Indian Creek Chronicles

by Pete Fromm

  Also by Pete Fromm

  The Tall Uncut

  Copyright © 1993 by Pete Fromm

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews and articles. All inquiries should be addressed to: Lyons & Burford, 31 West 21 Street, New York, NY 10010.

  Design by Catherine Lau Hunt

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publications Data

  Fromm, Pete, 1958—

  Indian Creek chronicles: a winter in the Bitterroot Wilderness /

  Pete Fromm.

  p.; cm.

  ISBN 1-55821-205-1

  Fromm, Pete, 1958- . 2. Authors, American—20th century—

  Biography. 3. Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness (Idaho and Mont.)—

  Biography. 4. Outdoor life—Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness (Idaho

  And Mont.) I. Title.

  PS3556.R5942Z469 1993

  818’.5403—dc20

  [B] 93-16430

  CIP

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A condensed version of the final several chapters, “Spring Runoff,” was a winner of the 1991 Sierra Nature-Writing Contest, appearing in that magazine’s November, 1991 issue.

  Chapter Nine was originally published in slightly different form under the title, “To Be a Mountain Man,” in the November, 1992 issue of Gray’s Sporting Journal.

  The author would like to thank John and Susan Daniel and Ruth McLaughlin for their help with the manuscript.

  To Ellen for the books, and Big Dan and Paul for trying,

  and finally to Rader, my connection to the world.

  1

  Once the game wardens left, the little tent we’d set up seemed even smaller. I stood in front of it, shivering at a gust I thought I felt running across my neck. Could this really be my home now? My home for the next seven months? For the entire winter? Alone? I glanced up at the river canyon’s steep, dark walls, already cutting off the mid-afternoon sun. Nothing lay beyond those walls of stone and tree but more of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. I was alone, in its very heart.

  The shadow of the canyon’s wall fell over me and I hurried away from it, into the sunlight remaining in the meadow. My steps rustled through the knee high grass and the breeze soughed through the towering firs and cedars hemming the small opening. The river’s whispering rush ran through it all, creating an insistent quiet that folded around me like a shroud.

  I stopped at the phone pole the warden had said would link me to the outside. Yesterday we’d discovered the phone didn’t work. I picked it up anyway, listening to its blank silence, the voice of the rest of the world. With the receiver still against my ear I turned and looked back at the shadowed tent, far enough away now for perspective.

  The canvas walls closed off an area fourteen by sixteen feet. The wardens had told me that, bragging it up, making it sound spacious. On the phone, sitting at a college swimming pool, when I’d been accepting this job, it had sounded palatial.

  Now I hung up the empty phone and walked back to the tent. Pulling the door flap aside I stepped in, out of the wilderness. A pile of boxes and bags—all my possessions and supplies for seven months—stood in the center of the floor, greatly reducing the space in the tent. I remembered the way, only yesterday, those boxes and bags had filled my dorm room, and the way my roommate and I had carved trails through them to get around.

  I sat down on the pole and Boone, the little rat-like dog my roommate had given me, sat on my foot. She had been weaned too early for this and didn’t want anything to do with anything unless she was within a foot or two of my leg. I took a big, shaky breath and scratched her drooping ears, whispering, “It’s beautiful here, isn’t it, Boone?” But instead of being able to conjure up any excitement for seven months of solitude, I sat and petted her warm head, wondering how in the world I’d wound up here.

  I thought of that first call to the warden, from the swimming pool where I’d first heard of this job, and I realized that swimming had started me toward this dark, lonely tent long before I ever could have guessed.

  The very first step on the long trail here could well have been the one my brother missed on a stairway in Milwaukee, four years earlier. Paul, my twin, the high school swimming star, had broken his leg by the time he reached the bottom of those stairs ending his swimming that season, but starting mine.

  The coach was on me first thing the next morning. “You Fromm’s twin?” he wanted to know.

  Though we didn’t look a bit alike, I couldn’t see any point in lying.

  “Good. Practice starts at 3:30. See you there.”

  “I don’t swim,” I said.

  “You’re Paul’s twin, right?”

  When I didn’t bother answering again he said, “3:30,” and walked out the door.

  When the last bell rang that afternoon I started home, only swerving into the pool building at the last possible moment. Until I was inside, the reek of chlorine engulfing me, I’d never thought of going. Unwittingly, I’d made the first in a series of completely unconsidered decisions leading to the tent.

  I struggled through twenty laps and when everyone stopped I thought it was over. Nobody could possibly swim another stroke. But the coach assigned the next set and I flailed away with the rest of them. Anything else would have been giving up. Though this wasn’t my world, I wasn’t about to face that kind of shame.

  This was junior year. The year of the college selections. But the world of swimming swept me up and I couldn’t have thought less about college. By senior year even my lunches were spent at the pool, making up for lost time, churning the water back and forth alone, with just the coach walking alongside me on the deck, shouting encouragement. With that in my ears and the searing oxygen debt in my lungs I forged new worlds for myself in my head—world records, the Olympics, Mark Spitz’s seven golds around my neck—laying the foundation for a life of daydreaming. Well suited to solitude.

  Toward the end of my senior year I spent more and more time deflecting my parents’ questions about college until the day a sheet of paper slipped from a friend’s pile of college catalogs. A bighorn sheep stood boldly atop the page, a stirring symbol of wildness and freedom. Beneath it were the obscure words Wildlife Biology and University of Montana.

  For years my family had taken summer camping trips, starting with a trailer, progressing through family-sized canvas tents, and finally to canoe trips and even a backpacking trip or two. The less civilized the better, I thought, and I’d often have the family drop me off as they drove to guided nature walks. I preferred exploring alone, seeing what there was to see without some guide telling me what to look at, without becoming part of what I saw as a crowd of ignorant city dwellers. Mooching, my father called it. Mooching around.

  I’d never heard of wildlife biology, but it sounded pretty much like professional mooching. In the second of a series of decisions without thought, I sent out just one college application.

  My knowledge of western geography was sketchy and I didn’t know how to pronounce the word Missoula, but three months later I landed there, a wildlife biology major. And though I didn’t know it yet, the tent site on the Selway River was only eighty miles away, as the crow flies.

  By the end of my first day in Missoula I’d joined the swim team. I’d felt adventurous coming to this empty state alone, but now I felt lost, and I fell gratefully into the discipline of the workouts. By winter quarter I had a scholarship, an official reason to be in Montana.

  For the next two years my days started with an exhausted shuffle to the pool in the dark and ended with an even more worn-out trudge ba
ck from the pool in the early night of winter. I was in Montana, though for all I saw of it, it could have been anywhere else in the world. But the last meet was in March, and spring was all my own.

  During my second year in Montana my roommate was a guy from Ohio, Jeff Rader, a hunter. He was older by a few years and, while I spent my summers lifeguarding at a Wisconsin country club, he was a seasonal ranger for the National Park Service. While I had goggles and Speedos, he had rifles and shotguns. And he had a car, a battered green station wagon he called the Deerslayer. That spring, released from the crushing exhaustion of the workouts, we began to explore the country around Missoula, and I began to realize what I’d been missing.

  Rader was also a reader, something I’d never been, and he would whistle in awe at the things he read, or laugh so hard I finally began picking up the books he finished. He was working through the library’s entire collection of mountain man stories. In Montana, that’s a big collection. Jim Beckworth’s ridiculous tall tales of becoming a Crow chief and single-handedly whipping every other tribe in the Northwest, and Lord Grizzly, with Hugh Glass’s monumental crawl after the grizzly mauling, lying in streams to let the minnows lip the maggots out of his back, began to be the things I’d dream about. I read of the mountain man’s all-purpose Green River knife, and his muzzle-loading Hawken rifles. Jim Bridger, Liver-Eating Johnson, Jedediah Smith, John Colter all became names I lived with more than those of my classmates. When I read A.B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky I walked around in a daze, the next Boone Caudill, waiting to explode.

  But even through the haze of romance I could still, at times, read between the lines. I’d winter camped, not with buffalo robes and tepees, but with what modern technology had to offer. I’d backpacked until I thought I would drop and I’d wished for escalators instead of switchbacks. I asked Rader if he didn’t think all the stuff those guys went through wasn’t, at the time, the biggest pain in the ass they could’ve imagined.

  “Sure,” he said. “But that always makes the best stories afterwards. When they were geezers I bet it’s all they ever talked about. Like guys who’ve been in wars.”

  I was nineteen and that made sense. And, worst of all, I came to the awful realization that I had no experiences like that, nothing that would make a story worth telling anyone, not when I was a geezer, not even right now. Though my questions still nagged from time to time, I shoved them away. They seemed vaguely traitorous, even weak. I didn’t ask about it again. Instead I picked up the next book. Pretty soon I was making a pair of knee-high moccasins for myself, in the Flathead style, though secretly I pretended they were Blackfeet. Blackfeet were much tougher.

  Over spring break Rader and I and his buddy Sponz and a few others piled into the Deerslayer and took a “rendezvous” trip down to the Tetons. We grilled chicken over an illegal fire and drank cheap whiskey the way the mountain men did in the books. We passed the bottle back and forth, swigging mountain-manfully. Later, when I tried to stand up, I pitched back down face first and couldn’t walk again until the next morning, when I didn’t much feel like it. The drinking described in the books began to seem impossible, but somehow I didn’t extend that to any of the rest of their tales. I wore my moccasins the whole time and wished I’d been born a hundred and fifty years earlier, closer to the tent on the Selway than I ever could have imagined.

  When I hit campus for my third year in the fall of 1978, I learned the swim team had been cut. I was furious with the school and my core classes in chemistry and calculus suddenly seemed further from mooching than it was possible to get. What was I doing taking stuff like this?

  To fill the sudden rush of free time I worked more and more hours at the pool and I put the finishing touches on a rifle kit I’d bought the spring before: a half-stock Hawken, .54 caliber. True mountain man stuff. I’d bought it though I had never owned a gun and I had no tools or experience to use in building it. Before I’d met Radar I’d never even seen a gun.

  Toward the end of that September, a few days before I turned twenty, a girl who’d been on our spring rendezvous to the Tetons walked up to my lifeguard chair for a chat. She smiled and I felt like I was at the country club again, flirting with girls in suits like sheer second skins, and I knew that wasn’t the way real mountain men acted. That summer had been my first away from home, working for the National Park Service at Lake Mead, Nevada, but even there I worked as a lifeguard, embarrassed I had no skills a real ranger needed.

  The girl had spent the summer with a friend cooking at a wilderness lodge in Idaho. She was from New Jersey originally and she told me about the cooking and about the Nez Perce Chief Joseph. “I will fight no more forever.” I was an expert. And here I sat in a Speedo, listening to a Jersey girl tell me about the mountains she’d lived in. The mountains I’d only read about.

  I was barely listening when she told about her friend and the game warden they’d met in Idaho. Her friend had taken a job with the Idaho Fish and Game, she told me, one that would mean spending a winter in the mountains alone. Something to do with salmon eggs.

  I was listening now. In the middle of the wilderness. Alone. Like a mountain man. She said she thought it sounded pretty cool, but her friend had hooked up with some guy and now it didn’t sound so cool to her. After all, it was seven months alone. Just that day she’d called the warden and backed out. “Boy, was the warden pissed,” she told me. She’d left him with two weeks to find somebody to spend seven months alone in the wilderness. Those people didn’t grow on trees, she said, and the whole expensive project was hanging in the balance.

  She gave me the name and number of the warden and I called him from the pool. Like a mountain man would have. Resourceful. Leaping at opportunity before it slipped away. Before thought could enter into the equation.

  Although I could hear how excited the warden was to have this call drop on him from the blue, he was careful to explain just what the job entailed. In fact, he said he wouldn’t let me accept before he went through a list of the conditions. He didn’t want anybody accepting it on some romantic whim, only to back out on him again. He actually used that word—romance. I’m sure he hadn’t intended it, but he hooked me with just that one word.

  “You’ll be living in a canvas wall tent at the junction of the Selway River and Indian Creek ,” he told me. “Right in the middle of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness Area.” I didn’t know what a wall tent was, but I kept quiet. “It’s just up from Paradise Guard Station. You know where that is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s where all the floaters put in,” he said, pausing before going on. I’d never floated anything.

  From mid-October to mid-June I would be responsible for two and a half million salmon eggs planted in a channel between the two streams. The closest plowed road was forty miles away; the closest person, sixty. If I was interested, he said, he could only give me two weeks to get ready.

  I was hearing less and less of what he had to say. Everything sounded perfect. I’d finally find out about this mountain man stuff. Romance or real? Pain in the ass or glorious freedom? And, no matter what I discovered, I was sure it would be something I could tell about later, a story all my own.

  I told the warden it sounded good, all of it. If I’d been listening more carefully, I could have probably heard him shaking his head.

  “Don’t you want to know how much it pays?” he asked.

  I said of course I did, though I hadn’t thought of that. He said, “Two hundred dollars a month.”

  “OK,” I said. This was too good to be true. Getting paid too.

  He told me to think about it and give him another call tomorrow. “No problem,” I said. A formality.

  I’d already accepted.

  2

  Immediately after hanging up with the warden I called my parents. They weren’t going to be too keen about my dropping out, but at first they were too busy asking other questions to get around to that. Most of their questions were ones I probably should have thought to as
k the warden myself, such as: How would I communicate?

  I told them I’d probably have a radio or something.

  “How will you stay warm?”

  “I guess it’s a big tent. He said there was a wood stove.”

  “What if you cut your foot off with an ax? How will you get help?”

  “I guess I’ll use the radio,” I said, and they said, “If you have one.” I wondered who they thought could be lame enough to cut their foot off with an ax.

  I wasn’t reassuring them, but I thought of Hugh Glass crawling some ungodly distance, hundreds and hundreds of miles, after being chewed up and spit out by a grizzly bear. I mentioned that to them. “If things get real ugly,” I said, “it’s only forty miles. I could crawl that if I had to.” That didn’t reassure them at all.

  My mother grew more and more logical, and I more and more defensive, throwing out things like, “This kind of experience will look really good. It’s impossible to get any job in wildlife biology without a bunch of experience.” My mother didn’t think experience as a lunatic would help with anything.

  “What about school?” she asked.

  “It’s only been going a week. I can drop out no problem.”

  There was silence then—none of their six kids had ever dropped out of anything. “I can always go back next year,” I said, trying to fill in the hole, though my classes had come to seem so ridiculous I was far from sure if I’d bother returning.

  My father finally said something like, “Well, I suppose it’s opportunities like this that you went to Montana for.”

  I agreed vehemently, though I’d never really had any idea why I went to Montana.

  My mother, on the bedroom phone, started to protest, but my dad interrupted long enough for me to hang up before things got worse. I stared at the phone in the office of the Grizzly Pool. Cut my foot off with an ax! What kind of a gimp did they think I was?