a weedy city park. There was a service station and two abandoned Victorian houses. From the air Strain could see at least two dozen dogs running the dirt streets. No smoke.

  The town had been founded as a cavalry camp. Brigadier General George Crook, who, unlike Custer, was famous for his restraint and rode a mule instead of a horse, spent the long summer of 1876 chasing hostiles around the prairie with little success. The Sioux set prairie fires that plagued the troopers on the days the elements of heat and drought didn’t do the job. The soldiers had to clear firebreaks at every camp. Crook’s outfit ran out of water several times, and out of food on one mission, which caused the men to resort to eating their horses. They didn’t kill many Indians, but the fishing was good. Crook was supposed to back up Custer at the Little Bighorn campaign, but was pushed southward at the upper reaches of Rosebud Creek and spent the battle trout fishing in the Bighorns. The Sioux torched half a million acres in an unsuccessful attempt to burn them out, but Crook’s supply wagons made it through. The afternoon Custer took his beating, General Crook caught seventy cutthroat.

  The most prominent building was the saltbox that housed the Sioux Ranger District headquarters. A tattered and faded American flag stretched toward the northeast like a guidon and served as a windsock. Mayday nosed the Ranger down in a slow, controlled auger. “Duck on your way out,” he said. “I wouldn’t want ya to get scalped.”

  Strain had always thought of South Dakota as a buffer state between Minnesota and the West: white-tailed deer, Indian reservations, and Republicans. The Sioux Ranger Station at Camp Crook was the Forest Service Region Two’s last outpost to the east. Dogs had the run of the few dirt streets and sagebrush trailer lots that made up the town. The dirt Main Street was sided with a few old and rundown frame buildings. Underneath the words HELLO FOLKS, OUR FIRE DANGER TODAY is, a plywood Smokey Bear pointed to where a giant plywood thermometer had been. No need for Smokey now.

  A bearded man in a ratty pickle suit limped out onto the makeshift helipad, a dog on his heels. His gray hair waved in the rotor blast like frosted cheatgrass as he shielded his eyes with his forearm. With his left hand he waved Strain to the building. Mayday gave the ranger a mock salute, pitched the ship to the west, and throttled back over Montana.

  Strain walked upright away from the ship. He had logged several thousand hours of flight time—riding shotgun. The bearded ranger yelled over the turbine whine and rotor slap, hunched over as they walked to the building. “Before you ask I’ll tell ya!” A few hearty late-November grasshoppers fastened to their pantlegs. The man’s breath smelled like herbicide. “After the Nam I became a hydrologist on the Trinity National Forest. Veteran’s preference. My family loved northern California and I did too. Rained like the jungle. I got mixed up in the details of a dirty timber sale and they busted me out here in the name of a promotion. I’m now head ranger of this hellhole. No more family except Festus.” He pointed to the Border collie-blue healer mix at his feet. “Name’s Horton Wynn and I bet you could use a drink with all this clusterfuck fire-in-winter business. I sure could. At ease, son.”

  The Sioux Ranger Station had been a schoolhouse built in the forties to strict utilitarian specs. Saltbox frame, shake shingles, peeling cream paint, government babyshit-brown trim. Routered into the shutters and the heavy oak door were the silhouettes of cookie-cutter evergreen trees, a wintertime project for the forest’s first ranger. Storm windows covered all the windows, their frames so rusty that they appeared not to have been taken down in years. A stone chimney stood along the south side.

  The interior was dimly lit. Dust floated in the wedges of sunlight at the windows. Yellowed posters of 1950s-era Smokey Bear and crumpled boxes lined the hallway. Newspapers covered Wynn’s desk, the floor, and every chair in the office. Behind him, smoked hard hats, Nomex web gear, and a framed photo of Ronald Reagan on horseback. Wynn opened a file drawer and pulled out a bottle of Lord Calvert. His hand shook as he poured the whiskey into Only You! coffee mugs. “How about a little dose of the Lord this afternoon, Strain?”

  “It’s eleven o’clock in the morning, Mr. Wynn.”

  “Never too early for religion. Name’s Horton. You’re on Camp Crook time now. The absence of the Burger King is pure demographics. Don’t drink the water here; we’re battling a bombproof coliform bacteria. Might as well be Mexico. Would you like some coffee in yours?” Strain shook his head. “Don’t worry, there’s more for this afternoon.”

  Strain took a sip. “Boise tells me your forest’s on fire.”

  “Not my forest—belongs to Washington, D.C. And yeah, it’s on fire because computers in Boise say it’s on fire, but the flames went out two years ago. Now I listen to the AM, wave to ranchers, and scratch my tired old ass. Once a month I make the drive into Ekalaka or Buffalo for groceries. See, there are certain assignments that folks are afraid to even mention, afraid their name might get noted with the locale and next they know they’re calling Atlas Van Lines to see if they go to Hell. The brass doubts there are worse places than this they could send me. This is the Forest Service equivalent of the Foreign Legion. I don’t want any more promotions.” He took a long sip. “I gassed-up a truck to take up there in the morning. We’ll get a look at this fire then. You want to phone in your arrival time to Boise?”

  “Suppose I should. So there isn’t a fire at all?”

  “Nope.”

  “I could choose to get angry,” Strain said. “Instead I’ll choose to fish. Hell, I’m on the clock.”

  Outside, a pair of black Percheron draft horses grazed, picketed in a pasture of browning hound’s-tongue, shooing the last of the fall’s bottle flies with their
tails.

  “Bottle flies in November,” Strain said. “What do you make of grasshoppers and bottle flies in November?”

  “What do you make of being humped to a fire that isn’t a fire? Look.” Horton paused and lit his cherrywood pipe with a series of sucks and blows. Captain Black pipe smoke filled the room. “That NIFC Data General computer is ahead of the times. Sometime, soon enough, fire season is really gonna last all year long. The aquifer’ll be long dry, so we’ll desalinate ocean water, irrigate, and grow oranges. Best not take the change of seasons for granted. Anyway, it’s cold enough for me. My blood don’t have the circulation it used to.”

  They played cards, Omaha and stud, in front of a bare electric heater. Strain hadn’t seen a heater like this one in years, since he’d last visited his grandmother who lived on a farm in Missouri. He stared at the glowing filaments as he remembered staring at a blue bug light at someone’s drunken lawn wedding. “Why not the wood-stove?”

  “Gotta cut wood,” Horton said, without looking up from the hand he studied.

  The shadows in the room slowly changed corners, and an occasional grasshopper sprang down the hallway. Outside, two curs ran reconnaissance circles around an old turquoise Apache pickup truck.

  “In 1966 or ’67 Uncle Sam sent Forest Service fire pros to the Nam to supervise firestorm experiments. Broadcast fire. Burn ’em out over there, put ’em out back here.” He relit his pipe and blew a convection column of sweet smoke. “Your reputation precedes you, son. I understand you’re quite a fisherman. See, Strain, you’re like me. One of those guys who never quite grew up. You began in the woods summertimes as a college kid and never wanted to leave. I used to love trees. Now I can’t remember what a live tree looks like. Guys like you, Strain, are out there, living down a haunt that has very little to do with putting out trees on fire.”

  Strain shuffled the deck of Bicycle cards. “Nothing to do with it, in fact.”

  Horton dealt. “Looks like you’ll be here for Thanksgiving.” “I’ll pick up a bottle of Wild Turkey at the tavern.” “A soldier needs his ration of spirits, now.”

  “That and whatever else you like. I’m billing everything to this fire. Think I’ll call up Cabela’s and order some new fly line.”

  “Ah”—Horton grinned like a raccoon—“but you’re going out with such style.” Then, as if to say “I fold,” he said, “Dinnertime.” He reached in a desk drawer and pulled out two brown plastic bags the size of full IVs. He tossed one to Strain, which landed thickly on his throwaway hand. An MRE: Meal Ready to Eat. Desert Storm surplus rations. “I live on these things.” Horton took a Swiss Army knife from his pocket and sliced the top from his bag, then handed the knife to Strain. “I’ve ordered the house special, SPAGHETTI WITH MEAT SAUCE. What’s yours?”

  “Says OMELET WITH HAM.” Strain searched through his meal: cocoa beverage powder, applesauce, oatmeal cookie bar, instant coffee, waterproof matches, chewing gum, toilet paper. All packaged to last past Armageddon. At the bottom of the bag he found the tiny bottle of Tabasco sauce.

  Horton looked up with just his eyes, still chewing. “This stuff is a far cry better than what we had in the Nam. Could be they’re riding you out and leaving you hanging. Just like Tom Horn. When the Association has no more need for your services, you’re on your own. Watch the trees for snipers.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  Horton refilled their coffee cups. Strain fell asleep on an army cot with the taste of whiskey and ten-year-old eggs in his mouth, the space heater clicking like a cheap alarm clock.

  Strain awoke with a hangover at 0900. “I’ve got another omelet for breakfast,” Horton said. He was fumbling with a Forest Service rec. map, slurping his whiskey coffee. “Here’s your fire. It’s easy to find. Just look for the black trees.” Strain shaved and dressed in his Nomex fireline clothes: yellow long-sleeved shirt, green pants, logging boots. Horton had boiled water and handed him a cup and a packet of MRE instant coffee.

  Horton dropped the tailgate, clicked his tongue, and Festus jumped in. Town dogs ran over to sniff him as he bent over to lock the front hubs. They crossed a cattle guard that separated private prairie from the Forest Service. Dirty snowdrifts capped the north sides of the rolling hills. The blackened pine covered the small mountains like so much Smokey Bear propaganda. He came to the fork. The road became steep and rutted in mud and snow. He levered the transfer case into four-low. In Strains rearview mirror, just wind and grasshoppers.

  “Why didn’t they salvage-log this?” Strain asked. “There was a lot of good timber left.”

  “Just not cost effective. The mill in Crook closed years ago. Here’s your fire.” They passed a deserted campground. The wind kicked up ash and snow, salt and pepper, so that he kept the windows rolled up and had to use the windshield washer periodically. Grasshoppers hugged the wiper blades for the duration of the arcing. Picnic tables were charred and splintered. A blackened latrine. I like it here, Strain thought. Now browning and dormant, the Indian grasses had sprung up, fertilized by the rich ash. Mule deer grazed on the bluestem, poa, beargrass, and snowberry. “You’re just two years too late,” Horton said.

  This is the way it ought to be, Strain wrote on the situation report.

  They kept driving westward into Montana, the small prairie town of Ekalaka you could drive all the way to on the two-track, to lay in the Thanksgiving supplies. “What do you think of rib-eye for Thanksgiving?” Strain asked. “Holidays stopped meaning much to me just before my second divorce. I’m not one for farm turkey when I can have a good steak.”

  “You bet. Let’s get a box of stuffing though. I love my Thanksgiving stuffing. And a pie. We’ll get a frozen pum’kin pie.”

  They bought all the amenities they could find in the Ekalaka IGA, which weren’t many, but they did get the Wild Turkey and the range-fed rib-eyes. “Cash or charge?” asked the lady in horn-rim glasses at the grocery.

  “Government voucher,” Strain said. The lady looked up over her glasses when she saw who the voucher belonged to. You guys look like bait fishermen, she was thinking, where did you steal this from?

  “Hello, Horton,” a man in a bloody apron said. The counter lady seemed relieved. Horton greeted the butcher shortly and they stepped onto Main Street to the jingle of the doorbells.

  At the truck Horton squinted toward him. “Now, I’m cynical, Strain, read too many of these espionage novels, but maybe they want you out for good.”

  “That’s real possible,” Strain said and climbed in. They drove into a stiff headwind. Pronghorn and cattle. “Unless a man’s got oil wells mixed in with his cattle, he’d need a ranch the size of Delaware to scratch out a living on these scablands,” Horton said. The soil had been beaten by a hundred and twenty years of overgrazing and drought. “Rain never followed the plow to Harding County. It’s cursed. Rains down in the Black Hills. Even up to the North Dakota prairie. Won’t rain here because we’re cursed. And they send me, a hydrologist, out here on the taxpayer’s dollar. When I kick the bucket, throw me in the river.” The next twenty miles were silent save for the wind and tires on asphalt.

  Horton spoke as they dropped out of the burn and neared the cottonwoods that signaled the river that saved Crook’s cavalry from dehydration a hundred and twenty years ago. “Maybe this is some sort of suicide mission. They’re trying by wrecking your home life. Make you choose. Fight fire and make your wife crazy, or love your wife. I made the wrong goddamned choice. At least the world will freeze over before the realtors get out here.” They were back in Camp Crook. The sky hung heavy with rain or snow, give or take a degree or two. “The thing about General Crook. After the Indian Wars on the Northern Plains, he retired to Arizona to chase Geronimo around the desert. Goddamn government sun-bird.”

  “I’m gonna throw some bugs at some fish before the drinking begins. What’s in the river?”

  “Carp, catfish mostly. Some perch and maybe a sauger or two. Ain’t trouty.”

  “Smallmouth m
ake it this far up?”

  “Don’t believe. Want to borrow a baitcaster?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Remember, Strain, whichever way you’re headed is north, east is to your right.”

  Dark came early now. Dusk had begun to settle in. Strain didn’t wear a watch, another point of contention between him and his supervisors, so he didn’t know, didn’t care, what time it was. Maybe 1700. Like Horton said, Camp Crook time. Time to fish.

  The Little Missouri ran muddy and shoaled from the summer of drought and fire. Strain needed the hike. He reached the closest bank, then walked upstream to find a hole to start with. He walked in ankle-deep water in his fire boots, to a sandbar, and began rigging up. Though grasshoppers still plagued the landscape, a bullet-head grasshopper pattern hadn’t yielded anything. Hoping for a sauger, maybe a perch, he chose a number ten renegade his father had sent him. His father spent his long retirement days tying bugs, the lion’s share of which he sent to his son in Wyoming. Strain clicked-in his floating-line spool, looped a twelve-foot 4x leader to the line, tied the renegade on with an improved clinch knot, and painted the fly with floatant. The renegade didn’t resemble anything in particular, but fish saw something in it. Strain thought of it as the bastard calf of the fly world, and if forced to have only one fly in his cache, he’d think long and hard about making it the renegade. He made several false casts, stripped line from the spool, and let the fly drop in the current and drift over the dark pools. He fished the renegade on top drying it with false casts, then let the bug soak up river water and slowly sink.