A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

by Norman Maclean

  “No, I don’t believe it.” I said. “Why not?” he asked. “It’s too high up there for rattlesnakes,” I said. “Are you sure?” he asked, and I told him I wasn’t sure but I thought so. Still working with the packs he said, “Why don’t you go up on the lookout for a couple of weeks and find out?”

  I didn’t ask him when; I knew he meant now. I lifted the two packs until I thought they were balanced, and then started for the door. He added, “If you spot any fires, call them in. And, if there’s a big rain or snow, close up camp and come back to the station.”

  I knew it would be dark before I got to Grave Peak, so I asked the cook to make me a sandwich. I had a big blue bandanna handkerchief, and I put the sandwich in the handkerchief and tied the handkerchief to my belt in the middle of my back. I picked up my razor, toothbrush, and comb, and my favorite ax and Carborundum stone. Then I strapped on my .32-20 and started up the high trail. I knew I had been sent into exile.

  It was twelve miles and all up, but I never stopped to rest or eat the sandwich. Bill seemed to be watching all the time. By walking hard I kept even with daylight until near the end. Then darkness passed over me from below—just the dazzling peak above told me where I was going.

  For the first few days, I was too tired to think about my troubles. I was still half-sick from the dynamite and I still dragged from that big fire we had fought in late July, so I spent most of my time just looking the place over and getting things squared away.

  Modern lookouts live on top of their peaks in what are called “birdcages”—glass houses on towers with lightning rods twisted around them so that the lookouts are not afraid of lightning striking them, and for twenty-four hours a day can remain on the towers to watch for lightning to strike and smoke to appear. This, of course, is the way it should be, but in 1919 birdcages, as far as we knew, were only for birds. We watched from the open peak and lived in a tent in a basin close to the peak where usually there was a spring of water. From my camp to the lookout was a good half-hour climb, and I spent about twelve hours a day watching mountains.

  Near the top there were few trees and nearly all of them had been struck by lightning. It had gone around them, like a snake of fire. But I was to discover that, on a high mountain, lightning does not seem to strike from the sky. On a high mountain, lightning seems to start somewhat below you and very close by, seemingly striking upward and outward. Once it was to knock me down, toss branches over me and leave me sick.

  The basin where my tent was pitched was covered with chunks of cliff that had toppled from above. I did not see a rattlesnake, but I shared the basin with a grizzly bear who occasionally came along flipping over fallen pieces of disintegrated cliff as he looked for disproportionately small grubs. When I saw him coming, I climbed the highest rock and tried to figure out how many hundreds of grubs he had to eat for a square meal. When he saw me, he made noises in his mouth as if he were shifting his false teeth. In a thicket on top of a jack pine, I found the skeleton of a deer. Your guess is as good as mine. Mine is that the snow in the high basin was deep enough to cover the trees, and the deer was crossing the crust and broke through or was killed and eventually the snow melted. There was a tear in my tent so when it rained I could keep either my food or my bed dry, but not both.

  Since this was not my first hitch as a lookout, I knew what to watch for—a little cloud coming up a big mountain, usually in the late afternoon when the dews had long dried and the winds were at their height. And usually it detached itself from the mountain and went on up into the sky and became just a little cloud. Once in a while it would disappear on the mountain, and then you didn’t know what you had seen—probably a cloud but maybe a puff of smoke and the wind had changed and you couldn’t see it now, so you marked it on your map to watch for several days. In a lightning storm you marked every strike to watch, and sometimes it was a week later before one of them became a little cloud again and then got bigger and began to boil. When a cloud began to boil, then it wasn’t a cloud, especially if it reflected red on the bottom. It could mean fire even when the cloud was two or three miles down the canyon from where it was first seen, because, if there were no wind, smoke could drift a long way behind a ridge before rising again where it would show. So that’s the way a fire first looks to a lookout: something—you don’t know what—usually in late afternoon, that may go away and not come again and, if it comes back and is smoke, it may be quite a long way from the fire.

  A possible late-afternoon cloud has no resemblance to what a fire looks like if it gets out of control, and it was often impossible in those early years to get men quickly on a fire when it was in the back country where there were no roads and sometimes not even trails, and of course long before there were planes stationed in Missoula ready to drop chemicals and smoke jumpers.

  Instead, when a fire got out of control the Forest Service hired a hundred or so bindle stiffs off the streets of Butte or Spokane at thirty cents an hour (forty-five cents for straw bosses), shipped them to some rail station near the end of a branch line, and walked them the final thirty-five or forty miles over “the wall.” By the time they reached the fire, it had spread all over the map, and had jumped into the crowns of trees, and for a lot of years a prospective ranger taking his exam had said the last word on crown fires. Even by my time he was a legend. When asked on his examination, “What do you do when a fire crowns?” he had answered, “Get out of the way and pray like hell for rain.”

  Our big fire that summer had been big enough so that I was still tired and my eyes still ached from smoke and no sleep, and big enough so that for years it crowned in my dreams, but it wasn’t in the class of those fires of 1910 that burned out the Coeur d’Alene and great pieces of the Bitterroot. The smoke from those fires drifted seven hundred miles to Denver, and in my home town of Missoula the street lights had to be turned on in the middle of the afternoon, and curled ashes brushed softly against the lamps as if snow were falling heavily in the heat of August. Of course, no other fires on record were as big as those of 1910, but the one of 1919 was the biggest I was ever on.

  It came in a rage and a crown to the top of the ridge. You may know, when a fire gets big enough it generates its own wind. The heat from the fire lightens the air, which rises in the sky, and the cooler air from above swoops down to replace it, and soon a great circular storm enrages the fire and the sky is a volcanic eruption of burning cones and branches descending in streamers of flames. The fire stands on the ridge, roaring for hell to arrive as reinforcement. While you are trying to peer through it to see the inferno on its way, suddenly somebody yells, “God, look behind. The son of a bitch has jumped the gulch.” One hundred and eighty degrees from where you have been looking for the inferno and half-way up the opposite ravine a small smoke is growing big where one of those burning cones or branches dropped out of the sky and trapped you with a fire in your rear. Then what do you do?

  Of course, the men who had been brought in from Butte or Spokane were dead tired and barefoot long before they reached the fire. At the hiring hall in Butte and Spokane each had to have a good pair of boots and a jacket to be employed, so they took turns in the alley changing the one good pair they had. Now all but one of them had marched across the Bitterroot wall in poor street shoes, and, not being able to keep ahead of the pack train, they ate twenty-eight miles of dust. They were bums off the street, miners out of the holes for the summer with the hope of avoiding tuberculosis, winos, and Industrial Workers of the World, who had been thick in Butte and Spokane during World War I. Since it was only the summer after the war, we ordinary working stiffs were still pretty suspicious of IWWs. Those of us who belonged to the regular crew (that is, who were paid sixty dollars a month instead of thirty cents an hour) said that IWW meant “I Won’t Work,” and we were also sure that they were happy to see our country burn. For whatever reason, we had to spend as much time patrolling them as we did the fire. First we had to get them to the top of the opposite ridge before the new fire arri
ved there, and a lot of them only wanted to lie down and go to sleep with the great fire coming from behind. It was the first time I ever saw that sometimes death has no meaning to men if they can lie down and sleep. We kicked them up the hill, while they begged to be left lying where they were, and we beat the new fire to the top. Then we made a “fire trench,” just a scraping two or three feet wide to remove anything that would burn, like dry needles or duff. In front of the fire trench we built piles of dry twigs and then we waited for the wind to turn and blow back toward the new fire coming up the side of the ravine. We waited until the foreman gave us the signal before we lit the piles of twigs and sent fires burning back into the main one. This is known as “backfiring” and for once it worked, although if the wind had shifted again to its original direction, all we would have done was give the fire a head start on us. We did not sleep for three days. Some of us had to carry drinking water in warm canvas sacks up a thousand-foot ridge. The rest of us slowly extended the fire trench down the sides of the fire. The bottom of it we let go for a while—a fire doesn’t go very far or fast downhill.

  We had done a good job in heading off the fire. What you do in the first couple of hours after you hit a fire is what counts, and if it isn’t right you had better take that young ranger’s advice and give yourself over to prayer. Bill and the man he had made fire foreman had both experience and gift, and it takes gift as well as having been there before to know where to hit a fire hard enough to turn it in its tracks. When it’s less than 110 degrees and nothing is about to burn you to death or roar at you and your lungs will still breathe the heat and your eyes aren’t closed with smoke, it’s easy to state the simple principles of a science, if that’s what it is. All you’re trying to do is to force the fire into some opening at the top of the ridge that’s covered with shale and rocks or, if such openings don’t abound in your vicinity, to force it into a thin stand of alpine pine or something that doesn’t burn very fast. But with the inferno having arrived and the smoke so thick you can see only two or three men ahead of you, it’s gift and guts, not science, that tells you where the head of the fire is, and where an open ridge is that can’t be seen, and where and when the wind will turn and whether your men have what it takes to stand and wait. Don’t forget this last point when you place your men—it isn’t just horses that panic when the barn burns. But we were placed right and either we had guts or we were too sick to care. Anyway, we stood and the wind stayed with us and we crowded the big fire with our backfires and turned it into the timberline.

  But every time we got the fire under control, something strange would happen—the fire would jump our fire trench, usually at some fairly ordinary place, so we became sure that IWWs were rolling burning logs over the trench and starting the fire off again. If they were, it was probably just to keep their jobs going, but that wasn’t what we thought, and anyway it didn’t matter much what we thought—the fire kept jumping the line everywhere until I and the red-headed kid were picked to patrol the fire. The fire foreman told us to carry revolvers. That’s all we were told. I still ask myself why the two youngest in the outfit were given this assignment. Did they think we were so young that we would make a big show of ourselves but would freeze in the clutch and wouldn’t shoot? Or did they think we were so young we were crazy enough to shoot almost sight unseen? Or did they think that nobody, especially the IWWs, could answer these questions? Anyway we patrolled miles and miles through burning branches and feathered ashes so light they rose ahead of us as we approached. We didn’t look for trouble and we didn’t find any. Also, we didn’t pray, but finally the rains came. The other kid being red-headed, I think he would have shot. That wouldn’t have left me much choice.

  I don’t suppose Bill would have sent me up to the lookout if he knew how much I needed a couple of days of rest, a thought that gave me a good deal of pleasure. Still being sore at him, I reported by telephone to the ranger station the fewest number of times required—three times a day. The telephone, in a coffin-shaped box, was nailed to the tent pole and had a crank on it. Two longs rang the ranger station, and one long and a short was my call, but nobody called me from the station. There was one woman on a distant lookout and her call was two longs and a short, and I am sure the rest of us lookouts often stood poised ready to ring two longs and a short, but never did. Instead we looked at her mountain and thought it looked different from other mountains, and we took off our telephone receivers and listened to her voice when it was her turn to report to the station. She was married and talked every night to her husband in Kooskia, but we did not listen to avoid feeling sorry for ourselves.

  After a few days of resting and not mending the tent, I started to feel tough again. I knew I had been sent up here as punishment. I was expected to sit still and watch mountains and long for company and something to do, like playing cribbage, I suppose. I was going to have to watch mountains for sure, that was my job, but I would not be without company. I already knew that mountains live and move. Long ago when I had had a child sickness and nobody could tell what it was or how to treat it, my mother put me outside in a bed with mosquito netting over it, and I lay there watching mountains until they made me well. I knew that, when needed, mountains would move for me.

  About the same time, I began to have another feeling, although one related to the feeling that I wasn’t going to let Bill punish me by making me watch mountains. Somewhere along here I first became conscious of the feeling I talked about earlier—the feeling that comes when you first notice your life turning into a story. I began to sense the difference between what I would feel if I were just nearing the end of a summer’s work or were just beginning a story. If what were coming was going to be like life as it had been, a summer’s job would be over soon and I would go home and tell my pals about the big fire and packing my .32-20 on the fire line and the dynamite. Looking down from Grave Peak, though, I was no longer sure that the big fire was of any importance in what was starting to happen to me. It was becoming more important that I didn’t like the damn cook, who was nobody, not even a good or bad cook, and could do nothing well except shuffle cards. Faintly but nevertheless truly I was becoming part of a plot and being made the opponent of my hero, Bill Bell, in fact, mysteriously making myself his opponent. The cook began to look like the mysterious bad guy; even I became mysterious to myself—I was going to show a ranger and a cook that I couldn’t be defeated by being made to watch mountains, which were childhood friends of mine.

  It doesn’t take much in the way of body and mind to be a lookout. It’s mostly soul. It is surprising how much our souls are alike, at least in the presence of mountains. For all of us, mountains turn into images after a short time and the images turn true. Gold-tossed waves change into the purple backs of monsters, and so forth. Always something out of the moving deep, and nearly always oceanic. Never a lake, never the sky. But no matter what images I began with, when I watched long enough the mountains turned into dreams, and still do, and it works the other way around—often, waking from dreams, I know I have been in the mountains, and I know they have been moving—sometimes advancing threateningly, sometimes creeping hesitantly, sometimes receding endlessly. Both mountains and dreams.

  In the late afternoon, of course, the mountains meant all business for the lookouts. The big winds were veering from the valleys toward the peaks, and smoke from little fires that had been secretly burning for several days might show up for the first time. New fires sprang out of thunder before it sounded. By three-thirty or four, the lightning would be flexing itself on the distant ridges like a fancy prizefighter, skipping sideways, ducking, showing off but not hitting anything. By four-thirty or five, it was another game. You could feel the difference in the air that had become hard to breathe. The lightning now came walking into you, delivering short smashing punches. With an alidade, you marked a line on the map toward where it struck and started counting, “Thousand-one, thousand-two,” and so on, putting in the “thousand” to slow your count to a seco
nd each time. If the thunder reached you at “thousand-five,” you figured the lightning had struck about a mile away. The punches became shorter and the count closer and you knew you were going to take punishment. Then the lightning and thunder struck together. There was no count.

  But what I remember best is crawling out of the tent on summer nights when on high mountains autumn is always approaching. To a boy, it is something new and beautiful to piss among the stars. Not under the stars but among them. Even at night great winds seem always to blow on great mountains, and tops of trees bend, but, as the boy stands there with nothing to do but to watch, seemingly the sky itself bends and the stars blow down through the trees until the Milky Way becomes lost in some distant forest. As the cosmos brushes by the boy and disappears among the trees, the sky is continually replenished with stars. There would be stars enough to brush by him all night, but by now the boy is getting cold.

  Then the shivering organic speck of steam itself disappears.

  By figuring backward, I knew it was the twenty-fifth of August when an unusually hot electrical storm crashed into the peak and was followed by an unusually high wind. The wind kept up all night and the next day, and I tightened all the ropes on my tent. Cold rode in with the wind. The next night after I went to bed it began to snow. It was August 27, and the stuff was damp and heavy and came down by the pound. Most of it went through the tear in my tent but there was enough left over so that by morning you could track elk in the snow.

  I didn’t think much of the immediate prospects of building a fire and cooking breakfast, so first I climbed to the top of the peak. When I looked, I knew I might never again see so much of the earth so beautiful, the beautiful being something you know added to something you see, in a whole that is different from the sum of its parts. What I saw might have been just another winter scene, although an impressive one. But what I knew was that the earth underneath was alive and that by tomorrow, certainly by the day after, it would be all green again. So what I saw because of what I knew was a kind of death with the marvelous promise of less than a three-day resurrection. From where I stood to the Bitterroot wall, which could have been the end of the world, was all windrows of momentary white. Beyond the wall, it seemed likely, eternity went on in windrows of Bitterroot Mountains and summer snow.