Indian Creek Chronicles

by Pete Fromm

  Rader would know how great this was. I changed as quickly as I could and ran across the green lawns of campus to tell him.

  “Seven months?” he asked. “Without seeing anybody?”

  I nodded, but added, “I guess they’ll snowmobile in now and then. Bring me mail and stuff.” I was reluctant to admit that. Seven months without any contact sounded a lot more mountain mannish.

  “You’re nuts,” he said, but he was excited about it. He thoughts it’d be a great experience, though he wouldn’t do it for anything. At the same time that made me think a little more about what exactly I’d agreed to do, it also made it all the more attractive. This wasn’t something any idiot would do. This took a special breed.

  Rader was considerably less swayed by romance than I was and he asked his own list of questions. How was I going to get into the middle of the wilderness?

  There was a road into it, I admitted. “Some sort of corridor, he called it. It usually gets snowed shut by the end of October, beginning of November.”

  “So you don’t have to horsepack all your stuff?”

  I had to confess that I could bring it all in with the Fish and Game pickup truck.

  “So you got to get all your gear together? What about food?”

  “I have to get it all before they come to pick me up.”

  “How long do you have?”

  “Couple of weeks.”

  He whistled again, the same way he did when he read about some fantastic mountain man feat.

  “They’re paying for all your food?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “I am, I guess. He didn’t say anything about that.”

  “What about your scholarship?”

  I hadn’t thought of that. While Rader had scraped together his last dollars for tuition I’d walked out of registration with a check for five hundred dollars. “I guess I’ll probably lose that.”

  He asked how much I made off my scholarship and I told him. He was never a miracle worker in math, so it was a minute before he said, “So you’re giving up fifteen hundred bucks of scholarship for fourteen hundred bucks of pay.”

  I nodded.“Well at least they’re letting you pay for all your own food.”

  I nodded a little less certainly, not having thought about it quite like that.

  “I wonder how much rent they’ll charge for the tent.”

  “He didn’t say anything about that,” I told him. “They couldn’t really make me pay rent.”

  Rader started to laugh and he reached out the window and snagged a couple of the stubby bottles of beer he had cooling on the sill. We knocked off the caps and he lifted his beer in a toast. “Fucking Fromm,” he said, grinning and shaking his head. I glowed under his eloquence.

  The next day I did business. Before I dropped out I tried everything I could to keep my scholarship. I finally got someone to admit that if I stayed enrolled my scholarship would stay intact. Rader and I sat back and wondered how that could be finagled. The next day I went into the unexplored liberal arts side of campus. I hooked up with a humanities professor, though I hadn’t even known there was such a thing. When I walked out I was enrolled for the next three quarters, in an independent study course on journal writing. Three credits a quarter, Pass/No Pass, since it would be impossible to grade.

  “Journal writing!” we cackled. What in the world kind of a course was that? We agreed that I’d pulled a world class boondoggle.

  The beers we cracked in celebration that first day uncorked a river of the stuff that flowed almost without stop for the next two weeks. Friends heard what I was doing and threw parties, or took me out on the town for a last taste of civilization. They took turns giving me send-offs, so no matter how bleary-eyed I grew there was always a fresh, eager face waiting to tie one on the next night.

  All the shopping I had to do was done in the lulls of these festivities. I knew so little about what was needed I don’t know if that hurt or not.

  When I’d left Mom’s table I’d moved straight to the college food service; I hadn’t cooked anything but a hotdog or two in my life. Now seven months’ worth of grocery shopping stared me down. Rader and I wandered the aisles of the bulk-rate food store in a quandary. I bought, as it turned out, enough rice for a few years and enough beans for decades. At the last instant I remembered to buy a percolator and a few pots and pans, things I’d never owned or used. And finally I added a hundred pounds of potatoes, saying I’d dig a food cache to keep them from freezing. I didn’t really have any idea how to make such a thing, but the word cache was always creeping up in the mountain man books. It had a certain sound to it.

  We bundled all the food into our tiny dorm room, forming an impressive pile, then set off for the fun stuff. Rader was convinced I wasn’t going to eat beans all winter, but that I was going to become a skilled subsistence hunter. I’d never shot a thing in my life, but this too had a nice ring to it. We took the Deerslayer to the local sporting goods store and I kissed my scholarship money goodbye.

  I bought candles and axes and splitting wedges. I bought two pairs of snowshoes (one round and one long, though I wasn’t sure what the difference was). They were made from ash and rawhide, full of primitive, utilitarian beauty.

  Wool pants were next; three pair, though two seemed like enough. I didn’t want to be caught short in the wilderness.

  Then the real fun began; the purchasing of all the mountain man accoutrements that would undoubtedly be essential. Though I had no idea how to work one, I bought traps—every mountain man needed traps. And Rader had trapped muskrats before in Ohio, and was willing to let me in on all his secrets.

  Rader, in fact, pretty much took over at this stage, a kid run amuck in a candy store. A few days earlier we’d driven up to the mountains to fire my muzzle loader for the first time. I’d been nursing a screaming hangover and the boom and jar of the rifle had made my eyes water. But an impressive amount of thick blue smoke blossomed from the barrel with each shot and I was hooked. Rader was less impressed, saying I needed a real gun to survive. I mentioned that Liver-Eating Johnson hadn’t needed any such thing, but in the gun department he talked me into buying a bolt-action .22. “For shooting rabbits and squirrels and stuff,” he told me. “You hit one of those with your buffalo gun and you’ll be looking for pieces for weeks.”

  When we got back to the dorm room I wrapped both rifles in the sheepskin and leather I’d bought to make myself another set of moccasins and a pair of mukluks.

  As the day of leaving wound closer I added little things to the pile in our room, which by now we’d made trails through so we could get to our beds. Things like a buffalo horn I planned to turn into a true-blue powder horn. Only a few days before the wardens were due to arrive and drive me away I remembered matches and I added boxes and boxes of them. The big Ohio Blue tips. The kind I’d always liked using on camping trips when I was a kid.

  And finally I added a few books. I took The Big Sky—my bible—and things like Foxfire manuals and Bradford Angier’s books on outdoor survival and an old Herter’s pamphlet on wilderness recipes. Even after following Rader’s lead into the whole mountain man morass, I wasn’t much of a reader. I left for seven months alone with six books.

  The weekend before the wardens came Rader dragged me out into the mountains for a hunting trip. It was opening day of big-game season, and he was going to get himself an elk.

  I’d had a big night the night before and I was too tired to shop for food when we left. Anyway, I had my rifle and mountain men never had any grocery stores when they were in the woods.

  By dusk, ten miles up some sorrowfully elkless trail near Lolo Peak, Rader and I made camp. My stomach was growling and twisting but I’d sat and watched Rader snack all day, too proud to admit that the mountain-man-to-be wanted a bite of that Snickers bar so bad he could taste it. Just before it got dark I shot a tree squirrel, one of the tiny red western ones. Nothing like the cat-size gray squirrels we had back home.

  It was the first animal
I’d ever killed and Rader showed me how to gut it. I was impressed how neat and clean the insides were, shiny and orderly, laid out exactly as our own. I figured Darwin must have had a similar peek into the workings of animals.

  Rader showed me how to skin the squirrel, working the hide over its head like a sock. This would all be invaluable information, once I was locked into the hills running my trap line, saving pelts that I’d later transfer into a small fortune at Pacific Hide and Fur. I kept the squirrel’s soft, furry tail.

  As we sat around our campfire that night, sipping whiskey (I’d learned to sip, no matter what the books said), Rader ate one peanut butter sandwich after another, while I slowly turned the stick on which I’d impaled the squirrel’s naked body. It grew blacker and tougher with every second over the flames and I finally ate it with feigned relish. My first kill. The inside was warm and the outside crusty, the meat tender as Naugahyde. It tasted of the pine we burned.

  When Rader finally offered a peanut butter sandwich I hesitated until I was sure I would not be laughed at. Then I wolfed it down.

  That night, while Rader snored on one side of the fire, I lay back in my bag and poked at the flames with a stick. We called them roasting sticks when we were little. I was starving and tired and cold, but I could not sleep. I wished I’d never seen the girl who’d come into the pool that afternoon. I thought of the pile of junk that had taken over our dorm room. Half of it I didn’t know how to use, the other half I didn’t want in the first place. How the hell were you supposed to cook a bean that was as hard as a diamond?

  Worn down by the frenzied drinking with all my friends—friends I realized I wasn’t going to be seeing again for a long time—those seven months finally began to seem like something real.

  But the wardens were coming for me in two days and I’d had at least ten going away parties and there was no way in the world to get out of what I’d gotten myself into. No way. If the wardens had called saying the project was off and I wouldn’t be able to go in after all, I would have danced a naked jig down Main Street. I closed my eyes and tried to force them to make that call. Things had snowballed far too long for me to back out on my own.

  Rader and I hiked out the next day and I went straight to the food service. I met some friends there and early that afternoon the last of the going away parties started. I swung past my room later, to pick up Rader before we all went downtown.

  He was sitting amongst all the boxes with Lorrie, a girl I’d gone out with my first year or so in Montana. She held a tiny, tiny puppy. It looked half shepherd, half rat, and all starved. “It’s yours,” Rader said. “You’d be crazy not to have a dog in there.”

  I looked at the scrawny little thing. “We picked her out at the pound,” Rader said. “She’s half husky, half shepherd. I waved a bunch of grouse tails at the whole litter and this one charged first.” Rader was smiling, proud of himself.

  I’d been drinking beer with the old swim team for several hours and I looked at Rader and the dog and Lorrie. I wondered when they had gotten friendly. She’d never liked him when we were going out.

  “What are you going to call her?” Lorrie asked, holding the pup up for me.

  “Boone,” I said. After Boone Caudill. A natural.

  Lorrie said, “It’s a girl.”

  I nodded. “Boone.”

  Then I turned to Rader and told him we were all heading downtown. I set Boone down on the floor and she toddled back to Lorrie. “Did you get any dog food?” I asked, proud that I could think of such logistics.

  “Uh oh.”

  “How much you suppose we'll need?”

  “A few hundred pounds probably.”

  So we made one last shopping run, adding six fifty-pound bags of dog food to the pile.

  When we dropped the dog food off I got a call informing me that my scholarship had been revoked. I had to be a full-time student, minimum twelve credits. I did some frenzied calling of my own, but it was hopeless and I watched the last of my money vanish. So much for boondoggles.

  The party was on though, and I didn’t bother taking the time to cross campus to drop out of my independent study course in journal writing. The notebooks were already packed.

  That night became a blur. The party split up downtown and I didn’t make it home until it was light out Monday morning.

  The wardens had said they’d be in by eight or nine, since it was a long drive. They’d also said they’d bring maps, so I hadn’t bought any of my own. About fifteen minutes before the wardens knocked on the door I realized for the first time that I really didn’t have any idea where I was going.

  3

  The wardens were businesslike, emptying my dorm room of all its supplies much faster than I’d hoped. Soon there wasn’t even an excuse left. My friends stood beside the Idaho Fish and Game trucks in the cool October sun, looking at me. Knowing there was nothing else to do, I shook hands all around, got a few kisses from the girls. I climbed into a truck then, with a warden, an older man, a total stranger. Boone crunched into my lap.

  I waved as we pulled away from campus. Not four hours ago my going-away party had been in full, riotous swing, as it had been for the last two weeks, since my twentieth birthday, since I’d accepted this job, and I didn’t feel very good. I managed to chat a little with the warden, but he smiled at my red eyes, saying they looked like road maps, that is must’ve been quite a send-off. I said it sure was, and though he was driving me deep into a place I had never been, and though he was going to leave me there for seven months, I was asleep against the passenger window before we left the string of fast food restaurants at the south end of Missoula.

  I woke up in Darby, a place I had never heard of. While the warden filled the truck I bought a Coke at the gas station, wondering when I’d taste another. Though I rarely drank soda, suddenly I couldn’t believe I hadn’t brought any in with me. What else could I have overlooked? I read an old road map pinned to the wall and discovered we were already sixty-five miles south of Missoula.

  We drove south out of Darby a few more miles, then turned off the highway onto another paved road. I realized I wouldn’t be able to recognize the turn off, that I hadn’t looked at the road signs. It seemed like a big mistake, though I couldn’t see how that lack of information could hurt. I wouldn’t be back out here until spring. But I didn’t have any idea where we were and we dropped onto a bone-jarring stretch of dirt road that tried my stomach pretty hard; I couldn’t tell if that was hangover, or the nervous, hopeless twisting of fear.

  It was too hot in the truck and another stretch of smooth pavement followed. Without wanting to I fell asleep again.

  When we hit the last stretch of dirt we were over the pass and sleep was impossible. I watched the narrow, jumbled river beside the truck and the steep, dark canyon walls that rose from its banks. It was a wet, dark looking place, with thicker, heavier vegetation than I was used to. The black sides of the river cut seemed to nearly snap shut over me.

  We hit a big clearing half full of elk hunters’ tents and the wardens pulled in. Indian Creek. Without talking much they pulled a bunch of lumber and plywood and the canvas tent from the back of one of the trucks and began cutting poles to set it up. After putting together a plywood floor, we hoisted the canvas on the ridge pole and I was left the job of tying off the guy line while they struggled to hold the tent upright. I ran the line around the tree they told me to and started looping it around itself in some sort of imitation of a knot. The warden, my boss, grunted, “A double half hitch would work best.”

  “A double what?”

  We traded places and he tied the tent up. Then he took me aside and demonstrated a half hitch. “Haven’t you ever messed around with rope?”

  I shook my head and saw the wardens glance at each other. I tried harder not to appear stupid, but couldn’t see why anyone would purposefully spend time “messing around with rope.” I still felt terrible from the night before, and that had been tremendous fun. This, with these two old st
rangers, was not.

  We unloaded my supplies next, stacking them into a pile inside. The warden pointed at the barrel of the twenty-two poking from the end of the rolled sheepskin. “You know you don’t have any hunting licenses?”

  I nodded.

  The warden kicked at one of the sacks on the floor and a trickle of white beans spilled onto the plywood. “I guess I can hardly expect you to eat those all winter.”

  He glanced around the tent and at the other warden, then pointed at the rifle again. “When you use that, just be discreet about it. If Old Ironsides caught you shooting so much as a rabbit he’d tack your hide to a tree.”

  “Old who?” I asked.

  He described the other warden for the district. “He’s spent most of his career looking for some way he could arrest his mother,” he said, and both the wardens laughed. “Odds are you’ll never see him. But for all our sakes, be discreet. He’d probably try to arrest us for aiding and abetting.”

  “I was really just going to use it for plinking,” I said, which was a lie. “I’ve never hunted,” I added, which wasn’t. He looked as if he believed me. After all, he knew I’d never once messed with rope.

  We left the tent then and drove back upstream ten miles to a summer ranger station, Magruder, for the night.

  In the morning the warden explained that they were going to leave the more battered truck with me over the winter. They both hopped into it and told me to go ahead and drive. Maybe they’d had a secret conversation. I killed the truck trying to get up the hill away from Magruder and they discovered I barely knew how to operate a manual transmission. They exchanged more worried looks and my boss began to explain the operations of a clutch. We lurched and bogged down for the next ten miles, but I made it without killing it until we reached the tent. I felt pretty good about that.

  By the time they discovered I’d never run a chainsaw they weren’t looking at me anymore. The boss handed me a saw file and told me I’d get the hang of sharpening. He didn’t offer any instruction. I think they were trying not to get to know me, like veteran soldiers with a new recruit who probably won’t survive long anyway.