A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

by Norman Maclean

  Bill was built to fit his hands. He was big all over. Primarily he was a horseman, and he needed an extra large horse. He was not the slender cowboy of the movies and the plains. He was a horseman of the mountains. He could swing an ax or pull a saw, run a transit and build trail, walk all day if he had to, put on climbing spurs and string number nine telephone wire, and he wasn’t a bad cook. In the mountains you work to live, and in the mountains you don’t care much whether your horse can run fast. Where’s he going to run? Bill’s horse was big and long-striding, and could walk all day over mountain trails at five miles an hour. He was a mountain horse carrying a mountain man. Bill called him Big Moose. He was brown and walked with his head thrown back as if he wore horns.

  Every profession has a pinnacle to its art. In the hospital it is the brain or heart surgeon, and in the sawmill it is the sawyer who with squinting eyes makes the first major cut that turns a log into boards. In the early Forest Service, our major artist was the packer, as it usually has been in worlds where there are no roads. Packing is an art as old as the first time man moved and had an animal to help him carry his belongings. As such, it came ultimately from Asia and from there across Northern Africa and Spain and then up from Mexico and to us probably from Indian squaws. You can’t even talk to a packer unless you know what a cinch (cincha) is, a latigo, and a manty (manta). With the coming of roads, this ancient art has become almost a lost art, but in the early part of this century there were still few roads across the mountains and none across the “Bitterroot Wall.” From the mouth of Blodgett Canyon, near Hamilton, Montana, to our ranger station at Elk Summit in Idaho nothing moved except on foot. When there was a big fire crew to be supplied, there could be as many as half a hundred mules and short-backed horses heaving and grunting up the narrow switchbacks and dropping extra large amounts of manure at the sharp turns. The ropes tying the animals together would jerk taut and stretch their connected necks into a straight line until they looked like dark gigantic swans circling and finally disappearing into a higher medium.

  Bill was our head packer, and the Forest Service never had a better one. But right now he was having a hard time figuring out which of his three remaining cards he should play. He would like to have taken off his black Stetson and scratched his head, but the first thing he did when he dressed in the morning was to put on his black hat, and it was the last thing he took off when he went to bed. In between he did not like to remove it. Before he got around to pushing it back on his head and playing a card, I found myself thinking of some of the trips I had taken with him across the Bitterroot Divide.

  As head packer, Bill rode in front of the string, a study in angles. With black Stetson hat at a slant, he rode with his head turned almost backward from his body so he could watch to see if any of the packs were working loose. Later in life I was to see Egyptian bas-reliefs where the heads of men are looking one way and their bodies are going another, and so it is with good packers. After all, packing is the art of balancing packs and then seeing that they ride evenly—otherwise the animals will have saddle sores in a day or two and be out of business for all or most of the summer.

  Up there in front with Bill, you could see just about anything happen. A horse might slip or get kicked out of the string and roll frightened downhill until he got tangled around a tree trunk. You might even have to shoot him, collect the saddle, and forget the rest of what was scattered over the landscape. But mostly what you were watching for took Bill’s trained eye to see—a saddle that had slipped back so far the animal couldn’t breathe, or a saddle that had slipped sideways. In an outfit that large, there are always a few “shad bellies” that no cinch can hang on to and quite a few “bloaters” that blow up in the morning when the cinch touches them and then slowly deflate. Who knows what? The trouble may have started back in the warehouse where the load cargoer couldn’t tell weight or didn’t give a damn and now an animal was trying to keep steady across the Bitterroot Divide with lopsided packs. Or maybe the packs balanced, but some assistant packer had tied one higher than the other. Or had tied a sloppy diamond hitch and everything slipped. The Bitterroot Divide, with its many switchbacks, granite boulders, and bog holes, brought out every weakness in a packer, his equipment, and his animals. To take a pack string of nearly half a hundred across the Bitterroot Divide was to perform a masterpiece in that now almost lost art, and in 1919 I rode with Bill Bell and saw it done.

  The divide was just as beautiful as the way up. In August it was blue with June lupine. Froth dropped off the jaws of the horses and mules, and, snorting through enlarged red nostrils, the animals shook their saddles, trying without hands to rearrange their loads. Not far to the south was El Capitan, always in snow and always living up to its name. Ahead and to the west was our ranger station—and the mountains of Idaho, poems of geology stretching beyond any boundaries and seemingly even beyond the world.

  Six miles or so west of the divide is a lake, roughly two-thirds of the way between Hamilton and Elk Summit, that is the only place where there is water and enough grass to hold a big bunch of horses overnight. K. D. Swan, the fine photographer of the early Forest Service, should have been there to record the design of the divide—ascending in triangles to the sky and descending in ovals and circles to an oval meadow and an oval lake with a moose knee-deep beside lily pads. It was triangles going up and ovals coming down, and on the divide it was springtime in August.

  The unpacking was just as beautiful—one wet satin back after another without saddle or saddle sore, and not a spot of white wet flesh where hair and hide had rubbed off. Perhaps one has to know something about keeping packs balanced on the backs of animals to think this beautiful, or to notice it at all, but to all those who work come moments of beauty unseen by the rest of the world.

  So, to a horseman who has to start looking for horses before daybreak, nothing is so beautiful in darkness as the sound of a bell mare.

  While I was sitting there thinking of how Bill was a major artist and how even the knots he tied were artistic, he had somehow got ahead of me in the cribbage game, at which he was a chump. At least, I was a lot better than he was at cribbage, once the favorite indoor pastime of the woods. We even played it outdoors, and often on the trail one of us would carry a deck of cards and a cribbage board in his pack sack, and in the middle of the morning and afternoon we would straddle a log and have a game.

  Bill really wasn’t ahead, but I was going to lose unless he played like a Chinaman. We both were in striking distance of 121, which is the end of the game in cribbage, and I had the advantage of counting first. I needed only eight points, which normally I should have been able to make with a decent hand plus the “pegging.” But I had a lousy hand, just a pair of fours, and a pair is worth only two points, so I would have to peg six to make 121, and that’s a lot. In case you don’t know cribbage, about all Bill had to do to stop me from pegging six was not to pair anything I put down. I started the pegging by playing one of my fours, and, so help me, he had a four in his hand and he snapped it down. “I’ll take two for a pair of fours,” he said. As I told you, all I had in my hand was a pair of fours. I put down the third four, and in cribbage three of a kind counts six, so I had 121 and the ball game, and a start toward discovering that somehow artists aren’t sharp at cards.

  Actually, I had heard rumors in Hamilton, which was Bill’s headquarters in the Bitterroot Valley, that the local smalltown gamblers could hardly wait for Bill to get his monthly check. Among the local housemen and shills he was supposedly noted for playing poker as if he breathed through gills. Knowing how Bill hated to lose, I was somewhat surprised that he hadn’t also been acquitted of shooting a shill.

  Knowing Bill, I also knew that he was sore at me, at least for the moment, so I thought, “Let’s see if a change of games won’t change the luck.” Of course, three can play a lot more card games than two. As the cook was finishing dishes, I asked him, “Why don’t you cut in on a nickel-and-dime game? Poker? Pinochle? You and Bill
name it.”

  I’ll never forget that cook; in fact, he was to become one of my longest memories. Even out in the woods, he wore low canvas shoes. He turned his shoes toward me and said, “I never play cards against the men I work with.” This wasn’t the first time the cook had made this stately speech to me, so I started disliking him all over again. His name may have been Hawkins, but I really think it was Hawks and in memory I made it into Hawkins because in some book there was a character I didn’t like by the name of Hawkins.

  Bill and I played one more game of cribbage trying to get over being sore, but we weren’t successful. I picked up the cards and put them in their case and the case on the only shelf in the cabin. Before I reached the door the cook had picked them up and was sitting at the table shuffling. He dealt out four hands. Then he went around the first three hands again, quickly giving each hand one or two cards as if each hand had asked to draw. He paused, however, before giving himself cards. Then with one motion he picked them all up. After shuffling, he dealt out five hands, sometimes four, never three, lest I get the idea that he would play with Bill and me. I stood there watching him shuffling and dealing. It was worth watching. After about five minutes, he picked up all the cards with one swoop, stuck them in the case and the case on the shelf and started for bed. I closed the door and started for the tent where the crew slept. I liked him less than ever.

  There were only four of us in the “regular crew,” plus the lookouts who were stationed on the high peaks, plus the ranger and the cook. The regular crew was hired by the month (sixty dollars per) for the summer—the ranger was the only one in the district who was hired all year. Earlier in the season, there had been a big fire in the district and an emergency crew of over a hundred men had been hired on the streets of Butte and Spokane, but the fire had been put out and the emergency crew sent back to town. Our small regular crew now was building trail about three miles from the station—grade A trail, too, with about a twenty-foot right-of-way and no more than a six-percent grade. A twenty-foot swath through the wilderness with no trees or brush left standing and, instead of going over an outcropping of rocks with a short steep pitch in the trail, we blasted through the rocks to keep the trail from gaining more than six feet of altitude every hundred feet. Tons of dynamite and we could have taken a hay wagon down our mountain boulevard. Of course, all we needed were trails wide enough to get pack horses through without the packs getting caught between trees, and in a few years the Forest Service revised the specifications and gave orders for the back country to be opened with as many trails as possible. Still, it is proper when young to strive for gigantic perfection that doesn’t make sense, and today somewhere in the jungles of Idaho is a mile or two of overgrown boulevard leading nowhere, not even to a deserted Mayan temple.

  Of the regular crew of four, two were old men and two were young punks. There was Mr. McBride and his redheaded son. Mr. McBride was a jack-of-all-trades who had worked at different ranches in the Bitterroot Valley and his son was trying to be like his father. Mr. Smith was the old man of the crew and was always worried about his bowels. He was addressed as “Mr. Smith.” He was dignified and took small, aged steps on large legs that made his feet look tiny. He had been a miner and he naturally was our powder man, and a good one. Since there were four of us and Mr. McBride had a son, Mr. Smith looked upon me as his. That’s how I was elected to the dynamite, which made me sick. Before I had started the job I had heard stories that if you touch dynamite and then your face you will get a headache. Maybe I was carried away by the story, because as long as I worked on the powder I always had headaches. Maybe, though, at seventeen I wasn’t quite big enough to swing a double jackhammer all day.

  When you are blasting, naturally you first make a hole in the rock for your powder. Nowadays it is done with a pneumatic drill; then it was done by hand and jackhammer. If you worked in a team of two it was called “double jacking.” One man held the drill, and every time the other man hit the head of it with the jackhammer the man holding the drill would turn it slightly until the bit completed a circle. This was the outline for the hole, and the same thing went on until the hole was dug, stopping only when the man holding the drill said, “Mud.” Then the hammer man gratefully rested while the man holding the drill took a very small dipper and cleaned out the hole. Otherwise, the man with the hammer kept swinging, and, if by chance just once he missed the small head of the drill and the hammer glanced off he would mutilate the hand or arm of the man holding the drill. Sometimes it seemed that Mr. Smith had forgotten how to say “Mud,” and I would look down and see the heads of two or three drills, on each of which Mr. Smith had the same hand, the skin of which was already freckled by age. I no longer think that rubbing my face gave me the headaches.

  This morning the headache started earlier than usual. I can’t give you any very clear reason why I disliked the cook so much. I was honest enough with myself to say that I might be jealous of him. Although I was only seventeen, this was my third summer in the Forest Service, two of them working for Bill, and he had started to show me how to pack, and in return I would do him favors like coming back to camp in the morning to pack out lunch to the crew. I couldn’t figure how this cook had moved into first place. Everything he said or did was just perfect, as far as Bill was concerned. Besides, I didn’t like his looks—he looked like a bluejay, cocky, with his head on a slant and a tuft of hair on top of it. A bluejay with low canvas shoes. Mostly, though, I didn’t need reasons to dislike him. When you get older, you become rational more or less, but when you are young you know. I knew this cook was a forty-cent piece.

  It wasn’t helping my headache either to think of the ranger being sore at me. I said to myself, “Take it easy, and keep your big mouth shut. It’s nothing and it will blow over.” Then I repeated to myself, “Keep your big mouth shut,” but I knew I wouldn’t. I had formed principles to compensate for having started work when I was fifteen. I had missed a lot, I knew—the swimming hole, summer girls, and a game called tennis which was played in white flannels with cuffs. I would say to myself, “You decided to go into the woods, so the least you can do is be tough.” I hadn’t felt this way at fifteen when I first worked for Bill, but that was the way I felt now at seventeen. Even though Bill was my model and an artist—maybe because he was—at seventeen something in me was half-looking for trouble with him.

  Before noon who should come along but the cook packing our lunch. He said to me, “The ranger wants you to come back to camp after you eat.”

  When I got back to camp, Bill was in the cabin we used as a warehouse, building the packs for the string that was going to Hamilton soon. I didn’t ask him why he had sent for me and he didn’t say. I just started helping him build and balance the packs, and tried to keep my mind on what I was doing, partly because building packs is never a mechanical job. Not even when you’re packing the simplest stuff like tin cans, which go into boxes called “panyards,” made of rawhide, wood, or canvas, that are hung on the prongs of the saddle. You can’t forget to wrap each can in toilet paper, or the labels on the cans will rub off and you won’t be able to tell peaches from peas. And the heaviest cans have to go to the bottom, or the pack will shift. Then each of the two side packs has to weigh the same and together (with the top pack) they shouldn’t weigh more than 175 pounds for a horse or 225 for a mule—at least, those were the Forest Service regulations then, but they were twenty-five pounds too heavy if the animals weren’t to be bone heaps by the middle of the summer. I don’t care who you are, I’ll bet you that without a scale you can’t build two packs weighing the same and together weighing 150 or 200 pounds when a top pack has been added.

  After we had packed for a while, I forgot to wonder why the ranger had sent for me. Maybe it was just to help him box things up. Then, while we were working with our heads bent, I heard the cook come by jingling the knives and forks the crew had used for lunch.

  Still working on a pack, I heard myself say, “I don’t like that son of
a bitch.”

  Bill lifted a pack and put it down. Inside I heard myself say, “Keep your big mouth shut.” Outside, I heard myself add, “Some day I am going to punch the piss out of him.” Bill stood up and said, “Not in this district you won’t.” He looked at me for a long time, and I looked back still crouched over my pack. I figured that at this moment crouching was a good position. Finally, we both went back to work.

  Bending and lifting, he began to tell me about how the morning had gone. “The lookout on Grave Peak quit this morning.” “Yeah?” I said. “Yeah,” he said. “He came off that mountain in about three jumps.” It was nearly twelve miles to the top of the peak. “Do you know what he said to me?” he asked. “No,” I said. I wasn’t happy about how this was going to end. “The lookout said, ‘Give me my time. This is too tough a job for me, fighting fire in the day and sleeping with rattlesnakes at night.’” After lifting the pack again for weight, he went on, “Seems that he put his hand on the bed to pull back the blanket and he felt something shaped like a fire hose. Do you believe it?”

  At Bear Creek, where I first worked for Bill, there had been a lot of rattlers on those bare mountainsides. On a steep sidehill trail, the up side can be as high as your hand, so you could almost brush those rattlesnakes as you swung along. And, being cold-blooded, they could be attracted to the warmth of a bed at night. But I hadn’t seen a rattlesnake this summer in Elk Summit, although it was the adjoining district.