by Laura Bell
It feels like a betrayal, heading into the mountains with these strangers, and I’m afraid I can’t do what it takes to walk among the living and leave her behind.
My place this season is bringing up the end of the pack string, riding a long-legged bay gelding named Waffle and leading Maggie, Irene, Biscuit and Trooper. I pick up dropped gloves and hats speared by low-hanging branches. I tighten loose cinches and point out king’s crown, scarlet penstemon, lacy wild carrot and the tracks of grizzly bears. But mostly, in the rear of the string, it’s quiet and private, and I’m left to my own thoughts.
At the Campbell Creek camp we wake to fog. I’d dreamt that a hand was laid on my shoulder, a voice saying that everything would be okay. I try to remember more when I wake, but it’s gone and only the feeling of being touched by peace remains. By the time the horses are packed and tied into strings, the fog has burned off and we ride out into the sunlight.
When I look back at the camp we’re leaving, I see only the shadows of where we’ve been and what we’ve done. The sod we dug up in heavy clumps for the fire pit has been pieced back together in the hole and covered with two buckets of water dipped from the stream, so once again alpine fescue and wild yarrow bloom there. The firewood has been stashed under low, drooping branches of evergreens. Horse droppings have been kicked and scattered to decompose. On the hard ground where we slept curled under canvas, there’s only the faintest impression of occupancy, with stems of grass already rising back.
Marsh marigold, prairie smoke, miner’s lettuce, wild strawberries. At the campfire I dish up hash browns and grilled pork chops with mustard and thyme. I pour fresh coffee for guests balanced on logs with plates in their laps. I nod, listening to stories of the jobs they’re retiring from, the empires they’ve created. I become the daughter they haven’t spoken to, the wife who no longer seems much interested. I listen and nod and, invisible, become the mirror they look into to judge their lives.
I have lost someone I love and am full of regret. Pouring coffee seems a small penance to win my way back to solid ground.
It’s almost dusk as the pack string falls downslope into the Dead Horse Meadows camp, the horses stumbling their loads side to side. From the guests, a hopeful murmur rises when they realize their first long ride’s almost over. Press circles the lead horses and calls out, “Dinner, one hour!” and, whistling, begins to loosen ropes and unload packhorses.
Our guests, two couples from Georgia, dismount on rubbery legs, pull their tents and duffels from the piles and pack them off into the meadow to locate the perfect spot to pitch them. I begin setting the kitchen up for dinner and out of the corner of my eye see David out in the meadow on hands and knees, feeling the ground for lumps. Flossie stands above him with arms spread wide, pivoting around to locate the best view.
Tents are placed to catch the morning sun on the sheer rock face or to capture the sound of running water. Each will house the dreams of its inhabitants, what’s missing from their lives, what they hope for, and inside is the peace that descends each night when they lay themselves down, sore and worn from a world that blisters their hands, pulls their muscles, roughs their skin and reminds them they’re living among bears that could eat them. For some reason, this gives comfort to us all.
Later, under cover of the kitchen fly, I fall asleep in the firelight and wake in the night to hear the deep howling of wolves on the far ridges, somber, mournful, nothing like the brash young sounds of coyotes. I lift my head, listening until there’s nothing but silence.
Three trips into our summer, and two days from our trailhead at the Double Cabins on the East Fork, we take a day ride up through stringer meadows toward Mount Kent. Christi, our wrangler on this trip, rides with us. And Boo and Bill, a jolly couple from Minnesota I’ve come to enjoy. Last night we sang a little and jitterbugged around the fire.
Also with us is Camille, a small, lovely Georgian in her seventies who’d grown up riding hunter jumpers. She comes out of her tent every morning looking completely unruffled, as though she’d slept on the ground every night of her life. On our first day out of the trailhead, she’d fallen to the back of the string and had ridden alongside me through the open meadows. When she asked about my life, I told her that my stepdaughter had been killed in a car accident only eight weeks before. “Oh,” she said, “I’m so sorry. It must be a comfort, though, to have so much life around you,” and she raised a gloved hand to the trees.
For nearly two hours out of camp we follow faint game trails, gaining elevation, until we reach a lower summit ridge of Mount Kent. From here, the climb becomes steep and rocky. We stop, and the others walk on in hopes of seeing elk in the snowfields on the other side. Camille and I stay behind with the horses.
We sit on the rocks with our lunches and binoculars, tiny yellow stonecrop and alpine phlox at our feet, the world spread out before us. At this altitude the air’s so thin it seems to quiver. We can see the high ridges along the boundary of the reservation, Castle Mountain, Steamboat Mountain and, to the south, the Wind River Range covered in snow.
From beneath her draped sun hat, Camille looks at me and says, “You never get over it.” I lean forward to hear her and see that there are tears in her eyes, see this even though the wind is blowing and the sun is strong and the human face seems not part of the view.
“I lost my first-born child when he was nine months old,” she says. “That was forty years ago. Time changes things, but you never get over it.”
In early August, we camp for two nights at Swain’s Riffle on the Upper Yellowstone River. The morning is wet, the willows dripping with the mists of low hanging clouds. There are only three guests this trip, Bob and Judy, a couple from Oklahoma, and Anna, their newly arrived exchange student from Germany. A year older than Jenny, she’s wide-eyed and game, never once complaining about the long hours in the saddle. She has Jenny’s olive skin and her sweet, even temperament. I find myself watching her, lingering over her movements.
Grizzly tracks crisscross this valley. We camp among trees with bark shredded by their claws and picnic at the edge of willow bottoms where piles of scat stand like monuments, markers that speak more of ownership than any line on a map. A closer look reveals pieces of moths, chokecherry pits, clumps of hair, and sometimes shards of bone, depending on place, season, and what’s available for them to eat.
In the soft earth, we spot grizzly tracks, the first Anna has seen, and Press gets down from his horse to show her, tracing a finger in the air above them and explaining how they differ from those of a black bear. What they have in common are the parts: pad, toes, claws. But the grizzly pad has a flatter outline across the top, its little toe nearly even with the next, while the black bear’s is more rounded, with its little toe dropped below. Unmistakable are the marks left by the claw tips, sprung around the toes like a half halo in the earth. A grizzly’s claws are half again the length of a black bear’s. The hind prints of both look unsettlingly like a human foot.
Our trail down to the lower Yellowstone is jackstrawed with dead timber, burned in the Mink Creek fire of 1988. We snake the horses around the splintered ends of downed trees and lunge them over top of the low ones. In between and under these silvered trunks are acres of magenta fireweed dotted with tender green aspen seedlings and clumps of feathery alpine fescue. What had once been a dark, thick monoculture of lodgepole pine is now a sunlit tangle of decaying timbers and new growth.
We are following Yellowstone’s South Boundary Trail up Lynx Creek toward Mariposa Lake when we emerge from the trees to see a grizzly sow feeding along the creek with her two cubs. She rises up from them, blindly alarmed, and paws the air that carries our scent. She woofs at her cubs, and they draw up close under her shadow. Risen up, she stands ready to protect them. Risen up, she is tender and fierce like love that can tear out your heart or heal it.
In early September, the three-lobed leaves of skunkbush along Shell Creek are turning to cranberry and the willows to gold. With a couple of days�
�� break from the mountains, I drive up to Shell to meet Amy at her dad’s house. She sits across the floor from me, a young woman of twenty, surrounded by piles of clothes. Her blond hair has grown stringy and needs to be cut, but she has some color back in her cheeks and a softness in her voice. We’re in the long attic bedroom with its sloping eaves that she used to share with Jenny. We pull clothes from the drawers and closet and sort them piece by piece into piles for each of us, for her close friends, the thrift store and the Shell dump. We both admit that we’d been dreading this task but find it oddly soothing to be doing something physical about her loss.
We begin as though we’re digging a grave, and each choice is hard. We linger over junior-high sweaters and motley T-shirts. When Amy holds up a lime-green polyester shirt with huge lapels, we finally crack up. “Oh my god, this is just awful. What was she thinking?” This one’s tossed into the thrift store pile, followed by another and another. We weep for our loss and laugh because we don’t know what else to do, and the piles grow more quickly.
When we finish in the late afternoon, my pickup’s filled with black garbage sacks of clothes for the thrift store, a half-dozen years’ worth of cross-country skis with their little boots, red and yellow and blue. We saved treasures for ourselves, for her dad, for her friends, and we’re tired but lightened.
I wonder what it is that we clear a space for. Of what possible use is this empty space created by loss?
It’s mid-September, our last trip of the season, and we’re camped in a thin scattering of trees at the edge of Basin Creek Meadows, a few miles below Heart Lake. The grasses along the creek are tall and turning to browns and yellows, bending deeply over the pools at each meander of the stream. At night we hear the howls of wolves. Early mornings we’re wrapped in an icy blanket of fog, sunk in silence that hangs low across the basin. When the sun burns through and the skies clear, great shining loops of spiderwebs are left hanging from the tree branches and hot pools across the basin send up drifts of steam.
We have packed in ten women from a Jackson Hole conservation group, and the conversation leans toward the racy and lighthearted. They’re vibrant women, artists and hikers, and I find myself drawn to them. Warned of the chance of early snow, they’ve come prepared with layers of fleece, pack boots and flasks for their ritual before-dinner happy hour. Among us all there is an air of celebration.
One evening just as we’re finishing dinner and circled close around the fire, a young boar grizzly appears in the meadow at the edge of camp, pawing in the tall grasses and digging up small roots. Speaking in whispers, we tiptoe for cans of pepper spray and binoculars and watch him in the last silvery light. He doesn’t look up. We watch as though there’s some invisible barrier between us, but any one of us imagines a scene in which he lifts his head and walks toward camp.
As the minutes pass, we grow louder, bolder, and still he doesn’t look up. Then it’s time to unsaddle horses and turn them free for the night, which we do, attaching bells around the necks of half of them. They go to their knees and roll on their backs in the tall grass, and even then the bear does not look up. The horses wander off, a clanging chorus in the dusk, and finally, when it’s almost too dark to see, the bear simply turns and ambles away, crossing the creek at a wide, shallow crossing, and heads east across the meadow.
I finish the dishes by headlamp and pull the food panniers up their ropes onto the bear pole. My tent’s set off by itself near where we last saw the bear, but when I crawl into my sleeping bag, I’m too tired to care.
From my duffel, I pull out pages that Jenny had written only weeks before her accident. The topic the students in her English class had been given was their own imagined deaths, and they were asked to describe how they’d be missed by loved ones and what their hopes had been for their lives. I imagine that the assignment was meant to highlight the importance of each young life, but the irony is hard to take.
Her nine pages are handwritten, with lines crossed out and words inserted with arrows. This clear window into her heart is unsettling, not least because the death she imagined comes in a car accident. She’s driving down Shell Canyon and headed home in the night when a rockslide sends her careening off a cliff. That weightless feeling you get on a roller coaster only 1,000 times more intense comes over my entire body and fear seemed to engulf me. It made me want to scream and laugh at the same time. Janis was still singing “Me and Bobby McGee” on the radio as I fall to my death. I could hear my dad downstairs making a drink. I wanted to go tell him that I was home but I knew I wouldn’t be here long. I couldn’t stand to think of what will happen to him. He will just give up. He will no longer be able to get close to people for fear of losing them. I see him taking his horse and riding away and never being seen again.
She says she’ll miss her sister the most and that it would be hardest for Amy because she can’t run away from it and will have to face her death every day of her life. Jenny then writes about her friend Jeremy and how she’ll miss their early-morning phone conversations about how to take over the world.
Of her desire to finish college, she writes, I planned on becoming a world traveler so I could be more certain of my decisions. I wanted to be a photographer so I could remember every moment of it and share my experience and wisdom. She writes, I see a picture of my relatives and me and realize I have a great relationship with lots of people.
She offers a small piece of advice: Don’t take anything for granted. Everything in your life is there for a reason and if you ignore it, you will miss out on a lot.
My name isn’t anywhere in the piece, not as someone she felt responsible for or depended on. Months after the accident, when I read these pages to a friend, she said, “But Laura, I hear you in every word.”
By the twentieth of September, the nights are long, and there isn’t enough light to find the horses until nearly seven in the morning. I shut off my alarm and pull my jeans and fleece from the bottom of my sleeping bag where they’ve stayed warm through the night. There’s a hard frost on the ground and the smell of snow in the air. I can see a flashlight moving through the dark toward the highline where the two wrangle horses are tied.
By seven thirty, the coffee has come to a boil, the Dutch oven full of bacon is beginning to sizzle, and the horses have been brought in, bells clanging, for morning grain. By eight, Press and his help have caught and saddled most of the horses, and I’m yelling, “Breakfast! Breakfast!” to ladies pulling on their boots or still deep in their sleeping bags. It’s move day, our last of the season, and it feels as if we’ll be leaving on the front side of a storm.
By nine, the kitchen fly gets dropped to the ground and duffel bags are piled up at the edge of camp, where we’ll pack the horses. Tents are dropped and rolled, still frosty and stiff, into canvas bags. “Last call for coffee!” And what’s left is poured into the fire pit. “Last call for the latrine!” And I head to the woods with a shovel to fill in the hole and bring back the roll of toilet paper. We scatter firewood, kick horse piles apart and comb the ground for bits of foil or debris.
Within hours, the camp that had been raised and cultivated into our home is simply gone, measured into even loads on either side of the packhorses. Next to each load, I throw a lash cinch and a canvas mantie and, for the hard-sided ones, an extra Decker pad. The ladies are done packing their duffels now and are holding horses, jerking the off-side lash ropes tight while Press whistles through the work. Diamonds are tied, the pack strings get half-hitched together, and then we’re moving out from our last camp as snowflakes begin to fall from the sky.
The campfire we’re leaving will be cold for the winter, blanketed under snow and visited by bears, wolves, raccoons and elk passing through, headed to lower winter ranges. I imagine the life that closes in neatly behind us, the tracks crossing the open meadows telling a story that’s not ours to hear. It seems to me a sort of spirit world, outside of my knowing, and I want to imagine Jenny here, too, passing in long, joyful strides on her way thro
ugh, moving in silence with her wise eyes like the bear or cackling and laughing like the women lined out in front of me.
We jump the horses over a boggy creek crossing on the northwest edge of the meadow, and I turn in my saddle to check the packs of my string. Cross bucks upright, ropes tight, nothing dangling. I look back at the trees where we camped and see that the snow’s already sifting the greens and browns and yellows into its own winter shades. Across the meadow to the east, where just the day before we’d sunbathed on warm rock slabs by the hot springs, white steam rises in the cold air and the silvered trunks of burned trees catch the snow.
HEART MOUNTAIN
Coming out of the mountains in the fall after Jenny’s death, grief lands back in my lap. When the reason to move every day is gone, I can’t find another. When I think the ash of every sorrow has burned cold, I’m mistaken. So when my sister comes and bundles me north to Cody, I let her take me, and when my family proposes a hike to the top of Heart Mountain, I lace up my boots.
From the bottom gates, we hike several hours on the faint two-track road with a steady and heart-pounding grade toward the mountain’s steepest slopes. It is mid-October, and panicles of Indian ricegrass are sprung open like fireworks. Tall clumps of Great Basin wildrye rustle in the breeze. We climb through sagebrush benches and limber pine to find ourselves in groves of silver-barked aspen, their golden leaves driven to ground in patches of early snow. In the last hour’s steep pitches, we move nearly hand over fist through snow and rock and small trees that slant from the wind.
