Indian Creek Chronicles

by Pete Fromm

  As the snow got deeper, however, the squirrels began to burrow through it, going from their dens to the caches of pine cones, never exposing themselves to the bitter cold of the air, or to quick eyes of hawks or coyotes or martens or me. And, though I had two years of a wildlife biology degree under my belt, I’d mismanaged my grouse population. I had to walk farther and farther to have a hope of finding one of them.

  Most importantly, I was a mountain man, not a squirrel eater. I began to leave my little .22 behind, lugging around my mountain man rifle instead, the muzzle-loading .54 caliber Hawken. I became, by idea alone, a big-game hunter, and I suffered a spectacular lack of success. I would find tracks, and even once broke something out of the thick cover at the edge of the river, but never saw it.

  Yet, the same snow that drove the squirrels under also drove the game out of the mountains the hunters had pushed them into. I opened my tent flap one morning to a herd of about sixty elk, blowing steaming breath into the air above the meadow. They saw me first and all that day, carrying my heavy mountain man rifle, I learned about the disappearing qualities of large game. Another embarrassment.

  So I carried the heavy rifle and ate oatmeal breakfasts, bread lunches, and rice dinners. Every meal was a reminder of my lack of skill, and though the warden’s visit was getting close, and I should have been growing concerned about hiding my hunting (our tacit agreement), I continued to hunt, as if killing and caring for four or five hundred pounds of elk meat would be nothing more complicated than picking up a grouse and carrying it home.

  Seeing the elk in my meadow threw me into a big-game hunting fever. The fact that I found tracks there every morning, proof that the elk spent the night not eighty yards away, practically rubbing my nose in it, did not do anything to make me think more clearly.

  One night, with the warden’s visit only three days away, I sat in my tent absorbed in my usual nighttime activities of drinking tea and rereading the Foxfire book, attempting to understand the arcane habits of Ozark people, and trying to get something on my battery AM radio. It was a clear night though, with no clouds to deflect radio waves into my canyon. On heavy, snowy nights I could pick up several western Idaho stations and two of the high-powered California stations, one in L.A., another in San Francisco. But that night, nothing but static.

  Finally, full of tea, I went outside to pee before going to bed. I ducked through the tent flap and stepped into a bright silver world. The full moon had risen above the wall of mountains hemming me in and now shone down upon my snow-whitened world. The flat fields of undisturbed snow reflected the light back up and the trees threw it every which way, until finally there were barely any shadows. I stood in awe, only slowly following my foot trails through the snow into my meadow, unable to believe the ghostly light.

  I was nearly laughing, so incredible were my surroundings, and I whispered, “Check this out, Boone.” Then my meadow erupted.

  There were a few quick, odd, rasping barks, but mainly all I heard was movement, the heavy sounds of big animals breaking quickly away, breathing hard, throwing snow, crushing through the thick timber. I crouched in time to see the fleeting shapes of elk vanishing into the dark line of trees across the meadow and, even surrounded by the quicksilver light, I swore. I’d stumbled into the middle of a herd, the whole time gawking up at the ridges, picking out details I’d never guessed I’d see beyond the bright of day. And now, once again, the game was gone.

  I held up my finger though, at arm’s length, and studied my nail. I could make it out perfectly. I wondered about the brown sights of my rifle. I moved quickly to my tent and came back out with the Hawken. In the center of the meadow I could line up the sights easily. Back in the trees it was more doubtful. If I was standing in a ray of moonlight it would work. I aimed at black tree trunks, approximating the dark sides of elk, and thought it was possible.

  I followed the path of the elk into the timber. The temperature was a little below zero and the snow was light powder. It muffled every trace of sound, even the shuffling of my snowshoes. I stalked silently, slipping from one patch of trees to the next, holding my breath to kill even that sound. But, eventually, the tingling anticipation drained away. I no longer believed elk lurked around every tree trunk. And in the thick stuff it really was too dark to sight a rifle. I began to stay in the open, though I doubted the elk were doing the same. Finally I was carrying my rifle over my shoulder, gawking again, at the way the moon transformed a lone spruce into a towering cone of pewter shine.

  I walked until one that morning, hunting for maybe the first thirty minutes. The rest of the time I was simply watching. The moon edged down over the other side of the river’s cut before I returned to my darkened tent and slipped between the heavy covers.

  I got up late the next morning, not having stayed up past ten in months. I was still rubbing sleep from my eyes when I stepped out of my tent, once again scattering my resident elk herd. I spent the rest of the day chasing them, futilely. But I came up with a plan.

  That night, as the moon was coming up, I double-checked the meadow for elk. They weren’t there yet, and I edged up the horse ramp near my tent. Used for moving horses in and out of trailers, the ramp was the only high point around. From its top I could spy on the entire clearing. I swept a body-wide strip clear of snow and returned to the tent for my blankets and rifle. I made a little bed on the ramp, drawing a white sheet over the top of everything for camouflage. Then I poked my rifle over the lip of the ramp and waited.

  By this time I’d completely overlooked what shooting an elk in front of my tent would do. I never stopped to picture what the meadow would look like after that. The wardens were coming in two days but I only thought about finally eating steaks, steaks I had procured through my own cunning and wit and firepower.

  It was cold out—six below—but I waited, shivering. The moon cleared the ridge and the meadow’s every detail leapt into focus. I tested my sights and swung them around the meadow. I covered everything from here. Nothing could get away. I waited. And waited.

  When I woke up the moon had set over the other ridge. It was dark out, black. I could feel falling snow touching me, melting against my cheek. I sat up stiffly, hunching into myself, startled by how cold I was. No stars shone. The Selway was socked in. Fumbling blindly for my tent, I walked into a guy line and followed it inside.

  I got my stove going full blast and lugged my blankets in. My body heat had melted most of the snow that had tried to bury me. The rest clung icily to the blankets. I stretched them out on the floor to dry and growled at Boone when she curled up on them. I took off my wet clothes, put on dry ones and just before going to bed I stuck the rifle barrel out the door and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell and the percussion cap popped, a sickeningly small sound compared to the proper booming roar of the rifle. As I’d suspected, the rifle wouldn’t fire. Condensation had soaked the powder.

  After turning the lantern out I crawled into a couple of the least damp sleeping bags, listening to the ticks and poppings of the stove. What a fiasco. Sleeping through a snowstorm on a horse ramp twenty yards from my bed. Soaking myself and my rifle. The elk could have trampled me if they’d felt like it. I closed my eyes and rolled over, wondering how sick of rice I’d get after eating it for half a year.

  The next morning it finally began to dawn on me that the wardens were due in. I stayed inside all day, the fire roaring away, drying blankets. When we’d pitched the tent one of the wardens had found an old roll of indoor/outdoor carpet at Magruder, the quarter-inch-thick stuff. It covered the floor now, holding dirt and wood pile splinters with incredible tenacity. I swept and swept, finally picking the last of the splinters out one at a time.

  I hid the raccoon skin, which was tanned now, though somehow, with all my elk hunting, I hadn’t found the time to turn it into a hat. I also put all my grouse tails and rabbit feet, my hunting trophies, into a can and buried it in the food cache.

  With those preparations out of the way I worked on
finishing the letters the wardens would take out. Along with fiddling with the radio and reading the Foxfire books, I spent some time most nights writing letters to friends and family—long letters, ten-, fifteen-pagers. Now that they were actually going to be mailed, I tried to wrap them up. I didn’t mention my night on the horse ramp in any of them.

  There were also only twelve more shopping days before Christmas. My Thanksgiving debacle was still clear in my mind and in an attempt to avoid that, I’d been working on presents for all my parents and siblings. I packaged my most beautifully dried grouse tails, and a lucky rabbit’s foot, and a squirrel skin rug, complete with claws, a joke on a bear skin. For my brothers I sent grouse feet that I’d dried with the two outside toes curled up, leaving the center toe rigidly extended—a bird foot flipping the bird. I didn’t have much to work with.

  But, as thin a package as it all added up to, I knew that come Christmas night I’d be able to imagine them opening it, doling out the presents to the proper people. They’d be holding proof that I had not forgotten them, and I would know, that much more surely, that I myself was not forgotten.

  I closed the box tightly, wrapping and rewrapping its seams with tape, keeping away the prying eyes of any warden curious about this box of contraband. I wrote “Do Not Open Until Christmas” on the side and set it in the corner. As I finished the letters I stacked the envelopes on top of the box.

  But the wardens didn’t show. The following day I stayed home, cooking bread, always an all-day project. I was just pulling the loaves from the oven when I heard the distant rumble of snowmobiles. The sound would disappear in different twists of the river canyon, then reappear, always a little closer, a little louder. I stood outside my tent and waited, remembering to call them machines, not mobiles.

  My boss and the district wildlife biologist rumbled into the meadow and shot directly for me, pulling up in a spray of snow, grinning. The warden bounded up and shook my hand. He walked into my tent as if he owned it, commenting on the bread, again saying how it looked like I was fitting in just fine. The biologist was new and just followed in the warden’s wake.

  We walked to the channel together and I told him it’d been dropping to ten below at night for the last few nights, only reaching fifteen in the day. On its own the channel had frozen over and was blanketed with snow. The warden was impressed by the flow of water underneath. He said things looked good and we walked back to the tent.

  We stood beside their machines and I asked how the trip in had been. They said it was cold and the biologist pulled a couple of boxes out of his machine and set them on my bed. I noticed the return addresses from Wisconsin. The biologist asked me what I did out here all day, every day. I shrugged and said, “Not much. Mooch around mostly. Write letters.” I handed him the letters I’d written and the box I’d packed.

  The warden came into the tent then, handing me a sheaf of letters, rubber banded together. I tossed them on the bed to keep from opening them immediately and we talked a minute or two about the game I’d been seeing. “Elk all over the place,” I said.

  The biologist said he thought his wife would think it’d be neat to stay in here for a few days. He asked if I’d mind getting out for a long weekend, while they took over.

  It sounded like a gift from heaven, and I tried not to seem too eager, or desperate when I said that’d be great. He said he’d talk it over with her and get back to me the next time they came in. My boss said that’d be around mid-January, if everything went well.

  They worked their way steadily back to their machines as we talked and then they climbed on, shouting, “See you next month,” and roared off. They’d been here for about half an hour and I wondered why my boss bothered being a game warden when he always seemed in such a hurry to leave the mountains.

  Though they were the first people I’d seen in a couple of weeks, I really wasn’t sorry to see them go. The whole time we talked I could barely keep from ripping into the packages and letters sitting on my bed. As soon as the wardens wound out of sight on their noisy machines I was at my mail.

  There was something from everyone in my family and most of my friends. I wondered in what order I should read them. My hands trembled a little as I held up the first pages. It was like a party in that tent. I laughed over some of those letters until I had tears in my eyes. Others made me realize how easy this was with all the support I had out there. My parents and my oldest sister, Ellen, sent in books, saying they couldn’t imagine living as I was without reading endlessly. I picked up each book like a small treasure and read the covers. There were novels and biographies and short stories. My dad sent all the Sherlock Holmes stories and the Jungle Books, things he remembered my liking as a kid, when he used to read to us. I doubted I’d ever again bother reading about pig scalding in the Ozarks.

  At the bottom of the box, under the books, Ellen even had sent cake mixes. I laughed at that, wondering how much of an idea they had about where I really was. But the ones I didn’t burn tasted great.

  Finally my tent couldn’t hold me. I ran out and raced around by the river, kicking snow into the air. I only stopped long enough to light the pipe my friends at school had sent, because all mountain men had pipes. I had never smoked before, and it was fun, although I couldn’t keep it lit. I kept laughing now and then, blowing puffs of smoke into the darkling blue of the evening. I ran home to reread everything all over again. I was wearing the pair of sheepskin mukluks I’d made and my feet felt as light as the snow. I had ice in my beard and I picked at it as I started all over at the very beginning of the mail.

  That night, however, with the mail so read it was dying, the thrill collapsed and I realized how I missed all those people. It was a melancholy evening. But already, in the two months I had been in here, it had softened from the early, desperate loneliness that closed my throat, to an easy kind I could almost savor.

  It was cloudy that night, and I was able to pick up a few of the Idaho radio stations. I caught most of the Groucho Marx broadcast on Nostalgia Radio. I laughed all over again, and by the time the station faded into static I was ready for another sleep.

  In the morning I tried to reread my mail again, but it was pointless—I still remembered every word of every letter and nothing had changed. I sat down to start writing responses, but it seemed an awfully crippled way to carry on a conversation. I quit before I’d really gotten started and I took my rifle and went for a walk. Not just a walk, I told myself, a hunt.

  But I didn’t see a thing, could hardly concentrate long enough to look and by late afternoon I was back at my tent, back at my mail, though by now the too familiar words had begun to lose their meanings. Even so, it was all I had.

  9

  The letter I reread more than any other in the first batch of mail was the one from my father. He and my twin brother, Paul, were in training, he said. They had ordered maps and picked up the last bits of equipment they figured they would need. The day after the Christmas festivities in Milwaukee, they planned to drive out to Darby. From there they would ski up over Nez Perce Pass, following the road, then ski down to the Selway and down the Selway to me. Forty miles. They hoped to make it in two days. Maybe three, but they hoped two, since, after the climb to the summit, it would all be downhill.

  Each time I finished that letter I’d look up and see my dark little tent. The tent could be spruced up, but more than the tent I thought of the menu I’d have to offer them, two people who’d skied forty miles just to see me. Oatmeal, bread, rice. If I really got carried away, maybe I’d gourmet the rice by adding a can of peas.

  I pictured them skiing through herds of big game, startling deer and elk at every turn. And here I sat with oatmeal, bread, rice. I’d load up my Hawken then and start out, resolved this time not to return until I had something to hang on the meat pole, something with which to stuff my father and my brother. Wild game, something they’d never tasted, something I’d killed alone, because I had to. Me, the hardy survivor, the mountain man.

>   Along with the letter my dad had sent in books, including the one I was reading now, about Scott’s epic trip to the South Pole. I had all sorts of romantic ideas about that kind of stubborn survival, my head still able to ignore the fact that they had all died in the end. I liked to picture Paul and Dad skiing on and on, with myself in the heroic role of providing succor at the end of their trail. The kind of thing that would have saved Scott and his men, if only I’d been there.

  But a week of arduous hunting passed and I had yet to point my rifle at anything. With every hour of every day at my disposal I developed the attention span of a five-year-old. Soon I was back to strolling in the evenings, using the last of the day’s light, puffing away on my pipe—which I had learned to keep lit—my rifle over my shoulder, held uselessly by the barrel as often as not.

  By the time of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, I was getting about four hours of direct sunlight, the sun slipping between the Selway’s walls between 10:00 A.M. and 2:00 P.M. The rest of the day was indirect lighting, unless I went up high on the ridges. I was eager to have the days begin their lengthening toward the distant spring and I took the day off, lying around and reading, putting logs on the fire, celebrating the low point. From now on every day would be longer, brighter, closer to the end.

  So that evening I walked upriver along the beaten path, blowing my first successful smoke rings into the dusk, saying goodbye to the shortest day of all. I’d brought my rifle simply out of habit and I was holding it over my shoulder, by the barrel, when below me on the river something crashed through the willow and rose and snowberry. I looked in time to see a huge, black animal throw itself into one of the last open stretches of the Selway and charge across, coming out on ridiculous, stilt-like legs, swinging a long, bulbous nose in my direction before crashing up the opposite bluff into the trees.