Hemingway Adventure (1999)

by Michael Palin

  But where the grass grows there is plenty of life. A wolf, businesslike and preoccupied, trots off into the trees, a herd of elk passes more slowly, the females calling to each other in high-pitched whinnies. Every now and then the bull elk lets out a high, pumping cry which is known, accurately enough, as a bugle. A solitary bison with its huge head and spindly back legs grazes beside an old cavalry post. He looks vaguely incongruous, as if he’s been put there by the tourist office, but once he and his kind had this land pretty much to themselves. Nearly two hundred years ago, when the explorers Lewis and Clark made the first overland crossing of America, they reported that it took them ten days to ride through one bison herd. There are now fewer than three thousand left in the three and a half thousand square miles of Yellowstone Park.

  High point of the day’s journey is the Craig Pass on the Continental Divide. Not only are we up above eight thousand feet but there’s something about the name and the concept of a continental divide that has always appealed. Like the North or South Pole or the source of the Amazon, it’s a place that is far more significant than it looks.

  Spend a while turning my head one way and then the other, trying to take in the fact that rain falling on one side of me drains east to the Mississippi, and rain falling on the other side of me may well end up coming out of a lawn sprinkler in Beverly Hills. We return home past the thermal wonders of the Park like the Old Faithful Geyser and the bubbling Fountain Paint Pot hot springs. I toy with the idea of a documentary on such places called This Flatulent Earth.

  But the big sights are full of people and that was what Hemingway came out west to get away from. He came to write and hunt and I must try and find some of his present-day counterparts.

  Breakfast at Big Sky, an hour’s ride from Bozeman up the dramatic Gallatin Valley, with rugged vertical rock faces on its east bank and a fast, bustling river. This is skiing country and the buildings are raised on stone pilings against the winter conditions.

  This time of year, October, is, I’m told, about the best time to visit. Less busy than the summer, more accessible than the winter, and beautiful too, with the sun hitting at dramatically low angles.

  Hemingway enjoyed driving across America. In his sixtieth year, he drove through Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming, keeping himself going, according to his biographer Carlos Baker, by listening to the World Series and ‘stopping at grocery stores in the smaller towns to buy apples, cheese, and pickles, which he washed down with Scotch and fresh lime juice.’ Eurghh.

  At the side of the road just before Big Sky resort there is a long single-storey building with a log-cabin finish called the Corral Bar. It’s a folksy, friendly place with a good smell of bacon and fresh coffee and, I like to think, just the sort of spot where Hemingway would have found the company he liked. The rest-rooms are called ‘Bucks’ and ‘Does’ and the decoration favours things like bleached deer skulls. A huge moose-head hangs out over one of the tables. It bears an expression of amused tolerance and the curly-haired bison next to it looks positively angelic. Man, beast and breakfast in perfect harmony.

  The elk-shooting season begins today, and the bow-hunting season ends. I get talking to a group of hunters, all around thirty or forty, with very big moustaches, who are about to leave for three or four days of elk-hunting in the outback.

  I tell them I’ve heard some pretty unpleasant stories of modern convenience hunters, would-be Hemingways who drive out to game farms and on payment of several thousand dollars, have a farm-raised moose or elk led out for them to shoot in a fenced-off area. Kill guaranteed. Maximum amount of money for the minimum of effort.

  This group condemns such people vociferously. They’re not hunters. All they want is a trophy. The real difference between the two approaches seems to boil down to the same answer I’ve had from everyone who hunts. Respect for the animal.

  ‘I have more respect for elk than I do for most people,’ one of them maintains, which just about sums up this curious commingling of sentiment and slaughter.

  They regard the tracking as an essential part of hunting, and they describe the delights of stalking their prey over difficult terrain.

  ‘You can find a nice fresh big bold track in snow, you know, fresh that morning and still steaming droppings, and you know you’re right on him and he’s walking five miles an hour and you’re only going three. You have to run sometimes. It gets pretty exciting.’

  They seem to enjoy the risks. They tell stories of being bitten in the thigh by grizzly bears and charged by buffalo, as if these were what made the whole thing worth while.

  They believe it’s important to make use of what they kill. One of them thinks that you should have to prove you’re going to eat the animal before you’re allowed to hunt it, which seems quite reasonable to me. Up here where winter lasts six months of the year, people need the meat and the livelihood that comes from hunting. Nothing of the elk they kill is wasted, even the antlers are sold to Korea for what they call, possibly euphemistically, vitamin supplement.

  The other element is that of tradition. Though two or three of these hunters are old Californian hippies, they do regard the shouldering of the gun as tapping in to a great American tradition and an even greater universal tradition. As one puts it, they see themselves as part of ‘the cycle of life in the mountains’.

  An hour later, having tapped in to the Great American Breakfast, we start back to Bozeman. The hunting party has forded the white waters of the Gallatin River and is clambering slowly up the steep, snow-slippery hill on the far bank. I feel a nagging envy. I’d go with them like a shot if I didn’t have to kill an elk.

  Back at the motel, where meat we haven’t killed is being prepared for our dinner, I pick up a copy of a local Sunday paper - the Billings Gazette. The ghost of Ernest flutters out of its pages. Inside the paper is a long feature on Dr Louis Allard, one of Billings’ greatest medical men, and the doctor who operated on Hemingway’s broken arm sixty-eight years ago, after the accident that brought Archie MacLeish out to Montana to see him. There is Ernest, arm in plaster and a big bandage around him, looking bashful and, as he tended to do when injured, a little pleased with himself.

  Later, as I’m about to settle down to sleep, I hear a sound which conveys better than anything in nature the sense of these wide, wild spaces. It’s the long, low wail of a passing freight train. As the mournful sound dies away, I pick up a collection of stories about Montana. It’s called The Last Best Place.

  Like the hunters up at Big Sky, Hemingway had an odd respect for the animals whose lives he brought to an end with such regularity.

  The more favoured of his victims ended up sharing his house with him. The walls of the Finca Vigia in Havana bristle with all manner of proud beasts. Buffalo, oryx and kudu in the bedroom, Grant’s gazelle in the living-room, pronghorn in the dining-room, hartebeest in the hallway. In the library a leopard stares glassily up from the floor, snarl frozen on its handsome jaws, in the guest room two lion skulls occupy the shelf above Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, a writing desk in the tower room rests firmly on a flattened lion. Hemingway, by nature a reluctant spender, must have made an exception for taxidermists.

  Stuffed heads and mounted skins seem to belong to the past, and I’m wondering if the modern hunter has the same inclination to hang his catches up on the wall. There is a taxidermist in a quiet suburb of Bozeman who I hope will be able to supply a few answers.

  He lives and works from a house in a respectable development of modern, prairie-style houses called Outlaw Drive, which is off a road of equally respectable houses known as Wild Bunch Drive. To confuse matters even more, the suburb is called Belgrade.

  There is no neon sign advertising Jerome Andres’ business, and the casual visitor strolling down Outlaw Drive might easily be confused by what is going on at No. 2950. A deer lies dead on the front lawn, a skinned corpse hangs in the open garage, swinging gently above a sea of antlers, and a mighty half-mounted bison head guards the door of one of the
outbuildings.

  As I walk up the short driveway I pass scatterings of horn and skin, a circular saw and a large plastic bin of jawbones marked ‘Inedible’.

  Jerome Andres, the owner and proprietor, comes out to meet me, or to be more accurate I bump into him as he emerges carrying a moose-head from the workshop to the garage. He pulls the garage door a little wider and I can see quite grisly scenes of carnage in there.

  He deposits his load in businesslike fashion and reappears. He’s a short, powerfully built man in jeans and a neat blue check shirt with long, greying sideburns protruding from a baseball cap, which he raises every now and then to wipe his brow, revealing a balding pate. He hitches up his trousers, smiles a little shyly and motions me to the door from which he first emerged. I feel faint unease and am glad that the sun’s shining and I’m not alone. In fact the door leads to a quite tasteful reception area. It is full of animals, but, unlike those in the garage, most of them are in one piece. There are a couple of heads in plastic bags nestling by the computer, but the room is a Noah’s Ark-like showpiece for taxidermy. A sign above the reception desk defines his business philosophy: ‘The Bitterness of Poor Quality remains long after the Sweetness of Low Price is Forgotten.’

  The phone goes, Jerome deals with it quickly and sympathetically and as he replaces the receiver jots a name down on a pad.

  ‘They’re bringing a mountain goat in at noon.’

  Jerome, or Jerry as he asks us to call him, is clearly a busy man. He was himself a hunter who learned taxidermy at eighteen and has taught it all over the States.

  He takes us through in to the workshop. The smell is bad, a mixture of the sickly sweetness of flesh and blood and the pungency of epoxy resin and spray paint. He’s currently working on a moose-head. In this confined space it looks enormous, like a small meteorite. He apologises for having to keep working as he talks and begins to brush the horns before spray-painting the nose and around the eyes with the care and delicacy of a make-up artist.

  He takes pride in this part of the process and says, without apparent irony, ‘Sometimes we make the animals better than they were before.’

  In another room off the back of the workshop is the rest of Jerry’s workforce. One man is carefully removing fur from a goat’s legs, another is making a pair of eyes to fit an antelope skin stretched tight on a polystyrene mould.

  ‘These will eventually pop out through the head,’ he explains, helpfully.

  A young woman with tumbling curly hair sits and paints another mould, another plaits what looks like bison beard. A radio plays quietly. The atmosphere is serene and studious. They could be embroidering a tapestry or illuminating manuscripts. Only the lingering fetid smell and a containerful of skinned heads gives it away.

  Jerry is constantly being interrupted. Two men have just pulled into his driveway and are unloading a two-year-old pronghorn antelope. They’re very sure how they want it mounted. Body sideways on, in relief, with the head turned as if it’s looking out into the room.

  Could Jerry do it by February? One of the men wants to give it as a present to his wife on Valentine’s Day.

  Jerry sizes it up, makes a measurement or two and there and then, right on the front lawn, produces a short, sharp knife and begins to remove the skin from the body. He asks one of the men to hold it down with his foot whilst, with a quick and expert twist, he breaks the head off. As he pulls it away the skin follows neatly, like a coat being slipped from a pair of shoulders.

  He carries the flayed carcass to the dreaded garage. He’ll clean the skin up tonight, remove all the flesh, turn the ears inside out, the lips will be split, salted and dried and then the skin will be sent to the local tannery.

  ‘Will you have it stuffed by February?’ I ask.

  Jerry looks pained at the use of the ‘s’ word.

  ‘Stuffing is when you stuff something in a bag,’ he says a trifle tartly. ‘This is artistic improvement.’

  ‘Will it be artistically improved by February?’

  ‘Not a chance.’

  The customer will have to wait over a year for his funny Valentine. Jerry has two hundred animals awaiting treatment, an African shipment is expected, there’s a water-buffalo in his workshop and the elk season started yesterday. The taxidermy business has clearly survived Hemingway’s death.

  What I should like to do now is to gauge the health of another business that was once close to Hemingway’s heart. His doorway to the West, the dude ranch. The L-Bar-T no longer takes guests but plenty of others do, and the brochures compete fiercely in offering temptations for jaded city folk.

  My favourite selling claim is the ranch that boasts, ‘Our view is out of sight!’

  That should be worth not seeing.

  Kalispell, Montana, is 275 miles, as the eagle flies, to the north-west of Bozeman, just to the far side of the Flathead Mountains, where the Rockies spread towards the Canadian border.

  I’m waiting at the airport for my transport to a dude ranch at Marion, fifty miles to the west, and wondering if living in these great open spaces doesn’t do something to the mind, when I hear the sound of a cow drawing up at the Arrivals area. For those who might not have heard a cow drawing up at an Arrivals area, I can only describe it as a long, defiant moo, ending on a strangely falsetto note. This may be because it doesn’t in fact emanate from a cow, but from a long black Lincoln limousine with a pair of horns on the front which is heading straight for me. I try to appear unconcerned, but the limousine moos again, more confidently this time, as if the damn thing has recognised me. And it has. A window slides down and a wide-brimmed black hat appears, and beneath it a woman’s head which enquires politely if I’m Michael Palin.

  Which is how I get to meet Ellen, better half of Leo; together they run the Hargrave Guest and Cattle Ranch - my home for the next couple of days.

  Ellen is around my age, I would think, with a merry twinkle in the eye and a line in Oklahoma!-style skirts, cotton blouses and high-heeled boots, which is not an affectation for she comes from a family of nine children brought up in rural Kansas. One of her sisters, a slim blonde called Mary-Beth, is visiting and has been roped in to drive the limousine and pull the moo control every now and then.

  Ellen and Leo Hargrave bought the 1400-acre ranch in 1968. It lies in a wide valley surrounded by distant mountains, an expanse of peacefulness, but not total isolation. There’s a micro-brewery across the meadow, with two private planes parked outside, and some buildings tucked in amongst the trees about a mile down the valley.

  Leo Hargrave is in his eighties, a good bit older and a good bit shorter than his wife. He has a similar mischievous twinkle in the eye which suggests that he doesn’t take everything too seriously, but a compact, wiry body and well-worn dusty jeans suggest that he’s dead serious about the farm. The fact that a man who flew missions for the USAF in the closing years of the Second World War should still be a working farmer seems to infect all us dudes and even as the first awkward introductions are made you can already feel city cares sliding off shoulders.

  The word ‘dude’ may be politely taken to mean a guest but it also implies a non-Westerner, an urban American who wants to sample the Wild West without getting too wild. The age of the computer seems only to have increased the appeal of the cowboy, and many of my fellow-guests picked Hargrave Ranch off the Internet. For Leo and Ellen the dudes are not just a casual sideline, they’re an economic necessity at a time when relatively small, traditional, environmentally friendly farms like theirs find it hard to fight the big boys.

  So we can all take comfort: Dawn the attorney from Buffalo; Smokey from Virginia, who’s very proud of working in the cleanest coal-fired power station in the USA; John and Lynne from New Jersey; Chris, a grandmother from Massachusetts, and her three girlfriends, who are spending a week away from their men. We may look helpless, but they need us.

  I’m soon confronting my incompetence with a bit of lasso-training from Ken, the ropeman. He’s thin and wiry and wha
t you can see of his face beneath the brim of his hat is lined and weathered. With enormous patience he stands by as I try to spin, throw and drop my rope clean over a black plastic cow’s head stuck on the end of a wooden frame about fifteen feet away.

  At my first attempt I’m slightly off target and lasso Nigel, the cameraman. I dissolve into uncontrolled peals of urban laughter. (We’ve been on the road a long time now, and hysteria lurks close to the surface.) Ken smiles politely but I think he finds my behaviour more alarming than that of any rogue steer.

  The American West, rather like Ernest Hemingway, has passed from reality, through legend, to cliche. The Native American tribes have been whittled away, the herds of bison have gone, and the survivor, the cowboy, has been hunted down by film producers and advertisers and designers and graphic artists so it’s hard to know what the real thing is any more.

  I think of this as I find myself in the saddle - never a comfortable place for me - on a Palomino stallion called Pal, heading slowly out across long, green grass to which the morning mist still clings, behind Randy, the sort of cowboy Marlboro’ would die for. He’s lean, which pretty much goes with the job - cowboys seem to be conspicuously thinner than the rest of America - laconic and laid-back. Randy’s introductory remarks in the paddock featured good sense rather than dire warning, and formal horsemanship was emphasised less than doing what comes naturally.

  I’ve always had a mild aversion to being lifted off the ground (maybe my father dropped me when young) and I would unhesitatingly nominate the camel as my least favourite method of transport, but today, less than an hour after swinging on to the broad back of this distinctive pale tan horse, I’m not only trotting along like Roy Rogers, but I’m about to do a real cowboy’s job.

  The Hargrave Ranch is a working farm with 320 head of cattle. Some of them are loose and we’re on our way to round them up. We’ve been told how to make the horse turn left or right, and stop, but it seems a bit of a leap from this to rounding-up. We enter a wooded area full of young pine and as Pal concentrates on picking his way through a web of fallen trees, I concentrate on keeping my hat on and my eyeballs in as the branches flick viciously at my face.